IV. _The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution:_--The Decay of the Brothel--The Tendency to the Humanization of Prostitution--The Monetary Aspects of Prostitution--The Geisha--The Hetaira--The Moral Revolt Against Prostitution--Squalid Vice Based on Luxurious Virtue--The Ordinary Attitude Towards Prostitutes--Its Cruelty Absurd--The Need of Reforming Prostitution--The Need of Reforming Marriage--These These Two Needs Closely Correlated--The Dynamic Relationships Involved.
Traditional morality, religion, and established convention combine to promote not only the extreme of rigid abstinence but also that of reckless license. They preach and idealize the one extreme; they drive those who cannot accept it to adopt the opposite extreme. In the great ages of religion it even happens that the severity of the rule of abstinence is more or less deliberately tempered by the permission for occasional outbursts of license. We thus have the orgy, which flourished in mediæval days and is, indeed, in its largest sense, a universal manifestation, having a function to fulfil in every orderly and laborious civilization, built up on natural energies that are bound by more or less inevitable restraints.
The consideration of the orgy, it may be said, lifts us beyond the merely sexual sphere, into a higher and wider region which belongs to religion. The Greek _orgeia_ referred originally to ritual things done with a religious purpose, though later, when dances of Bacchanals and the like lost their sacred and inspiring character, the idea was fostered by Christianity that such things were immoral.[107] Yet Christianity was itself in its origin an orgy of the higher spiritual activities released from the uncongenial servitude of classic civilization, a great festival of the poor and the humble, of the slave and the sinner. And when, with the necessity for orderly social organization, Christianity had ceased to be this it still recognized, as Paganism had done, the need for an occasional orgy. It appears that in 743 at a Synod held in Hainault reference was made to the February debauch (_de Spurcalibus in februario_) as a pagan practice; yet it was precisely this pagan festival which was embodied in the accepted customs of the Christian Church as the chief orgy of the ecclesiastical year, the great Carnival prefixed to the long fast of Lent. The celebration on Shrove Tuesday and the previous Sunday constituted a Christian Bacchanalian festival in which all classes joined. The greatest freedom and activity of physical movement was encouraged; "some go about naked without shame, some crawl on all fours, some on stilts, some imitate animals."[108] As time went on the Carnival lost its most strongly marked Bacchanalian features, but it still retains its essential character as a permitted and temporary relaxation of the tension of customary restraints and conventions. The Mediæval Feast of Fools--a New Year's Revel well established by the twelfth century, mainly in France--presented an expressive picture of a Christian orgy in its extreme form, for here the most sacred ceremonies of the Church became the subject of fantastic parody. The Church, according to Nietzsche's saying, like all wise legislators, recognized that where great impulses and habits have to be cultivated, intercalary days must be appointed in which these impulses and habits may be denied, and so learn to hunger anew.[109] The clergy took the leading part in these folk-festivals, for to the men of that age, as Méray remarks, "the temple offered the complete notes of the human gamut; they found there the teaching of all duties, the consolation of all sorrows, the satisfaction of all joys. The sacred festivals of mediæval Christianity were not a survival from Roman times; they leapt from the very heart of Christian society."[110] But, as Méray admits, all great and vigorous peoples, of the East and the West, have found it necessary sometimes to play with their sacred things.