Lurid presentation, by drama, novel, or magazine-story, of dramatic and
highly-colored individual sex histories, is to be avoided. These often
impress an abnormal situation on sensitive girls so strongly that
aversion to marriage, or sex antagonism, is aroused. Every effort should
be made to permeate art--dramatic, plastic, or literary--with the
highest ideals of sex and parenthood. A glorification of motherhood and
fatherhood in these ways would have a portentous influence on public
opinion.
"The true, intimate chronicle of an everyday married life has not been
written. Here is a theme for genius; for only genius can divine and
reveal the beauty, the pathos, and the wonder of the normal or the
commonplace. A felicitous marriage has its comedy, its complexities, its
element, too, of tragedy and grief, as well as its serenity and fealty.
Matrimony, whether the pair fare well or ill, is always a great
adventure, a play of deep instincts and powerful emotions, a drama of
two psyches. Every marriage provides a theme for the literary artist. No
lives are free from enigmas."[116]
More "temperance" in work would probably promote marriage of able and
ambitious young people. Walter Gallichan complains that "we do not even
recognize love as a finer passion than money greed.
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