There is too much geography of the body in this education of ours. You can talk about or write about or paint or sculpt some parts of the body but others must be treated like the Bad Lands. You can write about what you see that you don’t like, what you touch, taste, or hear; but you can’t write about what you smell; if you do you are accused of using nasty words. I could say a lot more about the geography of the body, and how its influence goes all the way through until the censor makes a geography for your mind and soul. But I want to talk about nasty words. The result of this education is that we have all the nasty words in the world in our language. How often a European or an Oriental will say: “Oh, to us it is something very nice—beautiful; but to you it would not be nice; it is much different in English.” When they told James Joyce he had words like that in his book he must have been as surprised as a painter would be if he were told that some of his colors were immoral. His story is told the way a person in a sick room sharply remembers all the over-felt impressions and experiences of a time of fever; until the story itself catches the fever and becomes a thing of more definite, closer-known, keener-felt consciousness—and of a restless oblivion of self-consciousness. jh. * * * * * This James Joyce book is the most beautiful piece of writing and the most creative piece of prose anywhere to be seen on the horizon to-day. It is consciously a work of Art in a way that _Jean-Christophe_ made no effort to be; it is such head and shoulders above _Jacob Stahl_ or Gilbert Cannan’s _Mendel_ that one must realize those books as very good novels and this as something quite more than that. It can be spoken of in terms that apply to _Pelle the Conqueror_, but only in this way: each is a work of Art and therefore not to be talked of as lesser or greater; but while _Pelle_ is made of language as it has been used the _Portrait_ is made of language as it will come to be used. There is no doubt that we will have novels before long written without even as much of the conventional structure of language as Mr. Joyce has adhered to—a new kind of “dimension in language” which is being felt in many places and which George Soule has illustrated beautifully in an article in _The New Republic_. But that isn’t the most important thing. The interest in _Pelle_ is in the way its stories are told. The interest in the _Portrait_ is in the way its æsthetic content is presented. For instance, these fragments: