Like many other works of mine, this playlet is a piece d'occasion. In
1905 it happened that Mr Arnold Daly, who was then playing the part of
Napoleon in The Man of Destiny in New York, found that whilst the play
was too long to take a secondary place in the evening's performance, it
was too short to suffice by itself. I therefore took advantage of four
days continuous rain during a holiday in the north of Scotland to write
How He Lied To Her Husband for Mr Daly. In his hands, it served its turn
very effectively.
I print it here as a sample of what can be done with even the most
hackneyed stage framework by filling it in with an observed touch of
actual humanity instead of with doctrinaire romanticism. Nothing in the
theatre is staler than the situation of husband, wife and lover, or the
fun of knockabout farce. I have taken both, and got an original play
out of them, as anybody else can if only he will look about him for his
material instead of plagiarizing Othello and the thousand plays that
have proceeded on Othello's romantic assumptions and false point of
honor.
A further experiment made by Mr Arnold Daly with this play is worth
recording. In 1905 Mr Daly produced Mrs Warren's Profession in New York.
The press of that city instantly raised a cry that such persons as Mrs
Warren are "ordure," and should not be mentioned in the presence
of decent people. This hideous repudiation of humanity and social
conscience so took possession of the New York journalists that the
few among them who kept their feet morally and intellectually could do
nothing to check the epidemic of foul language, gross suggestion,
and raving obscenity of word and thought that broke out. The writers
abandoned all self-restraint under the impression that they were
upholding virtue instead of outraging it. They infected each other with
their hysteria until they were for all practical purposes indecently
mad. They finally forced the police to arrest Mr Daly and his company,
and led the magistrate to express his loathing of the duty thus forced
upon him of reading an unmentionable and abominable play. Of course the
convulsion soon exhausted itself. The magistrate, naturally somewhat
impatient when he found that what he had to read was a strenuously
ethical play forming part of a book which had been in circulation
unchallenged for eight years, and had been received without protest by
the whole London and New York press, gave the journalists a piece of his
mind as to their moral taste in plays. By consent, he passed the case
on to a higher court, which declared that the play was not immoral;
acquitted Mr Daly; and made an end of the attempt to use the law to
declare living women to be "ordure," and thus enforce silence as to
the far-reaching fact that you cannot cheapen women in the market for
industrial purposes without cheapening them for other purposes as well.
I hope Mrs Warren's Profession will be played everywhere, in season and
out of season, until Mrs Warren has bitten that fact into the public
conscience, and shamed the newspapers which support a tariff to keep
up the price of every American commodity except American manhood and
womanhood.
Unfortunately, Mr Daly had already suffered the usual fate of those who
direct public attention to the profits of the sweater or the pleasures
of the voluptuary. He was morally lynched side by side with me. Months
elapsed before the decision of the courts vindicated him; and even then,
since his vindication implied the condemnation of the press, which was
by that time sober again, and ashamed of its orgy, his triumph received
a rather sulky and grudging publicity. In the meantime he had hardly
been able to approach an American city, including even those cities
which had heaped applause on him as the defender of hearth and home when
he produced Candida, without having to face articles discussing whether
mothers could allow their daughters to attend such plays as You Never
Can Tell, written by the infamous author of Mrs Warren's Profession, and
acted by the monster who produced it. What made this harder to bear was
that though no fact is better established in theatrical business than
the financial disastrousness of moral discredit, the journalists who had
done all the mischief kept paying vice the homage of assuming that it
is enormously popular and lucrative, and that I and Mr Daly, being
exploiters of vice, must therefore be making colossal fortunes out of
the abuse heaped on us, and had in fact provoked it and welcomed it with
that express object. Ignorance of real life could hardly go further.
One consequence was that Mr Daly could not have kept his financial
engagements or maintained his hold on the public had he not accepted
engagements to appear for a season in the vaudeville theatres [the
American equivalent of our music halls], where he played How He Lied
to Her Husband comparatively unhampered by the press censorship of
the theatre, or by that sophistication of the audience through press
suggestion from which I suffer more, perhaps, than any other author.
