Censor (Roman)

“ A strange incident preceded the performance of the Clerc et le Théologien. The play, written in collaboration by MM. Scribe and d'Épagny, and accepted by the Odéon Theatre, had been stopped by the censor of 1830. Good old Censorship! It is the same in all ages! There indeed come moments when it cuts its fingers with its own scissors; but censors are a race of polypii,—their fingers merely grow again. The censor had, then, stopped MM. Scribe and d'Épagny's drama. ”

“ Another evil of censorship is the ease with which the censor can erode liberty of expression. One stroke of the pen is all that is needed. Under a censor's regime the weights are cast against freedom. ”

“ Every one who condemns the principle of censorship must also condemn the Lord Chamberlain's control of the drama; but those who approve of the principle do not necessarily approve of the Lord Chamberlain being the Censor ex officio. ”

“ Still, with all this acceptance of ethics, the nature of the censorship has to be recognized—the true character of the censor is so often not taste or conscience in any clear condition, but an uninstructed agency of herd instinct, an institutional bully. In the censor as he appears in psycho-analytic literature there is something of the archaic, the irrational and the ritualistic—all just as likely to ask for decorum for themselves as is the thing in us which is against license and anarchy. ”

“ Genius would be required to predict accurately the reaction of the general public to any set piece which seems immoral to the censor. For instance, why was Mr. Sumner so certain that Jurgen, which inspired him with horror and loathing, would prove a persuasive temptation to all the rest of the world? Censorship is serious and drastic business; it should never rest merely upon guesswork and more particularly not upon the guesses of men so staunch in morals that they are obviously of distant kin to the rest of humanity. ”

“ Who then will succeed to the censor? who will be censor when the Censorship has been abolished? The public itself; the public represented not only by those of its members who are the most refined, but those who are strictest and most uncompromising. In other words, the Puritans will be on the watch. And after all, why not? Are they not one of the forces of the national mind, one of the reasons of England’s existence? They are the natural enemies of the theatre, and will last as long as it. ”

“ But let me make the point clear; for it is the crucial point in the discussion of the modern Pg 274Bookstall Censorship. A great deal may be said against setting up a censorship of literature. A great deal may be said in favor of a censorship. But if a censorship there must be, the censor should be deliberately chosen for his office, and, in exercising his power, should be directly responsible to the public conscience. If a censorship there must be, let the community choose a man whose qualifications have been weighed, a man in whose judgment it decides that it can rely. ”

“ If Censorship of the Drama be in the real interests of the people, or at all events in what the Censor for the time being conceives to be their interest—then Censorships of Art, Literature, Religion, Science, and Politics are in the interests of the people, unless it can be proved that there exists essential difference between the Drama and these other branches of the public being. ”

“ In the censor for whom I am groping, the censor of whom Eminent Victorians is so subversive, there are particularly these irrational and ritualistic characteristics, these remnants of outgrown institutions, these bondages of race and sex, of class and creed. Most biography, especially official biography, is written with such a censor in mind, under his very eye. Where Eminent Victorians was refreshing and stimulating was precisely in its refusal to keep him in mind. ”

“ In some respects the life of a censor is more exhilarating than that of an emperor. The best the emperor can do is to snip off the heads of men and women, who are mere mortals. The censor can decapitate ideas which but for him might have lived forever. Think, for instance, of the extraordinary thrill which might come to a matter-of-fact individual living to-day in the city of Philadelphia if he happened to be the censor to whom the moving-picture version of "Macbeth" was submitted. ”

“ But even this barbarian is preferable to the apathetic repressed human beings by whom he is surrounded. Harnessed to the right interests, he is invaluable because “creative.” And he should never be blocked in: he should at most be canalled.
The evil of the censor, at any rate, is never illustrated in his rational subordination of impulse, but in those subordinations that violate human and social freedom. ”

“ Not only does the censorship mutilate literary works, but it often suffocates the inspiration of the author. The Russian press has lately published a very interesting article on Nekrasov, explaining the frequent interruptions of his activity by a momentary paralysis of his inspiration. Often, he writes, the ideas and poetic forms which come to his mind are so strong that he need only take up his pen and write them down. But the thought that what he might write would be condemned by the censor, stops him. ”

“ The normal censor apparently knows nothing of that world where motor-reactions are cut off, that house made without hands, whose doors are closed on desire, eternal in the heavens. The censor is not for the moment a persona grata, but let us give him his due. He acts according to his lights and these often quite adequately represent the average darkness. A normal audience contains many “practical” men whose standard is the same as that of the normal censor. ”

“ As long as a censor is a censor, he cannot endorse by his licence opinions which seem to him dangerously heretical.
We may, therefore, conclude that the more enlightened a censorship is, the worse it would serve us. The Lord Chamberlain, an obviously unenlightened Censor, prohibits Ghosts and licenses all the rest of Ibsen’s plays. ”

“ Whenever, for any reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those embarrassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this process at work. ”

“ Under the systematic, though arbitrary and capricious, persecution of the censorship, writers have evolved the art of telling a bitter truth by means of satire which by its outward appearance generally escapes the scrutinising attention of the usually dull censor, but the esoteric meaning of which is quite comprehensible to the whole class of readers. ”

