The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet
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George Bernard Shaw >> The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet
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THE LIMITS TO TOLERATION
But the large toleration these considerations dictate has limits.
For example, though we tolerate, and rightly tolerate, the
propaganda of Anarchism as a political theory which embraces all
that is valuable in the doctrine of Laisser-Faire and the method
of Free Trade as well as all that is shocking in the views of
Bakounine, we clearly cannot, or at all events will not, tolerate
assassination of rulers on the ground that it is "propaganda
by deed" or sociological experiment. A play inciting to such an
assassination cannot claim the privileges of heresy or
immorality, because no case can be made out in support of
assassination as an indispensable instrument of progress. Now it
happens that we have in the Julius Caesar of Shakespear a play
which the Tsar of Russia or the Governor-General of India would
hardly care to see performed in their capitals just now. It is an
artistic treasure; but it glorifies a murder which Goethe
described as the silliest crime ever committed. It may quite
possibly have helped the regicides of 1649 to see themselves, as
it certainly helped generations of Whig statesmen to see them, in
a heroic light; and it unquestionably vindicates and ennobles a
conspirator who assassinated the head of the Roman State not
because he abused his position but solely because he occupied it,
thus affirming the extreme republican principle that all kings,
good or bad, should be killed because kingship and freedom cannot
live together. Under certain circumstances this vindication and
ennoblement might act as an incitement to an actual assassination
as well as to Plutarchian republicanism; for it is one thing to
advocate republicanism or royalism: it is quite another to make a
hero of Brutus or Ravaillac, or a heroine of Charlotte Corday.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems
hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.
The very people who would have scouted the notion of prohibiting
the performances of Julius Caesar at His Majesty's Theatre in
London last year, might now entertain very seriously a proposal
to exclude Indians from them, and to suppress the play completely
in Calcutta and Dublin; for if the assassin of Caesar was a hero,
why not the assassins of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Presidents
Lincoln and McKinley, and Sir Curzon Wyllie? Here is a strong
case for some constitutional means of preventing the performance
of a play. True, it is an equally strong case for preventing the
circulation of the Bible, which was always in the hands of our
regicides; but as the Roman Catholic Church does not hesitate to
accept that consequence of the censorial principle, it does not
invalidate the argument.
Take another actual case. A modern comedy, Arms and The Man,
though not a comedy of politics, is nevertheless so far
historical that it reveals the unacknowledged fact that as the
Servo-Bulgarian War of 1885 was much more than a struggle between
the Servians and Bulgarians, the troops engaged were officered by
two European Powers of the first magnitude. In consequence,
the performance of the play was for some time forbidden in
Vienna, and more recently it gave offence in Rome at a moment
when popular feeling was excited as to the relations of Austria
with the Balkan States. Now if a comedy so remote from political
passion as Arms and The Man can, merely because it refers to
political facts, become so inconvenient and inopportune that
Foreign Offices take the trouble to have its production
postponed, what may not be the effect of what is called a
patriotic drama produced at a moment when the balance is
quivering between peace and war? Is there not something to be
said for a political censorship, if not for a moral one? May not
those continental governments who leave the stage practically
free in every other respect, but muzzle it politically, be
justified by the practical exigencies of the situation?
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LAW AND CENSORSHIP
The answer is that a pamphlet, a newspaper article, or a
resolution moved at a political meeting can do all the mischief
that a play can, and often more; yet we do not set up a permanent
censorship of the press or of political meetings. Any journalist
may publish an article, any demagogue may deliver a speech
without giving notice to the government or obtaining its licence.
The risk of such freedom is great; but as it is the price of our
political liberty, we think it worth paying. We may abrogate
it in emergencies by a Coercion Act, a suspension of the Habeas
Corpus Act, or a proclamation of martial law, just as we stop the
traffic in a street during a fire, or shoot thieves at sight if
they loot after an earthquake. But when the emergency is past,
liberty is restored everywhere except in the theatre. The Act of
1843 is a permanent Coercion Act for the theatre, a permanent
suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act as far as plays are
concerned, a permanent proclamation of martial law with a single
official substituted for a court martial. It is, in fact, assumed
that actors, playwrights, and theatre managers are dangerous and
dissolute characters whose existence creates a chronic state of
emergency, and who must be treated as earthquake looters are
treated. It is not necessary now to discredit this assumption. It
was broken down by the late Sir Henry Irving when he finally
shamed the Government into extending to his profession the
official recognition enjoyed by the other branches of fine art.
