wants to—and there she has a right to lie,
for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges.
I saw young girls stealing furtive glances at her;
I saw young men gaze long and absorbedly at her; I
saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic
interest. How I should like to describe her—just
to see what a holy indignation I could stir up in
the world—just to hear the unreflecting
average man deliver himself about my grossness and
coarseness, and all that.
“In every gallery in Europe there are hideous
pictures of blood, carnage, oozing brains, putrefaction—pictures
portraying intolerable suffering —pictures
alive with every conceivable horror, wrought out in
dreadful detail—and similar pictures are
being put on the canvas every day and publicly exhibited—without
a growl from anybody—for they are innocent,
they are inoffensive, being works of art. But
suppose a literary artist ventured to go into a painstaking
and elaborate description of one of these grisly things—the
critics would skin him alive. Well, let it go,
it cannot be helped; Art retains her privileges, Literature
has lost hers. Somebody else may cipher out
the whys and the wherefores and the consistencies
of it—I haven’t got time.”
PROFESSOR SCENTS PORNOGRAPHY
Unfortunately, 1601 has recently been tagged by Professor
Edward Wagenknecht as “the most famous piece
of pornography in American literature.”
Like many another uninformed, Prof. W. is like
the little boy who is shocked to see “naughty”
words chalked on the back fence, and thinks they are
pornography. The initiated, after years of wading
through the mire, will recognize instantly the significant
difference between filthy filth and funny “filth.”
Dirt for dirt’s sake is something else again.
Pornography, an eminent American jurist has pointed
out, is distinguished by the “leer of the sensualist.”
“The words which are criticised as dirty,”
observed justice John M. Woolsey in the United States
District Court of New York, lifting the ban on Ulysses
by James Joyce, “are old Saxon words known to
almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and
are such words as would be naturally and habitually
used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical
and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe.”
Neither was there “pornographic intent,”
according to justice Woolsey, nor was Ulysses obscene
within the legal definition of that word.
“The meaning of the word ‘obscene,’”
the Justice indicated, “as legally defined by
the courts is: tending to stir the sex impulses
or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts.
“Whether a particular book would tend to excite
such impulses and thoughts must be tested by the court’s
opinion as to its effect on a person with average
sex instincts—what the French would call
’l’homme moyen sensuel’—who
plays, in this branch of legal inquiry, the same role
of hypothetical reagent as does the ‘reasonable
man’ in the law of torts and ‘the learned
man in the art’ on questions of invention in
patent law.”
