STRAY LEAVES

Southland Times, Issue 20831, 20 July 1929, Page 13

STRAY LEAVES

“ARS GRATIA ARTIS’’

(By

“Epicurus.”)

The question of literary censorship is again to the fore. Sir William Joynson Hicks (“Jicks” as he is rather contemptuously called in England) made himself particularly unpopular in England which proved itself not quite as amenable to an Arbiter Morum as its neighbour across the Atlantic, when he publicly made "DORA” his mistress. That personage, bearing unmistakeable evidence of the nervous strain of the war years, found that her dicta were not accepted with as much celerity as during the years of the great conflict when every heart was imbued with the martyr’s spirit. Those who were willing to go without cigarettes after eight o’clock in the knowledge that all was for the good of a suffering country do not see so clearly now the need for such an arbitary rule. One of Jick’s most prominent moves was the establishment of a system of unintelligent censorship of literature. Police Court magistrates were made the final judges of a book’s literary merit if any crank took it into his head to lay an information against a particular book.

Two books which almost all authorities admit were undeserving scapegoats were “The Well of Loneliness” and “Pansies,” both the productions of acknowledged | literary figures and obviously books that were written for the “intelligentsia” I amongst whom they would have done no ! harm. As it is, after being banned, the first was published in France and is now enjoying a huge vogue amongst a different class of readers altogether and a class which procures the book merely for a morbid purpose. That same effect is always obtained when a book is banned, and against the desires of the writers the book becomes immediately pornographic in purpose. The banning of books is either done because they expound theories that are anti-social or because the language or the incidents in the book are too coarse for general reading. In theory, the banning of such books is a just thing and even a necessary thing. But the distinction of the sheep from the goats should not be left to the common courts. If there is to be a censorship at all, it should be done by a board which includes men of literary taste, psychologists and economists. People with a definite leaning to one side or the other should be kept off it as far as possible. Baptist ministers should not be allowed to intrude their -unreasoning zeal for prudery any more than, from another aspect, Communists of the deepest dye should be there to let through all the latest propoganda for their cause. Even with an almost perfect "Board of Public Reading,’ the difficulties are many, so many that in the opinion of many people (of which I must confess I am one), except in the case of glaring examples of pornography, the matter should be left to the good taste of the readers themselves. To begin with, fashions change so much that to be consistent, the .censor would have to exclude some of the greatest masterpieces of the world’s literature. If the “Well of Loneliness” is to be banned, then assuredly one of the few Latin romances, the “Satyricon” of Petronius, must also be banned because it deals with a similar perversion but in a much coarser way. If “Pansies” is to be stolen from the mails to prevent it being published then assuredly some of Ovid’s poems must be taken from the shelves. Rabelais, de Maupassant and Zola also must go from our library of French literature which indeed would be singularly depleted. Boccaccio and some of d’Annunzio’s works would be amongst the losses from Italy’s shelves while English literature would be as sadly depleted. We would not have our Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” Tobias Smollet would be gone, Henry Fielding and some of Shakespeare would be gone and a considerable amount of the Bible.

The position is thus seen to be untenable if we are going any further than excluding the "obviously” pornographic productions. I assert that these latter can be separated with the utmost ease from those written from the literary standpoint. There are not many publishers in England who cater chiefly for "pornographs” but there are some and I think I could name two or three on which most people would agree. It is owing to the fear of the ban that these publishers never decend to the depths of the presses in the dark corners of Paris and other Continental cities. No one could condemn a ban of their productions. But anyone who has seen anything of such degradation of printing could never confuse that type of stuff with books like "The Well of Loneliness” or “All Quiet on the Western Front.” I myself feel, however, that while I am strongly against any move to suppress the latter book, it is nevertheless not an argument in its favour to say that it is true to life, realistic. A book could be written that could paint fairly realistically scenes in a brothel but the fact that they were “true to life” would not be an argument against its suppression. If the book was a work of art however, and cleverly done, it would be an argument. That may be a very artificial and superficial way of looking at the question and it is acknowledged that there are flaws when the theory is put into practice. But there is no perfect solution of the question. Twenty-five per cent, of the great works of art, in painting, sculpture or literature, could be objected to on moral grounds and it is probable that the same percentage could actually do some harm to a mind morbidly inflamed. But is that a reason for depriving the great majority of mankind from enjoying them as works of art? The question looked at in this way resembles the Prohibition question. Should the majority deprive themselves in an attempt to help a few fools from following their natural foolish inclinations? As far as Art is concerned at least, there can be little doubt. If the creation of man’s brain satisfies the criteria of true art (not necessarily -pornographic), it should be available to swell the treasures of the world. If it does not, it should be cast into oblivion. If it happens to do harm to a small section of the community, it will only take the place of something more bestial. No one could assert that anything ever circulated in New Zealand approached in coarseness the language or conversation, intentionally or unintentionally heard by most males at least in the course of their lives. Had the surrounding story been taken from the language used in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the book would fail to be a work of art and should be suppressed as pornography; had the typical language been left out of the book of the trenches, “All Quiet on the Western Front” would equally have failed to be a work of art, and could also be suppressed precisely for failing to be a work of art. “Art and morality should in very few occasions have any bearing at all on one another.”