e water covered her
naked parts; and then rising by degrees, put it on." Mincing
prudes were found among the early Christians, and their ways are
graphically described by St. Jerome in one of his letters to
Eustochium: "These women," he says, "speak between their teeth or
with the edge of the lips, and with a lisping tongue, only half
pronouncing their words, because they regard as gross whatever is
natural. Such as these," declares Jerome, the scholar in him
overcoming the ascetic, "corrupt even language." Whenever a new
and artificial "modesty" is imposed upon savages prudery tends to
arise. Haddon describes this among the natives of Torres Straits,
where even the children now suffer from exaggerated prudishness,
though formerly absolutely naked and unashamed (_Cambridge
Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, p. 271).

The nineteenth century, which witnessed the triumph of timidity and
prudery in this matter, also produced the first fruitful germ of new
conceptions of nakedness. To some extent these were embodied in the great
Romantic movement. Rousseau, indeed, had placed no special insistence on
nakedness as an element of the return to Nature which he preached so
influentially. A new feeling in this matter emerged, however, with
characteristic extravagance, in some of the episodes of the Revolution,
while in Germany in the pioneering _Lucinde_ of Friedrich Schlegel, a
characteristic figure in the Romantic movement, a still unfamiliar
conception of the body was set forth in a serious and earnest spirit.

In England, Blake with his strange and flaming genius, proclaimed a
mystical gospel which involved the spiritual glorification of the body and
contempt for the civilized worship of clothes ("As to a modern man," he
wrote, "stripped from his load of clothing he is like a dead corpse");
while, later, in America, Thoreau and Whitman and Burroughs asserted,
still more definitely, a not dissimilar message concerning the need of
returning to Nature.

We find the importance of the sight of the body--though very
narrowly, for the avoidance of fraud in the preliminaries of
marriage--set forth as early as the sixteenth century by Sir
Thomas More in his _Utopia_, which is so rich in new and fruitful
ideas. In Utopia, according to Sir Thomas More, before marriage,
a staid and honest matron "showeth the woman, be she maid or
widow,