Part 3 (1/2)
The second of these sub-species embraces the individuals with whom the reader of Carlier is familiar, and whom Ulrichs calls Weiblinge. In their boyhood they exhibited a marked disinclination for the games of their school-fellows, and preferred to consort with girls. They helped their mothers in the household, learned to sew and knit, caught at every opportunity of dressing up in female clothes. Later on, they began to call themselves by names of women, avoided the society of normal comrades, hated sport and physical exercise, were averse to smoking and drinking, could not whistle. Whether they refrained from swearing is not recorded. Many of them developed a taste for music, and prided themselves upon their culture. Eventually, when they became uncla.s.sed, they occupied themselves with toilette, scandal, tea, and talk about their lovers--dressed as far as possible in female clothes, painted, perfumed and curled their hair--addressed each other in the feminine gender, adopted pseudonyms of Countess or of Princess, and lived the life of women of a dubious demi-monde.[35]
Yet they remained in their physical configuration males. Unlike the preceding sub-species, they did not feel as men feel towards their sweethearts, but on the contrary like women. They had no impulse toward active paederasty, no inclination for blooming adolescents. What they wanted was a robust adult; and to him they submitted themselves with self-abandonment. Like all Urnings, they shrank from the act of coition for the most part, and preferred embracements which produced a brief and pleasurable o.r.g.a.s.m. But some developed a peculiar liking for the pa.s.sive act of sodomy or the anomalous act of f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o.
In this characterisation I have overpa.s.sed the limits of the fifteen cases presented by Krafft-Ebing. In order to const.i.tute the type, I have drawn upon one reliable, because sympathetic, source in Ulrichs, and on another reliable, because antipathetic, source in Carlier.
s.e.xual inversion, in persons of the third main species, has reached its final development. Descending, if we follow Krafft-Ebing's categories, from acquired to innate inversion, dividing the latter into psychopathic hermaphrodites and Urnings, subdividing Urnings into those who retain their masculine habit and those who develop a habit a.n.a.logous to that of females, we come in this last cla.s.s to the most striking phenomenon of inverted s.e.x. Here the soul which is doomed to love a man, and is nevertheless imprisoned in a male body, strives to convert that body to feminine uses so entirely that the marks of s.e.x, except in the determined organs of s.e.x, shall be obliterated. And sometimes it appears that the singular operation of nature, with which we are occupied in this Essay, goes even further. The inverted bias given to the s.e.xual appet.i.te, as part of the spiritual nature of the man, can never quite trans.m.u.te male organs into female organs of procreation. But it modifies the bony structure of the body, the form of the face, the fleshly and muscular integuments to such an obvious extent that Krafft-Ebing thinks himself justified in placing a separate cla.s.s of androgynous beings (with their gynandrous correspondents) at the end of the extraordinary process.
At this point it will be well to present a scheme of his a.n.a.lysis under the form of a table.
{ Persistent.
{ Acquired { { { Episodical.
{ s.e.xual Inversion { { Psychopathic Hemaphrodites.
{ { { { { Male Habitus { { { (Mannlinge).
{ Congenital { Urnings { { { Female Habitus { { (Weiblinge).
{ { Androgyni.
What is the rational explanation of the facts presented to us by the a.n.a.lysis which I have formulated in this table cannot as yet be thoroughly determined. We do not know enough about the law of s.e.x in human beings to advance a theory. Krafft-Ebing and writers of his school are at present inclined to refer them all to diseases of the nervous centres, inherited, congenital, excited by early habits of self-abuse.
The inadequacy of this method I have already attempted to set forth; and I have also called attention to the fact that it does not sufficiently account for phenomena known to us through history and through every-day experience.
Presently we shall be introduced to a theory (that of Ulrichs) which is based upon a somewhat grotesque and metaphysical conception of nature, and which dispenses with the hypothesis of hereditary disease. I am not sure whether this theory, unsound as it may seem to medical specialists, does not square better with ascertained facts than that of inherited disorder in the nervous centres.
However that may be, the physicians, as represented by Krafft-Ebing, absolve all subjects of inverted s.e.xuality from crime. They represent them to us as the subjects of ancestral malady. And this alters their position face to face with vulgar error, theological rancour, and the stringent indifference of legislators. A strong claim has been advanced for their treatment henceforth, not as delinquents, but as subjects of congenital depravity in the brain centres, over which they have no adequate control.
The fourth medical author, with whom we are about to be occupied, includes s.e.xual inversion in his general survey of human crime, and connects it less with anomalies of the nervous centres than with atavistic reversion to the state of nature and savagery. In the end, it will be seen, he accepts a concordat with the hypothesis of ”moral insanity.”
_Cesare Lombroso._ ”_Der Verbrecher in Anthropologischer, Aerztlicher und Juristischer Beziehung._”
This famous book, which has contributed no little to a revolution of opinion regarding crime and its punishment in Italy, contains a searching inquiry into the psychological nature, physical peculiarities, habits, and previous history of criminals.[36] It is, in fact, a study of the criminal temperament. Lombroso deals in the main, as is natural, with murder, theft, rape, cruelty, and their allied species. But he includes s.e.xual inversion in the category of crimes, and regards the abnormal appet.i.tes as signs of that morbid condition into which he eventually revolves the criminal impulse.
Wis.h.i.+ng to base his doctrine on a sound foundation, Lombroso begins with what may be termed the embryology of crime. He finds unnatural vices frequent among horses, donkeys, cattle, insects, fowls, dogs, ants. The phenomenon, he says, is usually observable in cases where the male animal has been excluded from intercourse with females. Having established his general position that what we call crimes of violence, robbery, murder, cruelty, blood-thirst, cannibalism, unnatural l.u.s.t, and so forth, exist among the brutes--in fact, that most of these crimes form the rule and not the exception in their lives--he pa.s.ses on to the consideration of the savage man. In following his a.n.a.lysis, I shall confine myself to what he says about abnormal s.e.xual pa.s.sion.
