LITMIR.BIZ

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Love alone should be the fount from which revelations should flow; the master, from the very nature of his position, cannot reveal.

      "An imminent breakdown in health—due, it would now appear, to quite obvious causes—relieved me from the purgatory of the college dormitory, and I was removed to one of the private houses. These establishments were considered more select and less 'rough.' The social atmosphere was, however, perhaps more unwholesome, because more effeminate, and was full of noble young sucklings. The nominal head of the house under normal conditions might have been a real leader; as it was, the real head of the house was a gilded young pariah, fairly low down in the school and full of hypocrisy and unnatural lusts. The boy who occupied the cubicle next to mine was also a bad case of sexual misdirection, though he had not the social distinction to make him quite so refined a terror. I had every opportunity of watching him until, two years later, he was fortunately asked to leave. He talked bawd from morning till night, got drunk on one or two occasions, masturbated constantly without concealment, had several of the younger boys inter femora, though without evincing any care or affection for them, and gave one the impression of having been born for a brothel. His one redeeming quality was an element of good nature: a characteristic one often finds among such as are selfish and irresponsible. I have since been told that he has gone completely to the dogs. Whether this young cub's sexual instincts could have been turned or guided I do not know; but in a rougher and simpler life than that of a public school, in a more open and less hypocritical atmosphere, he might, perhaps, have been licked into better shape. Hypocrisy is a vice, however, that schoolboys themselves are fortunately free from. It comes later. The tone among the boys was frankly and violently unclean, though unclean not from instinct, but from want of direction and from repression.

      "I have not a single happy recollection of this period of my school life. Yet out of this morass of misbegotten virtues I plucked my first blossom of genuine affection. I call it a blossom because it never ripened even to flower. I had been given the extreme of filth to feed upon at the outset, and now I found for myself the extreme of chastity. It will be a matter of lifelong regret to me that the love which was the lodestar of my school years was never fulfilled or set upon a sound basis of comradeship.

      "When I was about 16½ years old there came into the house a boy about two years younger than myself, and who became the absorbing thought of my school days. I do not remember a moment, from the time I first saw him to the time I left school, that I was not in love with him, and the affection was reciprocated, if somewhat reservedly. He was always a little ahead of me in books and scholarship, but as our affection ripened we spent most of our spare time together, and he received my advances much as a girl who is being wooed, a little mockingly, perhaps, but with real pleasure. He allowed me to fondle and caress him, but our intimacy never went further than a kiss, and about that even was the slur of shame; there was always a barrier between us, and we never so much as whispered to one another concerning those things of which all the school obscenely talked. Any connection between our own emotions and the sexual morals of the school never occurred to us. In fact, we lived a dream-life of chastity that could not relate itself to any human conditions. This was suddenly broken in upon. My friend was very beautiful and an object of attraction to others. That some of the elder boys had made offers of sexual intercourse to him I knew, but to him, as to me, that was unspeakable wickedness. One day I heard that four or five of these suitors of his had mishandled him; they had, I believe, taken off his trousers and attempted to masturbate him. The offense was probably horse play of an animal nature; to me it seemed an unpardonable offense. The matter had been reported to the master by a servant, but confirmatory evidence was needed before punishment could follow. I was torn asunder by passions I could not then analyze and in the end committed the greatest of schoolboy crimes—I sneaked. The action under the circumstances was courageous, but I was indifferent so long as the boy I loved judged me rightly. The result was that at the close of the term four or five of the senior boys were 'asked to leave.' The remaining brief period of my school life, which had previously been a living hell, became really happy. That this should have been brought about to the harm of four or five boys whose sin, after all, was but a misdirected impulse for which the system was responsible, seems to me now all very wrong. Of the boys sent away, however, certainly three have made honorable careers. For my friend and I, we became more afraid of each other than before; as our affections increased, so our fear of them increased also. The friendship was too ethereal to live; but even yet we still have a deep respect for one another.

      "When at the age of 19 I left school I was allowed to knock about for a year before entering college. During this time I picked up a sexual experience that may or may not have been a valuable one, I certainly look back upon it now, with regret, if not with horror. My father had discovered, some months before this date, that I was in the habit of masturbating, and he gave me what he conceived to be the right counsel under the circumstances: 'If you do this,' he said, 'you will never be able to use your penis with a woman. Therefore your best plan will be to go with a prostitute. Should you do this, however, you will probably pick up a beastly disease. Therefore the safest way would be to do it abroad if you get the chance, for there the houses are licensed.' Having delivered himself of this advice he troubled himself no further in the matter, but left me to work out my own destiny. The great physician, to whom I was taken about this time, also gave me his advice on this point. 'Masturbation,' he said, 'is death. A number of young men come to me with the same story. I tell them they are killing themselves, and you will kill yourself, too.' The doctor's hope was apparently to frighten his young patients into what he conceived to be natural conditions of life, and one went away from him with the impression that every sexual manifestation in one's self was a physical infirmity, due to one's own moral weakness. It took me some time before I could make up my mind to follow my father's advice, but after a period of real moral agony I deliberately and entirely in cold blood acted upon it. I sought out a scarlet woman in the streets of—— and went home with her. From something she said to me I know that I gave her pleasure, and she asked me to come to her again. This I did twice, but without any real pleasure. The whole thing was too sordid and soulless, and the man who decides to take an evil medicine regularly has first to make up his mind that he really needs it.

      "At about the same time I chanced to be, for a few months, in a German university town, and I determined, as I had the opportunity, to carry the parental advice to the logical conclusion. I tried a licensed house. The place was clean and decent, and the conditions, I take it, such as one would normally find in any properly regulated continental city; but to me the whole thing appeared unspeakably horrible. It was a purely commercial transaction, and it had not even the redeeming element of risk to one's self, or of offense against a social or disciplinary code. I came away feeling that I had touched bottom in my sexual experiences, and I understood what it was that Faust saw when the red mouse sprang from the mouth of the witch in the Walpurgis dance.

      "These were the only occasions upon which I have had sexual intercourse with women. Looking back to them now, they appear to me to have been almost inevitable; but if I had my life over again I would shun them as I would a lethal draught. I believe I came out of the fire unscathed; probably, indeed, it did me good, in the sense that it made it possible for me to look deeper into life; though to what extent seeing the torments of the damned makes us do this, perhaps only a Dante could tell. To gain knowledge at the expense of the shame and misery of others I hold to be fundamentally wrong and immoral. What is to me, however, the chief and bitterest thought is that I flung away the first spring of manhood where I got no love in return. His virginity is, or should be, as glorious and sacred a possession to a youth as to a maiden; to be guarded jealously; to be given only at the call of love, to one who loves him—be it comrade, mistress, or wife—and whom he can love in return.

      "The full university life into which I now entered at the age of 20 brought with it a flood of new ideas, feelings and sensations. The friendships I made there will always remain the central ones in my life. Up to my last term at college at the age of 24 I still wore my chain-mail of artificial chastity; but then a change gradually set in, and I began to understand the relationship of the physical phenomena of sex to its intellectual and imaginative manifestations. (I was not destined to fully realize this for some years and then exclusively through and out of my own personal experience.) It was the study of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass that first brought me light upon this question. Hitherto I had kept the two things locked up, as it

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