The condition of the English stage became a subject of some anxiety about this time, and was made the occasion for the introduction of an important Act of Parliament. The reader of to-day, looking back on the dramatic literature of the second George’s reign, would not be apt to think that it called for special measures of restriction. The vices of the Restoration period had apparently worked out their own cure. The hideous indecency of Dryden, of Wycherley, and of Vanbrugh had brought about a certain reaction. The indecency of such authors as these was not merely a coarseness of expression such as most of the Elizabethan writers freely indulged in, and which has but little to do with the deeper questions of morality; nor did its evil consist merely in the choice of subjects which are painful to study, and of questionable influence on the mind. Many of the finest plays of Ford and Massinger and Webster turn on sin and crime, the study of which it might reasonably be contended must always have the effect of disturbing the moral sense, if not of actually depraving the mind. But no one can pretend to find in the best of the Elizabethan writers any sympathy with viciousness, any stimulus to immorality. Of the Restoration authors, in general, the very contrary has to be said. They revel in uncleanness; they glorify immorality. It is the triumph and the honor of a gentleman to seduce his friend’s wife or his neighbor’s daughter. The business and the glory of men is the seduction of women. The sympathy of the dramatic author and his readers goes always with the seducer. The husband of the faithless wife is a subject of inextinguishable merriment and laughter. His own friends are made to laugh at him, and to feel a genuine delight in his suffering and his shame. The question of morality altogether apart, it seems positively wonderful to an English reader of to-day why the writers of the Restoration period should have always felt such an exuberant joy in the thought that a man’s wife was unfaithful to him. The common feeling of all men, even the men meant to be best, in the plays of Wycherley and Vanbrugh, seems one that might find expression in some such words as these: “I should like to seduce every pretty married woman if I could, but if I have not time or chance for such delight it is at least a great pleasure and comfort to me to know that she has been seduced by somebody; it is always a source of glee to me to know that a husband has been deceived; and, if the husband himself comes to know it too, that makes my joy all the greater.” The delight in sin seems to have made men in a certain sinful sense unselfish. They delighted so in vice that they were glad to hear of its existence even where it brought them no direct personal gratification.

All this had changed in the days of George the Second. There had been a gradual and marked improvement in the moral tone of the drama, unaccompanied, it must be owned, by any very decided improvement in the moral tone of society. Perhaps the main difference between the time of the Restoration and that of the early Georges is that the vice of the Restoration was wanton school-boy vice, and that of the early Georges the vice of mature and practical men. In the Restoration time people delighted in showing off their viciousness and making a frolic and a parade of it; at the time of the Georges they took their profligacy in a quiet, practical, man-of-the-world sort of way, and made no work about it. One effect of this difference was felt in the greater decorum, the greater comparative decorum, of the Georgian drama.

Yet this was the time when Walpole thought it necessary to introduce a measure putting the stage under new and severe restrictions. Walpole himself cared nothing about literature, and nothing about the drama; and he was as little squeamish as man could possibly be in the matter of plain-spoken indecency. What troubled him was not the indecency of the stage, but its political innuendo. It never occurred to him to care whether anything said in Drury Lane or Covent Garden brought a blush to the cheek of any young person; but he was much concerned when he heard of anything said there which was likely to make people laugh at a certain elderly person. As we have seen, he had never got the best of it in the long war of pamphlets and squibs and epigrams and caricature. It was out of his power to hire penmen who could stand up against such antagonists as Swift and Bolingbroke and Pulteney. He was out of humor with the press; had been out of humor with it for a long time; and now he began to be out of humor with the stage. Indeed, it should rather be said that he was now falling into a new fit of ill-humor with the stage; for he had been very angry indeed with Gay for his “Beggars’ Opera,” and for the attempt at a continuation of “The Beggars’ Opera” in the yet more audacious “Polly,” which brought in more money to Gay from its not having been allowed to get on the stage than its brilliant predecessor had done after all its unexampled run. The measure of Walpole’s wrath was filled by the knowledge that a piece was in preparation in which he was to be held up to public ridicule in the rudest and most uncompromising way. Walpole acted with a certain boldness and cunning. The play was brought to him, was offered for sale to him. This was an audacious attempt at black-mailing; and at first it appeared to be successful. Walpole agreed to the terms, bought the play, paid the money, and then proceeded at once to make the fact that such a piece had been written, and but for his payment might have been played, an excuse for the introduction of a measure to put the whole English stage under restriction, and to brand it with terms of shame. He picked out carefully all the worst passages, and had them copied, and sent round in private to the leading members of all parties in the House of Commons, and appealed to them to support him in passing a measure which he justified in advance by the illustrations of dramatic licentiousness thus brought under their own eyes. By this mode of action he secured beforehand an amount of support which made the passing of his Bill a matter of almost absolute certainty. Under these favorable conditions he introduced his Playhouse Bill.

