Читать книгу The Literary Discipline - John Erskine - Страница 8

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The principle of literary decorum which applies to the representation of the body applies also to the allied theme of sex. The body is a fit subject for literature, but not in detail. Sex is a proper subject for literature, so long as it is represented as a general force in life, and particular instances of it are decent so long as they illustrate that general force and turn our minds to it; but sexual actions are indecent when they cease to illustrate the general fact of sex, and are studied for their own sake; like the ears in the portrait, they then assume an emphasis they do not deserve. This seems to be the decorum of the theme as great writers have treated it, and this is the decorum which men instinctively adopt in discussion, if they have not been trained to think that all discussion of sex is naughty. People so trained will call any book indecent which in any way touches the theme. When Trilby appeared years ago, many of us then youngsters were protected (in vain) from the lovely story because Trilby had been somebody’s mistress before the romance began. So to an earlier generation The Scarlet Letter had seemed dangerous because Hester Prynne’s child was illegitimate. But neither book had physical passion for its theme, though the force of sex in life, for good or evil, gave each story most of its interest and its pathos. How indecent in the artistic sense, how indecorous, either book might have been, we realize by supposing that Du Maurier had centred attention on Trilby’s early and sordid affairs, before she met her true love, or that Hawthorne had given us in detail the experiences of Hester in Arthur Dimmesdale’s arms. One has an uneasy feeling that so the books might have been written today; the general fact of sex and its influence would not operate as a colossal force in the story, but would be deduced in an argument or assumed as an hypothesis—modern specialists in sex are so uncertain of its existence—and the focus would have been on the animal behavior of human beings, which the hypothesis of sex would explain. This kind of book is indecent, though it is usually too psychological in manner to disturb the censorious, and entirely too frequent in recent literature to suppress.

We turn for relief to the decorum of great literature. “From the roof David saw a woman washing herself, and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.” The painter might give the details of that beauty; the writer could not. But he could continue: “And David sent and inquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite? And David sent messengers and took her, and she came in unto him, and he lay with her; and she returned unto her house. And the woman conceived, and sent and told David, and said, I am with child. And David sent to Joab, saying, Send me Uriah the Hittite.” So begins one of the greatest of stories from both points of view, artistic and moral. Is it too frank for our taste? Would the minister who described so well the naked woman and the black velvet, set this story also before his congregation? He ought to, for it is a masterpiece of decency. David’s passion, Bathsheba’s acceptance of it and her consequent terror, were important only as beginning the spiritual tragedy; the old writer names the facts and passes on to his great subject. To have begun less frankly would have been to misrepresent life and spoil the moral; to have elaborated the scene of David’s love-making would have been indecent. In the same decorum the classical Greeks told their stories; Helen eloped with Paris; Œdipus had children by his own mother; Clytemnestra killed her husband and made her lover king—so much of the fact is necessary in each case to understand the magnificent and tragic consequences; but the Greek poets did not pry further into the details of passion.

There are, of course, unhealthy minds which have developed a mania for obscenity, and at the other extreme of exaggeration there are the unbalanced minds which do not care to admit the existence of sex. But sex, in one form or another, is in the thoughts of most people most of the time, and common folk—and the great poets—speak of it constantly, and in the same way. In unsophisticated society, among sincere and simple men, the references to sex are at once reticent and frank; it is recognized and respected as gravitation might be or as the sea is by sailors—as a power always immanent, in contact with which men may be lost or saved. Gossip in that kind of society may whisper that such a girl had a child by such a boy only a month after their wedding, or that so and so is not really the son of his supposed father. Exactly this kind of scandal furnishes material to Homer and to the old prophets in the Bible, to Dante and to Shakespeare, for sex is one of the permanent sides of our moral world. If this treatment of it is essential to a complete picture of life, the thinness of American literature may well come from lack of frankness; but current attempts to correct the thinness by dwelling on physical details are seeking frankness in the wrong direction and are but so many offenses against literary decorum. One reason why we cling with such pride to The Scarlet Letter is that with all its shortcomings as a novel it bases its great moral vision on just such a complete and decent observation of life as our books do not usually give us.