A Problem in Modern Ethics Part 3

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.

Wishing 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.

Be this as it may, whether we regard offenders against law and ethic as "born criminals," or as "morally insane," or whether we transcend the distinction implied in these two terms, Lombroso maintains that there is no good in trying to deal with them by punishment. They ought to be treated with life-long sequestration in asylums (p. 135), and rigidly forbidden to perpetuate the species. That is the conclusion to which the whole of his long argument is carried. He contends that the prevalent juristic conception of crime rests upon ignorance of nature, brute-life, savagery, and the gradual emergence of morality. So radical a revolution in ideas, which gives new meaning to the words sin and conscience, which removes moral responsibility, and which subst.i.tutes the anthropologist and the physician for the judge and jury, cannot be carried out, even by its fervent apostle, without some want of severe logic. Thus we find Lombroso frequently drawing distinctions between "habitual" or "born" criminals and what he calls "occasional" criminals, without explaining the phenomenon of "occasional crime," and saying how he thinks this ought to be regarded by society. Moreover, he almost wholly ignores the possibility of correcting criminal tendencies by appeal to reason, by establishing habits of self-restraint, and by the employment of such means as hypnotic suggestion.[40] Yet experience and the common practice of the world prove that these remedies are not wholly inefficacious; and indeed the pa.s.sage from childish savagery to moralised manhood, on which he lays so great a stress, is daily effected by the employment of such measures in combination with the fear of punishment and the desire to win esteem.

The final word upon Lombroso's book is this: Having started with the natural history of crime, as a prime const.i.tuent in nature and humanity, which only becomes crime through the development of social morality, and which survives atavistically in persons ill adapted to their civilised environment, he suddenly turns round and identifies the crime thus a.n.a.lysed with morbid nerve-conditions, malformations and moral insanity.

Logically, it is impossible to effect this coalition of two radically different conceptions. If crime was not crime but nature in the earlier stages, and only appeared as crime under the conditions of advancing culture, its manifestation as a survival in certain individuals ought to be referred to nature, and cannot be relegated to the category of physical or mental disease. Savages are savages, but not lunatics or epileptics.

NOTE TO THE FOREGOING SECTION.

At the close of this enquiry into medical theories of s.e.xual inversion, all of which a.s.sume that the phenomenon is morbid, it may not be superfluous to append the protest of an Urning against that solution of the problem. I translate it from the original doc.u.ment published by Krafft-Ebing (pp. 216-219). He says that the writer is "a man of high position in London"; but whether the communication was made in German or in English, does not appear.

"You have no conception what sustained and difficult struggles we all of us (the thoughtful and refined among us most of all) have to carry on, and how terribly we are forced to suffer under the false opinions which still prevail regarding us and our so-called immorality.

"Your view that, in most cases, the phenomenon in question has to be ascribed to congenital morbidity, offers perhaps the easiest way of overcoming popular prejudices, and awakening sympathy instead of horror and contempt for us poor 'afflicted' creatures.

"Still, while I believe that this view is the most favourable for us in the present state of things, I am unable in the interest of science to accept the term _morbid_ without qualification, and venture to suggest some further distinctions bearing on the central difficulties of the problem.

"The phenomenon is certainly anomalous; but the term _morbid_ carries a meaning which seems to me inapplicable to the subject, or at all events to very many cases which have come under my cognisance. I will concede _a priori_ that a far larger proportion of mental disturbance, nervous hyper-sensibility, &c., can be proved in Urnings than in normal men. But ought this excess of nervous erethism to be referred necessarily to the peculiar nature of the Urning? Is not this the true explanation, in a vast majority of cases, that the Urning, owing to present laws and social prejudices, cannot like other men obtain a simple and easy satisfaction of his inborn s.e.xual desires?

