also be because they care so little about learning foreign languages,
have so little esteem for them, since, while almost any cultivated
Englishman can speak French correctly enough, if often with a pronounced
accent, it is rare indeed to find a cultivated Frenchman who can speak
English with even tolerable ungrammatical fluency. (Shopkeepers and
hotel porters in France of course speak some English, because it is to
their financial advantage to do so). Moreover, even a literary knowledge
of other languages is rare among the French. When reputable English or
Italian authors have occasion to insert a French sentence in a novel,
the sentence is usually correct; a French author can seldom so much as
quote a foreign phrase correctly. Paul Morand, who, I believe, has spent
many years in the Diplomatic Service, and whose brilliant cosmopolitan
short stories do reveal interest in the national characteristics of
other people, is frequently guilty of solecisms in the foreign phrases
he now and then employs. In Henri Béraud’s excellent historical novel,
_Le Vitriol-de-Lune_, the principal character is an Italian who is
called, throughout the book, ‘Guiseppe,’ though Giuseppe is one of the
commonest Italian names. Alone among the contemporary French writers
with whose work I am acquainted, André Maurois reveals a genuine
knowledge of English. And it is significant that he, too, is practically
alone in revealing a genuine sympathetic understanding of the English
people. _Les Silences du Colonel Bramble_ occasionally crosses the line
into national caricature; but it is at least caricature based on
knowledge, not wild unrelated caricature like Abel Hermant’s. As for
_Ariel_, a work of far greater importance--well, written by an Italian,
it would have been, if surprising, at least credible, since there are
many Italians who love and understand Shelley; written by a Frenchman,
it appears little short of miraculous. Nor is this solely a personal
judgment of my own, employed for the sake of my thesis. English critics
fairly gasped with amazement at _Ariel_. But I repeat that André Maurois
stands alone. You would have to go back to Taine to find any similarly
lonely figure.[2]
So, reluctantly, I end, as I began, with those two irreconcilable, but I
think equally justified, estimates of the French--save that each has at
the moment lost something of its intensity for me through the relief of
putting it into written words.
It will not be the French who will overthrow the barriers between races,
sacrifice their nationality to something broader and greater, or conduct
the League of Nations to a position of supreme importance. True, there
are those moments of national madness when it is as though the French
were atoning for all their habitual narrowness. But one cannot say:
‘Come, let us now have a moment of madness.’ No, for the achievement of
unselfish uncircumscribed ideals the world will have to depend on
individuals who in their growth have gradually sloughed off all that is
narrow, restrictive and myopic in their nationality. Such individuals
have come in the past, and should come increasingly in the future, from
many different peoples--hardly from the French.
On the other hand, even though we may feel that nationality is
narrowing, and that at best it should be only a means to an end, we may
nevertheless be actually grateful that the French have made it an end in
itself. The similar devotion to it of the Poles arouses principally
distaste; in the French we not only excuse but admire it. For there is
about it in their case, and in their case alone, something akin to the
results of intensive cultivation in agriculture, something that the best
minds of other races must sacrifice (rightly, I think) to broader
results--a perfection, an orderliness of thought, a fine neat
thoroughness, incapable of achievement in any other way than through
this persistent nurture of nationality, and to the contemplation of
which we can always turn with pleasure.
PORNOGRAPHY
The abridged edition of the Oxford Dictionary, which is the only
dictionary within my reach at present, defines pornography as (1)
‘description of manners, etc., of harlots’ (an etymological definition
that the word has long since outgrown); and (2) ‘treatment of obscene
subjects in literature; such literature.’ Looking up ‘obscene,’ I find
‘lewd’; looking up ‘lewd,’ I find ‘lascivious’; and looking up
‘lascivious,’ I find ‘lustful; inciting to lust.’ (Is there something
especially wicked about the Ls?) So the definition finally appears as
‘literature treating of subjects inciting to lust.’
