Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/64

 impure and libidinous thoughts in minds 'open to such influences.' In the celebrated, but now remote, case of Madame Bovary, the prosecution, indeed, like a prurient schoolboy, selected from that grim and repellent history of illicit relations all the passages descriptive of sensual passion, wove them into a suggestive little narrative of its own, and thus presented its case to the jury. The defense, on the other hand, argued with a good deal of piquancy and cogency that Flaubert had dealt with sensual passion in the temper of Bossuet, with excerpts from whom the notebooks of the novelist were full; and that to judge a serious work of art without reference to its total intention and effect is not merely unjust but grossly absurd.

Each attempt to apply the law in such cases results inevitably in an extension of the legal prosecution and defense into an acrimonious, yet not uninstructive and often diverting, public debate between authors in general and the officers and friends of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Whatever the result of the legal proceedings may be, the cause of 'outraged virtue' is lost the moment that it is carried into the newspapers, where, as Mark Twain might have said, it is as much out of place 'as a Presbyterian in hell-fire.' The cause is lost through the manifested ineptitude, ignorance, and incompetency of those who espouse it. In these cases