CHAPTER XI.

[349]

Ten years ago, if not still, the United States came fourth in order of frequency of divorce, after Japan, Denmark, and Switzerland.

[350]

Lecky, the historian of European morals, has pointed out (Democracy and Liberty, vol. ii, p. 172) the close connection generally between facility of divorce and a high standard of sexual morality.

[351]

So,e.g., Hobhouse,Morals in Evolution, vol. i, p. 237.

[352]

In England this step was taken in the reign of Henry VII, when the forcible marriage of women against their will was forbidden by statute (3 Henry VII, c. 2). Even in the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the question of forcible marriage had again to be dealt with (Inderwick, Interregnum, pp. 40et seq.).

[353]

Woods Hutchinson (Contemporary Review, Sept., 1905) argues that when there is epilepsy, insanity, moral perversion, habitual drunkenness, or criminal conduct of any kind, divorce, for the sake of the next generation, should be not permissive but compulsory. Mere divorce, however, would not suffice to attain the ends desired.

[354]

Similarly in Germany, Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, who had suffered much from marriage, whatever her own defects of character may have been, writes at the end ofMeine Lebensbeichtethat "as long as women have not the courage to regulate, without State-interference or Church-interference, relationships which concern themselves alone, they will not be free." In place of this old decayed system of marriage so opposed to our modern thoughts and feelings, she would have private contracts made by a lawyer. In England, at a much earlier period, Charles Kingsley, who was an ardent friend to women's movements, and whose feeling for womanhood amounted almost to worship, wrote to J. S. Mill: "There will never be a good world for women until the last remnant of the Canon law is civilized off the earth."

[355]

"No fouler institution was ever invented," declared Auberon Herbert many years ago, expressing, before its time, a feeling which has since become more common; "and its existence drags on, to our deep shame, because we have not the courage frankly to say that the sexual relations of husband and wife, or those who live together, concern their own selves, and do not concern the prying, gloating, self-righteous, and intensely untruthful world outside."

[356]

Hobhouse,op. cit.vol. i, p. 237.

[357]

The same conception of marriage as a contract still persists to some extent also in the United States, whither it was carried by the early Protestants and Puritans. No definition of marriage is indeed usually laid down by the States, but, Howard says (op. cit., vol. ii, p. 395), "in effect matrimony is treated as a relation partaking of the nature of both status and contract."

[358]

This point of view has been vigorously set forth by Paul and Victor Margueritte,Quelques Idées.

[359]

I may remark that this was pointed out, and its consequences vigorously argued, many years ago by C. G. Garrison, "Limits of Divorce,"Contemporary Review, Feb., 1894. "It may safely be asserted," he concludes, "that marriage presents not one attribute or incident of anything remotely resembling a contract, either in form, remedy, procedure, or result; but that in all these aspects, on the contrary, it is fatally hostile to the principles and practices of that division of the rights of persons." Marriage is not contract, but conduct.

[360]

See,e.g., P. and V. Margueritte,op. cit.

[361]

As quoted by Howard,op. cit., vol. ii, p. 29.

[362]

Ellen Key similarly (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 343) remarks that to talk of "the duty of life-long fidelity" is much the same as to talk of "the duty of life-long health." A man may promise, she adds, to do his best to preserve his life, or his love; he cannot unconditionally undertake to preserve them.

[363]

Hobhouse,op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 159, 237-9;cf.P. and V. Margueritte,Quelques Idées.

[364]

"Divorce," as Garrison puts it ("Limits of Divorce,"Contemporary Review, Feb., 1894), "is the judicial announcement that conduct once connubial in character and purpose, has lost these qualities.... Divorce is a question of fact, and not a license to break a promise."

[365]

See,ante, p. 425.

[366]

It has been necessary to discuss reproduction in the first chapter of the present volume, and it will again be necessary in the concluding chapter. Here we are only concerned with procreation as an element of marriage.

[367]

Nietzold,Die Ehe in Ægypten zur Ptolemäisch-römischen Zeit, 1903, p. 3. This bond also accorded rights to any children that might be born during its existence.

[368]

See,e.g., Ellen Key,Mutter und Kind, p. 21. The necessity for the combination of greater freedom of sexual relationships with greater stringency of parental relationships was clearly realized at an earlier period by another able woman writer, Miss J. H. Clapperton, in her notable book,Scientific Meliorism, published in 1885. "Legal changes," she wrote (p. 320), "are required in two directions, viz., towards greater freedom as to marriage and greater strictness as to parentage. The marriage union is essentially a private matter with which society has no call and no right to interfere. Childbirth, on the contrary, is a public event. It touches the interests of the whole nation."

