Is it I? A book for every man.

by Horatio Robinson Storer

Again, all of us learn the lessons of life by experience—sad experience, indeed, it too often is. Many a man would give even his own soul could his past life be restored to him, and its follies, its sins be effaced. Too often his soul is no longer his own to give: inextricably entangled in passion’s web, wound about and about with its myriad threads, there remains but the dead and worthless semblance of himself, that can be restored by nought save the boundless grace of God. Who would not gladly escape such risk, and welcome every premonition of danger?

Still again, many, claiming to be immaculate themselves, will ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And yet, living together in communities, as we do, it must be confessed that we are responsible, every one of us, and to a very great extent, for the shortcomings and evil deeds of all the rest, and it must also be confessed that there does not exist, that there probably never existed, a perfectly immaculate man, who never once has erred in the very matter we are now considering, either in deed, or in word, or in thought. Consoling indeed for those of us who humbly confess our infirmities is this very fact. Take the very basest of us, and he at times is conscious of vain regrets of his own misdeeds, and a fond desire that those whom he loves, for every man has such, may be better than he. Take the very best of us, and he sees a height beyond any he has yet attained, that he prays he may yet reach and pass.

And further: not merely are researches, such as this essay is founded upon, publications for the general weal, such as it claims to be, perfectly legitimate and advisable in themselves; they have been sanctioned by precedents that have already been established. I do not refer to the attempts of unprincipled empirics to terrify the masses by overdrawn pictures of disease, nor of holy and well-meaning men to turn them to better ways by fervent descriptions of the wrath to come. We shall take neither the fear of things present nor future as our standard in this discussion, but appeal solely to each man’s reason—and such appeals have been made before. They have been made in France by Ricord, by Lallemand, and others of the great medical philosophers of the day; by Parent-Duchatelet and by Diday. In England, there are men like Acton, who dare to sound the trumpet of alarm, bringing forward their facts from private practice, from the hospital, and from the dead-house, and drawing from these indisputable conclusions. In our own country there are men like those brave souls, now one of them at least translated to a better country, Blatchford,[6] and Hodge, and Pope, and Barton, and Lopez, and Brisbane, physicians of the very highest rank in their profession, who were not ashamed, in the question of the frequency and the ill results of criminal abortion, to take stand beside me upon the platform of our personal knowledge, and knowing they dared maintain. I will cite but one instance more. It is that of a good man now gone to his rest, and a very rock he was to the swelling tide of moral as well as physical evil—the late Professor John Ware, of Massachusetts. His little work on a portion only of the topic we are now considering,[7] has stayed many a headlong step and saved many a soul alive. The book to which I refer has, however, probably obtained but a limited circulation compared with that at which I now aim, and its author, so good himself, used only the gentle, persuasive eloquence of a tongue attuned by Nature to peaceful themes. For myself, accustomed as I have been in the practice of my profession in the especial department most bearing upon this subject, to probe humanity to its lowest depths, I shall not hesitate to speak plainly the truth as it is, to pile argument upon argument, to resort to invective if need be, ay, and to apply the lash, till every man who reads me stammers, conscience-stricken or indignant, “Is it I?” For, one of themselves, both by birth and by nature, I know my ground, and my answer shall be, “Thou hast said.”

I shall try, I have stated, while speaking cogently, to keep my language within the bounds of the strictest decorum. Treating of similar topics with Michelet and Jean Jacques Rousseau, I would fain, while discussing the sphere, the charms, and the complaints of woman, the force and the claims of the passion of love, whether pure or illicit, and the unalloyed, unredeemable evils of purely selfish gratification, escape all semblance alike of approving sensuality and of condemning a rational yielding to natural laws—which last, as I shall be found to define it, must be considered a far different thing from the lustful appetite of a satyr or the nightly phantom of the ascetic, who is such from cowardice alone. Composed as we are, in this fleshly tabernacle, of many a member, and many an adaptation of these to use, combined as one, there is the old, old combat described by St. Paul,—our instincts warring with our better selves, our will and our reason, for mastery. To govern a slave, and govern him well, one need not crucify him. To govern one’s self, it may be necessary severely to discipline, but not always to kill, the body in which we have been placed for so many useful ends. To use, as not abusing ourselves or others, is but collateral to the rule called “golden”—together they form for us the safest of creeds.

