Part 2
“Frederick the Great admired it and paid it the doubtful compliment of imitation, and Condorcet regarded it only as an attack upon hypocrisy and superstition. Less prejudiced critics than these condemn it with severity, and even admirers of Voltaire regret that there are passages in it which have dimmed the fame of its author.” (_St. Hubert Guild_ v. _Quinn_, 64 Misc. 336, 338.)
For that very reason the final test of the law, as recognized by the courts of this State, is simple. It is only whether the thing is literature as distinct from a simple effort to portray the obscene.
It is quite true that scattered here and there in the books, are to be found expressions to the effect that a thing may be literature and yet be within the statute. The argument is that there are two classes in the community, the intelligent and the ignorant. Something may be literature and the intelligent will so appreciate it, but the statute is to protect the other class--the ones who ought not to be entrusted with books at all. The _sequitur_ is that a book is unlawful unless it can be read by the ignorant, by the child incapable of appreciating the sustained thought. To this effect will one find expressions in _U. S._ v. _Clark_ (38 Fed. 734), and the General Term decision in _People_ v. _Muller_ (32 Hun, 209). But one will never find that the Court of Appeals of this state has spoken to that effect, or has made that classification. It did not do so in affirming the judgment in _People_ v. _Muller_ (96 N. Y. 408), which, by the way, dealt with a picture and not a book; and it certainly did not do so when it expressed itself in _People_ v. _Eastman_ (188 N. Y. 478) or in _Halsey_ v. _N. Y. Society_ (234 N. Y. 1). In _People_ v. _Eastman_, as we have said, the article was undoubtedly such as should not fall into the hands of a child; and in _Halsey_ v. _N. Y. Society_ the majority opinion frankly admits that there are paragraphs in the book which, standing alone, are undoubtedly indecent. Nor has the successor of the General Term, the Appellate Division, spoken to that effect. Its decision in _People_ v. _Brainard_ (192 App. Div. 816) certainly does not bear out such interpretation. Nor have judges, sitting at Special or Trial Term, or in the Appellate Term, so expressed themselves. O’Brien, _J._, certainly made no such distinction in _Matter of Worthington_ (30 N. Y. Supp. 363; 24 L. R. A. 110). Nor did Seabury, _J._, make any such distinction in _St. Hubert Guild_ v. _Quinn_ (64 Misc. 336). If that were the law of this state, we say, with all sincerity, that literature would have to be reduced to the level of the movies; the stage would be reduced to the rendition of charades, thousands of plays being barred, ranging from those of which Shakespeare was the craftsman, to the productions of Somerset Maugham; Swinburne’s Chorus in “Atalanta in Calydon” would be on the index, and Keats would be barred from any public library because of “Endymion” and “The Eve of St. Agnes”. Nay, Sir Walter Scott’s collection of border minstrelsy would be barred because it contains those two exquisite ballads, “The Eve of St. John” and “Clerk Saunders and May Margaret”; and, incidentally, the “Oxford Book of English Verse” should be burned because it contains reprints of all these things. But it is useless to pursue this subject, for, to use the favorite phrase of the late Chief Justice White, “to state the argument is to answer it”. No, the test is whether the thing is literary; whether it is a criticism of life; whether that effort is apparent in the book.
3--In applying this test, all reasonable doubt should be resolved in favor of the book.
The courts, to repeat, apply the simple test of literature as distinct from the mere portrayal of the obscene. And in getting at whether a thing is literature, they are not disposed to substitute their judgment for that of others who speak of the book in the spirit of sincerity; nor are they disposed to tip the scales, even if people of that sort differ in their conclusions. “We have quoted”, says Andrews, _J._, in the latest case, “estimates of the book as showing the manner in which it affects different minds. The conflict among the members of this court itself points a finger at the dangers of a censorship entrusted to men of one profession, of like education and similar surroundings.” (_Halsey_ v. _N. Y. Society_, 234 N. Y. 1, 6.) Likewise, the opinions in _St. Hubert’s Guild_ v. _Quinn_ (64 Misc. 336), and _Matter of Worthington_ (30 N. Y. Supp. 363; 24 L. R. A. 110) refer to various criticisms of the books involved, as do the opinions of Magistrate Simpson and Magistrate Oberwager in the very recent (and still unreported) cases of _People_ v. _Seltzer_ and _People_ v. _Salsberg and Boni & Liveright_. In all of those cases the criticisms were contained in book or magazine form, which were available to the Court. In the present case the various criticisms of the book here involved are not available in such form, and consequently we are submitting herewith copies of letters and newspaper clippings containing the opinions of many competent critics concerning that book, which we respectfully ask this Court to consider in rendering its decision upon this motion.
