In any event, this Henry Adams, too, is everywhere faintly rancid with the taint of Puritanism, and that fact could not but lead me into injustice. Puritanism has many excellent points, which it perhaps employs too much in the manner of the porcupine: yet we Virginians cannot ever quite overcome our feeling that the Puritans are parvenus, deriving from families too recently arrived in this country to be as yet completely Americanized. We have never, for that matter, learned to think of the Pilgrim Fathers and their descendants as belonging, exactly, to the gentry. And while we do try, at a pinch, to be polite and respectful about their undeniable virtues, the result, somehow, stays a bit unconvincing and condescending. Besides, I had faced my especial troubles with the Puritan tradition, through the imbroglio incidental to the attempt to suppress _Jurgen_, and through the clinging, undesirable repute thus fastened to that book, and indeed to my books in general. I mildly resent, even now, my need to rest for the remainder of my lifetime under the imputation of being in lack-lustre eyes an "indecent writer." It sounds all very well, and stays, I believe, undeniable, to say that it was only a coterie of the obsessed--obsessed with the mad notion that "decency" is an affair of corporal centrifugality,--who had esteemed _Jurgen_ an improper book. But that is, too, upon a par with protesting on a pestered summer night it is only mosquitoes who are annoying you. Those shyster Sanhedrins of tinpot Torquemadas--as Mr. Mencken, you may remember, has for some reason or another not yet called the incorporated supporters of the Puritan tradition in letters,--are, beyond question, made up of peculiarly filthy and senseless little creatures acting after the law of their insectean kind. Yet they are also innumerable and poisonous: and they are blest, too (no doubt in common with the mosquitoes) with sincerity and an approving conscience, in all these assaults of the petty upon that which, however harmless, offends them by being bigger than they are. But I drift into a discussion of the _Jurgen_ case, which, as goes the law, is settled: and all that I really need to say about the indecency of _Jurgen_, or of the Biography as a whole, and about the baffling literary problem of censorship in general, was said some while ago. § 46