be found.  With Mr. Redford, as the Times puts it, “any tinge of literary merit seems at once to excite his worst suspicions.”  But with a censor whose sympathies were too purely literary, literary in too narrow a sense, would not scruples of some other kind begin to intrude themselves, scruples of the student who cannot tolerate an innocent jesting with “serious” things, scruples of the moralist who must choose between Maeterlinck and d’Annunzio, between Tolstoi and Ibsen?  I cannot so much as think of a man in all England who would be capable of justifying the existence of the censorship.  Is it, then, merely Mr. Redford who is made ridiculous by this ridiculous episode, or is it not, after all, England, which has given us the liberty of the press and withheld from us the liberty of the stage?

A PLAY AND THE PUBLIC

John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called “The Bishop’s Move,” which was an attempt to do artistically what so many writers for the stage have done without thinking about art at all.

She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom instead of vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society instead of an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners.  The play is a comedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the control of good manners.  The game is after all the thing, and the skill of the game.  When the pawns begin to cry out in the plaintive way of pawns, they are hushed before they become disturbing.  It is in this power to play the game on its own artificial lines, and yet to play with pieces made scrupulously after the pattern of nature, that Mrs. Craigie’s skill, in this play, seems to me to consist.

Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief, to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the writer is seen treating the real people of the audience and the imaginary people of the play as if they were alike ladies and gentlemen.  How this kind of work will appeal to the general public I can hardly tell.  When I saw “Sweet and Twenty” on its first performance, I honestly expected the audience to burst out laughing.  On the contrary, the audience thrilled with delight, and audience after audience went on indefinitely thrilling with delight.  If the caricature of the natural emotions can give so much pleasure, will a delicate suggestion of them, as in this play, ever mean very much to the public?

The public in England is a strange creature, to be studied with wonder and curiosity and I am not sure that a native can ever hope to understand it.  At the performance of a recent melodrama, “Sweet Nell of Old Drury,” I happened to be in the last row of the stalls.  My seat was not altogether well adapted for seeing and hearing the play, but it was admirably adapted for observing the pit, and I gave some of my attention to my neighbours there.