The Invisible Censor

by Francis Hackett

But these various confessions are significant. They indicate the existence and the vitality of the censor. They show that in the simplest matters we have not yet attained freedom of speech. Why? Because, I imagine, the world is chock-full of assumptions as to conduct which, while irrational and ritualistic and primitive, have all sorts of sanctions thrown around them and must take a whole new art of education to correct. Until this art it established and these assumptions are automatically rectified, it will be impossible to exercise free speech comfortably. An attempt may be made, of course, and indeed must be made, but to succeed too well will for many years mean either being exterminated or being ostracized.

It is not hard to show how each of us in turn becomes an agent of the invisible censorship. You, for instance, may have a perfectly free mind on the subject of suffrage, but you may have extremely strong views on the subject of sex. (Miss Alice Stone Blackwell, to be specific, thinks that Fielding is nothing but a “smutty” author.) Or you may think yourself quite emancipated on the subject of sex-desires and be hopelessly intolerant on the subject of the Bolsheviki. The French Rights of Man held out, after all, for the sacred rights of property—and the day before that, it was considered pretty advanced to believe in the divine right of kings. It is not humanly possible, considering how relative liberalism is, to examine all the facts or even convince oneself of the necessity of examining them, and in every case we are sure to be tempted to oppose certain novel ideas in the name of inertia, respectability and decorum. To dissemble awkward facts, in such cases, is much easier than to account for them—which is where the censor comes in.

I do not say that it is possible to do away with every discipline, even the rule-of-thumb of decorum. As a subservient middle-class citizen, I believe in the regulation of impulse. But as an intellectual fact, the use of the blue pencil in the interests of decorum is exceedingly inept. Human impulses are much too lively to be extinguished by the denial of expression. And if sane expression is denied to them, they’ll find expression of another kind.

Decorum has its uses, especially on the plane of social intercourse. I admit this all the more eagerly because I have seen much of one brilliant human being who has practically no sense of opposition. If he sees something that he wants, he helps himself. It may be the milk on the lunch-table that was intended for Uncle George. It may be the new volume from England that it took nine weeks to bring across. It may be the company of some sensitive gentlewoman or the busy hour of the mayor of Chicago. The object makes no visible difference to my friend. If he wants it, he sticks out his hand and takes it. And if it comes loose, he holds on.

Associated with this aggressiveness there is a good deal of purpose not self-regarding. The man is by no means all greedy maw. But the thing that distinguishes him is the quickness and frankness with which he obeys his impulse. Between having an impulse and acting on it there lies for him a miraculously short time.

In dealing with such a man, most people begin hilariously. Not all of them keep up with him in the same heroic spirit. At first it is extraordinarily stimulating to find a person who is so “creative,” who sweeps so freely ahead. Soon the dull obligations, the tedious details, begin to accumulate, and the man with the happy impulsiveness leaves all these dull obligations to his struggling friends. His lack of decorum in these respects is a source of hardship and misunderstanding, especially where persons of less energy or more circumspection are attendant. In his case, I admit, I see the raw problem of impulse, and I am glad to see his impulse squelched.

But even this barbarian is preferable to the apathetic repressed human beings by whom he is surrounded. Harnessed to the right interests, he is invaluable because “creative.” And he should never be blocked in: he should at most be canalled.

The evil of the censor, at any rate, is never illustrated in his rational subordination of impulse, but in those subordinations that violate human and social freedom. And the worst of them are the filmy, the vague, the subtle subordinations that take away the opportunity of truth. Life is in itself a sufficiently difficult picture-puzzle, but what chance have we if the turnip-headed censor confiscates some particularly indispensable fragment that he chooses to dislike? On reading Eminent Victorians, how we rejoice to escape from those wax effigies that we once believed to be statesmen—the kind of effigies of which text-books and correct histories and correct biographies are full! How we rejoice to escape from them, wondering that they had ever imposed on us, wondering that teachers and pious families and loyal historians ever lent themselves to this conspiracy against truth! But the horrible fact is, Mr. Strachey is one in a million. He has only poked his finger through the great spider-web of so-called “vital lies.”

Meanwhile, in the decorous and respectable biographies, the same old “vital lies” are being told. The insiders, the initiated, the disillusioned, are aware of them. They no longer subsist on them. They read between the lines. And yet when the insiders see in print the true facts—say, about Robert Louis Stevenson or Swinburne or Meredith or John Jones—these very insiders rush forward with a Mother Hubbard to fling around the naked truth. We must not speak the truth. We must edify. We must bring our young into a spotless, wax-faced world.

It means that we need a revolution in education, nothing less. It means that the truth must be taken out of the hands of the censor. We must be prepared to shed oceans of ink.