II.

This point is further illustrated by the following passage from a letter written by a lady: "Submission to the man's will is still, and always must be, the prelude to pleasure, and the association of ideas will probably always produce this much misunderstood instinct. Now, I find, indirectly from other women and directly from my own experience, that, when the point in dispute is very important and the man exerts his authority, the desire to get one's own way completely obliterates the sexual feeling, while, conversely, in small things the sexual feeling obliterates the desire to have one's own way. Where the two are nearly equal a conflict between them ensues, and I can stand aside and wonder which will get the best of it, though I encourage the sexual feeling when possible, as, if the other conquers, it leaves a sense of great mental irritation and physical discomfort. A man should command in small things, as in nine cases out of ten this will produce excitement. He shouldadvisein large matters, or he may find either that he is unable to enforce his orders or that he produces a feeling of dislike and annoyance he was far from intending. Women imagine men must be stronger than themselves to excite their passion. I disagree. A passionate man has the best chance, for in him the primitive instincts are strong. The wish to subdue the female is one of them, and in small things he will exert his authority to make her feel his power, while she knows that on a question of real importance she has a good chance of getting her own way by working on his greater susceptibility. Perhaps an illustration will show what I mean. I was listening to the band and a girl and herfiancécame up to occupy two seats near me. The girl sank into one seat, but for some reason the man wished her to take the other. She refused. He repeated his order twice, the second time so peremptorily that she changed places, and I heard him say: 'I don't think you heard what I said. I don't expect to give an order three times.'"This little scene interested me, and I afterward asked the girl the following questions:—"'Had you any reason for taking one chair more than the other?'"'No.'"'Did Mr. ——'s insistence on your changing give you any pleasure?'"'Yes' (after a little hesitation)."'Why?'"'I don't know.'"'Would it have done so if you had particularly wished to sit in that chair; if, for instance, you had had a boil on your cheek and wished to turn that side away from him?'"'No; certainly not. The worry of thinking he was looking at it would have made me too cross to feel pleased.'"Does this explain what I mean? The occasion, by the way, need not be really important, but, as in this imaginary case of the boil, if itseems importantto the woman, irritation will outweigh the physical sensation."

"This little scene interested me, and I afterward asked the girl the following questions:—

"'Had you any reason for taking one chair more than the other?'

"'No.'

"'Did Mr. ——'s insistence on your changing give you any pleasure?'

"'Yes' (after a little hesitation).

"'Why?'

"'I don't know.'

"'Would it have done so if you had particularly wished to sit in that chair; if, for instance, you had had a boil on your cheek and wished to turn that side away from him?'

"'No; certainly not. The worry of thinking he was looking at it would have made me too cross to feel pleased.'

"Does this explain what I mean? The occasion, by the way, need not be really important, but, as in this imaginary case of the boil, if itseems importantto the woman, irritation will outweigh the physical sensation."

I am well aware that in thus asserting a certain tendency in women to delight in suffering pain—however careful and qualified the position I have taken—many estimable people will cry out that I am degrading a whole sex and generally supporting the "subjection of women." But the day for academic discussion concerning the "subjection of women" has gone by. The tendency I have sought to make clear is too well established by the experience of normal and typical women—however numerous the exceptions may be—to be called in question. I would point out to those who would deprecate the influence of such facts in relation to social progress that nothing is gained by regarding women as simply men of smaller growth. They are not so; they have the laws of their own nature; their development must be along their own lines, and not along masculine lines. It is as true now as in Bacon's day that we only learn to command nature by obeying her. To ignore facts is to court disappointment in our measure of progress. The particular fact with which we have here come in contact is very vital and radical, and most subtle in its influence. It is foolish to ignore it; we must allow for its existence. We can neither attain a sane view of life nor a sane social legislation of life unless we possess a just and accurate knowledge of the fundamental instincts upon which life is built.

[61]

Various mammals, carried away by the reckless fury of the sexual impulse, are apt to ill-treat their females (R. Müller,Sexualbiologie, p. 123). This treatment is, however, usually only an incident of courtship, the result of excess of ardor. "The chaffinches and saffron-finches (FringellaandSycalis) are very rough wooers," says A. G. Butler (Zoölogist, 1902, p. 241); "they sing vociferously, and chase their hens violently, knocking them over in their flight, pursuing and savagely pecking them even on the ground; but when once the hens become submissive, the males change their tactics, and become for the time model husbands, feeding their wives from their crop, and assisting in rearing the young."

[62]

Cf.A. C. Haddon,Head Hunters, p. 107.

[63]

Marro considers that there may be transference of emotion,—the impulse of violence generated in the male by his rivals being turned against his partner,—according to a tendency noted by Sully and illustrated by Ribot in hisPsychology of the Emotions, part i, chapter xii.

[64]

Several writers have found in the facts of primitive animal courtship the explanation of the connection between love and pain. Thus, Krafft-Ebing (Psychopathia Sexualis, English translation of tenth German edition, p. 80) briefly notes that outbreaks of sadism are possibly atavistic. Marro (La Pubertà, 1898, p. 219et seq.) has some suggestive pages on this subject. It would appear that this explanation was vaguely outlined by Jäger. Laserre, in a Bordeaux thesis mentioned by Féré, has argued in the same sense. Féré (L'Instinct Sexuel, p. 134), on grounds that are scarcely sufficient, regards this explanation as merely a superficial analogy. But it is certainly not a complete explanation.

[65]

Schäfer (Jahrbücher für Psychologie, Bd. ii, p. 128, and quoted by Krafft-Ebing inPsychopathia Sexualis), in connection with a case in which sexual excitement was produced by the sight of battles or of paintings of them, remarks: "The pleasure of battle and murder is so predominantly an attribute of the male sex throughout the animal kingdom that there can be no question about the close connection between this side of the masculine character and male sexuality. I believe that I can show by observation that in men who are absolutely normal, mentally and physically, the first indefinite and incomprehensible precursors of sexual excitement may be induced by reading exciting scenes of chase and war. These give rise to unconscious longings for a kind of satisfaction in warlike games (wrestling, etc.) which express the fundamental sexual impulse to close and complete contact with a companion, with a secondary more or less clearly defined thought of conquest." Groos (Spiele der Menschen, 1899, p. 232) also thinks there is more or less truth in this suggestion of a subconscious sexual element in the playful wrestling combats of boys. Freud considers (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, p. 49) that the tendency to sexual excitement through muscular activity in wrestling, etc., is one of the roots of sadism. I have been told of normal men who feel a conscious pleasure of this kind when lifted in games, as may happen, for instance, in football. It may be added that in some parts of the world the suitor has to throw the girl in a wrestling-bout in order to secure her hand.

[66]

A minor manifestation of this tendency, appearing even in quite normal and well-conditioned individuals, is the impulse among boys at and after puberty to take pleasure in persecuting and hurting lower animals or their own young companions. Some youths display a diabolical enjoyment and ingenuity in torturing sensitive juniors, and even a boy who is otherwise kindly and considerate may find enjoyment in deliberately mutilating a frog. In some cases, in boys and youths who have no true sadistic impulse and are not usually cruel, this infliction of torture on a lower animal produces an erection, though not necessarily any pleasant sexual sensations.

[67]

Marro,La Pubertà, 1898, p. 223; Garnier, "La Criminalité Juvenile,"Comptes-rendus Congrès Internationale d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Amsterdam, 1901, p. 296;Archivio di Psichiatria, 1899, fasc. v-vi, p. 572.

