Early familiarity with the nude in classic and early Italian art should be combined at puberty with an equal familiarity with photographs of beautiful and naturally developed nude models. In former years books containing such pictures in a suitable and attractive manner to place before the young were difficult to procure. Now this difficulty no longer exists. Dr. C.H. Stratz, of The Hague, has been the pioneer in this matter, and in a series of beautiful books (notably in _Der Körper des Kindes, Die Schönheit des Weiblichen Körpers_ and _Die Rassenschönheit des Weibes_, all published by Enke in Stuttgart), he has brought together a large number of admirably selected photographs of nude but entirely chaste figures. More recently Dr. Shufeldt, of Washington (who dedicates his work to Stratz), has published his _Studies of the Human Form_ in which, in the same spirit, he has brought together the results of his own studies of the naked human form during many years. It is necessary to correct the impressions received from classic sources by good photographic illustrations on account of the false conventions prevailing in classic works, though those conventions were not necessarily false for the artists who originated them. The omission of the pudendal hair, in representations of the nude was, for instance, quite natural for the people of countries still under Oriental influence are accustomed to remove the hair from the body. If, however, under quite different conditions, we perpetuate that artistic convention to-day, we put ourselves into a perverse relation to nature. There is ample evidence of this. "There is one convention so ancient, so necessary, so universal," writes Mr. Frederic Harrison (_Nineteenth Century and After_, Aug., 1907), "that its deliberate defiance to-day may arouse the bile of the least squeamish of men and should make women withdraw at once." If boys and girls were brought up at their mother's knees in familiarity with pictures of beautiful and natural nakedness, it would be impossible for anyone to write such silly and shameful words as these.
There can be no doubt that among ourselves the simple and direct attitude of the child towards nakedness is so early crushed out of him that intelligent education is necessary in order that he may be enabled to discern what is and what is not obscene. To the plough-boy and the country servant-girl all nakedness, including that of Greek statuary, is alike shameful or lustful. "I have a picture of women like that," said a countryman with a grin, as he pointed to a photograph of one of Tintoret's most beautiful groups, "smoking cigarettes." And the mass of people in most northern countries have still passed little beyond this stage of discernment; in ability to distinguish between the beautiful and the obscene they are still on the level of the plough-boy and the servant-girl.
FOOTNOTES: [18] These manifestations have been dealt with in the study of Autoerotism in vol. i of the present _Studies_. It may be added that the sexual life of the child has been exhaustively investigated by Moll, _Das Sexualleben des Kindes_, 1909.
[19] This genital efflorescence in the sexual glands and breasts at birth or in early infancy has been discussed in a Paris thesis, by Camille Renouf (_La Crise Génital et les Manifestations Connexes chez le Foetus et le Nouveau-né_, 1905); he is unable to offer a satisfactory explanation of these phenomena.
[21] "The Social Evil in Philadelphia," _Arena_, March, 1896.
[23] This powerlessness of the law and the police is well recognized by lawyers familiar with the matter. Thus F. Werthauer (_Sittlichkeitsdelikte der Grosstadt_, 1907) insists throughout on the importance of parents and teachers imparting to children from their early years a progressively increasing knowledge of sexual matters.
[24] "Parents must be taught how to impart information," remarks E.L. Keyes ("Education upon Sexual Matters," _New York Medical Journal_, Feb. 10, 1906), "and this teaching of the parent should begin when he is himself a child."
[25] Moll (op. cit., p. 224) argues well how impossible it is to preserve children from sights and influence connected with the sexual life.
[26] Girls are not even prepared, in many cases, for the appearance of the pubic hair. This unexpected growth of hair frequently causes young girls much secret worry, and often they carefully cut it off.
[27] G.S. Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 511. Many years ago, in 1875, the late Dr. Clarke, in his _Sex in Education_, advised menstrual rest for girls, and thereby aroused a violent opposition which would certainly not be found nowadays, when the special risks of womanhood are becoming more clearly understood.
