Chapter VI…

Chapter VI

If, with Friedrich Ratzel, we understand by civilization the sum total of all the mental acquirements of a period, then also human love, this specific product of civilization, is merely a mirrored picture of the mental activities of the existing epoch of civilization. We can follow this =way of the spirit in love= from the primitive age down to the present day, and we can detect, in each successive epoch of civilization, the association with sexuality of peculiar spiritual states; and after thus passing in review the thousands of years of human history, we can discern once more in our own epoch the individual psychical elements which characterize the love of modern civilized man.

The increasing spiritualization and idealization of sensuality in the course of civilization, =notwithstanding= the persistence of the elementary intensity of the sexual impulse, is associated with the fact to which we have already alluded--namely, the preponderance of the brain characteristic of the genus homo--a preponderance which was unquestionably gradually acquired, and arose in consequence of an accumulation of original variations which gave their possessors a certain advantage in the struggle for existence.

Thus very gradually the primary, instinctive, still powerful animal ego underwent expansion into the secondary ego (in Meynert’s sense), into the =spiritual personality=, to which a fixed foundation was given by the possession of =speech=. With some justice the origin of speech has been singled out as extremely significant for the development of the feeling of love; and the conquest of the primitive animal instinct has been, above all, attributed to this faculty. A. Cabral, in his interesting work, “La Vénus Génitrix” (Paris, 1882, p. 155), expresses the opinion that speech and song developed solely on account of sexual relations; and he alludes in support of this view to the well-known manifold noises made by various animals in conditions of sexual excitement. It is very significant in this connexion that anthropological science has proved, as an important fact in racial psychology, that the development of poetry =preceded= that of prose.[33] The original form of speech was rhythmical noise, a poem, a song. And we saw above that this was subservient to more suggestive purposes, and, above all, to sexual allurement. Thus the primitive natural connexion between speech and sexuality appears somewhat probable. With these earlier erotic noises and alluring tones were subsequently associated the first elements of intellectual comprehension, the first =thoughts=.

This “withdrawal of mankind from pure instinct,” which Schiller, in his essay on the earliest human society, describes as the “most fortunate and most important occurrence in human history,” from which time the struggle towards freedom may be said to begin, gradually enabled the higher =feeling-tones= of sensation to become more predominant. The elementary impulses became associated with sensations of pleasure and pain as psychical reactions. The “organic sensations” entered the sphere of consciousness, and so gave rise, in association and reciprocal working with the higher sensory stimuli, to the psychico-emotional roots of the impulses. Thus, in the sexual sphere, out of pure voluptuousness, the simple instinctive impulse towards copulation, arose =love=, whose essence is an intimate association of physical sensations with feelings and thoughts, with the entire spiritual and emotional being of mankind.[34]

“Love,” says Charles Albert, “is the result of all the forward steps of human activity in all departments, and in every direction, as manifested in their effects upon the sexual life. It is an advance which goes hand in hand with all other advances. Man is an inseparable whole, and in theory only can he be subdivided into separate faculties. In reality, indeed, all departments of human development are so intimately associated that progress in any one of them must place something to the credit of all.”

Increasing psychical refinement and differentiation of the human type, domination of the intelligence and of emotion over brute force, transformation of the social relations between man and woman in consequence of economic conditions or of religious and moral ideas, respect for personality, a secured provision for the most pressing vital needs, and a consequent elevation and complication of the sexual life, the influence of a longing for ideal beauty in a psychical and moral sense--all these and much more have contributed to constitute sexual love in the sense in which we understand and experience it at the present day. The speech of the lover of our own time is the comprehensive expression of all human progress. The difference between animal rutting and the lofty sensation of love corresponds exactly to the gulf which separates primitive man, capable only of chipping for himself a few almost useless flint tools, from civilized man who, with the aid of innumerable machines, has tamed to his service the elementary forces of Nature.

We must recur to the earliest beginnings of the evolution of the human psyche in its association with sexuality, in order to understand the =profound= and =primitive= connexion between the bodily and the spiritual formative impulse; this connexion has been expressed by the saying that the sexual impulse is the father of all those intellectual impulses peculiar to man which have made him a thinker and a discoverer. In the time of Schelling’s natural philosophy, they went so far as to speak of the “testicular hemispheres” as analogous to the hemispheres of the brain. And is not this connexion also expressed etymologically (in German) in the verbal association of Zeugung (procreation) and Ueberzeugung (certainty, i.e., higher, or intellectual, procreation), and, further, by the fact that in the Hebrew tongue the ideas of “procreation” and “cognition” are jointly represented by a =single= term? And, returning to the physical sphere, it may be mentioned that, according to Moebius (“Ueber die Wirkungen der Kastration”--“Concerning the Effects of Castration,” Halle, 1906), sexuality is the common product of testicular and cerebral activity.

Plato was already aware of this relationship when he called thought a sublimated sexual impulse, and Buffon likewise when he described love as “le premier essor de la sensibilité, qui se porte ensuite à d’autres objets.” In more recent times, Dr. Santlus, in his valuable essay, “On the Psychology of the Human Impulses” (Archiv für Psychiatrie, 1864, vol. vi., pp. 244 and 262), alluded to this combination of the sexual sphere with the highest spiritual interests of mankind under the name of the “function-impulse.”

From these intimate relations between sexual and spiritual productivity is to be explained the remarkable fact that certain spiritual creations may take the place of the purely physical sexual impulse; that there are psychical =sexual equivalents= into which the potential energy of the sexual impulse may be transformed. Here belong numerous emotions, such as ferocity, anger, pain, and the productive spiritual activities which find their vent in poetry, art, and religion--in short, the whole =imaginative life= of mankind in the widest sense is able, when the natural activity of the sexual impulse is inhibited, to find such sexual equivalents, the importance of which in the evolutionary history of human love we shall have later to study in further detail.

Interesting observations regarding this intimate connexion between the spiritual and the physical procreative impulse are to be found in the work of a thinker who made no secret of his intense sensuality, and in whose life and thought sexuality played a peculiar part--in the work of Schopenhauer. In his “New Paralipomena” he lays stress on the similarity between the work of productive genius and the modification of the sexual impulse peculiar to the human race. In another place in which, as Frauenstädt also insists, he is speaking from personal experience, he writes: “In the days and hours when the =voluptuous= impulse is most powerful, not a dull desire, arising from emptiness and dullness of the consciousness, but a burning longing, a violent ardour, =precisely then also are the highest powers of the spirit available, the finest consciousness is prepared for its intensest activity=, although at the moment when the consciousness has given itself up to desire they are =latent=; but it needs merely a powerful effort to turn their direction, and instead of that tormenting, despairing lust (the kingdom of darkness), the activity of the highest spiritual powers fills the consciousness (the kingdom of light).”

Georg Hirth, who, in the section of his “Ways to Love” entitled “Stark-naked Thoughts,” gives in aphorisms an interesting account of the psychology of love, affirms the “delightful phenomenon of a peculiarly active enhancement of our impulse to thought and production,” =after= erotic satisfaction, =after= a fortunate love-night. Very ably, also, has Mantegazza described the spiritual activity produced by a happy and victorious love.[35]

Many great thinkers have complained of the alleged impairment of pure spirituality by the sexual life, and have recommended asceticism in order to arrive at a truer internal enlightenment. This, however, would imply pulling up the roots of spiritual poietic[36] activity, the suppression of a rich inner life of thought and feeling, the destruction of all true poetry and art. There would be left behind only the wilderness of a cold abstraction. Look at the letters of Abelard before and after his emasculation. Sexuality first breathes into our spiritual being the warm and blooming life.

“The world,” says Philipp Frey, “would be conceived by us in sharply bounded intellectual pictures, unless we saw it in the changing lights of our sexuality. From the green of gently dreaming desire, through the yellow of surging emotion, and from the blood-red of eager desire to the cool blue of satisfaction--all things appear to us in the light of our sexuality. Life would be better ordered if we were purely intelligible machines for the purposes of nutrition, work, and production. But without the dualism of desire and satisfaction, the world would become torpid in a great yawn.”

This intimate connexion between the psychic-emotional being and the sexual impulse gave rise to a deepening, a concentration, and an increasing intensity, of the feeling of love, whereby the latter becomes the most powerful influence affecting mankind in bodily and spiritual relations. Voltaire, in his “Pensées Philosophiques,” says aptly: “L’amour est de toutes les passions la plus forte, parce qu’elle attaque à la fois la tête, le cœur, et le corps.” That it is in love that the immediate admixture of organic processes most clearly manifests itself is a fact pointed out already by Aristotle, and among modems emphasized by Griesinger.[37]

Thus love discloses itself as a =nucleus=, the =axis= of the individual, and therewith also of the social life, a fact indicated already in Schopenhauer’s phrase, describing love as the “focus of the will,” and in Weismann’s expression “the continuity of the germ-plasma.” And we can easily understand that there are literary advocates of a consequent “=sexual philosophy=,” who base their view of the universe solely and entirely upon the sexual. To them the sexual problem becomes a world problem, eroticism expands into metaphysics. These sexual philosophers start from love to unveil the mysteries of life. The most celebrated advocate of such a sexual philosophy was the Marquis de Sade, of whom I have myself given an account in a pseudonymous work entitled “New Researches concerning the Marquis de Sade” (Berlin, 1904). According to de Sade, it is only through the sexual that the world can be grasped and understood.

In a certain sense the antipodes of the Marquis de Sade is a remarkable sexual philosopher of our own time, the author of “Sex and Character,” Dr. Otto Weininger. His whole circle of thought also revolves exclusively round the sexual. It forms the basis, the starting-point of his exposition; though, indeed, it does so in a purely negative sense. For Weininger is the apostle of =asexuality=; to him the highest type of human being is the non-sexual, the one who renounces all sexuality. And woman, as the incorporation of sexuality, is to him “nothingness,” the “radically evil” which must be annihilated.

A positive sexual philosopher of a nobler kind than these two anomalous spirits is Max Zeiss, whose book, “Ragnarök, a Philosophico-Social Study,” was published at Strasburg in 1904. He regards work, effort, creation, the strife for material position, for honour and renown, only as subordinate aims for the attainment of one aim--=love=.

The ever more intimate association of love with the spiritual life, its increasing depth, the inclusion within its sphere of influence of all feelings and thoughts, necessarily give rise to a stronger development of the =feeling of individual personality=, which, in contrast with the earlier instinctive impulse, came more and more to dominate the amatory life. Now love gained at least an =equal= importance for the individual that in former conditions it had for the purposes of reproduction, and therewith subjectively the reproductive idea was unquestionably thrust into the background, in comparison with the idea of personal living, of personal enrichment and development, by means of love. Hegel says aptly (“Æsthetics,” Berlin, 1837, vol. ii., p. 186): “The sorrows of love, these frustrate hopes, the very state of being in love, the never-ending pains which the lover actually experiences, this never-ending happiness and joy to which he looks forward in imagination--these are matters devoid of all general interest; =they concern only the lover himself=.” Schleiermacher also insists, in his letters concerning “Lucinde,” on the great importance of love for the spiritual development of the individual.

The individualization of love has certainly resulted in a great decline in the predominance of the reproductive idea, of the subjective sense of race, without it ever being possible for it to lose its eminent =objective= significance. Nietzsche, therefore, declares a “reproductive impulse” to be pure “mythology;”[38] and Carpenter, also, in his book, “Love’s Coming of Age,” says that human love is mainly a desire for complete union, and only in much less degree a wish for the reproduction of the race. The profound significance of individual love in the =promotion of civilization= is exceedingly well described by him when he says:

“Taking union as the main point, we may look upon the idealized sex-love as a sense of contact pervading the whole mind and body--while the sex-organs are a specialization of this faculty of union in the outermost sphere: union in the bodily sphere giving rise to bodily generation, the same as union in the mental and emotional spheres occasions generation of another kind.”

Proof of the fact that love, in its purely individual relations, is also of great importance for human civilization, that it is profoundly significant for the higher evolution of humanity, =in addition to= its importance for the perpetuation of the species--the proof of this thesis is very important in view of certain problems connected with the theory of population and in view of the practical conclusions deduced from that theory, as, for example, the doctrine of neo-malthusianism. =Love and love’s embrace do not exist only for the purposes of the species: they are also of importance to the ego; they are necessary for the life, the evolution, and the internal growth of the individual himself.=

And we must not fail to recognize to what extent the fact that the individual has gained much from love ultimately reacts also to the advantage of the species. For the species, as well as for the individual, the true path of progress lies in the direction of the individualization of the sexual impulses.

* * * * *

When we study in detail the gradual permeation of sexuality with spiritual elements, the gradual development of love, and its advance towards perfection by means of civilization, we ascertain that for the love of the modern civilized man there exists a kind of biogenetic, or rather psychogenetic, fundamental law. In modern love we encounter all the spiritual elements which were actively operative in the love of past times; the love of the civilized man of the present day is an extracted, shortened, compressed repetition of the entire developmental course of love from the earliest times to the present day. And the general course of this development reappears also in the love of the individual.

This course is, to put the matter shortly, from the general to the individual, from the remote to the proximate. We can further divide the history of human love into two great epochs. In the first epoch, love was, above all, a =transcendental relationship= of a religio-metaphysical nature. The transcendental relationships played a more important part than the purely human and personal. Everywhere an ulterior element played its part. In the second epoch, love underwent an evolution into a more =personal= relationship, in which the human being himself took foremost place, as compared with any transcendental considerations. The history of love is, in fact, an illustration of Compte’s replacement of the theologico-metaphysical epoch of mental development by the anthropological. In individual love, however, there still remain active and demonstrable many transcendental elements. The oldest spiritual elements of love continue to form a portion of the content of modern love, and to play a more or less dominant part in its genesis.

To this primeval and psychical phenomenon belongs, above all, an intimate association between =religious= ideas and feelings and the sexual life. In a certain sense, the history of religion can be regarded as the history of a peculiar mode of manifestation of the human sexual impulse, especially in its influence on the imagination and its products.

Certain modern writers, members of the laity far from learned in the history of civilization, have considered the Roman Catholic Church pre-eminently responsible for the appearance of this sexual element in ritual and dogma. This, however, is grossly unjust. A =scientific= study of these relations teaches us that =all= religions exhibit to a greater or less degree this sexual admixture, and if this appears more prominent in the Roman Catholic Church, it is due, in the first place, to the fact that this religion is nearer to us in time than many of the religions of antiquity, and, in the second place, it is explicable on the ground that the Roman Catholic Church has always displayed greater openness and less hypocrisy than, for example, the Protestant pietists, who, as the Königsberg scandal, the Eva van Buttler affair, etc., show, are no less blameworthy in respect of sexual vagaries.

A really =objective= basis for an opinion regarding the relations between religion and sexuality can only be obtained when we cease to consider these relations as an affair of dogma and of the confessional, and study them upon the basis to which they properly belong--to wit, the =anthropological=. For these relationships are peculiar to the genus homo as such. The sexual element is quite as prominent in the religions of primitive peoples as in those of modern civilized nations.

Anthropological science has hitherto been occupied more with the fact than with the explanation of the remarkable relations between religion and sexuality. There can, however, be no doubt that these relations arise out of the very nature of mankind. The various anthropologists and physicians who have occupied themselves with these problems are in agreement upon this point: that the connexion between religion and the sexual life can be explained only on =anthropomorphic-animistic= grounds--that is, by the same kind of ideas which Tylor has proved to be the foundation of the primitive mental life.

Thus, the great physician and anthropologist Theodor Billroth doubts the existence of any pure religious perception entirely free from all sensual elements. In a letter to Hanslick, dated February 21, 1891, he writes:

“In my opinion, it is nonsensical to speak of a special religious perception. What we call by this name is either a purely fanciful and imaginative opinion, which may rise to the intensity of hallucination, and has for substratum any kind of imaginative product which excites a yearning in the believing or loving individual--or else, in fanatics, it is an actual erotic excitement, like the rhythmical prayer-movements of the Mohammedans, the dancing of the Dervishes, or the jumping of the Flagellants. The Church as bridegroom for the nun, as bride for the monk, has a similar signification. It is, in a certain sense, the continuation of the service of Isis, and of the festivals of Aphrodite and Bacchus. Man has always created his gods or his god in his own image, and prays and sings to him--that is, properly speaking, to himself--in the artistic forms of the period. Since the so-called divine is always a mere abstraction or personification of one or several human attributes in the highest conceivable potency, it follows that human and divine, worldly and religious, cannot really be of differing natures. Man cannot, in fact, think anything supernatural, nor can he do anything unnatural, because he never can think or act except with human attributes.”

This explanation coincides with the view of Ludwig Feuerbach, who has especially insisted on the anthropomorphistic element in religio-sexual phenomena in his essay “Concerning Mariolatry.”

M’Lennan and Tylor were among the chief discoverers of the animistic aspect of religio-sexual ideas. In a way analogous to his attitude towards other phenomena, primitive man assumed the activity of spirits in explanation of the sexual impulse and everything associated therewith; and he paid divine worship to the sexual impulse, as the visible and palpable manifestation of those spirits.

I myself have more fully described this physiological process in a somewhat different manner (“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 76, 77), and I quote here my account of the primitive deification of the sexual.

As something elemental, incredible, supernatural, the sexual impulse made its appearance in man’s life at the time of puberty; by its overwhelming force, by the intensity, spontaneity, and multiplicity, of the perceptions to which it gave rise, it awakened feelings which enriched, vivified, and inflamed the imagination in an unexpected manner. This phenomenon, overwhelming him with elemental force, filled primitive man with a holy fear. He ascribed it to a supernatural influence, =and this supernatural influence became associated in his circle of perceptions with those others which he had previously experienced=, and which had aroused in him the feeling of =dependence upon one or several higher powers=, before which he knelt in worship. To what an extent the =metaphysical= invaded the whole sexual life of man, Schopenhauer has clearly shown in his “Metaphysic of Sexual Love.” Religion and sexuality come into the most intimate association in this perception of the metaphysical and in this feeling of dependence; hence arise the remarkable relations between the two, and that easy transition of religious feelings into sexual feelings which is manifest in all the relations of life. In both cases the surrender, the renunciation, of the individual personality is experienced as a pleasurable sensation. Schopenhauer has described in a classical manner the metaphysical impulsive force of love striving onward towards the infinite and the divine, whose analogy with the religious impulse we cannot fail to recognize.

In his thoughtful book, “The Vital Laws of Civilization” (Halle, 1904, p. 52), Eduard von Mayer has also discussed the religio-sexual problem. He starts from the idea that man regarded as higher than himself that which he was unable to master, and, above all, hunger and love.

“The pains of ungratified hunger or love plough deep furrows, into which falls the seed of voluptuousness, of satisfied hunger, or of the joys of love. And to primitive man, to whom the entire universe is full of living beings, hunger and love also appear as =divine powers=, which pain and plague him until their will is satisfied.”

The association of sexuality with religion affects both sexes equally, although the phenomenon appears more intense in woman, and is more enduring in her, owing to the greater depth of her emotional life. The brothers de Goncourt, in their diary, describe religion as simply a portion of woman’s sexual life. Feminine sexual activity thus appears something religious, pious, holy. And those priests who pretended to “sanctify” by their love the women whom they seduced, were certainly more accurate, from the =physiological= point of view, than the Church was in its condemnation of carnal lust as sin and the work of the devil. In the middle ages it was a view commonly held in France that women who had intercourse with priests were in some sort sanctified thereby. The mistresses of priests were called the “consecrated.”

The identity of religious and sexual perceptions explains the frequent transformation of one into the other, and the continuous association between the two. A sexual emotion will often function vicariously for a religious emotion, in part or wholly.

The unusually interesting history of the complicated and remarkable religio-sexual phenomena renders clear to us individual processes of this kind and certain peculiarities of racial psychology; and thereby we are led to understand the powerful after-effects of these phenomena in the customs, the morals, and the conventions of our time, and we are enlightened as to the rôle still played by the religio-sexual factor in the life of many men even of our own day.

One of the oldest, if not the oldest, of religio-sexual phenomena is =religious prostitution=--the “lust-sacrifice,” as Eduard von Mayer happily expresses it--since therein the sexual act is regarded as a sacrifice made to the deity. We have here the unrestricted offering by a woman of her body to every chance comer without love, =as an act of simple sensuality, and for payment=, and thus we find all the characteristics of what at the present day we term “prostitution.”

According to the researches I have myself previously published regarding religious prostitution, this may be divided into two great groups:

1. =A single act of prostitution in honour of the deity.=

2. =Permanent religious prostitution.=

A single act of religious prostitution mostly consists in the offering of virginity; sometimes also in the single, not repeated, offering of an already deflowered woman. In the single act of religious prostitution, the woman either offers herself =directly to the deity=, the bodily act of defloration being effected by a divine physical symbol--as, for instance, by a penis made of stone, ivory, or wood--or by direct intercourse with the statue of the god; or else the woman gives herself to a =human representative= of the deity--for instance, to the king, to a priest, to a blood-relative (not seldom to her own father, this being a variety of religious incest), and sometimes to a passing stranger.[39]

With regard to the first mode of defloration, by means of a divine symbol, we have especially full reports from the East Indies. Here, in the sixteenth century, in the Southern Deccan, the Portuguese Duarte Barbosa first saw the religious defloration of girls effected by means of the “lingam,” the divine phallus. Girls aged ten years only were sacrificed to the deity in this brutal manner. From a later time come the accounts of Jan Huygen van Linschoten and Gasparo Balbi, regarding the customs of the inhabitants of Goa. The bride was taken into the temple, where a penis of iron or ivory was thrust into the vagina, so that the hymen was destroyed. In other cases, the girl’s genitals were brought into contact with the stone penis of an image of the god, at a shrine eighteen miles distant from Goa. W. Schultze, in his “East Indian Journey” (Amsterdam, 1676, p. 161_a_), relates:

“By means of this priapus, with the assistance of friends and relatives, the maiden was deprived of her virginity with force and in a painful manner; at the same time the bridegroom rejoiced that the foul and accursed idol had done him this honour, in the hope that as a result of this sacrifice he would enjoy greater happiness in his marriage.”

This process of defloration of Indian virgins by the lingam idol is confirmed by the reports of John Fryer, Roe, Jeon Moquet, Abbé Guyon, Démeunier, and others.

The god Baal Peor, worshipped by the Moabites and Jews, seems also to have possessed such a divine power of defloration. His name, “Peor,” “to open,” is supposed to relate to the destruction of the hymen.[40]

This relationship is more distinctly expressed in the names of certain gods of the ancient Romans, such as Dea Perfica, Dea Pertunda, Mutunus Tutunus, regarding whose functions in connexion with defloration, shown unquestionably by the etymology of their names, I have referred to at greater length in my essay on “Ancient Roman Medicine” (published in Puschmann’s “Handbook of the History of Medicine,” p. 407; Jena, 1902).

