“No doubt. And if you treat your body in the way nature meant you to, as an equal, you attain to states of consciousness unknown to the vivisecting ascetics.”
“But the states of the vivisectors are better than the states of the indulgers.”
“In other words, lunatics are better than sane men. Which I deny. The sane, harmonious, Greek man gets as much as he can of both sets of states. He’s not such a fool as to want to kill part of himself. He strikes a balance. It isn’t easy of course; it’s even damnably difficult. The forces to be reconciled are intrinsically hostile. The conscious soul resents the activities of the unconscious, physical, instinctive part of the total being. The life of the one is the other’s death and vice versa. But the sane man at least tries to strike a balance. The Christians, who weren’t sane, told people that they’d got to throw half of themselves in the waste-paper basket. And now the scientists and business men come and tell us that we must throw away half of what the Christians left us. But I don’t want to be three quarters dead. I prefer to be alive, entirely alive. It’s time there was a revolt in favour of life and wholeness.”
“But from your point of view,” said Spandrell, “I should have thought this epoch needed no reforming. It’s the golden age of guzzling, sport, and promiscuous lovemaking.”
“But if you knew what a puritan Mark really was!” Mary Rampion laughed. “What a regular old puritan!”
“Not a puritan,” said her husband. “Merely sane. You’re like everyone else,” he went on, addressing himself to Spandrell. “You seem to imagine that the cold, modern, civilized lasciviousness is the same as the healthy—what shall I call it?—phallism (that gives the religious quality of the old way of life; you’ve read the Acharnians?)—phallism, then, of the ancients.”
Spandrell groaned and shook his head. “Spare us the Swedish exercises.”
“But it isn’t the same,” the other went on. “It’s just Christianity turned inside out. The ascetic contempt for the body expressed in a different way. Contempt and hatred. That was what I was saying just now. You hate yourselves, you hate life. Your only alternatives are promiscuity or asceticism. Two forms of death. Why, the Christians themselves understood phallism a great deal better than this godless generation. What’s that phrase in the marriage service? ‘With my body I thee worship.’ Worshipping with the body—that’s the genuine phallism. And if you imagine it has anything to do with the unimpassioned civilized promiscuity of our advanced young people, you’re very much mistaken indeed.”
“Oh, I’m quite ready to admit the deathliness of our civilized entertainments,” Spandrell answered. “There’s a certain smell,” he went on speaking in snatches between sucks at the half-smoked cigar he was trying to relight, “of cheap scent … and stale unwashedness … I often think … the atmosphere of hell … must be composed of it.” He threw the match away. “But the other alternative—there’s surely no death about that. No death in Jesus or St. Francis, for example.”
“In spots,” said Rampion. “They were dead in spots. Very much alive in others, I quite agree. But they simply left half of existence out of account. No, no, they won’t do. It’s time people stopped talking about them. I’m tired of Jesus and Francis, terribly tired of them.”
“Well then, the poets,” said Spandrell. “You can’t say that Shelley’s a corpse.”
“Shelley?” exclaimed Rampion. “Don’t talk to me of Shelley.” He shook his head emphatically. “No, no. There’s something very dreadful about Shelley. Not human, not a man. A mixture between a fairy and a white slug.”
“Come, come,” Spandrell protested.
“Oh, exquisite and all that. But what a bloodless kind of slime inside! No blood, no real bones and bowels. Only pulp and a white juice. And oh, that dreadful lie in the soul! The way he was always pretending for the benefit of himself and everybody else that the world wasn’t really the world, but either heaven or hell. And that going to bed with women wasn’t really going to bed with them, but just two angels holding hands. Ugh! Think of his treatment of women—shocking, really shocking. The women loved it, of course—for a little. It made them feel so spiritual—that is, until it made them feel like committing suicide. So spiritual. And all the time he was just a young schoolboy with a sensual itch like anybody else’s, but persuading himself and other people that he was Dante and Beatrice rolled into one, only much more so. Dreadful, dreadful! The only excuse is that, I suppose, he couldn’t help it. He wasn’t born a man; he was only a kind of fairy slug with the sexual appetites of a schoolboy. And then, think of that awful incapacity to call a spade a spade. He always had to pretend it was an angel’s harp or a platonic imagination. Do you remember the ode ‘To a Skylark’? ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert!’ ” Rampion recited with ludicrous parody of an elocutionist’s “expression.” “Just pretending, just lying to himself, as usual. The lark couldn’t be allowed to be a mere bird, with blood and feathers and a nest and an appetite for caterpillars. Oh no! That wasn’t nearly poetical enough, that was much too coarse. It had to be a disembodied spirit. Bloodless, boneless. A kind of ethereal flying slug. It was only to be expected. Shelley was a kind of flying slug himself; and, after all, nobody can really write about anything except himself. If you’re a slug, you must write about slugs, even though your subject is supposed to be a skylark. But I wish to God,” Rampion added, with a sudden burst of comically extravagant fury, “I wish to God the bird had had as much sense as those sparrows in the book of Tobit and dropped a good large mess in his eye. It would have served him damned well
