A Novelist on Novels Part 4

What canst thou have, O spoiler, Which dead men did not own?'

But I do not think so. I do not know whether she will be great. It is enough that to-day she is already alone.

Form and the Novel

Every now and then a reviewer, recovering the enthusiasm of a critic, discovers that the English novel has lost its form, that the men who to-day, a little ineffectually, bid for immortality, are burning the G.o.ds they once wors.h.i.+pped. They declare that the novel, because it is no longer a story travelling harmoniously from a beginning towards a middle and an end, is not a novel at all, that it is no more than a platform where self-expression has given place to self-proclamation. And sometimes, a little more hopefully, they venture to prophesy that soon the proud Sicambrian will wors.h.i.+p the G.o.ds that he burnt.

I suspect that this cla.s.sic revival is not very likely to come about.

True, some writers, to-day in their cradles, may yet emulate Flaubert, but they will not be Flaubert. They may take something of his essence and blend it with their own; but that will create a new essence, for literature does not travel in a circle. Rather it travels along a cycloid, bending back upon itself, following the movement of man.

Everything in the world we inhabit conspires to alter in the mirror of literature the picture it reflects; haste, luxury, hysterical sensuousness, race-optimism and race-despair. And notably publicity, the att.i.tude of the Press. For the time has gone when novels were written for young ladies, and told the placid love of Edwin and Angeline; nowadays the novel, growing ambitious, lays hands upon science, commerce, philosophy: we write less of moated granges, more of tea-shops and advertising agencies, for the Press is teaching the people to look to the novel for a cosmic picture of the day, for a cosmic commentary.

Evidently it was not always so. Flaubert, de Maupa.s.sant, Butler, Tolstoy (who are not a company of peers), aspired mainly 'to see life sanely and to see it whole.' Because they lived in days of lesser social complexity, economically speaking, they were able to use a purely narrative style, the only notable living exponent of which is Mr Thomas Hardy. But we, less fortunate perhaps, confronted with new facts, the factory system, popular education, religious unrest, pictorial rebellion, must adapt ourselves and our books to the new spirit. I do not pretend that the movement has been sudden. Many years before _L'Education Sentimentale_ was written, Stendhal had imported chaos (with genius) into the s.p.a.cious 'thirties. But Stendhal was a meteor: Dostoievsky and Mr Romain Rolland had to come to break up the old narrative form, to make the road for Mr Wells and for the younger men who attempt, not always successfully, to crush within the covers of an octavo volume the whole of the globe spinning round its axis, to express with an att.i.tude the philosophy of life, to preach by gospel rather than by statement.

Such movements as these naturally breed a reaction, and I confess that, when faced with the novels of the 'young men,' so turgid, so bombastic, I turn longing eyes towards the still waters of Turgenev, sometimes even towards my first influence, now long discarded--the novels of Zola.

Though the Zeitgeist hold my hand and bid me abandon my characters, forget that they should be people like ourselves, living, loving, dying, and this enough; though it suggest to me that I should a.n.a.lyse the economic state, consider what new world we are making, enlist under the banner of the 'free spirits' or of the 'simple life,' I think I should turn again towards the old narrative simplicities, towards the schedules of what the hero said, and of what the vicar had in his drawing-room, if I were not conscious that form evolves.

If literature be at all a living force it must evolve as much as man, and more if it is to lead him; it must establish a correspondence between itself and the uneasy souls for which it exists. So it is no longer possible to content ourselves with such as Jane Austen; we must exploit ourselves. Ashamed as we are of the novel with a purpose, we can no longer write novels without a purpose. We need to express the motion of the world rather than its contents. While the older novelists were static, we have to be kinetic: is not the picture-palace here to give us a lesson and to remind us that the waxworks which delighted our grandfathers have gone?

But evolution is not quite the same thing as revolution. I do believe that revolution is only evolution in a hurry; but revolution can be in too great a hurry, and cover itself with ridicule. When the Futurists propose to suppress the adjective, the adverb, the conjunction, and to make of literature a thing of 'positive substantives' and 'dynamic verbs'--when Mr Peguy repeats over and over again the same sentence because, in his view, that is how we think--we smile. We are both right and wrong to smile, for these people express in the wrong way that which is the right thing. The modern novel has and must have a new significance. It is not enough that the novelist should be cheery as d.i.c.kens, or genially cynical as Thackeray, or adventurous as Fielding.

