The Library Test
Independent Essays. By John Sparrow. (Faber, 30s.) To criticise a book composed mainly of the criti- cism of criticism might be enough to bring the whole unsteady pile tumbling down. It could be entertaining to concentrate on the gleeful think- piece in which Mr. Sparrow speculates whether or not Jane Austen actually met Sydney Smith, but the late Ronald Knox has already dealt with that kind of thing.
When Mr. Sparrow moves outside the library his essays lose their jollity. Take this judgment on the executed Roger Casement: `It is not only by the criteria of the lawyer and the moralist that Casement's fate must be deemed a just one; there was about it also a justice truly poetic, for it gave to his disordered career a climax that made a design of the whole. Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it; acquittal or reprieve would have denied it the dignity of tragedy.' To write such a judgment calls not only for strange definitions of `moralist,' truly poetic' and 'dig- nity,' but also for a titanic lack of imagination. Roger Casement was hanged.
That particular judgment could be put down, most kindly, as an example of otherworldliness. So could his lines on William Blake : `. . . Blake was a visionary: I am not persuaded by his poetry that he was anything but a passive vehicle for his visions, when he says that what he wrote was dictated to him by an angel he speaks the truth, and he is denying his own claim to great- ness.' All right then, but was the angel (Blake's winged brain) a great poet? Another one of Mr. Sparrow's judgments, or perhaps it is merely a conundrum, runs: '. . to compare Donne with Shakespeare is to see the difference between a great poet and one who is merely superb.'
This kind of word-juggling can sometimes lead to sense, but Mr. Sparrow often mistimes his catches. Examine his treatment of the law on homosexuality and the Lady Chatterley trial. Mr. Sparrow believes that any reform of the laws against homosexuality will have little effect simply because the general public has an 'in- stinctive horror' of such practices. The phrase is loaded. 'Horror' is certainly too strong a word for a general reaction which ranges from in- credulity to amusement and from mild sympathy to near-apoplexy. Such horror as there may be has been fostered by the law as it stands, general ignorance and the Christian churches, which have such a consistently disastrous record of interfer- ence with the sex lives of their flock that it seems about time they took instruction from the godless.
`Instinctive horror' is doubly misleading, but since it's a cornerstone of the book it has to be tested. 'Instinctive' implies that this repugnance is present in man at birth. But even Mr. Sparrow, elsewhere in his book, repeats the generally accepted truth that children are not shocked by anything until they are taught to be shocked. To accept an unprovable 'instinctive horror' as the basis of legal thinking could only represent a retreat from the illogical to the nonsensical.
Moving on to censorship, Mr. Sparrow's de- fence of prosecutions for obscene libel contains these words : 'Is it not at least as much the desire to protect members of the public from being disgusted or shocked as it is the desire to pro- tect them from being corrupted or depraved? . . . In short, is not the real reason for prose- cuting an indecent book the fact that it is inde- cent? Whether or not this is the "real" or only reason, is it not a sufficient one?' Hardly. The people who buy pornography buy it because, usually, they need it to brighten their inadequate sex lives. If they are shocked or disgusted by their purchases, what harm is done?
Finally, to the Lady Chatterley case. I'm bored, and I think Mr. Sparrow must be by now, by the controversy over what took place during that `night of sensual passion.' But I'm certainly not bored when Mr. Sparrow gets to the point: `Where circulation is effectively limited by the expense of the production or because the text is veiled in the obscurity of a learned language' doubtless no harm is done; but to offer the offending word to the public at a penny or six' pence or three-and-sixpence a copy is clearly just as bad, from the point of view of social decency, as it would be to give it away.' In other words, the don may read pornographY, but his scout mustn't. Even if you respect the class system as much as Mr. Sparrow, it's an odd twist to imply that the working class are more given to sexual experiment and excess than the rich. To answer that plainly, they haven't got the time, energy or money for mucking about. Mr. Sparrow's thought on this point is or mon to much official policy on censorship: Ordinary people, it seems, must be protected from the taboo-disturbers. So that television, the most popular of the arts, suffers the strides.' sexual censorship, while a wide variety of curi- ous, expensive books covering every sexual Whit" awaits the rich, bored man. What is the reasoning that leads to the prosecution of cheap edition: and the wink at the classier product? Maybe subconscious fear of a sexual Peasants' Rev°‘ led by a phallic Wat Tyler. Or the terror that
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somewhere, sometime, a miner might roll Coto bed on his wedding night and say : 'Eh, lass, I'm getting ideas above my station.' ADRIAN tarrcHat
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