Creativity Quote by Ivor Novello

A sly defense dressed up as polite disagreement, Novello’s line is doing two things at once: rejecting a sexist national stereotype and exposing how flimsy the “evidence” for it always was. The first sentence is all passive fog - “It has been argued” - a rhetorical trick that lets him summon a common prejudice without owning it. That distance matters. He’s not debating a serious theory; he’s pointing at a bit of received wisdom that has floated around theatrical circles long enough to start sounding like truth.

Then comes the pivot: “This, I am positive, is not true.” The certainty is theatrical in itself, a performer’s oath delivered with calm emphasis. Novello doesn’t counter with data; he counters with authority - the authority of taste, experience, and a working artist’s eye. In a culture that treated “temperament” as a kind of glamorous defect (especially in women), the word is doing loaded work. To accuse British girls of lacking it is to accuse them of being too proper to be passionate, too restrained to be interesting, too well-mannered to be art.

Novello, writing from the interwar entertainment world that traded in imported notions of “Latin” fire and Continental sophistication, refuses the idea that depth requires melodrama. The subtext: British restraint isn’t emotional emptiness; it’s a different register. And by defending “girls” specifically, he’s also staking out a quiet, progressive claim about who gets to be considered capable of artistry - not just the flamboyant, not just the “temperamental,” not just the mythologized other.