The Bounds of Decency
I
THERE is nothing in which taste changes more than in the matter of propriety. It seems incredible to us today that even so innocent an author as Charles Lamb was once driven to complain: ‘I have lived to grow into an indecent character.’ Not only, indeed, had he been told that Rosamund Gray was indelicate, but his sonnet, ‘The Gypsy’s Malison,’ was declined by the Germ on the ground that it would ‘shock all mothers.’ It was on the rejection of this sonnet that Lamb exclaimed in comic disgust: ‘Damn the age! I will write for antiquity!’
Obviously the capacity for being shocked varies, not only from age to age, but from person to person. There is, we may be sure, always an editor of the Germ alive, who needs no Rabelais or Whitman to bring the blush of startled innocence to his cheek. On the other hand it would be a mistake to think that the capacity for being shocked is a mark of the lower orders of intelligence. Men of genius have suffered the pangs of outraged propriety as have their fellows. We are accustomed, partly because of its fiction, to regard the middle of the eighteenth century as a time of comparative license of speech, but it was in that easy age that Oliver Goldsmith wrote for the Public Ledger his paper entitled ‘The Absurd Taste for Obscene and Pert Novels, such as Tristram Shandy, Ridiculed.’ ‘A bawdy blockhead,’ wrote Goldsmith in this essay, ‘often passes for a fellow of smart parts and pretensions,’ and he added: —
A prurient jest has always been found to give most pleasure to a few very old gentlemen, who, being in some measure dead to other sensations, feel the force of allusion with double force on the organs of risibility.
The author who writes in this manner is generally sure, therefore, of having the very old and the impotent among his admirers; for these he may properly be said to write, and from these he ought to expect his reward; his works being often a very proper succedaneum to cantharides, or an asafœtida pill.
An interesting problem in the psychology of decency is raised by the fact that Sterne himself does not seem to have realized that there were any just grounds for attacks on his book on the score of impropriety. He was genuinely hurt by the suggestion that Tristram Shandy was a book that no clergyman ought to have written, and we need not doubt too gravely his sincerity in protesting, like Rabelais, that his chief object in writing was ‘the hopes of doing the world good.’ Authors accused of scandal are all but unanimous in offering this defense, and of some we very reasonably suspect the good faith. But Sterne has left us evidence of the honesty of his contention in the letter in which, while at work on Tristram Shandy, he refers to his sixteen-year-old daughter and says: ‘My Lydia helps to copy for me — and my wife knits and listens as I read her chapters.’ We do not know whether Sterne allowed Lydia to copy out at random everything that he wrote, but we may presume from his readiness to associate her with Tristram Shandy that, far from acquiescing in Goldsmith’s opinion that it was a bawdy book, he seriously regarded it as a book of humor suitable for schoolgirls and for clergymen in their leisure hours.
As for Goldsmith’s criticism, it is chiefly interesting, not as the expression of a personal point of view, but because it is symptomatic of a centuriesold sense of decency and serves to remind us that, in spite of the outspokenness of certain of the novelists, the eighteenth century was as capable of being shocked by impropriety as was the age of Queen Victoria. Those who have the greatest scorn for the Victorian age speak at times as though it were the first period in history in which there was any demand for decorum in literature. Rebellious Victorians themselves sometimes imagined that they were living in such a prison of the conventions as had never existed before. Thackeray’s outcry on the subject is famous. ‘Since the author of Tom Jones was buried,’ he lamented in the preface to Pendennis, ‘no writer of fiction has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN. We must drape him, and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in Art.’ The proprieties existed, however, long before the reign of Queen Victoria, and were by no means confined, even in the most outspoken times, to the Puritans and the Jeremy Colliers.
