Part 4 (1/2)
The first of these histories is M. H. E. Meier's article on _Paederastie_ in Ersch and Gruber's ”Allgemeine Encyklopadie:” Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1837.
The second is a treatise ent.i.tled ”A Problem in Greek Ethics,” composed by an Englishman in English. The anonymous author was not acquainted with Meier's article before he wrote, and only came across it long after he had printed his own essay. This work is extremely rare, ten copies only having been impressed for private use.
Enquirers into the psychology and morality of s.e.xual inversion should not fail to study one or other of these treatises. It will surprise many a well-read scholar, when he sees the whole list of Greek authorities and pa.s.sages collected and co-ordinated, to find how thoroughly the manners and the literature of that great people were penetrated with paederastia. The myths and heroic legends of prehistoric h.e.l.las, the educational inst.i.tutions of the Dorian state, the dialogues of Plato, the history of the Theban army, the biographies of innumerable eminent citizens--lawgivers and thinkers, governors and generals, founders of colonies and philosophers, poets and sculptors--render it impossible to maintain that this pa.s.sion was either a degraded vice or a form of inherited neuropathy in the race to whom we owe so much of our intellectual heritage. Having surveyed the picture, we may turn aside to wonder whether modern European nations, imbued with the opinions I have described above in the section on Vulgar Errors, are wise in making Greek literature a staple of the higher education. Their motto is _erasez l'infame!_ Here the infamous thing clothes itself like an angel of light, and raises its forehead unabashed to heaven among the marble peristyles and olive-groves of an unrivalled civilization.
Another book, written from a medical point of view, is valuable upon the pathology of s.e.xual inversion and cognate aberrations among the nations of antiquity. It bears the t.i.tle ”Geschichte der l.u.s.tseuche im Alterthume,” and is composed by Dr. Julius Rosenbaum.[41] Rosenbaum attempts to solve the problem of the existence of syphilis and other venereal diseases in the remote past. This enquiry leads him to investigate the whole of Greek and Latin literature in its bearing upon s.e.xual vice. Students will therefore expect from his pages no profound psychological speculations and no idealistic presentation of an eminently repulsive subject. One of the most interesting chapters of his work is devoted to what Herodotus called ???s?? f??e?a among the Scythians, a wide-spread effemination prevailing in a wild warlike and nomadic race. We have already alluded to Krafft-Ebing's remarks on this disease, which has curious points of resemblance with some of the facts of male prost.i.tution in modern cities.[42]
Professed anthropologists have dealt with the subject, collecting evidence from many quarters, and in some cases attempting to draw general conclusions. Bastian's ”Der Mensch der Geschichte”[43] and Herbert Spencer's Tables deserve special mention for their encyclopaedic fulness of information regarding the distribution of abnormal s.e.xuality and the customs of savage tribes.
In England an Essay appended to the last volume of Sir Richard Burton's ”Arabian Nights” made a considerable stir upon its first appearance.[44]
The author endeavoured to co-ordinate a large amount of miscellaneous matter, and to frame a general theory regarding the origin and prevalence of h.o.m.os.e.xual pa.s.sions. His erudition, however, is incomplete; and though he possesses a copious store of anthropological details, he is not at the proper point of view for discussing the topic philosophically.[45] For example, he takes for granted that ”Pederasty,”
as he calls it, is everywhere and always what the vulgar think it. He seems to have no notion of the complicated psychology of Urnings, revealed to us by their recently published confessions in French and German medical and legal works. Still his views deserve consideration.
Burton regards the phenomenon as ”geographical and climatic, not racial.” He summarises the result of his investigations in the following five conclusions.[46]
”(1) There exists what I shall call a 'Sotadic Zone,' bounded westwards by the northern sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean (N. lat. 43) and by the southern (N. lat. 30). Thus the depth would be 780 to 800 miles, including meridional France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Morocco to Egypt.
”(2) Running eastward the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldaea, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab, and Kashmir.
”(3) In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, j.a.pan, and Turkistan.
”(4) It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World, where, at the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an established racial inst.i.tution.
”(5) Within the Sotadic Zone the vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically, amid the opprobrium of their fellows, who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation, and look upon it with the liveliest disgust.”
This is a curious and interesting generalisation, though it does not account for what history has transmitted regarding the customs of the Kelts, Scythians, Bulgars, Tartars, Normans, and for the acknowledged leniency of modern Slavs to this form of vice.
Burton advances an explanation of its origin. ”The only physical cause for the practice which suggests itself to me, and that must be owned to be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperament, a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically.”[47] So far as it goes, this suggestion rests upon ground admitted to be empirically sound by the medical writers we have already examined, and vehemently declared to be indisputable as a fact of physiology by Ulrichs, whom I shall presently introduce to my readers. But Burton makes no effort to account for the occurrence of this crasis of masculine and feminine temperaments in the Sotadic Zone at large, and for its sporadic appearance in other regions.
Would it not be more philosophical to conjecture that the crasis, if that exists at all, takes place universally; but that the consequences are only tolerated in certain parts of the globe, which he defines as the Sotadic Zone? Ancient Greece and Rome permitted them. Modern Greece and Italy have excluded them to the same extent as Northern European nations. North and South America, before the Conquest, saw no harm in them. Since its colonisation by Europeans they have been discountenanced. The phenomenon cannot therefore be regarded as specifically geographical and climatic. Besides, there is one fact mentioned by Burton which ought to make him doubt his geographical theory. He says that, after the conquest of Algiers, the French troops were infected to an enormous extent by the habits they had acquired there, and from them it spread so far and wide into civilian society that ”the vice may be said to have been democratised in cities and large towns.”[48] This surely proves that north of the Sotadic Zone males are neither physically incapable of the acts involved in abnormal pa.s.sion, nor gifted with an insuperable disgust for them. Law, and the public opinion generated by law and religious teaching, have been deterrent causes in those regions. The problem is therefore not geographical and climatic, but social. Again, may it not be suggested that the absence of ”the Vice” among the negroes and negroid races of South Africa, noticed by Burton,[49] is due to their excellent customs of s.e.xual initiation and education at the age of p.u.b.erty--customs which it is the shame of modern civilisation to have left unimitated?
