season of Brieux' "Damaged Goods." Its topic is entirely different, as
it deals exclusively with the spreading of contagious diseases and the
prevention of their destructive influence on the family. Yet the doubt
whether such a dramatized medical lesson belongs on the metropolitan
stage has here exactly the same justification. Nevertheless, it brings
its new set of issues. Brieux' play does not deserve any interest as a
drama. With complete sincerity the theatre programme announces, "The
object of this play is a study of the disease of syphilis in its
bearing on marriage." The play was first produced in Paris in the year
1901. It began its great medical teaching in America in the spring of
1913. Even those who have only superficial contact with medicine know
that the twelve years which lie between those dates have seen the
greatest progress in the study of syphilis which has ever been made.
It is sufficient to think of the Wassermann test, the Ehrlich
treatment, the new discoveries concerning the relations of lues and
brain disease, and many other details in order to understand that a
clinical lesson about this disease written in the first year of the
century must be utterly antiquated in its fourteenth year. We might
just as well teach the fighting of tuberculosis with the clinical
textbook of thirty years ago.
How misleading many of the claims of the play are ought to have struck
even the unscientific audience. The real centre of the so-called drama
is that the father and the grandmother of the diseased infant are
willing to risk the health of the wet nurse rather than to allow the
child to go over to artificial feeding. The whole play loses its chief
point and its greatest pathetic speech if we do not accept the
Parisian view that a sickly child must die if it has its milk from the
bottle. The Boston audience wildly applauded the great speech of the
grandmother who wants to poison the nurse rather than to sacrifice her
grandchild to the drinking of sterilized milk, and yet it was an
audience which surely was brought up on the bottle. It would be very
easy to write another play in which quite different medical views are
presented, and where will it lead us if the various treatments of
tuberculosis, perhaps by the Friedmann cures, or of diphtheria,
perhaps by chiropractice or osteopathy, are to be fought out on the
stage until finally the editors of _Life_ would write a play around
their usual thesis that the physicians are destroying mankind and that
our modern medicine is humbug. As long as the drama shows us human
elements, every one can be a party and can take a stand for the
motives of his heart. But if the stage presents arguments on
scientific questions in which no public is able to examine the facts,
the way is open for any one-sided propaganda.
Moreover, what, after all, are the lessons which the men are to learn
from these three hours of talk on syphilis? To be sure, it is
suggested that it would be best if every young man were to marry early
and remain faithful to his wife and take care that she remain faithful
to him. But this aphorism will make very little impression on the kind
of listener whose tendency would naturally turn him in other
directions. He hears in the play far more facts which encourage him in
his selfish instincts. He hears the old doctor assuring his patient
that not more than a negligible 10 per cent. of all men enter married
life without having had sexual intercourse with women. He hears that
the disease can be easily cured, that he may marry quite safely after
three years, that the harm done to the child can be removed, and that
no one ought to be blamed for acquiring the disease, as anybody may
acquire it and that it is only a matter of good or bad luck. The
president of the Medical Society in Boston drew the perfectly correct
consequences when in a warm recommendation of the play he emphasized
the importance of the knowledge about the disease, inasmuch as any one
may acquire it in a hundred ways which have nothing to do with sexual
life. He says anybody may get syphilis by wetting a lead pencil with
his lips or from an infected towel or from a pipe or from a drinking
glass or from a cigarette. This is medically entirely correct, and yet
if Brieux had added this medical truth to all the other medical
sayings of his doctor, he would have taken away the whole meaning of
the play and would have put it just on the level of a dramatized story
about scarlet fever or typhoid.
Yet here, too, the fundamental mistake remains the psychological one.
The play hopes to reform by the appeal to fear, while the whole mental
mechanism of man is so arranged that in the emotional tension of the
sexual desire the argument of the fear that we may have bad luck will
always be outbalanced by the hope and conviction that we will not be
the one who draws the black ball. And together with this psychological
fact goes the other stubborn feature of the mind, which no sermon can
remove, that the focussing of the attention on the sexual problems,
even in their repelling form, starts too often a reaction of glands
and with it sexual thoughts which ultimately lead to a desire for
satisfaction.
The cleverest of this group of plays strictly intended for sexual
education--as Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession" or plays of Pinero and
similar ones would belong only indirectly in this circle--is probably
Wedekind's "Spring's Awakening." It brought to Germany, and especially
to Berlin, any education which the Friedrichstrasse had failed to
bring. To prohibit it would have meant the reactionary crushing of a
distinctly literary work by a brilliant writer; to allow it meant to
fill the Berlin life for seasons with a new spirit which showed its
effects. The sexual discussion became the favourite topic; the girls
learned to look out for their safety: and it was probably only a
chance that at the same time a wave of immorality overflooded the
youth of Berlin. The times of naïve flirtation were over; any
indecency seemed allowable if only conception was artificially
prevented. The social life of Berlin from the fashionable quarters of
Berlin West to the factory quarters of Berlin East was never more
rotten and more perverse than in those years in which sexual education
from the stage indulged in its orgies.
