Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/73

 and their land and their type of culture inconceivably remote.

Pornography is defined as a 'treatise on prostitutes,' or as 'obscene or licentious writing.'

When our literature passed from the hands of scholars and gentlemen into the hands of our barbarian artists of what Emerson called the 'Jacksonian rabble,' it lost much of the high seriousness, the decorum, and the impeccable decency characteristic of the New England school. It eventually enlisted the pens of numerous writers who repudiate responsibility to society, and who are far more interested in the life of the senses than in the life of the mind and the imagination. Among these have appeared several authors to whom the sexual life is the all-absorbing centre of interest, and who have devoted no inconsiderable skill to familiarizing us with the life of the prostitute, and to domesticating her, with her amateur sisters, in our literature.

Now, the life of these interesting creatures, who are beginning, as it were, to swarm about our firesides and to 'homestead' the vacant territory of our imaginations, may or may not be written in an obscene or licentious fashion. If these words are ever applicable to literature, they are plainly, in my opinion, applicable to some of the most praised and prosecuted books of recent years. But the question whether they are applicable does not depend in the least upon the artistic skill with which the books are written. It depends upon the effect which they are designed to produce. Art, strictly speaking, is