We have lost these ancient and invaluable rites of initiation into manhood and womanhood, with their inestimable moral benefits; at the most we have merely preserved the shells of initiation in which the core has decayed. In time, we cannot doubt, they will be revived in modern forms. At present the spiritual initiation of youths and maidens is left to the chances of some happy accident, and usually it is of a purely cerebral character which cannot be perfectly wholesome, and is at the best absurdly incomplete.
This cerebral initiation commonly occurs to the youth through the medium of literature. The influence of literature in sexual education thus extends, in an incalculable degree, beyond the narrow sphere of manuals on sexual hygiene, however admirable and desirable these may be. The greater part of literature is more or less distinctly penetrated by erotic and auto-erotic conceptions and impulses; nearly all imaginative literature proceeds from the root of sex to flower in visions of beauty and ecstasy. The Divine Comedy of Dante is herein the immortal type of the poet's evolution. The youth becomes acquainted with the imaginative representations of love before he becomes acquainted with the reality of love, so that, as Leo Berg puts it, "the way to love among civilized peoples passes through imagination." All literature is thus, to the adolescent soul, a part of sexual education.[[39]] It depends, to some extent, though fortunately not entirely, on the judgment of those in authority over the young soul whether the literature to which the youth or girl is admitted is or is not of the large and humanizing order.
All great literature touches nakedly and sanely on the central facts of sex. It is always consoling to remember this in an age of petty pruderies. And it is a satisfaction to know that it would not be possible to emasculate the literature of the great ages, however desirable it might seem to the men of more degenerate ages, or to close the avenues to that literature against the young. All our religious and literary traditions serve to fortify the position of the Bible and of Shakespeare. "So many men and women," writes a correspondent, a literary man, "gain sexual ideas in childhood from reading the Old Testament, that the Bible may be called an erotic text-book. Most persons of either sex with whom I have conversed on the subject, say that the Books of Moses, and the stories of Amnon and Tamar, Lot and his daughters, Potiphar's wife and Joseph, etc., caused speculation and curiosity, and gave them information of the sexual relationship. A boy and girl of fifteen, both friends of the writer, and now over thirty years of age, used to find out erotic passages in the Bible on Sunday mornings, while in a Dissenting chapel, and pass their Bibles to one another, with their fingers on the portions that interested them." In the same way many a young woman has borrowed Shakespeare in order to read the glowing erotic poetry of Venus and Adonis, which her friends have told her about.
The Bible, it may be remarked, is not in every respect, a model introduction for the young mind to the questions of sex. But even its frank acceptance, as of divine origin, of sexual rules so unlike those that are nominally our own, such as polygamy and concubinage, helps to enlarge the vision of the youthful mind by showing that the rules surrounding the child are not those everywhere and always valid, while the nakedness and realism of the Bible cannot but be a wholesome and tonic corrective to conventional pruderies.
We must, indeed, always protest against the absurd confusion whereby nakedness of speech is regarded as equivalent to immorality, and not the less because it is often adopted even in what are regarded as intellectual quarters. When in the House of Lords, in the last century, the question of the exclusion of Byron's statue from Westminster Abbey was under discussion, Lord Brougham "denied that Shakespeare was more moral than Byron. He could, on the contrary, point out in a single page of Shakespeare more grossness than was to be found in all Lord Byron's works." The conclusion Brougham thus reached, that Byron is an incomparably more moral writer than Shakespeare, ought to have been a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of his argument, but it does not appear that anyone pointed out the vulgar confusion into which he had fallen.
It may be said that the special attractiveness which the nakedness of great literature sometimes possesses for young minds is unwholesome. But it must be remembered that the peculiar interest of this element is merely due to the fact that elsewhere there is an inveterate and abnormal concealment. It must also be said that the statements of the great writers about natural things are never degrading, nor even erotically exciting to the young, and what Emilia Pardo Bazan tells of herself and her delight when a child in the historical books of the Old Testament, that the crude passages in them failed to send the faintest cloud of trouble across her young imagination, is equally true of most children. It is necessary, indeed, that these naked and serious things should be left standing, even if only to counterbalance the lewdly comic efforts to besmirch love and sex, which are visible to all in every low-class bookseller's shop window.
This point of view was vigorously championed by the speakers on sexual education at the Third Congress of the German Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in 1907. Thus Enderlin, speaking as a headmaster, protested against the custom of bowdlerizing poems and folk-songs for the use of children, and thus robbing them of the finest introduction to purified sexual impulses and the highest sphere of emotion, while at the same time they are recklessly exposed to the "psychic infection" of the vulgar comic papers everywhere exposed for sale. "So long as children are too young to respond to erotic poetry it cannot hurt them; when they are old enough to respond it can only benefit them by opening to them the highest and purest channels of human emotion" (Sexualpädagogik, p. 60). Professor Schäfenacker (id., p. 98) expresses himself in the same sense, and remarks that "the method of removing from school-books all those passages which, in the opinion of short-sighted and narrow-hearted schoolmasters, are unsuited for youth, must be decisively condemned." Every healthy boy and girl who has reached the age of puberty may be safely allowed to ramble in any good library, however varied its contents. So far from needing guidance they will usually show a much more refined taste than their elders. At this age, when the emotions are still virginal and sensitive, the things that are realistic, ugly, or morbid, jar on the young spirit and are cast aside, though in adult life, with the coarsening of mental texture which comes of years and experience, this repugnance, doubtless by an equally sound and natural instinct, may become much less acute.
Ellen Key in Ch. VI of her Century of the Child well summarizes the reasons against the practice of selecting for children books that are "suitable" for them, a practice which she considers one of the follies of modern education. The child should be free to read all great literature, and will himself instinctively put aside the things he is not yet ripe for. His cooler senses are undisturbed by scenes that his elders find too exciting, while even at a later stage it is not the nakedness of great literature, but much more the method of the modern novel, which is likely to stain the imagination, falsify reality and injure taste. It is concealment which misleads and coarsens, producing a state of mind in which even the Bible becomes a stimulus to the senses. The writings of the great masters yield the imaginative food which the child craves, and the erotic moment in them is too brief to be overheating. It is the more necessary, Ellen Key remarks, for children to be introduced to great literature, since they often have little opportunity to occupy themselves with it in later life. Many years earlier Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies, had eloquently urged that even young girls should be allowed to range freely in libraries.
What has been said about literature applies equally to art. Art, as well as literature, and in the same indirect way, can be made a valuable aid in the task of sexual enlightenment and sexual hygiene. Modern art may, indeed, for the most part, be ignored from this point of view, but children cannot be too early familiarized with the representations of the nude in ancient sculpture and in the paintings of the old masters of the Italian school. In this way they may be immunized, as Enderlin expresses it, against those representations of the nude which make an appeal to the baser instincts. Early familiarity with nudity in art is at the same time an aid to the attainment of a proper attitude towards purity in nature. "He who has once learnt," as Höller remarks, "to enjoy peacefully nakedness in art, will be able to look on nakedness in nature as on a work of art."