Part 2

"In the numerous books," says M. Carlier, "which treat of prostitution, the antiphysical passions have hitherto been always deliberately omitted. Officially, public opinion does not recognise them, the legislature will take no notice of them. The police are left alone to react against them; and the unequal combat may some day cease, since it is supported by no text of the code and no regulation of the state. When that happens, pæderasty will become a calamity far more dangerous, more scandalous, than female prostitution, the organisation of which it shares in full. A magistrate once declared that 'in Paris it is the school where the cleverest and boldest criminals are formed; and as a matter of fact, it produces associations of special scoundrels, who use it as the means of theft and _chantage_, not stopping short of murder in the execution of their plots.'"

It will be seen from this exordium that M. Carlier regards the subject wholly from the point of view of prostitution. He has proved abundantly that male prostitution is organised in Paris upon the same system as its female counterpart, and he has demonstrated that this system is attended with the same dangers to society.

A violent animus against antiphysical passions makes him exaggerate these dangers, for it is clear that normal vice is no less free from sordid demoralisation and crimes of violence than its abnormal twin-brother. Both are fornication; and everywhere, in Corinth as in Sodom, the prostitute goes hand in hand with the bully, the robber, and the cut-throat.

With reference to the legal position of these passions in France, he says: "Pæderasty is not punished by our laws. It can only come within the reach of the code by virtue of circumstances under which it may be practised. If the facts take place in the presence of witnesses, or in a place open to public observation, there will be an outrage to decency. If minors are seduced, there may be proof of the habitual incitement of minors to debauch, corruption, or even rape. But the passion itself is not subject to penalty; it is only a vice arising from one of the seven deadly sins. We have no intention of analysing this perverted instinct. Since the law does not regard it, we will do like the law. We will pass in silence all its private details, occupying ourselves only with what meets the eye, with what may be called a veritable prostitution."

M. Carlier proceeds to describe the two main classes, which in France are known as _tantes_ and _amateurs_. The former are subdivided into minor branches, under the names of _jésus_, _petits jésus_, _corvettes_ (naval), soldiers. The latter, called also _rivettes_, are distinguished by their tastes for different sorts of _tantes_.

Those who are interested in such matters may turn to M. Carlier's pages for minute information regarding the habits, coteries, houses of debauch, bullies, earnings, methods of extortion, dwellings, balls, banquets, and even wedding-parties of these people. A peculiar world of clandestine vice in a great city is revealed; and the authentic documents, abundantly presented, render the picture vivid in its details. From the official papers which passed through M. Carlier's bureau during ten years (1860-70), he compiles a list of 6,342 pæderasts who came within the cognisance of the police: 2,049 Parisians, 3,709 provincials, 484 foreigners. Of these 3,532, or more than the half, could not be convicted of illegal acts.

While devoting most of his attention to professionals who dress like women, and have become exactly similar to the effeminated youth described in _Monsieur Vénus_,[9] Carlier gives some curious details about the French army. Soldiers are no less sought after in France than in England or in Germany, and special houses exist for military prostitution both in Paris and the garrison towns.[10] Upon this point it should be remarked that Carlier expresses a very strong opinion regarding the contagiousness of antiphysical passion. And certainly many facts known about the French army go to prove that these habits have been contracted in Algeria, and have spread to a formidable extent through whole regiments.[11]

In conclusion, M. Carlier, though he so strongly deplores the impunity extended by French law to sexual inversion, admits that this has not augmented the evil. Speaking about England, where legal penalties are heavy enough, he says; "Though they call it the _nameless crime_ there, it has in England at least as many votaries as in France, and they are quite as depraved."[12]

IV.

LITERATURE--MEDICO-FORENSIC.

Carlier's book deals with the external aspects of inverted sexuality, as this exists in Paris under the special form of prostitution. The author professes to know nothing more about the subject than what came beneath his notice in the daily practice of his trade as a policeman. He writes with excusable animosity. We see at once that he is neither a philosopher by nature, nor a man of science, but only a citizen, endowed with the normal citizen's antipathy for passions alien to his own. Placed at the head of the Bureau of Morals, Carlier was brought into collision with a tribe of people whom he could not legally arrest, but whom he cordially hated. They were patently vicious; and (what was peculiarly odious to the normal man) these degraded beings were all males. He saw that the public intolerance of "antiphysical passions," which he warmly shared, encouraged an organised system of _chantage_. Without entertaining the question whether public opinion might be modified, he denounced the noxious gang as pests of society. The fact that England, with her legal prohibitions, suffered to the same extent as France from the curse of "pæderasty," did not make him pause. Consequently, the light which he has thrown upon the subject of this treatise only illuminates the dark dens of male vice in a big city. He leaves us where we were about the psychological and ethical problem. He shows what deep roots the passion strikes in the centres of modern civilisation, and how it thrives under conditions at once painful to its victims and embarrassing to an agent of police.

