While Shakespeare thus narrowly escapes inclusion in the list of distinguished inverts, there is much better ground for the inclusion of his great contemporary, Francis Bacon. Aubrey in his laboriously compiled Short Lives, in which he shows a friendly and admiring attitude toward Bacon, definitely states that he was a pederast. Aubrey was only a careful gleaner of frequently authentic gossip, but a similar statement is made by Sir Simonds D'Ewes in his Autobiography. D'Ewes, whose family belonged to the same part of Suffolk as Bacon's sprang from, was not friendly to Bacon, but that fact will not suffice to account for his statement. He was an upright and honorable man of scholarly habits, and, moreover, a trained lawyer, who had many opportunities of obtaining first-hand information, for he had lived in the Chancery office from childhood. He is very precise as to Bacon's homosexual practices with his own servants, both before and after his fall, and even gives the name of a "very effeminate-faced youth" who was his "catamite and bedfellow"; he states, further, that there had been some question of bringing Bacon to trial for sodomy. These allegations may be supported by a letter of Bacon's own mother (printed in Spedding's Life of Bacon), reproving him on account of what she had heard concerning his behavior with the young Welshmen in his service whom he made his bedfellows. It is notable that Bacon seems to have been specially attracted to Welshmen (one might even find evidence of this in the life of the Welshman, Henry VII), a people of vivacious temperament unlike his own; this is illustrated by his long and intimate friendship with the mercurial Sir Toby Mathew, his "alter ego," a man of dissipated habits in early life, though we are not told that he was homosexual. Bacon had many friendships with men, but there is no evidence that he was ever in love or cherished any affectionate intimacy with a woman. Women play no part at all in his life. His marriage, which was childless, took place at the mature age of 46; it was effected in a business-like manner, and though he always treated his wife with formal consideration it is probable that he neglected her, and certain that he failed to secure her devotion; it is clear that toward the end of Bacon's life she formed a relationship with her gentleman usher, whom subsequently she married. Bacon's writings, it may be added, equally with his letters, show no evidence of love or attraction to women; in his Essays he is brief and judicial on the subject of Marriage, copious and eloquent on the subject of Friendship, while the essay on Beauty deals exclusively with masculine beauty.

During the first half of the eighteenth century we have clear evidence that homosexuality flourished in London with the features which it presents today in all large cities everywhere. There was a generally known name, "Mollies," applied to homosexual persons, evidently having reference to their frequently feminine characteristics; there were houses of private resort for them ("Molly houses"), there were special public places of rendezvous whither they went in search of adventure, exactly as there are today. A walk in Upper Moorfields was especially frequented by the homosexual about 1725. A detective employed by the police about that date gave evidence as follows at the Old Bailey; "I takes a turn that way and leans over the wall. In a little time the prisoner passes by, and looks hard at me, and at a small distance from me stands up against the wall as if he was going to make water. Then by degrees he siddles nearer and nearer to where I stood, till at last he was close to me. 'Tis a very fine night,' says he. 'Aye,' say I, 'and so it is.' Then he takes me by the hand, and after squeezing and playing with it a little, he conveys it to his breeches," whereupon the detective seizes the man by his sexual organs and holds him until the constable comes up and effects an arrest.

At the same period Margaret Clap, commonly called Mother Clap, kept a house in Field Lane, Holborn, which was a noted resort of the homosexual. To Mother Clap's Molly-house 30 or 40 clients would resort every night; on Sunday there might be as many as 50, for, as in Berlin and other cities today, that was the great homosexual gala night; there were beds in every room in this house. We are told that the "men would sit in one another's laps, kissing in a lewd manner and using their hands indecently. Then they would get up, dance and make curtsies, and mimic the voices of women, 'Oh, fie, sir,'—'Pray, sir,'—'Dear sir,'—'Lord, how can you serve me so?'—'I swear I'll cry out,'—'You're a wicked devil,'—'And you're a bold face,'—'Eh, ye dear little toad,'—'Come, bus.' They'd hug and play and toy and go out by couples into another room, on the same floor, to be 'married,' as they called it."

On the whole one gains the impression that homosexual practices were more prevalent in London in the eighteenth century, bearing in mind its population at that time, than they are today.[88] It must not, however, be supposed that the law was indulgent and its administration lax. The very reverse was the case. The punishment for sodomy, when completely effected, was death, and it was frequently inflicted. Homosexual intercourse, without evidence of penetration, was regarded as "attempt" and was usually punished by the pillory and a heavy fine, followed by two years' imprisonment. Moreover, it would appear that more activity was shown by the police in prosecution than is nowadays the case; this is, for instance, suggested by the evidence of the detective already quoted.

To keep a homosexual resort was also a severely punishable offense. Mother Clap was charged at the Old Bailey in 1726 with "keeping a sodomitical house"; she protested that she could not herself have taken part in these practices, but that availed her nothing; she could bring forward no witnesses on her behalf and was condemned to pay a fine, to stand in the pillory, and to undergo imprisonment for two years. The cases were dealt with in a matter-of-fact way which seems to bear further witness to the frequency of the offense, and with no effort to expend any specially vindictive harshness on this class of offenders. If there was the slightest doubt as to the facts, even though the balance of evidence was against the accused, he was usually acquitted, and the man who could bring witnesses to his general good character might often thereby escape. In 1721 a religious young man, married, was convicted of attempting sodomy with two young men he slept with; he was fined, placed in the pillory and imprisoned for two months. Next year a man was acquitted on a similar charge, and another man, of decent aspect, although the evidence indicated that he might have been guilty of sodomy, was only convicted of attempt, and sentenced to fine, pillory, and two years' imprisonment. In 1723, again, a schoolmaster was acquitted, on account of his good reputation, of the charge of attempt on a boy of 15, his pupil, though the evidence seemed decidedly against him. In 1730 a man was sentenced to death for sodomy effected on his young apprentice; this was a bad case and the surgeon's evidence indicated laceration of the perineum. Homosexuality of all kinds flourished, it will be seen, notwithstanding the fearless yet fair application of a very severe law.[89]

In more recent times Byron has frequently been referred to as experiencing homosexual affections, and I have been informed that some of his poems nominally addressed to women were really inspired by men. It is certain that he experienced very strong emotions toward his male friends. "My school-friendships," he wrote, "were with me passions." When he afterward met one of these friends, Lord Clare, in Italy, he was painfully agitated; and could never hear the name without a beating of the heart. At the age of 22 he formed one of his strong attachments for a youth to whom he left L7000 in his will.[90] It is probable, however, that here, as well as in the case of Shakespeare, and in that of Tennyson's love for his youthful friend, Arthur Hallam, as well as of Montaigne for Etienne de la Boetie, although such strong friendships may involve an element of sexual emotion, we have no true and definite homosexual impulse; homosexuality is merely simulated by the ardent and hyperesthetic emotions of the poet.[91] The same quality of the poet's emotional temperament may doubtless, also, be invoked in the case of Goethe, who is said to have written elegies which, on account of their homosexual character, still remain unpublished.

The most famous homosexual trial of recent times in England was that of Oscar Wilde, a writer whose literary reputation may be said to be still growing, not only in England but throughout the world. Wilde was the son of parents who were both of unusual ability and somewhat eccentric. Both these tendencies became in him more concentrated. He was born with, as it were, a congenital antipathy to the commonplace, a natural love of paradox, and he possessed the skill to embody the characteristic in finished literary form. At the same time, it must not be forgotten, beneath this natural attitude of paradox, his essential judgments on life and literature were usually sound and reasonable. His essay on "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" witnessed to his large and enlightened conception of life, and his profound admiration for Flaubert to the sanity and solidity of his literary taste. In early life he revealed no homosexual tendencies; he married and had children. After he had begun to outgrow his youthful esthetic extravagances, however, and to acquire success and fame, he developed what was at first a simply inquisitive interest in inversion. Such inquisitive interest is sometimes the sign of an emerging homosexual impulse. It proved to be so in Wilde's case and ultimately he was found to be cultivating the acquaintance of youths of low class and doubtful character. Although this development occurred comparatively late in life, we must hesitate to describe Wilde's homosexuality as acquired. If we consider his constitution and his history, it is not difficult to suppose that homosexual germs were present in a latent form from the first, and it may quite well be that Wilde's inversion was of that kind which is now described as retarded, though still congenital.

As is usual in England, no active efforts were made to implicate Wilde in any criminal charge. It was his own action, as even he himself seems to have vaguely realized beforehand, which brought the storm about his head. He was arrested, tried, condemned, and at once there arose a general howl of execration, joined in even by the judge, whose attitude compared unfavorably with the more impartial attitude of the eighteenth century judges in similar cases. Wilde came out of prison ambitious to retrieve his reputation by the quality of his literary work. But he left Reading gaol merely to enter a larger and colder prison. He soon realized that his spirit was broken even more than his health. He drifted at last to Paris, where he shortly after died, shunned by all but a few of his friends.[92]

In a writer of the first order, Edward Fitzgerald, to whom we owe the immortal and highly individualized version of Omar Khayyam, it is easy to trace an element of homosexuality, though it appears never to have reached full and conscious development. Fitzgerald was an eccentric person who, though rich and on friendly terms with some of the most distinguished men of his time, was always out of harmony with his environment. He felt himself called on to marry, very unhappily, a woman whom he had never been in love with and with whom he had nothing in common. All his affections were for his male friends. In early life he was devoted to his friend W.K. Browne, whom he glorified in Euphranor. "To him Browne was at once Jonathan, Gamaliel, Apollo,—the friend, the master, the God,—there was scarcely a limit to his devotion and admiration."[93] On Browne's premature death Fitzgerald's heart was empty. In 1859 at Lowestoft, Fitzgerald, as he wrote to Mrs. Browne, "used to wander about the shore at night longing for some fellow to accost me who might give some promise of filling up a very vacant place in my heart." It was then that he met "Posh" (Joseph Fletcher), a fisherman, 6 feet tall, said to be of the best Suffolk type, both in body and character. Posh reminded Fitzgerald of his dead friend Browne; he made him captain of his lugger, and was thereafter devoted to him. Posh was, said Fitzgerald, "a man of the finest Saxon type, with a complexion vif, male et flamboyant, blue eyes, a nose less than Roman, more than Greek, and strictly auburn hair that any woman might envy. Further he was a man of simplicity; of soul, justice of thought, tenderness of nature, a gentleman of Nature's grandest type," in fact the "greatest man" Fitzgerald had ever met. Posh was not, however, quite so absolutely perfect as this description suggests, and various misunderstandings arose in consequence between the two friends so unequal in culture and social traditions. These difficulties are reflected in some of the yet extant letters from the enormous mass which Fitzgerald addressed to "my dear Poshy."[94]

A great personality of recent times, widely regarded with reverence as the prophet-poet of Democracy[95]—Walt Whitman—has aroused discussion by his sympathetic attitude toward passionate friendship, or "manly love" as he calls it, in Leaves of Grass. In this book—in "Calamus," "Drumtaps," and elsewhere—Whitman celebrates a friendship in which physical contact and a kind of silent voluptuous emotion are essential elements. In order to settle the question as to the precise significance of "Calamus," J.A. Symonds wrote to Whitman, frankly posing the question. The answer (written from Camden, N.J., on August 19, 1890) is the only statement of Whitman's attitude toward homosexuality, and it is therefore desirable that it should be set on record:—

"About the questions on 'Calamus,' etc., they quite daze me. Leaves of Grass is only to be rightly construed by and within its own atmosphere and essential character—all its pages and pieces so coming strictly under. That the 'Calamus' part has ever allowed the possibility of such construction as mentioned is terrible. I am fain to hope that the pages themselves are not to be even mentioned for such gratuitous and quite at the time undreamed and unwished possibility of morbid inferences—which are disavowed by me and seem damnable."

It would seem from this letter[96] that Whitman had never realized that there is any relationship whatever between the passionate emotion of physical contact from man to man, as he had experienced it and sung it, and the act which with other people he would regard as a crime against nature. This may be singular, for there are many inverted persons who have found satisfaction in friendships less physical and passionate than those described in Leaves of Grass, but Whitman was a man of concrete, emotional, instinctive temperament, lacking in analytical power, receptive to all influences, and careless of harmonizing them. He would most certainly have refused to admit that he was the subject of inverted sexuality. It remains true, however, that "manly love" occupies in his work a predominance which it would scarcely hold in the feelings of the "average man," whom Whitman wishes to honor. A normally constituted person, having assumed the very frank attitude taken up by Whitman, would be impelled to devote far more space and far more ardor to the subject of sexual relationships with women and all that is involved in maternity than is accorded to them in Leaves of Grass. Some of Whitman's extant letters to young men, though they do not throw definite light on this question, are of a very affectionate character,[97] and, although a man of remarkable physical vigor, he never felt inclined to marry.[98] It remains somewhat difficult to classify him from the sexual point of view, but we can scarcely fail to recognize the presence of a homosexual tendency.

I should add that some friends and admirers of Whitman are not prepared to accept the evidence of the letter to Symonds. I am indebted to "Q." for the following statement of the objections:—

"I think myself that it is a mistake to give much weight to this letter—perhaps a mistake to introduce it at all, since if introduced it will, of course, carry weight. And this for three or four reasons:—

"1. That it is difficult to reconcile the letter itself (with its strong tone of disapprobation) with the general 'atmosphere' of Leaves of Grass, the tenor of which is to leave everything open and free.

"2. That the letter is in hopeless conflict with the 'Calamus' section of poems. For, whatever moral lines Whitman may have drawn at the time of writing these poems, it seems to me quite incredible that the possibility of certain inferences, morbid or other, was undreamed of.

"3. That the letter was written only a few months before his last illness and death, and is the only expression of the kind that he appears to have given utterance to.

"4. That Symonds's letter, to which this was a reply, is not forth coming; and we consequently do not know what rash expressions it may have contained—leading Whitman (with his extreme caution) to hedge his name from possible use to justify dubious practices."

I may add that I endeavored to obtain Symonds's letter, but he was unable to produce it, nor has any copy of it been found among his papers.

It should be said that Whitman's attitude toward Symonds was marked by high regard and admiration. "A wonderful man is Addington Symonds," he remarked shortly before his own death; "some ways the most indicative and penetrating and significant man of our time. Symonds is a curious fellow; I love him dearly. He is of college breed and education, horribly literary and suspicious, and enjoys things. A great fellow for delving into persons and into the concrete, and even into the physiological and the gastric, and wonderfully cute." But on this occasion he delved in vain.

The foregoing remarks (substantially contained in the previous editions of this book) were based mainly on the information received from J.A. Symonds's side. But of more recent years interesting light has been thrown on this remarkable letter from Walt Whitman's side. The Boswellian patience, enthusiasm, and skill which Horace Traubel has brought to his full and elaborate work, now in course of publication, With Walt Whitman in Camden, clearly reveal, in the course of various conversations, Whitman's attitude to Symonds's question and the state of mind which led up to this letter.

Whitman talked to Traubel much about Symonds from the twenty-seventh of April, 1888 (very soon after the date when Traubel's work begins), onward. Symonds had written to him repeatedly, it seems, concerning the "passional relations of men with men," as Whitman expressed it. "He is always driving at me about that: is that what Calamus means?—because of me or in spite of me, is that what it means? I have said no, but no does not satisfy him. [There is, however, no record from Symonds's side of any letter by Whitman to Symonds in this sense up to this date.] But read this letter—read the whole of it: it is very shrewd, very cute, in deadliest earnest: it drives me hard, almost compels me—it is urgent, persistent: he sort of stands in the road and says 'I won't move till you answer my question.' You see, this is an old letter—sixteen years old—and he is still asking the question: he refers to it in one of his latest notes. He is surely a wonderful man—a rare, cleaned-up man—a white-souled, heroic character.... You will be writing something about Calamus some day," said W. [to Traubel], "and this letter, and what I say, may help to clear your ideas. Calamus needs clear ideas; it may be easily, innocently distorted from its natural, its motive, body of doctrine."

The letter, dated Feb. 7, 1872, of some length, is then reproduced. It tells how much Leaves of Grass, and especially the Calamus section, had helped the writer. "What the love of man for man has been in the past," Symonds wrote, "I think I know. What it is here now, I know also—alas! What you say it can and should be I dimly discern in your Poems. But this hardly satisfies me—so desirous am I of learning what you teach. Some day, perhaps,—in some form, I know not what, but in your own chosen form,—you will tell me more about the Love of Friends. Till then I wait."

"Said W: 'Well, what do you think of that? Do you think that could be answered?' 'I don't see why you call that letter driving you hard. It's quiet enough—it only asks questions, and asks the questions mildly enough,' 'I suppose you are right—"drive" is not exactly the word: yet you know how I hate to be catechised. Symonds is right, no doubt, to ask the questions: I am just as much right if I do not answer them: just as much right if I do answer them. I often say to myself about Calamus—perhaps it means more or less than what I thought myself—means different: perhaps I don't know what it all means—perhaps never did know. My first instinct about all that Symonds writes is violently reactionary—is strong and brutal for no, no, no. Then the thought intervenes that I maybe do not know all my own meanings: I say to myself: "You, too, go away, come back, study your own book—as alien or stranger, study your own book, see what it amounts to." Some time or other I will have to write to him definitely about Calamus—give him my word for it what I meant or mean it to mean.'"

Again, a month later (May 24, 1888), Whitman speaks to Traubel of a "beautiful letter" from Symonds. "You will see that he harps on the Calamus poems again. I don't see why it should, but his recurrence to that subject irritates me a little. I suppose you might say—why don't you shut him up by answering him? There is no logical answer to that I suppose: but I may ask in my turn: 'What right has he to ask questions anyway?'" W. laughed a bit. "Anyway the question comes back to me almost every time he writes. He is courteous enough about it—that is the reason I do not resent him. I suppose the whole thing will end in an answer some day."

The letter follows. The chief point in it is that the writer hopes he has not been importunate in the question he had asked about Calamus three years before.

"I [Traubel] said to W.: 'That's a humble letter enough: I don't see anything in that to get excited about. He doesn't ask you to answer the old question. In fact he rather apologizes for having asked it.' W. fired up 'Who is excited? As to that question, he does ask it again and again: asks it, asks it, asks it.' I laughed at his vehemence. 'Well, suppose he does? It does not harm. Besides, you've got nothing to hide. I think your silence might lead him to suppose there was a nigger in your wood pile.' 'Oh, nonsense! But for thirty years my enemies and friends have been asking me questions about the Leaves: I'm tired of not answering questions.' It was very funny to see his face when he gave a humorous twist to the fling in his last phrase. Then he relaxed and added: 'Anyway I love Symonds. Who could fail to love a man who could write such a letter? I suppose he will yet have to be answered, damn 'im!'"