[68]

Bk. ii, ch. ii.

[69]

Herbert Spencer,Principles of Sociology, 1876, vol. i, p. 651.

[70]

Westermarck,Human Marriage, p. 388. Grosse is of the same opinion; he considers also that the mock-capture is often an imitation, due to admiration, of real capture; he does not believe that the latter has ever been a form of marriage recognized by custom and law, but only "an occasional and punishable act of violence." (Die Formen der Familie, pp. 105-7.) This position is too extreme.

[71]

Ernest Crawley,The Mystic Rose, 1902, p. 350et seq.Van Gennep rightly remarks that we cannot correctly say that the woman is abducted from "her sex," but only from her "sexual society."

[72]

A. Van Gennep (Rites de Passage, 1909, pp. 175-186) has put forward a third theory, though also of a psychological character, according to which the "capture" is a rite indicating the separation of the young girl from the special societies of her childhood. Gennep regards this rite as one of a vast group of "rites of passage," which come into action whenever a person changes his social or natural environment.

[73]

Féré (L'Instinct Sexuel, p. 133) appears to regard the satisfaction, based on the sentiment of personal power, which may be experienced in the suffering and subjection of a victim as an adequate explanation of the association of pain with love. This I can scarcely admit. It is a factor in the emotional attitude, but when it only exists in the sexual sphere it is reasonable to base this attitude largely on the still more fundamental biological attitude of the male toward the female in the process of courtship. Féré regards this biological element as merely a superficial analogy, on the ground that an act of cruelty may become an equivalent of coitus. But a sexual perversion is quite commonly constituted by the selection and magnification of a single moment in the normal sexual process.

[74]

The process may, however, be quite conscious. Thus, a correspondent tells me that he not only finds sexual pleasure in cruelty toward the woman he loves, but that he regards this as an essential element. He is convinced that it gives the woman pleasure, and that it is possible to distinguish by gesture, inflection of voice, etc., an hysterical, assumed, or imagined feeling of pain from real pain. He would not wish to give real pain, and would regard that as sadism.

[75]

De Sade had already made the same remark, while Duchenne, of Boulogne, pointed out that the facial expressions of sexual passion and of cruelty are similar.

[76]

Κρυπτάδια, vol. vi, p. 208.

[77]

Daumas,Chevaux de Sahara, p. 49.

[78]

See in vol. iv of theseStudies("Sexual Selection in Man"), Appendix A, on "The Origins of the Kiss."

[79]

De Stendhal (De l'Amour) mentions that when in London he was on terms of friendship with an English actress who was the mistress of a wealthy colonel, but privately had another lover. One day the colonel arrived when the other man was present. "This gentleman has called about the pony I want to sell," said the actress. "I have come for a very different purpose," said the little man, and thus aroused a love which was beginning to languish.

[80]

See Havelock Ellis,Man and Woman, chapter vi, "The Senses."

[81]

This liability is emphasized by Adler,Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, p. 125.

[82]

Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Bd. viii, 1876, pp. 22-28.

The Definition of Sadism—De Sade—Masochism to some Extent Normal—Sacher-Masoch—No Real Line of Demarcation between Sadism and Masochism—Algolagnia includes both Groups of Manifestations—The Love-bite as a Bridge from Normal Phenomena to Algolagnia—The Fascination of Blood—The Most Extreme Perversions are Linked on to Normal Phenomena.

We thus see that there are here two separate groups of feelings: one, in the masculine line, which delights in displaying force and often inflicts pain or the simulacrum of pain; the other, in the feminine line, which delights in submitting to that force, and even finds pleasure in a slight amount of pain, or the idea of pain, when associated with the experiences of love. We see, also, that these two groups of feelings are complementary. Within the limits consistent with normal and healthy life, what men are impelled to give women love to receive. So that we need not unduly deprecate the "cruelty" of men within these limits, nor unduly commiserate the women who are subjected to it.

Such a conclusion, however, as we have also seen, only holds good within those normal limits which an attempt has here been made to determine. The phenomena we have been considering are strictly normal phenomena, having their basis in the conditions of tumescence and detumescence in animal and primitive human courtship. At one point, however, when discussing the phenomena of the love-bite, I referred to the facts which indicate how this purely normal manifestation yet insensibly passes over into the region of the morbid. It is an instance that enables us to realize how even the most terrible and repugnant sexual perversions are still demonstrably linked on to phenomena that are fundamentally normal. The love-bite may be said to give us the key to that perverse impulse which has been commonly called sadism.

There is some difference of opinion as to how "sadism" may be best defined. Perhaps the simplest and most usual definition is that of Krafft-Ebing, as sexual emotion associated with the wish to inflict pain and use violence, or, as he elsewhere expresses it, "the impulse to cruel and violent treatment of the opposite sex, and the coloring of the idea of such acts with lustful feeling."[83]A more complete definition is that of Moll, who describes sadism as a condition in which "the sexual impulse consists in the tendency to strike, ill-use, and humiliate the beloved person."[84]This definition has the advantage of bringing in the element of moral pain. A further extension is made in Féré's definition as "the need of association of violence and cruelty with sexual enjoyment, such violence or cruelty not being necessarily exerted by the person himself who seeks sexual pleasure in this association."[85]Garnier's definition, while comprising all these points, further allows for the fact that a certain degree of sadism may be regarded as normal. "Pathological sadism," he states, "is an impulsive and obsessing sexual perversion characterized by a close connection between suffering inflicted or mentally represented and the sexual orgasm, without this necessary and sufficing condition frigidity usually remaining absolute."[86]It must be added that these definitions are very incomplete if by "sadism" we are to understand the special sexual perversions which are displayed in De Sade's novels. Iwan Bloch ("Eugen Dühren"), in the course of his book on De Sade, has attempted a definition strictly on this basis, and, as will be seen, it is necessary to make it very elaborate: "A connection, whether intentionally sought or offered by chance, of sexual excitement and sexual enjoyment with the real or only symbolic (ideal, illusionary) appearance offrightful and shocking events, destructive occurrences and practices, which threaten or destroy the life, health, and property of man and other living creatures, and threaten and interrupt the continuity of inanimate objects, whereby the person who from such occurrences obtains sexual enjoyment may either himself be the direct cause, or cause them to take place by means of other persons, or merely be the spectator, or, finally, be, voluntarily or involuntarily, the object against which these processes are directed."[87]This definition of sadism as found in De Sade's works is thus, more especially by its final clause, a very much wider conception than the usual definition.

