Victorian time…

I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found

inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I

knew the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to

keep away from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for

all the extravagant decency, the stimulating silences of my

upbringing…

The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle

and huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first

intimations of the beauty of the body that ever came into my life.

As I write of it I feel again the shameful attraction of those

gracious forms. I used to look at them not simply, but curiously

and askance. Once at least in my later days at Penge, I spent a

shilling in admission chiefly for the sake of them…

The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to

me now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that

strange combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced

me about with prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say

blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by

shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an

ignorance in which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like

a thing in a net. I knew so little and I felt so much. There was

indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead

there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have told how at last a

new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the

twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of

the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere rather

than incarnate in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a

picture.

All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked

avoided chamber…

It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down

the barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret

broodings to the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged

suddenly into what we called at first sociological discussion. I

can still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative

talks. I remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted

Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity great gate, but

we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named,

if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere of Hatherleigh's

rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background brown and

deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings-

he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it-and a huge French

May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on

a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.

Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even the

floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face

downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and

our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like

an elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of

mine; the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from

his chequered blue mugs full of audit ale. We sat on oak chairs,

except the four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank

a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk,

and we all smoked reckless-looking pipes,-there was a transient

fashion among us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was

responsible. Our little excesses with liquor were due far more to

conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away

from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the

instructive knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was a good Englishman

of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice

and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one

evening-Heaven knows how we got to it-" Look here, you know, it's

all Rot, this Shutting Up about Women. We OUGHT to talk about them.

What are we going to do about them? It's got to come. We're all

festering inside about it. Let's out with it. There's too much

Decency altogether about this Infernal University!"

We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk was

clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember

Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency. "Modesty and

Decency," said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices. The Jews brought

them to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and

the seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield.

And all that sort of thing."

Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually

wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of

those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for

decency. Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the

less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of

India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and

Cunninghame Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-

town spinster in his regard for respectability. But his case was

too preposterous, and Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and

his way of pointing with all four long fingers flat together,

carried the point against him. He quoted Cato and Roman law and the

monasteries of Thibet.

"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an

intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency."