From what has already been said another conclusion follows:—The book is to be judged not by isolated passages in it, but by the whole book. Peculiarly is this true in the present case, where the book at large is indicted, not parts of it, as was the case when complaint was made in Special Sessions, but all of it without reference to any particular part. That, when a book is indicted as a whole, no judgment can be passed upon it which is not based upon a reading of the whole, with the necessary test of correlation which this entails, would seem manifest on its face. But in view of certain expressions which judicially fell in the federal case of U. S. v. Bennett (16 Blatchf. 338; Fed. Cs. No. 14,571), it is just as well to refer to the fact that, both in England and in this State, the test is the whole book, not isolated parts to which it may please the prosecutor to point an accusing finger.
Halsey v. N. Y. Society (234 N. Y. 1);
Fitzpatrick’s Case (31 How. St. Tr. 1170, 1186).
St. Hubert’s Guild v. Quinn (64 Misc. 336).
“The judgment of the court below is based upon a few passages in each of these works, and these passages have been held to be of such a character as to invalidate the contract upon which the action has been brought. These few passages furnish no criterion by which the legality of the consideration of the contract can be determined. That some of these passages, judged by the standard of our day, mar rather than enhance the value of these books can be admitted without condemning the contract for the sale of the books as illegal. The same criticism has been directed against many of the classics of antiquity and against the works of some of our greatest writers from Chaucer to Walt Whitman, without being regarded as sufficient to invalidate contracts for the sale or publication of their works.”
St. Hubert Guild v. Quinn (64 Misc. 336, 339).
“No work may be judged from a selection of such paragraphs alone. Printed by themselves they might, as a matter of law, come within the prohibition of the statute. So might a similar selection from Aristophanes or Chaucer or Boccaccio or even from the Bible. The book, however, must be considered broadly as a whole.”
Halsey v. N. Y. Society (234 N. Y. 1, 4).
The proposition thus laid down is nothing but common sense,—the common sense which was expressed, over a century ago, in a trial in the Irish King’s Bench, for the publication of an alleged libel:
“Mr. Burrowes.—My lords, I beg to know, whether the Court be of opinion, that without any averment respecting other passages in the book, the counsel for the crown are entitled to read them.
Mr. Justice Day.—In order to show the quo animo, they may read those other passages.
Mr. Justice Osborne.—I think they have such right, as evidence of the intention.
Lord Chief Justice Downes.—And the defendant, if he thinks fit, may read all the rest of the book.” (Fitzpatrick’s Case, 31 Hows. St. Tr. 1170, 1186.)
It follows that if the book must be taken as a whole, then it cannot be condemned piecemeal. No part can be read without a mind to its relation to the whole. In the latest case on the subject, Andrews J., speaking for the majority of the court, twice concedes that, taken by themselves, certain parts of the book are not to be justified:
“It contains many paragraphs, however, which taken by themselves are undoubtedly vulgar and indecent. * * * On the other hand, it does contain indecent paragraphs.” Halsey v. N. Y. Society (234 N. Y. 1, 4, 6).
Yet the book was upheld for all that, both because, in the words which the court adopted from the late Professor Wells of Sewanee, the author there involved “helps us over the instinctive repulsion that we feel for the situation”, and because he excites “a purely artistic interest”, etc. (Halsey v. N. Y. Society, 234 N. Y. 1, 5.)