ACT I

MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION

by George Bernard Shaw

1894

With The Author’s Apology (1902)

THE AUTHOR’S APOLOGY

Mrs Warren’s Profession has been performed at last, after a delay of

only eight years; and I have once more shared with Ibsen the triumphant

amusement of startling all but the strongest-headed of the London

theatre critics clean out of the practice of their profession. No

author who has ever known the exultation of sending the Press into an

hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic, of involuntary and frantic

confession of sin, of a horror of conscience in which the power of

distinguishing between the work of art on the stage and the real life

of the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the

stereotyped compliments which every successful farce or melodrama

elicits from the newspapers. Give me that critic who rushed from my play

to declare furiously that Sir George Crofts ought to be kicked. What a

triumph for the actor, thus to reduce a jaded London journalist to

the condition of the simple sailor in the Wapping gallery, who shouts

execrations at Iago and warnings to Othello not to believe him! But

dearer still than such simplicity is that sense of the sudden earthquake

shock to the foundations of morality which sends a pallid crowd of

critics into the street shrieking that the pillars of society are

cracking and the ruin of the State is at hand. Even the Ibsen champions

of ten years ago remonstrate with me just as the veterans of those brave

days remonstrated with them. Mr Grein, the hardy iconoclast who first

launched my plays on the stage alongside Ghosts and The Wild Duck,

exclaimed that I have shattered his ideals. Actually his ideals! What

would Dr Relling say? And Mr William Archer himself disowns me because I

“cannot touch pitch without wallowing in it”. Truly my play must be more

needed than I knew; and yet I thought I knew how little the others know.

Do not suppose, however, that the consternation of the Press reflects

any consternation among the general public. Anybody can upset the

theatre critics, in a turn of the wrist, by substituting for the

romantic commonplaces of the stage the moral commonplaces of the pulpit,

platform, or the library. Play Mrs Warren’s Profession to an audience

of clerical members of the Christian Social Union and of women well

experienced in Rescue, Temperance, and Girls’ Club work, and no moral

panic will arise; every man and woman present will know that as long

as poverty makes virtue hideous and the spare pocket-money of rich

bachelordom makes vice dazzling, their daily hand-to-hand fight against

prostitution with prayer and persuasion, shelters and scanty alms,

will be a losing one. There was a time when they were able to urge that

though “the white-lead factory where Anne Jane was poisoned” may be a

far more terrible place than Mrs Warren’s house, yet hell is still more

dreadful. Nowadays they no longer believe in hell; and the girls among

whom they are working know that they do not believe in it, and would

laugh at them if they did. So well have the rescuers learnt that Mrs

Warren’s defence of herself and indictment of society is the thing that

most needs saying, that those who know me personally reproach me, not

for writing this play, but for wasting my energies on “pleasant

plays” for the amusement of frivolous people, when I can build up such

excellent stage sermons on their own work. Mrs Warren’s Profession is

the one play of mine which I could submit to a censorship without doubt

of the result; only, it must not be the censorship of the minor theatre

critic, nor of an innocent court official like the Lord Chamberlain’s

Examiner, much less of people who consciously profit by Mrs Warren’s

profession, or who personally make use of it, or who hold the widely

whispered view that it is an indispensable safety-valve for the

protection of domestic virtue, or, above all, who are smitten with a

sentimental affection for our fallen sister, and would “take her up

tenderly, lift her with care, fashioned so slenderly, young, and SO

fair.” Nor am I prepared to accept the verdict of the medical gentlemen

who would compulsorily sanitate and register Mrs Warren, whilst leaving

Mrs Warren’s patrons, especially her military patrons, free to destroy

her health and anybody else’s without fear of reprisals. But I should be

quite content to have my play judged by, say, a joint committee of

the Central Vigilance Society and the Salvation Army. And the sterner

moralists the members of the committee were, the better.

Some of the journalists I have shocked reason so unripely that they will

gather nothing from this but a confused notion that I am accusing the

National Vigilance Association and the Salvation Army of complicity in

my own scandalous immorality. It will seem to them that people who would

stand this play would stand anything. They are quite mistaken. Such

an audience as I have described would be revolted by many of our

fashionable plays. They would leave the theatre convinced that the

Plymouth Brother who still regards the playhouse as one of the gates of

hell is perhaps the safest adviser on the subject of which he knows so

little. If I do not draw the same conclusion, it is not because I am one

of those who claim that art is exempt from moral obligations, and deny

that the writing or performance of a play is a moral act, to be treated

on exactly the same footing as theft or murder if it produces equally

mischievous consequences. I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest,

the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in

the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive

even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works

by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving

to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom real life means

nothing. I have pointed out again and again that the influence of the

theatre in England is growing so great that whilst private conduct,

religion, law, science, politics, and morals are becoming more and

more theatrical, the theatre itself remains impervious to common

sense, religion, science, politics, and morals. That is why I fight the

theatre, not with pamphlets and sermons and treatises, but with plays;

and so effective do I find the dramatic method that I have no doubt I

shall at last persuade even London to take its conscience and its brains

with it when it goes to the theatre, instead of leaving them at home

with its prayer-book as it does at present. Consequently, I am the

last man in the world to deny that if the net effect of performing Mrs

Warren’s Profession were an increase in the number of persons entering

that profession, its performance should be dealt with accordingly.

Now let us consider how such recruiting can be encouraged by the

theatre. Nothing is easier. Let the King’s Reader of Plays, backed by

the Press, make an unwritten but perfectly well understood regulation

that members of Mrs Warren’s profession shall be tolerated on the stage

only when they are beautiful, exquisitely dressed, and sumptuously

lodged and fed; also that they shall, at the end of the play, die of

consumption to the sympathetic tears of the whole audience, or step

into the next room to commit suicide, or at least be turned out by their

protectors and passed on to be “redeemed” by old and faithful lovers who

have adored them in spite of their levities. Naturally, the poorer girls

in the gallery will believe in the beauty, in the exquisite dresses, and

the luxurious living, and will see that there is no real necessity for

the consumption, the suicide, or the ejectment: mere pious forms, all

of them, to save the Censor’s face. Even if these purely official

catastrophes carried any conviction, the majority of English girls

remain so poor, so dependent, so well aware that the drudgeries of such

honest work as is within their reach are likely enough to lead them

eventually to lung disease, premature death, and domestic desertion or

brutality, that they would still see reason to prefer the primrose path

to the strait path of virtue, since both, vice at worst and virtue at

best, lead to the same end in poverty and overwork. It is true that the

Board School mistress will tell you that only girls of a certain kind

will reason in this way. But alas! that certain kind turns out on

inquiry to be simply the pretty, dainty kind: that is, the only kind

that gets the chance of acting on such reasoning. Read the first report

of the Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes [Bluebook C

4402, 8d., 1889]; read the Report on Home Industries (sacred word,

Home!) issued by the Women’s Industrial Council [Home Industries of

Women in London, 1897, 1s., 12 Buckingham Street, W. C.]; and ask

yourself whether, if the lot in life therein described were your lot

in life, you would not prefer the lot of Cleopatra, of Theodora, of the

Lady of the Camellias, of Mrs Tanqueray, of Zaza, of Iris. If you can

go deep enough into things to be able to say no, how many ignorant

half-starved girls will believe you are speaking sincerely? To them the

lot of Iris is heavenly in comparison with their own. Yet our King, like

his predecessors, says to the dramatist, “Thus, and thus only, shall

you present Mrs Warren’s profession on the stage, or you shall starve.

Witness Shaw, who told the untempting truth about it, and whom We, by

the Grace of God, accordingly disallow and suppress, and do what in Us

lies to silence.” Fortunately, Shaw cannot be silenced. “The harlot’s

cry from street to street” is louder than the voices of all the kings.

I am not dependent on the theatre, and cannot be starved into making

my play a standing advertisement of the attractive side of Mrs Warren’s

business.

Here I must guard myself against a misunderstanding. It is not the fault

of their authors that the long string of wanton’s tragedies, from Antony

and Cleopatra to Iris, are snares to poor girls, and are objected to

on that account by many earnest men and women who consider Mrs Warren’s

Profession an excellent sermon. Mr Pinero is in no way bound to suppress

the fact that his Iris is a person to be envied by millions of better

women. If he made his play false to life by inventing fictitious

disadvantages for her, he would be acting as unscrupulously as any tract

writer. If society chooses to provide for its Irises better than for

its working women, it must not expect honest playwrights to manufacture

spurious evidence to save its credit. The mischief lies in the

deliberate suppression of the other side of the case: the refusal to

allow Mrs Warren to expose the drudgery and repulsiveness of plying for

hire among coarse, tedious drunkards; the determination not to let the

Parisian girl in Brieux’s Les Avaries come on the stage and drive into

people’s minds what her diseases mean for her and for themselves. All

that, says the King’s Reader in effect, is horrifying, loathsome.

Precisely: what does he expect it to be? would he have us represent it

as beautiful and gratifying? The answer to this question, I fear, must

be a blunt Yes; for it seems impossible to root out of an Englishman’s

mind the notion that vice is delightful, and that abstention from it

is privation. At all events, as long as the tempting side of it is kept

towards the public, and softened by plenty of sentiment and sympathy, it

is welcomed by our Censor, whereas the slightest attempt to place it in

the light of the policeman’s lantern or the Salvation Army shelter

is checkmated at once as not merely disgusting, but, if you please,

unnecessary.

