political damage of
their enmity, and of the enmity of their wealthy and influential
backers; above all, they have the command of far more money than any
author can hope to muster. Finally, they derive an advantage from two of
the most widespread of human weaknesses, the first being envy and the
second being fear. When an author is attacked, a good many of his rivals
see only a personal benefit in his difficulties, and not a menace to
the whole order, and a good many others are afraid to go to his aid
because of the danger of bringing down the moralists' rage upon
themselves. Both of these weaknesses revealed themselves very amusingly
in the Dreiser case, and I hope to detail their operations at some
length later on, when I describe that _cause celebre_ in a separate
work.

Now add to the unfairness and malignancy of the attack its no less
disconcerting arbitrariness and fortuitousness, and the path of the
American author is seen to be strewn with formidable entanglements
indeed. With the law what it is, he is quite unable to decide _a priori_
what is permitted by the national delicacy and what is not, nor can he
get any light from the recorded campaigns of the moralists. They seem to
strike blindly, unintelligently, without any coherent theory or plan.
"Trilby" is assaulted by the united comstockery of a dozen cities, and
"The Yoke" somehow escapes. "Hagar Revelly" is made the subject of a
double prosecution in the State and Federal courts, and "Love's
Pilgrimage" and "One Man" go unmolested. The publisher of
Przybyszewski's "Homo Sapiens" is forced to withdraw it; the publisher
of Artzibashef's "Sanine" follows it with "The Breaking Point." The
serious work of a Forel is brought into court as pornography, and the
books of Havelock Ellis are barred from the mails; the innumerable
volumes on "sex hygiene" by tawdry clergymen and smutty old maids are
circulated by the million and without challenge. Frank Harris is
deprived of a publisher for his "Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confession"
by threats of immediate prosecution; the newspapers meanwhile dedicate
thousands of columns to the filthy amusements of Harry Thaw. George
Moore's "Memoirs of My Dead Life" are bowdlerized, James Lane Allen's "A
Summer in Arcady" is barred from libraries, and a book by D. H. Lawrence
is forbidden publication altogether; at the same time half a dozen cheap
magazines devoted to sensational sex stories attain to hundreds of
thousands of circul