k embodying any sort of sympathy it would be
much better to leave out Mrs. Warren than to leave out Mr. Redford. The
veto was the pivot of so very personal a movement by the dramatist, of
so very positive an assertion of his own attitude towards things, that
it is only just and necessary to state what were the two essential
parties to the dispute; the play and the official who prevented the
play.

The play of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ is concerned with a coarse mother
and a cold daughter; the mother drives the ordinary and dirty trade of
harlotry; the daughter does not know until the end the atrocious origin
of all her own comfort and refinement. The daughter, when the discovery
is made, freezes up into an iceberg of contempt; which is indeed a very
womanly thing to do. The mother explodes into pulverising cynicism and
practicality; which is also very womanly. The dialogue is drastic and
sweeping; the daughter says the trade is loathsome; the mother answers
that she loathes it herself; that every healthy person does loathe the
trade by which she lives. And beyond question the general effect of the
play is that the trade is loathsome; supposing anyone to be so
insensible as to require to be told of the fact. Undoubtedly the upshot
is that a brothel is a miserable business, and a brothel-keeper a
miserable woman. The whole dramatic art of Shaw is in the literal sense
of the word, tragi-comic; I mean that the comic part comes after the
tragedy. But just as _You Never Can Tell_ represents the nearest
approach of Shaw to the purely comic, so _Mrs. Warren's Profession_
represents his only complete, or nearly complete, tragedy. There is no
twopenny modernism in it, as in _The Philanderer_. Mrs. Warren is as old
as the Old Testament; "for she hath cast down many wounded, yea, many
strong men have been slain by her; her house is in the gates of hell,
going down into the chamber of death." Here is no subtle ethics, as in
_Widowers' Houses_; for even those moderns who think it noble that a
woman should throw away her honour, surely cannot think it especially
noble that she should sell it. Here is no lighting up by laughter,
astonishment, and happy coincidence, as in _You Never Can Tell_. The
play is a pure tragedy about a permanent and quite plain human problem;
the problem is as plain and permanent, the tragedy is as proud and pure,
as in _OEdipus_ or _Macbeth_. This play was presented in the ordinary
way for public performance