§ 1
In the closing years of the school period comes the dawn of the process
of adolescence, and the simple egotism, the egotistical affections of
the child begin to be troubled by new interests, new vague impulses, and
presently by a flood of as yet formless emotions. The race, the species,
is claiming the individual, endeavouring to secure the individual for
its greater ends. In the space of a few years the almost sexless boy
and girl have become consciously sexual, are troubled by the still
mysterious possibilities of love, are stirred to discontent and
adventure, are reaching out imaginatively or actively towards what is at
last the recommencement of things, the essential fact in the perennial
reshaping of the order of the world. This is indeed something of a
second birth. At its beginning the child we have known begins to
recede, the new individuality gathers itself together with a sort of shy
jealousy, and withdraws from the confident intimacy of childhood into a
secret seclusion; all parents know of that loss; at its end we have an
adult, formed and determinate, for whom indeed the drama and conflict
of life is still only beginning, but who is, nevertheless, in a very
serious sense finished and made. The quaint, lovable, larval human being
has passed then into the full imago, before whom there is no further
change in kind save age and decay.
This development of the sexual being, of personal dreams, and the adult
imagination is already commencing in the early teens. It goes on through
all the later phases of the educational process, and it ends, or,
rather, it is transformed by insensible degrees into the personal
realities of adult life.
Now this second birth within the body of the first differs in many
fundamental aspects from that first. The first birth and the body
abound in inevitable things; for example, features, gestures aptitudes,
complexions, and colours, are inherited beyond any power of perversion;
but the second birth is the unfolding not of shaped and settled things
but of possibilities, of extraordinarily plastic mental faculties. No
doubt there are in each developing individual dispositions towards this
or that--tendencies, a bias in the texture this way or that--but
the form of it all is extraordinarily a matter of suggestion and the
influence of deliberate and accidental moulding forces. The universal
Will to live is there, peeping out at first in little curiosities,
inquiries, sudden disgusts, sudden fancies, the stumbling, slow
realization that for this in a mysteriously predominant way we live, and
growing stronger, growing presently, in the great multitude of cases, to
passionate preferences and powerful desires. This flow of sex comes like
a great river athwart the plain of our personal and egoistic schemes, a
great river with its rapids, with its deep and silent places, a river of
uncertain droughts, a river of overwhelming floods, a river no one who
would escape drowning may afford to ignore. Moreover, it is the very
axis and creator of our world valley, the source of all our power
in life, and the irrigator of all things. In the microcosm of each
individual, as in the microcosm of the race, this flood is a cardinal
problem.
And from its very nature this is a discussion of especial difficulty,
because it touches all of us--except for a few peculiar souls--so
intimately and so disturbingly. I had purposed to call this paper “Sex
and the Imagination,” and then I had a sudden vision of the thing that
happens. The vision presented a casual reader seated in a library,
turning over books and magazines and casting much excellent wisdom
aside, and then suddenly, as it were, waking up at that title, arrested,
displaying a furtive alertness, reading, flushed and eager, nosing
through the article. That in a vignette is the trouble in all this
discussion. Were we angels--! But we are not angels; we are all
involved. If we are young we are deep in it, whether we would have it
so or not; if we are old, even if we are quite old, our memories still
stretch out, living sensitive threads from our tender vanity to the
great trouble. Detachment is impossible. The nearest we can get to
detachment is to recognize that.
About this question the tragi-comic web of human absurdity thickens to
its closest. When has there ever been a lucid view or ever will be of
this great business? Here is the common madness of our species, here is
all a tissue of fine unreasonableness--to which, no doubt, we are in the
present paper infinitesimally adding. One has a vision of preposterous
proceedings; great, fat, wheezing, strigilated Roman emperors, neat
Parisian gentlemen of the latest cult, the good Saint Anthony rolling
on his thorns, and the piously obscene Durtal undergoing his expiatory
temptations, Mahomet and Brigham Young receiving supplementary
revelations, grim men babbling secrets to schoolgirls, enamoured errand
boys, amorous old women, debauchees dreaming themselves thoroughly
sensible men and going about their queer proceedings with insane
self-satisfaction, beautiful witless young persons dressed in the
most amazing things, all down the vista of history--a Vision of Fair
Women--looking their conscious queenliest, sentimentalists crawling over
every aspect and leaving tracks like snails, flushed young blockheads
telling the world “all about women,” intrigue, folly--you have as much
of it as one pen may condense in old Burton’s Anatomy--and through it
all a vast multitude of decent, respectable bodies pretending to have
quite solved the problem--until one day, almost shockingly, you get
their secret from a careless something glancing out of the eyes. Most
preposterous of all for some reason is a figure--one is maliciously
disposed to present it as feminine and a little unattractive, goloshed
for preference, and saying in a voice of cultivated flatness, “Why
cannot we be perfectly plain and sensible, and speak quite frankly about
this matter?” The answer to which one conceives, would be near the last
conclusions of Philosophy.
