view and characters that violate traditional assumptions. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, as a result of the success
of his plays at the Royal Court Theatre, Shaw had become a literary celebrity. Like
Oscar Wilde, he had worked to develop a public persona, but with a substantial
difference in aim. Whereas Wilde used his public image to define an aesthetic point
of view, Shaw used his public personality?iconoclastic, clownish, argumentative?
to advocate social ideas. He was radical in many respects. He was a vegetarian, a
nonsmoker, and a nondrinker. He was courageous enough to be a pacifist in World
War I. He championed the reform of English spelling and punctuation. He believed
in women's rights and the abolition of private property. He also believed in the Life
Force and progressive evolution, driven by the power of the human will, a point of
view that led him to sympathize with Mussolini and other dictators before World War
II. Shaw's insistent rationality made some of his contemporaries view him as bloodless. After seeing Arms and the Man, William Butler Yeats described a nightmare in
which he was haunted by a sewing machine 'that clicked and shone, but the incred
ible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually.' However, Yeats goes on
to say, 'Yet I delighted in Shaw the formidable man. He could hit my enemies and
the enemies of all I loved, as I could never hit, as no living author that was dear to
me could ever hit.'
Shaw wrote Mrs Warren's Profession in 1893; though it was published in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant in 1898, its public performance was long prohibited by British censors. In 1902 the Stage Society, technically a private club and so not under
the jurisdiction of the censors, gave performances for its own members. The play was
produced in New York in 1905; but it was closed down by the police, and the producer
and his company were arrested. They were eventually acquitted, and the play was
allowed to continue. No legal public performance took place in England until 1926,
the year after Shaw won the Nobel Prize. Shaw's preface to the play attacks the confusions and contradictions involved in
the censorship of plays and contains an eloquent plea for the recognition of the
seriousness and morality of Mrs Warren's Profession. The play was written, he tells
us, 'to draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by female depravity
and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking
women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to
keep body and soul together.' He argues that Mrs. Warren's defense of herself in the
play is 'valid and unanswerable.' (It is interesting to compare Mrs. Warren's defense
with that of the correspondent to the London Times who, claiming to be a prostitute,
wrote 'The Great Social Evil' [p. 1592].) Shaw's discussion of Mrs. Warren's self-
justification continues: But it is no defence at all of the vice which she organizes. It is no defence of an
immoral life to say that the alternative offered by society collectively to poor
women is a miserable life, starved, overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly. Though it is
.
174 6 / BERNARD SHAW
quite natural and right for Mrs Warren to choose what is, according to her lights,
the least immoral alternative, it is none the less infamous of society to offer such
alternatives. For the alternatives offered are not morality and immorality but two
sorts of immorality. The man who cannot see that starvation, overwork, dirt, and
disease are as anti-social as prostitution?that they are the vices and crimes of
a nation, and not merely its misfortunes?is (to put it as politely as possible) a
hopelessly Private Person. This is Shaw's way of saying that such a man is a hopeless idiot; the word idiot comes
from the Greek idiotes, 'a private person,' as distinct from one interested in public
affairs.
