On Kicking Oneself
BY MOTH.
I. • COULD have kicked myself," said my friend, who was reproaching himself for a thoughtless act. He lied. He could not have kicked himself. He was a fat, clumsy man. If he had tried to kick' himself he would have fallen down: Yet he spoke with real feeling. He was quite sincere. He had, at the time, really had an impulse to inflict on his person the swift, humiliating, and deserved retribution of a kick. Yet this he could not do. He had to repress the impulse.
Repression is a bad thing. Most of the psychologists— all the popular psychologists—say so. There can be hardly any doubt about it. Yet in all'our lives repression- is rife ; or; if you prefer it, rampant. HoWever hard we try (and few of us try at all) it remains the dominating factor of our relations with other people. Repression is the • corner-stone of modern society ; without it there could be no courtesy, and very few conventions. We all go in for it. We do not, for instance, tell our partner at the dinner-table that her conversation is vapid, her appearance repulsive, and her morals suspect. Yet by the end of the meal those are the thoughts uppermost in our Mind. We do not, however, express them. We con- tinue to smirk, to simulate interest, to pick up her napkin. It must be extraordinarily bad for us.
All the same, there is a case to make out for repression of this sortrepression towards other people. Only in a stronger, fiercer kind of society, in times less dishonest and among men more self-reliant, will it be possible to dispense with repression, to follow blindly such instincts as yob. consider trustworthy, to hit back on impulse. Until that society comes to be founded our fellow-beings are entitled to the benefits of repression, bad thing though it is.
But we ourselveS have no such claim on our own indulgence. When, like my friend who would have kicked hiMself if he had been able to, we are moved to take reprisals on ourselves, we should do so at once. The difficulty is to decide what form the reprisals shall take. Assume, for instance, that you have done what I have just done : that you have lit your pipe, put the match in your pocket, and thrown the matchbox out of the window. A great surge of anger conies over you when you realise the folly of this act. You are furious with yourself, the more so because (a) your pipe has since gone out and you now have nothing to light it with, and (b) you are in secret horribly afraid that this incident, taken in conjunction with others of a similar nature, heralds the collapse of your reason. There is need for swift, decisive action of a punitive kind. How are you going to manage this ?
An exceptionally well-knit man can, I grant you, kick himself but not to his own satisfaction. The whole meaning goes out of a kick delivered standing ; and not even the most many-sided person, not even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, could take a run at himself. What then Y The process of Tearing the Hair, at one time widely pre- valent and entirely comae it fan!, will recommend itself to the old-fashioned, painful though it is. There is, however, its effect on your personal appearance to be considered. Personal appearance counts for so much iri these days. Employers more often advertise their need for Smart Men than for Honest Men, or Sane Men, or Men Who Are Clever With Their Fingers. You will win no golden opinions by going about half-scalped. Besides, you may be bald.
It is, in truth, becoming increasingly difficult to carry- out a spontaneous act of aggression against yourself ; or even, vicariously, against your personal belongings, for- these are becoming more and more indestructible. cow- clubs, for instance. The tradition, fostered by generations of contributors to Punch, that in moments of passionate self-reproach you should smash your club across your knee has always seemed to me a healthy one. On the rare occasions when I play the game I observe it religiously, and thus end the round still in a condition to appreciate the happy,' smiling face of the caddy as he scampers off to return his greatly lightened burden to the fool who lent me his clubs. But now the steel shaft, insidious totem-pole of repression, has come to end all this.
Our ancestors were in all these respects better off than we. If they said, " Stap me vitals ! " they had about them long, sharp instruments suitable for the purpose they announced. Also they were or at least I always think of them as—covered with a good deal of superfluow, finery, segments of which- could he torn of( and stamped on, to the infinite relief of the emotions. That is no longer possible. DresS is now standardized down to the last button. There is not enough of the superfluous to adorn even a gesture. The man who will dance on his Club Tie is little better than a pariah.
How fortunate, compared with you and me, was Tristram Shandy ! You will remember (I don't think) with what superb aplomb he handled a crisis of this sort :
" It is not half an hour ago, when (in the great hurry and vexation of a poor devil's writing for daily bread) I threw a fair sheet, which I had carefully wrote 'out, slap into the fire, instead of the foul one.
"Instantly. I snatched off my wig, and throw it perpendicularly, with all imaginable violence, up to the top of the room—indeed I caught It as it fell—but there was an end of tho matter ; nor do I think anything else in Nature would have given such immediate
Lucky fellow l He Found it Formula. I wish I had a wig .. . .
* *
As I wrote those last six words a dense cloud of smoke, accompanied by the sound of crackling, rose from the waste-paper-basket, into which (now I come to think of it) I have lately knocked the ashes from my pipe. Oh, I wish i had a wig . • , I
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