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