For the honour of the sexual divinities, the bride was compelled, as Augustine, Lactantius, and Arnobius report, to seat herself upon the “fascinum”--that is, the membrum virile of the priapus statue--and in this way, either physically, or at least symbolically, sacrifice her virginity to the deity. According to the legend, the conception of Ocrisia was actually effected in this way![41]

According to the second method by which single acts of religious prostitution are effected, a representative of the deity exercises the latter’s right of defloration. It is a form of religious jus primæ noctis, which is given to the king, the priest, the father, and, above all, to a casual stranger, before the girl becomes the property of her husband or master. In cases in which the husband has effected defloration, the deity may be satisfied by the woman later giving herself once to his representative.

The best-known form of religious prostitution is the Mylittacult of the Babylonians, the worship of that goddess who, according to Bachofen, represents the uncontrolled life of Nature in its fullest creative activity, unchecked by any man-made laws--the goddess whose free nature is opposed to the constraining bonds of marriage. For this reason the goddess, as representative of the unrestrained nature principle, demands from every girl a free gift of herself to any man wishing to have intercourse with her. This demand is made in the name of Mylitta and in the temple devoted to her. The money paid by the man in return for his sexual indulgence belongs to the goddess, and is added to the treasures of the temple.[42]

Herodotus and Strabo give us additional accounts of this remarkable service of Mylitta. Women of rank, as well as those of the lower classes, must allow themselves to be possessed once by a stranger, and were not permitted to return home until they had given their tribute to the goddess. Moreover, the woman might not refuse herself to any stranger, whilst the man, on the other hand, had a free choice. Thus in this account we find all the characteristics of “prostitution” according to our present ideas.

This custom was abolished by the Emperor Constantine, as Eusebius informs us, in his biography of this Emperor. The accounts of Strabo and of Quintus Curtius show us that it had persisted from the time of Herodotus to the time of Constantine; in Cyprus, Phœnicia, Carthage, Judea, Armenia, and Lokris, the Mylittacult was diffused.[43]

The true origin of this cult was a consecration to the deity, a tribute to the goddess of voluptuousness. Secondarily only, other elements may have entered into the practice, as, for instance, the later widely diffused assumption of the uncleanness and poisonous properties of the blood which was shed in the act of defloration. At the same time the religious idea of a “sacrifice” may have become associated with the idea of “self-surrender” to an utterly strange and unloved man, so that it is possible that at the root of this peculiar custom there lay a kind of masochism on the part of the woman, whilst we cannot fail to recognize the existence of a sadistic basis in the demeanour of the betrothed man or husband, surrendering the woman to a strange man; both of these elements--sadism and masochism--having here a religious signification.

In Eastern Asia, and among many savage races, priests played the part of representatives of the deity to whom the defloration of the girls and the newly-married was assigned; for instance, in the Indian sect of the “Mahārājas,” founded by Vallabha, in which “=immorality was elevated to the level of a divine law=.”[44]

These “great kings” assumed the part of deities who had an unlimited right of possession over the wives of the faithful--above all, the right of defloration. They proclaimed as the most perfect mode of honouring the god a complete surrender of the woman to the spiritual chief of the sect, for purposes of carnal lust--in exact imitation of the shepherdesses (“gopis”), the mistresses of the god Krishna. This took place during the pastoral games “rasmandali” in the autumn.[45] In addition, on account of his activity as deflorator, the priest received a present in the name of the deity. Abel Rémusat reports in his “Nouveaux Mélanges Asiatiques” (Paris, 1824, vol. i., p. 16 et seq.), following the account of a Chinese author of the thirteenth century, the peculiar methods employed in Cambodia for the purpose of religious defloration. Here the priests of Buddha or the priests of the Tao religion were carried in sedan-chairs to the girls awaiting them. Each girl had a candle with a mark on it. The “tshin-than” (= adjustment of posture--that is, sexual intercourse) must be finished before the candle had burnt down to this mark!

The medicine-men and wizards among the Caribs of Central and South America, the “piaches” or “pajes,” had to effect the defloration of the young girls;[46] whilst among other primitive peoples this right was assigned to the chiefs.[47]

The talented and far-seeing Bachofen, one of the greatest of our investigators into the history and psychology of civilization, in his classical works upon “Matriarchy” and upon “The Legend of Tanaquil,” has very cleverly pointed out that religious prostitution in general arises from the primitive =opposition= to the individualization of love, instinctively felt by primitive peoples. In fact, in the religious view of sexual matters more value is placed upon the act than the person, the individual. Hence arises the slight esteem--so strongly opposed to our modern view--felt for physical and moral virginity in woman, which to us (whether rightly or not we will not now discuss) appears the symbol of feminine individuality. Waitz, Bachofen, Kulischer, Post, Ploss-Bartels, Rottmann, and other ethnologists, give additional accounts of the contempt, to us so remarkable, felt in primitive states for the virgin woman. The tragi-comic position of our own “old maids” is closely connected with this primeval sentiment.[48]

The facts we have just given regarding single acts of religious prostitution will pave the way for the understanding of =permanent temple prostitution= as a historical phenomenon.

Sexual self-surrender as a purely sensual act is associated with religious feeling. Thus in some cases a woman would experience a combination of ardent sensuality with intense religious feeling, would devote herself wholly to the service of the god, and in his name would permanently surrender her body; whilst in other cases the idea of a divine harem--in Indian belief every god has a harem--would find its earthly exemplar in temple prostitution, by means of which the deity would enjoy a number of women through the intermediation of men; or, finally, this custom would arise out of the primitive practice, according to which sexual intercourse, regarded as a religious act, =customarily= took place in a temple, or in some consecrated room of a house. In support of this view, we may quote a significant utterance from Herodotus (chapter lxiv. of the second book of his “History”), who in ethnological matters had such accurate discrimination. He reports that among the Egyptians intercourse was strictly forbidden in the temples, and then says:

“For people of all nations, except the Egyptians and the Hellenes, are accustomed to copulate in holy places, and proceed after intercourse unwashed into the holy places; and they are of opinion that men resemble animals, and every one sees beasts and birds copulating in the temples of the gods, and in the consecrated groves. Now, =if this were displeasing to the gods, the animals would not do it=. Men, therefore, do this, and give this reason for it.”

This custom arose, without doubt, from the need for a religious sentiment, and from the wish to enter into direct communion with the deity, by remaining in the temple during the sexual act. When later the divine beings obtained their own consecrated women in the form of the =temple-girls=, it was no longer necessary for a man to take his own wife or some other woman into the temple, for now communion with the deity could be obtained by means of intercourse with the temple-girls. In the case of =feminine= deities a fourth cause or influence comes into operation in the production of temple prostitution, inasmuch as the courtesans, on account of their extreme beauty and their remarkable intellectual powers, were often regarded as representatives of the goddess. This explains how it happened that among the Greeks beautiful hetairae served as models for Praxiteles and Apelles, when these sculptors were making statues for the temple.

The sacred priests of Venus, the “kade-girls” of the Phœnicians, and the “hierodules” of the Greeks, were the servants of Aphrodite, and dwelt within the precincts of the temple. Their number was often very great. Thus in Corinth more than 1,000 female hierodules prostituted themselves in the precincts of the temple of Aphrodite Porne, and even within the temple.[49]

India, where the primitive phenomena of the amatory life can best be studied, is also the favourite seat of temple prostitution, since the religious view of the sexual life is nowhere so prominent as in the Indian beliefs.[50] The temple girls of India are known as “nautch-girls,” or “nautch-women.” Warneck writes regarding them:

“Every Hindu temple of any importance possesses an arsenal of =nautch-girls=--that is, dancing-girls--who, next to the sacrificial priests, are the most highly respected among the personnel of the temple. It is not long since these temple-girls (just like the hetairae of Ancient Greece) were among the only educated women in India. These =priestesses, betrothed to the gods= from early childhood, were under the professional obligation to prostitute themselves to every one without distinction of caste. This self-surrender is so far from being regarded as a disgrace that even the most =highly placed= families regarded it as an honour to devote their daughters to the service of the temple. In the Madras Presidency alone there are about 12,000 of these temple prostitutes.”[51]

Shortt gives further interesting details of these temple prostitutes, who are also known as “thassee.”

Religious prostitution is to a certain extent still practised in Southern Borneo; and in a newspaper published at Amsterdam--The German Weekly News of the Netherlands--the following account of the practice appears in the issue of July 30, 1907:

“In the Dyak country there are to be found in nearly every kampong (village) individuals known as ‘balians’ and ‘basirs.’ The balians are prostitutes who also perform medical services. The basirs are men who dress in women’s clothing, and in other respects perform the same functions as the balians, but not all the basirs act in this way. Balians and basirs are also commonly employed to perform certain religious ceremonies, on festal occasions, at marriages, funerals, births, etc. According to the nature of the festivity, five to fifteen of them officiate. The president of the balians and basirs goes by the name of the ‘upu’; usually the oldest and most experienced is chosen for this office. The upu sits in the middle, with the others to right and left. At an important festival the upu receives from twenty to thirty gulden; the others one to fifteen gulden. The further away that a balian sits from the upu, the smaller is her honorarium; the honorarium is called ‘laluh.’ The principal balians and basirs are known as ‘bawimait maninjan sangjang’--that is, ‘holy women.’ At the present time the basirs no longer exercise the immoral portions of their duties, because the Government inflicts severe penalties if they do so; moreover, they are not allowed now to appear in public in women’s clothing.”

Religion shares with the sexual impulse the unceasing yearning, the sentiment of everlastingness, the mystic absorption into the depths of life, the longing for the coalescence of individualities in an eternally blessed union, free from earthly fetters. Hence the longing for death felt by lovers and by mystically enraptured pietists, which has been so wonderfully described by Leopardi. “The yearning for death felt by lovers is identical with the yearning for sexual union,” aptly remarks H. Swoboda, and he very rightly points out that many a suicide ascribed to “unfortunate love” is rather the result of a happy love.

Among primitive peoples, and in ancient times, =religio-erotic festivals= first gave an opportunity for the manifestation of this religio-sexual mysticism. In this the transition of religious ecstasy into sexual perceptions is very clearly visible, and in the sexual orgies in which these religious frenzies often found an appropriate finale we see the crudest expression of the relationship between religion and sexuality. In such cases sexual ardour appears to be equivalent to a =prolongation= and an =increase= of the religious ardour--fundamentally, radically coincident, as the natural earthly discharge of an ecstatic tension directed to the sphere of the remote and the metaphysical.

The fact that such sexual excesses are =throughout the world= found in association with religion, that since the very earliest times they have been connected with the =most various forms= of religion, proves once more that the origin of this relationship is dependent on the very nature of religion as such, and that it is =not in any way= due to the individual historic character of any one belief. It is, moreover, quite uncritical and altogether without justification for any modern writer to endeavour to make Roman Catholicism responsible for such an association; Roman Catholicism as such has as little to do with the matter as all other beliefs. Religio-sexual phenomena belong to the everywhere recurring =elementary ideas= of the human race (elementary ideas in the sense of Bastian); and the only way of regarding such phenomena that can be considered scientifically sound, is from the anthropological and ethnological standpoint.

This sexual religious mysticism meets us everywhere--in the religious festivals of antiquity, the festivals of Isis in Egypt, and the festivals of imperial Rome, both alike accompanied by the wildest sexual orgies; in the festivals of Baal Peor, among the Jews, in the Venus and Adonis festivals of the Phœnicians, in Cyprus and Byblos, in the Aphrodisian, the Dionysian, and the Eleusinian festivals of the Hellenes; in the festival of Flora in Rome, in which prostitutes ran about naked; in the Roman Bacchanalia; and in the festival of the bona dea, the wild sexual licence of which is only too clearly presented to our eyes in the celebrated account of Juvenal.

In India, the sect of Caitanya, founded in the sixteenth century, celebrated the maddest religio-sexual orgies. Their ritual consisted principally of long litanies and hymns, stuffed full with unbridled eroticism, and followed by wild dances, all leading up to the sexual culmination, in which “the love of God” (bhakti) was to be made as clearly perceptible as possible.[52] Even worse were the Sakta sects (the name is derived from sakti, force--that is, the sensuous manifestation of the god Siva). They gave themselves up with ardent sensuality to the service of the female emanations of Siva, all distinctions of caste being ignored, and wild sensual promiscuity prevailing. Divine service always preceded the act of sexual intercourse.

Among the Kauchiluas, one of these Sakta sects, each of the women who took part in these divine services threw a small ornament into a box kept by the priests. After the termination of the religious festival, each male member of the congregation took one of these articles out of the box, whereupon the possessor of the article must give herself to him in the subsequent unbridled sexual excesses, even if the two should happen to be brother and sister.[53]

Ancient Central and South America were also familiar with wild outbreaks of a sexual-religious character. In Guatemala, on the days of the great sacrifices, there occurred sexual orgies of the worst kind, men having intercourse promiscuously with mothers, sisters, daughters, children, and concubines; and at the “Akhataymita festivals” of the ancient Peruvians, the religious observances terminated in a race between completely nude men and women, in which each man overtaking a woman immediately had sexual intercourse with her.[54]

Sexual mysticism found its way also into Christianity. When the renowned theologian Usener, in his work “Mythology,” writes in relation to these matters, “the whole of paganism found its way into Christianity,” we must point out that in our view what “corrupted” Christianity was not “paganism,” but the =fundamental phenomena of primitive human nature=, the primordial connexion between religion and sexuality, which by a natural necessity manifested itself in Christianity not less than in other religions.

=Thus down to the present day= we encounter the most peculiar manifestations of sexual mysticism in the most diverse Christian sects, and not merely in Roman Catholicism.

In the fourth century of our era, the Jewish-Christian sect of the Sarabaïtes concluded their religious festivals with wild sexual orgies, which are graphically described by Cassianus. This sect persisted into the ninth century. The later history of the Christian sects is full of this religio-sexual element. Religious and sexual ardour take one another’s place, pass one into the other, mutually =increase= one another. I need merely allude to certain points familiar in the history of civilization, and investigated and described by many recent students: the religio-erotic orgiastic festivals of the Nicolaitans, the Adamites, the Valesians, the Carpocratians, the Epiphanians, the Cainites, and the Manichæans. Dixon, in his “Spiritual Wives” (2 vols., London, 1868), has described the sexual excesses of recent Protestant sects, such as the “Mucker” of Königsberg, the “Erweckten” (“the awakened”), the Foxian spiritualists of Hydesville, etc. Widely known also is the peculiar association between sexuality and religion in Mormonism, polygamy being among the Mormons a religious ordinance.

Not only do Roman Catholicism and Protestantism exhibit such phenomena, but in the Greek Church also sexual mysticism gives rise to the most remarkable offshoots. Leroy-Beaulieu gives an account of the Russian sect of the “Skakuny,” or “Jumpers,” who at their nocturnal assemblies throw themselves into a state of erotic religious ecstasy by hopping and jumping, like the dancing Dervishes of Islam. When the frenzy reaches a climax, a shameless, utterly promiscuous union of the sexes occurs, of which incest is a common feature.[55]

Quite apart from these sectarian peculiarities, religio-sexual perceptions play a definite part in the ideas of present-day, truly pious Christians. The idea of a “unio mystica” between man and the Deity manifests itself everywhere.[56]

Albrecht Dieterich, in his learned work, “A Mithraist Liturgy,” contributes valuable material to the history of civilization concerning these mystical unions. The oldest heathen cults were familiar with the idea of love unions as a representation of the union of man with God; and in the New Testament the ideas of the bridegroom and the marriage feast play a leading part. Christ is the “bridegroom” of the Church, the Church is His “bride.” Pious maidens and nuns are happy to call themselves the brides of Christ. This ecstatic union has always as its substratum a sexual imagination. Augustine says: “Like a bridegroom Christ leaves His bridal chamber; in the mood of a bridegroom He bestrides the field of the world.”

The literature, the theology, the visions, and the plastic art of the middle ages abound in embellishments of the mystical marriage. St. Catherine of Siena and St. Theresa were favourite objects of this form of art. The baroque artist Bernini, in his representation of St. Theresa, in the Church Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, has painted a truly modern “alcove scene,” so that a mocking Frenchman, President de Brosses, said, speaking of this picture, “Ah, if that is divine love, I know all about it.”

On October 8, 1900, when Crescentia Höss, of Kaufbeuren, was canonized in the Peterskirche, a picture was exhibited in which was depicted the mystical union between the new saint and the Redeemer. To the picture was attached a Latin inscription signifying, “Our Lord Jesus Christ presents to the virgin Crescentia, in the presence of the most holy Mother of God and of Crescentia’s guardian angel as groomsman, the marriage ring, and weds her.” The novice about to become a nun appears before the altar dressed as a bride, in order to wed herself eternally to Christ; and in the life of the common people we find an even more realistic view is taken of this mystical marriage. A celibate priesthood appears to the peasant, notwithstanding all the respect that he has for the clerical vocation, as something strange and incomprehensible; he regards the “primiz,” the first mass of the newly ordained priest, as a marriage which the most reverend priest celebrates with the Church, and for this purpose the Church is represented by a young girl. This is at the present day still a popular custom in Baden, Bavaria, and the Tyrol. In this ceremony, which does not lack a poetic aspect--it is admirably described by F. P. Piger in the Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, 1899--the peasants who are present make the coarsest and most pointed jokes, and as soon as the celebration is finished, they withdraw, in the company of the “holy” bride, to a public-house, where “they need not be embarrassed by the presence of the reverend priest.”

The intimate association between sexuality and religion in these mystical unions and marriages has been shown by Ludwig Feuerbach in his treatise, “Ueber den Marienkultus” (“On Mariolatry”), Complete Works, Leipzig, 1846, vol. i., pp. 181-199. A very interesting instance of this is also afforded by the following religious poem, which appears in a poetical devotional work, at one time very widely diffused among the feminine population of France (“Les Perles de Saint François de Sales, ou les plus belles Pensées du Bienheureux sur l’Amour de Dieu,” Paris, 1871):

“Vive Jésus, vive sa force, Vive son agréable amorce! Vive Jésus, quand sa bonté Me reduit dans la nudité; Vive Jésus, quand il m’appelle: Ma sœur, ma colombe, ma belle!

Vive Jésus en tous mes pas, Vivent ses amoureux appas! Vive Jésus, lorsque sa bouche D’un baiser amoureux me touche!

Vive Jésus quand ses blandices Me comblent de chastes délices! Vive Jésus lorsque à mon aise Il me permet que je la baise!”

[“Praise to Jesus, praise His power, Praise His sweet allurements! Praise to Jesus, when His goodness Reduces me to nakedness; Praise to Jesus when He says to me: ‘My sister, My dove, My beautiful one!’

“Praise to Jesus in all my steps, Praise to His amorous charms! Praise to Jesus, when His mouth Touches mine in a loving kiss!

“Praise to Jesus when His gentle caresses Overwhelm me with chaste joys! Praise to Jesus when at my leisure He allows me to kiss Him!”]

In addition to religious prostitution and to sexual mysticism, two other religious manifestations show an intimate relationship with the sexual life, are, indeed, in part of sexual origin--namely, =asceticism= and the =belief in witchcraft=.

Neither of these is, as has often been maintained by superficial writers, peculiar to the Christian faith. As Nietzsche says, Eros did not poison Christianity alone; asceticism and the belief in witchcraft are =common anthropological conceptions, met with throughout the history of civilization=, and arising from the primitive ardour of religious perceptions.

To what degree is the high estimation of asceticism--that is, the view that earthly and eternal salvation are to be found in =complete sexual abstinence=--associated with the religious sentiment? Religion is the yearning after an ideal, a belief in a process of perfectibility. To such a belief the sexual impulse and everything connected with it must appear as the greatest possible hindrance to the realization of the ideal, because nowhere else is the =disharmony= of existence so plainly manifest as in the sexual life.

In the fifth chapter of his work on “The Nature of Man,” Metchnikoff has collected all the numerous disharmonies of the reproductive organs and the reproductive functions, in consequence of which the modern man, become self-conscious, suffers so severely. Among these disharmonious phenomena in social life, Metchnikoff enumerates, inter alia, the troublesome, painful, and unæsthetic menstrual hæmorrhage in women, which all primitive peoples regarded as something unclean and evil; the pains of childbirth; the asynchronism between puberty and the general maturity of the organism, the latter occurring much later than the former, and thus giving rise to temporal inequalities of development in different parts of the sexual functions, causing, for example, masturbation actually before the development of spermatozoa; the long interval that commonly elapses between the onset of sexual maturity and the conclusion of marriage; the numerous disharmonious phenomena occurring in connexion with the decline of reproductive activity at a later stage of life, when marked specific excitability and sexual sensibility often persist after the capacity for sexual intercourse has been lost; and finally the disharmonies in sexual intercourse between man and woman.

According to Metchnikoff, this disharmony of the sexual life, from the earliest to the most advanced age, is the source of so many evils, that almost all religions have harshly judged and severely condemned the sexual functions, and have recommended abstinence from coitus as the best means for the harmonious and ideal regulation of life.

In addition to this, we have to take into consideration the opposition between spirit and matter, deeply realized already by primitive man. The sexual, as the most intense and most sensuous expression of material existence, was opposed to the spiritual, and was regarded as an unclean element, which must be fought, overcome, and, when possible, utterly uprooted, in favour of the spiritual life. In one of the most ancient of mythologies the first recorded instance of the gratification of sexual desire resulted in excluding man for ever from “Paradise”--in excluding him, that is to say, from the highest kind of spiritual existence. The principal psychological characteristic of asceticism is therefore to be found, not only in the vow of poverty, but, in addition, and even more, is it found in =sexual abstinence=, in the battle against the “flesh” (“caro,” to the fathers of the early Church, always denoted the genital organs).

What is, however, the inevitable consequence of this continual battle with the sexual impulse? Weininger expressed the opinion (“Sex and Character,” p. 469, second edition; Vienna, 1904): “The renunciation of sexuality =kills= only the =physical= man, and kills him only in order, for the first time, to ensure the complete existence of the spiritual man”; but this is =entirely false=, and proceeds from an extremely deficient knowledge of human nature. For the “renunciation of sexuality” is, in truth, the most unsuitable way of securing a complete existence for the spiritual man. Just as little will it annihilate the physical man. For he who wishes to overcome and cast out the sexual impulse (powerful in every normal man, and at times overwhelming in its strength) =must keep the subject constantly before his eyes, for ever in his thoughts=. Thus it came to pass that the ascetic was actually more occupied with the subject of the sexual impulse than is the case with the normal man. This was favoured all the more by the ascetic’s voluntary =flight from the world=, by his continuous life in solitude--a life favourable to the production of hallucinations and visions, and one which becomes tolerable only by a sort of natural reaction in the form of a luxuriance of imaginative sensuality. For

“Nous naissons, nous vivons pour la société: A nous-mêmes livrés dans une solitude, Notre bonheur bientôt fait notre inquiétude.”

