and the miseries of sexual life entered into the
drama, they would be accepted as a social background, just as the
landscape is the natural background. A community which is aesthetically
mature enough to appreciate Ibsen does not leave "The Ghosts" with
eugenic reform ideas. The inherited paralysis on a luetic basis is
accepted there as a tragic element of human fate. On the height of
true art the question of decency or indecency has disappeared, too.
The nude marble statue is an inspiration, and not a possible stimulus
to frivolous sensuality, if the mind is aesthetically cultivated. The
nakedness of erotic passion in the drama of high aesthetic intent
before a truly educated audience has not the slightest similarity to
the half-draped chorus of sensual operetta before a gallery which
wants to be tickled. But who would claim that the dramatic literature
of the sexual problems with which the last seasons have filled the
theatres from the orchestra to the second balcony has that sublime
aesthetic intent, or that it was brought to a public which even posed
in an aesthetic attitude! As far as any high aim was involved, it was
the antiaesthetic moral value. The plays presented themselves as
appeals to the social conscience, and yet this idealistic
interpretation would falsify the true motives on both sides. The crowd
went because it found the satisfaction of sexual curiosity and erotic
tension through the unveiled discussion of social perversities. And
the managers produced the plays because the lurid subjects with their
appeal to the low instincts, and therefore with their sure commercial
success, could here escape the condemnation of police and decent
public as they were covered by the pretence of social reform. How far
the writers of the play of prostitution prostituted art in order to
share the commercial profits in this wave of sexual reform may better
remain undiscussed.

What do these plays really teach us? I think I have seen almost all of
them, and the composite picture in my mind is one of an absurdly
distorted, exaggerated, and misleading view of actual social
surroundings, suggesting wrong problems, wrong complaints, and wrong
remedies. When I studied the reports of the vice commissions of the
large American and European cities, the combined image in my
consciousness was surely a stirring and alarming one, but it had no
similarity with the character of those melodramatic vagaries. Even the
best and most famous