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