guilty and frail and so on: all these may provide material for
very effective plays; but such plays are not dramatic studies of
sex: one might as well say that Romeo and Juliet is a dramatic
study of pharmacy because the catastrophe is brought about
through an apothecary. Duels are not sex; divorce cases are not
sex; the Trade Unionism of married women is not sex. Only the
most insignificant fraction of the gallantries of married people
produce any of the conventional results; and plays occupied
wholly with the conventional results are therefore utterly
unsatisfying as sex plays, however interesting they may be as
plays of intrigue and plot puzzles.

The world is finding this out rapidly. The Sunday papers, which
in the days when they appealed almost exclusively to the lower
middle class were crammed with police intelligence, and more
especially with divorce and murder cases, now lay no stress on
them; and police papers which confined themselves entirely to
such matters, and were once eagerly read, have perished through
the essential dulness of their topics. And yet the interest in
sex is stronger than ever: in fact, the literature that has
driven out the journalism of the divorce courts is a literature
occupied with sex to an extent and with an intimacy and frankness
that would have seemed utterly impossible to Thackeray or Dickens
if they had been told that the change would complete itself
within fifty years of their own time.


ART AND MORALITY.

It is ridiculous to say, as inconsiderate amateurs of the arts