§ 6
So beset, it is no wonder that the typical American maker of books becomes a timorous and ineffective fellow, whose work tends inevitably toward a feeble superficiality. Sucking in the Puritan spirit with the very air he breathes, and perhaps burdened inwardly with an inheritance of the actual Puritan stupidity, he is further kept upon the straight path of chemical purity by the very real perils that I have just rehearsed. The result is a literature full of the mawkishness that the late Henry James so often roared against—a literature almost wholly detached from life as men are living it in the world—in George Moore’s phrase, a literature still at nurse. It is on the side of sex that the appointed virtuosi of virtue exercise their chief repressions, for it is sex that especially fascinates the lubricious Puritan mind; but the conventual reticence that thus becomes the enforced fashion in one field extends itself to all others. Our fiction, in general, is marked by an artificiality as marked as that of Eighteenth Century poetry or the later Georgian drama. The romance in it runs to set forms and stale situations; the revelation, by such a book as “The Titan,” that there may be a glamour as entrancing in the way of a conqueror of men as in the way of a youth with a maid, remains isolated and exotic. We have no first-rate political or religious novel; we have no first-rate war story; despite all our national engrossment in commercial enterprise, we have few second-rate tales of business. Romance, in American fiction, still means only a somewhat childish amorousness and sentimentality—the love affairs of Paul and Virginia, or the pale adulteries of their elders. And on the side of realism there is an almost equal vacuity and lack of veracity. The action of all the novels of the Howells school goes on within four walls of painted canvas; they begin to shock once they describe an attack of asthma or a steak burning below stairs; they never penetrate beneath the flow of social concealments and urbanities to the passions that actually move men and women to their acts, and the great forces that circumscribe and condition personality. So obvious a piece of reporting as Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” or Robert Herrick’s “Together” makes a sensation; the appearance of a “Jennie Gerhardt” or a “Hagar Revelly” brings forth a growl of astonishment and rage.
In all this dread of free inquiry, this childish skittishness in both writers and public, this dearth of courage and even of curiosity, the influence of comstockery is undoubtedly to be detected. It constitutes a sinister and ever-present menace to all men of ideas; it affrights the publisher and paralyzes the author; no one on the outside can imagine its burden as a practical concern. I am, in moments borrowed from more palatable business, the editor of an American magazine, and I thus know at first hand what the burden is. That magazine is anything but a popular one, in the current sense. It sells at a relatively high price; it contains no pictures or other baits for the childish; it is frankly addressed to a sophisticated minority. I may thus assume reasonably, I believe, that its readers are not sex-curious and itching adolescents, just as my colleague of the Atlantic Monthly may assume reasonably that his readers are not Italian immigrants. Nevertheless, as a practical editor, I find that the Comstocks, near and far, are oftener in my mind’s eye than my actual patrons. The thing I always have to decide about a manuscript offered for publication, before ever I give any thought to its artistic merit and suitability, is the question whether its publication will be permitted—not even whether it is intrinsically good or evil, moral or immoral, but whether some roving Methodist preacher, self-commissioned to keep watch on letters, will read indecency into it. Not a week passes that I do not decline some sound and honest piece of work for no other reason. I have a long list of such things by American authors, well-devised, well-imagined, well-executed, respectable as human documents and as works of art—but never to be printed in mine or any other American magazine. It includes four or five short stories of the very first rank, and the best one-act play yet done, to my knowledge, by an American. All of these pieces would go into type at once on the Continent; no sane man would think of objecting to them; they are no more obscene, to a normal adult, than his own bare legs. But they simply cannot be printed in the United States, with the law what it is and the courts what they are.
