This point of view was vigorously championed by the speakers on

sexual education at the Third Congress of the German Gesellschaft

zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in 1907. Thus Enderlin,

speaking as a headmaster, protested against the custom of

bowdlerizing poems and folk-songs for the use of children, and

thus robbing them of the finest introduction to purified sexual

impulses and the highest sphere of emotion, while at the same

time they are recklessly exposed to the "psychic infection" of

the vulgar comic papers everywhere exposed for sale. "So long as

children are too young to respond to erotic poetry it cannot hurt

them; when they are old enough to respond it can only benefit

them by opening to them the highest and purest channels of human

emotion" (_Sexualpädagogik_, p. 60). Professor Schäfenacker (id.,

p. 98) expresses himself in the same sense, and remarks that "the

method of removing from school-books all those passages which, in

the opinion of short-sighted and narrow-hearted schoolmasters,

are unsuited for youth, must be decisively condemned." Every

healthy boy and girl who has reached the age of puberty may be

safely allowed to ramble in any good library, however varied its

contents. So far from needing guidance they will usually show a

much more refined taste than their elders. At this age, when the

emotions are still virginal and sensitive, the things that are

realistic, ugly, or morbid, jar on the young spirit and are cast

aside, though in adult life, with the coarsening of mental

texture which comes of years and experience, this repugnance,

doubtless by an equally sound and natural instinct, may become

much less acute.

Ellen Key in Ch. VI of her _Century of the Child_ well summarizes

the reasons against the practice of selecting for children books

that are "suitable" for them, a practice which she considers one

of the follies of modern education. The child should be free to

read all great literature, and will himself instinctively put

aside the things he is not yet ripe for. His cooler senses are

undisturbed by scenes that his elders find too exciting, while

even at a later stage it is not the nakedness of great

literature, but much more the method of the modern novel, which

is likely to stain the imagination, falsify reality and injure

taste. It is concealment which misleads and coarsens, producing a

state of mind in which even the Bible becomes a stimulus to the

senses. The writings of the great masters yield the imaginative

food which the child craves, and the erotic moment in them is too

brief to be overheating. It is the more necessary, Ellen Key

remarks, for children to be introduced to great literature, since

they often have little opportunity to occupy themselves with it

in later life. Many years earlier Ruskin, in _Sesame and Lilies_,

had eloquently urged that even young girls should be allowed to

range freely in libraries.

What has been said about literature applies equally to art. Art, as well

as literature, and in the same indirect way, can be made a valuable aid in

the task of sexual enlightenment and sexual hygiene. Modern art may,

indeed, for the most part, be ignored from this point of view, but

children cannot be too early familiarized with the representations of the

nude in ancient sculpture and in the paintings of the old masters of the

Italian school. In this way they may be immunized, as Enderlin expresses

it, against those representations of the nude which make an appeal to the

baser instincts. Early familiarity with nudity in art is at the same time

an aid to the attainment of a proper attitude towards purity in nature.

"He who has once learnt," as Höller remarks, "to enjoy peacefully

nakedness in art, will be able to look on nakedness in nature as on a work

of art."

Casts of classic nude statues and reproductions of the pictures

of the old Venetian and other Italian masters may fittingly be

used to adorn schoolrooms, not so much as objects of instruction

as things of beauty with which the child cannot too early become

familiarized. In Italy it is said to be usual for school classes

to be taken by their teachers to the art museums with good

results; such visits form part of the official scheme of

education.

There can be no doubt that such early familiarity with the beauty

of nudity in classic art is widely needed among all social

classes and in many countries. It is to this defect of our

education that we must attribute the occasional, and indeed in

America and England frequent, occurrence of such incidents as

petitions and protests against the exhibition of nude statuary in

art museums, the display of pictures so inoffensive as Leighton's

"Bath of Psyche" in shop windows, and the demand for the draping

of the naked personifications of abstract virtues in

architectural street decoration. So imperfect is still the

education of the multitude that in these matters the ill-bred

fanatic of pruriency usually gains his will. Such a state of

things cannot but have an unwholesome reaction on the moral

atmosphere of the community in which it is possible. Even from

the religious point of view, prurient prudery is not justifiable.

Northcote has very temperately and sensibly discussed the

question of the nude in art from the standpoint of Christian

morality. He points out that not only is the nude in art not to

be condemned without qualification, and that the nude is by no

means necessarily the erotic, but he also adds that even erotic

art, in its best and purest manifestations, only arouses emotions

that are the legitimate object of man's aspirations. It would be

impossible even to represent Biblical stories adequately on

canvas or in marble if erotic art were to be tabooed (Rev. H.

Northcote, _Christianity and Sex Problems_, Ch. XIV).

Early familiarity with the nude in classic and early Italian art

should be combined at puberty with an equal familiarity with

photographs of beautiful and naturally developed nude models. In

former years books containing such pictures in a suitable and

attractive manner to place before the young were difficult to

procure. Now this difficulty no longer exists. Dr. C.H. Stratz,

of The Hague, has been the pioneer in this matter, and in a

series of beautiful books (notably in _Der Körper des Kindes, Die

Schönheit des Weiblichen Körpers_ and _Die Rassenschönheit des

Weibes_, all published by Enke in Stuttgart), he has brought

together a large number of admirably selected photographs of nude

but entirely chaste figures. More recently Dr. Shufeldt, of

Washington (who dedicates his work to Stratz), has published his

_Studies of the Human Form_ in which, in the same spirit, he has

brought together the results of his own studies of the naked

human form during many years. It is necessary to correct the

impressions received from classic sources by good photographic

illustrations on account of the false conventions prevailing in

classic works, though those conventions were not necessarily

false for the artists who originated them. The omission of the

pudendal hair, in representations of the nude was, for instance,

quite natural for the people of countries still under Oriental

influence are accustomed to remove the hair from the body. If,

however, under quite different conditions, we perpetuate that

artistic convention to-day, we put ourselves into a perverse

relation to nature. There is ample evidence of this. "There is

one convention so ancient, so necessary, so universal," writes

Mr. Frederic Harrison (_Nineteenth Century and After_, Aug.,

1907), "that its deliberate defiance to-day may arouse the bile

of the least squeamish of men and should make women withdraw at

once." If boys and girls were brought up at their mother's knees

in familiarity with pictures of beautiful and natural nakedness,

it would be impossible for anyone to write such silly and

shameful words as these.

There can be no doubt that among ourselves the simple and direct

attitude of the child towards nakedness is so early crushed out

of him that intelligent education is necessary in order that he

may be enabled to discern what is and what is not obscene. To the

plough-boy and the country servant-girl all nakedness, including

that of Greek statuary, is alike shameful or lustful. "I have a

picture of women like that," said a countryman with a grin, as he

pointed to a photograph of one of Tintoret's most beautiful

groups, "smoking cigarettes." And the mass of people in most

northern countries have still passed little beyond this stage of

discernment; in ability to distinguish between the beautiful and

the obscene they are still on the level of the plough-boy and the

servant-girl.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] These manifestations have been dealt with in the study of Autoerotism

in vol. i of the present _Studies_. It may be added that the sexual life

of the child has been exhaustively investigated by Moll, _Das Sexualleben

des Kindes_, 1909.

[19] This genital efflorescence in the sexual glands and breasts at birth

or in early infancy has been discussed in a Paris thesis, by Camille

Renouf (_La Crise Génital et les Manifestations Connexes chez le Foetus et

le Nouveau-né_, 1905); he is unable to offer a satisfactory explanation of

these phenomena.

[20] Amélineau, _La Morale des Egyptiens_, p. 64.

[21] "The Social Evil in Philadelphia," _Arena_, March, 1896.

[22] Moll, _Konträre Sexualempfindung_, third edition, p. 592.

[23] This powerlessness of the law and the police is well recognized by

lawyers familiar with the matter. Thus F. Werthauer (_Sittlichkeitsdelikte

der Grosstadt_, 1907) insists throughout on the importance of parents and

teachers imparting to children from their early years a progressively

increasing knowledge of sexual matters.

[24] "Parents must be taught how to impart information," remarks E.L.

Keyes ("Education upon Sexual Matters," _New York Medical Journal_, Feb.

10, 1906), "and this teaching of the parent should begin when he is

himself a child."

[25] Moll (op. cit., p. 224) argues well how impossible it is to preserve

children from sights and influence connected with the sexual life.

[26] Girls are not even prepared, in many cases, for the appearance of the

pubic hair. This unexpected growth of hair frequently causes young girls

much secret worry, and often they carefully cut it off.

[27] G.S. Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 511. Many years ago, in 1875,

the late Dr. Clarke, in his _Sex in Education_, advised menstrual rest for

girls, and thereby aroused a violent opposition which would certainly not

be found nowadays, when the special risks of womanhood are becoming more

clearly understood.

[28] For a summary of the physical and mental phenomena of the menstrual

period, see Havelock Ellis: _Man and Woman_, Ch. XI. The primitive

conception of menstruation is briefly discussed in Appendix A to the first

volume of these _Studies_, and more elaborately by J.G. Frazer in _The

Golden Bough_. A large collection of facts with regard to the menstrual

seclusion of women throughout the world will be found in Ploss and

Bartels, _Das Weib_. The pubertal seclusion of girls at Torres Straits has

been especially studied by Seligmann, _Reports Anthropological Expedition

to Torres Straits_, vol. v, Ch. VI.

[29] Thus Miss Lura Sanborn, Director of Physical Training at the Chicago

Normal School, found that a bath once a fortnight was not unusual. At the

menstrual period especially there is still a superstitious dread of water.

Girls should always be taught that at this period, above all, cleanliness

is imperatively necessary. There should be a tepid hip bath night and

morning, and a vaginal douche (which should never be cold) is always

advantageous, both for comfort as well as cleanliness. There is not the

slightest reason to dread water during menstruation. This point was

discussed a few years ago in the _British Medical Journal_ with complete

unanimity of opinion. A distinguished American obstetrician, also, Dr. J.

Clifton Edgar, after a careful study of opinion and practice in this

matter ("Bathing During the Menstrual Period," _American Journal

Obstetrics_, Sept., 1900), concludes that it is possible and beneficial to

take cold baths (though not sea-baths) during the period, provided due

precautions are observed, and that there are no sudden changes of habits.

Such a course should not be indiscriminately adopted, but there can be no

doubt that in sturdy peasant women who are inured to it early in life even

prolonged immersion in the sea in fishing has no evil results, and is even

beneficial. Houzel (_Annales de Gynécologie_, Dec., 1894) has published

statistics of the menstrual life of 123 fisherwomen on the French coast.

They were accustomed to shrimp for hours at a time in the sea, often to

above the waist, and then walk about in their wet clothes selling the

shrimps. They all insisted that their menstruation was easier when they

were actively at work. Their periods are notably regular, and their

fertility is high.

[30] J.H. McBride, "The Life and Health of Our Girls in Relation to Their

Future," _Alienist and Neurologist_, Feb., 1904.

[31] W.G. Chambers, "The Evolution of Ideals," _Pedagogical Seminary_,

March, 1903; Catherine Dodd, "School Children's Ideals," _National

Review_, Feb. and Dec., 1900, and June, 1901. No German girls acknowledged

a wish to be men; they said it would be wicked. Among Flemish girls,

however, Varendonck found at Ghent (_Archives de Psychologie_, July, 1908)

that 26 per cent. had men as their ideals.

[32] A. Reibmayr, _Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies_,

1908, Bd. i, p. 70.

[33] R. Hellmann, _Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit_, p. 14.

[34] This belief seems frequent among young girls in Continental Europe.

It forms the subject of one of Marcel Prevost's _Lettres de Femmes_. In

Austria, according to Freud, it is not uncommon, exclusively among girls.

[35] Yet, according to English law, rape is a crime which it is impossible

for a husband to commit on his wife (see, e.g., Nevill Geary, _The Law of

Marriage_, Ch. XV, Sect. V). The performance of the marriage ceremony,

however, even if it necessarily involved a clear explanation of marital

privileges, cannot be regarded as adequate justification for an act of

sexual intercourse performed with violence or without the wife's consent.

