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 takingan 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 hisIntroduction 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 inBritish 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), thatpsoriasis 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'sItineraryshows) 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 hisNackt-Cultur, and by R. Ungewitter inDie 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.
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 takingan 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 hisIntroduction 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 inBritish 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), thatpsoriasis 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'sItineraryshows) 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 hisNackt-Cultur, and by R. Ungewitter inDie 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 ofthe body; familiarity with the sight of the body abolishes petty pruriencies, trains the sense of beauty, and makes for the health of the soul. This double aspect of the matter has undoubtedly weighed greatly with those teachers who now approve of customs which, a few years ago, would have been hastily dismissed as "indecent." There is still a wide difference of opinion as to the limits to which the practice of nakedness may be carried, and also as to the age when it should begin to be restricted. The fact that the adult generation of to-day grew up under the influence of the old horror of nakedness is an inevitable check on any revolutionary changes in these matters.
Maria Lischnewska, one of the ablest advocates of the methodical enlightenment of children in matters of sex (op. cit.), clearly realizes that a sane attitude towards the body lies at the root of a sound education for life. She finds that the chief objection encountered in such education, as applied in the higher classes of schools, is "the horror of the civilized man at his own body." She shows that there can be no doubt that those who are engaged in the difficult task of working towards the abolition of that superstitious horror have taken up a moral task of the first importance.Walter Gerhard, in a thoughtful and sensible paper on the educational question ("Ein Kapitel zur Erziehungsfrage,"Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. i, Heft 2), points out that it is the adult who needs education in this matter—as in so many other matters of sexual enlightenment—considerably more than the child. Parents educate their children from the earliest years in prudery, and vainly flatter themselves that they have thereby promoted their modesty and morality. He records his own early life in a tropical land and accustomed to nakedness from the first. "It was not till I came to Germany when nearly twenty that I learnt that the human body is indecent, and that it must not be shown because that 'would arouse bad impulses.' It was not till the human body was entirely withdrawn from my sight and after I was constantly told that there was something improper behind clothes, that I was able to understand this.... Until then I had not known that a naked body, by the mere fact of being naked, could arouse erotic feelings. I had known erotic feelings, but they had not arisen from the sight of the naked body, but gradually blossomed from the union of our souls." And he draws the final moral that, if only for the sake of our children, we must learn to educate ourselves.Forel (Die Sexuelle Frage, p. 140), speaking in entirely the same sense as Gerhard, remarks that prudery may be either caused or curedin children. It may be caused by undue anxiety in covering their bodies and hiding from them the bodies of others. It may be cured by making them realize that there is nothing in the body that is unnatural and that we need be ashamed of, and by encouraging bathing of the sexes in common. He points out (p. 512) the advantages of allowing children to be acquainted with the adult forms which they will themselves some day assume, and condemns the conduct of those foolish persons who assume that children already possess the adult's erotic feelings about the body. That is so far from being the case that children are frequently unable to distinguish the sex of other children apart from their clothes.At the Mannheim Congress of the German Society for Combating Venereal Diseases, specially devoted to sexual hygiene, the speakers constantly referred to the necessity of promoting familiarity with the naked body. Thus Eulenburg and Julian Marcuse (Sexualpädagogik, p. 264) emphasize the importance of air-baths, not only for the sake of the physical health of the young, but in the interests of rational sexual training. Höller, a teacher, speaking at the same congress (op. cit., p. 85), after insisting on familiarity with the nude in art and literature, and protesting against the bowdlerising of poems for the young, continues: "By bathing-drawers ordinances no soul was ever yet saved from moral ruin. One who has learnt to enjoy peacefully the naked in art is only stirred by the naked in nature as by a work of art." Enderlin, another teacher, speaking