Student: Your work is a classic. They also print Trimalcio’s _Supper_, and the tales of Suetonius, and red-headed virgins annotate the writings of Martial, but let a novelist mention a privy, or a poet the rear side of a woman, and the whole town reeks with an uproar. In England a scientific work was recently censored. A great discovery was kept secret three years. For the rest, I do not speak of obscenity. Obscene books are sold in the rubber shops, they are doled out with quack medicines, societies for the Suppression of Vice go into all details, and thereby attain circulation. Masterpieces are decked out with lewd covers to entoil one part of the public, but let an unknown man write clear and clean realism; let a poet use the speech of his predecessors, either being as antiseptic as the instruments of a surgeon, and out of the most debased and ignorant classes they choose him his sieve and his censor. Rabelais: But surely these things are avoidable? Student: The popular novelist, the teaser and tickler, casts what they call a veil, or caul, over his language. He pimps with suggestion. The printer sees only one word at a time, and tons of such books are passed yearly, the members of the Royal Automobile Club and of the Isthmian and Fly Fishers are not concerned with the question of morals. Rabelais: You mistake me, I did not mean this sort of evasion, I did not mean that a man should ruin his writing or join the ranks of procurers. Student: Well? Rabelais: Other means. There is what is called private printing. Student: I have had a printer refuse to print lines “in any form” private or public, perfectly innocent lines, lines refused thus in London, which appeared and caused no blush in Chicago; and vice-versa, lines refused in Chicago and printed by a fat-headed prude—Oh, most fat-headed—in London, a man who will have no ruffling of anyone’s skirts, and who will not let you say that some children do not enjoy the proximity of their parents. Rabelais: At least you are free from theology. Student: If you pinch the old whore by the toes you will find a press clique against you; you will come up against “boycott”; people will rush into your publisher’s office with threats. Have you ever heard of “the libraries?” Rabelais: I have heard the name, but not associated with strange forms of blackmail. Student: I admit they do not affect serious writers. Rabelais: But you think your age as stupid as mine. Student: Humanity is a herd, eaten by perpetual follies. A few in each age escape, the rest remain savages, “That deyed the Arbia crimson.” Were the shores of Gallipoli paler, that showed red to the airmen flying thousands of feet above them? Rabelais: Airmen. Intercommunication is civilization. Your life is full of convenience.