41 



The Appointment of the New Examiner of Plays. 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE WORLD 



LONDON' was bt.utled last moiuh by the 

 announcement that the Lord Chamberlain had 

 appointed Mr. Charles Brookfield to be Joint 

 Examiner of Flays with Mr. Redford. The appoint- 

 ment was at once challenged, and questions were asked 

 in Parliament, to which Mr. McKenna replied in 

 a fashion that amazed and confounded his friends. 



If Mr. Footc, the editor of the Freethinker, were to 

 be appointed examining chaplain to the Archbishop 

 of Canterbury, the otficial defence for such an 

 appointment would no doubt be as sophistical and 

 unconvincing as that with which Mr. McKenna 

 endeavoured to belittle the significance of the 

 appointment of the author of " Dear Old Charlie " to 

 be Reader of Pl?iys for the Lord Chamberlain and the 

 Committee of Censorship. 



I.— PROTEST BY PETITION TO THE KING. 



The matter cannot rest where the Home Secretary 

 left it. Every responsible dramatic critic of any 

 standing in London, every newspaper save one, and 

 many of the leading dramatists of our time have united in 

 protesting against the appointment of Mr, Brookfield. 



Despite all the outcry .Mr. Brookfield took office on 

 January i.aiid is now duly discharging the duties of 

 Reader of Plays for the Lord Chamberlain. It will 

 therefore be necessary to proceed with the suggested 

 Petition to the King, which has been drawn up in the 

 following terms : — 



SUGGESTED PETITION. 

 May it please Your Majesty — 



We, your undersigned humble petitioners, beg leave 

 to call attention to the appointment, during 

 your "Majesty's absence in India, of Mr. Charles 

 Brookfield to the office of Reader of Plays under 

 your Majesty's Lord Chamberlain. 



Some of your petitioners believe a censorship of 

 the stage to be desirable, others do not ; but all 

 are agreed in holding that the art of drama is 

 insulted, and the office ©f Censor brought into 

 < ontempt, by the appointment to that office of 

 the author of a play notorious for its cynical 

 inuiiorality, entitled '" Dear Old Charlie." 



We humbly beg your Majesty to take personal 

 cognisance of that play — which, having been 

 licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, has of course 

 been filed in his Lordship's office — and to decide 

 whether its author is a fit and proper person to 

 be attached to your Majesty's household in the 

 capacity of a guardian of public morals. 

 And your petitioners -vilt ei'er pray, etc. 



This petition will be signed by all those who object 

 to accept the author of " Dear Old Charlie" as a fit 

 and proper guardian of public morality on the British 

 stage. 



THE FLESH. AND THE DEVIL. 



II.— THE MOR.\L OBJECTION STATED. , 

 When the Nonconformists were challenged to say 

 what they thought of the appointment, I ventured to 

 express the universal sentiment of my fellow Free 

 Churchmen in the following article, which was not 

 published by the newspaper for which it was originally 

 written : — 



THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE GOVERNMENT. 



The present Government is largely the creation of 

 the Nonconformists of England and Wales, the Pres- 

 byterians of Scodand, the Roman Catholics of Ireland. 

 The Prime Minister was brought up as a Congrega- 

 tionalist, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a Baptist, 

 and very few of their colleagues in the Cabinet are 

 Anglicans. Yet it is this Government which, through 

 its Lord Chamberlain, is responsible for the greatest 

 triumph of the World, the Flesh and the Devil 

 which has been achieved in our time in the theatrical 

 world. This is not merely a scandal ; it is an outrage 

 — a positive indecency which for its cynicism is with- 

 out a parallel. 



DE.\R OLD CH.ARLIE .\S CENSOR. 



I refer, of course, to the appointment of Mr. 

 Charles Brookfield to the post of Joint Examiner of 

 Plays with Mr. G. A. Redford. Of Mr. Brookfield, 

 personally, I say nothing, for I know nothing. He 

 may be as his friends declare, " a most delightful and 

 amusing talker." He may be an .A,donis for all I 

 know, and his private life may be absolutely irreproach 

 able. That has nothing to do with the question. 

 Mr, Brookfield is to me as he is to the great public 

 not so much an individual as an author — the 

 author of " Dear Old Charlie," and many other 

 plays inspired by " the merry humours of Labiche" 

 and similar dramatists who have cultivated to great 

 perfection the art of giving a comic turn to adultery. 

 To make such a man, who only the other day pub- 

 lished a defiant justification of the popular play whose 

 OT('/;/is "moral laxity," responsible for reading and 

 reporting to the Lord Chamberlain " any matters 

 about whicli there can be any doubt " in any new 

 plays submitted to the Censor, is an outrage upon the 

 moral sense of the nation. The appointment may 

 have been made inadvertently. It has been defended 

 with an extraordinary lack of discretion by the Home 

 Secretary. But it cannot be maintained. Mr. Brook- 

 field must go, and if the Lord Chamberlain goes with 

 him, so much the better. 



THE HO.ME SECKKT.VRV'S DEFENCE. 



I confess that I read the Home Secretary's defence 

 of this appointment with mingled feelings of amaze- 

 ment and disgust. i'he soi)histical quibbling con- 

 cerning the division of responsibility between the 

 Examiner who reads and reports on plays and the 

 Lord Chamberlain, whose statutory duty is to pass or 



