The Author's Apology - Page 2

than Mrs Warren's house, yet hell is still more
dreadful. Nowadays they no longer believe in hell; and the girls among
whom they are working know that they do not believe in it, and would
laugh at them if they did. So well have the rescuers learnt that Mrs
Warren's defence of herself and indictment of society is the thing that
most needs saying, that those who know me personally reproach me, not
for writing this play, but for wasting my energies on "pleasant
plays" for the amusement of frivolous people, when I can build up such
excellent stage sermons on their own work. Mrs Warren's Profession is
the one play of mine which I could submit to a censorship without doubt
of the result; only, it must not be the censorship of the minor theatre
critic, nor of an innocent court official like the Lord Chamberlain's
Examiner, much less of people who consciously profit by Mrs Warren's
profession, or who personally make use of it, or who hold the widely
whispered view that it is an indispensable safety-valve for the
protection of domestic virtue, or, above all, who are smitten with a
sentimental affection for our fallen sister, and would "take her up
tenderly, lift her with care, fashioned so slenderly, young, and SO
fair." Nor am I prepared to accept the verdict of the medical gentlemen
who would compulsorily sanitate and register Mrs Warren, whilst leaving
Mrs Warren's patrons, especially her military patrons, free to destroy
her health and anybody else's without fear of reprisals. But I should be
quite content to have my play judged by, say, a joint committee of
the Central Vigilance Society and the Salvation Army. And the sterner
moralists the members of the committee were, the better.

Some of the journalists I have shocked reason so unripely that they will
gather nothing from this but a confused notion that I am accusing the
National Vigilance Association and the Salvation Army of complicity in
my own scandalous immorality. It will seem to them that people who would
stand this play would stand anything. They are quite mistaken. Such
an audience as I have described would be revolted by many of our
fashionable plays. They would leave the theatre convinced that the
Plymouth Brother who still regards the playhouse as one of the gates of
hell is perhaps the safest adviser on the subject of which he knows so
little. If I do not draw the same conclusion, it is not because I am one
of those who claim that art is exempt from moral obligations, and deny
that the writing or performance of a play is a moral act, to be treated
on exactly the same footing as theft or murder if it produces equally
mischievous consequences. I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest,
the most seductive, the most effective