So obvious a
piece of reporting as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" or Robert Herrick's
"Together" makes a sensation; the appearance of a "Jennie Gerhardt" or a
"Hagar Revelly" brings forth a growl of astonishment and rage.
In all this dread of free inquiry, this childish skittishness in both
writers and public, this dearth of courage and even of curiosity, the
influence of comstockery is undoubtedly to be detected. It constitutes a
sinister and ever-present menace to all men of ideas; it affrights the
publisher and paralyzes the author; no one on the outside can imagine
its burden as a practical concern. I am, in moments borrowed from more
palatable business, the editor of an American magazine, and I thus know
at first hand what the burden is. That magazine is anything but a
popular one, in the current sense. It sells at a relatively high price;
it contains no pictures or other baits for the childish; it is frankly
addressed to a sophisticated minority. I may thus assume reasonably, I
believe, that its readers are not sex-curious and itching adolescents,
just as my colleague of the _Atlantic Monthly_ may assume reasonably
that his readers are not Italian immigrants.
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