enjoying the work of a great
artist? Be d----d to Robinson's daughter! I don't care a bilberry for
either her or her innocence. I'm not going to be responsible for
Robinson's daughter. Let Robinson, if he is such a fool as to suppose that
daughters can be spoiled by bad books or good books--let him look after
her himself! Let him establish his confounded censorship at his front
door, or at his drawing-room door. Let him do his own work. Nothing but
idleness--that's what's the matter with him! The whole project that
Robinson suggests is simply monstrous. He might just as well say that
because his daughter has a weak digestion and an unruly appetite for rich
cakes, therefore all the cake shops in London must be shut up. Let him
keep her out of cake shops. All I want is freedom. I don't mean to defend
my tastes or to apologize for them. If I wish to hire a certain book,
that's enough. I must have it--until the police step in. There can only be
one censorship, and that is by the police. A Library is a commercial
concern, and I won't look at it from any other point of view. I have no
interest at the present moment in your notions about the future of
literature, and the livelihood of serious artists, and so on. All that's
absolutely beside the point. The sole point is that I am ready to let
other people have what they want, and I claim that I've the right to have
what I want. The whole thing is simple rot, and there's no other word for
it."

1910

CENSORSHIP BY THE LIBRARIES

[_13 Jan. '10_]

A number of people have been good enough to explain to me that the project
of the Circulating Libraries Censorship (now partially "in being") did not
originally concern itself with novels, and that, in the first place, it
was directed against books of more or less scandalous memoirs. Of this I
was well aware. But in writing about the matter I expressly tried to
centre its interest on the novel, because the novel is the only important
part of the affair. For a year past I have been inveighing against the
increasing taste for feeble naughtiness concerning king's mistresses and
all that sort of tedious person. And I have remarked on the growing
frequency of such words as "fair," "frail," "lover," "enchantress," etc.,
in the supposed-to-be-alluring titles of books of historical immorality.
(I presume that these volumes are called for by the respectable, as the
_cocotte_ calls for a _creme de menthe_ at a fashionable seasid