We must, indeed, always protest against the absurd confusion whereby nakedness of speech is regarded as equivalent to immorality, and not the less because it is often adopted even in what are regarded as intellectual quarters.  When in the House of Lords, in the last century, the question of the exclusion of Byron’s statue from Westminster Abbey was under discussion, Lord Brougham “denied that Shakespeare was more moral than Byron.  He could, on the contrary, point out in a single page of Shakespeare more grossness than was to be found in all Lord Byron’s works.”  The conclusion Brougham thus reached, that Byron is an incomparably more moral writer than Shakespeare, ought to have been a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of his argument, but it does not appear that anyone pointed out the vulgar confusion into which he had fallen.

It may be said that the special attractiveness which the nakedness of great literature sometimes possesses for young minds is unwholesome.  But it must be remembered that the peculiar interest of this element is merely due to the fact that elsewhere there is an inveterate and abnormal concealment.  It must also be said that the statements of the great writers about natural things are never degrading, nor even erotically exciting to the young, and what Emilia Pardo Bazan tells of herself and her delight when a child in the historical books of the Old Testament, that the crude passages in them failed to send the faintest cloud of trouble across her young imagination, is equally true of most children.  It is necessary, indeed, that these naked and serious things should be left standing, even if only to counterbalance the lewdly comic efforts to besmirch love and sex, which are visible to all in every low-class bookseller’s shop window.

This point of view was vigorously championed by the speakers on sexual education at the Third Congress of the German Gesellschaft zur Bekaempfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in 1907.  Thus Enderlin, speaking as a headmaster, protested against the custom of bowdlerizing poems and folk-songs for the use of children, and thus robbing them of the finest introduction to purified sexual impulses and the highest sphere of emotion, while at the same time they are recklessly exposed to the “psychic infection” of the vulgar comic papers everywhere exposed for sale.  “So long as children are too young to respond to erotic poetry it cannot hurt them; when they are old enough to respond it can only benefit them by opening to them the highest and purest channels of human emotion” (Sexualpaedagogik, p. 60).  Professor Schaefenacker (id., p. 98) expresses himself in the same sense, and remarks that “the method of removing from school-books all those passages which, in the opinion of short-sighted and narrow-hearted schoolmasters, are unsuited for youth, must be decisively condemned.”