We have only to glance casually through the records in order to discover that, though men have differed considerably as to where the bounds of decency are to be traced, they are usually agreed that the bounds of decency do somewhere exist. Even Mr. Pepys, whose own writings are in places so indecorous that an entirely unexpurgated edition of the Diary has never yet been published, was offended by the indecorousness of Dryden’s play, An Evening’s Love, or The Mock Astrologer, and, after seeing it, wrote in his diary: ‘I saw this new play with my wife yesterday, and do not like it, it being very smutty.’ Again, we find in his Diary the characteristic entry: ‘To the Strand, to my book-seller’s, and there bought an idle, rogueish French book, “L’escholle des Filles,” which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better-bound, because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it should be found.’ Similarly Fielding, whose novels were once considered so indecent that they were withheld from general circulation in some Victorian libraries, was sufficient of a puritan in his turn to denounce Aristophanes and Rabelais for having made ‘so wretched a use’ of their talents, and to declare that the object of their works seemed to be ‘to ridicule all sobriety, modesty, decency, virtue and religion out of the world.’
The further we prosecute the inquiry, the more inevitably we are forced to the conclusion that everybody is shocked by somebody or something. Swinburne shocked the Victorian age with the first series of Poems and Ballads, but he himself was shocked by some things in Shakespeare — sufficiently shocked, at least, to praise Dr. Bowdler for having expurgated the plays and made them fit reading for the young.
All this goes to prove that, the sense of decency is no pallid and unnatural growth of a too respectable age, but is an eternal and universal part of human nature. It is like the sense of right and wrong: we may differ from age to age and from person to person as to what is right and what is wrong, but every sane human being recognizes a distinction between right and wrong, and there are certain things which he will condemn his neighbors and even himself for doing.
Morals may in some respects change with climate, but there is no climate without its standard of virtue. Pull down one moral standard, and you will find yourself compelled to set up another in its place. And some standard of decency is equally essential. We can no more live a full and free life without it than without morals or manners. In ordinary affairs we all accept this as obvious. We should regard it as indecent nowadays to go about with black finger nails, or to become verminous through abstinence from bathing, or to spit in a church. Most people would even look on it as indecent for a man to walk naked along the street. And there are a number of habits unnecessary to mention which create among civilized people universal disgust.
Even those who denounce the decencies in literature demand some kind of decency in the conduct of their friends. For everyone, be he ever so little fastidious, is capable of disgust. Disgust is merely the other side of good taste, and without it we should never have had civilization or the arts, nor could we continue to enjoy them.
II
This is so obvious that it would not be worth repeating if it were not for the fact that certain writers of our own time have made a virtue of being disgusting and their work has been praised by admirers as though it were extending the territories of literature.
They go on the assumption that there is nothing that a man can do that is not fit to be written about, and that it is the business of the artist, not to make a selection of the facts of life for an imaginative purpose, but to guide his readers into every obscene nook and corner with a courageous indifference to everything that offends the senses, both physical and moral.
If literature were a chaotic catalogue of slimy and grimy things, and not an imaginative reconstruction of life in its most interesting aspects, there might be something to be said for this view. But literature depends on careful selection and omission as much as does the work of a good gardener. No good gardener will lead you to his beds and point out boastfully as his supreme achievement a wilderness of weeds, slugs, and leatherjackets. The ultimate test of literature is the quality of its flowers, or rather of its flowers and its fruits. And the greatest writers seem to have realized instinctively that these cannot be produced in perfection until the weeds, the slugs, and the leatherjackets have been to some extent eliminated. Homer is as instinctively decent as he is instinctively frank, d^schylus is food for boys in their teens. And you will find as a rule that the greater the classic is, the less it stands in need of expurgation ‘virginibus puerisque,’ and the less it suffers from such expurgation if this happens to be made. The more ‘minor’ the classic is, the more likely it is to be indecent. There is more indecency in Petronius than in all the plays of Molière.
It would be absurd, of course, to pretend that all the greatest writers have observed the decorum required in a Victorian drawing-room, or to deny that many of them have gayly transgressed the bounds of decency. Man is naturally Rabelaisian in his comedy, and the comic writers contain many a passage likely to shock an oldfashioned clergyman. Even in comedy, however, genius only came to flower as the result of an escape into comparative decency. Aristotle makes this point emphatically in the Ethics. ‘There is a difference,’ he says, ‘between the jocularity of the gentleman and that of the vulgarian. . . . The difference may be seen by comparing the old and the modern comedies; the earlier dramatists found their fun in obscenity, the moderns prefer innuendo which marks a great advance in decorum.'
