in them as their sexual
traits, the persons that figure in novels would simulate reality.

They would not be reality, but they would be less untrue than they are
to-day. This, however, is merely theory, for it is impossible to apply
to the novel the paradox that insincerity in everything being better
than insincerity in one thing it is desirable to be insincere
throughout. The paradox cannot be applied, because then a novel of ideas
could not be written; shrouded religious doubt, shy socialism, suggested
anarchism, would reduce the length by nine tenths, make of the novel a
short story. It would be perfectly balanced and perfectly insincere;
aesthetically sound, it would satisfy nobody. We should be compelled to
pad it out with murder, theft, and arson, which, as everybody knows, are
perfectly moral things to write about.

It is a cruel position for the English novel. The novelist may discuss
anything but the main pre-occupation of life. If he describes the City
clerk he may dilate upon City swindles, but he must select warily from
among the City clerk's loves. The novelist knows these loves, records
them in his mind, speaks of them freely, but he does not write them
down. If he did, his publisher would go to jail. For this reason there
is no completely sincere writing. The novelist is put into the witness
box, but he is not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth; he is sworn to tell the truth, but not the whole truth.
He is not perjured, but he is muzzled.

Obviously this is an unhealthy state, for the spirit of a people is in
its books, and I suspect that it does a people no good if its
preoccupation find no outlet; it develops inhibitions, while its Puritan
masters develop phobias. The cloaking of the truth makes neither modesty
nor mock modesty; it makes impurity. There is no market for pornography,
for pornography makes no converts who were not already converted. I
believe that the purity propaganda creates much of the evil that lives;
I charge advertising reformers with minds full of hate, bishops full of
wind, and bourgeois full of fear, with having exercised through the
pulpit and the platform a more stimulating effect upon youth, and with
having given it more unhealthy information about white slavery, secret
cinemas, and disorderly houses than it could ever have gained from all
the books that were ever printed in Amsterdam. I once went to a meeting
for men only, and came out with