THE CAVE MAN

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2313, 4 December 1925, Page 9

THE CAVE MAN

Mr. G. K. Chesterton has been writing about “the cave-man,” who, after all, docs not appear to be so very different from ourselves: "To-day all our novels and newspapers will bo found swarming with numberless allusions to a popular character called a cave-man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character, but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, ms chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is I believe, known in the film world as Tough stuff.’ I have never happened to conic upon the evidence of this idea . , .. On every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, to insist on being knocked down befor 0 consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been 80 vel Y refined. . • • Now, there does happen to be some real evidence of what he did in the cave, but it is concerned with the foal cave-man and his cave, and not the literary cave-man and his club. . . . When the realist of the sex-novel writes, ‘Red sparks dance in Dagraar Doublcdick’s brain, he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,’ the novelist’s readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went o ffand drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, ‘The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,’ hq docs not refer to the impulse ho paint in water-colours: or to make conscientous studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave-man did these mild and innocent things: and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious thing’s/’