We need not pause to inquire what exactly Aristotle meant by ‘innuendo,’ — hyponoia, the word he used, is said by the scholarly not to convey the unpleasant shade of meaning that ‘innuendo’ conveys to the modern reader, — but it is clear that he regarded comedy as having grown to perfection as a result of its having broken free from its original obsession with obscenity. In this he may have intended to disparage the humor of Aristophanes in comparison with the more subtle humor of his successors; but it is equally true that, in the hands of Aristophanes, Greek comedy, which appears to have been the child and nursling of obscenity, escaped from its mother’s obscene apron strings to roam freely over life, politics, and literature. The comedies of Aristophanes survive to-day, indeed, not because of their obscenity, though their obscenity is often extremely amusing, but because they contain so much more than obscenity — a comic vision of the world as a poet of genius saw it.
It is possible, however, to enjoy the great comic literature of the past in its frequently Fescennine license and yet to doubt whether we should gain as much as we should lose if we attempted to recover that license. Manners have changed, and what Aristophanes could say without offense to the citizens of Athens could not always be said without offense to the citizens of London or New York. It is not that we have got beyond Aristophanes in genius and virtue, but that the conventions of speech are different in America and in England from the conventions that were accepted in Athens, and that to-day the writers are addressing a mixed general audience such as, I imagine, did not exist in the ancient world.
No sensitive writer can fail to be conscious of his audience. In private life there are things that a man will say in the presence of men and that he would not say in the presence of children. Most of those who champion the artist’s right to say anything and everything ignore the fact of this enlargement of the audience. But the little writer is likelier to ignore it than the great. Sir Walter Scott and even Dumas certainly acknowledged it, and claimed it as a virtue that they had respected the decencies in their writings; and Anthony Trollope, who is at last being generally admitted into the circle of the enduring writers, asks in his Autobiography, after referring to six of the leading nineteenth-century novelists: ‘Can any one by search through the works of the six great English novelists I have named, find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest?’
We may, if we please, dismiss all this as prudery and priggishness, but he would be a bold perverter of words who affixed the word ‘prig’ to authors at once so genial and so virile as Scott and Trollope. They were guilty, indeed, of nothing worse than good sense — the good sense to recognize the emergence of a great mixed audience and their responsibility to it.
Literary manners have altered, however, not only as a result of the enlargement of the audience, — though that was bound to have an important effect on literature, — but as a result of changes in the manners and customs of everyday life. The increase of privacy, the improvement of sanitation, the growing custom of cleanliness both of habits and of the body, and the abolition of many gross usages, have resulted in making many things that once were the comic contretemps of ordinary life seem now merely offensive irrelevancies. Probably improved sanitation has had more influence on literary manners than anyone yet suspects. You will notice that what its enemies call prudery is most general in countries in which sanitation has made the greatest progress. If Rabelais were to return as an Englishman or an American to-day, he would probably find himself blushing like a Victorian girl at having made some of his own jokes. This is not to belittle the jokes of Rabelais, but merely to recognize that the manners and conventions that were the natural soil of many of those jokes no longer exist to-day.
Decency, it need hardly be said, belongs for the most part to the realm of manners rather than of morals. Sir Thomas More and Luther jested in a fashion that would be accounted indecent by modern conventions, but no intelligent man would think of making use of the fact as an argument against the excellence of their characters. It is true that Chaucer — if we accept the prayer at the end of ‘The Parson’s Tale’ as genuine—prayed near his death for divine forgiveness for having written The Canterbury Tales, but, when he expressed his sorrow for having written ‘many a song and many a lecherous lay,’ it is likely that he was thinking of his narratives of love — ‘endytings of worldly vanities’ — at least as much as of the indecorous situations and speech in his comic poems. Certainly taste has changed to such a point that it is almost impossible to conceive a modern poet of genius who could write a poem in the happy, gross vein of ‘The Miller’s Tale.’
