It had never worked things out.In this matter just as in every other matter that really signified things had still to be worked out.Nothing had been worked out hitherto.The wisdom of the ages was a Cant.People had been too busy quarrelling, fighting and running away.There wasn't any digested experience of the ages at all.Only the mis-remembered hankey-pankey of the Dead Old Man.
"Is this love-making a physical necessity for most men and women or isn't it?" Prothero demanded."There's a simple question enough, and is there anything whatever in your confounded wisdom of the ages to tell me yes or no? Can an ordinary celibate be as healthy and vigorous as a mated man? Is a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy human being? Can she be? I don't believe so.Then why in thunder do we let her be? Here am I at a centre of learning and wisdom and I don't believe so; and there is nothing in all our colleges, libraries and roomsfull of wiseacres here, to settle that plain question for me, plainly and finally.My life is a grubby torment of cravings because it isn't settled.If sexual activity IS a part of the balance of life, if it IS a necessity, well let's set about making it accessible and harmless and have done with it.Swedish exercises.That sort of thing.If it isn't, if it can be reduced and done without, then let us set about teaching people HOW to control themselves and reduce and get rid of this vehement passion.
But all this muffled mystery, this pompous sneak's way we take with it!""But, Billy! How can one settle these things? It's a matter of idiosyncrasy.What is true for one man isn't true for another.
There's infinite difference of temperaments!""Then why haven't we a classification of temperaments and a moral code for each sort? Why am I ruled by the way of life that is convenient for Rigdon the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like a glove? It isn't convenient for me.It fits me like a hair-shirt.
Of course there are temperaments, but why can't we formulate them and exercise the elementary charity of recognizing that one man's health in these matters is another man's death? Some want love and gratification and some don't.There are people who want children and people who don't want to be bothered by children but who are full of vivid desires.There are people whose only happiness is chastity, and women who would rather be courtesans than mothers.
Some of us would concentrate upon a single passion or a single idea;others overflow with a miscellaneous--tenderness.Yes,--and you smile! Why spit upon and insult a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham?
Why grin at it? Why try every one by the standards that suit oneself? We're savages, Benham, shamefaced savages, still.
Shamefaced and persecuting.
"I was angry about sex by seventeen," he went on."Every year Ilive I grow angrier."
His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.
"Think," he said, "of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex that is going on in Cambridge this morning.The hundreds out of these thousands full of it.A vast tank of cerebration.And we put none of it together; we work nothing out from that but poor little couplings and casual stories, patchings up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders, disease, trouble, escapes; and the next generation will start, and the next generation after that will start with nothing but your wisdom of the ages, which isn't wisdom at all, which is just awe and funk, taboos and mystery and the secretive cunning of the savage....
"What I really want to do is my work," said Prothero, going off quite unexpectedly again."That is why all this business, this incessant craving and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally angry...."11
"There I'm with you," cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent of Prothero's prepossessions."What we want to do is our work."He clung to his idea.He raised his voice to prevent Prothero getting the word again.
"It's this, that you call Work, that I call--what do I call it?--living the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity out of this business.If it was only submission....YOU think it is only submission--giving way....It isn't only submission.
We'd manage sex all right, we'd be the happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn't know all the time that there was something else to live for, something far more important.And different.
Absolutely different and contradictory.So different that it cuts right across all these considerations.It won't fit in....Idon't know what this other thing is; it's what I want to talk about with you.But I know that it IS, in all my bones....YOUknow....It demands control, it demands continence, it insists upon disregard."But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to Prothero that day.
"Mankind," said Benham, "is overcharged with this sex.It suffocates us.It gives life only to consume it.We struggle out of the urgent necessities of a mere animal existence.We are not so much living as being married and given in marriage.All life is swamped in the love story....""Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied," said Prothero, sticking stoutly to his own view.
12
