the condition of the simple sailor in the Wapping gallery, who shouts
execrations at Iago and warnings to Othello not to believe him! But
dearer still than such simplicity is that sense of the sudden earthquake
shock to the foundations of morality which sends a pallid crowd of
critics into the street shrieking that the pillars of society are
cracking and the ruin of the State is at hand. Even the Ibsen champions
of ten years ago remonstrate with me just as the veterans of those brave
days remonstrated with them. Mr Grein, the hardy iconoclast who first
launched my plays on the stage alongside Ghosts and The Wild Duck,
exclaimed that I have shattered his ideals. Actually his ideals! What
would Dr Relling say? And Mr William Archer himself disowns me because I
"cannot touch pitch without wallowing in it". Truly my play must be more
needed than I knew; and yet I thought I knew how little the others know.

Do not suppose, however, that the consternation of the Press reflects
any consternation among the general public. Anybody can upset the
theatre critics, in a turn of the wrist, by substituting for the
romantic commonplaces of the stage the moral commonplaces of the pulpit,
platform, or the library. Play Mrs Warren's Profession to an audience
of clerical members of the Christian Social Union and of women well
experienced in Rescue, Temperance, and Girls' Club work, and no moral
panic will arise; every man and woman present will know that as long
as poverty makes virtue hideous and the spare pocket-money of rich
bachelordom makes vice dazzling, their daily hand-to-hand fight against
prostitution with prayer and persuasion, shelters and scanty alms,
will be a losing one. There was a time when they were able to urge that
though "the white-lead factory where Anne Jane was poisoned" may be a
far more terrible place 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