The World’s Tragedy

XXIV PREFACE. PORNOGRAPHY Now to give battle one must find a disputed point, and struggle for its mastery. English pudibundery being the main strong hold of the Puritan, I now concentrate my guns on that position. With the exception of the Chinese classics and one or two of the Hindu and Buddhist, all authors of antiquity are wholly or partially concerned to discourse frankly, joyously, amusingly, of the sexual act. Of modern authors we observe that only the pornographic survive. Shakespeare, Sterne, Swift, Rabelais, Villon, — what names have we to put against these ? Milton and some lesser. And to-day ? What authors of the last century do we find on our shelves ? Byron, exiled, yet with wealth suffi- cient to mock his foes ; Shelley, expelled from Oxford, exi- led, robbed of his children ; Keats, bullied into consump- tion ; Blake, nigh starved ; Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier, Zola, Richepin all prosecuted, suppressed ; Verlaine, his life a mere holiday between spells of prison. I cannot quote you the good authors, the popular authors ; neither I nor any one else can remember their names. All this babble about indecency is the merest froth ; as Vizetelly dies, broken by imprisonment for the crime of having translated Zola, that same Zola is being feasted at the Guildhall by the Lord Mayor of London.