“ 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. ”

“ No one, until Mr. Kingsley broke silence, had complained of Jurgen as an obscene production; no letters of condemnation had been received by the publishers; and the press had failed to suggest that decorum, much less decency, had anywhere been violated.
Mr. Kingsley’s letter altered affairs. Immediately a chorus in discussion of Jurgen arose. In the newspapers appeared many letters, some in defense of the book, others crying Amen to Mr. Kingsley. Within a week, the merry game of discovering the “key” to Jurgen was well under way and a pleasant, rather heated controversy had begun. ”

“ 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”. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is an undercurrent of extreme sensuality throughout the book, and once the trick of transposing the key is mastered one can dip into this tepid stream on every page. Cabell has cleansed his bosom of much perilous stuff—a little too much, in fact, for Jurgen grows tiresome toward the end—but he has said everything about the mechanics of passion and said it prettily. He has a gift of dulcet English prose, but I like better the men who say things straight out and use gruff Anglo-Saxon monosyllables for the big facts of nature that we are supposed to ignore. ”

“ An attack on religious belief cannot be indictable as an obscenity under Section 1141 of the Penal Code; if prosecuted, it must be indicted as a libel (People v. Eastman, 188 N. Y. 478) . But we will not allow the defendants, nor Mr. Cabell, the author, to remain for a moment solely under that protection. This book puts forth the attack upon the Christian belief, not to support the attack, but to deride the attack itself. It is a matter of common observation that infidelity itself partakes of a religious fervor, and it is of that fervor that Jurgen makes fun. ”

“ Today, however, the vicissitudes of Jurgen [Pg 8] are of indisputable importance, if only because similar misfortunes may overtake yet other publications. At the moment it appears that the position of literature is less precarious than it has been in the recent past. For the courts, of late, with gratifying accord have failed to detect obscenity in a number of volumes at which professional righteousness has taken offense, and there apparently is cause to hope that legal precedent will dispel the obscurity which so long has surrounded decency—within the meaning of the statute. ”

“ But of one thing we are sure, that it fills the test of literature as distinct from pornography; that it has a theme, sustains a thought, criticises life. It attempts, among other things, to show the futility of escaping from conventionality by way of seeking sin, for sin itself has its conventions. It pictures sin in this spirit, and in doing so it perforce speaks of sin. But it must be judged as a whole, not by a sentence here, or even by a page there (Halsey v. N. Y. Society, 234 N. Y. 1) . ”

“ We submit that, having in mind the context, there is nothing in “Jurgen” which is indecent. A man studiously on the alert for the indecent can put his finger on certain words in the book; but the very meaning of these words is decent if we will but read them in the connection to which they are meant to refer. And other things that are said, so far from being indecent, are things lawfully to be said, unless the body of our literature should perish from the earth. ”

“ The first person whom he sees is a little boy who was once Jurgen himself. When Jurgen meets God he says, “Once very long ago I had faith in you”; to which the reply is, “No, for that boy is here with me as you yourself have seen, and today there is nothing remaining of him anywhere [Pg 54] in the man that is Jurgen” (297) . [7] Heaven contains children, mothers and grandmothers. Logic cannot lead one to it, because logic does not exist there. Therefore, children, mothers and grandmothers can ascend to Heaven where people like Jurgen cannot. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 38] of the power of darkness. ”

“ Cabell’s classifications as to what pertains to Philistia. Many of us are citizens of that country without knowing it. But it is not obscene or lewd for some one else to call us Philistines because of the views we may happen to hold dear. Legally we cannot object; practically we conserve our energies by not doing so. Like the famous Bishop Bonner of Queen Mary’s time, we may do well to laugh at the caricatures which the heretics make of us.
With this in mind we might get enjoyment out of Jurgen’s observations as to the real issue between Heaven and Hell. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ The brief is not in any sense an argument in behalf of unrestricted publication of any matter, however obscene, or indeed in behalf of the publication of obscenity in any form. It is not a denial of the community’s right to protect itself from offenses against good taste or against its moral security, or to punish violation of the laws by which the public welfare is safe-guarded. ”

“ 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.
[Pg 39]
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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 37] undertakes to tell what one reader, at least, may think that “Jurgen” is about. ”

“ It is very difficult to see upon what theory these world-renowned classics can be regarded as specimens of that pornographic literature which it is the office of the Society for the Suppression of Vice to suppress, or how they can come under any stronger condemnation than that high standard literature which consists of the works of Shakespeare, of Chaucer, of Laurence Sterne, and of other great English writers, without making reference to many parts of the Old Testament Scriptures, which are to be found in almost every household in the land. ”

“ Today therefore the courts apply simple tests, tests savoring of nothing that involves censorship, tests necessary only for the protection of the public against influences that directly, and without the necessity of argument in demonstrating their effect, bear upon public morals. ”

“ Those tests, like all the others which the courts have used in the application of criminal law to the case of the individual against whom it is alleged that his act has offended the interests of society, are simple and do not go beyond the actual necessities. ”

“ Consequently the wisest person among them is the god Silenus, the god of drunkenness, and he is always drunk in order to escape the conventional (208–9) . That of course is not right, but the indictment is not drawn under the Volstead Law. Jurgen stops among these people and marries a little hamadryad, who is all that a wife should be (215) and who puts up a lunch for him when he goes for a walk (215) . ”

“ But one need not be an apologist of license to perceive that there is in a thoughtful consideration of every aspect of life no kinship to indecency; or to perceive that the community cannot, without serious danger to its own cultural development, ignore the distinction between the artist’s attempt to create beauty by means of the written word, and the lewd and vulgar outpourings of the pornographer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Knowing everything, believing in nothing that is not practical, they have a summary way of dealing with those who presume to disagree. All such recalcitrants are sent to Hell, “relegated to Limbo” (242) .
Against the people of Leuke, the ordinary conventionalists, came these Philistines, the militant Realists. Naturally the Philistines conquered, and the people of Leuke were condemned to death. Jurgen’s wife, the little hamadryad whose life was bound up with that of her tutelary tree (215) perished with its felling. ”

“ Of course it is not criminal to think about her, since otherwise the second part of Faust should not be allowed in print, nor should Tennyson’s “Dream of Fair Women”. So it is lawful for Jurgen to look for her, and he does look. But on his way comes another episode.
In the domain of Leuke (192) he meets a hamadryad [Pg 49] named Chloris. Leuke is the land of conventionality where nobody ever does anything except what he has been accustomed to do, and would never dream of doing a thing which nobody ever heard of doing (203–204) . ”

“ So conventional is Leuke, be it noted, that even a stroll is out of keeping. In this country of conventionality the people have never taken a holiday, nobody ever having heard of such a thing (206) . It is the Utopia of the Podsnaps of Dickens’ time, of the Rotarians of our own. But his life in this happy place, where nothing out of the ordinary ought in nature’s course to happen, does not last long. War is threatened by the Philistines. ”

“ Cabell’s work only through the recorded opinions of Messrs. Kingsley and Sumner, did certainly condemn him unread and, shuddering, barred their library doors against him.... No, Mr. Cabell owes no debt of thanks to the accusers of Jurgen.
[Pg 15] But all this is by the way. The argument, which appears in the following pages, is of importance not alone because it so ably defends Jurgen, but because it defines, more clearly than any other recent document, the present legal status of literature in America in relation to permissible candor in treatment and subject matter. ”