(Boileau, Satire X.)

[“We are born, we live for society: Given up to ourselves in solitude, Our happiness is speedily replaced by restlessness.”]

This “inquiétude,” this intensification of the nervous life in all relations, was especially noticeable in the sexual sphere. Visions of a sexual character, erotic temptations, mortifications of the flesh in the form of self-flagellation, self-emasculation and mutilations of the genital organs, are characteristic =ascetic= phenomena. On the other hand, the excessive valuation and glorification of the pure spiritual led not only to the view that matter was something in its nature sinful and base, =but also led directly to sexual excesses=, for many ascetic sects declared that what happened to the already sinful body was a matter of indifference, that every contamination of the body was permissible. Hence is to be explained the remarkable fact of the occurrence of =natural and unnatural unchastity in numerous ascetic sects=.

Sexual mortification and sexual excesses--these are the two poles between which the life of the ascetic oscillates, so that we see in each case a marked sexual intermixture. Asceticism is, therefore, often merely the means by which sexual enjoyment is obtained in another form and in a more intense degree.

=Asceticism is as old as human religion, and as widely diffused throughout the entire world.= We find individual ascetics among many savage peoples; ascetic sects, especially among the ancient and modern civilized races, in Babylon, Syria, Phrygia, Judæa, even in pre-Columbian Mexico, and most developed in India, in Islam, and in Christianity.

The Indian samkhya-doctrine, demanding increased self-discipline, “yoga,” which was based upon the opposition between spirit and matter, led to the adoption of asceticism in Buddhism and in the religion of the Jains, also to the foundation of ascetic sects, such as the “Acelakas,” the “Ajivakas,” the “Suthrēs” or “Pure,” who, according to Hardy, “are in their life a disgrace to their name.” Yogahood attained its highest development among Sivaitic sects of the ninth to the sixteenth centuries; these alternated between uncontrolled satisfaction of the rudest sexual impulses and asceticism pushed to the point of self-torture.

In Islam it was the sect of the Sufi in which the relation between sexuality and asceticism was especially manifest; but before this Christianity had developed asceticism into a formal system, and had deduced its most extreme consequences. To the early Christians, only the nutritive impulse appeared natural; the sexual impulse was debased nature; physical and psychical emasculation were actually recommended in the New Testament writings (cf. Matt. xix. 12). Already in the second century of the Christian era numerous Christians voluntarily castrated themselves, and in the fourth century the Council of Nicæa found it necessary to deal with the prevalence of this ascetic abuse, and with the predecessors of the modern “skopzen.”[57]

Numerous ascetics and saints withdrew into solitude in order to attain salvation by castigation of the body. But it is very noteworthy that they almost all =lived and moved exclusively in the sexual=, and that, in the way already explained, they came to occupy themselves incessantly with all the problems of the sexual life.

The writings of the saints are full of such references to the vita sexualis, and are, therefore, a valuable source for the history of ancient morals. Nothing was so interesting to these ascetics as the life of prostitutes and the sexual excesses of the impious. Numerous legends relate the attempts of the saints to induce prostitutes to abandon their profession, and to turn to a holy life, and the work of Charles de Bussy, “Les Courtisanes Saintes,” shows the result of these labours. St. Vitalius visited the brothels every night, to give the women money in order that they might not sin, and prayed for their conversion.

Thus, in the case of the ascetics, whose thoughts were continually occupied with sexual matters, the sole result of their castigation, self-torture, and emasculation, was to lead their sexual life ever wider astray into morbid and perverse paths. The monstrous =sexual visions= of the saints reflect in a typical manner the incredible violence of the sexual perceptions of the ascetics. To use the words of Augustine, how far were these unhappy beings from the “serene clearness of love,” how near were they to the “obscurity of sensual lust!” These visions, these “false pictures,” allured the “sleepers” to something to which, indeed, in the awakening state they could not have been misled (Augustine, “Confessions,” x. 30). The forms of beautiful naked women (with whom, moreover, the ascetics often really lay in bed in order to test their powers) appeared to them in dreams. Fetichistic and symbolic vision of an erotic nature pestered them, and led to the most violent sensual temptations, until in the sects of the Valesians, the Marcionites, and the Gnostics they resulted in sexual excesses. Marcion, the founder of the well-known sect named after him, preached continence, but maintained that sexual excesses could not hinder salvation, since it was only the soul that rose again after death! The Gnostics oscillated between unconditional celibacy and indiscriminate sexual indulgence. As late as the nineteenth century an ascetic mystic led the Protestant sect of Königsberg pietists into the grossest sensual excesses.

From asceticism arose =monasticism= and the =cloistral life=, to which the considerations above given fully apply. The undeniable unchastity of the medieval cloisters, which found its most characteristic expression in denoting brothels by the name of “abbeys,” and, above all, in popular songs and in folk-tales, also shows us very clearly the relations between religious asceticism and the vita sexualis.

The idea of asceticism has not lost its primitive force even at the present day, and retains it for certain men not under the influence of the Church. But the character and origin of this =modern asceticism= are different. We understand it when we remind ourselves of the saying of Otto Weininger, this typical adherent of “modern” asceticism, that the man who has the worst opinion of woman is not the one who has least to do with them, but rather the one who has had the greatest number of bonnes fortunes (“Sex and Character,” p. 315).

The ascetics of early Christianity first denied sexuality--for example, by self-castration, or by flight into solitude--in order subsequently to affirm it the more strongly. Our modern fin-de-siècle ascetics, above all, the three most successful literary apostles of asceticism--Schopenhauer, Tolstoi, and Weininger--at first affirmed their sexuality most intensely, in order subsequently to deny it in the most fundamental manner. They studied voluptuousness, not merely in the ideal, but also in reality. For this reason, also, they have furnished us with more valuable conclusions regarding its nature and its significance in the life of individual men than we can obtain from the visions of the early Christian ascetics. This is true above all of Schopenhauer and Tolstoi.

Schopenhauer had first to endure in his own person the whole tragedy of voluptuousness, to experience the elemental force of the sexual impulse, the “enmity” of love (see his own account given to Challemel-Lacour), before he proceeded to grasp the full significance of the ascetic idea. His asceticism is intimately associated with his sensuality, and with the consequences of its activity. I believe that I have myself recently furnished a striking proof of this fact by the publication of a hitherto unknown holograph manuscript of the philosopher,[58] by which it is clearly established that he had suffered from syphilitic infection. In this connexion we find the explanation of the close relationship which Schopenhauer himself postulated between the “wonderful venereal disease” and asceticism. From his own utterances regarding syphilis, and, above all, from the fact that he himself had suffered from the disease, we are able to grasp the significance that syphilis had in the conception of his ascetic views, which were developed under the immediate influence of his experiences, sorrows, and passions; whereas in old age, when the elemental force of the sexual impulse, and the unhappy consequence of yielding to it, no longer troubled him, there appeared in his thought a distinctly happier colouring.

Tolstoi also recognizes without reserve how much he had been affected by voluptuousness. “I know,” he says, “how lust hides everything, how it annihilates everything, by which the heart and the reason are nourished.” Lack of continence on the part of men is, in his view, the cause of the stupidity of life. Tolstoi’s conception of asceticism is, however, by no means identical with the early Christian, the Buddhistic, and the Schopenhauerian asceticism. In the beautiful saying, “Only with woman can one lose purity, only with her can one preserve it,” lies the admission that =absolute= chastity is an unattainable ideal, and that man can reach only a =relative asceticism=. We should hold fast to this utterance in Tolstoi’s teaching, which is in no way systematically developed, and should ignore his insane doctrine of the unchastity of married life. Later, during our discussion of the so-called “problem of continence,” we shall return to this idea of a relative continence, and of the good that lies therein.

Weininger, whose views are unquestionably strongly pathological, recurs wholly to the ideas of early Christian asceticism. According to him, “coitus in every case contradicts the idea of humanity”! Sexuality debases man, reproduction and fertility are “=nauseating=.”[59] Man is not free, only because he has originated in an immoral manner! In woman he denies again and again the idea of humanity. The renunciation, the conquest of femininity, it is this that he demands. =Since all femininity is immorality, woman must cease to be woman, and must become man!=[60]

Georg Hirth has described Weininger’s book as “an unparalleled crime against humanity.”[61] Since, however, Probst, in his psychiatric study of Weininger, has brought forward evidence to show that in Weininger’s book we have to do with the work of a lunatic, the author of this crime cannot at any rate be held responsible. It is only to be regretted that so many readers have been led astray by the presence of isolated thoughtful passages in the book to take Weininger in earnest as a “thinker,” and even in company with the bizarre August Strindberg to believe that Weininger has solved “the most difficult of all problems”!

* * * * *

Very significant and influential even down to the present day are the relations between religion and sexual sentiments exhibited in the =belief in witchcraft=.[62] This belief, extending backwards to the most remote age, is the principal source of all misogyny and contempt for women--of which fact we cannot too often remind our modern misogynists, in order to make clear to them the utter stupidity, the primitiveness, and the atavistic character of their views.

Here, again, we must first show the falsity of the view that the belief in witches is a specifically Christian experience. To the diffusion of this error the celebrated work of J. Michelet, “La Sorcière,” has especially contributed, for in this book the witch is represented as a Christian medieval discovery. But the Christian religion, as such, is as little blameworthy for this belief as are all the other confessions of faith. =The belief in witches, with its religio-sexual basis, is a primitive general anthropological phenomenon=, a fixture, a part of primitive human history arising from the primeval relations between religious magic and the sexual life.

“When we look deeply into the province of psychology,” says G. H. von Schubert, “we not only suspect, but recognize with great certainty, that there exists a secret combination between the activities of the animal carnal sexual impulse and the receptivity of human nature for magical manifestations.

“We stand here in the depths of the abyss in which the lust of the flesh becomes inflamed to the lust of hell, and in which the flesh, with all its indwelling forces of sin and death, celebrated its greatest triumph over the spirit appointed by God to command the flesh.”[63]

The animism of primitive man, and of savage man at the present day, sees in all frightful natural phenomena shaking his innermost being to its foundation the manifestation and action of demons and sorcerers. The rutting impulse also, which attracts primitive man to woman, appears to him to be due to the influence of a demon, =and soon woman herself came to seem to man something uncanny, something magical=. Thus, in its origin the belief in witchcraft arises from the =sexual impulse=, and =throughout its history sorcery in all its forms remained associated with the sexual impulse=.

This sexual origin of the belief in witches and in magic has been carefully described by the celebrated ethnologist K. Fr. Ph. von Martius, on the basis of his observations amongst the indigens of Central Brazil. “=All sorcery arises from rutting=,” said an old Indian to him.

Magic propagates itself by means of sexual desire, and, according to Martius, will predominate among primitive peoples as long as these =remain unchaste=.[64] Secret arts, voluptuousness, and unnatural vice are inseparable one from another. This is proved by the entire history of human civilization and morals. Among the indigens of Brazil, the “pajé” or “piache,” the sorcerer or medicine-man, plays the same part as the medieval or Christian witch.

Sorcerers and witches are, above all, experienced in the sexual province; popular belief always turns first to this subject. The witches of ancient Rome resemble those of the middle ages in respect of their evil practices in sexual relations. According to J. Frank, the word “hexe” (witch) is derived from “hagat”--that is, “vagabond woman.” The ascetic view of the middle ages, formulated principally by men, saw in woman one who seduced man to sensual, sinful lust, the personification of the Evil One, the “janua diaboli,” and, ultimately, a female demon and a witch, whose very being is an impersonation of the obscene and the sexual. The doctrines of Original Sin and of the Immaculate Conception had unquestionably an important share in this conception of woman.

The idea of woman as a witch turned almost exclusively on the sexual, and the witch was for the most part represented as a “=mistress of the devil=” (cf. W. G. Soldan, “History of Witch-Trials,” pp. 147-159; Stuttgart, 1843), in which sexual perversion plays the principal part, since, instead of simple sexual intercourse, the most horrible unnatural vice was assumed to occur.

Holzinger, in his valuable lecture on the “Natural History of Witches,” characterized the spiritual and moral condition of the time, which brought forth such an idea, in a few apt words:

“Whilst in the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, as those well acquainted with the state of morals during this period can all confirm, a most unbounded freedom was dominant in sexual relations, the State and the Church were desirous of compelling the people to keep better order by the use of actual force, and by religious compulsion. So forced a transformation in so vital a matter necessarily resulted in a reaction of the worst kind, and forced into secret channels the impulse which it had attempted to suppress. This reaction occurred, moreover, with an elemental force. There resulted widespread sexual violence and seduction, hesitating at nothing, often insanely daring, in which everywhere the devil was supposed to help; every one’s head was turned in this way, the uncontrolled lust of debauchees found vent in secret bacchanalian associations and orgies, wherein many, with or without masquerade, played the part of Satan; shameful deeds were perpetrated by excited women and by procuresses and prostitutes ready for any kind of immoral abomination; add to these sexual orgies the most widely diffused web of a completely developed theory of witchcraft, and the systematic strengthening by the clergy of the widely prevalent belief in the devil--all these things woven in a labyrinthine connexion, made it possible for thousands upon thousands to be murdered by a disordered justice and to be sacrificed to delusion.”

The study of the witch-trials of the middle ages and of recent times--for it is well known that in the seventies of the nineteenth century (!) such trials still occurred[65]--would without doubt afford valuable contributions to the doctrine of psychopathia sexualis, and at the same time would throw a remarkable light upon the origin of sexual aberrations.

What a large amount of sexual abnormality arises even to-day from this common, human, obscure, superstitious impulse dependent upon the intermixture of religious mysticism and sexual desire, and which in the medieval belief in witches attained such astonishing development!

As Michelet proved in his great work on “Sorcery,” it was =the religious imagination straying into sexual by-paths=, which for the most part animated the belief in witchcraft, and thus led to the most horrible aberrations, principally of a sadistic nature.

Like superstition, so also the sexual-religious obsession of the middle ages, still persists in many persons, =even at the present day=, and gives rise to sexual anomalies.

Apart from asceticism and the belief in witchcraft, theological literature offers numerous instances of the relationship between religion and sexuality.

In an essay published six years ago,[66] I showed the important part which sexual questions have played in the so-called =pastoral medicine=--that is to say, in those theological writings in which the individual facts and problems of medicine are studied from the theological standpoint, and their relation to dogma is determined. We find here theological casuistry carried to its extreme limits, in relation to all possible problems of the vita sexualis. The experiences of the confessional are employed in a remarkable manner, the religious imagination wandering, in a peculiar combination of scholasticism and sensuality, in the obscure fields of human aberration.

The =ostensible= inducement to the theological consideration of sexual problems is in part offered by the statements of perverse individuals in the confessional, and in part by public scandals. In both cases casuistry endeavours, from the religious standpoint, to formulate certain normal rules for the judgment of the various matters relating to the sexual life. This would, however, have been impossible, had there not existed an intimate connexion between sexuality and religion.

Only in this way is it possible to explain the origin of the gigantic =literature of sexual casuistry= in theology, and especially in pastoral medicine. A comprehension of these facts has led certain writers to launch bitter invectives against the system of which the confessional formed so essential a part. This is a narrow and prejudiced view, which we mention only to condemn. There is, however, ample justification for the representations of =physicians= and =anthropologists=, who are able to observe matters in the great connexion sketched above, and who have recognized the relations between religion and the sexual life to be something common to all humanity, not the artificial products of any particular spiritual tendency. It is precisely the frequent endeavours of the Catholic Church to overcome the worst outgrowths in this direction, which teach us, notwithstanding their failure to eradicate sexual aberrations, that these relationships depend upon the very nature of religion.

There is not a single sexual problem which has not been discussed in the most subtle manner by the theological casuists,[67] so that their writings offer us a most instructive picture of =imaginative activity= in the sexual sphere.

The most detailed discussion, verging on the salacious, of the degree to which sexual contact is permissible, gave rise to the name “theologiens mammillaires,” because some of them--Benzi, for example, and Rousselot--sanctioned “tatti mammillari” (mammillary palpation). This doctrine was condemned by Pope Benedict XIV., which proves that the Catholic Church as such has not invariably sanctioned these things.

In the “Golden Key” (“Llave de Oro”) of Antonio Maria Claret, the Archbishop of Cuba, in Debreyne’s “Moechialogie,” in the writings on moral theology of Liguori, Dens, and J. C. Saettler, in the “Diaconales,” widely diffused in France, and in many similar works, all possible sexual problems which have come before the confessional, or possibly =might= come there, have been thoroughly discussed--even the most improbable and impossible. Coitus interruptus, irrigatio vaginæ post coitum, pollutions (nocturnal seminal emissions), bestiality, necrophilia, figuræ Veneris (positions in which coitus is effected), procuration, various kinds of caresses, conjugal onanism, abortion, varieties of masturbation, pæderasty, intercourse with a statue (!), psychical onanism, pædication, etc.--all have been subjected to a subtle critical theological analysis. In a sense, these writings are really valuable mines for the study of psychopathia sexualis. Later we shall have frequently to touch on the religious etiology of the individual sexual aberrations.

From the preceding discussion it appears quite clearly that the relations between religion and the vita sexualis are to be regarded as general anthropological phenomena, and not as peculiarities arising by chance, the accidental results of beliefs, time, or race. The modern physician, jurist, and criminal anthropologist must therefore pay the most careful attention to the religious factor in the normal and abnormal sexual life of mankind, if he wishes to arrive at an unprejudiced and undisturbed knowledge of sexual anomalies. Havelock Ellis has also laid stress on the leading significance of religious sexual perceptions. He proved that small oscillations of erotic feelings accompany all religious perceptions, and that in some circumstances the erotic feelings overwhelm the religious perceptions.[68] We still meet with sexual excesses under the cloak of religion, as occurred recently (1905) in Holland, and (1901) in England. In the English instance young girls were initiated into the most horrible forms of unchastity in the religious association founded by the American Horos and his wife, and known by the name of “Theocratic Unity.”[69]

Friedrich Schlegel, as Rudolf von Gottschall remarks, proclaimed in his “Lucinde” the new evangel of the future, in which voluptuousness--as during the time of Astarte--is to form a part of religious ritual. The reawakened tendency of our own day towards romantic modes of perception would certainly seem to involve the danger of a renewal and strengthening of religio-sexual ideas.

For as long as the feelings of love carry with them an inexpressible, overwhelming force, like that of religious perceptions, the intimate association between religion and sexuality will persist both in a good and a bad sense. An elderly physician, who in his interesting book detailed the experiences derived from forty years of practice,[70] made very apposite remarks regarding this religious sexualism. According to him, unbounded piety is “often no more than a sexual symptom,” proceeding from =deprivation of love or satiety of love=, the latter reminding us of the saying “Young whore, old devotee.” Moreover, this is true alike of man and woman. Piety dependent upon deprivation of love can often be cured by “castor, cold douches, or a well-arranged marriage with a robust, energetic man,” who drives away for ever the “heavenly bridegroom.”[71]

The religious perception is a completely =general= yearning, and the same is the case with the associated sexual feelings. The boundless everlasting impulsion which both contain does not admit of any individualization. For this reason, the religio-sexual perceptions can play only a subordinate part in the individual love of the future; they constitute only the first step in the history of the idealization of the sexual impulse, and of its spiritualization to form love.

In the romance “Scipio Cicala,” by Rehfues, the Neapolitan abbess calls out “=I love love=,” after she has gone through the enumeration of all the phases of passionate love towards God. The modern man, however, says to the woman, and the woman says to the man, “=I love you=”; the general religious love has capitulated to the individual love.

This is clearly the direction taken by “the way of the spirit” in love, which we shall now pursue further.

[33] Cf. F. von Andrian, “Some Results of Modern Ethnology,” in “Correspondenzblatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte” (1894, No. 8, p. 71).

[34] “Love,” in the sense above defined, is peculiar to mankind, and for this reason we must, as Ploss-Bartels also insists, admit its existence in human beings at the very lowest levels of civilization. There it is, indeed, no more than “a faintly glimmering, easily extinguished spark,” while among civilized peoples it has become “a bright, widely diffused flame.”

[35] Regarding the connexion between sexuality and spiritual activity, see also Virey, “Recherches médico-philosophiques sur la Nature et les Facultés de l’Homme” (Paris, 1817, p. 39).

[36] For the apt and convenient word poietic, in preference to creative or productive, I have to thank Mr. H. G. Wells. See his most admirable “A Modern Utopia,” and on p. 265 et seq. his brilliant classification of “four main classes of mind--the Poietic, the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base.”... “The Poietic or creative class of mental individuality embraces a wide range of types,” but, he goes on to say, the two principal varieties of the poietic type are those classified as artistic and scientific natures respectively. It is the quality by which these two natures are distinguished from the kinetic and the dull to which Mr. Wells gives the name of “poietic,” and it is precisely this quality whose interconnexion with the sexual life is insisted on in the text by Dr. Bloch and by the authors from whom he quotes.--TRANSLATOR.

[37] Cf. W. Griesinger, “Mental Disorders,” third edition (Brunswick, 1871, p. 7).

[38] Rudolf Topp speaks of a “degeneration” of the “healthy natural reproductive impulse” into the “sexual impulse.” In the primeval period of human history, he maintains, man knew and gratified the reproductive impulse only; the sexual impulse developed gradually, and in a later stage of the evolutionary history of mankind, out of the reproductive impulse, and, in fact, is a degeneration (!) of the latter. In this period we may look for the first beginnings of functional impotence, on account of the too frequent exercise of the sexual function. Cf. R. Topp, “On the Therapeutic Use of Yohimbin ‘Riedel’ as an Aphrodisiac, with Especial Reference to Functional Impotence in the Male,” published in the Allgemeine Medizinische Central-Zeitung, 1906, No. 10.

[39] From this fact we may draw the conclusion that the so-called hospitable prostitution is only a variety of religious prostitution.

[40] J. A. Dulaure, “Des Divinités génératrices,” etc. (Paris, 1885).

[41] W. Schwartz, “Prehistoric Anthropological Studies,” p. 278 (Berlin, 1884).

[42] Cf. J. J. Bachofen, “The Legend of Tanaquil, an Investigation concerning Orientalism in Rome and Italy,” p. 43 (Heidelberg, 1870).

[43] Cf. the details and more exact reports in my work, “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 84, 85.

[44] Karsandas Mulji, “History of the Sect of Mahārājas or Vallabhāchārjas in Western India,” p. 161 (London, 1865).

[45] Cf. E. Hardy, “History of Indian Religions,” pp. 124-126 (Leipzig, 1898).

