Passion and criminality in France : a legal and literary study / by Louis Proal ; translated from the French by A. R. Allinsom [!].

  • Proal, Louis, 1843-
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Passion and criminality in France : a legal and literary study / by Louis Proal ; translated from the French by A. R. Allinsom [!]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    power that it could, if it would, throw a halo of poetry- over honourable love. Did it not in the Eighteenth Century, by the pen of Jean Jacques Rousseau, bring into fashion the practice of mothers suckling their own children, till Society ladies, dining out, would have their babies brought to them at dessert, to give them the breast there and then ? Nothing is impossible to Poets and Novelists. They have turned into ridicule Mankind's two greatest blessings, health and virtue ; they have found health less poetical than disease, life less picturesque than death, virtue more tiresome than vice ; they have embellished melancholy, phthisis, perversions of the sexual instinct, Sapphism, Sadism, Masochism, adultery, suicide, double suicide and crimes of passion. I hold they are equally capable of idealizing health, reason, temperance, hard work, and pure love, which are just as poetical as folly, idleness, intemperance, and profligacy. We may apply to the type of Literature that embellishes Vice and makes Virtue look ugly the verse of the Latin Poet: Dat veniam corvis, vexat censura columbas. ^ It would make the crow white and the dove black, and so in everything. Instead of teaching the beauty of modesty, the value of temperance, the dignity of married love, it holds up for the reader's imitation and admiration orgy, suicides, and crimes. But surely the Writer's task is not to make men melan- choly, desperate, vindictive, and criminal, to supply excuses for passions that are always on the look-out for some piece of sophistry to palliate their heinousness, to silence con- science, that tiresome, unfortunate judge. Society being based on family life and this on marriage,^ is it too much ^ While it is lenient to the crows, censure falls heavy on the doves. ^ In Egypt and Syria, Mussulmans of the higher classes, recognizing that Polygamy is a principle of disintegration for the family and the State, are going back to Monogamy, in spite of the fact that Mahomet allows them to take a number of wives. I have this information from a Mussulman judge at the High Court of Cairo and a former Froaireur Général at the Court of Alexandria.