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 municipal 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 If they were they would not be concerned with censorships; they would not be published at all.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 sex 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 _Trespasser_, 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 sex 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 sex 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.