never do.)

It may be said that all this is not insincerity, and that there is no
need to dwell upon what the respectable call the unwholesome, the
unhealthy, the unnecessary, but I think we must accept that the
bowdlerising to which a novelist subjects his own work results in
lopsidedness. If a novelist were to develop his characters evenly the
three hundred page novel might extend to five hundred; the additional
two hundred pages would be made up entirely of the sex preoccupations
of the characters, their adventures and attempts at satisfaction. There
would be as many scenes in the bedroom as in the drawing-room, probably
more, given that human beings spend more time in the former than in the
latter apartment. There would be abundant detail, detail that would
bring out an intimacy of contact, a completeness of mutual understanding
which does not generally come about when characters meet at breakfast or
on the golf course. The additional pages would offer pictures of the sex
side of the characters, and thus would compel them to come alive; at
present they often fail to come alive because they develop only on, say,
five sides out of six.

No character in a modern English novel has been fully developed.
Sometimes, as in the case of Mendel, of Jude the Obscure, of Mark
Lennan, of Gyp Fioersen, one has the impression that they are fully
developed because the book mainly describes their sex adventures, but
one could write a thousand pages about sex adventures and have done
nothing but produce sentimental atmosphere. A hundred kisses do not make
one kiss, and there is more truth in one page of _Madame Bovary_, than
in the shackled works of Mr Hardy. It is not his fault, it is a case of
... if England but knew ... and, therefore, if Hardy but could. Our
literary characters are lopsided because their ordinary traits are fully
portrayed, analysed with extraordinary minuteness, while their sex life
is cloaked, minimised, or left out. Therefore, as the ordinary man does
indulge his sexual proclivities, as a large proportion of his thoughts
run on sex, if he is a live man, the characters in modern novels are
false. They are megacephalous and emasculate. If their religious views,
their political opinions, their sporting tastes were whittled down as
cruelly as their sexual tendencies, then the characters would become
balanced; they would be dwarfs, but they would be true; if all the
characteristics of men were as faintly suggested