第12章 THE FOURTH(2)

"The real force of life, the rage of life, isn't here," he said."It's down underneath, sulking and smouldering.Every now and then it strains and cracks the surface.This stretch of the Thames, this pleasure stretch, has in fact a curiously quarrelsome atmosphere.People scold and insult one another for the most trivial things, for passing too close, for taking the wrong side, for tying up or floating loose.Most of these notice boards on the bank show a thoroughly nasty spirit.People on the banks jeer at anyone in the boats.You hear people quarrelling in boats, in the hotels, as they walk along the towing path.There is remarkably little happy laughter here.The RAGE, you see, is hostile to this place, the RAGE breaks through....The people who drift from one pub to another, drinking, the people who fuddle in the riverside hotels, are the last fugitives of pleasure, trying to forget the rage....""Isn't it that there is some greater desire at the back of the human mind?" the doctor suggested."Which refuses to be content with pleasure as an end?""What greater desire?" asked Sir Richmond, disconcertingly.

"Oh!..." The doctor cast about.

"There is no such greater desire," said Sir Richmond."You cannot name it.It is just blind drive.I admit its discontent with pleasure as an end--but has it any end of its own? At the most you can say that the rage in life is seeking its desire and hasn't found it.""Let us help in the search," said the doctor, with an afternoon smile under his green umbrella."Go on."Section 2

"Since our first talk in Harley Street," said Sir Richmond, "I have been trying myself over in my mind.(We can drift down this backwater.) ""Big these trees are," said the doctor with infinite approval.

"I am astonished to discover what a bundle of discordant motives I am.I do not seem to deserve to be called a personality.I cannot discover even a general direction.Much more am I like a taxi-cab in which all sorts of aims and desires have travelled to their destination and got out.Are we all like that?""A bundle held together by a name and address and a certain thread of memory?" said the doctor and considered."More than that.More than that.We have leading ideas, associations, possessions, liabilities.""We build ourselves a prison of circumstances that keeps us from complete dispersal.""Exactly," said the doctor."And there is also something, a consistency, that we call character.""It changes."

"Consistently with itself."

"I have been trying to recall my sexual history," said Sir Richmond, going off at a tangent."My sentimental education.

I wonder if it differs very widely from yours or most men's.""Some men are more eventful in these matters than others,"said the doctor,--it sounded--wistfully.

"They have the same jumble of motives and traditions, Isuspect, whether they are eventful or not.The brakes may be strong or weak but the drive is the same.I can't remember much of the beginnings of curiosity and knowledge in these matters.Can you?""Not much," said the doctor."No."

"Your psychoanalysts tell a story of fears, suppressions, monstrous imaginations, symbolic replacements.I don't remember much of that sort of thing in my own case.It may have faded out of my mind.There were probably some uneasy curiosities, a grotesque dream or so perhaps; I can't recall anything of that sort distinctly now.I had a very lively interest in women, even when I was still quite a little boy, and a certain--what shall I call it?--imaginative slavishness--not towards actual women but towards something magnificently feminine.My first love--"Sir Richmond smiled at some secret memory."My first love was Britannia as depicted by Tenniel in the cartoons in PUNCH.Imust have been a very little chap at the time of the Britannia affair.I just clung to her in my imagination and did devoted things for her.Then I recall, a little later, a secret abject adoration for the white goddesses of the Crystal Palace.Not for any particular one of them that I can remember,--for all of them.But I don't remember anything very monstrous or incestuous in my childish imaginations,--such things as Freud, I understand, lays stress upon.If there was an Oedipus complex or anything of that sort in my case it has been very completely washed out again.Perhaps a child which is brought up in a proper nursery of its own and sees a lot of pictures of the nude human body, and so on, gets its mind shifted off any possible concentration upon the domestic aspect of sex.I got to definite knowledge pretty early.By the time I was eleven or twelve.""Normally? "

"What is normally? Decently, anyhow.Here again I may be forgetting much secret and shameful curiosity.I got my ideas into definite form out of a little straightforward physiological teaching and some dissecting of rats and mice.

My schoolmaster was a capable sane man in advance of his times and my people believed in him.I think much of this distorted perverse stuff that grows up in people's minds about sex and develops into evil vices and still more evil habits, is due to the mystery we make about these things.""Not entirely," said the doctor.

"Largely.What child under a modern upbringing ever goes through the stuffy horrors described in James Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN.""I've not read it."

"A picture of the Catholic atmosphere; a young soul shut up in darkness and ignorance to accumulate filth.In the name of purity and decency and under threats of hell fire.""Horrible!"