[46] K. Fr. Ph. von Martius, “Contributions to the Ethnography and Philology of America,” vol. i., p. 113 (Leipzig, 1867).

[47] Starke, “The Primitive Family,” p. 135 (Leipzig, 1888).

[48] Cf. L. Tobler, “Old Maids in Belief and Custom among the German People” (Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie), by Lazarus and Steinthal, vol. xiv., pp. 64-90 (Berlin, 1882).

[49] W. H. Roscher, “Nectar and Ambrosia,” pp. 80-89 (Leipzig, 1883).

[50] Cf. Edward Sellon, “Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus,” p. 3 (London, 1865).

[51] Ploss-Bartels, “Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde,” vol. i., p. 580 (eighth edition, Leipzig, 1905).

[52] E. Hardy, op. cit., p. 125.

[53] Sellon, “Annotations,” etc., p. 30.

[54] Ploss-Bartels, op. cit., p. 608.

[55] Cf. H. Beck, “Count Tolstoi’s ‘Kreuzer Sonata,’” etc., p. 5 (Leipzig, 1898).

[56] Cf. “Mystical Marriages,” in the Vossische Zeitung, No. 370, August 9, 1904.

[57] Cf. Adolf Harnack, “Medical Data from Ancient Ecclesiastical History” (Leipzig, 1892, pp. 27, 28, and 52).

[58] Iwan Bloch, “Schopenhauer’s Illness in the Year 1823” (A Contribution to Pathography based upon an Unpublished Document). Paper read at the Berlin Society for the History of the Natural Sciences and Medicine on June 15, 1906. Printed in Medizinische Klinik, 1906, Nos. 25 and 26.

[59] It is a remarkable fact that the hypersexual Marquis de Sade expressed this identical idea, in precise agreement with the asexual Weininger.

[60] Cf. the chapter “Woman and Humanity,” in “Sex and Character,” pp. 453-472.

[61] G. Hirth, “Ways to Love,” p. 219. Cf. also the pertinent remark of Grete Meisel-Hess, “Misogyny and Contempt for Women” (Vienna, 1904).

[62] Cf. also the exhaustive research, with regard to witch-mania and witchcraft, by Count von Hoensbroech, “The Papacy in its Socio-Civil Reality” (third edition, vol. i., pp. 380-599; Leipzig).

[63] Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, “The Sins of Sorcery in their Old and New Form” (Erlangen, 1854, p. 25).

[64] Cf. K. Fr. von Martius, “The Nature, the Diseases, the Doctors, and the Therapeutic Methods of the Primitive Inhabitants of Brazil” (Munich, 1843, pp. 111-113).

[65] According to Holzinger, on August 20, 1877, at St. Jacobo in Mexico, five witches were burnt alive! Then “hundreds of angry pens were set in motion to declaim the horrible anachronism.” As late as 1875, Friedrich Nippold, in a work published by Holtzendorff and Oncken--“Problems of the Day in Germany”--gives an account of the continued belief in witches at the present day.

[66] Iwan Bloch, “Regarding the Idea of a History of Civilization in Relation to Medicine,” published in Die Medizinische Woche, 1900, No. 36.

[67] The best-known of these are Augustine, Benzi, Bouvier, Cangiamila, Capellmann, Claret, Debreyne, Dens, Filliucius, Gury, Liguori, Moja, Molinos, Moullet, Pereira, Rodriguez, Rousselot, Sa, Thomas Sanchez, Samuel Schroeer, Skiers, Soto, Suarez, Tamburini, Thomas Aquinas, Vivaldi, Wigandt, Zenardi. Copious extracts from their writings are given by Count von Hoensbroech in the second volume of his work--“The Papacy in its Socio-Civil Reality” (Leipzig, 1907).

[68] Havelock Ellis, “The Sexual Impulse and the Sentiment of Shame.”

[69] We shall return later to the religio-sexual “Masses,” celebrated even at the present day in Paris and other large towns.

[70] “Personal Experiences, or Forty Years from the life of a Well-known Physician” (Leipzig, 1854, three vols.). In addition, “Gleanings In and Out of Myself,” from the papers of the author of the “Personal Experiences,” etc. (Leipzig, 1856, four vols.).

[71] “Gleanings In and Out of Myself,” vol. ii., pp. 37-45. Regarding the relations between religion and sexuality, many interesting details are found in the work of George Keben, “The Half-Christians and the Whole Devil: the Road to Hell of Superstition” (Gross-Lichterfelde, 1905), especially in the chapter “The Brothel,” pp. 93-110.

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Chapter VII

THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE--THE EROTIC SENSE OF SHAME (NAKEDNESS AND CLOTHING)

“Shame has made no change in man as regards his bodily outlines, but shame has played a very important part in the entire province of clothing, and it has acquired such spiritual power that the entire amatory life of the higher human beings is dominated by it. It is, in the first place, in consequence of this sense of shame that man’s amatory life has ultimately and individually separated from that of other animals.”--WILHELM BÖLSCHE.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VII

The individualizing influence of the sentiment of shame -- Recent anthropological researches regarding the origin and nature of the erotic sense of shame -- The animal and the social factor of shame -- Shame as a biological sense of warding off -- Coquetry -- The fundamental social element of the sense of shame -- Lombroso’s theory of shame -- The dread of arousing repulsion -- Connexion of the sense of shame with clothing -- Conditions among the indigens of Central Brazil -- Nudity as a natural condition -- The coverings of the genital organs among the primitive races have a protective function, and are not portions of clothing -- Origin of clothing -- The original purpose of decoration and adornment -- Relation of clothing to the feeling of love -- Tattooing a preliminary stage to clothing -- Prehistoric painting of the body -- Tattooing as a sexual lure -- Tattooing of the genital organs -- Sexual effect of colours -- Occurrence of tattooing amongst modern civilized nations -- Recent anthropological researches regarding this subject -- Erotic tattooing -- Tattooing in women of the upper classes -- The colour element in clothing -- Its connexion with sexual charm -- With jealousy -- With sexual allurement -- Sexual influence of concealment -- The stimulus of the unknown -- The two fundamental elements of fashion -- Accentuation and display of portions of the body -- Influence of partial concealment, of retroussé -- The two principal forms of clothing -- Accentuating and enlarging influences of clothing -- H. Lotzes’s theory of the nature of clothing -- Reciprocal influence between clothing and personality -- “Physiognomy” of clothing -- Clothing as an expression of the psyche -- Denuding of portions of the body as a sexual stimulus -- Fashion -- Its absence in antiquity -- Difference between ancient and modern clothing -- Diaphanous raiment of the ancient half-world -- Analysis of clothing -- Upper and under clothing -- The waist -- Further differentiation into clothing proper and more intimate articles of dress -- Dressing and undressing -- Separation of the body-spheres by the waist -- Beginnings of fashion in the middle ages -- The corset as a witness of Christian teaching -- Contest between medieval fashion and asceticism -- Victory of fashion -- Accentuation of the bosom -- Décolleté -- Views of the æsthetics on this subject -- Harmfulness of the corset -- A sin against æsthetics and hygiene -- Its deleterious influence upon the thoracic and abdominal organs -- The corset and anæmia -- Atrophy of the mammary glands -- Other serious consequences -- Its influence on the female reproductive organs -- The corset and “fluor albus” -- The corset and sterility -- Pre-Raphaelite flat-breastedness -- Accentuation of the regions of the hips -- Tournure (cul de Paris), the “crinolette” -- Indication of the abdominal region and of pregnancy -- The farthingale and the crinoline -- Waldeyer’s views regarding the cause of the difference between men’s clothing and women’s -- Greater simplicity of men’s clothing -- Connexion of this with the greater mental differentiation of man -- Former anomalies of men’s clothing -- The breeches-flap -- Feminine men’s clothing -- Present predominance of the English style in men’s clothing -- Influence of clothing on the skin -- Venus im Pelz (Venus in fur) -- Sacher-Masoch’s explanation of the sexual influence of furs -- The face and clothing -- Sexual differentiation of the features -- The relation of clothing to the environment -- Enlargement of the conception of “fashion” -- Theory of fashion -- The two functions of fashion -- Social equalization and individual differentiation -- The demi-monde and fashion -- Fashion as a safeguard of personality -- Economic theories of fashion -- Their connexion with capitalism -- The reform of women’s clothing -- “Rational dress.”

The relation between the feeling of shame and nudity as a problem of modern civilization -- Prudery -- Natural and lascivious nakedness -- Prudery is concealed lust -- Schleiermacher’s talented characterization of the sexual element in prudery -- Psychiatric observations -- Unnatural increase in the sense of shame -- Importance to civilization of the genuine, natural feeling of shame -- False fig-leaf morality -- Natural views regarding nudity and sexual matters the watchword for the future.

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Chapter VII

The first step on the road to the individualization of love was effected at the very outset of the grey primeval age by the origination of the sexual =sense of shame=. Recent researches have for the first time established the fact that the sense of shame is not innate in man, but that it is =a specific product of civilization=--that is to say, a mental phenomenon arising in the course of progressive evolution, and as such is peculiar to man--present already, indeed, in the naked man, but, above all, characteristic of the =clothed= man. Clothing and the sense of shame have developed proportionally side by side, and in dependence each on the other; and originally both subserved the same purpose, to develop more strongly, and to bring to expression the individual, personal, peculiar nature of the individual man. They mirror the first individual activities in the amatory life of primitive man.

Georg Simmel has recognized very clearly this individualizing influence of the sense of shame by saying: “The entire sense of shame depends upon the self-uplifting of the individual.”[72]

By means of the recent critical investigations of leading anthropologists and ethnologists, we have obtained most important conclusions regarding the erotic sense of shame. Above all worthy of mention are the clear-sighted investigations of Havelock Ellis, and these have been supplemented by the researches of C. H. Stratz, Karl von den Steinen, etc.

Havelock Ellis distinguishes an =animal= and a =social= factor of shame. The former is specifically of a sexual nature, and is the simplest and most primitive element in the sense of shame. It is unquestionably more strongly developed in woman than in man; originally, indeed, it was peculiar to the female sex, and was the expression of the endeavour to protect the genital organs against the undesired approach of the male. In this form we may observe the sense of shame in other animals.

The sexual sense of shame of the female animal, declares Havelock Ellis, is rooted in the sexual periodicity of the female sex in general, and is an involuntary expression of the organic fact that the present time is not the time for love. Since this fact persists throughout the greater part of the life of the females of all animals kept under man’s control, the expression of this sense of warding off becomes so much a matter of custom that it manifests itself also at times when it has ceased to be appropriate. We see this, for example, in the bitch, which, when on heat, herself runs up to the dog, but then turns round again and tries to run away, and finally permits copulation only after the most delicate approaches on the part of the dog. =In this manner the sense of shame becomes more and more a simple manifestation of the proximity of the male; it comes to be expected by the male, and takes its place among his ideas of what is sexually desirable in the female.= Thus the sense of shame would appear to be also explicable as =a psychical secondary sexual character=. The sexual sense of shame of the female, continues Havelock Ellis, is, therefore, the unavoidable by-product of the naturally aggressive demeanour of the male being in sexual relations, and of the naturally repellent demeanour of the female; and this, again, is founded upon the fact that--in man and in nearly all the species allied to him--the sexual function of the female is periodic, and must always be treated with circumspection by the other sex; whereas in the male any care of this kind in regard to the exercise of his own sexual functions is seldom or never needed.

Groos very rightly points out that the great biological and psychological importance of =coquetry= is dependent upon this protective nature of the sense of shame, coquetry arising from the conflict between the sexual instinct and the innate sense of shame. It is to some extent the turning to account of the sense of shame for sensual purposes, a seldom failing speculation on the sexual impulse of the male, and in this sense it is the outcome of a genuine gynecocratic instinct, which we shall again encounter in our study of masochism.

Since, then, it is no longer possible to question the data of the most recent researches, by which we are assured of the existence of a primitively organic animal basis for the sexual feeling of shame, it is quite as little open to doubt that the true psychic individual importance of the feeling of shame arises out of a second fundamental element of that feeling, out of the =social= factor; and this factor also affords an explanation of the origin of the sense of shame in man. This phenomenal form of the sense of shame is, moreover, specifically human.

This second social fundamental element of the sense of shame is =the fear of arousing disgust=.

In this connexion we must refer to the interesting and thoroughly naturalistic theory of Lombroso regarding the origin of the sense of shame. Lombroso starts from the observation that in many prostitutes there exists a kind of remarkable equivalent of the sense of shame--namely, the dislike to permit of an inspection of their genital organs when they are menstruating, or when for any other reason the organs are not clean. Now, the Romance term for shame is derived from “putere,” which indicates the origin of the sense of shame from the repugnance to the smell of decomposing secretions. If we connect with this the fact that the kiss was originally a smell, Lombroso declares that this pseudo-shame of prostitutes represents the original, primitive sense of shame of primeval woman--that is, the fear of being disgusting to man.[73] Sergi also accepts this hypothesis of Lombroso’s.

According to Richet’s studies regarding the origin of disgust, the genito-anal region, with its secretions and excrements, is an object of disgust among most primitive races, for which reason they carefully conceal it even from their own sex, but more particularly from the other sex. Later, quite commonly the fear of arousing dislike or disgust plays a prominent part in the production of the sense of shame. This fear relates not only to the actual sexual organs, but also to the buttocks. Among many primitive races the latter alone are covered.

The idea also of =ceremonial= uncleanness, aroused especially by the process of menstruation, and associated with ritual practices, plays a part in the genesis of the sense of shame.

Incontestably, however, the sense of shame has most intimate relations with =clothing=; but clothing is in part only to be referred to the above-described primary factors of the sense of shame. In the later course of the development of civilization, however, clothing has come to play a peculiar independent rôle in the further development of a refined sexual sense of shame.

Karl von den Steinen is led, as the result of his own observations among the Bakäiri of Central Brazil, to the most remarkable conclusions.

“I find it,” he writes, “impossible to believe that the sense of shame, which is entirely wanting among these naked Indians, can in other men be a primary sense. I am compelled to believe that this sense first made its appearance after certain parts of the body had been covered by clothing, and that the nakedness of women was first concealed from the gaze of others when, perhaps, in very slightly complicated economic and social conditions, the value of marriageable girls had increased, in consequence of more active intercourse, as is now the case among the principal families in Schingu. I am also of opinion that we make the explanation more difficult than it really is when we theoretically believe ourselves to possess a greater sense of shame than we practically have.”[74]

Thus we find that among the Bakäiri, who go =completely naked=, our (sexual) sense of shame is almost completely undeveloped; more especially, a sense of shame due to disclosure of parts does not exist, whilst the purely animal, physiological sense of shame is clearly manifested by these people.[75]

Where nudity is customary, the erotic sense of shame is very slightly developed. Civilized man also accustoms himself with incredible quickness to nudity, as if it were an entirely natural condition.

“The feeling of being in the presence of nudity is no longer noticed after a quarter of an hour, and when those who witness it are intentionally reminded of it, and are asked whether naked men and women, fathers, mothers, and children, who are standing about or walking unconcernedly, should be condemned or regarded with compassion on account of their shamelessness, the observer only feels inclined to laugh, as at something quite absurd, or to protest at a preposterous suggestion.... With what rapidity in unfamiliar regions it is possible to become accustomed to a purely nude environment is most clearly shown by the fact that I myself, in the night from the 15th to the 16th September, and again on the following night, dreamed of my German home, and there in my dream I saw all my acquaintances as completely nude as the Bakäiri with whom I was sojourning. I myself felt astonished at this, but my neighbour at table at a dinner-party at which in my dream I was a guest, a lady of quality, at once bade me compose myself, and said, ‘Now we all go like this.’”[76]

The Bakäiri, who go completely naked, have no “private parts.” They jest about these parts verbally and pictorially with complete indifference. It would be ridiculous for this reason to regard them as “indecent.” The onset of puberty is celebrated in the case of both sexes by noisy popular festivals, in which the “private parts” receive a demonstrative and joyful attention. A man who wishes to inform a stranger that he is the father of one of those present, a woman who wishes to declare herself to be the mother of a child, grasps the genital organs with an earnest and unconcerned demeanour, intending by this gesture to indicate that they themselves are the procreators. The cloth covering the penis of the male, and the three cornered apron of the female, are not for purposes of concealment, but are simply intended to protect the mucous membranes--as a bandage or an apron in the women, and in the men as an apparatus for the mechanical treatment of phimosis.

It is only in jest that such things can be regarded as “articles of clothing,” the principal object of which is to subserve the sense of shame. Sexual excitement is not concealed by this simple covering. The red threads of the Trumai, the vari-coloured cloths of the Bororo, are adornments, by which attention is attracted to this region rather than repelled.[77] The completely naked Suyá women wash their genital organs in the river in the presence of Europeans.[78]

Thus among these Caribs of Central Brazil, who are still living in the stone age, we observe in all their simplicity the results of complete nudity, and we are able to determine that this nudity entirely prevents the origination of an erotic sense of shame in our meaning of the term. The physiological factors of the sense of shame are not, taken alone, sufficiently strong to lead to the appearance of this sense in its full strength as a special psychical phenomenon. It is first in association with clothing that these physiological factors have any great significance in the production of the sense of shame.

C. H. Stratz, in a historical and anthropological study regarding women’s clothing (Stuttgart, 1900), has compared the data of the more recent ethnological investigations with the facts already known in the history of civilization and art, and has noticed a remarkable agreement between the two. According to him, “the first original purpose of clothing was, not the covering, but simply and solely the =adornment= of the naked body.”[79] The naked man feels little or no shame; the clothed man is the first to feel shame--=he feels it when the customary ornament is lacking=. This is true alike for primitive and for civilized man. For Stratz very rightly points out that any manifestation of nudity which is prescribed by fashion--that is to say, by the then dominant code of beautification--is never felt as nudity. On the contrary, a lady in a high-necked dress amongst the décolletée ladies of a ballroom, “would feel deeply ashamed because her breast was not bare.”

The history of =clothing= and of =fashion=, which is so closely associated therewith, affords us the most important elements for the understanding of the sense of shame of modern man, and for the judgment of its importance and of its natural limitations. Moreover, clothing has most intimate relations to love as a psychical phenomenon. “How great an influence,” says Emanuel Herrmann, “love exercises, in all its stages, upon clothing, and how clearly, on the other hand, love is expressed by clothing!”[80] Clothing more especially satisfies the general human need, proved by Hoche and myself to exist, for variety in sexual relationships, which continually demands new allurements and new stimuli.

The preliminary stage of clothing, a kind of symbolic clothing for primitive man, is the =staining=, =painting=, and =tattooing=, of the skin, regarding which recent ethnological researches, especially those of Westermarck,[81] Joest,[82] and Marquardt,[83] have afforded us noteworthy conclusions.

It is a fact of great interest that the tendency to painting and adorning the body existed already in prehistoric times, thus affording a notable illustration of the truth of Herbert Spencer’s opinion that the vanity of uncivilized man was much greater than that of civilized man. In palæolithic dwellings coloured earths have actually been discovered, and coloured pastes made by mixing iron rust with reindeer fat, which unquestionably were employed for the colouring of the human body. Moreover, as Ludwig Stein remarks, the history of cosmetics, which Lord Bacon, in his “Cosmetica,” dated from the days of Biblical antiquity, can be traced back with certainty to the man of the ice age, upon whose individual and moral qualities this fact throws a significant light. According to Klaatsch, palæolithic man was not contented simply with painting his skin; he also tattooed himself by means of fine flint knives.[84]

Painting and tattooing of the body must, then, be regarded as a primitive stage of clothing. Ploss-Bartels remarks: “I find it impossible to doubt that the original meaning of tattooing is to be found in the endeavour =to cover nakedness=”; and Joest, the most learned student of tattooing, is of the same opinion. He writes: “The less a man clothes himself, the more he tattoos his skin; and the more he clothes himself, the less he tattoos.”[85]

We must also regard the coloration of the skin produced by tattooing as a means of allurement; tattooing was, in fact, =principally= carried out for the purpose of sexual allurement and stimulation. The tattooed man is the more beautiful, the more worthy object of desire. Even in cases in which painting and tattooing were originally undertaken for other purposes--for instance, with some therapeutic aim, or perhaps to serve as means of social or political differentiation--still, these signs and visible changes in the skin of the body speedily exerted a powerful influence upon the other sex, and by sexual selection were converted into sexual lures.[86]

This sexual character of tattooing is indicated also by the fact that amongst numerous savage people of the South Seas, in the Caroline Islands, in New Guinea, and in the Pelew Islands, the girls, in order to attract the men, were accustomed to tattoo =exclusively the genital region=, and especially the mons Veneris; thus, by tattooing, they made this region markedly apparent. It is characteristic that Miklucho-Maclay at the first glance received the impression that the girl tattooed in this manner wore on the mons Veneris a three-cornered piece of blue cloth, so closely can tattooing simulate clothing.

The sexual nature of tattooing is also shown by its association with =phallic= festivals. In Tahiti there is a very characteristic legend regarding the sexual origin of tattooing.[87] Among many primitive peoples the first appearance of menstruation gives the signal for tattooing, and for priapistic festivals.

An important sexual relationship is also manifested by the =colour= element of tattooing. It appears that the sense of love in primitive man is closely connected with the sight of particular colours. According to Konrad Lange, the sensual voluptuous value of these colours obtained its peculiar character from the feeling of love associated with viewing them; and, speaking generally, we can prove the existence of a certain =association between the love of colour and the sexual impulse=. Lange records an experience of his own youth, that when, about fourteen years of age, he was glancing at a vari-coloured necktie he had feelings which were not very different in their nature from sexual desire. He rightly draws attention to the fact that in primitive man this association of ideas is especially vivid, for the reason that, as already stated, the painting of the body is usually first undertaken at the time of the commencement of puberty.[88]

It is a significant fact that among modern civilized peoples the practice of tattooing is generally confined to certain lower classes of the population, such as sailors, criminals, and prostitutes, among whom the primitive impulses remain active in a quite exceptional strength, as Lombroso has more especially shown in his “Palimsesti di Carcere,” and in his works on the criminal and the prostitute. Very frequently obscene tattooings were found in such persons.[89] Marro, Lacassagne, Batut, and Rudolf Bergh, have also studied the tattooings of prostitutes and criminals, and have observed the same objects and ornaments in both classes. Salillas in Spain, Drago in the Argentine, Ellis and Greaves in England, and Tronow in Russia, obtained similar results. In 12·5 per cent. of the inmates of reformatories in Brieg, Kurella found that the skin was tattooed. According to him, cynicism, revenge, cruelty, remorselessness, gloomy or indifferent fatalism, bestial lewdness, with a dominant tendency to unnatural vices of every kind, “constituted the principal psychical manifestations exhibited by these tattoo-pictures.”

