that no manager would dare produce on his own responsibility the pieces
he can now get royal certificates for at two guineas per piece.

I hasten to add that I believe these evils to be inherent in the
nature of all censorship, and not merely a consequence of the form the
institution takes in London. No doubt there is a staggering absurdity
in appointing an ordinary clerk to see that the leaders of European
literature do not corrupt the morals of the nation, and to restrain Sir
Henry Irving, as a rogue and a vagabond, from presuming to impersonate
Samson or David on the stage, though any other sort of artist may daub
these scriptural figures on a signboard or carve them on a tombstone
without hindrance. If the General Medical Council, the Royal College of
Physicians, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Incorporated Law Society, and
Convocation were abolished, and their functions handed over to the Mr
Redford, the Concert of Europe would presumably declare England mad, and
treat her accordingly. Yet, though neither medicine nor painting nor
law nor the Church moulds the character of the nation as potently as the
theatre does, nothing can come on the stage unless its dimensions admit
of its passing through Mr Redford's mind! Pray do not think that I
question Mr Redford's honesty. I am quite sure that he sincerely thinks
me a blackguard, and my play a grossly improper one, because, like
Tolstoy's Dominion of Darkness, it produces, as they are both meant to
produce, a very strong and very painful impression of evil. I do not
doubt for a moment that the rapine play which I have described, and
which he licensed, was quite incapable in manuscript of producing
any particular effect on his mind at all, and that when he was once
satisfied that the ill-conducted hero was a German and not an English
officer, he passed the play without studying its moral tendencies. Even
if he had undertaken that study, there is no more reason to suppose
that he is a competent moralist than there is to suppose that I am a