I do not see how exactly Senator Sir John Keane could establish what he affirms in his motion when he says that this board—the existing board—has ceased to retain the public confidence. I do not see how anyone can know whether it does or not, or how anyone can tell me what the people are thinking. If anyone says that he can tell us what the people are thinking, he does not know what he is talking about. I do not see how anyone could sit here and say that the board had got public confidence, because we do not know whether it had public confidence or whether it has lost that confidence. It would be a rather difficult and complicated thing to do, but I do not think that Senator Sir John Keane gave us any instance in which a book came under the ban of the board when it was not due to come under the ban within the terms of the Act.
I cannot say that Senator Sir John Keane did that, because you could not do it merely by reading extracts from certain books. Therefore, it seems to me that this motion remains rather in the air. It would be ridiculous for me to vote and to say that, to my knowledge and conviction, the public had a certain view with regard to the Censorship Board. Quite a number of things have been said during this debate which I found rather irritating. For instance, the last and other speakers have asserted often that we are not as other people are. If we were not as other people are, you would then possibly have good ground for abolishing the board; it would be unnecessary. But, just let us observe one or two facts. At the present time, I think it is an undoubted fact that the old standards of decent reticence are not maintained as they were at a previous time. For instance, Senator Sir John Keane says that in the very beginning the methods employed across the water would be adequate for the exclusion of obscene literature. I think I can say that books are now published in England and allowed free circulation against which the law, which has remained in England over a long period, in its application before the last war, or 50 or 100 years ago, would have been in operation though it does not operate to exclude them now. The reason is that the public standards of taste or the conception of the reticence that decency requires have completely changed and one of the troubles in this country is not as our patriots are asserting, that we are not as other men, but that really this country is very much as other countries are.
On the point of freedom, I want to say two things. The fact that these books have such a wide circulation in this country comes from the restriction of freedom by the State. An enormous number of the readers of these books are able to read them by virtue of the operation of the compulsory School Attendance Act. At a cost of £5,000,000 a year these people have been put in a position to read, but are not educated, and they naturally tend to read that which requires the least mental effort. Every time I got on a bus or a tram I used to see copies of a certain illustrated paper published in England. It seemed to be in the hands of every second passenger. It does not come here now, not because people do not want to buy it, but because the paper restrictions in England have made it undesirable to use paper for the printing of copies for the export market. Some time ago I was with a friend of some academic distinction. He said that the job of the editor was perfectly simple—all you have to do is to have firmly in your mind an intelligent child of nine. That paper, catering for the mentality of an undeveloped child of nine, circulated widely here.
There is a very peculiar and difficult situation in the world at present because you have compulsory literature along with literacy, arising from the taxation of people. In Anglo-Saxon countries, or countries which conform with all the institutions of Anglo-Saxon countries, you have at present a widespread system of public libraries. Local authorities impose a tax on the people to provide public libraries. I, personally, cannot see why I or anyone else should be taxed to provide an unlimited amount of these modern published books to be read by young men and young women and girls going to offices to be typists, and so on. I cannot see why the public should be asked to provide them with an unrestricted flood of that stuff.
There is a breakdown in the old standards of reticence, and the law which has existed in England for so long would certainly, when the ordinary standard was rather different from what it is now, have been applied in regard to a great number of books. There is the problem. I do not say that the body we are discussing serves any vital purpose, but I think it is a necessary institution. I was given figures showing that in England before the war, 17,000 books were published annually. Making a generous estimate of the value of literature published at the moment, I think we might say that not less than 16,900 of them certainly represented an awful waste of the wood pulp that went into the making of the paper. I am afraid that if I were on a censoring body, and if I could read all that mass of print, I would have felt called upon, and not according to the Act, to censor most of them, because not merely are these books a waste of time, but the reading of them has a corrosive effect upon the mind. On the other hand, it does seem to me, from the speeches against Senator Sir John Keane's motion, that there has been a general assumption that if any book contained anything which might be harmful to any section of the community, for instance, young people, it is due to be banned. There, I think, is entirely a wrong point of view. Any book can do harm. Senator Johnston referred to Shakespeare and the Bible. There is no doubt about it, a prurient mind could go through the Bible and find things on which to feed its prurience. When he refers to Shakespeare, there are certain individual things in Shakespeare, and I think one can say this with some certainty, that the things which strike one in Shakespeare as most indecent strike one as indecent because they were written for no other purpose.
