Study Edition · Essay 73
The Censor of Plays: An Appreciation
Source: First published in the Daily Mail (1907); collected in Notes on Life and Letters (1921). Text from Project Gutenberg #1143. Complete. Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
Joseph Conrad, born in Poland, became a sea captain and then one of the great novelists in English (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim). Until 1968, every play performed in Britain needed a licence from an official called the Examiner of Plays, who could ban it without giving reasons. In 1907 the censor banned Edward Garnett's play The Breaking Point, and Conrad, a close friend of Garnett, joined the protest with this angry, ironic essay. The “Appreciation” in the title is sarcastic. Notice the extended image of the censor as a grotesque ornament on a high shelf, and how Conrad's irony grows into open contempt.
82 sentences: 43 simple, 20 moderate, 19 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- licenseto give official permission
- scrupulouslywith great care to be exact
- obscuritythe state of being unknown
- certitudecomplete certainty
- monstrositysomething very ugly or outrageous
- heirlooman object handed down through a family
- intrinsicbelonging to the thing itself
- stoliddull and unemotional
- impotencepowerlessness
- aberrationa departure from what is normal or sensible
- grotesquestrangely ugly or distorted
- malevolentwishing harm to others
- unobtrusivenot noticeable
- odioushateful
- Philistinea person hostile to art and culture
- megalomaniaca person obsessed with their own power
- mediocreordinary; not very good
- antagonisticopposed; hostile
- venerabledeserving respect because of age
The Essay
A couple of years ago I was moved to write a one-act play—and I lived long enough to accomplish the task.1 We live and learn.2 When the play was finished I was informed that it had to be licensed for performance.3 Thus I learned of the existence of the Censor of Plays.4 I may say without vanity that I am intelligent enough to have been astonished by that piece of information: for facts must stand in some relation to time and space, and I was aware of being in England—in the twentieth-century England.5 The fact did not fit the date and the place.6 That was my first thought.7 It was, in short, an improper fact.8 I beg you to believe that I am writing in all seriousness and am weighing my words scrupulously.9
Therefore I don’t say inappropriate.10 I say improper—that is: something to be ashamed of.11 And at first this impression was confirmed by the obscurity in which the figure embodying this after all considerable fact had its being.12 The Censor of Plays!13 His name was not in the mouths of all men.14 Far from it.15 He seemed stealthy and remote.16 There was about that figure the scent of the far East, like the peculiar atmosphere of a Mandarin’s back yard, and the mustiness of the Middle Ages, that epoch when mankind tried to stand still in a monstrous illusion of final certitude attained in morals, intellect and conscience.17
It was a disagreeable impression.18 But I reflected that probably the censorship of plays was an inactive monstrosity; not exactly a survival, since it seemed obviously at variance with the genius of the people, but an heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported curiosity preserved because of that weakness one has for one’s old possessions apart from any intrinsic value.19 One more object of exotic virtu, an Oriental potiche, a magot chinois conceived by a childish and extravagant imagination, but allowed to stand in stolid impotence in the twilight of the upper shelf.20
Thus I quieted my uneasy mind.21 Its uneasiness had nothing to do with the fate of my one-act play.22 The play was duly produced, and an exceptionally intelligent audience stared it coldly off the boards.23 It ceased to exist.24 It was a fair and open execution.25 But having survived the freezing atmosphere of that auditorium I continued to exist, labouring under no sense of wrong.26 I was not pleased, but I was content.27 I was content to accept the verdict of a free and independent public, judging after its conscience the work of its free, independent and conscientious servant—the artist.28
Only thus can the dignity of artistic servitude be preserved—not to speak of the bare existence of the artist and the self-respect of the man.29 I shall say nothing of the self-respect of the public.30 To the self-respect of the public the present appeal against the censorship is being made and I join in it with all my heart.31
For I have lived long enough to learn that the monstrous and outlandish figure, the magot chinois whom I believed to be but a memorial of our forefathers’ mental aberration, that grotesque potiche, works!32 The absurd and hollow creature of clay seems to be alive with a sort of (surely) unconscious life worthy of its traditions.33 It heaves its stomach, it rolls its eyes, it brandishes a monstrous arm: and with the censorship, like a Bravo of old Venice with a more carnal weapon, stabs its victim from behind in the twilight of its upper shelf.34 Less picturesque than the Venetian in cloak and mask, less estimable, too, in this, that the assassin plied his moral trade at his own risk deriving no countenance from the powers of the Republic, it stands more malevolent, inasmuch that the Bravo striking in the dusk killed but the body, whereas the grotesque thing nodding its mandarin head may in its absurd unconsciousness strike down at any time the spirit of an honest, of an artistic, perhaps of a sublime creation.35
