and was suddenly stopped by the Censor of
Plays.

The Censor of Plays is a small and accidental eighteenth-century
official. Like nearly all the powers which Englishmen now respect as
ancient and rooted, he is very recent. Novels and newspapers still talk
of the English aristocracy that came over with William the Conqueror.
Little of our effective oligarchy is as old as the Reformation; and none
of it came over with William the Conqueror. Some of the older English
landlords came over with William of Orange; the rest have come by
ordinary alien immigration. In the same way we always talk of the
Victorian woman (with her smelling salts and sentiment) as the
old-fashioned woman. But she really was a quite new-fashioned woman; she
considered herself, and was, an advance in delicacy and civilisation
upon the coarse and candid Elizabethan woman to whom we are now
returning. We are never oppressed by old things; it is recent things
that can really oppress. And in accordance with this principle modern
England has accepted, as if it were a part of perennial morality, a
tenth-rate job of Walpole's worst days called the Censorship of the
Drama. Just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century parvenus to
date from Hastings, just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century
ladies to date from Eve, so they have supposed the eighteenth-century
Censorship to date from Sinai. The origin of the thing was in truth
purely political. Its first and principal achievement was to prevent
Fielding from writing plays; not at all because the plays were coarse,
but because they criticised the Government. Fielding was a free writer;
but they did not resent his sexual freedom; the Censor would not have
objected if he had torn away the most intimate curtains of decency or
rent the last rag from private life. What the Censor disliked was his
rending the curtain from public life. There is still much of that spirit
in our country; there are no affairs which men seek so much to cover up
as public affairs. But the thing was done somewhat more boldly and
baldly in Walpole's day; and the Censorship of plays has its origin, not
merely in tyranny, but in a quite trifling and temporary and partisan
piece of tyranny; a thing in its nature far more ephemeral, far less
essential, than Ship Money. Perhaps its brightest moment was when the
office of censor was held by that filthy writer, Colman the younger; and
when he gravely refused to license a work by the aut