It is clear that these conversations considerably diminish the force of the declaration in Whitman's letter. We see that the letter which, on the face of it, might have represented the swift and indignant reaction of a man who, suddenly faced by the possibility that his work may be interpreted in a perverse sense, emphatically repudiates that interpretation, was really nothing of the kind. Symonds for at least eighteen years had been gently, considerately, even humbly, yet persistently, asking the same perfectly legitimate question. If the answer was really an emphatic no, it would more naturally have been made in 1872 than 1890. Moreover, in the face of this ever-recurring question, Whitman constantly speaks to his friends of his great affection for Symonds and his admiration for his intellectual cuteness, feelings that would both be singularly out of place if applied to a man who was all the time suggesting the possibility that his writings contained inferences that were "terrible," "morbid," and "damnable." Evidently, during all those years, Whitman could not decide what to reply. On the one hand he was moved by his horror of being questioned, by his caution, by his natural aversion to express approval of anything that could be called unnatural or abnormal. On the other hand, he was moved by the desire to let his work speak for itself, by his declared determination to leave everything open, and possibly by a more or less conscious sympathy with the inferences presented to him. It was not until the last years of his life, when his sexual life belonged to the past, when weakness was gaining on him, when he wished to put aside every drain on his energies, that—being constitutionally incapable of a balanced scientific statement—he chose the simplest and easiest solution of the difficulty.[99]

Concerning another great modern writer—Paul Verlaine, the first of modern French poets—it seems possible to speak with less hesitation. A man who possessed in fullest measure the irresponsible impressionability of genius, Verlaine—as his work shows and as he himself admitted—all his life oscillated between normal and homosexual love, at one period attracted to women, at another to men. He was without doubt, it seems to me, bisexual. An early connection with another young poet, Arthur Rimbaud, terminated in a violent quarrel with his friend, and led to Verlaine's imprisonment at Mons. In after-years he gave expression to the exalted passion of this relationship—mon grand peche radieux—in Laeti et Errabundi, published in the volume entitled Parallelement; and in later poems he has told of less passionate and less sensual relationships which yet were more than friendship, for instance, in the poem, "Mon ami, ma plus belle amitie, ma Meilleure" in Bonheur.[100]

In this brief glance at some of the ethnographical, historical, religious, and literary aspects of homosexual passion there is one other phenomenon which may be mentioned. This is the alleged fact that, while the phenomena exist to some extent everywhere, we seem to find a special proclivity to homosexuality (whether or not involving a greater frequency of congenital inversion is not usually clear) among certain races and in certain regions.[101] In Europe this would be best illustrated by the case of southern Italy, which in this respect is held to be distinct from northern Italy, although Italians generally are franker than men of northern race in admitting their sexual practices.[102] How far the supposed greater homosexuality of southern Italy may be due to Greek influence and Greek blood it is not very easy to say.

It must be remembered that, in dealing with a northern country like England, homosexual phenomena do not present themselves in the same way as they do in southern Italy today, or in ancient Greece. In Greece the homosexual impulse was recognized and idealized; a man could be an open homosexual lover, and yet, like Epaminondas, be a great and honored citizen of his country. There was no reason whatever why a man, who in mental and physical constitution was perfectly normal, should not adopt a custom that was regarded as respectable, and sometimes as even specially honorable. But it is quite otherwise today in a country like England or the United States.[103] In these countries all our traditions and all our moral ideals, as well as the law, are energetically opposed to every manifestation of homosexual passion. It requires a very strong impetus to go against this compact social force which, on every side, constrains the individual into the paths of heterosexual love. That impetus, in a well-bred individual who leads the normal life of his fellow-men and who feels the ordinary degree of respect for the social feeling surrounding him, can only be supplied by a fundamental—usually, it is probable, inborn—perversion of the sexual instinct, rendering the individual organically abnormal. It is with this fundamental abnormality, usually called sexual inversion, that we shall here be concerned. There is no evidence to show that homosexuality in Greece was a congenital perversion, although it appears that Coelius Aurelianus affirms that in the opinion of Parmenides it was hereditary. Aristotle also, in his fragment on physical love, though treating the whole matter with indulgence, seems to have distinguished abnormal congenital homosexuality from acquired homosexual vice. Doubtless in a certain proportion of cases the impulse was organic, and it may well be that there was an organic and racial predisposition to homosexuality among the Greeks, or, at all events, the Dorians. But the state of social feeling, however it originated, induced a large proportion of the ordinary population to adopt homosexuality as a fashion, or, it may be said, the environment was peculiarly favorable to the development of latent homosexual tendencies. So that any given number of homosexual persons among the Greeks would have presented a far smaller proportion of constitutionally abnormal individuals than a like number in England. In a similar manner—though I do not regard the analogy as complete—infanticide or the exposition of children was practised in some of the early Greek States by parents who were completely healthy and normal; in England a married woman who destroys her child is in nearly every case demonstrably diseased or abnormal. For this reason I am unable to see that homosexuality in ancient Greece—while of great interest as a social and psychological problem—throws light on sexual inversion as we know it in England or the United States.

Concerning the wide prevalence of sexual inversion and of homosexual phenomena generally, there can be no manner of doubt. This question has been most fully investigated in Germany. In Berlin, Moll states that he has himself seen between 600 and 700 homosexual persons and heard of some 250 to 350 others. Hirschfeld states that he has known over 10,000 homosexual persons.

There are, I am informed, several large cafes in Berlin which are almost exclusively patronized by inverts who come here to flirt and make acquaintances; as these cafes are frequented by male street prostitutes (Pupenjunge) the invert risks being blackmailed or robbed if he goes home or to a hotel with a cafe acquaintance. There are also a considerable number of homosexual Kneipen, small and unpretentious bar-rooms, which are really male brothels, the inmates being sexually normal working men and boys, out of employment or in quest of a few marks as pocket money; these places are regarded by inverts as very safe, as the proprietors insist on good order and allow no extortion, while the police, though of course aware of their existence, never interfere. Homosexual cafes for women are also found in Berlin.

There is some reason for believing that homosexuality is especially prominent in Germany and among Germans. I have elsewhere referred to the highly emotional and sentimental traits which have frequently marked German friendships. Germany is the only country in which there is a definite and well-supported movement for the defense and social rehabilitation of inverts. The study of sexual inversion began in Germany, and the scientific and literary publications dealing with homosexuality issued from the German press probably surpass in quantity and importance those issued from all other countries put together. The homosexual tendencies of Germans outside Germany have been noted in various countries. Among my English cases I have found that a strain of German blood occurs much more frequently than we are entitled to expect; Parisian prostitutes are said to be aware of the homosexual tastes of Germans; it is significant that (as a German invert familiar with Turkey informed Naecke), at Constantinople, the procurers, who naturally supply girls as well as youths, regard Germans and Austrians as more tending to homosexuality than the foreigners from any other land. Germans usually deny, however, that there is any special German proclivity to inversion, and it would not appear that such statistics as are available (though all such statistics cannot be regarded as more than approximations) show any pronounced predominance of inversion among Germans. It is to Hirschfeld that we owe the chief attempt to gain some notion of the percentage of homosexual persons among the general population.[104] It may be said to vary in different regions and more especially in different occupations, from 1 to 10 per cent. But the average when the individuals belonging to a large number of groups are combined is generally found to be rather over 2 per cent. So that there are about a million and a half inverted persons in Germany.[105] This would be a minimum which can scarcely fail to be below the actual proportion, as no one can be certain that he is acquainted with the real proclivities of all the persons comprising a larger group of acquaintances.[106] It is not found in the estimates which have reached Hirschfeld that the French groups show a smaller proportion of homosexual persons than the German groups, and a Japanese group comes out near to the general average for the whole. Various authorities, especially Germans, believe that homosexuality is just as common in France as in Germany.[107] Saint-Paul ("Dr. Laupts"), on the other hand, is unable to accept this view. As an army surgeon who has long served in Africa he can (as also Rebierre in his Joyeux et demifous) bear witness to the frequency of homosexuality among the African battalions of the French army, especially in the cavalry, less so in the infantry; in the French army generally he finds it rare, as also in the general population.[108] Naecke is also inclined to believe that homosexuality is rarer in Celtic lands, and in the Latin countries generally, than in Teutonic and Slavonic lands, and believes that it may be a question of race.[109] The question is still undecided. It is possible that the undoubted fact that homosexuality is less conspicuous in France and the other Latin countries than in Teutonic lands, may be due not to the occurrence of a smaller proportion of congenital inverts in the former lands, but mainly to general difference in temperament and in the social reaction.[110] The French idealize and emphasize the place of women to a much greater degree than the Germans, while at the same time inverts in France have much less occasion than in Germany to proclaim their legal grievances. Apart from such considerations as these it seems very doubtful whether inborn inversion is in any considerable degree rarer in France than in Germany.

As to the frequency of homosexuality in England[111] and the United States there is much evidence. In England its manifestations are well marked for those whose eyes have once been opened. The manifestations are of the same character as those in Germany, modified by social and national differences, and especially by the greater reserve, Puritanism, and prudery of England.[112] In the United States these same influences exert a still greater effect in restraining the outward manifestations of homosexuality. Hirschfeld, though so acute and experienced in the investigation of homosexuality, states that when visiting Philadelphia and Boston he could scarcely detect any evidence of homosexuality, though he was afterward assured by those acquainted with local conditions that its extension in both cities is "colossal." There have been numerous criminal cases and scandals in the United States in which homosexuality has come to the surface, and the very frequently occurring cases of transvestism or cross-dressing in the States seem to be in a large proportion associated with homosexuality.