This Chinese monstrosity, disguised in the trousers of the Western Barbarian and provided by the State with the immortal Mr. Stiggins’s plug hat and umbrella, is with us.36 It is an office.37 An office of trust.38 And from time to time there is found an official to fill it.39 He is a public man.40 The least prominent of public men, the most unobtrusive, the most obscure if not the most modest.41
But however obscure, a public man may be told the truth if only once in his life.42 His office flourishes in the shade; not in the rustic shade beloved of the violet but in the muddled twilight of mind, where tyranny of every sort flourishes.43 Its holder need not have either brain or heart, no sight, no taste, no imagination, not even bowels of compassion.44 He needs not these things.45 He has power.46 He can kill thought, and incidentally truth, and incidentally beauty, providing they seek to live in a dramatic form.47 He can do it, without seeing, without understanding, without feeling anything; out of mere stupid suspicion, as an irresponsible Roman Caesar could kill a senator.48 He can do that and there is no one to say him nay.49 He may call his cook (Molière used to do that) from below and give her five acts to judge every morning as a matter of constant practice and still remain the unquestioned destroyer of men’s honest work.50 He may have a glass too much.51 This accident has happened to persons of unimpeachable morality—to gentlemen.52 He may suffer from spells of imbecility like Clodius.53 He may . . . what might he not do!54 I tell you he is the Caesar of the dramatic world.55 There has been since the Roman Principate nothing in the way of irresponsible power to compare with the office of the Censor of Plays.56
Looked at in this way it has some grandeur, something colossal in the odious and the absurd.57 This figure in whose power it is to suppress an intellectual conception—to kill thought (a dream for a mad brain, my masters!)—seems designed in a spirit of bitter comedy to bring out the greatness of a Philistine’s conceit and his moral cowardice.58
But this is England in the twentieth century, and one wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post.59 It is a matter for meditation.60 Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.61
He must be unconscious.62 It is one of the qualifications for his magistracy.63 Other qualifications are equally easy.64 He must have done nothing, expressed nothing, imagined nothing.65 He must be obscure, insignificant and mediocre—in thought, act, speech and sympathy.66 He must know nothing of art, of life—and of himself.67 For if he did he would not dare to be what he is.68 Like that much questioned and mysterious bird, the phoenix, he sits amongst the cold ashes of his predecessor upon the altar of morality, alone of his kind in the sight of wondering generations.69
And I will end with a quotation reproducing not perhaps the exact words but the true spirit of a lofty conscience.70 “Often when sitting down to write the notice of a play, especially when I felt it antagonistic to my canons of art, to my tastes or my convictions, I hesitated in the fear lest my conscientious blame might check the development of a great talent, my sincere judgment condemn a worthy mind.71 With the pen poised in my hand I hesitated, whispering to myself ‘What if I were perchance doing my part in killing a masterpiece.’”72
Such were the lofty scruples of M. Jules Lemaître—dramatist and dramatic critic, a great citizen and a high magistrate in the Republic of Letters; a Censor of Plays exercising his august office openly in the light of day, with the authority of a European reputation.73 But then M. Jules Lemaître is a man possessed of wisdom, of great fame, of a fine conscience—not an obscure hollow Chinese monstrosity ornamented with Mr. Stiggins’s plug hat and cotton umbrella by its anxious grandmother—the State.74
Frankly, is it not time to knock the improper object off its shelf?75 It has stood too long there.76 Hatched in Pekin (I should say) by some Board of Respectable Rites, the little caravan monster has come to us by way of Moscow—I suppose.77 It is outlandish.78 It is not venerable.79 It does not belong here.80 Is it not time to knock it off its dark shelf with some implement appropriate to its worth and status?81 With an old broom handle for instance.82
Sentence Notes
In plain English: A couple of years ago I felt inspired to write a one-act play, and I lived long enough to finish it.
Reference & context: The play was One Day More (1905), adapted from his story “To-morrow.”
In plain English: We live and learn.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A dry proverb introduces the irony to come.
In plain English: When the play was done, I was told that it needed an official licence before it could be performed.
In plain English: That's how I found out that there was such a thing as a Censor of Plays.
Reference & context: Officially the Examiner of Plays, working for the Lord Chamberlain. Stage censorship in Britain lasted from 1737 until the Theatres Act of 1968.
In plain English: I can say, without boasting, that I was intelligent enough to be amazed by this news: facts ought to fit their time and place, and I knew I was in England, in twentieth-century England.
In plain English: This fact didn't fit the date or the place.
In plain English: That was my first reaction.
In plain English: In short, it was an indecent fact.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Conrad turns the censor's own favourite word, “improper,” against him.
In plain English: Please believe that I'm writing seriously and choosing my words with great care.
In plain English: So I don't say “inappropriate.”
In plain English: I say “improper,” meaning something shameful.
In plain English: At first this impression was confirmed by how little known the person was who represented this rather important fact.
In plain English: The Censor of Plays!