“Pæderastic symbols among the men, and tribadistic among the female prostitutes, are of especially frequent occurrence, and among these we often find a mackerel sketched on the vulva, denoting the souteneur; still more perverse sexual representations even French authors such as Batut have not ventured to reproduce; we see things which would send the police des mœurs out of their minds. Already in quite young vagabonds, frequently sons of prostitutes, we see representations of this kind.”[90]

Not only, however, in criminals and prostitutes, but also in the non-criminal members of the lowest classes of the population, we often observe erotic tattooings of the most obscene character, which, without doubt, serve as sexual lures and stimuli. J. Robinsohn and Friedrich S. Krauss recently published an interesting account of these matters.[91]

=Cases of Tattooing in Women of the Upper Classes.=--It appears that the primitive tendency to tattooing as a sexual stimulus and means of allurement has recently revived in certain circles of the refined sensual world. René Schwaeblé, in his celebrated book based on his own observations and moral studies, and entitled, “Les Détraquées de Paris” (Paris, 1904), gives an account of the increasing diffusion of tattooing among both men and women of the upper classes of Parisian society, for which purpose a specialist has opened an atelier in the Rue Blanche, in Montmartre. Schwaeblé devotes a special chapter to the “tatouées” (pp. 47-57), and describes an assembly of some of these distinguished libertines in a house in the Rue de la Pompe in Passy. In one of these ladies, tattooing imitated in a most deceptive manner a pair of stockings, thus affording a characteristic instance of the above-mentioned association between tattooing and clothing. Another woman had inscriptions tattooed on the thighs and hips; in two the legs were adorned with garlands of vine-leaves, birds were billing on the abdomen, and on the back were depicted many coloured bouquets of flowers, with the inscription, “X. pinxit, after Watteau.” A marchioness had her family coat-of-arms depicted between the shoulder blades; another great lady had had tattooed on her body the maddest and most obscene drawings of a satanistic character! Two unmistakably homosexual women had a common tattooing--that is to say, one was complementary to the other; only when they were side by side had the picture a meaning. The most remarkable of all the tattooings, however, was that of the hostess. On her body was the picture of a complete hunt, the individual scenes of which wound round her body; it was in the most vivid colours; carriages, packs of hounds and hunters were all shown. The final goal of the hunt was a fox tattooed in the genital region.

Tattooing leads on to the consideration of =many-coloured clothing=, which is especially common in primitive conditions of mankind. Such clothing, in such conditions, serves chiefly to accentuate particular portions of the body, in order to stimulate the sexual appetite of members of the opposite sex. According to Moseley, the savage begins by painting and tattooing himself for the sake of adornment. Then he takes a movable appendage, which he throws round his body, and on which he places the ornamentation =which he had previously marked on his skin in a more or less ineradicable manner=. Now a greater =variation= is rendered possible than was the case with tattooing and painting. Thus, by means of vari-coloured and bright bands, fringes, girdles, and aprons, which for the most part are attached in the genital region, attention is drawn to this part--and here a =contrast of colours= is found extremely effective. The Indians of the Admiralty Islands have as their only article of clothing a brilliant white mussel-shell, which exhibits a striking contrast to the dark colour of their skin. The Areois of Tahiti, a class of privileged libertines and voluptuous individuals, manifested this character in public places by wearing a girdle made of “ti-leaves.”[92]

The first and most primitive form of clothing was this =pubic ornament=, the original purpose of which was adornment, not concealment. The latter significance it acquired only in proportion as the genital organs became the object of a superstitious feeling of fear and respect, and were regarded as the seat of a dangerous magic.[93] The above-mentioned connexion between sexuality and magic here made itself apparent. It was necessary that this wonderful, daimonic region should be concealed, in order to protect an onlooker from its evil and influence, or, contrariwise, to protect the genital region from the evil glance of the observer. Both ideas are ethnologically demonstrable. According to Dürkheim, the genital organs, and especially those of women, were covered in primitive times, in order to prevent the perception of any disagreeable emanations from these regions. Finally, Waitz, Schurz, and Letourneau propounded the theory that the jealousy of primitive man was the primary ground of clothing, and was indirectly also the cause of the sense of shame. This view is supported by the interesting ethnological fact that in many races only the married women are clothed, whilst the fully-grown unmarried girls go completely naked. The married woman is part of the property of the husband; to the latter, clothing appears to be a protection against glances at his property--to unclothe the wife is a dishonour and a shame. When the idea of possession was extended to the relationship between the father and his unmarried daughters, these latter also were clothed; thus the idea of chastity and the feeling of shame were developed.[94]

We can, however, adduce numerous considerations in support of the view that the first covering of the genital organs, in association with the pubic ornament, did not arise out of the feeling of shame, but, on the contrary, that it served as a means of sexual allurement. By all kinds of striking ornaments, such as cat’s tails, mussel-shells, or strips of hide, fastened either in front or behind, every possible attention was attracted to the genital region or the buttocks.[95] Concealment made itself felt as a =more powerful= sensual stimulus than nudity. This is an old anthropological experience which still possesses great significance in our modern civilized life.

Virey believed that human beings had more intense and manifold sexual enjoyments than the lower animals, because these latter see their wives at all times without any kind of adornment, whereas the half-opened veil with which the human female conceals or partially discloses her charms increases a hundredfold the already boundless lust of mankind. “The less one sees, the more does imagination picture.”[96] That which causes a refined and sensual stimulus is not the entirely naked, but the half-naked or partial nudity. Westermarck remarks:

“We have numerous examples of races who generally go about completely naked, but sometimes employ a covering. In such cases they always wear the latter in circumstances which make it perfectly clear that the covering is used simply as a means of allurement. Thus, Lohmann relates that among the Saliras only prostitutes wear clothing, and they do this =in order to stimulate by means of the unknown=. Barth informs us that among many heathen races in Central Africa, the married women go entirely naked, whilst the girls ripe for marriage clothe themselves (in order that they may appear worthy of desire). The married women of Tipperah wear no more than a short apron, while the unmarried girls cover the breasts with vari-coloured cloths with fringed edges. Among the Toungta, the breasts of the women remain uncovered after the birth of the first child, but the unmarried women wear a narrow breast-cloth.”[97]

The significance of clothing and partial clothing as a sexual stimulus, proved by K. von den Steinen and Stratz to exist among primitive peoples, can be shown to form an element in the “fashion” of civilized races, which provides the imagination with entirely new sexual stimuli, by means of the two fundamental elements of the =accentuation= and =disclosure= of certain parts, and speaks to man of “hidden joys.” Moses made use of this psychical sexual influence of clothing. He wished to increase the numbers of his small people, and therefore he ordered the =concealment= of the feminine charms, “=in order to stimulate the senses of the male members of his community=, and thus increase the fertility of his people.”[98] Nudity, rejected by him as =unsuitable=, came in the Christian teaching to be regarded as “=immoral=”; for such a change in the point of view, we can find numerous examples in the public life of the present day.

The greatest sensual stimulus is exerted by the =half-clothing= or =partial disclosure= of the body, the so-called retroussé--that is, the art of bringing about a refined mutual influence between the charms of clothing and the charms of the body.[99] This plays a very important part in the origination of the so-called “clothes fetichism,” which we shall describe at greater length when we come to the consideration of these sexual anomalies.

There are two fundamental forms of clothing, the =tropical= (coat and sash) and the =arctic= (doublet and hose), and these, in addition to their simple function of protecting in the tropics from the powerful rays of the sun, and in the northern climates of protecting from cold, serve also in both sexes as a means of sexual allurement. The changeful phenomena and phases of “fashion in clothing” afford the most certain proofs of this fact; they may, in fact, be regarded as the most valuable sexual psychological documents of the successive epochs of civilization. The celebrated writer on æsthetics Friedrich Theodor Vischer has regarded them especially from this point of view in his original work, distinguished by its pithy style, “Fashion and Cynicism: Contributions to the Knowledge of the Forms of Civilization and of our Moral Ideas” (Stuttgart, 1888). He regards “the rage to excel in man-catching” as “the most powerful of impulses, capable of inflaming to fever-heat the madness of fashion, with its brainless changes, its furious inclinations, its raging distortions.” In a certain sense we may also speak of some of the fashions of men’s clothing as an art of “woman-catching.” Still, on the whole, this feature is much less manifest here than in relation to woman’s clothing.

Clothing has a sexually stimulating influence in a twofold manner: either certain parts are especially =accentuated= and =enlarged= by the shape or cut of the clothing and by peculiar kinds of ornamentation, or else particular portions of the body are directly =denuded=. Both of these have a sexual influence.

The accentuation and enlargement of certain parts of the body by means of clothing takes its origin in man’s belief that by this means he really produces certain enlargements of his personality, =as though these portions of clothing were actually a part of himself=. This remarkable theory of clothing, according to which the latter represents a =strengthening of the body=, a kind of outwardly projected emanation of the human personality, a direct continuation of the body, was first enunciated by the celebrated philosopher Hermann Lotze. He writes:

“Everywhere when we place a foreign body in connexion with the surface of our body (for not the hand alone develops this peculiarity), =the consciousness of our personal identity is in a certain sense transmitted into the ends and outer surface of this foreign body=, and there arise feelings, partly of an enlargement of our personal ego, partly of a change in form and in extent of movement, now become possible to us, but naturally foreign to our organs, and partly of an unaccustomed tension, firmness, or security of our carriage.”[100]

Naturally the reciprocal influence of one person upon another is not wanting, and the observer believes that in the clothing he actually finds the body. Parts that otherwise would not have attracted attention now appear as important objects. For example, the tall hat, as a prolongation of the head, seems to give the latter a certain height and worth. Gustave Flaubert, in “Madame Bovary,” very beautifully describes this remarkable transition, this identification of clothing with the body:

“Beneath her hair, which was drawn upwards towards the top of the head, the skin of the nape of her neck appeared to have a brownish tint, which gradually became paler, and lost itself in the shadows of her clothing. Her dress spread out on either side over the chair on which she was sitting; it fell in many folds, and spread out on the floor. When he chanced to touch it with his foot, he immediately drew the foot back again, =as if he had trodden on something living=.”

The same association of ideas has led to the idea that clothing “is, as it were, a complete skin to man,” as if it must represent a kind of “ideal nudity.”[101] Clothing represents the person, shelters the nature, the soul. It can, therefore, become the means of expression of human peculiarities, of individual traits of character. There exists a “physiognomy” of clothing; it is a mirror of the physical and spiritual being.[102] Very rightly is it asserted, in a pseudonymous essay on the “Erotics of Clothing,” that clothing, in the course of the many thousand years of the development of civilization, has taken up into itself so much of the =spirit= of mankind that we should find a solution for all the problems of human civilization if we were able completely and immediately to understand the spirit of clothing. The form of clothing is at the same time also the most subtle and accurate measuring apparatus for the peculiar and personal in a man--for the individual in him.[103]

If the accentuation of certain parts is the first sexual stimulus of clothing the denuding of certain parts is the second. When once the custom of concealing the body has been introduced, the denuding of portions of the body has acquired a sexually stimulating effect which it did not previously possess, and which it does not now possess among primitive communities. In the saying of a thoughtful writer, that there is a great difference from an erotic point of view between a glance at the naked leg of a sturdy peasant girl and a glance at the naked leg of a fashionable young lady, this different conception of nudity finds very clear expression. There is, in fact, a natural, sexually indifferent nudity, and an artificial, erotically stimulating nudity. It is the latter only which plays a part in the history of clothing and of fashion; and it is this, in association with the erotic accentuation of certain portions of the body, which has from early times been cultivated for the allurement of men, and above all by the world of prostitution and by the half-world.

This first occurred in classical antiquity, to which, however, true “fashion” was unknown, because clothing was not then, as it is in modern times, fused with the body, and therefore did not appear to be a continuation and representation of the bodily personality. In general, the refined quality of the modern “mode” was lacking, in regard to the accentuation of particular parts of the body by means of clothing. Very aptly has Schopenhauer, in the second volume of his “Parerga and Paralipomena,” pointed out the thorough-going difference between antique and modern clothing in this relationship. In the days of antiquity clothing was still a whole, which remained distinct from the body, and which allowed the human form to be recognized as distinctly as possible in all its parts. Sexual stimulation could be effected only by the employment of =diaphanous= fabrics, which were preferred in the circles of the half-world and by effeminate men. Varro, Juvenal, and Seneca chastise with biting words this immorality of “coacæ vestes,” and of the network clothing imported from Egypt. Then there appeared for the first time as a peculiar type the woman in man’s clothing, a proof of the wide diffusion of the love of boys, on which those prostitutes who went about clothed as men must have speculated when they assumed this dress.

The analysis of clothing into =upper-clothing= and =under-clothing= signifies a differentiation of clothing very effective as regards erotic influence. For the first time could the individual portions of the body appear in definite significance in relation to the body as a whole. And the indication of the waist became characteristic of fashion in clothing.[104]

The analysis of clothing was carried a stage further in the separation of clothing, properly speaking, from that which lies beneath it, the more intimate covering of the body, the washable underclothing--shirt, chemise, petticoat, etc. More especially had this differentiation a great erotic significance. It was the increase in the number of individual articles of clothing which first gave rise to the erotically tinged idea of the gradual “dressing” and “undressing,” to the idea of the intimate “toilet.” The possibilities of disclosure, half concealment, and semi-nudity were notably increased, and a much larger playground was opened to the erotic imagination.

In association with this, the waist, especially in the case of woman, indicated a separation of the bodily spheres into an upper sphere, associated chiefly with the intellectual, and a lower sphere, belonging rather to the purely sexual.

“The waist, which is already, roughly speaking, indicated by the sash or girdle, but which, in consequence of the progressive differentiation of feminine clothing, comes to play a principal part in women’s dress, divides the woman’s body into thorax and abdomen. The fully clothed woman becomes an insect, a wasp, with two sharply defined emotional and sexual spheres, with a heavenly and an earthly division.”[105]

With this classification and differentiation of clothing there now developed a fertile field for the activity of “fashion,” which therefore, as such, first really takes its rise in the middle ages. According to Sombart,[106] it was in the Italian States of the fifteenth century that it first became a living reality. Fashion is a product of the Christian middle ages; the specific element that this period introduced into feminine clothing--the corset--is a witness to Christian doctrine.

Stratz remarks on this subject:

“Strange as it may seem, it is very remarkably true that =the corset derives its origin from the Christian worship of God=. Owing to the strict ecclesiastical control in the middle ages--strict, at least, as regards public life--the dominant ascetic point of view demanded the fullest possible covering of the feminine body, and the =mortification of the flesh=; it insisted, at any rate, that those portions of the body should be withdrawn from the view of sinful man which are regarded as especially characteristic of the female sex. Through woman sin had entered the world, and therefore woman must, above all, take care to conceal as much as possible the sinful characteristics of her baser sex. Whilst man, by the greatest possible increase in breadth of shoulders and chest, endeavoured to suggest a more powerful and warlike aspect, we find that among women from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, the endeavour was dominant to make the breasts as flat and childlike and as narrow as possible, and for this purpose, =for the compression and obliteration of the breasts, an early form of the corset was employed=.”[107]

It is characteristic that fashion later employed the corset in precisely the =opposite= sense--namely, in order to make the breasts “stand out more prominently above the upper margin of the corset, which continually became shorter.” Thus there arose a conflict between medieval fashion and the ascetic tendencies of the times. Fashion was victorious along the whole line, as we can learn in detail in Ritter’s interesting essay regarding the nudities of the middle ages.[108]

Since the middle ages, two portions of the body have in the female sex been especially accentuated by clothing--the breasts, and the region of the hips and the buttocks.

As we have already pointed out, the corset was especially employed to accentuate the breasts, the corset having already produced the stimulating contrast between the prominence of the breast and the slenderness of the waist, increased by lacing. At the same time, at an early date the denuding of the upper part of the breasts was associated with this accentuation, the top of the dress being cut away in front à la grand’ gorge, whilst the corset, strengthened by rods of whalebone or steel, produced a bonne conché. This accentuation of the breasts dominated feminine fashion down to the present day. Besides the use of the corset in this matter, the region of the breasts was also rendered more prominent by the use of artificial breasts made of wax, by ornaments in the form of breast-rings, etc.

The partial denuding of the breasts represents the true décolleté of our balls and parties, a custom which a man so tolerant in other respects as H. Bahr condemns on æsthetic grounds.[109]

“The art of undressing and enjoying =in imagination= beautiful girls and women,” says Georg Hirth, “is learnt chiefly at Court and other balls, at which the feminine guests are compelled by fashion to bare the upper part of the body. It is astonishing how quickly, how invariably, the girls of the upper classes accustom themselves to this exhibition, which exercises so stimulating an effect upon us of the opposite sex. And yet they would turn up their noses if, at the parties of non-commissioned officers and servants, the women allowed such extensive glimpses of their charms. I once heard a girl three years of age express a naive surprise when she saw the décolletage of her mother, who was about to go to a ball. What a scolding would the poor servant-girl get if she were to exhibit her nudity to the children in such a manner!”[110]

Fr. Th. Vischer also severely criticizes this exposure of feminine nudities coram publico. Moreover, the free enjoyment of alcohol customary among men at these evening entertainments is likely to induce a frame of mind in which the charms thus freely displayed before their eyes will receive an attention not purely æsthetic.

As regards the corset more particularly, it is not only =unæsthetic=, but also =unhygienic=.

The corset draws in the beautiful outline of the feminine body in the most disagreeable manner; the wasp waist which it produces is an ugly exaggeration of the natural condition. The lady editor of the Documents of Women instituted an inquiry amongst a number of artists in regard to the corset. One of these, the architect Leopold Bauer, replied as follows:

“Nature has endowed the feminine body with a most beautiful outline. It is almost incomprehensible that the ideal of beauty should during so lengthy a period aim at the destruction of this wonderful and unique perfection. The corset makes an ugly bend in the vertebral column, it makes the hip shapeless, it suggests an unnatural and even repulsive development of the breasts, which transforms our sentiment of the sacred beauty of the human body into the lowest sexual and perverse impulses. That the corset does not really make the body appear slender is no longer open to doubt. All the suggested advantages of the corset are prejudices.... It is only when women’s dress is freed from the tyranny of this detestable corset that it will be able to develop in a free and artistic manner.”[111]

Physicians are unanimous regarding the unhygienic nature of the corset. The deleterious influence of tight-lacing upon the form and the activity of the thoracic and abdominal organs has been thoroughly elucidated by many authors. I need refer only, among many, to the writings of Hugo Klein,[112] Menge,[113] and O. Rosenbach,[114] regarding the dangers of the corset. The corset hinders the sufficient inspiration, which is so necessary for the adequate activity of the respiratory and circulatory organs, and herein we find a principal cause of anæmia (O. Rosenbach); it exercises the most harmful pressure on the abdominal organs, especially on the stomach and the liver, and presses them out of their natural situation, so that it gives rise to a descent of the kidneys, the liver, and the genital organs. The extremely ugly “pendulous belly” is also dependent on the influence of the corset. The pressure of the corset also often gives rise to an atrophy of the mammary glands, and to abnormal changes in the nipples. Thence ensues, further, a serious hindrance to the function of lactation, which may indeed be rendered completely impossible. For this reason, Georg Hirth, in his admirable essay upon the indispensable character of the maternal breast, exclaims: “Away with the corset!”[115]

The dorsal and abdominal muscles also undergo partial atrophy in consequence of the habitual wearing of the corset, because this garment to some extent relieves these muscles of their natural function. Anæmia, gastric and hepatic disorders, and intercostal neuralgia are also dependent upon this “most disastrous error of woman’s dress,” as von Krafft-Ebing calls the corset. Menge has very thoroughly studied the hurtful influence of the corset on the feminine reproductive organs. He enumerates, as a result of wearing it, among many evil results, inflammatory states and enlargement of the ovaries, relaxation of the uterine muscles, atrophy and excessive proliferation of the uterine mucous membrane, the onset of the extremely disagreeable fluor albus, premature termination of pregnancy, displacements of the uterus (retroflexion, anteversion, prolapse), abnormal stretching of the entire pelvic floor, retention of urine, constipation, and nervous troubles of the most varied character. Very often, also, sterility in woman is causally dependent upon the constriction and pressure exercised by the corset.

Rightly, therefore, the abandonment of the corset plays a principal part in the “reformed dress” of woman--a subject to which we shall later return.

In addition to the accentuation of the breast by the corset and by other apparatus,[116] another aim of feminine fashion has been most persistent in very various forms, namely, the exaggeration of =the hips, or the buttocks, or both=--in fact, of all the visible parts of the clothed body which are directly related to the sexual functions of woman; that is to say, there has been a persistent endeavour to indicate in the most prominent manner, in a way to stimulate the male, the secondary sexual characters of the female in this region of the body.

“The thoroughly modern women,” says Heinrich Pudor, “coquet at the present day less with their breasts than with their hind-quarters--for this reason, because for the most part they have a masculine type (?). It began with the cul de Paris. Nowadays, clothes are cut in such a way that in the view from the back the gluteal region is especially prominent. This is how the fashionable wife of a German officer strikes us at present.

“‘Tailor-made’ is the phrase that has for some time been in use in England. The tailor has made it--not the milliner. No, the tailor, who perhaps is at the same time bath-master and masseur.... Certain species of baboons are distinguished by their brightly coloured and prominent hind-quarters--there seems to be no doubt that our modern ladies in high life have taken these for their example. Or can it be that they wish to avail themselves of the homosexual inclinations of their male acquaintances? Beyond question this is so. Here we find the fundamental ground of the type of clothing of our own day by which so much attention is drawn to the region of the buttocks. What is repulsive here is not the homosexuality, but the misuse that is made of clothing. In fact, that which is most repulsive to a refined sentiment is this--that women have their clothes cut as tightly as possible round the hips, in order that the broad pelvis, which is especially characteristic of women as a sexual being, shall be as far as possible visibly isolated.”[117]

Similarly Fr. Th. Vischer has castigated the immorality of the gross accentuation of kallipygian charms,[118] which in the eighteenth century was inaugurated by the invention of the so-called tournure (cul de Paris), against which Mary Wollstonecraft inveighed so severely. By the tension of the clothing, not only the buttocks, but also the hips and the thighs, were rendered grossly apparent. In certain epochs, also, the feminine abdomen was very markedly indicated by the mode of dress; for instance, in the middle ages, down to the sixteenth century, fashion provided women and girls with the insignia of pregnancy, as is apparent in the pictures of Jan van Eyck (“The Lamb,” “Eva”), Hans Memling (“Eva”), and Titian (“The Beauty of Urbino”). The fashion of the “thick abdomen” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was only another variation of the same theme.