in the same sense (p. 58), points out that nakedness cannot act sexually or immorally on the child, since the sexual impulse has not yet become pronounced, and the earlier he is introduced to the naked in nature and in art, as a matter of course, the less likely are the sexual feelings to be developed precociously. The child thus, indeed, becomes immune to impure influences, so that later, when representations of the nude are brought before him for the object of provoking his wantonness, they are powerless to injure him. It is important, Enderlin adds, for familiarity with the nude in art to be learnt at school, for most of us, as Siebert remarks, have to learn purity through art.Nakedness in bathing, remarks Bölsche in hisLiebesleben in der Natur(vol. iii, pp. 139et seq.), we already in some measure possess; we need it in physical exercises, at first for the sexes separately; then, when we have grown accustomed to the idea, occasionally for both sexes together. We need to acquire the capacity to see the bodies of individuals of the other sex with such self-control and such natural instinct that they become non-erotic to us and can be gazed at without erotic feeling. Art, he says, shows that this is possible in civilization. Science, he adds, comes to the aid of the same view.Ungewitter (Die Nacktheit, p. 57) also advocates boys and girlsengaging in play and gymnastics together, entirely naked in air-baths. "In this way," he believes, "the gymnasium would become a school of morality, in which young growing things would be able to retain their purity as long as possible through becoming naturally accustomed to each other. At the same time their bodies would be hardened and developed, and the perception of beautiful and natural forms awakened." To those who have any "moral" doubts on the matter, he mentions the custom in remote country districts of boys and girls bathing together quite naked and without any sexual consciousness. Rudolf Sommer, similarly, in an excellent article entitled "Mädchenerziehung oder Menschenbildung?" (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. i, Heft 3) advises that children should be made accustomed to each other's nakedness from an early age in the family life of the house or the garden, in games, and especially in bathing; he remarks that parents having children of only one sex should cultivate for their children's sake intimate relations with a family having children of like age of the opposite sex, so that they may grow up together.
Maria Lischnewska, one of the ablest advocates of the methodical enlightenment of children in matters of sex (op. cit.), clearly realizes that a sane attitude towards the body lies at the root of a sound education for life. She finds that the chief objection encountered in such education, as applied in the higher classes of schools, is "the horror of the civilized man at his own body." She shows that there can be no doubt that those who are engaged in the difficult task of working towards the abolition of that superstitious horror have taken up a moral task of the first importance.
Walter Gerhard, in a thoughtful and sensible paper on the educational question ("Ein Kapitel zur Erziehungsfrage,"Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. i, Heft 2), points out that it is the adult who needs education in this matter—as in so many other matters of sexual enlightenment—considerably more than the child. Parents educate their children from the earliest years in prudery, and vainly flatter themselves that they have thereby promoted their modesty and morality. He records his own early life in a tropical land and accustomed to nakedness from the first. "It was not till I came to Germany when nearly twenty that I learnt that the human body is indecent, and that it must not be shown because that 'would arouse bad impulses.' It was not till the human body was entirely withdrawn from my sight and after I was constantly told that there was something improper behind clothes, that I was able to understand this.... Until then I had not known that a naked body, by the mere fact of being naked, could arouse erotic feelings. I had known erotic feelings, but they had not arisen from the sight of the naked body, but gradually blossomed from the union of our souls." And he draws the final moral that, if only for the sake of our children, we must learn to educate ourselves.
Forel (Die Sexuelle Frage, p. 140), speaking in entirely the same sense as Gerhard, remarks that prudery may be either caused or curedin children. It may be caused by undue anxiety in covering their bodies and hiding from them the bodies of others. It may be cured by making them realize that there is nothing in the body that is unnatural and that we need be ashamed of, and by encouraging bathing of the sexes in common. He points out (p. 512) the advantages of allowing children to be acquainted with the adult forms which they will themselves some day assume, and condemns the conduct of those foolish persons who assume that children already possess the adult's erotic feelings about the body. That is so far from being the case that children are frequently unable to distinguish the sex of other children apart from their clothes.