In the opinion of some, English homosexuality has become much more conspicuous during recent years, and this is sometimes attributed to the Oscar Wilde case. No doubt, the celebrity of Oscar Wilde and the universal publicity given to the facts of the case by the newspapers may have brought conviction of their perversion to many inverts who were before only vaguely conscious of their abnormality, and, paradoxical though it may seem, have imparted greater courage to others; but it can scarcely have sufficed to increase the number of inverts. Rather, one may say, the development of urban life renders easier the exhibition and satisfaction of this as of all other forms of perversion. Regarding the proportion of inverts among the general population, it is very difficult to speak positively. The invert himself is a misleading guide because he has formed round himself a special coterie of homosexual persons, and, moreover, he is sometimes apt to overestimate the number of inverts through the misinterpretation of small indications that are not always conclusive. The estimate of the ordinary normal person, feeling the ordinary disgust toward abnormal phenomena, is also misleading, because his homosexual acquaintances are careful not to inform him concerning their proclivities. A writer who has studied the phenomena of homosexuality is apt to be misguided in the same way as the invert himself, and to overestimate the prevalence of the perversion. Striving to put aside this source of fallacy, and only considering those individuals with whom I have been brought in contact by the ordinary circumstances of life, and with whose modes of feeling I am acquainted, I am still led to the conclusion that the proportion is considerable. Among the professional and most cultured element of the middle class in England, there must be a distinct percentage of inverts which may sometimes be as much as 5 per cent., though such estimates must always be hazardous. Among women of the same class the percentage seems to be at least double, though here the phenomena are less definite and deep-seated. This seems to be a moderate estimate for this class, which includes, however, it must be remembered, a considerable proportion of individuals who are somewhat abnormal in other respects. As we descend the scale the phenomena are doubtless less common, though when we reach the working class we come to that comparative indifference to which allusion has already been made. Taken altogether we may probably conclude that the proportion of inverts is the same as in other related and neighboring lands, that is to say, slightly over 2 per cent. That would give the homosexual population of Great Britain as somewhere about a million.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Taking all its forms en bloc, as they are known to the police, homosexuality is seen to possess formidable proportions. Thus in France, from official papers which passed through M. Carlier's bureau during ten years (1860-70), he compiled a list of 6342 pederasts who came within the cognizance of the police; 2049 Parisians, 3709 provincials, and 584 foreigners. Of these, 3432, or more than the half, could not be convicted of illegal acts.

[2] The chief general collection of data (not here drawn upon) concerning homosexuality among animals is by the zooelogist Prof. Karsch, "Paederastie und Tribadie bei den Tieren," Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. ii. Brehm's Tierleben also contains many examples. See also a short chapter (ch. xxix) in Hirschfeld's Homosexualitaet.

[3] H. Sainte-Claire Deville, "De l'Internat et son influence sur l'education de la jeunesse," a paper read to the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, July 27, 1871, and quoted by Chevalier, L'Inversion Sexuelle, pp. 204-5.

[4] M. Bombarda, Comptes rendus Congres Internationale de l'Anthropologie Criminelle, Amsterdam, p. 212.

[5] Lacassagne, "De la Criminalite chez les Animaux," Revue Scientifique, 1882.

[6] Steinach, "Utersuchungen zu vergleichende Physiologie," Archiv fuer die Gesammte Physiologie, Bd. lvi, 1894, p. 320.

[7] Fere, Comptes-rendus Societe de Biologie, July 30, 1898. We may perhaps connect this with an observation of E. Selous (Zooelogist, May and Sept., 1901) on a bird, the Great Crested Grebe; after pairing, the male would crouch to the female, who played his part to him; the same thing is found among pigeons. Selous suggests that this is a relic of primitive hermaphroditism. But it may be remembered that in the male generally sexual intercourse tends to be more exhausting than in the female; this fact would favor a reversion of their respective parts.

[8] E. Selous, "Sexual Selection in Birds," Zooelogist, Feb., 1907, p. 65; ib., May, p. 169. Sexual aberrations generally are not uncommon among birds; see, e.g., A. Heim, "Sexuelle Verirrungen bei Voegeln in den Tropen," Sexual-Probleme, April, 1913.

[9] See Moll, Untersuchungen ueber die Libido Sexualis, 1898, Bd. i, pp. 369, 374-5. For a summary of facts concerning homosexuality in animals see F. Karsch, "Paederastie und Tribadie bei den Tieren auf Grund der Literatur," Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. ii, 1899, pp. 126-154

[10] Muccioli, "Degenerazione e Criminalita nei Colombi," Archivio di Psichiatria, 1893, p. 40.

[11] L'Intermediare des Biologistes, November 20, 1897.

[12] R.I. Pocock, Field, 25 Oct., 1913.

[13] R.S. Rutherford, "Crowing Hens," Poultry, January 26, 1896.

[14] This has now been very thoroughly done by Prof. F. Karsch-Haack in a large book, Das Gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der Naturvoelker, 1911. An earlier and shorter study by the same author was published in the Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. iii, 1901.

[15] See a brief and rather inconclusive treatment of the question by Bruns Meissner, "Assyriologische Studien," iv, Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1907.

[16] Monatshefte fuer praktische Dermatologie, Bd. xxix, 1899, p. 409.

[17] Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitaet, p. 739.

[18] Beardmore also notes that sodomy is "regularly indulged in" in New Guinea on this account. (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, May, 1890, p. 464.)

[19] I have been told by medical men in India that it is specially common among the Sikhs, the finest soldier-race in India.

[20] Foley, Bulletin Societe d'Anthropologie de Paris, October 9, 1879.

[21] See, e.g., O. Kiefer, "Plato's Stellung zu Homosexualitaet," Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. vii.

[22] Bethe, op. cit., p. 440. In old Japan (before the revolution of 1868) also, however, according to F.S. Krauss (Das Geschlechtsleben der Japaner, ch. xiii, 1911), the homosexual relations between knights and their pages resembled those of ancient Greece.

[23] Archiv fuer Kriminal-Anthropologie, 1906, p. 106.

[24] Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft, 1914, Heft 2, p. 73.

[25] Among the Sarts of Turkestan a class of well-trained and educated homosexual prostitutes, resembling those found in China and many regions of northern Asia, bearing also the same name of batsha, are said to be especially common because fostered by the scarcity of women through polygamy and by the women's ignorance and coarseness. The institution of the batsha is supposed to have come to Turkestan from Persia. (Herman, "Die Paederastie bei den Sarten," Sexual-Probleme, June, 1911.) This would seem to suggest that Persia may have been a general center of diffusions of this kind of refined homosexuality in northern Asia.

[26] Morache, art. "Chine," Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences Medicales; Matignon, "La Pederastie en Chine," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Jan., 1899; Von der Choven, summarized in Archives de Neurologie, March, 1907; Scie-Ton-Fa, "L'Homosexualite en Chine," Revue de l'Hypnotisme, April, 1909.

[27] Moeurs des Peuples de l'Inde, 1825, vol. i, part ii, ch. xii. In Lahore and Lucknow, as quoted by Burton, Daville describes "men dressed as women, with flowing locks under crowns of flowers, imitating the feminine walk and gestures, voice and fashion of speech, ogling their admirer with all the coquetry of bayaderes."

[28] Voyages and Travels, 1814, part ii, p. 47.

[29] A. Lisiansky, Voyage, etc., London, 1814, p. 1899.

[30] Ethnographische Skizzen, 1855, p. 121.

[31] C.F.P. von Martius, Zur Ethnographie Amerika's, Leipzig, 1867, Bd. i, p. 74. In Ancient Mexico Bernal Diaz wrote: Erant quasi omnes sodomia commaculati, et adolescentes multi, muliebriter vestiti, ibant publice, cibum quarentes ab isto diabolico et abominabili labore.

[32] Hammond, Sexual Impotence, pp. 163-174.

[33] New York Medical Journal, Dec. 7, 1889.

[34] J. Turnbull, "A Voyage Round the World in the Year 1800," etc., 1813, p. 382.

[35] Annales d'Hygiene et de Medecine Coloniale, 1899, p. 494.

[36] Oskar Baumann, "Contraere Sexual-Erscheinungen bei die Neger-Bevoelkerung Zanzibars," Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1899, Heft 6, p. 668.

[37] Rev. J.H. Weeks, Journal Anthropological Institute, 1909, p. 449. I am informed by a medical correspondent in the United States that inversion is extremely prevalent among American negroes. "I have good reason to believe," he writes, "that it is far more prevalent among them than among the white people of any nation. If inversion is to be regarded as a penalty of 'civilization' this is remarkable. Perhaps, however, the Negro, relatively to his capacity, is more highly civilized than we are; at any rate his civilization has been thrust upon him, and not acquired through the long throes of evolution. Colored inverts desire white men as a rule, but are not averse to men of their own race. I believe that 10 per cent, of Negroes in the United States are sexually inverted."

[38] Among the Papuans of German New Guinea, where the women have great power, marriage is late, and the young men are compelled to live separated from the women in communal houses. Here, says Moskowski (Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1911, Heft 2, p. 339), homosexual orgies are openly carried on.

[39] C.G. Seligmann, "Sexual Inversion Among Primitive Races," Alienist and Neurologist, Jan., 1902. In a tale of the Western Solomon Islands, reported by J.C. Wheeler (Anthropophyteia, vol. ix, p. 376) we find a story of a man who would be a woman, and married another man and did woman's work.

[40] Hardman, "Habits and Customs of Natives of Kimberley, Western Australia," Proceedings Royal Irish Academy, 3d series, vol. i, 1889, p. 73.

[41] Klaatsch, "Some Notes on Scientific Travel Amongst the Black Populations of Tropic Australia," Adelaide meeting of Australian Association for the Advancement of Science, January, 1907, p. 5.

[42] In further illustration of this I have been told that among the common people there is often no feeling against connection with a woman per anum.

[43] Chevalier (L'Inversion Sexuelle, pp. 85-106) brings forward a considerable amount of evidence regarding homosexuality at Rome under the emperors. See also Moll, Kontraere Sexualempfindung, 1899, pp. 56-66, and Hirschfeld, Homosexualitaet, 1913, pp. 789-806. On the literary side, Petronius best reveals the homosexual aspect of Roman life about the time of Tiberius.

[44] J.A. Symonds wrote an interesting essay on this subject; see also Kiefer, Jahrbuch f. sex. Zwischenstufen, vol. viii, 1906.

