It is well that this is so, that the emotion is primitive, since thus, even when the pretence of something to be something else is refined upon and made acceptable to civilized adults, a fresh youthful quality inspires it. One’s delight in words that say one thing while pretending to say another, is not at all due to a sense of one’s own cleverness in detecting the real meaning, and is only in part due to the richness created by the allusions and by thinking of two things at a time; there is, besides, that gay light-hearted relish of pretence. Nothing, for example, is more delightful than a conversation with a woman whom one does not really desire--well, at least not very much--that is all made up of very risky _sous-entendus_ (and the riskier they are, the daintier they must become), leading to nothing at all, indulged in for their own sake. Precisely this is what pornography does. It plays about the idea of sex with all the art and wisdom and trained fancy of experience--but _it plays_. Good pornography is always gay, which is the more to its credit since the subject it is being gay about is so grim. We should welcome such gaiety, not suppress it. SUCCESS It is sometimes hard to divine what a certain period in the past was all about, what its principal aim was, if indeed it had one. But the retrospective investigator of some hundred years hence will surely have no difficulty in discovering what our period was about. Discarding (since we assume him to be intelligent) whatever we may have produced of permanent and therefore universal and therefore uncharacteristic of any single epoch, he will devote himself to our ephemeral literature, once the last word in modernity, in his day totally forgotten, but preserved in the British Museum and the Congressional Library. He will also, to even better effect, pore delightedly over such bound volumes of our weekly and monthly magazines as he can obtain. And he will know with a most beautiful certainty that what our period was about was Success. We can hardly miss the fact ourselves, since our novels do little but exalt success or revile it, and our magazines glorify it, and all our advertisements canonize it. We live in a utilitarian epoch (it is possible that this has been said before), and results are what people demand. Well, results are surely important, and if one sets out for results it is of no interest, or of little, why he fails to obtain them. The fable known as _A Message to Garcia_ is admirably typical of the spirit of the age we live in.