ygoers. It was the perils of vice that were carefully concealed
from them. The gay adventures, the gorgeous dresses, the champagne and
oysters, the diamonds and motor-cars, dramatists were allowed to drag
all these dazzling temptations before any silly housemaid in the gallery
who was grumbling at her wages. But they were not allowed to warn her of
the vulgarity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions and the blasting
diseases of that life. _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ was not up to a
sufficient standard of immorality; it was not spicy enough to pass the
Censor. The acceptable and the accepted plays were those which made the
fall of a woman fashionable and fascinating; for all the world as if the
Censor's profession were the same as Mrs. Warren's profession.

Such was the angle of Shaw's energetic attack; and it is not to be
denied that there was exaggeration in it, and what is so much worse,
omission. The argument might easily be carried too far; it might end
with a scene of screaming torture in the Inquisition as a corrective to
the too amiable view of a clergyman in _The Private Secretary_. But the
controversy is definitely worth recording, if only as an excellent
example of the author's aggressive attitude and his love of turning the
tables in debate. Moreover, though this point of view involves a
potential overstatement, it also involves an important truth. One of
the best points urged in the course of it was this, that though vice is
punished in conventional drama, the punishment is not really impressive,
because it is not inevitable or even probable. It does not arise out of
the evil act. Years afterwards Bernard Shaw urged this argument again in
connection with his friend Mr. Granville Barker's play of _Waste_, in
which the woman dies from an illegal operation. Bernard Shaw said, truly
enough, that if she had died from poison or a pistol shot it would have
left everyone unmoved, for pistols do not in their nature follow female
unchastity. Illegal operations very often do. The punishment was one
which might follow the crime, not only in that case, but in many cases.
Here, I think, the whole argument might be sufficiently cleared up by
saying that the objection to such things on the stage is a purely
artistic objection. There is nothing wrong in talking about an illegal
operation; there are plenty of occasions when it would be very wrong not
to talk about it. But it may easily be just a shade too ugly for the
shape of