So much seethes about the plain discussion of the question of sexual
institutions. One echoes the intelligent inquiry of that quite
imaginary, libellously conceived lady in goloshes with a smile and a
sigh. As well might she ask, “Why shouldn’t I keep my sandwiches in
the Ark of the Covenant? There’s room!” “Of course there’s room,” one
answers, “but--As things are, Madam, it is inadvisable to try. You
see--for one thing--people are so peculiar. The quantity of loose stones
in this neighbourhood.”
The predominant feeling about the discussion of these things is, to
speak frankly, Fear. We know, very many of us, that our present state
has many evil aspects, seems unjust and wasteful of human happiness, is
full of secret and horrible dangers, abounding in cruelties and painful
things; that our system of sanctions and prohibitions is wickedly
venial, pressing far more gravely on the poor than on the rich, and
that it is enormously sapped by sentimentalities of various sorts
and undermined and qualified by secret cults; it is a clogged and
an ill-made and dishonest machine, but we have a dread, in part
instinctive, in part, no doubt, the suggestion of our upbringing and
atmosphere, of any rash alterations, of any really free examination of
its constitution. We are not sure or satisfied where that process of
examination may not take us; many more people can take machines to
pieces than can put them together again. Mr. Grant Allen used to call
our current prohibitions Taboos. Well, the fact is, in these matters
there is something that is probably an instinct, a deeply felt necessity
for Taboos. We know perhaps that our Taboos were not devised on
absolutely reasonable grounds, but we are afraid of just how many
may not collapse before a purely reasonable inquiry. We are afraid of
thinking quite freely even in private. We doubt whether it is wise to
begin, though only in the study and alone. “Why should we--? Why should
we not--?” And the thought of a public discussion without limitations
by a hasty myriad untrained to think, does, indeed, raise an image of
consequences best conveyed perhaps by that fine indefinite phrase,
“A Moral Chaos.” These people who are for the free, frank, and open
discussion assume so much; they either intend a sham with foregone
conclusions, or they have not thought of all sorts of things inherent in
the natural silliness of contemporary man.
On the whole I think a man or woman who is no longer a fabric of pure
emotion may, if there is indeed the passion for truth and the clear
sight of things to justify research, venture upon this sinister seeming
wilderness of speculation, and I think, too, it is very probable the
courageous persistent explorer will end at last not so very remote from
the starting-point, but above it, as it were, on a crest that will
give a wider view, reaching over many things that now confine the lower
vision. But these are perilous paths, it must always be remembered. This
is no public playground. One may distrust the conventional code, and
one may leave it in thought, long before one is justified in leaving it
either in expressed opinion or in act. We are social animals; we cannot
live alone; manifestly from the nature of the question, here, at
any rate, we must associate and group. For all who find the accepted
righteousness not good enough or clear enough for them, there is the
chance of an ironical destiny. We must look well to our company, as we
come out of the city of the common practice and kick its dust from
our superior soles. There is an abominable riff-raff gone into those
thickets for purposes quite other than the discovery of the right thing
to do, for quite other motives than our high intellectual desire. There
are ugly rebels and born rascals, cheats by instinct, and liars to
women, swinish unbelievers who would compromise us with their erratic
pursuit of a miscellaneous collection of strange fancies and betray us
callously at last. Because a man does not find the law pure justice,
that is no reason why he should fake his gold to a thieves’ kitchen;
because he does not think the city a sanitary place, why he should pitch
his tent on a dust-heap amidst pariah dogs. Because we criticize the old
limitations that does not bind us to the creed of unfettered liberty.
