THE WAR UPON THE PRINTED WORD
I find it increasingly difficult to write history. I am rather like a man
who has been trained to be a fiddler and then at the age of thirty-five
is suddenly given a piano and ordered to make his living as a virtuoso of
the Klavier, because that too “is music.” I learned my trade in one sort
of a world and I must practice it in an entirely different one. I was
taught to look upon all events of the past in the light of a definitely
established order of things; a universe more or less competently managed
by emperors and kings and arch-dukes and presidents, aided and abetted by
congressmen and senators and secretaries of the treasury. Furthermore, in
the days of my youth, the good Lord was still tacitly recognized as the
ex-officio head of everything, and a personage who had to be treated with
great respect and decorum.
Then came the war.
The old order of things was completely upset, emperors and kings were
abolished, responsible ministers were superseded by irresponsible secret
committees, and in many parts of the world, Heaven was formally closed
by an order in council and a defunct economic hack-writer was officially
proclaimed successor and heir to all the prophets of ancient times.
Of course all this will not last. But it will take civilization several
centuries to catch up and by then I shall be dead.
Meanwhile I have to make the best of things, but it will not be easy.
Take the question of Russia. When I spent some time in that Holy Land,
some twenty years ago, fully one quarter of the pages of the foreign
papers that reached us were covered with a smeary black substance, known
technically as “caviar.” This stuff was rubbed upon those items which a
careful government wished to hide from its loving subjects.
The world at large regarded this sort of supervision as an insufferable
survival of the Dark Ages and we of the great republic of the west saved
copies of the American comic papers, duly “caviared,” to show the folks
at home what backward barbarians those far famed Russians actually were.
Then came the great Russian revolution.
For the last seventy-five years the Russian revolutionist had howled that
he was a poor, persecuted creature who enjoyed no “liberty” at all and as
evidence thereof he had pointed to the strict supervision of all journals
devoted to the cause of socialism. But in the year 1918, the under-dog
turned upper-dog. And what happened? Did the victorious friends of
freedom abolish censorship of the press? By no means. They padlocked all
papers and magazines which did not comment favorably upon the acts of the
new masters, they sent many unfortunate editors to Siberia or Archangel
(not much to choose) and in general showed themselves a hundred times
more intolerant than the much maligned ministers and police sergeants of
the Little White Father.
It happens that I was brought up in a fairly liberal community, which
heartily believed in the motto of Milton that the “liberty to know, to
utter and to argue freely according to our own conscience, is the highest
form of liberty.”
“Came the war,” as the movies have it, and I was to see the day when the
Sermon on the Mount was declared to be a dangerous pro-German document
which must not be allowed to circulate freely among a hundred million
sovereign citizens and the publication of which would expose the editors
and the printers to fines and imprisonment.
In view of all this it would really seem much wiser to drop the further
study of history and to take up short story writing or real estate.
But this would be a confession of defeat. And so I shall stick to my job,
trying to remember that in a well regulated state, every decent citizen
is supposed to have the right to say and think and utter whatever he
feels to be true, provided he does not interfere with the happiness and
comfort of his neighbors, does not act against the good manners of polite
society or break one of the rules of the local police.
This places me, of course, on record as an enemy of all official
censorship. As far as I can see, the police ought to watch out for
certain magazines and papers which are being printed for the purpose of
turning pornography into private gain. But for the rest, I would let
every one print whatever he liked.
I say this not as an idealist or a reformer, but as a practical person
who hates wasted efforts, and is familiar with the history of the last
five hundred years. That period shows clearly that violent methods
of suppression of the printed or spoken word have never yet done the
slightest good.
Nonsense, like dynamite, is only dangerous when it is contained in a
small and hermetically closed space and subjected to a violent impact
from without. A poor devil, full of half-baked economic notions, when
left to himself will attract no more than a dozen curious listeners and
as a rule will be laughed at for his pains.
The same creature handcuffed to a crude and illiterate sheriff, dragged
to jail and condemned to thirty-five years of solitary confinement,
will become an object of great pity and in the end will be regarded and
honored as a martyr.
But it will be well to remember one thing.
There have been quite as many martyrs for bad causes as martyrs for good
causes. They are tricky people and one never can tell what they will do
next.
Hence I would say, let them talk and let them write. If they have
anything to say that is good, we ought to know it, and if not, they will
soon be forgotten. The Greeks seem to have felt that way, and the Romans
did until the days of the Empire. But as soon as the commander-in-chief
of the Roman armies had become an imperial and semi-divine personage, a
second-cousin to Jupiter and a thousand miles removed from all ordinary
mortals, this was changed.
The crime of “laesa majestas,” the heinous offense of “offering insult
to his Majesty,” was invented. It was a purely political misdemeanor and
from the time of Augustus until the days of Justinian, many people were
sent to prison because they had been a little too outspoken in their
opinions about their rulers. But if one let the person of the emperor
alone, there was practically no other subject of conversation which the
Roman must avoid.
