And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own
significance, with nothing to guide in but shocked looks and sentimental
twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples.
I have tried to indicate something of my own sexual development in the
preceding chapter. Nobody was ever frank and decent with me in this
relation; nobody, no book, ever came and said to me thus and thus is
the world made, and so and so is necessary. Everything came obscurely,
indefinitely, perplexingly; and all I knew of law or convention in the
matter had the form of threatenings and prohibitions. Except through the
furtive, shameful talk of my coevals at Goudhurst and Wimblehurst, I
was not even warned against quite horrible dangers. My ideas were made
partly of instinct, partly of a romantic imagination, partly woven out
of a medley of scraps of suggestion that came to me haphazard. I had
read widely and confusedly "Vathek," Shelley, Tom Paine, Plutarch,
Carlyle, Haeckel, William Morris, the Bible, the Freethinker, the
Clarion, "The Woman Who Did,"--I mention the ingredients that come first
to mind.
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