I very much doubt if, when at last the days for the sane complete
discussion of our sexual problems come, it will give us anything at all
in the way of “Liberty,” as most people understand that word. In the
place of the rusty old manacles, the chain and shot, the iron yoke,
cruel, ill-fitting, violent implements from which it was yet possible to
wriggle and escape to outlawry, it may be the world will discover only
a completer restriction, will develop a scheme of neat gyves, light
but efficient, beautifully adaptable to the wrists and ankles, never
chafing, never oppressing, slipped on and worn until at last, like
the mask of the Happy Hypocrite, they mould the wearer to their own
identity. But for all that--gyves!
Let us glance for a moment or so now, in the most tentative fashion, at
some of the data for this inquiry, and then revert from this excursion
into general theory to our more immediate business, to the manner
in which our civilized community at present effects the emotional
initiation of youth.
The intellectual trouble in the matter, as it presents itself to me,
comes in upon this, that the question does not lie in one plane. So many
discussions ignore this fact, and deal with it on one plane only. For
example, we may take the whole business on the plane of the medical man,
ignoring all other considerations. On that plane it would probably be
almost easy to reason out a working system. It never has been done by
the medical profession, as a whole, which is fairly understandable, or
by any group of medical men, which is the more surprising, but it
would be an extremely interesting thing to have done and a material
contribution to the sane discussion of this problem. It would not solve
it but it would illuminate certain aspects. Let the mere physiological
problem be taken. We want healthy children and the best we can get. Let
the medical man devise his scheme primarily for that. Understand we
are shutting our eyes to every other consideration but physical or
quasi-physical ones. Imagine the thing done, for example, by a
Mr. Francis Galton, who had an absolutely open mind upon all other
questions. Some form of polygamy, marriage of the most transient
description, with reproduction barred to specified types, would probably
come from such a speculation. But, in addition, a number of people who
can have only a few children or none are, nevertheless, not adapted
physiologically for celibacy. Conceive the medical man working that
problem out upon purely materialistic lines and with an eye to all
physiological and pathological peculiarities. The Tasmanians (now
extinct) seem to have been somewhere near the probable result.
Then let us take one step up to a second stage of consideration,
remaining still materialistic, and with the medical man still as our
only guide. We want the children to grow up healthy; we want them to
be taken care of. This means homes, homes of some sort. That may not
abolish polygamy, but it will qualify it, it will certainly abolish any
approach to promiscuity that was possible at the lowest stage, it will
enhance the importance of motherhood and impose a number of limits upon
the sexual freedoms of men and women. People who have become parents, at
any rate, must be tied to the children and one another. We come at once
to much more definite marriage, to an organized family of some sort, be
it only Plato’s state community or something after the Oneida pattern,
but with at least a system of guarantees and responsibilities. Let
us add that we want the children to go through a serious educational
process, and we find at once still further limitations coming in.
We discover the necessity of deferring experience, of pushing back
adolescence, of avoiding precocious stimulation with its consequent
arrest of growth. We are already face to face with an enlarged case for
decency, for a system of suppressions and of complicated Taboos.
Directly we let our thoughts pass out of this physical plane and rise
so high as to consider the concurrent emotions--and I suppose to a
large number of people these are at least as important as the physical
aspects--we come to pride, we come to preference and jealousy, and so
soon as we bring these to bear upon our physical scheme, crumpling
and fissures begin. The complications have multiplied enormously. More
especially that little trouble of preferences. These emotions we may
educate indeed, but not altogether. Neither pride nor preference nor
jealousy are to be tampered with lightly. We are making men, we are
not planning a society of regulated slaves; we want fine upstanding
personalities, and we shall not get them if we break them down to
obedience in this particular--for the cardinal expression of freedom
in the human life is surely this choice of a mate. There is indeed no
freedom without this freedom. Our men and women in the future must feel
free and responsible. It seems almost instinctive, at least in the
youth of the white races, to exercise this power of choice, not simply
rebelling when opposition is offered to it, but _wanting to rebel_; it
is a socially good thing, and a thing we are justified in protecting if
the odds are against it, this passion for making the business one’s very
own private affair. Our citizens must not be caught and paired; it will
never work like that. But in all social contrivances we must see to it
that the freedoms we give are real freedoms. Our youths and maidens
as they grow up out of the protection of our first taboos, grow into
a world very largely in the hands of older people; strong men and
experienced women are there before them, and we are justified in any
effectual contrivance to save them from being “gobbled up”--against
their real instincts. That works--the reflective man will
discover--towards whittling the previous polygamy to still smaller
proportions. Here, indeed, our present arrangements fail most
lamentably; each year sees a hideous sacrifice of girls, mentally
scarcely more than children--to our delicacy in discussion. We
give freedom, and we do not give adequate knowledge, and we punish
inexorably. There are a multitude of women, and not a few men, with
lives hopelessly damaged by this blindfold freedom. So many poor girls,
so many lads also, do not get a fair chance against the adult world.
