Later on, I had occasion to point out to the defenders of sex as the
proper theme of drama, that though they were right in ranking sex as an
intensely interesting subject, they were wrong in assuming that sex is
an indispensable motive in popular plays. The plays of Moliere are,
like the novels of the Victorian epoch or Don Quixote, as nearly
sexless as anything not absolutely inhuman can be; and some of
Shakespear's plays are sexually on a par with the census: they contain
women as well as men, and that is all. This had to be admitted; but it
was still assumed that the plays of the XIX century Parisian school
are, in contrast with the sexless masterpieces, saturated with sex; and
this I strenuously denied. A play about the convention that a man
should fight a duel or come to fisticuffs with his wife's lover if she
has one, or the convention that he should strangle her like Othello, or
turn her out of the house and never see her or allow her to see her
children again, or the convention that she should never be spoken to
again by any decent person and should finally drown herself, or the
convention that persons involved in scenes of recrimination or
confession by these conventions should call each other certain abusive
names and describe their conduct as guilty and frail and so on: all
these may provide material for very effective plays; but such plays are
not dramatic studies of sex: one might as well say that Romeo and
Juliet is a dramatic study of pharmacy because the catastrophe is
brought about through an apothecary. Duels are not sex; divorce cases
are not sex; the Trade Unionism of married women is not sex. Only the
most insignificant fraction of the gallantries of married people
produce any of the conventional results; and plays occupied wholly with
the conventional results are therefore utterly unsatisfying as sex
plays, however interesting they may be as plays of intrigue and plot
puzzles.
The world is finding this out rapidly. The Sunday papers, which in the
days when they appealed almost exclusively to the lower middle class
were crammed with police intelligence, and more especially with divorce
and murder cases, now lay no stress on them; and police papers which
confined themselves entirely to such matters, and were once eagerly
read, have perished through the essential dulness of their topics. And
yet the interest in sex is stronger than ever: in fact, the literature
that has driven out the journalism of the divorce courts is a
literature occupied with sex to an extent and with an intimacy and
frankness that would have seemed utterly impossible to Thackeray or
Dickens if they had been told that the change would complete itself
within fifty years of their own time.