Some coarse language was put into the mouths of porters by Shakespeare, but Shakespeare's greatness was not enhanced by these passages. One assumes as the most obvious thing that he wanted to get his crowd in the pit when he inserted these little indecent bits without feeling that he was enhancing his tragic conception or adding to his enormous poetical power by what was merely a sop to the groundlings. I do not know what passages Senator Johnston had in mind but he certainly must be aware that Shakespeare did not need to be Shakespeare to write them. Any of the hack writers who wanted to play down to the lower types of audience could have written them just as well as Shakespeare.
That is certainly the problem in this country; is the Government in a world where the old standards of reticence have gone down—and I am not saying that we are any better than the rest of the world in this matter—to open the gates to the 17,000 volumes that flow annually out of England? There have been certain references to things in Latin and Greek literature. There is no doubt that to us whose language is not Latin a thing written in Latin would be less detrimental than something written in English. We have to recognise these various shades of distinction. I think it is rather unfortunate that Senator Keane hung so much on to the book to which he referred—The Tailor and Ansty I think it is called. I saw in a certain newspaper —it might have been more than one newspaper—what was obviously the usual rant of protests worked up against this banning. I am not in a position to discuss the matter because I have not read the book but the passages which Senator Sir John Keane read struck me not alone as outrageously immoral but as inconceivably boring. There was, for instance, the constant repetition of that phrase about the bull and the cow. I think that anyone with a proper sense of economy of diction in literature would certainly have cut it down when it came to writing it out.
Senator Sir John Keane also spoke of one man whom the Church recognised as one of its outstanding poets. I cannot understand how he could say that. Certainly I do not know what machinery the Church has for recognising him as one of its outstanding poets. There is this problem, as I say, of the enormous masses of our people who have gone through the elementary schools, who are able to read, and who are then submitted to this enormous flood of literature written in a world which has lost its old reticence and which has largely ceased to have the identical moral standards that prevailed through Christendom for a long period. Those who suggest that our people are such an extraordinarily marvellous people that they should be protected from this imported literature are likely to destroy their own case because if our people were such a marvellous people this undesirable literature would really have no effect. It is because we know that the masses of our people can hardly be called educated that censorship must be exercised to protect them from this pernicious literature.
Reference was made to a book which has a wide circulation, and it was suggested that the suppression of such books in this country has brought us a bad name. I do not know of any book—it might have been that I have not followed the books that have been censored—that has been censored that I feel any the poorer for not having free access to. If we have public libraries, I do not see why unfortunate ratepayers should be called be upon to pay for the circulation of books amongst the people other than books that have for a long period been recognised as books of great value. As far as modern novels are concerned, I do not know of more than half a dozen novels that have been published in the last 20 years that there would be any harm in the people not reading. Taking the modern novel, the publisher calculates that the copies that are not sold within one month of its publication may be regarded as practically unsaleable. When a writer writes a book he immediately submits it to a censorship. When you write a book you have got to depend on the publisher's decision as to whether it will be published or not. It is common knowledge that there are publishers in England who will undertake to publish a novel if it is sufficiently indecent to guarantee a certain sale. The writer has to submit first of all to the censorship of the publisher who decides whether the book will be published or not. Secondly, the book is submitted to the censorship of the reviewers. The people know only of new books in so far as they have been reviewed in various publications. So far as this country is concerned, our whole standard of judgment is completely that of a flunkey. We accept what has been acclaimed as a great book in England. Every Irish writer who is acclaimed by completely unimportant English critics, immediately establishes himself in this country as an outstanding pundit in all matters of literature, philosophy, politics and the ordering of society. That is our weakness. We have no critical standards. We do not produce any great numbers of writers ourselves that we can be proud of.
We are in the modern world which we can objectively consider as moving in the wrong direction. We have this position in all stages of society. Take, for instance, the university society which wants to attract a big crowd. What do you get? You get somebody who by reason of the fact that what he has to say requires such little mental application that he has won the mass of the English public. If you can bring such a man as that forward you are guaranteed an overflow meeting. You can take an unimportant biologist, whose competence in biology has merely served as an advertisement tag for his work as an unimportant journalist, discussing politics and defending them from the Leftist point of view. The fact that he is a journalist and a Leftist guarantees him an enormous advertisement and a whole body of people will declare that he is one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other men who came over here, and whose books are guaranteed to have an enormous circulation, might happen to have attained their position by being members of what the B.B.C. calls the Brains Trust. If you know anything about any particular subject and listen to those pundits discoursing on your subject, you would be astounded as to how any men could, in public, show such an enormous lack of elementary knowledge. They come over here and, of course, we hail them as some of the greatest thinkers in the world because of that general flunkeyism of spirit that is prevalent here.
