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