The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet
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George Bernard Shaw >> The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet
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AN ANTI-SHAVIAN PANIC
As far as I can guess, the next thing that happened was that some
timid or unawakened member of the Committee read my statement and
was frightened or scandalized out of his wits by it. At all
events it is certain that the majority of the Committee allowed
themselves to be persuaded to refuse to allow any statement to be
read; but to avoid the appearance of pointing this expressly at
me, the form adopted was a resolution to adhere strictly to
precedent, the Committee being then unaware that the precedents
were on my side. Accordingly, when I appeared before the
Committee, and proposed to read my statement "according to
precedent," the Committee was visibly taken aback. The Chairman
was bound by the letter of the decision arrived at to allow me to
read my statement, since that course was according to precedent;
but as this was exactly what the decision was meant to prevent,
the majority of the Committee would have regarded this hoisting
of them with their own petard as a breach of faith on the part of
the Chairman, who, I infer, was not in agreement with the
suppressive majority. There was nothing for it, after a somewhat
awkward pause, but to clear me and the public out of the room and
reconsider the situation IN CAMERA. When the doors were opened
again I was informed simply that the Committee would not hear my
statement, but as the Committee could not very decently refuse my
evidence altogether, the Chairman, with a printed copy of my
statement in his hand as "proof," was able to come to the rescue
to some extent by putting to me a series of questions to which no
doubt I might have replied by taking another copy out of my
pocket, and quoting my statement paragraph by paragraph, as
some of the later witnesses did. But as in offering the
Committee my statement for burial in their bluebook I had made a
considerable sacrifice, being able to secure greater publicity
for it by independent publication on my own account; and as,
further, the circumstances of the refusal made it offensive
enough to take all heart out of the scrupulous consideration with
which I had so far treated the Committee, I was not disposed to
give its majority a second chance, or to lose the opportunity
offered me by the questions to fire an additional broadside into
the censorship. I pocketed my statement, and answered the
questions VIVA VOCE. At the conclusion of this, my examination-
in-chief, the Committee adjourned, asking me to present myself
again for (virtually) cross-examination. But this cross-
examination never came off, as the sequel will shew.
A RARE AND CURIOUS FIRST EDITION
The refusal of the Committee to admit my statement had not
unnaturally created the impression that it must be a scandalous
document; and a lively demand for copies at once set in. And
among the very first applicants were members of the majority
which had carried the decision to exclude the document. They had
given so little attention to the business that they did not know,
or had forgotten, that they had already been supplied with copies
at their own request. At all events, they came to me publicly and
cleaned me out of the handful of copies I had provided for
distribution to the press. And after the sitting it was intimated
to me that yet more copies were desired for the use of the
Committee: a demand, under the circumstances, of breath-bereaving
coolness. At the same time, a brisk demand arose outside the
Committee, not only among people who were anxious to read what I
had to say on the subject, but among victims of the craze for
collecting first editions, copies of privately circulated
pamphlets, and other real or imaginary rarities, and who will
cheerfully pay five guineas for any piece of discarded old
rubbish of mine when they will not pay four-and-sixpence for this
book because everyone else can get it for four-and-sixpence too.
THE TIMES TO THE RESCUE
The day after the refusal of the Committee to face my statement,
I transferred the scene of action to the columns of The Times,
which did yeoman's service to the public on this, as on many
other occasions, by treating the question as a public one without
the least regard to the supposed susceptibilities of the Court on
the one side, or the avowed prejudices of the Free Churches or
the interests of the managers or theatrical speculators on the
other. The Times published the summarized conclusions of my
statement, and gave me an opportunity of saying as much as it was
then advisable to say of what had occurred. For it must be
remembered that, however impatient and contemptuous I might feel
of the intellectual cowardice shewn by the majority of the
Committee face to face with myself, it was none the less
necessary to keep up its prestige in every possible way, not only
for the sake of the dignity and importance of the matter with
which it had to deal, and in the hope that the treatment of
subsequent witnesses and the final report might make amends for a
feeble beginning, but also out of respect and consideration for
the minority. For it is fair to say that the majority was never
more than a bare majority, and that the worst thing the Committee
did--the exclusion of references to particular plays--was
perpetrated in the absence of the Chairman.
