Mrs. Warren’s Profession(华伦夫人的职业)

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MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION

MRS WARREN'S

PROFESSION

George Bernard Shaw

1894

MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION

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

MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION

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

MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION

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

MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION

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

MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION

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

MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION

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

MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION

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

MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION

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

MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION

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

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