The Playhouse Bill was a measure that attracted much attention, and provoked a very fierce controversy. It was a Bill to explain and amend so much of an Act made in the twelfth year of the reign of Queen Anne, entitled “An Act for reducing the laws relating to rogues, vagabonds, sturdy beggars, and vagrants, and sending them whither they ought to be sent,” as relates to the common players of interludes. One clause empowered the Lord Chamberlain to prohibit the representation of any theatric performance, and compelled all persons to send copies of new plays, or new parts or prologues or epilogues added to old plays, fourteen days before performance, in order that they might be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for his permission or prohibition. Every person who set up a theatre, or gave a theatrical exhibition, without having a legal settlement in the place where the exhibition was given, or authority by letters-patent from the Crown, or a license from the Lord Chamberlain, was to be deemed a rogue and vagabond, and subject to the penalties liberally doled out to such homeless offenders. The system of license thus virtually established by Walpole is the same that prevails in our own day. We do not, indeed, stigmatize managers and actors as rogues and vagabonds, even if they should happen to give a theatrical performance without the fully ascertained permission of the authorities, and we no longer keep up the monopoly of what used to be called the patent theatres. But the principle of Walpole’s Act is the principle of our present system. A play must have the permission of the Lord Chamberlain before it can be put on the stage; and while it is in course of performance the Lord Chamberlain can insist on any amendments or alterations in the dialogue or in the dresses which he believes necessary in the interest of public morality. A manager is, therefore, put under conditions quite different from those which surround a publisher; an actor is fenced in by preliminary restrictions which do not trouble an author. There is no censorship of the press; there is a censorship of the theatre. If a publisher brings out any book which is grossly indecent or immoral or blasphemous, he can be prosecuted, and if a conviction be obtained he can of course be punished. But there is no way of preventing him from bringing out the book; there is no authority which has to be appealed to beforehand for its sanction.

