NOVELISTS AND SEX

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 32, 9 February 1929, Page 20

NOVELISTS AND SEX

A CONDEMNATION BY "Q"

I Have Btill—and at my time of "life it may be pardonably asserted —the assurance that I have been able,^ in various ways, to touch many neartt, and ani still able to touch some, writos Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in. the preface to the Duchy Edition of his volume "The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales." They are few, perhaps,. jus^t now, and may yot'dwindle,' >vhile professors talk 6t "The romantic ;m9vement" as though a spirit enjoyed a period, to pass into a dead thing, to be classified. It is not a dead thing. In thi> race that has bred Drake, Wotton, Peterborough, Scott, Gordon, it mußt ever revive and recur. And I ask ' to be remembered for no more than this—that, while he >lived, through a time of unpopularity, one man held on his way in that faith. I might plead many things on behalf of romance, but.will confine myself to ono plea, taking Scott for my illustration—or Dickens, if you wiU. The worlds they drew, were feindly worlds, if extravagant; world in which, as in the quieter world of Jane Austen or Trollope, it was a privilege to live. They, as did Goldsmith and Fielding before-them, took our span of life as 'companionable, humorous, on the whole making for: good. Now—to drive at practice—any clever fellow can pull faces at humanity and deride it. as anyone ■with little expense can invent mishaps. and. misunderstandings. A novelist who traffics with sex and suioide, domestic bickerings, and disillusions is playing the very easiest game in the world. Any illiterate can make a "hit" with such,a theme, if his mind be of the sort to ■descend to it But. to people a wide stage with characters at once good (as most are) and brave in patience or adventure—that is the artist's test, as it seems to me.. It. means that, in growing he has learnt to judge his fellow-sinners charitably, and to help them, before he leaves a world of all sorts in which it hns been worth while to live.