At the Mannheim Congress of the German Society for Combating Venereal Diseases, specially devoted to sexual hygiene, the speakers constantly referred to the necessity of promoting familiarity with the naked body. Thus Eulenburg and Julian Marcuse (Sexualpädagogik, p. 264) emphasize the importance of air-baths, not only for the sake of the physical health of the young, but in the interests of rational sexual training. Höller, a teacher, speaking at the same congress (op. cit., p. 85), after insisting on familiarity with the nude in art and literature, and protesting against the bowdlerising of poems for the young, continues: "By bathing-drawers ordinances no soul was ever yet saved from moral ruin. One who has learnt to enjoy peacefully the naked in art is only stirred by the naked in nature as by a work of art." Enderlin, another teacher, speaking in the same sense (p. 58), points out that nakedness cannot act sexually or immorally on the child, since the sexual impulse has not yet become pronounced, and the earlier he is introduced to the naked in nature and in art, as a matter of course, the less likely are the sexual feelings to be developed precociously. The child thus, indeed, becomes immune to impure influences, so that later, when representations of the nude are brought before him for the object of provoking his wantonness, they are powerless to injure him. It is important, Enderlin adds, for familiarity with the nude in art to be learnt at school, for most of us, as Siebert remarks, have to learn purity through art.
Nakedness in bathing, remarks Bölsche in hisLiebesleben in der Natur(vol. iii, pp. 139et seq.), we already in some measure possess; we need it in physical exercises, at first for the sexes separately; then, when we have grown accustomed to the idea, occasionally for both sexes together. We need to acquire the capacity to see the bodies of individuals of the other sex with such self-control and such natural instinct that they become non-erotic to us and can be gazed at without erotic feeling. Art, he says, shows that this is possible in civilization. Science, he adds, comes to the aid of the same view.
Ungewitter (Die Nacktheit, p. 57) also advocates boys and girlsengaging in play and gymnastics together, entirely naked in air-baths. "In this way," he believes, "the gymnasium would become a school of morality, in which young growing things would be able to retain their purity as long as possible through becoming naturally accustomed to each other. At the same time their bodies would be hardened and developed, and the perception of beautiful and natural forms awakened." To those who have any "moral" doubts on the matter, he mentions the custom in remote country districts of boys and girls bathing together quite naked and without any sexual consciousness. Rudolf Sommer, similarly, in an excellent article entitled "Mädchenerziehung oder Menschenbildung?" (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. i, Heft 3) advises that children should be made accustomed to each other's nakedness from an early age in the family life of the house or the garden, in games, and especially in bathing; he remarks that parents having children of only one sex should cultivate for their children's sake intimate relations with a family having children of like age of the opposite sex, so that they may grow up together.
It is scarcely necessary to add that the cultivation of nakedness must always be conciliated with respect for the natural instincts of modesty. If the practice of nakedness led the young to experience a diminished reverence for their own or others' personalities the advantages of it would be too dearly bought. This is, in part, a matter of wholesome instinct, in part of wise training. We now know that the absence of clothes has little relation with the absence of modesty, such relation as there is being of the inverse order, for the savage races which go naked are usually more modest than those which wear clothes. The saying quoted by Herodotus in the early Greek world that "A woman takes off her modesty with her shift" was a favorite text of the Christian Fathers. But Plutarch, who was also a moralist, had already protested against it at the close of the Greek world: "By no means," he declared, "she who is modest clothes herself with modesty when she lays aside her tunic." "A woman may be naked," as Mrs. Bishop, the traveller, remarked to Dr. Baelz, in Japan, "and yet behave like a lady."[42]
The question is complicated among ourselves because establishedtraditions of rigid concealment have fostered a pruriency which is an offensive insult to naked modesty. In many lands the women who are accustomed to be almost or quite naked in the presence of their own people cover themselves as soon as they become conscious of the lustful inquisitive eyes of Europeans. Stratz refers to the prevalence of this impulse of offended modesty in Japan, and mentions that he himself failed to arouse it simply because he was a physician, and, moreover, had long lived in another land (Java) where also the custom of nakedness prevails.[43]So long as this unnatural prurience exists a free unqualified nakedness is rendered difficult.
