So, reluctantly, I end, as I began, with those two irreconcilable, but I think equally justified, estimates of the French—save that each has at the moment lost something of its intensity for me through the relief of putting it into written words.
It will not be the French who will overthrow the barriers between races, sacrifice their nationality to something broader and greater, or conduct the League of Nations to a position of supreme importance. True, there are those moments of national madness when it is as though the French were atoning for all their habitual narrowness. But one cannot say: ‘Come, let us now have a moment of madness.’ No, for the achievement of unselfish uncircumscribed ideals the world will have to depend on individuals who in their growth have gradually sloughed off all that is narrow, restrictive and myopic in their nationality. Such individuals have come in the past, and should come increasingly in the future, from many different peoples—hardly from the French.
On the other hand, even though we may feel that nationality is narrowing, and that at best it should be only a means to an end, we may nevertheless be actually grateful that the French have made it an end in itself. The similar devotion to it of the Poles arouses principally distaste; in the French we not only excuse but admire it. For there is about it in their case, and in their case alone, something akin to the results of intensive cultivation in agriculture, something that the best minds of other races must sacrifice (rightly, I think) to broader results—a perfection, an orderliness of thought, a fine neat thoroughness, incapable of achievement in any other way than through this persistent nurture of nationality, and to the contemplation of which we can always turn with pleasure.
PORNOGRAPHY
The abridged edition of the Oxford Dictionary, which is the only dictionary within my reach at present, defines pornography as (1) ‘description of manners, etc., of harlots’ (an etymological definition that the word has long since outgrown); and (2) ‘treatment of obscene subjects in literature; such literature.’ Looking up ‘obscene,’ I find ‘lewd’; looking up ‘lewd,’ I find ‘lascivious’; and looking up ‘lascivious,’ I find ‘lustful; inciting to lust.’ (Is there something especially wicked about the Ls?) So the definition finally appears as ‘literature treating of subjects inciting to lust.’
Now I have nothing at all against dictionaries. I find them entertaining reading, pithy, diversified, pleasantly alliterative, well informed but never tedious. Indeed, appreciation of the dictionary is growing steadily. Its influence on the arts is strong and increasing. In literature, as far back as E. F. Benson’s Dodo it could be faintly discerned, while to-day it shines unmistakably in such books as Compton Mackenzie’s Sylvia Scarlett or in any novel by Stephen McKenna. As for the movies, they are fairly suffused with the spirit of the dictionary. For example, a two-dimensioned heroine is going to make a visit. You see her enter her motor car, ride in her motor car, descend from her motor car. From what does such bright thoroughness derive if not from the thoroughness and inevitable logic of the dictionary? Predictable; prediction; predictive(ly). Nevertheless, the dictionary is imperfect. For it defines only the literal meaning of a word, which is less than half its significance. All valuable words grow hazy with connotation, and this luminous haze becomes a true part of their meaning. What sort of definition is ‘sprite or goblin of Arabian tales’ for ‘genie’? In fact, there are a number of words that to a great many people mean nothing but their connotation, the haze that has risen around them; ‘Bolshevism,’ for instance.
This emanation or glow or haze about words infinitely enriches language; it makes poetry possible. But one does not always want to use language emotionally; often one desires merely to express accurately a prosaic thought. Then the richness clogs one. It is as though a commercial traveller in olive oil, setting out to go from Naples to Smyrna, were to find himself not traversing the eastern Mediterranean, but adrift on the confused enchanted sea of Odysseus. Mediaeval saints frequently had visions of the Madonna that rendered them ecstatic with joy. But the celestial light that shone from her face was so dazzling that they were seldom able to give any satisfactory account of her features.
Thus with words. Thus with ‘pornography.’ ‘Literature treating of subjects inciting to lust’ is no explanation of the shuddering sense of evil, arousing a desire to cross oneself, that the word evokes. Good gracious! we have all listened to dirty stories—in the smoking-room of Pullman cars if we are men, at our finishing schools if we are women—and, whether interested or bored, we certainly felt no shuddering sense of evil. The truth is that the connotation, the emotional significance, of a word may be so different from its original prosaic meaning as almost to kill the thing the word purports to define. This has happened in the case of ‘pornography.’ So powerful is the maleficent exhalation of the name that it has, if not actually destroyed the thing itself, at least repressed and stultified it. It is a pity; for pornography is capable of becoming, and, despite its handicap, has at times in the employ of skilful writers become, one of the most delicate of minor arts. By our terrified taboo we keep it out of the hands of artists, and so a gross and especially a childish thing at the primitive level of the coarse words scrawled on latrines by little boys.
This is all the more unfortunate since there are certain fine and fastidious artists who are at their best when writing pornographically. Sterne was one. Norman Douglas and James Branch Cabell are examples to-day. South Wind contains some of the daintiest pornography ever written, done in so candid and virginal a way that to read it is like hearing a girl of seventeen say sweetly to a group of her parents’ friends: ‘I always tell my mother everything.’ As for Jurgen, its pornographic passages are as fresh and delightful as the Contes Drolatiques themselves. I have no patience (and I dare say Mr. Cabell has none) with those persons who defend Jurgen by denying that it is pornographic, and I have still less patience with those who assert about any book of the kind that it is not pornographic, but teaches a great moral lesson. No doubt there are dull inferior books that ‘treat the phenomena of sex very frankly’ and thereby ‘teach a great moral lesson’; but they bear no relation to pornography, which is either an art in itself or nothing.
‘Literature treating of subjects inciting to lust.’ H’m ... I fear the dictionary has failed us all around. For the definition is not only inadequate but inaccurate. Oh, it will hold, I suppose, for the lowest forms of pornography—for, say, certain passages in Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom or in Richardson’s nasty Pamela. (It is a significant fact that the authors of such primitively and grossly pornographic books as these nearly always protest that they are not pornographic, but teach that ‘great moral lesson’ referred to above, whereas the authors of first-rate grown-up pornography take pride in their calling). But when one progresses beyond such elementary pornography, which can be of interest only to children or to men with the minds of children, the definition collapses. Really good pornography for grown-ups simply does not ‘incite to lust.’ For example, I read with delight the conversation between Jurgen and the Hamadryad (and if that is not pornography, and of the best, then I don’t know what pornography is, and had better give up trying to write about it), but it did not give me a desire to go downstairs and assault the cook. It is probably true that to a person incapable of desire for the opposite sex such a passage as this would be without interest, but the passage itself does not incite desire; it plays mentally with the idea of the emotion. In short, one must be capable of desire in order to like pornography, but that liking itself is something quite different from desire. Jurgen, you may remember, though scarcely a weakling, soon wearied of the conscientious perversities of his wife, Anaitis, but he loved to get off by himself in her magnificent pornographic library (the run of which I envy him) and read about such things. That is profoundly true and illuminating.