[45] See L. von Scheffler, "Elagabal," Jahrbuch f. sex. Zwischenstufen, vol. iii, 1901; also Duviquet, Heliogabale (Mercure de France).

[46] The following note has been furnished to me: "Balzac, in Une Derniere Incarnation de Vautrin, describes the morals of the French bagnes. Dostoieffsky, in Prison-Life in Siberia, touches on the same subject. See his portrait of Sirotkin, p. 52 et seq., p. 120 (edition J. and R. Maxwell, London). We may compare Carlier, Les Deux Prostitutions, pp. 300-1, for an account of the violence of homosexual passions in French prisons. The initiated are familiar with the fact in English prisons. Bouchard, in his Confessions, Paris, Liseux, 1881, describes the convict station at Marseilles in 1630." Homosexuality among French recidivists at Saint-Jean-du-Maroni in French Guiana has been described by Dr. Cazanova, Arch. d'Anth. Crim., January, 1906, p. 44. See also Davitt's Leaves from a Prison Diary, and Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist; also Rebierre, Joyeux et Demifous, 1909.

[47] D. McMurtrie, Chicago Medical Recorder, January, 1914.

[48] See Appendix A: "Homosexuality among Tramps," by "Josiah Flynt."

[49] Inferno, xv. The place of homosexuality in the Divine Comedy itself has been briefly studied by Undine Freuen von Verschuer, Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. viii, 1906.

[50] Hirschfeld and others have pointed out, very truly, that inverts are less prone than normal persons to regard caste and social position. This innately democratic attitude renders it easier for them than for ordinary people to rise to what Cyples has called the "ecstasy of humanity," the emotional attitude, that is to say, of those rare souls of whom it may be said, in the same writer's words, that "beggars' rags to their unhesitating lips grew fit for kissing because humanity had touched the garb." Edward Carpenter (Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk, p. 83) remarks that great ethical leaders have often exhibited feminine traits, and adds: "It becomes easy to suppose of those early figures—who once probably were men—those Apollos, Buddhas, Dionysus, Osiris, and so forth—to suppose that they too were somewhat bisexual in temperament, and that it was really largely owing to that fact that they were endowed with far-reaching powers and became leaders of mankind."

[51] English translation, Primitive Folk, in Contemporary Science series.

[52] R. Horneffer, Der Priester, 2 vols., 1912. J.G. Frazer, in the volume entitled "Adonis, Attis, Osiris" (pp. 428-435) of the third edition of his Golden Bough, discusses priests dressed as women, and finds various reasons for the custom.

[53] Edward Carpenter, Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk, 1914.

[54] Westermarck, Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, vol. ii, ch. xliii.

[55] "Italian literature," remarks Symonds, "can show the Rime Burlesche, Becadelli's Hermaphroditus, the Canti Carnascialeschi, the Macaronic poems of Fidentius, and the remarkably outspoken romance entitled Alcibiade Fanciullo a Scola."

[56] The life of Muret has been well written by C. Dejob, Marc-Antoine Muret, 1881.

[57] F.M. Nichols, Epistles of Erasmus, vol. i, pp. 44-55.

[58] Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance, vol. ii, Excursus ci.

[59] F. de Gaudenzi in ch. v of his Studio Psico-patologico sopra T. Tasso (1899) deals fully with the poet's homosexual tendencies.

[60] Herbert P. Horne, Leonardo da Vinci, 1903, p. 12.

[61] S. Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, 1910.

[62] See Parlagreco, Michelangelo Buonarotti, Naples, 1888; Ludwig von Scheffler, Michelangelo: Ein Renaissance Studie, 1892; Archivo di Psichiatria, vol. xv, fasc. i, ii, p. 129; J.A. Symonds, Life of Michelangelo, 1893; Dr. Jur. Numa Praetorius, "Michel Angelo's Urningtum," Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. ii, 1899, pp, 254-267.

[63] J.A. Symonds, Life of Michelangelo, vol. ii, p. 384.

[64] Sodoma's life and temperament have been studied and his pictures copiously reproduced by Elisar von Kupffer, Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. ix, 1908, p. 71 et seq., and by R.H. Hobart Cust, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi.

[65] Cellini, Life, translated by J.A. Symonds, introduction, p. xxxv, and p. 448. Queringhi (La Psiche di B. Cellini, 1913) argues that Cellini was not homosexual.

[66] See the interesting account of Duquesnoy by Eekhoud (Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. ii, 1899), an eminent Belgian novelist who has himself been subjected to prosecution on account of the pictures of homosexuality in his novels and stories, Escal-Vigor and Le Cycle Patibulaire (see Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. iii, 1901).

[67] See Justi's Life of Winkelmann, and also Moll's Die Kontraere Sexualempfindung, third edition, 1899, pp. 122-126. In this work, as well as in Raffalovich's Uranisme et Unisexualite, as also in Moll's Beruehmte Homosexuelle (1910) and Hirschfeld's Die Homosexualitaet, p. 650 et seq., there will be found some account of many eminent men who are, on more or less reliable grounds, suspected of homosexuality. Other German writers brought forward as inverted are Platen, K.P. Moritz, and Iffland. Platen was clearly a congenital invert, who sought, however, the satisfaction of his impulses in Platonic friendship; his homosexual poems and the recently published unabridged edition of his diary render him an interesting object of study; see for a sympathetic account of him, Ludwig Frey, "Aus dem Seelenleben des Grafen Platen," Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vols. i and vi. Various kings and potentates have been mentioned in this connection, including the Sultan Baber; Henri III of France; Edward II, William II, James I, and William III of England, and perhaps Queen Anne and George III, Frederick the Great and his brother, Heinrich, Popes Paul II, Sixtus IV, and Julius II, Ludwig II of Bavaria, and others. Kings, indeed, seem peculiarly inclined to homosexuality.

[68] Schultz, Das Hoefische Leben, Bd. i, ch. xiii.

[69] De Planctu Naturae has been translated by Douglas Moffat, Yale Studies in English, No. xxxvi, 1908.

[70] P. de l'Estoile, Memoires-Journaux, vol. ii, p. 326.

[71] Laborde, Le Palais Mazarin, p. 128.

[72] Thus she writes in 1701 (Correspondence, edited by Brunet, vol. i, p. 58): "Our heroes take as their models Hercules, Theseus, Alexander, and Caesar, who all had their male favorites. Those who give themselves up to this vice, while believing in Holy Scripture, imagine that it was only a sin when there were few people in the world, and that now the earth is populated it may be regarded as a divertissement. Among the common people, indeed, accusations of this kind are, so far as possible, avoided; but among persons of quality it is publicly spoken of; it is considered a fine saying that since Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord has punished no one for such offences."

[73] Serieux and Libert, "La Bastille et ses Prisonniers," L'Encephale, September, 1911.

[74] Witry, "Notes Historiques sur l'Homosexualite en France," Revue de l'Hypnotisme, January, 1909.

[75] In early Teutonic days there was little or no trace of any punishment for homosexual practices in Germany. This, according to Hermann Michaelis, only appeared after the Church had gained power among the West Goths; in the Breviarium of Alaric II (506), the sodomist was condemned to the stake, and later, in the seventh century, by an edict of King Chindasvinds, to castration. The Frankish capitularies of Charlemange's time adopted ecclesiastical penances. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries death by fire was ordained, and the punishments enacted by the German codes tended to become much more ferocious than that edicted by the Justinian code on which they were modelled.

[76] Raffalovich discusses German friendship, Uranisme et Unisexualite, pp. 157-9. See also Birnbaum, Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. viii, p. 611; he especially illustrates this kind of friendship by the correspondence of the poets Gleim and Jacobi, who used to each other the language of lovers, which, indeed, they constantly called themselves.

[77] This letter may be found in Ernst Schur's Heinrich von Kleist in seinen Briefen, p. 295. Dr. J. Sadger has written a pathographic and psychological study of Kleist, emphasizing the homosexual strain, in the Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens series.

[78] Alexander's not less distinguished brother, Wilhelm von Humboldt, though not homosexual, possessed, a woman wrote to him, "the soul of a woman and the most tender feeling for womanliness I have ever found in your sex;" he himself admitted the feminine traits in his nature. Spranger (Wilhelm von Humboldt, p. 288) says of him that "he had that dual sexuality without which the moral summits of humanity cannot be reached."

[79] Krupp caused much scandal by his life at Capri, where he was constantly surrounded by the handsome youths of the place, mandolinists and street arabs, with whom he was on familiar terms, and on whom he lavished money. H.D. Davray, a reliable eyewitness, has written "Souvenirs sur M. Krupp a Capri," L'Europeen, 29 November, 1902. It is not, however, definitely agreed that Krupp was of fully developed homosexual temperament (see, e.g., Jahrbuch f. sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. v, p. 1303 et seq.) An account of his life at Capri was published in the Vorwaerts, against which Krupp finally brought a libel action; but he died immediately afterward, it is widely believed, by his own hand, and the libel action was withdrawn.

[80] Madame, the mother of the Regent, in her letters of 12th October, 4th November, and 13th December, 1701, repeatedly makes this assertion, and implies that it was supported by the English who at that time came over to Paris with the English Ambassador, Lord Portland. The King was very indifferent to women.

[81] Anselm, Epistola lxii, in Migne's Patrologia, vol. clix, col. 95. John of Salisbury, in his Polycrates, describes the homosexual and effeminate habits of his time.

[82] Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, vol. ii, p. 556.

[83] Coleridge in his Table Talk (14 May, 1833) remarked: "A man may, under certain states of the moral feeling, entertain something deserving the name of love towards a male object—an affection beyond friendship, and wholly aloof from appetite. In Elizabeth's and James's time it seems to have been almost fashionable to cherish such a feeling. Certainly the language of the two friends Musidorus and Pyrocles in the Arcadia is such as we could not use except to women." This passage of Coleridge's is interesting as an early English recognition by a distinguished man of genius of what may be termed ideal homosexuality.