The pa.s.sions of men, love, hunger, patriotism, wors.h.i.+p, all these things must now be shared between the novelist and his reader. He must collaborate with his audience ... emulate the show-girls in a revue, abandon the stage, and come parading through the stalls. A new pa.s.sion is born, and it is a complex of the old pa.s.sions; the novelist of to-day cannot end as Montaigne, say that he goes to seek a great perhaps. He needs to be more positive, to aspire to know what we are doing with the working-cla.s.s, with the Empire, the woman question, and the proper use of lentils. It is this aspiration towards truth that breaks up the old form: you cannot tell a story in a straightforward manner when you do but glimpse it through the veil of the future.

And so it goes hard with Edwin and Angeline. We have no more time to tell that love; we need to break up their simple story, to consider whether they are eugenically fitted for each other, and whether their marriage settlement has a bearing upon national finance. Inevitably we become chaotic; the thread of our story is tangled in the threads which bind the loves of all men. We must state, moralise, explain, a.n.a.lyse motives, because we try to fit into a steam civilisation the old horse-plough of our fathers. I do not think that we shall break the old plough; now and then we may use it upon sands, but there is much good earth for it to turn.

Sincerity: the Publisher and the Policeman

There is always much talk of sincerity in literature. It is a favourite topic in literary circles, but often the argument sounds vain, for English literature seldom attains sincerity; it may never do so until Englishmen become Russians or Frenchmen, which, in spite of all temptations, they are not likely to do.

Once upon a time we had a scapegoat ready, the circulating libraries, for they made themselves ridiculous when they banned _Black Sheep_ and _The Uncounted Cost_, while every now and then they have banned a book of artistic value, likely to lead astray the mothers rather than the daughters. Like the others, I foamed and fumed against the libraries, who after all were only conducting their business according to their commercial interests; like many others, I set up the idea that the circulating library was a sort of trustee for literature, and after this coronation I abused the library as one unworthy of a crown. It was rather unfair, for the conditions which militate against the free embodiment of brute facts into fiction form prevailed before the Library Censors.h.i.+p was thought of; the libraries have not made public opinion but followed it; nowadays they slightly influence it. For public opinion is not the opinion of the public, it is the opinion of a minority. The opinion of a minority makes the opinion of the majority, because the latter has, as a rule, no opinion at all.

Who the censorious minority is I do not quite know. I have a vision of a horrid conclave made up of the National Council of Public Morals, some shopkeepers addicted to their chapel in default of other vices, of anti-suffragists who think _Ann Veronica_ dangerous; it must number some elderly ladies too, tired of converting the stubborn heathen, and I think some bishops, quite elderly and still more ladylike; there are celibates with whom celibacy has not agreed and who naturally want to serve out the world; there is everybody who in the name of duty, decency, self-control, purity, and such like catch-words, has stuffed his ears against the pipes of Pan with the cotton wool of aggressive respectability. A pretty congress, and like all congresses it talks as abundantly and as virulently as any young novelist. The vocal opinion of these people is well described in a recent successful revue: 'To the pure all things are impure.' Often of late years it has run amuck. Not long ago it caused the Munic.i.p.al Libraries of Doncaster and Dewsbury to banish _Tom Jones_ and to p.r.o.nounce _Westward Ho!_ unfit for devout Roman Catholics; it still spreads into the drama and holds such plays as _Waste_, _Mrs Warren's Profession_, _Monna Vanna_ well hidden under the calico and red flannel of British rect.i.tude; it has had its outbursts in picture palaces and music halls, where it happened to overlook the Salome dance and living pictures; often it unchains merriment, as on the perfect days when it cropped t.i.tles that seemed suggestive and caused plays to appear under more stimulating t.i.tles of 'The Girl Who Went' ...

and 'The Girl Who Lost' ... (I do not remember what she lost, but I pa.s.sionately want to know; such are the successes of Puritanism).

It is true that in some directions Puritanism has recently weakened.

Plays long outcast, such as 'Damaged Goods,' 'Ghosts,' and 'The Three Daughters of Monsieur Dupont' have unashamedly taken the boards, but I fear that this does not exhibit the redemption of virtue by sin: if the newspapers had not conducted a campaign for the protection of the notoriously guileless New Zealand soldiers against the flapper with the hundred heads (every one of them filled with evil), if contagious diseases had not suddenly become fas.h.i.+onable, these plays would still be lying with the other unborn in the limbo of the Lord Chamberlain. But Puritanism has long teeth; it can still drive out of politics our next Charles Dilke, our next Parnell, however generous or gifted; it still hangs over the Law Courts, where women may be ordered out, or where cases may be heard _in camera_; it still holds some sway over everything but private life, where humanity recoups its public losses.