In plain English: Not everyone was talking about him.
In plain English: Quite the opposite.
In plain English: He seemed secretive and distant.
In plain English: The figure had a whiff of the Far East about it, like the strange air of a Chinese official's back yard, and the stale smell of the Middle Ages, when people tried to stand still in the monstrous illusion that they had reached final certainty about morals, thought and conscience.
Reference & context: A mandarin was a high official of imperial China. Conrad uses China, as many Europeans of his time did, as a stereotyped symbol of rigid, unchanging bureaucracy; the image is unfair to China.
In plain English: It was an unpleasant impression.
In plain English: But I thought the censorship of plays was probably a harmless horror; not really a living tradition, since it clearly clashed with the English character, but an heirloom from the past, a strange foreign curiosity kept because of the fondness we have for our old possessions, whatever they are worth.
In plain English: Just another exotic collector's item, an Eastern vase, a Chinese grotesque figurine, dreamed up by a childish, extravagant imagination but left standing, dull and powerless, in the shadows of the top shelf.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The central image: the censor as an ugly ornament gathering dust on a high shelf.
Reference & context: Virtu: fine art objects. Potiche (French): a large porcelain vase. Magot chinois (French): a squat, grotesque Chinese porcelain figure.
In plain English: That's how I calmed my worried mind.
In plain English: My worry had nothing to do with what happened to my one-act play.
In plain English: The play was put on as planned, and an unusually intelligent audience stared at it so coldly that it closed.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Self-mocking humour: Conrad admits his own play flopped.
Reference & context: “The boards” means the stage. One Day More was performed in London in 1905 and was not a success.
In plain English: It died.
In plain English: It was a fair, public execution.
In plain English: But I survived the icy atmosphere of that theatre, and I went on living without feeling I'd been treated unfairly.
In plain English: I wasn't happy, but I accepted it.
In plain English: I was willing to accept the judgment of a free, independent audience, judging honestly the work of its free, independent and honest servant, the artist.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The key contrast: an audience's open verdict versus a censor's secret one.
In plain English: Only in this way can the artist's dignity as a servant of the public be kept, not to mention the artist's survival and his self-respect as a man.
In plain English: I won't say anything about the public's self-respect.
In plain English: This current campaign against censorship appeals to the public's self-respect, and I join it wholeheartedly.
Reference & context: In 1907, seventy-one writers, including Conrad, Hardy, Shaw, Henry James and Galsworthy, signed a letter to The Times protesting against stage censorship.
In plain English: Because I've lived long enough to find out that the monstrous, bizarre figure, the Chinese figurine I thought was just a reminder of our ancestors' foolishness, that ugly vase, actually works!
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A long build-up ends in one short, shocking verb.
In plain English: The ridiculous, empty clay creature seems to be alive, with a kind of (surely) unthinking life that suits its history.
In plain English: It heaves its belly, rolls its eyes and waves a monstrous arm, and with its censorship, like a hired killer of old Venice with a real knife, it stabs its victim in the back from the shadows of its high shelf.
Reference & context: A bravo was a hired assassin in Renaissance Italy. “Carnal” here means physical, of the flesh.
In plain English: It is less colourful than the Venetian in his cloak and mask, and less admirable too, because the assassin worked at his own risk without support from the state; and it is more evil, because the assassin killed only the body, while this grotesque nodding figure may, without even knowing it, destroy the spirit of an honest, artistic, perhaps magnificent work at any moment.
Reference & context: Calling the assassin's trade “moral” is ironic. The censor is worse because he has the state's backing.
In plain English: This Chinese horror, dressed up in Western trousers and given by the State the top hat and umbrella of Dickens's hypocrite Mr. Stiggins, is here among us.
Reference & context: Mr. Stiggins is a drunken, hypocritical preacher in Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. A plug hat is a tall top hat.
In plain English: It is an official position.
In plain English: A position of trust.
In plain English: And now and then someone is found to fill it.
In plain English: He is a public figure.
In plain English: The least famous of public figures, the least noticeable, the most unknown, though not necessarily the most modest.
In plain English: But however unknown he is, a public figure can be told the truth at least once in his life.
In plain English: His position thrives in the shade; not the country shade that violets love, but the confused half-light of the mind, where every kind of tyranny thrives.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A gentle flower image is set up only to be swapped for a sinister one.
In plain English: The person who holds it needs no brain or heart, no vision, no taste, no imagination, not even a scrap of pity.
Reference & context: “Bowels of compassion” is a biblical phrase (1 John 3:17), from the old belief that the bowels were the seat of pity.
In plain English: He doesn't need any of these.
In plain English: He has power.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Three words, after a long list of what he lacks.
In plain English: He can kill ideas, and with them truth and beauty, as long as they try to exist in the form of a play.