Everybody will, I hope, admit that this state of things is intolerable;

that the subject of Mrs Warren’s profession must be either tapu

altogether, or else exhibited with the warning side as freely displayed

as the tempting side. But many persons will vote for a complete tapu,

and an impartial sweep from the boards of Mrs Warren and Gretchen and

the rest; in short, for banishing the sexual instincts from the stage

altogether. Those who think this impossible can hardly have considered

the number and importance of the subjects which are actually banished

from the stage. Many plays, among them Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth,

Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, have no sex complications: the thread of

their action can be followed by children who could not understand a

single scene of Mrs Warren’s Profession or Iris. None of our plays rouse

the sympathy of the audience by an exhibition of the pains of maternity,

as Chinese plays constantly do. Each nation has its own particular set

of tapus in addition to the common human stock; and though each of

these tapus limits the scope of the dramatist, it does not make drama

impossible. If the Examiner were to refuse to license plays with female

characters in them, he would only be doing to the stage what our tribal

customs already do to the pulpit and the bar. I have myself written a

rather entertaining play with only one woman in it, and she is quite

heartwhole; and I could just as easily write a play without a woman in

it at all. I will even go so far as to promise the Mr Redford my support

if he will introduce this limitation for part of the year, say during

Lent, so as to make a close season for that dullest of stock dramatic

subjects, adultery, and force our managers and authors to find out what

all great dramatists find out spontaneously: to wit, that people who

sacrifice every other consideration to love are as hopelessly unheroic

on the stage as lunatics or dipsomaniacs. Hector is the world’s hero;

not Paris nor Antony.

But though I do not question the possibility of a drama in which love

should be as effectively ignored as cholera is at present, there is not

the slightest chance of that way out of the difficulty being taken by

the Mr Redford. If he attempted it there would be a revolt in which he

would be swept away in spite of my singlehanded efforts to defend him.

A complete tapu is politically impossible. A complete toleration is

equally impossible to Mr Redford, because his occupation would be gone

if there were no tapu to enforce. He is therefore compelled to maintain

the present compromise of a partial tapu, applied, to the best of his

judgement, with a careful respect to persons and to public opinion. And

a very sensible English solution of the difficulty, too, most readers

will say. I should not dispute it if dramatic poets really were what

English public opinion generally assumes them to be during their

lifetime: that is, a licentiously irregular group to be kept in order

in a rough and ready way by a magistrate who will stand no nonsense

from them. But I cannot admit that the class represented by Eschylus,

Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, Shakespear, Goethe, Ibsen, and

Tolstoy, not to mention our own contemporary playwrights, is as much in

place in Mr Redford’s office as a pickpocket is in Bow Street. Further,

it is not true that the Censorship, though it certainly suppresses Ibsen

and Tolstoy, and would suppress Shakespear but for the absurd rule that

a play once licensed is always licensed (so that Wycherly is permitted

and Shelley prohibited), also suppresses unscrupulous playwrights. I

challenge Mr Redford to mention any extremity of sexual misconduct which

any manager in his senses would risk presenting on the London stage that

has not been presented under his license and that of his predecessor.

The compromise, in fact, works out in practice in favor of loose plays

as against earnest ones.

To carry conviction on this point, I will take the extreme course of

narrating the plots of two plays witnessed within the last ten years

by myself at London West End theatres, one licensed by the late Queen

Victoria’s Reader of Plays, the other by the present Reader to the King.

Both plots conform to the strictest rules of the period when La Dame aux

Camellias was still a forbidden play, and when The Second Mrs Tanqueray

would have been tolerated only on condition that she carefully explained

to the audience that when she met Captain Ardale she sinned “but in

intention.”

Play number one. A prince is compelled by his parents to marry the

daughter of a neighboring king, but loves another maiden. The scene

represents a hall in the king’s palace at night. The wedding has taken

place that day; and the closed door of the nuptial chamber is in view of

the audience. Inside, the princess awaits her bridegroom. A duenna is in

attendance. The bridegroom enters. His sole desire is to escape from a

marriage which is hateful to him. An idea strikes him. He will assault

the duenna, and get ignominiously expelled from the palace by his

indignant father-in-law. To his horror, when he proceeds to carry out

this stratagem, the duenna, far from raising an alarm, is flattered,

delighted, and compliant. The assaulter becomes the assaulted. He flings

her angrily to the ground, where she remains placidly. He flies. The

father enters; dismisses the duenna; and listens at the keyhole of

his daughter’s nuptial chamber, uttering various pleasantries, and

declaring, with a shiver, that a sound of kissing, which he supposes to

proceed from within, makes him feel young again.

In deprecation of the scandalized astonishment with which such a story

as this will be read, I can only say that it was not presented on the

stage until its propriety had been certified by the chief officer of the

Queen of England’s household.

Story number two. A German officer finds himself in an inn with a French

lady who has wounded his national vanity. He resolves to humble her by

committing a rape upon her. He announces his purpose. She remonstrates,

implores, flies to the doors and finds them locked, calls for help

and finds none at hand, runs screaming from side to side, and, after

a harrowing scene, is overpowered and faints. Nothing further being

possible on the stage without actual felony, the officer then relents

and leaves her. When she recovers, she believes that he has carried out

his threat; and during the rest of the play she is represented as vainly

vowing vengeance upon him, whilst she is really falling in love with

him under the influence of his imaginary crime against her. Finally she

consents to marry him; and the curtain falls on their happiness.

This story was certified by the present King’s Reader, acting for the

Lord Chamberlain, as void in its general tendency of “anything immoral

or otherwise improper for the stage.” But let nobody conclude therefore

that Mr Redford is a monster, whose policy it is to deprave the theatre.

As a matter of fact, both the above stories are strictly in order from

the official point of view. The incidents of sex which they contain,

though carried in both to the extreme point at which another step would

be dealt with, not by the King’s Reader, but by the police, do not

involve adultery, nor any allusion to Mrs Warren’s profession, nor to

the fact that the children of any polyandrous group will, when they grow

up, inevitably be confronted, as those of Mrs Warren’s group are in my

play, with the insoluble problem of their own possible consanguinity.

In short, by depending wholly on the coarse humors and the physical

fascination of sex, they comply with all the formulable requirements of

the Censorship, whereas plays in which these humors and fascinations are

discarded, and the social problems created by sex seriously faced and

dealt with, inevitably ignore the official formula and are suppressed.

If the old rule against the exhibition of illicit sex relations on stage

were revived, and the subject absolutely barred, the only result would

be that Antony and Cleopatra, Othello (because of the Bianca episode),

Troilus and Cressida, Henry IV, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens,

La Dame aux Camellias, The Profligate, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, The

Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, The Gay Lord Quex, Mrs Dane’s Defence, and

Iris would be swept from the stage, and placed under the same ban as

Tolstoy’s Dominion of Darkness and Mrs Warren’s Profession, whilst such

plays as the two described above would have a monopoly of the theatre as

far as sexual interest is concerned.

What is more, the repulsiveness of the worst of the certified plays

would protect the Censorship against effective exposure and criticism.

Not long ago an American Review of high standing asked me for an article

on the Censorship of the English stage. I replied that such an article

would involve passages too disagreeable for publication in a magazine

for general family reading. The editor persisted nevertheless; but

not until he had declared his readiness to face this, and had pledged

himself to insert the article unaltered (the particularity of the pledge

extending even to a specification of the exact number of words in the

article) did I consent to the proposal. What was the result?

The editor, confronted with the two stories given above, threw his

pledge to the winds, and, instead of returning the article, printed

it with the illustrative examples omitted, and nothing left but the

argument from political principles against the Censorship. In doing this

he fired my broadside after withdrawing the cannon balls; for neither

the Censor nor any other Englishman, except perhaps Mr Leslie Stephen

and a few other veterans of the dwindling old guard of Benthamism, cares

a dump about political principle. The ordinary Briton thinks that if

every other Briton is not kept under some form of tutelage, the more

childish the better, he will abuse his freedom viciously. As far as its

principle is concerned, the Censorship is the most popular institution

in England; and the playwright who criticizes it is slighted as a

blackguard agitating for impunity. Consequently nothing can really shake

the confidence of the public in the Lord Chamberlain’s department except

a remorseless and unbowdlerized narration of the licentious fictions

which slip through its net, and are hallmarked by it with the approval

of the Throne. But since these narrations cannot be made public without

great difficulty, owing to the obligation an editor is under not to

deal unexpectedly with matters that are not _virginibus puerisque_, the

chances are heavily in favor of the Censor escaping all remonstrance.

With the exception of such comments as I was able to make in my own

critical articles in The World and The Saturday Review when the pieces

I have described were first produced, and a few ignorant protests by

churchmen against much better plays which they confessed they had not

seen nor read, nothing has been said in the press that could seriously

disturb the easygoing notion that the stage would be much worse than it

admittedly is but for the vigilance of the King’s Reader. The truth is,

that no manager would dare produce on his own responsibility the pieces

he can now get royal certificates for at two guineas per piece.