It is not that the moderns are either better men or better poets than Chaucer. It is simply that the genius of the age has changed its manners, and that manners that were natural in Chaucer’s age would be artificial in this. Poetry, while it remains fundamentally the same, has altered its clothes, and it would be idle affectation to attempt to return to the ancient garments. Those who love Chaucer most would be the last people to think of adopting in their writings the manners of the fourteenth century.
And much the same is true of Rabelais. The greatest disciples of Rabelais who are writing to-day are as chaste in phrase as Louisa M. Alcott. We even find the modern Rabelaisian enthusiast solemnly discussing such things as the relation of Rabelais to Biblical studies! (This, I fancy, would have amused Rabelais.) If the genius of Rabelais has descended to any modern author, it is not to the tittering imitators of his grossness, but to such a writer as Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who, instead of copying the mud on Rabelais’s shoes, has brought back the soul of Rabelais into a twentieth-century body of good prose.
This is not to pretend that the modern intelligent man in all his moods talks like a character in Daisy in the Field. But, as the proverb says, there is a time for everything, and no one, however much he may delight in sitting in Rabelais’s easy-chair among his fellow Rabelaisians, would, unless he were a fool, make it a principle to force Rabelaisian conversation on a company in which the code of manners was opposed to it. After all, the chief object of comedy is to amuse and not merely to shock. If you are dining with Catholics, you do not indulge in ribald jests about the Pope. If you are dining with Christians of any creed, there are certain blasphemous levities of speech which, however much you may be inclined to them, you will avoid. It is all a matter of good manners, and in such things the sensitive—and all good artists are sensitive — find it easy to conform.
There is, of course, no clear line that can be permanently drawn between decency and indecency. One age may be so delicate that — though it is difficult to believe this — it will shrink from mentioning legs and will even speak of the ‘limb’ of a chicken. Another age will speak freely of every natural function. Every age probably tends either to an excess of refinement or to an excess of outspokenness. And the more extreme is the swing of the pendulum in one direction, the more extreme is the succeeding swing of the pendulum in the other. The only thing we can be sure of with regard to literature is that, in whatever direction the pendulum swings, great literature recovers and survives. Miss Austen is as sure of immortality as Rabelais, Charles Lamb as Montaigne, Dickens as Chaucer. No writer ever survived in the general love of mankind either because of his propriety or because of his impropriety. Sir Walter Raleigh once pointed out that there were many writers of Boccaccio’s age who were more indecent than he, and that nevertheless they had been forgotten; and there are many writers to-day as decent as Charles Garvice, and they too will be forgotten.
Literature survives because of its morals rather than because of its manners — and by its morals I mean its fidelity to the author’s vision of life, his sympathy with and understanding of his fellow creatures, and its service to an ideal that cannot be corrupted by money or applause, though the artist as much as any other man likes to have as much as possible of both. Talent is purchasable, but genius is not. There is no great book in literature which is not essentially the book of an honest man — a book of good faith. We realize this whether we are reading Mr. Pepys’s secret confessions of his peccadilloes or the austere moralizings of Marcus Aurelius.
III
Even when we have accepted this fundamental truth of criticism, however, we have not yet settled the question whether, on the whole, literature gains from the taboos of decency or whether it is hampered and devitalized by them. There are critics who maintain that certain modern writers, in describing the progress of abnormal passions, have cultivated new and beautiful fields of literature in what was forbidden land to the Victorian novelists. They also regard Mr. James Joyce as having performed a service to truth in having dragged into the light of day thoughts and words that the ordinary adult man would not utter except in a delirium.