[84] See account of Udall in the National Dictionary of Biography.

[85] Complete Poems of Richard Barnfield, edited with an introduction by A.B. Grosart, 1876. The poems of Barnfield were also edited by Arber, in the English Scholar's Library, 1883. Arber, who always felt much horror for the abnormal, argues that Barnfield's occupation with homosexual topics was merely due to a search for novelty, that it was "for the most part but an amusement and had little serious or personal in it." Those readers of Barnfield, however, who are acquainted with homosexual literature will scarcely fail to recognize a personal preoccupation in his poems. This is also the opinion of Moll in his Beruehmte Homosexuelle.

[86] See appendix to my edition of Marlowe in the Mermaid Series, first edition. For a study of Marlowe's "Gaveston," regarded as "the hermaphrodite in soul," see J.A. Nicklin, Free Review, December, 1895.

[87] As Raffalovich acutely points out, the twentieth sonnet, with its reference to the "one thing to my purpose nothing," is alone enough to show that Shakespeare was not a genuine invert, as then he would have found the virility of the loved object beautiful. His sonnets may fairly be compared to the In Memoriam of Tennyson, whom it is impossible to describe as inverted, though in his youth he cherished an ardent friendship for another youth, such as was also felt in youth by Montaigne.

[88] A scene in Vanbrugh's Relapse, and the chapter (ch. li) in Smollett's Roderick Random describing Lord Strutwell, may also be mentioned as evidencing familiarity with inversion. "In our country," said Lord Strutwell to Rawdon, putting forward arguments familiar to modern champions of homosexuality, "it gains ground apace, and in all probability will become in a short time a more fashionable vice than simple fornication."

[89] These observations on eighteenth century homosexuality in London are chiefly based on the volumes of Select Trials at the Old Bailey, published in 1734.

[90] Numa Praetorius (Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. iv, p. 885), who has studied Byron from this point of view, considers that, though his biography has not yet been fully written on the sexual side, he was probably of bisexual temperament; Raffalovich (Uranisme et Unisexualite, p. 309) is of the same opinion.

[91] A youthful attraction of this kind in a poet is well illustrated by Dolben, who died at the age of nineteen. In addition to a passion for Greek poetry he cherished a romantic friendship of extraordinary ardor, revealed in his poems, for a slightly older schoolfellow, who was never even aware of the idolatry he aroused. Dolben's life has been written, and his poems edited, by his friend the eminent poet, Robert Bridges (The Poems of D.M. Dolben, edited with a Memoir by R. Bridges, 1911).

[92] A well-informed narrative of the Oscar Wilde trial is given by Raffalovich in his Uranisme et Unisexualite, pp. 241-281; the full report of the trial has been published by Mason. The best life of Wilde is probably that of Arthur Ransome. Andre Gide's little volume of reminiscences, Oscar Wilde (also translated into English), is well worth reading. Wilde has been discussed in relation to homosexuality by Numa Praetorius (Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. iii, 1901). An instructive document, an unpublished portion of De Profundis, in which Wilde sought to lay the blame for his misfortune on a friend,—his "ancient affection" for whom has, he declares, been turned to "loathing, bitterness, and contempt,"—was published in the Times, 18th April, 1913; it clearly reveals an element of weakness of character.

[93] T. Wright, Life of Edward Fitzgerald, vol. i, p. 158.

[94] Most of these were carelessly lost or destroyed by Posh. A few have been published by James Blyth, Edward Fitzgerald and 'Posh,' 1908.

[95] It is as such that Whitman should be approached, and I would desire to protest against the tendency, now marked in many quarters, to treat him merely as an invert, and to vilify him or glorify him accordingly. However important inversion may be as a psychological key to Whitman's personality, it plays but a small part in Whitman's work, and for many who care for that work a negligible part. (I may be allowed to refer to my own essay on Whitman, in The New Spirit, written nearly thirty years ago.)

[96] I may add that Symonds (in his book on Whitman) accepted this letter as a candid and final statement showing that Whitman was absolutely hostile to sexual inversion, that he had not even taken its phenomena into account, and that he had "omitted to perceive that there are inevitable points of contact between sexual inversion and his doctrine of friendship." He recalls, however, Whitman's own lines at the end of "Calamus" in the Camden edition of 1876:—

"Here my last words, and the most baffling, Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting, Here I shade down and hide my thoughts—I do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems."

[97] Whitman's letters to Peter Doyle, an uncultured young tram-conductor deeply loved by the poet, have been edited by Dr. Bucke, and published at Boston: Calamus: A Series of Letters, 1897.

[98] Whitman acknowledged, however (as in the letter to Symonds already referred to), that he had had six children; they appear to have been born in the earlier part of his life when he lived in the South. (See a chapter on Walt Whitman's children in Edward Carpenter's interesting book, Days with Walt Whitman, 1906.) Yet his brother George Whitman said: "I never knew Walt to fall in love with young girls, or even to show them marked attention." And Doyle, who knew him intimately during ten years of late life, said: "Women in that sense never came into his head." The early heterosexual relationship seems to have been an exception in his life. With regard to the number of children I am informed that, in the opinion of a lady who knew Whitman in the South, there can be no reasonable doubt as to the existence of one child, but that when enumerating six he possibly included grandchildren.

[99] While the homosexual strain in Walt Whitman has been more or less definitely admitted by various writers, the most vigorous attempts to present the homosexual character of his personality and work are due to Eduard Bertz in Germany, and to Dr. W.C. Rivers in England. Bertz has issued three publications on Whitman: see especially his Der Yankee-Heiland, 1906, and Whitman-Mysterien, 1907. The arguments of Rivers are concisely stated in a pamphlet entitled Walt Whitman's Anomaly (London: George Allen, 1913). Both Bertz and Rivers emphasize the feminine traits in Whitman. An interesting independent picture of Whitman, at about the date of the letter to Symonds, accompanied by the author's excellent original photographs, is furnished by Dr. John Johnston, A Visit to Walt Whitman, 1898. It may be added that, probably, both the extent and the significance of the feminine traits in Whitman have been overestimated by some writers. Most artists and men of genius have some feminine traits; they do not prove the existence of inversion, nor does their absence disprove it. Dr. Clark Bell writes to me in reference to the little book by Dr. Rivers: "I knew Walt Whitman personally. To me Mr. Whitman was one of the most robust and virile of men, extraordinarily so. He was from my standpoint not feminine at all, but physically masculine and robust. The difficulty is that a virile and strong man who is poetic in temperament, ardent and tender, may have phases and moods of passion and emotion which are apt to be misinterpreted." A somewhat similar view, in opposition to Bertz and Rivers, has been vigorously set forth by Bazalgette (who has written a very thorough study of Whitman in French), especially in the Mercure de France for 1st July, 1st Oct., and 15th Nov., 1913.

[100] Lepelletier, in what may be regarded as the official biography of Verlaine (Paul Verlaine, 1907) seeks to minimize or explain away the homosexual aspect of the poet's life. So also Berrichon, Rimbaud's brother-in-law, Mercure de France, 16 July, 1911 and 1 Feb., 1912. P. Escoube, in a judicious essay (included in Preferences, 1913), presents a more reasonable view of this aspect of Verlaine's temperament. Even apart altogether from the evidence as to the poet's tendency to passionate friendship, there can be no appeal from the poems themselves, which clearly possess an absolute and unquestionable sincerity.

[101] Sir Richard Burton, who helped to popularize this view, regarded the phenomenon as "geographical and climatic, not racial," and held that within what he called the Sotadic Zone "the vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, while the races to the north and south of the limits here defined practice it only sporadically, amid the opprobrium of their fellows, who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation, and look upon it with the liveliest disgust." He adds: "The only physical cause for the practice which suggests itself to me, and that must be owned to be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments, a crasis which elsewhere only occurs sporadically" (Arabian Nights, 1885, vol. x, pp. 205-254). The theory of the Sotadic Zone fails to account for the custom among the Normans, Celts, Scythians, Bulgars, and Tartars, and, moreover, in various of these regions different views have prevailed at different periods. Burton was wholly unacquainted with the psychological investigations into sexual inversion which had, indeed, scarcely begun in his day.

[102] Spectator (Anthropophyteia, vol. vii, 1910), referring especially to the neighborhood of Sorrento, states that the southern Italians regard passive pedicatio as disgraceful, but attach little or no shame to active pedicatio. This indifference enables them to exploit the homosexual foreigners who are specially attracted to southern Italy in the development of a flourishing homosexual industry.

[103] It is true that in the solitude of great modern cities it is possible for small homosexual coteries to form, in a certain sense, an environment of their own, favorable to their abnormality; yet this fact hardly modifies the general statement made in the text.

[104] See especially Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitaet, chs. xxiv and xxv.

[105] Ulrichs, in his Argonauticus, in 1869, estimated the number as only 25,000, but admitted that this was probably a decided underestimate. Bloch (Die Prostitution, Bd. i, p. 792) has found reason to believe that in Cologne in the fifteenth century the percentage was nearly as high as Hirschfeld finds it today. A few years earlier Bloch had believed (Beitraege, part i, p. 215, 1902) that Hirschfeld's estimate of 2 per cent, was "sheer nonsense."

[106] Hirschfeld mentions the case of two men, artists, one of them married, who were intimate friends for a great many years before each discovered that the other was an invert.

[107] See articles by Numa Praetorius and Fernan, maintaining that homosexuality is at least as frequent in France (Sexual-Probleme, March and December, 1909).