I hasten to add that I believe these evils to be inherent in the

nature of all censorship, and not merely a consequence of the form the

institution takes in London. No doubt there is a staggering absurdity

in appointing an ordinary clerk to see that the leaders of European

literature do not corrupt the morals of the nation, and to restrain Sir

Henry Irving, as a rogue and a vagabond, from presuming to impersonate

Samson or David on the stage, though any other sort of artist may daub

these scriptural figures on a signboard or carve them on a tombstone

without hindrance. If the General Medical Council, the Royal College of

Physicians, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Incorporated Law Society, and

Convocation were abolished, and their functions handed over to the Mr

Redford, the Concert of Europe would presumably declare England mad, and

treat her accordingly. Yet, though neither medicine nor painting nor

law nor the Church moulds the character of the nation as potently as the

theatre does, nothing can come on the stage unless its dimensions admit

of its passing through Mr Redford’s mind! Pray do not think that I

question Mr Redford’s honesty. I am quite sure that he sincerely thinks

me a blackguard, and my play a grossly improper one, because, like

Tolstoy’s Dominion of Darkness, it produces, as they are both meant to

produce, a very strong and very painful impression of evil. I do not

doubt for a moment that the rapine play which I have described, and

which he licensed, was quite incapable in manuscript of producing

any particular effect on his mind at all, and that when he was once

satisfied that the ill-conducted hero was a German and not an English

officer, he passed the play without studying its moral tendencies. Even

if he had undertaken that study, there is no more reason to suppose

that he is a competent moralist than there is to suppose that I am a

competent mathematician. But truly it does not matter whether he is a

moralist or not. Let nobody dream for a moment that what is wrong with

the Censorship is the shortcoming of the gentleman who happens at any

moment to be acting as Censor. Replace him to-morrow by an Academy of

Letters and an Academy of Dramatic Poetry, and the new and enlarged

filter will still exclude original and epoch-making work, whilst passing

conventional, old-fashioned, and vulgar work without question. The

conclave which compiles the index of the Roman Catholic Church is the

most august, ancient, learned, famous, and authoritative censorship in

Europe. Is it more enlightened, more liberal, more tolerant that the

comparatively infinitesimal office of the Lord Chamberlain? On the

contrary, it has reduced itself to a degree of absurdity which makes a

Catholic university a contradiction in terms. All censorships exist

to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing

institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current concepts,

and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the

first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. There is the

whole case against censorships in a nutshell.

It will be asked whether theatrical managers are to be allowed to

produce what they like, without regard to the public interest. But that

is not the alternative. The managers of our London music-halls are not

subject to any censorship. They produce their entertainments on their

own responsibility, and have no two-guinea certificates to plead if

their houses are conducted viciously. They know that if they lose their

character, the County Council will simply refuse to renew their license

at the end of the year; and nothing in the history of popular art

is more amazing than the improvement in music-halls that this simple

arrangement has produced within a few years. Place the theatres on the

same footing, and we shall promptly have a similar revolution: a whole

class of frankly blackguardly plays, in which unscrupulous low comedians

attract crowds to gaze at bevies of girls who have nothing to exhibit

but their prettiness, will vanish like the obscene songs which were

supposed to enliven the squalid dulness, incredible to the younger

generation, of the music-halls fifteen years ago. On the other hand,

plays which treat sex questions as problems for thought instead of as

aphrodisiacs will be freely performed. Gentlemen of Mr Redford’s way of

thinking will have plenty of opportunity of protesting against them

in Council; but the result will be that the Mr Redford will find his

natural level; Ibsen and Tolstoy theirs; so no harm will be done.

This question of the Censorship reminds me that I have to apologize

to those who went to the recent performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession

expecting to find it what I have just called an aphrodisiac. That was

not my fault; it was Mr Redford’s. After the specimens I have given of

the tolerance of his department, it was natural enough for thoughtless

people to infer that a play which overstepped his indulgence must be a

very exciting play indeed. Accordingly, I find one critic so explicit as

to the nature of his disappointment as to say candidly that “such airy

talk as there is upon the matter is utterly unworthy of acceptance as

being a representation of what people with blood in them think or do on

such occasions.” Thus am I crushed between the upper millstone of the Mr

Redford, who thinks me a libertine, and the nether popular critic, who

thinks me a prude. Critics of all grades and ages, middle-aged fathers

of families no less than ardent young enthusiasts, are equally indignant

with me. They revile me as lacking in passion, in feeling, in manhood.

Some of them even sum the matter up by denying me any dramatic power: a

melancholy betrayal of what dramatic power has come to mean on our stage

under the Censorship! Can I be expected to refrain from laughing at

the spectacle of a number of respectable gentlemen lamenting because a

playwright lures them to the theatre by a promise to excite their senses

in a very special and sensational manner, and then, having successfully

trapped them in exceptional numbers, proceeds to ignore their senses and

ruthlessly improve their minds? But I protest again that the lure was

not mine. The play had been in print for four years; and I have spared

no pains to make known that my plays are built to induce, not voluptuous

reverie but intellectual interest, not romantic rhapsody but humane

concern. Accordingly, I do not find those critics who are gifted with

intellectual appetite and political conscience complaining of want of

dramatic power. Rather do they protest, not altogether unjustly, against

a few relapses into staginess and caricature which betray the young

playwright and the old playgoer in this early work of mine.

As to the voluptuaries, I can assure them that the playwright, whether

he be myself or another, will always disappoint them. The drama can do

little to delight the senses: all the apparent instances to the contrary

are instances of the personal fascination of the performers. The drama

of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright: it has been

conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts

seem cold and tame. Romeo and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet is dry,

tedious, and rhetorical in comparison with Wagner’s Tristan, even though

Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she often is in Germany.

Indeed, it needed no Wagner to convince the public of this. The

voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod’s Faust and Bizet’s Carmen has

captured the common playgoer; and there is, flatly, no future now for

any drama without music except the drama of thought. The attempt to

produce a genus of opera without music (and this absurdity is what

our fashionable theatres have been driving at for a long time without

knowing it) is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept

problem as the normal materiel of the drama.

That this determination will throw me into a long conflict with our

theatre critics, and with the few playgoers who go to the theatre as

often as the critics, I well know; but I am too well equipped for the

strife to be deterred by it, or to bear malice towards the losing side.

In trying to produce the sensuous effects of opera, the fashionable

drama has become so flaccid in its sentimentality, and the intellect

of its frequenters so atrophied by disuse, that the reintroduction

of problem, with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact,

inevitably produces at first an overwhelming impression of coldness and

inhuman rationalism. But this will soon pass away. When the intellectual

muscle and moral nerve of the critics has been developed in the struggle

with modern problem plays, the pettish luxuriousness of the clever ones,

and the sulky sense of disadvantaged weakness in the sentimental ones,

will clear away; and it will be seen that only in the problem play is

there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera

to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between

Man’s will and his environment: in a word, of problem. The vapidness of

such drama as the pseudo-operatic plays contain lies in the fact that

in them animal passion, sentimentally diluted, is shewn in conflict, not

with real circumstances, but with a set of conventions and assumptions

half of which do not exist off the stage, whilst the other half can

either be evaded by a pretence of compliance or defied with complete

impunity by any reasonably strong-minded person. Nobody can feel that

such conventions are really compulsory; and consequently nobody can

believe in the stage pathos that accepts them as an inexorable fate, or

in the genuineness of the people who indulge in such pathos. Sitting

at such plays, we do not believe: we make-believe. And the habit of

make-believe becomes at last so rooted that criticism of the theatre

insensibly ceases to be criticism at all, and becomes more and more a

chronicle of the fashionable enterprises of the only realities left on

the stage: that is, the performers in their own persons. In this

phase the playwright who attempts to revive genuine drama produces the

disagreeable impression of the pedant who attempts to start a serious

discussion at a fashionable at-home. Later on, when he has driven the

tea services out and made the people who had come to use the theatre as

a drawing-room understand that it is they and not the dramatist who are

the intruders, he has to face the accusation that his plays ignore human

feeling, an illusion produced by that very resistance of fact and law to

human feeling which creates drama. It is the _deus ex machina_ who, by

suspending that resistance, makes the fall of the curtain an immediate

necessity, since drama ends exactly where resistance ends. Yet the

introduction of this resistance produces so strong an impression of

heartlessness nowadays that a distinguished critic has summed up the

impression made on him by Mrs Warren’s Profession, by declaring that

“the difference between the spirit of Tolstoy and the spirit of Mr

Shaw is the difference between the spirit of Christ and the spirit of

Euclid.” But the epigram would be as good if Tolstoy’s name were put in

place of mine and D’Annunzio’s in place of Tolstoy. At the same time

I accept the enormous compliment to my reasoning powers with sincere

complacency; and I promise my flatterer that when he is sufficiently

accustomed to and therefore undazzled by problem on the stage to be able

to attend to the familiar factor of humanity in it as well as to the

unfamiliar one of a real environment, he will both see and feel that

Mrs Warren’s Profession is no mere theorem, but a play of instincts

and temperaments in conflict with each other and with a flinty social

problem that never yields an inch to mere sentiment.

I go further than this. I declare that the real secret of the

cynicism and inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is the

unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human beings,

instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage. The axioms and

postulates of that dreary mimanthropometry are so well known that it is

almost impossible for its slaves to write tolerable last acts to

their plays, so conventionally do their conclusions follow from their

premises. Because I have thrown this logic ruthlessly overboard, I am

accused of ignoring, not stage logic, but, of all things, human feeling.

People with completely theatrified imaginations tell me that no girl

would treat her mother as Vivie Warren does, meaning that no stage

heroine would in a popular sentimental play. They say this just as they

might say that no two straight lines would enclose a space. They do not

see how completely inverted their vision has become even when I throw

its preposterousness in their faces, as I repeatedly do in this very

play. Praed, the sentimental artist (fool that I was not to make him a

theatre critic instead of an architect!) burlesques them by expecting

all through the piece that the feelings of others will be logically

deducible from their family relationships and from his “conventionally

unconventional” social code. The sarcasm is lost on the critics: they,

saturated with the same logic, only think him the sole sensible person

on the stage. Thus it comes about that the more completely the dramatist

is emancipated from the illusion that men and women are primarily

reasonable beings, and the more powerfully he insists on the ruthless

indifference of their great dramatic antagonist, the external world, to

their whims and emotions, the surer he is to be denounced as blind to

the very distinction on which his whole work is built. Far from ignoring

idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in human action,

I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the elderly citizen,

accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of manufactured logic about

duty, and to disguise even his own impulses from himself in this way,

finds the picture as unnatural as Carlyle’s suggested painting of

parliament sitting without its clothes.