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis De Sade, was born in 1740 at Paris in the house of the great Condé. He belonged to a very noble, ancient, and distinguished Provençal family; Petrarch's Laura, who married a De Sade, was one of his ancestors, and the family had cultivated both arms and letters with success. He was, according to Lacroix, "an adorable youth whose delicately pale and dusky face, lighted up by two large black [according to another account blue] eyes, already bore the languorous imprint of the vice which was to corrupt his whole being"; his voice was "drawling and caressing"; his gait had "a softly feminine grace." Unfortunately there is no authentic portrait of him. His early life is sketched in letter iv of hisAline et Valcourt. On leaving the Collège-Louis-le-Grand he became a cavalry officer and went through the Seven Years' War in Germany. There can be little doubt that the experiences of his military life, working on a femininely vicious temperament, had much to do with the development of his perversion. He appears to have got into numerous scrapes, of which the details are unknown, and his father sought to marry him to the daughter of an aristocratic friend of his own, a noble and amiable girl of 20. It so chanced that when young De Sade first went to the house of his future wife only her younger sister, a girl of 13, was at home; with her he at once fell in love and his love was reciprocated; they were both musical enthusiasts, and she had a beautiful voice. The parents insisted on carrying out the original scheme of marriage. De Sade's wife loved him, and, in spite of everything, served his interests with Griselda-like devotion; she was, Ginisty remarks, a saint, a saint of conjugal life; but her love was from the first only requited with repulsion, contempt, and suspicion. There were, however, children of themarriage; the career of the eldest—an estimable young man who went into the army and also had artistic ability, but otherwise had no community of tastes with his father—has been sketched by Paul Ginisty, who has also edited the letters of the Marquise. De Sade's passion for the younger sister continued (he idealized her as Juliette), though she was placed in a convent beyond his reach, and at a much later period he eloped with her and spent perhaps the happiest period of his life, soon terminated by her death. It is evident that this unhappy marriage was decisive in determining De Sade's career; he at once threw himself recklessly into every form of dissipation, spending his health and his substance sometimes among refinedly debauched nobles and sometimes among coarsely debauched lackeys. He was, however, always something of an artist, something of a student, something of a philosopher, and at an early period he began to write, apparently at the age of 23. It was at this age, and only a few months after his marriage, that on account of some excess he was for a time confined in Vincennes. He was destined to spend 27 years of his life in prisons, if we include the 13 years which in old age he passed in the asylum at Charenton. His actual offenses were by no means so terrible as those he loved to dwell on in imagination, and for the most part they have been greatly exaggerated. His most extreme offenses were the indecent and forcible flagellation in 1768 of a young woman, Rosa Keller, who had accosted him in the street for alms, and whom he induced by false pretenses to come to his house, and the administration of aphrodisiacal bonbons to some prostitutes at Marseilles. It is owing to the fact that the prime of his manhood was spent in prisons that De Sade fell back on dreaming, study, and novel-writing. Shut out from real life, he solaced his imagination with the perverted visions—to a very large extent, however, founded on knowledge of the real facts of perverted life in his time—which he has recorded inJustine(1781);Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'Ecole du Libertinage(1785);Aline et Valcour ou le Roman Philosophique(1788);Juliette(1796);La Philosophie dans le Boudoir(1795). These books constitute a sort of encyclopedia of sexual perversions, an eighteenth centuryPsychopathia Sexualis, and embody, at the same time, a philosophy. He was the first, Bloch remarks, who realized the immense importance of the sexual question. His general attitude may be illustrated by the following passage (as quoted by Lacassagne): "If there are beings in the world whose acts shock all accepted prejudices, we must not preach at them or punish them ... because their bizarre tastes no more depend upon themselves than it depends on you whether you are witty or stupid, well made or hump-backed.... What would become of your laws, your morality, your religion, your gallows, your Paradise, your gods,your hell, if it were shown that such and such fluids, such fibers, or a certain acridity in the blood, or in the animal spirits, alone suffice to make a man the object of your punishments or your rewards?" He was enormously well read, Bloch points out, and his interest extended to every field of literature:belles lettres, philosophy, theology, politics, sociology, ethnology, mythology, and history. Perhaps his favorite reading was travels. He was minutely familiar with the bible, though his attitude was extremely critical. His favorite philosopher was Lamettrie, whom he very frequently quotes, and he had carefully studied Machiavelli.De Sade had foreseen the Revolution; he was an ardent admirer of Marat, and at this period he entered into public life as a mild, gentle, rather bald and gray-haired person. Many scenes of the Revolution were the embodiment in real life of De Sade's imagination; such, for instance, were the barbaric tortures inflicted, at the instigation of Théroigne de Méricourt, on La Belle Bouquetière. Yet De Sade played a very peaceful part in the events of that time, chiefly as a philanthropist, spending much of his time in the hospitals. He saved his parents-in-law from the scaffold, although they had always been hostile to him, and by his moderation aroused the suspicions of the revolutionary party, and was again imprisoned. Later he wrote a pamphlet against Napoleon, who never forgave him and had him shut up in Charenton as a lunatic; it was a not unusual method at that time of disposing of persons whom it was wished to put out of the way, and, notwithstanding De Sade's organically abnormal temperament, there is no reason to regard him as actually insane. Royer-Collard, an eminent alienist of that period, then at the head of Charenton, declared De Sade to be sane, and his detailed report is still extant. Other specialists were of the same opinion. Bloch, who quotes these opinions (Neue Forschungen, etc., p. 370), says that the only possible conclusion is that De Sade was sane, but neurasthenic, and Eulenburg also concludes that he cannot be regarded as insane, although he was highly degenerate. In the asylum he amused himself by organizing a theater. Lacroix, many years later, questioning old people who had known him, was surprised to find that even in the memory of most virtuous and respectable persons he lived merely as an "aimable mauvais sujet." It is noteworthy that De Sade aroused, in a singular degree, the love and devotion of women,—whether or not we may regard this as evidence of the fascination exerted on women by cruelty. Janin remarks that he had seen many pretty little letters written by young and charming women of the great world, begging for the release of the "pauvre marquis."Sardou, the dramatist, has stated that in 1855 he visited the Bicêtre and met an old gardener who had known De Sade during hisreclusion there. He told that one of the marquis's amusements was to procure baskets of the most beautiful and expensive roses; he would then sit on a footstool by a dirty streamlet which ran through the courtyard, and would take the roses, one by one, gaze at them, smell them with a voluptuous expression, soak them in the muddy water, and fling them away, laughing as he did so. He died on the 2d of December, 1814, at the age of 74. He was almost blind, and had long been a martyr to gout, asthma, and an affection of the stomach. It was his wish that acorns should be planted over his grave and his memory effaced. At a later period his skull was examined by a phrenologist, who found it small and well formed; "one would take it at first for a woman's head." The skull belonged to Dr. Londe, but about the middle of the century it was stolen by a doctor who conveyed it to England, where it may possibly yet be found. [The foregoing account is mainly founded on Paul Lacroix,Revue de Paris, 1837, andCuriosités de l'Histoire de France, second series,Procès Célèbres, p. 225; Janin,Revue de Paris, 1834; Eugen Dühren (Iwan Bloch),Der Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit, third edition, 1901;id.,Neue Forschungen über den Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit, 1904; Lacassagne,Vacher l'Eventreur et les Crimes Sadiques, 1899; Paul Ginisty,La Marquise de Sade, 1901.]

De Sade had foreseen the Revolution; he was an ardent admirer of Marat, and at this period he entered into public life as a mild, gentle, rather bald and gray-haired person. Many scenes of the Revolution were the embodiment in real life of De Sade's imagination; such, for instance, were the barbaric tortures inflicted, at the instigation of Théroigne de Méricourt, on La Belle Bouquetière. Yet De Sade played a very peaceful part in the events of that time, chiefly as a philanthropist, spending much of his time in the hospitals. He saved his parents-in-law from the scaffold, although they had always been hostile to him, and by his moderation aroused the suspicions of the revolutionary party, and was again imprisoned. Later he wrote a pamphlet against Napoleon, who never forgave him and had him shut up in Charenton as a lunatic; it was a not unusual method at that time of disposing of persons whom it was wished to put out of the way, and, notwithstanding De Sade's organically abnormal temperament, there is no reason to regard him as actually insane. Royer-Collard, an eminent alienist of that period, then at the head of Charenton, declared De Sade to be sane, and his detailed report is still extant. Other specialists were of the same opinion. Bloch, who quotes these opinions (Neue Forschungen, etc., p. 370), says that the only possible conclusion is that De Sade was sane, but neurasthenic, and Eulenburg also concludes that he cannot be regarded as insane, although he was highly degenerate. In the asylum he amused himself by organizing a theater. Lacroix, many years later, questioning old people who had known him, was surprised to find that even in the memory of most virtuous and respectable persons he lived merely as an "aimable mauvais sujet." It is noteworthy that De Sade aroused, in a singular degree, the love and devotion of women,—whether or not we may regard this as evidence of the fascination exerted on women by cruelty. Janin remarks that he had seen many pretty little letters written by young and charming women of the great world, begging for the release of the "pauvre marquis."

