Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/74

 nothing but the means employed to produce a desired effect, and is not to be confused with beauty, which is the effect upon fine minds of fine art employed by fine artists. The difference between a filthy story told by a coal-heaver and a filthy story told by an artist is only the difference between expert pornography and inexpert pornography, when, as is often the case, the effect sought is the same. There is undeniably a streak of salacity in human nature, and some very eminent men of letters have from time to time, in the intervals of more noble occupation, permitted themselves to express it.

Certain critics and authors who are quite willing to have the coal-heaver's filthy story debarred from the mails, because it can be understood by coal-heavers, protest against debarring the filthy story of the artist, because only the highly sophisticated can understand it. I object to the discrimination, on democratic principles! I avow that it affects me, an 'equalitarian' of a sort, like a proposal to forbid the coal-heaver beer, because he can get drunk on it, but to allow the comfortable bond-holder champagne—not because he cannot get drunk on it, but because the coal-heaver cannot afford to get drunk on it. The 'morality' implicit in the discrimination reminds one of Falstaff's penitent resolution never to get drunk again except among gentlemen and such as fear God, and not among drunken knaves. In the presence of such moral subtleties, I become an old-fashioned angry upholder of the 'rights of man.' I declare that, if the sophisticated possess