To-day we have on the roll of knighthood actors, authors, and
managers. The rogue and vagabond theory of the depravity of the
theatre is as dead officially as it is in general society; and
with it has perished the sole excuse for the Act of 1843 and
for the denial to the theatre of the liberties secured, at
far greater social risk, to the press and the platform.
There is no question here of giving the theatre any larger
liberties than the press and the platform, or of claiming larger
powers for Shakespear to eulogize Brutus than Lord Rosebery has
to eulogize Cromwell. The abolition of the censorship does not
involve the abolition of the magistrate and of the whole civil
and criminal code. On the contrary it would make the theatre more
effectually subject to them than it is at present; for once
a play now runs the gauntlet of the censorship, it is
practically placed above the law. It is almost humiliating
to have to demonstrate the essential difference between a censor
and a magistrate or a sanitary inspector; but it is impossible to
ignore the carelessness with which even distinguished critics of
the theatre assume that all the arguments proper to the support
of a magistracy and body of jurisprudence apply equally to a
censorship.
A magistrate has laws to administer: a censor has nothing but his
own opinion. A judge leaves the question of guilt to the jury:
the Censor is jury and judge as well as lawgiver. A magistrate
may be strongly prejudiced against an atheist or an anti-
vaccinator, just as a sanitary inspector may have formed a
careful opinion that drains are less healthy than cesspools; but
the magistrate must allow the atheist to affirm instead of to
swear, and must grant the anti-vaccinator an exemption
certificate, when their demands are lawfully made; and in cities
the inspector must compel the builder to make drains and must
prosecute him if he makes cesspools. The law may be only the
intolerance of the community; but it is a defined and limited
intolerance. The limitation is sometimes carried so far that a
judge cannot inflict the penalty for housebreaking on a burglar
who can prove that he found the door open and therefore made only
an unlawful entry. On the other hand, it is sometimes so vague,
as for example in the case of the American law against obscenity,
that it makes the magistrate virtually a censor. But in the main
a citizen can ascertain what he may do and what he may not do;
and, though no one knows better than a magistrate that a single
ill-conducted family may demoralize a whole street, no magistrate
can imprison or otherwise restrain its members on the ground that
their immorality may corrupt their neighbors. He can prevent any
citizen from carrying certain specified weapons, but not from
handling pokers, table-knives, bricks or bottles of corrosive
fluid, on the ground that he might use them to commit murder or
inflict malicious injury. He has no general power to prevent
citizens from selling unhealthy or poisonous substances, or
judging for themselves what substances are unhealthy and what
wholesome, what poisonous and what innocuous: what he CAN do is
to prevent anybody who has not a specific qualification from
selling certain specified poisons of which a schedule is kept.
Nobody is forbidden to sell minerals without a licence; but
everybody is forbidden to sell silver without a licence. When the
law has forgotten some atrocious sin--for instance, contracting
marriage whilst suffering from contagious disease--the magistrate
cannot arrest or punish the wrongdoer, however he may abhor his
wickedness. In short, no man is lawfully at the mercy of the
magistrate's personal caprice, prejudice, ignorance,
superstition, temper, stupidity, resentment, timidity, ambition,
or private conviction. But a playwright's livelihood, his
reputation, and his inspiration and mission are at the personal
mercy of the Censor. The two do not stand, as the criminal and
the judge stand, in the presence of a law that binds them both
equally, and was made by neither of them, but by the
deliberative collective wisdom of the community. The only law
that affects them is the Act of 1843, which empowers one of them
to do absolutely and finally what he likes with the other's work.