Writers on forensic medicine take the next place in the row of literary witnesses. It is not their business to investigate the psychological condition of persons submitted to the action of the laws. They are concerned with the law itself, and with those physical circumstances which may bring the accused within its operation, or may dismiss him free from punishment.

Yet their function, by importing the quality of the physician into the sphere of jurisprudence, renders them more apprehensive of the underlying problem than a mere agent of police. We expect impartial scientific scrutiny in such authorities, and to some extent we find it.

The leading writers on forensic medicine at the present time in Europe are Casper (edited by Liman) for Germany, Tardieu for France, and Taylor for England. Taylor is so reticent upon the subject of unnatural crime that his handbook on "The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence" does not demand minute examination. It may, however, be remarked that he believes false accusations to be even commoner in this matter than in the case of rape, since they are only too frequently made the means of blackmailing. For this reason he leaves the investigation of such crimes to the lawyers.

Both Casper and Tardieu discuss the topic of sexual inversion with antipathy. But there are notable points of difference in the method and in the conclusions of the two authors. Tardieu, perhaps because he is a Frenchman, educated in the school of Paris, which we have learned to know from Carlier, assumes that all subjects of the passion are criminal or vicious. He draws no psychological distinction between pæderast and pæderast. He finds no other name for them, and looks upon the whole class as voluntarily degraded beings who, for the gratification of monstrous desires, have unsexed themselves. A large part of his work is devoted to describing what he believes to be the signs of active and passive immorality in the bodies of persons addicted to these habits.[13] It is evident that imagination has acted powerfully in the formation of his theories. But this is not the place to discuss their details.[14]

Casper and Liman approach the subject with almost equal disgust, but with more regard for scientific truth than Tardieu. They point out that the term pæderast is wholly inadequate to describe the several classes of male persons afflicted with sexual inversion. They clearly expect, in course of time, a general mitigation of the penalties in force against such individuals. According to them, the penal laws of North Germany, on the occasion of their last revision, would probably have been altered, had not the jurists felt that the popular belief in the criminality of pæderasts ought to be considered.[15] Consequently, a large number of irresponsible persons, in the opinion of experts like Casper and Liman, are still exposed to punishment by laws enacted under the influence of vulgar errors.

These writers are not concerned with the framing of codes, nor again with the psychological diagnosis of accused persons. It is their business to lay down rules whereby a medical authority, consulted in a doubtful case, may form his own view as to the guilt or innocence of the accused. Their attention is therefore mainly directed to the detection of signs upon the bodies of incriminated individuals.

This question of physical diagnosis leads them into a severe critique of Tardieu. Their polemic attacks each of the points which he attempted to establish. I must content myself by referring to the passage of their work which deals with the important topic.[16] Suffice it here to say that they reject all signs as worse than doubtful, except a certain deformation of one part of the body, which may possibly be taken as the proof of habitual prostitution, when it occurs in quite young persons. Of course they admit that wounds, violent abrasions of the skin, in certain places, and some syphilitic affections strongly favour the presumption of a criminal act. Finally, after insisting on the insecurity of Tardieu's alleged signs, and pointing out the responsibility assumed by physicians who base a judgment on them, the two Germans sum up their conclusions in the following words (p. 178): "It is extremely remarkable that while Tardieu mentions 206 cases, and communicates a select list of 19, which appear to him to exhibit these peculiar conformations of the organs, he can only produce one single instance where the formation seemed indubitable. Let anyone peruse his 19 cases, and he will be horrified at the unhesitating condemnations pronounced by Tardieu." The two notes of exclamation which close this sentence in the original are fully justified. It is indeed horrifying to think that a person, implicated in some foul accusation, may have his doom fixed by a doctrinaire like Tardieu. Antipathy and ignorance in judges and the public, combined with erroneous canons of evidence in the expert, cannot fail to lead in such cases to some serious miscarriage of justice.