Puritan opinion has therefore a broader face of attack on the novel than is afforded by the Library Censors.h.i.+p. For the latter can injure a book but it cannot suppress it; on the whole banned books have suffered, but they have also benefited because many people buy what they cannot borrow, and because many buy the books which the Puritans advertise as unfit to read. (They are much disappointed, as a rule, unless they are themselves Puritans.) That buying cla.s.s is not very large, but it counts, and I suppose we must charitably a.s.sume that the people who post to the bookseller to purchase the works which the library has rejected are supporters of literary sincerity; we must form our private opinion as to that. But whether the people who buy the banned book are or are not eager to obtain four-and-six penn'orth of truth, the fact remains that they do buy, that the deplorable authors do live, and that they do persist in writing their regrettable novels. The libraries have not killed sincerity; they have done no more than trammel it. For instance, in the well-known cases of _The Devil's Garden_, _Sinister Street_, and _The Woman Thou Gavest Me_, the faltering hesitation of the circulating libraries resulted in a colossal advertis.e.m.e.nt, of which Mr Maxwell and Mr Compton Mackenzie made the best, and Mr Hall Caine of course a little more. The libraries did not deprive of sustenance the authors of _Limehouse Nights_ and _Capel Sion_, and in their new spirit did not interfere when Mr Galsworthy's heroine, in _Beyond_, made the best of one world and of two men.

The a.s.sa.s.sins of sincerity are the publisher and the policeman. Dismiss the illusion that banned books are bold and bad; for the most part they are kindly and mild, silly beyond the conception of Miss Elinor Glyn, beyond the sentimental limits of Mrs Barclay; they are seldom vicious in intent, and too devoid of skill to be vicious in achievement. The real bold books are unwritten or unpublished; for n.o.body but a fool would expect a publisher to be fool enough to publish them. There are, it is true, three or four London publishers who are not afraid of the libraries, but they are afraid of the police, and any one who wishes to test them can offer them, for instance, a translation of _Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre_. A publisher is to a certain extent a human being; he knows that works of this type (and this one is masterly) are often works of art; he knows that they are saleable, and that a.s.sured profits would follow on publication, were the books not suppressed by the police. But he does not publish them, because he also knows that the police and its backers, purity societies and common informers, would demand seizure of the stock after the first review and hurry to Bow Street all those who had taken part in the printing and issue of the works. As a result many of these books are driven underground into the vile atmosphere of the vilest shops; some are great works of art; one is, in the words of Mr Anatole France, 'minded to weep over them with the nine Muses for company.' Need I say more than that _Madame Bovary_, the greatest novel the world has seen, is now being sold in a s.h.i.+lling paper edition under a cover which shows Madame Bovary in a sort of private dining-room, dressed in a chemise, and preparing to drink off a b.u.mper of champagne. (Possibly the designer of this cover has in his mind sparkling burgundy.)

Several cases are fresh in my memory where purity, living in what Racine called 'the fear of G.o.d, sir, and of the police,' has intervened to stop the circulation of a novel. One is that of _The Yoke_, a novel of no particular merit, devoid of subversive teaching, but interesting because it was frank, because it did not portray love on the lines of musical comedy, because it faced the common s.e.x problem of the middle aged spinster and the very young man, because it did not ignore the peril which everybody knows to be lurking within a mile of Charing Cross. _The Yoke_ enjoyed a large sale at 6s. and was not interfered with, presumably because those who can afford 6s. may be abandoned to the scarlet woman. It was then published at a s.h.i.+lling. Soon after, the secret combination of common informer, purity group, and police forced the publisher into a police court, compelled him to express regret for the publication, and to destroy all the remaining copies and moulds.

That is a brief tragedy, and it in no wise involves the library system.

Another tragedy may be added. In 1910 Sudermann's novel, _Das Hohe Lied_, was published under the t.i.tle of _The Song of Songs_. It is not a very interesting novel; it is long, rather crude, but it relates faithfully enough the career of a woman who lived by the sale of herself. The trouble was that she made rather a success of it, and it was shown in a few scenes that she did not always detest the incidents of this career, which is not unnatural. In December, 1910, two inspectors from the Criminal Investigation Department called on the publisher and informed his manager that a complaint had been made against the book; it was described as obscene. The officers apparently went on to say that their director, Sir Melville Macnaghten, did not a.s.sociate himself with that opinion, but their object was to draw the publisher's attention to the fact that a complaint had been made.

