Here, too, carefully as the titles are selected the pictures themselves are “clean.” If they were not, the various Boards of Censorship would have seen to it that they become so. At most a director will manage to show the heroine plunging into her morning’s rose-water bath, as in “Male and Female,” for instance, or an exotic harem partially disrobing for a cold dip into the perfumed waters of the Rajah’s pool, as in “Kismet.” Whether the scenes are vitally necessary to the unfolding of the plot is immaterial. They constitute an irresistible attraction in themselves, and must be smuggled in, if possible. A couple of feet of nakedness results in thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising.
What is true of the moving pictures is equally true of our spoken stage. Think of “Twin Beds” and “Up in Mabel’s Room” and “Parlor, Bedroom and Bath” and “Mary’s Ankle” and “Nighty, Nighty” and “Scrambled Wives” and “Ladies’ Night in a Turkish Bath” and “Getting Gertie’s Garter” and the various “Follies” and “Scandals” and a hundred-and-one other titles which were surely chosen for a purpose—the same purpose which impelled some years ago the manager of the old Academy of Music in New York to advertise a stock company production of Daudet’s “Sapho” as the “greatest immoral play ever written.” And again the plays themselves are not remotely as licentious as the titles would intimate.
What, then, is this “cleanness” of ours? What are its impositions and how far can they be stretched? The answer is simple and more than a trifle sad. Our “cleanness” excludes serious thought. “Something audacious suits us, but nothing salacious,” writes one editor of a well-known publication of the frothy type. “Salacious” stands for thought, reflection, analysis. A little suggestiveness, a hint, a double-edged joke, a farcical situation, a vulgar thrust, will do. But a deep, sincere analysis, a fearless uncovering of a cowering conscience—that is salacious, immoral, lewd, unclean. That accounts for the free and open dissemination of so much debasing, lurid stuff and the hypocritical suppression of Dreiser and Cabell. That accounts for the popularity of Bertha M. Clay et al. and the unpopularity of Sherwood Anderson et al. Sex is a fit subject to jest about, to inject breezily as a gently-naughty stimulant. Sex as an elemental force which shapes the lives of men and women, which actuates their struggles in this terrestrial sphere of ours, making for success or failure, for happiness or despair, for sinner or saint, is vile, lascivious, and therefore taboo.
The literary teaching profession has not passed this degrading scene unnoticed. It has broken up in two camps. The great mass of instructors have simply adopted the position that a writer must give whatever is demanded of him. Would a tailor refuse to accept an order calling for a fabric he personally does not approve of and a fashion he detests? Granted that this is not a particularly lofty conception of literary art, it is still less pernicious than the conception held by the smaller group of so-called idealists in the profession. To these the sex aspect of our literature calls for stormy denunciation. They would impress upon the future writer the sanctity of his mission. The pen must not be polluted. Sex must be left alone entirely. The moral tone must be preserved in all productions. Laws for the ruthless suppression of the unclean must be fought for and their enactment obtained.
What these honest Puritans cannot understand is that the entire class of bawdy, sex-reeking literature is a product of the very laws they have been fortunate enough to have enacted; that the complete abolition of these laws and the absolute cessation from persecution in the interests of morality of any expression of sex would purge our literature of the curse as nothing else. If any one could purchase a mature, intelligent literary expression of the mysterious passion that animates nature and moves the world, the profane effusions of shriveled minds would appear shocking and abhorrent by comparison. All literature that has ever been written has dealt directly or indirectly with the relation of men and women—for the very trite reason that all life that has ever been lived has been the life of this relation of men and women. To place the yellow ticket of evil upon this relation as a literary subject is to degrade it beyond words of contempt. The prevailing spectacle of our literary sewage is perfectly natural: the thought of uncleanness wrapped around the stuff of life is bound to pollute it.