[36] Hirschfeld, _Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, 1903, p. 88. It

may be added that a horror of coitus is not necessarily due to bad

education, and may also occur in hereditarily degenerate women, whose

ancestors have shown similar or allied mental peculiarities. A case of

such "functional impotence" has been reported in a young Italian wife of

twenty-one, who was otherwise healthy, and strongly attached to her

husband. The marriage was annulled on the ground that "rudimentary sexual

or emotional paranoia, which renders a wife invincibly refractory to

sexual union, notwithstanding the integrity of the sexual organs,

constitutes psychic functional impotence" (_Archivio di Psichiatria_,

1906, fasc. vi, p. 806).

[37] The reasonableness of this step is so obvious that it should scarcely

need insistence. "The instruction of school-boys and school-girls is most

adequately effected by an elderly doctor," Näcke remarks, "sometimes

perhaps the school-doctor." "I strongly advocate," says Clouston (_The

Hygiene of Mind_, p. 249), "that the family doctor, guided by the parent

and the teacher, is by far the best instructor and monitor." Moll is of

the same opinion.

[38] I have further developed this argument in "Religion and the Child,"

_Nineteenth Century and After_, 1907.

[39] The intimate relation of art and poetry to the sexual impulse has

been realized in a fragmentary way by many who have not attained to any

wide vision of auto-erotic activity in life. "Poetry is necessarily

related to the sexual function," says Metchnikoff (_Essais Optimistes_, p.

352), who also quotes with approval the statement of Möbius (previously

made by Ferrero and many others) that "artistic aptitudes must probably be

considered as secondary sexual characters."

CHAPTER III.

SEXUAL EDUCATION AND NAKEDNESS.

The Greek Attitude Towards Nakedness--How the Romans Modified That

Attitude--The Influence of Christianity--Nakedness in Mediæval

Times--Evolution of the Horror of Nakedness--Concomitant Change in the

Conception of Nakedness--Prudery--The Romantic Movement--Rise of a New

Feeling in Regard to Nakedness--The Hygienic Aspect of Nakedness--How

Children May Be Accustomed to Nakedness--Nakedness Not Inimical to

Modesty--The Instinct of Physical Pride--The Value of Nakedness in

Education--The Æsthetic Value of Nakedness--The Human Body as One of the

Prime Tonics of Life--How Nakedness May Be Cultivated--The Moral Value of

Nakedness.

The discussion of the value of nakedness in art leads us on to the allied

question of nakedness in nature. What is the psychological influence of

familiarity with nakedness? How far should children be made familiar with

the naked body? This is a question in regard to which different opinions

have been held in different ages, and during recent years a remarkable

change has begun to come over the minds of practical educationalists in

regard to it.

In Sparta, in Chios, and elsewhere in Greece, women at one time practiced

gymnastic feats and dances in nakedness, together with the men, or in

their presence.[40] Plato in his _Republic_ approved of such customs and

said that the ridicule of those who laughed at them was but "unripe fruit

plucked from the tree of knowledge." On many questions Plato's opinions

changed, but not on this. In the _Laws_, which are the last outcome of his

philosophic reflection in old age, he still advocates (Bk. viii) a similar

co-education of the sexes and their coöperation in all the works of life,

in part with a view to blunt the over-keen edge of sexual appetite; with

the same object he advocated the association together of youths and girls

without constraint in costumes which offered no concealment to the form.

It is noteworthy that the Romans, a coarser-grained people than the Greeks

and in our narrow modern sense more "moral," showed no perception of the

moralizing and refining influence of nakedness. Nudity to them was merely

a licentious indulgence, to be treated with contempt even when it was

enjoyed. It was confined to the stage, and clamored for by the populace.

In the Floralia, especially, the crowd seem to have claimed it as their

right that the actors should play naked, probably, it has been thought, as

a survival of a folk-ritual. But the Romans, though they were eager to run

to the theatre, felt nothing but disdain for the performers. "Flagitii

principium est, nudare inter cives corpora." So thought old Ennius, as

reported by Cicero, and that remained the genuine Roman feeling to the

last. "Quanta perversitas!" as Tertullian exclaimed. "Artem magnificant,

artificem notant."[41] In this matter the Romans, although they aroused

the horror of the Christians, were yet in reality laying the foundation of

Christian morality.

Christianity, which found so many of Plato's opinions congenial, would

have nothing to do with his view of nakedness and failed to recognize its

psychological correctness. The reason was simple, and indeed

simple-minded. The Church was passionately eager to fight against what it

called "the flesh," and thus fell into the error of confusing the

subjective question of sexual desire with the objective spectacle of the

naked form. "The flesh" is evil; therefore, "the flesh" must be hidden.

And they hid it, without understanding that in so doing they had not

suppressed the craving for the human form, but, on the contrary, had

heightened it by imparting to it the additional fascination of a forbidden

mystery.

Burton, in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (Part III, Sect II, Mem.

II, Subs. IV), referring to the recommendations of Plato, adds:

"But _Eusebius_ and _Theodoret_ worthily lash him for it; and

well they might: for as one saith, the very sight of naked

parts, _causeth enormous, exceeding concupiscences, and stirs up

both men and women to burning lust_." Yet, as Burton himself adds

further on in the same section of his work (Mem. V, Subs. III),

without protest, "some are of opinion, that to see a woman naked,

is able of itself to alter his affection; and it is worthy of

consideration, saith _Montaigne_, the Frenchman, in his Essays,

that the skilfullest masters of amorous dalliance appoint for a

remedy of venereous passions, a full survey of the body."

There ought to be no question regarding the fact that it is the

adorned, the partially concealed body, and not the absolutely

naked body, which acts as a sexual excitant. I have brought

together some evidence on this point in the study of "The

Evolution of Modesty." "In Madagascar, West Africa, and the

Cape," says G.F. Scott Elliot (_A Naturalist in Mid-Africa_, p.

36), "I have always found the same rule. Chastity varies

inversely as the amount of clothing." It is now indeed generally

held that one of the chief primary objects of ornament and

clothing was the stimulation of sexual desire, and artists'

models are well aware that when they are completely unclothed,

they are most safe from undesired masculine advances. "A favorite

model of mine told me," remarks Dr. Shufeldt (_Medical Brief_,

Oct., 1904), the distinguished author of _Studies of the Human

Form_, "that it was her practice to disrobe as soon after

entering the artist's studio as possible, for, as men are not

always responsible for their emotions, she felt that she was far

less likely to arouse or excite them when entirely nude than when

only semi-draped." This fact is, indeed, quite familiar to

artists' models. If the conquest of sexual desire were the first

and last consideration of life it would be more reasonable to

prohibit clothing than to prohibit nakedness.

When Christianity absorbed the whole of the European world this strict

avoidance of even the sight of "the flesh," although nominally accepted by

all as the desirable ideal, could only be carried out, thoroughly and

completely, in the cloister. In the practice of the world outside,

although the original Christian ideals remained influential, various pagan

and primitive traditions in favor of nakedness still persisted, and were,

to some extent, allowed to manifest themselves, alike in ordinary custom

and on special occasions.

How widespread is the occasional or habitual practice of

nakedness in the world generally, and how entirely concordant it

is with even a most sensitive modesty, has been set forth in "The

Evolution of Modesty," in vol. i of these _Studies_.

Even during the Christian era the impulse to adopt nudity, often

with the feeling that it was an especially sacred practice, has

persisted. The Adamites of the second century, who read and

prayed naked, and celebrated the sacrament naked, according to

the statement quoted by St. Augustine, seem to have caused little

scandal so long as they only practiced nudity in their sacred

ceremonies. The German Brethren of the Free Spirit, in the

thirteenth century, combined so much chastity with promiscuous

nakedness that orthodox Catholics believed they were assisted by

the Devil. The French Picards, at a much later date, insisted on

public nakedness, believing that God had sent their leader into

the world as a new Adam to reestablish the law of Nature; they

were persecuted and were finally exterminated by the Hussites.

In daily life, however, a considerable degree of nakedness was

tolerated during mediæval times. This was notably so in the

public baths, frequented by men and women together. Thus Alwin

Schultz remarks (in his _Höfische Leben zur Zeit der

Minnesänger_), that the women of the aristocratic classes, though

not the men, were often naked in these baths except for a hat and

a necklace.

It is sometimes stated that in the mediæval religious plays Adam

and Eve were absolutely naked. Chambers doubts this, and thinks

they wore flesh-colored tights, or were, as in a later play of

this kind, "apparelled in white leather" (E.K. Chambers, _The

Mediæval Stage_, vol. i, p. 5). It may be so, but the public

exposure even of the sexual organs was permitted, and that in

aristocratic houses, for John of Salisbury (in a passage quoted

by Buckle, _Commonplace Book_, 541) protests against this custom.

The women of the feminist sixteenth century in France, as R. de

Maulde la Clavière remarks (_Revue de l'Art_, Jan., 1898), had no

scruple in recompensing their adorers by admitting them to their

toilette, or even their bath. Late in the century they became

still less prudish, and many well-known ladies allowed themselves

to be painted naked down to the waist, as we see in the portrait

of "Gabrielle d'Estrées au Bain" at Chantilly. Many of these

pictures, however, are certainly not real portraits.

Even in the middle of the seventeenth century in England

nakedness was not prohibited in public, for Pepys tells us that

on July 29, 1667, a Quaker came into Westminster Hall, crying,

"Repent! Repent!" being in a state of nakedness, except that he

was "very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal."

(This was doubtless Solomon Eccles, who was accustomed to go

about in this costume, both before and after the Restoration. He

had been a distinguished musician, and, though eccentric, was

apparently not insane.)

In a chapter, "De la Nudité," and in the appendices of his book,

_De l'Amour_ (vol. i, p. 221), Sénancour gives instances of the

occasional practice of nudity in Europe, and adds some

interesting remarks of his own; so, also, Dulaure (_Des Divinités

Génératrices_, Ch. XV). It would appear, as a rule, that though

complete nudity was allowed in other respects, it was usual to

cover the sexual parts.

The movement of revolt against nakedness never became completely

victorious until the nineteenth century. That century represented the

triumph of all the forces that banned public nakedness everywhere and

altogether. If, as Pudor insists, nakedness is aristocratic and the

slavery of clothes a plebeian characteristic imposed on the lower classes

by an upper class who reserved to themselves the privilege of physical

culture, we may perhaps connect this with the outburst of democratic

plebeianism which, as Nietzsche pointed out, reached its climax in the

nineteenth century. It is in any case certainly interesting to observe

that by this time the movement had entirely changed its character. It had

become general, but at the same time its foundation had been undermined.

It had largely lost its religious and moral character, and instead was

regarded as a matter of convention. The nineteenth century man who

encountered the spectacle of white limbs flashing in the sunlight no

longer felt like the mediæval ascetic that he was risking the salvation of

his immortal soul or even courting the depravation of his morals; he

merely felt that it was "indecent" or, in extreme cases, "disgusting."

That is to say he regarded the matter as simply a question of conventional

etiquette, at the worst, of taste, of æsthetics. In thus bringing down his

repugnance to nakedness to so low a plane he had indeed rendered it

generally acceptable, but at the same time he had deprived it of high

sanction. His profound horror of nakedness was out of relation to the

frivolous grounds on which he based it.