I now come to those critics who, intellectually baffled by the problem

in Mrs Warren’s Profession, have made a virtue of running away from it.

I will illustrate their method by quotation from Dickens, taken from the

fifth chapter of Our Mutual Friend:

“Hem!” began Wegg. “This, Mr Boffin and Lady, is the first chapter of

the first wollume of the Decline and Fall off----” here he looked hard

at the book, and stopped.

“What’s the matter, Wegg?”

“Why, it comes into my mind, do you know, sir,” said Wegg with an air of

insinuating frankness (having first again looked hard at the book), “that

you made a little mistake this morning, which I had meant to set you

right in; only something put it out of my head. I think you said Rooshan

Empire, sir?”

“It is Rooshan; ain’t it, Wegg?”

“No, sir. Roman. Roman.”

“What’s the difference, Wegg?”

“The difference, sir?” Mr Wegg was faltering and in danger of breaking

down, when a bright thought flashed upon him. “The difference, sir?

There you place me in a difficulty, Mr Boffin. Suffice it to observe,

that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs

Boffin does not honor us with her company. In Mrs Boffin’s presence,

sir, we had better drop it.”

Mr Wegg thus came out of his disadvantage with quite a chivalrous air,

and not only that, but by dint of repeating with a manly delicacy,

“In Mrs Boffin’s presence, sir, we had better drop it!” turned the

disadvantage on Boffin, who felt that he had committed himself in a very

painful manner.

I am willing to let Mr Wegg drop it on these terms, provided I am

allowed to mention here that Mrs Warren’s Profession is a play for

women; that it was written for women; that it has been performed and

produced mainly through the determination of women that it should be

performed and produced; that the enthusiasm of women made its first

performance excitingly successful; and that not one of these women had

any inducement to support it except their belief in the timeliness and

the power of the lesson the play teaches. Those who were “surprised to

see ladies present” were men; and when they proceeded to explain that

the journals they represented could not possibly demoralize the public

by describing such a play, their editors cruelly devoted the space saved

by their delicacy to an elaborate and respectful account of the progress

of a young lord’s attempt to break the bank at Monte Carlo. A few days

sooner Mrs Warren would have been crowded out of their papers by an

exceptionally abominable police case. I do not suggest that the police

case should have been suppressed; but neither do I believe that regard

for public morality had anything to do with their failure to grapple

with the performance by the Stage Society. And, after all, there was no

need to fall back on Silas Wegg’s subterfuge. Several critics saved the

faces of their papers easily enough by the simple expedient of saying

all they had to say in the tone of a shocked governess lecturing a

naughty child. To them I might plead, in Mrs Warren’s words, “Well,

it’s only good manners to be ashamed, dearie;” but it surprises me,

recollecting as I do the effect produced by Miss Fanny Brough’s delivery

of that line, that gentlemen who shivered like violets in a zephyr as

it swept through them, should so completely miss the full width of its

application as to go home and straightway make a public exhibition of

mock modesty.

My old Independent Theatre manager, Mr Grein, besides that reproach to

me for shattering his ideals, complains that Mrs Warren is not wicked

enough, and names several romancers who would have clothed her black

soul with all the terrors of tragedy. I have no doubt they would; but

if you please, my dear Grein, that is just what I did not want to do.

Nothing would please our sanctimonious British public more than to throw

the whole guilt of Mrs Warren’s profession on Mrs Warren herself. Now

the whole aim of my play is to throw that guilt on the British public

itself. You may remember that when you produced my first play, Widowers’

Houses, exactly the same misunderstanding arose. When the virtuous young

gentleman rose up in wrath against the slum landlord, the slum

landlord very effectively shewed him that slums are the product, not

of individual Harpagons, but of the indifference of virtuous young

gentlemen to the condition of the city they live in, provided they

live at the west end of it on money earned by someone else’s labor. The

notion that prostitution is created by the wickedness of Mrs Warren

is as silly as the notion--prevalent, nevertheless, to some extent in

Temperance circles--that drunkenness is created by the wickedness of

the publican. Mrs Warren is not a whit a worse woman than the reputable

daughter who cannot endure her. Her indifference to the ultimate social

consequences of her means of making money, and her discovery of that

means by the ordinary method of taking the line of least resistance to

getting it, are too common in English society to call for any special

remark. Her vitality, her thrift, her energy, her outspokenness, her

wise care of her daughter, and the managing capacity which has enabled

her and her sister to climb from the fried fish shop down by the Mint

to the establishments of which she boasts, are all high English social

virtues. Her defence of herself is so overwhelming that it provokes the

St James Gazette to declare that “the tendency of the play is wholly

evil” because “it contains one of the boldest and most specious defences

of an immoral life for poor women that has ever been penned.” Happily

the St James Gazette here speaks in its haste. Mrs Warren’s defence of

herself is not only bold and specious, but valid and unanswerable.

But it is no defence at all of the vice which she organizes. It is

no defence of an immoral life to say that the alternative offered

by society collectively to poor women is a miserable life, starved,

overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly. Though it is quite natural and RIGHT

for Mrs Warren to choose what is, according to her lights, the least

immoral alternative, it is none the less infamous of society to offer

such alternatives. For the alternatives offered are not morality and

immorality, but two sorts of immorality. The man who cannot see

that starvation, overwork, dirt, and disease are as anti-social as

prostitution--that they are the vices and crimes of a nation, and

not merely its misfortunes--is (to put it as politely as possible) a

hopelessly Private Person.

The notion that Mrs Warren must be a fiend is only an example of the

violence and passion which the slightest reference to sex arouses in

undisciplined minds, and which makes it seem natural for our lawgivers

to punish silly and negligible indecencies with a ferocity unknown in

dealing with, for example, ruinous financial swindling. Had my play been

titled Mr Warren’s Profession, and Mr Warren been a bookmaker, nobody

would have expected me to make him a villain as well. Yet gambling is

a vice, and bookmaking an institution, for which there is absolutely

nothing to be said. The moral and economic evil done by trying to get

other people’s money without working for it (and this is the essence of

gambling) is not only enormous but uncompensated. There are no two sides

to the question of gambling, no circumstances which force us to tolerate

it lest its suppression lead to worse things, no consensus of opinion

among responsible classes, such as magistrates and military commanders,

that it is a necessity, no Athenian records of gambling made splendid by

the talents of its professors, no contention that instead of violating

morals it only violates a legal institution which is in many respects

oppressive and unnatural, no possible plea that the instinct on which it

is founded is a vital one. Prostitution can confuse the issue with all

these excuses: gambling has none of them. Consequently, if Mrs Warren

must needs be a demon, a bookmaker must be a cacodemon. Well, does

anybody who knows the sporting world really believe that bookmakers are

worse than their neighbors? On the contrary, they have to be a good deal

better; for in that world nearly everybody whose social rank does not

exclude such an occupation would be a bookmaker if he could; but the

strength of character for handling large sums of money and for strict

settlements and unflinching payment of losses is so rare that successful

bookmakers are rare too. It may seem that at least public spirit

cannot be one of a bookmaker’s virtues; but I can testify from personal

experience that excellent public work is done with money subscribed

by bookmakers. It is true that there are abysses in bookmaking: for

example, welshing. Mr Grein hints that there are abysses in Mrs Warren’s

profession also. So there are in every profession: the error lies in

supposing that every member of them sounds these depths. I sit on a

public body which prosecutes Mrs Warren zealously; and I can assure Mr

Grein that she is often leniently dealt with because she has conducted

her business “respectably” and held herself above its vilest branches.

The degrees in infamy are as numerous and as scrupulously observed as

the degrees in the peerage: the moralist’s notion that there are depths

at which the moral atmosphere ceases is as delusive as the rich man’s

notion that there are no social jealousies or snobberies among the very

poor. No: had I drawn Mrs Warren as a fiend in human form, the very

people who now rebuke me for flattering her would probably be the

first to deride me for deducing her character logically from occupation

instead of observing it accurately in society.

One critic is so enslaved by this sort of logic that he calls my

portraiture of the Reverend Samuel Gardner an attack on religion.

According to this view Subaltern Iago is an attack on the army, Sir

John Falstaff an attack on knighthood, and King Claudius an attack on

royalty. Here again the clamor for naturalness and human feeling, raised

by so many critics when they are confronted by the real thing on the

stage, is really a clamor for the most mechanical and superficial sort

of logic. The dramatic reason for making the clergyman what Mrs Warren

calls “an old stick-in-the-mud,” whose son, in spite of much capacity

and charm, is a cynically worthless member of society, is to set up a

mordant contrast between him and the woman of infamous profession, with

her well brought-up, straightforward, hardworking daughter. The critics

who have missed the contrast have doubtless observed often enough that

many clergymen are in the Church through no genuine calling, but simply

because, in circles which can command preferment, it is the refuge

of “the fool of the family”; and that clergymen’s sons are often

conspicuous reactionists against the restraints imposed on them in

childhood by their father’s profession. These critics must know, too,

from history if not from experience, that women as unscrupulous as Mrs

Warren have distinguished themselves as administrators and rulers, both

commercially and politically. But both observation and knowledge are

left behind when journalists go to the theatre. Once in their stalls,

they assume that it is “natural” for clergymen to be saintly, for

soldiers to be heroic, for lawyers to be hard-hearted, for sailors to

be simple and generous, for doctors to perform miracles with little

bottles, and for Mrs Warren to be a beast and a demon. All this is not

only not natural, but not dramatic. A man’s profession only enters into

the drama of his life when it comes into conflict with his nature. The

result of this conflict is tragic in Mrs Warren’s case, and comic in the

clergyman’s case (at least we are savage enough to laugh at it); but

in both cases it is illogical, and in both cases natural. I repeat,

the critics who accuse me of sacrificing nature to logic are so

sophisticated by their profession that to them logic is nature, and

nature absurdity.