Modesty is not, however, the only natural impulse which has to be considered in relation to the custom of nakedness. It seems probable that in cultivating the practice of nakedness we are not merely carrying out a moral and hygienic prescription but allowing legitimate scope to an instinct which at some periods of life, especially in adolescence, is spontaneous and natural, even, it may be, wholesomely based in the traditions of the race in sexual selection. Our rigid conventions make it impossible for us to discover the laws of nature in this matter by stifling them at the outset. It may well be that there is a rhythmic harmony and concordance between impulses of modesty and impulses of ostentation, though we have done our best to disguise the natural law by our stupid and perverse by-laws.
Stanley Hall, who emphasizes the importance of nakedness, remarks that at puberty we have much reason to assume that in a state of nature there is a certain instinctive pride and ostentation that accompanies the new local development, and quotes the observation of Dr. Seerley that the impulse to conceal the sexual organs is especially marked in young men who are underdeveloped, but not evident in those who are developed beyond the average. Stanley Hall (Adolescence, vol. ii, p. 97), also refers to the frequency with which not only "virtuous young men, but even women, rather glory in occasions when they can display the beauty of their forms without reserve, not only to themselves and to loved ones, but even to others with proper pretexts."Many have doubtless noted this tendency, especially in women, andchiefly in those who are conscious of beautiful physical development. Madame Céline Renooz believes that the tendency corresponds to a really deep-rooted instinct in women, little or not at all manifested in men who have consequently sought to impose artificially on women their own masculine conceptions of modesty. "In the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a moment when, by a secret atavism, she feels the pride of her sex, the intuition of her moral superiority and cannot understand why she must hide its cause. At this moment, wavering between the laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely knows if nakedness should, or should not, affright her. A sort of confused atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing was known, and reveals to her as a paradisaical ideal the customs of that human epoch" (Céline Renooz,Psychologie Comparée de l'Homme et de la Femme, pp. 85-87). Perhaps this was obscurely felt by the German girl (mentioned in Kalbeck'sLife of Brahms), who said: "One enjoys music twice as muchdécolletée."
Stanley Hall, who emphasizes the importance of nakedness, remarks that at puberty we have much reason to assume that in a state of nature there is a certain instinctive pride and ostentation that accompanies the new local development, and quotes the observation of Dr. Seerley that the impulse to conceal the sexual organs is especially marked in young men who are underdeveloped, but not evident in those who are developed beyond the average. Stanley Hall (Adolescence, vol. ii, p. 97), also refers to the frequency with which not only "virtuous young men, but even women, rather glory in occasions when they can display the beauty of their forms without reserve, not only to themselves and to loved ones, but even to others with proper pretexts."
Many have doubtless noted this tendency, especially in women, andchiefly in those who are conscious of beautiful physical development. Madame Céline Renooz believes that the tendency corresponds to a really deep-rooted instinct in women, little or not at all manifested in men who have consequently sought to impose artificially on women their own masculine conceptions of modesty. "In the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a moment when, by a secret atavism, she feels the pride of her sex, the intuition of her moral superiority and cannot understand why she must hide its cause. At this moment, wavering between the laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely knows if nakedness should, or should not, affright her. A sort of confused atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing was known, and reveals to her as a paradisaical ideal the customs of that human epoch" (Céline Renooz,Psychologie Comparée de l'Homme et de la Femme, pp. 85-87). Perhaps this was obscurely felt by the German girl (mentioned in Kalbeck'sLife of Brahms), who said: "One enjoys music twice as muchdécolletée."
