Part 3

It is not necessary to follow Moreau in his otherwise interesting account of the various manifestations of sexual disease. The greater part of these have no relation to the subject of my work. But what he says in passing about "pæderasts, sodomites, saphists," has to be resumed. He reckons them among "A class of individuals who cannot and ought not to be confounded either with men enjoying the fulness of their intellectual faculties, or yet with madmen properly so called. They form an intermediate class, a mixed class, constituting a real link of union between reason and madness, the nature and existence of which can most frequently be explained only by one word: Heredity" (p. 159). It is surprising, after this announcement, to discover that what he has to say about sexual inversion is limited to Europe and its moral system, "having nothing to do with the morals of other countries where pæderasty is accepted and admitted" (p. 172, note). Literally, then, he regards sexual inversion in modern Christian Europe as a form of hereditary neuropathy, a link between reason and madness; but in ancient Greece, in modern Persia and Turkey, he regards the same psychological anomaly from the point of view, not of disease, but of custom. In other words, an Englishman or a Frenchman who loves the male sex must be diagnosed as tainted with disease; while Sophocles, Pindar, Pheidias, Epaminondas, Plato, are credited with yielding to an instinct which was healthy in their times because society accepted it. The inefficiency of this distinction in a treatise of analytical science ought to be indicated. The bare fact that ancient Greece tolerated, and that modern Europe refuses to tolerate sexual inversion, can have nothing to do with the etiology, the pathology, the psychological definition of the phenomenon in its essence. What has to be faced is that a certain type of passion flourished under the light of day and bore good fruits for society in Hellas; that the same type of passion flourishes in the shade and is the source of misery and shame in Europe. The passion has not altered; but the way of regarding it morally and legally is changed. A scientific investigator ought not to take changes of public opinion into account when he is analysing a psychological peculiarity.

This point on which I am insisting--namely, that it is illogical to treat sexual inversion among the modern European races as a malady, when you refer its prevalence among Oriental peoples and the ancient Hellenes to custom--is so important that I shall illustrate it by a passage from one of Dr. W. R. Huggard's Essays.[20] "It may be said that the difference between the delusion of the overpowering impulse in the Fijian and in the insane Englishman is that, in the savage, the mental characters are due to education and surroundings; while, in the lunatic they are due to disease. In a twofold manner, however, would this explanation fail. On the one hand, even if in the Fijian there were disease, the question of insanity could not arise in regard to a matter considered by his society to be one of indifference. It would be absurd to talk of homicidal mania, of nymphomania, and of kleptomania, as forms of insanity, where murder, promiscuous intercourse, and stealing are not condemned. On the other hand, the assumption that insanity is always due to disease is not merely an unproved, but an improbable supposition. There must, of course, be some defect of organism; but there is every reason to think that, in many cases, the defect is of the nature of a congenital lack of balance between structures themselves healthy; and that many cases of insanity might properly be regarded as a kind of 'throwback' to a type of organisation now common among the lower races of mankind." Substitute any term to indicate sexual inversion for "nymphomania" in this paragraph, and the reasoning precisely suits my argument. It is interesting, by the way, to find this writer agreeing with Ulrichs in his suggestion of a "congenital lack of balance between structures themselves healthy," and with Lombroso in his supposition of atavistic reversion to savagery. Lombroso, we shall see, ultimately identifies congenital criminality (one form of which is sexual aberration in this theory) with moral insanity; and here Dr. Huggard is, unconsciously perhaps, in agreement with him; for he defines insanity to be "any mental defect that renders a person unable (and not capable of being made able by punishment) to conform to the requirements of society"--a definition which is no less applicable to the born criminal than to the madman.

How little Dr. Moreau has weighed the importance of ancient Greece in his discussion of this topic, appears from the omission of all facts supplied by Greek literature and history in the introduction to his Essay. He dilates upon the legends recorded by the Roman Emperors, because these seem to support his theory of hereditary malady. He uses Juvenal, Tacitus, Suetonius, and the Augustan Histories to support his position, although they form part of the annals of a people among whom "pæderasty was accepted and admitted." He ignores the biographies of the Spartan kings, the institutions of Crete, the Theban Sacred Band, the dialogues of Plato, the anecdotes related about Pheidias, Sophocles, Pindar, Demosthenes, Alcibiades, and so forth. Does he perhaps do so because they cannot in any way be made to square with his theory of morbidity? The truth is that ancient Greece offers insuperable difficulties to theorists who treat sexual inversion exclusively from the points of view of neuropathy, tainted heredity, and masturbation. And how incompetent Dr. Moreau is to deal with Greek matters may be seen in the grotesque synonym he has invented for pæderasty-_philopodie_ (p. 173). Properly the word is compounded of [Greek: philein] and [Greek: pous]; but I suppose it is meant to suggest [Greek: philein] and _podex_.

