qualities. At puberty they were secluded, sometimes for a whole
year, being kept in darkness, suffering, and filth. Yet defective
and unsatisfactory as this initiation was, "Langsdorf suggests,"
says Bancroft (_Native Races of Pacific_, vol. i, p. 110),
referring to the virtues of the Thlinkeet woman, "that it may be
during this period of confinement that the foundation of her
influence is laid; that in modest reserve and meditation her
character is strengthened, and she comes forth cleansed in mind
as well as body."

We have lost these ancient and invaluable rites of initiation into manhood
and womanhood, with their inestimable moral benefits; at the most we have
merely preserved the shells of initiation in which the core has decayed.
In time, we cannot doubt, they will be revived in modern forms. At present
the spiritual initiation of youths and maidens is left to the chances of
some happy accident, and usually it is of a purely cerebral character
which cannot be perfectly wholesome, and is at the best absurdly
incomplete.

This cerebral initiation commonly occurs to the youth through the medium
of literature. The influence of literature in sexual education thus
extends, in an incalculable degree, beyond the narrow sphere of manuals on
sexual hygiene, however admirable and desirable these may be. The greater
part of literature is more or less distinctly penetrated by erotic and
auto-erotic conceptions and impulses; nearly all imaginative literature
proceeds from the root of sex to flower in visions of beauty and ecstasy.
The Divine Comedy of Dante is herein the immortal type of the poet's
evolution. The youth becomes acquainted with the imaginative
representations of love before he becomes acquainted with the reality of
love, so that, as Leo Berg puts it, "the way to love among civilized
peoples passes through imagination." All literature is thus, to the
adolescent soul, a part of sexual education.[39] It depends, to some
extent, though fortunately not entirely, on the judgment of those in
authority over the young soul whether the literature to which the youth or
girl is admitted is or is not of the large and humanizing order.

All great literature touches nakedly and sanely on the central
facts of sex. It is always consoling to remember this in an age
of petty pruderies. And it is a satisfaction to know that it
would not be possible to emasculate the literature of