heartwhole; and I could just as easily write a play without a woman in
it at all. I will even go so far as to promise the Mr Redford my support
if he will introduce this limitation for part of the year, say during
Lent, so as to make a close season for that dullest of stock dramatic
subjects, adultery, and force our managers and authors to find out what
all great dramatists find out spontaneously: to wit, that people who
sacrifice every other consideration to love are as hopelessly unheroic
on the stage as lunatics or dipsomaniacs. Hector is the world's hero;
not Paris nor Antony.

But though I do not question the possibility of a drama in which love
should be as effectively ignored as cholera is at present, there is not
the slightest chance of that way out of the difficulty being taken by
the Mr Redford. If he attempted it there would be a revolt in which he
would be swept away in spite of my singlehanded efforts to defend him.
A complete tapu is politically impossible. A complete toleration is
equally impossible to Mr Redford, because his occupation would be gone
if there were no tapu to enforce. He is therefore compelled to maintain
the present compromise of a partial tapu, applied, to the best of his
judgement, with a careful respect to persons and to public opinion. And
a very sensible English solution of the difficulty, too, most readers
will say. I should not dispute it if dramatic poets really were what
English public opinion generally assumes them to be during their
lifetime: that is, a licentiously irregular group to be kept in order
in a rough and ready way by a magistrate who will stand no nonsense
from them. But I cannot admit that the class represented by Eschylus,
Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, Shakespear, Goethe, Ibsen, and
Tolstoy, not to mention our own contemporary playwrights, is as much in
place in Mr Redford's office as a pickpocket is in Bow Street. Further,
it is not true that the Censorship, though it certainly suppresses Ibsen