From the point of view with which we are here essentially concerned there are three ways in which the cultivation of nakedness—so far as it is permitted by the slow education of public opinion—tends to exert an influence: (1) It is an important element in the sexual hygiene of the young, introducing a wholesome knowledge and incuriosity into a sphere once given up to prudery and pruriency. (2) The effect of nakedness is beneficial on those of more mature age, also, in so far as it tends to cultivate the sense of beauty and to furnish the tonic and consoling influences of natural vigor and grace. (3) The custom of nakedness, in its inception at all events, has a dynamic psychological influence also on morals, an influence exerted in the substitution of a strenuous and positive morality for the merely negative and timid morality which has ruled in this sphere.
Perhaps there are not many adults who realize the intense and secret absorption of thought in the minds of many boys and some girls concerning the problem of the physical conformation of the other sex, and the time, patience, and intellectual energy which they are willing to expend on the solution of this problem. This is mostly effected in secret, but not seldom the secret impulse manifests itself with a sudden violence which in the blind eyes of the law is reckoned as crime. A German lawyer, Dr. Werthauer, has lately stated that if there were a due degreeof familiarity with the natural organs and functions of the opposite sex ninety per cent. of the indecent acts of youths with girl children would disappear, for in most cases these are not assaults but merely the innocent, though uncontrollable, outcome of a repressed natural curiosity. It is quite true that not a few children boldly enlist each others' coöperation in the settlement of the question and resolve it to their mutual satisfaction. But even this is not altogether satisfactory, for the end is not attained openly and wholesomely, with a due subordination of the specifically sexual, but with a consciousness of wrong-doing and an exclusive attentiveness to the merely physical fact which tend directly to develop sexual excitement. When familiarity with the naked body of the other sex is gained openly and with no consciousness of indecorum, in the course of work and of play, in exercise or gymnastics, in running or in bathing, from a child's earliest years, no unwholesome results accompany the knowledge of the essential facts of physical conformation thus naturally acquired. The prurience and prudery which have poisoned sexual life in the past are alike rendered impossible.
Nakedness has, however, a hygienic value, as well as a spiritual significance, far beyond its influences in allaying the natural inquisitiveness of the young or acting as a preventative of morbid emotion. It is an inspiration to adults who have long outgrown any youthful curiosities. The vision of the essential and eternal human form, the nearest thing to us in all the world, with its vigor and its beauty and its grace, is one of the prime tonics of life. "The power of a woman's body," said James Hinton, "is no more bodily than the power of music is a power of atmospheric vibrations." It is more than all the beautiful and stimulating things of the world, than flowers or stars or the sea. History and legend and myth reveal to us the sacred and awful influence of nakedness, for, as Stanley Hall says, nakedness has always been "a talisman of wondrous power with gods and men." How sorely men crave for the spectacle of the human body—even to-day after generations have inculcated the notion that it is an indecorous and even disgusting spectacle—iswitnessed by the eagerness with which they seek after the spectacle of even its imperfect and meretricious forms, although these certainly possess a heady and stimulating quality which can never be found in the pathetic simplicity of naked beauty. It was another spectacle when the queens of ancient Madagascar at the annual Fandroon, or feast of the bath, laid aside their royal robes and while their subjects crowded the palace courtyard, descended the marble steps to the bath in complete nakedness. When we make our conventions of clothing rigid we at once spread a feast for lust and deny ourselves one of the prime tonics of life.