[28] For a summary of the physical and mental phenomena of the menstrual period, see Havelock Ellis: _Man and Woman_, Ch. XI. The primitive conception of menstruation is briefly discussed in Appendix A to the first volume of these _Studies_, and more elaborately by J.G. Frazer in _The Golden Bough_. A large collection of facts with regard to the menstrual seclusion of women throughout the world will be found in Ploss and Bartels, _Das Weib_. The pubertal seclusion of girls at Torres Straits has been especially studied by Seligmann, _Reports Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, Ch. VI.
[29] Thus Miss Lura Sanborn, Director of Physical Training at the Chicago Normal School, found that a bath once a fortnight was not unusual. At the menstrual period especially there is still a superstitious dread of water. Girls should always be taught that at this period, above all, cleanliness is imperatively necessary. There should be a tepid hip bath night and morning, and a vaginal douche (which should never be cold) is always advantageous, both for comfort as well as cleanliness. There is not the slightest reason to dread water during menstruation. This point was discussed a few years ago in the _British Medical Journal_ with complete unanimity of opinion. A distinguished American obstetrician, also, Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, after a careful study of opinion and practice in this matter ("Bathing During the Menstrual Period," _American Journal Obstetrics_, Sept., 1900), concludes that it is possible and beneficial to take cold baths (though not sea-baths) during the period, provided due precautions are observed, and that there are no sudden changes of habits. Such a course should not be indiscriminately adopted, but there can be no doubt that in sturdy peasant women who are inured to it early in life even prolonged immersion in the sea in fishing has no evil results, and is even beneficial. Houzel (_Annales de Gynécologie_, Dec., 1894) has published statistics of the menstrual life of 123 fisherwomen on the French coast.
They were accustomed to shrimp for hours at a time in the sea, often to above the waist, and then walk about in their wet clothes selling the shrimps. They all insisted that their menstruation was easier when they were actively at work. Their periods are notably regular, and their fertility is high.
[30] J.H. McBride, "The Life and Health of Our Girls in Relation to Their Future," _Alienist and Neurologist_, Feb., 1904.
[31] W.G. Chambers, "The Evolution of Ideals," _Pedagogical Seminary_, March, 1903; Catherine Dodd, "School Children's Ideals," _National Review_, Feb. and Dec., 1900, and June, 1901. No German girls acknowledged a wish to be men; they said it would be wicked. Among Flemish girls, however, Varendonck found at Ghent (_Archives de Psychologie_, July, 1908) that 26 per cent. had men as their ideals.
[34] This belief seems frequent among young girls in Continental Europe. It forms the subject of one of Marcel Prevost's _Lettres de Femmes_. In Austria, according to Freud, it is not uncommon, exclusively among girls.
[35] Yet, according to English law, rape is a crime which it is impossible for a husband to commit on his wife (see, e.g., Nevill Geary, _The Law of Marriage_, Ch. XV, Sect. V). The performance of the marriage ceremony, however, even if it necessarily involved a clear explanation of marital privileges, cannot be regarded as adequate justification for an act of sexual intercourse performed with violence or without the wife's consent.
[36] Hirschfeld, _Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, 1903, p. 88. It may be added that a horror of coitus is not necessarily due to bad education, and may also occur in hereditarily degenerate women, whose ancestors have shown similar or allied mental peculiarities. A case of such "functional impotence" has been reported in a young Italian wife of twenty-one, who was otherwise healthy, and strongly attached to her husband. The marriage was annulled on the ground that "rudimentary sexual or emotional paranoia, which renders a wife invincibly refractory to sexual union, notwithstanding the integrity of the sexual organs, constitutes psychic functional impotence" (_Archivio di Psichiatria_, 1906, fasc. vi, p. 806).
[37] The reasonableness of this step is so obvious that it should scarcely need insistence. "The instruction of school-boys and school-girls is most adequately effected by an elderly doctor," Näcke remarks, "sometimes perhaps the school-doctor." "I strongly advocate," says Clouston (_The Hygiene of Mind_, p. 249), "that the family doctor, guided by the parent and the teacher, is by far the best instructor and monitor." Moll is of the same opinion.
[38] I have further developed this argument in "Religion and the Child," _Nineteenth Century and After_, 1907.
