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 G.o.ds 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 l.u.s.t 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"I was feeling in despair and walking despondently along a Melbourne street," writes the Australian author of a yet unpublished autobiography, "when three children came running out of a lane and crossed the road in full daylight.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 Bolsche 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 Bolsche truly adds, is not merely "naked body," it is the most sacred region of the body, the s.e.xual 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 j.a.pan (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 ent.i.tled 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 (s.e.xual-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 s.e.xes 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 gra.s.s, and the intercourse was delightful. We felt as members of one family, and behaved accordingly. In an entirely natural and unembarra.s.sed way we gave ourselves up entirely to the liberating feelings aroused by this light- and air-bath, and pa.s.sed 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual centres of the body should be covered in public, while it is otherwise fairly un.o.bjectionable. It consists of two pieces, made of porous material, one covering the b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 aesthetic, adequately covers the s.e.xual 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 pa.s.sion it is still a challenge that calls out the enn.o.bling 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 pa.s.sions if we would; reason, as Holbach said, is the art of choosing the right pa.s.sions, 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 aesthetic 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 l.u.s.t 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 s.e.x. 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 pa.s.sions," Edward Carpenter remarks. "No doubt the things may act that way. But why, we may ask, should people be afraid of rousing pa.s.sions which, after all, are the great driving forces of human life?" It is true, the same writer continues, our conventional moral formulae are no longer strong enough to control pa.s.sion adequately, and that we are generating steam in a boiler that is cankered with rust. "The cure is not to cut off the pa.s.sions, 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 s.e.xual influence, regarded as dynamic forces which, when suppressed, make for corruption and when wisely used serve to inspire and enn.o.ble 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 pa.s.sages: "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 l.u.s.tfulness 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 s.e.xual 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, G.o.d"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 s.e.xual pa.s.sion in its moral relations."
[40]
Thus Athenaeus (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 Korperformen in Kunst und Leben der j.a.paner, Second edition, Ch. III; id., Frauenkleidung, Third edition, pp. 22, 30.
[44]
I have not considered it in place here to emphasize the aesthetic influence of familiarity with nakedness. The most aesthetic nations (notably the Greeks and the j.a.panese) 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 Hoppener), 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 s.e.xUAL LOVE.
The Conception of s.e.xual Love-The Att.i.tude of Mediaeval Asceticism-St. Bernard and St. Odo of Cluny-The Ascetic Insistence on the Proximity of the s.e.xual and Excretory Centres-Love as a Sacrament of Nature-The Idea of the Impurity of s.e.x 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 Att.i.tude-The Recognition of the Sacredness of the Body by Tertullian, Rufinus and Athanasius-The Reformation-The s.e.xual Instinct regarded as Beastly-The Human s.e.xual Instinct Not Animal-like-l.u.s.t 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 s.e.xual Desire-Whether Love is a Delusion-The Spiritual as Well as the Physical Structure of the World in Part Built up on s.e.xual 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 aesthetic 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 s.e.xual impulse. Our att.i.tude towards the naked human body is the test of our att.i.tude towards the instinct of s.e.x. If our own and our fellows" bodies seem to us intrinsically shameful or disgusting, nothing will ever really enn.o.ble or purify our conceptions of s.e.xual love. Love craves the flesh, and if the flesh is shameful the lover must be shameful. "Se la cosa amata e 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 s.e.xual 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 Piissimae.[45] Sometimes, indeed, these mediaeval 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 ac.u.men, 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 mediaeval 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 emanc.i.p.ate themselves from such ancient superst.i.tions. 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, Linnaeus 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 s.e.x,-for the ascetics, as we see, freely but not quite legitimately, based their asceticism largely on aesthetic considerations,-that insistence on the proximity of the s.e.xual to the excretory centres which found expression in the early Church in Augustine"s depreciatory a.s.sertion: "Inter faeces et urinam nascimur," and still persists among many who by no means always a.s.sociate 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 Th.o.r.eau, that "the G.o.ds 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 acc.u.mulated 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 v.a.g.i.n.a 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.x 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 a.s.sert 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.n.u.s, which is the more aesthetically unattractive