Now I have nothing at all against dictionaries. I find them entertaining
reading, pithy, diversified, pleasantly alliterative, well informed but
never tedious. Indeed, appreciation of the dictionary is growing
steadily. Its influence on the arts is strong and increasing. In
literature, as far back as E. F. Benson’s _Dodo_ it could be faintly
discerned, while to-day it shines unmistakably in such books as Compton
Mackenzie’s _Sylvia Scarlett_ or in any novel by Stephen McKenna. As for
the movies, they are fairly suffused with the spirit of the dictionary.
For example, a two-dimensioned heroine is going to make a visit. You
see her enter her motor car, ride in her motor car, descend from her
motor car. From what does such bright thoroughness derive if not from
the thoroughness and inevitable logic of the dictionary? Predictable;
prediction; predictive(ly). Nevertheless, the dictionary is imperfect.
For it defines only the literal meaning of a word, which is less than
half its significance. All valuable words grow hazy with connotation,
and this luminous haze becomes a true part of their meaning. What sort
of definition is ‘sprite or goblin of Arabian tales’ for ‘genie’? In
fact, there are a number of words that to a great many people mean
nothing _but_ their connotation, the haze that has risen around them;
‘Bolshevism,’ for instance.
This emanation or glow or haze about words infinitely enriches language;
it makes poetry possible. But one does not always want to use language
emotionally; often one desires merely to express accurately a prosaic
thought. Then the richness clogs one. It is as though a commercial
traveller in olive oil, setting out to go from Naples to Smyrna, were to
find himself not traversing the eastern Mediterranean, but adrift on the
confused enchanted sea of Odysseus. Mediaeval saints frequently had
visions of the Madonna that rendered them ecstatic with joy. But the
celestial light that shone from her face was so dazzling that they were
seldom able to give any satisfactory account of her features.
Thus with words. Thus with ‘pornography.’ ‘Literature treating of
subjects inciting to lust’ is no explanation of the shuddering sense of
evil, arousing a desire to cross oneself, that the word evokes. Good
gracious! we have all listened to dirty stories--in the smoking-room of
Pullman cars if we are men, at our finishing schools if we are
women--and, whether interested or bored, we certainly felt no shuddering
sense of evil. The truth is that the connotation, the emotional
significance, of a word may be so different from its original prosaic
meaning as almost to kill the thing the word purports to define. This
has happened in the case of ‘pornography.’ So powerful is the maleficent
exhalation of the name that it has, if not actually destroyed the thing
itself, at least repressed and stultified it. It is a pity; for
pornography is capable of becoming, and, despite its handicap, has at
times in the employ of skilful writers become, one of the most delicate
of minor arts. By our terrified taboo we keep it out of the hands of
artists, and so a gross and especially a childish thing at the primitive
level of the coarse words scrawled on latrines by little boys.
This is all the more unfortunate since there are certain fine and
fastidious artists who are at their best when writing pornographically.
Sterne was one. Norman Douglas and James Branch Cabell are examples
to-day. _South Wind_ contains some of the daintiest pornography ever
written, done in so candid and virginal a way that to read it is like
hearing a girl of seventeen say sweetly to a group of her parents’
friends: ‘I always tell my mother everything.’ As for _Jurgen_, its
pornographic passages are as fresh and delightful as the _Contes
Drolatiques_ themselves. I have no patience (and I dare say Mr. Cabell
has none) with those persons who defend _Jurgen_ by denying that it is
pornographic, and I have still less patience with those who assert about
any book of the kind that it is not pornographic, but teaches a great
moral lesson. No doubt there are dull inferior books that ‘treat the
phenomena of sex very frankly’ and thereby ‘teach a great moral lesson’;
but they bear no relation to pornography, which is either an art in
itself or nothing.