[39] The intimate relation of art and poetry to the sexual impulse has been realized in a fragmentary way by many who have not attained to any wide vision of auto-erotic activity in life. "Poetry is necessarily related to the sexual function," says Metchnikoff (_Essais Optimistes_, p. 352), who also quotes with approval the statement of Möbius (previously made by Ferrero and many others) that "artistic aptitudes must probably be considered as secondary sexual characters."
CHAPTER III.
SEXUAL EDUCATION AND NAKEDNESS.
The Greek Attitude Towards Nakedness--How the Romans Modified That Attitude--The Influence of Christianity--Nakedness in Mediæval Times--Evolution of the Horror of Nakedness--Concomitant Change in the Conception of Nakedness--Prudery--The Romantic Movement--Rise of a New Feeling in Regard to Nakedness--The Hygienic Aspect of Nakedness--How Children May Be Accustomed to Nakedness--Nakedness Not Inimical to Modesty--The Instinct of Physical Pride--The Value of Nakedness in Education--The Æsthetic Value of Nakedness--The Human Body as One of the Prime Tonics of Life--How Nakedness May Be Cultivated--The Moral Value of Nakedness.
The discussion of the value of nakedness in art leads us on to the allied question of nakedness in nature. What is the psychological influence of familiarity with nakedness? How far should children be made familiar with the naked body? This is a question in regard to which different opinions have been held in different ages, and during recent years a remarkable change has begun to come over the minds of practical educationalists in regard to it.
In Sparta, in Chios, and elsewhere in Greece, women at one time practiced gymnastic feats and dances in nakedness, together with the men, or in their presence.[40] Plato in his _Republic_ approved of such customs and said that the ridicule of those who laughed at them was but "unripe fruit plucked from the tree of knowledge." On many questions Plato's opinions changed, but not on this. In the _Laws_, which are the last outcome of his philosophic reflection in old age, he still advocates (Bk. viii) a similar co-education of the sexes and their coöperation in all the works of life, in part with a view to blunt the over-keen edge of sexual appetite; with the same object he advocated the association together of youths and girls without constraint in costumes which offered no concealment to the form.
It is noteworthy that the Romans, a coarser-grained people than the Greeks and in our narrow modern sense more "moral," showed no perception of the moralizing and refining influence of nakedness. Nudity to them was merely a licentious indulgence, to be treated with contempt even when it was enjoyed. It was confined to the stage, and clamored for by the populace. In the Floralia, especially, the crowd seem to have claimed it as their right that the actors should play naked, probably, it has been thought, as a survival of a folk-ritual. But the Romans, though they were eager to run to the theatre, felt nothing but disdain for the performers. "Flagitii principium est, nudare inter cives corpora." So thought old Ennius, as reported by Cicero, and that remained the genuine Roman feeling to the last. "Quanta perversitas!" as Tertullian exclaimed. "Artem magnificant, artificem notant."[41] In this matter the Romans, although they aroused the horror of the Christians, were yet in reality laying the foundation of Christian morality.
Christianity, which found so many of Plato's opinions congenial, would have nothing to do with his view of nakedness and failed to recognize its psychological correctness. The reason was simple, and indeed simple-minded. The Church was passionately eager to fight against what it called "the flesh," and thus fell into the error of confusing the subjective question of sexual desire with the objective spectacle of the naked form. "The flesh" is evil; therefore, "the flesh" must be hidden. And they hid it, without understanding that in so doing they had not suppressed the craving for the human form, but, on the contrary, had heightened it by imparting to it the additional fascination of a forbidden mystery.
Burton, in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (Part III, Sect II, Mem. II, Subs. IV), referring to the recommendations of Plato, adds: "But _Eusebius_ and _Theodoret_ worthily lash him for it; and well they might: for as one saith, the very sight of naked parts, _causeth enormous, exceeding concupiscences, and stirs up both men and women to burning lust_." Yet, as Burton himself adds further on in the same section of his work (Mem. V, Subs. III), without protest, "some are of opinion, that to see a woman naked, is able of itself to alter his affection; and it is worthy of consideration, saith _Montaigne_, the Frenchman, in his Essays, that the skilfullest masters of amorous dalliance appoint for a remedy of venereous passions, a full survey of the body."