Thereupon, without further combat, the publisher withdrew the book.

n.o.body can blame him; he was not in business to fight battles of this kind, and I suppose that few British juries would have supported him.

They would, more likely, have given the case against him first and tried to get hold of a private copy of the book after, presumably to read on Sunday afternoons. The interesting part of the business is that the accusation remained anonymous, that the police did not a.s.sociate itself with it, but came humbly, helmet in hand, to convey the displeasure of some secret somebody with some secret something in the book. And there you are! That is all you need to snuff out the quite good work of a novelist with a quite good European reputation.

Once upon a time, I thought I might myself have a taste of the purity medicine. In 1910 I had ready for publication a novel called _A Bed of Roses_. I placed it with Messrs Alston Rivers, Ltd., whose standard of respectability was beyond attachment. They read the book without, so far as I remember, any ill effects; at least I saw no signs of corruption in the managing director and the secretary; the maidenly reserve of the lady shorthand-typist seemed unblemished. But some horrid internal convulsion must have suddenly occurred in the firm; they must have lost their nerve; or perhaps my corrupting influence was gradual and progressive; at any rate, they suddenly sent the book to their legal adviser, who wired back that it would almost certainly be prosecuted. So the contract was not signed, and if I had not, in those days, been an enthusiastic young man who longed to be prosecuted, I might never have published the book at all; the moral pressure might have been enough to keep it down. But I offered it to many publishers, all of whom rejected it, at the same time asking whether some milder spring might not be struck from the rock of my imagination, until I came across Mr Frank Palmer, who was a brave man. I offered him that book, cropped of about seventy pages, which I thought so true to life that I realised they must cause offence. He accepted it. Those were beautiful times, and I knew an exquisite day when I decided to chance the prosecution. I remember the bang of the MS. as it dropped into the post box; garbling an old song, I thought: 'Good-bye, good-bye, ye lovely young girls, we're off to Botany Bay.'

The police treated me very scurvily; they took no notice at all. The book was banned by all libraries owing to its alleged hectic qualities, and in due course achieved a moderate measure of scandalous success. I tell this story to show that had I been a sweet and shrinking soul, that if Mr Palmer had not shared in my audacity, the book would not have been published. We should not have been stopped, but we should have been frightened off, and this, I say, is the force that keeps down sincere novels, deep down in the muddy depths of their authors' imagination.

Now and then a publisher dares, and dares too far. Such is the case of _The Rainbow_, by Mr D. H. Lawrence, where the usual methods of Puritan terrorism were applied, where the publisher was taken into court, and made to eat humble pie, knowing that if he refused he must drink hemlock. Certainly _The Rainbow_ was a bad book, for it was an ill-written book, a book of hatred and desire ... but many of us are people of hatred and desire, and I submit that there is no freedom when a minority of one in a nation of fifty millions is hampered in the expression of his feelings. More than one opinion has been held by one man and is now the belief of all the world. The beliefs of to-morrow will be slain if we suppress to-day the opinion of one. I would surrender all the rupees and virgins of Bengal for the sake of the atom of truth which may, in another age, build up immortal understanding in the heart of man.

All this has frightened publishers, so that they will now take no risks, and even the shy sincerity of English writers is turned away. The public subserve the Puritans, little mean people whom Mr Wells ideally nicknamed 'Key-hole,' or 'Snuffles,' little people who form 'watch committees' or 'vigilance societies'; who easily discover the obscene because it hangs like a film before their eyes, little people who keep the window shut. The police must obey, or be called corrupt; the courts are ready to apply the law severely rather than leniently, for who shall play devil's advocate at the Old Bailey? No wonder the publishers are frightened; the combination of their timidity, of truculent Puritanism and of a reluctantly vigilant police makes it almost impossible to _publish_ a sincere work.

One result is that we are deprived of translations of foreign novels, some of which are of the first rank. There is _Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre_; there is _Aphrodite_, the work of M. Pierre Louys, who is an artist in his way; there is Mr Boylesve's delicate, inwrought _La Lecon d'Amour dans un Parc_; there is the Parisian mischief of M. Prevost's _Lettres de Femmes_, the elegance of M. Henri de Regnier. _Sanin_ got through, how I do not know; I have not read the translation, and it may very well be that it escaped only after the translator had thickly coated it with the soapsuds of English virtue.