The central problem is not whether the facts are distorted or not, and
whether the suggestions are wise or not, and whether the remedies are
practicable or not. All this is secondary to the fundamental question
of whether it is wise to spread out such problems before the
miscellaneous public of our theatres. No doubt a few of the social
reformers are sprinkled over the audiences. There are a few in the
boxes as well as in the galleries who discern the realities and who
hear the true appeal, even through those grotesque melodramas. But
with the overwhelming majority it is quite different. For them it is
entertainment, and as such it is devastating. It is quite true that
many a piquant comic opera shows more actual frivolity, and no one
will underestimate the shady influence of such voluptuous vulgarities
in their multicoloured stage setting. Yet from a psychological point
of view the effect of the pathetic treatment is far more dangerous
than that of the frivolous. A good many well-meaning reformers do not
see that, because they know too little of the deeper layers of the
sexual imagination. The intimate connection between sexuality and
cruelty, perversion and viciousness, may produce much more injurious
results in the mind of the average man when he sees the tragedy of the
white slave than when he laughs at the farce of the chorus girl.
Moreover, even the information which such plays divulge may stimulate
some model citizens to help the police and the doctors, but it may
suggest to a much larger number hitherto unknown paths of viciousness.
The average New Yorker would hear with surprise from the Rockefeller
Report on Commercialized Prostitution in New York City that the
commission has visited in Manhattan a hundred and forty parlour
houses, twenty of which were known to the trade as fifty-cent houses,
eighty as one-dollar houses, six as two-dollar houses, and
thirty-four as five-and ten-dollar houses. Yet the chances are great
that essentially persons with serious interests in social hygiene turn
to such books of sober study. But to cry out such information to those
Broadway crowds which seek a few hours' fun before they go to the next
lobster palace or to the nearest cabaret cannot possibly serve social
hygiene.
Worst of all, the theatre, more than any other source of so-called
information, has been responsible for the breakdown of the barriers of
social reserve in sexual discussions, and that means ultimately in
erotic behaviour. The book which the individual man or woman reads at
his fireside has no socializing influence, but the play which they see
together is naturally discussed, views are exchanged, and all which in
old-fashioned times was avoided, even in serious discussion, becomes
daily more a matter of the most superficial gossip. When recently at a
dinner party a charming young woman whom I had hardly met before asked
me, when we were at the oysters, how prostitution is regulated in
Germany, and did not conclude the subject before we had reached the
ice cream, I saw the natural consequences of this new era of theatre
influence. Society, which with the excuse of philanthropic sociology
favours erotically tainted problems, must sink down to a community in
which the sexual relations become chaotic and turbulent. Finally, the
theatre is not open only to the adult. Its filthy message reaches the
ears of boys and girls, who, even if they take it solemnly, are forced
to think of these facts and to set the whole mechanism of sexual
associations and complex reactions into motion. The playwriters know
that well, but they have their own theory. When I once remonstrated
against the indecencies which are injected into the imagination of the
adolescent by the plays, Mr. Bayard Veiller, the talented author of
"The Fight," answered in a Sunday newspaper. He said that he could not
help thinking of the insane man who objected to throwing a bucket of
salt water into the ocean for fear it would turn the ocean salt. "Does
not Professor Münsterberg know that you can't put more sex thoughts
into the minds of young men and women, because their minds contain
nothing else?" If the present movement is not brought to a stop, the
time may indeed come when those young minds will not contain anything
else. But is that really true of to-day, and, above all, was it true
of yesterday, before the curtain was raised on the red-light drama?
VI
How is it possible that with such obvious dangers and such evident
injurious effects, this movement on the stage and in literature, in
the schools and in the homes, is defended and furthered by so many
well-meaning and earnest thinking men and women in the community? A
number of causes may have worked together there. It cannot be
overlooked that one of the most effective ones was probably the new
enthusiasm for the feministic movement. We do not want to discuss here
the right and wrong of this worldwide advance toward the fuller
liberation of women. If we have to touch on it here, it is only to
point out that this connection between the sound elements of the
feministic movement and the propaganda for sex education on the
new-fashioned lines is really not necessary at all. I do not know
whether the feminists are entirely right, but I feel sure that their
own principles ought rather to lead them to an opposition to this
breaking down of the barriers. It is nothing but a superficiality if
they instinctively take their stand on the side of those who spread
broadcast the knowledge about sex.
