Part 8

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.

§ 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.

At all events, those who believe the artist has any "rights" are in the negligible minority. I hardly need to explain why the bashaws of such orgiastic societies have embattled back of them the complacent muddle-headedness of that "solid" upper middle-class which pays pew-rent, and which from the first has rather fretfully resented any talk about æsthetics. Dr. Paul E. More,[6] in one of the letters relative to the _Jurgen_ imbroglio, has nicely summed up this popular point of view: "I am not at all in sympathy with a group of writers who would take any protest against the Society as a justification of what they are pleased to call art. The harm done by the Society seems to me very slight, whereas the harm done by the self-styled artist may be very great."

Now that is really the popular and, therefore, the most exalted moral attitude. For the morality of a republic is, after all, a matter of elementary arithmetic: and one counts the ballots (sometimes, here and there, it is said, quite honestly) in order to distinguish between right and wrong, because the voice of the people is notoriously the voice of God. And time and again this divine orality has proclaimed that the American peerage of nature's noblemen does not want to be bothered with any nonsense about literature and art: for the reasons, first, that such fripperies play no part in honest poll-tax-payers' lives; and, second, that in very much the manner of this Dr. More, our reputable citizenry--obscurely and inarticulately, but none the less genuinely,--resents the impudence of "self-styled artists" who presume to know more than their betters about "what they are pleased to call art."

And here, I must protest, our more reputable citizens are wholly in the right. I think they feel, without ever quite perceiving, the innumerous dangers, for the reputable, which lurk in this continual playing with piety and common-sense. The artist, they dimly feel, is up to something which--somehow--threatens them and their security: and in this, I repeat, they are wholly right. If art were not very cruelly restrained it would empoison and wreck all civilizations, not here to speak of reordering heaven. But there is no need to worry, because art, as it happens, is always, and probably always will be, just thus restrained, by the inefficiency of the artist. So art may never ruin America, after all.

It seems, in any case, eminently appropriate that in our National Hall of Statuary, along with such world-famous statesmen and shapers of human destiny as Jacob Collamer, S.J. Kirkwood and George L. Shoup, the sole representative of our art and letters should to-day be General Lew Wallace; for _Ben-Hur_ is really the perfected expression of the best-thought-of American ideals in literature. And it is equally appropriate, I like to think, that, when judged by these ideals, _Jurgen_ and all the rest of the Biography should be decreed "offensive, and lascivious, and lewd, and indecent...."

Well! a good deal of this I said (over and over again) before the courts decided that _Jurgen_ had been incarcerated for twenty-one months, as an "indecent" book, through error.... And I have not anything to add or to retract. Still, the affair has left me, I cannot but suspect, with a bias against the Puritan tradition and its adherents. I feel, indeed, that much of what I have just written down does not over-cloyingly reek of loving-kindness toward--in Swinburne's phrase,--"the barbarian sect from whose inherited and infectious tyranny this nation is as yet imperfectly delivered." So I dismiss the Puritans and their latter-day flowering in Henry Adams, in favor of a noticeably different person. I turn instead to M. Anatole France, as affording a clear illustration of the point I have in mind; and as perfectly illustrating my point as to the most diverting of all themes which thought can play with, in _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_.

§ 48

What one first notes about _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_, as I have elsewhere observed, is the fact that in this ironic and subtle book is presented a "story" which is remarkable for its innocence of subtlety and irony. Abridge the "plot" into a synopsis, and you will find your digest to be what is manifestly the outline of a straightforward, plumed romance by the elder Dumas.

Indeed, Dumas would have handled to a nicety the "strange surprising adventures" of Jacques Tournebroche, if only Dumas had ever thought to have his collaborators write this brisk tale, wherein d'Astarac and Tournebroche and Mosaïde display, even now, a noticeable something in common with the Balsamo and Gilbert and Althotas of the _Mémoires d'un Médicin_. One foresees, to be sure, that, with the twin-girthed Creole for guide, M. Jérôme Coignard would have waddled into our affections not quite as we know him, but with somewhat more of a fraternal resemblance to the Dom Gorenflot of _La Dame de Monsoreau_ and _Les Quarante-Cinq_; and that the blood of the abbé's deathwound could never have bedewed the book's final pages, in the teeth of Dumas' economic unwillingness ever to despatch any character who could be used in a sequel.

And one thinks rather kindlily of the _Rôtisserie_ as Dumas would have equipped it.... Yes, in reading this book, it is the most facile and least avoidable of mental exercises to prefigure how excellently Dumas would have contrived this book,--somewhat as in the reading of Mr. Joseph Conrad's novels a many of us are haunted by the sense that the Conrad "story" is, in its essential beams and stanchions, the sort of thing which W. Clark Russell used to put together, in a rather different way, for our illicit perusal. Whereby I only mean that such seafaring was illicit in those aureate days when, Cleveland being consul for the second time, your geography figured as the screen of fictive reading-matter during school hours.

