Confessions of Aleister Crowley

247 {410} ad they are, practically all abuse and perversions would disappear. They are for the most part morbid phantasms of putrefaction, aggravated by the attempt at suppression. The wound of Amfortas will not heal because it has never been properly opened and rendered aseptic. Madame Bovary was assumed to be a provincial Phryne. The story of her adultery was condemned as "immoral", as tending to incite illicit passions. Its critics had been simply unable to read the book. Flaubert was in reality grinding his heel into the woman's foolish face; he was showing that her conduct was not romantic and voluptuous, but sordid, stupid, bestial and anaphrodisiac. What could be more puritanical than Ghosts? It is the most frightful indictment of immorality that has ever been penned. Yet to the Anglo-Saxon it is "immoral". They don't understand a word, but it makes them think of their own beastliness; with the result that they discuss it furtively, licking their lips, and cry in the market place that it is an offence to their purity. I have never been able to comply with these foully perverse conventions. I face anything frankly and the phantasm fades. I do not permit any author to play on my passions. I read a book with my soul, and only those books appeal to me whose authors speak sincerely and sanely such truth as has been given them. I utterly loathe the author who practises on popular psychology. The sentimentalism of Charles Dickens, the eroticism of D. H. Lawrence, the pornographic religiosity of Mrs. Humphry Ward1 seem to me to be appeals to the appetites of the unintelligent. They prostitute their scrap of art exactly as quacks do when they try to persuade people that a pain in the back always means Bright's disease; or that every trifling symptom, from headache to ingrowing toe-nails, is the result of secret vice. The plain truth of the matter is that love stories are only fit for the solace of people in the insanity of puberty. No healthy adult human being can really care whether so-and-so does or does not succeed in satisfying his physiological uneasiness by the aid of some particular person or not. The Woman in White and The Moonstone illustrate the situation with singular clearness. Despite the astounding power of Wilkie Collins to draw characters, he cannot make the heroine interesting. Laura Fairlie is little better than an imbecile even when not actually suffering from dementia. The artist's subconscious mind play this sort of thing on him as a joke. He gets so disgusted with himself that he avenges himself on the dummy which offends him. In these tow novels, the heroes are represented as exceptionally fine fellows in every way, but for all their heroic deeds they seem wishy-washy, sordid dummies; for the simple reason that they have no object in life but to attain sexual possession of so many pounds of flesh. Nor does the interest of these books really depend on love. Great artists {411} 1. I have never read a word of her. But somehow I don't like the idea. always find more serious themes. Sex is a means of intoxication; it is therefore proper to celebrate it in lyrics. But when one is sober, as one is when reading a novel, one doesn't want sex thrust down one's throat. One doesn't mind white wine in the sauce of the fish, and the man who is upset by its presence is a neurotic. As for the man who wants his cook to make his sauce so that he can get drunk on it --- I simply don't want to meet him. But that is what the Anglo-Saxon public does, and that is why I don't want to meet it. Shakespeare has few stories of which the interest depends on love; when it does, the love always implies ruin, as in Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra and Othello. His only love stories with a happy ending, bar absolutely mechanical d‚nouements, are where he is secretly gratifying his secret perversity, as in Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Our greatest novelists have complied with convention by inserting a love interest ready made; Tom Jones, Roderick Random and so on; but the interest is hardly even secondary. All our greatest masterpieces treat love in its proper relation to life. Jonathan Wild, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, Tristram Shandy, Gulliver's Travels, A Tail of a