We must not, however, under-rate the tenacity with which this

horror of nakedness was held. Nothing illustrates more vividly

the deeply ingrained hatred which the nineteenth century felt of

nakedness than the ferocity--there is no other word for it--with

which Christian missionaries to savages all over the world, even

in the tropics, insisted on their converts adopting the

conventional clothing of Northern Europe. Travellers' narratives

abound in references to the emphasis placed by missionaries on

this change of custom, which was both injurious to the health of

the people and degrading to their dignity. It is sufficient to

quote one authoritative witness, Lord Stanmore, formerly Governor

of Fiji, who read a long paper to the Anglican Missionary

Conference in 1894 on the subject of "Undue Introduction of

Western Ways." "In the centre of the village," he remarked in

quoting a typical case (and referring not to Fiji but to Tonga),

"is the church, a wooden barn-like building. If the day be

Sunday, we shall find the native minister arrayed in a

greenish-black swallow-tail coat, a neckcloth, once white, and a

pair of spectacles, which he probably does not need, preaching to

a congregation, the male portion of which is dressed in much the

same manner as himself, while the women are dizened out in old

battered hats or bonnets, and shapeless gowns like bathing

dresses, or it may be in crinolines of an early type. Chiefs of

influence and women of high birth, who in their native dress

would look, and do look, the ladies and gentlemen they are, are,

by their Sunday finery, given the appearance of attendants upon

Jack-in-the-Green. If a visit be paid to the houses of the town,

after the morning's work of the people is over, the family will

be found sitting on chairs, listless and uncomfortable, in a room

full of litter. In the houses of the superior native clergy there

will be a yet greater aping of the manners of the West. There

will be chairs covered with hideous antimacassars, tasteless

round worsted-work mats for absent flower jars, and a lot of ugly

cheap and vulgar china chimney ornaments, which, there being no

fireplace, and consequently no chimney-piece, are set out in

order on a rickety deal table. The whole life of these village

folk is one piece of unreal acting. They are continually asking

themselves whether they are incurring any of the penalties

entailed by infraction of the long table of prohibitions, and

whether they are living up to the foreign garments they wear.

Their faces have, for the most part, an expression of sullen

discontent, they move about silently and joylessly, rebels in

heart to the restrictive code on them, but which they fear to

cast off, partly from a vague apprehension of possible secular

results, and partly because they suppose they will cease to be

good Christians if they do so. They have good ground for their

dissatisfaction. At the time when I visited the villages I have

specially in my eye, it was punishable by fine and imprisonment

to wear native clothing, punishable by fine and imprisonment to

wear long hair or a garland of flowers; punishable by fine or

imprisonment to wrestle or to play at ball; punishable by fine

and imprisonment to build a native-fashioned house; punishable

not to wear shirt and trousers, and in certain localities coat

and shoes also; and, in addition to laws enforcing a strictly

puritanical observation of the Sabbath, it was punishable by fine

and imprisonment to bathe on Sundays. In some other places

bathing on Sunday was punishable by flogging; and to my

knowledge women have been flogged for no other offense. Men in

such circumstances are ripe for revolt, and sometimes the revolt

comes."

An obvious result of reducing the feeling about nakedness to an

unreasoning but imperative convention is the tendency to

prudishness. This, as we know, is a form of pseudo-modesty which,

being a convention, and not a natural feeling, is capable of

unlimited extension. It is by no means confined to modern times

or to Christian Europe. The ancient Hebrews were not entirely

free from prudishness, and we find in the Old Testament that by a

curious euphemism the sexual organs are sometimes referred to as

"the feet." The Turks are capable of prudishness. So, indeed,

were even the ancient Greeks. "Dion the philosopher tells us,"

remarks Clement of Alexandria (_Stromates_, Bk. IV, Ch. XIX)

"that a certain woman, Lysidica, through excess of modesty,

bathed in her clothes, and that Philotera, when she was to enter

the bath, gradually drew back her tunic as the water covered her

naked parts; and then rising by degrees, put it on." Mincing

prudes were found among the early Christians, and their ways are

graphically described by St. Jerome in one of his letters to

Eustochium: "These women," he says, "speak between their teeth or

with the edge of the lips, and with a lisping tongue, only half

pronouncing their words, because they regard as gross whatever is

natural. Such as these," declares Jerome, the scholar in him

overcoming the ascetic, "corrupt even language." Whenever a new

and artificial "modesty" is imposed upon savages prudery tends to

arise. Haddon describes this among the natives of Torres Straits,

where even the children now suffer from exaggerated prudishness,

though formerly absolutely naked and unashamed (_Cambridge

Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, p. 271).

The nineteenth century, which witnessed the triumph of timidity and

prudery in this matter, also produced the first fruitful germ of new

conceptions of nakedness. To some extent these were embodied in the great

Romantic movement. Rousseau, indeed, had placed no special insistence on

nakedness as an element of the return to Nature which he preached so

influentially. A new feeling in this matter emerged, however, with

characteristic extravagance, in some of the episodes of the Revolution,

while in Germany in the pioneering _Lucinde_ of Friedrich Schlegel, a

characteristic figure in the Romantic movement, a still unfamiliar

conception of the body was set forth in a serious and earnest spirit.

In England, Blake with his strange and flaming genius, proclaimed a

mystical gospel which involved the spiritual glorification of the body and

contempt for the civilized worship of clothes ("As to a modern man," he

wrote, "stripped from his load of clothing he is like a dead corpse");

while, later, in America, Thoreau and Whitman and Burroughs asserted,

still more definitely, a not dissimilar message concerning the need of

returning to Nature.

We find the importance of the sight of the body--though very

narrowly, for the avoidance of fraud in the preliminaries of

marriage--set forth as early as the sixteenth century by Sir

Thomas More in his _Utopia_, which is so rich in new and fruitful

ideas. In Utopia, according to Sir Thomas More, before marriage,

a staid and honest matron "showeth the woman, be she maid or

widow, naked to the wooer. And likewise a sage and discreet man

exhibiteth the wooer naked to the woman. At this custom we

laughed and disallowed it as foolish. But they, on their part, do

greatly wonder at the folly of all other nations which, in buying

a colt where a little money is in hazard, be so chary and

circumspect that though he be almost all bare, yet they will not

buy him unless the saddle and all the harness be taken off, lest

under these coverings be hid some gall or sore. And yet, in

choosing a wife, which shall be either pleasure or displeasure to

them all their life after, they be so reckless that all the

residue of the woman's body being covered with clothes, they

estimate her scarcely by one handsbreadth (for they can see no

more but her face) and so join her to them, not without great

jeopardy of evil agreeing together, if anything in her body

afterward should chance to offend or mislike them. Verily, so

foul deformity may be hid under these coverings that it may quite

alienate and take away the man's mind from his wife, when it

shall not be lawful for their bodies to be separate again. If

such deformity happen by any chance after the marriage is

consummate and finished, well, there is no remedy but patience.

But it were well done that a law were made whereby all such

deceits were eschewed and avoided beforehand."

The clear conception of what may be called the spiritual value of

nakedness--by no means from More's point of view, but as a part

of natural hygiene in the widest sense, and as a high and special

aspect of the purifying and ennobling function of beauty--is of

much later date. It is not clearly expressed until the time of

the Romantic movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

We have it admirably set forth in Sénancour's _De l'Amour_ (first

edition, 1806; fourth and enlarged edition, 1834), which still

remains one of the best books on the morality of love. After

remarking that nakedness by no means abolishes modesty, he

proceeds to advocate occasional partial or complete nudity. "Let

us suppose," he remarks, somewhat in the spirit of Plato, "a

country in which at certain general festivals the women should be

absolutely free to be nearly or even quite naked. Swimming,

waltzing, walking, those who thought good to do so might remain

unclothed in the presence of men. No doubt the illusions of love

would be little known, and passion would see a diminution of its

transports. But is it passion that in general ennobles human

affairs? We need honest attachments and delicate delights, and

all these we may obtain while still preserving our

common-sense.... Such nakedness would demand corresponding

institutions, strong and simple, and a great respect for those

conventions which belong to all times" (Sénancour, _De l'Amour_,

vol. i, p. 314).

From that time onwards references to the value and desirability

of nakedness become more and more frequent in all civilized

countries, sometimes mingled with sarcastic allusions to the

false conventions we have inherited in this matter. Thus Thoreau

writes in his journal on June 12, 1852, as he looks at boys

bathing in the river: "The color of their bodies in the sun at a

distance is pleasing. I hear the sound of their sport borne over

the water. As yet we have not man in Nature. What a singular fact

for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his

note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under

the severest penalties."

Iwan Bloch, in Chapter VII of his _Sexual Life of Our Time_,

discusses this question of nakedness from the modern point of

view, and concludes: "A natural conception of nakedness: that is

the watchword of the future. All the hygienic, æsthetic, and

moral efforts of our time are pointing in that direction."

Stratz, as befits one who has worked so strenuously in the cause

of human health and beauty, admirably sets forth the stage which

we have now attained in this matter. After pointing out (_Die

Frauenkleidung_, third edition, 1904, p. 30) that, in opposition

to the pagan world which worshipped naked gods, Christianity

developed the idea that nakedness was merely sexual, and

therefore immoral, he proceeds: "But over all glimmered on the

heavenly heights of the Cross, the naked body of the Saviour.

Under that protection there has gradually disengaged itself from

the confusion of ideas a new transfigured form of nakedness made

free after long struggle. I would call this _artistic nakedness_,

for as it was immortalized by the old Greeks through art, so also

among us it has been awakened to new life by art. Artistic

nakedness is, in its nature, much higher than either the natural

or the sensual conception of nakedness. The simple child of

Nature sees in nakedness nothing at all; the clothed man sees in

the uncovered body only a sensual irritation. But at the highest

standpoint man consciously returns to Nature, and recognizes that

under the manifold coverings of human fabrication there is

hidden the most splendid creature that God has created. One may

stand in silent, worshipping wonder before the sight; another may

be impelled to imitate and show to his fellow-man what in that

holy moment he has seen. But both enjoy the spectacle of human

beauty with full consciousness and enlightened purity of

thought."

It was not, however, so much on these more spiritual sides, but on the

side of hygiene, that the nineteenth century furnished its chief practical

contribution to the new attitude towards nakedness.

Lord Monboddo, the Scotch judge, who was a pioneer in regard to

many modern ideas, had already in the eighteenth century realized

the hygienic value of "air-baths," and he invented that now

familiar name. "Lord Monboddo," says Boswell, in 1777 (_Life of

Johnson_, edited by Hill, vol. iii, p. 168) "told me that he

awaked every morning at four, and then for his health got up and

walked in his room naked, with the window open, which he called

taking _an air-bath_." It is said also, I know not on what

authority, that he made his beautiful daughters take an air-bath

naked on the terrace every morning. Another distinguished man of

the same century, Benjamin Franklin, used sometimes to work naked

in his study on hygienic grounds, and, it is recorded, once

affrighted a servant-girl by opening the door in an absent-minded

moment, thus unattired.

Rikli seems to have been the apostle of air-baths and sun-baths

regarded as a systematic method. He established light-and

air-baths over half a century ago at Trieste and elsewhere in

Austria. His motto was: "Light, Truth, and Freedom are the motive

forces towards the highest development of physical and moral

health." Man is not a fish, he declared; light and air are the

first conditions of a highly organized life. Solaria for the

treatment of a number of different disordered conditions are now

commonly established, and most systems of natural therapeutics

attach prime importance to light and air, while in medicine

generally it is beginning to be recognized that such influences

can by no means be neglected. Dr. Fernand Sandoz, in his

_Introduction à la Thérapeutique Naturiste par les agents

Physiques et Dietétiques_ (1907) sets forth such methods

comprehensively. In Germany sun-baths have become widely common;

thus Lenkei (in a paper summarized in _British Medical Journal_,

Oct. 31, 1908) prescribes them with much benefit in tuberculosis,

rheumatic conditions, obesity, anæmia, neurasthenia, etc. He

considers that their peculiar value lies in the action of light.

Professor J.N. Hyde, of Chicago, even believes ("Light-Hunger in

the Production of Psoriasis," _British Medical Journal_, Oct. 6,

1906), that psoriasis is caused by deficiency of sunlight, and

is best cured by the application of light. This belief, which has

not, however, been generally accepted in its unqualified form, he

ingeniously supports by the fact that psoriasis tends to appear

on the most exposed parts of the body, which may be held to

naturally receive and require the maximum of light, and by the

absence of the disease in hot countries and among negroes.

The hygienic value of nakedness is indicated by the robust health

of the savages throughout the world who go naked. The vigor of

the Irish, also, has been connected with the fact that (as Fynes

Moryson's _Itinerary_ shows) both sexes, even among persons of

high social class, were accustomed to go naked except for a

mantle, especially in more remote parts of the country, as late

as the seventeenth century. Where-ever primitive races abandon

nakedness for clothing, at once the tendency to disease,

mortality, and degeneracy notably increases, though it must be

remembered that the use of clothing is commonly accompanied by

the introduction of other bad habits. "Nakedness is the only

condition universal among vigorous and healthy savages; at every

other point perhaps they differ," remarks Frederick Boyle in a

paper ("Savages and Clothes," _Monthly Review_, Sept., 1905) in

which he brings together much evidence concerning the hygienic

advantages of the natural human state in which man is "all face."