Many friendly critics are too little skilled in social questions and

moral discussions to be able to conceive that respectable gentlemen like

themselves, who would instantly call the police to remove Mrs Warren if

she ventured to canvass them personally, could possibly be in any way

responsible for her proceedings. They remonstrate sincerely, asking me

what good such painful exposures can possibly do. They might as well ask

what good Lord Shaftesbury did by devoting his life to the exposure

of evils (by no means yet remedied) compared to which the worst things

brought into view or even into surmise by this play are trifles.

The good of mentioning them is that you make people so extremely

uncomfortable about them that they finally stop blaming “human nature”

for them, and begin to support measures for their reform.

Can anything be more absurd than the copy of The Echo which contains a

notice of the performance of my play? It is edited by a gentleman who,

having devoted his life to work of the Shaftesbury type, exposes social

evils and clamors for their reform in every column except one; and that

one is occupied by the declaration of the paper’s kindly theatre critic,

that the performance left him “wondering what useful purpose the play

was intended to serve.” The balance has to be redressed by the more

fashionable papers, which usually combine capable art criticism with

West-End solecism on politics and sociology. It is very noteworthy,

however, on comparing the press explosion produced by Mrs Warren’s

Profession in 1902 with that produced by Widowers’ Houses about ten

years earlier, that whereas in 1892 the facts were frantically denied

and the persons of the drama flouted as monsters of wickedness, in

1902 the facts are admitted and the characters recognized, though it is

suggested that this is exactly why no gentleman should mention them in

public. Only one writer has ventured to imply this time that the poverty

mentioned by Mrs Warren has since been quietly relieved, and need

not have been dragged back to the footlights. I compliment him on his

splendid mendacity, in which he is unsupported, save by a little plea in

a theatrical paper which is innocent enough to think that ten guineas a

year with board and lodging is an impossibly low wage for a barmaid. It

goes on to cite Mr Charles Booth as having testified that there are

many laborers’ wives who are happy and contented on eighteen shillings

a week. But I can go further than that myself. I have seen an Oxford

agricultural laborer’s wife looking cheerful on eight shillings a week;

but that does not console me for the fact that agriculture in England

is a ruined industry. If poverty does not matter as long as it is

contented, then crime does not matter as long as it is unscrupulous. The

truth is that it is only then that it does matter most desperately.

Many persons are more comfortable when they are dirty than when they are

clean; but that does not recommend dirt as a national policy.

Here I must for the present break off my arduous work of educating the

Press. We shall resume our studies later on; but just now I am tired of

playing the preceptor; and the eager thirst of my pupils for improvement

does not console me for the slowness of their progress. Besides, I must

reserve space to gratify my own vanity and do justice to the six artists

who acted my play, by placing on record the hitherto unchronicled

success of the first representation. It is not often that an author,

after a couple of hours of those rare alternations of excitement and

intensely attentive silence which only occur in the theatre when actors

and audience are reacting on one another to the utmost, is able to step

on the stage and apply the strong word genius to the representation with

the certainty of eliciting an instant and overwhelming assent from the

audience. That was my good fortune on the afternoon of Sunday, the fifth

of January last. I was certainly extremely fortunate in my interpreters

in the enterprise, and that not alone in respect of their artistic

talent; for had it not been for their superhuman patience, their

imperturbable good humor and good fellowship, there could have been no

performance. The terror of the Censor’s power gave us trouble enough to

break up any ordinary commercial enterprise. Managers promised and even

engaged their theatres to us after the most explicit warnings that the

play was unlicensed, and at the last moment suddenly realized that Mr

Redford had their livelihoods in the hollow of his hand, and backed

out. Over and over again the date and place were fixed and the tickets

printed, only to be canceled, until at last the desperate and overworked

manager of the Stage Society could only laugh, as criminals broken on

the wheel used to laugh at the second stroke. We rehearsed under great

difficulties. Christmas pieces and plays for the new year were being

produced in all directions; and my six actor colleagues were busy

people, with engagements in these pieces in addition to their current

professional work every night. On several raw winter days stages for

rehearsal were unattainable even by the most distinguished applicants;

and we shared corridors and saloons with them whilst the stage was

given over to children in training for Boxing night. At last we had to

rehearse at an hour at which no actor or actress has been out of bed

within the memory of man; and we sardonically congratulated one another

every morning on our rosy matutinal looks and the improvement wrought

by our early rising in our health and characters. And all this, please

observe, for a society without treasury or commercial prestige, for

a play which was being denounced in advance as unmentionable, for an

author without influence at the fashionable theatres! I victoriously

challenge the West End managers to get as much done for interested

motives, if they can.

Three causes made the production the most notable that has fallen to my

lot. First, the veto of the Censor, which put the supporters of the play

on their mettle. Second, the chivalry of the Stage Society, which, in

spite of my urgent advice to the contrary, and my demonstration of the

difficulties, dangers, and expenses the enterprise would cost, put my

discouragements to shame and resolved to give battle at all costs to

the attempt of the Censorship to suppress the play. Third, the artistic

spirit of the actors, who made the play their own and carried it through

triumphantly in spite of a series of disappointments and annoyances much

more trying to the dramatic temperament than mere difficulties.

The acting, too, required courage and character as well as skill and

intelligence. The veto of the Censor introduced quite a novel element of

moral responsibility into the undertaking. And the characters were very

unusual on the English stage. The younger heroine is, like her mother,

an Englishwoman to the backbone, and not, like the heroines of our

fashionable drama, a prima donna of Italian origin. Consequently she

was sure to be denounced as unnatural and undramatic by the critics.

The most vicious man in the play is not in the least a stage villain;

indeed, he regards his own moral character with the sincere complacency

of a hero of melodrama. The amiable devotee of romance and beauty is

shewn at an age which brings out the futilization which these worships

are apt to produce if they are made the staple of life instead of

the sauce. The attitude of the clever young people to their elders is

faithfully represented as one of pitiless ridicule and unsympathetic

criticism, and forms a spectacle incredible to those who, when young,

were not cleverer than their nearest elders, and painful to those

sentimental parents who shrink from the cruelty of youth, which pardons

nothing because it knows nothing. In short, the characters and their

relations are of a kind that the routineer critic has not yet learned

to place; so that their misunderstanding was a foregone conclusion.

Nevertheless, there was no hesitation behind the curtain. When it went

up at last, a stage much too small for the company was revealed to an

auditorium much too small for the audience. But the players, though it

was impossible for them to forget their own discomfort, at once made the

spectators forget theirs. It certainly was a model audience, responsive

from the first line to the last; and it got no less than it deserved in

return.

I grieve to add that the second performance, given for the edification

of the London Press and of those members of the Stage Society who cannot

attend the Sunday performances, was a less inspiriting one than the

first. A solid phalanx of theatre-weary journalists in an afternoon

humor, most of them committed to irreconcilable disparagement of problem

plays, and all of them bound by etiquette to be as undemonstrative

as possible, is not exactly the sort of audience that rises at the

performers and cures them of the inevitable reaction after an excitingly

successful first night. The artist nature is a sensitive and therefore

a vindictive one; and masterful players have a way with recalcitrant

audiences of rubbing a play into them instead of delighting them with

it. I should describe the second performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession,

especially as to its earlier stages, as decidedly a rubbed-in one. The

rubbing was no doubt salutary; but it must have hurt some of the thinner

skins. The charm of the lighter passages fled; and the strong scenes,

though they again carried everything before them, yet discharged that

duty in a grim fashion, doing execution on the enemy rather than moving

them to repentance and confession. Still, to those who had not seen the

first performance, the effect was sufficiently impressive; and they

had the advantage of witnessing a fresh development in Mrs Warren, who,

artistically jealous, as I took it, of the overwhelming effect of the

end of the second act on the previous day, threw herself into the fourth

act in quite a new way, and achieved the apparently impossible feat of

surpassing herself. The compliments paid to Miss Fanny Brough by

the critics, eulogistic as they are, are the compliments of men

three-fourths duped as Partridge was duped by Garrick. By much of her

acting they were so completely taken in that they did not recognize it

as acting at all. Indeed, none of the six players quite escaped this

consequence of their own thoroughness. There was a distinct tendency

among the less experienced critics to complain of their sentiments and

behavior. Naturally, the author does not share that grievance.

PICCARD’S COTTAGE, JANUARY 1902.

MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION

[Mrs Warren’s Profession was performed for the first time in the theatre

of the New Lyric Club, London, on the 5th and 6th January 1902, with

Madge McIntosh as Vivie, Julius Knight as Praed, Fanny Brough as Mrs

Warren, Charles Goodhart as Crofts, Harley Granville-Barker as Frank,

and Cosmo Stuart as the Reverend Samuel Gardner.]

ACT I

[Summer afternoon in a cottage garden on the eastern slope of a hill a

little south of Haslemere in Surrey. Looking up the hill, the cottage is

seen in the left hand corner of the garden, with its thatched roof and

porch, and a large latticed window to the left of the porch. A paling

completely shuts in the garden, except for a gate on the right. The

common rises uphill beyond the paling to the sky line. Some folded

canvas garden chairs are leaning against the side bench in the porch. A

lady’s bicycle is propped against the wall, under the window. A little

to the right of the porch a hammock is slung from two posts. A big

canvas umbrella, stuck in the ground, keeps the sun off the hammock,

in which a young lady is reading and making notes, her head towards

the cottage and her feet towards the gate. In front of the hammock,

and within reach of her hand, is a common kitchen chair, with a pile of

serious-looking books and a supply of writing paper on it.]