One need not say that here is no question, in either case, of "imitation," far less of "plagiarism"; nor need one, surely, point out the impossibility of anybody's ever mistaking the _Rôtisserie_ for a novel by Alexandre Dumas. Ere Homer's eyesight began not to be what it had been, the fact was noted by the observant Chian, that very few sane architects commence an edifice by planting and rearing the oaks which are to compose its beams and stanchions. You take over all such supplies ready hewn, and choose by preference time-seasoned timber. Since Homer's prime a host of other great creative writers have recognized this axiom when they too began to build: and "originality" has by ordinary been, like chess and democracy, a Mecca for little minds.

Besides, there is the vast difference that M. Anatole France has introduced into the Dumas theatre some pre-eminently un-Dumas-like stage-business: the characters, between assignations and combats, toy amorously with ideas. That is the difference which at a stroke dissevers them from any helter-skelter character in Dumas as utterly as from any of our clearest thinkers in office.

It is this toying, this series of mental amourettes, which incommunicably "makes the difference" in almost all the volumes of M. France familiar to me; but our affair is with this one story. Now in this vivid book we have our fill of color and animation and gallant strangenesses, and a stir of characters who impress us as living with a poignancy unmastered as yet by anybody's associates in flesh and blood. We have, in brief, all that Dumas could ever offer, here utilized not to make drama but background, all being woven into a bright undulating tapestry behind an erudite and battered figure,--a figure of odd medleys, in which the erudition is combined with much of Autolycus, and the unkemptness with something of à Kempis. For what one remembers of the _Rôtisserie_ is l'Abbé Jérôme Coignard; and what one remembers, ultimately, about Coignard is not his crowded career, however opulent in larcenous and lectual escapades and fisticuffs and broached wineflasks, but his religious meditations, wherein a merry heart does, quite actually, go all the way.

Coignard I take to be a peculiarly rare type of man (there is no female of this species), the type that is genuinely interested in religion. In that his mind is actually at grapple with the most diverting of all themes, he stands apart. He halves little with the staid majority of us who sociably contract our sacred tenets from our neighbors like a sort of theological measles. He halves nothing whatever with our more earnest-minded juniors who--perennially discovering that all religions thus far put to the test of nominal practise have, whatever their paradisial entrée, resulted in a deplorable earthly hash,--perennially run yelping into the shrill agnosticism which believes only that one's neighbors should not be permitted to believe in anything.

The creed of Coignard is more urbane: "Always bear in mind that a sound intelligence rejects everything that is contrary to reason, except in matters of faith, where it is necessary to believe blindly." Your opinions are thus all-important, your physical conduct is largely a matter of taste, in a philosophy which ranks affairs of the mind immeasurably above the gross accidents of matter. Indeed, man can win to heaven only through repentance, and the initial step toward repentance is to do something to repent of. There is no flaw in this logic, and in its clear lighting such abrogations of parochial and transitory human laws as may be suggested by reason, and the consciousness that nobody is looking, take on the aspect of divinely appointed duties.

§ 49

Some dullard may here object that M. France could not himself have believed all this while writing the book, and that it was with an ironic glitter in his ink he recorded these dicta. To which the obvious answer would be that M. France (again, like all great creative writers) is an ephemeral and negligible person beside his more permanent puppets; and that, moreover, to reason thus is, it may be precipitately, to disparage the plumage of birds on the ground that an egg has no feathers.... Whatever M. France may have believed, our concern is here with the conviction of M. Coignard that his religion is all-important and all-significant. And I find it curious to observe how unerringly the abbé's thoughts aspire, from no matter what remote and low-lying starting point, to the loftiest niceties of religion and the high thin atmosphere of ethics. Sauce spilt upon his collar is but a reminder of the influence of clothes upon our moral being, and of how terrifyingly is the destiny of each person's soul dependent upon such trifles; a glass of light white wine leads, not, as we are nowadays taught to believe, to instant ruin, but to edifying considerations of the life and glory of St. Peter; and a pack of cards suggests, straightway, intransigent fine points of martyrology. Always this churchman's thoughts deflect to the most interesting of themes, to the relationship between God and His children, and what familiary etiquette may be necessary to preserve the relationship unstrained. These problems alone engross Coignard unfailingly, even when the philosopher has had the ill luck to fall simultaneously into drunkenness and a public fountain; and retains so notably his composure between the opposed assaults of fluidic unfriends.

What, though, is found the outcome of this philosophy, appears a question to be answered with wariness of empiricism. None can deny that Coignard says, when he lies dying: "My son, reject, along with the example I gave you, the maxims which I may have proposed to you during my period of life-long folly. Do not listen to those who, like myself, subtilize over good and evil." Yet this is just one low-spirited moment, as set against the preceding fifty-two high-hearted years. And the utterance wrung forth by this moment is, after all, merely that sentiment which seems the inevitable bedfellow of the moribund,--"Were I to have my life over again, I would live differently." The sentiment is familiar and venerable, but its truthfulness has not yet been attested.

To the considerate, therefore, it may appear expedient to dismiss Coignard's trite winding-up of a half-century of splendid talking, as just the infelicitous outcropping, in the dying man's enfeebled condition, of an hereditary foible. And when moralizing would approach an admonitory forefinger to the point that Coignard's manner of living brought him to die haphazardly, among preoccupied strangers at a casual wayside inn, you do, there is no questioning it, recall that a more generally applauded manner of living has been known to result in a more competently arranged-for demise, under the best churchly and legal auspices, through the rigors of crucifixion.