Sardou, the dramatist, has stated that in 1855 he visited the Bicêtre and met an old gardener who had known De Sade during hisreclusion there. He told that one of the marquis's amusements was to procure baskets of the most beautiful and expensive roses; he would then sit on a footstool by a dirty streamlet which ran through the courtyard, and would take the roses, one by one, gaze at them, smell them with a voluptuous expression, soak them in the muddy water, and fling them away, laughing as he did so. He died on the 2d of December, 1814, at the age of 74. He was almost blind, and had long been a martyr to gout, asthma, and an affection of the stomach. It was his wish that acorns should be planted over his grave and his memory effaced. At a later period his skull was examined by a phrenologist, who found it small and well formed; "one would take it at first for a woman's head." The skull belonged to Dr. Londe, but about the middle of the century it was stolen by a doctor who conveyed it to England, where it may possibly yet be found. [The foregoing account is mainly founded on Paul Lacroix,Revue de Paris, 1837, andCuriosités de l'Histoire de France, second series,Procès Célèbres, p. 225; Janin,Revue de Paris, 1834; Eugen Dühren (Iwan Bloch),Der Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit, third edition, 1901;id.,Neue Forschungen über den Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit, 1904; Lacassagne,Vacher l'Eventreur et les Crimes Sadiques, 1899; Paul Ginisty,La Marquise de Sade, 1901.]

The attempt to define sadism strictly and penetrate to its roots in De Sade's personal temperament reveals a certain weakness in the current conception of this sexual perversion. It is not, as we might infer, both from the definition usually given and from its probable biological heredity from primitive times, a perversion due to excessive masculinity. The strong man is more apt to be tender than cruel, or at all events knows how to restrain within bounds any impulse to cruelty; the most extreme and elaborate forms of sadism (putting aside such as are associated with a considerable degree of imbecility) are more apt to be allied with a somewhat feminine organization. Montaigne, indeed, observed long ago that cruelty is usually accompanied by feminine softness.

In the same way it is a mistake to suppose that the very feminine woman is not capable of sadistic tendencies. Even if we take into account the primitive animal conditions of combat, the male must suffer as well as inflict pain, and the female must not only experience subjection to the male, but also share in the emotions of her partner's victory over his rivals. As bearing on these points, I may quote the followingremarks written by a lady: "It is said that, the weaker and more feminine a woman is, the greater the subjection she likes. I don't think it has anything at all to do with the general character, but depends entirely on whether the feeling of constraint and helplessness affects her sexually. In men I have several times noticed that those who were most desirous of subjection to the women they loved had, in ordinary life, very strong and determined characters. I know of others, too, who with very weak characters are very imperious toward the women they care for. Among women I have often been surprised to see how a strong, determined woman will give way to a man she loves, and how tenacious of her own will may be some fragile, clinging creature who in daily life seems quite unable to act on her own responsibility. A certain amount of passivity, a desire to have their emotions worked on, seems to me, so far as my small experience goes, very common among ordinary, presumably normal men. A good deal of stress is laid on femininity as an attraction in a woman, and this may be so to very strong natures, but, so far as I have seen, the women who obtain extraordinary empire over men are those with a certainvirilityin their character and passions. If with this virility they combine a fragility or childishness of appearance which appeals to a man in another way at the same time, they appear to be irresistible."I have noted some of the feminine traits in De Sade's temperament and appearance. The same may often be noted in sadists whose crimes were very much more serious and brutal than those of De Sade. A man who stabbed women in the streets at St. Louis was a waiter with a high-pitched, effeminate voice and boyish appearance. Reidel, the sadistic murderer, was timid, modest, and delicate; he was too shy to urinate in the presence of other people. A sadistic zoöphilist, described by A. Marie, who attempted to strangle a woman fellow-worker, had always been very timid, blushed with much facility, could not look even children in the eyes, or urinate in the presence of another person, or make sexual advances to women.Kiernan and Moyer are inclined to connect the modesty and timidity of sadists with a disgust for normal coitus. They were called upon to examine an inverted married woman who had inflicted several hundred wounds, mostly superficial, with forks, scissors, etc., on the genital organs and other parts of a girl whom she had adopted from a "Home." This woman was very prominent in church and social matters in the city in which she lived, so that many clergymen and local persons of importance testified to her chaste, modest, and even prudish character; she was found to be sane at the time of the acts. (Moyer,Alienist and Neurologist, May, 1907, and private letter from Dr. Kiernan.)

I have noted some of the feminine traits in De Sade's temperament and appearance. The same may often be noted in sadists whose crimes were very much more serious and brutal than those of De Sade. A man who stabbed women in the streets at St. Louis was a waiter with a high-pitched, effeminate voice and boyish appearance. Reidel, the sadistic murderer, was timid, modest, and delicate; he was too shy to urinate in the presence of other people. A sadistic zoöphilist, described by A. Marie, who attempted to strangle a woman fellow-worker, had always been very timid, blushed with much facility, could not look even children in the eyes, or urinate in the presence of another person, or make sexual advances to women.

Kiernan and Moyer are inclined to connect the modesty and timidity of sadists with a disgust for normal coitus. They were called upon to examine an inverted married woman who had inflicted several hundred wounds, mostly superficial, with forks, scissors, etc., on the genital organs and other parts of a girl whom she had adopted from a "Home." This woman was very prominent in church and social matters in the city in which she lived, so that many clergymen and local persons of importance testified to her chaste, modest, and even prudish character; she was found to be sane at the time of the acts. (Moyer,Alienist and Neurologist, May, 1907, and private letter from Dr. Kiernan.)

We are thus led to another sexual perversion, which is usually considered the opposite of sadism. Masochism is commonly regarded as a peculiarly feminine sexual perversion, in women, indeed, as normal in some degree, and in man as a sort of inversion of the normal masculine emotional attitude, but this view of the matter is not altogether justified, for definite and pronounced masochism seems to be much rarer in women than sadism.[88]Krafft-Ebing, whose treatment of this phenomenon is, perhaps, his most valuable and original contribution to sexual psychology, has dealt very fully with the matter and brought forward many cases. He thus defines this perversion: "By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion of the psychicalvita sexualisin which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex, of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused. This idea is colored by sexual feeling; the masochist lives in fancies in which he creates situations of this kind, and he often attempts to realize them."[89]

