Like many other works of
mine, this playlet is a piece d'occasion. In 1905 it happened that
Mr Arnold Daly, who was then playing the part of Napoleon in The
Man of Destiny in New York, found that whilst the play was too long
to take a secondary place in the evening's performance, it was too
short to suffice by itself. I therefore took advantage of four days
continuous rain during a holiday in the north of Scotland to write
How He Lied To Her Husband for Mr Daly. In his hands, it served its
turn very effectively.
I print it here as a sample of what can be done with even the
most hackneyed stage framework by filling it in with an observed
touch of actual humanity instead of with doctrinaire romanticism.
Nothing in the theatre is staler than the situation of husband,
wife and lover, or the fun of knockabout farce. I have taken both,
and got an original play out of them, as anybody else can if only
he will look about him for his material instead of plagiarizing
Othello and the thousand plays that have proceeded on Othello's
romantic assumptions and false point of honor.
A further experiment made by Mr Arnold Daly with this play is
worth recording. In 1905 Mr Daly produced Mrs Warren's Profession
in New York. The press of that city instantly raised a cry that
such persons as Mrs Warren are "ordure," and should not be
mentioned in the presence of decent people. This hideous
repudiation of humanity and social conscience so took possession of
the New York journalists that the few among them who kept their
feet morally and intellectually could do nothing to check the
epidemic of foul language, gross suggestion, and raving obscenity
of word and thought that broke out. The writers abandoned all
self-restraint under the impression that they were upholding virtue
instead of outraging it. They infected each other with their
hysteria until they were for all practical purposes indecently mad.
They finally forced the police to arrest Mr Daly and his company,
and led the magistrate to express his loathing of the duty thus
forced upon him of reading an unmentionable and abominable play. Of
course the convulsion soon exhausted itself. The magistrate,
naturally somewhat impatient when he found that what he had to read
was a strenuously ethical play forming part of a book which had
been in circulation unchallenged for eight years, and had been
received without protest by the whole London and New York press,
gave the journalists a piece of his mind as to their moral taste in
plays. By consent, he passed the case on to a higher court, which
declared that the play was not immoral; acquitted Mr Daly; and made
an end of the attempt to use the law to declare living women to be
"ordure," and thus enforce silence as to the far-reaching fact that
you cannot cheapen women in the market for industrial purposes
without cheapening them for other purposes as well. I hope Mrs
Warren's Profession will be played everywhere, in season and out of
season, until Mrs Warren has bitten that fact into the public
conscience, and shamed the newspapers which support a tariff to
keep up the price of every American commodity except American
manhood and womanhood.
Unfortunately, Mr Daly had already suffered the usual fate of
those who direct public attention to the profits of the sweater or
the pleasures of the voluptuary. He was morally lynched side by
side with me. Months elapsed before the decision of the courts
vindicated him; and even then, since his vindication implied the
condemnation of the press, which was by that time sober again, and
ashamed of its orgy, his triumph received a rather sulky and
grudging publicity. In the meantime he had hardly been able to
approach an American city, including even those cities which had
heaped applause on him as the defender of hearth and home when he
produced Candida, without having to face articles discussing
whether mothers could allow their daughters to attend such plays as
You Never Can Tell, written by the infamous author of Mrs Warren's
Profession, and acted by the monster who produced it. What made
this harder to bear was that though no fact is better established
in theatrical business than the financial disastrousness of moral
discredit, the journalists who had done all the mischief kept
paying vice the homage of assuming that it is enormously popular
and lucrative, and that I and Mr Daly, being exploiters of vice,
must therefore be making colossal fortunes out of the abuse heaped
on us, and had in fact provoked it and welcomed it with that
express object. Ignorance of real life could hardly go further.
One consequence was that Mr Daly could not have kept his
financial engagements or maintained his hold on the public had he
not accepted engagements to appear for a season in the vaudeville
theatres [the American equivalent of our music halls], where he
played How He Lied to Her Husband comparatively unhampered by the
press censorship of the theatre, or by that sophistication of the
audience through press suggestion from which I suffer more,
perhaps, than any other author. Vaudeville authors are fortunately
unknown: the audiences see what the play contains and what the
actor can do, not what the papers have told them to expect. Success
under such circumstances had a value both for Mr Daly and myself
which did something to console us for the very unsavory mobbing
which the New York press organized for us, and which was not the
less disgusting because we suffered in a good cause and in the very
best company.