The feminists vehemently object to the dual standard, but if they help
everything which makes sex an object of common gossip, it may work
indeed toward a uniform standard; only the uniformity will not consist
in the men's being chaste like the women, but in the women's being
immoral like the men. The feministic enthusiasm turns passionately
against those scandalous places of women's humiliation; and yet its
chief influence on female education is the effort to give more freedom
to the individual girl, and that means to remove her from the
authority and discipline of the parental home, to open the door for
her to the street, to leave her to her craving for amusement, to
smooth the path which leads to ruin. The sincere feminists may say
that some of the changes which they hope for are so great that they
are ready to pay the price for them and to take in exchange a rapid
increase of sexual vice and of erotic disorderliness. But to fancy
that the liberation of women and the protection of women can be
furthered by the same means is a psychological illusion. The community
which opens the playhouses to the lure of the new dramatic art may
protect 5 per cent. of those who are in danger to-day, but throws 50
per cent. more into abysses. The feminists who see to the depths of
their ideals ought to join full-heartedly the ranks of those who
entirely object to this distribution of the infectious germs of sexual
knowledge.
Some stray support may come to the new movement also from another
side. Some believe that this great emphasis on sexual interests may
intensify æsthetic longings in the American commonwealth. No doubt
this interrelation exists. No civilization has known a great artistic
rise without a certain freedom and joy in sensual life. Prudery always
has made true æsthetic unfolding impossible. Yet if we yielded here,
we would again be pushed away from our real problem. The æsthetic
enthusiast might think it a blessing for the American nation if a
great æsthetic outburst were secured, even by the ruin of moral
standards: a wonderful blossoming of fascinating flowers from a swampy
soil in an atmosphere full of moral miasmas. To be sure, even then it
is very doubtful whether any success could be hoped for, as a
lightness in sexual matters may be a symptom of an artistic age, but
surely is not its cause. The artist may love to drink, but the drink
does not make an artist. An æsthetic community may reach its best when
it is freed from sexual censorship, but throwing the censor out of the
house would not add anything to the æsthetic inspiration of a society
which is instinctively indifferent to the artistic calling. Above all,
the question for us is not whether the sexual overeducation may have
certain pleasant side effects: we ask only how far it succeeds in its
intended chief effect of improving morally the social community.
In fact, neither feminism nor æstheticism could have secured this
indulgence of the community in the new movement, if one more direct
argument had not influenced the conviction of some of our leaders.
They reason around one central thought--namely, that the old policy of
silence, in which they grew up, has been tried and has shown itself
unsuccessful. The horrible dimensions which the social evil has taken,
the ruinous effects on family life and national health, are before us.
The old policy must therefore be wrong. Let us try with all our might
the reform, however disgusting its first appearance may be. This
surely is the virile argument of men who know what they are aiming at.
And yet it is based on fundamental psychological misapprehensions. It
is a great confusion of causes and effects. The misery has this
distressing form not on account of the policy of silence, but in spite
of it, or rather it took the tremendous dimensions of to-day at the
same time that the dam of silence was broken and the flood of sexual
gossip rushed in.
We find exactly this relation throughout the history of civilized
mankind. To be sure, some editorial writers behave as if the erotic
calamity of the day were something unheard of, and as if it demanded a
new remedy. The historical retrospect leaves no doubt that periods of
sexual tension and of sexual relaxation, of hysteric erotic excitement
and of a certain cool indifference have alternated throughout
thousands of years. And whenever an age was unusually immoral and
lascivious, it was always also a period in which under the mask of
scientific interest or social frankness or æsthetic openmindedness the
sexual problems were matters of freest discussion. The periods of
austerity and restraint, on the other hand, were always characterized
also by an unwillingness to talk about sexual relations and to show
them in their animal nakedness. Antiquity knew those ups and downs,
mediæval times knew them, and in modern centuries the fluctuations
have been still more rapid. As soon as a moral age with its policy of
silence is succeeded by an immoral age, it is certainly a very easy
historical misconstruction to say that the immorality resulted from
the preceding conspiracy of silence and that the immorality would
disappear if the opposite scheme of frankest speech were adopted. But
the fact that this argument is accepted and that the overwhelming
majority hails the new régime with enthusiasm is nothing but an
almost essential part of the new period, which has succeeded the time
of modesty.
Sexual discussion and sexual immorality have always been parts of one
circle; sexual silence and moral restraint form another circle. The
change from one to the other has come in the history of mankind,
usually through new conditions of life, and the primary factor has not
been any policy of keeping quiet in respect or of gossiping in
curiosity, but the starting point has generally been a change in the
life habits. When new wealth has come to a people with new liberties
and new desires for enjoyment, the great periods of sexual frivolity
have started and brought secondarily the discussions of sex problems,
which intensified the immoral life. On the other hand, when a nation
in the richness of its life has been brought before new great
responsibilities, great social earthquakes and revolutions, great wars
for national honour, or great new intellectual or religious ideals,
then the sexual tension has been released, the attention has been
withdrawn from the frivolous concerns, and the people have settled
down soberly to a life of modesty and morality, which brought with it
as a natural consequence the policy of reverence and silence. The new
situation in America, and to a certain degree all over the world, has
come in, too, not through the silence of the preceding generation,
but by the sudden change from agricultural to industrial life, with
its gigantic cumulation of capital, with its widespread new wealth,
with its new ideas of social liberty, with its fading religion, with
its technical wonders of luxury and comfort. This new age, which takes
its orders from Broadway with its cabarets and tango dances, must
ridicule the silence of our fathers and denounce it as a conspiracy.
