Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/85

 thinking directly of the interests of literature, and only indirectly of public morals, may propose to itself some such questions as these: Assuming that the exhibition of sex and the treatment of illicit passion are innocuous to public morals, is it in the interest of literature for authors to enter into rivalry with one another for honors in the field of pornographic art? Is it wise to create a situation in which no novel will sell which does not pungently depict illicit passion? Is there not a danger that American authors who now specialize in this subject will, as they grow older, find themselves obliged, like certain of their European colleagues, to present a 'salacious' scene at the end of every chapter, in order to hold the attention of over-stimulated and jaded readers? Is it not true that, if you turn too high a light upon passages of this sort, you kill the interest of everything else in your book, so that readers will pass over your beautiful writing with such blurred and dull vision as men turn on the loveliest landscape, after staring with naked eyes at the sun? If you habitually present what you call 'sex' as sensual passion or as disgusting animalism, are you not imprisoning yourself in an hallucination and speaking infamously of that power, which Spenser, contemplating it from another point of view, spoke of as