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The Author's Apology from Mrs. Warren's Profession by Bernard Shaw
The Author's Apology from Mrs Warren's Profession by Bernard Shaw Author:Bernard Shaw Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Author's Apology MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION has been performed at last, after a delay of only eight years; and I have once more shared with Ibsen the trium... more »phant amusement of startling all but the strongest-headed of the London theater critics clean out of the practice of their profession. No author who has ever known the exultation of sending the press into an hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic, of involuntary and frantic confession of sin, of a horror of conscience in which the power of distinguishing between the work of art on the stage and the real life of the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the stereotyped compliments which every successful farce or melodrama elicits from the newspapers. Give me that critic who has just rushed from my play to declare furiously that Sir George Crofts ought to be kicked. What a triumph for the actor, thus to reduce a jaded London journalist to the condition of the simple sailor in the Wapping gallery, who shouts execrations at lago and warnings to Othello not to believe him! But dearer still than such simplicity is that sense of the sudden earthquake shock to thefoundations of morality which sends a pallid crowd of critics into the street shrieking that the pillars of society are cracking and the ruin of the state at hand. Even the Ibsen champions of ten years ago remonstrate with me even as the veterans of those brave days remonstrated with them. Mr. Grein, the hardy iconoclast who first launched my plays on the stage alongside Ghosts and The Wild Duck, exclaims that I have shattered his ideals. Actually his ideals! What would Dr. Relling say ? And Mr. William Archer himself disowns me because I "cannot touch pitch without wallowing in it." Truly my play must be more needed than I knew; and yet I though...« less