In the above cases the general question of censorship is separable
from the question of the present form of it. Every one who condemns the
principle of censorship must also condemn the Lord Chamberlain's control
of the drama; but those who approve of the principle do not necessarily
approve of the Lord Chamberlain being the Censor ex officio. They may,
however, be entirely opposed to popular liberties, and may conclude from
what has been said, not that the stage should be made as free as the
church, press, or platform, but that these institutions should be
censored as strictly as the stage. It will seem obvious to them that
nothing is needed to remove all objections to a censorship except the
placing of its powers in better hands.
Now though the transfer of the censorship to, say, the Lord Chancellor,
or the Primate, or a Cabinet Minister, would be much less humiliating to
the persons immediately concerned, the inherent vices of the institution
would not be appreciably less disastrous. They would even be aggravated,
for reasons which do not appear on the surface, and therefore need to be
followed with some attention.
It is often said that the public is the real censor. That this is to
some extent true is proved by the fact that plays which are licensed and
produced in London have to be expurgated for the provinces. This does
not mean that the provinces are more strait-laced, but simply that in
many provincial towns there is only one theatre for all classes and
all tastes, whereas in London there are separate theatres for separate
sections of playgoers; so that, for example, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
can conduct His Majesty's Theatre without the slightest regard to the
tastes of the frequenters of the Gaiety Theatre; and Mr. George Edwardes
can conduct the Gaiety Theatre without catering in any way for lovers of
Shakespear. Thus the farcical comedy which has scandalized the critics
in London by the libertinage of its jests is played to the respectable
dress circle of Northampton with these same jests slurred over so as
to be imperceptible by even the most prurient spectator. The public, in
short, takes care that nobody shall outrage it.
But the public also takes care that nobody shall starve it, or regulate
its dramatic diet as a schoolmistress regulates the reading of her
pupils. Even when it wishes to be debauched, no censor can--or at least
no censor does--stand out against it. If a play is irresistibly amusing,
it gets licensed no matter what its moral aspect may be. A brilliant
instance is the Divorcons of the late Victorien Sardou, which may not
have been the naughtiest play of the 19th century, but was certainly
the very naughtiest that any English manager in his senses would have
ventured to produce. Nevertheless, being a very amusing play, it passed
the licenser with the exception of a reference to impotence as a ground
for divorce which no English actress would have ventured on in any
case. Within the last few months a very amusing comedy with a strongly
polygamous moral was found irresistible by the Lord Chamberlain. Plenty
of fun and a happy ending will get anything licensed, because the public
will have it so, and the Examiner of Plays, as the holder of the office
testified before the Commission of 1892 (Report, page 330), feels with
the public, and knows that his office could not survive a widespread
unpopularity. In short, the support of the mob--that is, of the
unreasoning, unorganized, uninstructed mass of popular sentiment--is
indispensable to the censorship as it exists to-day in England. This is
the explanation of the toleration by the Lord Chamberlain of coarse and
vicious plays. It is not long since a judge before whom a licensed play
came in the course of a lawsuit expressed his scandalized astonishment
at the licensing of such a work. Eminent churchmen have made similar
protests. In some plays the simulation of criminal assaults on the stage
has been carried to a point at which a step further would have involved
the interference of the police. Provided the treatment of the theme is
gaily or hypocritically popular, and the ending happy, the indulgence
of the Lord Chamberlain can be counted on. On the other hand,
anything unpleasing and unpopular is rigorously censored. Adultery and
prostitution are tolerated and even encouraged to such an extent that
plays which do not deal with them are commonly said not to be plays
at all. But if any of the unpleasing consequences of adultery
and prostitution--for instance, an UNSUCCESSFUL illegal operation
(successful ones are tolerated) or venereal disease--are mentioned,
the play is prohibited. This principle of shielding the playgoer from
unpleasant reflections is carried so far that when a play was submitted
for license in which the relations of a prostitute with all the male
characters in the piece was described as "immoral," the Examiner of
Plays objected to that passage, though he made no objection to the
relations themselves. The Lord Chamberlain dare not, in short, attempt
to exclude from the stage the tragedies of murder and lust, or the
farces of mendacity, adultery, and dissolute gaiety in which vulgar
people delight. But when these same vulgar people are threatened with an
unpopular play in which dissoluteness is shown to be no laughing matter,
it is prohibited at once amid the vulgar applause, the net result being
that vice is made delightful and virtue banned by the very institution
which is supported on the understanding that it produces exactly the
opposite result.