of the excretory centres, is comparatively remote from the s.e.xual centre, and that, as R. h.e.l.lmann 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 a.n.u.s can never be attractive to the normal mind; but the a.n.u.s 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 s.e.xual emotion or to those in love. The result is some degree of repulsion at ordinary times and a strong attraction at times of s.e.xual activity. Hence, the ordinary guarding of the parts, from fear of creating disgust, greatly increases their attractiveness at other times when s.e.xual 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 Manichaeans." I may add, however, that, as Northcote points out (Christianity and s.e.x Problems, p. 14), side by side in the Old Testament with the frank recognition of s.e.xuality, there is a circle of ideas revealing the feeling of impurity in s.e.x 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 s.e.x, so that those who would lead a religious life must avoid s.e.xual 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 p.e.n.i.s, 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 s.e.x in its shame. Westermarck argues that among nearly all peoples there is a feeling against s.e.xual relationship with members of the same family or household, and as s.e.x 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 s.e.xual intercourse, because at that moment the couple would be a prey to hostile attacks, and that it was by an easy transition that s.e.x came to be regarded as a thing that ought to be concealed, and, therefore, a sinful thing. (Diderot, in his Supplement 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, s.e.x 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, mediaeval 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 chast.i.ty 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 mediaeval 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 a.s.sociated with the public bath, the gymnasium, and the theatre; in profoundly disapproving of these pagan inst.i.tutions Christianity discouraged nakedness. The fact that familiarity with nakedness was favorable, rather than opposed, to the chast.i.ty 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 cla.s.sic 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 a.s.serting that the body is a focus of impurity and that the physical organs of s.e.x 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, s.e.x, 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 cla.s.sic light reflected from his mind shed some illumination over this question of s.e.x. He protested, for instance, against that prudery which, as the sun of the cla.s.sic world set, had begun to overshadow life. "We should not be ashamed to name," he declared, "what G.o.d has not been ashamed to create."[52] It was a memorable declaration because, while it accepted the old cla.s.sic 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 s.e.x against those who treated them with contempt. And as the cause of s.e.x is the cause of women he always strongly a.s.serts 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 pa.s.sionate 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 s.e.xual organs; the fact of sin has modified the original divine act of creation, and we cannot treat s.e.x and its organs as though there had been no inherited sin. Our s.e.xual organs, he declares, have become shameful because, through sin, they are now moved by l.u.s.t. At the same time Augustine by no means takes up the mediaeval 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 l.u.s.t."[54] Even in the sphere of s.e.x 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. "s.e.xual conjugation would have been under the control of the will without any s.e.xual desire. The s.e.m.e.n would be injected into the v.a.g.i.n.a 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, s.e.xual 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l, 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 a.s.sociation. 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 mediaeval 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 s.e.xual organs of a woman, Rufinus replies that G.o.d created the s.e.xual 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 rea.s.sure 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 G.o.d. 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 mediaeval 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 s.e.xual life is always the first impulse to be sacrificed to the pa.s.sion for renunciation. But there were other germs also in Christianity, and Luther, who in his own plebeian way a.s.serted the rights of the body, although he broke with mediaeval 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude towards s.e.x. The Mahommedans were as emphatic in a.s.serting the sanct.i.ty of s.e.x as they were in a.s.serting physical cleanliness; they were prepared to carry the functions of s.e.x 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, s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual act has often had a religious significance in India, and the minutest details of the s.e.xual life and its variations are discussed in Indian erotic treatises in a spirit of gravity, while nowhere else have the anatomical and physiological s.e.xual characters of women been studied with such minute and adoring reverence. "Love in India, both as regards theory and practice," remarks Richard Schmidt (Beitrage 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 s.e.x as natural, indirectly tended to subst.i.tute in popular feeling towards s.e.x the opprobrium of sinfulness by the opprobrium of animality. Henceforth the s.e.xual impulse must be disguised or adorned to become respectably human. This may be ill.u.s.trated by a pa.s.sage 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 b.i.t.c.h." We no longer insist on the music, but the same feeling still exists in the craving for other disguises and adornments for the s.e.xual impulse. We do not always realize that love brings its own sanct.i.ty with it.
