ADOLESCENCE
1
I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form and interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading, ever-deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into which I had been born.Every day added its impressions, its hints, its subtle explications to the growing understanding.Day after day the living interlacing threads of a mind weave together.Every morning now for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and Istarted on a Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the factors and early influences by which my particular scrap of subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the child playing on the nursery floor, the son perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father, exploring interminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused avidity towards the centres of the life of London.It is only by such an effort to write it down that one realises how marvellously crowded, how marvellously analytical and synthetic those ears must be.One begins with the little child to whom the sky is a roof of blue, the world a screen of opaque and disconnected facts, the home a thing eternal, and "being good" just simple obedience to unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to the vast world of one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring searchlights of partial understanding, here masked by mists, here refracted and distorted through half translucent veils, here showing broad prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.
I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by night, and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce the web of appearances about me.It is hard to measure these things in receding perspective, and now I cannot trace, so closely has mood succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an utter horror of death was replaced by the growing realisation of its necessity and dignity.Difficulty of the imagination with infinite space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral distress for the pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now irreparable wrongs.Many an intricate perplexity of these broadening years did not so much get settled as cease to matter.
Life crowded me away from it.
I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for some permanently satisfying Truth.That, too, ceased after a time to be urgently interesting.I came at last into a phase that endures to this day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all things, may be.Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it.I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days were done.I am sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so that one must needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but failure, no promise but pain....
But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was comparatively late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies of sex.I was afraid of sex.I had an instinctive perception that it would be a large and difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant thing, as something disconnected from all the broad significances of life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality.The world was never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it was in the 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 Iknew 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....
