two entirely new brands of vice; a
bishop held up to me the luridities of secret cinemas, and did
everything for me except to give me the address. But he filled my mind
with cinemas. One could multiply these instances indefinitely. I do not
think that we should cover things up; we had enough of that during the
mid-Victorian period, when respectability was at its height, and when
women, in bodice and bustle, did their best to make respectability
difficult; no, we do not want things covered up, but we do want them
advertised. I believe that as good coin drives out bad the Puritans
would find a greater safety and the world a greater freedom in allowing
good literature to vie with evil; the good would inevitably win; no
immoral literature is good; all bad literature dies. The seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in England and France produced the vilest
pornography we know. Those centuries also produced Moliere and Fielding.
Well, to-day, you can buy Moliere and Fielding everywhere, but the
pornography of those centuries is dead, and you can find it nowhere
except in a really good West End club.

It may be argued that the English are not, as a nation, interested in
sex, that they do not discuss it and that they do not think about it. If
this were true, then a novelist would be sincere if he devoted nine
tenths of his novel to business and play and no more than a tenth to
sex. But it is not true. The English, particularly English women, speak
a great deal about sex and, as they are certainly shy of the subject,
they must devote to it a great deal of thought which they never put into
words. If anybody doubts this, let him play eavesdropper in a club, a
public house, or an office, listen to men, their views, their stories;
let him especially discover how many 'humorous' tales are based on sex.
And let him discreetly ascertain the topics young women discuss when no
men are present; some, like Elsie Lindtner, are frank enough to tell.

In their private lives the English do not talk of sex as they would like
to, but they do talk, and more openly every day. Yet their sex
preoccupations are not reflected in the novels which purport to reflect
their lives; conversation is over-sexed, the novel is under-sexed,
therefore untrue, therefore insincere. For this there is no immediate
remedy. Neither the Society of Authors, nor a combine of publishers, nor
a 'Liberty Library' can shake the combination of fears which actuates
persecution.