That, indeed, is the odd thing about the modern revolt against the oldfashioned notions of decency. It began in the nineteenth century as a kind of feverish religion, and, instead of being a defense of laughter against the laughterless, it nowadays invites the imagination into a sanctuary of gloom. It is not only serious: it is solemn. There is nothing Rabelaisian or hilarious about it. There are still, indeed, writers who treat the physical life of man in the ancient comic spirit, though without the ancient gusto; but one of the eminent characteristics of most of the modern adherents of ‘outspoken’ literature is their laughterless enthusiasm and devotional awe. It is as though they seriously believed that it had been left to them to make the grand discovery of sex, both in its normal and in its abnormal manifestations, for the first time — that their ancestors, while marrying and bringing up families, had remained completely ignorant of sex, either through stupidity or as a result of not having the courage to open their eyes and face the facts. Everything that Freud and the psychoanalysts announce about sex they regard as though it were a revelation from Heaven.
It is as if a new sun had arisen and disclosed continents unknown to Shakespeare and the writers of old time. Shakespeare did not know that Hamlet was in love with his mother and had been homicidally jealous of his father, but the young disciples of Freud know. Dickens, when he wrote David Copperfield, thought that Mr. Dick was only an innocent eccentric, but the Freudian knows, as a result of reading one of the latest books on psychoanalysis, that Mr. Dick was really a case of sexual aberration. I do not mean to suggest that psychoanalysis is the parent of all the earnestly sexual fiction of to-day, but undoubtedly it has loosed on the world a flood of crazy theories about sex that has swept a great many writers and readers into morasses that their ancestors instinctively avoided. It is important that psychologists and doctors should examine these theories carefully, sifting the true from the false, and giving the former its due and comparatively obscure place in the crowded paradox of human life. But I have never yet seen any association between psychoanalysis and literature that was not injurious to literature. This, indeed, is bound to be so, since, like any other theory that is carried too far, psychoanalysis is a bed of Procrustes into which men and women as we know them cannot be fitted without mutilation. We have only to look round among the people we know most intimately to realize that there is not one thing in a hundred that make them interesting human beings on which a psychoanalyst could throw the faintest glimmer of candlelight.
And the increasing absorption of novelists in the ‘sexual’ life of man is as likely to be barren in literary results. There is nothing that fascinates the curiosity, especially of the adolescent, more than sex, and there is no kind of curiosity that provides less food for the imagination. Here, perhaps, it is important to define one’s terms. By curiosity about sex I mean curiosity, not about men and women and their tragic and comic relations, but about their animal functions. Obviously, in a broad sense, everybody must be curious about sex. In this sense the poet, the novelist, and the moralist, as well as the most ordinary man, must be profoundly interested in it. There is all the difference in the world, however, between the interest of Homer in Helen and the Peeping Tom curiosity of the adolescent. Homer did not look at life through puritanical eyes, but he saw that the interesting thing about Helen was not what some people nowadays call her ‘sex life,’ but was her beauty and the long train of tragedy and war that followed from Paris’s love of her.
The great artists, like the great moralists, do not dwell on the descriptions of adultery, but on its consequences. Their theme is a man or a woman in the toils of destiny, and not the animal functions; and, if anyone replies that for some men and women the animal functions are themselves destiny, all one can say in reply is that the greatest writers have, in choosing their heroes and heroines, avoided characters of so limited an interest.
Take any of the great love stories of the world, — the story of Paris and Helen, of Antony and Cleopatra, of Tristram and Iseult, of Paolo and Francesca, — and everywhere you will find the story, not of a ‘sex life,’ but of the fate of a noble soul. Nowhere is there a description of commonplace sexual adventures. The lovers in all cases bear more resemblance to betrothed or married lovers on whom a doom has fallen than to the vaguely amorous nonentities who pop ulate so many modern novels. The truth is, passion is interesting to the imagination only when it is more than physical passion and absorbs the whole being — when it is all but, in the ancient phrase, faithful unto death and for its sake there is no suffering too great to be endured.
Mr. George Moore once said that children are born of the marriage, stories of the adulterous, bed. It is an epigram that stops a long way short of the truth. Ordinary adultery has given us no great stories. It is the sufferings of lovers, their fidelity, and their desperate struggle in the hands of destiny, that fit them to be immortal figures in literature. The amours of uninteresting people are no more interesting in the world of the imagination than their meals or the symptoms of their illnesses. A writer cannot make an uninteresting person interesting in the literary sense merely by giving him a number of sexual adventures. One sexual adventure is very like another, and in the end even Paul Pry will complain of the monotony.
