§ 46
For censorship of our reading matter, as I granted even when Jurgen was yet lying under arrest in Mr. Sumner's[5] cellar, may, in pure theory, be—just possibly—advisable. In practise, though, I can imagine no persons or class of persons qualified to perform this censorship. Speaking here with all, if only, the respect due to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, I must none the less insist there is a difference between pornography and fine literature, if but the difference that everybody enjoys the first where few care one way or the other about the second: and certainly the two should be appraised by diverse and appropriate standards. A work of art should therefore, in theory, be judged entirely as a work of art, by a jury of practitioners of the art concerned.
Yet, since every self-respecting author at bottom abominates his competitors, despises his inferiors, and is frantically irritated by the writings of those who differ from him in æsthetic canons, such an arrangement would, in practise, only fling open more conspicuous fields wherein to flaunt the mutual spite and miscomprehension common to us creative writers. Besides, it is not difficult to forecast what sort of writers might, and would, be chosen for the judiciary, as representing pre-eminence in letters by the happiest combination of mediocrity and senility. Thus, in the end, an attempt to establish a purely "literary" tribunal would result in setting over American art a death-watch of genial clergymen and decrepit college professors: and I despondently question if their decisions would be a whit less imbecile than the present arbitraments of the Society's hired spies.
It remains, moreover, the defect of every method of legal "suppression" that magistrates and courts of law are unable really to suppress any book. A book, once printed, either suppresses itself or else stays, as things human fare, immortal. And that always appeared to me the very silliest feature of the Jurgen imbroglio. Irrespective of any possible legal decision, as I patiently pointed out, over and over again, when Jurgen lodged in Mr. Sumner's cellar, the book existed in a sufficient number of unarrestable copies to place it beyond destruction by anything except its own inherent faults. If Jurgen contained the right constituents it would live; and if it lacked the stuff of longevity it would in due course die: either way, the outcome was to be decided neither by me nor by vice commissioners, nor even by a judge and a grand jury.
Nobody disputed this logic: nobody in fact paid any attention to it.
And as touches my personal share in the publication of an "indecent book called Jurgen"—though, indeed, I hear that a great deal of the Biography is "indecent,"—it is in the end by my book that I must be condemned or justified, rather than by what anyone, including me, may for some while to come elect to say about my book, which is the Biography. So I say nothing. For against the explicit charge of having violated the current morality of 1920, I think, any serious defence would be waste of effort, if only because the question must so soon, and in fact already tends to, become of purely antiquarian interest. Our children may not improve, even from the standpoint of humor, upon our moral standards, but our children will certainly not retain them. When, as must inevitably happen before very long, our present ethical criteria have come to seem as quaint as those of the Druids or the Etruscans, or even as the flyblown and rococo axioms of 1913 appear nowadays, offences against any one of these outmoded codes will hardly be esteemed worth talking about. Should Jurgen be remembered ten years hence, it will, through being remembered, be amply exonerated: whereas if Jurgen be forgotten, the book will then of course be violating nobody's moral sensibility. Time thus lies under bond to silence, whether with praise or with oblivion, every conceivable sort of "moral" aspersion; and willy-nilly I must defer to time.
None the less do I still believe that Jurgen is, as originally labelled, "a book wherein each man will find what his nature enables him to see": and when anyone confesses that he finds therein only "offensiveness, and lasciviousness, and lewdness, and indecency," I must make bold to take the announcement as a less candid summary of the book's nature than of the critic's.
§ 47
What can be done, people very often ask of me, with a flattering if misplaced assumption of my ability to answer,—what can be done toward restraining our present literary saturnalia of prudishness? And I must answer, if at all, with a shrug: for the intelligent here contend against well-meaning and courageous persons who fight for high aims. The most fantastic feature of this droll year-long warring is the profound sincerity of the participants, upon both sides. You and I may know—and welcome, as the saying runs,—that we are in the right so far as goes the unhuman abstraction called rationality. But the officers and backers of the Clean Book League and of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, also, quite honestly believe they are engaged in praiseworthy work when, to cite but two farces from the exhaustless repertoire, they hale Petronius and Mademoiselle de Maupin into the police courts.
Indeed they appear inebriated to these antics by much the same real love of virtue which incites a portion of their congeners to burn an unruly negro as a torch to illumine their reprehension of lawlessness; and drives yet others to express their disfavor of intemperance by decreeing that wine is a compound too atrocious to be employed for any purpose except to symbolize the blood of Christ. In the face of so many laudable intentions thus obscurely communicated, we can but deduce, I am afraid, that whenever stupidity and high morals pig together they beget an offspring doubly cursed with zealotry and toxic aphasia. Nor, of course, does it appear quite unblasphemous to contend against these presumably ordained phenomena.