4--In judging the book by the standards above indicated, it must be read as a whole, and, on that basis, it must be upheld even though it may contain portions which would not stand the test if isolated.
From what has already been said another conclusion follows:--The book is to be judged not by isolated passages in it, but by the whole book. Peculiarly is this true in the present case, where the book at large is indicted, not parts of it, as was the case when complaint was made in Special Sessions, but all of it without reference to any particular part. That, when a book is indicted as a whole, no judgment can be passed upon it which is not based upon a reading of the whole, with the necessary test of correlation which this entails, would seem manifest on its face. But in view of certain expressions which judicially fell in the federal case of _U. S._ v. _Bennett_ (16 Blatchf. 338; Fed. Cs. No. 14,571), it is just as well to refer to the fact that, both in England and in this State, the test is the whole book, not isolated parts to which it may please the prosecutor to point an accusing finger.
_Halsey_ v. _N. Y. Society_ (234 N. Y. 1); _Fitzpatrick’s Case_ (31 How. St. Tr. 1170, 1186). _St. Hubert’s Guild_ v. _Quinn_ (64 Misc. 336).
“The judgment of the court below is based upon a few passages in each of these works, and these passages have been held to be of such a character as to invalidate the contract upon which the action has been brought. These few passages furnish no criterion by which the legality of the consideration of the contract can be determined. That some of these passages, judged by the standard of our day, mar rather than enhance the value of these books can be admitted without condemning the contract for the sale of the books as illegal. The same criticism has been directed against many of the classics of antiquity and against the works of some of our greatest writers from Chaucer to Walt Whitman, without being regarded as sufficient to invalidate contracts for the sale or publication of their works.”
_St. Hubert Guild_ v. _Quinn_ (64 Misc. 336, 339).
“No work may be judged from a selection of such paragraphs alone. Printed by themselves they might, as a matter of law, come within the prohibition of the statute. So might a similar selection from Aristophanes or Chaucer or Boccaccio or even from the Bible. The book, however, must be considered broadly as a whole.”
_Halsey_ v. _N. Y. Society_ (234 N. Y. 1, 4).
The proposition thus laid down is nothing but common sense,--the common sense which was expressed, over a century ago, in a trial in the Irish King’s Bench, for the publication of an alleged libel:
“Mr. Burrowes.--My lords, I beg to know, whether the Court be of opinion, that without any averment respecting other passages in the book, the counsel for the crown are entitled to read them.
Mr. Justice Day.--In order to show the _quo animo_, they may read those other passages.
Mr. Justice Osborne.--I think they have such right, as evidence of the intention.
Lord Chief Justice Downes.--And the defendant, if he thinks fit, may read all the rest of the book.” (_Fitzpatrick’s Case_, 31 Hows. St. Tr. 1170, 1186.)
It follows that if the book must be taken as a whole, then it cannot be condemned piecemeal. No part can be read without a mind to its relation to the whole. In the latest case on the subject, Andrews _J._, speaking for the majority of the court, twice concedes that, taken by themselves, certain parts of the book are not to be justified:
“It contains many paragraphs, however, which taken by themselves are undoubtedly vulgar and indecent. * * * On the other hand, it _does_ contain indecent paragraphs.”
_Halsey_ v. _N. Y. Society_ (234 N. Y. 1, 4, 6).
Yet the book was upheld for all that, both because, in the words which the court adopted from the late Professor Wells of Sewanee, the author there involved “helps us over the instinctive repulsion that we feel for the situation”, and because he excites “a purely artistic interest”, etc. (_Halsey_ v. _N. Y. Society_, 234 N. Y. 1, 5.)
