Now comes the question, Why is our censorship, armed as it is with
apparently autocratic powers, so scandalously timid in the face of the
mob? Why is it not as autocratic in dealing with playwrights below
the average as with those above it? The answer is that its position is
really a very weak one. It has no direct co-ercive forces, no funds to
institute prosecutions and recover the legal penalties of defying it,
no powers of arrest or imprisonment, in short, none of the guarantees of
autocracy. What it can do is to refuse to renew the licence of a theatre
at which its orders are disobeyed. When it happens that a theatre is
about to be demolished, as was the case recently with the Imperial
Theatre after it had passed into the hands of the Wesleyan Methodists,
unlicensed plays can be performed, technically in private, but really in
full publicity, without risk. The prohibited plays of Brieux and Ibsen
have been performed in London in this way with complete impunity. But
the impunity is not confined to condemned theatres. Not long ago a West
End manager allowed a prohibited play to be performed at his theatre,
taking his chance of losing his licence in consequence. The event proved
that the manager was justified in regarding the risk as negligible;
for the Lord Chamberlain's remedy--the closing of a popular and
well-conducted theatre--was far too extreme to be practicable. Unless
the play had so outraged public opinion as to make the manager odious
and provoke a clamor for his exemplary punishment, the Lord Chamberlain
could only have had his revenge at the risk of having his powers
abolished as unsupportably tyrannical.
The Lord Chamberlain then has his powers so adjusted that he is
tyrannical just where it is important that he should be tolerant, and
tolerant just where he could screw up the standard a little by being
tyrannical. His plea that there are unmentionable depths to which
managers and authors would descend if he did not prevent them is
disproved by the plain fact that his indulgence goes as far as the
police, and sometimes further than the public, will let it. If our
judges had so little power there would be no law in England. If our
churches had so much, there would be no theatre, no literature, no
science, no art, possibly no England. The institution is at once
absurdly despotic and abjectly weak.