Things mend indeed in this respect; as one sign the percentage of
illegitimate births in England has almost halved in fifty years, but
it is clear we have much to revise before this leakage to perdition of
unlucky creatures, for the most part girls no worse on the average, I
honestly believe--until our penalties make them so--than other women,
ceases. If our age of moral responsibility is high enough, then our age
of complete knowledge is too high. But nevertheless, things are better
than they were, and promise still to mend. All round we raise the age,
the average age at marriage rises, just as, I believe, the average age
at misconduct has risen. We may not be approaching a period of universal
morality, but we do seem within sight of a time when people will know
what they are doing.
That, however, is something of a digression. The intelligent inquirer
who has squared his initially materialistic system of morals with
the problems arising out of the necessity of sustaining pride and
preference, is then invited to explore an adjacent thicket of this
tortuous subject. It is, we hold, of supreme importance in our state to
sustain in all our citizens, women as well as men, a sense of personal
independence and responsibility. Particularly is this the case with
mothers. An illiterate mother means a backward child, a downtrodden
mother bears a dishonest man, an unwilling mother may even hate her
children. Slaves and brutes are the sexes where women are slaves.
The line of thought we are following out in these papers necessarily
attaches distinctive importance to the woman as mother. Our system of
morals, therefore, has to make it worth while and honourable to be a
mother; it is particularly undesirable that it should be held to be
right for a woman of exceptional charm or exceptional cleverness to
evade motherhood, unless, perhaps, to become a teacher. A woman evading
her high calling, must not be conceded the same claim upon men’s toil
and service as the mother-woman; more particularly Lady Greensleeves
must not flaunt it over the housewife. And here also comes the question
of the quality of jealousy, whether being wife of a man and mother
of his children does not almost necessarily give a woman a feeling of
exclusive possession in him, and whether, therefore, if we are earnest
in our determination not to debase her, our last shred of polygamy does
not vanish. From first to last, of course, it has been assumed that a
prolific polygamy alone can be intended, for long before we have plumbed
the bottom of the human heart we shall know enough to imagine what the
ugly and pointless consequences of permitting sterile polygamy must be.
Then into all this tangle, whether as a light or an added confusion it
is hard to say, comes the fact that while we are ever apt to talk of
what “a woman” feels and what “a man” will do, and so contrive our code,
there is, indeed, no such woman and no such man, but a vast variety of
temperaments and dispositions, monadic, dyadic, and polymeric souls, and
this sort of heart and brain and that. It is only the young fool and the
brooding mattoid who believe in a special separate science of “women,”
there are all sorts of people, and some of each sort are women and some
are men. With every stage in educational development people become more
varied, or, at least, more conscious of their variety, more sensitively
insistent upon the claim of their individualities over any general
rules. Among the peasants of a countryside one may hope to order
homogeneous lives, but not among the people of the coming state. It is
well to sustain a home, it is noble to be a good mother, and splendid to
bear children well and train them well, but we shall get no valid rules
until we see clearly that life has other ways by which the future may
be served. There are laws to be made and altered, there are roads
and bridges to be built, figuratively and really; there is not only a
succession of flesh and blood but of thought that is going on for ever.
To write a fruitful book or improve a widely used machine is just as
much paternity as begetting a son.