That is, I think, one of the surest safeguards against pornography. Normal intelligent people with any breadth of interest in life simply get tired of it. In comic pornography, indecency is a kind of sauce piquante which becomes infinitely wearisome as soon as we realize that the flavor is, as it is in nine cases out of ten, merely a means of concealing the flavorlessness of the wit and humor. In serious pornography it is a strong spice which as a rule is used to disguise the poor quality of the dish to which it is added. It is, to a large part of the present generation, something of a novelty in literature, and to many people it is still as exciting as a new dance or a new fashion in clothes. Let it become more general, however, and it will gradually seem as unattractive as if everybody were to give up washing or to take to going about with grimy hands and faces.
There is much the same argument for cleanliness of the mind as for cleanliness of the body. The plain fact is that most people, given the chance, enjoy being clean, and that they feel more comfortable in the company of people who are clean than in the company of people who are not. And, when once the habit of cleanliness had been established, no one would pay much attention to a man who argued: ‘Greater ages than ours have been ages of dirt. Shakespeare never used a toothbrush: why should I? Villon was probably verminous: why should n’t I be?’ We should say to him, if we said anything, ‘Can you imitate Shakespeare’s genius, or only his teeth? Have you suffered like Villon and turned your sufferings into music like his, or do you forget that there were millions of verminous men in the Middle Ages, but only one Villon?’
There are some things, indeed, to which the world, if it remains reasonably sane, will never go back. It will never abandon soap for vermin, and it will never return to the unsanitary conditions of Rabelais’s day in literature any more than in ordinary life.
If there is a danger of the world’s doing so, it lies, perhaps, in our making a fetish of cleanliness. Cleanliness is a convenience, as filth is an inconvenience, and it is chiefly that. Whoever said that it was next to godliness was neither a Christian nor a philosopher. A kind of negative cleanliness that becomes self-righteous as though it were a rival of the supreme virtues is scarcely less offensive than its opposite. Who would praise whited sepulchres, and who does not know that it is possible for a man to take a bath every morning and yet not to possess a single admirable quality? Similarly in literature there are hundreds of clean books that make the sensitive young impatient of cleanliness— books that are nambypamby, empty-headed, empty-hearted falsifications. Imaginative readers are quick to detect the difference between truth and imposture, and they prefer the truth told grossly by Montaigne to shallow lies told by professional optimists.
At the same time, it is sometimes forgotten nowadays that truth is not merely an absence of reticence, and that a filthy lie is just as much a lie as a clean lie. The truth of the artist is widely different from the truth of the doctor or farmer or the man not engaged in the arts who looks at the world through the glasses of a particular trade or profession. The doctor, in his capacity of doctor, is bound to look on a human being largely as an assemblage of organs; and, if he were examining Julius Ca;sar himself, it would be his duty to take more note of the condition of Cæsar’s stomach than of Casar’s conquests. His report would be the truth about Cæsar as the doctor professionally sees it, but Shakespeare can tell us infinitely greater truth about Cæsar, while ignoring what may be called the doctor’s truth. Shakespeare knew perfectly well that Cæsar had a stomach, but he had no occasion to draw attention to it. Similarly, Wordsworth in his vision of the countryside ignores the manure that it would be criminal in a farmer cultivating his fields to forget. It is not that Wordsworth did not know about manure or that, in a conversation with a farmer, he would have shrunk from freely discussing the manuring of crops; but as a poet he was more interested in lambs and green linnets and daffodils.