[108] Dr. Laupts, L'Homosexualite, 1910, pp. 413, 420.

[109] Naecke, Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft, 1908, Heft 6.

[110] It is a fact significant of the French attitude toward homosexuality that the psychologist, Dr. Saint-Paul, when writing a book on this subject, though in a completely normal and correct manner, thought it desirable to adopt a pseudonym.

[111] A well-informed series of papers dealing with English homosexuality generally, and especially with London (L. Pavia, "Die maennliche Homosexualitaet in England," Vierteljahrsberichte des wissenschaftlich-humanitaeren Komitees, 1909-1911) will be found instructive even by those who are familiar with London. And see also Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitaet, ch. xxvi. Much information of historical nature concerning homosexuality in England will be found in Eugen Duehren (Iwan Bloch), Das Geschlechtsleben in England.

[112] This: is doubtless the reason why so many English inverts establish themselves outside England. Paris, Florence, Nice, Naples, Cairo, and other places, are said to swarm with homosexual Englishmen.



CHAPTER II.

THE STUDY OF SEXUAL INVERSION.

Westphal—Hoessli—Casper—Ulrichs—Krafft-Ebing—Moll—Fere—Kiernan— Lydston—Raffalovich—Edward Carpenter—Hirschfeld.

Westphal, an eminent professor of psychiatry at Berlin, may be said to be the first to put the study of sexual inversion on an assured scientific basis. In 1870 he published, in the Archiv fuer Psychiatrie, of which he was for many years editor, the detailed history of a young woman who, from her earliest years, differed from other girls: she liked to dress as a boy, only cared for boys' games, and as she grew up was sexually attracted only to women, with whom she formed a series of tender relationships, in which the friends obtained sexual gratification by mutual caresses; while she blushed and was shy in the presence of women, more especially the girl with whom she chanced to be in love, she was always absolutely indifferent in the presence of men. Westphal—a pupil, it may be noted, of Griesinger, who had already called attention to the high character sometimes shown by subjects of this perversion—combined keen scientific insight with a rare degree of personal sympathy for those who came under his care, and it was this combination of qualities which enabled him to grasp the true nature of a case such as this, which by most medical men at that time would have been hastily dismissed as a vulgar instance of vice or insanity. Westphal perceived that this abnormality was congenital, not acquired, so that it could not be termed vice; and, while he insisted on the presence of neurotic elements, his observations showed the absence of anything that could legitimately be termed insanity. He gave to this condition the name of "contrary sexual feeling" (Kontraere Sexualempfindung), by which it was long usually known in Germany. The way was thus made clear for the rapid progress of our knowledge of this abnormality. New cases were published in quick succession, at first exclusively in Germany, and more especially in Westphal's Archiv, but soon in other countries also, chiefly Italy and France.[113]

While Westphal was the first to place the study of sexual inversion on a progressive footing, many persons had previously obtained glimpses into the subject. Thus, in 1791, two cases were published[114] of men who showed a typical emotional attraction to their own sex, though it was not quite clearly made out that the inversion was congenital. In 1836, again, a Swiss writer, Heinrich Hoessli, published a rather diffuse but remarkable work, entitled Eros, which contained much material of a literary character bearing on this matter. He seems to have been moved to write this book by a trial which had excited considerable attention at that time. A man of good position had suddenly murdered a youth, and was executed for the crime, which, according to Hoessli, was due to homosexual love and jealousy. Hoessli was not a trained scholar; he was in business at Glarus as a skillful milliner, the most successful in the town. His own temperament is supposed to have been bisexual. His book was prohibited by the local authorities and at a later period the entire remaining stock was destroyed in a fire, so that its circulation was very small. It is now, however, regarded by some as the first serious attempt to deal with the problem of homosexuality since Plato's Banquet.[115]

Some years later, in 1852, Casper, the chief medico-legal authority of his time in Germany,—for it is in Germany that the foundations of the study of sexual inversion have been laid,—pointed out in Casper's Vierteljahrsschrift that pederasty, in a broad sense of the word, was sometimes a kind of "moral hermaphroditism," due to a congenital psychic condition, and also that it by no means necessarily involved sodomy (immissio penis in anum). Casper brought forward a considerable amount of valuable evidence concerning these cardinal points, which he was the first to note,[116] but he failed to realize the full significance of his observations, and they had no immediate influence, though Tardieu, in 1858, admitted a congenital element in some pederasts.

The man, however, who more than anyone else brought to light the phenomena of sexual inversion had not been concerned either with the medical or the criminal aspects of the matter. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (born in 1825 near Aurich), who for many years expounded and defended homosexual love, and whose views are said to have had some influence in drawing Westphal's attention to the matter, was a Hanoverian legal official (Amtsassessor), himself sexually inverted. From 1864 onward, at first under the name of "Numa Numantius" and subsequently under his own name, Ulrichs published, in various parts of Germany, a long series of works dealing with this question, and made various attempts to obtain a revision of the legal position of the sexual invert in Germany.

Although not a writer whose psychological views can carry much scientific weight, Ulrichs appears to have been a man of most brilliant ability, and his knowledge is said to have been of almost universal extent; he was not only well versed in his own special subjects of jurisprudence and theology, but in many branches of natural science, as well as in archeology; he was also regarded by many as the best Latinist of his time. In 1880 he left Germany and settled in Naples, and afterward at Aquila in the Abruzzi, whence he issued a Latin periodical. He died in 1895.[117] John Addington Symonds, who went to Aquila in 1891, wrote: "Ulrichs is chrysostomos to the last degree, sweet, noble, a true gentleman and man of genius. He must have been at one time a man of singular personal distinction, so finely cut are his features, and so grand the lines of his skull."[118]

For many years Ulrichs was alone in his efforts to gain scientific recognition for congenital homosexuality. He devised (with allusion to Uranos in Plato's Symposium) the word uranian or urning, ever since frequently used for the homosexual lover, while he called the normal heterosexual lover a dioning (from Dione). He regarded uranism, or homosexual love, as a congenital abnormality by which a female soul had become united with a male body—anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa—and his theoretical speculations have formed the starting point for many similar speculations. His writings are remarkable in various respects, although, on account of the polemical warmth with which, as one pleading pro domo, he argued his cause, they had no marked influence on scientific thought.[119]

This privilege was reserved for Westphal. After he had shown the way and thrown open his journal for their publication, new cases appeared in rapid succession. In Italy, also, Ritti, Tamassia, Lombroso, and others began to study these phenomena. In 1882 Charcot and Magnan published in the Archives de Neurologie the first important study which appeared in France concerning sexual inversion and allied sexual perversions. They regarded sexual inversion as an episode (syndrome) in a more fundamental process of hereditary degeneration, and compared it with such morbid obsessions as dipsomania and kleptomania. From a somewhat more medico-legal standpoint, the study of sexual inversion in France was furthered by Brouardel, and still more by Lacassagne, whose stimulating influence at Lyons has produced fruitful results in the work of many pupils.[120]

Of much more importance in the history of the theory of sexual inversion was the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing (born at Mannheim in 1840 and died at Graz in 1902), for many years professor of psychiatry at Vienna University and one of the most distinguished alienists of his time. While active in all departments of psychiatry and author of a famous textbook, from 1877 onward he took special interest in the pathology of the sexual impulse. His Psychopathia Sexualis contained over two hundred histories, not only of sexual inversion but of all other forms of sexual perversion. For many years it was the only book on the subject and it long remained the chief storehouse of facts. It passed through many editions and was translated into many languages (there are two translations in English), enjoying an immense and not altogether enviable vogue.

Krafft-Ebing's methods were open to some objection. His mind was not of a severely critical order. He poured out the new and ever-enlarged editions of his book with extraordinary rapidity, sometimes remodelling them. He introduced new subdivisions from time to time into his classification of sexual perversions, and, although this rather fine-spun classification has doubtless contributed to give precision to the subject and to advance its scientific study, it was at no time generally accepted. Krafft-Ebing's great service lay in the clinical enthusiasm with which he approached the study of sexual perversions. With the firm conviction that he was conquering a great neglected field of morbid psychology which rightly belongs to the physician, he accumulated without any false shame a vast mass of detailed histories, and his reputation induced sexually abnormal individuals in all directions to send him their autobiographies, in the desire to benefit their fellow-sufferers.

It is as a clinician, rather than as a psychologist, that we must regard Krafft-Ebing. At the outset he considered inversion to be a functional sign of degeneration, a partial manifestation of a neuropathic and psychopathic state which is in most cases hereditary. This perverse sexuality appears spontaneously with the developing sexual life, without external causes, as the individual manifestation of an abnormal modification of the vita sexualis, and must then be regarded as congenital; or it develops as a result of special injurious influences working on a sexuality which had at first been normal, and must then be regarded as acquired. Careful investigation of these so-called acquired cases, however, Krafft-Ebing in the end finally believed, would indicate that the predisposition consists in a latent homosexuality, or at least bisexuality, which requires for its manifestation the operation of accidental causes. In the last edition of his work Krafft-Ebing was inclined to regard inversion as being not so much a degeneration as a variation, a simple anomaly, and acknowledged that his opinion thus approximated to that which had long been held by inverts themselves.[121]

At the time of his death, Krafft-Ebing, who had begun by accepting the view, at that time prevalent among alienists, that homosexuality is a sign of degeneration, thus fully adopted and set the seal of his authority on the view, already expressed alike by some scientific investigators as well as by inverts themselves, that sexual inversion is to be regarded simply as an anomaly, whatever difference of opinion there might be as to the value of the anomaly. The way was even opened for such a view as that of Freud and most of the psychoanalysts today who regard a strain of homosexuality as normal and almost constant, with a profound significance for the psychonervous life. In 1891 Dr. Albert Moll, of Berlin, published his work, Die Kontraere Sexualempfindung, which subsequently appeared in much enlarged and revised editions. It speedily superseded all previous books as a complete statement and judicious discussion of sexual inversion. Moll was not content merely to present fresh clinical material. He attacked the problem which had now become of primary importance: the nature and causes of sexual inversion. He discussed the phenomena as a psychologist even more than as a physician, bearing in mind the broader aspects of the problem, keenly critical of accepted opinions, but judiciously cautious in the statement of conclusions. He cleared away various ancient prejudices and superstitions which even Krafft-Ebing sometimes incautiously repeated. He accepted the generally received doctrine that the sexually inverted usually belong to families in which various nervous and mental disorders prevail, but he pointed out at the same time that it is not in all cases possible to prove that we are concerned with individuals possessing a hereditary neurotic taint. He also rejected any minute classification of sexual inverts, only recognizing psycho-sexual hermaphroditism and homosexuality. At the same time he cast doubt on the existence of acquired homosexuality, in a strict sense, except in occasional cases, and he pointed out that even when a normal heterosexual impulse appears at puberty, and a homosexual impulse later, it may still be the former that was acquired and the latter that was inborn.