In plain English: He can do this without seeing, understanding or feeling anything, out of pure stupid suspicion, just as an unaccountable Roman emperor could have a senator killed.
In plain English: He can do that, and nobody can stop him.
In plain English: He could call up his cook from the kitchen every morning and have her judge a five-act play, as a regular habit, and still be the unquestioned destroyer of honest people's work.
Reference & context: Molière, the French playwright, is said to have read his comedies to his housekeeper, La Forêt, to test whether they were funny.
In plain English: He might have had too much to drink.
In plain English: This has happened even to people of perfect morals, to gentlemen.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A sly dig: the guardian of morals is no better than anyone else.
In plain English: He might have fits of stupidity, like the emperor Claudius.
Reference & context: Conrad probably means the Roman emperor Claudius, mocked as a fool; Clodius was a different Roman, a gang-leading politician.
In plain English: He might… what might he not do!
In plain English: I'm telling you, he is the emperor of the theatre world.
In plain English: Since the time of the Roman emperors, there has been no unaccountable power to compare with the Censor of Plays.
Reference & context: The Principate is the period of the early Roman Empire, from Augustus (27 BC) onward.
In plain English: Seen like this, it has a kind of grandeur, something gigantic in its hatefulness and absurdity.
In plain English: This person, who has the power to suppress an idea, to kill thought (a mad dream, gentlemen!), seems to have been invented as a bitter joke to show how vast an enemy of culture's arrogance and moral cowardice can be.
Reference & context: “My masters” is an old-fashioned address to an audience, as in Shakespeare. The Philistines were enemies of the Israelites; Matthew Arnold made the word mean people hostile to culture.
In plain English: But this is twentieth-century England, and it's surprising that anyone could be brave enough to take the job.
In plain English: It's something to think about.
In plain English: After thinking about it for a few minutes, with a calm heart and clear conscience, I conclude that he must either be hugely power-mad or completely unaware of what he is doing.
In plain English: He must be unaware.
In plain English: It's one of the requirements for his office.
In plain English: The other requirements are just as easy.
In plain English: He must have done nothing, said nothing and imagined nothing.
In plain English: He must be unknown, unimportant and ordinary in his thinking, actions, speech and feelings.
In plain English: He must know nothing about art, about life, and about himself.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The final item, “himself,” is the sharpest insult.
In plain English: Because if he did, he wouldn't dare to be what he is.
In plain English: Like the doubtful, mysterious phoenix, he sits on the altar of morality among the cold ashes of the man before him, the only one of his kind, while generations stare in amazement.
Reference & context: In legend, only one phoenix lives at a time; it burns itself and a new one rises from the ashes. Here the ashes are “cold”: no fire, no glory.
In plain English: I'll finish with a quotation that may not give the exact words but captures the true spirit of a noble conscience.
In plain English: “Often when I sat down to review a play, especially one that went against my artistic rules, tastes or beliefs, I hesitated, afraid that my honest criticism might hold back a great talent, or that my sincere judgment might condemn a worthy mind.
In plain English: With my pen ready, I hesitated, whispering to myself, ‘What if I'm helping to kill a masterpiece?’”
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The humility of a real critic, set against the censor's careless power.
Reference & context: “Perchance” is an old word for “perhaps.”
In plain English: Those were the noble doubts of Jules Lemaître, playwright and theatre critic, a great citizen and a senior judge in the world of literature; a true “censor of plays” who did his important job openly, backed by a reputation across Europe.
Reference & context: Jules Lemaître (1853–1914) was a leading French critic and member of the Académie française. The “Republic of Letters” means the community of writers and scholars.
In plain English: But then Lemaître is a wise, famous man with a fine conscience, not an unknown, hollow ornament dressed up in a hypocrite's top hat and cotton umbrella by its fussy grandmother, the State.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The State as an “anxious grandmother”: a comic image of an over-protective government.
In plain English: Honestly, isn't it time to knock this indecent object off its shelf?
In plain English: It has been there too long.
In plain English: Created in Beijing, I'd guess, by some Board of Respectable Ceremonies, the little monster has travelled to us by camel caravan through Moscow, I suppose.
Reference & context: Imperial China had a Board of Rites that controlled ceremonies. Conrad, a Pole who hated Russian rule, links censorship to Tsarist Russia as well.
In plain English: It is bizarre and foreign.
In plain English: It doesn't deserve respect for its age.
In plain English: It doesn't belong here.
In plain English: Isn't it time to knock it off its dark shelf with a tool that suits its value and rank?
In plain English: An old broom handle, for example.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A deflating, comic final line: the mighty Caesar is fit only for the broom.
Fun Fact
Conrad's wish came true, but slowly. The Lord Chamberlain kept the power to censor British plays for another 61 years. It was abolished by the Theatres Act of 1968, and the very next night the rock musical Hair, with its famous nude scene, opened in London.