George Soule
Is it true that a Chicago woman’s club recently declared any book to be immoral which contains a character whom you wouldn’t invite into your home to meet your daughter? If so, the world is to be congratulated, because all novels except the Rollo Books are labeled immoral, and we needn’t worry any more about the word. Provided, of course, that the daughters of this particular woman’s club are sheltered as carefully as they should be, having been brought up by such mothers.
I’m afraid only authors and publishers know just how threatening this fear of “immoral” books is getting to be. The most significant American novelist has just written a masterful book which has been declined by two at least of the oldest and best publishing houses because it is “too frank.” The men in charge want to publish it; they think the world ought to have a chance at it. But they are afraid. And the author, unlike most authors under similar circumstances, won’t modify the book. He says he’ll wait twenty-five years, if necessary, but he won’t change a word. And yet, if the book were published, some people would accuse him of “pandering to commercialism.”
Don’t blame the publisher. Mitchell Kennerley came near being fined hundreds of dollars and sent to jail recently for issuing Hagar Revelly—a serious though by no means a great novel. Anthony Comstock, who earns his living by attempting to suppress anything which he happens to consider immoral, is likely at any time to pick out a good piece of work for his thunderbolts—and he is a government official in the post office department. You can’t tell what he is going to do next. Everybody remembers his ill-advised censorship of Paul Chabas’s delicate and inoffensive little September Morn; yet in every cheap picture-store window in New York there is now displayed without protest a photograph of a nude woman which makes no pretense to art or beauty.
Not many people know that six men decide what Boston may or may not read. The Watch and Ward Society, a group of puritans backed up by the blue laws of the state, have long been active in this pharisaical undertaking and from time to time have arrested booksellers. The booksellers in self-defense have recently formed a committee of three to act with three members of this society. When a new book comes along which anybody “suspects,” it is put before the joint committee, and if that decides against it, Boston cannot buy it except by mail. The Devil’s Garden only barely escaped, because somebody had read to the end of the book and labeled it “religious.” In other words, it teaches a lesson. But the same argument did not save Witter Bynner’s Tiger.
Magazine editors will tell you similar facts by the hour. The Metropolitan was recently held up by the post office because it contained photographs of nude statuary—from the winter exhibition of the National Academy!
We shall not rid ourselves of this vicious situation by simply getting enraged at the censors. The truth is, they are too well entrenched in public opinion. The people who enforce the law are ignorant postal clerks, clergymen of archaic convictions, and lower court judges of the tobacco-chewing, corner-saloon type to whom any thought of sex is necessarily nasty. But behind them is the man who is always saying that such and such a book or play “oughtn’t to be allowed.” He is always wanting to protect “the young,” or somebody else, although he rarely reads books himself, and probably would resent interference with his own often vicious pleasures. His mind is essentially rotten. He is incapable of understanding the pure beauty of the human body, because he has seen so many “musical comedies.” He would be shocked by the statement that passion is a beautiful element of nature toward which we should be reverent. He has a sense of propriety, not so much about what should be done as about what should be said. And then there is the vast Florence Barclay contingent, largely women, who, because they don’t know what the world is like, don’t want to know, and don’t think anybody should be allowed to know.
The trouble with censorship is that we always want it to apply to other people, never to ourselves. It is our national weakness that we try to prescribe conduct by law, instead of seeing that the individual is strong and truth-seeing, and leaving conduct to take care of itself, allowing ideas to fight their own battles. If we must have a censorship, let it be in the hands of the strong and intelligent. Let us forbid all books which are not true. Mental and moral fibre is really vitiated by the Florence Barclay sort of thing. People brought up on that are enemies of light and progress. Their world is an exercise-place for impossible ethics. Their emotion is washed-out sentiment. Courage and vigor are unknown to them. And the worst of it is that their soft and clinging hands are wrapped about the rest of us, as they try to drag us down from the rain-washed skies of the morning to their stuffy hair-cloth religion and pink-candy pleasures.
The fight between the writers and the censors is sure to grow bitter in the next few years; both sides are getting more determined every day. But such crises are welcomed by the adventurous. We shall end not only by riding over our small opponents, but by carrying with us an army awakened to the true issues of art and life.