"born criminals," or as "morally insane," or whether we transcend the
distinction implied in these two terms, Lombroso maintains that there is
no good in trying to deal with them by punishment. They ought to be
treated with life-long sequestration in asylums (p. 135), and rigidly
forbidden to perpetuate the species. That is the conclusion to which the
whole of his long argument is carried. He contends that the prevalent
juristic conception of crime rests upon ignorance of nature, brute-life,
savagery, and the gradual emergence of morality. So radical a revolution
in ideas, which gives new meaning to the words sin and conscience,
which removes moral responsibility, and which substitutes the
anthropologist and the physician for the judge and jury, cannot be
carried out, even by its fervent apostle, without some want of severe
logic. Thus we find Lombroso frequently drawing distinctions between
"habitual" or "born" criminals and what he calls "occasional" criminals,
without explaining the phenomenon of "occasional crime," and saying how
he thinks this ought to be regarded by society. Moreover, he almost
wholly ignores the possibility of correcting criminal tendencies by
appeal to reason, by establishing habits of self-restraint, and by the
employment of such means as hypnotic suggestion.[40] Yet experience and
the common practice of the world prove that these remedies are not
wholly inefficacious; and indeed the passage from childish savagery to
moralised manhood, on which he lays so great a stress, is daily effected
by the employment of such measures in combination with the fear of
punishment and the desire to win esteem.
The final word upon Lombroso's book is this: Having started with the
natural history of crime, as a prime constituent in nature and humanity,
which only becomes crime through the development of social morality, and
which survives atavistically in persons ill adapted to their civilised
environment, he suddenly turns round and identifies the crime thus
analysed with morbid nerve-conditions, malformations and moral insanity.
Logically, it is impossible to effect this coalition of two radically
different conceptions. If crime was not crime but nature in the earlier
stages, and only appeared as crime under the conditions of advancing
culture, its manifestation as a survival in certain individuals ought to
be referred to nature, and cannot be relegated to the category of
physical or mental disease. Savages are savages, but not lunatics or
epileptics.
NOTE TO THE FOREGOING SECTION.
At the close of this enquiry into medical theories of sexual inversion,
all of which assume that the phenomenon is morbid, it may not be
superfluous to append the protest of an Urning against that solution of
the problem. I translate it from the original document published by
Krafft-Ebing (pp. 216-219). He says that the writer is "a man of high
position in London"; but whether the communication was made in German or
in English, does not appear.
"You have no conception what sustained and difficult struggles we all of
us (the thoughtful and refined among us most of all) have to carry on,
and how terribly we are forced to suffer under the false opinions which
still prevail regarding us and our so-called immorality.
"Your view that, in most cases, the phenomenon in question has to be
ascribed to congenital morbidity, offers perhaps the easiest way of
overcoming popular prejudices, and awakening sympathy instead of horror
and contempt for us poor 'afflicted' creatures.
"Still, while I believe that this view is the most favourable for us in
the present state of things, I am unable in the interest of science to
accept the term _morbid_ without qualification, and venture to suggest
some further distinctions bearing on the central difficulties of the
problem.
"The phenomenon is certainly anomalous; but the term _morbid_ carries a
meaning which seems to me inapplicable to the subject, or at all events
to very many cases which have come under my cognisance. I will concede
_à priori_ that a far larger proportion of mental disturbance, nervous
hyper-sensibility, &c., can be proved in Urnings than in normal men. But
ought this excess of nervous erethism to be referred necessarily to the
peculiar nature of the Urning? Is not this the true explanation, in a
vast majority of cases, that the Urning, owing to present laws and
social prejudices, cannot like other men obtain a simple and easy
satisfaction of his inborn sexual desires?