‘Literature treating of subjects inciting to lust.’ H’m ... I fear the
dictionary has failed us all around. For the definition is not only
inadequate but inaccurate. Oh, it will hold, I suppose, for the lowest
forms of pornography--for, say, certain passages in Smollett’s
_Ferdinand Count Fathom_ or in Richardson’s nasty _Pamela_. (It is a
significant fact that the authors of such primitively and grossly
pornographic books as these nearly always protest that they are not
pornographic, but teach that ‘great moral lesson’ referred to above,
whereas the authors of first-rate grown-up pornography take pride in
their calling). But when one progresses beyond such elementary
pornography, which can be of interest only to children or to men with
the minds of children, the definition collapses. Really good
pornography for grown-ups simply does not ‘incite to lust.’ For example,
I read with delight the conversation between Jurgen and the Hamadryad
(and if that is not pornography, and of the best, then I don’t know what
pornography is, and had better give up trying to write about it), but it
did not give me a desire to go downstairs and assault the cook. It is
probably true that to a person incapable of desire for the opposite sex
such a passage as this would be without interest, but the passage itself
does not incite desire; it plays mentally with the idea of the emotion.
In short, one must be capable of desire in order to like pornography,
but that liking itself is something quite different from desire. Jurgen,
you may remember, though scarcely a weakling, soon wearied of the
conscientious perversities of his wife, Anaitis, but he loved to get off
by himself in her magnificent pornographic library (the run of which I
envy him) and _read_ about such things. That is profoundly true and
illuminating.
The history of civilization is the history of man’s effort to enrich the
simple world he was presented with. He transforms handsome but
monotonous primeval forests into complicated cities furnished with
bathrooms and radios; he builds music up from a few primitive sounds to
the elaborate symphony; in eating he progresses from the rending of raw
meat and the consumption of wild berries to a dreamy dinner at
Paillard’s. And you may be sure that he would have done the same with
the sex-relationship had he been able. Alas, there he was baffled! The
facts of sex are immutably simple. There are so few things that one can
do. Heroic efforts have been made to increase on these, but, though many
men have given their whole lives to the cause, without avail. New meats
and vegetables for the table were continually being invented or
discovered--_foie gras_, the grapefruit, the alligator pear; no
satisfactory new ways of love were possible. Even so, man was not
defeated. On the contrary, he won a great moral victory. The facts of
sex were unalterably simple, but the atmosphere of thought and emotion
surrounding those facts he discovered to be a luxuriant tropical forest.
Three thousand years of thrilling exploration have not exhausted its
richness or exorcized its dangers--for the forest breeds monsters as
well as gods, and men have been lost and have gone mad there. In fact,
in this rich region one may find anything one looks for (besides
startling surprises), from harpies to shapes of serene loveliness. It is
a Swiss-Family-Robinson kind of forest, save for the delightful
uselessness of the discoveries.
To this world pornography belongs. But it is not an earnest-minded art,
and so does not concern itself with either the beauties or the horrors,
both of which its mocking, reasonable, eighteenth-century nature finds
excessive, but with all the minor mysteries of the wood--the fantastic
tricks and illusions, the dainty mischievous sprites, the malicious
imps who make faces from behind trees then vanish with a burst of clear
laughter.
This gay hide-and-seek elusiveness is the precise spirit of pornography.
It is always saying one thing while pretending to say another. Why the
pretence of something to be something else is art, I don’t profess to
know, and of course it is not great art. But pornography lays no claim
to be anything but one of the minor arts--and that is what the minor
arts all do. In architecture it is no doubt a mistake for a railway
station to look like a cathedral, but in fine cooking it is proper for a
potato to look like a rose. So--perhaps even especially--with
pornography. For it must be remembered that those few facts of sex from
which pornography derives are solid, stern and tragically intense. So
there is all the more reason why pornography, playing delicately above
them, but bound to them none the less, should adopt every possible
artifice to display its iridescent lightness. Almost alone among the
arts, it runs no danger in this--as does poetry or painting; it can
never become thin or empty, since its feet are anchored in those eternal
facts. The Siegfried theme beneath the leaping flickering fire-music.
Given this foundation (to say nothing of the stupid opposition to the
art), it is amazing what delicacy pornography has, at its best,
achieved. But that is of course the point. The difficulties of working
in such material explain the appeal the art makes to those fine and
fastidious artists who practise it.