In a minor degree, not amounting to a complete perversion of the sexual instinct, this sentiment of abnegation, the desire to be even physically subjected to the adored woman, cannot be regarded as abnormal. More than two centuries before Krafft-Ebing appeared, Robert Burton, who was no mean psychologist, dilated on the fact that love is a kind of slavery. "They are commonly slaves," he wrote of lovers, "captives, voluntary servants;amator amicæ mancipium, as Castilio terms him; his mistress's servant, her drudge, prisoner, bondman, what not?"[90]Before Burton's time the legend of the erotic servitude of Aristotle was widely spread in Europe, and pictures exist of thevenerable philosopher on all fours ridden by a woman with a whip.[91]In classic times various masochistic phenomena are noted with approval by Ovid. It has been pointed out by Moll[92]that there are traces of masochistic feeling in some of Goethe's poems, especially "Lilis Park" and "Erwin und Elmire." Similar traces have been found in the poems of Heine, Platen, Hamerling, and many other poets.[93]The poetry of the people is also said to contain many such traces. It may, indeed, be said that passion in its more lyric exaltations almost necessarily involves some resort to masochistic expression. A popular lady novelist in a novel written many years ago represents her hero, a robust soldier, imploring the lady of his love, in a moment of passionate exaltation, to trample on him, certainly without any wish to suggest sexual perversion. If it is true that the Antonio of Otway'sVenice Preservedis a caricature of Shaftesbury, then it would appear that one of the greatest of English statesmen was supposed to exhibit very pronounced and characteristic masochistic tendencies; and in more recent days masochistic expressions have been noted as occurring in the love-letters of so emphatically virile a statesman as Bismarck.

Thus a minor degree of the masochistic tendency may be said to be fairly common, while its more pronounced manifestations are more common than pronounced sadism.[94]It very frequently affects persons of a sensitive, refined, and artistic temperament. It may even be said that this tendency is in the line of civilization. Krafft-Ebing points out that some of the most delicate and romantic love-episodes of the Middle Ages are distinctly colored by masochistic emotion.[95]The increasingtendency to masochism with increasing civilization becomes explicable if we accept Colin Scott's "secondary law of courting" as accessory to the primary law that the male is active, and the female passive and imaginatively attentive to the states of the excited male. According to the secondary law, "the female develops a superadded activity, the male becoming relatively passive and imaginatively attentive to the psychical and bodily states of the female."[96]We may probably agree that this "secondary law of courting" does really represent a tendency of love in individuals of complex and sensitive nature, and the outcome of such a receptive attitude on the part of the male is undoubtedly in well-marked cases a desire of submission to the female's will, and a craving to experience in some physical or psychic form, not necessarily painful, the manifestations of her activity.

When we turn from vague and unpronounced forms of the masochistic tendency to the more definite forms in which it becomes an unquestionable sexual perversion, we find a very eminent and fairly typical example in Rousseau, an example all the more interesting because here the subject has himself portrayed his perversion in his famousConfessions. It is, however, the name of a less eminent author, the Austrian novelist, Sacher-Masoch, which has become identified with the perversion through the fact that Krafft-Ebing fixed upon it as furnishing a convenient counterpart to the term "sadism." It is on the strength of a considerable number of his novels and stories, more especially ofDie Venus im Pelz, that Krafft-Ebing took the scarcely warrantable liberty of identifying his name, while yet living, with a sexual perversion.

