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The Assize of Jealousy10
"You pull things down to your own level," said Benham as they went through the heat to Grantchester.
"I pull them down to truth," panted Prothero.
"Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and discipline and training some sort of falsity!"
"Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig`s pride."
For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them. . . .
The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.
"I`m not talking of Love," he said, remaining persistently outrageous. "I`m talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is physically possible. . . .
"But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?"
"Then why don`t we up and find out?" said Billy.
He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that surrounded these questions. We didn`t worship our ancestors when it came to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with awe and terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in particular should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? "What is the wisdom of the ages?" said Prothero. "Think of the corners where that wisdom was born. . . . Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels. . . . Wandering wise man with a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab epileptic. . . ."
"Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?" protested Benham.
The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter experience. Most of it was better forgotten. It didn`t convince. 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 I live 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. . . ."
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