Mr Daly, having weathered the storm, can perhaps shake his soul
free of it as he heads for fresh successes with younger authors.
But I have certain sensitive places in my soul: I do not like that
word "ordure." Apply it to my work, and I can afford to smile,
since the world, on the whole, will smile with me. But to apply it
to the woman in the street, whose spirit is of one substance with
our own and her body no less holy: to look your women folk in the
face afterwards and not go out and hang yourself: that is not on
the list of pardonable sins.
POSTSCRIPT. Since the above was written news has arrived from
America that a leading New York newspaper, which was among the most
abusively clamorous for the suppression of Mrs Warren's Profession,
has just been fined heavily for deriving part of its revenue from
advertisements of Mrs Warren's houses.
Many people have been puzzled by the fact that whilst stage
entertainments which are frankly meant to act on the spectators as
aphrodisiacs, are everywhere tolerated, plays which have an almost
horrifyingly contrary effect are fiercely attacked by persons and
papers notoriously indifferent to public morals on all other
occasions. The explanation is very simple. The profits of Mrs
Warren's profession are shared not only by Mrs Warren and Sir
George Crofts, but by the landlords of their houses, the newspapers
which advertize them, the restaurants which cater for them, and, in
short, all the trades to which they are good customers, not to
mention the public officials and representatives whom they silence
by complicity, corruption, or blackmail. Add to these the employers
who profit by cheap female labor, and the shareholders whose
dividends depend on it [you find such people everywhere, even on
the judicial bench and in the highest places in Church and State],
and you get a large and powerful class with a strong pecuniary
incentive to protect Mrs Warren's profession, and a correspondingly
strong incentive to conceal, from their own consciences no less
than from the world, the real sources of their gain. These are the
people who declare that it is feminine vice and not poverty that
drives women to the streets, as if vicious women with independent
incomes ever went there. These are the people who, indulgent or
indifferent to aphrodisiac plays, raise the moral hue and cry
against performances of Mrs Warren's Profession, and drag actresses
to the police court to be insulted, bullied, and threatened for
fulfilling their engagements. For please observe that the judicial
decision in New York State in favor of the play does not end the
matter. In Kansas City, for instance, the municipality, finding
itself restrained by the courts from preventing the performance,
fell back on a local bye-law against indecency to evade the
Constitution of the United States. They summoned the actress who
impersonated Mrs Warren to the police court, and offered her and
her colleagues the alternative of leaving the city or being
prosecuted under this bye-law.
Now nothing is more possible than that the city councillors who
suddenly displayed such concern for the morals of the theatre were
either Mrs Warren's landlords, or employers of women at starvation
wages, or restaurant keepers, or newspaper proprietors, or in some
other more or less direct way sharers of the profits of her trade.
No doubt it is equally possible that they were simply stupid men
who thought that indecency consists, not in evil, but in mentioning
it. I have, however, been myself a member of a municipal council,
and have not found municipal councillors quite so simple and
inexperienced as this. At all events I do not propose to give the
Kansas councillors the benefit of the doubt. I therefore advise the
public at large, which will finally decide the matter, to keep a
vigilant eye on gentlemen who will stand anything at the theatre
except a performance of Mrs Warren's Profession, and who assert in
the same breath that [a] the play is too loathsome to be bearable
by civilized people, and [b] that unless its performance is
prohibited the whole town will throng to see it. They may be merely
excited and foolish; but I am bound to warn the public that it is
equally likely that they may be collected and knavish.
At all events, to prohibit the play is to protect the evil which
the play exposes; and in view of that fact, I see no reason for
assuming that the prohibitionists are disinterested moralists, and
that the author, the managers, and the performers, who depend for
their livelihood on their personal reputations and not on rents,
advertisements, or dividends, are grossly inferior to them in moral
sense and public responsibility.
It is true that in Mrs Warren's Profession, Society, and not any
individual, is the villain of the piece; but it does not follow
that the people who take offence at it are all champions of
society. Their credentials cannot be too carefully examined.
