censorship is, the worse it would serve us. The Lord Chamberlain,
an obviously unenlightened Censor, prohibits Ghosts and licenses
all the rest of Ibsen's plays. An enlightened censorship would
possibly license Ghosts; but it would certainly suppress many of
the other plays. It would suppress subversiveness as well as what
is called bad taste. The Lord Chamberlain prohibits one play by
Sophocles because, like Hamlet, it mentions the subject of
incest; but an enlightened censorship might suppress all the
plays of Euripides because Euripides, like Ibsen, was a
revolutionary Freethinker. Under the Lord Chamberlain, we can
smuggle a good deal of immoral drama and almost as much coarsely
vulgar and furtively lascivious drama as we like. Under a college
of cardinals, or bishops, or judges, or any other conceivable
form of experts in morals, philosophy, religion, or politics, we
should get little except stagnant mediocrity.


THE PRACTICAL IMPOSSIBILITIES OF CENSORSHIP

There is, besides, a crushing material difficulty in the way of
an enlightened censorship. It is not too much to say that the
work involved would drive a man of any intellectual rank mad.
Consider, for example, the Christmas pantomimes. Imagine a judge
of the High Court, or an archbishop, or a Cabinet Minister, or an
eminent man of letters, earning his living by reading through the
mass of trivial doggerel represented by all the pantomimes which
are put into rehearsal simultaneously at the end of every year.
The proposal to put such mind-destroying drudgery upon an
official of the class implied by the demand for an enlightened
censorship falls through the moment we realize what it implies