Sacher-Masoch's biography has been written with intimate knowledge and much candor by C. F. von Schlichtegroll (Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus, 1901) and, more indirectly, by his first wife Wanda von Sacher-Masoch in her autobiography (Meine Lebensbeichte, 1906; French translation,Confession de ma Vie, 1907). Schlichtegroll's book is written with a somewhat undue attempt to exalt his hero and to attribute his misfortunes to his first wife. The autobiography of the latter, however, enables us to form a more complete picture of Sacher-Masoch's life, for, while his wife by no means spares herself, she clearly shows that Sacher-Masoch was the victim of his own abnormal temperament, and she presents both the sensitive, refined, exalted, and generous aspects of his nature, and his morbid, imaginative, vain aspects.Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 at Lemberg in Galicia. He was of Spanish, German, and more especially Slavonic race. The founder of the family may be said to be a certain Don Matthias Sacher, a young Spanish nobleman, in the sixteenth century, who settled in Prague. The novelist's father was director of police in Lemberg and married Charlotte von Masoch, a Little Russian lady of noble birth. The novelist, the eldest child of this union, was not born until after nine years of marriage, and in infancy was so delicate that he was not expected to survive. He began to improve, however, when his mother gave him to be suckled to a robust Russian peasant woman, from whom, as he said later, he gained not only health, but "his soul"; from her he learned all the strange and melancholy legends of her people and a love of the Little Russians which never left him. While still a child young Sacher-Masoch was in the midst of the bloody scenes of the revolution which culminated in 1848. When he was 12 the family migrated to Prague, and the boy, though precocious in his development, then first learned the German language, of which he attained so fine a mastery. At a very early age he had found the atmosphere, and even some of the most characteristic elements, of the peculiar types which mark his work as a novelist.It is interesting to trace the germinal elements of those peculiarities which so strongly affected his imagination on the sexual side. As a child, he was greatly attracted by representations of cruelty; he loved to gaze at pictures of executions, the legends of martyrs were his favorite reading, and with the onset of puberty he regularly dreamed that he was fettered and in the power of a cruel woman who tortured him. It has been said by an anonymous author that the women of Galicia either rule their husbands entirely and make them their slaves or themselves sink to be the wretchedest of slaves. At the age of 10, according to Schlichtegroll's narrative, the child Leopold witnessed a scene in which a woman of the former kind, a certain Countess XenobiaX., a relative of his own on the paternal side, played the chief part, and this scene left an undying impress on his imagination. The Countess was a beautiful but wanton creature, and the child adored her, impressed alike by her beauty and the costly furs she wore. She accepted his devotion and little services and would sometimes allow him to assist her in dressing; on one occasion, as he was kneeling before her to put on her ermine slippers, he kissed her feet; she smiled and gave him a kick which filled him with pleasure. Not long afterward occurred the episode which so profoundly affected his imagination. He was playing with his sisters at hide-and-seek and had carefully hidden himself behind the dresses on a clothes-rail in the Countess's bedroom. At this moment the Countess suddenly entered the house and ascended the stairs, followed by a lover, and the child, who dared not betray his presence, saw the countess sink down on a sofa and begin to caress her lover. But a few moments later the husband, accompanied by two friends, dashed into the room. Before, however, he could decide which of the lovers to turn against the Countess had risen and struck him so powerful a blow in the face with her fist that he fell back streaming with blood. She then seized a whip, drove all three men out of the room, and in the confusion the lover slipped away. At this moment the clothes-rail fell and the child, the involuntary witness of the scene, was revealed to the Countess, who now fell on him in anger, threw him to the ground, pressed her knee on his shoulder, and struck him unmercifully. The pain was great, and yet he was conscious of a strange pleasure. While this castigation was proceeding the Count returned, no longer in a rage, but meek and humble as a slave, and kneeled down before her to beg forgiveness. As the boy escaped he saw her kick her husband. The child could not resist the temptation to return to the spot; the door was closed and he could see nothing, but he heard the sound of the whip and the groans of the Count beneath his wife's blows.It is unnecessary to insist that in this scene, acting on a highly sensitive and somewhat peculiar child, we have the key to the emotional attitude which affected so much of Sacher-Masoch's work. As his biographer remarks, woman became to him, during a considerable part of his life, a creature at once to be loved and hated, a being whose beauty and brutality enabled her to set her foot at will on the necks of men, and in the heroine of his first important novel, theEmissär, dealing with the Polish Revolution, he embodied the contradictory personality of Countess Xenobia. Even the whip and the fur garments, Sacher-Masoch's favorite emotional symbols, find their explanation in this early episode. He was accustomed to say of an attractive woman: "I should like to see her in furs," and, of an unattractive woman: "I could not imagine her in furs." His writing-paper at one time wasadorned with the figure of a woman in Russian Boyar costume, her cloak lined with ermine, and brandishing a scourge. On his walls he liked to have pictures of women in furs, of the kind of which there is so magnificent an example by Rubens in the gallery at Munich. He would even keep a woman's fur cloak on an ottoman in his study and stroke it from time to time, finding that his brain thus received the same kind of stimulation as Schiller found in the odor of rotten apples.[97]At the age of 13, in the revolution of 1848, young Sacher-Masoch received his baptism of fire; carried away in the popular movement, he helped to defend the barricades together with a young lady, a relative of his family, an amazon with a pistol in her girdle, such as later he loved to depict. This episode was, however, but a brief interruption of his education; he pursued his studies with brilliance, and on the higher side his education was aided by his father's esthetic tastes. Amateur theatricals were in special favor at his home, and here even the serious plays of Goethe and Gogol were performed, thus helping to train and direct the boy's taste. It is, perhaps, however, significant that it was a tragic event which, at the age of 16, first brought to him the full realization of life and the consciousness of his own power. This was the sudden death of his favorite sister. He became serious and quiet, and always regarded this grief as a turning-point in his life.At the Universities of Prague and Graz he studied with such zeal that when only 19 he took his doctor's degree in law and shortly afterward became aprivatdocentfor German history at Graz. Gradually, however, the charms of literature asserted themselves definitely, and he soon abandoned teaching. He took part, however, in the war of 1866 in Italy, and at the battle of Solferino he was decorated on the field for bravery in action by the Austrian field-marshal. These incidents, however, had little disturbing influence on Sacher-Masoch's literary career, and he was gradually acquiring a European reputation by his novels and stories.A far more seriously disturbing influence had already begun to be exerted on his life by a series of love-episodes. Some of these were of slight and ephemeral character; some were a source of unalloyed happiness, all the more so if there was an element of extravagance to appeal to his Quixotic nature. He always longed to give a dramatic and romantic character to his life, his wife says, and he spent some blissful days on an occasion when he ran away to Florence with a Russian princess as her private secretary. Most often these episodes culminated in deception and misery. It was after a relationship of this kind from which he could not free himself for four years that he wroteDie Geschiedene Frau, Passionsgeschichte eines Idealisten, putting into it much of his own personal history. At one time he was engaged to a sweet and charming young girl. Then it was that he met a young woman at Graz, Laura Rümelin, 27 years of age, engaged as a glove-maker, and living with her mother. Though of poor parentage, with little or no knowledge of the world, she had great natural ability and intelligence. Schlichtegroll represents her as spontaneously engaging in a mysterious intrigue with the novelist. Her own detailed narrative renders the circumstances more intelligible. She approached Sacher-Masoch by letter, adopting for disguise the name of his heroine Wanda von Dunajev, in order to recover possession of some compromising letters which had been written to him, as a joke, by a friend of hers. Sacher-Masoch insisted on seeing his correspondent before returning the letters, and with his eager thirst for romantic adventure he imagined that she was a married woman of the aristocratic world, probably a Russian countess, whose simple costume was a disguise. Not anxious to reveal the prosaic facts, she humored him in his imaginations and a web of mystification was thus formed. A strong attraction grew up on both sides and, though for some time Laura Rümelin maintained the mystery and held herself aloof from him, a relationship was formed and a child born. Thereupon, in 1893, they married. Before long, however, there was disillusion on both sides. She began to detect the morbid, chimerical, and unpractical aspects of his character, and he realized that not only was his wife not an aristocrat, but, what was of more importance to him, she was by no means the domineering heroine of his dreams. Soon after marriage, in the course of an innocent romp in which the whole of the small household took part, he asked his wife to inflict a whipping on him. She refused, and he thereupon suggested that the servant should do it; the wife failed to take this idea seriously; but he had it carried out, with great satisfaction at the severity of the castigation he received. When, however, his wife explained to him that, after this incident, it was impossible for the servant to stay, Sacher-Masoch quite agreed andshe was at once discharged. But he constantly found pleasure in placing his wife in awkward or compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too normal to share. This necessarily led to much domestic wretchedness. He had persuaded her, against her wish, to whip him nearly every day, with whips which he devised, having nails attached to them. He found this a stimulant to his literary work, and it enabled him to dispense in his novels with his stereotyped heroine who is always engaged in subjugating men, for, as he explained to his wife, when he had the reality in his life he was no longer obsessed by it in his imaginative dreams. Not content with this, however, he was constantly desirous for his wife to be unfaithful. He even put an advertisement in a newspaper to the effect that a young and beautiful woman desired to make the acquaintance of an energetic man. The wife, however, though she wished to please her husband, was not anxious to do so to this extent. She went to an hotel by appointment to meet a stranger who had answered this advertisement, but when she had explained to him the state of affairs he chivalrously conducted her home. It was some time before Sacher-Masoch eventually succeeded in rendering his wife unfaithful. He attended to the minutest details of her toilette on this occasion, and as he bade her farewell at the door he exclaimed: "How I envy him!" This episode thoroughly humiliated the wife, and from that moment her love for her husband turned to hate. A final separation was only a question of time. Sacher-Masoch formed a relationship with Hulda Meister, who had come to act as secretary and translator to him, while his wife became attached to Rosenthal, a clever journalist later known to readers of theFigaroas "Jacques St.-Cère," who realized her painful position and felt sympathy and affection for her. She went to live with him in Paris and, having refused to divorce her husband, he eventually obtained a divorce from her; she states, however, that she never at any time had physical relationships with Rosenthal, who was a man of fragile organization and health. Sacher-Masoch united himself to Hulda Meister, who is described by the first wife as a prim and faded but coquettish old maid, and by the biographer as a highly accomplished and gentle woman, who cared for him with almost maternal devotion. No doubt there is truth in both descriptions. It must be noted that, as Wanda clearly shows, apart from his abnormal sexual temperament, Sacher-Masoch was kind and sympathetic, and he was strongly attached to his eldest child. Eulenburg also quotes the statement of a distinguished Austrian woman writer acquainted with him that, "apart from his sexual eccentricities, he was an amiable, simple, and sympathetic man with a touchingly tender love for his children." He had very few needs, did not drink or smoke, and though he liked to put the woman hewas attached to in rich furs and fantastically gorgeous raiment he dressed himself with extreme simplicity. His wife quotes the saying of another woman that he was as simple as a child and as naughty as a monkey.In 1883 Sacher-Masoch and Hulda Meister settled in Lindheim, a village in Germany near the Taunus, a spot to which the novelist seems to have been attached because in the grounds of his little estate was a haunted and ruined tower associated with a tragic medieval episode. Here, after many legal delays, Sacher-Masoch was able to render his union with Hulda Meister legitimate; here two children were in due course born, and here the novelist spent the remaining years of his life in comparative peace. At first, as is usual, treated with suspicion by the peasants, Sacher-Masoch gradually acquired great influence over them; he became a kind of Tolstoy in the rural life around him, the friend and confidant of all the villagers (something of Tolstoy's communism is also, it appears, to be seen in the books he wrote at this time), while the theatrical performances which he inaugurated, and in which his wife took an active part, spread the fame of the household in many neighboring villages. Meanwhile his health began to break up; a visit to Nauheim in 1894 was of no benefit, and he died March 9, 1895.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 at Lemberg in Galicia. He was of Spanish, German, and more especially Slavonic race. The founder of the family may be said to be a certain Don Matthias Sacher, a young Spanish nobleman, in the sixteenth century, who settled in Prague. The novelist's father was director of police in Lemberg and married Charlotte von Masoch, a Little Russian lady of noble birth. The novelist, the eldest child of this union, was not born until after nine years of marriage, and in infancy was so delicate that he was not expected to survive. He began to improve, however, when his mother gave him to be suckled to a robust Russian peasant woman, from whom, as he said later, he gained not only health, but "his soul"; from her he learned all the strange and melancholy legends of her people and a love of the Little Russians which never left him. While still a child young Sacher-Masoch was in the midst of the bloody scenes of the revolution which culminated in 1848. When he was 12 the family migrated to Prague, and the boy, though precocious in his development, then first learned the German language, of which he attained so fine a mastery. At a very early age he had found the atmosphere, and even some of the most characteristic elements, of the peculiar types which mark his work as a novelist.