“ The Romans had their censors appointed to regulate morals, and to keep the nation firm in the path of duty and the customs of their sires, but among us no censor is required, as the life of our Sovereign supplies his place. ”

“ And the worst of them are the filmy, the vague, the subtle subordinations that take away the opportunity of truth. Life is in itself a sufficiently difficult picture-puzzle, but what chance have we if the turnip-headed censor confiscates some particularly indispensable fragment that he chooses to dislike? On reading Eminent Victorians, how we rejoice to escape from those wax effigies that we once believed to be statesmen—the kind of effigies of which text-books and correct histories and correct biographies are full! ”

“ Your people have been taught to believe from precedental prejudice, founded upon the selfish arrogance of ancient exemplars, that the word censor signifies an arbitrary agent for the restriction of liberty under the rulings of tyrannical power. But as with the tribunes of Heraclea, who act as censors under the direction of the prætor, our privileges extend in an advisorial capacity through all the gradations of life, from the child to parents, and in their collective capacity, styled the people. ”

“ He sees that we enjoy the privilege of doing and saying whatever we please, so that we infringe no law. If he write a book, it is submitted to the censor, and if it be marked by any boldness of opinion, it is suppressed. ”

“ If censors are banned from the publishing business, from the pulpit, from the public platform-as they are-they should be banned from the theatre. I would not admit the censor even for the limited role accorded him in Kingsley Books, Inc. ”

“ The proposal to put such mind-destroying drudgery upon an official of the class implied by the demand for an enlightened censorship falls through the moment we realize what it implies in practice.
Another material difficulty is that no play can be judged by merely reading the dialogue. To be fully effective a censor should witness the performance. The mise-en-scene of a play is as much a part of it as the words spoken on the stage. ”

“ Sometimes a tense public itself raised definitely labeled rumors to the rank of official communications. In a few instances war correspondents have deliberately faked.
The censorship, generally unintelligent, sometimes incredibly stupid, is responsible for a great many myths. "Beating the censor" was a gleeful [Pg 257] game for some correspondents until it became clear that the censor always held the winning hand, and that he could even suppress their activities altogether. ”

“ Moreover, if this precedent ought to have been transferred from military affairs to the animadversion of the censors, at all events the system of drawing lots should have been retained. But if it is not consistent with the dignity of a censor to draw lots for punish meet, and to commit the guilt of men to the decision of fortune, it certainly cannot be right in the case of an offence committed by many, that a few should be selected for ignominy and disgrace. ”

“ There is an important official of the inner man who in the latest psychology is called the Censor; his function is to forbid the utterance, in the council chamber within us, of unparliamentary sentiments, and to suppress all reports not in the interest of our moral dignity. By relegating half our experience to oblivion and locking up our unseemly passions in solitary dungeons, the Censor composes a conventional personage that we may decently present to the world. It is he, whilst we are sane and virtuous, that regulates our actions. ”

“ Either this or an unwise desire to pose as literary censor, mixed with and marred by immedicable envy of the men he singled out for reprobation, seems to us the secret source of irritation lying back of the entire controversy. ”

“ Christopher Ulwing raised one eyebrow in sign of derision. “Is it the censor who says that?”
“It is I,” came the answer, emphatically, as if an incontrovertible argument had been thrust into the discussion.
“Literary people in Pest have a different opinion,” grumbled the builder.
“Perhaps it would be better not to drag them in. As censor, I am a literary man myself....”
[Pg 31]
The builder was getting more and more impatient. The censor turned to the chaplain. ”

“ All, in short, is darkness. Scarce a syllable by which a man would be led to suspect, that the affair in hand were an affair that happiness or unhappiness was at all concerned in. [27]
To return, once more, to our Author's Commentaries. Not even in a censorial view would I be understood to deem them altogether without merit. For the institutions commented on, where they are capable of good reasons, good reasons are every now and then given: in which way, so far as it goes, one-half of the Censor's task is well accomplished. ”

“ Roman censorship implied, like ostracism, a discretionary power. In a republic where all the citizens, kept by poverty to an extremely simple moral code, lived in the same town, exercised no profession which might distract their attention from the affairs of the state, and thus constantly found themselves the spectators and judges of the usage of public power, censorship could on the one hand have greater influence: while on the other, the arbitrary power of the censors was restrained by a kind of moral surveillance exercised over them. ”

“ The function of the censorship is to secure the repose of con- sciousness and to keep at a distance all psychic creations which would cause pain or disturb rest. And like the censor of political absolutism, who sometimes works at night, the psychic censorship is kept in activity during sleep, though its red pen- ciling is not so strongly in evidence as in waking life. ”

“ Although, surprising to relate, no steps were taken against the conspirators at Harmony, they soon noticed an extraordinary increase in the vigilance of the censor, so much so, that the most harmless [62] communications failed to reach their destination, and when by chance anything was allowed to pass through it was mutilated beyond recognition, whole sentences being smirched with printer's ink or pages cut away by the ruthless hand of the censor. ”

“ What the censor is chiefly interested in is, let us say, edification. He aims by no means to give us access to the facts. He aims not at all to let us judge for ourselves. With all his might he strives to relate the facts under his supervision to the end that he thinks desirable, whatever it may be. And so, when facts come to light which do not chime in with his prepossession, he does his best either to discredit them or to set them down as immoral, heretical or contrary to policy. ”