Mrs. Warren\'s Profession

G >> George Bernard Shaw >> Mrs. Warren\'s Profession

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.