The last temporary raft of a logical moral code goes to pieces at this,
and its separated spars float here and there. So I will confess they
float at present in my mind. I have no System--I wish I had--and I never
encountered a system or any universal doctrine of sexual conduct that
did not seem to me to be reached by clinging tight to one or two of
these dissevered spars and letting the rest drift disregarded, making
a law for A, B, and C, and pretending that E and F are out of the
question. That motherhood is a great and noble occupation for a good
woman, and not to be lightly undertaken, is a manifest thing, and so
also that to beget children and see them full grown in the world is the
common triumph of life, as inconsequence is its common failure. That to
live for pleasure is not only wickedness but folly, seems easy to admit,
and equally foolish, as Saint Paul has intimated, must it be to waste
a life of nervous energy in fighting down beyond a natural minimum our
natural desires. That we must pitch our lives just as much as we can
in the heroic key, and hem and control mere lasciviousness as it were
a sort of leprosy of the soul, seems fairly certain. And all that
love-making which involves lies, all sham heroics and shining snares,
assuredly must go out of a higher order of social being, for here more
than anywhere lying is the poison of life. But between these data there
are great interrogative blanks no generalization will fill--cases,
situations, temperaments. Each life, it seems to me, in that
intelligent, conscious, social state to which the world is coming, must
square itself to these things in its own way, and fill in the details of
its individual moral code according to its needs. So it seems, at least,
to one limited thinker.
To be frank, upon that common ground of decent behaviour, pride and
self-respect, health and the heroic habit of thinking, we need for
ourselves not so much rules as wisdom, and for others not, indeed, a
foolish and indiscriminate toleration but at least patience, arrests
of judgment, and the honest endeavour to understand. Now to help the
imagination in these judgments, to enlarge and interpret experience, is
most certainly one of the functions of literature. A good biography may
give facts of infinite suggestion, and the great multitude of novels at
present are, in fact, experiments in the science of this central field
of human action, experiments in the “way of looking at” various cases
and situations. They may be very misleading experiments, it is true,
done with adulterated substances, dangerous chemicals, dirty flasks and
unsound balances; but that is a question of their quality and not of
their nature, they are experiments for all that. A good novel may become
a very potent and convincing experiment indeed. Books in these matters
are often so much quieter and cooler as counsellors than friends. And
there, in truth, is my whole mind in this matter.
Meanwhile, as we work each one to solve his own problems, the young
people are growing up about us.
§ 2
How do the young people arrive at knowledge and at their interpretation
of these things? Let us for a few moments at least, put pretence and
claptrap aside, and recall our own youth. Let us recognize that this
complex initiation is always a very shy and secret process, beyond
the range of parent and guardian. The prying type of schoolmaster or
schoolmistress only drives the thing deeper, and, at the worst, blunders
with a hideous suggestiveness. It is almost an instinct, a part of the
natural modesty of the growing young, to hide all that is fermenting in
the mind from authoritative older people. It would not be difficult to
find a biological reason for that. The growing mind advances slowly,
intermittently, with long pauses and sudden panics, that is the law of
its progress; it feels its way through three main agencies, firstly,
observation, secondly, tentative, confidential talk with unauthoritative
and trusted friends, and thirdly, books. In the present epoch
observation declines relatively to books; books and pictures, these dumb
impersonal initiators, play a larger and a larger part in this great
awakening. Perhaps for all but the children of the urban poor, the
furtive talk also declines and is delayed; a most desirable thing in a
civilizing process that finds great advantage in putting off adolescence
and prolonging the average life.
Now the furtive talk is largely beyond our control, only by improving
the general texture of our communal life can we effectually improve the
quality of that. But we may bear in mind that factor of observation, and
give it a casting vote in any decision upon public decency. That is
all too often forgotten. Before Broadbeam, the popular humorist, for
example, flashes his glittering rapier upon the County Council for
suppressing some vulgar obscenity in the music-halls, or tickles the
ribs of a Vigilance Association for its care of our hoardings, he should
do his best to imagine the mental process of some nice boy or girl he
knows, “taking it in.” To come outright to the essential matter of this
paper, we are all too careless of the quality of the stuff that
reaches the eyes and ears of our children. It is not that the stuff
is knowledge, but that it is knowledge in the basest and vulgarest
colourings, knowledge without the antiseptic quality of heroic
interpretation, debased, suggestive, diseased and contagious knowledge.
