ably 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 Cæsar himself, it would be his duty to take more note of the condition of Cæsar's stomach than of Cæsar'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 aesthetic 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 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.

WHEN the United States ship Memphis crashed against the rocks of Santo Domingo, the catastrophe was too big for any one man to see in its entirety. My part in the event was small, but it is all I know. It is all I shall try to tell.

It was hot and sticky weather, a typical August afternoon in the Caribbean. Occasional light showers drifted across the roadstead and the ship swung easily in the long swell. I had intended making an inspection of the Castine's pay department that afternoon, but a troublesome error in the balance of my own clothing return kept me hunting for an elusive discrepancy of twenty cents until nearly three o'clock. By that time I was drowsy; and as I came on deck, to find the sun shining through a patter of big, plashing raindrops, I reflected that the afternoon was too far gone to make much of an inspection. My room was on the breezy side, and an air port twenty inches square opened by the head of my berth. I went below instead of going to the Castine.

There was a two-inch batten on the long bookshelf overhead to hold my books when the ship rolled. Nevertheless, I was aroused by the impact of a thick volume of Montaigne landing in the pit of my stomach. Still drowsy, I put the book back. Before it was fairly set on the shelf, six or seven volumes of Decisions of the Comptroller cascaded all around me. I was

suddenly wide-awake. The ship had never rolled like that during my time on board.

Automatically I closed and dogged down my air port and pulled on my coat. Was there a hurricane making up? The log, kept in a desk on the quarter-deck, would show. As I started up the ladder to investigate, the engineer officer, Lieutenant Jones, ran into his room next mine, and I heard him call down the voice tube, 'Light off six more boilers!' as he began hurriedly to pull on his overalls preparatory to going below.

Another heavy roll sent the ship on her beam ends. The log showed nothing unusual in the column devoted to barometer, wind, or clouds. The yellow afternoon sun was blinking through the wet air. A little shower was drifting slowly a mile inshore, a soft breeze following its thin shadow. At the mouth of the river I could see our motor launch with returning liberty men heading out toward the ship. The surgeon, first lieutenant, and gunnery officer joined me, also peering curiously at the log for some hint of what was causing the queer, dead rolling.

Then the surgeon said, 'My God!' in a hushed voice and pointed out to sea. Miles out showed a wavering, racing line like a range of hills. After one incredulous instant — no wave could possibly be so tremendous!the first lieutenant burst into a roar

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