I confess that I took an objection to that play on the spot. It may be a
good play. I don't know. I never shall know, for I shall never see it. But
why should it be assumed that you and I will run off to the pay box to see
a new play "by a peer"? Suppose the anonymous playwright had been a lawyer,
or a journalist, or a pork-butcher, or a grocer. Would the producer have
thought it helpful to announce a new play by a pork-butcher, or a lawyer,
or a grocer, or a journalist? He certainly would not. He would have left
the play to stand or fall on its merits.
Why, then, does he think that the fact that it is by a peer will bring us
all crowding to his doors? You may, of course, take it as a reflection on
the peerage. You may be supposed to think it such a miraculous thing that a
peer should be able to write a play that you may be expected to go and see
it as you would go to Barnum's to see a two-headed man or a bearded woman?
We may be invited to see it merely as a marvel, much as we used to be
invited to go and see the horse that could count or the monkeys that could
ride bicycles.
If it were so I should feel it was unjust to the peerage which is certainly
not below the average in intellectual capacity. But it is not so. It is
something much more serious than that. It is not intended to be a
reflection on the peerage. It is an unconscious reflection on the British
public. The idea behind the announcement is not that we shall go to see the
play in a spirit of curiosity, as if it had been written by an
ourang-outang, but that we shall go to see it in a spirit of flunkeyism, as
if it had been written by a demi-god. We are conceived sitting in hushed
wonder that a visitor from realms far above our experience should stoop
down to amuse us.
I wish I could feel that this was a false estimate of the British public.
It would certainly be a false estimate of the French public. The most
splendid thing, I think, in connection with the French people is their
freedom from flunkeyism. The great wind of the Revolution blew that rubbish
out of their souls for ever. It gave them the sublime conception of
citizenship as the basis of human relationship. It destroyed all the social
fences that feudalism had erected to keep the people out of the common
inheritance of the possibilities of human life. It liberated them from
shams, and made them the one realistic people in Europe. They looked truth
in the face, because they had cleaned its face of the dirty accretions of
the past. They saw, and they are the only people in Europe who as a nation
have seen, that
The rank is but the guinea stamp:
The man's the gowd, for a' that.
It is this fact which has made France the standard-bearer of human ideals.
It is this fact which puts her spiritually at the head of all the nations.
I am afraid it must be admitted that we are still in the flunkey stage. We
are still hypnotised by rank and social caste. I saw a crowd running
excitedly after a carriage near the Gaiety Theatre the other day, and found
it was because Princess So-and-So was passing. Our Press reeks with the
disease, and loves to record this sort of thing:--