And as touches my personal share in the publication of an "indecent book called _Jurgen_"--though, indeed, I hear that a great deal of the Biography is "indecent,"--it is in the end by my book that I must be condemned or justified, rather than by what anyone, including me, may for some while to come elect to say about my book, which is the Biography. So I say nothing. For against the explicit charge of having violated the current morality of 1920, I think, any serious defence would be waste of effort, if only because the question must so soon, and in fact already tends to, become of purely antiquarian interest. Our children may not improve, even from the standpoint of humor, upon our moral standards, but our children will certainly not retain them. When, as must inevitably happen before very long, our present ethical criteria have come to seem as quaint as those of the Druids or the Etruscans, or even as the flyblown and rococo axioms of 1913 appear nowadays, offences against any one of these outmoded codes will hardly be esteemed worth talking about. Should _Jurgen_ be remembered ten years hence, it will, through being remembered, be amply exonerated: whereas if _Jurgen_ be forgotten, the book will then of course be violating nobody's moral sensibility. Time thus lies under bond to silence, whether with praise or with oblivion, every conceivable sort of "moral" aspersion; and willy-nilly I must defer to time. None the less do I still believe that _Jurgen_ is, as originally labelled, "a book wherein each man will find what his nature enables him to see": and when anyone confesses that he finds therein only "offensiveness, and lasciviousness, and lewdness, and indecency," I must make bold to take the announcement as a less candid summary of the book's nature than of the critic's. § 47 What can be done, people very often ask of me, with a flattering if misplaced assumption of my ability to answer,--what can be done toward restraining our present literary saturnalia of prudishness? And I must answer, if at all, with a shrug: for the intelligent here contend against well-meaning and courageous persons who fight for high aims. The most fantastic feature of this droll year-long warring is the profound sincerity of the participants, upon both sides. You and I may know--and welcome, as the saying runs,--that we are in the right so far as goes the unhuman abstraction called rationality. But the officers and backers of the Clean Book League and of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, also, quite honestly believe they are engaged in praiseworthy work when, to cite but two farces from the exhaustless repertoire, they hale Petronius and _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ into the police courts.