It is in Germany that a return towards nakedness has been most

ably and thoroughly advocated, notably by Dr. H. Pudor in his

_Nackt-Cultur_, and by R. Ungewitter in _Die Nacktheit_ (first

published in 1905), a book which has had a very large circulation

in many editions. These writers enthusiastically advocate

nakedness, not only on hygienic, but on moral and artistic

grounds. Pudor insists more especially that "nakedness, both in

gymnastics and in sport, is a method of cure and a method of

regeneration;" he advocates co-education in this culture of

nakedness. Although he makes large claims for

nakedness--believing that all the nations which have disregarded

these claims have rapidly become decadent--Pudor is less hopeful

than Ungewitter of any speedy victory over the prejudices opposed

to the culture of nakedness. He considers that the immediate task

is education, and that a practical commencement may best be made

with the foot which is specially in need of hygiene and exercise;

a large part of the first volume of his book is devoted to the

foot.

As the matter is to-day viewed by those educationalists who are equally

alive to sanitary and sexual considerations, the claims of nakedness, so

far as concerns the young, are regarded as part alike of physical and

moral hygiene. The free contact of the naked body with air and water and

light makes for the health of the body; familiarity with the sight of the

body abolishes petty pruriencies, trains the sense of beauty, and makes

for the health of the soul. This double aspect of the matter has

undoubtedly weighed greatly with those teachers who now approve of customs

which, a few years ago, would have been hastily dismissed as "indecent."

There is still a wide difference of opinion as to the limits to which the

practice of nakedness may be carried, and also as to the age when it

should begin to be restricted. The fact that the adult generation of

to-day grew up under the influence of the old horror of nakedness is an

inevitable check on any revolutionary changes in these matters.

Maria Lischnewska, one of the ablest advocates of the methodical

enlightenment of children in matters of sex (op. cit.), clearly

realizes that a sane attitude towards the body lies at the root

of a sound education for life. She finds that the chief objection

encountered in such education, as applied in the higher classes

of schools, is "the horror of the civilized man at his own body."

She shows that there can be no doubt that those who are engaged

in the difficult task of working towards the abolition of that

superstitious horror have taken up a moral task of the first

importance.

Walter Gerhard, in a thoughtful and sensible paper on the

educational question ("Ein Kapitel zur Erziehungsfrage,"

_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. i, Heft 2), points out that

it is the adult who needs education in this matter--as in so many

other matters of sexual enlightenment--considerably more than the

child. Parents educate their children from the earliest years in

prudery, and vainly flatter themselves that they have thereby

promoted their modesty and morality. He records his own early

life in a tropical land and accustomed to nakedness from the

first. "It was not till I came to Germany when nearly twenty that

I learnt that the human body is indecent, and that it must not be

shown because that 'would arouse bad impulses.' It was not till

the human body was entirely withdrawn from my sight and after I

was constantly told that there was something improper behind

clothes, that I was able to understand this.... Until then I had

not known that a naked body, by the mere fact of being naked,

could arouse erotic feelings. I had known erotic feelings, but

they had not arisen from the sight of the naked body, but

gradually blossomed from the union of our souls." And he draws

the final moral that, if only for the sake of our children, we

must learn to educate ourselves.

Forel (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, p. 140), speaking in entirely the

same sense as Gerhard, remarks that prudery may be either caused

or cured in children. It may be caused by undue anxiety in

covering their bodies and hiding from them the bodies of others.

It may be cured by making them realize that there is nothing in

the body that is unnatural and that we need be ashamed of, and by

encouraging bathing of the sexes in common. He points out (p.

512) the advantages of allowing children to be acquainted with

the adult forms which they will themselves some day assume, and

condemns the conduct of those foolish persons who assume that

children already possess the adult's erotic feelings about the

body. That is so far from being the case that children are

frequently unable to distinguish the sex of other children apart

from their clothes.

At the Mannheim Congress of the German Society for Combating

Venereal Diseases, specially devoted to sexual hygiene, the

speakers constantly referred to the necessity of promoting

familiarity with the naked body. Thus Eulenburg and Julian

Marcuse (_Sexualpädagogik_, p. 264) emphasize the importance of

air-baths, not only for the sake of the physical health of the

young, but in the interests of rational sexual training. Höller,

a teacher, speaking at the same congress (op. cit., p. 85), after

insisting on familiarity with the nude in art and literature, and

protesting against the bowdlerising of poems for the young,

continues: "By bathing-drawers ordinances no soul was ever yet

saved from moral ruin. One who has learnt to enjoy peacefully the

naked in art is only stirred by the naked in nature as by a work

of art." Enderlin, another teacher, speaking in the same sense

(p. 58), points out that nakedness cannot act sexually or

immorally on the child, since the sexual impulse has not yet

become pronounced, and the earlier he is introduced to the naked

in nature and in art, as a matter of course, the less likely are

the sexual feelings to be developed precociously. The child thus,

indeed, becomes immune to impure influences, so that later, when

representations of the nude are brought before him for the object

of provoking his wantonness, they are powerless to injure him. It

is important, Enderlin adds, for familiarity with the nude in art

to be learnt at school, for most of us, as Siebert remarks, have

to learn purity through art.

Nakedness in bathing, remarks Bölsche in his _Liebesleben in der

Natur_ (vol. iii, pp. 139 et seq.), we already in some measure

possess; we need it in physical exercises, at first for the sexes

separately; then, when we have grown accustomed to the idea,

occasionally for both sexes together. We need to acquire the

capacity to see the bodies of individuals of the other sex with

such self-control and such natural instinct that they become

non-erotic to us and can be gazed at without erotic feeling. Art,

he says, shows that this is possible in civilization. Science, he

adds, comes to the aid of the same view.

Ungewitter (_Die Nacktheit_, p. 57) also advocates boys and girls

engaging in play and gymnastics together, entirely naked in

air-baths. "In this way," he believes, "the gymnasium would

become a school of morality, in which young growing things would

be able to retain their purity as long as possible through

becoming naturally accustomed to each other. At the same time

their bodies would be hardened and developed, and the perception

of beautiful and natural forms awakened." To those who have any

"moral" doubts on the matter, he mentions the custom in remote

country districts of boys and girls bathing together quite naked

and without any sexual consciousness. Rudolf Sommer, similarly,

in an excellent article entitled "Mädchenerziehung oder

Menschenbildung?" (_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. i, Heft 3)

advises that children should be made accustomed to each other's

nakedness from an early age in the family life of the house or

the garden, in games, and especially in bathing; he remarks that

parents having children of only one sex should cultivate for

their children's sake intimate relations with a family having

children of like age of the opposite sex, so that they may grow

up together.

It is scarcely necessary to add that the cultivation of nakedness must

always be conciliated with respect for the natural instincts of modesty.

If the practice of nakedness led the young to experience a diminished

reverence for their own or others' personalities the advantages of it

would be too dearly bought. This is, in part, a matter of wholesome

instinct, in part of wise training. We now know that the absence of

clothes has little relation with the absence of modesty, such relation as

there is being of the inverse order, for the savage races which go naked

are usually more modest than those which wear clothes. The saying quoted

by Herodotus in the early Greek world that "A woman takes off her modesty

with her shift" was a favorite text of the Christian Fathers. But

Plutarch, who was also a moralist, had already protested against it at the

close of the Greek world: "By no means," he declared, "she who is modest

clothes herself with modesty when she lays aside her tunic." "A woman may

be naked," as Mrs. Bishop, the traveller, remarked to Dr. Baelz, in Japan,

"and yet behave like a lady."[42]

The question is complicated among ourselves because established

traditions of rigid concealment have fostered a pruriency which is an

offensive insult to naked modesty. In many lands the women who are

accustomed to be almost or quite naked in the presence of their own people

cover themselves as soon as they become conscious of the lustful

inquisitive eyes of Europeans. Stratz refers to the prevalence of this

impulse of offended modesty in Japan, and mentions that he himself failed

to arouse it simply because he was a physician, and, moreover, had long

lived in another land (Java) where also the custom of nakedness

prevails.[43] So long as this unnatural prurience exists a free

unqualified nakedness is rendered difficult.

Modesty is not, however, the only natural impulse which has to be

considered in relation to the custom of nakedness. It seems probable that

in cultivating the practice of nakedness we are not merely carrying out a

moral and hygienic prescription but allowing legitimate scope to an

instinct which at some periods of life, especially in adolescence, is

spontaneous and natural, even, it may be, wholesomely based in the

traditions of the race in sexual selection. Our rigid conventions make it

impossible for us to discover the laws of nature in this matter by

stifling them at the outset. It may well be that there is a rhythmic

harmony and concordance between impulses of modesty and impulses of

ostentation, though we have done our best to disguise the natural law by

our stupid and perverse by-laws.

Stanley Hall, who emphasizes the importance of nakedness, remarks

that at puberty we have much reason to assume that in a state of

nature there is a certain instinctive pride and ostentation that

accompanies the new local development, and quotes the observation

of Dr. Seerley that the impulse to conceal the sexual organs is

especially marked in young men who are underdeveloped, but not

evident in those who are developed beyond the average. Stanley

Hall (_Adolescence_, vol. ii, p. 97), also refers to the

frequency with which not only "virtuous young men, but even

women, rather glory in occasions when they can display the beauty

of their forms without reserve, not only to themselves and to

loved ones, but even to others with proper pretexts."

Many have doubtless noted this tendency, especially in women, and

chiefly in those who are conscious of beautiful physical

development. Madame Céline Renooz believes that the tendency

corresponds to a really deep-rooted instinct in women, little or

not at all manifested in men who have consequently sought to

impose artificially on women their own masculine conceptions of

modesty. "In the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a

moment when, by a secret atavism, she feels the pride of her sex,

the intuition of her moral superiority and cannot understand why

she must hide its cause. At this moment, wavering between the

laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely knows if

nakedness should, or should not, affright her. A sort of confused

atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing was

known, and reveals to her as a paradisaical ideal the customs of

that human epoch" (Céline Renooz, _Psychologie Comparée de

l'Homme et de la Femme_, pp. 85-87). Perhaps this was obscurely

felt by the German girl (mentioned in Kalbeck's _Life of

Brahms_), who said: "One enjoys music twice as much

_décolletée_."

From the point of view with which we are here essentially concerned there

are three ways in which the cultivation of nakedness--so far as it is

permitted by the slow education of public opinion--tends to exert an

influence: (1) It is an important element in the sexual hygiene of the

young, introducing a wholesome knowledge and incuriosity into a sphere

once given up to prudery and pruriency. (2) The effect of nakedness is

beneficial on those of more mature age, also, in so far as it tends to

cultivate the sense of beauty and to furnish the tonic and consoling

influences of natural vigor and grace. (3) The custom of nakedness, in its

inception at all events, has a dynamic psychological influence also on

morals, an influence exerted in the substitution of a strenuous and

positive morality for the merely negative and timid morality which has

ruled in this sphere.

Perhaps there are not many adults who realize the intense and secret

absorption of thought in the minds of many boys and some girls concerning

the problem of the physical conformation of the other sex, and the time,

patience, and intellectual energy which they are willing to expend on the

solution of this problem. This is mostly effected in secret, but not

seldom the secret impulse manifests itself with a sudden violence which in

the blind eyes of the law is reckoned as crime. A German lawyer, Dr.

Werthauer, has lately stated that if there were a due degree of

familiarity with the natural organs and functions of the opposite sex

ninety per cent. of the indecent acts of youths with girl children would

disappear, for in most cases these are not assaults but merely the

innocent, though uncontrollable, outcome of a repressed natural curiosity.