"To begin with the years of boyhood: an Urning, when he first becomes aware of s.e.xual stirrings in his nature, and innocently speaks about them to his comrades, soon finds that he is unintelligible. So he wraps himself within his own thoughts. Or should he attempt to tell a teacher or his parents about these feelings, the inclination, which for him is as natural as swimming to a fish, will be treated by them as corrupt and sinful; he is exhorted at any cost to overcome and trample on it. Then there begins in him a hidden conflict, a forcible suppression of the s.e.xual impulse; and in proportion as the natural satisfaction of his craving is denied, fancy works with still more lively efforts, conjuring up those seductive pictures which he would fain expel from his imagination. The more energetic is the youth who has to fight this inner battle, the more seriously must his whole nervous system suffer from it. It is this forcible suppression of an instinct so deeply rooted in our nature, it is this, in my humble opinion, which first originates the morbid symptoms, that may often be observed in Urnings. But such consequences have nothing in themselves to do with the s.e.xual inversion proper to the Urning.

"Well then; some persons prolong this never-ending inner conflict, and ruin their const.i.tutions in course of time; others arrive eventually at the conviction that an inborn impulse, which exists in them so powerfully, cannot possibly be sinful--so they abandon the impossible task of suppressing it. But just at this point begins in real earnest the Iliad of their sufferings and constant nervous excitations. The normal man, if he looks for means to satisfy his s.e.xual inclinations, knows always where to find that without trouble. Not so the Urning. He sees the men who attract him; he dares not utter, nay, dares not even let it be perceived, what stirs him. He imagines that he alone of all the people in the world is the subject of emotions so eccentric.

Naturally, he cultivates the society of young men, but does not venture to confide in them. So at last he is driven to seek some relief in himself, some makeshift for the satisfaction he cannot obtain. This results in masturbation, probably excessive, with its usual pernicious consequences to health. When, after the lapse of a certain time, his nervous system is gravely compromised, this morbid phenomenon ought not to be ascribed to s.e.xual inversion in itself; far rather we have to regard it as the logical issue of the Urning's position, driven as he is by dominant opinion to forego the gratification which _for him_ is natural and normal, and to betake himself to onanism.

"But let us now suppose that the Urning has enjoyed the exceptional good-fortune of finding upon his path in life a soul who feels the same as he does, or else that he has been early introduced by some initiated friend into the circles of the Urning-world. In this case, it is possible that he will have escaped many painful conflicts; yet a long series of exciting cares and anxieties attend on every step he takes. He knows indeed now that he is by no means the only individual in the world who harbours these abnormal emotions; he opens his eyes, and marvels to discover how numerous are his comrades in all social spheres and every cla.s.s of industry; he also soon perceives that Urnings, no less than normal men and women, have developed prost.i.tution, and that male strumpets can be bought for money just as easily as females.

Accordingly, there is no longer any difficulty for him in gratifying his s.e.xual impulse. But how differently do things develop themselves in his case! How far less fortunate is he than normal man!

"Let us a.s.sume the luckiest case that can befall him. The sympathetic friend, for whom he has been sighing all his life, is found. Yet he cannot openly give himself up to this connection, as a young fellow does with the girl he loves. Both of the comrades are continually forced to hide their _liaison_; their anxiety on this point is incessant; anything like an excessive intimacy, which could arouse suspicion (especially when they are not of the same age, or do not belong to the same cla.s.s in society), has to be concealed from the external world. In this way, the very commencement of the relation sets a whole chain of exciting incidents in motion: and the dread lest the secret should be betrayed or divined, prevents the unfortunate lover from ever arriving at a simple happiness. Trifling circ.u.mstances, which would have no importance for another sort of man, make him tremble: lest suspicion should awake, his secret be discovered, and he become a social outcast, lose his official appointment, be excluded from his profession. Is it conceivable that this incessant anxiety and care should pa.s.s over him without a trace, and not react upon his nervous system?