I know many other editors. All of them are in the same boat. Some of them try to get around the difficulty by pecksniffery more or less open—for example, by fastening a moral purpose upon works of art, and hawking them as uplifting.75 Others, facing the intolerable fact, yield to it with resignation. And if they didn’t? Well, if one of them didn’t, any professional moralist could go before a police magistrate, get a warrant upon a simple affidavit, raid the office of the offending editor, seize all the magazines in sight, and keep them impounded until after the disposition of the case. Editors cannot afford to take this risk. Magazines are perishable goods. Even if, after a trial has been had, they are returned, they are worthless save as waste paper. And what may be done with copies found in the actual office of publication may be done too with copies found on news-stands, and not only in one city, but in two, six, a dozen, a hundred. All the costs and burdens of the contest are on the defendant. Let him be acquitted with honour, and invited to dinner by the judge, he has yet lost his property, and the Comstock hiding behind the warrant cannot be made to pay. In this concealment, indeed, lurk many sinister things—not forgetting personal enmity and business rivalry. The actual complainant is seldom uncovered; Comstockery, taking on a semi-judicial character, throws its chartered immunity around the whole process. A hypothetical outrage? By no means. It has been perpetrated, in one American city or another, upon fully half of the magazines of general circulation published today. Its possibility sticks in the consciousness of every editor and publisher like a recurrent glycosuria.76
But though the effects of comstockery are thus abominably insane and irritating, the fact is not to be forgotten that, after all, the thing is no more than an effect itself. The fundamental causes of all the grotesque (and often half-fabulous) phenomena flowing out of it are to be sought in the habits of mind of the American people. They are, as I have shown, besotted by moral concepts, a moral engrossment, a delusion of moral infallibility. In their view of the arts they are still unable to shake off the naïve suspicion of the Fathers.77 A work of the imagination can justify itself, in their sight, only if it show a moral purpose, and that purpose must be obvious and unmistakable. Even in their slow progress toward a revolt against the ancestral Philistinism, they cling to this ethical bemusement: a new gallery of pictures is welcomed as “improving,” to hear Beethoven “makes one better.” Any questioning of the moral ideas that prevail—the principal business, it must be plain, of the novelist, the serious dramatist, the professed inquirer into human motives and acts—is received with the utmost hostility. To attempt such an enterprise is to disturb the peace—and the disturber of the peace, in the national view, quickly passes over into the downright criminal.
These symptoms, it seems to me, are only partly racial, despite the persistent survival of that third-rate English strain which shows itself so ingenuously in the colonial spirit, the sense of inferiority, the frank craving for praise from home. The race, in truth, grows mongrel, and the protest against that mongrelism only serves to drive in the fact. But a mongrel race is necessarily a race still in the stage of reaching out for culture; it has not yet formulated defensible standards; it must needs rest heavily upon the superstitions that go with inferiority. The Reformation brought Scotland among the civilized nations, but it took Scotland a century and a half to live down the Reformation.78 Dogmatism, conformity, Philistinism, the fear of rebels, the crusading spirit; these are the marks of an upstart people, uncertain of their rank in the world and even of their direction.79 A cultured European, reading a typical American critical journal, must needs conceive the United States, says H. G. Wells, as “a vain, garrulous and prosperous female of uncertain age and still more uncertain temper, with unfounded pretensions to intellectuality and an ideal of refinement of the most negative description... the Aunt Errant of Christendom.”80 There is always that blushful shyness, that timorous uncertainty, broken by sudden rages, sudden enunciations of impeccable doctrine, sudden runnings amuck. Formalism is the hall-mark of the national culture, and sins against the one are sins against the other. The American is school-mastered out of gusto, out of joy, out of innocence. He can never fathom William Blake’s notion that “the lust of the goat is also to the glory of God.” He must be correct, or, in his own phrase, he must bust.
Via trita est tutissima. The new generation, urged to curiosity and rebellion by its mounting sap, is rigorously restrained, regimented, policed. The ideal is vacuity, guilelessness, imbecility. “We are looking at this particular book,” said Comstock’s successor of “The ‘Genius,’” “from the standpoint of its harmful effect on female readers of immature mind.”81 To be curious is to be lewd; to know is to yield to fornication. Here we have the mediaeval doctrine still on its legs: a chance word may arouse “a libidinous passion” in the mind of a “modest” woman. Not only youth must be safeguarded, but also the “female,” the untrustworthy one, the temptress. “Modest,” is a euphemism; it takes laws to keep her “pure.” The “locks of chastity” rust in the Cluny Museum; in place of them we have comstockery....
But, as I have said in hymning Huneker, there is yet the munyonic consolation. Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals. We have yet no delivery, but we have at least the beginnings of a revolt, or, at all events, of a protest. We have already reached, in Howells, our Hannah More; in Clemens, our Swift; in Henry James, our Horace Walpole; in Woodberry, Robinson et al., our Cowpers, Southeys and Crabbes; perhaps we might even make a composite and call it our Johnson. We are sweating through our Eighteenth Century, our era of sentiment, our spiritual measles. Maybe a new day is not quite so far off as it seems to be, and with it we may get our Hardy, our Conrad, our Swinburne, our Thomas, our Moore, our Meredith and our Synge.