In close relation to the variations of fashion we have just described is the =farthingale= (montgolfière) or =crinoline=. It was first adopted in the sixteenth century by courtesans and prostitutes, who thus exhibited rounded and provocative forms, wishing to allure men by these vertugales, which, according to the bon mot of a Franciscan, expelled vertu, leaving behind only the gale (syphilis). The aptest remarks regarding the repulsive and dirty fashion of the crinoline were made by Schopenhauer.[119] It seems as if the crinoline, which is well known to have celebrated its greatest triumph during the period of the Second Empire in France--who is not familiar with the characteristic daguerrotypes of that period?--has recently endeavoured to come to life once more, for it appears that attempts have actually been made towards the rehabilitation of this monstrosity of clothing.

The physical difference between man and woman is also beyond question the principal cause of the difference between masculine and feminine clothing. According to Waldeyer (Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Congress of Anthropologists at Kassel, 1895, published in the Journal of the German Society of Anthropologists, No. 9, p. 76), it is especially the difference in the length and position of the thigh-bones that is responsible for the differentiation between masculine and feminine clothing. In woman, the upper ends of the femora are, in consequence of the greater width of the pelvis, more widely separated than in the male; and since in both sexes these bones are closely approximated at the knees, in women their position appears more oblique. This, in combination with the comparative shortness of women’s thighs, has a manifest influence upon the gait, especially in running, in which man distinctly excels woman. In this purely anatomical difference is to be found the reason why the masculine mode of dress, which makes the lower extremities very manifest, is not adapted for woman, especially when in the upright posture. This is an important cause for the differentiation between masculine and feminine clothing.

A further fundamental difference between the clothing of man and that of woman is the much greater simplicity and monotony, on the whole, of masculine clothing. This has, with good reason, been associated with the greater intellectual differentiation of man, who, therefore, stands less in need of any peculiar accentuation of the individual personality by means of clothing. Woman, who earlier was =only= a sexual being, utilized clothing in manifold ways as a means of sexual allurement, as the chief means of compensation for the life of activity denied her by Nature and custom, whereas to man, on the whole, the employment of sexual stimulation by means of clothing was superfluous.

Georg Simmel writes from another point of view. He is of opinion that woman, in comparison with man, is, on the whole, the more constant being, but that precisely this constancy, which expresses the equability and unity of her nature on the emotional side, demands, on the principle of compensation of vital tendencies, a more active variability in other less central provinces; whereas, on the contrary, man, in his very nature less constant, who is not accustomed to cleave with the same unconditional concentration of all vital interests to any once experienced emotional relationship, precisely in consequence of this, stands less in need of such external variability. Man, as regards objective phenomena, is, on the whole, more indifferent than woman, because fundamentally he is the more variable being, and therefore can more easily dispense with such objective variability.[120]

Notwithstanding this, down to the beginning of the nineteenth century there were not wanting, in the fashion of men’s clothing, attempts to employ certain parts of dress for the purpose of sexual stimulation. I refer in this connexion to my earlier contributions.[121] Here I shall allude only in passing to the peculiar and characteristic variations of men’s clothing in the form of marked attention drawn to the male genitals by the breeches-flap (braguettes); to the shoe, à la poulaine, which imitated the form of a male penis; to certain effeminate tendencies in the dress of man which have recurred very often since the days of the Roman Empire,[122] which are connected with the wide diffusion of homosexual tendencies, and which sometimes have given men’s dress so variegated a character, have involved such frequent changes and such occasional nudities, that at these times it could enter into competition with women’s clothing. In this respect, clothing enables us to draw conclusions not merely regarding the nature of the men who wore it, but also regarding the character of the time. There exists also the modern dandyhood, which recalls many peculiarities of earlier times; but, on the whole, fashion in men’s clothing tends to simplicity and sexual indifference. This movement originated in England, and the English fashion in men’s clothing has become dominant throughout the whole world, whereas women’s clothing now, as formerly, receives its fashionable stimulus from Paris.

In addition to the indirect relations of clothing with the vita sexualis, which we have already described, there is a direct relationship, and this is =the effect of certain fabrics upon the skin=, from which certain associations of ideas and certain abnormal tendencies may arise. Thus, for example, the contact of woollen stuffs and of furs has a sexually stimulating influence. Ryan compared their influence with that of flagellation.[123] In this sense, also, furs and the whip go together--these two symbols of “masochism”; velvet has a similar effect. The celebrated author of “Venus im Pelz,” Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, in his well-known romance bearing this name, deals fully with the sexual significance of furs. According to him, they exert a peculiar, prickling, physical stimulus, perhaps dependent upon their being charged with electricity, and upon the warmth of their atmosphere. A woman in a fur coat is like a “great cat,[124] a powerful electric battery.” Influences of smell also appear to be associated herewith. For, in a letter to his wife, Sacher-Masoch once wrote to tell her what voluptuous pleasure it would give to him to bathe his face in the warm odour of her furs.[125] With the description of the stimulating effect of fur dependent upon sensations of contact and smell, he associated also the fact that fur gave woman a dominant, masterful, magical influence. His “Venus im Pelz” is also to him “one who commands.” Titian found for the rosy beauty of his beloved one no more costly frame than dark fur. It is doubtless the strong contrast-effect between the delicate charm and the shaggy surroundings that evokes that remarkable symbolical relationship to longings for power and cruel despotism. In a thoughtful essay, “Venus im Pelz” (Berliner Tageblatt, No. 487, September 25, 1903), the idea is developed and explained, that the love of woman for furs results from her inward nature. It is the secret longing for an increase of her power and influence by means of contrast.[126]

Men’s and women’s clothing comprises the covering of the entire body with the exception of the face--the idea does not, as a rule, include the head-covering and the way the hair is dressed. In a recent work, H. Pudor brings the face into a peculiar =sexual relationship with the clothing=. His remarks on this subject, which contain many valuable observations, notwithstanding the fact that much of what he says is overdrawn, run as follows:

“There is no doubt that the face is a bearer of the sexual sense in the second and third degree. Not only the mouth or the larynx. The nose, especially in virtue of the mucous membranes by which odours are perceived. The eye, in virtue of the magnetic currents, the perception of light, and the chemical activity of the retina. But even the cheeks and the ears. Let some one you are fond of whisper something into your ear--notice the emotional wave you will feel, and observe how from the ear there are paths of conduction to the sexual cells [!]. Above all, however, naturally the mouth. We speak of the labia of the female genital organs, and therewith already we indicate the relationship to the lips of the mouth. We can, in fact, prove the existence, not only of a parallelism in the structure of the mouth and that of the sexual organs, in man just as in woman. We can go even further: we can regard the sacral region as the forehead, the anal region as the nose, the pudendal region as the mouth, and the gluteal region as the cheeks [!].

“If we regard the sexual differentiation of the features of the face as established, from this standpoint we gain an interesting light upon the deeper lying causes of the wearing of clothes. Civilized mankind conceals the sexual organs of the first degree; the sexual organs of the third degree--that is, the features of the face--are left naked; in fact, on account of the thorough way in which the parts of the body adjacent to the face are covered, stress is actually laid upon the nakedness of the face as bearing sexual organs of the third degree--now we recognize the rôle played by the hat--and by means of that which we call coquetry, we see mirrored in the features the proper sexual organs, or we have our attention drawn to the sexual organs by means of the features, and by the latter we are made aware of certain peculiarities of the former. In this connexion, let us remember certain facial adornments which serve to limit still more the naked area of the face, and to clothe a larger portion of that region, such as the locks of hair covering the ears which the dancer Cléo de Mérode introduced, ringlets such as were worn in youth by our grandmothers, or the chin-band drawn across the middle of the chin. Perhaps even other ornaments of the face (neck-band, ear-rings, and even eyeglasses and lorgnette [!]) also play a certain part in this connexion. Think, above all, of the stand-up collar and all other varieties of high collar by which the clothing is carried up as high as the chin. But those parts of the face which remain naked must now be as naked as possible; for this reason hairs, unless they belong to the beard as sexual organs of the second degree, must be removed, and society determinedly insists that faces shall be clean-shaven.”[127]

The relation of the face to the clothing already makes clear to us the idea of “costume” as an extension of clothing beyond the mere covering of the body. All which surrounds man, which has a relation to his appearance, is costume in the widest sense of the word; thus, sitting-room, workshop, study, dressing-room, park, library, etc.

“We take pains regarding all that we have nearest to us and round about us, our toilet, because therein we are at home, therein we suffer and we rejoice. Where we feel ourselves at home, we shall endeavour so to arrange matters that everything is comfortable to us, down to the furthest manifestations of our existence, so that our sitting-room, our bedroom, our house and our garden, constitute =a prolongation, an extension of our clothing=” (A. von Eye).[128]

Thus it happens that fashion is concerned, not merely with clothing, but also with an abundance of customary details of environment. The arrangement and furnishing of rooms, artistic objects, bodily exercises, social intercourse, sports, etc., are subject to the caprices of fashion. On this extended idea of fashion is based Fr. Th. Vischer’s definition: “Fashion is a general term to denote a complex of temporary current forms of civilization.”

The =theory= of fashion has been elaborated especially by Sombart[129] and Simmel.[130] In the work of W. Fred,[131] also, we find some thoughtful observations.

According to Simmel, fashion fulfils a double task. On the one hand, it is the imitation of a given example, and thus satisfies the need for social dependence; it leads the individual along the path on which all are going. But, on the other hand, it satisfies also the need for difference, the tendency to differentiation, to variation, to self-assertion. This fashion effects by means of frequent changes, and by the fact that first of all it is always a class fashion. The fashions of the upper classes are distinguished from those of the lower classes, and are instantly abandoned when the lower classes adopt them. Thus, =according to Simmel’s definition, fashion is nothing else than a peculiar form among many forms of life, by means of which the tendency towards social equalization is connected with the tendency towards individual differentiation and variation to constitute a unitary activity=.

In Paris, the centre of fashion, the associated work of these two tendencies may be studied most accurately and purely. We can there observe how at first always a portion only of society adopts the fashion, whilst the commonalty are still only on the way towards its adoption. If the fashion has become entirely general, if it is followed without exception, it is already over, it is no longer “fashionable,” because this class difference has ceased to exist.

“By means of this interplay--between its tendency to general diffusion on the one hand, and, on the other, the annihilation of its significance which this very diffusion brings about--fashion exercises the peculiar charm of the border-line, the charm of simultaneous beginning and ending, the charm of that which is at the same time new and obsolete” (Simmel).

In connexion with this fact we find that from the earliest times the “=demi-monde=” has always given the impulse to new fashions. Owing to the peculiarly uncertain position occupied by this class, everything conventional, everything long in use, is detested by its members; only newness and change are agreeable.

“In the continuous endeavour to find new, hitherto unheard-of fashions, in the heedlessness with which precisely that which is opposed to what has gone before is passionately grasped, there lies an æsthetic form of the destructive impulse, which all pariah existences appear to possess, so long, at any rate, as they are not completely enslaved” (Simmel).

On the other hand, the equalizing tendency of fashion serves delicate, sensitive natures as a kind of =protection= of their personality, as Simmel has shown in a masterly manner. To such persons fashion plays the part, as it were, of a mask.

“Thus it is a delicate shame and shyness, lest by a peculiarity in outward aspect, some peculiarity of the subjective character might perhaps be betrayed, that leads many natures to seek with eagerness the concealing equalization of fashion.... It gives a veil and a protection to all that lies within, and that thereby becomes more perfectly free.”

That modern fashion is, for the most part, a child of the nineteenth century, and is most intimately dependent upon the nature of capitalism, has been directly proved by W. Sombart. He indicates as a decisive fact in the process of the formation of fashion the perception that the participation of the consumer is thereby reduced to a minimum, that, on the contrary, the driving force in the creation of modern fashion is the capitalistic entrepreneur. If, for example, a Parisian cocotte discovers a new style of dress, or if, as the newspapers recently reported, the King of England introduces the fashion of a white hat or white shoes for men, these actions have, according to Sombart, the character only of intermediate assistance. The true driving agent for the rapid =general= diffusion of fashion, and for the frequent =changes of fashion=, remains the capitalistic entrepreneur, the producer, or merchant. Sombart proves this convincingly by striking examples. This economic aspect of fashion must receive no less consideration than the psychological.

If men’s clothing, as we have already said, is, in the gross, far less subject to the dominion of fashion than women’s clothing, still recently efforts have been apparent to simplify women’s clothing also, to make it independent of the caprices of fashion, and, above all, to subordinate it to hygienic principles. It is noteworthy that these efforts proceed more particularly from the leaders of the modern woman’s movement, an interesting proof of the connexion already alluded to between personality and clothing. The more differentiated and the more inwardly rich the personality, the simpler and more monotonous is the clothing. To this extent, therefore, the desire for simplification of feminine clothing is an entirely logical postulate of the emancipation of women. But this demand finds a justification also from the point of view of hygiene. This fact has been discussed especially by Paul Schultze-Naumburg in his book on “The Culture of the Feminine Body as the Basis of Women’s Clothing” (Leipzig, 1901). He insists above all on the =complete abandonment of the corset=, and of the “small waist,” and on a return of women’s clothing to the free, simple outlines of the antique. He makes, also, very noteworthy observations on the unhygienic footgear of both sexes.

The idea that woman’s clothing should unconstrainedly represent the form of her body has been admirably realized in the different varieties of the so-called “=reformed dress=.” Not without influence on these deserving attempts has been the recognition of the distinguished simplicity and hygienic purposefulness of the Japanese women’s clothing.

For the present, however, fashion, as of old, remains dominant, and celebrates annually its triumph in respect of new discoveries and refinements of the dress of women of the world, employing for this purpose the familiar means of accentuation and disclosure, and of coloured and ornamental stimuli. The “woman’s movement” has as yet had little ostensible and practical influence in liberating women’s dress from the all-powerful control of fashion.

Now that we have considered clothing and fashion in their relations to the sexual life, and have learned to understand how they combine in action as means of sexual stimulation of a peculiar nature, we are in a position to grasp the =relations between the sense of shame and nudity=, as it presents itself to us as a =problem of modern civilization=.

While, as Simmel also maintains, and as we have thoroughly explained above, clothing, through the intermediation of fashion, gives rise to shamelessness as a group manifestation, or, as we are accustomed to say at the present day, seriously impairs the sense of shame in such a manner as would be repelled with disgust if it were adopted by the personal choice of an isolated individual,[132] clothing has, on the other hand, led astray the natural biological sense of shame, since it is the sole cause of the “exaggerated sense of shame” known as =prudery=. Prudery recognizes the existence of =clothed= human beings only; it will not recognize the existence of naked man; it refuses to admit the purely moral-æsthetic influence of natural nudity--to prudery this is something immoral and repulsive.

To prudery alone we must ascribe the fact that we modern civilized human beings have completely lost the taste for natural nudity, and also for the natural sense of shame, and thus we show little understanding of the ennobling, civilizing influence of both.

Natural nudity, the state in which every human being is born into this world, not artificial nudity, with its lascivious influence dependent upon clothing, posture, and gesture, is purely an object of simple contemplation for the human being of normal perceptions, who sees in the unclothed human body precisely the same individual natural object as he sees in the bodies of other living beings. People, in other respects extremely prudish, admit this when they have the opportunity--at the present day certainly very rare--of seeing completely naked human beings in natural surroundings, as, for instance, when bathing.

It is only when we introduce =intentionally= a sensual or, speaking generally, an artificial influence, that nudity has an effect of lascivious stimulation. =Prudery is, however, nothing more than such a way of looking at nudity, with concealed lustful feelings.= The talented Schleiermacher already recognized this fact. He unmasked prudery as a lack of the sense of shame, and very clearly pointed out the sexual and lascivious element which it conceals. In his “Vertrauten Briefen über die Lucinde” (edition of K. Gutzkow, Hamburg, 1835, pp. 63-65) we find the following beautiful passage:

“What, then, shall we think of those who pretend to be in a condition of quiet thought and activity, and yet are so intolerably sensitive that as a result of the most trivial and most remote impulse, passion arises in them, and who believe themselves to be the more fully equipped with the sense of shame the more readily they find in everything something worthy of suspicion? They do not really find what they pretend to find in every occurrence; =it is their own crude lust which lies always on the watch=, and springs forward as soon as anything shows itself in the distance akin to themselves, and which therefore they find it possible to condemn; and they will quickly seize an opportunity for blaming anything of which the motives were =absolutely blameless=. Ordinarily, indeed, blamelessness appears to them a pretence. Youths and maidens are represented as knowing nothing as yet of love, but none the less as full of yearnings which every moment threaten to break out, and which clutch the slightest opportunity in order to grasp the forbidden fruit. But this is absurd. True youths and maidens are, indeed, the ideals of this kind of modesty, =but in them it takes another form=. Only that which has no other purpose than to arouse desire and passion can do them any harm; =but why should they not be allowed to learn love and to understand Nature, both of which they see everywhere round them=? Why should they not, without restraint, understand and enjoy what is thought and said about these matters, since in this way so much the less would passion be aroused in them? =Such anxious and limited modesty as is at the present day characteristic of society is based only upon the consciousness of a great and widespread perversity, and upon a deep corruption.= What will be the end of all this? If matters were left to themselves, they would become worse and worse; when we so persistently hunt out that which in reality is =not shameful=, we shall at last succeed in finding something immodest in every circle of ideas; and finally all conversation and all society must come to an end; we must separate the sexes so that they may not look at one another; we must introduce monasticism, or even something more severe. But this is not to be borne, and it will happen to our society as it happened to our wives when morality confined them ever more and more strictly, until at last it became improper for them to show the tips of their fingers--and then in despair they suddenly turned round, and they exposed their necks, their shoulders, and their breasts to the rude winds and to lascivious eyes; or, like the caterpillars, they cast off their old skin by a predetermined movement. Thus will it be; when corruption has reached its climax, and the crude impulses become so dominant =that it is no longer possible to keep them within bounds=, all these false appearances will break down of themselves, and behind them we shall see youthful shamelessness which has long intimately entwined itself round the body of society, so that this has become the true skin in which society naturally and easily moves. Complete corruption and =completed culture, by way of which we return to blamelessness=--both of these make an end of prudery.”

Fine words from a theologian! This thoroughly just description of the nature of prudery and of its dangers should be laid seriously to heart by our modern theological bigots and moral fanatics. How truly Schleiermacher has depicted the nature of prudery is shown by the observations of the alienist J. L. A. Koch, that it is precisely the women who were formerly prudish and “moral” when they become insane--for example, in mania--who are much more shameless than women who in everyday life had taken a more natural view of sexual relationships.

The =eternal concealment= of the most natural things is what first makes them appear unnatural, first awakens desire, where otherwise they would have been passed by quietly and harmlessly without attention. At the present day the natural justifiable sense of shame has been =intensified= to an unnatural degree, and has been falsified to such an extent that this exaggeration of the sense of shame, this unceasing objective suppression of natural harmless activities and feelings, has really increased the hidden desires to an immeasurable degree; it is this, in fact, which heaps fuel on the fire of fleshly lust.[133]

The genuine, natural, biological sense of shame sets bounds to lust. To this shame we owe the ennobling and spiritualizing of the crude sexual impulse; it is the preliminary stage to the individualization of that impulse. It is intimately related to that voluntary, temporary, and relative continence which has so great an importance for the individual life. The sense of shame has civilized the sexual impulse without denying its essential basis.

Complete culture returns to complete innocence. It knows no fig-leaves; it does not go about, as did recently in the Dresden Museum a clergyman affected with the psychosis of hyper-prudery, knocking off the genital organs from naked statues; nor does it castrate the human spirit, as we find most biographers do even now in the case of the great men whose lives they describe. It recognizes the sexual as something noble and natural.

The sense of shame is an inalienable acquirement of civilization; it is self-respect. But, as Havelock Ellis rightly remarks, in =completely developed= human beings self-respect keeps a tight rein on any excess of the sense of shame. Knowledge and culture give the death-blow to all false prudery. The cultured man looks the natural in the face; he recognizes its value and its necessity. To him the sexual is the indispensable preliminary of life; hence in its essential nature it is something =harmless, wholly comprehensible=; something that must not be underrated, but =above all must not be overrated=, as our virtuous hypocrites and fanatics of prudery invariably overrate it.

The true league against immorality is the league against prudery. The apostles of the nude do more service to true morality than the men of the “Lex-Heinze,” than those who hold conferences on morality, than the German Christian League of Virtue. A natural conception of the nude--that is the watchword of the future. This is shown by all the hygienic, æsthetic, and ethical endeavours of our time.

[72] G. Simmel, “Philosophy of Fashion” (Berlin, 1906, p. 27).

[73] Cf. C. Lombroso and G. Ferrero, “Woman as Criminal and Prostitute.”

[74] Karl von den Steinen, “Experiences among the Savage Races of Central Brazil” (Berlin, 1894, p. 199).

[75] Op. cit., p. 66.

[76] Op. cit., p. 64.

[77] A discussion of the early manifestations of the sexual sense of shame as exhibited by savages and by primitive man would hardly be complete without an allusion to the theory mentioned by Robert Browning (“Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” Collected Works, 1889, vol. iv., p. 271):

“Suppose a pricking to incontinence-- Philosophers deduce you chastity Or shame, from just the fact that at the first Whoso embraced a woman in the field, Threw club down and forewent his brains beside, So stood a ready victim in the reach Of any brother savage, club in hand; Hence saw the use of going out of sight In wood or cave to prosecute his loves: I read this in a French book t’other day.”

[78] Op. cit., pp. 190, 191, 195. Cf. also the interesting remarks regarding the nudity of the indigens of South America by Alex. von Humboldt, “Journey in the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent” (Stuttgart, vol. ii., pp. 15, 16).

[79] Somewhat diverging from these views, Karl von den Steinen (op. cit., pp. 174, 178, and 186) is of opinion that man learned first by their use for practical ends the employment of the articles later utilized for adornment. Above all, in this connexion, he alludes to tattooing, which originated, he believes, in the practice of smearing the body with various coloured earths and with different kinds of clay, these at the same time serving to promote coolness and to afford a protection against the bites of insects. Cf. also Yrjö Hirn, “The Origin of Art” (Leipzig, 1904, p. 222).

[80] E. Herrmann, “Natural History of Clothing” (Vienna, 1878, p. 239).

[81] Edward Westermarck, “History of Human Marriage.”

[82] Wilhelm Joest, “Tattooing, Scarifying, and Painting the Body” (Berlin, 1887).

[83] Carl Marquardt, “Tattooing of Both Sexes in Samoa” (Berlin. 1899).

[84] Ludwig Stein, “The Beginnings of Human Civilization” (Leipzig, 1906, pp. 74, 75); Edward Tylor, “Anthropology: an Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization” (Macmillan, 1881, p. 237).