There ought to be no question regarding the fact that it is the adorned, the partially concealed body, and not the absolutely naked body, which acts as a sexual excitant. I have brought together some evidence on this point in the study of "The Evolution of Modesty." "In Madagascar, West Africa, and the Cape," says G.F. Scott Elliot (_A Naturalist in Mid-Africa_, p. 36), "I have always found the same rule. Chastity varies inversely as the amount of clothing." It is now indeed generally held that one of the chief primary objects of ornament and clothing was the stimulation of sexual desire, and artists' models are well aware that when they are completely unclothed, they are most safe from undesired masculine advances. "A favorite model of mine told me," remarks Dr. Shufeldt (_Medical Brief_, Oct., 1904), the distinguished author of _Studies of the Human Form_, "that it was her practice to disrobe as soon after entering the artist's studio as possible, for, as men are not always responsible for their emotions, she felt that she was far less likely to arouse or excite them when entirely nude than when only semi-draped." This fact is, indeed, quite familiar to artists' models. If the conquest of sexual desire were the first and last consideration of life it would be more reasonable to prohibit clothing than to prohibit nakedness.
When Christianity absorbed the whole of the European world this strict avoidance of even the sight of "the flesh," although nominally accepted by all as the desirable ideal, could only be carried out, thoroughly and completely, in the cloister. In the practice of the world outside, although the original Christian ideals remained influential, various pagan and primitive traditions in favor of nakedness still persisted, and were, to some extent, allowed to manifest themselves, alike in ordinary custom and on special occasions.
How widespread is the occasional or habitual practice of nakedness in the world generally, and how entirely concordant it is with even a most sensitive modesty, has been set forth in "The Evolution of Modesty," in vol. i of these _Studies_.
Even during the Christian era the impulse to adopt nudity, often with the feeling that it was an especially sacred practice, has persisted. The Adamites of the second century, who read and prayed naked, and celebrated the sacrament naked, according to the statement quoted by St. Augustine, seem to have caused little scandal so long as they only practiced nudity in their sacred ceremonies. The German Brethren of the Free Spirit, in the thirteenth century, combined so much chastity with promiscuous nakedness that orthodox Catholics believed they were assisted by the Devil. The French Picards, at a much later date, insisted on public nakedness, believing that God had sent their leader into the world as a new Adam to reestablish the law of Nature; they were persecuted and were finally exterminated by the Hussites.
In daily life, however, a considerable degree of nakedness was tolerated during mediæval times. This was notably so in the public baths, frequented by men and women together. Thus Alwin Schultz remarks (in his _Höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesänger_), that the women of the aristocratic classes, though not the men, were often naked in these baths except for a hat and a necklace.
It is sometimes stated that in the mediæval religious plays Adam and Eve were absolutely naked. Chambers doubts this, and thinks they wore flesh-colored tights, or were, as in a later play of this kind, "apparelled in white leather" (E.K. Chambers, _The Mediæval Stage_, vol. i, p. 5). It may be so, but the public exposure even of the sexual organs was permitted, and that in aristocratic houses, for John of Salisbury (in a passage quoted by Buckle, _Commonplace Book_, 541) protests against this custom.
The women of the feminist sixteenth century in France, as R. de Maulde la Clavière remarks (_Revue de l'Art_, Jan., 1898), had no scruple in recompensing their adorers by admitting them to their toilette, or even their bath. Late in the century they became still less prudish, and many well-known ladies allowed themselves to be painted naked down to the waist, as we see in the portrait of "Gabrielle d'Estrées au Bain" at Chantilly. Many of these pictures, however, are certainly not real portraits.
Even in the middle of the seventeenth century in England nakedness was not prohibited in public, for Pepys tells us that on July 29, 1667, a Quaker came into Westminster Hall, crying, "Repent! Repent!" being in a state of nakedness, except that he was "very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal." (This was doubtless Solomon Eccles, who was accustomed to go about in this costume, both before and after the Restoration. He had been a distinguished musician, and, though eccentric, was apparently not insane.)
