The Town That Would Not Have a Pageant
When dignity takes it into its head that dignity has been offended, and remonstrates, the laugh is far more likely to be on dignity than on the offehder. If a small boy with a lively sense of the absurd knocks the top hat off a stout and morning- Wilted person, that is deplorable : but it is more deplorable still when the stout party pursues the small boy round Parliament Square and up the middle of Whitehall. In the now famous Abtrgavenny case Mr. L. du Garde Peach cannot even be called a deliberate offender, for until the Town Clerk of Abergavenny forbade the performance of Mr. Peach's The Town That Would Have A gageant, the author had never even heard of the place. The Town Clerk admits that the play is an excellent farce, but as the licensee of the borough theatre he will not have it, because " Scene I depicts a meeting of a council committee and the dialogue is such as to cause ridicule to members of the council and the Town Clerk, and is derogatory to the dignity of office." If everyone were so sensitive for his dignity as the the Town Clerk of Abergavenny, every comedy or farce between Aristophanes and Coward would - ,have to go on the index double-quick. Then .dignitaries of all sorts could breathe freely. Meanwhile the impartial observer of the Abergavenny affair may well come to the conclusion that none is more destructive of dignity than the dignitary. But in the gale of laughter the Town Clerk of Abergavenny may take refuge in the thought that Plato at least would have sympathised.
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