hor of _Our
Village_. Few funnier notions can ever have actually been facts than
this notion that the restraint and chastity of George Colman saved the
English public from the eroticism and obscenity of Miss Mitford.

Such was the play; and such was the power that stopped the play. A
private man wrote it; another private man forbade it; nor was there any
difference between Mr. Shaw's authority and Mr. Redford's, except that
Mr. Shaw did defend his action on public grounds and Mr. Redford did
not. The dramatist had simply been suppressed by a despot; and what was
worse (because it was modern) by a silent and evasive despot; a despot
in hiding. People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we at the present
day suffer from the modesty of tyrants; from the shyness and the
shrinking secrecy of the strong. Shaw's preface to _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ was far more fit to be called a public document than the
slovenly refusal of the individual official; it had more exactness, more
universal application, more authority. Shaw on Redford was far more
national and responsible than Redford on Shaw.

The dramatist found in the quarrel one of the important occasions of his
life, because the crisis called out something in him which is in many
ways his highest quality--righteous indignation. As a mere matter of the
art of controversy of course he carried the war into the enemy's camp
at once. He did not linger over loose excuses for licence; he declared
at once that the Censor was licentious, while he, Bernard Shaw, was
clean. He did not discuss whether a Censorship ought to make the drama
moral. He declared that it made the drama immoral. With a fine strategic
audacity he attacked the Censor quite as much for what he permitted as
for what he prevented. He charged him with encouraging all plays that
attracted men to vice and only stopping those which discouraged them
from it. Nor was this attitude by any means an idle paradox. Many plays
appear (as Shaw pointed out) in which the prostitute and the procuress
are practically obvious, and in which they are represented as revelling
in beautiful surroundings and basking in brilliant popularity. The crime
of Shaw was not that he introduced the Gaiety Girl; that had been done,
with little enough decorum, in a hundred musical comedies. The crime of
Shaw was that he introduced the Gaiety Girl, but did not represent her
life as all gaiety. The pleasures of vice were already flaunted before
the pla