AN UNPUBLISHED PREFACE
(Written in 1910.)
It is not my habit to write prefaces, but there are certain things I
want to say concerning the play “Justice,” as to its subject-matter, not
its artistic qualities, bad, good, or indifferent.
Holding perhaps a more intimate knowledge of its author’s mind than can
elsewhere be obtained, I would remark that the play is no indictment or
attack, but a picture of the whole process of Justice as seen by this
painter’s eye. There are thickenings of line here, and thinnings there,
occasioned by lack of technical knowledge, or demanded by the exigencies
of dramatic craft, but the spiritual essence of the matter is set down
honestly, as best it could be perceived by him.
Justice was known by the ancients to be blind; by ourselves is admitted
blind; will be acclaimed blind by the tongues of our descendants. It is
blind because it is depart- or rather compart-mental.
The prosecutor, be he ancient Roman or Englishman of to-day, cannot
gauge or control the _whole_ effect on the offender and on society of
the process which he initiates. The Judge, be he Solon or Judge of the
High Court, cannot know enough of the temperament and antecedents of a
prisoner to adequately apportion a sentence which he cannot see being
carried out. The prison official is tied to the terms of the sentence
and the conditions of the system, for some system there must be. The
Public, on the prisoner’s release, acts mechanically in its own defence
against a marked man. All see only their own bits of the game.
From this general blindness, it follows that punishment is almost always
out of proportion. This is why it seemed to me worth while to make a
picture of Blind Justice, and to hang it on the wall. There are some who
believe that this picture will rapidly become out of date. I am not so
sanguine. Short of our all becoming not only eager, but able, to see
that which does not lie underneath our noses, I much fear that this
picture will remain valid for some considerable time The conditions will
change, but the spirit will remain—Justice is too naturally and
inevitably blind. Is that any reason why we should not occasionally be
reminded of the evil—one of the enduring, but perhaps diminishable,
evils of human life? Even the administrators of this Justice might like
now and then to glance at a picture of its blindness.
One word about the cell scene. It has been called false and
exaggerated. . . . Two brothers went to see this play. At the end of the
cell scene the younger, who stammers, turned to his elder and said:
“It’s n-not so—j-j—olly as all that!”
Precisely! Prisoners do not commonly enjoy the relief of beating on
their cell doors, though the incident is not unknown. But he who can
project himself into the minds of others knows that prisoners, in closed
cells, moping and brooding week after week, month after month, shut off
from all real distraction, from all touch with the outer world and
everything they care for, with the knowledge of years of imprisonment
before them and of broken lives when they come out—knows that such
prisoners, thousands of them, unseen by any eye, _reach a state of mind_
which would make them constantly fling themselves for relief on their
cell doors, if it were not for fear. No, it is not so jolly as all that!
The characteristics of all prison life, at all events in England, are
silence and solitude, physical or spiritual; and this cell scene was
selected to convey as nearly as the limitations of the stage permitted,
these commonest characteristics of detention.
For the truth of this picture of Blind Justice as a whole I rely on the
testimonial of that theatre attendant, employed out of charity, who,
having been prosecuted, sentenced, imprisoned, and released, knew, let
us hope, more of the matter spiritually, than those who criticize. After
the play on the first night, to the question of his manager, “Well, is
it true?” he looked up from his sweeping, and said: “Every word of it,
sir.”
I have only this to add. If each scene is taken separately and looked on
with a departmentally professional eye, it must needs seem out of
drawing, for it was visualized by an eye looking on each department only
in relation to the whole. When the professional reader or spectator of
the Court or Prison scene, says “Oh! this or that is not true!” he is
criticizing from the departmental, and not from the bird’s-eye point of
view, which an author must needs assume. Even if the sentence be more
than typically severe, though I doubt that, or the judgment not
typically worded, they serve well enough as illustrations of that
blindness which has accompanied the wisest judgments of one human being
on another since the world began.
No, the only legitimate criticism which the professional reader or
spectator can pass is that the particular bird’s-eye view is wrong. To
that criticism this bird can make no answer, except to say with
deference and courtesy that he must believe in his own eye—for it is
all he has to see with.