There must be some reason beyond the mere sound of a word for the
popular horror of pornography; and, in fact, as soon as one begins to
dig down, one discovers all sorts of reasons, such as they are. There
is, for example, especially in America, a buried remnant of puritanism,
which makes people feel obscurely that something is wrong with anything
conveying such intense pleasure as the sexual relation, which therefore
should be considered morosely, if at all, and should certainly not be
made the starting point for all sorts of agreeable fancies. (It is only
fair to add that most of the people who feel this would deny quite
sincerely that they feel it; nevertheless, they do). More obscure than
this objection, but probably even more potent, is another, based on the
average individual’s inharmonious attitude toward the whole question of
sex. He has been taught, and holds firmly, that the sexual relation is a
grave and sacred thing to be celebrated as a holy married rite; but,
considering himself honestly, he perceives that it is, instead, a wild
physical ecstasy with nothing of grave and little that is perceptibly
sacred. Desiring to be honest, he is baffled and exasperated by the
contradiction between what he thinks and what he feels, and it is
probably this which makes him avoid explaining the facts of sex to his
children. He is right about this emotionally; it is an indication of
moral integrity for which he should be admired, rather than censured.
How in the world can he explain the sexual relation to his sons as
something grave and sacred when he knows in his heart that it is not
that at all? Pornography stirs up and intensifies this latent discomfort
in him. Gambolling about and impudently joking, it obviously considers
sex neither as something grave and sacred (which he is convinced is the
way it ought to be considered, at least publicly) nor yet with the
shrinking fear due it, if it is, as he knows it to be, a shattering
earthquake among emotions. It is as though pornography were sticking out
its tongue at him personally. He is upset by it.
Among more maturely self-conscious persons, who, knowing more about
themselves, care less, the sole objection to pornography is one of
taste, and is felt only for its grosser primitive forms.
Now it is true that good taste is not a creative thing, but even
something of a drag. Great art frequently violates it, and forces
subsequent modifications of its criteria. But for minor art, and by and
large in the world, taste is valuable. It tends to level things down to
a standard--but it only tends. Good taste preserves the amenities. It is
taste that makes existence agreeable; with life it has little to do.
Used with discretion, it is of great service. For instance, good taste
objects to violent noise, violent smells and all monstrous deformities;
and while it is true that what at first hearing sounds as violent noise
may be made by a Stravinsky, and what at first appears a monstrous
deformity be created by a Baudelaire, most noises and deformities are
really such, and deserving of suppression. Anyway, no permanent harm is
done by good taste; it cannot crush genius. Aristophanes was unable to
demolish Euripides. Good taste objects to emotional unrestraint, whether
at a prize fight or at a religious revival. It aims at moderation in
everything; and the proof that moderation is not fatal to achievement is
that the Greeks professed to love it beyond all else.
Especially, taste is averse to anything that inspires disgust, the most
sterile and desolate of all emotions. Now there are certain things that
almost universally inspire disgust--why, it does not matter; they do.
The odour of hydrogen-dioxide, for instance, goitres, or a disfigured
human face. And in gross unworthy pornography there are brutal or
distorted forms that do so for most of us: _Le Rideau Levé_, the Marquis
de Sade’s _Justine_, or Cleland’s _Memoirs of Fanny Hill_. These offend
against taste. They do not in a mature man arouse a shuddering sense of
horror, but they do arouse disgust, which is a much worse sensation. But
it would be as absurd to condemn all pornography on account of these
books as to condemn all music on account of ‘Yes, We Have no Bananas.’