"I was feeling in despair and walking despondently along a Melbourne street," writes the Australian author of a yet unpublished autobiography, "when three children came running out of a lane and crossed the road in full daylight. The beauty and texture of their legs in the open air filled me with joy, so that I forgot all my troubles whilst looking at them. It was a bright revelation, an unexpected glimpse of Paradise, and I have never ceased to thank the happy combination of shape, pure blood, and fine skin of these poverty-stricken children, for the wind seemed to quicken their golden beauty, and I retained the rosy vision of their natural young limbs, so much more divine than those always under cover. Another occasion when naked young limbs made me forget all my gloom and despondency was on my first visit to Adelaide. I came on a naked boy leaning on the railing near the Baths, and the beauty of his face, torso, fair young limbs and exquisite feet filled me with joy and renewed hope. The tears came to my eyes, and I said to myself, 'While there is beauty in the world I will continue to struggle,'"We must, as Bölsche declares (loc. cit.), accustom ourselves to gaze on the naked human body exactly as we gaze at a beautiful flower, not merely with the pity with which the doctor looks at the body, but with joy in its strength and health and beauty. For a flower, as Bölsche truly adds, is not merely "naked body," it is the most sacred region of the body, the sexual organs of the plant."For girls to dance naked," said Hinton, "is the only truly pure form of dancing, and in due time it must therefore come about. This is certain: girls will dance naked and men will be pure enough to gaze on them." It has already been so in Greece, he elsewhere remarks, as it is to-day in Japan (as more recently described by Stratz). It is nearly forty years since these prophetic words were written, but Hinton himself would probably have been surprised at the progress which hasalready been made slowly (for all true progress must be slow) towards this goal. Even on the stage new and more natural traditions are beginning to prevail in Europe. It is not many years since an English actress regarded as a calumny the statement that she appeared on the stage bare-foot, and brought an action for libel, winning substantial damages. Such a result would scarcely be possible to-day. The movement in which Isadora Duncan was a pioneer has led to a partial disuse among dancers of the offensive device of tights, and it is no longer considered indecorous to show many parts of the body which it was formerly usual to cover.It should, however, be added at the same time that, while dancers, in so far as they are genuine artists, are entitled to determine the conditions most favorable to their art, nothing whatever is gained for the cause of a wholesome culture of nakedness by the "living statues" and "living pictures" which have obtained an international vogue during recent years. These may be legitimate as variety performances, but they have nothing whatever to do with either Nature or art. Dr. Pudor, writing as one of the earliest apostles of the culture of nakedness, has energetically protested against these performances (Sexual-Probleme, Dec., 1908, p. 828). He rightly points out that nakedness, to be wholesome, requires the open air, the meadows, the sunlight, and that nakedness at night, in a music hall, by artificial light, in the presence of spectators who are themselves clothed, has no element of morality about it. Attempts have here and there been quietly made to cultivate a certain amount of mutual nakedness as between the sexes on remote country excursions. It is significant to find a record of such an experiment in Ungewitter'sDie Nacktheit. In this case a party of people, men and women, would regularly every Sunday seek remote spots in woods or meadows where they would settle down, picnic, and enjoy games. "They made themselves as comfortable as possible, the men laying aside their coats, waistcoats, boots and socks; the women their blouses, skirts, shoes and stockings. Gradually, as the moral conception of nakedness developed in their minds, more and more clothing fell away, until the men wore nothing but bathing-drawers and the women only their chemises. In this 'costume' games were carried out in common, and a regular camp-life led. The ladies (some of whom were unmarried) would then lie in hammocks and we men on the grass, and the intercourse was delightful. We felt as members of one family, and behaved accordingly. In an entirely natural and unembarrassed way we gave ourselves up entirely to the liberating feelings aroused by this light- and air-bath, and passed these splendid hours in joyous singing and dancing, in wantonly childish fashion, freed from the burden of a false civilization. It was, of course, necessary to seek spots as remote as possible from high-roads, for fear of being disturbed. At the same time we byno 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 hisStudies of the Human Formthat 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'sDie 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.
"I was feeling in despair and walking despondently along a Melbourne street," writes the Australian author of a yet unpublished autobiography, "when three children came running out of a lane and crossed the road in full daylight. The beauty and texture of their legs in the open air filled me with joy, so that I forgot all my troubles whilst looking at them. It was a bright revelation, an unexpected glimpse of Paradise, and I have never ceased to thank the happy combination of shape, pure blood, and fine skin of these poverty-stricken children, for the wind seemed to quicken their golden beauty, and I retained the rosy vision of their natural young limbs, so much more divine than those always under cover. Another occasion when naked young limbs made me forget all my gloom and despondency was on my first visit to Adelaide. I came on a naked boy leaning on the railing near the Baths, and the beauty of his face, torso, fair young limbs and exquisite feet filled me with joy and renewed hope. The tears came to my eyes, and I said to myself, 'While there is beauty in the world I will continue to struggle,'"
We must, as Bölsche declares (loc. cit.), accustom ourselves to gaze on the naked human body exactly as we gaze at a beautiful flower, not merely with the pity with which the doctor looks at the body, but with joy in its strength and health and beauty. For a flower, as Bölsche truly adds, is not merely "naked body," it is the most sacred region of the body, the sexual organs of the plant.