"To begin with the years of boyhood: an Urning, when he first becomes
aware of sexual stirrings in his nature, and innocently speaks about
them to his comrades, soon finds that he is unintelligible. So he wraps
himself within his own thoughts. Or should he attempt to tell a teacher
or his parents about these feelings, the inclination, which for him is
as natural as swimming to a fish, will be treated by them as corrupt and
sinful; he is exhorted at any cost to overcome and trample on it. Then
there begins in him a hidden conflict, a forcible suppression of the
sexual impulse; and in proportion as the natural satisfaction of his
craving is denied, fancy works with still more lively efforts, conjuring
up those seductive pictures which he would fain expel from his
imagination. The more energetic is the youth who has to fight this
inner battle, the more seriously must his whole nervous system suffer
from it. It is this forcible suppression of an instinct so deeply rooted
in our nature, it is this, in my humble opinion, which first originates
the morbid symptoms, that may often be observed in Urnings. But such
consequences have nothing in themselves to do with the sexual inversion
proper to the Urning.
"Well then; some persons prolong this never-ending inner conflict, and
ruin their constitutions in course of time; others arrive eventually at
the conviction that an inborn impulse, which exists in them so
powerfully, cannot possibly be sinful--so they abandon the impossible
task of suppressing it. But just at this point begins in real earnest
the Iliad of their sufferings and constant nervous excitations. The
normal man, if he looks for means to satisfy his sexual inclinations,
knows always where to find that without trouble. Not so the Urning. He
sees the men who attract him; he dares not utter, nay, dares not even
let it be perceived, what stirs him. He imagines that he alone of all
the people in the world is the subject of emotions so eccentric.
Naturally, he cultivates the society of young men, but does not venture
to confide in them. So at last he is driven to seek some relief in
himself, some makeshift for the satisfaction he cannot obtain. This
results in masturbation, probably excessive, with its usual pernicious
consequences to health. When, after the lapse of a certain time, his
nervous system is gravely compromised, this morbid phenomenon ought not
to be ascribed to sexual inversion in itself; far rather we have to
regard it as the logical issue of the Urning's position, driven as he is
by dominant opinion to forego the gratification which _for him_ is
natural and normal, and to betake himself to onanism.
"But let us now suppose that the Urning has enjoyed the exceptional
good-fortune of finding upon his path in life a soul who feels the same
as he does, or else that he has been early introduced by some initiated
friend into the circles of the Urning-world. In this case, it is
possible that he will have escaped many painful conflicts; yet a long
series of exciting cares and anxieties attend on every step he takes. He
knows indeed now that he is by no means the only individual in the world
who harbours these abnormal emotions; he opens his eyes, and marvels to
discover how numerous are his comrades in all social spheres and every
class of industry; he also soon perceives that Urnings, no less than
normal men and women, have developed prostitution, and that male
strumpets can be bought for money just as easily as females.
Accordingly, there is no longer any difficulty for him in gratifying his
sexual impulse. But how differently do things develop themselves in his
case! How far less fortunate is he than normal man!
"Let us assume the luckiest case that can befall him. The sympathetic
friend, for whom he has been sighing all his life, is found. Yet he
cannot openly give himself up to this connection, as a young fellow does
with the girl he loves. Both of the comrades are continually forced to
hide their _liaison_; their anxiety on this point is incessant; anything
like an excessive intimacy, which could arouse suspicion (especially
when they are not of the same age, or do not belong to the same class
in society), has to be concealed from the external world. In this way,
the very commencement of the relation sets a whole chain of exciting
incidents in motion: and the dread lest the secret should be betrayed or
divined, prevents the unfortunate lover from ever arriving at a simple
happiness. Trifling circumstances, which would have no importance for
another sort of man, make him tremble: lest suspicion should awake, his
secret be discovered, and he become a social outcast, lose his official
appointment, be excluded from his profession. Is it conceivable that
this incessant anxiety and care should pass over him without a trace,
and not react upon his nervous system?
"Another individual, less lucky, has not found a sympathetic comrade,
but has fallen into the hands of some pretty fellow, who at the outset
readily responded to his wishes, till he drew the very deepest secret of
his nature forth. At that point the subtlest methods of blackmailing
begin to be employed. The miserable persecuted wretch, placed between
the alternative of paying money down or of becoming socially impossible,
losing a valued position, seeing dishonour bursting upon himself and
family, pays, and still the more he pays, the greedier becomes the
vampire who sucks his life-blood, until at last there lies nothing else
before him except total financial ruin or disgrace. Who will be
astonished if the nerves of an individual in this position are not equal
to the horrid strain?
