In France, where great social questions are sometimes faced with a more chivalrous daring than elsewhere, the dangers of syphilis, and the social position of the prostitute, have alike been dealt with by distinguished novelists and dramatists. Huysmans inaugurated this movement with his first novel, Marthe, which was immediately suppressed by the police. Shortly afterwards Edmond de Goncourt published La Fille Elisa, the first notable novel of the kind by a distinguished author. It was written with much reticence, and was not indeed a work of high artistic value, but it boldly faced a great social problem and clearly set forth the evils of the common attitude towards prostitution. It was dramatized and played by Antoine at the Théâtre Libre, but when, in 1891, Antoine wished to produce it at the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre, the censor interfered and prohibited the play on account of its "contexture générale." The Minister of Education defended this decision on the ground that there was much in the play that might arouse repugnance and disgust. "Repugnance here is more moral than attraction," exclaimed M. Paul Déroulède, and the newspapers criticized a censure which permitted on the stage all the trivial indecencies which favor prostitution, but cannot tolerate any attack on prostitution. In more recent years the brothers Margueritte, both in novels and in journalism, have largely devoted their distinguished abilities and high literary skill to the courageous and enlightened advocacy of many social reforms. Victor Margueritte, in his Prostituée (1907)—a novel which has attracted wide attention and been translated into various languages—has sought to represent the condition of women in our actual society, and more especially the condition of the prostitute under what he regards as the odious and iniquitous system still prevailing. The book is a faithful picture of the real facts, thanks to the assistance the author received from the Paris Préfecture of Police, and largely for that reason is not altogether a satisfactory work of art, but it vividly and poignantly represents the cruelty, indifference, and hypocrisy so often shown by men towards women, and is a book which, on that account, cannot be too widely read. One of the most notable of modern plays is Brieux's Les Avariés (1902). This distinguished dramatist, himself a medical man, dedicates his play to Fournier, the greatest of syphilographers. "I think with you," he writes here, "that syphilis will lose much of its danger when it is possible to speak openly of an evil which is neither a shame nor a punishment, and when those who suffer from it, knowing what evils they may propagate, will better understand their duties towards others and towards themselves." The story developed in the drama is the old and typical story of the young man who has spent his bachelor days in what he considers a discrete and regular manner, having only had two mistresses, neither of them prostitutes, but at the end of this period, at a gay supper at which he bids farewell to his bachelor life, he commits a fatal indiscretion and becomes infected by syphilis; his marriage is approaching and he goes to a distinguished specialist who warns him that treatment takes time, and that marriage is impossible for several years; he finds a quack, however, who undertakes to cure him in six months; at the end of the time he marries; a syphilitic child is born; the wife discovers the state of things and forsakes her home to return to her parents; her indignant father, a deputy in Parliament, arrives in Paris; the last word is with the great specialist who brings finally some degree of peace and hope into the family. The chief morals Brieux points out are that it is the duty of the bride's parents before marriage to ascertain the bridegroom's health; that the bridegroom should have a doctor's certificate; that at every marriage the part of the doctors is at least as important as that of the lawyers. Even if it were a less accomplished work of art than it is, Les Avariés is a play which, from the social and educative point of view alone, all who have reached the age of adolescence should be compelled to see.
Another aspect of the same problem has been presented in Plus Fort que le Mal, a book written in dramatic form (though not as a properly constituted play intended for the stage) by a distinguished French medical author who here adopts the name of Espy de Metz. The author (who is not, however, pleading pro domo) calls for a more sympathetic attitude towards those who suffer from syphilis, and though he writes with much less dramatic skill than Brieux, and scarcely presents his moral in so unequivocal a form, his work is a notable contribution to the dramatic literature of syphilis.
It will probably be some time before these questions, poignant as they are from the dramatic point of view, and vitally important from the social point of view, are introduced on the English or the American stage. It is a remarkable fact that, notwithstanding the Puritanic elements which still exist in Anglo-Saxon thought and feeling generally, the Puritanic aspect of life has never received embodiment in the English or American drama. On the English stage it is never permitted to hint at the tragic side of wantonness; vice must always be made seductive, even though a deus ex machina causes it to collapse at the end of the performance. As Mr. Bernard Shaw has said, the English theatrical method by no means banishes vice; it merely consents that it shall be made attractive; its charms are advertised and its penalties suppressed. "Now, it is futile to plead that the stage is not the proper place for the representation and discussion of illegal operations, incest, and venereal disease. If the stage is the proper place for the exhibition and discussion of seduction, adultery, promiscuity, and prostitution, it must be thrown open to all the consequences of these things, or it will demoralize the nation."