But the pernicious influence of this immoral taboo goes beyond its direct inhibition of the most legitimate of themes. It perpetuates an æsthetic literary tenet which is a relic of the Age of Darkness. It is to the effect that the morality or unmorality of its contents determines the value of a literary production. “It is a shame that such splendid writing should be wasted on such an atrocious theme,” said a sweet little lady student apropos Sherwood Anderson’s “The Other Woman.”[20] The remark at once characterized her as a member of the Second-Grade Bigots. The First-Grade Bigots would not permit themselves to see any excellences in a work so pronouncedly unorthodox. When cornered, the little lady admitted that there might be sound psychology in Anderson’s story—and a large measure of unsavory truth. “But why choose such horrid themes when there are so many nice, clean ones?” It is the cry of all Pollyanna-nurtured readers. It’s the cry of the author of “Pollyanna” herself. “Is there, then, no human experience that deals with the good, the happy, the beautiful?” she asks, in a circular issued by her publishers. “Are joy, faith and purity utterly illogical? Is only the thunder-cloud real?—the sunshine a sham?” In such cases argument is impossible. The criterion of moral and optimistic content is deep-rooted and well-nourished by authority. Is it not largely this same criterion that for more than a half century prevented the acceptance by the Judges of Walt Whitman as a poet, and that is excluding the name of Theodore Dreiser from its rightful place in our scholarly histories of the modern American novel?
To counteract this blind perpetuation of a fallacious doctrine demands a complete severance with old school criticism and old-age pedagogy. Not until authority-worship is mightily shaken can this be accomplished. But that would be a hopeless task to undertake. The great mass must have and will have its Great Authorities to bow to. It is easier than to depend upon one’s own critical faculties. Besides, habit has become second nature. We have always been taught that knowledge is merely to know where to find what we want to know. No, we must be merciful; our literary apostles must remain. But among them there are those that are blind with senility and those that are glowing with fresh vision. Let us follow the more musical of the new criers until they, in their turn, reach their dotage and truth turns to ashes in their toothless mouths. In no other way can we hope to uproot the puerile beliefs that art can be judged by its optimistic or uplifting message, by its morality, or by any other of, what Joel Elias Spingarn terms, the “Seven confusions.” We have not yet reached the stage where the relativity of the term “morality” can be discussed with impunity and to any considerable advantage. But we can bring to bear upon a rising generation of readers and writers all the force of our warm logic to combat the notion that any standard of morality, no matter how sublime, has any determining value in art. We can insist that a story might be entirely devoid of any moral significance and yet be an immortal masterpiece; that the whole notion is merely another one of the confusions we have inherited from an age which was too busy developing the raw resources of a vast young continent—a task which necessitated the invocation of Providential aid—to pay attention to literature.
“To say that poetry (or any other art) is moral or immoral is as meaningless as to say that an equilateral triangle is moral and an isosceles triangle immoral. Surely we must realize the absurdity of testing anything by a standard which does not belong to it or a purpose for which it was not intended. Imagine these whiffs of conversation at a dinner table: ‘This cauliflower would be excellent if it had only been prepared in accordance with international law.’ ‘Do you know why my cook’s pastry is so good? He has never told a lie or seduced a woman.’ But why multiply obvious examples? We do not concern ourselves with morals when we test the engineer’s bridge or the scientist’s researches; indeed we go farther, and say that it is the moral duty of the scientist to disregard morals in his search for truth. As a man he may be judged by moral standards, but the truth of his conclusions can only be judged by the standard of science.... Art is expression, and poets succeed or fail by their success or failure in completely and perfectly expressing themselves. If the ideals they express are not the ideals we admire most, we must blame not the poets but ourselves; in the world where morals count we have failed to give them the proper material out of which to rear a nobler edifice. To separate art and morality is not to destroy moral values but to augment them—to give them increased powers and a new freedom in the realm in which they have the right to reign.”[21]
3. Religion
It is literally true that American literature is not irreverent. The penalty for meddling with religion in any unconventional way is contemptuous obscurity. But meddling with religion in a way that brings out its blessings to humanity is praiseworthy and leads to opulence and glory. For that reason nine-tenths of our literature has a strain of religious righteousness running through it. In the main the specters of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards still hover over our literary output, imparting to it a theological tint. Our fictionists are still obsessed with the idea that a story or a novel must preach, must instill the right kind of ideals, must exert a redeeming influence upon its reader. To be sure, the experienced ones among them are fully aware of the dangers of obvious moralizing, but they have mastered the devious ways of preaching without arousing the reader’s suspicion that he is being preached to.