The End
Footnotes
38 American Literature, tr. by Julia Franklin; New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1915.
39 New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916.
40 The first edition for public sale did not appear until June, 1917, and in it the preface was suppressed.
41 Second edition; Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1859, xxvi.
42 Cf. The Puritan, by Owen Hatteras, The Smart Set, July, 1916; and The Puritan’s Will to Power, by Randolph S. Bourne, The Seven Arts, April, 1917.
43 An instructive account of the organization and methods of the Anti-Saloon League, a thoroughly typical Puritan engine, is to be found in Alcohol and Society, by John Koren; New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1916.
44 U.S. Rep., vol. 242, No. 7, p. 502.
45 The majority opinion, written by Mr. Justice Day, is given in U. S. Rep., vol. 242, no. 7, pp. 482-496.
46 New York, (1914).
47 I quote from page 157 of Anthony Comstock, Fighter, the official biography. On page 239 the number of his prosecutions is given as 3,646, with 2,682 convictions, which works out to but 73 per cent. He is credited with having destroyed 50 tons of books, 28,425 pounds of stereotype plates, 16,900 photographic negatives, and 3,984,063 photographs—enough to fill “sixteen freight cars, fifteen loaded with ten tons each, and the other nearly full.”
48 By Charles Gallaudet Trumbull; New York, Fleming H. Revell Co. (1913).
49 An example: “All the evil men in New York cannot harm a hair of my head, were it not the will of God. If it be His will, what right have I or any one to say aught? I am only a speck, a mite, before God, yet not a hair of my head can be harmed unless it be His will. Oh, to live, to feel, to be—Thy will be done!” (pp. 84-5). Again: “I prayed that, if my bill might not pass, I might go back to New York submissive to God’s will, feeling that it was for the best. I asked for forgiveness and asked that my bill might pass, if possible; but over and above all, that the will of God be done” (p. 6). Nevertheless, Comstock neglected no chance to apply his backstairs pressure to the members of both Houses.
50 Now, with amendments, sections 211, 212 and 245 of the United States Criminal Code.
51 Vide Anthony Comstock, Fighter, pp. 81, 85, 94.
52 Now sections 1141, 1142 and 1143 of the Penal Laws of New York.
53 U. S. vs. Casper, reported in the Twentieth Century, Feb. 11, 1892.
54 The trial court dodged the issue by directing the jury to find the prisoner not guilty on the ground of insanity. The necessary implication, of course, was that the publication complained of was actually obscene. In 1895, one Wise, of Clay Center, Kansas, sent a quotation from the Bible through the mails, and was found guilty of mailing obscene matter. See The Free Press Anthology, compiled by Theodore Schroeder; New York, Truth Seeker Pub. Co., 1909, p. 258.
55 U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 368-9 (1877).
56 Idem, 362; People vs. Muller, 96 N. Y., 411; U. S. vs. Clark, 38 Fed. Rep. 734.
57 U. S. vs. Moore, 129 Fed., 160-1 (1904).
58 U. S. vs. Heywood, judge’s charge, Boston, 1877. Quoted in U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford.
59 U. S. vs. Slenker, 32 Fed. Rep., 693; People vs. Muller, 96 N. Y. 408-414; Anti-Vice Motion Picture Co. vs. Bell, reported in the New York Law Journal, Sept. 22, 1916; Sociological Research Film Corporation vs. the City of New York, 83 Misc. 815; Steele vs. Bannon, 7 L. R. C. L. Series, 267; U. S. vs. Means, 42 Fed. Rep. 605, etc.
60 U. S. vs. Cheseman, 19 Fed. Rep., 597 (1884).
61 People vs. Muller, 96 N. Y., 413.
62 U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 368-9.
63 U. S. vs. Smith, 45 Fed. Rep. 478.
64 U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 360-1; People vs. Berry, 1 N. Y., Crim. R., 32.
65 People vs. Muller, 32 Hun., 212-215.
66 U. S. vs. Bennett, 16 Blatchford, 361.
67 U. S. vs. Moore, 16 Fed. Rep., 39; U. S. vs. Wright, 38 Fed. Rep., 106; U. S. vs. Dorsey, 40 Fed. Rep., 752; U. S. vs. Baker, 155 Mass., 287; U. S. vs. Grimm, 15 Supreme Court Rep., 472.