In America attention had been given to the phenomena at a fairly early period. Mention may be specially made of J.G. Kiernan and G. Frank Lydston, both of whom put forward convenient classifications of homosexual manifestations some thirty years ago.[122] More recently (1911) an American writer, under the pseudonym of Xavier Mayne, privately printed an extensive work entitled The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life, popularly written and compiled from many sources. This book, from a subjective and scarcely scientific standpoint, claims that homosexual relationships are natural, necessary, and legitimate.[123]

In England the first attempts to deal seriously, from the modern point of view, with the problem of homosexuality came late, and were either published privately or abroad. In 1883 John Addington Symonds privately printed his discussion of paiderastia in ancient Greece, under the title of A Problem in Greek Ethics, and in 1889-1890 he further wrote, and in 1891 privately printed, A Problem of Modern Ethics: Being an Enquiry into the Phenomena of Sexual Inversion. In 1886 Sir Richard Burton added to his translation of the Arabian Nights a Terminal Essay on the same subject. In 1894 Edward Carpenter privately printed in Manchester a pamphlet entitled Homogenic Love, in which he criticised various psychiatric views of inversion at that time current, and claimed that the laws of homosexual love are the same as those of heterosexual love, urging, however, that the former possesses a special aptitude to be exalted to a higher and more spiritual level of comradeship, so fulfilling a beneficent social function. More recently (1907) Edward Carpenter published a volume of papers on homosexuality and its problems, under the title of The Intermediate Sex, and later (1914) a more special study of the invert in early religion and in warfare, Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk.

In 1896 the most comprehensive book so far written on the subject in England was published in French by Mr. Andre Raffalovich (in Lacassagne's Bibliotheque de Criminologie), Uranisme et Unisexualite. This book dealt chiefly with congenital inversion, publishing no new cases, but revealing a wide knowledge of the matter. Raffalovich put forward many just and sagacious reflections on the nature and treatment of inversion, and the attitude of society toward perverted sexuality. The historical portions of the book, which are of special interest, deal largely with the remarkable prevalence of inversion in England, neglected by previous investigators. Raffalovich, whose attitude is, on the whole, philosophical rather than scientific, regards congenital inversion as a large and inevitable factor in human life, but, taking the Catholic standpoint, he condemns all sexuality, either heterosexual or homosexual, and urges the invert to restrain the physical manifestations of his instinct and to aim at an ideal of chastity. On the whole, it may be said that the book is the work of a thinker who has reached his own results in his own way, and those results bear an imprint of originality and freedom from tradition.

In recent years no one has so largely contributed to place our knowledge of sexual inversion on a broad and accurate basis as Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld of Berlin, who possesses an unequalled acquaintance with the phenomena of homosexuality in all their aspects. He has studied the matter exhaustively in Germany and to some extent in other countries also; he has received the histories of a thousand inverts; he is said to have met over ten thousand homosexual persons. As editor of the Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, which he established in 1899, and author of various important monographs—more especially on transitional psychic and physical stages between masculinity and femininity—Hirschfeld had already contributed greatly to the progress of investigation in this field before the appearance in 1914 of his great work, Die Homosexualitaet des Mannes und des Weibes. This is not only the largest but the most precise, detailed, and comprehensive—even the most condensed—work which has yet appeared on the subject. It is, indeed, an encyclopedia of homosexuality. For such a task Hirschfeld had been prepared by many years of strenuous activity as a physician, an investigator, a medico-legal expert before the courts, and his position as president of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitaeren Komitee which is concerned with the defense of the interests of the homosexual in Germany. In Hirschfeld's book the pathological conception of inversion has entirely disappeared; homosexuality is regarded as primarily a biological phenomenon of universal extension, and secondarily as a social phenomenon of serious importance. There is no attempt to invent new theories; the main value of Hirschfeld's work lies, indeed, in the constant endeavor to keep close to definite facts. It is this quality which renders the book an indispensable source for all who seek enlightened and precise information on this question.

Even the existence of such a treatise as this of Hirschfeld's is enough to show how rapidly the study of this subject has grown. A few years ago—for instance, when Dr. Paul Moreau wrote his Aberrations du Sens Genesique—sexual inversion was scarcely even a name. It was a loathsome and nameless vice, only to be touched with a pair of tongs, rapidly and with precautions. As it now presents itself, it is a psychological and medico-legal problem so full of interest that we need not fear to face it, and so full of grave social actuality that we are bound to face it.

FOOTNOTES:

[113] In England aberration of the sexual instinct, or the tendency of men to feminine occupations and of women to masculine occupations, had been referred to in the Medical Times and Gazette, February 9, 1867; Sir G. Savage first described a case of "Sexual Perversion" in the Journal of Mental Science, vol. xxx, October, 1884.

[114] Moritz, Magazin fuer Erfahrungsseelenkunde, Berlin, Bd. viii.

[115] A full and interesting account of Hoessli and his book is given by Karsch in the Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. v, 1903, pp. 449-556.

[116] "Eugen Duehren" (Iwan Bloch) remarks, however (Neue Forschungen ueber den Marquis de Sade und seine Zeit, p. 436), that de Sade in his Aline et Valcour seems to recognize that inversion is sometimes inborn, or at least natural, and apt to develop at a very early age, in spite of all provocations to the normal attitude. "And if this inclination were not natural," he makes Sarmiento say, "would the impression of it be received in childhood?... Let us study better this indulgent Nature before daring to fix her limits." Still earlier, in 1676 (as Schouten has pointed out, Sexual-Probleme, January, 1910, p. 66), an Italian priest called Carretto recognized that homosexual tendencies are innate.

[117] For some account of Ulrichs see Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. i, 1899, p. 36.

[118] Horatio Brown, John Addington Symonds, a Biography, vol. ii, p. 344.

[119] Ulrichs scarcely went so far as to assert that both homosexual and heterosexual love are equally normal and healthy; this has, however, been argued more recently.

[120] Special mention may be made of L'Inversion Sexuelle, a copious and comprehensive, though sometimes uncritical book by Dr. J. Chevalier, published in 1893, and the Perversion et Perversite Sexuelles of Dr. Saint-Paul, writing under the pseudonym of "Dr. Laupts," published in 1896 and republished in an enlarged form, under the title of L'Homosexualite et les Types Homosexuels, in 1910.

[121] Krafft-Ebing set forth his latest views in a paper read before the International Medical Congress, at Paris, in 1900 (Comptes-rendus, "Section de Psychiatrie," pp. 421, 462; also in contributions to the Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. iii, 1901).

[122] Kiernan, Detroit Lancet, 1884, Alienist and Neurologist, April, 1891; Lydston, Philadelphia Medical and Surgical Reporter, September 7, 1889, and Addresses and Essays, 1892.

[123] A summary of the conclusion of this book, of which but few copies were printed, will be found in Hirschfeld's Vierteljahrsberichte, October, 1911, pp. 78-91.



CHAPTER III.

SEXUAL INVERSION IN MEN.

Relatively Undifferentiated State of the Sexual Impulse in Early Life—The Freudian View—Homosexuality in Schools—The Question of Acquired Homosexuality—Latent Inversion—Retarded Inversion—Bisexuality—The Question of the Invert's Truthfulness—Histories.

When the sexual instinct first appears in early youth, it is much less specialized than normally it becomes later. Not only is it, at the outset, less definitely directed to a specific sexual end, but even the sex of its object is sometimes uncertain.[124] This has always been so well recognized that those in authority over young men have sometimes forced women upon them to avoid the risk of possible unnatural offenses.[125]

The institution which presents these phenomena to us in the most marked and the most important manner is, naturally, the school, in England especially the Public School. In France, where the same phenomena are noted, Tarde called attention to these relationships, "most usually Platonic in the primitive meaning of the word, which indicate a simple indecision of frontier between friendship and love, still undifferentiated in the dawn of the awakening heart," and he regretted that no one had studied them. In England we are very familiar with vague allusions to the vices of public schools. From time to time we read letters in the newspapers denouncing public schools as "hot-beds of vice" and one anonymous writer remarks that "some of our public schools almost provoke the punishment of the cities of the Plain."[126] But these allegations are rarely or never submitted to accurate investigation. The physicians and masters of public schools who are in a position to study the matter usually possess no psychological training, and appear to view homosexuality with too much disgust to care to pay any careful attention to it. What knowledge they possess they keep to themselves, for it is considered to be in the interests of public schools that these things should be hushed up. When anything very scandalous occurs one or two lads are expelled, to their own grave and, perhaps, lifelong injury, and without benefit to those who remain, whose awakening sexual life rarely receives intelligent sympathy.