Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/59

 Waldo Franck, and James Joyce, one's first impression is frequently of wonder as to what motive can prompt an author to perpetuate a record of experience so humiliatingly painful, and a vision of souls so atrociously ugly. Is the motive revenge upon life for having taken them in? Is the motive to cleanse the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff that preys upon the reason? The mad King Lear perhaps felt relieved when he had completed his psychoanalysis of the "simp'ring dame"; but when he had reached his conclusion in "burning, scalding, stench, consumption," he cried perforce: "Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination!" In the Emetic School of fiction appears the reductio ad nauseam of the idea of sex as a social asset. No lust-bitten monk wrestling with hallucinations in a mediæval cloister could have made the entire subject more bewilderingly detestable than this group of anti-Puritan and anti-Catholic emancipators, who apparently set out with a desire to make it pleasant.