[369]

Ellen Key,Liebe und Ehe, p. 168;cf.the same author'sCentury of the Child.

[370]

In Germany alone 180,000 "illegitimate" children are born every year, and the number is rapidly increasing; in England it is only 40,000 per annum, the strong feeling which often exists against such births in England (as also in France) leading to the wide adoption of methods for preventing conception.

[371]

"Where are real monogamists to be found?" asked Schopenhauer in his essay, "Ueber die Weibe." And James Hinton was wont to ask: "What is the meaning of maintaining monogamy? Is there any chance of getting it, I should like to know? Do you call English life monogamous?"

[372]

"Almost everywhere," says Westermarck of polygyny (which he discusses fully in Chs. XX-XXII of hisHistory of Human Marriage) "it is confined to the smaller part of the people, the vast majority being monogamous." Maurice Gregory (Contemporary Review, Sept., 1906) gives statistics showing that nearly everywhere the tendency is towards equality in number of the sexes.

[373]

In a polygamous land a man is of course as much bound by his obligations to his second wife as to his first. Among ourselves the man's "second wife" is degraded with the name of "mistress," and the worse he treats her and her children the more his "morality" is approved, just as the Catholic Church, when struggling to establish sacerdotal celibacy, approved more highly the priest who had illegitimate relations with women than the priest who decently and openly married. If his neglect induces a married man's mistress to make known her relationship to him the man is justified in prosecuting her, and his counsel, assured of general sympathy, will state in court that "this woman has even been so wicked as to write to the prosecutor's wife!"

[374]

Howard, in his judicialHistory of Matrimonial Institutions(vol. ii. pp. 96et seq.), cannot refrain from drawing attention to the almost insanely wild character of the language used in England not so many years ago by those who opposed marriage with a deceased wife's sister, and he contrasts it with the much more reasonable attitude of the Catholic Church. "Pictures have been drawn," he remarks, "of the moral anarchy such marriages must produce, which are read by American, Colonial, and Continental observers with a bewilderment that is not unmixed with disgust, and are, indeed, a curious illustration of the extreme insularity of the English mind." So recently as A.D. 1908 a bill was brought into the British House of Lords proposing that desertion without cause for two years shall be a ground for divorce, a reasonable and humane measure which is law in most parts of the civilized world. The Lord Chancellor (Lord Loreburn), a Liberal, and in the sphere of politics an enlightened and sagacious leader, declared that such a proposal was "absolutely impossible." The House rejected the proposal by 61 votes to 2. Even the marriage decrees of the Council of Trent were not affirmed by such an overwhelming majority. In matters of marriage legislation England has scarcely yet emerged from the Middle Ages.

Marriage Not Only for Procreation—Theologians on theSacramentum Solationis—Importance of theArt of Love—The Basis of Stability in Marriage and the Condition for Right Procreation—The Art of Love the Bulwark Against Divorce—The Unity of Love and Marriage a Principle of Modern Morality—Christianity and the Art of Love—Ovid—The Art of Love Among Primitive Peoples—Sexual Initiation in Africa and Elsewhere—The Tendency to Spontaneous Development of the Art of Love in Early Life—Flirtation—Sexual Ignorance in Women—The Husband's Place in Sexual Initiation—Sexual Ignorance in Men—The Husband's Education for Marriage—The Injury Done by the Ignorance of Husbands—The Physical and Mental Results of Unskilful Coitus—Women Understand the Art of Love Better Than Men—Ancient and Modern Opinions Concerning Frequency of Coitus—Variation in Sexual Capacity—The Sexual Appetite—The Art of Love Based on the Biological Facts of Courtship—The Art of Pleasing Women—The Lover Compared to the Musician—The Proposal as a Part of Courtship—Divination in the Art of Love—The Importance of the Preliminaries in Courtship—The Unskilful Husband Frequently the Cause of the Frigid Wife—The Difficulty of Courtship—Simultaneous Orgasm—The Evils of Incomplete Gratification in Women—Coitus Interruptus—Coitus Reservatus—The Human Method of Coitus—Variations in Coitus—Posture in Coitus—The Best Time for Coitus—The Influence of Coitus in Marriage—The Advantages of Absence in Marriage—The Risks of Absence—Jealousy—The Primitive Function of Jealousy—Its Predominance Among Animals, Savages, etc., and in Pathological States—An Anti-Social Emotion—Jealousy Incompatible with the Progress of Civilization—The Possibility of Loving More Than One Person at a Time—Platonic Friendship—The Conditions Which Make It Possible—The Maternal Element in Woman's Love—The Final Development of Conjugal Love—The Problem of Love One of the Greatest of Social Questions.

