parison 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.

Eve