Sex is a universal temptation and activity and a great amnesty will naturally have to attend it throughout life. Scarcely anyone would wish it to define, enclose, imprison a man’s being. Society has other things for him to do, being a soldier for instance — a group notoriously indifferent to sexual consequence. Obligation is so often improvident, against thrift. Still, the break with human love remains somewhere inside, and at times, under rain clouds, it aches like an amputation. But it is not serious. George Eliot said that she wrote novels out of a belief that a seed brings forth in time a crop of its own kind. How to the point is this metaphor for the plot of the illicit, the plot of love.

Now the old plot is dead, fallen into obsolescence. You cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value. Technology annihilates consequences. Heroism hurts and no one easily consents to be under its rule. The heroines in Henry James, rich and in every way luckily endowed by circumstance, are seduced and betrayed by surfaces, misled because life, under certain rules, is a language they haven’t the key to. Feeling and desire hang on and thus misfortune (if not tragedy) in the emotional life is always ahead of us, waiting its turn. Stoicism, growing to meet the tyrannical demands of consequence, cannot be without its remaining uses in life and love; but if we read contemporary fiction we learn that improvisation is better, more economical, faster, more promising.

Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent “I,” the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality. Process is not implacable; mutation is the expedient of the future, and its exhilaration too.