Passing from the problem of diagnosis and the polemic against Tardieu, it must be remarked that Casper was the first writer of this class to lay down the distinction between inborn and acquired perversion of the sexual instinct. The law does not recognise this distinction. If a criminal act be proved, the psychological condition of the agent is legally indifferent--unless it can be shown that he was clearly mad and irresponsible, in which case he may be consigned to a lunatic asylum instead of a jail. But Casper and Liman, having studied the question of sexual maladies in general, and given due weight to the works of Ulrichs, call attention to the broad differences which exist between persons in whom abnormal appetites are innate and those in whom they are acquired. Their companion sketches of the two types deserve to be translated and presented in a somewhat condensed form.[17]

"In the majority of persons who are subject to this vice, it is congenital; or at any rate the sexual inclination can be followed back into the years of childhood, like a kind of physical hermaphroditism. Sexual contact with a woman inspires them with real disgust. Their imagination delights in handsome young men, and statues or pictures of the same. In the case of this numerous class of pæderasts there is therefore no depraved fancy at work, no demoralisation through satiety of natural sexual appetite,[18] Their congenital impulse explains the fact, moreover, that very many pæderasts are addicted to what may be termed a Platonic voluptuousness, and feel themselves drawn towards the objects of their desire with a warmth of passion more fervent than is common in the relations of the opposed sexes; that, in other cases again, they are satisfied with embracements, from which they derive a mutual pleasure. Westphal maintains that this anomalous direction of the sexual appetite is more often the symptom of a psychopathical, neuropathical condition than people commonly suppose."[19]

"In the case of another class of men, upon the contrary, the taste for this vice has been acquired in life, and is the result of over-satiety with natural pleasures. People of this stamp sometimes indulge their gross appetites alternately with either sex. I once observed a man, after contracting a venereal disease with women, adopt pæderasty out of fear of another infection; but he was, it must be admitted, a weak-minded individual. In all the great towns of Europe the vice goes creeping around, unobserved by the uninitiated. It appears that there is no inhabited spot of the globe where it may not be discovered. I said, unobserved by the uninitiated, advisedly. In antiquity the members of the sect had their own means of mutual recognition. And at the present time, these men know each other at first sight; moreover, they are found everywhere, in every station of society, without a single exception. 'We recognise each other at once,' says the writer of a report which I shall communicate below: 'A mere glance of the eye suffices; and I have never been deceived. On the Rigi, at Palermo, in the Louvre, in the Highlands of Scotland, in Petersburg, on disembarking at the port of Barcelona, I have found people, never seen by me before, and whom I discriminated in a second.' Several men of this sort whom I have known (continues Casper) are certainly accustomed to dress and adorn themselves in a rather feminine way. Nevertheless, there are indisputable pæderasts, who present an entirely different aspect, some of them elderly and negligent in their attire, and people of the lower classes, distinguished by absolutely nothing in their exterior from other persons of the same rank."

Medico-juristic science made a considerable step when Casper adopted this distinction of two types of sexual inversion. But, as is always the case in the analysis of hitherto neglected phenomena, his classification falls far short of the necessities of the problem. While treating of acquired sexual inversion, he only thinks of debauchees. He does not seem to have considered a deeper question--deeper in its bearing upon the way in which society will have to deal with the whole problem--the question of how far these instincts are capable of being communicated by contagion to persons in their fullest exercise of sexual vigour. Taste, fashion, preference, as factors in the dissemination of anomalous passions, he has left out of his account. It is also, but this is a minor matter, singular that he should have restricted his observations on the freemasonry among pæderasts to those in whom the instinct is acquired. That exists quite as much or even more among those in whom it is congenital.

The upshot of the whole matter, however, is that the best book on medical jurisprudence now extant repudiates the enormities of Tardieu's method, and lays it down for proved that "the majority of persons who are subject" to sexual inversion come into the world, or issue from the cradle, with their inclination clearly marked.

V.

LITERATURE--MEDICINE.

Medical writers upon this subject are comparatively numerous in French and German literature, and they have been multiplying rapidly of late years. The phenomenon of sexual inversion is usually regarded in these books from the point of view of psychopathic or neuropathic derangement, inherited from morbid ancestors, and developed in the patient by early habits of self-abuse.

What is the exact distinction between "psychopathic" and "neuropathic" I do not know. The former term seems intelligible in the theologian's mouth, the latter in a physician's. But I cannot understand both being used together to indicate different kinds of pathological diathesis. What is the soul, what are the nerves? We have probably to take the two terms as indicating two ways of considering the same phenomenon; the one subjective, the other objective; "psychopathic" pointing to the derangement as observed in the mind emotions of its subject; "neuropathic" to the derangement as observed in anomalies of the nervous system.

It would be impossible, in an essay of this kind, to review the whole mass of medical observation, inference and speculation which we have at our command. Nor is a layman, perhaps, well qualified for the task of criticism and comparison in a matter of delicacy where doctors differ as to details. I shall therefore content myself with giving an account of four of the most recent, most authoritative, and, as it seems to me, upon the whole most sensible studies. Moreau, Tarnowsky, Krafft-Ebing and Lombroso take very nearly similar views of the phenomenon; and between them they are gradually forming a theory which is likely to become widely accepted.

