A STATEMENT
If Mr. Cabell had not pre-empted the phrase, the words with which he characterized the tale Jurgen might well be used as a title for an account of the tale’s adventures with the law. Those adventures, which the matter of this book commemorates no less effectively than it helped to divert them from a less happy outcome, form indeed a comedy of justice: a comedy which, perhaps, aroused more of indignation than of mirth, and which, in its duration, somewhat exceeded the time-limit that a canny dramatist allots himself, but which ended appropriately on a note of justice, and thus showed Mr. Cabell to be not only the maker of a happily descriptive phrase but also somewhat of a prophet.
Well, the comedy of Jurgen’s suppression is ended. The book is admitted once more to the freedom of the library, and the pawnbroker is again at liberty to wander throughout the universe in search of rationality and fair dealing. And in due course, time and the wisdom of other generations will decide whether the pawnbroker, or the book, or the adventures of either be in any way memorable.
Today, however, the vicissitudes of Jurgen are of indisputable importance, if only because similar misfortunes may overtake yet other publications. At the moment it appears that the position of literature is less precarious than it has been in the recent past. For the courts, of late, with gratifying accord have failed to detect obscenity in a number of volumes at which professional righteousness has taken offense, and there apparently is cause to hope that legal precedent will dispel the obscurity which so long has surrounded decency—within the meaning of the statute. Yet it is still possible for an incorporated organization to waylay and imprison art: to exercise by accusation a censorship which impermanence makes no less dangerous. Until the difference between the liberty permitted to art and the license forbidden to the vulgar be clearly defined, it remains impossible for any artist to foreknow how fully he may describe and thereby interpret life as he sees it, or for the community to enjoy uninterrupted access to much of the best of ancient and modern literature.
In the pages which follow is printed an argument that expressly defines the test whereby that which is legally permissible and that which is prohibited may be determined. It is, explicitly, an argument in behalf of Jurgen, submitted at the trial of the publishers of that book: and it is published in book form, in part because of its intrinsic interest to all readers of Cabell, in part because it is a valuable addition to the literature of censorship. But here there seems need to preface the argument with a brief history of the Jurgen case.