He has received a special permit to corrupt
innocence. Hence, the peculiar prestige for civilized Christians,
of the wedding night, sung by Shelley, in ecstatic verses:--
"'Oh, joy! Oh, fear! What will be done
In the absence of the sun!'"
This feeling has, however, its normal range, and is not, _per
se_, a perversity, though it may doubtless become so when unduly
heightened by Christian sentiment, and especially if it leads, as
to some extent it has led in my Russian correspondent, to an
abnormal feeling of the sexual attraction of girls who have only
or scarcely reached the age of puberty. The sexual charm of this
period of girlhood is well illustrated in many of the poems of
Thomas Ashe, and it is worthy of note, as perhaps supporting the
contention that this attraction is based on Christian feeling,
that Ashe had been a clergyman. An attentiveness to the woman's
pleasure remains, in itself, very far from a perversion, but
increases, as Colin Scott has pointed out, with civilization,
while its absence--the indifference to the partner's pleasure--is
a perversion of the most degraded kind.
There is no such instinctive demand on the woman's part for innocence in
the man.[19] In the nature of things that could not be. Such emotion is
required for properly playing the part of the pursued; it is by no means
an added attraction on the part of the pursuer.
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