[85] According to Karl von den Steinen (op. cit., p. 186), the oil colours used in painting the body are “=actually the clothing of the Indians, employed for this purpose as occasion demands=.” Their oldest aim was protection against heat, cutaneous irritation, and external noxious influences.

[86] Cf. Y. Hirn, “The Origin of Art” (Leipzig, 1904, pp. 223, 224).

[87] Cf. my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., p. 338.

[88] Cf. K. Lange, “The Nature of Art” (Berlin, 1901, vol. ii., pp. 185, 186).

[89] The significance of tattooing of this nature in the diagnosis of sexual perversities we shall later discuss at greater length.

[90] Cf. Kurella, “The Natural History of the Criminal” (Stuttgart, 1893, pp. 105-112).

[91] “Erotic Tattooing” in “Anthropophyteia, Annual for Folk-lore and for Researches regarding the History of the Evolution of Sexual Morals,” edited by Friedrich S. Krauss (Leipzig, 1904, vol. i., pp. 507-513). According to an account in the Temps, in a deserter from the French army the most remarkable tattooings were observed. On the breast there were two seductive women throwing kisses to a sturdy musketeer, in addition to portraits of music-hall singers, both male and female--for example, Yvette Guilbert. The entire back was covered with love sketches. Cf. B. Z. am Mittag, August 21, 1906.

[92] William Ellis, “Polynesian Researches” (London, 1859, vol. i., p. 235).

[93] Cf. Hirn, “The Origin of Art,” pp. 214, 215.

[94] Cf. Havelock Ellis, op. cit. pp. 56-62.

[95] It is well known that the buttocks formed an object of erotic allurement in many savage races, and especially so in certain African tribes.

[96] J. J. Virey, “Woman” (Leipzig, 1825, p. 300).

[97] Westermarck, “History of Human Marriage,” pp. 193, 197.

[98] C. H. Stratz, “Women’s Clothing” (Stuttgart, 1900, p. 42).

[99] In his “Confessions,” Rousseau writes regarding the collar of the beautiful courtesan Giulietta: “Her cuffs and collar had silken threads running through them, and were adorned with pictures of roses. =These made a beautiful contrast with her fine skin.=”

[100] H. Lotze, “Mikrokosmus: Ideas regarding the Natural History of Mankind” (third edition, Leipzig, 1878, vol. ii., p. 210).

[101] H. Bahr, “Clothing Reform,” in Dokumente der Frauen, 1902, vol. vi., No. 23, p. 665.

[102] Cf. the detailed account of this aspect of clothing in my “Contributions to the Etiology of the Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 334-336.

[103] Cf. Lucianus, “Erotics of Clothing,” published in Die Fackel, edited by Karl Kraus (Vienna, No. 198, March 12, 1906, pp. 12, 13).

[104] Cf., in this connexion, Ernest Kapp, “Fundamental Outlines of a Philosophy of Technique,” p. 267 (Brunswick, 1877).

[105] Lucianus, “Erotica of Clothing,” p. 16.

[106] W. Sombart, “Domestic Economy and Fashion” (Wiesbaden, 1902, p. 12).

[107] Stratz, “Woman’s Clothing,” pp. 123, 124.

[108] B. Ritter, “Nudities in the Middle Ages: Outlines of the History of Morals,” in the Annual of Science and Art, published by O. Wigand (Leipzig, 1855, vol. iii., p. 229).

[109] H. Bahr, “Clothing Reform,” op. cit., p. 666.

[110] G. Hirth, “Ways to Love,” p. 619.

[111] Leopold Bauer, in Documents of Women, March, 1902, pp. 675, 676.

[112] Op. cit., pp. 671, 672.

[113] Menge, “The Influence of Constricting Clothing upon the Abdominal Organs, and more Especially upon the Reproductive Organs of Woman” (Leipzig, 1904).

[114] O. Rosenbach, “The Corset and Anæmia” (Stuttgart, 1895).

[115] G. Hirth, “Ways to Love,” p. 49.

[116] The modern fancy for slender, ethereal, Pre-Raphaelite feminine figures is also to some extent allied with a negative accentuation of the breasts. Heinrich Pudor with good reason declares that at the present time perhaps the strongest sexual influence of woman is dependent upon the fact that “the existence of the breasts is concealed, and the appearance of the male sex is simulated.” Cf. his article, “Clothing and Sex,” in Die Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, August number, 1906, p. 22. Still, the sexual stimulating influence of this concealment of the breasts appears to be of a transient character, and confined to certain circles of the hyperæsthetic and the homosexual.

[117] Heinrich Pudor, “Nackt-Kultur,” vol. ii.; “Clothing and Sex; Limbs and Pelvis,” pp. 7, 8 (Berlin-Steglitz, 1906).

[118] Cf. the passages relating to this in my work, “Contributions,” etc., vol. i., pp. 152, 153.

[119] Schopenhauer, “Parerga and Paralipomena,” vol. v., p. 176.

[120] G. Simmel, “Philosophy of Fashion, p. 24” (Berlin, 1906).

[121] “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 158-162.

[122] Ovid, in his “Ars Amandi,” long ago advised men who wished to please women to avoid feminine adornments, and to leave those to the homosexual.

[123] J. Ryan, “Prostitution in London,” p. 382 (London, 1839).

[124] In Alfred de Musset’s erotic story, “Gamiani,” he describes how a woman danced on a mat of catskin, which gave rise in her to very voluptuous sensations.

[125] “Confessions of My Life,” Memoirs of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, p. 38 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1906).

[126] Here we may allude to a remark in the diary of the de Goncourts that there is nothing to compare to the delicate voluptuous charm of old cashmere as a dress-fabric for women (E. and J. de Goncourt, “Diary,” 1851-1895).

[127] H. Pudor, “Nackt-Kultur,” vol. ii., pp. 4-6.

[128] Ernst Kapp, “Elements of a Philosophy of Technique,” pp. 269, 270 (Brunswick, 1877).

[129] W. Sombart, “Domestic Economy and Fashion” (Wiesbaden, 1902).

[130] G. Simmel, “The Psychology of Fashion,” published in Die Zeit, October 12, 1895; “The Philosophy of Fashion” (Berlin, 1906).

[131] W. Fred, “The Psychology of Fashion” (Berlin, 1905).

[132] Simmel rightly points out that many women would feel very uncomfortable if they had to appear in their private sitting-room, or before a single strange man, in a dress so décolleté as that in which they readily appear, in society and following the fashion, before thirty or a hundred.

[133] What serious dangers to health prudery may entail has recently been shown by Karl Ries in a valuable essay, “Prudery as the Cause of Bodily Disorders” (published in the Reports of the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1906, vol. iv., pp. 113-121).

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VIII. THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE--THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF LOVE

“Above all, we must avoid the widely diffused error of regarding love as a simple and single feeling. The exact opposite is the truth--love consists of an entire group, and, indeed, of an extremely complex, incessantly varying, group of feelings.”--H. T. FINCK.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VIII

The individualization of love a product of recent times -- Finck’s “romantic” love too narrow a conception -- Rôle of the idealization of the senses -- First beginnings of individual love -- The Platonism of the Greeks and of the Renascence -- Distinction between the plastic and the romantic -- The love of the minnesinger -- The connexion between the nature-sense and love -- The secret elements in love -- Love and gallantry -- The slavery of love -- The imaginative element in love -- Predominance of tender feelings in the days of chivalry -- The development of the conventional in the relationships of love -- True and false gallantry -- Love as presented by Shakespeare -- Conventional life of pleasure in the days of Louis XIV. and XV. -- The belief in woman (“Manon Lescaut”) -- Rousseau’s “Julie” and Goethe’s “Werther” -- The nature-sense and sentimentality in love -- Difference between “The New Héloïse” and “Werther” -- The first beginnings of Weltschmerz -- Its physiological connexion with the vital feelings of puberty -- The vital energy in the Weltschmerz of Goethe and Heine -- The modern Weltschmerz -- Nietzsche’s connexion with this matter -- The love of the romantic period -- A mirroring of the past -- Dreams and emotions -- Moonshine reverie -- Conflict with conventional Philistine morality -- Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” -- Apotheosis of individual love -- Individual love in relation to genius -- Rôle of the emotional in romantic love -- Love mysticism -- The modern renascence of romanticism -- The Dionysiac element in modern romantic love -- Difference between romantic and classical love -- Theodor Mundt on this subject -- Goethe’s “Tasso” -- Gretchen and Helena in “Faust” -- Heine’s “Ardinghello,” a combination of romantic and classical love -- The prototype of “young Germany” -- Discussion of all modern love problems in young German literature -- Gutzkow’s overwhelming importance -- Among writers of the nineteenth century, Gutzkow’s knowledge of women is the most profound -- His characteristic girls and women -- Brings for the first time the problem of love upon the stage -- The problem of personality in Gutzkow’s writings -- The young German poetry of the flesh -- Self-analysis and reflection in love -- French precursors -- Replacement of the medieval “sin” by self-reflection -- Gutzkow’s “Wally” and “Seraphine” -- The love of the emancipated woman -- Kierkegaard’s and Grillparzer’s diaries -- “Free love” and “free marriage” in modern literature -- Influence of the Second Empire -- The satanic and artistic elements in love -- Pessimism. -- Grisebach’s “New Tanhäuser” -- The affirmation of life in this work -- A glance at the present day.

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Chapter VIII

The individualization of love is principally a product of recent times. A talented author, H. T. Finck, has dealt with this fact in a comprehensive work in two volumes.[134] This individual love, containing the spiritual elements of all the successive epochs of civilization, he denotes by the term “romantic” love, whereas we ourselves generally understand by that term a special variety of the more comprehensive individual love.

Every one who is interested in the numerous “overtones” of individual love will find in Finck’s book a rich, though not very well arranged, supply of material.

Independently of Finck, I shall endeavour in this chapter to describe very briefly the most =important= elements and the developmental phases of modern love.

First, however, let us consider the “=idealization of the senses=,” this expression being used by Georg Hirth to denote the capacity of the senses for self-government; for independent feelings of pleasure and pain; for the development of peculiar imaginations, ideas, and talents; and for the utilization at will of other sensory areas and foci of impulse--indeed, of the entire individual--for the purposes of purely sensual self-command. The lower senses, among which Hirth also reckons the sexual impulse, can only be idealized in consequence of the centripetal spontaneous activity of the higher senses.[135]

This artistic idealization of the senses and impulses also plays an important part in the process of the individualization and spiritualization of love. The sexual impulse becomes “the source of rich joys and imaginative tragedy” by means of the “veil of imagination,” the “heaping up of emotions,” and the “helmet of reason” (Hirth). The libido sexualis also takes part in the idealization of all the human senses and impulses. This is the indispensable preliminary and foundation of the transformation of the sexual impulse into love.

The first important enrichment of the sexual inclinations by means of a higher spiritual, individual element, which continues to-day to form a constituent of modern love, is, I consider, the =Platonism= of Greek antiquity and of the Italian renascence. It is a metaphysic of love resting upon the individual, æsthetic contemplation of the beloved personality.[136] For that is the true sense of “Platonic love.” It ennobles physical love to the heavenly Eros, which is nothing else than the idea of =beauty= in the highest sense of the word. Kuno Fischer, in his first published writing, “Diotima” (Pforzheim, 1849), has erected a beautiful monument in honour of this Platonic love. And did not the immortal Darwin restate the thought of Plato, when he described beauty as the testimony of love? In Platonism, at any rate, is to be found the first intimation of a =higher= individual significance of love. In Dante’s Beatrice, in Petrarch’s Platonic lyrics, this idea is reillumined after the long night of the middle ages, to shine forth still more clearly at the time of the renascence in the new Platonism and in the cult of the beautiful, thus attaining a much more powerful individual colouring than it had among the Greeks.

In the sphere of love, as elsewhere, the plastic genius of the Greeks manifested itself in the form of peaceful æsthetic contemplation; romantic individualism, on the other hand, was foreign to the Greek mind. The latter is a modern sentiment. Jean Paul, in his “Vorschule der Aesthetik” (Hamburg, 1804, vol. i., p. 139), has aptly characterized the difference between antique and modern sensibility in the words: “The plastic sun (of the ancients) illuminates universally, like waking; the romantic moon (of the moderns) gleams fitfully, like dreams.”

These first traces of =romantic-individual= love may be detected already in Christian medievalism, among the troubadours and the minnesinger. The heartfelt song, “Thou art mine, I am thine,” gives the clearest expression to the individual, purely personal nature of the love-relations between man and woman, and discloses also the “romantic” sentiment, as in “Thou art locked within my heart; lost is the key: now must thou stay there for ever,” and discloses the intimate association peculiar to romanticism between the nature-sense and the feeling of love. It is the beloved who first fills for us the joy of summer; her love is like the rose. An enormous range is thus opened to the subjectivity of this sentiment. The romanticism of the =secret= element in love is first perceived at this time, and finds perception in the words:

“No fire, no coal, can burn so hot As secret love, of which no one knows anything.”[137]

The age of chivalry now arrives, the epoch of =minne=[138] (=love=) and =gallantry=. What a new and remarkable change in the spiritual physiognomy of love! This also has left deep traces in the love of modern civilized man; this period represents an important stage in the developmental history of individual eroticism.

In the middle ages the honour of the knight and the love of woman, “the most beautiful radiance coming down to us from the life of this wonderful period,” as Wienberg says, belong together. Since that time man’s honour has been associated in a peculiar manner with woman’s love.

Boldly but aptly the far-sighted Herder has described the knightly minne (love) as a reflex of the Gothic. The same immeasurability of the imagination, the same indescribable sentiment, constructed the huge cathedral, and disclosed the unrivalled worth and beauty of the beloved--created minne and its outward expression, gallantry.

In deifying supplication, the knightly spirit elevated the beautiful sex to the heavens, =raised woman far above man=, and placed man far beneath woman. The knight sacrificed himself for the mistress of his heart, subjected himself to her judgment before the cours d’amour (courts of love), and in the lists. He became the =slave= of love and of the beloved woman; he wore her fetters, he obeyed her slightest nod, he endured chastisement and pain for her sake. But was this all reality? Was it not rather pure imagination? There was, indeed, as Johannes Scherr says, a worm at the heart of all this romanticism. The ideal deification of woman did not affect a corresponding elevation in her true social position; minne was but too often a mere “pose,” and was often associated with unbridled sexual licence in relation to women of lower degrees.

The domination of the imaginative element characterized the aberrations of minne, debasing itself for the honour of the beloved. The masochistic element concealed in all love was here for the first time elevated into a system. We shall return to this subject in the chapter on “Masochism.”

And yet there is another side to the matter, and by the spirit of chivalry there was aroused a nobler view of woman’s nature.

“The cause and the secret of this dominance (of women) is this, that woman, with her complete, noble womanliness, entered wholly and fully into life; that she controlled a kingdom which was hers by right, the world of feeling and emotion, but controlled this kingdom and no more. As mistress of feeling, as guardian of feeling, she brought poetry into life; and into art she brought that lofty impetus, the above-described fanciful ideal or feminine tendency, which, when observed and perceived, reacts on the emotional mood of the observer.”[139]

To this time also belongs the development of the =conventional= in the amatory relations of the sexes, which came to be governed by definite rules; since that time, for example, it has been regarded as improper and scandalous for an unmarried woman to remain for any considerable time alone with a man, a view which has persisted to the present day. The social intercourse of the sexes was based upon “=gallantry=” or “courtesy,” upon a refined behaviour towards “ladies,” regulated by the laws of beauty, propriety, and social tact. In the sequel there developed out of this that exaggerated modern gallantry, characterized by little real delicacy of feeling, because it exhibits an undertone of contempt which makes woman feel only too clearly that she is the representative of a “weaker,” inferior sex, and is in no way the possessor of any proper individual, personal value. Intelligent, eminent women have always protested against this modern gallantry. Mantegazza, in his “Physiology of Woman,” p. 442 (Jena, 1893), ably describes the hypocrisy underlying this evil form of gallantry.

The first intimation of modern individual love is to be found in Shakespeare, to whom love was in general, indeed, only a “superhuman” passion, something lying beyond good and evil, which seized hold of man against his will; but none the less he embodies in his work the romantic ideal life of his time in feminine characters possessing the fullest individuality--as, for example, Ophelia, Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona, Virginia, Imogen, and Cordelia, whilst in Cleopatra he has described the daimonic-bacchantic traits of the love of woman. In Juliet, who sees in “true love acted simple modesty,” we observe the passionate emotion of the primordial natural impulse, and the first awakening of woman as a personality.

False gallantry, in association with conventional propriety, both of which were developed to the fullest degree at the Courts of Louis XIV. and Louis XV., subordinated love to rules, and was very well compatible with the most frivolous and epicurean sensual life. And this occurred at the expense of deeply-felt natural sentiment, the place of which was taken by mere flirtation and coquetry. Here, also, the contempt of woman clearly shows itself. Especially in regard to this period, the opinion has been maintained that the modern Frenchman has never suspected, understood, recognized the divine in woman’s nature. Still, the general truth of this assertion is belied by the amatory life of the celebrated heroines of the salons, such as Du Deffand, Lespinasse, Du Chatelet, Quinault, and above all of the celebrated Ninon de l’Enclos[140]; and the Abbé Prévost, in his immortal “Manon Lescaut,” proved that even in that period the indestructible belief in woman persisted, at least as an ideal.

It was, in fact, in France that the higher individual love underwent a new spiritual enrichment; Rousseau’s “Julie” appeared on the horizon of Love’s heaven. And in the background was disclosed the German “Werther,” a book strangely influenced by that of Rousseau. The =nature-sense= on the one hand, =sentimentality= on the other, are the new elements in the love of the period of Héloïse and Werther.

In Rousseau’s “New Héloïse,” passionate love and a complete self-surrender were described without the artificiality, and also without the coquetry and wantonness, of which the literature of the time was full. =It was love in a grander style= than people were then accustomed to see. For this reason, the book constituted a turning-point in literature. That love is an earnest thing, that it can become “la grande affaire de notre vie,” has perhaps never been more deeply and thoroughly depicted than in the character of “Julie.” In maintaining the essential purity of the love relationship, when the voice of Nature is really expressed therein, Rousseau speaks of the principal theme of his own life.

“Is not true love,” asks Julie, “the chastest of all bonds?... Is not love in itself the purest as well as the most magnificent impulse of our nature? Does it not despise low and crawling souls, in order to inspire only grand and strong souls? And does it not ennoble all feeling, does it not double our being and elevate us above ourselves? In contrast to social inequalities, the love relationship points to a higher law, before which all are equal.”[141]

The love of Rousseau is, in fact, not social; it is not a product of civilization, but it is a creation of nature; it is one with nature. The nature-sense and the love-sense are here most intimately associated. And he observes both, nature and love, =with feeling=. The sensibilité de l’âme finds in nature and in love objects of the most glorious delight, of the sweetest pain, of the most burning tears.

“Out of the perceptions of mingled pain and ecstasy which the vision of nature, of beauty, or of a fine action, induced in him, he wove the web of sensibility with which he enveloped the creatures of his imagination. Incessantly thrust back into himself, his heart bleeding from wounded friendship or from unrequited love, self-tormentingly dissecting his own wishes and illusions, his own faculties and impossibilities, he became one of the first heralds of the Weltschmerz, of the woes of Werther and René, to which Byron and Heine had only to add self-mockery.”[142]

The sentimentality of the eighteenth century took its rise in England, as I have explained at some length in my pseudonymous work, “The Sexual Life in England,” vol. ii., pp. 95-107 (Berlin, 1903). In that country it found its most characteristic expression in the romances of Richardson and Sterne, and in landscape-gardening; but it was by Rousseau and Goethe that for the first time it was really brought into contact with the realities of life.

For the history of Julie, the history of Werther--this was the history of all happily or unhappily loving youths and maidens of that day; each maiden had her Saint Preux, each youth his Lotte.

The profound influence exercised by Rousseau, especially on women, has been described by H. Buffenoir in a very careful study.[143] The significance which “Werther” had for the emotional life of the time has been explained with the most cultivated understanding by Erich Schmidt in a well-known monograph.[144]

He shows that the nature-sense and sentimentality are much more deeply felt in Goethe’s “Werther” than in Rousseau’s “Nouvelle Héloïse.” Goethe himself says in “Wahrheit und Dichtung,” speaking of this poetical, rational, intimate, and loving absorption into nature:

“I endeavoured to separate myself inwardly from everything foreign to me, to regard the outward world lovingly, and to allow all beings, from the human onwards, to influence me, each in its kind, as deeply as was possible. Thus arose a wonderful alliance with the individual objects of nature, and an inward harmony, a harmony with the whole; so that every change, whether of places and of regions, or of days and seasons, or of any possible kind, moved me to my inmost soul. The painter’s view became associated with that of the poet; the beautiful country landscape through which the friendly river was wandering, increased my inclination to solitude, and favoured my quiet attitude of contemplation extending itself in every direction.”

Werther’s feeling for nature is intimately related to his love passion. The two harmonize, and each exercises a reciprocal influence upon the other. Nature is to Werther a second beloved. The youth of nature, the spring of nature, are also the youth and the spring of his love.

In the peculiar association of love with the nature-sense and sentimentality, which is so characteristic of the time of Julie and Werther, are to be found the first beginnings of the “=Weltschmerz=,” with its erotically significant “ecstasy of sorrow.” The following words in Goethe’s “Stella” appear to me to bind Weltschmerz and eroticism in an extremely distinct relationship. Stella says of men:

“They make us at once happy and miserable! They fill our heart with feelings of bliss! What new, unknown feelings and hopes fill our souls, when their stormful passion invades our nerves! How often has everything in me trembled and throbbed, =when, in uncontrollable tears, he has washed away the sorrows of a world on my breast=! I begged him, for God’s sake, to spare himself!--to spare me!--in vain!--=into my inmost marrow he fanned the flames which were devouring himself=. And thus the girl, from head to foot, became all heart, all sentiment.”

Here we find clearly described the erotic element in mental pain; and we observe the remarkable =increase= of passion by means of sorrow, tears, and a profound perception of the evil of the world. This Weltschmerz fans the flames of eroticism, increases love, and ultimately gives rise to a peculiar sense of power; it is, indeed, most frequently in the first bloom of love, in the years of puberty, that its relations with sexuality are most distinctly manifested. The celebrated alienist Mendel has described this almost physiological Weltschmerz of the age of puberty as “hypo-melancholia.” An indefinite, passionate longing, which seeks relief in tears, a by no means negligible inclination to suicide--of which Werther is the classical exemplar--characterizes this condition, which is connected with the complete revolutionizing of the spiritual and emotional life by means of the sexual. The Weltschmerz of youth is a latent sexual sense of power.

