The Invisible Censor

by Francis Hackett

A “cheap” effect, I assume, is commonly one that builds itself on a false foundation. It may promise beautifully, but it never lives up to its promise. Whether it is a house or a human character, a binding or a book, it proves itself gimcrack and shoddy. It hasn’t the goods. And of Eminent Victorians, as I remembered it (having read it to review it), this was the last thing to be said. The book began by fitting exquisitely, but it went on fitting exquisitely. It never pulled or strained. And the memory of it wears like a glove.

Now why, after all, did I like this book so thoroughly, which my distinguished friend thought so cheap? For many minor reasons of course, as one likes anything—contributory reasons—but principally, as I laboriously analyzed it, because in Eminent Victorians the invisible censor was so perfectly understood. What seemed cheap to her ladyship was, I do not doubt, the very thing that made Eminent Victorians seem so precious to me—the deft disregard of appearances, the refusal to let decorum stand in the way of our possessing the facts. This to my critic was a proof that Mr. Strachey was imperceptive and vulgar—“common” the ugly word is. To me it simply proved that he knew his game. What he definitely disregarded, as so many felt, was not any decorum dear and worth having. It was simply that decorum which to obey is to produce falsification. The impeccable craft of Mr. Strachey was shown in his evaluation, not his acceptance, of decorum. He did not take his characters at their face value, while he did not do the other vulgar thing, go through their careers with a muck-rake. In vivisecting them (the awful thing to do, presumably), he never let them die on him. He opened them out, but not cruelly or brutally. He did it as Mr. William Johnston plays tennis or as Dr. Blake is said to operate or as Dr. Muck conducts an orchestra or as Miss Kellerman dives. He did it for the best result under the circumstances and with a form that comes of a real command of the medium—genuine “good form.”

The essential achievement of Eminent Victorians is worth dwelling on because in every book of social character the question of the invisible censor is unavoidably present. By the censor I do not mean that poor blinkered government official who decides on the facts that are worthy of popular acquaintance. I mean a still more secret creature of still more acute solicitude, who feels that social facts must be manicured and pedicured before they are fit to be seen. He is not concerned with the facts themselves but with their social currency. He is the supervisor of what we say we do, the watchman over our version and our theoretical estimate of ourselves. His object, as I suppose, is to keep up the good old institutions, to set their example before the world, to govern the imitative monkey in us. And to fulfill that object he continually revises and blue-pencils the human legend. He is constantly at the elbow of every man or woman who writes. An invisible, scarcely suspected of existing, he is much more active, much more solidly intrenched, than the legal censor whom liberals detest.

Every one is now more or less familiar with the Freudian censor, the domesticated tribal agent whose function it seems to be to enforce the tribal scruples and superstitions—to keep personal impulse where the tribe thinks it belongs. This part of the ego—to give it a spatial name—came in for a good deal of excited remonstrance in the early days of popular Freudian talk. To-day, I think, the censor is seldom so severely interpreted. In many cases there is clearly a savagery or a stupidity which brings about “the balked disposition,” but it is being admitted that the part which is regulated by the censor, the “disposition” end of the ego, may not always be socially tolerable; and as for the “balking,” there is a difference between blunt repressiveness and enlightened regulation. Still, with all this acceptance of ethics, the nature of the censorship has to be recognized—the true character of the censor is so often not taste or conscience in any clear condition, but an uninstructed agency of herd instinct, an institutional bully. In the censor as he appears in psycho-analytic literature there is something of the archaic, the irrational and the ritualistic—all just as likely to ask for decorum for themselves as is the thing in us which is against license and anarchy.

In the censor for whom I am groping, the censor of whom Eminent Victorians is so subversive, there are particularly these irrational and ritualistic characteristics, these remnants of outgrown institutions, these bondages of race and sex, of class and creed. Most biography, especially official biography, is written with such a censor in mind, under his very eye. Where Eminent Victorians was refreshing and stimulating was precisely in its refusal to keep him in mind. Hovering behind Eminent Victorians we see agonized official biography, with its finger on its lips, and the contrast is perhaps the chief delight that Mr. Strachey affords. When Cardinal Manning’s pre-clerical marriage, for example, came to be considered by Mr. Strachey, he did not obey the conventional impulse, did not subordinate that fact of marriage as the Catholic Church would wish it to be subordinated (as a matter of “good taste,” of course). He gave to that extremely relevant episode its due importance. And so Manning, for the first time for most people, took on the look not so much of the saintly cardinal of official biography as of a complex living man.

What does the censor care for this æsthetic result? Very little. What the censor is chiefly interested in is, let us say, edification. He aims by no means to give us access to the facts. He aims not at all to let us judge for ourselves. With all his might he strives to relate the facts under his supervision to the end that he thinks desirable, whatever it may be. And so, when facts come to light which do not chime in with his prepossession, he does his best either to discredit them or to set them down as immoral, heretical or contrary to policy. And the policy that he is serving is not æsthetic.

A theory of the æsthetic is now beside the point, but I am sure it would move in a relation to human impulses very different from the relation of the censor. The censor is thinking, presumably, of immediate law and order, with its attendant conventions and respectabilities. The æsthetic could not be similarly bound. It is not reckless of conduct, but surely enormously reckless of decorum, with its conventions and respectabilities clustering around the status quo. Hence the apparent “revolt” of modernism, the insurrection of impulse against edification.

But there is more in Eminent Victorians than an amusing, impish refusal to edify. There is the instructive contrast between the “censored celebrity” and the uncensored celebrity disinterestedly observed. Disinterestedly observed, for one thing, we get something in these celebrities besides patriotism and mother-love and chastity and heroism. We get hot impulses and cold calculations, brandy and treachery, the imperious and the supine, glorious religiousness and silly family prayers. And these things, though very unlike the products of official photography, are closely related to impulses as we know them in ourselves. To find them established for Mr. Strachey’s “eminent” Victorians is to enjoy a constant dry humor, since the invisible censor, the apostle of that expediency known as edification, stood at the very heart of Victorianism.

This is possibly why Samuel Butler, in his autobiographical way, is so remarkable as a Victorian. In the midst of innumerable edifying figures, he declined to edify. When people said to him, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” he answered in effect that his father was a pinhead theologian who had wanted to cripple his mentality, and his mother was, to use his own phrase, full of the seven deadly virtues. This was not decorous but it had the merit of being true. And all the people whose unbidden censors had been forcing good round impulses into stubborn parental polygons immediately felt the relief of this revelation. Not all of them confess it. When they have occasion to speak or write about “mothers”—as if the biological act of parturition brings with it an unquestionable “mother” psyche—most of them still allow the invisible censor to govern them and represent them as having feelings not really their own. But even this persistence of the censor could not deprive Samuel Butler of his effectiveness. He has spoken out, regardless of edification, and that sort of work cannot be undone.

A similar work is performed by such highly personal confessants as Marie Bashkirtseff and W. N. P. Barbellion, and even by Mary MacLane. The account that these impulsive human beings give of themselves is sensational simply because it clashes with the strict preconception that we are taught to establish. But only a man who remembers nothing or admits nothing of his own impulses can deny the validity of theirs. The thing that takes away from their interest, as one grows older, is the unimportance of the censorship that agonizes them. Their documentary value being their great value, they lose importance as more specific and dramatic documents become familiar. And with psycho-analysis there has been a huge increase in the evidence of hidden life. It is the Montaignes who remain, the confessants who offer something besides a psychological document—a transcendence which is not incoherent with pain.