The World’s Tragedy

PREFACE. XXV But, then, of course, the question arises “ what is por- nography ? ” It has been justly remarked that the greatest men are those who play upon the whole scale of human emotions, from the spiritual to the obscene. The humour of Aristo- phanes, Shakespere, Sterne, and Rabelais is identical with that of the ordinary smoking-room story ; only a deal better done. Nor is there any other eternal humour ; other kinds depend on the accidents of the age. You never find a single impure line in any of these au- thors, any gloating on impurity. The laughter is hearty, there is no schoolboy sniggering — no consciousness of guilt. (So even with Keats’ Gadfly and Sharing Eve’s Apple ; Browning’s bawdy jests in Pippa Passes, the Ring and the Book, One Word More, La Saisiaz and elsewhere ; cleaner, truly, than the furtive eroticism in Prometheus Unbound. Shelley was more consciously under the curse of Jesus.) It is this consciousness of sin which is to my mind the essen- tially Christian attitude. It is this which inspires the out- cry against art and simple pleasures ; these swine nose eve- rywhere for filth, and grunt with shocked glee when they find it. All serious subject are tabooed as “ bad form ! ” (I must add in parenthesis that the eugenic prigs and sex- problem pigs are every whit as bad. They are just as shoc- ked at Rabelais as the other Puritans). There is nothing impure in passion, if only it be ele-