The Dominion. FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 1912. CENSORSHIP.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1347, 26 January 1912, Page 4

The Dominion. FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 1912. CENSORSHIP.

Lktters of protest against the appointment of Mr. Charles Brookfield as Joint Examiner of Plays were still appearing in the papers when the last mail left London. Mr. Chesterton took a hand in the Daily News, by way of rebuking some of the others for discussing irrelevancics, like Mr. Brookfield, and his "Dear Old Charlie," instead of the Censorship as an institution. "The foes of Mr. Brookfield," he said, "start trying to prove that his plays arc much wickeder than problem plays; that splitting one's sides about sex must be infinitely worse than splitting one's head about it. I doubt the theory; but in any case it is a theory that could be argued about for infinity." And with the common sense that rarely fails him, even in his most brilliant moments, Mr. Chesterton insisted: "The Censor is not by any means a fool, but he is -a folly : he is an irresponsible despot who does not keep the peace. . . . He is not only supreme, but he is secret: the guilt of his failures docs not fall on him, as it does on Popes and Kings." With oven more directness, Mr. Granville Barker, writing a second letter to the Nation, demands the abolition of the Censorship, "holding, as many other people do, that the common law and the licensing laws together (laws for the licensing of theatres—not plays, if you please) are ample to control the drama. It is not a question of comic plays, or serious plays, or of

. . . taste in them. ... It is a question of civil liberty." As if to illustrate this last sentence, a dramatist of a very different school, Me. Cecil Raleigh, writes in the Westminster Gazette :

I put it to ordinary .Englishmen, from a business point of view and from a business point of view only, would they bo content to put money into any business that could, at a moment's'no!ice, be stopped by an arbitrary Censor without any sort of appeal ? The Lord Chamberlain has the power, and he recently used it in the ease of "Kismet," to come down upon a play, that has cost thousands to produce, and insist upon its alteration, or, if need be, its suppression. six months after its production. This is not just, this is,not equitable, this is in even - way discreditable.

Mr. Zangwill,. in the same paper, rejoices yet again that the Censorship continues to make itself ridiculous, but ho relents so far as to communicate a suggestion by his wife that if a second Censor had to be appointed, it should have been a woman. He found the claim so convincing the moment it was made that, he could only wonder at "the habit of masculine monopoly," which prevented it occurring even to so ardent a suffragist as himself. Will the resignation of Mn. Brookfield's colleague, Mr. Bedford, which has been reported by cable, be used as an opportunity for acting upon this suggestion 1 'it will at any rate help to keep the agitation going, and if the movement for the establishment of repertory theatres is rightly gauged by Mr. Gp.anvii.le Barker, the Censorship cannot in its present form survive much longer. Mr. Barker writes of meetings he has addressed in the North of England —meetings "of men and women who think they can find in the theatre, as it might be, the intellectual and emotional stimulus of which the good citizen stands in need," and who want to make the theatre a "sort" of secular meeting-house for the give-and-take of ideas and opinions." In these words, Mr. Barker seems to have uncovered the root of the trouble. The English have put up with the Lord Chamberlain and his Examiner of Plays, as long as they were merely censors of taste, but when these become (through the modern changes of the drama) censors of ideas and opinions, they will not be endured much longer.