I, therefore, had to treat the Committee in The Times very much
better than its majority deserved, an injustice for which I now
apologize. I did not, however, resist the temptation to hint,
quite good-humoredly, that my politeness to the Committee had
cost me quite enough already, and that I was not prepared to
supply the members of the Committee, or anyone else, with extra
copies merely as collectors' curiosities.
THE COUNCIL OF TEN
Then the fat was in the fire. The majority, chaffed for its
eagerness to obtain copies of scarce pamphlets retailable at five
guineas, went dancing mad. When I presented myself, as requested,
for cross-examination, I found the doors of the Committee room
shut, and the corridors of the House of Lords filled by a
wondering crowd, to whom it had somehow leaked out that something
terrible was happening inside. It could not be another licensed
play too scandalous to be discussed in public, because the
Committee had decided to discuss no more of these examples of the
Censor's notions of purifying the stage; and what else the
Committee might have to discuss that might not be heard by all
the world was not easily guessable.
Without suggesting that the confidence of the Committee was in
any way violated by any of its members further than was
absolutely necessary to clear them from suspicion of complicity
in the scene which followed, I think I may venture to conjecture
what was happening. It was felt by the majority, first, that it
must be cleared at all costs of the imputation of having procured
more than one copy each of my statement, and that one not from
any interest in an undesirable document by an irreverent author,
but in the reluctant discharge of its solemn public duty; second,
that a terrible example must be made of me by the most crushing
public snub in the power of the Committee to administer. To throw
my wretched little pamphlet at my head and to kick me out of the
room was the passionate impulse which prevailed in spite of all
the remonstrances of the Commoners, seasoned to the give-and-take
of public life, and of the single peer who kept his head. The
others, for the moment, had no heads to keep. And the fashion in
which they proposed to wreak their vengeance was as follows.
THE SENTENCE
I was to be admitted, as a lamb to the slaughter, and allowed to
take my place as if for further examination. The Chairman was
then to inform me coldly that the Committee did not desire to
have anything more to say to me. The members were thereupon
solemnly to hand me back the copies of my statement as so much
waste paper, and I was to be suffered to slink away with what
countenance I could maintain in such disgrace.
But this plan required the active co-operation of every member of
the Committee; and whilst the majority regarded it as an august
and impressive vindication of the majesty of parliament, the
minority regarded it with equal conviction as a puerile
tomfoolery, and declined altogether to act their allotted parts
in it. Besides, they did not all want to part with the books. For
instance, Mr Hugh Law, being an Irishman, with an Irishman's
sense of how to behave like a gallant gentleman on occasion, was
determined to be able to assure me that nothing should induce him
to give up my statement or prevent him from obtaining and
cherishing as many copies as possible. (I quote this as an
example to the House of Lords of the right thing to say in such
emergencies). So the program had to be modified. The minority
could not prevent the enraged majority from refusing to examine
me further; nor could the Chairman refuse to communicate that
decision to me. Neither could the minority object to the
secretary handing me back such copies as he could collect from
the majority. And at that the matter was left. The doors were
opened; the audience trooped in; I was called to my place in the
dock (so to speak); and all was ready for the sacrifice.
THE EXECUTION
Alas! the majority reckoned without Colonel Lockwood. That hardy
and undaunted veteran refused to shirk his share in the scene
merely because the minority was recalcitrant and the majority
perhaps subject to stage fright. When Mr Samuel had informed me
that the Committee had no further questions to ask me with an
urbanity which gave the public no clue as to the temper of the
majority; when I had jumped up with the proper air of relief and
gratitude; when the secretary had handed me his little packet of
books with an affability which effectually concealed his dramatic
function as executioner; when the audience was simply
disappointed at being baulked of the entertainment of hearing Mr
Robert Harcourt cross-examine me; in short, when the situation
was all but saved by the tact of the Chairman and secretary,
Colonel Lockwood rose, with all his carnations blazing, and gave
away the whole case by handing me, with impressive simplicity and
courtesy, his TWO copies of the precious statement. And I believe
that if he had succeeded in securing ten, he would have handed
them all back to me with the most sincere conviction that every
one of the ten must prove a crushing addition to the weight of my
discomfiture. I still cherish that second copy, a little blue-
bound pamphlet, methodically autographed "Lockwood B" among my
most valued literary trophies.