How the sexual consciousness of a great proportion of our young people
is being awakened, the curious reader may see for himself if he will
expend a few pennies weekly for a month or so upon the halfpenny or
penny “comic” papers which are bought so eagerly by boys. They begin
upon the facts of sex as affairs of nodding and winking, of artful
innuendo and scuffles in the dark. The earnest efforts of Broadbeam’s
minor kindred to knock the nonsense out of even younger people may be
heard at almost any pantomime. The Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to stem
the tide amaze the English Judges. No scheme for making the best of
human lives can ignore this system of influences.
What could be done in a sanely ordered state to suppress this sort of
thing?
There immediately arises the question whether we are to limit art and
literature to the sphere permissible to the growing youth and “young
person.” So far as shop windows, bookstalls, and hoardings go, so far
as all general publicity goes, I would submit the answer is Yes. I am on
the side of the Puritans here, unhesitatingly. But our adults must not
walk in mental leading strings, and were this world an adult world
I doubt if there is anything I would not regard as fit to print and
publish. But cannot we contrive that our adult literature shall be
as free as air while the literature and art of the young is sanely
expurgated?
There is in this matter a conceivable way, and as it is the principal
business of these papers to point out and discuss such ways, it may be
given here. It will be put, as for the sake of compact suggestion so
much of these papers is put, in the form of a concrete suggestion, a
sample suggestion as it were. This way, then, is to make a definition
of what is undesirable matter for the minds of young people, and to make
that cover as much suggestive indecency and coarseness as possible, to
cover everything, indeed, that is not _virginibus puerisque_, and to
call this matter by some reasonably inoffensive adjective, “adult,” for
example. One might speak of “adult” art, “adult” literature, and “adult”
science, and the report of all proceedings under certain specified
laws could be declared “adult” matter. In the old times there was an
excellent system of putting “adult” matter into Latin, and for
many reasons one regrets that Latin. But there is a rough practical
equivalent to putting “adult” matter into Latin even now. It depends
upon the fact that very few young people of the age we wish to protect,
unless they are the children of the imbecile rich, have the spending of
large sums of money. Consequently, it is only necessary to state a high
minimum price for periodicals and books containing “adult” matter or
“adult” illustrations, and to prosecute everything below that limit, in
order to shut the flood-gates upon any torrent of over-stimulating and
debasing suggestions there may be flowing now. It should be more clearly
recognized in our prosecutions for obscenity, for example, that the
gravity of the offence is entirely dependent upon the accessibility of
the offensive matter to the young. The application of the same method
to the music-hall, the lecture-theatre, and the shelves of the public
library, and to several other sources of suggestion would not be
impossible. If the manager of a theatre saw fit to produce “adult”
matter without excluding people under the age of eighteen, let us say,
he would have to take his chance, and it would be a good one, of a
prosecution. This latter expedient is less novel than the former, and it
finds a sort of precedent in the legislative restriction of the sale of
drink to children and the protection of children’s morals under specific
unfavourable circumstances.
There is already a pretty lively sense in our English-speaking
communities of the particular respect due to the young, and it is
probable that those who publish these suggestive and stimulating prints
do not fully realize the new fact in our social body, that the whole
mass of the young now not only read but buy reading matter. The last
thirty or forty years have established absolutely new relations for
our children in this direction. Legislation against free art and free
writing is, and one hopes always will be, intensely repugnant to our
peoples. But legislation which laid stress not on the indecorum but on
the accessibility to the young, which hammered with every clause upon
that note, is an altogether different matter. We want to make the
pantomime writer, the proprietor of the penny “comic,” the billsticker,
and the music-hall artist extremely careful, punctiliously clean, but we
do not want, for example, to pester Mr. Thomas Hardy.
Yet there is danger in all this. The suppression of premature and base
suggestions must not overleap itself and suppress either mature thought
(which has been given its hemlock not once but many times on this
particular pretext) or the destruction of necessary common knowledge. If
we begin to hunt for suggestion and indecency it may be urged we shall
end by driving all these things underground. Youth comes to adult life
now between two dangers, vice, which has always threatened it, and
morbid virtue, which would turn the very heart of life to ugliness and
shame. How are we, or to come closer to the point, how is the average
juryman going to distinguish between these three things; between
advisable knowledge and corruptingly presented knowledge, and
unnecessary and undesirable knowledge? In practice, under the laws I
have sketched, it is quite probable the evil would flourish extremely,
and necessary information would be ruthlessly suppressed. Many of our
present laws and provisions for public decency do work in that manner.
