Faksimile

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Therese
35: Jchnchnng
box 6/2
APRIL 1929
CONSTABLES MONTHLMLIST
Censorskip: The Publisher’s Shure (cont.)
So, with the best will in the world, we must evade the responsibility which is
thrust upon us. We cannot change a national psychology (Arnold Bennett wrote
the other day that“one of the defects of the Anglo-Saxon temperament is a
passion for interfering with other people’s tastes'’) and we are reluctant ourselves
to disturb even a journalist at play.
But what we can do, we have done.
We have quoted at the head of this article an extract from the comically angust
scolding administered to publishers by one of their Trade-papers, This article in
Dhe Publisher's Circular provoked a letter from one of the paper’s readers,
which letter in its turn provoked an editorial reply. Surely, asked the editor,
Mr.—
would be able to decide if such and such a book is fit to be read by a
lad or girl of sixteen or eighteen?“
All is now clear. Dur trouble had been precisely that no one seemed to know
what was obscene and what not. Whenthe Publisher’s Circular in its original
article declared that any person of average common-sense can apply the test
which is the basis of these persecutions, viz., whether the tendency of the matter
is to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral infiuenees
and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall,'’ we could merely
wring our hands. Suppose we have a tantalus on our sideboard and a weak¬
minded caller is left alone in the room for ten minutes. Are we ogres of
depravity for putting whisky within the reach of one“open to such immoral
influences'? This sort of thing has no end—at least so it seemed to us.“ But
thanks be, the editor of 7'e Publisher’s Circular has, in his second comment.
supplied the needful precision.
We have immediately sacked all our readers, lest we be tempted to plead their
reports as an excuse for turning out an obscene book. In their place we have
engaged some charming lads and girls ofsixteen and eighteen, to whom we read
aloud by the hour, while experts sit at hand ready to detect the least flush of
shame or pucker of bewilderment on those fair young faces, The grate is full of
charred paper. Dur coal-merchants are in despair.
Who says a trade paper is not a help to the trade?
And weare rigkt. For some astonishing reason the Editor repeated this purely lunatie paragraph in yet a
later number of his paper. Why? Wedo not know. As forthe paragraph itself, it still meanggothing.
ARTHUR SCHNITZLER:
A WRITER FOR THE CIVILISED
An 1892 Schnitzler’s first play Das Märchen was produced in Vienna, declared
Fimmoral' and withdrawn. Fifteen years later it was played again, considered
old fashioned'’ and again withdrawn.
This curions little episode is in a way symbolical of Schnitzler’s genius. His
has always been the essence of sophistication—a shrewd, tolerant, slightly
amused perception of the shifts and hypocrisies of polite society. Such percep¬
tion Gike the cant which it perceives) is a constant thing, and not, like the society
itself, for ever creating new modernities, for ever believing itself the latest thing
in freedom and chic. Wherefore, because Schnitzler, like the human nature he
knows so well, is always fundamentally the same, but his successive readers,
at ihe moments of his first impacts with them, are at various stages of callowness
or self-deception, his books have perpeiually either the tang of immorality orthe
flatness of dissipation. His work is a little startling to those who come freshly
to his art, seeing that to palates nurtured on the falsehood of successive conven¬
tions nothing is so astringent as truth, and the taste for truth is a taste to be
acquired. But when he has done his duty, educated his readers, and they have
passed on to the exaggeration of cynicism which is not life but license, he is
liable to be scorned; for in their new zeal for eccentricity, folk forget that he
taught them reality and in their folly pass beyond the influence of his sanity
and realism. Such is the fate of truth—either to be too violent or too mild.
(3.