An innocent lady told me afterwards that she never knew that I
could smile so beautifully, and that she thought it shewed very
good taste on my part. I was not conscious of smiling; but I
should have embraced the Colonel had I dared. As it was, I turned
expectantly to his colleagues, mutely inviting them to follow his
example. But there was only one Colonel Lockwood on that
Committee. No eye met mine except minority eyes, dancing with
mischief. There was nothing more to be said. I went home to my
morning's work, and returned in the afternoon to receive the
apologies of the minority for the conduct of the majority, and to
see Mr Granville Barker, overwhelmed by the conscience-stricken
politeness of the now almost abject Committee, and by a powerful
smell of carnations, heading the long list of playwrights who
came there to testify against the censorship, and whose
treatment, I am happy to say, was everything they could have
desired.
After all, ridiculous as the scene was, Colonel Lockwood's
simplicity and courage were much more serviceable to his
colleagues than their own inept coup de theatre would have been
if he had not spoiled it. It was plain to every one that he had
acted in entire good faith, without a thought as to these
apparently insignificant little books being of any importance or
having caused me or anybody else any trouble, and that he was
wounded in his most sensitive spot by the construction my Times
letter had put on his action. And in Colonel Lockwood's case one
saw the case of his party on the Committee. They had simply been
thoughtless in the matter.
I hope nobody will suppose that this in any way exonerates them.
When people accept public service for one of the most vital
duties that can arise in our society, they have no right to be
thoughtless. In spite of the fun of the scene on the surface, my
public sense was, and still is, very deeply offended by it. It
made an end for me of the claim of the majority to be taken
seriously. When the Government comes to deal with the question,
as it presumably will before long, I invite it to be guided
by the Chairman, the minority, and by the witnesses according to
their weight, and to pay no attention whatever to those
recommendations which were obviously inserted solely to
conciliate the majority and get the report through and the
Committee done with.
My evidence will be found in the Bluebook, pp. 46-53. And here is
the terrible statement which the Committee went through so much
to suppress.
THE REJECTED STATEMENT
PART I
THE WITNESS'S QUALIFICATIONS
I am by profession a playwright. I have been in practice since
1892. I am a member of the Managing Committee of the Society of
Authors and of the Dramatic Sub-Committee of that body. I have
written nineteen plays, some of which have been translated and
performed in all European countries except Turkey, Greece, and
Portugal. They have been performed extensively in America. Three
of them have been refused licences by the Lord Chamberlain. In
one case a licence has since been granted. The other two are
still unlicensed. I have suffered both in pocket and reputation
by the action of the Lord Chamberlain. In other countries I have
not come into conflict with the censorship except in Austria,
where the production of a comedy of mine was postponed for a year
because it alluded to the part taken by Austria in the Servo-
Bulgarian war. This comedy was not one of the plays suppressed in
England by the Lord Chamberlain. One of the plays so suppressed
was prosecuted in America by the police in consequence of an
immense crowd of disorderly persons having been attracted to the
first performance by the Lord Chamberlain's condemnation of it;
but on appeal to a higher court it was decided that the
representation was lawful and the intention innocent, since when
it has been repeatedly performed.
I am not an ordinary playwright in general practice. I am a
specialist in immoral and heretical plays. My reputation has been
gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to
reconsider its morals. In particular, I regard much current
morality as to economic and sexual relations as disastrously
wrong; and I regard certain doctrines of the Christian religion
as understood in England to-day with abhorrence. I write plays
with the deliberate object of converting the nation to my
opinions in these matters. I have no other effectual incentive to
write plays, as I am not dependent on the theatre for my
livelihood. If I were prevented from producing immoral and
heretical plays, I should cease to write for the theatre, and
propagate my views from the platform and through books. I mention
these facts to shew that I have a special interest in the
achievement by my profession of those rights of liberty of speech
and conscience which are matters of course in other professions.
