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.