course a little
more. The libraries did not deprive of sustenance the authors of
_Limehouse Nights_ and _Capel Sion_, and in their new spirit did not
interfere when Mr Galsworthy's heroine, in _Beyond_, made the best of
one world and of two men.

The assassins of sincerity are the publisher and the policeman. Dismiss
the illusion that banned books are bold and bad; for the most part they
are kindly and mild, silly beyond the conception of Miss Elinor Glyn,
beyond the sentimental limits of Mrs Barclay; they are seldom vicious in
intent, and too devoid of skill to be vicious in achievement. The real
bold books are unwritten or unpublished; for nobody but a fool would
expect a publisher to be fool enough to publish them. There are, it is
true, three or four London publishers who are not afraid of the
libraries, but they are afraid of the police, and any one who wishes to
test them can offer them, for instance, a translation of _Le Journal
d'une Femme de Chambre_. A publisher is to a certain extent a human
being; he knows that works of this type (and this one is masterly) are
often works of art; he knows that they are saleable, and that assured
profits would follow on publication, were the books not suppressed by
the police. But he does not publish them, because he also knows that
the police and its backers, purity societies and common informers, would
demand seizure of the stock after the first review and hurry to Bow
Street all those who had taken part in the printing and issue of the
works. As a result many of these books are driven underground into the
vile atmosphere of the vilest shops; some are great works of art; one
is, in the words of Mr Anatole France, 'minded to weep over them with
the nine Muses for company.' Need I say more than that _Madame Bovary_,
the greatest novel the world has seen, is now being sold in a shilling
paper edition under a cover which shows Madame Bovary in a sort of
private dining-room, dressed in a chemise, and preparing to drink off a
bumper of champagne. (Possibly the designer of this cover has in his
mind sparkling burgundy.)

Several cases are fresh in my memory where purity, living in what Racine
called 'the fear of God, sir, and of the police,' has intervened to stop
the circulation of a novel. One is that of _The Yoke_, a novel of no
particular merit, devoid of subversive teaching, but interesting because
it was frank, because it did not portray love on the lines of musical
comed