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There is nothing to be curious about. It is all as much a matter of course to him as the rising of the sun. And he is safeguarded against a certain pruriency that comes from wrongly stimulated and vilely fed curiosity. Instead of causing the child to think more about the subject, the tendency of good teaching is to prevent his thinking of it.
The pages of The Spectator, of The Saturday Review, of The Athenæum, of The London Examiner, of The Nation, are full of reviews which denounce in unmeasured terms the vulgarity and pruriency of much of the fiction of the present day. But their censure can have little practical effect.
Every 2 x 4 newspaper man who thinks he has a mission, every preacher who desires to make a sensation in the pulpit, every maiden novelist whose feminine mind battens in pruriency, every old maid who has missed her opportunity to be manhandled and wishes to reform a race she has done nothing to increase, every two-for-a-quarter evangelist between Bangor and Los Angeles is talking a lung out for the public on the subject of making the stage higher and better.
But where man is concerned these facts are so largely made to serve the purposes of pruriency, so exploited to inflame the imagination in an undesirable and directly harmful way that they can be approached only with the utmost caution.
We have had concerning sex not knowledge, but a series of attitudes, the attitude of virtue, the attitude of pruriency, the attitude of good taste, the attitude of the theoretic libertine, the attitude of the satyr's vulgarity. All these poses, of course, have supplied not an iota to an understanding of the foundations of the problems of sex, biologically considered.
It is a terrible misfortune for this same book of mine, but more so to the Republick of letters; so that my own is quite swallowed up in the consideration of it, that this self-same vile pruriency for fresh adventures in all things, has got so strongly into our habit and humour, and so wholly intent are we upon satisfying the impatience of our concupiscence that way, that nothing but the gross and more carnal parts of a composition will go down: The subtle hints and sly communications of science fly off, like spirits upwards, the heavy moral escapes downwards; and both the one and the other are as much lost to the world, as if they were still left in the bottom of the ink-horn.
Over the wine young Silk cajoled the senior member of the firm, and in the drawing-room, sitting by the wife, he alluded to his father's philanthropic duties, which he relieved with such sniggering and pruriency as he thought the occasion demanded. About six months ago, Mr.
With what good-humour the rosy sinner confesses her sins! how hilarious she is in her repentance! "The Miller's Tale" is coarse and full-flavoured, just the kind of thing to be told by a rough, humourous fellow who is hardly yet sober. And here it may be said that although there is a good deal of coarseness in the "Canterbury Tales," there is not the slightest tinge of pruriency.
It is manifested, for instance, in the greater openness of a man's sexual life. "While he formerly slinked into a brothel in a remote street," Dr. The thing is becoming more commonplace, more natural." It is also, Hellpach proceeds to point out, thus becoming more moral also, and much unwholesome prudery and pruriency is being done away with.
There never was an age in which outspoken honesty was indecent. There never was an age in which pruriency in any guise could cease to be indecent.
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