How the nature-sense and love combine to constitute a perception of Weltschmerz has been most beautifully expressed by Byron and Heine in their poetry. With quite exceptional clearness, Heine also describes it in a letter to Friedrich Merckel (written at Nordeney on August 7, 1826), in which he described a nightly recurring scene with a beautiful woman on the seashore:

“The sea no longer appeared so romantic as before--and yet on its strand I had lived through the =sweetest= and most mystically dear experience of my life which could ever inspire a poet. The moon seemed to wish to show me that in this world happiness yet remained for me. We did not speak--it was only a long, profound glance, the moonlight supplied the music--as we walked to and fro, I took her hand in mine, I felt the secret pressure--my soul trembled and glowed--=afterwards I wept=.”

How different were these tears from the floods of tears in Miller’s “Siegwart,” and in other similar productions of the Werther epoch, which, with their weakly sentimentality, their emotionally happy “sensibility,” had nothing whatever in common with the much more natural Weltschmerz of Goethe and Heine--more natural because based on a physiological foundation.

In modern love also, the Weltschmerz continues to live. The only difference is that by means of the pessimistic philosophy it has to some extent obtained a logical foundation. And Nietzsche has shown us the =force= which lies hidden in this ecstasy of sorrow. Precisely on account of the pains of the world, he affirms joyfully life and love. Anyone who wishes to write the history of Weltschmerz, from a psychological point of view so profoundly interesting, must not overlook Nietzsche as a most important turning-point in that history.

The passion inspired by genius, the excess of vital energy in the “Sturm und Drang” epoch of German literature, was admirably consistent with that genuine, primitive Weltschmerz. Rousseau’s more indeterminate sensibility had, on the other hand, a more powerful influence upon the mode of feeling of =romanticism=, and this movement appears more closely related to him than to Goethe.

=Romantic love= combines the elements of feeling of the previous epochs in an increased subjectivism. Not nature alone, but history also, folk-tales, legends, poetry, and the wonderful secrets of the primeval age--all these are reflected in romantic love, and awaken singular dreams and emotions. The “mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht” (“moon-illumined magic night”) is much more than a mere feeling of nature; it is the recognition of a connexion with the past and with its secret, sweet, half-forgotten stories. Fonqué’s “Undine” is the classical type of all this. Romantic love delights in this wonder-mood of the heart; reality becomes, as it were, a dream. The obscure, the problematical--these attract the romanticist. It is for this reason that he loves the night and the night-mood of nature, rather than the clear daylight. =Moonshine reverie= is a characteristic trait of romantic love. Everything flows away into the indeterminate, the cloudy, the boundless. This love knows no limitation or narrowing, no fetters. It is the sworn enemy of the conventional, narrow-hearted, philistine morality, and of all limitations of personality. In Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” this most celebrated monument of romantic love, the campaign against philistinism, as the greatest enemy of a free, noble amatory life, is most energetically carried on. It is utterly untrue to describe “Lucinde” as a romance in which there is a cult of suggestive nudity--as the poetry of the flesh. It certainly preaches the free natural conception and perception of the nude and the sexual, and is a glorious protest against the artificial and hypocritical separation of body and soul in love; but, on the other side, it unlocks in love the entire kingdom of the emotional and spiritual life, and discloses its significance for the individual man as a free personality.

More than Rousseau’s “Julie” and Goethe’s “Werther” is Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” the apotheosis of individual love. Romantic love is the mirror of personality; it is changeable, filled with the highest spiritual content, and, above all, like personality, is capable of development. In a masterly manner Schlegel has represented the intimate connexion between true love and all vital energy. The relations of love to genius have never before been so admirably described.

“Here,” says Karl Gutzkow, “there is no question of artificiality; we have to do rather with the yearning of a youth who loves, who sees the one and only beloved in many different forms, in the metamorphoses of his own ego, which yearns to reconcile egoism and love.”

Schleiermacher, in his “Confidential Letters regarding Lucinde,” Gutzkow in his preface to the new edition of this work, and recently H. Meyer-Benfey,[145] have supplied us with conclusions regarding the true significance of “Lucinde,” conclusions in harmony with our own view.

We must allude here to a new element in romantic love, which since that time has played an important part in modern eroticism. It is l’art pour l’art of love, the revelling in pure moods and emotions as the means of enjoyment. The emotional frequently grows luxuriantly and chokes the natural feeling of love. Jean Paul, for example,

“regards eroticism purely as a method of cultivation. Human beings are not to be actually loved, but are to be used to strike sparks from, by which one’s own inward life may be illuminated.... He is the exemplar of that artist-love which, vampire-like, drinks the souls of those who become its prey. This love sees in the hearts offered to it only the stuff for pictures; and in their warm blood it finds only an intoxicating, stimulating drink.”[146]

This unqualified search for personal emotional experiences in love, without regard to the love-partner, is especially represented in Jean Paul’s “Titan.”

Wackenroder, in his “Phantasien über die Kunst” (“Imaginative Studies concerning Art”), has already warned us of the dangers of this purely erotic-emotional love. Karl Joel has recently described very vividly how the romanticists ultimately reduced all vital relationships to the emotions of love.[147] This attempt must lead finally to mysticism, the poetical representative of which is Novalis.

It is very interesting to find that all the diverse elements of romantic love may also be detected in the latter-day renascence of romanticism. In his admirable book on “Nietzsche and Romanticism,” Karl Joel has clearly shown the existence of this romantic element in modern love, and, above all, has insisted upon the intimate connexion which the philosophy of Nietzsche has with the joy in battle and the vital energy of the romanticists. Both are apostles of the Dionysiac, not of the Apollinian.[148]

This also is the difference by which “romantic” love is distinguished from “=classical=” love--a difference and a distinction which I find indicated for the first time in Theodor Mundt’s romance “Madelon oder die Romantiker in Paris” (Leipzig, 1832).

The relevant passage (pp. 9-12) runs as follows:

“I am therefore of opinion that there can be a romantic and a classical poetry; there are also romantic and classical love; and it is only by means of this twofold nature that it is possible to discover and understand this contrast in poetry....

“This wild and yet so sweet disturbance of the heart, in which love subsists, this rejoicing and revelry of the aroused imagination which, originated by the charm of the beloved, lead to an intoxication with all the sensual dreams of a delightful, ethereal happiness; and as in the flower-bud in which a burning ray of sunshine has suddenly awakened the impulse to bloom, give rise to the desire and longing of sensual impulsion--all these tears and sighs of the lovers, pains and joys, this love-happiness and love-misery at the same time, this star-flaming night-side of passion, to which after a vagrant drunken frenzy, an ice-cold, unwelcome morning follows--all this, my friend, is romantic love....

“And shall I now describe also =classical= love?... Believe me, there are faces which at the very first glance seem to us so trustworthy and so near akin, they draw us to them, as if we had spent years with them in sympathy, asking for love and receiving love. By the sight of this girl’s face there was induced in me so suddenly a sense of peace, such as never before in my life had I experienced; and this gentle feeling which drew me towards her, I may call true love and true happiness. In her loving eyes there glowed no seductive fire, no repellent pride like that of our romantic Madelon; in the simple beautiful German girl, all is clear and true; out of her gentle features speaks her gentle soul; and all for which I have longed in passionate, aberrant hours of my life--a definite, unalloyed happiness in existence--seemed to me, as I saw her for the very first time, to shine on me out of her blue true eyes. My friend, is not that classical love?”

It is the Apollinian-Platonic element of modern love which Theodor Mundt here describes as “classical” love, and certainly he wrongly places it before romantic love, which is the expression of modern subjectivism and individualism. Such classical love found in Goethe’s “Tasso” its most complete representation. Here love was conceived as “possession, which should give =peace=”; the beloved being influences after the manner of an already understood picture. As Kuno Fischer remarks, in the world of Goethe’s “Tasso” the Platonic Eros is the fashion. Love is here the pure, quiet contemplation of beauty in and with the beloved.

Gretchen and Helena in “Faust” embody very clearly the contrast between romantic and classical love. We find these contrasts united in Wilhelm Heinse’s celebrated “Ardinghello,” a romance which even to us at the present day seems so modern. In this work we find the Dionysiac-Faustian impulse of the loving individual, and the Apollinian-artistic contemplation of the loved one, described with equal mastery.

In regard to love, Heinse was the prototype of “=Young Germany=.” And we are young Germany.

For all the problems of amatory life which to-day occupy our minds have already been made topics of public discussion by the authors of young Germany. In young German love-philosophy, the “Knights of the Spirit” as well as the “Knights of the Flesh,” come to their full rights. Only the ignorant can regard the so-called “emancipation of the flesh,” the apotheosis of lascivious sensuality, as the sole characteristic of the efforts and battles of our own time. No, he who wishes to understand modern love, in all its =spiritual= manifestations and relationship, let him read the writings of young Germany, especially the works of Laube, Gutzkow, Mundt; and also those of Heine, who has a more intimate relationship to young Germany than he has to romanticism.

More especially Gutzkow,[149] who appears to me the greatest and most comprehensive spirit of the young German literature--indeed, of the more recent German literature in general--overlooks no single riddle and problem of modern eroticism. Of all the writers of the nineteenth century, he has the profoundest knowledge of women. How stimulating are his girl characters; how true, notwithstanding their manifoldness! Wally, riding proudly upon a white palfrey, outwardly an image of beauty, but, like so many modern emancipated women, inwardly tormented by the demon of doubt; Seraphine the dreamer, uncertain about herself and her love, of whom the poet himself later admitted that her character was based on reality; Idaline,[150] full of majesty, the ideal “bride of the waves,” a typical figure of conventional high life, who yet in sudden revolution against this conventionalism gives her whole being to a chance love, a love of the moment,[151] which alienates her from her betrothed and later husband, and drives her to death; then, again, all the brilliant feminine characters in the great romances, “Die Ritter vom Geiste,” Melanie, Helene, Selma, Pauline, Olga--all are characters bearing the stamp of reality in their spiritual and emotional life, so various and yet so true, and, above all, in their manifold, differentiated relationships to men, genuinely =modern= women.

Gutzkow was also the first to bring upon the stage the modern woman and the problems of modern love, long before the French dramatists and before Ibsen.

As Karl Frenzel pointed out as early as 1864, Gutzkow made the stage the battlefield of modern ideas. The inward contrasts of love, the psychological problem of the heart--he first ventured to deal with these in the dramatic form.

“We all of us felt the wounds which ‘the world’ inflicted on Werner; we all wandered from the quiet violet, Agathe, to the brilliant rose, Sidonie; as in Ottfried, so in ourselves, the love of the heart battled with the love of the spirit. Who would admit himself to be so miserably poor as never to have revelled, lived, and suffered, in the play of these feelings? What wife has not, at least in imagination, hesitated for a moment, like Ella Rose, between the lover and the husband? Such figures as these bear in themselves the essence of truth, and do not lose their lofty value because, perhaps, their garments are not draped with sufficient harmony. They touch us, because we recognize in them our own flesh and blood; and they fulfil, in so far as the form of the society drama allows, Shakespeare’s canon of dramatic art--they hold the mirror up to nature.”

In his tragedies, “Werner,” “Ottfried,” “Ella Rose,” Gutzkow presents in a masterly manner the inner life of the time; we see in them the pulsing wing-beats of the souls, which in pain, as it must be in these days, soar upwards in the effort to attain beauty and freedom.[152]

Of all the young German authors, Gutzkow has best grasped the problem of problems in love--the problem of =personality=. In the painful question asked of Helene d’Azimont, in “Die Ritter vom Geiste”--

“Is it, then, thy innermost need, To be everything to others, =nothing to thyself=? Nothing to woman’s highest glory, love, Nothing, Helene, to the pang of renunciation?”

--this inalienable right to the safeguarding and development of the individual personality, notwithstanding all the self-sacrifice of passionate love, is most forcibly maintained. This is, indeed, the true nucleus of all higher individual love between man and woman.

Gutzkow has been accused, by those who had in mind only the purely symbolic nudity scene in “Wally,” of preaching the “emancipation of the flesh”; the same accusation has been levelled against other young German authors, such as Lambe (in “Jungen Europa”), Theodor Mundt (in the “Madonna”), Wienbarg (in the “Aesthetische Feldzüge”), Heine (in the “Neue Gedichte”). The charge is unjust. It is only the =poetry= of the flesh which they wish to bring to its rights. Notwithstanding his enthusiastic hymn of praise to Casanova, Theodor Mundt declares in his “Madonna” that the separation of flesh and spirit is the “inexpiable suicide of the human consciousness.”

Much more important, the true characteristic of all the authors of young Germany, appear to me the parts which =self-analysis= and =reflection= here for the first time play in love, visible beneath the influence of the offshoots of French romanticism, in which, however, we also encounter the same phenomenon, as in George Sand’s “Lelia,” in Alfred de Musset’s “Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle,” in Balzac’s “Femme de Trente Ans”--in which last romance we find the following passage:

“Love assumes the colouring of every century. Now, in the year 1822, it is doctrinaire. Instead of, as formerly, proving it by deeds, it is argued, it is discussed, it is brought upon the tribune in a speech.”

=Just as in the middle ages the idea of “sin” was the disturbing principle of love, so for the modern civilized man, since the days of young Germany, this cold self-reflection, this critical analysis of one’s peculiar passionate perceptions and feelings, is the modern disturbing principle.= This is the worm which gnaws unceasingly at the root of our love, and destroys its most beautiful blossoms. Gutzkow’s “Wally the Doubter” and “Seraphine” are the classical literary documents for this destructive ascendancy of pure thought in love. Very noteworthy is it that in both these romances it is =woman= who destroys life and love by reflection, whilst from earliest days this danger has always lain in the path of man. It is the fate of the modern woman, of individual personalities, which is here depicted; this fate makes its appearance from the moment when woman comes to take a share in the spiritual life of man. The cold dialectic of Seraphine, who, as Gutzkow makes one of her lovers say, reverses the natural order of man and woman, is a necessary product of the love of woman ripening in the direction of a free personality--happily, however, it is only a =transient= phenomenon. The fully developed personality will return to the primitiveness of feeling, and will no longer endure within herself any kind of division or laceration. The corresponding phenomena in man have been described by Kierkegaard and Grillparzer in their diaries, which are classical documents of “reflection-love.”

The love of the present day contains within itself, and nourishes itself upon, all the above-described spiritual elements of the past. More especially at the present day is the question of the so-called =free love= or =free marriage=, disregardant of the legally binding forms of civil and ecclesiastical marriage, representative of all the heartfelt needs of highly civilized mankind, hitherto held back, oppressed, and fettered by the materialism of the time, and still more by its conventionalism still active beneath its covering of outlived forms. The problem of free love was first formulated in “Lucinde,” but found in the young German literature, especially in the writings of Laube, Mundt, and Dingelstedt, its theoretical foundation; and in the Bohemian life of the Second Empire free love obtained its practical realization, although the purely =idyllic= character of this Bohemian life, and its limitation to the circle of the dolce far niente students and artists, in truth makes it differ widely from the most intensely personal free love, =taking its part fully in the struggle for life=, as it presents itself in the ideal form to modern humanity.

The Second French Empire, whose significance for the spiritual tendencies of our time was a very great one, allowed two elements of love, to which we have earlier alluded, to appear with marked predominance--elements still influential at the present day: the =satanic-diabolic= element of eroticism, which found its most incisive expression in the works of Barbey d’Aurevilly (strongly influenced by the writings of de Sade), of Baudelaire, and more particularly of the great Félicien Rops; and the purely artistic element, as it appears in the works of the authors just mentioned, but more especially in the writings of Théophile Gautier. This “Young France” (to use the name of a novel of Gautier’s) has influenced the amatory life and the amatory theory of the present day almost as strongly as young Germany.

At the same time, in the sixties of the nineteenth century Schopenhauer’s philosophy was dominant in Germany, and his metaphysic of love, which considered the individual not at all, but the species as all in all--this =pessimistic= conception of all love found its poetic expression in Edward Grisebach’s “New Tanhäuser,” published in 1869. Here, also, it would be a grave error to condemn these erotic poems of the day, on account of their glowing sensuality, as mere glorifications of carnal lust. The poet himself was the new Tanhäuser. He wished, as he often told me, to find expression in these poems for the life-denying as well as for the life-affirming forces. He sang the pleasure and the pain, the hopes and the disappointments of modern love. For him love is indeed the rose =with= the thorns. For this reason the motto of the poem is a saying of Meister Eckart: “The voluptuousness of the creature is intermingled with bitterness;” and this is the theme of the poets, though expressed in numerous variations: “There is no pleasure without regret.”

But for this reason Grisebach--and in this respect he resembles Nietzsche--wished none the less joyfully to affirm this life, filled as it is with pain, and in all its activity bringing with it regrets. In this sense he is no exclusive pessimist, but an apostle of =activity=, like the men of young Germany, in whose footsteps, and especially in those of Heine, he follows. The beautiful saying of Laube, in his “Liebesbriefen” (Leipzig, 1835, p. 29), “He who has never been shaken to the depths by any profound sorrow is also ignorant of all deep rejoicing, he knows no single verse of that enthusiasm which woos the denied heaven, he experiences no sort of religion, he is capable of no sacrifice, of no greatness,” is suited also to the “new Tanhäuser,” which so powerfully influenced German youth during the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century.

He who wishes to understand how the various love-problems are represented in the literature of the present, strongly influenced as it is by the problem-poems of Ibsen, by Zola’s naturalism, and by the French symbolism[153] dependent on him, will find it described later in a special chapter devoted to love in the literature of to-day.

In the following chapter we have to consider one additional influence which is especially apparent in the love and eroticism of the present day, and possesses great importance for the individualization of love. This is the artistic element in modern love.

[134] H. T. Finck, “Romantic Love and Personal Beauty.”

[135] Cf. G. Hirth, “Ways to Freedom,” pp. 468-472 (Munich, 1903).

[136] G. Saint-Yves (“La Littérature Amoureuse,” Paris, 1887, p. 25) also sees in the æsthetic contemplation of the beloved person the fundamental root of individual love. It has gradually developed out of the ordinary æsthetic contemplation of nature. An interesting proof of this connexion is the Song of Solomon, in which the æsthetic stimuli of the beloved one are compared with every possible animate and inanimate natural object.

[137] Cf. regarding the numerous variations of this ancient couplet, the interesting account given by Arthur Kopp, “Old Proverbs and Popular Rhymes for Loving Hearts,” published in the Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, Heft i., pp. 8, 9 (Berlin, 1902).

[138] Minne is an old German word (now obsolete) for love, “the love of fair women.” The minnesinger were love-singers who sang their own compositions to the accompaniment of the music of harp or viol--in fact, they were lyric poets. The most flourishing years of this art were from about 1170 to 1250; thus the minnesinger were contemporary with and closely akin to the Provençal troubadours. But the German development was essentially native, and the minnesinger’s treatment of love was characterized by a more ideal note than was usually attained by the troubadours. A good, though brief, account (with a list of authorities) is given of the minnesinger in “Chambers’s Encyclopædia.”--TRANSLATOR.

[139] Jacob Falke, “The Society of Knighthood in the Epoch of the Cult of Women,” p. 49.

[140] In her letters (“Letters of Ninon de l’Enclos,” with ten etchings by Karl Walser, Berlin, 1906), the deep spiritual relationships of love found a classical representation.

[141] Cf. Harald Höffding, “Rousseau and his Philosophy,” pp. 86, 89 (Stuttgart, 1897).

[142] Emil Du Bois-Reymond, “Frederick II. and Jean Jacques Rousseau.”

[143] H. Buffenoir, “Jean Jacques Rousseau and Women” (Paris, 1891).

[144] Erich Schmidt, “Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe” (Jena, 1875).

[145] H. Meyer-Benfey, “Lucinde,” published in Mutterschutz--Zeitschrift zur Reform der sexuellen Ethik, 1906, No. 5, pp. 173-192. Edited by Dr. Helene Stöcker.

[146] Felix Poppenberg, “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s Liebe und Ehestand,” in “Bibelots,” p. 214 (Leipzig, 1904).

[147] Carl Joel, “Nietzsche und die Romantik,” pp. 13-16 (Jena and Leipzig, 1905).

[148] Cf. also Helene Stöcker, “Nietzsche und die Romantik,” in Kölnische Zeitung, No. 1127, October 29, 1905.

[149] At the present time but few of my living contemporaries share this opinion of Gutzkow, which I myself base upon the careful reading of all his works. I may quote, however, with satisfaction the prophecy of the deceased dramatist Theodor Wehl. He writes of Gutzkow: “As a literary phenomenon he will grow with time. After long, long years, out of the literature of our time two characteristic heads will emerge--one laughing, and one glancing round him earnestly and sorrowfully: the head of Heinrich Heine, and the head of Karl Gutzkow” (F. Wehl, “Zeit und Menschen,” “Tagebuch Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren von 1863 bis 1884,” vol. i., p. 297 (Altona, 1889)).

[150] Karl Gutzkow, “Reminiscences of my Life,” p. 18 (Berlin, 1875).

[151] “The time of love is not age, it is not youth: the time of love is the moment,” says Beate, one of Gutzkow’s characters, at the end of the tragedy “Ein Weisser Blatt.”

[152] K. Frenzel, “Karl Gutzkow,” published in “Büsten und Bilder,” pp. 177 and 178 (Hanover, 1864).

[153] Heinrich Stümcke refers to this connexion between naturalism and symbolism in a very thoughtful essay (“Zwischen den Garben,” p. 156; Leipzig, 1899).

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IX. THE ARTISTIC ELEMENT IN MODERN LOVE

“I am of opinion that love bears within itself, more than any other moral relationship, the sense of the beautiful, and when anywhere a heavy heart begins to move its wings and to strive towards the ideal, it is in the time when it loves. Without doubt an æsthetic perception always accompanies the eye of the lover, and in a greater degree than it ever accompanies the dispassionate eye.”--KUNO FISCHER.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER IX

Ennoblement and reform of the amatory life as a demand of our time -- The battle with the elemental forces of the sexual impulse and of asceticism -- The artistic element in modern love -- Erotic rhythmotropism -- Sexuality and æsthetics -- The awakening of æsthetic sensibility at the time of puberty -- Importance of sensuality to life and to the poietic impulse -- The example of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff -- Sensuality of great poets and artists -- Views of recent æsthetics regarding the relations between sexual love and artistic perception -- Rôle of the erotic need for illusion in social life -- Emerson, Konrad Lange, and William Scherer, on the æsthetic eroticism of social life -- The liberating and vitalizing elements therein -- Significance of modern individual beauty -- Misnamed “nervous” beauty -- The English “Pre-Raphaelites” and the ideal of beauty -- Masculine beauty -- Why women love ugly men -- Caroline Schlegel, Goethe, Eduard von Hartmann, and Swedenborg, on this subject -- The attractive force of the poietic and the spiritual in man.

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