which raises a protest in favour of purity.

Why have not novelists raised the protest earlier? For this
reason. Hitherto, owing to the stern necessity laid upon the
modern seer for earning his bread, and, incidentally, for finding a
publisher to assist him in promulgating his prophetic opinions, it
has seldom happened that writers of exceptional aims have been able
to proclaim to the world at large the things which they conceived
to be best worth their telling it. Especially has this been the
case in the province of fiction. Let me explain the situation.
Most novels nowadays have to run as serials through magazines or
newspapers; and the editors of these periodicals are timid to a
degree which outsiders would hardly believe with regard to the
fiction they admit into their pages. Endless spells surround them.
This story or episode would annoy their Catholic readers; that one
would repel their Wesleyan Methodist subscribers; such an incident
is unfit for the perusal of the young person; such another would
drive away the offended British matron. I do not myself believe
there is any real ground for this excessive and, to be quite frank,
somewhat ridiculous timidity. Incredible as it may seem to the
ordinary editor, I am of opinion that it would be possible to tell
the truth, and yet preserve the circulation. A first-class journal
does not really suffer because two or three formalists or two or
three bigots among its thousands of subscribers give it up for six
weeks in a pet of ill-temper--and then take it on again. Still,
the effect remains: it is almost impossible to get a novel printed
in an English journal unless it is warranted to contain nothing at
all to which anybody, however narrow, could possibly object, on any
grounds whatever, religious, political, social, moral, or
aesthetic. The romance that appeals to the average editor must say