Excerpt from Jurgen and the Censor, 1920: Report of the Emergency Committee Organized to Protest Against the Suppression of James Branch Cabell's Jurgen

None the less do I still believe that Jurgen is, as originally labeled, a book wherein each man will find what his nature enables him to see; and when anyone confesses that he finds therein only offensiveness, and lasciviousness, and lewd ness, and indecency, I must make bold to take the announcement as a less candid summary of the book's nature than of the critic's.

What can be done, you ask me, to better the present literary situation? Not much, I fear: for we contend against well-meaning and courageous persons who fight for high aims. The most fantastic feature of this droll affair is the profound sincerity of its participants upon both sides. You and I may know and welcome, as the saying runs - that we are in the right so far as goes the un human abstraction called rationality. But the officers and backers of the society's imbecilities, also, quite honestly believe they are engaged in praiseworthy work when, to cite a recent example, they hale Mademoiselle de Maupin into the police courts. Indeed, they appear to be inebriated to these antics by very much the same real love of virtue which incites some of their congeners to burn an unruly negro as a torch to illumine their reprehension of lawlessness, and yet others to express their disfavor of intemperance by decreeing that wine is too atrocious a compound to be employed for any purpose except to symbolize the blood of Jesus Christ. In the face of so many laudable intentions thus obscurely communicated, we can but deduce that whenever stupidity and high morals pig together they beget an offspring that is doubly cursed with zealotry and toxic aphasia. Nor, of course, does it appear quite pious to contend against these natural phenomena.

At all events, you and I are in the negligible minority. I need hardly remind you that the officers of the society have embattled back of them all the complacent muddleheadedness of the average pew-renting American, who from the first has rather fretfully resented any talk about art. Mr. Paul E. More, in one of the letters relative to the jurgen imbroglio, has nicely summed up this popular point of View: I am not at all in sympathy with a group of writers who would take any protest against the society as a justification of what they are pleased to call art. The harm done by the society seems to me very slight, whereas the harm done by the self-styled artist may be very great.

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