An Unpublished Preface

(Written in 1910.)

It is not my habit to write prefaces, but there are certain things I want to say concerning the play “Justice,” as to its subject-matter, not its artistic qualities, bad, good, or indifferent.

Holding perhaps a more intimate knowledge of its author’s mind than can elsewhere be obtained, I would remark that the play is no indictment or attack, but a picture of the whole process of Justice as seen by this painter’s eye. There are thickenings of line here, and thinnings there, occasioned by lack of technical knowledge, or demanded by the exigencies of dramatic craft, but the spiritual essence of the matter is set down honestly, as best it could be perceived by him.

Justice was known by the ancients to be blind; by ourselves is admitted blind; will be acclaimed blind by the tongues of our descendants. It is blind because it is depart- or rather compart-mental.

The prosecutor, be he ancient Roman or Englishman of to-day, cannot gauge or control the whole effect on the offender and on society of the process which he initiates. The Judge, be he Solon or Judge of the High Court, cannot know enough of the temperament and antecedents of a prisoner to adequately apportion a sentence which he cannot see being carried out. The prison official is tied to the terms of the sentence and the conditions of the system, for some system there must be. The Public, on the prisoner’s release, acts mechanically in its own defence against a marked man. All see only their own bits of the game.

From this general blindness, it follows that punishment is almost always out of proportion. This is why it seemed to me worth while to make a picture of Blind Justice, and to hang it on the wall. There are some who believe that this picture will rapidly become out of date. I am not so sanguine. Short of our all becoming not only eager, but able, to see that which does not lie underneath our noses, I much fear that this picture will remain valid for some considerable time The conditions will change, but the spirit will remain—Justice is too naturally and inevitably blind. Is that any reason why we should not occasionally be reminded of the evil—one of the enduring, but perhaps diminishable, evils of human life? Even the administrators of this Justice might like now and then to glance at a picture of its blindness.

One word about the cell scene. It has been called false and exaggerated.... Two brothers went to see this play. At the end of the cell scene the younger, who stammers, turned to his elder and said: “It’s n-not so—j-j—olly as all that!”

Precisely! Prisoners do not commonly enjoy the relief of beating on their cell doors, though the incident is not unknown. But he who can project himself into the minds of others knows that prisoners, in closed cells, moping and brooding week after week, month after month, shut off from all real distraction, from all touch with the outer world and everything they care for, with the knowledge of years of imprisonment before them and of broken lives when they come out—knows that such prisoners, thousands of them, unseen by any eye, reach a state of mind which would make them constantly fling themselves for relief on their cell doors, if it were not for fear. No, it is not so jolly as all that!

The characteristics of all prison life, at all events in England, are silence and solitude, physical or spiritual; and this cell scene was selected to convey as nearly as the limitations of the stage permitted, these commonest characteristics of detention.

For the truth of this picture of Blind Justice as a whole I rely on the testimonial of that theatre attendant, employed out of charity, who, having been prosecuted, sentenced, imprisoned, and released, knew, let us hope, more of the matter spiritually, than those who criticize. After the play on the first night, to the question of his manager, “Well, is it true?” he looked up from his sweeping, and said: “Every word of it, sir.”

I have only this to add. If each scene is taken separately and looked on with a departmentally professional eye, it must needs seem out of drawing, for it was visualized by an eye looking on each department only in relation to the whole. When the professional reader or spectator of the Court or Prison scene, says “Oh! this or that is not true!” he is criticizing from the departmental, and not from the bird’s-eye point of view, which an author must needs assume. Even if the sentence be more than typically severe, though I doubt that, or the judgment not typically worded, they serve well enough as illustrations of that blindness which has accompanied the wisest judgments of one human being on another since the world began.

No, the only legitimate criticism which the professional reader or spectator can pass is that the particular bird’s-eye view is wrong. To that criticism this bird can make no answer, except to say with deference and courtesy that he must believe in his own eye—for it is all he has to see with.