Yet a moment’s consideration would have shown that the paradox was a platitude.  For about quarter of a century Irving was confined night after night to his own theatre and his own dressing-room, never seeing a play even there because he was himself part of the play; producing the works of long-departed authors; and, to the extent to which his talent was extraordinary, necessarily making his theatre unlike any other theatre.  When he went to the provinces or to America, the theatres to which he went were swept and garnished for him, and their staffs replaced—­as far as he came in contact with them—­by his own lieutenants.  In the end, there was hardly a first-nighter in his gallery who did not know more about the London theatres and the progress of dramatic art than he; and as to the provinces, if any chief constable had told him the real history and character of many provincial theatres, he would have denounced that chief constable as an ignorant libeller of a noble profession.  But the constable would have been right for all that.  Now if this was true of Sir Henry Irving, who did not become a London manager until he had roughed it for years in the provinces, how much more true must it be of, say, Mr. George Alexander, whose successful march through his profession has passed as far from the purlieus of our theatrical world as the king’s naval career from the Isle of Dogs?  The moment we come to that necessary part of the censorship question which deals with the control of theatres from the point of view of those who know how much money can be made out of them by managers who seek to make the auditorium attractive rather than the stage, you find the managers divided into two sections.  The first section consists of honorable and successful managers like Mr. Alexander, who know nothing of such abuses, and deny, with perfect sincerity and indignant vehemence, that they exist except, perhaps, in certain notorious variety theatres.  The other is the silent section which knows better, but is very well content to be publicly defended and privately amused by Mr. Alexander’s innocence.  To accept a West End manager as an expert in theatres because he is an actor is much as if we were to accept the organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral as an expert on music halls because he is a musician.  The real experts are all in the conspiracy to keep the police out of the theatre.  And they are so successful that even the police do not know as much as they should.

The police should have been examined by the Committee, and the whole question of the extent to which theatres are disorderly houses in disguise sifted to the bottom.  For it is on this point that we discover behind the phantoms of the corrupt dramatists who are restrained by the censorship from debauching the stage, the reality of the corrupt managers and theatre proprietors who actually do debauch it without let or hindrance from the censorship.  The whole case for giving control over theatres to local authorities rests on this reality.