It is interesting to trace the germinal elements of those peculiarities which so strongly affected his imagination on the sexual side. As a child, he was greatly attracted by representations of cruelty; he loved to gaze at pictures of executions, the legends of martyrs were his favorite reading, and with the onset of puberty he regularly dreamed that he was fettered and in the power of a cruel woman who tortured him. It has been said by an anonymous author that the women of Galicia either rule their husbands entirely and make them their slaves or themselves sink to be the wretchedest of slaves. At the age of 10, according to Schlichtegroll's narrative, the child Leopold witnessed a scene in which a woman of the former kind, a certain Countess XenobiaX., a relative of his own on the paternal side, played the chief part, and this scene left an undying impress on his imagination. The Countess was a beautiful but wanton creature, and the child adored her, impressed alike by her beauty and the costly furs she wore. She accepted his devotion and little services and would sometimes allow him to assist her in dressing; on one occasion, as he was kneeling before her to put on her ermine slippers, he kissed her feet; she smiled and gave him a kick which filled him with pleasure. Not long afterward occurred the episode which so profoundly affected his imagination. He was playing with his sisters at hide-and-seek and had carefully hidden himself behind the dresses on a clothes-rail in the Countess's bedroom. At this moment the Countess suddenly entered the house and ascended the stairs, followed by a lover, and the child, who dared not betray his presence, saw the countess sink down on a sofa and begin to caress her lover. But a few moments later the husband, accompanied by two friends, dashed into the room. Before, however, he could decide which of the lovers to turn against the Countess had risen and struck him so powerful a blow in the face with her fist that he fell back streaming with blood. She then seized a whip, drove all three men out of the room, and in the confusion the lover slipped away. At this moment the clothes-rail fell and the child, the involuntary witness of the scene, was revealed to the Countess, who now fell on him in anger, threw him to the ground, pressed her knee on his shoulder, and struck him unmercifully. The pain was great, and yet he was conscious of a strange pleasure. While this castigation was proceeding the Count returned, no longer in a rage, but meek and humble as a slave, and kneeled down before her to beg forgiveness. As the boy escaped he saw her kick her husband. The child could not resist the temptation to return to the spot; the door was closed and he could see nothing, but he heard the sound of the whip and the groans of the Count beneath his wife's blows.

It is unnecessary to insist that in this scene, acting on a highly sensitive and somewhat peculiar child, we have the key to the emotional attitude which affected so much of Sacher-Masoch's work. As his biographer remarks, woman became to him, during a considerable part of his life, a creature at once to be loved and hated, a being whose beauty and brutality enabled her to set her foot at will on the necks of men, and in the heroine of his first important novel, theEmissär, dealing with the Polish Revolution, he embodied the contradictory personality of Countess Xenobia. Even the whip and the fur garments, Sacher-Masoch's favorite emotional symbols, find their explanation in this early episode. He was accustomed to say of an attractive woman: "I should like to see her in furs," and, of an unattractive woman: "I could not imagine her in furs." His writing-paper at one time wasadorned with the figure of a woman in Russian Boyar costume, her cloak lined with ermine, and brandishing a scourge. On his walls he liked to have pictures of women in furs, of the kind of which there is so magnificent an example by Rubens in the gallery at Munich. He would even keep a woman's fur cloak on an ottoman in his study and stroke it from time to time, finding that his brain thus received the same kind of stimulation as Schiller found in the odor of rotten apples.[97]

At the age of 13, in the revolution of 1848, young Sacher-Masoch received his baptism of fire; carried away in the popular movement, he helped to defend the barricades together with a young lady, a relative of his family, an amazon with a pistol in her girdle, such as later he loved to depict. This episode was, however, but a brief interruption of his education; he pursued his studies with brilliance, and on the higher side his education was aided by his father's esthetic tastes. Amateur theatricals were in special favor at his home, and here even the serious plays of Goethe and Gogol were performed, thus helping to train and direct the boy's taste. It is, perhaps, however, significant that it was a tragic event which, at the age of 16, first brought to him the full realization of life and the consciousness of his own power. This was the sudden death of his favorite sister. He became serious and quiet, and always regarded this grief as a turning-point in his life.

At the Universities of Prague and Graz he studied with such zeal that when only 19 he took his doctor's degree in law and shortly afterward became aprivatdocentfor German history at Graz. Gradually, however, the charms of literature asserted themselves definitely, and he soon abandoned teaching. He took part, however, in the war of 1866 in Italy, and at the battle of Solferino he was decorated on the field for bravery in action by the Austrian field-marshal. These incidents, however, had little disturbing influence on Sacher-Masoch's literary career, and he was gradually acquiring a European reputation by his novels and stories.

