This gay hide-and-seek elusiveness is the precise spirit of pornography. It is always saying one thing while pretending to say another. Why the pretence of something to be something else is art, I don’t profess to know, and of course it is not great art. But pornography lays no claim to be anything but one of the minor arts--and that is what the minor arts all do. In architecture it is no doubt a mistake for a railway station to look like a cathedral, but in fine cooking it is proper for a potato to look like a rose. So--perhaps even especially--with pornography. For it must be remembered that those few facts of sex from which pornography derives are solid, stern and tragically intense. So there is all the more reason why pornography, playing delicately above them, but bound to them none the less, should adopt every possible artifice to display its iridescent lightness. Almost alone among the arts, it runs no danger in this--as does poetry or painting; it can never become thin or empty, since its feet are anchored in those eternal facts. The Siegfried theme beneath the leaping flickering fire-music. Given this foundation (to say nothing of the stupid opposition to the art), it is amazing what delicacy pornography has, at its best, achieved. But that is of course the point. The difficulties of working in such material explain the appeal the art makes to those fine and fastidious artists who practise it. There must be some reason beyond the mere sound of a word for the popular horror of pornography; and, in fact, as soon as one begins to dig down, one discovers all sorts of reasons, such as they are. There is, for example, especially in America, a buried remnant of puritanism, which makes people feel obscurely that something is wrong with anything conveying such intense pleasure as the sexual relation, which therefore should be considered morosely, if at all, and should certainly not be made the starting point for all sorts of agreeable fancies. (It is only fair to add that most of the people who feel this would deny quite sincerely that they feel it; nevertheless, they do). More obscure than this objection, but probably even more potent, is another, based on the average individual’s inharmonious attitude toward the whole question of sex. He has been taught, and holds firmly, that the sexual relation is a grave and sacred thing to be celebrated as a holy married rite; but, considering himself honestly, he perceives that it is, instead, a wild physical ecstasy with nothing of grave and little that is perceptibly sacred. Desiring to be honest, he is baffled and exasperated by the contradiction between what he thinks and what he feels, and it is probably this which makes him avoid explaining the facts of sex to his children. He is right about this emotionally; it is an indication of moral integrity for which he should be admired, rather than censured. How in the world can he explain the sexual relation to his sons as