The impulse to insist that vice shall always be made attractive is not really, notwithstanding appearances, a vicious impulse. It arises from a mental confusion, a common psychic tendency, which is by no means confined to Anglo-Saxon lands, and is even more well marked among the better educated in the merely literary sense, than among the worse educated people. The æsthetic is confused with the moral, and what arouses disgust is thus regarded as immoral. In France the novels of Zola, the most pedestrianally moralistic of writers, were for a long time supposed to be immoral because they were often disgusting. The same feeling is still more widespread in England. If a prostitute is brought on the stage, and she is pretty, well-dressed, seductive, she may gaily sail through the play and every one is satisfied. But if she were not particularly pretty, well-dressed, or seductive, if it were made plain that she was diseased and was reckless in infecting others with that disease, if it were hinted that she could on occasion be foul-mouthed, if, in short, a picture were shown from life—then we should hear that the unfortunate dramatist had committed something that was "disgusting" and "immoral." Disgusting it might be, but, on that very account, it would be moral. There is a distinction here that the psychologist cannot too often point out or the moralist too often emphasize.
It is not for the physician to complicate and confuse his own task as teacher by mixing it up with considerations which belong to the spiritual sphere. But in carrying out impartially his own special work of enlightenment he will always do well to remember that there is in the adolescent mind, as it has been necessary to point out in a previous chapter, a spontaneous force working on the side of sexual hygiene. Those who believe that the adolescent mind is merely bent on sensual indulgence are not less false and mischievous in their influence than are those who think it possible and desirable for adolescents to be preserved in sheer sexual ignorance. However concealed, suppressed, or deformed—usually by the misplaced and premature zeal of foolish parents and teachers—there arise at puberty ideal impulses which, even though they may be rooted in sex, yet in their scope transcend sex. These are capable of becoming far more potent guides of the physical sex impulse than are merely material or even hygienic considerations.
It is time to summarize and conclude this discussion of the prevention of venereal disease, which, though it may seem to the superficial observer to be merely a medical and sanitary question outside the psychologist's sphere, is yet seen on closer view to be intimately related even to the most spiritual conception of the sexual relationships. Not only are venereal diseases the foes to the finer development of the race, but we cannot attain to any wholesome and beautiful vision of the relationships of sex so long as such relationships are liable at every moment to be corrupted and undermined at their source. We cannot yet precisely measure the interval which must elapse before, so far as Europe at least is concerned, syphilis and gonorrhœa are sent to that limbo of monstrous old dead diseases to which plague and leprosy have gone and smallpox is already drawing near. But society is beginning to realize that into this field also must be brought the weapons of light and air, the sword and the breastplate with which all diseases can alone be attacked. As we have seen, there are four methods by which in the more enlightened countries venereal disease is now beginning to be combated.[[255]] (1) By proclaiming openly that the venereal diseases are diseases like any other disease, although more subtle and terrible than most, which may attack anyone from the unborn baby to its grandmother, and that they are not, more than other diseases, the shameful penalties of sin, from which relief is only to be sought, if at all, by stealth, but human calamities; (2) by adopting methods of securing official information concerning the extent, distribution, and variation of venereal disease, through the already recognized plan of notification and otherwise, and by providing such facilities for treatment, especially for free treatment, as may be found necessary; (3) by training the individual sense of moral responsibility, so that every member of the community may realize that to inflict a serious disease on another person, even only as a result of reckless negligence, is a more serious offence than if he or she had used the knife or the gun or poison as the method of attack, and that it is necessary to introduce special legal provision in every country to assist the recovery of damages for such injuries and to inflict penalties by loss of liberty or otherwise; (4) by the spread of hygienic knowledge, so that all adolescents, youths and girls alike, may be furnished at the outset of adult life with an equipment of information which will assist them to avoid the grosser risks of contamination and enable them to recognize and avoid danger at the earliest stages.
A few years ago, when no method of combating venereal disease was known except that system of police regulation which is now in its decadence, it would have been impossible to bring forward such considerations as these; they would have seemed Utopian. To-day they are not only recognizable as practical, but they are being actually put into practice, although, it is true, with very varying energy and insight in different countries. Yet it is certain that in the competition of nationalities, as Max von Niessen has well said, "that country will best take a leading place in the march of civilization which has the foresight and courage to introduce and carry through those practical movements of sexual hygiene which have so wide and significant a bearing on its own future, and that of the human race generally."[[256]]