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. Obviously, there can be no fixed verbal rule. To say that no writer may use certain words or describe certain actions and things; no playwright may paint certain scenes; would be to "speak as a fool." Each case must be determined by its inner spiritual truth. In one sense our selection of phrase must be a matter of taste and good feeling; in another, it comes from our artistic instinct. What I maintain, and have tried to show, is that modern novels are, too often, both poisonous _and_ untrue to life because their choice of words and, indeed, their whole picture of life, is dominated by a false view: that, if only your figures are naked they _must_ be true, that our bodies cannot lie. _In angry revolt against the half-truths of the past, they snatch at the other half and swear it is the whole._ Let the writer be sure that he cares only for truth; and loyalty to his vision will give him the right, clean thoughts and words. Let the reader trust to his own natural instincts. Almost certainly, if a phrase or thought either shock or suggest the unclean, it is itself—as then used—unclean, false to life and nature; _and_ also bad art. If you are told that the first slight shock, prick of the conscience, impulse to shrink away, is false hypocrisy, _do not believe it_.