[A gentleman walking on the common comes into sight from behind the

cottage. He is hardly past middle age, with something of the artist

about him, unconventionally but carefully dressed, and clean-shaven

except for a moustache, with an eager susceptible face and very amiable

and considerate manners. He has silky black hair, with waves of grey and

white in it. His eyebrows are white, his moustache black. He seems not

certain of his way. He looks over the palings; takes stock of the place;

and sees the young lady.]

THE GENTLEMAN [taking off his hat] I beg your pardon. Can you direct me

to Hindhead View--Mrs Alison’s?

THE YOUNG LADY [glancing up from her book] This is Mrs Alison’s. [She

resumes her work].

THE GENTLEMAN. Indeed! Perhaps--may I ask are you Miss Vivie Warren?

THE YOUNG LADY [sharply, as she turns on her elbow to get a good look at

him] Yes.

THE GENTLEMAN [daunted and conciliatory] I’m afraid I appear intrusive.

My name is Praed. [Vivie at once throws her books upon the chair, and

gets out of the hammock]. Oh, pray don’t let me disturb you.

VIVIE [striding to the gate and opening it for him] Come in, Mr Praed.

[He comes in]. Glad to see you. [She proffers her hand and takes his

with a resolute and hearty grip. She is an attractive specimen of the

sensible, able, highly-educated young middle-class Englishwoman. Age 22.

Prompt, strong, confident, self-possessed. Plain business-like dress,

but not dowdy. She wears a chatelaine at her belt, with a fountain pen

and a paper knife among its pendants].

PRAED. Very kind of you indeed, Miss Warren. [She shuts the gate with a

vigorous slam. He passes in to the middle of the garden, exercising his

fingers, which are slightly numbed by her greeting]. Has your mother

arrived?

VIVIE [quickly, evidently scenting aggression] Is she coming?

PRAED [surprised] Didn’t you expect us?

VIVIE. No.

PRAED. Now, goodness me, I hope I’ve not mistaken the day. That would be

just like me, you know. Your mother arranged that she was to come down

from London and that I was to come over from Horsham to be introduced to

you.

VIVIE [not at all pleased] Did she? Hm! My mother has rather a trick of

taking me by surprise--to see how I behave myself while she’s away, I

suppose. I fancy I shall take my mother very much by surprise one of

these days, if she makes arrangements that concern me without consulting

me beforehand. She hasnt come.

PRAED [embarrassed] I’m really very sorry.

VIVIE [throwing off her displeasure] It’s not your fault, Mr Praed, is

it? And I’m very glad you’ve come. You are the only one of my mother’s

friends I have ever asked her to bring to see me.

PRAED [relieved and delighted] Oh, now this is really very good of you,

Miss Warren!

VIVIE. Will you come indoors; or would you rather sit out here and talk?

PRAED. It will be nicer out here, don’t you think?

VIVIE. Then I’ll go and get you a chair. [She goes to the porch for a

garden chair].

PRAED [following her] Oh, pray, pray! Allow me. [He lays hands on the

chair].

VIVIE [letting him take it] Take care of your fingers; theyre rather

dodgy things, those chairs. [She goes across to the chair with the books

on it; pitches them into the hammock; and brings the chair forward with

one swing].

PRAED [who has just unfolded his chair] Oh, now do let me take that

hard chair. I like hard chairs.

VIVIE. So do I. Sit down, Mr Praed. [This invitation she gives with a

genial peremptoriness, his anxiety to please her clearly striking her as

a sign of weakness of character on his part. But he does not immediately

obey].

PRAED. By the way, though, hadnt we better go to the station to meet

your mother?

VIVIE [coolly] Why? She knows the way.

PRAED [disconcerted] Er--I suppose she does [he sits down].

VIVIE. Do you know, you are just like what I expected. I hope you are

disposed to be friends with me.

PRAED [again beaming] Thank you, my _dear_ Miss Warren; thank you. Dear

me! I’m so glad your mother hasnt spoilt you!

VIVIE. How?

PRAED. Well, in making you too conventional. You know, my dear Miss

Warren, I am a born anarchist. I hate authority. It spoils the relations

between parent and child; even between mother and daughter. Now I was

always afraid that your mother would strain her authority to make you

very conventional. It’s such a relief to find that she hasnt.

VIVIE. Oh! have I been behaving unconventionally?

PRAED. Oh no: oh dear no. At least, not conventionally unconventionally,

you understand. [She nods and sits down. He goes on, with a cordial

outburst] But it was so charming of you to say that you were disposed

to be friends with me! You modern young ladies are splendid: perfectly

splendid!

VIVIE [dubiously] Eh? [watching him with dawning disappointment as to

the quality of his brains and character].

PRAED. When I was your age, young men and women were afraid of each

other: there was no good fellowship. Nothing real. Only gallantry copied

out of novels, and as vulgar and affected as it could be. Maidenly

reserve! gentlemanly chivalry! always saying no when you meant yes!

simple purgatory for shy and sincere souls.

VIVIE. Yes, I imagine there must have been a frightful waste of time.

Especially women’s time.

PRAED. Oh, waste of life, waste of everything. But things are improving.

Do you know, I have been in a positive state of excitement about meeting

you ever since your magnificent achievements at Cambridge: a thing

unheard of in my day. It was perfectly splendid, your tieing with the

third wrangler. Just the right place, you know. The first wrangler

is always a dreamy, morbid fellow, in whom the thing is pushed to the

length of a disease.

VIVIE. It doesn’t pay. I wouldn’t do it again for the same money.

PRAED [aghast] The same money!

VIVIE. Yes. Fifty pounds. Perhaps you don’t know how it was. Mrs Latham,

my tutor at Newnham, told my mother that I could distinguish myself in

the mathematical tripos if I went in for it in earnest. The papers were

full just then of Phillipa Summers beating the senior wrangler. You

remember about it, of course.

PRAED [shakes his head energetically] !!!

VIVIE. Well, anyhow, she did; and nothing would please my mother but

that I should do the same thing. I said flatly that it was not worth

my while to face the grind since I was not going in for teaching; but I

offered to try for fourth wrangler or thereabouts for fifty pounds. She

closed with me at that, after a little grumbling; and I was better than

my bargain. But I wouldn’t do it again for that. Two hundred pounds would

have been nearer the mark.

PRAED [much damped] Lord bless me! Thats a very practical way of looking

at it.

VIVIE. Did you expect to find me an unpractical person?

PRAED. But surely it’s practical to consider not only the work these

honors cost, but also the culture they bring.

VIVIE. Culture! My dear Mr Praed: do you know what the mathematical

tripos means? It means grind, grind, grind for six to eight hours a day

at mathematics, and nothing but mathematics.

I’m supposed to know something about science; but I know nothing except

the mathematics it involves. I can make calculations for engineers,

electricians, insurance companies, and so on; but I know next to

nothing about engineering or electricity or insurance. I don’t even know

arithmetic well. Outside mathematics, lawn-tennis, eating, sleeping,

cycling, and walking, I’m a more ignorant barbarian than any woman could

possibly be who hadn’t gone in for the tripos.

PRAED [revolted] What a monstrous, wicked, rascally system! I knew it!

I felt at once that it meant destroying all that makes womanhood

beautiful!

VIVIE. I don’t object to it on that score in the least. I shall turn it

to very good account, I assure you.

PRAED. Pooh! In what way?

VIVIE. I shall set up chambers in the City, and work at actuarial

calculations and conveyancing. Under cover of that I shall do some law,

with one eye on the Stock Exchange all the time. I’ve come down here by

myself to read law: not for a holiday, as my mother imagines. I hate

holidays.

PRAED. You make my blood run cold. Are you to have no romance, no beauty

in your life?

VIVIE. I don’t care for either, I assure you.

PRAED. You can’t mean that.

VIVIE. Oh yes I do. I like working and getting paid for it. When I’m

tired of working, I like a comfortable chair, a cigar, a little whisky,

and a novel with a good detective story in it.

PRAED [rising in a frenzy of repudiation] I don’t believe it. I am an

artist; and I can’t believe it: I refuse to believe it. It’s only that

you havn’t discovered yet what a wonderful world art can open up to you.

VIVIE. Yes I have. Last May I spent six weeks in London with Honoria

Fraser. Mamma thought we were doing a round of sightseeing together; but

I was really at Honoria’s chambers in Chancery Lane every day, working

away at actuarial calculations for her, and helping her as well as a

greenhorn could. In the evenings we smoked and talked, and never dreamt

of going out except for exercise. And I never enjoyed myself more in my

life.

I cleared all my expenses and got initiated into the business without a

fee in the bargain.

PRAED. But bless my heart and soul, Miss Warren, do you call that

discovering art?

VIVIE. Wait a bit. That wasn’t the beginning. I went up to town on an

invitation from some artistic people in Fitzjohn’s Avenue: one of the

girls was a Newnham chum. They took me to the National Gallery--

PRAED [approving] Ah!! [He sits down, much relieved].

VIVIE [continuing]--to the Opera--

PRAED [still more pleased] Good!

VIVIE.--and to a concert where the band played all the evening:

Beethoven and Wagner and so on. I wouldn’t go through that experience

again for anything you could offer me. I held out for civility’s sake

until the third day; and then I said, plump out, that I couldn’t stand

any more of it, and went off to Chancery Lane. N o w you know the sort

of perfectly splendid modern young lady I am. How do you think I shall

get on with my mother?