All men, old or young, seek companionship. This is necessary for their very self-possession, both in body and in mind; and the companionship which they instinctively seek, as truly and as unvaryingly as the loadstar seeks its pole, is that of the opposite sex. Where this special yearning is absent or has never existed, there is to be found, always, the effect of disappointment or of disease. The disease, if such is present, may, it is true, have been self-occasioned, but the vessel itself was either improperly built for the voyage of life or was stopped in its course by some hidden shoal: it has foundered or been wrecked, and we shall find that in by far the majority of cases this was from neglect in obtaining the necessary sailing charts or from non-adjustment of the compass.

And here let me answer in advance one question that would undoubtedly be put to me by every one of my readers, Do I believe in fairweather sailing alone? in hugging the shore, and never daring to put to sea? Do I expect that each craft should be so stanch as to defy every wave and every blast of danger? I do neither. It is not the zephyr that calls into being the sturdiness of the oak, nor the mere heat of the sun that separates from the dross its fine gold. It is the burning that causes a child to dread the fire, and the philosophy that learns these things tentatively, and not from chance, is not of necessity sheer wickedness. I am no apologist for vice. A habit of evil doing is one thing, and a slip, or even a momentary plunge into the mire, is a very different thing. The last, by its very taste of earth, may engender a longing, else unknown, for heaven. For myself I have little faith in passive goodness; that is, in us men. Those who have never been exposed to temptation, from staying quietly at home or through accident alone, are the soonest to yield if the tempter comes. Having never tested their strength, they find it but weakness. As with eagles reared in a cage, there is no power of wing. It is the fall to the ground from the eyry, and the often disappointment when too fully self-relying, that gives the force of pinion to soar to the highest ether, face to face with nought but the sun. That I may be rightly understood upon this very threshold of our inquiry, let me quote a few lines from one of the most thoughtful, most chaste, and most accepted writers of the present day, the late Rev. Mr. Robertson, of England. “The first use,” he says, “a man makes of every power and talent given to him is a bad use. The first time a man ever uses a flail, it is to the injury of his own head and of those who stand around him. The first time a child has a sharp-edged tool in his hand, he cuts his fingers. But this is no reason why he should not be ever taught to use a knife. The first use a man makes of his affections is to sensualize his spirit. Yet he cannot be ennobled except through those very affections. The first time a kingdom is put in possession of liberty, the result is anarchy. The first time a man is put in possession of intellectual knowledge, he is conscious of the approaches of sceptical feeling. But that is no proof that liberty is bad, or that instruction should not be given. It is a law of our humanity that man must know both good and evil; he must know good through evil. There never was a principle but what triumphed through much evil; no man ever progressed to greatness and goodness but through great mistakes.”[8]

These remarks apply more particularly to the young man, just becoming conscious of his newly-awakened emotions and physical powers. Should he be viewed and treated as a child, or allowed to go out from home to the dangers of the world? In acquiescing, as a general rule, in the latter course, I know that I shall shock the sensibilities and prejudices of many superficial observers. Yet Sydney Smith did not hesitate to avow a similar opinion. “Very few young men,” acknowledges the reverend gentleman, “have the power of negation in any great degree at first. Every young man must be exposed to temptation; he cannot learn the ways of men without being witness to their vices. If you attempt to preserve him from danger by keeping him out of the way of it, you render him quite unfit for any style of life in which he may be placed. The great point is, not to turn him out too soon, and to give him a pilot.” He must be taught purity.

