generally, the Puritanic aspect of life has never received embodiment in the English or American drama.  On the English stage it is never permitted to hint at the tragic side of wantonness; vice must always be made seductive, even though a deus ex machina causes it to collapse at the end of the performance.  As Mr. Bernard Shaw has said, the English theatrical method by no means banishes vice; it merely consents that it shall be made attractive; its charms are advertised and its penalties suppressed.  “Now, it is futile to plead that the stage is not the proper place for the representation and discussion of illegal operations, incest, and venereal disease.  If the stage is the proper place for the exhibition and discussion of seduction, adultery, promiscuity, and prostitution, it must be thrown open to all the consequences of these things, or it will demoralize the nation.”

The impulse to insist that vice shall always be made attractive is not really, notwithstanding appearances, a vicious impulse.  It arises from a mental confusion, a common psychic tendency, which is by no means confined to Anglo-Saxon lands, and is even more well marked among the better educated in the merely literary sense, than among the worse educated people.  The aesthetic is confused with the moral, and what arouses disgust is thus regarded as immoral.  In France the novels of Zola, the most pedestrianally moralistic of writers, were for a long time supposed to be immoral because they were often disgusting.  The same feeling is still more widespread in England.  If a prostitute is brought on the stage, and she is pretty, well-dressed, seductive, she may gaily sail through the play and every one is satisfied.  But if she were not particularly pretty, well-dressed, or seductive, if it were made plain that she was diseased and was reckless in infecting others with that disease, if it were hinted that she could on occasion be foul-mouthed, if, in short, a picture were shown from life—­then we should hear that the unfortunate dramatist had committed something that was “disgusting” and “immoral.”  Disgusting it might be, but, on that very account, it would be moral.  There is a distinction here that the psychologist cannot too often point out or the moralist too often emphasize.

It is not for the physician to complicate and confuse his own task as teacher by mixing it up with considerations which belong to the spiritual sphere.  But in carrying out impartially his own special work of enlightenment he will always do well to remember that there is in the adolescent mind, as it has been necessary to point out in a previous chapter, a spontaneous force working on the side of sexual hygiene.  Those who believe that the adolescent mind is merely bent on sensual indulgence are not less false and mischievous in their influence than are those who think it possible and desirable for adolescents to be preserved in sheer sexual ignorance.  However concealed, suppressed, or deformed—­usually by the misplaced and premature zeal of foolish parents and teachers—­there arise at puberty ideal impulses which, even though they may be rooted in sex, yet in their scope transcend sex.  These are capable of becoming far more potent guides of the physical sex impulse than are merely material or even hygienic considerations.