It is to be noted that books such as those I have just cited are not
really sophisticated; they are unaware of the mental richness enveloping
the facts of sex. This is as true of De Sade’s novels, for all the
complicated aberrations they record, as of Cleland’s puerile story. They
concern themselves solely with the facts, and are still at the stage of
trying to increase the number of these, whereas the aim of civilized
pornographers is to get away from those monotonous facts into a richer
region. A common trick among lesser pornographers is to hint
mysteriously that the facts are more numerous than they really are. For
example, in an absurd novel by Catulle Mendès, the author, after
describing with wearisome detail what the hero and his mistress did
together (which was pretty much all of the little that _can_ be done),
sends them out into the night. ‘When they returned,’ he says, ‘they did
not dare look at each other; they had committed the unforgivable sin;
henceforth they were cut off from humanity’--or words to that effect. A
puerile and ridiculous piece of bravado. One cannot alter the facts or
stare them out of countenance. In truth, it is intolerable to stare at
them at all. The sexual act itself, while thrilling to the two
concerned, must be depressing and even faintly revolting to a mentally
adult observer of it--in part because the violent unrestrained
expression of any emotion is distasteful (I can still remember with a
touch of nausea Mrs. Leslie Carter in _Zaza_), but chiefly because such
a spectacle can only remind us drearily of the elementary paucity of
those facts on which all life is constructed. I am told that there are
sordid resorts in Paris, where, for a price, one may gaze through a
peep-hole at this primitive exhibition. It is incredible to me that any
one should want to. I should go home and weep. ‘“Dust and ashes!” so you
creak it ... what’s become of all the gold ...?’ There are enough barren
unsought-for moments, God knows! when all life seems but a skeleton
affair, unendurably indigent--merely greed, hunger, passion, passion,
hunger, greed--without one’s deliberately going in search of others.
In a way it is a shame that we cannot permit the movies to become
appreciably pornographic. Still, we cannot. As a virtuous man I admit
that at once. Pornographic books and spectacles seem to do something
physiologically harmful to immature boys and girls, and while we can
(possibly) keep such books out of their hands, we cannot forbid children
the movies, which are obviously made for them. Appealing only to the
eye, the cinema could not, anyway, achieve such richness as can
literature; still, some very pretty pornographic effects might be
obtained. Even with the heavy-handed censorship and the determination of
producers to run no risks, something now and then slips through. I
remember a delightful film in which Miss--no, I had better not mention
her name, because perhaps she or her press-agent might assert that the
film taught a great moral lesson, and sue me--in which the heroine, when
wearing a scandalously alluring bathing suit, paused for a full minute,
arms upstretched, before diving--because the water was cold. Later,
there was a lovely scene in which the heroine, in the daintiest of
nightgowns, was surprised in her bedroom by a young man. The beauty of
this scene was that neither he nor she was thinking any harm, both being
absorbed in the solution of I forget what innocent problem, whereas the
audience, including myself, was thinking all the thoughts that pretty
girls in bedrooms normally arouse; just as in the bathing picture the
heroine was convincingly thinking about the chill of the water, while we
were not. This was really good pornography--something pretending to be
something else.
Delight in the pretence of something to be something else is not in
itself a sophisticated emotion; it is, like most others, a primitive
emotion capable of great sophistication. If you find it in the ceiling
decorations of the Settecento, where frescoes are mockingly made to look
like architectural reliefs, you also find it in the humblest Italian
houses, where an outer wall is grossly painted to represent a window
with a blind half-open and a woman looking out. For that matter, you
find it--or might have found it thirty years ago--in the American
folding-bed (in which incarnation it was certainly not art--not even
minor art). This extraordinary piece of furniture really solved no
problem of space (a couch would have done that much better), and
existed, for a time, solely because it was something pretending to be
something else. It disappeared, partly because it was uncomfortable, but
chiefly because it did not keep its promise, since the most ingenuous
observer could never possibly have mistaken it for a sideboard or a
chest of drawers. Children themselves rejoice in examples of this
pretence.
It is well that this is so, that the emotion is primitive, since thus,
even when the pretence of something to be something else is refined upon
and made acceptable to civilized adults, a fresh youthful quality
inspires it. One’s delight in words that say one thing while pretending
to say another, is not at all due to a sense of one’s own cleverness in
detecting the real meaning, and is only in part due to the richness
created by the allusions and by thinking of two things at a time; there
is, besides, that gay light-hearted relish of pretence. Nothing, for
example, is more delightful than a conversation with a woman whom one
does not really desire--well, at least not very much--that is all made
up of very risky _sous-entendus_ (and the riskier they are, the daintier
they must become), leading to nothing at all, indulged in for their own
sake.
Precisely this is what pornography does. It plays about the idea of sex
with all the art and wisdom and trained fancy of experience--but _it
plays_. Good pornography is always gay, which is the more to its credit
since the subject it is being gay about is so grim. We should welcome
such gaiety, not suppress it.
SUCCESS