dear reader, that up to the time I met Emmy Tenders, I was green as grass. It had never occurred to me to seek for any connection between the wondrously blissful emotions of intimacy that continually occupied me - and certain physical sensations which only alarmed me because I thought them unhealthy. And yet I consider this very connection well-nigh the most mysterious and interesting of all the enigmas of life. And perhaps, as I, you too have always felt when reading the writings of the great and distinguished lovers among mankind, a certain want of exactness, which led me to exclaim: "But how did you deal with that question?"
My father fared in this matter like the man who dropped his glasses in a dark room and when, after much hesitation and deliberation he very carefully set down his foot, stepped precisely on the glass. He had tried to bring me up with such extraordinary care and wisdom, and now failed for that very reason. He encouraged my boyish scorn of girls and courting and did not oppose my partiality for boy friendships. The terrible risk I thereby ran of warping my sound and natural instinct and thus making myself unhappy for life, he did not seem to see, and when the time came to enlighten me in this regard he neglected to do so. My very sensitive prudishness concerning everything pertaining to my body he, rightly and to my gratitude, respected as long as possible.
But when it became clear to him that I was seized with a glowing passion for Emmy Tenders - and he must indeed have been very deaf and blind not to notice my very apparent confusion and perplexity, my air of abstraction, my brightening at everything that suggested her, my pallor, my nocturnal wanderings abroad and my agonies of weeping in bed - he considered the time for my final enlightenment come.
Between two sensitive, proud and refined natures like my father and myself, this was a most painful and most difficult task. But he performed it with his customary undaunted determination. I have never spent a more uncomfortable hour in my life. My father had brought books and prints for better demonstration; he dared not look at me and mumbled a good deal under his breath in a hollow voice. Beads of perspiration stood on his brow.
When he had left the room, nervous and embarrassed as a child who has done wrong, my first thought was: a revolver. I was crushed and wanted to end my life. But the secret, - the secret itself bound me to life. The strange, attractive, mysterious, repulsive secret fascinated me too much to leave it.
Insensible with pain and humiliation, I went to my room. And there, before I could help it, the name "Emmy" rose to my lips. I shivered, crying out the name once more, now like a despairing shriek of distress. Then I fell down upon my bed and wept as though I would weep out my very heart.
IV
The type of men which my father called philistines has this common characteristic, that for all wonders and mysteries they forthwith find a convenient explanation. Does the truth not fit it exactly? Then they do as did the Kaffir, who receiving as a present a much too narrow pair of shoes, solved the difficulty by undauntedly chopping off his toes and then, greatly delighted, went out walking in the precious gift.
This time it was my father himself who pretended to see nothing strange or mysterious in my deeply agitated state of mind. The substance of the matter he had now explained to me scientifically, biologically, physiologically and anatomically; to this nothing need be added nor did it leave anything unexplained.
My disgust, my profound horror and dejection at this simple increase of knowledge which, as every new acquisition of knowledge, should have delighted and edified me - Yes! for that there was no room in his explanation, as little as for his own embarrassment while imparting it. And therefore, without any sentimentality, these toes must be lopped off so that the boot would fit.
Reader, do not imagine that I demand of you deep regard and veneration for the great foolish boy who lay helplessly weeping because of that strange difference between men and flowers that with the former carries so much discord into their most important vital function.
I myself now softly laugh at my self of fifty years ago, not scornfully, but with gentle irony - sympathetically. I pat the boy on the shoulder and admonish him kindly: "Quiet, laddie, be not so dismayed. We are a strange mingling of ape and angel. But try, as quickly as possible, to reconcile yourself to this, then everything becomes quite bearable. Do you think this same thing would have caused like consternation to Emmy Tenders, if the knowledge but came to her in the right way, that is to say the way of reverent love, and deep devotion? She is indeed wiser. And had you learned it as a poet and lover and not as a philistine then you too would not have found it so appalling."
But all this, dear reader, does not alter the mysterious and distressing truth, and one cannot make disharmony bearable by denying it. So much is certain that my father's assertion, declaring my horror wholly unreasonable, affected me like an attempt at lopping off my toes to make the boot fit. I resisted passionately, maintaining an inexorable separation between my noble and lofty sentiments for Emmy and the low and vile things my father had disclosed to me, and thus wandered hastily and eagerly on the dangerous path whose course branches out but once - one road leading to fanaticism and the other to dissolute cynicism.
This was my father's work. But I have never reproached him for it with feelings of bitter resentment. Why not? Can we pronounce sentence, reader, in a suit whereof the most important facts still lie in impenetrable darkness?
From my unimpassioned tribunal here in the dreamy and forgotten little town, I hold acquittal for all who have strayed and gone to ruin in Cupid's flowery and thorny labyrinth. For assuredly it is not of human designing.
That there is guilt I cannot deny. Every ill has a father and a mother, and for once and all, we are accustomed to calling these parents sin and guilt. But I follow the genealogical tree of these strange and tender woes beyond Adam and Eve or the Pithecantropus Erectus, even should I then have to launch my accusations at Powers which from generation to generation have imprinted in us the belief in their inviolability.
And now observe what makes the matter still more strange and illogical. I am not only of a very amorous but also of a very sensual nature. Together with my strong susceptibility to the joys of soul communion there went the mighty overpowering impulse of propagation. Before the contact of these two currents had been brought about in such a painful manner the low, dark, physical instinct had filled me with a continual though not very distressing restlessness and with doubt concerning my health. The splendid equilibrium of my other functions, that has maintained itself to this day, always outweighed this doubt.
But when the secret was half explained it became all the more absorbing and enticing and so occupied my thoughts that, even now an old man, I wonder again and again that a human brain can ponder over such comparatively simple facts ad infinitum, without having them lose their interest, and without really arriving at any conclusion.
Physicians would speak of pathological conditions and of libido sexualis. But I would point out to you, dear reader, that though there may be very good and noble men among physicians, every physician of our day without exception, in so much as he would be called a physician, is at the same time also a philistine. With their explanations and their fine words for things that are beyond their comprehension because their science is still unpoetical and unphilosophical, they do not serve us in the least.
And how could one of these present-day sages reasonably explain to me that in a noble and lofty human type such as I, certainly not without some right, dared call myself, the very strong working of an impulse common to all animals was coupled with an exaggerated sensitiveness for its ignoble character? Were this impulse good and beautiful and in no part ignoble, whence then my aversion? - were it really low and unworthy, whence its presence, so impertinent and