"In some cases the nerves give way altogether: mental alienation sets
in; at last the wretch finds in a madhouse that repose which life would
not afford him. Others terminate their unendurable situation by the
desperate act of suicide. How many unexplained cases of suicide in young
men ought to be ascribed to this cause!
"I do not think I am far wrong when I maintain that at least half of the
suicides of young men are due to this one circumstance. Even in cases
where no merciless blackmailer persecutes the Urning, but a connection
has existed which lasted satisfactorily on both sides, still in these
cases even discovery, or the dread of discovery, leads only too often to
suicide. How many officers, who have had connection with their
subordinates, how many soldiers, who have lived in such relation with a
comrade, when they thought they were about to be discovered, have put a
bullet through their brains to avoid the coming disgrace! And the same
thing might be said about all the other callings in life.
"In consequence of all this, it seems clear that if, as a matter of
fact, mental abnormalities and real disturbances of the intellect are
commoner with Urnings than in the case of other men, this does not
establish an inevitable connection between the mental eccentricity and
the Urning's specific temperament, or prove that the latter causes the
former. According to my firm conviction, mental disturbances and morbid
symptoms which may be observed in Urnings ought in the large majority of
instances not to be referred to their sexual anomaly; the real fact is
that they are educed in them by the prevalent false theory of sexual
inversion, together with the legislation in force against Urnings and
the reigning tone of public opinion. It is only one who has some
approximate notion of the mental and moral sufferings, of the anxieties
and perturbations, to which an Urning is exposed, who knows the
never-ending hypocrisies and concealments he must practise in order to
cloak his indwelling inclination, who comprehends the infinite
difficulties which oppose the natural satisfaction of his sexual
desire--it is only such a one, I say, who is able properly to wonder at
the comparative rarity of mental aberrations and nervous ailments in the
class of Urnings. The larger proportion of these morbid circumstances
would certainly not be developed if the Urning, like the normal man,
could obtain a simple and facile gratification of his sexual appetite,
and if he were not everlastingly exposed to the torturing anxieties I
have attempted to describe."
This is powerfully and temperately written. It confirms what I have
attempted to establish while criticising the medical hypothesis; and
raises the further question whether the phenomenon of sexual inversion
ought not to be approached from the point of view of embryology rather
than of psychical pathology. In other words, is not the true Urning to
be regarded as a person born with sexual instincts improperly correlated
to his sexual organs? This he can be without any inherited or latent
morbidity; and the nervous anomalies discovered in him when he falls at
last beneath the observation of physicians, may be not the evidence of
an originally tainted constitution, but the consequence of unnatural
conditions to which he has been exposed from the age of puberty.
VI.
LITERATURE--HISTORICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL.
No one has yet attempted a complete history of inverted sexuality in all
ages and in all races. This would be well worth doing. Materials, though
not extremely plentiful, lie to hand in the religious books and codes of
ancient nations, in mythology and poetry and literature, in narratives
of travel, and the reports of observant explorers.
Gibbon once suggested that: "A curious dissertation might be formed on
the introduction of pæderasty after the time of Homer, its progress
among the Greeks of Asia and Europe, the vehemence of their passions,
and the thin device of virtue and friendship which amused the
philosophers of Athens. But," adds the prurient prude, "Scelera ostendi
oportet dum puniunter, abscondi flagitia."
Two scholars responded to this call. The result is that the chapter on
Greek love has been very fairly written by equally impartial, equally
learned, and independent authors, who approached the subject from
somewhat different points of view, but who arrived in the main at
similar conclusions.
The first of these histories is M. H. E. Meier's article on
_Pæderastie_ in Ersch and Gruber's "Allgemeine Encyklopädie:" Leipzig,
Brockhaus, 1837.
The second is a treatise entitled "A Problem in Greek Ethics," composed
by an Englishman in English. The anonymous author was not acquainted
with Meier's article before he wrote, and only came across it long after
he had printed his own essay. This work is extremely rare, ten copies
only having been impressed for private use.
