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
in practice.
Another material difficulty is that no play can be judged by
merely reading the dialogue. To be fully effective a censor
should witness the performance. The mise-en-scene of a play is as
much a part of it as the words spoken on the stage. No censor
could possibly object to such a speech as "Might I speak to you
for a moment, miss"; yet that apparently innocent phrase has
often been made offensively improper on the stage by popular low
comedians, with the effect of changing the whole character and
meaning of the play as understood by the official Examiner. In
one of the plays of the present season, the dialogue was that of
a crude melodrama dealing in the most conventionally correct
manner with the fortunes of a good-hearted and virtuous girl.
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