pate that this partial freedom will be abused. For who are the men who will be bold enough to defy the Censorship, either by refusing to ask its opinion at all, or declining to take it when received? Not, surely, the purveyor of frivolous vulgarity or cloaked incitement to vice, not the speculator in lewdness or political passion. In one word, it would not be worth his while. There can be little question that, for a time, at any rate, an unlicensed play will be taken by the great public to be born in sin and damned from birth. Such a play must come before the world prepared to force approval by its beauty or its earnestness. Genuine or hypocritical, public opinion at the start will be against it. Even without the safeguards which the Select Committee proposes, we believe that the public opinion which has purified the music-halls with very little help from County Council or police, will make short work of mere vulgarity, sedition, or personal insult. At the same time, it is well to be prepared against the possibility of offence; and the safeguards proposed by the Select Committee seem adequate. For the first time we have a clear statement of the principles on which the Licenser should act, the offences he should refuse to sanction. Every play, it is proposed, should be licensed, except those which (a) are indecent; (b) contain offensive personalities; (c) represent on the stage in an invidious manner a (g) are calculated to cause a breach of the peace. The list is clear, comprehensive, and wisely chosen; it replaces vague tradition and secret instructions by definite and simple rules. Under (d) must be noticed especially a great advance. There never was a word in the law against the presentation of biblical characters; and by the proposed rule the foolish old precedent would be destroyed. Reverent presentations of sacred persons and subjects in a medium which, being a part of life, has as much right to them as any other part, will not be confused with irreverence and profanity. It is impossible in this world to avoid offending the religious feelings of some one; the religious feelings of a sturdy Protestant are hurt every time that, passing a Catholic chapel, he hears the mass-bell or the Angelus; the religious feelings of an 'old' Jew are hurt every time he sees a 'new' Jew at work on a Saturday. But the Catholic is not prevented by law from ringing his bell, nor the Jew from working on the Sabbath; and the same liberty may be justly claimed by those who see no harm in the reverent presentation in a theatre of religious drama. Suppose the rules accepted; a play held by the Licenser to offend in none of the seven particulars will be no more immune than it is now from subsequent interference, though such interference would no longer be left to the common informer, or the local authority. Whether a play has or has not been submitted for licence, it will be open to the Public Prosecutor to prefer an indictment against manager and authors for an infringement of the first rule-that against indecency; and the performance of the play will become illegal from the moment the manager has received notice from the Public Prosecutor that he intends to take proceedings. The remaining heads of offence are left to the care of the AttorneyGeneral and a standing committee of legal and lay members of the Privy Council-a tribunal surely august enough to satisfy even those who make the loftiest claims for the dignity of the drama. As in the case of proceedings for indecency, notice of intended action stops the run of the play immediately; and while the manager and author are not to be liable to penalties, as they are under the heading of indecency, the play may be prohibited for ten years, after which it may not be played without a licence, and the licence of the theatre is to be endorsed, three endorsements within three years bringing forfeiture. Without entering into a detailed examination of these proposals, it may be said that they seem to provide efficient control of both licensed and unlicensed plays, a means of promptly stopping suspected plays and sufficient penalties for offence. Acting under these clear instructions, a capable Examiner, with or without an Advisory Board, should be able-even with no more than the manuscript of the unacted play can give him-to cleanse the stage of much offence that at present slips through. The grave dangers of the present day, indecency, incitement, direct or indirect, to vice, and insults to foreign Powers should occur in no licensed play; and our contention is that the trader in undesirable sensation, the holeand-corner purveyor of mere lewdness, and the rich and powerful syndicate that makes dividends by sailing as near the wind as it dares, will find their operations sensibly and sharply foiled at the outset by a power which it will not be worth their while to defy. The general public will still depute the work of judgment to a single person, who, if he be wisely chosen and keeps to his instructions, should do the work to their satisfaction. The only men likely to set the Censorship at naught will be men who do not regard money-making as their primary object; earnest persons who have a doctrine to preach, and believe in it so passionately that they dare to appeal to the public against the law and the conventions; lovers of beauty in whom the desire to create and spread beauty is stronger than the fear of obloquy and trouble. Such people are few, and their