_Des Aberrations du Sens Génésique, par le Dr. Paul Moreau_, 4th edition, 1887.

Moreau starts with the proposition that there is a sixth sense, "le sens génital," which, like other senses, can be injured psychically and physically without the mental functions, whether affective or intellectual, suffering thereby. His book is therefore a treatise on the diseases of the sexual sense. These diseases are by no means of recent origin, he says. They have always and everywhere existed.

He begins with a historical survey, which, so far as antiquity is concerned, is very defective. Having quoted with approval the following passage about Greek society:--

"La sodomie se répand dans toute la Grèce; les écoles des philosophes deviennent des maisons de débauche, et les grands exemples d'amitié légués par le paganisme ne sont, pour la plupart, qu'une infâme turpitude voilée par une sainte apparence": having quoted these words of Dr. Descuret, Moreau leaves Greece alone, and goes on to Rome. The state of morals in Rome under the empire he describes as "une dépravation maladive, devenue par la force des choses héréditaire, endémique, épidémique." Then follows a short account of the emperors and their female relatives. "Cet éréthisme génésique qui, pendant près de deux siècles, régna a l'état épidémique dans Rome" he ascribes mainly to heredity. Of Julia, the daughter of Augustus, he says, "Peut-on lutter contre un état morbide héréditaire?" The union of unrestrained debauchery and ferocity with great mental gifts strikes him as a note of disease; and he winds up with this sentence: "Parmi les causes les plus fréquentes des aberrations du sens génital, l'hérédité tient la première place."

Then he passes to the middle ages, and dwells upon the popular belief in _incubi_ and _succubi_. It is curious to find him placing Leo X., François I., Henri IV., Louis XIV., among the neuropathics. When it comes to this, everybody with strong sexual instincts, and the opportunity of indulging them, is a nervous invalid. Modern times are illustrated by the debaucheries of the Regency, the reign of Louis XV., Russian ladies, the Marquis de Sade. The House of Orleans seems in truth to have been tainted with hereditary impudicity of a morbid kind. But if it was so at the end of the last century, it has since the Revolution remarkably recovered health--by what miracle?

Moreau now formulates the thesis he wishes to prove: "L'aberration pathologique des sentiments génésiques doit être assimilée complètement à une névrose, et, comme telle, son existence est compatible avec les plus hautes intelligences." He discovers hereditary taint universally present in these cases. "Hérédité directe, hérédité indirecte, hérédité transformée, se trouve chez les génésiaques."

Passing to etiology, he rests mainly upon an organism predisposed by ancestry, and placed in a milieu favourable to its morbid development. Provocative causes are not sufficient to awake the aberration in healthy organisms, but the least thing will set a predisposed organism on the track. This, I may observe, seems to preclude simple imitation, upon which Moreau afterwards lays considerable stress; for if none but the already tainted can be influenced by their milieu, none but the tainted will imitate.

What he calls "General Physical Causes" are (1) Extreme Poverty, (2) Age, (3) Constitution, (4) Temperament, (5) Seasons of the Year, (6) Climate, (7) Food.

Extreme poverty leads to indiscriminate vice, incest, sodomy, &c. That is true, and we know that our city poor and the peasants of some countries are habitually immoral. Yet Moreau proves too much here. For, according to his principles, hereditary neurosis ought by this time to have become chronic, epidemic, endemic, in all the city poor and in all the peasants of all countries; which is notably not the fact. Puberty and the approach of senility are pointed out as times when genesiac symptoms manifest themselves. His observations upon the other points are commonplace enough; and he repeats the current notion that inhabitants of hot climates are more lascivious than those of the North.

Among "Individual Physical Causes," Moreau treats of malformation of the sexual organs, diseases of those organs, injuries to the organism by wounds, blows, poisons, masturbation, excessive indulgence in venery, and exaggerated continence.

When we come to "General Moral Causes," heredity plays the first part. This may be direct, i.e., the son of a genesiac will have the same tastes as his father, or transformed; what is phthisis in one generation assuming the form of sexual aberration in another. Bad education and exposure to bad examples, together with imitation, are insisted on more vaguely.

The "Individual Moral Causes" include impressions received in early youth, on which I think perhaps Moreau does not lay sufficient stress, and certain tendencies to subjective preoccupations with ideal ideas, certain abnormal physical conditions which disturb the whole moral sensibility.

Passing to Pathological Anatomy, Moreau declares that it is as yet impossible to localise the sexual sense. The brain, the cerebellum, the spinal marrow? We do not know. He seems to incline toward the cerebellum.