ble. I would be a servant, bound to the same master, to live in the same house with you.

BARN: How strange, and yet how kind, her words and actions are! and the effect they have on me is as strange. I feel desires I never knew before. I must be gone, while I have power to go. (Aside.) Madam, I humbly take my leave. MILL: You will not, sure, leave me so soon! BARN: Indeed, I must.

MILL: You cannot be so cruel! I have prepared a poor supper, at which I promised myself your company.

BARN: I am sorry I must refuse the honor you designed me; but my duty to my master calls me hence. I never yet neglected his service. He is so gentle, and so good a master, that, should I wrong him, though he might forgive me, I should never forgive myself.

MILL: Am I refused by the first man, the second favor I ever stooped to ask? Go then, thou proud, hard-hearted youth; but know, you are the only man that could be found, who would let me sue twice for greater favors.

BARN: What shall I do? How shall I go or stay?

MILL: Yet do not, do not leave me. I with my sex's pride would meet your scorn; but when I look upon you, when I behold those eyes. Oh! spare my tongue, and let my blushes-this flood of tears, too, that will force its way, declarewhat woman's modesty should hide.

BARN: Oh, heavens! she loves me, worthless as I am. Her looks, her words, her flowing tears confess it. And can I leave her then? Oh, never, never! Madam, dry up your tears; you shall command me always. I will stay here forever, if you would have me.

This was bourgeois realism, realism through the lens of bourgeois propriety. It was the reality of life as the bourgeoisie viewed it. To-day we call it sentimentalism, but that is only because our realism and ethic have changed. Our outlook is different. Society has altered. The class conflict has changed. The criteria of morality and sex habit, expressive of the prevailing economics, have swung from one orbit to another. Realism consisted then of painting the passions as evil instead of snickeringly exalting them; of introducing characters of the bourgeoisie and themes that centered about the struggle and success of the merchant class.

Sex expression in literature was curbed by this trend or modified so as to impress a moral or enforce a

sermon.

It is a different social world that had come into creation. A new class had not only imprinted itself upon a culture, it had made a culture. The political world, the business world, the art world, had been remade by this culture. New norms had been erected. The words of Lenglet-dufresnay:

"Choose only noble subjects, kings, princes, heroes. . . . A son or a daughter of a minister is too low in birth

had become anachronistic. Art and politics were no longer things of the aristocracy. Art and politics had become the possession of another class—the bourgeoisie. A bourgeois comedy and a bourgeois tragedy had superseded the aristocratic play with its noble heroes and heroic warriors. A bourgeois politics had supplanted a feudal. A bourgeois morality had eclipsed an aristocratic.

The economic change that pinnacled the bourgeoisie had caused a revolution in every phase of endeavor: political, moral, esthetic.

8 L'usage des Romans.

CHAPTER V

SEX EXPRESSION IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL

THE

HE modern novel is a result of economic evolution. It is a product of the bourgeoisie. Without the economic change of the eighteenth century, the expanding wealth of the commercial class, the increasing spread of education, the modern novel would have been a pure chimera. The limits of the drama had been marked and profound. The dramas met but a severely limited audience. Their appeal, therefore, was narrow and insufficient. Not many authors could survive on their meager profits. Patronage had been noisome but necessitous. were not plenteous, authors were few. At the time of the Restoration when dramatists were rewarded in style not stinted, and actors ricochetted across town in gilded carriage and gorgeous dress, there were scarcely more than a dozen dramatists that wrote the overwhelming majority of the plays of the era. There was not room for more. The theater was too confined

a medium.

Since patrons

The aristocracy had patronized, in a sense, had created the stage. The stage, as we have pointed out

before, until the advance of the bourgeoisie, had reflected, in every detail of its artifice and convention, the social attitude of the aristocracy. The dramatist, unless he engaged in political gymnastics, was a parasite, living with unabashed countenance upon the generosity of his feudal superiors.

The dominancy of the bourgeoisie altered the situation. A new public had been created. The nature of bourgeois enterprise necessitated the advance and spread of education. Bible-reading itself, as an individual duty, a duty unknown to the old Catholic communicant, furthered and encouraged the reading custom. The publication of sermons developed a reading public that was led at times to the perusal of less sacred literature. Profane literature that denounced turpitude and upheld virtue was not distant from the religious. It was a kind of interlude between the old sacrosanct literature of the earlier bourgeoisie and the more mundane though moral literature of the industrial bourgeoisie.

But not only a new public had been created-a new purchasing class also had been created. A literature cannot flourish without economic support. The modern newspaper and the modern novel would not have been possible without this phase of social change, marked by the rise and dominancy of the bourgeoisie. The newspaper and the novel derived their existence