Illa Lesbia quam Catullus unam
Plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes.
Nunc in quadriviis et angiportis
Glubit magnanimos Remi nepotes.
Where “Glubit” by self-disgust and by the bitter irony of the “magnanimos Remi nepotes” leaves obscenity looking foolish. The “Long Man of Cerne” carved out in chalk on the Dorset Downs is not obscene in the real sense that the modern Cinema is obscene with its sudden blackings-out at the crisis of sexual excitement.
When a future historian comes to treat of the social-taboos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a fourteen-volume life-work, his theories of the existence of an enormous secret-language of bawdry and an immense oral literature of obscene stories and rhymes known, in various degrees of initiation, to every man and woman in the country, yet never consigned to writing or openly admitted as existing, will be treated as a chimerical notion by the enlightened age in which he writes. As Sir James Frazer took, as the text for his inquiries, the Golden Bough legend of Aricia and the primitive ceremonies there surviving until Imperial times, so this new Sir James may take The Bottom Legend recorded by a contemporary historian Roberts as his text. As follows:
‘Shortly before the “Great War for Civilization” (the indecisive conflict, 1914–1918, between rival European confederations to decide which was to have the right of defining Civilization) there was a student at Oxford University famous for his “practical joking”. He is said to have been one of the rare persons of the day to whom a peculiar licence was given for such “practical joking” and for deriding the most sacred taboos of the time. It was he who first defiled a local altar, “The Martyr’s Memorial,” by climbing to the very summit at night-time and planting a chamber-pot—a stringently tabood vessel—on the cross which crowned it. The civic authorities had great difficulty in removing this scandalous object, because climbing the Memorial was no easy feat, and the chamber-pot, being made of enamel ware and not, as was first thought, of porcelain, could not be dislodged by rifle fire. On another occasion, this same student is said to have impersonated an African potentate and, with a suite of disguised companions, to have been officially welcomed with a Royal Salute aboard a battleship of the English Navy, and to have aggravated this quasi-blasphemous performance (for the Fleet was a religious institution of greater dignity and efficiency than the Church itself) by the bestowal of medals on the ship’s officers.
‘But the most interesting breach of taboo with which he is credited was a dinner-party which he gave at a Cathedral town in the Midlands. He spent over a year, and a great deal of money, in scraping acquaintance under an assumed name with every person in the town whose surname contained the syllable “bottom”; Ramsbottom, Longbottom, Sidebottom, Winterbottom, Higginbottom, Whethambottom, Bottomwetham, Bottomwallop, Bottomley, and plain Bottom; he insinuated himself into the friendship of every one of these families, but separately, without allowing them to meet in his presence, until finally he was able to invite them all together to a huge dinner-party at his hotel. When each name in turn had been announced by a particularly loud-voiced hotel-servant, he withdrew, promising to return in a few minutes, and begging them to begin dinner without him. The meal consisted merely of rump-steak, and the host was already in a railway train, riding swiftly towards London, and leaving no address.