PRAED [startled] Well, I hope--er--

VIVIE. It’s not so much what you hope as what you believe, that I want

to know.

PRAED. Well, frankly, I am afraid your mother will be a little

disappointed. Not from any shortcoming on your part, you know: I don’t

mean that. But you are so different from her ideal.

VIVIE. Her what?!

PRAED. Her ideal.

VIVIE. Do you mean her ideal of ME?

PRAED. Yes.

VIVIE. What on earth is it like?

PRAED. Well, you must have observed, Miss Warren, that people who are

dissatisfied with their own bringing-up generally think that the world

would be all right if everybody were to be brought up quite differently.

Now your mother’s life has been--er--I suppose you know--

VIVIE. Don’t suppose anything, Mr Praed. I hardly know my mother. Since

I was a child I have lived in England, at school or at college, or with

people paid to take charge of me. I have been boarded out all my life.

My mother has lived in Brussels or Vienna and never let me go to her.

I only see her when she visits England for a few days. I don’t complain:

it’s been very pleasant; for people have been very good to me; and there

has always been plenty of money to make things smooth. But don’t imagine

I know anything about my mother. I know far less than you do.

PRAED [very ill at ease] In that case--[He stops, quite at a loss. Then,

with a forced attempt at gaiety] But what nonsense we are talking! Of

course you and your mother will get on capitally. [He rises, and looks

abroad at the view]. What a charming little place you have here!

VIVIE [unmoved] Rather a violent change of subject, Mr Praed. Why won’t

my mother’s life bear being talked about?

PRAED. Oh, you mustn’t say that. Isn’t it natural that I should have a

certain delicacy in talking to my old friend’s daughter about her behind

her back? You and she will have plenty of opportunity of talking about

it when she comes.

VIVIE. No: she won’t talk about it either. [Rising] However, I daresay

you have good reasons for telling me nothing. Only, mind this, Mr

Praed, I expect there will be a battle royal when my mother hears of my

Chancery Lane project.

PRAED [ruefully] I’m afraid there will.

VIVIE. Well, I shall win because I want nothing but my fare to London

to start there to-morrow earning my own living by devilling for Honoria.

Besides, I have no mysteries to keep up; and it seems she has. I shall

use that advantage over her if necessary.

PRAED [greatly shocked] Oh no! No, pray. Youd not do such a thing.

VIVIE. Then tell me why not.

PRAED. I really cannot. I appeal to your good feeling. [She smiles at

his sentimentality]. Besides, you may be too bold. Your mother is not to

be trifled with when she’s angry.

VIVIE. You can’t frighten me, Mr Praed. In that month at Chancery Lane I

had opportunities of taking the measure of one or two women v e r y like

my mother. You may back me to win. But if I hit harder in my ignorance

than I need, remember it is you who refuse to enlighten me. Now, let us

drop the subject. [She takes her chair and replaces it near the hammock

with the same vigorous swing as before].

PRAED [taking a desperate resolution] One word, Miss Warren. I had

better tell you. It’s very difficult; but--

[Mrs Warren and Sir George Crofts arrive at the gate. Mrs Warren is

between 40 and 50, formerly pretty, showily dressed in a brilliant

hat and a gay blouse fitting tightly over her bust and flanked by

fashionable sleeves. Rather spoilt and domineering, and decidedly

vulgar, but, on the whole, a genial and fairly presentable old

blackguard of a woman.]

[Crofts is a tall powerfully-built man of about 50, fashionably dressed

in the style of a young man. Nasal voice, reedier than might be expected

from his strong frame. Clean-shaven bulldog jaws, large flat ears, and

thick neck: gentlemanly combination of the most brutal types of city

man, sporting man, and man about town.]

VIVIE. Here they are. [Coming to them as they enter the garden] How do,

mater? Mr Praed’s been here this half hour, waiting for you.

MRS WARREN. Well, if you’ve been waiting, Praddy, it’s your own fault:

I thought youd have had the gumption to know I was coming by the 3.10

train. Vivie: put your hat on, dear: youll get sunburnt. Oh, I forgot to

introduce you. Sir George Crofts: my little Vivie.

[Crofts advances to Vivie with his most courtly manner. She nods, but

makes no motion to shake hands.]

CROFTS. May I shake hands with a young lady whom I have known by

reputation very long as the daughter of one of my oldest friends?

VIVIE [who has been looking him up and down sharply] If you like.

[She takes his tenderly proferred hand and gives it a squeeze that makes

him open his eyes; then turns away, and says to her mother] Will you

come in, or shall I get a couple more chairs? [She goes into the porch

for the chairs].

MRS WARREN. Well, George, what do you think of her?

CROFTS [ruefully] She has a powerful fist. Did you shake hands with her,

Praed?

PRAED. Yes: it will pass off presently.

CROFTS. I hope so. [Vivie reappears with two more chairs. He hurries to

her assistance]. Allow me.

MRS WARREN [patronizingly] Let Sir George help you with the chairs,

dear.

VIVIE [pitching them into his arms] Here you are. [She dusts her hands

and turns to Mrs Warren]. Youd like some tea, wouldn’t you?

MRS WARREN [sitting in Praed’s chair and fanning herself] I’m dying for

a drop to drink.

VIVIE. I’ll see about it. [She goes into the cottage].

[Sir George has by this time managed to unfold a chair and plant it by

Mrs Warren, on her left. He throws the other on the grass and sits down,

looking dejected and rather foolish, with the handle of his stick in

his mouth. Praed, still very uneasy, fidgets around the garden on their

right.]

MRS WARREN [to Praed, looking at Crofts] Just look at him, Praddy: he

looks cheerful, don’t he? He’s been worrying my life out these three

years to have that little girl of mine shewn to him; and now that Ive

done it, he’s quite out of countenance. [Briskly] Come! sit up, George;

and take your stick out of your mouth. [Crofts sulkily obeys].

PRAED. I think, you know--if you don’t mind my saying so--that we had

better get out of the habit of thinking of her as a little girl. You see

she has really distinguished herself; and I’m not sure, from what I have

seen of her, that she is not older than any of us.

MRS WARREN [greatly amused] Only listen to him, George! Older than any

of us! Well she _has_ been stuffing you nicely with her importance.

PRAED. But young people are particularly sensitive about being treated

in that way.

MRS WARREN. Yes; and young people have to get all that nonsense taken

out of them, and good deal more besides. Don’t you interfere, Praddy: I

know how to treat my own child as well as you do. [Praed, with a grave

shake of his head, walks up the garden with his hands behind his back.

Mrs Warren pretends to laugh, but looks after him with perceptible

concern. Then, she whispers to Crofts] Whats the matter with him? What

does he take it like that for?

CROFTS [morosely] Youre afraid of Praed.

MRS WARREN. What! Me! Afraid of dear old Praddy! Why, a fly wouldn’t be

afraid of him.

CROFTS. _You’re_ afraid of him.

MRS WARREN [angry] I’ll trouble you to mind your own business, and not

try any of your sulks on me. I’m not afraid of y o u, anyhow. If you

can’t make yourself agreeable, youd better go home. [She gets up, and,

turning her back on him, finds herself face to face with Praed]. Come,

Praddy, I know it was only your tender-heartedness. Youre afraid I’ll

bully her.

PRAED. My dear Kitty: you think I’m offended. Don’t imagine that: pray

don’t. But you know I often notice things that escape you; and though you

never take my advice, you sometimes admit afterwards that you ought to

have taken it.

MRS WARREN. Well, what do you notice now?

PRAED. Only that Vivie is a grown woman. Pray, Kitty, treat her with

every respect.

MRS WARREN [with genuine amazement] Respect! Treat my own daughter with

respect! What next, pray!

VIVIE [appearing at the cottage door and calling to Mrs Warren] Mother:

will you come to my room before tea?

MRS WARREN. Yes, dearie. [She laughs indulgently at Praed’s gravity, and

pats him on the cheek as she passes him on her way to the porch]. Don’t

be cross, Praddy. [She follows Vivie into the cottage].

CROFTS [furtively] I say, Praed.

PRAED. Yes.

CROFTS. I want to ask you a rather particular question.

PRAED. Certainly. [He takes Mrs Warren’s chair and sits close to

Crofts].

CROFTS. Thats right: they might hear us from the window. Look here: did

Kitty every tell you who that girl’s father is?

PRAED. Never.

CROFTS. Have you any suspicion of who it might be?

PRAED. None.

CROFTS [not believing him] I know, of course, that you perhaps might

feel bound not to tell if she had said anything to you. But it’s very

awkward to be uncertain about it now that we shall be meeting the girl

every day. We don’t exactly know how we ought to feel towards her.

PRAED. What difference can that make? We take her on her own merits.

What does it matter who her father was?

CROFTS [suspiciously] Then you know who he was?

PRAED [with a touch of temper] I said no just now. Did you not hear me?

CROFTS. Look here, Praed. I ask you as a particular favor. If you _do_

know [movement of protest from Praed]--I only say, if you know,

you might at least set my mind at rest about her. The fact is, I fell

attracted.

PRAED [sternly] What do you mean?

CROFTS. Oh, don’t be alarmed: it’s quite an innocent feeling. Thats what

puzzles me about it. Why, for all I know, _I_ might be her father.

PRAED. You! Impossible!

CROFTS [catching him up cunningly] You know for certain that I’m not?

PRAED. I know nothing about it, I tell you, any more than you. But

really, Crofts--oh no, it’s out of the question. Theres not the least

resemblance.

CROFTS. As to that, theres no resemblance between her and her mother

that I can see. I suppose she’s not y o u r daughter, is she?

PRAED [rising indignantly] Really, Crofts--!