Nowadays indeed, whenever the repugnance to the s.e.xual side of life manifests itself, the a.s.sertion 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 s.e.x in man and animals is identical cannot be borne out. From the point of view of those who accept this ident.i.ty 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 s.e.xual instinct is strictly subordinated to reproduction and very little susceptible to deviation, so that from the standpoint of those who wish to minimize s.e.x, 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 s.e.x are among the least animal-like acquisitions of man. The human sphere of s.e.x differs from the animal sphere of s.e.x 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.x referred to as "b.e.s.t.i.a.l" 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 s.e.xual 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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 s.e.x is perilous, and he is right. But the person who feels that the s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.x by drawing a sharp distinction between "l.u.s.t" 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 "l.u.s.t" and what we mean by "love," and this is not easy if they are regarded as mutually exclusive. It is sometimes said that "l.u.s.t" must be understood as meaning a reckless indulgence of the s.e.xual 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. "l.u.s.t" 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, "l.u.s.t" is an entirely colorless word[62] and merely means desire in general and s.e.xual 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 a.s.sume that the word "hungry" had the offensive meaning of "greedy." The result has been that sensitive minds indignantly reject the term "l.u.s.t" in connection with love.[63] In the early use of our language, "l.u.s.t," "l.u.s.ty," and "l.u.s.tful" conveyed the sense of wholesome and normal s.e.xual vigor; now, with the partial exception of "l.u.s.ty," 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 mediaeval ascetic crudities that all our words of s.e.x 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 s.e.xes, 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" G.o.d or to "love" eating.
Love, in the s.e.xual sense, is, summarily considered, a synthesis of l.u.s.t (in the primitive and uncolored sense of s.e.xual emotion) and friendship. It is incorrect to apply the term "love" in the s.e.xual sense to elementary and uncomplicated s.e.xual desire; it is equally incorrect to apply it to any variety or combination of varieties of friendship. There can be no s.e.xual love without l.u.s.t; but, on the other hand, until the currents of l.u.s.t 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 s.e.xual love. l.u.s.t, the specific s.e.xual 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 l.u.s.t 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x has become phanersgamous and expanded enormously into form and color and fragrance.
While "l.u.s.t" 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. s.e.xual 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 s.e.x, 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 Litteraire, 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 fur 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) a.s.sertions of sameness or similarity; (3) a.s.sertions of conjunction or union; (4) a.s.sertions 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.sertions, 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual. 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." aeschylus makes even a father a.s.sume that his daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. There is no s.e.xual love in Sophocles, and in Euripides it is only the women who fall in love. Benecke concludes (p. 67) that in Greece s.e.xual 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 Graecia 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 s.e.xual 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 ma.s.ses in Europe. In the sixteenth century, or whenever it was that the ballad of "Glasgerion" was written, we see it is a.s.sumed that a churl"s relation to his mistress is confined to the mere act of s.e.xual intercourse; he fails to kiss her on arriving or departing; it is only the knight, the man of upper cla.s.s, 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 (s.e.xualleben unserer Zeit, p. 29), following E. H. Meyer, that the word "love" is unknown among the ma.s.ses, and only its coa.r.s.e counterpart recognized.
On the other side of the world, in j.a.pan, s.e.xual love seems to be in as great disrepute as it was in ancient Greece; thus Miss Tsuda, a j.a.panese 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 l.u.s.t, even in the best sense of that word, becomes merely a coordinated element among many other elements. Herbert Spencer, in an interesting pa.s.sage of his Principles of Psychology (Part IV, Ch. VIII), has a.n.a.lyzed love into as many as nine distinct and important elements: (1) the physical impulse of s.e.x; (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 pa.s.sion," 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 s.e.xual love, or even to a.n.a.lyze 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 impa.s.sable. "There is no word more often p.r.o.nounced 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 a.n.a.lyzing 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 a.n.a.logous 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 s.e.xual love is the seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the necessarily circ.u.mscribed 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 pa.s.sionate 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]
That love is a natural insanity, a temporary delusion which the individual is compelled to suffer for the sake of the race, is indeed an explanation that has suggested itself to many who have been baffled by this mystery. That, as we know, was the explanation offered by Schopenhauer. When a youth and a girl fall into each other"s arms in the ecstacy of love they imagine that they are seeking their own happiness. But it is not so, said Schopenhauer; they are deluded by the genius of the race into the belief that they are seeking a personal end in order that they may be induced to effect a far greater impersonal end: the creation of the future race. The intensity of their pa.s.sion is not the measure of the personal happiness they will secure but the measure of their apt.i.tude for producing offspring. In accepting pa.s.sion and renouncing the counsels of cautious prudence the youth and the girl are really sacrificing their chances of selfish happiness and fulfilling the larger ends of Nature. As Schopenhauer saw the matter, there was here no vulgar illusion. The lovers thought that they were reaching towards a boundlessly immense personal happiness; they were probably deceived. But they were deceived not because the reality was less than their imagination, but because it was more; instead of pursuing, as they thought, a merely personal end they were carrying on the creative work of the world, a task better left undone, as Schopenhauer viewed it, but a task whose magnitude he fully recognized.[65]