There is no doubt that in very many children an improper tone of thought is established even before the period of puberty, unnatural as this must be allowed to be, and that oftentimes this sexual precocity is induced very directly by causes within our control. For a boy in our cities, or even our villages, to reach his teens without learning from his associates or by observation something of these matters, is simply impossible. It is for us to see to it that he does not receive the idea that they constitute the whole or the best part of life. “Remember,” says Herbert Spencer, “that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a self-governing being, not to produce a being to be governed by others. As your children are by and bye to be free men, with no one to control their daily conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they are still under your eye. Aim, therefore, to diminish the parental government as fast as you can substitute for it in your child’s mind that self-government arising from a foresight of results. All transitions are dangerous, and the most dangerous is the transition from the restraint of the family circle to the non-restraint of the world. Hence the policy of cultivating a boy’s faculty of self-restraint by continually increasing the degree in which he is left to his self-restraint, and so bringing him, step by step, to a state of unaided self-restraint, obliterates the ordinary sudden and hazardous change from externally governed youth to internally governed maturity.”[9]

With reference to this point, who of us does not agree with the strictures of Acton upon the carelessness or prejudice which subjects a boy to unnecessary and too early temptations, sanctioning perhaps by parental advice his exposure to the wiliest and most dangerous of foes, his own unbridled imagination? Humphrey Clinker and Roderick Random are no longer to be found upon the family book-shelf. Griffith Gaunt, and the exciting issues of the modern French press, have taken their place. Lempriere, Ovid, and the other such meat for strong men, are put into the boy’s hands with an expurgated text. What lad, however, who has not been tempted to ransack his father’s library, and every other collection of books within his reach, in the hope of finding an original edition, just precisely as at a certain time of his youth, longer or shorter as this may have been, he has found himself turning to the coarsely translated and sometimes flagrant pages of the Old Testament, rather than to the chaste and ennobling language of the Gospels? “It has often surprised me,” writes Acton,[10] “that the filthy stories of the loves of the heathen mythology should have been so generally placed in the hands of lads. In such works the youth gloats over the pleasures which the heathen deities are supposed to have indulged in, while his imagination runs riot amid the most lascivious passages. The doctrine laid down in these volumes seems to be, that lust went on unchecked, that it was attended with no evil results, either physically or morally, to the individual, or to the society in which such scenes are supposed to have existed. To enable him to live as these gods of old are supposed to have done, with what companions must he not associate? He reads in them of the pleasures, nothing of the penalties, of sexual indulgence, and it is at a later period that the poor schoolboy is first to learn that sexual pleasure is not to be indulged in with impunity. He is not intuitively aware that, if the sexual desires are excited, it will require greater power of will to master them than falls to the lot of most lads; that if indulged in, the man will and must pay the penalty for the errors of the boy; that for one that escapes ten will suffer; that an awful risk attends abnormal substitutes for sexual intercourse; and that self-indulgence, long pursued, tends ultimately to early death or self-destruction.”

Thus educated, and thus vainly imagining, a large proportion of our boys pass from childhood into youth, with the preconceived idea they soon find apparently confirmed by their own sensations, that it is not good to be alone. Let Kingsley tell us what is but too often the very reasonable result. Lancelot had discovered “a new natural object, including in itself all—more than all yet found beauties and wonders—Woman. What was to be expected? Pleasant things were pleasant, there was no doubt of that, whatever else might be doubtful. He had read Byron by stealth; he had been flogged into reading Ovid and Tibullus, and commanded by his private tutor to read Martial and Juvenal for the improvement of his style. All conversation on the subject of love had been prudishly avoided, as usual, by his parents and teacher. The parts of the Bible which spoke of it had been kept out of his sight. Love had been to him, practically, ground tabooed and carnal. What was to be expected? Just what happened. If woman’s beauty had nothing holy in it, why should his fondness for it? Just what happens every day—that he had to sow his wild oats for himself, and eat the fruit thereof, and the dirt thereof also.”[11]