He points out that in New Caledonia the male savages meet together at night in huts for the purpose of promiscuous intercourse (p. 42). The same occurs in Tahiti, where the practice is placed under the protection of a G.o.d. Next he alludes to the ancient Mexicans; and then proceeds to h.e.l.las and Rome, where this phase of savage immorality survived and became a recognised factor in social life (p. 43). At Rome, he says, the Venus of the sodomites received the t.i.tle of Castina (p. 38).
Lombroso's treatment of s.e.xual inversion regarded as a survival from prehistoric times is by no means exhaustive. It might be supplemented and confirmed by what we know about the manners of the Kelts, as reported by Aristotle (Pol. ii. 6. 5.)--Tartars, Persians, Afghans, North American Indians, &c. Diodorus Siculus, writing upon the morals of the Gauls, deserves attention in this respect.[37] It is also singular to find that the Norman marauders of the tenth century carried unnatural vices wherever they appeared in Europe.[38] The Abbot of Clairvaux, as quoted by Lombroso (p. 43), accused them of spreading their brutal habits through society. People accustomed to look upon these vices as a form of corruption in great cities will perhaps be surprised to find them prevalent among nomadic and warlike tribes. But, in addition to survival from half-savage periods of social life, the necessities of warriors thrown together with an insufficiency of women must be considered. I have already suggested that Greek love grew into a custom during the Dorian migration and the conquest of Crete and Peloponnesus by bands of soldiers.
Cannibalism, Lombroso points out (p. 68), originated in necessity, became consecrated by religion, and finally remained as custom and a form of gluttony. The same process of reasoning, when applied to s.e.xual aberrations, helps us to understand how a non-ethical habit, based on scarcity of women, survived as a social and chivalrous inst.i.tution among the civilised h.e.l.lenes.
Lombroso traces the growth of justice in criminal affairs, and the establishment of pains and penalties, up to the instinct of revenge and the despotic selfishness of chiefs in whom the whole property of savage tribes, including women, was vested. This section of his work concludes with the following remarkable sentence (p. 96): ”The universal diffusion of crime which we have demonstrated at a certain remote epoch, and its gradual disappearance as a consequence of new crimes springing up, traces of which are still discoverable in our penal codes [he means revenge, the egotism of princes, and ecclesiastical rapacity], are calculated even more than the criminality of brutes to make us doubt of what metaphysicians call eternal justice, and indicate the real cause of the perpetual reappearance of crime among civilised races, namely atavism.”
Having established this principle, Lombroso proceeds to trace the atavism of criminality in children. He shows that just as the human embryo pa.s.ses through all forms of lower lives, so men and women in their infancy exactly reproduce the moral type of savages. Ungovernable rage, revengeful instincts, jealousy, envy, lying, stealing, cruelty, laziness, vanity, s.e.xual proclivities, imperfect family affections, a general bluntness of the ethical sense, are common qualities of children, which the parent and the teacher strive to control or to eradicate by training. ”The child, considered as a human being devoid of moral sense, presents a perfect picture of what doctors call moral insanity, and I prefer to cla.s.sify as inborn crime” (p. 97). ”All species of anomalous s.e.xual appet.i.te, with the exception of those dependent upon senile decadence, make their appearance in childhood, together with the other criminal tendencies” (p. 117).
Lombroso arrives, then, at the conclusion that what civilised humanity calls crime and punishes, is the law of nature in brutes, persists as a normal condition among savages, and displays itself in the habits and instincts of children. The moral instinct is therefore slowly elaborated out of crime in the course of generations by whole races, and in the course of infancy and adolescence in the individual. The habitual criminal, who remains a criminal in his maturity, in whom crime is inborn and ineradicable, who cannot develop a moral sense, he explains at first by atavism. A large section of his volume (pp. 124-136, 137-253) is devoted to anthropometrical observations upon the physical structure, the cranial and cerebral development, and the physiognomy of such criminals. Into this part of his work we need not enter. Nor is it necessary to follow his interesting researches in the biology and psychology of ”born criminals”--chapters on tattooing, ways of thinking and feeling, pa.s.sions, tendencies to suicide, religious sentiment, intelligence and culture, capacity of self-control, liability to relapse, and so forth. Many curious facts relating to s.e.xual inversion are treated in the course of these enquiries; and one pa.s.sage describing the general characteristics of paederasts (p. 376) ought to be alluded to. Considering this subject solely as a phase of crime, Lombroso reveals a superficial conception of its perplexity.
It is more important to reflect upon his theory of crime in general.
Having started with the hypothesis of atavism, and adopted the term ”born criminal,” he later on identifies ”innate crime” with ”moral insanity,” and ill.u.s.trates both by the phenomena of epilepsy.[39] This introduces a certain confusion and incoherence into his speculative system; for he frankly admits that he has only gradually and tardily been led to recognise the ident.i.ty of what is called crime and what is called moral insanity. Criminal atavism might be defined as the sporadic reversion to savagery in certain individuals. It has nothing logically to connect it with distortion or disease--unless we a.s.sume that all our savage ancestors were malformed or diseased, and that the Greeks, in whom one form of Lombroso's criminal atavism became established, were as a nation morally insane. The appearance of structural defects in habitual criminals points less to atavistic reversion than to radical divergence from the normal type of humanity. In like manner the invocation of heredity as a principle (p. 135) involves a similar confusion. Hereditary taint is a thing different not in degree but in kind from savage atavism prolonged from childhood into manhood.