CROFTS. No offence, Praed. Quite allowable as between two men of the

world.

PRAED [recovering himself with an effort and speaking gently and

gravely] Now listen to me, my dear Crofts. [He sits down again].

I have nothing to do with that side of Mrs Warren’s life, and never had.

She has never spoken to me about it; and of course I have never spoken

to her about it. Your delicacy will tell you that a handsome woman needs

some friends who are not--well, not on that footing with her. The effect

of her own beauty would become a torment to her if she could not escape

from it occasionally. You are probably on much more confidential terms

with Kitty than I am. Surely you can ask her the question yourself.

CROFTS. I h a v e asked her, often enough. But she’s so determined to

keep the child all to herself that she would deny that it ever had a

father if she could. [Rising] I’m thoroughly uncomfortable about it,

Praed.

PRAED [rising also] Well, as you are, at all events, old enough to be

her father, I don’t mind agreeing that we both regard Miss Vivie in a

parental way, as a young girl who we are bound to protect and help. What

do you say?

CROFTS [aggressively] I’m no older than you, if you come to that.

PRAED. Yes you are, my dear fellow: you were born old. I was born a boy:

Ive never been able to feel the assurance of a grown-up man in my life.

[He folds his chair and carries it to the porch].

MRS WARREN [calling from within the cottage] Prad-dee! George!

Tea-ea-ea-ea!

CROFTS [hastily] She’s calling us. [He hurries in].

[Praed shakes his head bodingly, and is following Crofts when he is

hailed by a young gentleman who has just appeared on the common, and is

making for the gate. He is pleasant, pretty, smartly dressed, cleverly

good-for-nothing, not long turned 20, with a charming voice and

agreeably disrespectful manners. He carries a light sporting magazine

rifle.]

THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN. Hallo! Praed!

PRAED. Why, Frank Gardner! [Frank comes in and shakes hands cordially].

What on earth are you doing here?

FRANK. Staying with my father.

PRAED. The Roman father?

FRANK. He’s rector here. I’m living with my people this autumn for the

sake of economy. Things came to a crisis in July: the Roman father had

to pay my debts. He’s stony broke in consequence; and so am I. What are

you up to in these parts? do you know the people here?

PRAED. Yes: I’m spending the day with a Miss Warren.

FRANK [enthusiastically] What! Do you know Vivie? Isn’t she a jolly girl?

I’m teaching her to shoot with this [putting down the rifle]. I’m so

glad she knows you: youre just the sort of fellow she ought to know.

[He smiles, and raises the charming voice almost to a singing tone as he

exclaims] It’s e v e r so jolly to find you here, Praed.

PRAED. I’m an old friend of her mother. Mrs Warren brought me over to

make her daughter’s acquaintance.

FRANK. The mother! Is _she_ here?

PRAED. Yes: inside, at tea.

MRS WARREN [calling from within] Prad-dee-ee-ee-eee! The tea-cake’ll be

cold.

PRAED [calling] Yes, Mrs Warren. In a moment. I’ve just met a friend

here.

MRS WARREN. A what?

PRAED [louder] A friend.

MRS WARREN. Bring him in.

PRAED. All right. [To Frank] Will you accept the invitation?

FRANK [incredulous, but immensely amused] Is that Vivie’s mother?

PRAED. Yes.

FRANK. By Jove! What a lark! Do you think she’ll like me?

PRAED. I’ve no doubt youll make yourself popular, as usual. Come in and

try [moving towards the house].

FRANK. Stop a bit. [Seriously] I want to take you into my confidence.

PRAED. Pray don’t. It’s only some fresh folly, like the barmaid at

Redhill.

FRANK. It’s ever so much more serious than that. You say you’ve only just

met Vivie for the first time?

PRAED. Yes.

FRANK [rhapsodically] Then you can have no idea what a girl she is. Such

character! Such sense! And her cleverness! Oh, my eye, Praed, but I can

tell you she is clever! And--need I add?--she loves me.

CROFTS [putting his head out of the window] I say, Praed: what are you

about? Do come along. [He disappears].

FRANK. Hallo! Sort of chap that would take a prize at a dog show, ain’t

he? Who’s he?

PRAED. Sir George Crofts, an old friend of Mrs Warren’s. I think we had

better come in.

[On their way to the porch they are interrupted by a call from the gate.

Turning, they see an elderly clergyman looking over it.]

THE CLERGYMAN [calling] Frank!

FRANK. Hallo! [To Praed] The Roman father. [To the clergyman] Yes,

gov’nor: all right: presently. [To Praed] Look here, Praed: youd better

go in to tea. I’ll join you directly.

PRAED. Very good. [He goes into the cottage].

[The clergyman remains outside the gate, with his hands on the top of

it. The Rev. Samuel Gardner, a beneficed clergyman of the Established

Church, is over 50. Externally he is pretentious, booming, noisy,

important. Really he is that obsolescent phenomenon the fool of the

family dumped on the Church by his father the patron, clamorously

asserting himself as father and clergyman without being able to command

respect in either capacity.]

REV. S. Well, sir. Who are your friends here, if I may ask?

FRANK. Oh, it’s all right, gov’nor! Come in.

REV. S. No, sir; not until I know whose garden I am entering.

FRANK. It’s all right. It’s Miss Warren’s.

REV. S. I have not seen her at church since she came.

FRANK. Of course not: she’s a third wrangler. Ever so intellectual. Took

a higher degree than you did; so why should she go to hear you preach?

REV. S. Don’t be disrespectful, sir.

FRANK. Oh, it don’t matter: nobody hears us. Come in. [He opens the gate,

unceremoniously pulling his father with it into the garden]. I want to

introduce you to her. Do you remember the advice you gave me last July,

gov’nor?

REV. S. [severely] Yes. I advised you to conquer your idleness and

flippancy, and to work your way into an honorable profession and live on

it and not upon me.

FRANK. No: thats what you thought of afterwards. What you actually said

was that since I had neither brains nor money, I’d better turn my good

looks to account by marrying someone with both. Well, look here. Miss

Warren has brains: you can’t deny that.

REV. S. Brains are not everything.

FRANK. No, of course not: theres the money--

REV. S. [interrupting him austerely] I was not thinking of money, sir. I

was speaking of higher things. Social position, for instance.

FRANK. I don’t care a rap about that.

REV. S. But I do, sir.

FRANK. Well, nobody wants y o u to marry her. Anyhow, she has what

amounts to a high Cambridge degree; and she seems to have as much money

as she wants.

REV. S. [sinking into a feeble vein of humor] I greatly doubt whether

she has as much money as y o u will want.

FRANK. Oh, come: I havn’t been so very extravagant. I live ever so

quietly; I don’t drink; I don’t bet much; and I never go regularly to the

razzle-dazzle as you did when you were my age.

REV. S. [booming hollowly] Silence, sir.

FRANK. Well, you told me yourself, when I was making every such an ass

of myself about the barmaid at Redhill, that you once offered a woman

fifty pounds for the letters you wrote to her when--

REV. S. [terrified] Sh-sh-sh, Frank, for Heaven’s sake! [He looks round

apprehensively Seeing no one within earshot he plucks up courage to boom

again, but more subduedly]. You are taking an ungentlemanly advantage of

what I confided to you for your own good, to save you from an error you

would have repented all your life long. Take warning by your father’s

follies, sir; and don’t make them an excuse for your own.

FRANK. Did you ever hear the story of the Duke of Wellington and his

letters?

REV. S. No, sir; and I don’t want to hear it.

FRANK. The old Iron Duke didn’t throw away fifty pounds: not he. He

just wrote: “Dear Jenny: publish and be damned! Yours affectionately,

Wellington.” Thats what you should have done.

REV. S. [piteously] Frank, my boy: when I wrote those letters I put

myself into that woman’s power. When I told you about them I put myself,

to some extent, I am sorry to say, in your power. She refused my money

with these words, which I shall never forget. “Knowledge is power” she

said; “and I never sell power.”

Thats more than twenty years ago; and she has never made use of her

power or caused me a moment’s uneasiness. You are behaving worse to me

than she did, Frank.

FRANK. Oh yes I dare say! Did you ever preach at her the way you preach

at me every day?

REV. S. [wounded almost to tears] I leave you, sir. You are

incorrigible. [He turns towards the gate].

FRANK [utterly unmoved] Tell them I shan’t be home to tea, will you,

gov’nor, like a good fellow? [He moves towards the cottage door and is

met by Praed and Vivie coming out].

VIVIE [to Frank] Is that your father, Frank? I do so want to meet him.

FRANK. Certainly. [Calling after his father] Gov’nor. Youre wanted. [The

parson turns at the gate, fumbling nervously at his hat. Praed crosses

the garden to the opposite side, beaming in anticipation of civilities].

My father: Miss Warren.

VIVIE [going to the clergyman and shaking his hand] Very glad to see

you here, Mr Gardner. [Calling to the cottage] Mother: come along: youre

wanted.

[Mrs Warren appears on the threshold, and is immediately transfixed,

recognizing the clergyman.]

VIVIE [continuing] Let me introduce--

MRS WARREN [swooping on the Reverend Samuel] Why it’s Sam Gardner, gone

into the Church! Well, I never! Don’t you know us, Sam? This is George

Crofts, as large as life and twice as natural. Don’t you remember me?

REV. S. [very red] I really--er--

MRS WARREN. Of course you do. Why, I have a whole album of your letters

still: I came across them only the other day.

REV. S. [miserably confused] Miss Vavasour, I believe.

MRS WARREN [correcting him quickly in a loud whisper] Tch! Nonsense! Mrs

Warren: don’t you see my daughter there?