Genius of any kind, whether in an art or in a profession or in a trade, is, it seems to me, largely the power to concentrate on relevant facts and to order them to a large purpose. Hence the writer of genius must give us a very much purified account of his vision of the world — an account purified, so far as it is possible, from everything irrelevant, whether it is decent or indecent. There are realists, on the other hand, who seem to think that, if only a fact is indecent, it ceases to be irrelevant. Incapable of delight, they find a perverted substitute for delight in disgust. It is true that, if it is their object to preach a gospel of disgust, their indecencies may be relevant to their propaganda; but in that case they must be content to be judged, not as artists, but as preachers of a gospel that seems to most people false.
I do not mean to suggest that it is impossible for a great writer to adhere to the gospel of disgust with life in general. But, if he cannot impart his vision of disgust in such a way as to afford more delight than disgust to his fellow creatures, his writings have no place in literature. The pessimism of Schopenhauer and Baudelaire, like the cynicism of La Rochefoucauld, is beautiful in its expression. The truth is, a writer of great intellect and imagination writes instinctively in obedience to certain laws of beauty which themselves overlap the ultimate laws of decency and of delight. We may regard his vision as evil and his creed as poisonous, and may believe that no man inspired by such a creed and vision has ever ascended to the highest peaks of literature; but, as we read his masterpieces, we have no sense of the dull tedium of disgust. It is the men of lesser talents — the men of half-genius and the men of no genius at all, but of abnormal vanity — who repel us with their deliberate indecorum. They are epicures of the unsavory — hosts who, in order to be original, dispense titbits of offal to their guests. They take pleasure in defiling life, and are scandalmongers about the soul and body of man.
IV
Writers, of course, like other men, are commonly inspired by mixed motives, and it is seldom that a writer’s only motive is a passion for indecency. Some of the Restoration dramatists almost achieved this single-mindedness, and the general oblivion into which their works have fallen is the inevitable reward of the single-minded bore in literature. If a number of modern writers outrage the decencies, however, it is usually only in patches. Some of them are merely escaped puritans. They are so smug and so selfsatisfied as they dabble in their mud pies that you think of them as cracked and crazy little Jack Horners. They have none of the generous joviality and superabundant spirits of the great outragers of the decencies. Their error is the result, not of an excess, but of a deficiency, of vitality. Other writers of the kind are, as Stevenson said of Zola, ‘diseased anyway and blackhearted and fundamentally at enmity with joy.’ We can love almost any author who enjoys life, or even any noble author who does not enjoy it, but an author who can give us nothing but prying and joyless excursions into mud is a predestined bore, and literature will have none of him.
It would, I admit, be as absurd as it would be unjust to speak of Zola and certain other writers who have shocked the respectable as though they were obscene and nothing more. Zola in some of his novels all but achieved greatness, and there are one or two living writers with comparable preoccupations to whom, one feels, the divine gift of genius was offered at their cradles. The question at issue is not whether Zola and those others are worthless writers, but whether they may not have lost vastly more than they have gained by refusing to recognize the ordinary taboos of decency. I for one am convinced that they have lost immeasurably.
The artist, after all, is a creator of life in its infinite variety. In him the whole range of human emotion is reborn for us. If he gives us disgust, it must be only as the shadow of our raptures. He takes us through child’s play and April and sunshine, through friendship and love that challenges the grave and seems even in death to defeat it, through all the conflicts of ambition, greed, and noble disinterestedness, through laughter, tears, and the medicinal wisdom that makes laughter a release into charity, and tears a release into faith and hope, and so on finally to the calm sunset peace of Prospero.
If the artist is preoccupied with the indecent, he has not that free imagination out of which the greatest and most beautiful figures of literature have been born. He has become the slave of a fixed idea, and his imagination enjoys about as much liberty as the caged eagles on the Roman Capitol. If you want to see evidence of this, you have only to look at English lyric poetry. No Rochester, or man of Rochester’s mood and mind, has ever soared to those heights to which Wordsworth and the great lyric poets have soared. I doubt, indeed, if a selection of the thousand greatest lyrics in the English language, made on purely æsthetic grounds, would contain half a dozen lyrics that would be gravely questioned on grounds of decency by a committee of bishops.