Vaudeville authors are fortunately unknown: the audiences see what the
play contains and what the actor can do, not what the papers have told
them to expect. Success under such circumstances had a value both for Mr
Daly and myself which did something to console us for the very unsavory
mobbing which the New York press organized for us, and which was not the
less disgusting because we suffered in a good cause and in the very best
company.
Mr Daly, having weathered the storm, can perhaps shake his soul free
of it as he heads for fresh successes with younger authors. But I have
certain sensitive places in my soul: I do not like that word "ordure."
Apply it to my work, and I can afford to smile, since the world, on the
whole, will smile with me. But to apply it to the woman in the street,
whose spirit is of one substance with our own and her body no less holy:
to look your women folk in the face afterwards and not go out and hang
yourself: that is not on the list of pardonable sins.
POSTSCRIPT. Since the above was written news has arrived from America
that a leading New York newspaper, which was among the most abusively
clamorous for the suppression of Mrs Warren's Profession, has just been
fined heavily for deriving part of its revenue from advertisements of
Mrs Warren's houses.
Many people have been puzzled by the fact that whilst stage
entertainments which are frankly meant to act on the spectators as
aphrodisiacs, are everywhere tolerated, plays which have an almost
horrifyingly contrary effect are fiercely attacked by persons and papers
notoriously indifferent to public morals on all other occasions. The
explanation is very simple. The profits of Mrs Warren's profession
are shared not only by Mrs Warren and Sir George Crofts, but by the
landlords of their houses, the newspapers which advertize them, the
restaurants which cater for them, and, in short, all the trades to
which they are good customers, not to mention the public officials
and representatives whom they silence by complicity, corruption, or
blackmail. Add to these the employers who profit by cheap female labor,
and the shareholders whose dividends depend on it [you find such people
everywhere, even on the judicial bench and in the highest places in
Church and State], and you get a large and powerful class with a
strong pecuniary incentive to protect Mrs Warren's profession, and a
correspondingly strong incentive to conceal, from their own consciences
no less than from the world, the real sources of their gain. These are
the people who declare that it is feminine vice and not poverty that
drives women to the streets, as if vicious women with independent
incomes ever went there. These are the people who, indulgent or
indifferent to aphrodisiac plays, raise the moral hue and cry against
performances of Mrs Warren's Profession, and drag actresses to the
police court to be insulted, bullied, and threatened for fulfilling
their engagements. For please observe that the judicial decision in New
York State in favor of the play does not end the matter. In Kansas City,
for instance, the municipality, finding itself restrained by the courts
from preventing the performance, fell back on a local bye-law against
indecency to evade the Constitution of the United States. They summoned
the actress who impersonated Mrs Warren to the police court, and offered
her and her colleagues the alternative of leaving the city or being
prosecuted under this bye-law.
Now nothing is more possible than that the city councillors who suddenly
displayed such concern for the morals of the theatre were either Mrs
Warren's landlords, or employers of women at starvation wages, or
restaurant keepers, or newspaper proprietors, or in some other more
or less direct way sharers of the profits of her trade. No doubt it
is equally possible that they were simply stupid men who thought that
indecency consists, not in evil, but in mentioning it. I have, however,
been myself a member of a municipal council, and have not found
municipal councillors quite so simple and inexperienced as this. At all
events I do not propose to give the Kansas councillors the benefit of
the doubt. I therefore advise the public at large, which will finally
decide the matter, to keep a vigilant eye on gentlemen who will stand
anything at the theatre except a performance of Mrs Warren's Profession,
and who assert in the same breath that [a] the play is too loathsome to
be bearable by civilized people, and [b] that unless its performance
is prohibited the whole town will throng to see it. They may be merely
excited and foolish; but I am bound to warn the public that it is
equally likely that they may be collected and knavish.
At all events, to prohibit the play is to protect the evil which the
play exposes; and in view of that fact, I see no reason for assuming
that the prohibitionists are disinterested moralists, and that
the author, the managers, and the performers, who depend for
their livelihood on their personal reputations and not on rents,
advertisements, or dividends, are grossly inferior to them in moral
sense and public responsibility.
It is true that in Mrs Warren's Profession, Society, and not any
individual, is the villain of the piece; but it does not follow that
the people who take offence at it are all champions of society. Their
credentials cannot be too carefully examined.