In a chapter on Legal Medicine, Moreau starts by observing that "The facts are so monstrous, so tainted with aberration, and yet their agents offer so strong an appearance of sound reason, occupy such respectable positions in the world, are reputed to enjoy such probity, such honourable sentiments, &c., that one hesitates to utter an opinion." Proceeding further, he considers it sufficiently established that: "Not unfrequently, under the influence of some vice of organism, generally of heredity, the moral faculties may undergo alterations, which, if they do not actually destroy the social relations of the individual, as happens in cases of declared insanity, yet modify them to a remarkable degree, and certainly demand to be taken into account, when we have to estimate the morality of these acts" (p. 301). His conclusion, therefore, is that the aberrations of the sexual sense, including its inversion, are matters for the physician rather than the judge, for therapeutics rather than punishment, and that representatives of the medical faculty ought to sit upon the bench as advisers or assessors when persons accused of outrages against decency come to trial. "While we blame and stigmatise these crimes with reason, the horrified intellect seeks an explanation and a moral excuse (nothing more) for such odious acts. It insists on asking what can have brought a man honourably known in society, enjoying (apparently at least) the fulness of his mental faculties, to these base and shameful self-indulgences. We answer: Such men for the most part are abnormal intelligences, veritable candidates for lunacy, and, what is more, they are the subjects of hereditary maladies. But let us cast a veil over a subject so humiliating to the honour of humanity!" (p. 177).

As the final result of this analysis, Moreau classifies sexual inversion with erotomania, nymphomania, satyriasis, bestiality, rape, profanation of corpses, &c., as the symptom of a grave lesion of the procreative sense. He seeks to save its victims from the prison by delivering them over to the asylum. His moral sentiments are so revolted that he does not even entertain the question whether their instincts are natural and healthy though abnormal. Lastly, he refuses to face the aspects of this psychological anomaly which are forced upon the student of ancient Hellas. He does not even take into account the fact, patent to experienced observers, that simple folk not unfrequently display no greater disgust for the abnormalities of sexual appetite than they do for its normal manifestations.[21]

_Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtssinnes. B. Tarnowsky. Berlin, Hirschwald_, 1886.

This is avowedly an attempt to distinguish the morbid kinds of sexual perversion from the merely vicious, and to enforce the necessity of treating the former not as criminal but as pathological. "The forensic physician discerns corruption, oversatiated sensuality, deep-rooted vice, perverse will, &c., where the clinical observer recognises with certainty a morbid condition of the patient marked by typical steps of development and termination. Where the one wishes to punish immorality, the other pleads for the necessity of methodical therapeutic treatment."

The author is a Russian, whose practice in St. Petersburg has brought him into close professional relations with the male prostitutes and habitual pæderasts of that capital.

He is able therefore to speak with authority, on the ground of a quite exceptional knowledge of the moral and physical disturbances connected with sodomy. I cannot but think that the very peculiarities of his experience have led him to form incomplete theories. He is too familiar with venal pathics, pædicators, and effeminates who prostitute their bodies in the grossest way, to be able to appreciate the subtler bearings of the problem.

Tarnowsky makes two broad divisions of sexual inversion. The first kind is inborn, dependent upon hereditary taint and neuropathic diathesis. He distinguishes three sorts of inborn perversity. In the most marked of its forms it is chronic and persistent, appearing with the earliest dawn of puberty, unmodified by education, attaining to its maximum of intensity in manhood, manifesting, in fact, all the signs of ordinary sexual inclination. In a second form it is not chronic and persistent, but periodical. The patient is subject to occasional disturbances of the nervous centres, which express themselves in violent and irresistible attacks of the perverted instinct. The third form is epileptical.

With regard to acquired sexual inversion, he dwells upon the influence of bad example, the power of imitation, fashion, corrupt literature, curiosity in persons jaded with normal excesses. Extraordinary details are given concerning the state of schools in Russia (pp. 63-65); and a particular case is mentioned, in which Tarnowsky himself identified twenty-nine passive pæderasts, between the ages of nine and fifteen, in a single school. He had been called in to pronounce upon the causes of an outbreak of syphilis among the pupils. Interesting information is also communicated regarding the prevalence of abnormal vice in St. Petersburg, where it appears that bath-men, cab-drivers, care-takers of houses, and artisans are particularly in request (pp. 98-101). The Russian people show no repugnance for what they call "gentlemen's tricks." Tarnowsky calls attention to ships, garrisons, prisons, as milieux well calculated for the development of this vice, when it had once been introduced by some one tainted with it. His view about nations like the Greeks, the Persians, and the Afghans is that, through imitation, fashion, and social toleration, it has become endemic. But all the sorts of abnormality included under the title of acquired Tarnowsky regards as criminal. The individual ought, he thinks, to be punished by the law. He naturally includes under this category of acquired perversion the vices of old debauchees. At this point, however, his classification becomes confused; for he shows how senile tendencies to sodomitic passion are frequently the symptom of approaching brain disease, to which the reason and the constitution of the patient will succumb. French physicians call this "la pédérastie des ramollis."