This happy condition came to an end when the world was brought under
the domination of the Church. The line between good and bad, between
orthodox and heretical, was definitely drawn before Jesus had been dead
more than a few years. During the second half of the first century, the
apostle Paul spent quite a long time in the neighborhood of Ephesus in
Asia Minor, a place famous for its amulets and charms. He went about
preaching and casting out devils, and with such great success that he
convinced many people of the error of their heathenish ways. As a token
of repentance they came together one fine day with all their books of
magic and burned more than ten thousand dollars worth of secret formulae,
as you may read in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.
This, however, was an entirely voluntary act on the part of a group of
repentant sinners and it is not stated that Paul made an attempt to
forbid the other Ephesians from reading or owning similar books.
Such a step was not taken until a century later.
Then, by order of a number of bishops convened in this same city of
Ephesus, a book containing the life of St. Paul was condemned and the
faithful were admonished not to read it.
During the next two hundred years, there was very little censorship.
There also were very few books.
But after the Council of Nicaea (325) when the Christian Church had
become the official church of the Empire, the supervision of the written
word became part of the routine duty of the clergy. Some books were
absolutely forbidden. Others were described as “dangerous” and the people
were warned that they must read them at their own risk. Until authors
found it more convenient to assure themselves of the approval of the
authorities before they published their works and made it a rule to send
their manuscripts to the local bishops for their approbation.
Even then, a writer could not always be sure that his works would be
allowed to exist. A book which one Pope had pronounced harmless might be
denounced as blasphemous and indecent by his successor.
On the whole, however, this method protected the scribes quite
effectively against the risk of being burned together with their
parchment offspring and the system worked well enough as long as books
were copied by hand and it took five whole years to get out an edition of
three volumes.
All this of course was changed by the famous invention of Johann
Gutenberg, alias John Gooseflesh.
After the middle of the fifteenth century, an enterprising publisher was
able to produce as many as four or five hundred copies in less than two
weeks’ time and in the short period between 1453 and 1500 the people
of western and southern Europe were presented with not less than forty
thousand different editions of books that had thus far been obtainable
only in some of the better stocked libraries.
The Church regarded this unexpected increase in the number of available
books with very serious misgivings. It was difficult enough to catch a
single heretic with a single home made copy of the Gospels. What then of
twenty million heretics with twenty million copies of cleverly edited
volumes? They became a direct menace to all idea of authority and it was
deemed necessary to appoint a special tribunal to inspect all forthcoming
publications at their source and say which could be published and which
must never see the light of day.
Out of the different lists of books which from time to time were
published by this committee as containing “forbidden knowledge” grew that
famous Index which came to enjoy almost as nefarious a reputation as the
Inquisition.
But it would be unfair to create the impression that such a supervision
of the printing-press was something peculiar to the Catholic Church.
Many states, frightened by the sudden avalanche of printed material that
threatened to upset the peace of the realm, had already forced their
local publishers to submit their wares to the public censor and had
forbidden them to print anything that did not bear the official mark of
approbation.
But nowhere, except in Rome, has the practice been continued until today.
And even there it has been greatly modified since the middle of the
sixteenth century. It had to be. The presses worked so fast and furiously
that even that most industrious Commission of Cardinals, the so-called
Congregation of the Index, which was supposed to inspect all printed
works, was soon years behind in its task. Not to mention the flood of
rag-pulp and printers-ink which was poured upon the landscape in the form
of newspapers and magazines and tracts and which no group of men, however
diligent, could hope to read, let alone inspect and classify, in less
than a couple of thousand years.
But rarely has it been shown in a more convincing fashion how terribly
this sort of intolerance avenges itself upon the rulers who force it upon
their unfortunate subjects.
Already Tacitus, during the first century of the Roman Empire, had
declared himself against the persecution of authors as “a foolish thing
which tended to advertise books which otherwise would never attract any
public attention.”
The Index proved the truth of this statement. No sooner had the
Reformation been successful than the list of forbidden books was promoted
to a sort of handy guide for those who wished to keep themselves
thoroughly informed upon the subject of current literature. More than
that. During the seventeenth century, enterprising publishers in Germany
and in the Low Countries maintained special agents in Rome whose business
it was to get hold of advance copies of the Index Expurgatorius. As soon
as they had obtained these, they entrusted them to special couriers who
raced across the Alps and down the valley of the Rhine that the valuable
information might be delivered to their patrons with the least possible
loss of time. Then the German and the Dutch printing shops would set to
work and would get out hastily printed special editions which were sold
at an exorbitant profit and were smuggled into the forbidden territory by
an army of professional book-leggers.
But the number of copies that could be carried across the frontier
remained necessarily very small and in such countries as Italy and Spain
and Portugal, where the Index was actually enforced until a short time
ago, the results of this policy of repression became very noticeable.
If such nations gradually dropped behind in the race for progress, the
reason was not difficult to find. Not only were the students in their
universities deprived of all foreign text-books, but they were forced to
use a domestic product of very inferior quality.
And worst of all, the Index discouraged people from occupying themselves
seriously with literature or science. For no man in his senses would
undertake to write a book when he ran the risk of seeing his work
“corrected” to pieces by an incompetent censor or emendated beyond
recognition by the inconsequential secretary of an Inquisitorial Board of
Investigators.
Instead, he went fishing or wasted his time playing dominoes in a
wine-shop.
Or he sat down and in sheer despair of himself and his people, he wrote
the story of Don Quixote.