A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

my first fuck.’ He enjoys making the girls describe what is happening: ‘What’s that inside you?’
‘Your prick.’ ‘What am I doing?’ ‘Fucking me.’ We can see that he is trying to make himself more
conscious of what is happening; in fact, sex is simply a means to an end: to making himself more
conscious. He writes about it because he feels that the experience has not engraved itself deeply
enough on his consciousness. His attitude is as far as possible from that of Casanova or the
Elizabethans. They accepted sex as a pleasure, but then went on to something else; for Walter sex is
the most deliciously intense of all experiences because it is the most forbidden.
It is interesting to note that this feverish interest is not simply a matter of a physical need. From the
beginning, his obsession has a distinctly romantic element that relates it to the raptures of Young
Werther and Rousseau’s St Preux. He describes reading novels as a schoolboy, ‘thinking of the
beauty of the women, reading over and over again the description of their charms, and envying
their lovers’ meetings.’ As absurd as it sounds, Walter is a true worshipper of the ‘eternal
feminine’. His passion may express itself in the crudest physical forms, but it springs from the
imagination. And, like all idealists, he finds it hard to reconcile dream and reality: ‘These feelings
got intensified when I thought of my aunt’s backside, and the cunts of my cousins, but when I
thought of the heroines, it seemed strange that such beautiful creatures should have any.’ His
lifelong craving for women is based on a feeling that there is something untouchable,
unpossessable, about them. His quest for ultimate sexual satisfaction is a kind of mystical
pilgrimage, like Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail.
And here we come to the heart of the matter. Walter lacks the self-confidence for knight errantry.
He sees himself - with some slight justification - as coarse, boring and stupid. If he possessed the
panache of a Don Juan or Casanova, he would devote himself to pursuing the beautiful, slimwaisted
girls he sees riding in the park, who are closer to the romantic heroines who fire his
imagination. But he lacks the courage, and so is willing to settle for less - far less. In order to
satisfy the itch in his loins, he deliberately lowers his aim. This lowering of the aim, this decision to
take a short-cut, also constitutes the essence of criminality.
The Pearl makes it clear that Walter’s attitude to sex was not unique; the Victorian male was
subject to all kinds of obsessions. He longed for virgins and under-aged girls, for incest and rape,
for spanking and flogging. How had this change come about in a mere century? Victorian prudery
cannot be wholly to blame, for these trends were apparent a decade before Victoria came to the
throne; moreover, the Index of Prohibited Books makes it clear that this was also true of France,
which was far less inhibited than England.
The answer begins to emerge if we think of the most basic differences between the Europe of Dr
Johnson and Voltaire and the Europe of Tennyson and Flaubert: the factories and railways.
Casanova lived in an age of adventure; Walter lived in an age where adventure was fast
disappearing. Walter, like Casanova, travelled all over Europe; but wherever he went, he was
surrounded by Victorian domesticity, and his travels seem tame by comparison. Casanova hardly
strikes us as a fully mature adult; but Walter seems a permanent adolescent. He devotes his life to
sex because it is the only thing left to conquer, the only satisfactory outlet for his will.
Zoologists have observed that monkeys in zoos copulate far more than monkeys in the wild; it is
the only thing left to do. The same is true of a civilisation that has achieved a high level of security.
Chesterton remarked that an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered, and that an
inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. The aim of civilisation is to do away with
inconvenience; in doing so, it also does away with adventure. Adventurous individuals may even