This was a bad beginning. Everybody knew that in England the censorship
would not be crushed by the weight of the constitutional argument
against it, heavy as that was, unless it were also brought home to the
Committee and to the public that it had sanctioned and protected the
very worst practicable examples of the kind of play it professed
to extirpate. For it must be remembered that the other half of the
practical side of the case, dealing with the merits of the plays it had
suppressed, could never secure a unanimous assent. If the Censor had
suppressed Hamlet, as he most certainly would have done had it been
submitted to him as a new play, he would have been supported by a large
body of people to whom incest is a tabooed subject which must not
be mentioned on the stage or anywhere else outside a criminal court.
Hamlet, Oedipus, and The Cenci, Mrs Warren's Profession, Brieux's
Maternite, and Les Avaries, Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna and Mr. Granville
Barker's Waste may or may not be great poems, or edifying sermons, or
important documents, or charming romances: our tribal citizens know
nothing about that and do not want to know anything: all that they do
know is that incest, prostitution, abortion, contagious diseases, and
nudity are improper, and that all conversations, or books, or plays in
which they are discussed are improper conversations, improper books,
improper plays, and should not be allowed. The Censor may prohibit all
such plays with complete certainty that there will be a chorus of "Quite
right too" sufficient to drown the protests of the few who know better.
The Achilles heel of the censorship is therefore not the fine plays it
has suppressed, but the abominable plays it has licensed: plays which
the Committee itself had to turn the public out of the room and close
the doors before it could discuss, and which I myself have found it
impossible to expose in the press because no editor of a paper or
magazine intended for general family reading could admit into his
columns the baldest narration of the stories which the Censor has not
only tolerated but expressly certified as fitting for presentation on
the stage. When the Committee ruled out this part of the case it shook
the confidence of the authors in its impartiality and its seriousness.
Of course it was not able to enforce its ruling thoroughly. Plays which
were merely lightminded and irresponsible in their viciousness
were repeatedly mentioned by Mr Harcourt and others. But the really
detestable plays, which would have damned the censorship beyond all
apology or salvation, were never referred to; and the moment Mr Harcourt
or anyone else made the Committee uncomfortable by a move in their
direction, the ruling was appealed to at once, and the censorship saved.