It is quite true that not a few children boldly enlist each others'

coöperation in the settlement of the question and resolve it to their

mutual satisfaction. But even this is not altogether satisfactory, for the

end is not attained openly and wholesomely, with a due subordination of

the specifically sexual, but with a consciousness of wrong-doing and an

exclusive attentiveness to the merely physical fact which tend directly to

develop sexual excitement. When familiarity with the naked body of the

other sex is gained openly and with no consciousness of indecorum, in the

course of work and of play, in exercise or gymnastics, in running or in

bathing, from a child's earliest years, no unwholesome results accompany

the knowledge of the essential facts of physical conformation thus

naturally acquired. The prurience and prudery which have poisoned sexual

life in the past are alike rendered impossible.

Nakedness has, however, a hygienic value, as well as a spiritual

significance, far beyond its influences in allaying the natural

inquisitiveness of the young or acting as a preventative of morbid

emotion. It is an inspiration to adults who have long outgrown any

youthful curiosities. The vision of the essential and eternal human form,

the nearest thing to us in all the world, with its vigor and its beauty

and its grace, is one of the prime tonics of life. "The power of a woman's

body," said James Hinton, "is no more bodily than the power of music is a

power of atmospheric vibrations." It is more than all the beautiful and

stimulating things of the world, than flowers or stars or the sea. History

and legend and myth reveal to us the sacred and awful influence of

nakedness, for, as Stanley Hall says, nakedness has always been "a

talisman of wondrous power with gods and men." How sorely men crave for

the spectacle of the human body--even to-day after generations have

inculcated the notion that it is an indecorous and even disgusting

spectacle--is witnessed by the eagerness with which they seek after the

spectacle of even its imperfect and meretricious forms, although these

certainly possess a heady and stimulating quality which can never be found

in the pathetic simplicity of naked beauty. It was another spectacle when

the queens of ancient Madagascar at the annual Fandroon, or feast of the

bath, laid aside their royal robes and while their subjects crowded the

palace courtyard, descended the marble steps to the bath in complete

nakedness. When we make our conventions of clothing rigid we at once

spread a feast for lust and deny ourselves one of the prime tonics of

life.

"I was feeling in despair and walking despondently along a

Melbourne street," writes the Australian author of a yet

unpublished autobiography, "when three children came running out

of a lane and crossed the road in full daylight. The beauty and

texture of their legs in the open air filled me with joy, so that

I forgot all my troubles whilst looking at them. It was a bright

revelation, an unexpected glimpse of Paradise, and I have never

ceased to thank the happy combination of shape, pure blood, and

fine skin of these poverty-stricken children, for the wind seemed

to quicken their golden beauty, and I retained the rosy vision of

their natural young limbs, so much more divine than those always

under cover. Another occasion when naked young limbs made me

forget all my gloom and despondency was on my first visit to

Adelaide. I came on a naked boy leaning on the railing near the

Baths, and the beauty of his face, torso, fair young limbs and

exquisite feet filled me with joy and renewed hope. The tears

came to my eyes, and I said to myself, 'While there is beauty in

the world I will continue to struggle,'"

We must, as Bölsche declares (loc. cit.), accustom ourselves to

gaze on the naked human body exactly as we gaze at a beautiful

flower, not merely with the pity with which the doctor looks at

the body, but with joy in its strength and health and beauty. For

a flower, as Bölsche truly adds, is not merely "naked body," it

is the most sacred region of the body, the sexual organs of the

plant.

"For girls to dance naked," said Hinton, "is the only truly pure

form of dancing, and in due time it must therefore come about.

This is certain: girls will dance naked and men will be pure

enough to gaze on them." It has already been so in Greece, he

elsewhere remarks, as it is to-day in Japan (as more recently

described by Stratz). It is nearly forty years since these

prophetic words were written, but Hinton himself would probably

have been surprised at the progress which has already been made

slowly (for all true progress must be slow) towards this goal.

Even on the stage new and more natural traditions are beginning

to prevail in Europe. It is not many years since an English

actress regarded as a calumny the statement that she appeared on

the stage bare-foot, and brought an action for libel, winning

substantial damages. Such a result would scarcely be possible

to-day. The movement in which Isadora Duncan was a pioneer has

led to a partial disuse among dancers of the offensive device of

tights, and it is no longer considered indecorous to show many

parts of the body which it was formerly usual to cover.

It should, however, be added at the same time that, while

dancers, in so far as they are genuine artists, are entitled to

determine the conditions most favorable to their art, nothing

whatever is gained for the cause of a wholesome culture of

nakedness by the "living statues" and "living pictures" which

have obtained an international vogue during recent years. These

may be legitimate as variety performances, but they have nothing

whatever to do with either Nature or art. Dr. Pudor, writing as

one of the earliest apostles of the culture of nakedness, has

energetically protested against these performances

(_Sexual-Probleme_, Dec., 1908, p. 828). He rightly points out

that nakedness, to be wholesome, requires the open air, the

meadows, the sunlight, and that nakedness at night, in a music

hall, by artificial light, in the presence of spectators who are

themselves clothed, has no element of morality about it. Attempts

have here and there been quietly made to cultivate a certain

amount of mutual nakedness as between the sexes on remote country

excursions. It is significant to find a record of such an

experiment in Ungewitter's _Die Nacktheit_. In this case a party

of people, men and women, would regularly every Sunday seek

remote spots in woods or meadows where they would settle down,

picnic, and enjoy games. "They made themselves as comfortable as

possible, the men laying aside their coats, waistcoats, boots and

socks; the women their blouses, skirts, shoes and stockings.

Gradually, as the moral conception of nakedness developed in

their minds, more and more clothing fell away, until the men wore

nothing but bathing-drawers and the women only their chemises. In

this 'costume' games were carried out in common, and a regular

camp-life led. The ladies (some of whom were unmarried) would

then lie in hammocks and we men on the grass, and the intercourse

was delightful. We felt as members of one family, and behaved

accordingly. In an entirely natural and unembarrassed way we gave

ourselves up entirely to the liberating feelings aroused by this

light- and air-bath, and passed these splendid hours in joyous

singing and dancing, in wantonly childish fashion, freed from the

burden of a false civilization. It was, of course, necessary to

seek spots as remote as possible from high-roads, for fear of

being disturbed. At the same time we by no means failed in

natural modesty and consideration towards one another. Children,

who can be entirely naked, may be allowed to take part in such

meetings of adults, and will thus be brought up free from morbid

prudery" (R. Ungewitter, _Die Nacktheit_, p. 58).

No doubt it may be said that the ideal in this matter is the

possibility of permitting complete nakedness. This may be

admitted, and it is undoubtedly true that our rigid police

regulations do much to artificially foster a concealment in this

matter which is not based on any natural instinct. Dr. Shufeldt

narrates in his _Studies of the Human Form_ that once in the

course of a photographic expedition in the woods he came upon two

boys, naked except for bathing-drawers, engaged in getting water

lilies from a pond. He found them a good subject for his camera,

but they could not be induced to remove their drawers, by no

means out of either modesty or mock-modesty, but simply because

they feared they might possibly be caught and arrested. We have

to recognize that at the present day the general popular

sentiment is not yet sufficiently educated to allow of public

disregard for the convention of covering the sexual centres, and

all attempts to extend the bounds of nakedness must show a due

regard for this requirement. As concerns women, Valentin Lehr, of

Freiburg, in Breisgau, has invented a costume (figured in

Ungewitter's _Die Nacktheit_) which is suitable for either public

water-baths or air-baths, because it meets the demand of those

whose minimum requirement is that the chief sexual centres of the

body should be covered in public, while it is otherwise fairly

unobjectionable. It consists of two pieces, made of porous

material, one covering the breasts with a band over the

shoulders, and the other covering the abdomen below the navel and

drawn between the legs. This minimal costume, while neither ideal

nor æsthetic, adequately covers the sexual regions of the body,

while leaving the arms, waist, hips, and legs entirely free.

There finally remains the moral aspect of nakedness. Although this has

been emphasized by many during the past half century it is still

unfamiliar to the majority. The human body can never be a little thing.

The wise educator may see to it that boys and girls are brought up in a

natural and wholesome familiarity with each other, but a certain terror

and beauty must always attach to the spectacle of the body, a mixed

attraction and repulsion. Because it has this force it naturally calls out

the virtue of those who take part in the spectacle, and makes impossible

any soft compliance to emotion. Even if we admit that the spectacle of

nakedness is a challenge to passion it is still a challenge that calls

out the ennobling qualities of self-control. It is but a poor sort of

virtue that lies in fleeing into the desert from things that we fear may

have in them a temptation. We have to learn that it is even worse to

attempt to create a desert around us in the midst of civilization. We

cannot dispense with passions if we would; reason, as Holbach said, is the

art of choosing the right passions, and education the art of sowing and

cultivating them in human hearts. The spectacle of nakedness has its moral

value in teaching us to learn to enjoy what we do not possess, a lesson

which is an essential part of the training for any kind of fine social

life. The child has to learn to look at flowers and not pluck them; the

man has to learn to look at a woman's beauty and not desire to possess it.

The joyous conquest over that "erotic kleptomania," as Ellen Key has well

said, reveals the blossoming of a fine civilization. We fancy the conquest

is difficult, even impossibly difficult. But it is not so. This impulse,

like other human impulses, tends under natural conditions to develop

temperately and wholesomely. We artificially press a stupid and brutal

hand on it, and it is driven into the two unnatural extremes of repression

and license, one extreme as foul as the other.

To those who have been bred under bad conditions, it may indeed seem

hopeless to attempt to rise to the level of the Greeks and the other finer

tempered peoples of antiquity in realizing the moral, as well as the

pedagogic, hygienic, and æsthetic advantages[44] of admitting into life

the spectacle of the naked human body. But unless we do we hopelessly

fetter ourselves in our march along the road of civilization, we deprive

ourselves at once of a source of moral strength and of joyous inspiration.

Just as Wesley once asked why the devil should have all the best tunes, so

to-day men are beginning to ask why the human body, the most divine melody

at its finest moments that creation has yielded, should be allowed to

become the perquisite of those who lust for the obscene. And some are,

further, convinced that by enlisting it on the side of purity and strength

they are raising the most powerful of all bulwarks against the invasion of

a vicious conception of life and the consequent degradation of sex. These

are considerations which we cannot longer afford to neglect, however great

the opposition they arouse among the unthinking.

"Folk are afraid of such things rousing the passions," Edward

Carpenter remarks. "No doubt the things may act that way. But

why, we may ask, should people be afraid of rousing passions

which, after all, are the great driving forces of human life?" It

is true, the same writer continues, our conventional moral

formulæ are no longer strong enough to control passion

adequately, and that we are generating steam in a boiler that is

cankered with rust. "The cure is not to cut off the passions, or

to be weakly afraid of them, but to find a new, sound, healthy

engine of general morality and common sense within which they

will work" (Edward Carpenter, _Albany Review_, Sept., 1907).

So far as I am aware, however, it was James Hinton who chiefly

sought to make clear the possibility of a positive morality on

the basis of nakedness, beauty, and sexual influence, regarded as

dynamic forces which, when suppressed, make for corruption and

when wisely used serve to inspire and ennoble life. He worked out

his thoughts on this matter in MSS., written from about 1870 to

his death two years later, which, never having been prepared for

publication, remain in a fragmentary state and have not been

published. I quote a few brief characteristic passages: "Is not,"

he wrote, "the Hindu refusal to see a woman eating strangely like

ours to see one naked? The real sensuality of the thought is

visibly identical.... Suppose, because they are delicious to eat,

pineapples were forbidden to be seen, except in pictures, and

about that there was something dubious. Suppose no one might have

sight of a pineapple unless he were rich enough to purchase one

for his particular eating, the sight and the eating being so

indissolubly joined. What lustfulness would surround them, what

constant pruriency, what stealing!... Miss ---- told us of her

Syrian adventures, and how she went into a wood-carver's shop and

he would not look at her; and how she took up a tool and worked,

till at last he looked, and they both burst out laughing. Will it

not be even so with our looking at women altogether? There will

come a _work_--and at last we shall look up and both burst out

laughing.... When men see truly what is amiss, and act with

reason and forethought in respect to the sexual relations, will

they not insist on the enjoyment of women's beauty by youths, and

from the earliest age, that the first feeling may be of beauty?

