be performed at his theatre, taking his chance of losing his licence in consequence.  The event proved that the manager was justified in regarding the risk as negligible; for the Lord Chamberlain’s remedy—­the closing of a popular and well-conducted theatre—­was far too extreme to be practicable.  Unless the play had so outraged public opinion as to make the manager odious and provoke a clamor for his exemplary punishment, the Lord Chamberlain could only have had his revenge at the risk of having his powers abolished as unsupportably tyrannical.

The Lord Chamberlain then has his powers so adjusted that he is tyrannical just where it is important that he should be tolerant, and tolerant just where he could screw up the standard a little by being tyrannical.  His plea that there are unmentionable depths to which managers and authors would descend if he did not prevent them is disproved by the plain fact that his indulgence goes as far as the police, and sometimes further than the public, will let it.  If our judges had so little power there would be no law in England.  If our churches had so much, there would be no theatre, no literature, no science, no art, possibly no England.  The institution is at once absurdly despotic and abjectly weak.

AN ENLIGHTENED CENSORSHIP STILL WORSE THAN THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN’S

Clearly a censorship of judges, bishops, or statesmen would not be in this abject condition.  It would no doubt make short work of the coarse and vicious pieces which now enjoy the protection of the Lord Chamberlain, or at least of those of them in which the vulgarity and vice are discoverable by merely reading the prompt copy.  But it would certainly disappoint the main hope of its advocates:  the hope that it would protect and foster the higher drama.  It would do nothing of the sort.  On the contrary, it would inevitably suppress it more completely than the Lord Chamberlain does, because it would understand it better.  The one play of Ibsen’s which is prohibited on the English stage, Ghosts, is far less subversive than A Doll’s House.  But the Lord Chamberlain does not meddle with such far-reaching matters as the tendency of a play.  He refuses to license Ghosts exactly as he would refuse to license Hamlet if it were submitted to him as a new play.  He would license even Hamlet if certain alterations were made in it.  He would disallow the incestuous relationship between the King and Queen.  He would probably insist on the substitution of some fictitious country for Denmark in deference to the near relations of our reigning house with that realm.  He would certainly make it an absolute condition that the closet scene, in which a son, in an agony of shame and revulsion, reproaches his mother for her relations with his uncle, should be struck out as unbearably horrifying and improper.  But compliance with these conditions would satisfy him.  He would raise no speculative objections to the tendency of the play.