‘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.