Caught at last by "romance," falling in love with a man who wondered—"would she be more trouble than she was worth"; this determined young woman "leapt up and began undressing . . . plunged into the water"; so that "the momentary glance he had of her naked beauty, the excitement, overcame him."
The hero, in his "first affair" with "the daughter of a very respectable God-fearing parson," carefully taught her the new ideals of "free love, free conscience, free everything . . . hoping himself to reap the fruit of his labours." Submitting, however, to the "ceremonial" of marriage, he was caught in his own trap. She was now "enlightened," and "dreading suddenly the binding nature of the service," ran away, at the eleventh hour, with another man.
Afterwards "she came back ill, very ill, and he left her to sink or swim." Such is the chivalry of free love; that ultimately drove her to become "a horrible, decadent, drug-maniac."
Of his "spiritual" union with another, we read: "Both were exhausted, the emotions
of the soul had overpowered them, they fell fainting against the cool grey stone, and there, like a burning picture of all the romances there have been since the beginning of time, they leant in the twilight."
By all means call a spade a spade; but do not imagine that all life is spades. To insist upon bedroom scenes in fiction or drama, and all the nakedness of phrase such a conception of art implies, does, and must, often suggest the sly and coarse innuendo. It is the same with all excess of emphasis on physical detail. When Mr. D. H. Lawrence dwells on the feverish symptoms (mainly skin-deep) of his lovers, describes their breasts and loins, he is—actually—playing with the obscene.
The reticence we demand is not based on any pretence that our bodies are unclean, on any conventional association between mere words and thoughts.
A nude painting may be supremely, spiritually, beautiful: it may be lewd: but it is not, as many would now declare, more real because of its nudity.
Can we honestly say that the increasing undress on stage or in daily life provokes more deep, true and sincere feeling, reveals more of a girl's or a woman's real and best
self? We know it does not. It distracts our thoughts from the woman herself to memories of purely animal and gross experience, tempts us to lower depths. It matters not, in the book or in the play, that innocence prevail. I have heard men, for example, when the curtain fell at The Sign of the Cross, chuckling over the public attack on a girl's body (though it failed), with gay plans for vile conquests.