Will they not say, 'We must not allow the false purity, we must

have the true.' The false has been tried, and it is not good

enough; the power purely to enjoy beauty must be gained;

attempting to do with less is fatal. Every instructor of youth

shall say: 'This beauty of woman, God's chief work of beauty, it

is good you see it; it is a pleasure that serves good; all beauty

serves it, and above all this, for its office is to make you

pure. Come to it as you come to daily bread, or pure air, or the

cleansing bath: this is pure to you if you be pure, it will aid

you in your effort to be so. But if any of you are impure, and

make of it the feeder of impurity, then you should be ashamed and

pray; it is not for you our life can be ordered; it is for men

and not for beasts.' This must come when men open their eyes, and

act coolly and with reason and forethought, and not in mere panic

in respect to the sexual passion in its moral relations."

FOOTNOTES:

[40] Thus Athenæus (Bk. xiii, Ch. XX) says: "In the Island of Chios it is

a beautiful sight to go to the gymnasia and the race-courses, and to see

the young men wrestling naked with the maidens who are also naked."

[41] Augustine (_De civitate Dei_, lib. ii, cap. XIII) refers to the same

point, contrasting the Romans with the Greeks who honored their actors.

[42] See "The Evolution of Modesty" in the first volume of these

_Studies_, where this question of the relationship of nakedness to modesty

is fully discussed.

[43] C.H. Stratz, _Die Körperformen in Kunst und Leben der Japaner_,

Second edition, Ch. III; id., _Frauenkleidung_, Third edition, pp. 22, 30.

[44] I have not considered it in place here to emphasize the æsthetic

influence of familiarity with nakedness. The most æsthetic nations

(notably the Greeks and the Japanese) have been those that preserved a

certain degree of familiarity with the naked body. "In all arts,"

Maeterlinck remarks, "civilized peoples have approached or departed from

pure beauty according as they approached or departed from the habit of

nakedness." Ungewitter insists on the advantage to the artist of being

able to study the naked body in movement, and it may be worth mentioning

that Fidus (Hugo Höppener), the German artist of to-day who has exerted

great influence by his fresh, powerful and yet reverent delineation of the

naked human form in all its varying aspects, attributes his inspiration

and vision to the fact that, as a pupil of Diefenbach, he was accustomed

with his companions to work naked in the solitudes outside Munich which

they frequented (F. Enzensberger, "Fidus," _Deutsche Kultur_, Aug., 1906).

CHAPTER IV.

THE VALUATION OF SEXUAL LOVE.

The Conception of Sexual Love--The Attitude of Mediæval Asceticism--St.

Bernard and St. Odo of Cluny--The Ascetic Insistence on the Proximity of

the Sexual and Excretory Centres--Love as a Sacrament of Nature--The Idea

of the Impurity of Sex in Primitive Religions Generally--Theories of the

Origin of This Idea--The Anti-Ascetic Element in the Bible and Early

Christianity--Clement of Alexandria--St. Augustine's Attitude--The

Recognition of the Sacredness of the Body by Tertullian, Rufinus and

Athanasius--The Reformation--The Sexual Instinct regarded as Beastly--The

Human Sexual Instinct Not Animal-like--Lust and Love--The Definition of

Love--Love and Names for Love Unknown in Some Parts of the World--Romantic

Love of Late Development in the White Race--The Mystery of Sexual

Desire--Whether Love is a Delusion--The Spiritual as Well as the Physical

Structure of the World in Part Built up on Sexual Love--The Testimony of

Men of Intellect to the Supremacy of Love.

It will be seen that the preceding discussion of nakedness has a

significance beyond what it appeared to possess at the outset. The

hygienic value, physically and mentally, of familiarity with nakedness

during the early years of life, however considerable it may be, is not the

only value which such familiarity possesses. Beyond its æsthetic value,

also, there lies in it a moral value, a source of dynamic energy. And now,

taking a still further step, we may say that it has a spiritual value in

relation to our whole conception of the sexual impulse. Our attitude

towards the naked human body is the test of our attitude towards the

instinct of sex. If our own and our fellows' bodies seem to us

intrinsically shameful or disgusting, nothing will ever really ennoble or

purify our conceptions of sexual love. Love craves the flesh, and if the

flesh is shameful the lover must be shameful. "Se la cosa amata è vile,"

as Leonardo da Vinci profoundly said, "l'amante se fa vile." However

illogical it may have been, there really was a justification for the old

Christian identification of the flesh with the sexual instinct. They stand

or fall together; we cannot degrade the one and exalt the other. As our

feelings towards nakedness are, so will be our feelings towards love.

"Man is nothing else than fetid sperm, a sack of dung, the food of

worms.... You have never seen a viler dung-hill." Such was the outcome of

St. Bernard's cloistered _Meditationes Piissimæ_.[45] Sometimes, indeed,

these mediæval monks would admit that the skin possessed a certain

superficial beauty, but they only made that admission in order to

emphasize the hideousness of the body when deprived of this film of

loveliness, and strained all their perverse intellectual acumen, and their

ferocious irony, as they eagerly pointed the finger of mockery at every

detail of what seemed to them the pitiful figure of man. St. Odo of

Cluny--charming saint as he was and a pioneer in his appreciation of the

wild beauty of the Alps he had often traversed--was yet an adept in this

art of reviling the beauty of the human body. That beauty only lies in the

skin, he insists; if we could see beneath the skin women would arouse

nothing but nausea. Their adornments are but blood and mucus and bile. If

we refuse to touch dung and phlegm even with a fingertip, how can we

desire to embrace a sack of dung?[46] The mediæval monks of the more

contemplative order, indeed, often found here a delectable field of

meditation, and the Christian world generally was content to accept their

opinions in more or less diluted versions, or at all events never made any

definite protest against them.

Even men of science accepted these conceptions and are, indeed, only now

beginning to emancipate themselves from such ancient superstitions. R. de

Graef in the Preface to his famous treatise on the generative organs of

women, _De Mulierum Organis Generatione Inservientibus_, dedicated to

Cosmo III de Medici in 1672, considered it necessary to apologize for the

subject of his work. Even a century later, Linnæus in his great work, _The

System of Nature_, dismissed as "abominable" the exact study of the female

genitals, although he admitted the scientific interest of such

investigations. And if men of science have found it difficult to attain an

objective vision of women we cannot be surprised that medieval and still

more ancient conceptions have often been subtly mingled with the views of

philosophical and semi-philosophical writers.[47]

We may regard as a special variety of the ascetic view of sex,--for the

ascetics, as we see, freely but not quite legitimately, based their

asceticism largely on æsthetic considerations,--that insistence on the

proximity of the sexual to the excretory centres which found expression in

the early Church in Augustine's depreciatory assertion: "Inter fæces et

urinam nascimur," and still persists among many who by no means always

associate it with religious asceticism.[48] "As a result of what

ridiculous economy, and of what Mephistophilian irony," asks Tarde,[49]

"has Nature imagined that a function so lofty, so worthy of the poetic and

philosophical hymns which have celebrated it, only deserved to have its

exclusive organ shared with that of the vilest corporal functions?"

It may, however, be pointed out that this view of the matter, however

unconsciously, is itself the outcome of the ascetic depreciation of the

body. From a scientific point of view, the metabolic processes of the

body from one end to the other, whether regarded chemically or

psychologically, are all interwoven and all of equal dignity. We cannot

separate out any particular chemical or biological process and declare:

This is vile. Even what we call excrement still stores up the stuff of our

lives. Eating has to some persons seemed a disgusting process. But yet it

has been possible to say, with Thoreau, that "the gods have really

intended that men should feed divinely, as themselves, on their own nectar

and ambrosia.... I have felt that eating became a sacrament, a method of

communion, an ecstatic exercise, and a sitting at the communion table of

the world."

The sacraments of Nature are in this way everywhere woven into the texture

of men's and women's bodies. Lips good to kiss with are indeed first of

all chiefly good to eat and drink with. So accumulated and overlapped have

the centres of force become in the long course of development, that the

mucous membranes of the natural orifices, through the sensitiveness gained

in their own offices, all become agents to thrill the soul in the contact

of love; it is idle to discriminate high or low, pure or impure; all alike

are sanctified already by the extreme unction of Nature. The nose receives

the breath of life; the vagina receives the water of life. Ultimately the

worth and loveliness of life must be measured by the worth and loveliness

for us of the instruments of life. The swelling breasts are such divinely

gracious insignia of womanhood because of the potential child that hangs

at them and sucks; the large curves of the hips are so voluptuous because

of the potential child they clasp within them; there can be no division

here, we cannot cut the roots from the tree. The supreme function of

manhood--the handing on of the lamp of life to future races--is carried

on, it is true, by the same instrument that is the daily conduit of the

bladder. It has been said in scorn that we are born between urine and

excrement; it may be said, in reverence, that the passage through this

channel of birth is a sacrament of Nature's more sacred and significant

than men could ever invent.

These relationships have been sometimes perceived and their meaning

realized by a sort of mystical intuition. We catch glimpses of such an

insight now and again, first among the poets and later among the

physicians of the Renaissance. In 1664 Rolfincius, in his _Ordo et Methods

Generationi Partium etc._, at the outset of the second Part devoted to the

sexual organs of women, sets forth what ancient writers have said of the

Eleusinian and other mysteries and the devotion and purity demanded of

those who approached these sacred rites. It is so also with us, he

continues, in the rites of scientific investigation. "We also operate with

sacred things. The organs of sex are to be held among sacred things. They

who approach these altars must come with devout minds. Let the profane

stand without, and the doors be closed." In those days, even for science,

faith and intuition were alone possible. It is only of recent years that

the histologist's microscope and the physiological chemist's test-tube

have furnished them with a rational basis. It is no longer possible to cut

Nature in two and assert that here she is pure and there impure.[50]

There thus appears to be no adequate ground for agreeing with

those who consider that the proximity of the generative and

excretory centres is "a stupid bungle of Nature's." An

association which is so ancient and primitive in Nature can only

seem repulsive to those whose feelings have become morbidly

unnatural. It may further be remarked that the anus, which is the

more æsthetically unattractive of the excretory centres, is

comparatively remote from the sexual centre, and that, as R.

Hellmann remarked many years ago in discussing this question

(_Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit_, p. 82): "In the first place,

freshly voided urine has nothing specially unpleasant about it,

and in the second place, even if it had, we might reflect that a

rosy mouth by no means loses its charm merely because it fails to

invite a kiss at the moment when its possessor is vomiting."

A clergyman writes suggesting that we may go further and find a

positive advantage in this proximity: "I am glad that you do not

agree with the man who considered that Nature had bungled by

using the genitals for urinary purposes; apart from teleological

or theological grounds I could not follow that line of reasoning.

I think there is no need for disgust concerning the urinary

organs, though I feel that the anus can never be attractive to

the normal mind; but the anus is quite separate from the

genitals. I would suggest that the proximity serves a good end in

making the organs more or less secret except at times of sexual

emotion or to those in love. The result is some degree of

repulsion at ordinary times and a strong attraction at times of

sexual activity. Hence, the ordinary guarding of the parts, from

fear of creating disgust, greatly increases their attractiveness

at other times when sexual emotion is paramount. Further, the

feeling of disgust itself is merely the result of habit and

sentiment, however useful it may be, and according to Scripture

everything is clean and good. The ascetic feeling of repulsion,

if we go back to origin, is due to other than Christian

influence. Christianity came out of Judaism which had no sense of

the impurity of marriage, for 'unclean' in the Old Testament

simply means 'sacred.' The ascetic side of the religion of

Christianity is no part of the religion of Christ as it came from

the hands of its Founder, and the modern feeling on this matter

is a lingering remnant of the heresy of the Manichæans." I may

add, however, that, as Northcote points out (_Christianity and

Sex Problems_, p. 14), side by side in the Old Testament with the

frank recognition of sexuality, there is a circle of ideas

revealing the feeling of impurity in sex and of shame in

connection with it. Christianity inherited this mixed feeling. It

has really been a widespread and almost universal feeling among

the ancient and primitive peoples that there is something impure

and sinful in the things of sex, so that those who would lead a

religious life must avoid sexual relationships; even in India

celibacy has commanded respect (see, e.g., Westermarck,

_Marriage_, pp. 150 et seq.). As to the original foundation of

this notion--which it is unnecessary to discuss more fully

here--many theories have been put forward; St. Augustine, in his

_De Civitate Dei_, sets forth the ingenious idea that the penis,

being liable to spontaneous movements and erections that are not

under the control of the will, is a shameful organ and involves

the whole sphere of sex in its shame. Westermarck argues that

among nearly all peoples there is a feeling against sexual

relationship with members of the same family or household, and as

sex was thus banished from the sphere of domestic life a notion

of its general impurity arose; Northcote points out that from the

first it has been necessary to seek concealment for sexual

intercourse, because at that moment the couple would be a prey to

hostile attacks, and that it was by an easy transition that sex

came to be regarded as a thing that ought to be concealed, and,

therefore, a sinful thing. (Diderot, in his _Supplément au Voyage

de Bougainville_, had already referred to this motive for

seclusion as "the only natural element in modesty.") Crawley has

devoted a large part of his suggestive work, _The Mystic Rose_,

to showing that, to savage man, sex is a perilous, dangerous, and

enfeebling element in life, and, therefore, sinful.