“Is this right?” The question is still asked, Why should the people of these countries submit to a censorship of the press? What can be the comparison between the harm done by a play which is seldom seen more than once by the same person, and is likely to be forgotten a week after it is seen, and the evil done by a bad book which finds its way into households, and lies on tables, and may be read again and again until its poison has really corrupted the mind? Again, a parent is almost sure to exercise some caution when he is taking his children to a theatre. He will find out beforehand what the play is like, and whether it is the sort of performance his daughter ought to see. But it is out of the question to suppose that a parent will be able to read beforehand every book that comes into his house in order to make sure that it contains nothing which is unfit for a girl to study. Why then not have a censorship of the press as well as of the theatre, or why have the one if you will not have the other? The answer to the first question is that a censorship of the press is impossible in England. The multitude of publications forbids it. The most imaginative person would find his imagination fail him if he tried to realize in his mind the idea of the British public waiting for its morning newspaper several hours while the censor was crawling over its columns to find out whether they contained anything that could bring a blush to the cheek of a young person. It would be ridiculous to put in force a censorship for books which had no application to newspapers. But it is quite easy to maintain a certain form of censorship over the theatres. The number of plays brought out in a year is comparatively small. The preparation for each new play after it has been written and has passed altogether out of its author’s hands must necessarily take some time, and there is hardly any practical inconvenience, therefore, in its being submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for his approval. But then comes the question, Is the censorship of any use? Are we any the better for having it? Should we not get on just as well without it? The answer, as it seems to us, ought to be that the censorship is on the whole of some use; that we are better with it than without it. It would be idle to contend that it is of any great service to public morality in the higher sense, but is certainly of considerable advantage as a safeguard to public decency and decorum. The censorship of the stage in England to-day does not pretend to be a guardian of public morality. In all that relates to the higher moral law the public must take care of itself. Let us give one or two illustrations. Many sincere and not unintelligent persons firmly believe that the cause of public morality is injured by the representation of any play in which vice of a certain kind is brought under public notice, even though the object of the play may be to condemn the vice it exposes; but no censor of plays now would think of refusing to permit the performance of “Othello” on that account. To take a lower illustration: many people believe, and on better ground, that such a piece as “The Lady of Lyons” is injurious to public morals, because in that play the man who makes himself a leading actor in an infamous fraud becomes glorified into a hero and wins fame, fortune, and wife in the end. But no censor would think of refusing to allow the performance of “The Lady of Lyons.” The censor regards it as his duty to take care that indecent words are not spoken, and that what society considers indecent dressing is not exhibited. That is not much, it may be said, but it is better than nothing, and it is all we can get or would have. The censor cannot go ahead of the prevailing habits and the common opinion of the society of his day. If we had a censor who started a lofty code of morality and propriety all his own, public opinion would not stand him and his code. Suppose we had a censor who considered “Othello” shocking, and an ordinary decolletee dress or an ordinary ballet costume indecent, an outcry would soon be raised against him which would compel him to resign his purposes or his office. All he can do is to endeavor to order things so that nothing is said or exhibited which might shock society’s sense of propriety, and this he can as a rule fairly accomplish. He must also take his society as he finds it. A West End audience in London will stand allusions and jests and scantiness of costume which an East End audience, made up almost exclusively of the working-people and the poor, would not endure for a moment. The censor of plays can be much more rigid in his discipline when he is protecting the proprieties of poverty than when he is protecting the proprieties of fashion. The censorship works well in England on the whole, because it has almost always been worked by capable men of the world who understand that they are not dealing with children, who do not magnify their office, and do not strain after an austere authority which it would be quite impossible for them to exert.

The Playhouse Bill passed through the House of Commons easily enough. No one of any mark took much account of it, except Pulteney, who opposed it. The opposition offered by Pulteney does not appear to have been very severe or even serious, for no division was taken in the representative Chamber. The feeling of every one was not so much concerned about what we should now call immorality or indecency, but about lampoons on public men. This fear was common to the Opposition as well as to the Government, was shared alike by the Patriots and the Court party; and so the Bill was sent speedily through both Houses.

The debate was made memorable by the brilliant speech of Lord Chesterfield in the House of Lords. All contemporary accounts agree in describing this speech as one of the most fascinating and impressive ever heard in Parliament. Chesterfield strongly opposed the measure in the interests of public liberty and the freedom of the press. He knew where to hit hard when he called the licensing department which the Bill proposed to create “a new excise.” The real object of the measure, he insisted, was not so much to restrain the stage as to shackle the press. “It is an arrow that does but glance at the stage; the mortal wound seems destined against the liberty of the press.” His argument to this effect was decidedly clever, keen, plausible, and telling. “You can prevent a play from being acted,” he said, “but you do not prevent it from being printed. Therefore a play which by your censorship you refuse to allow to come on the stage, and in the interests of public morals very properly refuse, you allow to come in a printed form on the shelves of the booksellers. The very fact that a play was not allowed to be put on the stage will only make people the more eager to read it in book form; prohibited publications are in all countries diligently and generally sought after. Plays will be written in order to be prohibited by the censor and then to be sold in book form. What will come of this? Unquestionably an extension of the present measure for the purpose of preventing the printing as well as the public representation of plays. It is out of the question that society could allow a play to be read by all the public which it would not allow to be recited on the boards of a theatre. Now then you have got so far as the preventing of plays from being printed, what happens next? That a writer will turn his rejected, prohibited play into a novel or something of the kind; will introduce a little narrative as well as dialogue, and in this slightly altered form offer his piece of scandalous work to the general reader. Then it will be asked, What! will you allow an infamous libel to be printed and dispersed merely because it does not bear the title of a play? Thus, my Lords, from the precedent before us, we may, we shall be induced, nay, we can find no reason for refusing to lay the press under a general license, and then we may bid adieu to the liberties of Great Britain.”