Small as their chances may be it is a pity that the publishers do not adventure. It is true that Mr Vizetelly went to jail for publis.h.i.+ng translations of Zola's novels, but when we are told by Mr George Moore that Mr W. T. Stead confided to him that the Vigilance Society considered the prosecution of _Madame Bovary_, it seems necessary again to test the law. For you will observe that in all the cases quoted the publisher has not allowed himself to be committed for trial; he has chosen the prudent and humble course of apologising and withdrawing the book, and one wonders what would happen if just once, supported by a common fund, a publisher were to face the Puritans, let the case go for trial, test the law. One wonders what the result might not be in the hands of, for instance, Sir John Simon. He might win a glorious victory for English letters; he might do away with much of the muckraking which is keeping English letters in subjection because n.o.body dares drag it out for public exposure and combat. Until that happens Puritan influence is more potent than a score of convictions, for no publisher knows what he may do and what he may not; prosecution is as effective in threat as in action, and I hope that if ever this struggle comes it will be over some book of mine.

Let it be clear that no blame attaches to the publisher; he does not trade under the name 'Galahad & Co.'; he knows that even defeated Puritans would attempt to avenge their downfall, and malignantly pursue all the works he issued in every munic.i.p.al library. But still it is a pity that no publisher will face them; half a dozen of our best known publishers are knights: perhaps one day one of them will put on his armour.

This secret terrorism is a national calamity, for it procures the sterilisation of the English novel. It was always so, for there is not complete sincerity in _Tom Jones_, or in _A Mummer's Wife_, even as the word sincerity is understood in England, and there is little nowadays.

We have to-day a certain number of fairly courageous novelists whose works are alluded to in other chapters, but they are not completely sincere. If they were they would not be concerned with censors.h.i.+ps; they would not be published at all. I do not suggest that they wish to be insincere, but they cannot help it. Their insincerity, I suspect, as exemplified by the avoidance of certain details, arises from the necessity of that avoidance; it arises also from the habit of concealment and evasion which a stupefied public, led by a neurotic faction, has imposed upon them.

Our novelists openly discuss every feature of social life, politics, religion, but they cast over s.e.x a thick veil of ellipse and metaphor.

Thus Mr Onions suggests, but dares not name, the disease a character contracts; Mr Lawrence leaves in some doubt the actual deeds of his _Trespa.s.ser_, while 'H. H. Richardson' leaves to our conjectures the habits of Schilsky. (So do I, you see; if I were to say exactly what I mean it would never do.)

It may be said that all this is not insincerity, and that there is no need to dwell upon what the respectable call the unwholesome, the unhealthy, the unnecessary, but I think we must accept that the bowdlerising to which a novelist subjects his own work results in lopsidedness. If a novelist were to develop his characters evenly the three hundred page novel might extend to five hundred; the additional two hundred pages would be made up entirely of the s.e.x preoccupations of the characters, their adventures and attempts at satisfaction. There would be as many scenes in the bedroom as in the drawing-room, probably more, given that human beings spend more time in the former than in the latter apartment. There would be abundant detail, detail that would bring out an intimacy of contact, a completeness of mutual understanding which does not generally come about when characters meet at breakfast or on the golf course. The additional pages would offer pictures of the s.e.x side of the characters, and thus would compel them to come alive; at present they often fail to come alive because they develop only on, say, five sides out of six.

No character in a modern English novel has been fully developed.

Sometimes, as in the case of Mendel, of Jude the Obscure, of Mark Lennan, of Gyp Fiorsen, one has the impression that they are fully developed because the book mainly describes their s.e.x adventures, but one could write a thousand pages about s.e.x adventures and have done nothing but produce sentimental atmosphere. A hundred kisses do not make one kiss, and there is more truth in one page of _Madame Bovary_, than in the shackled works of Mr Hardy. It is not his fault, it is a case of ... if England but knew ... and, therefore, if Hardy but could. Our literary characters are lopsided because their ordinary traits are fully portrayed, a.n.a.lysed with extraordinary minuteness, while their s.e.x life is cloaked, minimised, or left out. Therefore, as the ordinary man does indulge his s.e.xual proclivities, as a large proportion of his thoughts run on s.e.x, if he is a live man, the characters in modern novels are false. They are megacephalous and emasculate. If their religious views, their political opinions, their sporting tastes were whittled down as cruelly as their s.e.xual tendencies, then the characters would become balanced; they would be dwarfs, but they would be true; if all the characteristics of men were as faintly suggested in them as their s.e.xual traits, the persons that figure in novels would simulate reality.