"For girls to dance naked," said Hinton, "is the only truly pure form of dancing, and in due time it must therefore come about. This is certain: girls will dance naked and men will be pure enough to gaze on them." It has already been so in Greece, he elsewhere remarks, as it is to-day in Japan (as more recently described by Stratz). It is nearly forty years since these prophetic words were written, but Hinton himself would probably have been surprised at the progress which hasalready been made slowly (for all true progress must be slow) towards this goal. Even on the stage new and more natural traditions are beginning to prevail in Europe. It is not many years since an English actress regarded as a calumny the statement that she appeared on the stage bare-foot, and brought an action for libel, winning substantial damages. Such a result would scarcely be possible to-day. The movement in which Isadora Duncan was a pioneer has led to a partial disuse among dancers of the offensive device of tights, and it is no longer considered indecorous to show many parts of the body which it was formerly usual to cover.
It should, however, be added at the same time that, while dancers, in so far as they are genuine artists, are entitled to determine the conditions most favorable to their art, nothing whatever is gained for the cause of a wholesome culture of nakedness by the "living statues" and "living pictures" which have obtained an international vogue during recent years. These may be legitimate as variety performances, but they have nothing whatever to do with either Nature or art. Dr. Pudor, writing as one of the earliest apostles of the culture of nakedness, has energetically protested against these performances (Sexual-Probleme, Dec., 1908, p. 828). He rightly points out that nakedness, to be wholesome, requires the open air, the meadows, the sunlight, and that nakedness at night, in a music hall, by artificial light, in the presence of spectators who are themselves clothed, has no element of morality about it. Attempts have here and there been quietly made to cultivate a certain amount of mutual nakedness as between the sexes on remote country excursions. It is significant to find a record of such an experiment in Ungewitter'sDie Nacktheit. In this case a party of people, men and women, would regularly every Sunday seek remote spots in woods or meadows where they would settle down, picnic, and enjoy games. "They made themselves as comfortable as possible, the men laying aside their coats, waistcoats, boots and socks; the women their blouses, skirts, shoes and stockings. Gradually, as the moral conception of nakedness developed in their minds, more and more clothing fell away, until the men wore nothing but bathing-drawers and the women only their chemises. In this 'costume' games were carried out in common, and a regular camp-life led. The ladies (some of whom were unmarried) would then lie in hammocks and we men on the grass, and the intercourse was delightful. We felt as members of one family, and behaved accordingly. In an entirely natural and unembarrassed way we gave ourselves up entirely to the liberating feelings aroused by this light- and air-bath, and passed these splendid hours in joyous singing and dancing, in wantonly childish fashion, freed from the burden of a false civilization. It was, of course, necessary to seek spots as remote as possible from high-roads, for fear of being disturbed. At the same time we byno 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 hisStudies of the Human Formthat 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'sDie 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 stilla 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 humanbody. 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 hewould 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 awork—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."
"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 hewould 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 awork—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."
[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."
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.
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 theseStudies, where this question of the relationship of nakedness to modesty is fully discussed.
See "The Evolution of Modesty" in the first volume of theseStudies, 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.
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).
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).
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.
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 falltogether; 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 cloisteredMeditationes 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, themetabolic 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 catchglimpses of such an insight now and again, first among the poets and later among the physicians of the Renaissance. In 1664 Rolfincius, in hisOrdo 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]