Celestial Architecture
§ 44
The literary artist plays, I had said, with death. But everybody played with death: it was the one subject not anywhere to be approached except in a spirit of sober superficiality. And I wanted—in at any event this epilogue to the Biography,—to offend the sensibilities of nobody. At forty-five one has become, with no choice in the matter, bourgeois; and has no least desire to épater one's clan.
Here, indeed, it occurred to me that, somewhat farther back, I had referred, without assuming the proper elongation of countenance and a suitably spondaic utterance, to our natural delight in most forms of what we are generally agreed to describe as sin. And I hoped that would not be taken as implying that we can nowhere find more diverting employment than in wrong-doing, and should give over our lives to its practise. For iniquity, in its pleasanter branches, I reflected, is a pursuit in which the young excel. With age, one is adapted only for the less amusing crimes: and so with age one tends, upon the whole, and willy-nilly, to become reasonably virtuous. One tends, one in fact is driven, to seek diversion in the alcoves of thought rather than of action. One begins to toy amorously with ideas, now that age abates the ardor and the equipment for more juvenile recreations.
Of course there were many ideas to play with: so congressmen harped zealously upon morals, with a just half-boastful air of having often heard of them; the clergy averted from instructing Heaven in its painful duty toward Germany, to settle civic affairs and the proper number of feet allowable to an embrace in moving picture films; and among our state justiciary far-reaching codes of literary criticism, not to speak of Clean Book Leagues, were evolved by the distressing discovery that one's daughter was running counter to parental traditions by reading a book.
But hardier spirits would play with the greatest and most diverting of all ideas.... So that, in the outcome, I decided I would not, as I had intended to do, recur to Henry Adams. His thinking hardly aspires, it lacks such elevation as would warrant dwelling upon its modest pinnacles. Besides, there was always the ugly book which Adams wrote about John Randolph of Roanoke, to shake one's faith in the Education: once anybody has been at public pains to demonstrate himself an expert at coloring and falsifying the truth about another man, he cannot complain if none regards very trustingly his pretensions to write the truth as to himself. No doubt the prompter to this biographical blackguardism, the notion of standing up for your family name and your great-grandfather's intelligence, was all very well: and here, indeed, I could peculiarly sympathize, since it happened that my own paternal great-grandfather, also, had been aspersed by Randolph with just the same spirited and careful malignity he displayed in his verbal portraits of the Adams "bear and cub." Even so, it seemed to me that the natural impulse to atone by defaming Randolph was more easily understood than justified.
§ 45
In any event, this Henry Adams, too, is everywhere faintly rancid with the taint of Puritanism, and that fact could not but lead me into injustice. Puritanism has many excellent points, which it perhaps employs too much in the manner of the porcupine: yet we Virginians cannot ever quite overcome our feeling that the Puritans are parvenus, deriving from families too recently arrived in this country to be as yet completely Americanized. We have never, for that matter, learned to think of the Pilgrim Fathers and their descendants as belonging, exactly, to the gentry. And while we do try, at a pinch, to be polite and respectful about their undeniable virtues, the result, somehow, stays a bit unconvincing and condescending.
Besides, I had faced my especial troubles with the Puritan tradition, through the imbroglio incidental to the attempt to suppress Jurgen, and through the clinging, undesirable repute thus fastened to that book, and indeed to my books in general. I mildly resent, even now, my need to rest for the remainder of my lifetime under the imputation of being in lack-lustre eyes an "indecent writer." It sounds all very well, and stays, I believe, undeniable, to say that it was only a coterie of the obsessed—obsessed with the mad notion that "decency" is an affair of corporal centrifugality,—who had esteemed Jurgen an improper book. But that is, too, upon a par with protesting on a pestered summer night it is only mosquitoes who are annoying you. Those shyster Sanhedrins of tinpot Torquemadas—as Mr. Mencken, you may remember, has for some reason or another not yet called the incorporated supporters of the Puritan tradition in letters,—are, beyond question, made up of peculiarly filthy and senseless little creatures acting after the law of their insectean kind. Yet they are also innumerable and poisonous: and they are blest, too (no doubt in common with the mosquitoes) with sincerity and an approving conscience, in all these assaults of the petty upon that which, however harmless, offends them by being bigger than they are.
But I drift into a discussion of the Jurgen case, which, as goes the law, is settled: and all that I really need to say about the indecency of Jurgen, or of the Biography as a whole, and about the baffling literary problem of censorship in general, was said some while ago.