e ought to have
been treated under the same head as that of sentimental literature.
But it will become clear not only that there can be a popular erotic
literature of a quite different order, but that I might have
subdivided this class into two: one concerned with the popular
literature of passion, the other with that of sensualism. There is, of
course, a sentiment of love which is sufficiently considered in the
last section. But I have made a distinction between sentiment and
passion, which for my view is important; and I must add the further
and more obvious distinction between the love passion, which is an
intense emotional experience affecting the imagination no less than
the senses, and that sex feeling, which in essence is merely sensual.
Leaving out of count, then, the "sentiment" of love, we have an
obvious distinction between the literature which deals with the love
passion and the literature which deals with sensual desire. But I do
not propose any grandmotherly legislation which permits one subject to
the artist and relegates the other to the pornographer. For it is
clear that an author may deal well or ill with a subject intended to
yield genuine passion (though in the latter case the popular interest
will attach to the sensational character of the incidents rather than
to the treatment of passion as such, and a book of this kind may be
considered as I have already considered the "novel of incident"). And,
again, an author may deal well or ill with the sensations of sex;
those sensations can provide material for fine art. It is a matter of
treatment. Upon feelings of this sort Maupassant based some of his
most felicitous stories. But Maupassant did not use sexual incidents
for the sake of sex feeling; for him such incidents were various
symbols, flickering images, of life, incarnations of the brooding
spirit of cynicism and scorn. We have already seen that to Fielding,
for whom they were of less special significance on their own account,
they were presented as assertions of boisterous physical eagerness, of
delight in energetic life for its own sake.

It has already become obvious that the tendency of the most popular
literature is to substitute the cruder sensations for the higher
emotions and sentiments. We have seen how incident is liked for the
mere sensation it can afford; how sentiment is turned into
sentimentality. As a rule, in discussing inferior literature the
higher emotions need be taken little