"Another individual, less lucky, has not found a sympathetic comrade, but has fallen into the hands of some pretty fellow, who at the outset readily responded to his wishes, till he drew the very deepest secret of his nature forth. At that point the subtlest methods of blackmailing begin to be employed. The miserable persecuted wretch, placed between the alternative of paying money down or of becoming socially impossible, losing a valued position, seeing dishonour bursting upon himself and family, pays, and still the more he pays, the greedier becomes the vampire who sucks his life-blood, until at last there lies nothing else before him except total financial ruin or disgrace. Who will be astonished if the nerves of an individual in this position are not equal to the horrid strain?

"In some cases the nerves give way altogether: mental alienation sets in; at last the wretch finds in a madhouse that repose which life would not afford him. Others terminate their unendurable situation by the desperate act of suicide. How many unexplained cases of suicide in young men ought to be ascribed to this cause!

"I do not think I am far wrong when I maintain that at least half of the suicides of young men are due to this one circ.u.mstance. Even in cases where no merciless blackmailer persecutes the Urning, but a connection has existed which lasted satisfactorily on both sides, still in these cases even discovery, or the dread of discovery, leads only too often to suicide. How many officers, who have had connection with their subordinates, how many soldiers, who have lived in such relation with a comrade, when they thought they were about to be discovered, have put a bullet through their brains to avoid the coming disgrace! And the same thing might be said about all the other callings in life.

"In consequence of all this, it seems clear that if, as a matter of fact, mental abnormalities and real disturbances of the intellect are commoner with Urnings than in the case of other men, this does not establish an inevitable connection between the mental eccentricity and the Urning's specific temperament, or prove that the latter causes the former. According to my firm conviction, mental disturbances and morbid symptoms which may be observed in Urnings ought in the large majority of instances not to be referred to their s.e.xual anomaly; the real fact is that they are educed in them by the prevalent false theory of s.e.xual inversion, together with the legislation in force against Urnings and the reigning tone of public opinion. It is only one who has some approximate notion of the mental and moral sufferings, of the anxieties and perturbations, to which an Urning is exposed, who knows the never-ending hypocrisies and concealments he must practise in order to cloak his indwelling inclination, who comprehends the infinite difficulties which oppose the natural satisfaction of his s.e.xual desire--it is only such a one, I say, who is able properly to wonder at the comparative rarity of mental aberrations and nervous ailments in the cla.s.s of Urnings. The larger proportion of these morbid circ.u.mstances would certainly not be developed if the Urning, like the normal man, could obtain a simple and facile gratification of his s.e.xual appet.i.te, and if he were not everlastingly exposed to the torturing anxieties I have attempted to describe."

This is powerfully and temperately written. It confirms what I have attempted to establish while criticising the medical hypothesis; and raises the further question whether the phenomenon of s.e.xual inversion ought not to be approached from the point of view of embryology rather than of psychical pathology. In other words, is not the true Urning to be regarded as a person born with s.e.xual instincts improperly correlated to his s.e.xual organs? This he can be without any inherited or latent morbidity; and the nervous anomalies discovered in him when he falls at last beneath the observation of physicians, may be not the evidence of an originally tainted const.i.tution, but the consequence of unnatural conditions to which he has been exposed from the age of p.u.b.erty.

VI.

LITERATURE--HISTORICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL.

No one has yet attempted a complete history of inverted s.e.xuality in all ages and in all races. This would be well worth doing. Materials, though not extremely plentiful, lie to hand in the religious books and codes of ancient nations, in mythology and poetry and literature, in narratives of travel, and the reports of observant explorers.

Gibbon once suggested that: "A curious dissertation might be formed on the introduction of paederasty after the time of Homer, its progress among the Greeks of Asia and Europe, the vehemence of their pa.s.sions, and the thin device of virtue and friendship which amused the philosophers of Athens. But," adds the prurient prude, "Scelera ostendi oportet dum puniunter, abscondi flagitia."

Two scholars responded to this call. The result is that the chapter on Greek love has been very fairly written by equally impartial, equally learned, and independent authors, who approached the subject from somewhat different points of view, but who arrived in the main at similar conclusions.