5--The book, read as a whole, sustains the test of the law.
The following has been prepared by counsel, with full appreciation of the fact that the book under review must, in the last analysis, speak for itself, and that every book makes its different impression on each mind that it reaches. The only possible aid to reflection which this writing can constitute therefore, lies in such suggestion as it fairly may convey, that Mr. Cabell’s book is literature, in the accepted sense of that term, which is, as the foregoing brief shows, the legal sense as well. It presents a theme and its object is to stimulate reflection.
The book in question is a criticism of life. It treats with satire certain of the thoughts so current among us. It is Matthew Arnold and Carlyle in different guise. But the guise adopted is not new or novel. In the Sixteenth Century Erasmus put forth his comments on the ruling ideas of his time by writing a book “In Praise of Folly”. Mr. Cabell has adopted the same method of treatment. To his book can be applied the words which Professor Wells spoke of a book which our Court of Appeals has recently held _not_ to be within the condemnation of the statute invoked in the present case: “With a springboard of fact in the seventeenth century to start from, he * * * transfers the adventures from the real world to a sort of forest of Arden, where the Rosalind of Shakespeare might meet a Watteau shepherdess and a melancholy Jacques.” (_Halsey_ v. _N. Y. Society_, 234 N. Y. 1, 5.)
But that is not the only motive of the book. It deals also with aspirations for the unattainable, aspirations which it falls to the lot of some men to feel,--aspirations whose portrayal finds expression in books ranging from Goethe’s “Faust” to Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt”. These are things which, to use the words of Magistrate Simpson in the recent (and still unreported) case of _People_ v. _Seltzer_, are not “naturally calculated to excite in the susceptible impure imaginations”. And if we want a moral lesson, we have it, because these desires are shown to be useless. _The conventional cannot be escaped by fleeing to sin, for wickedness itself is conventional._
And may we observe in passing that the author, Mr. Cabell, is no radical? He makes no plea for reform by way of sociological experiment. Indeed, as expressed in “Beyond Life”, his contempt for sociology has been condemned by one of the apostles of the new Reign of Science and a lecturer in the Rand School (Robinson, “The Mind in the Making”, page 208). “What we want”, said Mr. Gradgrind, “are facts”. Mr. Cabell’s book now under attack deals with things not within the spectrum of the Gradgrind School,--eternal things which continue whether the world happens to be of the “New Philosophy” mode of thinking, or to have returned to the Age of Faith. How well he succeeds with what he has undertaken is quite another matter; in law it is sufficient that he has assumed the task. And with this in mind, the following undertakes to tell what one reader, at least, may think that “_Jurgen_” is about.
Jurgen’s name is “derived from jargon, a confused chattering such as birds give forth at sunrise” (183).[5] He is a pawnbroker, and he lives in Poictesme, but it might just as well be Kennaquhair. In his youth he had been in love with a Lady Dorothy; at forty-four we find him a pawnbroker, settled down to business, with a wife who has all the virtues of the good wife; somewhat henpecked, longing, like Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, for he knows not what. He has not the culture of Faust, he is not a Ph.D.; but, like the doctor of Leipzig whose venturings as set forth in legend attracted Marlowe and then Goethe, Jurgen yearns for “the distant land”, where he shall be able “to grasp infinite nature”. He thinks that he is a “monstrous clever fellow”;--so did Faust, the learned doctor,--in the end he reaches his salvation through a return to the routine from whence he came. Like Faust he assumes to unravel a tangled knot. Life is a riddle, nature is a mystery, justice has an indefinable basis. The learned man in Goethe’s poem seeks to find out why these things are so; Mr. Cabell’s hero is a man of ordinary station, but he, too, pursues the quest.
Jurgen passes from his routine of life, as Faust does, through communion with spirits that partake of the power of darkness. It all starts with one night when, on his way home from a day of trafficking in his shop, Jurgen passes a Cistercian monk who, having stumbled over a stone, is cursing the devil that had placed it there. “Fie, brother”, says this wordly wise, this all sufficient Jurgen, “have not the devils enough to bear as it is?” (1) This attracts the attention of an earth spirit, one Koshchei, “who made things as they are”.