Enquirers into the psychology and morality of sexual inversion should
not fail to study one or other of these treatises. It will surprise many
a well-read scholar, when he sees the whole list of Greek authorities
and passages collected and co-ordinated, to find how thoroughly the
manners and the literature of that great people were penetrated with
pæderastia. The myths and heroic legends of prehistoric Hellas, the
educational institutions of the Dorian state, the dialogues of Plato,
the history of the Theban army, the biographies of innumerable eminent
citizens--lawgivers and thinkers, governors and generals, founders of
colonies and philosophers, poets and sculptors--render it impossible to
maintain that this passion was either a degraded vice or a form of
inherited neuropathy in the race to whom we owe so much of our
intellectual heritage. Having surveyed the picture, we may turn aside to
wonder whether modern European nations, imbued with the opinions I have
described above in the section on Vulgar Errors, are wise in making
Greek literature a staple of the higher education. Their motto is
_Érasez l'infâme!_ Here the infamous thing clothes itself like an angel
of light, and raises its forehead unabashed to heaven among the marble
peristyles and olive-groves of an unrivalled civilization.
Another book, written from a medical point of view, is valuable upon the
pathology of sexual inversion and cognate aberrations among the nations
of antiquity. It bears the title "Geschichte der Lustseuche im
Alterthume," and is composed by Dr. Julius Rosenbaum.[41] Rosenbaum
attempts to solve the problem of the existence of syphilis and other
venereal diseases in the remote past. This enquiry leads him to
investigate the whole of Greek and Latin literature in its bearing upon
sexual vice. Students will therefore expect from his pages no profound
psychological speculations and no idealistic presentation of an
eminently repulsive subject. One of the most interesting chapters of his
work is devoted to what Herodotus called [Greek: Nousos phêleia] among
the Scythians, a wide-spread effemination prevailing in a wild warlike
and nomadic race. We have already alluded to Krafft-Ebing's remarks on
this disease, which has curious points of resemblance with some of the
facts of male prostitution in modern cities.[42]
Professed anthropologists have dealt with the subject, collecting
evidence from many quarters, and in some cases attempting to draw
general conclusions. Bastian's "Der Mensch der Geschichte"[43] and
Herbert Spencer's Tables deserve special mention for their encyclopædic
fulness of information regarding the distribution of abnormal sexuality
and the customs of savage tribes.
In England an Essay appended to the last volume of Sir Richard Burton's
"Arabian Nights" made a considerable stir upon its first appearance.[44]
The author endeavoured to co-ordinate a large amount of miscellaneous
matter, and to frame a general theory regarding the origin and
prevalence of homosexual passions. His erudition, however, is
incomplete; and though he possesses a copious store of anthropological
details, he is not at the proper point of view for discussing the topic
philosophically.[45] For example, he takes for granted that "Pederasty,"
as he calls it, is everywhere and always what the vulgar think it. He
seems to have no notion of the complicated psychology of Urnings,
revealed to us by their recently published confessions in French and
German medical and legal works. Still his views deserve consideration.
Burton regards the phenomenon as "geographical and climatic, not
racial." He summarises the result of his investigations in the following
five conclusions.[46]
"(1) There exists what I shall call a 'Sotadic Zone,' bounded westwards
by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. lat. 43°) and by the
southern (N. lat. 30°). Thus the depth would be 780 to 800 miles,
including meridional France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece,
with the coast-regions of Africa from Morocco to Egypt.
"(2) Running eastward the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia Minor,
Mesopotamia and Chaldæa, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab, and Kashmir.
"(3) In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, Japan,
and Turkistan.
"(4) It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World, where, at
the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an
established racial institution.
"(5) Within the Sotadic Zone the vice is popular and endemic, held at
the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and
South of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically, amid the
opprobrium of their fellows, who, as a rule, are physically incapable of
performing the operation, and look upon it with the liveliest disgust."
This is a curious and interesting generalisation, though it does not
account for what history has transmitted regarding the customs of the
Kelts, Scythians, Bulgars, Tartars, Normans, and for the acknowledged
leniency of modern Slavs to this form of vice.