Much of the indecency of the present day, I fancy, is due to a feeling that the soil of literature is exhausted and that we can enrich it by digging deeper and working in the subsoil. Writers who take this view forget, unfortunately, that when you are digging a garden, while you are advised to dig deep, you are warned on no account to bring the subsoil to the surface. The subsoil is barren, and the great artists, if they refrained from bringing it to the surface, did so because they knew very well that nothing would grow in it. In ordinary life, if we buried the soil under the subsoil, we should find ourselves starving. Mr. Joyce seems to me to have buried the soil under the subsoil in Ulysses, and to have produced a vast waste in which the imagination starves.
There are things that Nature never meant us to drag into the light. Just as the gardener must dig down to the subsoil and break it up with his fork, so the artist may venture as deep as he will with his curiosity, but he must be careful to leave hidden what was meant to be hidden and to cultivate the same exuberant earth that was cultivated by the great artists before him.
The instinct of shame and reticence, in spite of its many absurd manifestations, was implanted in him by Nature as a means of enabling him to distinguish between what was worth his doing and what was not. It goes deeper than superstition, though it has often been accompanied by superstition, and we owe to a hundred taboos our rise out of savagery, the progress of human society, and the development of the arts. For every great work of art is a masterpiece of suppression no less than of expression. Homer and Shakespeare knew a great deal about the animal life of man and the quagmires of the human imagination that they were not too great prudes but too great artists to put into writing.
V
As to where the bounds of decency are to be fixed, it is impossible to lay down an absolute rule. All we can be sure of is that decorum of one sort or another is as essential to the arts as it is to social life, and that without it the arts tend to sink into a monotony of triviality or feverishness. Rabelais and Sterne may be cited as witness on the other side, and undoubtedly the laws of decorum are looser in comic than in more solemn writing; but even of Rabelais Coleridge could say, as could be said of few of the supremely indecorous authors: ‘I could write a treatise in praise of the moral elevation of Rabelais’s work which would make the Church stare and the Conventicle groan, and yet would be truth and nothing but truth.’
To-day, however, it is, as I have suggested, not the comic writers, but the writers who never make a joke, who seem oftenest to transgress the bounds of decency; and it would be difficult to write a treatise in praise of their moral elevation.
Some of them have imaginations that can scarcely rise above the physical side of sex, and any uninteresting nobody making love to any other uninteresting nobody is more fascinating to them than Helen on the walls of Troy or the agony of Lear beside the dead Cordelia. They are more interested in love affairs than in love, and, in opposition to the old Sunday-school tracts, write what might be described as Witches’-Sabbath-school tracts. They too, however, have their own reticence. They too, like Homer and Shakespeare, leave things out; they leave out, indeed, just those things that Shakespeare and Homer thought important. It is as though they were trying to construct novels from the refuseheaps of the artists of the past. But, after all, if a novelist can move us neither to tears nor to laughter, it does not very much matter whether he is indecent or not, since he has already written his epitaph with his signature on the title-page. And, if he can move us to tears and laughter, we shall take him to our hearts, however he may offend the conventions of the hour.
If a defense of decency in literature is necessary, it is not in order to denounce this or that writer, but in order to keep alive in a generation of fluctuating thought and opinion a sense of the eternal values in the arts. Readers too easily allow themselves to be herded into opposing camps of puritans and antipuritans, and in the result we often find the antipuritans, in the heat and enthusiasm of battle, trying to foist upon us as a work of exalted genius some third-rate book that has very little merit except that it is likely to shock the pious. The puritans, to do them justice, are less concerned to prove that a book with the morals of which they agree is great literature. They are content to enjoy a bad book of a morally good kind in the same illiterate mood in which most of us enjoy detective stories.
On the whole, there seems to be no necessity to join either of the camps. Literature needs to be defended alike against the deadly decorum of the extreme puritans and the equally deadly indecorum of the extreme antipuritans. But that a profound and noble decorum is all but an essential of great modern literature I am convinced. It was not altogether by accident that the most decorous age in English history produced the greatest novelist in English literature — Charles Dickens.