Читать книгу The Erotic Motive in Literature - Albert Mordell - Страница 9

Table of Contents

Psychology has in recent years investigated the unconscious day dreams which are now recognised as part of our imaginative life. No matter how religious or moral we may be, erotic fancies are always with us. This mental life has often been described in mediæval literature in the accounts of sensuous visions which tempted saints. The authors who aimed at inculcating moral and religious lessons thus gave vent to their own erotic fancies in the alluring and enticing verbal pictures they drew. Many instances thus appear in puritanical and ascetic literature, of immorality and exhibitionism.

We are learning to deal directly with a phase of our lives, whose influence upon our happiness can scarcely be overestimated. We must first admit the reality of the fantasies that occupy so much of our existence. Out of them bloom as a flower the emotions which are associated with the noblest sentiments in human nature—love. How these fancies may be sublimated into higher purposes, like beautiful deeds and works of art, how they may be directed into the channels of love, how they may be partly gratified without impairing the finer instincts of man, are problems which are being made the subject of serious study. It is also being realised that these fancies increase in vividness, number and variety where, for economic and conventional reasons, means of normal love life are cut off. It is also being admitted that much of the mental misery and physical debility of many people is due to the absurd asceticism forced upon us in sex matters by our modern civilisation.

We must learn to discuss, in a sincere manner, the nature and tendencies of the erotic in our lives. Scientists have the privilege of speaking openly on the subject; many literary men who have claimed the same freedom have used it, however, to evolve pornographic works for commercial purposes. Yet no literary man to-day would be permitted to discuss sexual questions with the frankness of Montaigne in his essay "Upon Some Verses of Virgil."

Let us examine the word "erotic" itself. Unfortunately it has assumed an unsavoury meaning, although it means "related to love" and is derived from the Greek word "eros"—love. It has been used to designate the perverse and the immoral in sex matters; it has been made synonymous with lust, abnormality, excess and every unpleasant feature in regard to sex matters. Pater once complained that he did not like the use of the word "hedonism" because of the misapprehension created in the minds of people who did not understand Greek. The same objection may be brought against the use of the word "eroticism." Properly speaking all love poetry is erotic poetry; in fact the greatness of poetry and literature is its eroticism, for they are most true then to life, which is largely erotic. To call a great poet like Paul Verlaine erotic is a compliment, not a disparagement. Nor is he nearly as erotic as the author of The Song of Songs. Since there is no word in English to specify love interest in its widest sense, we must cling to the use of the words "erotic" and "eroticism." We should restore to the word "eroticism" its original and nobler meaning.

Any literary work that lays an emphasis on the part played by love in our lives is erotic. Literature could not exist without dwelling on the love interest. The stories of Jacob and Rachel, of Ruth, and of David and Uriah's wife, are all beautiful examples of eroticism in the Bible.

Man is averse to admitting certain facts about his mental love life. People are often shocked by the immorality of the dreams which reveal their unconscious lives. A man, however, will often confess in intimate circles the existence of sensuous fancies within himself. People show indications in many ways of the parts played by the love and sex interests in their mental lives. Some witness suggestive plays; others indulge in telling and hearing lewd jests, indecent witticisms and improper stories. Any one who has listened to the conversation of men in the club or smoker, in the factory or office, in the bar-room or sitting room, cannot be blind to the fact that the erotic interests rule us far more than we wish to admit. He who thinks that the wealthy are too much absorbed in accumulating more riches and the poor too much worn out by the struggle for existence, to be occupied with erotic fancies, is mistaken. A day spent in a factory or an evening at a club will show one that the millionaire and the pauper are brothers under their skins.

Man's nature is erotic to its very foundations; he was erotic, in infancy, in his own way; he carries within him all the erotic instincts of millions of ancestors for thousands of years back. His eroticism extends to many sensitive areas of his body like his lips, the palms of his hands, his chest and back. Eroticism often is hidden in an interest in many subjects which are apparently unrelated to it, an interest which is a compensation to one for his lack of love. Man's first real combined physical and spiritual suffering commences at puberty when he hears new and strange voices in his soul calling for a reply to which there is no answer. He discovers that society is so constituted that he must spend his youth, when the passions are at their height, in unnaturally curbing or misdirecting them. He often discovers later that even marriage is not a full satisfaction for his love instincts.

Though man has refused to concede the importance that the erotic has played in his life, his fellow men who were poets spoke for him. They did not conceal the truth, for the words in which their emotions were couched betrayed them. Often the people persecuted their spokesman for uttering the truth, though they delighted in secretly reading his books.

The "purist" to-day is often the one who revels (in private) most in obscene literature; while many people find in such literature the only means they have of indulging their ungratified love life. Many book-sellers make a specialty of furnishing pornographic books and pictures to many roués and celibates.

The mere interest, however, in a virile and unhypocritical literary work like a novel by Fielding or Smollett, does not indicate abnormal eroticism in the reader. In fact, it is often a sign of some unhealthy tendency or starvation in human nature when a person shrinks from honest and frank literature. The school-boy or college student who reads in stealth De Foe's novel Roxana, instead of Robinson Crusoe, who turns from his Greek version of Aristophanes to the translation of Lysistrata, or who wearies of Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and tries to read in spite of the old English "The Miller's Tale" or "The Reeve's Tale," is not an immoral youngster. The reader who not having read these works may look them up (now that they have been mentioned) is not therefore an indecent or abnormal person. The school-boy's as well as the reader's interest is each additional proof of the erotic in us.

The real lover of literature who has read most of the Latin poets, English dramatists and French novels is soon in the position where the "erotic" portions do not assume for him the vast importance they have for the reader who merely hunts them out and takes no interest in any other passages but these.

Bayle, whose Dictionary abounds in many risqué stories, defended himself in an excellent essay called "Explanation Concerning Obscenities." He said there very aptly:

"If any one was so great a lover of purity, as to wish not only that no immodest desire should arise in his mind, but also that his imagination should be constantly free from every obscene idea, he could not attain his end without losing his eyes and his ears, and the remembrance of many things which he could not choose but see and hear. Such a perfection could not be hoped for, whilst we see men and beasts, and know the significance of certain words that make a necessary part of our language. It is not in our power to have, or not to have, certain ideas, when certain objects strike our senses; they are imprinted in our imagination whether we will or not. Chastity is not endangered by them, provided we don't grow fond of them."