It would, however, be a mistake to think that such men as St. Bernard and

St. Odo of Cluny, admirably as they represented the ascetic and even the

general Christian views of their own time, are to be regarded as

altogether typical exponents of the genuine and primitive Christian view.

So far as I have been able to discover, during the first thousand years of

Christianity we do not find this concentrated intellectual and emotional

ferocity of attack on the body; it only developed at the moment when, with

Pope Gregory VII, mediæval Christianity reached the climax of its conquest

over the souls of European men, in the establishment of the celibacy of

the secular clergy, and the growth of the great cloistered communities of

monks in severely regulated and secluded orders.[51] Before that the

teachers of asceticism were more concerned to exhort to chastity and

modesty than to direct a deliberate and systematic attack on the whole

body; they concentrated their attention rather on spiritual virtues than

on physical imperfections. And if we go back to the Gospels we find little

of the mediæval ascetic spirit in the reported sayings and doings of

Jesus, which may rather indeed be said to reveal, on the whole,

notwithstanding their underlying asceticism, a certain tenderness and

indulgence to the body, while even Paul, though not tender towards the

body, exhorts to reverence towards it as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

We cannot expect to find the Fathers of the Church sympathetic towards the

spectacle of the naked human body, for their position was based on a

revolt against paganism, and paganism had cultivated the body. Nakedness

had been more especially associated with the public bath, the gymnasium,

and the theatre; in profoundly disapproving of these pagan institutions

Christianity discouraged nakedness. The fact that familiarity with

nakedness was favorable, rather than opposed, to the chastity to which it

attached so much importance, the Church--though indeed at one moment it

accepted nakedness in the rite of baptism--was for the most part unable to

see if it was indeed a fact which the special conditions of decadent

classic life had tended to disguise. But in their decided preference for

the dressed over the naked human body the early Christians frequently

hesitated to take the further step of asserting that the body is a focus

of impurity and that the physical organs of sex are a device of the devil.

On the contrary, indeed, some of the most distinguished of the Fathers,

especially those of the Eastern Church who had felt the vivifying breath

of Greek thought, occasionally expressed themselves on the subject of

Nature, sex, and the body in a spirit which would have won the approval of

Goethe or Whitman.

Clement of Alexandria, with all the eccentricities of his over-subtle

intellect, was yet the most genuinely Greek of all the Fathers, and it is

not surprising that the dying ray of classic light reflected from his mind

shed some illumination over this question of sex. He protested, for

instance, against that prudery which, as the sun of the classic world set,

had begun to overshadow life. "We should not be ashamed to name," he

declared, "what God has not been ashamed to create."[52] It was a

memorable declaration because, while it accepted the old classic feeling

of no shame in the presence of nature, it put that feeling on a new and

religious basis harmonious to Christianity. Throughout, though not always

quite consistently, Clement defends the body and the functions of sex

against those who treated them with contempt. And as the cause of sex is

the cause of women he always strongly asserts the dignity of women, and

also proclaims the holiness of marriage, a state which he sometimes places

above that of virginity.[53]

Unfortunately, it must be said, St. Augustine--another North African, but

of Roman Carthage and not of Greek Alexandria--thought that he had a

convincing answer to the kind of argument which Clement presented, and so

great was the force of his passionate and potent genius that he was able

in the end to make his answer prevail. For Augustine sin was hereditary,

and sin had its special seat and symbol in the sexual organs; the fact of

sin has modified the original divine act of creation, and we cannot treat

sex and its organs as though there had been no inherited sin. Our sexual

organs, he declares, have become shameful because, through sin, they are

now moved by lust. At the same time Augustine by no means takes up the

mediæval ascetic position of contemptuous hatred towards the body. Nothing

can be further from Odo of Cluny than Augustine's enthusiasm about the

body, even about the exquisite harmony of the parts beneath the skin. "I

believe it may be concluded," he even says, "that in the creation of the

human body beauty was more regarded than necessity. In truth, necessity is

a transitory thing, and the time is coming when we shall be able to enjoy

one another's beauty without any lust."[54] Even in the sphere of sex he

would be willing to admit purity and beauty, apart from the inherited

influence of Adam's sin. In Paradise, he says, had Paradise continued, the

act of generation would have been as simple and free from shame as the act

of the hand in scattering seed on to the earth. "Sexual conjugation would

have been under the control of the will without any sexual desire. The

semen would be injected into the vagina in as simple a manner as the

menstrual fluid is now ejected. There would not have been any words which

could be called obscene, but all that might be said of these members would

have been as pure as what is said of the other parts of the body."[55]

That, however, for Augustine, is what might have been in Paradise where,

as he believed, sexual desire had no existence. As things are, he held, we

are right to be ashamed, we do well to blush. And it was natural that, as

Clement of Alexandria mentions, many heretics should have gone further on

this road and believed that while God made man down to the navel, the rest

was made by another power; such heretics have their descendants among us

even to-day.

Alike in the Eastern and Western Churches, however, both before and after

Augustine, though not so often after, great Fathers and teachers have

uttered opinions which recall those of Clement rather than of Augustine.

We cannot lay very much weight on the utterance of the extravagant and

often contradictory Tertullian, but it is worth noting that, while he

declared that woman is the gate of hell, he also said that we must

approach Nature with reverence and not with blushes. "Natura veneranda

est, non erubescenda." "No Christian author," it has indeed been said,

"has so energetically spoken against the heretical contempt of the body as

Tertullian. Soul and body, according to Tertullian, are in the closest

association. The soul is the life-principle of the body, but there is no

activity of the soul which is not manifested and conditioned by the

flesh."[56] More weight attaches to Rufinus Tyrannius, the friend and

fellow-student of St. Jerome, in the fourth century, who wrote a

commentary on the Apostles' Creed, which was greatly esteemed by the early

and mediæval Church, and is indeed still valued even to-day. Here, in

answer to those who declared that there was obscenity in the fact of

Christ's birth through the sexual organs of a woman, Rufinus replies that

God created the sexual organs, and that "it is not Nature but merely human

opinion which teaches that these parts are obscene. For the rest, all the

parts of the body are made from the same clay, whatever differences there

may be in their uses and functions."[57] He looks at the matter, we see,

piously indeed, but naturally and simply, like Clement, and not, like

Augustine, through the distorting medium of a theological system.

Athanasius, in the Eastern Church, spoke in the same sense as Rufinus in

the Western Church. A certain monk named Amun had been much grieved by the

occurrence of seminal emissions during sleep, and he wrote to Athanasius

to inquire if such emissions are a sin. In the letter he wrote in reply,

Athanasius seeks to reassure Amun. "All things," he tells him, "are pure

to the pure. For what, I ask, dear and pious friend, can there be sinful

or naturally impure in excrement? Man is the handwork of God. There is

certainly nothing in us that is impure."[58] We feel as we read these

utterances that the seeds of prudery and pruriency are already alive in

the popular mind, but yet we see also that some of the most distinguished

thinkers of the early Christian Church, in striking contrast to the more

morbid and narrow-minded mediæval ascetics, clearly stood aside from the

popular movement. On the whole, they were submerged because Christianity,

like Buddhism, had in it from the first a germ that lent itself to ascetic

renunciation, and the sexual life is always the first impulse to be

sacrificed to the passion for renunciation. But there were other germs

also in Christianity, and Luther, who in his own plebeian way asserted the

rights of the body, although he broke with mediæval asceticism, by no

means thereby cast himself off from the traditions of the early Christian

Church.

I have thought it worth while to bring forward this evidence, although I

am perfectly well aware that the facts of Nature gain no additional

support from the authority of the Fathers or even of the Bible. Nature and

humanity existed before the Bible and would continue to exist although the

Bible should be forgotten. But the attitude of Christianity on this point

has so often been unreservedly condemned that it seems as well to point

out that at its finest moments, when it was a young and growing power in

the world, the utterances of Christianity were often at one with those of

Nature and reason. There are many, it may be added, who find it a matter

of consolation that in following the natural and rational path in this

matter they are not thereby altogether breaking with the religious

traditions of their race.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that when we turn from

Christianity to the other great world-religions, we do not

usually meet with so ambiguous an attitude towards sex. The

Mahommedans were as emphatic in asserting the sanctity of sex as

they were in asserting physical cleanliness; they were prepared

to carry the functions of sex into the future life, and were

never worried, as Luther and so many other Christians have been,

concerning the lack of occupation in Heaven. In India, although

India is the home of the most extreme forms of religious

asceticism, sexual love has been sanctified and divinized to a

greater extent than in any other part of the world. "It seems

never to have entered into the heads of the Hindu legislators,"

said Sir William Jones long since (_Works_, vol. ii, p. 311),

"that anything natural could be offensively obscene, a

singularity which pervades all their writings, but is no proof of

the depravity of their morals." The sexual act has often had a

religious significance in India, and the minutest details of the

sexual life and its variations are discussed in Indian erotic

treatises in a spirit of gravity, while nowhere else have the

anatomical and physiological sexual characters of women been

studied with such minute and adoring reverence. "Love in India,

both as regards theory and practice," remarks Richard Schmidt

(_Beiträge zur Indischen Erotik_, p. 2) "possesses an importance

which it is impossible for us even to conceive."

In Protestant countries the influence of the Reformation, by

rehabilitating sex as natural, indirectly tended to substitute in popular

feeling towards sex the opprobrium of sinfulness by the opprobrium of

animality. Henceforth the sexual impulse must be disguised or adorned to

become respectably human. This may be illustrated by a passage in Pepys's

_Diary_ in the seventeenth century. On the morning after the wedding day

it was customary to call up new married couples by music; the absence of

this music on one occasion (in 1667) seemed to Pepys "as if they had

married like dog and bitch." We no longer insist on the music, but the

same feeling still exists in the craving for other disguises and

adornments for the sexual impulse. We do not always realize that love

brings its own sanctity with it.

Nowadays indeed, whenever the repugnance to the sexual side of life

manifests itself, the assertion nearly always made is not so much that it

is "sinful" as that it is "beastly." It is regarded as that part of man

which most closely allies him to the lower animals. It should scarcely be

necessary to point out that this is a mistake. On whichever side, indeed,

we approach it, the implication that sex in man and animals is identical

cannot be borne out. From the point of view of those who accept this

identity it would be much more correct to say that men are inferior,

rather than on a level with animals, for in animals under natural

conditions the sexual instinct is strictly subordinated to reproduction

and very little susceptible to deviation, so that from the standpoint of

those who wish to minimize sex, animals are nearer to the ideal, and such

persons must say with Woods Hutchinson: "Take it altogether, our animal

ancestors have quite as good reason to be ashamed of us as we of them."

But if we look at the matter from a wider biological standpoint of

development, our conclusion must be very different.