For that reason this spirit, Koshchei, has his limitations. To him love is impossible--not carnal love, but the love of God, such love as never enters into Hell (257); such love as Jurgen’s grandmother, instructed by the priest, has for God (299, 302). Also to this earth spirit, Koshchei, is pride impossible (303). Of heavenly love the earth spirit cannot conceive, because he “made things as they are, and day and night he contemplates things as they are”. “How then”, says God Himself, “can Koshchei love anything?” (303). Pride, as the philosophical Satan tells Jurgen, is impossible to whoever it was that made things as they are, because he has to look at them, having nothing else to look at, so how can he be proud? (257). Almost, having in mind a certain treatise, _De Civitate Dei_, we can imagine St. Augustine speaking. The things of this world, the things as they are, are not to be loved, and he who made them, assuredly not the real God, finds love foreign to his breast.
Anyhow, this Koshchei, “monstrously pleased” with Jurgen’s defense of the devils against the Cistercian monk, puts himself in Jurgen’s way. Appearing to the hero in the shape of a small black gentleman, the earth spirit promises Jurgen a reward (10-11).
What that reward is to be soon develops. Arriving home, Jurgen finds his wife has vanished. She has gone to a cave, of evil magic, across Amneran Heath. On Walpurgis night, that night renowned in the calendar of demonology, Jurgen follows her there; but first, at her bidding he must remove from his neck a cross which had hung there, the gift of his dead mother (13).
Then comes a medley of classic, of Russian, and of Norse mythology. Jurgen finds in the cave a centaur, who gives him a Nessus-shirt (16)--“an old poet, loaned at once a young man’s body and the Centaur’s shirt” (131)--the young man’s body which Faust desired, but the Nessus-shirt which even Hercules could not wear for long. Jurgen is now off for his tour of the infinite.
And yet it is not the real Jurgen who makes this voyage. The real Jurgen, where is he? There are, in fact, many Jurgens. One of these is a little boy in Heaven. “That boy”, says God, “is here with me as you yourself have seen. And today there is nothing remaining of him anywhere in the man that is Jurgen” (297). Another Jurgen is “a young man barely come of age” (23) who had loved the young girl Dorothy, and who sees the Jurgen of today only “as one might see the face of a dead man drowned in muddy water” (31). Then there is the Jurgen of today, the Jurgen who “retains his shop and a fair line of business”, the Jurgen whose _confiteor_ is that Koshchei, the earth spirit “who made things as they are”, has dealt with him very justly. “And probably his methods are everything they should be; certainly I cannot go so far as to say that they are wrong; but still, at the same time--” (368). And, separate from all these Jurgens, the little boy who loved God, the youth who cherished the normal things of youth, and the Jurgen of middle age who worships things as they are, is yet another Jurgen--the Faust-Jurgen, who, by favor of the powers of darkness, goes careering on his voyage of the world of fancy, the world of vision, the world of regrets, the world of disillusion.
The sequence of his adventures may easily be traced.
In the first episode Jurgen visits a garden between dawn and sunrise. It is a garden where “each man that has ever lived has sojourned for a little while, with no company save his illusions” (20). And the spirit of it all is shown forth in the people whom he first encounters. For they are a small boy and a girl who forever walk in the glaze of a mustard jar (19),--forever, that is, like the youth and the maid on the Grecian urn which drew the immortal gaze of Keats. The glance sweeps forward soon, however, and hence presently in this garden of memory Jurgen meets the girl Dorothy, meets her and talks with her (24-33). When she had gone all was gone and so, when the sun rose, it was simply “another workday” (34). The Philistine spirit blew upon the garden, it was to be remodelled and all the gold was to be rubbed away (36-7).