I object to censorship not merely because the existing form of it
grievously injures and hinders me individually, but on public
grounds.
THE DEFINITION OF IMMORALITY
In dealing with the question of the censorship, everything
depends on the correct use of the word immorality, and a careful
discrimination between the powers of a magistrate or judge to
administer a code, and those of a censor to please himself.
Whatever is contrary to established manners and customs is
immoral. An immoral act or doctrine is not necessarily a sinful
one: on the contrary, every advance in thought and conduct is by
definition immoral until it has converted the majority. For this
reason it is of the most enormous importance that immorality
should be protected jealously against the attacks of those who
have no standard except the standard of custom, and who regard
any attack on custom--that is, on morals--as an attack on
society, on religion, and on virtue.
A censor is never intentionally a protector of immorality. He
always aims at the protection of morality. Now morality is
extremely valuable to society. It imposes conventional conduct on
the great mass of persons who are incapable of original ethical
judgment, and who would be quite lost if they were not in
leading-strings devised by lawgivers, philosophers, prophets and
poets for their guidance. But morality is not dependent on
censorship for protection. It is already powerfully fortified
by the magistracy and the whole body of law. Blasphemy,
indecency, libel, treason, sedition, obscenity, profanity, and
all the other evils which a censorship is supposed to avert, are
punishable by the civil magistrate with all the severity of
vehement prejudice. Morality has not only every engine that
lawgivers can devise in full operation for its protection, but
also that enormous weight of public opinion enforced by social
ostracism which is stronger than all the statutes. A censor
pretending to protect morality is like a child pushing the
cushions of a railway carriage to give itself the sensation of
making the train travel at sixty miles an hour. It is immorality,
not morality, that needs protection: it is morality, not
immorality, that needs restraint; for morality, with all the dead
weight of human inertia and superstition to hang on the back of
the pioneer, and all the malice of vulgarity and prejudice to
threaten him, is responsible for many persecutions and many
martyrdoms.
Persecutions and martyrdoms, however, are trifles compared to the
mischief done by censorships in delaying the general march of
enlightenment. This can be brought home to us by imagining what
would have been the effect of applying to all literature the
censorship we still apply to the stage. The works of Linnaeus and
the evolutionists of 1790-1830, of Darwin, Wallace, Huxley,
Helmholtz, Tyndall, Spencer, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Samuel Butler,
would not have been published, as they were all immoral and
heretical in the very highest degree, and gave pain to many
worthy and pious people. They are at present condemned by the
Greek and Roman Catholic censorships as unfit for general
reading. A censorship of conduct would have been equally
disastrous. The disloyalty of Hampden and of Washington; the
revolting immorality of Luther in not only marrying when he was a
priest, but actually marrying a nun; the heterodoxy of Galileo;
the shocking blasphemies and sacrileges of Mohammed against the
idols whom he dethroned to make way for his conception of one
god; the still more startling blasphemy of Jesus when he declared
God to be the son of man and himself to be the son of God, are
all examples of shocking immoralities (every immorality shocks
somebody), the suppression and extinction of which would have
been more disastrous than the utmost mischief that can be
conceived as ensuing from the toleration of vice.
These facts, glaring as they are, are disguised by the
promotion of immoralities into moralities which is constantly
going on. Christianity and Mohammedanism, once thought of and
dealt with exactly as Anarchism is thought of and dealt with
today, have become established religions; and fresh immoralities
are prosecuted in their name. The truth is that the vast majority
of persons professing these religions have never been anything
but simple moralists. The respectable Englishman who is a
Christian because he was born in Clapham would be a Mohammedan
for the cognate reason if he had been born in Constantinople. He
has never willingly tolerated immorality. He did not adopt any
innovation until it had become moral; and then he adopted it, not
on its merits, but solely because it had become moral. In doing
so he never realized that it had ever been immoral: consequently
its early struggles taught him no lesson; and he has opposed the
next step in human progress as indignantly as if neither manners,
customs, nor thought had ever changed since the beginning of the
world. Toleration must be imposed on him as a mystic and painful
duty by his spiritual and political leaders, or he will condemn
the world to stagnation, which is the penalty of an inflexible
morality.