So far from being animal-like, the human impulses of sex are among the

least animal-like acquisitions of man. The human sphere of sex differs

from the animal sphere of sex to a singularly great extent.[59] Breathing

is an animal function and here we cannot compete with birds; locomotion is

an animal function and here we cannot equal quadrupeds; we have made no

notable advance in our circulatory, digestive, renal, or hepatic

functions. Even as regards vision and hearing, there are many animals that

are more keen-sighted than man, and many that are capable of hearing

sounds that to him are inaudible. But there are no animals in whom the

sexual instinct is so sensitive, so highly developed, so varied in its

manifestations, so constantly alert, so capable of irradiating the highest

and remotest parts of the organism. The sexual activities of man and woman

belong not to that lower part of our nature which degrades us to the level

of the "brute," but to the higher part which raises us towards all the

finest activities and ideals we are capable of. It is true that it is

chiefly in the mouths of a few ignorant and ill-bred women that we find

sex referred to as "bestial" or "the animal part of our nature."[60] But

since women are the mothers and teachers of the human race this is a piece

of ignorance and ill-breeding which cannot be too swiftly eradicated.

There are some who seem to think that they have held the balance evenly,

and finally stated the matter, if they admit that sexual love may be

either beautiful or disgusting, and that either view is equally normal and

legitimate. "Listen in turn," Tarde remarks, "to two men who, one cold,

the other ardent, one chaste, the other in love, both equally educated and

large-minded, are estimating the same thing: one judges as disgusting,

odious, revolting, and bestial what the other judges to be delicious,

exquisite, ineffable, divine. What, for one, is in Christian phraseology,

an unforgivable sin, is, for the other, the state of true grace. Acts that

for one seem a sad and occasional necessity, stains that must be carefully

effaced by long intervals of continence, are for the other the golden

nails from which all the rest of conduct and existence is suspended, the

things that alone give human life its value."[61] Yet we may well doubt

whether both these persons are "equally well-educated and broad-minded."

The savage feels that sex is perilous, and he is right. But the person who

feels that the sexual impulse is bad, or even low and vulgar, is an

absurdity in the universe, an anomaly. He is like those persons in our

insane asylums, who feel that the instinct of nutrition is evil and so

proceed to starve themselves. They are alike spiritual outcasts in the

universe whose children they are. It is another matter when a man declares

that, personally, in his own case, he cherishes an ascetic ideal which

leads him to restrain, so far as possible, either or both impulses. The

man, who is sanely ascetic seeks a discipline which aids the ideal he has

personally set before himself. He may still remain theoretically in

harmony with the universe to which he belongs. But to pour contempt on

the sexual life, to throw the veil of "impurity" over it, is, as Nietzsche

declared, the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost of Life.

There are many who seek to conciliate prejudice and reason in their

valuation of sex by drawing a sharp distinction between "lust" and "love,"

rejecting the one and accepting the other. It is quite proper to make such

a distinction, but the manner in which it is made will by no means usually

bear examination. We have to define what we mean by "lust" and what we

mean by "love," and this is not easy if they are regarded as mutually

exclusive. It is sometimes said that "lust" must be understood as meaning

a reckless indulgence of the sexual impulse without regard to other

considerations. So understood, we are quite safe in rejecting it. But that

is an entirely arbitrary definition of the word. "Lust" is really a very

ambiguous term; it is a good word that has changed its moral values, and

therefore we need to define it very carefully before we venture to use it.

Properly speaking, "lust" is an entirely colorless word[62] and merely

means desire in general and sexual desire in particular; it corresponds to

"hunger" or "thirst"; to use it in an offensive sense is much the same as

though we should always assume that the word "hungry" had the offensive

meaning of "greedy." The result has been that sensitive minds indignantly

reject the term "lust" in connection with love.[63] In the early use of

our language, "lust," "lusty," and "lustful" conveyed the sense of

wholesome and normal sexual vigor; now, with the partial exception of

"lusty," they have been so completely degraded to a lower sense that

although it would be very convenient to restore them to their original

and proper place, which still remains vacant, the attempt at such a

restoration scarcely seems a hopeful task. We have so deeply poisoned the

springs of feeling in these matters with mediæval ascetic crudities that

all our words of sex tend soon to become bespattered with filth; we may

pick them up from the mud into which they have fallen and seek to purify

them, but to many eyes they will still seem dirty. One result of this

tendency is that we have no simple, precise, natural word for the love of

the sexes, and are compelled to fall back on the general term, which is so

extensive in its range that in English and French and most of the other

leading languages of Europe, it is equally correct to "love" God or to

"love" eating.

Love, in the sexual sense, is, summarily considered, a synthesis of lust

(in the primitive and uncolored sense of sexual emotion) and friendship.

It is incorrect to apply the term "love" in the sexual sense to elementary

and uncomplicated sexual desire; it is equally incorrect to apply it to

any variety or combination of varieties of friendship. There can be no

sexual love without lust; but, on the other hand, until the currents of

lust in the organism have been so irradiated as to affect other parts of

the psychic organism--at the least the affections and the social

feelings--it is not yet sexual love. Lust, the specific sexual impulse, is

indeed the primary and essential element in this synthesis, for it alone

is adequate to the end of reproduction, not only in animals but in men.

But it is not until lust is expanded and irradiated that it develops into

the exquisite and enthralling flower of love. We may call to mind what

happens among plants: on the one hand we have the lower organisms in which

sex is carried on summarily and cryptogamically, never shedding any shower

of gorgeous blossoms on the world, and on the other hand the higher plants

among whom sex has become phanersgamous and expanded enormously into form

and color and fragrance.

While "lust" is, of course, known all over the world, and there

are everywhere words to designate it, "love" is not universally

known, and in many languages there are no words for "love." The

failures to find love are often remarkable and unexpected. We may

find it where we least expect it. Sexual desire became idealized

(as Sergi has pointed out) even by some animals, especially

birds, for when a bird pines to death for the loss of its mate

this cannot be due to the uncomplicated instinct of sex, but must

involve the interweaving of that instinct with the other elements

of life to a degree which is rare even among the most civilized

men. Some savage races seem to have no fundamental notion of

love, and (like the American Nahuas) no primary word for it,

while, on the other hand, in Quichua, the language of the ancient

Peruvians, there are nearly six hundred combinations of the verb

_munay_, to love. Among some peoples love seems to be confined to

the women. Letourneau (_L'Evolution Littéraire_, p. 529) points

out that in various parts of the world women have taken a leading

part in creating erotic poetry. It may be mentioned in this

connection that suicide from erotic motives among primitive

peoples occurs chiefly among women (_Zeitschrift für

Sozialwissenschaft_, 1899, p. 578). Not a few savages possess

love-poems, as, for instance, the Suahali (Velten, in his _Prosa

und Poesie der Suahali_, devotes a section to love-poems

reproduced in the Suahali language). D.G. Brinton, in an

interesting paper on "The Conception of Love in Some American

Languages" (_Proceedings American Philosophical Society_, vol.

xxiii, p. 546, 1886) states that the words for love in these

languages reveal four main ways of expressing the conception: (1)

inarticulate cries of emotion; (2) assertions of sameness or

similarity; (3) assertions of conjunction or union; (4)

assertions of a wish, desire, a longing. Brinton adds that "these

same notions are those which underlie the majority of the words

of love in the great Aryan family of languages." The remarkable

fact emerges, however, that the peoples of Aryan tongue were slow

in developing their conception of sexual love. Brinton remarks

that the American Mayas must be placed above the peoples of early

Aryan culture, in that they possessed a radical word for the joy

of love which was in significance purely psychical, referring

strictly to a mental state, and neither to similarity nor desire.

Even the Greeks were late in developing any ideal of sexual love.

This has been well brought out by E.F.M. Benecke in his

_Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek

Poetry_, a book which contains some hazardous assertions, but is

highly instructive from the present point of view. The Greek

lyric poets wrote practically no love poems at all to women

before Anacreon, and his were only written in old age. True love

for the Greeks was nearly always homosexual. The Ionian lyric

poets of early Greece regarded woman as only an instrument of

pleasure and the founder of the family. Theognis compares

marriage to cattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes to be

complimentary to the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his "female

boy-friends." Æschylus makes even a father assume that his

daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. There is no

sexual love in Sophocles, and in Euripides it is only the women

who fall in love. Benecke concludes (p. 67) that in Greece sexual

love, down to a comparatively later period, was looked down on,

and held to be unworthy of public discussion and representation.

It was in Magna Græcia rather than in Greece itself that men took

interest in women, and it was not until the Alexandrian period,

and notably in Asclepiades, Benecke maintains, that the love of

women was regarded as a matter of life and death. Thereafter the

conception of sexual love, in its romantic aspects, appears in

European life. With the Celtic story of Tristram, as Gaston Paris

remarks, it finally appears in the Christian European world of

poetry as the chief point in human life, the great motive force

of conduct.

Romantic love failed, however, to penetrate the masses in Europe.

In the sixteenth century, or whenever it was that the ballad of

"Glasgerion" was written, we see it is assumed that a churl's

relation to his mistress is confined to the mere act of sexual

intercourse; he fails to kiss her on arriving or departing; it is

only the knight, the man of upper class, who would think of

offering that tender civility. And at the present day in, for

instance, the region between East Friesland and the Alps, Bloch

states (_Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, p. 29), following E.H. Meyer,

that the word "love" is unknown among the masses, and only its

coarse counterpart recognized.

On the other side of the world, in Japan, sexual love seems to be

in as great disrepute as it was in ancient Greece; thus Miss

Tsuda, a Japanese head-mistress, and herself a Christian, remarks

(as quoted by Mrs. Eraser in _World's Work and Play_, Dec.,

1906): "That word 'love' has been hitherto a word unknown among

our girls, in the foreign sense. Duty, submission,

kindness--these were the sentiments which a girl was expected to

bring to the husband who had been chosen for her--and many happy,

harmonious marriages were the result. Now, your dear sentimental

foreign women say to our girls: 'It is wicked to marry without

love; the obedience to parents in such a case is an outrage

against nature and Christianity. If you love a man you must

sacrifice everything to marry him.'"

When, however, love is fully developed it becomes an enormously

extended, highly complex emotion, and lust, even in the best

sense of that word, becomes merely a coördinated element among

many other elements. Herbert Spencer, in an interesting passage

of his _Principles of Psychology_ (Part IV, Ch. VIII), has

analyzed love into as many as nine distinct and important

elements: (1) the physical impulse of sex; (2) the feeling for

beauty; (3) affection; (4) admiration and respect; (5) love of

approbation; (6) self-esteem; (7) proprietary feeling; (8)

extended liberty of action from the absence of personal barriers;

(9) exaltation of the sympathies. "This passion," he concludes,

"fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary

excitations of which we are capable."

It is scarcely necessary to say that to define sexual love, or even to

analyze its components, is by no means to explain its mystery. We seek to

satisfy our intelligence by means of a coherent picture of love, but the

gulf between that picture and the emotional reality must always be

incommensurable and impassable. "There is no word more often pronounced

than that of love," wrote Bonstetten many years ago, "yet there is no

subject more mysterious. Of that which touches us most nearly we know

least. We measure the march of the stars and we do not know how we love."

And however expert we have become in detecting and analyzing the causes,

the concomitants, and the results of love, we must still make the same

confession to-day. We may, as some have done, attempt to explain love as a

form of hunger and thirst, or as a force analogous to electricity, or as a

kind of magnetism, or as a variety of chemical affinity, or as a vital

tropism, but these explanations are nothing more than ways of expressing

to ourselves the magnitude of the phenomenon we are in the presence of.

What has always baffled men in the contemplation of sexual love is the

seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the

necessarily circumscribed region of mucous membrane which is the final

goal of such love and the sea of world-embracing emotions to which it

seems as the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has said, "the mucous

membranes, by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds all the

riches of the infinite." It is a mystery before which the thinker and the

artist are alike overcome. Donnay, in his play _L'Escalade_, makes a cold

and stern man of science, who regards love as a mere mental disorder which

can be cured like other disorders, at last fall desperately in love

himself. He forces his way into the girl's room, by a ladder, at dead of

night, and breaks into a long and passionate speech: "Everything that

touches you becomes to me mysterious and sacred. Ah! to think that a thing

so well known as a woman's body, which sculptors have modelled, which

poets have sung of, which men of science like myself have dissected, that

such a thing should suddenly become an unknown mystery and an infinite joy

merely because it is the body of one particular woman--what insanity! And

yet that is what I feel."[64]