He says such things to himself, and will hear of no other possibility of conduct outside their scope. The last thing he will do is to admit our common, essential and unavoidable incoherence. He fences himself about with taboos and customs and creeds, and the more energetic sort of people, themselves believing, have been only too ready to assist their weaker brethren and strengthen their own faith, by guiding and controlling them. This is right and lovely, and as for that? Oh! you’d never do that! The sage, the teacher, the priest, the guru, have kept their fingers pointing steadily away from fact towards the ideal.
And as long as the circumstances of the life of Homo Tewler have not changed too rapidly for these guides to accomodate themselves to the new conditions, his societies have been able to get along by clinging to this or that particular compromise with truth, which provided an effective method of co-operation. The co-operation might be imperfect, but it rubbed along.
For long ages Homo Tewler managed to pretend that his private imaginations and the more unpleasant realities of his behaviour were not actually there at all, that the misbehaviours of his fellow-creatures were “abnormalities” and lapses which he did not share—“Oh, quite impossible!”—or that they were due to diabolical possession of an exceptional tort. It was only with the advent of psychoanalysis that a complex tangle of fancies and dreams that he had hitherto denied and smuggled away, was dragged out shamefacedly as his “sub-conscious” into an almost too vivid light of day.
“What’s all this?” asked the psychoanalyst, “I’m really surprised at you,” like a conjuror taking a rabbit out of the good man’s hair. We all had a sub-conscious, he declared. Every one of us. All. But—we began to remember things we had been in the habit of dismissing from our minds. It was most disconcerting.
Freud and his psychoanalysts suffered from the disadvantages of a classical education, and in their researches into the concealments of their troubled patients, they found remarkable reminders of the sonorous taboo tragedies of the Greeks. Impressed by the irrational freaks of adverse incidents, and unable to believe the dreadful truth that Nature, pursuing a course as yet undeciphered, cares not a dam for her individual offspring, Homo Tewler has always pitted his poor cunning against the Indifference, in the hope of finding lucky and unlucky observances that will compel It to behave and misbehave. Magic was primitive science in practice, and its observance was Taboos. Taboos still rule our minds. We break a Taboo and nothing we believe will arrest the consequences. It is Fate. Scarcely anything will persuade us that Fate doesn’t care a rap about it, that the calm of the Indifference is unruffled. We keep on fussing. You mustn’t marry your mother-in-law, even if you don’t know she is your mother-in-law, or look, like Ham, at your parent’s ill-adjusted dress. Oh! it’s just awful for you if you do. If you meet a black cat or three magpies, cross yourself or go home and hide. But these scholar-psychiatrists chose to elevate their Greek classics to a sort of history of the human imagination, and invented (Jung chiefly) a great Oedipus complex, a lesser Electra complex and all the rest of the psychoanalysts’ Classical Walpurgis Night, to systematise our mental chaos. With these Fate dramas they entangled the Hebrew idea of original sin, which also manifestly arose out of a legend of a broken taboo and a curse. (You can’t be too careful.) Adler, as we shall see later, with his “inferiority complex”, came much nearer to the main reality of human imperatives.
A little less of the classics and a trifle more of biology, and the psychoanalysts would have understood that this “sense of sin” of theirs is neither more nor less than the natural discomfort of an imperfectly adapted animal to its environment. It has no more to do with some profound universal conviction of transgression than a coat that is tight under the arms or the wrong spectacles. Now that the environment of Homo Tewler has begun to change at a pace and to an extent that would have been absolutely incredible fifty years ago, a ruthless urgency calls upon him to adapt his mind and his way of living to these vast demands and become Homo sapiens indeed, before utter disaster overwhelms him. Can he? And will he? He is much more likely to give way to storms of taboo terrorism, to mutilate and prostrate himself, to seek to propitiate the offended fetishes by violent persecutions, to revert to inquisitions and witch smellings....
At this point the Censor intervenes and objects that if this goes on, our story will cease to be a specific monograph upon Edward Albert Tewler and will become a general dissertation upon human life, which is precisely, says the Censor, what I undertook to avoid. I would dispute that, were I not afraid that the reader would take sides with the Censor, In the Introduction....
But there is no need to wrangle. What I have said I have said. I will revert now to our “specimen” of Homo Tewler var. Anglicanus and tell how he lived into the opening phase of our world catastrophe and what he said and did then. I will do my utmost henceforth to stick still more closely to the record of his individual acts and experiences.
Yet I must admit here that I join with Mrs Richard Tewler in deploring the inaudibility of Mrs Humbelay. If only we could have heard those lost trailers of hers, we might have benefited greatly from her unlimited store of obscure and occasionally, what many people might be disposed to consider, obscene wisdom. I could have quoted her and that would have been indisputable story-telling....
It has to be recorded then that Edward Albert never in the whole course of his life really loved or felt honest, generous friendship for any human being such as the codes of our literary tradition require. That demands an amount of deliberate mental synthesis of which his early education and upbringing had already rendered him incapable. How he worked out his own conception of an acceptable religious life has been told. He became a moderate Christian after the fashion of the majority of his fellow-countrymen, occasionally he went to church, some Anglican church, but he rarely did so unless there was nowhere else to go or he had some personal incentive, and he thought about his religion as little as he could. There it was, like a passport put away in a safe, and you did not bother about it until there was a call for it. Then out it came. “Pass Christian!” (“Them Atheists will look a bit silly!”) His sexual development was more confused and complicated than his religious history, it had become entangled with a number of factors in the metamorphosis which were essentially independent of sexual reproduction, and to that greater complex we must now address ourselves.
II. Purity by Terror
Among the claims made for that ideal life lived in the imaginations of the good folk of the Edwardian age was its Purity. Most people were supposed to be more or less pure, and in the case of the autobiographical type this was stressed very aggressively. I remember being told, on our second day’s acquaintance on a liner, by a proud and happy mother, apropos of a rather lumpish son of seventeen or eighteen who may or may not have been just out of earshot, “That boy is still as pure as the driven snow.” (I don’t think I saw his face.) But they kept up the make-believe so widely that mostly they did believe that the majority of the people about them who seemed to be leading pure lives were in fact leading pure lives. You have witnessed Mrs Tewler’s struggle to keep our hero pure. And here I recall my never to be sufficiently lamented Mrs Humbelay and how she was saying something about forgetting one’s dreams and imaginations, when she so unhappily went under the threshold of audibility and was lost to us.
Those people who still seek and profess purity in our harder world must murder and banish memories to a wonderful extent. True that almost all animals forget sexual experiences very readily. That is understandable of animals, who have their transitory annual rutting, because otherwise the creatures would always be in a state of unseasonable excitement. But man is an unseasonable creature and he does not naturally forget so completely. Consider all our pastors and teachers, and particularly consider the case of Mr Myame, His passion for Purity, for the complete suppression of any thought of an approach to a sexual act, in himself and others, assumed an undeniable frightfulness.