" THE IRISH CENSORSHIP "
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
is with much diffidence that I make a feeble protest against the article of Mr. Yeats on this subject. He is a man of genius, but I am only one of the common people ; yet I may be permitted to record my convictions. There is art and there ' is perverted art. There is literature and there is perverted literature. There is science and there is perverted science.
Art is perverted when it is used to portray the nude in every conceivable attitude, for whatever its merits may be, man,- being what he is, cannot look upon such presentation without having the sexual passion stirred within him. I speak of the artist as well as of the people. There is also literature and there is perverted literature, which is especially prevalent at the present day. It is perverted when it turns on the nauseous question of sex; which every decent man and woman endeavours daily to throw overboard, and to be quit of it.
There is hardly a modern book of fiction without (to use Mr. Yeats's epithet) this " damned " 'subject which savours of the beasts of the field and not of humanity. There is science and there is perverted science. The science of birth- control is nothing less than the modem torm of the crime of Herod—the massacre of the Innocents; In this case we are nbt concerned with remote consequences, which may never come to pass, but with an unnatural crime, here and now.
All honour to thOse who support the Irish censorship on the ground that they are protecting their sons and daughters, and " who cannot understand why the good of nine-tenths that never open a book should not prevail over the good of the tenth that does." What right has art or literature or science to destroy the soul of a nation ? It is not liberty that the arts claim, but licence—licence to destroy the finest virtues of a people.
There are things higher than art or literature or science, viz., the morals, the virtue, the chastity of a nation. It is these things that make a nation great, and not the others. If the Irish censorship can effect this end it will be crowned with glory for all time, and set a great example to Britain and the world. We have been too long ruled by the cant of art and literature and science ; but one saint is worth
them all, in lifting a nation out of the slough of sexual passion and making it clean and pure and. chaste. . : _ That the Irish censorship may succeed in a most difficult task is the fervent hope of the,writer.--I am, Sir, &c.,
WILLIAM MCCARTHY.
9 Prospect Terrace, Ramsgate.
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