And when it is remembered that the slave in this case is the man
whose profession is that of Eschylus and Euripides, of Shakespear
and Goethe, of Tolstoy and Ibsen, and the master the holder of a
party appointment which by the nature of its duties practically
excludes the possibility of its acceptance by a serious statesman
or great lawyer, it will be seen that the playwrights are
justified in reproaching the framers of that Act for having
failed not only to appreciate the immense importance of the
theatre as a most powerful instrument for teaching the nation how
and what to think and feel, but even to conceive that those who
make their living by the theatre are normal human beings with
the common rights of English citizens. In this extremity of
inconsiderateness it is not surprising that they also did not
trouble themselves to study the difference between a censor and a
magistrate. And it will be found that almost all the people who
disinterestedly defend the censorship today are defending him on
the assumption that there is no constitutional difference between
him and any other functionary whose duty it is to restrain
crime and disorder.
One further difference remains to be noted. As a magistrate grows
old his mind may change or decay; but the law remains the same.
The censorship of the theatre fluctuates with every change in the
views and character of the man who exercises it. And what this
implies can only be appreciated by those who can imagine what the
effect on the mind must be of the duty of reading through every
play that is produced in the kingdom year in, year out.
WHY THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN?
What may be called the high political case against censorship as
a principle is now complete. The pleadings are those which have
already freed books and pulpits and political platforms in
England from censorship, if not from occasional legal
persecution. The stage alone remains under a censorship of a
grotesquely unsuitable kind. No play can be performed if the Lord
Chamberlain happens to disapprove of it. And the Lord
Chamberlain's functions have no sort of relationship to
dramatic literature. A great judge of literature, a farseeing
statesman, a born champion of liberty of conscience and
intellectual integrity--say a Milton, a Chesterfield, a Bentham--
would be a very bad Lord Chamberlain: so bad, in fact, that his
exclusion from such a post may be regarded as decreed by natural
law. On the other hand, a good Lord Chamberlain would be a
stickler for morals in the narrowest sense, a busy-body, a man to
whom a matter of two inches in the length of a gentleman's sword
or the absence of a feather from a lady's head-dress would be a
graver matter than the Habeas Corpus Act. The Lord Chamberlain,
as Censor of the theatre, is a direct descendant of the King's
Master of the Revels, appointed in 1544 by Henry VIII. To keep
order among the players and musicians of that day when they
performed at Court. This first appearance of the theatrical
censor in politics as the whipper-in of the player, with its
conception of the player as a rich man's servant hired to amuse
him, and, outside his professional duties, as a gay, disorderly,
anarchic spoilt child, half privileged, half outlawed, probably
as much vagabond as actor, is the real foundation of the
subjection of the whole profession, actors, managers, authors
and all, to the despotic authority of an officer whose business
it is to preserve decorum among menials. It must be remembered
that it was not until a hundred years later, in the reaction
against the Puritans, that a woman could appear on the English
stage without being pelted off as the Italian actresses were. The
theatrical profession was regarded as a shameless one; and it is
only of late years that actresses have at last succeeded in
living down the assumption that actress and prostitute are
synonymous terms, and made good their position in respectable
society. This makes the survival of the old ostracism in the Act
of 1843 intolerably galling; and though it explains the
apparently unaccountable absurdity of choosing as Censor of
dramatic literature an official whose functions and
qualifications have nothing whatever to do with literature, it
also explains why the present arrangement is not only criticized
as an institution, but resented as an insult.
THE DIPLOMATIC OBJECTION TO THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN
There is another reason, quite unconnected with the
Susceptibilities of authors, which makes it undesirable that a
member of the King's Household should be responsible for the
character and tendency of plays. The drama, dealing with all
departments of human life, is necessarily political. Recent
events have shown--what indeed needed no demonstration--that it
is impossible to prevent inferences being made, both at home and
abroad, from the action of the Lord Chamberlain. The most talked-
about play of the present year (1909), An Englishman's Home, has
for its main interest an invasion of England by a fictitious
power which is understood, as it is meant to be understood, to
represent Germany. The lesson taught by the play is the danger of
invasion and the need for every English citizen to be a soldier.