However this may be, Burton regards the instinct as natural, not _contre nature_, and says that its patients ”deserve, not prosecution but the pitiful care of the physician and the study of the psychologist.”[50]
Another distinguished anthropologist, Paolo Mantegazza, has devoted special attention to the physiology and psychology of what he calls ”I pervertimenti dell'amore.”[51] Starting with the vulgar error that all s.e.xual inversion implies the unmentionable act of coition (for which, by the way, he is severely rebuked by Krafft-Ebing, Psy. s.e.x., p. 92), he explains anomalous pa.s.sions by supposing that the nerves of pleasurable sensation, which ought to be carried to the genital organs, are in some cases carried to the r.e.c.t.u.m.[52] This malformation makes its subject desire _coitum per anum_. That an intimate connection exists between the nerves of the reproductive organs and the nerves of the r.e.c.t.u.m is known to anatomists and is felt by everybody. Probably some _cinaedi_ are excited voluptuously in the mode suggested. Seneca, in his Epistles, records such cases; and it is difficult in any other way to account for the transports felt by male prost.i.tutes of the Weibling type. Finally, writers upon female prost.i.tution mention women who are incapable of deriving pleasure from any s.e.xual act except _aversa venus_.
Mantegazza's observation deserves to be remembered, and ought to be tested by investigation. But, it is obvious, he pushes the corollary he draws from it, as to the prevalence of s.e.xual inversion, too far.
He distinguishes three cla.s.ses of sodomy: (1) Perpheric or anatomical, caused by an unusual distribution of the nerves pa.s.sing from the spine to the reproductive organs and the r.e.c.t.u.m; (2) psychical, which he describes as ”specific to intelligent men, cultivated, and frequently neurotic,” but which he does not attempt to elucidate, though he calls it ”not a vice, but a pa.s.sion”; (3) luxurious or l.u.s.tful, when the _aversa venus_ is deliberately chosen on account of what Mantegazza terms ”la desolante larghezza” of the female.[53]
Mantegazza winds up, like Burton, by observing that ”sodomy, studied with the pitying and indulgent eye of the physician and the physiologist, is consequently a disease which claims to be cured, and can in many cases be cured.”[54]
After perusing what physicians, historians, and anthropologists have to say about s.e.xual inversion, there is good reason for us to feel uneasy as to the present condition of our laws. And yet it might be argued that anomalous desires are not always maladies, not always congenital, not always psychical pa.s.sions. In some cases they must surely be vices deliberately adopted out of l.u.s.tfulness, wanton curiosity, and seeking after sensual refinements. The difficult question still remains then--how to repress vice, without acting unjustly toward the naturally abnormal, the unfortunate, and the irresponsible.
I pa.s.s now to the polemical writings of a man who maintains that h.o.m.os.e.xual pa.s.sions, even in their vicious aspects, ought not to be punished except in the same degree and under the same conditions as the normal pa.s.sions of the majority.
VII.
LITERATURE--POLEMICAL.
It can hardly be said that inverted s.e.xuality received a serious and sympathetic treatment until a German jurist, named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, began his long warfare against what he considered to be prejudice and ignorance upon a topic of the greatest moment to himself.
A native of Hanover, and writing at first under the a.s.sumed name of Numa Numantius, he kept pouring out a series of polemical, a.n.a.lytical, theoretical, and apologetical pamphlets between the years 1864 and 1870.
The most important of these works is a lengthy and comprehensive Essay ent.i.tled ”Memnon. Die Geschlechtsnatur des mannliebenden Urnings. Eine naturwissenschaftliche Darstellung. Schleiz, 1868.” Memnon may be used as the text-book of its author's theories; but it is also necessary to study earlier and later treatises--Inclusa, Formatrix, Vindex, Ara Spei, Gladius Furens, Incubus, Argonauticus, Prometheus, Araxes, Kritische Pfeile--in order to obtain a complete knowledge of his opinions, and to master the whole ma.s.s of information he has brought together.
The object of Ulrichs in these miscellaneous writings is twofold. He seeks to establish a theory of s.e.xual inversion upon the basis of natural science, proving that abnormal instincts are inborn and healthy in a considerable percentage of human beings; that they do not owe their origin to bad habits of any kind, to hereditary disease, or to wilful depravity; that they are incapable in the majority of cases of being extirpated or converted into normal channels; and that the men subject to them are neither physically, intellectually, nor morally inferior to normally const.i.tuted individuals. Having demonstrated these points to his own satisfaction, and supported his views with a large induction of instances and a respectable show of erudition, he proceeds to argue that the present state of the law in many states of Europe is flagrantly unjust to a cla.s.s of innocent persons, who may indeed be regarded as unfortunate and inconvenient, but who are guilty of nothing which deserves reprobation and punishment. In this second and polemical branch of his exposition, Ulrichs a.s.sumes, for his juristic starting-point, that each human being is born with natural rights which legislation ought not to infringe but protect. He does not attempt to confute the utilitarian theory of jurisprudence, which regards laws as regulations made by the majority in the supposed interests of society. Yet a large amount of his reasoning is designed to invalidate utilitarian arguments in favour of repression, by showing that no social evil ensues in those countries which have placed abnormal s.e.xuality upon the same footing as the normal, and that the toleration of inverted pa.s.sion threatens no danger to the well-being of nations.