Burton advances an explanation of its origin. "The only physical cause
for the practice which suggests itself to me, and that must be owned to
be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is a
blending of the masculine and feminine temperament, a crasis which
elsewhere occurs only sporadically."[47] So far as it goes, this
suggestion rests upon ground admitted to be empirically sound by the
medical writers we have already examined, and vehemently declared to be
indisputable as a fact of physiology by Ulrichs, whom I shall presently
introduce to my readers. But Burton makes no effort to account for the
occurrence of this crasis of masculine and feminine temperaments in the
Sotadic Zone at large, and for its sporadic appearance in other regions.
Would it not be more philosophical to conjecture that the crasis, if
that exists at all, takes place universally; but that the consequences
are only tolerated in certain parts of the globe, which he defines as
the Sotadic Zone? Ancient Greece and Rome permitted them. Modern Greece
and Italy have excluded them to the same extent as Northern European
nations. North and South America, before the Conquest, saw no harm in
them. Since its colonisation by Europeans they have been
discountenanced. The phenomenon cannot therefore be regarded as
specifically geographical and climatic. Besides, there is one fact
mentioned by Burton which ought to make him doubt his geographical
theory. He says that, after the conquest of Algiers, the French troops
were infected to an enormous extent by the habits they had acquired
there, and from them it spread so far and wide into civilian society
that "the vice may be said to have been democratised in cities and large
towns."[48] This surely proves that north of the Sotadic Zone males are
neither physically incapable of the acts involved in abnormal passion,
nor gifted with an insuperable disgust for them. Law, and the public
opinion generated by law and religious teaching, have been deterrent
causes in those regions. The problem is therefore not geographical and
climatic, but social. Again, may it not be suggested that the absence of
"the Vice" among the negroes and negroid races of South Africa, noticed
by Burton,[49] is due to their excellent customs of sexual initiation
and education at the age of puberty--customs which it is the shame of
modern civilisation to have left unimitated?
However this may be, Burton regards the instinct as natural, not _contre
nature_, and says that its patients "deserve, not prosecution but the
pitiful care of the physician and the study of the psychologist."[50]
Another distinguished anthropologist, Paolo Mantegazza, has devoted
special attention to the physiology and psychology of what he calls "I
pervertimenti dell'amore."[51] Starting with the vulgar error that all
sexual inversion implies the unmentionable act of coition (for which, by
the way, he is severely rebuked by Krafft-Ebing, Psy. Sex., p. 92), he
explains anomalous passions by supposing that the nerves of pleasurable
sensation, which ought to be carried to the genital organs, are in some
cases carried to the rectum.[52] This malformation makes its subject
desire _coitum per anum_. That an intimate connection exists between the
nerves of the reproductive organs and the nerves of the rectum is known
to anatomists and is felt by everybody. Probably some _cinædi_ are
excited voluptuously in the mode suggested. Seneca, in his Epistles,
records such cases; and it is difficult in any other way to account for
the transports felt by male prostitutes of the Weibling type. Finally,
writers upon female prostitution mention women who are incapable of
deriving pleasure from any sexual act except _aversa venus_.
Mantegazza's observation deserves to be remembered, and ought to be
tested by investigation. But, it is obvious, he pushes the corollary he
draws from it, as to the prevalence of sexual inversion, too far.
He distinguishes three classes of sodomy: (1) Perpheric or anatomical,
caused by an unusual distribution of the nerves passing from the spine
to the reproductive organs and the rectum; (2) psychical, which he
describes as "specific to intelligent men, cultivated, and frequently
neurotic," but which he does not attempt to elucidate, though he calls
it "not a vice, but a passion"; (3) luxurious or lustful, when the
_aversa venus_ is deliberately chosen on account of what Mantegazza
terms "la desolante larghezza" of the female.[53]
Mantegazza winds up, like Burton, by observing that "sodomy, studied
with the pitying and indulgent eye of the physician and the
physiologist, is consequently a disease which claims to be cured, and
can in many cases be cured."[54]