And here, I must protest, our more reputable citizens are wholly in the right. I think they feel, without ever quite perceiving, the innumerous dangers, for the reputable, which lurk in this continual playing with piety and common-sense. The artist, they dimly feel, is up to something which--somehow--threatens them and their security: and in this, I repeat, they are wholly right. If art were not very cruelly restrained it would empoison and wreck all civilizations, not here to speak of reordering heaven. But there is no need to worry, because art, as it happens, is always, and probably always will be, just thus restrained, by the inefficiency of the artist. So art may never ruin America, after all. It seems, in any case, eminently appropriate that in our National Hall of Statuary, along with such world-famous statesmen and shapers of human destiny as Jacob Collamer, S.J. Kirkwood and George L. Shoup, the sole representative of our art and letters should to-day be General Lew Wallace; for _Ben-Hur_ is really the perfected expression of the best-thought-of American ideals in literature. And it is equally appropriate, I like to think, that, when judged by these ideals, _Jurgen_ and all the rest of the Biography should be decreed "offensive, and lascivious, and lewd, and indecent...." Well! a good deal of this I said (over and over again) before the courts decided that _Jurgen_ had been incarcerated for twenty-one months, as an "indecent" book, through error.... And I have not anything to add or to retract. Still, the affair has left me, I cannot but suspect, with a bias against the Puritan tradition and its adherents. I feel, indeed, that much of what I have just written down does not over-cloyingly reek of loving-kindness toward--in Swinburne's phrase,--"the barbarian sect from whose inherited and infectious tyranny this nation is as yet imperfectly delivered." So I dismiss the Puritans and their latter-day flowering in Henry Adams, in favor of a noticeably different person. I turn instead to M. Anatole France, as affording a clear illustration of the point I have in mind; and as perfectly illustrating my point as to the most diverting of all themes which thought can play with, in _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_. § 48 What one first notes about _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_, as I have elsewhere observed, is the fact that in this ironic and subtle book is presented a "story" which is remarkable for its innocence of subtlety and irony. Abridge the "plot" into a synopsis, and you will find your digest to be what is manifestly the outline of a straightforward, plumed romance by the elder Dumas.