‘His lordship heartily recommended to all ministers and other public servants who think of retiring from the service of the Crown that they should devote their energies and leisure to the interesting and enjoyable occupation of farming: he himself had proved....’
The second occasion was this: an evening paper injudiciously printed a letter on the disorganization of the London traffic without observing the signature: which was R. Supward. The edition had to be destroyed at the cost of several thousand pounds.
‘It is a pity that Brunel has left us in the dark about the obscene connotation of Supward: perhaps it stands for “Bedward”, supper being the preliminary to bed, and bed being a tabood word. But this is only a conjecture. Nor do we know what action would have been taken in the matter by the Censor, an official in whose hands the avenging of all broken taboos lay, had the mistake not been noticed in time; but certainly it must have been a serious one, a heavy fine or a temporary suppression of publication. It seems possible, however, that it was not merely fear of the Censorship which preserved the strength of these taboos: they were sometimes valued on their own account by men and women of otherwise considerable intellectual force. Thus, while our ethnologist writes of the primitive savage “so tightly bound” by taboos of another variety that he “scarcely knows which way to turn”, he is careful to express “the enormous debts which we owe to the savage,” and the context makes it plain that chief among these debts are the ideas of “decency” and “morals” in their most fantastic development. Johnstone, an essayist of this period, has a passage which it would not be out of place to quote here:
“But I cannot describe the awful look of horror which I remember in the eyes of middle-aged women of the pre-War decade when they uttered the word décolletée (“with a low-necked dress cut almost to the bosom”) or the embarrassment still shown by the young schoolmistress or even the young schoolmaster in the Divinity lesson, should the innocent question be piped: “Please, teacher, what does ‘whoremonger’ mean?””
‘The ethnologist from whom we have been quoting gives us the most authoritative of all surviving late nineteenth-century accounts of the superstitions, taboos, and magic of earlier primitive peoples; but what impresses us most now besides the lucidity of the argument is the elaborate care with which, as we have seen, the author has consented to the sexual and religious taboos of his own society and the great number also of literary and academic superstitions in which his accounts of savage superstitions are dressed. Though clearly a great force in the contemporary movement for the breaking of taboos that had outlasted their use, he never makes a direct attack upon them. It may indeed be said that he clings to the very superstition which he records among primitive tribes, that to dispatch the tribal god by indirect means is not blasphemy in the first degree: that is, he treats facetiously the beliefs and ceremonies of almost every religion but that of contemporary English Protestantism, but points out the common resemblances and leaves the reader to take the inevitable step. For instance, he derides the claims of priests to divine revelation, the doctrines also of Immaculate Conception, Redemption of Sins, the Real Presence in the Sacrament, the Resurrection of a slain God, the transference of evil spirits to goats and swine, but only derides them in religions earlier than Christianity and, therefore, “superstitious”. Though heretics within Christianity are ridiculed by him for having claimed divinity for themselves, the divinity of Jesus Christ is nowhere directly impugned: who is permitted to have been immaculately conceived, to have cast out devils, taken over the burden of human sin, and risen again. He is allowed a capital F as Founder of Christianity, and the Virgin Mary is written of with traditional tenderness and reverence.
‘As regards literary and academic superstitions, our author’s faithfulness to contemporary literary ritual is such that even pedants who recognized the dangerous tendencies of his theory were forced to applaud the beauty of his style with its heavy rhetorical ornaments, its numerous and unnecessary quotations from the duller poets, and its most careful avoidance of repetition even where repetition is necessary for the clarity of the argument. For example, he cannot bring himself to write plainly:
Every province had the tomb and mummy of its dead god. The mummy of Osiris was at Mendes, the mummy of Anhouri at Thinis, the mummy of Toumon at Heliopolis.
He must dress it up as:
The mummy of Osiris was to be seen at Mendes, Thinis boasted of the mummy of Anhouri, and Heliopolis rejoiced in the possession of that of Toumon;
and in chapters where analogous customs of many tribes have to be catalogued and compared, this fear of repeating the same phrase soon fidgets the reader so much that he forgets what he is reading about. Our author also feels the academic necessity for an occasional platitude in the ancient “moral progress” superstition to round off an over-argumentative chapter; it seems to weigh as heavily upon him as the necessity of sacrificing black wallabies (or were they black cockatoos?) in time of drought weighed on the Australian blackfellow. He writes: