about nakedness to an unreasoning but imperative convention is the tendency to prudishness.  This, as we know, is a form of pseudo-modesty which, being a convention, and not a natural feeling, is capable of unlimited extension.  It is by no means confined to modern times or to Christian Europe.  The ancient Hebrews were not entirely free from prudishness, and we find in the Old Testament that by a curious euphemism the sexual organs are sometimes referred to as “the feet.”  The Turks are capable of prudishness.  So, indeed, were even the ancient Greeks.  “Dion the philosopher tells us,” remarks Clement of Alexandria (Stromates, Bk.  IV, Ch.  XIX) “that a certain woman, Lysidica, through excess of modesty, bathed in her clothes, and that Philotera, when she was to enter the bath, gradually drew back her tunic as the water covered her naked parts; and then rising by degrees, put it on.”  Mincing prudes were found among the early Christians, and their ways are graphically described by St. Jerome in one of his letters to Eustochium:  “These women,” he says, “speak between their teeth or with the edge of the lips, and with a lisping tongue, only half pronouncing their words, because they regard as gross whatever is natural.  Such as these,” declares Jerome, the scholar in him overcoming the ascetic, “corrupt even language.”  Whenever a new and artificial “modesty” is imposed upon savages prudery tends to arise.  Haddon describes this among the natives of Torres Straits, where even the children now suffer from exaggerated prudishness, though formerly absolutely naked and unashamed (Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. v, p. 271).

The nineteenth century, which witnessed the triumph of timidity and prudery in this matter, also produced the first fruitful germ of new conceptions of nakedness.  To some extent these were embodied in the great Romantic movement.  Rousseau, indeed, had placed no special insistence on nakedness as an element of the return to Nature which he preached so influentially.  A new feeling in this matter emerged, however, with characteristic extravagance, in some of the episodes of the Revolution, while in Germany in the pioneering Lucinde of Friedrich Schlegel, a characteristic figure in the Romantic movement, a still unfamiliar conception of the body was set forth in a serious and earnest spirit.

In England, Blake with his strange and flaming genius, proclaimed a mystical gospel which involved the spiritual glorification of the body and contempt for the civilized worship of clothes ("As to a modern man,” he wrote, “stripped from his load of clothing he is like a dead corpse"); while, later, in America, Thoreau and Whitman and Burroughs asserted, still more definitely, a not dissimilar message concerning the need of returning to Nature.