It is quite true that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many men of high moral and intellectual distinction pronounced very decidedly their condemnation of the ideal of chastity.  The great Buffon refused to recognize chastity as an ideal and referred scornfully to “that kind of insanity which has turned a girl’s virginity into a thing with a real existence,” while William Morris, in his downright manner, once declared at a meeting of the Fellowship of the New Life, that asceticism is “the most disgusting vice that afflicted human nature.”  Blake, though he seems always to have been a strictly moral man in the most conventional sense, felt nothing but contempt for chastity, and sometimes confers a kind of religious solemnity on the idea of unchastity.  Shelley, who may have been unwise in sexual matters but can scarcely be called unchaste, also often seems to associate religion and morality, not with chastity, but with unchastity, and much the same may be said of James Hinton.[69]

But all these men—­with other men of high character who have pronounced similar opinions—­were reacting against false, decayed, and conventional forms of chastity.  They were not rebelling against an ideal; they were seeking to set up an ideal in a place where they realized that a mischievous pretense was masquerading as a moral reality.

We cannot accept an ideal of chastity unless we ruthlessly cast aside all the unnatural and empty forms of chastity.  If chastity is merely a fatiguing effort to emulate in the sexual sphere the exploits of professional fasting men, an effort using up all the energies of the organism and resulting in no achievement greater than the abstinence it involves, then it is surely an unworthy ideal.  If it is a feeble submission to an external conventional law which there is no courage to break, then it is not an ideal at all.  If it is a rule of morality imposed by one sex on the opposite sex, then it is an injustice and provocative of revolt.  If it is an abstinence from the usual forms of sexuality, replaced by more abnormal or more secret forms, then it is simply an unreality based on misconception.  And if it is merely an external acceptance of conventions without any further acceptance, even in act, then it is a contemptible farce.  These are the forms of chastity which during the past two centuries many fine-souled men have vigorously rejected.

The fact that chastity, or asceticism, is a real virtue, with fine uses, becomes evident when we realize that it has flourished at all times, in connection with all kinds of religions and the most various moral codes.  We find it pronounced among savages, and the special virtues of savagery—­hardness, endurance, and bravery—­are intimately connected with the cultivation of chastity and asceticism.[70] It is true that savages seldom have any ideal of chastity in the degraded modern sense, as a state of permanent abstinence from sexual relationships having a merit