Returning to what Tarnowsky says about the inborn species of sexual inversion, I may call attention to an admirable description of the type in general (pp. 11-15) I think, however, that he lays too great stress upon the passivity of the emotions in these persons, their effeminacy of press, habits, inclinations. He is clearly speaking from large experience. So it must be supposed that he has not come across frequent instances of men who feel, look, and act like men, the only difference between them and normal males being that they love their own sex. In describing a second degree of the aberration (pp. 16, 17), he still accentuates effeminacy in dress and habits beyond the point which general observation would justify. Careful study of the cases adduced in Krafft-Ebing's "Psychopathia" supplies a just measure for the criticism of Tarnowsky upon this head. From them we learn that effeminacy of physique and habit is by no means a distinctive mark of the born pæderast. Next it may be noticed that Tarnowsky believes even innate and hereditary tendencies can be modified and overcome by proper moral, and physique discipline in youth, and that the subjects of them will even be brought to marry in some cases (pp. 17, 18).

It would not serve any purpose of utility here to follow Tarnowsky into further details regarding the particular forms assumed by perverted appetite. But attention must be directed to his definition of hereditary predisposition (pp. 33-35). This is extraordinarily wide. He regards every disturbance of the nervous system in an ancestor as sufficient; epilepsy, brain disease, hysteria, insanity. He includes alcoholism, syphilitic affections, pneumonia, typhus, physical exhaustion, excessive anæmia, debauchery, "anything in short which is sufficient to enfeeble the nervous system and the sexual potency of the parent." At this point he remarks that long residence at high altitudes tends to weaken the sexual activity and to develop perversity, adducing an old belief of the Persians that pæderastia originated in the high plateau of Armenia (p. 35). It need hardly, I think, be said that these theories are contradicted to the fullest extent by the experience of those who have lived with the mountaineers of Central Europe. They are indeed capable of continence to a remarkable degree, but they are also vigorously procreative and remarkably free from sexual inversion.

Finally, it must be observed that Tarnowsky discusses the physical signs of active and passive sodomy at some length (108-135). His opportunities of physical observation in medical practice as the trusted physician of the St. Petersburg pæderasts gives him the right to speak with authority. The most decisive thing he says is that Casper, through want of familiarity with the phenomena, is too contemptuous toward one point in Tardieu's theory. In short, Tarnowsky feels sure that a habitual passive pæderast will show something like the sign in question, if examined by an expert in the proper position. But that is the only deformation of the body on which he relies.

_Psychopathia Sexualis, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Conträren Sexualempfindung. Von Dr. R. v. Krafft-Ebing. Stuttgart, Enke, 1889._

Krafft-Ebing took the problem of sexual inversion up when it had been already investigated by a number of pioneers and predecessors. They mapped the ground out, and established a kind of psychical chart. We have seen the medical system growing in the works of Moreau and Tarnowsky. If anything, Krafft-Ebing's treatment suffers from too much subdivision and parade of classification. It is only, however, by following the author in his differentiation of the several species that we can form a conception of his general theory, and of the extent of the observations upon which this is based. He starts with (A) Sexual Inversion as an acquired morbid phenomenon. Then he reviews (B) Sexual Inversion as an inborn morbid phenomenon.

(A) "Sexual feeling and sexual instinct," he begins, "remain latent, except in obscure foreshadowings and impulses, until the time when the organs of procreation come to be developed. During the period of latency, when sex has not arrived at consciousness, is only potentially existent, and has no powerful organic bias, influences may operate, injurious to its normal and natural evolution. In that case the germinating sexual sensibility runs a risk of being both qualitatively and quantitatively impaired, and under certain circumstances may even be perverted into a false channel. Tarnowsky has already published this experience. I can thoroughly confirm it, and am prepared to define the conditions of this acquired, or, in other words, this cultivated perversion of the sexual instinct in the following terms. The fundamental or ground predisposition is a neuropathic hereditary bias. The exciting or efficient cause is sexual abuse, and more particularly onanism. The etiological centre of gravity has to be sought in hereditary disease; _and I think it is questionable whether an untainted individual is capable of homosexual feelings at all_."[22]

Krafft-Ebing's theory seems then to be that all cases of acquired sexual inversion may be ascribed in the first place to morbid predispositions inherited by the patient (_Belastung_), and in the second place to onanism as the exciting cause of the latent neuropathic ailment.

