the rioting that attended the first performances of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World before the most sensitive and, on provocation, the most turbulent audience in the kingdom.  The directors of the Irish National Theatre, Lady Gregory and Mr. William Butler Yeats, rose to the occasion with inspiriting courage.  I am a conciliatory person, and was willing, as I always am, to make every concession in return for having my own way.  But Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats not only would not yield an inch, but insisted, within the due limits of gallant warfare, on taking the field with every circumstance of defiance, and winning the battle with every trophy of victory.  Their triumph was as complete as they could have desired.  The performance exhausted the possibilities of success, and provoked no murmur, though it inspired several approving sermons.  Later on, Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats brought the play to London and performed it under the Lord Chamberlain’s nose, through the instrumentality of the Stage Society.

After this, the play was again submitted to the Lord Chamberlain.  But, though beaten, he, too, understands the art of How Not To Do It.  He licensed the play, but endorsed on his licence the condition that all the passages which implicated God in the history of Blanco Posnet must be omitted in representation.  All the coarseness, the profligacy, the prostitution, the violence, the drinking-bar humor into which the light shines in the play are licensed, but the light itself is extinguished.  I need hardly say that I have not availed myself of this licence, and do not intend to.  There is enough licensed darkness in our theatres today without my adding to it.

AYOT st. Lawrence,
14th July 1910.

Postscript.—­Since the above was written the Lord Chamberlain has made an attempt to evade his responsibility and perhaps to postpone his doom by appointing an advisory committee, unknown to the law, on which he will presumably throw any odium that may attach to refusals of licences in the future.  This strange and lawless body will hardly reassure our moralists, who object much more to the plays he licenses than to those he suppresses, and are therefore unmoved by his plea that his refusals are few and far between.  It consists of two eminent actors (one retired), an Oxford professor of literature, and two eminent barristers.  As their assembly is neither created by statute nor sanctioned by custom, it is difficult to know what to call it until it advises the Lord Chamberlain to deprive some author of his means of livelihood, when it will, I presume, become a conspiracy, and be indictable accordingly; unless, indeed, it can persuade the Courts to recognize it as a new Estate of the Realm, created by the Lord Chamberlain.  This constitutional position is so questionable that I strongly advise the members to resign promptly before the Lord Chamberlain gets them into trouble.

THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET