lteries of their
elders. And on the side of realism there is an almost equal vacuity and
lack of veracity. The action of all the novels of the Howells school
goes on within four walls of painted canvas; they begin to shock once
they describe an attack of asthma or a steak burning below stairs; they
never penetrate beneath the flow of social concealments and urbanities
to the passions that actually move men and women to their acts, and the
great forces that circumscribe and condition personality. So obvious a
piece of reporting as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" or Robert Herrick's
"Together" makes a sensation; the appearance of a "Jennie Gerhardt" or a
"Hagar Revelly" brings forth a growl of astonishment and rage.

In all this dread of free inquiry, this childish skittishness in both
writers and public, this dearth of courage and even of curiosity, the
influence of comstockery is undoubtedly to be detected. It constitutes a
sinister and ever-present menace to all men of ideas; it affrights the
publisher and paralyzes the author; no one on the outside can imagine
its burden as a practical concern. I am, in moments borrowed from more
palatable business, the editor of an American magazine, and I thus know
at first hand what the burden is. That magazine is anything but a
popular one, in the current sense. It sells at a relatively high price;
it contains no pictures or other baits for the childish; it is frankly
addressed to a sophisticated minority. I may thus assume reasonably, I
believe, that its readers are not sex-curious and itching adolescents,
just as my colleague of the _Atlantic Monthly_ may assume reasonably
that his readers are not Italian immigrants. Nevertheless, as a
practical editor, I find that the Comstocks, near and far, are oftener
in my mind's eye than my actual patrons. The thing I always have to
decide about a manuscript offered for publication, before ever I give
any thought to its artistic merit and suitability, is the question
whether its publication will be permitted--not even whether it is
intrinsically good or evil, moral or immoral, but whether some roving
Methodist preacher, self-commissioned to keep watch on letters, will
read indecency into it. Not a week passes that I do not decline some
sound and honest piece of work for no other reason. I have a long list
of such things by American authors, well-devised, well-imagined,
well-executed, respectable as human documents and as works of art--but
ne