The errand-boy may not look at the Venus de Medici, but he can cram his
mind with the lore of how “nobs” run after ballet girls, and why Lady
X locked the door. One can only plead here, as everywhere, no law, no
succinct statement can save us without wisdom, a growing general wisdom
and conscience, coming into the detailed administration of whatever law
the general purpose has made.
Beside our project for law and the state, it is evident there is scope
for the individual. Certain people are in a position of exceptional
responsibility. The Newsagents, for example, constitute a fairly strong
trade organization, and it would be easy for them to think of the
boy with a penny just a little more than they do. Unfortunately such
instances as we have had of voluntary censorship will qualify the
reader’s assent to this proposition. Another objection may be urged to
this distinction between “adult” and general matter, and that is the
possibility that what is marked off and forbidden becomes mysterious and
attractive. One has to reckon with that. Everywhere in this field one
must go wisely or fail. But what is here proposed is not so much
the suppression of information as of a certain manner of presenting
information, and our intention is at the most delay, and to give the
wholesome aspect first.
Let us leave nothing doubtful upon one point; the suppression of
stimulus must not mean the suppression of knowledge. There are things
that young people should know, and know fully before they are involved
in the central drama of life, in the serious business of love. There
should be no horrifying surprises. Sane, clear, matter-of-fact books
setting forth the broad facts of health and life, the existence of
certain dangers, should come their way. In this matter books, I would
insist, have a supreme value. The printed word may be such a quiet
counsellor. It is so impersonal. It can have no conceivable personal
reaction with the reader. It does not watch its reader’s face, it is
itself unobtrusively unabashed and safer than any priest. The power of
the book, the possible function of the book in the modern state is still
but imperfectly understood. It need not be, it ought not, I think, to
be, a book specifically on what one calls delicate questions, that would
be throwing them up in just the way one does not want them thrown up;
it should be a sort of rationalized and not too technical handbook of
physiological instruction in the College Library--or at home. Naturally,
it would begin with muscular physiology, with digestion, and so on.
Other matters would come in their due place and proportion. From first
to last it would have all that need be known. There is a natural and
right curiosity on these matters, until we chase it underground.
Restriction alone is not half this business. It is inherent in the
purpose of things that these young people should awaken sexually, and
in some manner and somewhere that awakening must come. To ensure they do
not awaken too soon or in a fetid atmosphere among ugly surroundings
is not enough. They cannot awaken in a void. An ignorance kept beyond
nature may corrupt into ugly secrecies, into morose and sinister
seclusions, worse than the evils we have suppressed. Let them awaken as
their day comes, in a sweet, large room. The true antiseptic of the
soul is not ignorance, but a touch of the heroic in the heart and in the
imagination. Pride has saved more men than piety, and even misconduct
loses something of its evil if it is conceived upon generous lines.
There lurks a capacity for heroic response in all youth, even in
contaminated youth. Before five-and-twenty, at any rate, we were all
sentimentalists at heart.
And the way to bring out these responses?
Assuredly it is not by sermons on Purity to Men Only and by nasty little
pamphlets of pseudo-medical and highly alarming information stuffed into
clean young hands [Footnote: See Clouston’s _Mental Diseases_, fifth
edition, p. 535, for insanity caused by these pamphlets; see also p. 591
_et seq._ for “adolescent” literature.]--ultra “adult” that stuff should
be--but in the drum and trumpet style the thing should be done. There
is a mass of fine literature to-day wherein love shines clean and
noble. There is art telling fine stories. There is a possibility in the
Theatre. Probably the average of the theatre-goer is under rather than
over twenty-two. Literature, the drama, art; that is the sort of food
upon which the young imagination grows stout and tall. There is the
literature and art of youth that may or may not be part of the greater
literature of life, and upon this mainly we must depend when our
children pass from us into these privacies, these dreams and inquiries
that will make them men and women. See the right stuff is near them and
the wrong stuff as far as possible away, chase cad and quack together,
and for the rest, in this matter--_leave them alone._