The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON THE KING down the drain, the savage is like a mountain torrent cutting its own course amongst the hills and rushing on wildly yet wisely to the sea. No doubt, from the point of view of a sanitary engineer, the drain is more useful, more rational, altogether more proper than the wayward stream. But it is the rigid utilitarianism of this bread-and-water morality, this one-shirt-a-week thrift, this skimmed-milk philosophy, this cake-on-Sunday religion, and all the other halfpenny economies of a gluttonous mediocrity, that must be trampled under foot as if they were the very cockroaches of hell, before Freedom of even a protoplasmic kind can be brought to life. Better be a savage, a one-legged hottentot, better be anything than a civilised eunuch, a crape-capped “ widder ” in Upper Tooting lamenting her “demised husband” whilst she counts the halfpence he has left behind him in his trouser pockets. If there is going to be a flood, let it be grand, typhoonic, tor- rential; do not let others pass by us and say: “ Really, my dear, what an insalubrious odour!” The savage babe being born is taught the myths of his tribe, that uncorrupted are beautiful enough; the civilised child the myths of his nation, that corrupted are merely bestial, and are as rigid as the former are elastic. The savage youth passes through one great ordeal—the struggle with Nature; the civilised through another—the struggle with Reason. The one is taught the hero tales of his forefathers, the other the platitudes of the schools, which luckily are always a few decades behind the ideas current at his birth. Few of us remember anything that happened during the first two years of our existence, and very little during the next two; thus it comes about that from two to four years of our II P 225