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will be one which does not represent wickedness in the world, or which does not represent wickedness unpunished. Or a good play will be one in which no evil character or no evil side of life is shown. Or a good play is one in which the bodies of the actors are fully clothed; the term admits of some definition, but we will assume that a complete covering of the human frame is here understood to make for dramatic excellence. Or a good play is one which conceals a subject about which the young and the feeble-minded ought not to think so much as we do.

This sort of dramatic criticism of course is absurd, and rather childish. I do not mean to imply that it represents fairly the view of intelligent advocates of censorship, but it does represent the attitude of some of them. It is implied in many of the hasty remarks about good and bad plays, or good and bad books. Any one of these definitions can be quickly reduced to absurdity, and in literary practice they have often been so reduced. There have been plays, as well as stories, based on the theory that bad characters should not afford us an evening's entertainment; or if bad characters enter the story, their badness should be punished and the virtue of the good should be rewarded. The classic story of this type in English is "Sanford and Merton," now little read, but imitated by a host of those ridiculous fables known rather unjustly as Sunday-school stories, in which the good boy who does not interest us at all gets rewards we feel he does not deserve, and the bad boy, who may not interest us either, is punished with an accuracy and a tenacity

which we do not elsewhere observe in the morality of the universe. It would be impossible to construct a story on these childish precautions for our neighbor's welfare which any one would care to listen to, or which any one would call true.

Probably the excellence of a play or a novel will have to be defined in quite other terms, in terms of the emotional effect upon the audience or reader. A few literary critics here and there in the world have tried, without much success, to study this effect. Coleridge had the problem in mind, and Poe emphasized it. The professional student of literature and esthetics, however, has paid it too little attention. Perhaps now that the psychologists are measuring us for many other values, they may help us to a method for determining what difference it makes in our natures whether we read a novel by Dickens, let us say, or one by Thackeray, or one by Hawthorne. Some difference there surely must be. Each author puts us in a different mood, and leaves us with a different attitude toward life. So with the poets, and so with all other artists. And these differences must be in the end practical, working out through our nerves into various unconscious actions. We are willing to believe that the kind of wall-paper we live with is of consequence to our happiness. Certain violent reds are too exciting, and some other tones would make us nervous or irritable. know in a general way whether or not a room is restful or the opposite. But we have only begun to ask which authors in literature or which masterpieces produce which effects. If we are so slow in the very elementals of

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criticism, it is not to be marveled at that our definitions of complete excellence are inadequate.

We need not be unduly mortified by our ignorance; men greater than we have shared it. Most of us think that Homer is the world's greatest poet, or certainly one of the few great. Yet Plato let Socrates suggest that from any well run state Homer's books would have to be excluded. The argument is strangely modern. Do we not wish the young to think well of religion? Does not religion speak to us of immortal life much happier than any we can find on earth? Does not Homer tell us that when Odysseus met Achilles in the other world, among the blessed, and gazed with awe at the great hero there enjoying his reward, Achilles replied that he would gladly be the meanest and most unhappy man on earth, if he could only get out of heaven and live again on earth? Of course this is exactly the way most of us feel about going to heaven, but no statesmanlike censor would let us express our feelings. So Homer must be kept out, lest the the people of little faith should find encouragement in him.

One of the speakers in the Platonic dialogue replied to Socrates that of course it would be admirable to furnish the public with good books exclusively, but how are we to tell whether a book is good? Socrates answered: "For the moment, my dear friend, we are not literary critics, but founders of a state. May not those who found a state be expected to know what is a good book? Very well, then, we will put Homer out."

THE MORALITY OF ART:-The psychological effect of a book or play on reader or audience may turn out to be less moral or more so than we expected. Some of our friends object to such a poem as ""Twas the Night Before Christmas" on the ground that there is no literal Santa Claus and that an anthropomorphic picture of benevolence misleads childhood. Personally, I should say the poem is altogether moral, because the effect of it is to increase kindness in the reader, and to give goodness what it often sorely needs, an atmosphere of adventure and romance. On the other hand, I am personally somewhat troubled by certain aspects of Dickens's "Christmas Carol." The cheerfulness of that moving story is largely shadowed for me by pictures in it of poverty and sickness to which the total moral of the plot does not seem to apply. I find myself worried over the implications of many other famous stories which pass for what is altogether pure and noble. Emotional implications, I mean. If the Book of Ruth were written to-day for the first time and put on the stage, and if I were reviewing it, I think I should say that Ruth was a gentle but not particularly important character, that Naomi was a rather unstable scheming woman with a quite inadequate sense of morality, and that Boaz was her victim. I know there was an ancient custom that the nearest unmarried male should espouse a widow, and Naomi avails herself of that tradition to promote Ruth's fortunes. But what sticks out as the most conspicuous part of the story is the fact that the nearest male relative in this case was poor,

and Naomi fastened her attention on the next relative after him, who was rich. I don't object; why should I object to one of the greatest stories in the world? But I observe that the effect of the story is less perhaps a sense of providence in life than a sophisticated awareness of the way in which some human beings behave.

This sort of thing, however, is not what would bother the advocates of censorship. Anything one might say about the character of Naomi would for them be a small matter in comparison with the glaring evils now to be witnessed on Broadway. Nudity, for example. Human bodies are exposed completely, or almost so, in tableaux and dances. This, say the indignant reformers, should be stopped. At the risk of losing some more reputation, some of us ask why. We too have in mind the moral effect on the audience. Modesty and self-respect have nothing to do with clothing. Even the fully dressed sometimes have an immodest influence on their associates. We understand that in races so primitive that nakedness is the rule among them, some people in that absolute state appear virtuous and others not. If bodies are indecent and immodest, they ought not to be looked at; but if they express grace and beauty, and if they inspire pure thought, why should they not be exhibited? Can it be that some of us cannot tell a modest body when we see it?

Well, say the censors, any exposure of the human body is dangerous. That is the simplest stand to take. Magazines which reproduce photographs of the nude are often sup

pressed as pornographic. Not being a reader of such journals myself, I can say nothing for or against them. But I wonder if censorship here also ought not to be thoroughgoing and blanket the nudes in the art galleries, lock up the various Venuses which adorn the long tradition of sculpture, and suppress the drawings of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Rodin. Where is the line to be drawn between the good and the bad? No doubt some line is to be drawn, but at present we do not know on what principles; and until we do know, our interference, always questionable, is certainly premature. We cannot in this day suppress the human body altogether. We are too deeply interested in dancing; we have given too much encouragement to the young to care for their bodies, and to carry themselves well. Our attention is fixed, as it has not been for a long time, on the possibilities of expression through the human frame. To draw a curtain before it at this moment would be as impossible as it would be silly. The critic on the other side may argue that all this applies well enough to those who have made some progress in art, and who have some self-control in morals; but there are other people, he will add, to whom even lovely things, like the Venus de Milo, turn out to be an overpowering and unworthy temptation. The inference is that for the benefit of such people we should hide the human body. I cannot take that view myself. In the ordinary disasters of life we recognize such a thing as contributory negligence. Perhaps we ought to recognize the presence among us of contributory indecency. Many

a beautiful work of art, which of itself once suggested nothing but noble emotions, has been somewhat smirched by the talk of the censors, pointing out its possibilities for evil. We did not know the possibilities till the censors drew our attention to them. There are among us, we admit, creatures so evil that the sight of divine beauty would stir in them diabolical thoughts. Why suppress the divine beauty and let the degraded weaklings go at large?

Next after nudity the censor would try to suppress the discussion of sex. Here again he would, in my opinion, be choosing an unfortunate moment for his attempt. Sex has constituted an important theme in literature ever since stories have been told, but never has the subject received such intelligent study as in our day. Many serious men and women the world over, who are immune, one would suppose, to the charge of levity, agree that the understanding of sex is now the most important task before human society. The old stories which recorded its dramatic behavior threw little light on the nature of the thing itself. The church proclaimed marriage a sacrament; and men in general, whether or not they followed the church, have aspired to find a sacrament in their own marriage. But nowhere could we learn, because no one knew, on what terms the sacrament of marriage could be achieved. We have come to feel something grotesque in the blessing of the church pronounced on the union of two people physically unfit to bear healthy children. Many of us feel also that a great wrong is done when the church or state sanctions the

marriage of people spiritually and mentally unfit to live with each other. To be sure, the passion we call love is a kind of lightning which strikes in what seems to be unpredictable ways; but we begin to suspect that none of nature's ways is entirely unpredictable.

The psychologists, the anthropologists, and the sociologists are bringing new information to the solving of this tragic and fascinating problem. To ask the dramatist or the novelist not to mention it would be a peculiarly imbecile form of obscurantism. antism. This is what we think of when we are alone, what we discuss with our wives and husbands, what we talk over with our friends. Around us we see marriages that promised well, breaking up in divorce and separation. We used to think that all divorce was tragic. Perhaps because we have grown somewhat used to it, we are now not sure that all divorces are equally tragic; we find it difficult to state the distinction we feel. To break up a home and spoil the happiness of childhood seems terrible; but it also seems terrible that people, who ought never to have married in the first place, should ruin the lives of their children, as they sometimes do, by continuing to live with them. We used to think the sole purpose of marriage was to found a home. We now suspect other motives, desire for companionship rather than for domesticity, for a collaboration in life-work rather than for children. And even though people do not marry at all, the unexpressed sex in them takes its revenge in queer twists and repressions. Why should we not learn more about it, if we can?

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THE FIRST AMERICAN REALIST: According to the trustworthy anthropologist Paul Radin, editor of "Crashing Thunder" (Appleton), this is not only the first autobiography that has ever been obtained under scientific conditions from any American Indian, but also the "only account that has ever been obtained from a so-called 'primitive' man." It therefore deserves to be studied from many points of view, and it will be. There is, for instance, the literary point of view. The candor and directness of Crashing Thunder make him such an example to all realists and such a warning to all sentimentalists that his story must at once take an important place among the writings which show how truthful literature can be.

Nothing less than quotation can exhibit his qualities, which appear, on the whole, most strikingly in his record of a certain murder in which he had a share and for which he was tried. Crashing Thunder and three other young Winnebago decided about 1890 to kill a Pottawatomie for the honor which this would give them. "We proceeded to a place where horses of other tribes used to pasture. Just as we got there we saw the owner of some of these horses and killed him. My

friend killed him. friend killed him. Then we went home, and secretly I told my father all about it." What Crashing Thunder told his father is equally without apology and bravado; it is statement, and nothing else. It ends: "We searched his pockets and found medicine and money in them. The money we divided among ourselves. After that we cut out his heart, for we had heard that hearts were used for medicine. That is why we cut out his heart. He had a gun and that we took away from him and hid."" The father seems to have been as forthright as the son. "My son, it is good. Your life is no longer an effeminate one. This is the manner in which our ancestors encouraged us to live. It is the will of the spirits in control of war that has led you to do this. Of your own initiative you could not possibly have done it. However, we had better not have a Victory Dance as yet. We have the honor anyhow. We must be careful about the Whites.'" With this Stoic blessing and caution Crashing Thunder seems to have been content.

But murder, even among Indians, will out. One of Crashing Thunder's companions boasted while on a visit to Nebraska. Word reached the whites. Two officers came to the

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