The Lord Chamberlain licensed this play, but refused to license a
parody of it. Shortly afterwards he refused to license another
play in which the fear of a German invasion was ridiculed. The
German press drew the inevitable inference that the Lord
Chamberlain was an anti-German alarmist, and that his opinions
were a reflection of those prevailing in St. James's Palace.
Immediately after this, the Lord Chamberlain licensed the play.
Whether the inference, as far as the Lord Chamberlain was
concerned, was justified, is of no consequence. What is important
is that it was sure to be made, justly or unjustly, and extended
from the Lord Chamberlain to the Throne.
THE OBJECTION OF COURT ETIQUET
There is another objection to the Lord Chamberlain's censorship
which affects the author's choice of subject. Formerly very
little heed was given in England to the susceptibilities of
foreign courts. For instance, the notion that the Mikado of Japan
should be as sacred to the English playwright as he is to the
Japanese Lord Chamberlain would have seemed grotesque a
generation ago. Now that the maintenance of entente cordiale
between nations is one of the most prominent and most useful
functions of the crown, the freedom of authors to deal with
political subjects, even historically, is seriously
threatened by the way in which the censorship makes the King
responsible for the contents of every play. One author--the
writer of these lines, in fact--has long desired to dramatize the
life of Mahomet. But the possibility of a protest from the
Turkish Ambassador--or the fear of it--causing the Lord
Chamberlain to refuse to license such a play has prevented the
play from being written. Now, if the censorship were abolished,
nobody but the author could be held responsible for the play.
The Turkish Ambassador does not now protest against the
publication of Carlyle's essay on the prophet, or of the English
translations of the Koran in the prefaces to which Mahomet is
criticized as an impostor, or of the older books in which he is
reviled as Mahound and classed with the devil himself. But if
these publications had to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain it
would be impossible for the King to allow the licence to be
issued, as he would thereby be made responsible for the opinions
expressed. This restriction of the historical drama is an
unmixed evil. Great religious leaders are more interesting
and more important subjects for the dramatist than great
conquerors. It is a misfortune that public opinion would not
tolerate a dramatization of Mahomet in Constantinople. But to
prohibit it here, where public opinion would tolerate it, is an
absurdity which, if applied in all directions, would make it
impossible for the Queen to receive a Turkish ambassador without
veiling herself, or the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's to display
a cross on the summit of their Cathedral in a city occupied
largely and influentially by Jews. Court etiquet is no doubt an
excellent thing for court ceremonies; but to attempt to impose it
on the drama is about as sensible as an attempt to make everybody
in London wear court dress.
WHY NOT AN ENLIGHTENED CENSORSHIP?
In the above cases the general question of censorship is
separable from the question of the present form of it. Every one
who condemns the principle of censorship must also condemn the
Lord Chamberlain's control of the drama; but those who approve of
the principle do not necessarily approve of the Lord Chamberlain
being the Censor ex officio. They may, however, be entirely
opposed to popular liberties, and may conclude from what has been
said, not that the stage should be made as free as the church,
press, or platform, but that these institutions should be
censored as strictly as the stage. It will seem obvious to them
that nothing is needed to remove all objections to a censorship
except the placing of its powers in better hands.
Now though the transfer of the censorship to, say, the Lord
Chancellor, or the Primate, or a Cabinet Minister, would be much
less humiliating to the persons immediately concerned, the
inherent vices of the institution would not be appreciably less
disastrous. They would even be aggravated, for reasons which do
not appear on the surface, and therefore need to be followed with
some attention.
It is often said that the public is the real censor. That this is
to some extent true is proved by the fact that plays which are
licensed and produced in London have to be expurgated for the
provinces. This does not mean that the provinces are more strait-
laced, but simply that in many provincial towns there is only one
theatre for all classes and all tastes, whereas in London there
are separate theatres for separate sections of playgoers; so
that, for example, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree can conduct His
Majesty's Theatre without the slightest regard to the tastes of
the frequenters of the Gaiety Theatre; and Mr. George Edwardes
can conduct the Gaiety Theatre without catering in any way for
lovers of Shakespear. Thus the farcical comedy which has
scandalized the critics in London by the libertinage of its jests
is played to the respectable dress circle of Northampton
with these same jests slurred over so as to be imperceptible by
even the most prurient spectator. The public, in short, takes
care that nobody shall outrage it.