68 Various cases in point are cited in the Brief on Behalf of Plaintiff in Dreiser vs. John Lane Co., App. Div. 1st Dept. N. Y., 1917. I cite a few: People vs. Eastman, 188 N. Y., 478; U. S. vs. Swearingen, 161 U. S., 446; People vs. Tylkoff, 212 N. Y., 197; In the matter of Worthington Co., 62 St. Rep. 116-7; St. Hubert Guild vs. Quinn, 64 Misc., 336-341. But nearly all such decisions are in New York cases. In the Federal courts the Comstocks usually have their way.
69 St. Hubert Guild vs. Quinn, 64 Misc., 339.
70 For example, Judge Chas. L. Benedict, sitting in U. S. vs. Bennett, op. cit. This is a leading case, and the Comstocks make much of it. Nevertheless, a contemporary newspaper denounces Judge Benedict for his “intense bigotry” and alleges that “the only evidence which he permitted to be given was on the side of the prosecution.” (Port Jervis, N. Y., Evening Gazette, March 22, 1879.) Moreover, a juror in the case, Alfred A. Valentine, thought it necessary to inform the newspapers that he voted guilty only in obedience to judicial instructions.
71 Vide Newspaper Morals, by H. L. Mencken, the Atlantic Monthly, March, 1914.
72 As a fair specimen of the sort of reasoning that prevails among the consecrated brethren I offer the following extract from an argument against birth control delivered by the present active head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice before the Women’s City Club of New York, Nov. 17, 1916:
“Natural and inevitable conditions, over which we can have no control, will assert themselves wherever population becomes too dense. This has been exemplified time after time in the history of the world where over-population has been corrected by manifestations of nature or by war, flood or pestilence.... Belgium may have been regarded as an over-populated country. Is it a coincidence that, during the past two years, the territory of Belgium has been devastated and its population scattered throughout the other countries of the world?”
73 For example, the printed contract of the John Lane Co., publisher of Dreiser’s The “Genius,” contains this provision: “The author hereby guarantees... that the work... contains nothing of a scandalous, an immoral or a libelous nature.” The contract for the publication of The “Genius” was signed on July 30, 1914. The manuscript had been carefully read by representatives of the publisher, and presumably passed as not scandalous or immoral, inasmuch as the publication of a scandalous or immoral book would have exposed the publisher to prosecution. About 8,000 copies were sold under this contract. Two years later, in July, 1916, the Society for the Suppression of Vice threatened to begin a prosecution unless the book was withdrawn. It was withdrawn forthwith, and Dreiser was compelled to enter suit for a performance of the contract. The withdrawal, it will be noticed, was not in obedience to a court order, but followed a mere comstockian threat. Yet Dreiser was at once deprived of his royalties, and forced into expensive litigation. Had it not been that eminent counsel volunteered for his defence, his personal means would have been insufficient to have got him even a day in court.
74 The chief sufferers from this conflict are the authors of moving pictures. What they face at the hands of imbecile State boards of censorship is described at length by Channing Pollock in an article entitled “Swinging the Censor” in the Bulletin of the Authors’ League of America for March, 1917.
75 For example, the magazine which printed David Graham Phillips’ Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall as a serial prefaced it with a moral encomium by the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst. Later, when the novel appeared in book form, the Comstocks began an action to have it suppressed, and forced the publisher to bowdlerize it.
76 An account of a typical prosecution, arbitrary, unintelligent and disingenuous, is to be found in Sumner and Indecency, by Frank Harris, in Pearson’s Magazine for June, 1917, p. 556.
77 For further discussions of this point consult Art in America, by Aleister Crowley, The English Review, Nov., 1913; Life, Art and America, by Theodore Dreiser, The Seven Arts, Feb., 1917; and The American; His Ideas of Beauty, by H. L. Mencken, The Smart Set, Sept., 1913.
78 Vide The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. XI, p. 225.
79 The point is discussed by H. V. Routh in The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. XI, p. 290.
80 In Boon; New York, George H. Doran Co., 1915.
81 In a letter to Felix Shay, Nov. 24, 1916.