How He Lied to Her Husband: Preface

Preface

Like many other works of mine, this playlet is a piece
d'occasion. In 1905 it happened that Mr Arnold Daly, who was then
playing the part of Napoleon in The Man of Destiny in New York,
found that whilst the play was too long to take a secondary place
in the evening's performance, it was too short to suffice by
itself. I therefore took advantage of four days continuous rain
during a holiday in the north of Scotland to write How He Lied To
Her Husband for Mr Daly. In his hands, it served its turn very
effectively.

I print it here as a sample of what can be done with even the
most hackneyed stage framework by filling it in with an observed
touch of actual humanity instead of with doctrinaire romanticism.
Nothing in the theatre is staler than the situation of husband,
wife and lover, or the fun of knockabout farce. I have taken
both, and got an original play out of them, as anybody else can
if only he will look about him for his material instead of
plagiarizing Othello and the thousand plays that have proceeded
on Othello's romantic assumptions and false point of honor.

A further experiment made by Mr Arnold Daly with this play is
worth recording. In 1905 Mr Daly produced Mrs Warren's Profession
in New York. The press of that city instantly raised a cry that
such persons as Mrs Warren are "ordure," and should not be
mentioned in the presence of decent people. This hideous
repudiation of humanity and social conscience so took possession
of the New York journalists that the few among them who kept
their feet morally and intellectually could do nothing to check
the epidemic of foul language, gross suggestion, and raving
obscenity of word and thought that broke out. The writers
abandoned all self-restraint under the impression that they were
upholding virtue instead of outraging it. They infected each
other with their hysteria until they were for all practical
purposes indecently mad. They finally forced the police to arrest
Mr Daly and his company, and led the magistrate to express his
loathing of the duty thus forced upon him of reading an
unmentionable and abominable play. Of course the convulsion soon
exhausted itself. The magistrate, naturally somewhat impatient
when he found that what he had to read was a strenuously ethical
play forming part of a book which had been in circulation
unchallenged for eight years, and had been received without
protest by the whole London and New York press, gave the
journalists a piece of his mind as to their moral taste in plays.
By consent, he passed the case on to a higher court, which
declared that the play was not immoral; acquitted Mr Daly; and
made an end of the attempt to use the law to declare living women
to be "ordure," and thus enforce silence as to the far-reaching
fact that you cannot cheapen women in the market for industrial
purposes without cheapening them for other purposes as well. I
hope Mrs Warren's Profession will be played everywhere, in season
and out of season, until Mrs Warren has bitten that fact into the
public conscience, and shamed the newspapers which support a
tariff to keep up the price of every American commodity except
American manhood and womanhood.

Unfortunately, Mr Daly had already suffered the usual fate of
those who direct public attention to the profits of the sweater
or the pleasures of the voluptuary. He was morally lynched side
by side with me. Months elapsed before the decision of the courts
vindicated him; and even then, since his vindication implied the
condemnation of the press, which was by that time sober again,
and ashamed of its orgy, his triumph received a rather sulky and
grudging publicity. In the meantime he had hardly been able to
approach an American city, including even those cities which had
heaped applause on him as the defender of hearth and home when he
produced Candida, without having to face articles discussing
whether mothers could allow their daughters to attend such plays
as You Never Can Tell, written by the infamous author of Mrs
Warren's Profession, and acted by the monster who produced it.
What made this harder to bear was that though no fact is better
established in theatrical business than the financial
disastrousness of moral discredit, the journalists who had done
all the mischief kept paying vice the homage of assuming that it
is enormously popular and lucrative, and that I and Mr Daly,
being exploiters of vice, must therefore be making colossal
fortunes out of the abuse heaped on us, and had in fact provoked
it and welcomed it with that express object. Ignorance of real
life could hardly go further.

One consequence was that Mr Daly could not have kept his
financial engagements or maintained his hold on the public had he
not accepted engagements to appear for a season in the vaudeville
theatres [the American equivalent of our music halls], where he
played How He Lied to Her Husband comparatively unhampered by the
press censorship of the theatre, or by that sophistication of the
audience through press suggestion from which I suffer more,
perhaps, than any other author. Vaudeville authors are
fortunately unknown: the audiences see what the play contains and
what the actor can do, not what the papers have told them to
expect. Success under such circumstances had a value both for Mr
Daly and myself which did something to console us for the very
unsavory mobbing which the New York press organized for us, and
which was not the less disgusting because we suffered in a good
cause and in the very best company.