A far more seriously disturbing influence had already begun to be exerted on his life by a series of love-episodes. Some of these were of slight and ephemeral character; some were a source of unalloyed happiness, all the more so if there was an element of extravagance to appeal to his Quixotic nature. He always longed to give a dramatic and romantic character to his life, his wife says, and he spent some blissful days on an occasion when he ran away to Florence with a Russian princess as her private secretary. Most often these episodes culminated in deception and misery. It was after a relationship of this kind from which he could not free himself for four years that he wroteDie Geschiedene Frau, Passionsgeschichte eines Idealisten, putting into it much of his own personal history. At one time he was engaged to a sweet and charming young girl. Then it was that he met a young woman at Graz, Laura Rümelin, 27 years of age, engaged as a glove-maker, and living with her mother. Though of poor parentage, with little or no knowledge of the world, she had great natural ability and intelligence. Schlichtegroll represents her as spontaneously engaging in a mysterious intrigue with the novelist. Her own detailed narrative renders the circumstances more intelligible. She approached Sacher-Masoch by letter, adopting for disguise the name of his heroine Wanda von Dunajev, in order to recover possession of some compromising letters which had been written to him, as a joke, by a friend of hers. Sacher-Masoch insisted on seeing his correspondent before returning the letters, and with his eager thirst for romantic adventure he imagined that she was a married woman of the aristocratic world, probably a Russian countess, whose simple costume was a disguise. Not anxious to reveal the prosaic facts, she humored him in his imaginations and a web of mystification was thus formed. A strong attraction grew up on both sides and, though for some time Laura Rümelin maintained the mystery and held herself aloof from him, a relationship was formed and a child born. Thereupon, in 1893, they married. Before long, however, there was disillusion on both sides. She began to detect the morbid, chimerical, and unpractical aspects of his character, and he realized that not only was his wife not an aristocrat, but, what was of more importance to him, she was by no means the domineering heroine of his dreams. Soon after marriage, in the course of an innocent romp in which the whole of the small household took part, he asked his wife to inflict a whipping on him. She refused, and he thereupon suggested that the servant should do it; the wife failed to take this idea seriously; but he had it carried out, with great satisfaction at the severity of the castigation he received. When, however, his wife explained to him that, after this incident, it was impossible for the servant to stay, Sacher-Masoch quite agreed andshe was at once discharged. But he constantly found pleasure in placing his wife in awkward or compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too normal to share. This necessarily led to much domestic wretchedness. He had persuaded her, against her wish, to whip him nearly every day, with whips which he devised, having nails attached to them. He found this a stimulant to his literary work, and it enabled him to dispense in his novels with his stereotyped heroine who is always engaged in subjugating men, for, as he explained to his wife, when he had the reality in his life he was no longer obsessed by it in his imaginative dreams. Not content with this, however, he was constantly desirous for his wife to be unfaithful. He even put an advertisement in a newspaper to the effect that a young and beautiful woman desired to make the acquaintance of an energetic man. The wife, however, though she wished to please her husband, was not anxious to do so to this extent. She went to an hotel by appointment to meet a stranger who had answered this advertisement, but when she had explained to him the state of affairs he chivalrously conducted her home. It was some time before Sacher-Masoch eventually succeeded in rendering his wife unfaithful. He attended to the minutest details of her toilette on this occasion, and as he bade her farewell at the door he exclaimed: "How I envy him!" This episode thoroughly humiliated the wife, and from that moment her love for her husband turned to hate. A final separation was only a question of time. Sacher-Masoch formed a relationship with Hulda Meister, who had come to act as secretary and translator to him, while his wife became attached to Rosenthal, a clever journalist later known to readers of theFigaroas "Jacques St.-Cère," who realized her painful position and felt sympathy and affection for her. She went to live with him in Paris and, having refused to divorce her husband, he eventually obtained a divorce from her; she states, however, that she never at any time had physical relationships with Rosenthal, who was a man of fragile organization and health. Sacher-Masoch united himself to Hulda Meister, who is described by the first wife as a prim and faded but coquettish old maid, and by the biographer as a highly accomplished and gentle woman, who cared for him with almost maternal devotion. No doubt there is truth in both descriptions. It must be noted that, as Wanda clearly shows, apart from his abnormal sexual temperament, Sacher-Masoch was kind and sympathetic, and he was strongly attached to his eldest child. Eulenburg also quotes the statement of a distinguished Austrian woman writer acquainted with him that, "apart from his sexual eccentricities, he was an amiable, simple, and sympathetic man with a touchingly tender love for his children." He had very few needs, did not drink or smoke, and though he liked to put the woman hewas attached to in rich furs and fantastically gorgeous raiment he dressed himself with extreme simplicity. His wife quotes the saying of another woman that he was as simple as a child and as naughty as a monkey.

In 1883 Sacher-Masoch and Hulda Meister settled in Lindheim, a village in Germany near the Taunus, a spot to which the novelist seems to have been attached because in the grounds of his little estate was a haunted and ruined tower associated with a tragic medieval episode. Here, after many legal delays, Sacher-Masoch was able to render his union with Hulda Meister legitimate; here two children were in due course born, and here the novelist spent the remaining years of his life in comparative peace. At first, as is usual, treated with suspicion by the peasants, Sacher-Masoch gradually acquired great influence over them; he became a kind of Tolstoy in the rural life around him, the friend and confidant of all the villagers (something of Tolstoy's communism is also, it appears, to be seen in the books he wrote at this time), while the theatrical performances which he inaugurated, and in which his wife took an active part, spread the fame of the household in many neighboring villages. Meanwhile his health began to break up; a visit to Nauheim in 1894 was of no benefit, and he died March 9, 1895.

A careful consideration of the phenomena of sadism and masochism may be said to lead us to the conclusion that there is no real line of demarcation. Even De Sade himself was not a pure sadist, as Bloch's careful definition is alone sufficient to indicate; it might even be argued that De Sade was really a masochist; the investigation of histories of sadism and masochism, even those given by Krafft-Ebing (as, indeed, Colin Scott and Féré have already pointed out), constantly reveals traces of both groups of phenomena in the same individual. They cannot, therefore, be regarded as opposed manifestations. This has been felt by some writers, who have, in consequence, proposed other names more clearly indicating the relationship of the phenomena. Féré speaks of sexual algophily[98]; he only applies the term to masochism; it might equally well be applied to sadism. Schrenck-Notzing, to cover both sadism and masochism, has invented the term algolagnia (ἄλγος, pain, and λάγνος sexually excited), and calls the former active, the latterpassive, algolagnia.[99]Eulenburg has also emphasized the close connection between these groups of perverted sexual manifestations, and has adopted the same terms, adding the further group of ideal (illusionary) algolagnia, to cover the cases in which the mere autosuggestive representation of pain, inflicted or suffered, suffices to give sexual gratification.[100]

A brief discussion of the terms "sadism" and "masochism" has imposed itself upon us at this point because as soon as, in any study of the relationship between love and pain, we pass over the limits of normal manifestations into a region which is more or less abnormal, these two conceptions are always brought before us, and it was necessary to show on what grounds they are here rejected as the pivots on which the discussion ought to turn. We may accept them as useful terms to indicate two groups of clinical phenomena; but we cannot regard them as of any real scientific value. Having reached this result, we may continue our consideration of the love-bite, as the normal manifestation of the connection between love and pain which most naturally leads us across the frontier of the abnormal.

The result of the love-bite in its extreme degree is to shed blood. This cannot be regarded as the direct aim of the bite in its normal manifestations, for the mingled feelings of close contact, of passionate gripping, of symbolic devouring, which constitute the emotional accompaniments of the bite would be too violently discomposed by actual wounding and real shedding of blood. With some persons, however, perhaps more especially women, the love-bite is really associated with a conscious desire, even if more or less restrained, to draw blood, a real delight in this process, a love of blood. Probably this only occurs in persons who are not absolutely normal, but on the borderland of the abnormal. We have to admit that this craving has, however, a perfectly normal basis. There is scarcely anynatural object with so profoundly emotional an effect as blood, and it is very easy to understand why this should be so.[101]Moreover, blood enters into the sphere of courtship by virtue of the same conditions by which cruelty enters into it; they are both accidents of combat, and combat is of the very essence of animal and primitive human courtship, certainly its most frequent accompaniment. So that the repelling or attracting fascination of blood may be regarded as a by-product of normal courtship, which, like other such by-products, may become an essential element of abnormal courtship.[102]

Normally the fascination of blood, if present at all during sexual excitement, remains more or less latent, either because it is weak or because the checks that inhibit it are inevitably very powerful. Occasionally it becomes more clearly manifest, and this may happen early in life. Féré records the case of a man of Anglo-Saxon origin, of sound heredity so far as could be ascertained and presenting no obvious stigmata of degeneration, who first experienced sexual manifestations at the age of 5 when a boy cousin was attacked by bleeding at the nose. It was the first time he had seen such a thing and he experienced erection and much pleasure at the sight. This was repeated the next time the cousin's nose bled and also whenever he witnessed any injuries or wounds, especially when occurring in males. A few years later he began to find pleasure in pinching and otherwise inflicting slight suffering. This sadism was not, however, further developed, although a tendency to inversion persisted.[103]

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