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.