IT is a pity that sex is such an ugly little word. An ugly little word, and really almost incomprehensible. What is sex, after all? The more we think about it, the less we know.

Science says it is an instinct: but what is an instinct? Apparently an instinct is an old, old habit that has become ingrained. But a habit, however old, has to have a beginning. And there is really no beginning to sex. Where life is, there it is. So sex is no "habit" that has been formed. Again, they talk of sex as an appetite, like hunger. An appetite: but for what? An appetite for propagation? It is rather absurd. They say a peacock puts on all his fine feathers to dazzle the pea-hen into letting him yearn for propagation. But why should the pea-hen not put on fine feathers, to dazzle the peacock, and satisfy her desire for propagation? She has surely quite as great a desire for eggs and chickens as he has. We cannot believe that her sex-urge is so weak that she needs all that blue splendour of feathers to rouse her. Not at all. As for me, I never even saw a pea-hen so much as look at her lord's bronze and blue glory. I don't believe she ever sees it. I don't believe, for a moment, that she knows the difference between bronze, blue, brown or green. If I had ever seen a pea-hen gazing with rapt attention on her lord's flamboyancy, I might believe that he had put on all those feathers just to "attract" her. But she never looks at him. Only she seems to get a little perky when he shudders all his quills at her, like a storm in the trees. Then she does seem to notice, just casually, his presence.

THESE theories of sex are amazing. A peacock puts on his glory for the sake of a wall-eyed pea-hen who never looks at him. Imagine a scientist being so naïve as to credit the pea-hen with a profound, dynamic appreciation of a peacock's colour and pattern. Oh, highly aesthetic pea-hen!

And a nightingale sings to attract his female. Which is mighty curious, seeing he sings his best when courtship and honeymoon are over, and the female is no longer concerned with him at all, but with the young. Well then, if he doesn't sing to attract her, he must sing to distract her, and amuse her while she's sitting.

How delightful, how naïve theories are! But there is a hidden will behind them all. There is a hidden will behind all theories of sex; implacable. And that, strangely enough, is the will to deny, to wipe out the mystery of beauty. Because beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it. Well then, says science, it is just a trick to catch the female and induce her to propagate. How naïve! As if the female needed inducing. She will propagate in the dark, even—so where then is the beauty trick?

Science has a mysterious hatred of beauty, because it doesn't fit in the cause-and-effect chain. And society has a mysterious hatred of sex, because it perpetually interferes with the nice money-making schemes of social man. So the two hatreds made a combine, and sex and beauty are mere propagation-appetite.

Now sex and beauty are one thing, like flame and fire. If you hate sex you hate beauty. If you love living beauty, you have a reverence for sex. Of course you can love old dead beauty and hate sex. But to love living beauty you must have a reverence for sex.

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition. The great disaster of our civilisation is the morbid hatred of sex. What, for example, could show a more poisoned hatred of sex than Freudian psycho-analysis?—which carries with it a morbid fear of beauty, "alive" beauty, and which causes the atrophy of our intuitive faculty and our intuitive self. The deep psychic disease of modern men and women is the diseased, atrophied condition of the intuitive faculties. There is a whole world of life that we might know and enjoy by intuition, and by intuition alone. This is denied us, because we deny sex and beauty, the source of the intuitive life and of the insouciance which is so lovely in free animals and in plants.

SEX is the root of which intuition is the foliage, and beauty the flower. Why is a woman lovely, if ever, in her twenties? It is the time when sex rises softly to her face, as a rose to the top of a rose-bush.

And the appeal is the appeal of beauty. We deny it wherever we can. We try to make the beauty as shallow and trashy as possible. But, first and foremost, sex appeal is the appeal of beauty.

Now beauty is a thing about which we are so uneducated, we can hardly speak of it. We try to pretend it is a fixed arrangement: straight nose, large eyes, etc. We think a lovely woman must look like Lillian Gish, a handsome man must look like Rudolph Valentino. So we think. In actual life, we behave quite differently. We say: she's quite beautiful, but I don't care for her. Which shows we are using the word beautiful all wrong. We should say: she has the stereotyped attributes of beauty, but she is not beautiful to me.

Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow, or a communicated sense of fineness. What ails us is that our sense of beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all the best. But to stick to the films—there is a greater essential beauty in Charlie Chaplin's odd face than ever there was in Valentino's. There is a bit of true beauty in Chaplin's brows and eyes, a gleam of something pure. But our sense of beauty is so bruised and clumsy, we don't see it, and don't know it when we do see it. We can only see the blatantly obvious, like the so-called beauty of Rudolph Valentino, which only pleased because it satisfied some ready-made notion of handsomeness.

But the plainest person can look beautiful, can be beautiful. It only needs the fire of sex to rise delicately, to change an ugly face to a lovely one. That is really sex appeal: the communicating of a sense of beauty. And in the reverse way, no one can be quite so repellent as a really pretty woman. That is, since beauty is a question of experience, not of concrete form, no one can be as acutely ugly as a really pretty woman. When the sex-glow is missing, and she moves in ugly coldness, how hideous she seems, and all the worse for her externals of prettiness.

What sex is, we don't know, but it must be some sort of fire. For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when the glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty.

We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the. world. Nothing is more ugly than a human being in whom the fire of sex has gone out. You get a nasty clayey creature whom everybody wants to avoid.

But while we are fully alive, the fire of sex smoulders or burns in us. In youth it flickers and shines, in age it glows softer and stiller, but there it is. We have some control over it; but only partial control. That is why society hates it. While ever it lives, the fire of sex, which is the source of beauty and anger, burns in us beyond our understanding. Like actual fire, while it lives it will burn our fingers if we touch it carelessly. And so social man, who only wants to be "safe", hates the fire of sex.

LUCKILY not many men succeed in being merely social men. The fire of the old Adam smoulders. And one of the qualities of fire is that it calls to fire. Sex-fire here kindles sex-fire there. It may only rouse the smoulder into a soft glow. It may call up a sharp flicker. Or it may rouse a flame: and then flame leans to flame, and starts a blaze.

Whenever the sex-fire glows through, it will kindle an answer somewhere or other. It may only kindle a sense of warmth and optimism. Then you say: I like that girl, she's a real good sort.

It may kindle a glow that makes the world look kindlier, and life feel better. Then you say: She's an attractive woman; by Jove, I like her. Or she may rouse a flame that lights up her own face first, before it lights up the universe. Then you say: She's a lovely woman. She looks lovely to me.

Let's say no more.

It takes a rare woman to rouse a real sense of loveliness. It is not that a woman is born beautiful. We say that to escape our own poor, bruised, clumsy understanding of beauty. There have been thousands and thousands of women quite as good-looking as Diane de Poictiers or Mrs. Langtry or any of the famous ones. There are today thousands and thousands of superbly good-looking women. But how few lovely women!

And why? Because of the failure of their sex appeal. A good-looking woman becomes lovely when the fire of sex rouses pure and fine in her, and flickers through her face and touches the fire in our hearts. Then she becomes a lovely woman, then she is, in the living flesh, a lovely woman: not a mere photograph of one. And how lovely a lovely woman! But alas! how rare! How bitterly rare, in a world full of handsome girls and women!

Handsome, good-looking, but not lovely, not beautiful. Handsome and good-looking women are the women with good features and the right hair. But a lovely woman is an experience. It is a question of communicated fire. It is a question of sex appeal, in our poor, delapidated modern phraseology. Sex appeal!—applied to Diane de Poictiers!—or even, in the lovely hours, to one's wife! Why is it a libel and a slander in itself.

There is, of course, the other side of sex appeal—it can be the destruction of the one appealed to. When a woman starts using her sex appeal to her own advantage, it is usually a bad moment for some poor devil. But this side of sex appeal has been overworked lately, so it is not nearly as dangerous as it was. The sex-appealing courtesans who ruined so many men in Balzac's novels no longer find it smooth running. Men have grown canny. In fact, they are inclined to think they smell a rat the moment they feel the a-little-too-obvious touch of feminine sex appeal.

Which is a pity, for sex appeal is only a dirty name for a bit of life-flame. No man works so well and so successfully, as when some woman has kindled a little fire in his veins. No woman does her work at home with real joy unless she is in love—and of course, a woman may go on being quietly in love for fifty years, almost without knowing it. If only our civilisation had taught us how to let sex appeal flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of sex clear and alive, flickering or glowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of strength and communication, we might all of us have lived all our lives in love, which means kindled and full of zest, in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things. Whereas, what a lot of dead ash there is in our lives at present!