But the public also takes care that nobody shall starve it, or
regulate its dramatic diet as a schoolmistress regulates the
reading of her pupils. Even when it wishes to be debauched, no
censor can--or at least no censor does--stand out against it. If
a play is irresistibly amusing, it gets licensed no matter what
its moral aspect may be. A brilliant instance is the Divorcons of
the late Victorien Sardou, which may not have been the naughtiest
play of the 19th century, but was certainly the very naughtiest
that any English manager in his senses would have ventured to
produce. Nevertheless, being a very amusing play, it passed the
licenser with the exception of a reference to impotence as a
ground for divorce which no English actress would have ventured
on in any case. Within the last few months a very amusing comedy
with a strongly polygamous moral was found irresistible by the
Lord Chamberlain. Plenty of fun and a happy ending will get
anything licensed, because the public will have it so, and the
Examiner of Plays, as the holder of the office testified before
the Commission of 1892 (Report, page 330), feels with the public,
and knows that his office could not survive a widespread
unpopularity. In short, the support of the mob--that is, of the
unreasoning, unorganized, uninstructed mass of popular
sentiment--is indispensable to the censorship as it exists to-
day in England. This is the explanation of the toleration by the
Lord Chamberlain of coarse and vicious plays. It is not long
since a judge before whom a licensed play came in the course of a
lawsuit expressed his scandalized astonishment at the licensing
of such a work. Eminent churchmen have made similar protests.
In some plays the simulation of criminal assaults on the stage
has been carried to a point at which a step further would have
involved the interference of the police. Provided the treatment
of the theme is gaily or hypocritically popular, and the ending
happy, the indulgence of the Lord Chamberlain can be counted on.
On the other hand, anything unpleasing and unpopular is
rigorously censored. Adultery and prostitution are tolerated and
even encouraged to such an extent that plays which do not deal
with them are commonly said not to be plays at all. But if any of
the unpleasing consequences of adultery and prostitution--for
instance, an UNSUCCESSFUL illegal operation (successful ones are
tolerated) or venereal disease--are mentioned, the play is
prohibited. This principle of shielding the playgoer from
unpleasant reflections is carried so far that when a play was
submitted for license in which the relations of a prostitute
with all the male characters in the piece was described as
"immoral," the Examiner of Plays objected to that passage, though
he made no objection to the relations themselves. The Lord
Chamberlain dare not, in short, attempt to exclude from the stage
the tragedies of murder and lust, or the farces of mendacity,
adultery, and dissolute gaiety in which vulgar people delight.
But when these same vulgar people are threatened with an
unpopular play in which dissoluteness is shown to be no
laughing matter, it is prohibited at once amid the vulgar
applause, the net result being that vice is made delightful
and virtue banned by the very institution which is
supported on the understanding that it produces exactly
the opposite result.
THE WEAKNESS OF THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN'S DEPARTMENT
Now comes the question, Why is our censorship, armed as it is
with apparently autocratic powers, so scandalously timid in the
face of the mob? Why is it not as autocratic in dealing with
playwrights below the average as with those above it? The answer
is that its position is really a very weak one. It has no direct
co-ercive forces, no funds to institute prosecutions and recover
the legal penalties of defying it, no powers of arrest or
imprisonment, in short, none of the guarantees of autocracy. What
it can do is to refuse to renew the licence of a theatre at which
its orders are disobeyed. When it happens that a theatre is about
to be demolished, as was the case recently with the Imperial
Theatre after it had passed into the hands of the Wesleyan
Methodists, unlicensed plays can be performed, technically in
private, but really in full publicity, without risk. The
prohibited plays of Brieux and Ibsen have been performed in
London in this way with complete impunity. But the impunity is
not confined to condemned theatres. Not long ago a West End
manager allowed a prohibited play to 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.
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