Another hare was started by Professor Gilbert Murray and Mr. Laurence
Housman, who, in pure kindness to the managers, asked whether it would
not be possible to establish for their assistance a sort of King's
Proctor to whom plays might be referred for an official legal opinion
as to their compliance with the law before production. There are several
objections to this proposal; and they may as well be stated in case the
proposal should be revived. In the first place, no lawyer with the most
elementary knowledge of the law of libel in its various applications to
sedition, obscenity, and blasphemy, could answer for the consequences
of producing any play whatsoever as to which the smallest question could
arise in the mind of any sane person. I have been a critic and an author
in active service for thirty years; and though nothing I have written
has ever been prosecuted in England or made the subject of legal
proceedings, yet I have never published in my life an article, a play,
or a book, as to which, if I had taken legal advice, an expert could
have assured me that I was proof against prosecution or against an
action for damages by the persons criticized. No doubt a sensible
solicitor might have advised me that the risk was no greater than all
men have to take in dangerous trades; but such an opinion, though it may
encourage a client, does not protect him. For example, if a publisher
asks his solicitor whether he may venture on an edition of Sterne's
Sentimental Journey, or a manager whether he may produce King Lear
without risk of prosecution, the solicitor will advise him to go ahead.
But if the solicitor or counsel consulted by him were asked for a
guarantee that neither of these works was a libel, he would have to
reply that he could give no such guarantee; that, on the contrary, it
was his duty to warn his client that both of them are obscene libels;
that King Lear, containing as it does perhaps the most appalling
blasphemy that despair ever uttered, is a blasphemous libel, and that
it is doubtful whether it could not be construed as a seditious libel as
well. As to Ibsen's Brand (the play which made him popular with the most
earnestly religious people) no sane solicitor would advise his client
even to chance it except in a broadly cultivated and tolerant (or
indifferent) modern city. The lighter plays would be no better off. What
lawyer could accept any responsibility for the production of Sardou's
Divorcons or Clyde Fitch's The Woman in the Case? Put the proposed
King's Proctor in operation to-morrow; and what will be the result? The
managers will find that instead of insuring them as the Lord Chamberlain
does, he will warn them that every play they submit to him is vulnerable
to the law, and that they must produce it not only on the ordinary risk
of acting on their own responsibility, but at the very grave additional
risk of doing so in the teeth of an official warning. Under such
circumstances, what manager would resort a second time to the Proctor;
and how would the Proctor live without fees, unless indeed the
Government gave him a salary for doing nothing? The institution would
not last a year, except as a job for somebody.