All that censorship does and can do is to ban a very limited number of books—the number being limited by the number they can read during the year—and that number is negligible as compared with the enormous outflow from the printing presses available to the people here. It seems to me that some such body should be in existence symbolically, as on certain occasions there may be something so outrageous that it must be banned immediately. Otherwise, when people are denied access to half a dozen of more or less indecent books, they still have available to them a couple of thousand others to which they can turn for consolation. As I said in the beginning, I do not think any of us is in a position to show whether or not the present censorship board has the confidence of the people.
I want to refer to two books. One of them was mentioned by Senator Keane—the book by Halliday Sutherland. I can understand that it could be argued that that book, widely spread about and read in the wrong spirit, and by people who should not be reading such books, might be harmful; but, at the same time, it does not follow that, because a book might do harm to certain people, such a book is necessarily bad. All that one can do there would be to try, if there were machinery for that purpose, to see that it circulated only amongst people to whom it would not be harmful. I wish to stress that point—because a thing can do harm, it is not necessarily bad. I think I can quote St. Thomas on the point. He says that a man who makes a bow and arrow, which may be used for killing somebody, is eminently justified in making it, provided it is for a good purpose. It is the same with books. There are some which you would not like to see in everybody's hands, but which, at the same time, are valuable and which should not be unavailable. I wish to embark on one point of literary criticism on which I am not more competent than, say, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement or the literary editor of the Sunday Times. I cannot confess that I am not going to be more competent than such negligible people. One book, The Power and the Glory, was full, if you like, of coarseness, and yet, in my judgment, it is the one great novel that I have seen published in England in recent years, or, I might say, in modern times. It is a book you might describe as outrageous, but it plunges into the depths of human perfidy and turpitude. Nevertheless, its total effect is what Aristotle calls catharsis—its total effect is noble, human and purifying. That is my personal judgement. I think the Censorship Board banned that. In that matter, I disagree with their judgment, although I can quite understand that they decided that such a book, in all the Carnegie libraries throughout the country, might easily have a bad effect on a great number of people.
As to certain Irish writers depicting Irish characters as undesirable, that is quite irrelevant to the Act under which this board operates. There is hypersensitiveness here: we are always afraid that the outside world will think that some character in some book, important or unimportant, written by an Irishman, will make everybody think that we are all like that. That comes only from a certain inferiority that we are conscious of— we are always in terror of what other people think of us. If you read the Inferno of Dante and just note the characters there, from his own City of Florence, you will agree that most of the characters are rather undesirable —their very presence in the Inferno indicated that they were not perfect little saints. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the glorious City of Florence has, as its greater glory, the fact that it produced the supreme poet of all time—Dante.
Therefore, although the relatives of the various people situated in Hell could have been rather sore about it, and though Florentines of that time might have said: "The Venetians, Romans, Pisans and Franks will think we are an awful lot of people," it is clearly established that Dante brought honour and glory, which will exist for all time, to the city whose people he represented in such an undesirable light. Irish writers who say that such characters would give people outside the idea that all the Irish people are like that, have a sort of inferiority complex which they should get rid of. When it comes to examining and analysing and plunging deep into the more obscene human passions, personally I do not think that, when that is done, the book is necessarily an indecent one. As a great French writer has pointed out, the author who is going to do that must himself be sure that he is moved by a terrifying purity.
There comes the point as to how the Censorship Board is to judge. One man, in whose heart resides that enormous purity, might himself plunge into these obscene depths of the human heart and himself produce a book which would be essentially noble and ennobling; whereas another man, writing of the identical subject and identical characters, would produce a book subversive to morality amongst the population.
I do not think that Senator Sir John Keane could establish what he states in the motion. I am quite prepared to believe, and quite prepared not to believe, if the proofs come forward, that the Censorship Board has not acted strictly within the terms of the Act. That is the only thing that could be established. I do not see how we can propose that censorship in this country be abolished. Every State in every age has had to establish some sort of censorship. At the moment it happens that the majority of the books published in the world have cast away discipline and reticence, because it is so much easier to write without discipline or reticence. There must be some machinery available, to be put into operation any time that the threat becomes too vital. At the same time, I hate to hear people talking as though anything not suitable for a girl of 14 or for a typist going on the bus to the office, must necessarily be condemned and excluded. If some harm is done in that way, there is a greater good in seeing that the richest of literature and the greatest of human thought should be available to the people of this country.
