en at
different intervals during the past ten or twelve years. I have not
attempted to classify them. In several instances I have appended
the date of first publication, as it seemed necessary, or at least
convenient.

G. W. FOOTE

June, 1894.

LUSCIOUS PIETY.

Lord Tennyson's poem, _Locksley Hall: Sixty Years After_, is severe on
what he evidently regards as the pornographic tendency of our age.

"Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your sewer;
Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream should issue pure.
Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism,--
Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the abysm."

There is some truth in this, but far more exaggeration. English novels,
however they may trifle and sentimentalise with the passion of love,
are as a rule exceedingly "proper." For the most part, in fact, they
deliberately ignore all the unconventional aspects of that passion, and
you might read a thousand of their productions without suspecting, if
you did not already know the fact, that it had any connexion with our
physical nature. The men and women, youths and maidens, of Thackeray,
Dickens, and George Eliot, to say nothing of minor writers, are true
enough to nature in other respects, but in all sexual relations they
are mere simulacri. George Meredith is our only novelist who triumphs
in this region. As Mr. Lowell has noticed, there is a fine natural
atmosphere of sex in his books. Without the obtrusion of physiology,
which is out of place in art, his human beings are clearly divided
into males and females, thinking, feeling and acting according to their
sexual characteristics. Other novelists simply shirk the whole problem
of sex, and are satisfied with calling their personages John or Mary as
the one safe method of indicating to what gender they belong. This is
how the English public is pleased to have it; in this manner it feeds
the gross hypocrisy which is its constant bane. Hence the shock of
surprise, and even of disgust, felt by the ordinary Englishman when he
takes up a novel by a great French master of fiction, who thinks that
Art, as well as Science, should deal frankly and courageously with every
great problem of life. "Shocking!" cry the English when the veil of
mystery is lifted. Yet the purism is only on the lips. We are not a whit
more virtuous than those plain-spoken foreigners; for, after all, facts
exist, howev