They would not be reality, but they would be less untrue than they are to-day. This, however, is merely theory, for it is impossible to apply to the novel the paradox that insincerity in everything being better than insincerity in one thing it is desirable to be insincere throughout. The paradox cannot be applied, because then a novel of ideas could not be written; shrouded religious doubt, shy socialism, suggested anarchism, would reduce the length by nine tenths, make of the novel a short story. It would be perfectly balanced and perfectly insincere; aesthetically sound, it would satisfy n.o.body. We should be compelled to pad it out with murder, theft, and arson, which, as everybody knows, are perfectly moral things to write about.

It is a cruel position for the English novel. The novelist may discuss anything but the main pre-occupation of life. If he describes the City clerk he may dilate upon City swindles, but he must select warily from among the City clerk's loves. The novelist knows these loves, records them in his mind, speaks of them freely, but he does not write them down. If he did, his publisher would go to jail. For this reason there is no completely sincere writing. The novelist is put into the witness box, but he is not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; he is sworn to tell the truth, but not the whole truth.

He is not perjured, but he is muzzled.

Obviously this is an unhealthy state, for the spirit of a people is in its books, and I suspect that it does a people no good if its preoccupation find no outlet; it develops inhibitions, while its Puritan masters develop phobias. The cloaking of the truth makes neither modesty nor mock modesty; it makes impurity. There is no market for p.o.r.nography, for p.o.r.nography makes no converts who were not already converted. I believe that the purity propaganda creates much of the evil that lives; I charge advertising reformers with minds full of hate, bishops full of wind, and bourgeois full of fear, with having exercised through the pulpit and the platform a more stimulating effect upon youth, and with having given it more unhealthy information about white slavery, secret cinemas, and disorderly houses than it could ever have gained from all the books that were ever printed in Amsterdam. I once went to a meeting for men only, and came out with two entirely new brands of vice; a bishop held up to me the luridities of secret cinemas, and did everything for me except to give me the address. But he filled my mind with cinemas. One could multiply these instances indefinitely. I do not think that we should cover things up; we had enough of that during the mid-Victorian period, when respectability was at its height, and when women, in bodice and bustle, did their best to make respectability difficult; no, we do not want things covered up, but we do want them advertised. I believe that as good coin drives out bad the Puritans would find a greater safety and the world a greater freedom in allowing good literature to vie with evil; the good would inevitably win; no immoral literature is good; all bad literature dies. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and France produced the vilest p.o.r.nography we know. Those centuries also produced Moliere and Fielding.

Well, to-day, you can buy Moliere and Fielding everywhere, but the p.o.r.nography of those centuries is dead, and you can find it nowhere except in a really good West End club.

It may be argued that the English are not, as a nation, interested in s.e.x, that they do not discuss it and that they do not think about it. If this were true, then a novelist would be sincere if he devoted nine tenths of his novel to business and play and no more than a tenth to s.e.x. But it is not true. The English, particularly English women, speak a great deal about s.e.x and, as they are certainly shy of the subject, they must devote to it a great deal of thought which they never put into words. If anybody doubts this, let him play eavesdropper in a club, a public house, or an office, listen to men, their views, their stories; let him especially discover how many 'humorous' tales are based on s.e.x.

And let him discreetly ascertain the topics young women discuss when no men are present; some, like Elsie Lindtner, are frank enough to tell.

In their private lives the English do not talk of s.e.x as they would like to, but they do talk, and more openly every day. Yet their s.e.x preoccupations are not reflected in the novels which purport to reflect their lives; conversation is over-s.e.xed, the novel is under-s.e.xed, therefore untrue, therefore insincere. For this there is no immediate remedy. Neither the Society of Authors, nor a combine of publishers, nor a 'Liberty Library' can shake the combination of fears which actuates persecution. The law should certainly be tested, just as it was tested in France by the prosecution of Flaubert in 1857, but we know perfectly well that even a victory for sincerity would do no more than carry us a little nearer to our goal. The law is a trifle compared with public feeling, and public feeling is a trifle beside the emotions the public is told it ought to feel. We had best reconcile ourselves to the inevitable, admit that we cannot be sincere because the police dare not allow it, and acquit the libraries of this one sin, that they killed in English literature a sincerity which was not there.

Three Comic Giants

1. TARTARIN