man than for the young woman, as he is more easily able to satisfy his desires. We must thus undoubtedly expect most evil consequences from the instruction of the boys; and yet we cannot deny the possible advantages. Their hygienic consciousness may be enriched and their moral consciousness tainted by the same hour of well-meant instruction. With the girls an energetic no is the only sane answer; with the boys the social reformer may well hesitate between the no and the yes. The balance between fear and hope may be very even there. Yet, however depressing such a decision may be, the psychologist must acknowledge that even here the loss by frank discussion is greater than the gain.
A serious warning lies in the well-known fact that of all professional students, the young medical men have the worst reputation for their reckless indulgence in an erotic life. They know most, and it is psychologically not surprising that just on that account they are most reckless. The instinctive fear of the half knower has left them; they live in an illusory safety, the danger has become familiar to them, and they deceive themselves with the idea that the particular case is harmless. If the steps to be taken were to be worked out at the writing desk in cool mood and sober deliberation, the knowledge would at least often be a certain help, but when the passionate desire has taken hold of the mind and the organic tension of the irritated body works on the mind, there is no longer a fair fight with those sober reasons. The action of the glands controls the psychophysical reactions, so that the ideas which would lead to opposite response are inhibited. Alcohol and the imitative mood of social gayety may help to dull those hygienic fears, but on the whole the mere sexual longing is sufficient to break down the reminiscence of medical warning. The situation for the boy is then ultimately this: A full knowledge of the chances of disease will start in hours of sexual coolness on the one side a certain resolution to abstain from sexual intercourse, and on the other side a certain intention to use protective means for the prevention of venereal diseases. As soon as the sexual desire awakes, the decision of the first kind will become the less effective, and will be the more easily overrun the more firmly the idea is fixed that such preventive means are at his disposal. At the same time the discussion of all these sexual matters, even with their gruesome background, will force on the mind a stronger engagement with sexual thought than had ever before occurred, and this will find its discharge in an increased sexual tension. On the other hand, this new knowledge of means of safety will greatly increase the playing with danger. Of course it may be said that the education ought not to refer only to sexual hygiene, but that it ought to be a moral education. That, however, is an entirely different story. We shall speak about it; we shall put our faith in it, but at present we are talking of that specific sexual education which is the fad of the day.
V
Sexual education, to be sure, does not necessarily mean education of young people only. The adults who know, the married men and women of the community, may not know enough to protect their sons and daughters. And the need for their full information may stretch far beyond their personal family interests. They are to form the public opinion which must stand behind every real reform, their consciences must be stirred, the hidden misery must be brought before them. Thus they need sexual education as much as the youngsters, only they need it in a form which appeals to them and makes them willing to listen; and our reformers have at last discovered the form. The public must be taught from the stage of the theatre. The magazine with its short stories on sex incidents, the newspaper with its sensational court reports, may help to carry the gruesome information to the masses, but the deepest impression will always be made when actual human beings are shown on the stage in their appealing distress, as living accusations against the rotten foundations of society. The stage is overcrowded with sexual drama and the social community inundated with discussions about it.
It is not easy to find the right attitude toward this red-light literature. Many different interests are concerned, and it is often extremely difficult to disentangle them. Three such interests stand out very clearly: the true æsthetic one, the purely commercial one, and the sociological one. It would be wonderful if the æsthetic culture of our community had reached a development at which the æsthetic attitude toward a play would be absolutely controlling. If we could trust this æsthetic instinct, no other question would be admissible but the one whether the play is a good work of art or not. The social inquiry whether the human fates which the poet shows us suggests legislative reforms or hygienic improvements would be entirely inhibited in the truly artistic consciousness. It would make no difference to the spectator whether the action played in Chicago or Petersburg, whether it dealt with men and women of to-day or of two thousand years ago. The human element would absorb our interest, and as far as the joys and the miseries of sexual life entered into the drama, they would be accepted as a social background, just as the landscape is the natural background. A community which is æsthetically mature enough to appreciate Ibsen does not leave “The Ghosts” with eugenic reform ideas. The inherited paralysis on a luetic basis is accepted there as a tragic element of human fate. On the height of true art the question of decency or indecency has disappeared, too. The nude marble statue is an inspiration, and not a possible stimulus to frivolous sensuality, if the mind is æsthetically cultivated. The nakedness of erotic passion in the drama of high æsthetic intent before a truly educated audience has not the slightest similarity to the half-draped chorus of sensual operetta before a gallery which wants to be tickled. But who would claim that the dramatic literature of the sexual problems with which the last seasons have filled the theatres from the orchestra to the second balcony has that sublime æsthetic intent, or that it was brought to a public which even posed in an æsthetic attitude! As far as any high aim was involved, it was the antiæsthetic moral value. The plays presented themselves as appeals to the social conscience, and yet this idealistic interpretation would falsify the true motives on both sides. The crowd went because it found the satisfaction of sexual curiosity and erotic tension through the unveiled discussion of social perversities. And the managers produced the plays because the lurid subjects with their appeal to the low instincts, and therefore with their sure commercial success, could here escape the condemnation of police and decent public as they were covered by the pretence of social reform. How far the writers of the play of prostitution prostituted art in order to share the commercial profits in this wave of sexual reform may better remain undiscussed.
What do these plays really teach us? I think I have seen almost all of them, and the composite picture in my mind is one of an absurdly distorted, exaggerated, and misleading view of actual social surroundings, suggesting wrong problems, wrong complaints, and wrong remedies. When I studied the reports of the vice commissions of the large American and European cities, the combined image in my consciousness was surely a stirring and alarming one, but it had no similarity with the character of those melodramatic vagaries. Even the best and most famous of these fabrications throw wrong sidelights on the social problems, and by a false emphasis inhibit the feeling for the proportions of life. If in “The Fight” the father, a senator, visits a disorderly house, unlocks the room in which the freshest fruit is promised him, and finds there his young daughter who has just been abducted by force, the facts themselves are just as absurd as the following scenes, in which this father shows that the little episode did not make the slightest impression on him. He coolly continues to fight against those politicians who want to remove such places from the town. In “Bought and Paid For” marriage itself is presented as white slavery. The woman has to tolerate the caresses of her husband, even when he has drunk more champagne than is wise for him. The play makes us believe that she must suffer his love because she was poor before she married and he has paid her with a life of luxury. Where are we to end if such logic in questions of sexual intercourse is to benumb common sense? England brought us “The Blindness of Virtue,” the story of a boy and a girl whom we are to believe to be constantly in grave danger because they are ignorant, while in reality nothing happens, and everything suggests that the moral danger for this particular girl would have been much greater if she had known how to enjoy love without consequences.
The most sensational specimen of the group was “The Lure.” It would be absurd to face this production from any æsthetic point of view. It would be unthinkable that a work of such crudeness could satisfy a metropolitan public, even if some of the most marked faults of construction were acknowledged as the results of the forceful expurgation
