First Mid 277
Lamus laughed merrily.
“Good for you, kid, very much to the point ! .
“T’ve wandered a good deal through queer parts
of the world, as you know, and in some of those places
there are still taboos about eating and hunting and
fishing—all sorts of things which we in England take
quite simply, in consequence of which they give no
trouble.
“ But where a man has to think of a thousand things
before he has his dinner: what he eats, and how it was
killed, and who cooked it, and so on for ever and ever,
he gets no chance to develop his mind in more important
ways. Taboo is responsible for the low mental and moral
development of the peoples whom it afflicts, more than
anything else. An appetite should be satisfied in the
simplest and easiest way. Once you begin to worry
about the right and wrong of it, you disturb the mind
unnaturally, and begin to think awry in all sorts of
ways that have apparently nothing to do with it.
“ Think of the Queen of Spain who was being dragged
by her horse, and lost her life because of the absence
of the official appointed by etiquette to assist her to
dismount |”
We all laughed ; the girls frankly, but I with an ill-
defined, uncomfortable feeling that Lamus was getting
on to dangerous ground.
“What is modern fiction?” he asked, ‘ from
Hardy and Dostoevski to the purveyors of garbage
to servant girls, but an account of the complications
set up by the exaggerated importance attached by
themselves or their neighbours to the sexual appetites
of two or more bimanous monkeys.
““ Most sexual troubles and offences so-called would
do very little harm if nobody attached any importance
to what was or was not going on.”
Of course, there is an answer to this type of argument ;
but I don’t know what it is. I felt very uneasy. He
was laying his axe to the root of the tree of civilisation.
That was evident: