The principle of literary decorum which applies to the representation of the body applies also to the allied theme of sex. The body is a fit subject for literature, but not in detail. Sex is a proper subject for literature, so long as it is represented as a general force in life, and particular instances of it are decent so long as they illustrate that general force and turn our minds to it; but sexual actions are indecent when they cease to illustrate the general fact of sex, and are studied for their own sake; like the ears in the portrait, they then assume an emphasis they do not deserve. This seems to be the decorum of the theme as great writers have treated it, and this is the decorum which men instinctively adopt in discussion, if they have not been trained to think that all discussion of sex is naughty. People so trained will call any book indecent which in any way touches the theme. When _Trilby_ appeared years ago, many of us then youngsters were protected (in vain) from the lovely story because Trilby had been somebody’s mistress before the romance began. So to an earlier generation _The Scarlet Letter_ had seemed dangerous because Hester Prynne’s child was illegitimate. But neither book had physical passion for its theme, though the force of sex in life, for good or evil, gave each story most of its interest and its pathos. How indecent in the artistic sense, how indecorous, either book might have been, we realize by supposing that Du Maurier had centred attention on Trilby’s early and sordid affairs, before she met her true love, or that Hawthorne had given us in detail the experiences of Hester in Arthur Dimmesdale’s arms. One has an uneasy feeling that so the books might have been written today; the general fact of sex and its influence would not operate as a colossal force in the story, but would be deduced in an argument or assumed as an hypothesis—modern specialists in sex are so uncertain of its existence—and the focus would have been on the animal behavior of human beings, which the hypothesis of sex would explain. This kind of book is indecent, though it is usually too psychological in manner to disturb the censorious, and entirely too frequent in recent literature to suppress.