plays appeal only to a small section of the public. Plays that have not asked or have been refused a licence will rarely be seen, we imagine, on the public stage. They will have, nevertheless, the chance of being seen. The proposals of the Select Committee have been condemned in some quarters as a compromise. We are English enough to believe that that is their very merit. In the present stage of the history of the drama, compromise is precisely what will prove to be, though not the ideal state, the most useful and instructive state. The need of the present moment is exact knowledge-knowledge of how far the proffered inch of liberty can or will be abused; of how far the public is worthy to be entrusted with the choice and control of its drama; of what demand there is for the kind of drama that is called by its enemies advanced.' While stoutly convinced that the ideal step would be the abolition of the Censorship, we may still welcome the proposals of the Select Committee as likely to provide through experience the information needed. In any case, they offer the best we are likely to get. (377 Art. 4. THE AUTHOR OF 'VATHEK.' 1. The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (Author of Vathek). By Lewis Melville. Illustrated. London: Heinemann, 1910. 2. Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents; in a Series of Letters from Various Parts of Europe. London: Printed for J. Johnson, MDCCLXXXIII. (Reprinted in "The History of the Caliph Vathek and European Travels.' London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1891.) 3. An Arabian Tale, from an Unpublished Manuscript: with Notes Critical and Explanatory. London: Printed for J. Johnson, MDCCLXXXVI. 6 4. Italy; with Sketches of Spain and Portugal. By the Author of Vathek.' Two vols. London: Bentley, 1834. 5. Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha. By the Author of Vathek.' London: Richard Bentley, 1835. 6. Memoirs of William Beckford, of Fonthill. [By Cyrus Redding.] Two vols. London: Skeet, 1859. 7. The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century. By Martha Pike Conant, Ph.D. New York: Columbia University Press, 1908. WHEN he was about eighty years old, William Beckford professed that he had never in all his life known a moment's ennui. Many men would give a good deal to learn his secret. This is not, of course, to say that he was never bored; for boredom implies an external agent, not always evitable, whilst ennui springs from within. Beckford possessed in a high degree the capacity for being bored, but he escaped whenever possible-even at the cost of broken chairs. When a 'personage of some political importance and a distinguished graduate of the University of Coimbra 'pressed him too resolutely for his opinion upon some passages in Blackstone's Commentaries, Beckford made a strategic retreat with his chair; but this determined bore pushed his after me with such vehemence that a conflict must have ensued, perhaps to my total discomfiture, had not his chair been killed under him; both back and legs gave way, and down he fell flat on the gritty floor.' To suffer fools gladly was the last thought that would occur to so perfect a hedonist; he shunned them as he would the pestilence. It was probably this resolute avoidance of the claims and penalties of conventional society that eventually earned him the reputation of eccentricity, lunacy, even monstrous defiance of moral laws. We believe that the explanation of his strange life is rather to be found in the one word sincerity. From his boyhood he had resolved to be true to his ideal; and whatever hindered his purpose he simply cut off from his life. Whether his ideal was good or bad is not the question. The essential point is that he had certainly formed it when he was barely seventeen years old, and that he clung to it immovably till he died. There is not a trace of inconsistency from beginning to end. Beckford merely lived the life he intended to live, and allowed nothing seriously to interfere with the execution of his plan. What was 'expected' of him, from his wealth and position, his intellect and accomplishments, and his early achievements in literature-all this went for nothing in his estimation. He knew what he wanted, and so far as possible he got it. What other people thought he ought to want and to get did not matter. He had the supreme advantage, from his point of view from others it may seem even a curse-of being born to such a position that within necessary limits he could shape his life as he chose. He knew that when he came of age he would be perhaps the richest commoner in England, with a million in cash and an income of over a hundred thousand a year. The only son of the stout Lord Mayor of London, who bearded George III with paralysing abruptness on the rights of the people, he might be expected to choose a parliamentary career; but though he held a seat in the House of Commons for many years, he seldom sat, and probably never spoke. The whole business of politics was utterly distasteful to him. 'The news of the World' (he wrote in 1780, when he was not yet twenty) 'affects me not half so much as the chirping of a sparrow or the rustling of withered leaves. . . . I wish not to eclipse those who retail the faded flowers of parliamentary eloquence. My senate house is a wood of pines, from whence, on a misty evening, I watch the western sky streaked with portentous red, whilst awful whispers amongst the boughs |