He excludes the hypothesis of a physiological and healthy deflection from the normal rule of sex. "I think it questionable," he says, "whether the untainted individual (_das unbelastete Individuum_) is capable of homosexual feelings at all." The importance of this sentence will be apparent when we come to deal with Krafft-Ebing's account of congenital sexual inversion, which he establishes upon a large induction of cases observed in his own practice.

For the present we have the right to assume that Krafft-Ebing regards sexual inversion, whether "acquired" or "congenital," as a form of inherited neuropathy (_Belastung_). In cases where it seems to be "acquired," he lays stress upon the habit of self-pollution.

This is how he states his theory of onanism as an exciting cause of inherited neuropathy, resulting in sexual inversion. The habit of self-abuse prepares the patient for abnormal appetites by weakening his nervous force, degrading his sexual imagination, and inducing hyper-sensibility in his sexual apparatus. Partial impotence is not unfrequently exhibited. In consequence of this sophistication of his nature, the victim of inherited neuropathy and onanism feels shy with women, and finds it convenient to frequent persons of his own sex. In other words, it is supposed to be easier for an individual thus broken down at the centres of his life to defy the law and to demand sexual gratification from men than to consort with venal women in a brothel.

Krafft-Ebing assumes that males who have been born with neuropathic ailments of an indefinite kind will masturbate, destroy their virility, and then embark upon a course of vice which offers incalculable dangers, inconceivable difficulties, and inexpressible repugnances. That is the theory. But whence, if not from some overwhelming appetite, do the demoralised victims of self-abuse derive courage for facing the obstacles which a career of sexual inversion carries with it in our civilisation? One would have thought that such people, if they could not approach a prostitute in a brothel, would have been unable to solicit a healthy man upon the streets. The theory seems to be constructed in order to elude the fact that the persons designated are driven by a natural impulse into paths far more beset with difficulties than those of normal libertines.

Krafft-Ebing gives the details of five cases of "acquired" sexual inversion. Three of these were the children of afflicted parents. One had no morbid strain in his ancestry, except pulmonary consumption. The fifth sprang from a strong father and a healthy mother. Masturbation entered into the history of all.

It must be observed, in criticising Krafft-Ebing's theory, that it is so constructed as to render controversy almost impossible. If we point out that a large percentage of males who practise onanism in their adolescence do not acquire sexual inversion, he will answer that these were not tainted with hereditary disease. The autobiographies of onanists and passionate woman-lovers (J. J. Rousseau, for example, who evinced a perfect horror of homosexual indulgence, and J. J. Bouchard, whose disgusting excentricities were directed toward females even in the period of his total impotence) will be dismissed with the remark that the ancestors of these writers must have shown a clean record.

It is difficult to square Krafft-Ebing's theory with the phenomena presented by schools, both public and private, in all parts of Europe. In these institutions not only is masturbation practised to a formidable extent, but it is also everywhere connected with some form of sexual inversion, either passionately Platonic or grossly sensual. Nevertheless, we know that few of the boys addicted to these practices remain abnormal after they have begun to frequent women. The same may be said about convict establishments, military prisons, and the like.[23] With such a body of facts staring us in the face, it cannot be contended that "only tainted individuals are capable of homosexual feelings." Where females are absent or forbidden, males turn for sexual gratification to males. And in certain conditions of society sexual inversion may become permanently established, recognised, all but universal. It would be absurd to maintain that all the boy-lovers of ancient Greece owed their instincts to hereditary neuropathy complicated with onanism.

The invocation of heredity in problems of this kind is always hazardous. We only throw the difficulty of explanation further back. At what point of the world's history was the morbid taste acquired? If none but tainted individuals are capable of homosexual feelings, how did these feelings first come into existence? On the supposition that neuropathy forms a necessary condition of abnormal instinct, is it generic neuropathy or a specific type of that disorder? If generic, can valid reasons be adduced for regarding nervous malady in any of its aspects (hysteria is the mother, insanity is the father) as the cause of so peculiarly differentiated an affection of the sexual appetite? If specific, that is, if the ancestors of the patient must have been afflicted with sexual inversion, in what way did they acquire it, supposing all untainted individuals to be incapable of the feeling?

At this moment of history there is probably no individual in Europe who has not inherited some portion of a neuropathic stain. If that be granted, everybody is liable to sexual inversion, and the principle of heredity becomes purely theoretical.

That sexual inversion may be and actually is transmitted, like any other quality, appears to be proved by the history of well-known families both in England and in Germany. That it is not unfrequently exhibited by persons who have a bad ancestral record, may be taken for demonstrated. In certain cases we are justified, then, in regarding it as the sign or concomitant of nervous maladies. But the evidence of ancient Greece or Rome, of what Burton calls the "sotadic races" at the present time, of European schools and prisons, ought to make us hesitate before we commit ourselves to Krafft-Ebing's theory that hereditary affliction is a necessary predisposing cause.[24]