fifties, and the single-barrel will then give them pleasure up to three score years and ten.
Moreover, not only do I desire in this way to increase the sum of happiness in the world while decreasing the pains and disabilities of men, but I wish also to set an example and encourage other writers to continue the work that I am sure is beneficent, as well as enjoyable.
W. L. George in A Novelist on Novels writes: «If a novelist were to develop his characters evenly, the three- hundred-page novel might extend to five hundred, the additional two hundred pages would be made up entirely of the sex preoccupations of the characters. There would be as many scenes in the bedroom as in the drawing room, probably more, as more time is passed in the sleeping apartment. The additional two hundred pages would offer pictures of the sex side of the characters and would compel them to become alive: at present they often fail to come to life because they only develop, say, five sides out of six… Our literary characters are lop-sided because their ordinary traits are fully portrayed while their sex life is cloaked, minimized or left out… Therefore the characters in modern novels are all false. They are megalocephalous and emasculate. English women speak a great deal about sex… It is a cruel position for the English novel. The novelist may discuss anything but the main preoccupation of life… we are compelled to pad out with murder, theft and arson which, as everybody knows, are perfectly moral things to write about.»
Pure is the snow-till mixed with mire-
But never half so pure as fire.
There are greater reasons than any I have yet given why the truth should be told boldly. The time has come when those who are, as Shakespeare called them, «God's Spies,» having learned the mystery of things, should be called to counsel, for the ordinary political guides have led mankind to disaster: blind leaders of the blind!
Over Niagara we have plunged, as Carlyle predicted, and as every one with vision must have foreseen, and now like driftwood we move round and round the whirlpool impotently without knowing whither or why.
One thing certain: we deserve the misery into which we have fallen. The laws of this world are inexorable and don't cheat! Where, when, how have we gone astray? The malady is as wide as civilization which fortunately narrows the enquiry to time.
Ever since our conquest of natural forces began, towards the end of the eighteenth century, and material wealth increased by leaps and bounds, our conduct has deteriorated. Up to that time we had done the Gospel of Christ mouth honor at least; and had to some slight extent shown consideration if not love to our fellowmen: we did not give tithes to charity; but we did give petty doles till suddenly science appeared to reinforce our selfishness with a new message: progress comes through the blotting out of the unfit, we were told, and self-assertion was preached as a duty: the idea of the Superman came into life and the Will to Power, and thereby Christ's teaching of love and pity and gentleness was thrust into the background.
At once we men gave ourselves over to wrong-doing and our iniquity took monstrous forms.
The creed we professed and the creed we practiced were poles apart. Never I believe in the world's history was there such confusion in man's thought about conduct, never were there so many different ideals put forward for his guidance. It is imperatively necessary for us to bring clearness into this muddle and see why we have gone wrong and where.
For the World War is only the last of a series of diabolical acts which have shocked the conscience of humanity. The greatest crimes in recorded time have been committed during the last half century almost without protest by the most civilized nations, nations that still call themselves Christian. Whoever has watched human affairs in the last half century must acknowledge that our progress has been steady hell-ward.
The hideous massacres and mutilations of tens of thousands of women and children in the Congo Free State without protest on the part of Great Britain, who could have stopped it all with one word, is surely due to the same spirit that directed the abominable blockade (continued by both England and America long after the armistice) which condemned hundreds and thousands of women and children of our own kith and kin to death by starvation. The unspeakable meanness and confessed fraud of the Peace of Versailles with its tragic consequences from Vladivostok to London and finally the shameless, dastardly war waged by all the Allies and by America on Russia, for money, show us that we have been assisting at the overthrow of morality itself and returning to the ethics of the wolf and the polity of the Thieves' Kitchen.
And our public acts as nations are paralleled by our treatment of our fellows within the community. For the small minority the pleasures of living have been increased in the most extraordinary way while the pains and sorrows of existence have been greatly mitigated, but the vast majority even of civilized peoples have hardly been admitted to any share in the benefits of our astounding material progress. The slums of our cities show the same spirit we have displayed in our treatment of the weaker races. It is no secret that over fifty per cent of English volunteers in the war were below the pigmy physical standard required and about one-half of our American soldiers were morons with the intelligence of children under twelve years of age: vae victis has been our motto, with the most appalling results. Clearly we have come to the end of a period and must take thought about the future.
The religion that directed or was supposed to direct our conduct for nineteen centuries has been finally discarded. Even the divine spirit of Jesus was thrown aside by Nietzsche as one throws the hatchet after the helve, or to use the better German simile, the child was thrown out with the bathwater. The silly sex-morality of Paul has brought discredit upon the whole Gospel. Paul was impotent, boasted indeed that he had no sexual desires, wished that all men were even as he was in this respect, just as the fox in the fable who had lost his tail wished that all other foxes should be mutilated in the same way in order to attain his perfection.
I often say that the Christian churches were offered two things: the spirit of Jesus and the idiotic morality of Paul, and they all rejected the highest inspiration and took to their hearts the incredibly base and stupid prohibition. Following Paul, we have turned the goddess of love into a fiend and degraded the crowning impulse of our being into a capital sin; yet everything high and ennobling in our nature springs directly out of the sexual instinct.
Grant Allen says rightly: «Its alliance is wholly with whatever is purest and most beautiful within us. To it we owe our love of bright colors, graceful form, melodious sound, rhythmic motion. To it we owe the evolution of music, of poetry, of romance, of belles lettres, of painting, of sculpture, of decorative art, of dramatic entertainment. To it we owe the entire existence of our aesthetic sense which in the last resort is a secondary sex-attribute. From it springs the love of beauty, around it all beautiful arts circle as their center. Its subtle aroma pervades all literature. And to it we owe the paternal, maternal and marital relations, the growth of affections, the love of little pattering feet and baby laughter.»
And this scientific statement is incomplete: not only is the sexual instinct the inspiring force of all art and literature; it is also our chief teacher of gentleness and tenderness, making loving-kindness an ideal and so warring against cruelty and harshness and that misjudging of our fellows which we men call justice. To my mind, cruelty is the one diabolic sin which must be wiped out of life and made impossible.
Paul's condemnation of the body and its desires is in direct contradiction to the gentle teaching of Jesus and is in itself idiotic. I reject Paulism as passionately as I accept the Gospel of Christ. In regard to the body, I go back to the pagan ideals, to Eros and Aphrodite and The fair humanities of old religion.
Paul and the Christian churches have dirtied desire, degraded women, debased procreation, vulgarized and vilified the best instinct in us. Priests in black gowns are going their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys and desires.
And the worst of it all is that the highest function of man has been degraded by foul words so that it is almost impossible to write the body's hymn of joy as it should be written. The poets have been almost as guilty in this respect as the priests: Aristophanes and Rabelais are ribald, duty, Boccaccio cynical, while Ovid leers cold- bloodedly and Zola, like Chaucer, finds it difficult to suit language to his desires. Walt Whitman is better, though often merely commonplace. The Bible is the best of all, but not frank enough even in the noble song of Solomon which now and then by sheer imagination manages to convey the ineffable!
We are beginning to reject Puritanism and its unspeakable, brainless pruderies; but Catholicism is just as bad. Go to the Vatican Gallery and the great Church of St. Peter in Rome and you will find the fairest figures of ancient art clothed in painted tin, as if the most essential organs of the body were disgusting and had to be concealed.
I say the body is beautiful and must be lifted and dignified by our reverence: I love the body more than any Pagan of them all and I love the soul and her aspirations as well; for me the body and the soul are alike beautiful, all dedicate to Love and her worship.