Then follows a visit to a character of many names, but always the same. Jurgen calls her Sereda, after the manner of Russian mythology, but she corresponds with the Roman Cybele, the Goddess of Earth (210, 316) and in the Norse she is called Æsred (176-7). Goddess of Earth, she takes the color out of all things. The Fates spin the glowing threads and weave them into curious patterns; but when she is done with them there is no more color, beauty or strangeness apparent “than in so many dishrags” (40), for she bleaches where others have colored. Naturally enough she refers Jurgen back to Koshchei, the spirit who made things as they are. Once more, through his intervention, Jurgen meets Dorothy. For in his attempt to answer life’s riddle, he must perforce return to the girl whom he had loved while young. If but they two could be together again in youth, would not the failures of his life, the disappointments of the middle years, be but as things that never had happened? (See 55.)
While the glamour still holds its spell, to Jurgen this is the young Dorothy, the girl who has not yet married; and so, on the moonlit ramp of her father’s castle they talk of many things as young lovers would. To them soon comes the girl’s future husband, but to Jurgen the magic makes it the appearance simply of a rival suitor; and, the magic having not yet exhausted its force, the conventional will have it that, in the words of the old stage directions, “they fight, and the rival is slain”. Then the conqueror turns to the lady, but dawn is coming and the magic is spent. Jurgen finds that this is not the Dorothy whom he had seen in the garden between dawn and sunrise (47-60). She is now repulsive, and he repels her. It is meet and right, therefore, that the next place to which Jurgen comes is a cave where are the bodies of many whom he had formerly known (60-65).
Winding his way through this cave he comes to Guenevere. She is held by the power of a giant; and from that giant does Jurgen rescue her (66-78).
Guenevere, of course, is the lady, charming but of errant fancy, to whom the chronicles Morte d’Arthur and Mabinogion were devoted, and of whose vagaries speak Tennyson’s “Idyls of the King.” At this time her marriage to Arthur has been arranged, and Lancelot is coming as his master’s envoy to arrange the details of the wedding. In the end Lancelot captures the heart of Guenevere (147) but, meanwhile her inclinations have their way with Jurgen. For Jurgen abides with her father in the latter’s city of Cameliard, which, of course, is but another name for Camelot (78-146). It is, to use the words of our time, a house party; and, like many house parties, it brings forth various events. To the guest Jurgen it befalls to do things ancient and modern, to rescue a princess from a giant, after the fashion of Sir Thomas Malory (82-3), to converse with ghosts in a haunted bed room (145-9) and to carry on with the fickle Guenevere, whose outstanding trait is “her innocence, combined with a certain moral obtuseness” (108). Her worldlywise father learns of the affair, talks it over with Jurgen, and reminds him of the duty apparent in the circumstances, that, if necessary, Jurgen should lie like a gentleman (93). The matter, however, comes to nothing, for the time of Guenevere’s marriage to Arthur is at hand. So she and Jurgen part, she with her mind already full of Lancelot (147) and Jurgen being taken with the charms of a new person of the play, of whom presently. In short, Jurgen leaves Guenevere where Tennyson takes her up, the stage being thus cleared for the drama of Lancelot.
Jurgen leaves Cameliard with one who is called Anaitis (147). But even as Guenevere typifies innocence combined with obtuseness (108) Anaitis is the personification of a capital sin. Like the earth goddess Sereda, known also to men as Cybele and Æsred (of whom _supra_) this Anaitis bears different names in different places. But always she is the same. In the Arthurian legend she is the Lady of the Lake (109), in classic lands she was Venus, on Eastern soil she was Ashtoreth. She serves the moon (150), she is the sun’s daughter (173); and in all lands from Paphos to Babylon do men rear temples in her honor (341-3). But the breath of evil nevertheless goes forth from her; and in her train follows Alecto, whose quality is retribution (178).
With this Venus, this Anaitis in her land of Cocaigne, Jurgen lives for a time. But he is not the only guest of whom legend bears record, not the only visitor of whom contemporary literature and art have spoken. Mr. Cabell, however, preserving that balance of humor which always in this book is kept level, has given this situation a new color. Tannhäuser is tempted to return to the Venusberg; Jurgen leaves Anaitis with never a glance behind.
But while he stays there, things of black magic happen. Nor is that strange. Anyone familiar with the legend embodied in “Tannhäuser” might expect to find that all things abhorred by Christians are practiced in the land of Venus, the Cocaigne of Anaitis.