It needs the sexual discussions, as it craves the lurid music and the
sensual dances, until finally even the most earnest energies, those of
social reform and of hygiene, of intellectual culture and of artistic
effort, are forced into the service of this antimoral fashion.
Some sober spectators argue that as things have gone to this extent,
it might be wise to try the new policy as an experiment, because
matters cannot become worse than they are to-day. But those who yield
to the new advice so readily ought again to look into the pages of
history, or ought at least to study the situation in some other
countries before they proclaim that the climax has been reached. It
may be true that it would not be possible to transform still more New
York hotels into dancing halls, since the innovation of this fashion,
which suggests the dancing epidemics of mediæval times, has reached
practically every fashionable hostelry. Yet we may be only at the
beginning, as in this vicious circle of craving for sensual life and
talking about sexual problems the erotic transformation of the whole
social behaviour is usually a rapid one. The Rococo age reached many
subtleties, which we do not dream of as yet, but to which the
conspiracy against silence may boldly push us. Read the memoirs of
Casanova, the Italian of the eighteenth century, whose biography gives
a vivid picture of a time in which certainly no one was silent on
sexual affairs and in which life was essentially a chain of gallant
adventures; even the sexual diseases figured as gallant diseases. In
the select American circles it is already noticeable that the
favourites of rich men get a certain social acknowledgment. The great
masses have not reached this stage at present, which is, of course,
very familiar in France. But if we proceed in that rapid rhythm with
which we have changed in the last ten years, ten years hence we may
have substituted the influence of mistresses for the influence of
Tammany grafters, and twenty years hence a Madame Pompadour may be
dwelling not far from the White House and controlling the fate of the
nation with her small hands, as she did for two decades when Louis XV
was king. History has sufficiently shown that these are the logical
consequences of the sensualization of a rich people, whose mind is
filled with sexual problems. Are we to wait, too, until a great
revolution or a great war shakes the nation to its depths and hammers
new ideas of morality into its conscience? Even our literature might
sink still deeper and deeper. If we begin with the sexual problem, it
lies in its very nature that that which is interesting to-day is
to-morrow stale, and new regions of sexuality must be opened. The
fiction of Germany in the last few years shows the whole pathetic
decadence which results. The most abstruse perversions, the ugliest
degenerations of sexual sinfulness, have become the favourite topics,
and the best sellers are books which in the previous age would have
been crushed by police and public opinion alike, but which in the
present time are excused under scientific and sociological pretences,
although they are more corrupt and carry more infection than any
diseases against which they warn.
VII
What is to be done? In one point we all agree: Those who are called to
do so must bend their utmost energy toward the purification of the
outer forms of community life and of the public institutions. Certain
eugenic ideas must be carried through relentlessly; above all, the
sexual segregation of the feeble-minded, whose progeny fills the
houses of disorder and the ranks of the prostitutes. The hospitals
must be wide open for every sexual disease, and all discrimination
against diseases which may be acquired by sexual intercourse must be
utterly given up in order to stamp out this scourge of mankind, as far
as possible, with the medical knowledge of our day. Every effort must
be made to suppress places through which unclean temptations are
influencing the youth. Parents and doctors should speak in the
intimacy of private talk earnest words of warning. The fight against
police corruption and graft must be relentlessly carried on so as to
have the violation of the laws really punished.
Many means may still seem debatable among those who know the social
and medical facts. Certainly some of the eugenic postulates go too
far. It is, for instance, extremely difficult to say where the limit
is to be set for permissible marriages. There may be no doubt that
feeble-mindedness ought not to be transmitted to the next generation,
but have we really a right to prevent the marriage of epileptics or
psychasthenics? Can we be surprised then that others already begin to
demand that neurasthenics shall not marry? Even the health
certificate at the wedding may give only an illusion of safety, as the
health of too many marriages is destroyed by the escapades of the
husband, and it may, on the other hand, lead to a narrowing down under
the pressure of arbitrary theories, producing a true race suicide. The
question whether the healthy man is the only desirable element of the
community is one which allows different answers. Much of the greatest
work for the world's progress has been created by men with faulty
animal constitutions whose parents would never have received
permission to marry from a rigorous eugenic board.