on is: could any one man be found on whose opinion all England
might safely rely for its dramatic instruction and entertainment? I do
not think such a man could be found. With Mr. Redford, as the _Times_
puts it, "any tinge of literary merit seems at once to excite his worst
suspicions." But with a censor whose sympathies were too purely
literary, literary in too narrow a sense, would not scruples of some
other kind begin to intrude themselves, scruples of the student who
cannot tolerate an innocent jesting with "serious" things, scruples of
the moralist who must choose between Maeterlinck and d'Annunzio,
between Tolstoi and Ibsen? I cannot so much as think of a man in all
England who would be capable of justifying the existence of the
censorship. Is it, then, merely Mr. Redford who is made ridiculous by
this ridiculous episode, or is it not, after all, England, which has
given us the liberty of the press and withheld from us the liberty of
the stage?

A PLAY AND THE PUBLIC

John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called "The Bishop's
Move," which was an attempt to do artistically what so many writers for
the stage have done without thinking about art at all.

She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom instead
of vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society instead
of an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners. The play is a
comedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the control of
good manners. The game is after all the thing, and the skill of the
game. When the pawns begin to cry out in the plaintive way of pawns,
they are hushed before they become disturbing. It is in this power to
play the game on its own artificial lines, and yet to play with pieces
made scrupulously after the pattern of nature, that Mrs. Craigie's
skill, in this play, seems to me to consist.

Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief,
to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the writer is seen
treating the real people of the audience and the imaginary people of the
play as if they were alike ladies and gentlemen. How this kind of work
will appeal to the general public I can hardly tell. When I saw "Sweet
and Twenty" on its first performance, I honestly expected the audience
to burst out laughing. On the contrary, the audience thrilled with
delight, and audience after audience went on indefinitely thrilling with
delight. If t