For censorship of our reading matter, as I granted even when _Jurgen_ was yet lying under arrest in Mr. Sumner's[5] cellar, may, in pure theory, be--just possibly--advisable. In practise, though, I can imagine no persons or class of persons qualified to perform this censorship. Speaking here with all, if only, the respect due to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, I must none the less insist there is a difference between pornography and fine literature, if but the difference that everybody enjoys the first where few care one way or the other about the second: and certainly the two should be appraised by diverse and appropriate standards. A work of art should therefore, in theory, be judged entirely as a work of art, by a jury of practitioners of the art concerned. Yet, since every self-respecting author at bottom abominates his competitors, despises his inferiors, and is frantically irritated by the writings of those who differ from him in æsthetic canons, such an arrangement would, in practise, only fling open more conspicuous fields wherein to flaunt the mutual spite and miscomprehension common to us creative writers. Besides, it is not difficult to forecast what sort of writers might, and would, be chosen for the judiciary, as representing pre-eminence in letters by the happiest combination of mediocrity and senility. Thus, in the end, an attempt to establish a purely "literary" tribunal would result in setting over American art a death-watch of genial clergymen and decrepit college professors: and I despondently question if their decisions would be a whit less imbecile than the present arbitraments of the Society's hired spies. It remains, moreover, the defect of every method of legal "suppression" that magistrates and courts of law are unable really to suppress any book. A book, once printed, either suppresses itself or else stays, as things human fare, immortal. And that always appeared to me the very silliest feature of the _Jurgen_ imbroglio. Irrespective of any possible legal decision, as I patiently pointed out, over and over again, when _Jurgen_ lodged in Mr. Sumner's cellar, the book existed in a sufficient number of unarrestable copies to place it beyond destruction by anything except its own inherent faults. If _Jurgen_ contained the right constituents it would live; and if it lacked the stuff of longevity it would in due course die: either way, the outcome was to be decided neither by me nor by vice commissioners, nor even by a judge and a grand jury. Nobody disputed this logic: nobody in fact paid any attention to it.