WHAT TOLERATION MEANS
This must be done all the more arbitrarily because it is not
possible to make the ordinary moral man understand what
toleration and liberty really mean. He will accept them verbally
with alacrity, even with enthusiasm, because the word toleration
has been moralized by eminent Whigs; but what he means by
toleration is toleration of doctrines that he considers
enlightened, and, by liberty, liberty to do what he considers
right: that is, he does not mean toleration or liberty at all;
for there is no need to tolerate what appears enlightened or to
claim liberty to do what most people consider right.
Toleration and liberty have no sense or use except as
toleration of opinions that are considered damnable, and
liberty to do what seems wrong. Setting Englishmen free to marry
their deceased wife's sisters is not tolerated by the people who
approve of it, but by the people who regard it as incestuous.
Catholic Emancipation and the admission of Jews to parliament
needed no toleration from Catholics and Jews: the toleration they
needed was that of the people who regarded the one measure as a
facilitation of idolatry, and the other as a condonation
of the crucifixion. Clearly such toleration is not clamored
for by the multitude or by the press which reflects its
prejudices. It is essentially one of those abnegations of passion
and prejudice which the common man submits to because uncommon
men whom he respects as wiser than himself assure him that it
must be so, or the higher affairs of human destiny will suffer.
Such admission is the more difficult because the arguments
against tolerating immorality are the same as the arguments
against tolerating murder and theft; and this is why the Censor
seems to the inconsiderate as obviously desirable a functionary
as the police magistrate. But there is this simple and tremendous
difference between the cases: that whereas no evil can
conceivably result from the total suppression of murder and
theft, and all communities prosper in direct proportion to such
suppression, the total suppression of immorality, especially
in matters of religion and sex, would stop enlightenment,
and produce what used to be called a Chinese civilization until
the Chinese lately took to immoral courses by permitting railway
contractors to desecrate the graves of their ancestors, and their
soldiers to wear clothes which indecently revealed the fact that
they had legs and waists and even posteriors. At about the same
moment a few bold Englishwomen ventured on the immorality of
riding astride their horses, a practice that has since
established itself so successfully that before another generation
has passed away there may not be a new side-saddle in England or
a woman who could use it if there was.
THE CASE FOR TOLERATION
Accordingly, there has risen among wise and far-sighted men a
perception of the need for setting certain departments of human
activity entirely free from legal interference. This has nothing
to do with any sympathy these liberators may themselves have with
immoral views. A man with the strongest conviction of the Divine
ordering of the universe and of the superiority of monarchy to
all forms of government may nevertheless quite consistently and
conscientiously be ready to lay down his life for the right of
every man to advocate Atheism or Republicanism if he believes in
them. An attack on morals may turn out to be the salvation of the
race. A hundred years ago nobody foresaw that Tom Paine's
centenary would be the subject of a laudatory special article in
The Times; and only a few understood that the persecution of his
works and the transportation of men for the felony of reading
them was a mischievous mistake. Even less, perhaps, could they
have guessed that Proudhon, who became notorious by his essay
entitled "What is Property? It is Theft" would have received,
on the like occasion and in the same paper, a respectful
consideration which nobody would now dream of according to Lord
Liverpool or Lord Brougham. Nevertheless there was a mass of
evidence to shew that such a development was not only possible
but fairly probable, and that the risks of suppressing liberty of
propaganda were far greater than the risk of Paine's or
Proudhon's writings wrecking civilization. Now there was no such
evidence in favor of tolerating the cutting of throats and the
robbing of tills. No case whatever can be made out for the
statement that a nation cannot do without common thieves and
homicidal ruffians. But an overwhelming case can be made out for
the statement that no nation can prosper or even continue to
exist without heretics and advocates of shockingly immoral
doctrines. The Inquisition and the Star Chamber, which were
nothing but censorships, made ruthless war on impiety and
immorality. The result was once familiar to Englishmen, though of
late years it seems to have been forgotten. It cost England a
revolution to get rid of the Star Chamber. Spain did not get rid
of the Inquisition, and paid for that omission by becoming a
barely third-rate power politically, and intellectually no power
at all, in the Europe she had once dominated as the
mightiest of the Christian empires.
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