There was a great deal of force and of justice in Chesterfield’s reasoning. But its defect was that it made no account of the amount of common-sense which must go to the administration of law in every progressive country. If the censorship of the stage had been worked in the spirit and style which Chesterfield expected, then it is beyond question that it would have to be followed up by a censorship of the press or withdrawn altogether. It would clearly be impossible to allow the very words which were not to be spoken on the stage to be set out in the clearest type on the shelves of every bookseller. But Chesterfield’s own speech showed that he had entirely misconceived the extent and operation of a censorship of the stage in a country like England. The censorship of the stage which Chesterfield assumed to be coming, and which he condemned, could not possibly, as we have shown, exist in those islands. The censorship of the stage, if it were to move in such a direction, would not be paving the way for a censorship of the press, but simply paving the way for its own abolition. The speech was a capital and a telling piece of argument addressed to an audience who were glad to hear something decided and animated on the subject; but it never could have deceived Chesterfield himself. It took no account of the elementary political fact that all legislation is compromise, and that the supposed logical and extreme consequences of no measure are ever allowed to follow its enactment. The censorship of plays has gone on since that time, and it has not interfered with the general liberty of acting and of publishing dramatic pieces. It has not compelled Parliament to choose between introducing a censorship of the press or abolishing the censorship of plays. We have never heard of any play worth seeing which was lost to the English stage through the censorship of the drama, nor was the suggestion ever made by the most reactionary Ministry that it should be followed up by a censorship of the press.

Indeed in Walpole’s day it might almost have seemed as if the stage required censorship less than the ballad. Probably, if it had been thought humanly possible to prevent the publication and the circulation of scurrilous poems against eminent men and women, Walpole might have ventured on the experiment. But he had too much robust common-sense not to recognize the impossibility of doing anything effective in the way of repression in that field of art.

Certainly the Muse of Song made herself very often a shrieking sister in those days. When she turned her attention to politics, and had her patrons to be sung up and her patrons’ enemies to be sung down, she very often screamed and called names, and cursed like an intoxicated fish-wife. Pope, Swift, Gay, Hervey, flung metrical abuse about in the coarsest fashion. There seemed to be hardly any pretence at accuracy of description or epithet. If the poet or the poet’s patron did not like a man or woman, no word of abuse was too coarse or foul to be employed against the odious personage. Women, indeed, got off rather worse than men on the whole; even Lord Hervey did not suffer so much at the hands of Pope as did Mary Wortley Montagu. The poets of one faction did not spare even the princes and princesses, even the King or Queen, of another. Furious and revolting lines were written about George and his wife by one set of versifiers; about the Prince of Wales by another. No hour, no event, was held sacred. Around a death-bed the wits were firing off their sarcasms on its occupant. Some of the verses written about Queen Caroline, verses often containing the foulest and filthiest libels, followed her into the sick-chamber, the bed of death, the coffin, and the grave. One could easily understand all this if the libellers had been vulgar and venal Grub Street hacks who were paid to attack some enemy of their paymaster. But the vilest calumnies of the time were penned by men of genius, by men of the highest rank in literature; by men whose literary position made them the daily companions of great nobles and of princes and princesses. Political and social hatred seemed to level all distinctions and to obliterate most of the Christian virtues.