In a chapter, "De la Nudité," and in the appendices of his book, _De l'Amour_ (vol. i, p. 221), Sénancour gives instances of the occasional practice of nudity in Europe, and adds some interesting remarks of his own; so, also, Dulaure (_Des Divinités Génératrices_, Ch. XV). It would appear, as a rule, that though complete nudity was allowed in other respects, it was usual to cover the sexual parts.
The movement of revolt against nakedness never became completely victorious until the nineteenth century. That century represented the triumph of all the forces that banned public nakedness everywhere and altogether. If, as Pudor insists, nakedness is aristocratic and the slavery of clothes a plebeian characteristic imposed on the lower classes by an upper class who reserved to themselves the privilege of physical culture, we may perhaps connect this with the outburst of democratic plebeianism which, as Nietzsche pointed out, reached its climax in the nineteenth century. It is in any case certainly interesting to observe that by this time the movement had entirely changed its character. It had become general, but at the same time its foundation had been undermined. It had largely lost its religious and moral character, and instead was regarded as a matter of convention. The nineteenth century man who encountered the spectacle of white limbs flashing in the sunlight no longer felt like the mediæval ascetic that he was risking the salvation of his immortal soul or even courting the depravation of his morals; he merely felt that it was "indecent" or, in extreme cases, "disgusting." That is to say he regarded the matter as simply a question of conventional etiquette, at the worst, of taste, of æsthetics. In thus bringing down his repugnance to nakedness to so low a plane he had indeed rendered it generally acceptable, but at the same time he had deprived it of high sanction. His profound horror of nakedness was out of relation to the frivolous grounds on which he based it.
We must not, however, under-rate the tenacity with which this horror of nakedness was held. Nothing illustrates more vividly the deeply ingrained hatred which the nineteenth century felt of nakedness than the ferocity--there is no other word for it--with which Christian missionaries to savages all over the world, even in the tropics, insisted on their converts adopting the conventional clothing of Northern Europe. Travellers' narratives abound in references to the emphasis placed by missionaries on this change of custom, which was both injurious to the health of the people and degrading to their dignity. It is sufficient to quote one authoritative witness, Lord Stanmore, formerly Governor of Fiji, who read a long paper to the Anglican Missionary Conference in 1894 on the subject of "Undue Introduction of Western Ways." "In the centre of the village," he remarked in quoting a typical case (and referring not to Fiji but to Tonga), "is the church, a wooden barn-like building. If the day be Sunday, we shall find the native minister arrayed in a greenish-black swallow-tail coat, a neckcloth, once white, and a pair of spectacles, which he probably does not need, preaching to a congregation, the male portion of which is dressed in much the same manner as himself, while the women are dizened out in old battered hats or bonnets, and shapeless gowns like bathing dresses, or it may be in crinolines of an early type. Chiefs of influence and women of high birth, who in their native dress would look, and do look, the ladies and gentlemen they are, are, by their Sunday finery, given the appearance of attendants upon Jack-in-the-Green. If a visit be paid to the houses of the town, after the morning's work of the people is over, the family will be found sitting on chairs, listless and uncomfortable, in a room full of litter. In the houses of the superior native clergy there will be a yet greater aping of the manners of the West. There will be chairs covered with hideous antimacassars, tasteless round worsted-work mats for absent flower jars, and a lot of ugly cheap and vulgar china chimney ornaments, which, there being no fireplace, and consequently no chimney-piece, are set out in order on a rickety deal table. The whole life of these village folk is one piece of unreal acting. They are continually asking themselves whether they are incurring any of the penalties entailed by infraction of the long table of prohibitions, and whether they are living up to the foreign garments they wear.
Their faces have, for the most part, an expression of sullen discontent, they move about silently and joylessly, rebels in heart to the restrictive code on them, but which they fear to cast off, partly from a vague apprehension of possible secular results, and partly because they suppose they will cease to be good Christians if they do so. They have good ground for their dissatisfaction. At the time when I visited the villages I have specially in my eye, it was punishable by fine and imprisonment to wear native clothing, punishable by fine and imprisonment to wear long hair or a garland of flowers; punishable by fine or imprisonment to wrestle or to play at ball; punishable by fine and imprisonment to build a native-fashioned house; punishable not to wear shirt and trousers, and in certain localities coat and shoes also; and, in addition to laws enforcing a strictly puritanical observation of the Sabbath, it was punishable by fine and imprisonment to bathe on Sundays. In some other places bathing on Sunday was punishable by flogging; and to my knowledge women have been flogged for no other offense. Men in such circumstances are ripe for revolt, and sometimes the revolt comes."
