his drawing-room door.  Let him do his own work.  Nothing but idleness—­that’s what’s the matter with him!  The whole project that Robinson suggests is simply monstrous.  He might just as well say that because his daughter has a weak digestion and an unruly appetite for rich cakes, therefore all the cake shops in London must be shut up.  Let him keep her out of cake shops.  All I want is freedom.  I don’t mean to defend my tastes or to apologize for them.  If I wish to hire a certain book, that’s enough.  I must have it—­until the police step in.  There can only be one censorship, and that is by the police.  A Library is a commercial concern, and I won’t look at it from any other point of view.  I have no interest at the present moment in your notions about the future of literature, and the livelihood of serious artists, and so on.  All that’s absolutely beside the point.  The sole point is that I am ready to let other people have what they want, and I claim that I’ve the right to have what I want.  The whole thing is simple rot, and there’s no other word for it.”

1910

CENSORSHIP BY THE LIBRARIES

[13 Jan. ’10]

A number of people have been good enough to explain to me that the project of the Circulating Libraries Censorship (now partially “in being”) did not originally concern itself with novels, and that, in the first place, it was directed against books of more or less scandalous memoirs.  Of this I was well aware.  But in writing about the matter I expressly tried to centre its interest on the novel, because the novel is the only important part of the affair.  For a year past I have been inveighing against the increasing taste for feeble naughtiness concerning king’s mistresses and all that sort of tedious person.  And I have remarked on the growing frequency of such words as “fair,” “frail,” “lover,” “enchantress,” etc., in the supposed-to-be-alluring titles of books of historical immorality.  (I presume that these volumes are called for by the respectable, as the cocotte calls for a creme de menthe at a fashionable seaside hotel on a winter Sunday afternoon.) Apparently the circulating libraries also have noticed the growing frequency of such words in their lists.  But what they have noticed with more genuine alarm is the growing prices which clever publishers have been putting on such books.  It has not escaped the observation of clever publishers that the demand by library subscribers for such books is a very real demand, and clever publishers therefore thought that they might make a little bit extra in this connexion by charging high for volumes brief but scandalous.  The libraries thought otherwise.  Hence, in truth, the attempted censorship.  The now famous moral crusade of the libraries would certainly not have occurred had not the libraries perceived, in the moral pressure which was exercised upon them from lofty regions, the chance of effecting economies.  And there is not a circulating library that does not feel an authentic need of economies.