MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON I AVING for twenty years been a member of the British Civil Service, I have retained the deepest respect for authority.
I tend to assume that all professionals and experts must
be right, and I am chary of expressing opinions differing from those of policemen, under-secretaries, doctors, dons, dentists or engineers.
I have noticed, however, that when these experts leave the orbit of their own specialisation and impinge upon areas with which I am myself familiar, they are apt to get their premises a little out of proportion and to rush to conclusions -which, to my mind, seem intemperate and even wrong. I have been reading this week a most stimulating address given by Dr. Russell Brain to the London Hospital Medical Society and published in the British Medical Journal under the title "Authors and Psychopaths." In this lecture Dr. Russell Brain contends that most famous authors were either certifiably insane or else psychopaths, obsessionals, alcoholics, drug addicts, schizophrenics and cyclothymes. It is true, of course, that "great wits are sure to madness near allied," and that the peculiar sensibilities of poets, genus irritabile vatum, render them somewhat odd. I should not deny that such people as Care, Smart, Cowper, Swift and Blake suffered from mental derangement, or that Shelley experienced occasional delusions and Dr. Johnson dark moods of fear. But Dr.-Russell Brain includes in his list of psychopaths such names as Goethe, Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Rimbaud and Boswell. I should have thought that Goethe was one of the sanest human beings that ever lived, and Rimbaud assuredly became, once he had abandoned poetry, a tough. Byron may have had his epileptic moments, but on the whole he was a sensible and equable man. The whole point about Tennyson is that he succeeded, with an admirable effort of will, in conquering his congenital morbidity. Dickens, according to Dr. Russell Brain, was a man of hypomanic energy who suffered much from sado-masochism. And dear little Boswell, we are assured, was a cyclothyme for whom Dr. Johnson (and I suppose Paoli also) became a "father substitute."
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A cyclothyme, it seems, is a person who suffers from alternations of depression and elation. Such changes of mood are not, however, confined- to men and women of genius. The crowds which, during the rush hours, push into the Underground to the tune of "Mind the Gap" are composed, to some 80 or even 85 per cent., of cyclothymes. It is no sign of mental derangement to feel gay at one moment and at the next depressed. I do not for one moment question Dr. Russell Brain's main argument that all men and women of letters are a trifle mad ; in fact, I once read a paper to a learned society in which I upheld that very thesis. All I complain of is that these medical men are apt to take too Freudian a view of their fellow-mortals and to dig too deep into the mud of the unconscious. Dr. James Halliday, to take another instance, has recently published a book on Thomas Carlyle. The whole apparatus of the psychiatrist is turned on the unfortunate sage of Chelsea, who is churned up as if by an automatic drill. We hear an immense amount about the father complex and the mother com- plex, about his scoptophilic tendencies, about his gymnophobia, about his sado-masochism. I am not saying that Dr. Halliday's book is a foolish book ; in some ways it is a wise one ; all I am saying is that these psychiatrists become so obsessed by their technique of investigation that they dig too deep.
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I have a suspicion that the anthropohigists also become obsessed by their own technique. I am fascinated by books on anthropology, and I have nothing but the deepest respect for such investigators as Dr. Ruth Benedict and Miss Margaret Mead. The latter has devoted much of her life to ascertaining whether the temperamental differences between the sexes are innate or whether they are deter- mined by cultural patterns. The years which she spent in New Guinea seem to have convinced her that these differences are socially induced. 'and in her' lategt- book, 'Male and Female, she drives the lesson home. I am not naturally sceptical, but when I read again her book, Sex and Temperament, 1 am assailed by moments of disbelief. In a Papuan area no larger than that included within a triangle between London and Stratford-on-Avon and Stratford and Norwich she discovered three entirely different patterns of culture. The Arapesh had evolved a system under which both the males and the females had acquired the habit of feminine tenderness. Among the neighbouring Mundugumor the idea was that both the men and the women should be of equally violent temperament. Whereas among the Tchambuli, slightly to the west, there was "a genuine reversal of the sex-attitudes of out own culture " ; there the woman was the dominant partner and the man became the emotionally dependent person. It seems strange
to me that three such totally different patterns should exist among three contiguous tribes, but it would be foolish to question the accuracy of Miss Mead's observation. Yet the suspicion inserts itself that sometimes perhaps some member of the Arapesh, the
Mundugumor or the Tchambuli may have conceived the evil idea of pulling Miss Mead's leg. I know this is an unworthy suspicion, and I dismiss it hurriedly from my mind. Yet it creeps back.
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Let us reverse the process and suppose that Miss Rachael Yabiok,' recently graduated from High School at Manuetti, New Guinea, were to come on an anthropological investigation to this island. I should, I hope, be anxious at first to provide Miss Yabiok with useful and accurate information. She would ask me, with pad and pencil poised, why it was that so many eminent Englishmen, including statesmen and divines, would murmur " rabbits " to them- selves the first thing in the morning on the first day of every month.' I should find it difficult to provide Miss Yabiok with any satis- factory answer to this question. She would look up the word " rabbits " in the Oxford English Dictionary and discover that it was of uncertain origin, but probably derived from the Flemish word robbe. From that she might well evolve conclusions which were elaborate but false. She would ask me again why it was that the English were afraid of seeing the new moon through glass, and why, when they did see the new moon, they bowed three times and turned the money over in their pockets. Again I should be totally unable to provide Miss Yabiok with any satisfactory answer, and again she would evolve some important theory regarding the survival of Isis or Osiris worship. By this time, I fear, I should be becoming bored by Miss Yabiok, and I might well seek to glut her curiosity by providing her with information which was imaginative but untrue. I should tell her stories of the horrible initiation ceremonies which occurred at our public schools, and explain to her the difference between those practised at Eton (at which the Provost presided) and those in force at Winchester, which were supervised by the prefects alone. I should tell her that little boys, between the ages of six and nine, were told that on even days of the month they must try and walk on the cracks in the pave- ments, whereas on the odd days of the month they must avoid the cracks. I should tell her that the white leaves of the cineraria maritima were a secret totem, the name of which could only be mentioned, during the summer solstice, to the male relations of one's aunt by marriage. On her return to Manuetti, Miss Yabiok would write an interesting volume entitled The Silver Leaf.
* * * * As I said at the outset, I respect authority and revere specialists. It is foolish for someone who has never done any anthropological field-work, who has never submitted himself to the ministrations of a psychiatrist, to question their technique. Yet when I read the works of the admirable Miss Mead, I cannot help asking myself whether no Papuan mother has ever said to her son : "Listen, Dobomugau, if the white lady who lives by the sea asks you about your grandmother, you must display terror and run screaming into. the woods." That, I suppose, is a very mean question to ask.
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