Mr Daly, having weathered the storm, can perhaps shake his soul
free of it as he heads for fresh successes with younger authors.
But I have certain sensitive places in my soul: I do not like
that word "ordure." Apply it to my work, and I can afford to
smile, since the world, on the whole, will smile with me. But to
apply it to the woman in the street, whose spirit is of one
substance with our own and her body no less holy: to look your
women folk in the face afterwards and not go out and hang
yourself: that is not on the list of pardonable sins.

POSTSCRIPT. Since the above was written news has arrived from
America that a leading New York newspaper, which was among the
most abusively clamorous for the suppression of Mrs Warren's
Profession, has just been fined heavily for deriving part of its
revenue from advertisements of Mrs Warren's houses.

Many people have been puzzled by the fact that whilst stage
entertainments which are frankly meant to act on the spectators
as aphrodisiacs, are everywhere tolerated, plays which have an
almost horrifyingly contrary effect are fiercely attacked by
persons and papers notoriously indifferent to public morals on
all other occasions. The explanation is very simple. The profits
of Mrs Warren's profession are shared not only by Mrs Warren and
Sir George Crofts, but by the landlords of their houses, the
newspapers which advertize them, the restaurants which cater for
them, and, in short, all the trades to which they are good
customers, not to mention the public officials and
representatives whom they silence by complicity, corruption, or
blackmail. Add to these the employers who profit by cheap female
labor, and the shareholders whose dividends depend on it [you
find such people everywhere, even on the judicial bench and in
the highest places in Church and State], and you get a large and
powerful class with a strong pecuniary incentive to protect Mrs
Warren's profession, and a correspondingly strong incentive to
conceal, from their own consciences no less than from the world,
the real sources of their gain. These are the people who declare
that it is feminine vice and not poverty that drives women to the
streets, as if vicious women with independent incomes ever went
there. These are the people who, indulgent or indifferent to
aphrodisiac plays, raise the moral hue and cry against
performances of Mrs Warren's Profession, and drag actresses to
the police court to be insulted, bullied, and threatened for
fulfilling their engagements. For please observe that the
judicial decision in New York State in favor of the play does not
end the matter. In Kansas City, for instance, the municipality,
finding itself restrained by the courts from preventing the
performance, fell back on a local bye-law against indecency to
evade the Constitution of the United States. They summoned the
actress who impersonated Mrs Warren to the police court, and
offered her and her colleagues the alternative of leaving the
city or being prosecuted under this bye-law.

Now nothing is more possible than that the city councillors who
suddenly displayed such concern for the morals of the theatre
were either Mrs Warren's landlords, or employers of women at
starvation wages, or restaurant keepers, or newspaper
proprietors, or in some other more or less direct way sharers of
the profits of her trade. No doubt it is equally possible that
they were simply stupid men who thought that indecency consists,
not in evil, but in mentioning it. I have, however, been myself a
member of a municipal council, and have not found municipal
councillors quite so simple and inexperienced as this. At all
events I do not propose to give the Kansas councillors the
benefit of the doubt. I therefore advise the public at large,
which will finally decide the matter, to keep a vigilant eye on
gentlemen who will stand anything at the theatre except a
performance of Mrs Warren's Profession, and who assert in the
same breath that [a] the play is too loathsome to be bearable by
civilized people, and [b] that unless its performance is
prohibited the whole town will throng to see it. They may be
merely excited and foolish; but I am bound to warn the public
that it is equally likely that they may be collected and knavish.

At all events, to prohibit the play is to protect the evil which
the play exposes; and in view of that fact, I see no reason for
assuming that the prohibitionists are disinterested moralists,
and that the author, the managers, and the performers, who depend
for their livelihood on their personal reputations and not on
rents, advertisements, or dividends, are grossly inferior to them
in moral sense and public responsibility.

It is true that in Mrs Warren's Profession, Society, and not any
individual, is the villain of the piece; but it does not follow
that the people who take offence at it are all champions of
society. Their credentials cannot be too carefully examined.

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