was considered a heresiarch of the most extravagant kind when I
expressed my opinion at the outset of my career as a playwright,
that adultery is the dullest of themes on the stage, and that
from Francesca and Paolo down to the latest guilty couple of the
school of Dumas fils, the romantic adulterers have all been
intolerable bores.


THE PSEUDO SEX PLAY.

Later on, I had occasion to point out to the defenders of sex as
the proper theme of drama, that though they were right in ranking
sex as an intensely interesting subject, they were wrong in
assuming that sex is an indispensable motive in popular plays.
The plays of Moliere are, like the novels of the Victorian epoch
or Don Quixote, as nearly sexless as anything not absolutely
inhuman can be; and some of Shakespear's plays are sexually on a
par with the census: they contain women as well as men, and that
is all. This had to be admitted; but it was still assumed that
the plays of the XIX century Parisian school are, in contrast
with the sexless masterpieces, saturated with sex; and this I
strenuously denied. A play about the convention that a man should
fight a duel or come to fisticuffs with his wife's lover if she
has one, or the convention that he should strangle her like
Othello, or turn her out of the house and never see her or allow
her to see her children again, or the convention that she should
never be spoken to again by any decent person and should finally
drown herself, or the convention that persons involved in scenes
of recrimination or confession by these conventions should call
each other certain abusive names and describe their conduct as