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.
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