An obvious result of reducing the feeling about nakedness to an unreasoning but imperative convention is the tendency to prudishness. This, as we know, is a form of pseudo-modesty which, being a convention, and not a natural feeling, is capable of unlimited extension. It is by no means confined to modern times or to Christian Europe. The ancient Hebrews were not entirely free from prudishness, and we find in the Old Testament that by a curious euphemism the sexual organs are sometimes referred to as "the feet." The Turks are capable of prudishness. So, indeed, were even the ancient Greeks. "Dion the philosopher tells us," remarks Clement of Alexandria (_Stromates_, Bk. IV, Ch. XIX) "that a certain woman, Lysidica, through excess of modesty, bathed in her clothes, and that Philotera, when she was to enter the bath, gradually drew back her tunic as the water covered her naked parts; and then rising by degrees, put it on." Mincing prudes were found among the early Christians, and their ways are graphically described by St. Jerome in one of his letters to Eustochium: "These women," he says, "speak between their teeth or with the edge of the lips, and with a lisping tongue, only half pronouncing their words, because they regard as gross whatever is natural. Such as these," declares Jerome, the scholar in him overcoming the ascetic, "corrupt even language." Whenever a new and artificial "modesty" is imposed upon savages prudery tends to arise. Haddon describes this among the natives of Torres Straits, where even the children now suffer from exaggerated prudishness, though formerly absolutely naked and unashamed (_Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, p. 271).
The nineteenth century, which witnessed the triumph of timidity and prudery in this matter, also produced the first fruitful germ of new conceptions of nakedness. To some extent these were embodied in the great Romantic movement. Rousseau, indeed, had placed no special insistence on nakedness as an element of the return to Nature which he preached so influentially. A new feeling in this matter emerged, however, with characteristic extravagance, in some of the episodes of the Revolution, while in Germany in the pioneering _Lucinde_ of Friedrich Schlegel, a characteristic figure in the Romantic movement, a still unfamiliar conception of the body was set forth in a serious and earnest spirit.
In England, Blake with his strange and flaming genius, proclaimed a mystical gospel which involved the spiritual glorification of the body and contempt for the civilized worship of clothes ("As to a modern man," he wrote, "stripped from his load of clothing he is like a dead corpse"); while, later, in America, Thoreau and Whitman and Burroughs asserted, still more definitely, a not dissimilar message concerning the need of returning to Nature.
We find the importance of the sight of the body--though very narrowly, for the avoidance of fraud in the preliminaries of marriage--set forth as early as the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas More in his _Utopia_, which is so rich in new and fruitful ideas. In Utopia, according to Sir Thomas More, before marriage, a staid and honest matron "showeth the woman, be she maid or widow, naked to the wooer. And likewise a sage and discreet man exhibiteth the wooer naked to the woman. At this custom we laughed and disallowed it as foolish. But they, on their part, do greatly wonder at the folly of all other nations which, in buying a colt where a little money is in hazard, be so chary and circumspect that though he be almost all bare, yet they will not buy him unless the saddle and all the harness be taken off, lest under these coverings be hid some gall or sore. And yet, in choosing a wife, which shall be either pleasure or displeasure to them all their life after, they be so reckless that all the residue of the woman's body being covered with clothes, they estimate her scarcely by one handsbreadth (for they can see no more but her face) and so join her to them, not without great jeopardy of evil agreeing together, if anything in her body afterward should chance to offend or mislike them. Verily, so foul deformity may be hid under these coverings that it may quite alienate and take away the man's mind from his wife, when it shall not be lawful for their bodies to be separate again. If such deformity happen by any chance after the marriage is consummate and finished, well, there is no remedy but patience. But it were well done that a law were made whereby all such deceits were eschewed and avoided beforehand."