It will be clear from the preceding discussion that there are two elements in every marriage so far as that marriage is complete. On the one hand marriage is a union prompted by mutual love and only sustainable as a reality, apart from its mere formal side, by the cultivation of such love. On the otherhand marriage is a method for propagating the race and having its end in offspring. In the first aspect its aim is erotic, in the second parental. Both these ends have long been generally recognized. We find them set forth, for instance, in the marriage service of the Church of England, where it is stated that marriage exists both for "the mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other," and also for "the procreation of children." Without the factor of mutual love the proper conditions for procreation cannot exist; without the factor of procreation the sexual union, however beautiful and sacred a relationship it may in itself be, remains, in essence, a private relationship, incomplete as a marriage and without public significance. It becomes necessary, therefore, to supplement the preceding discussion of marriage in its general outlines by a final and more intimate consideration of marriage in its essence, as embracing the art of love and the science of procreation.

There has already been occasion from time to time to refer to those who, starting from various points of view, have sought to limit the scope of marriage and to suppress one or other of its elements. (Seee.g.,ante, p. 135.)In modern times the tendency has been to exclude the factor of procreation, and to regard the relationship of marriage as exclusively lying in the relationship of the two parties to each other. Apart from the fact, which it is unnecessary again to call attention to, that, from the public and social point of view, a marriage without children, however important to the two persons concerned, is a relationship without any public significance, it must further be said that, in the absence of children, even the personal erotic life itself is apt to suffer, for in the normal erotic life, especially in women, sexual love tends to grow into parental love. Moreover, the full development of mutual love and dependence is with difficulty attained, and there is absence of that closest of bonds, the mutual coöperation of two persons in producing a new person. The perfect and complete marriage in its full development is a trinity.Those who seek to eliminate the erotic factor from marriage as unessential, or at all events as only permissible when strictly subordinated to the end of procreation, have made themselves heard from time to time at various periods. Even the ancients, Greeks and Romans alike, in their more severe moments advocated the elimination of theerotic element from marriage, and its confinement to extra-marital relationships, that is so far as men were concerned; for the erotic needs of married women they had no provision to make. Montaigne, soaked in classic traditions, has admirably set forth the reasons for eliminating the erotic interest from marriage: "One does not marry for oneself, whatever may be said; a man marries as much, or more, for his posterity, for his family; the usage and interest of marriage touch our race beyond ourselves.... Thus it is a kind of incest to employ, in this venerable and sacred parentage, the efforts and the extravagances of amorous license" (Essais, Bk. i, Ch. XXIX; Bk. iii, Ch. V). This point of view easily commended itself to the early Christians, who, however, deliberately overlooked its reverse side, the establishment of erotic interests outside marriage. "To have intercourse except for procreation," said Clement of Alexandria (Pædagogus, Bk. ii, Ch. X), "is to do injury to Nature." While, however, that statement is quite true of the lower animals, it is not true of man, and especially not true of civilized man, whose erotic needs are far more developed, and far more intimately associated with the finest and highest part of the organism, than is the case among animals generally. For the animal, sexual desire, except when called forth by the conditions involved by procreative necessities, has no existence. It is far otherwise in man, for whom, even when the question of procreation is altogether excluded, sexual love is still an insistent need, and even a condition of the finest spiritual development. The Catholic Church, therefore, while regarding with admiration a continence in marriage which excluded sexual relations except for the end of procreation, has followed St. Augustine in treating intercourse apart from procreation with considerable indulgence, as only a venial sin. Here, however, the Church was inclined to draw the line, and it appears that in 1679 Innocent XI condemned the proposition that "the conjugal act, practiced for pleasure alone, is exempt even from venial sin."Protestant theologians have been inclined to go further, and therein they found some authority even in Catholic writers. John à Lasco, the Catholic Bishop who became a Protestant and settled in England during Edward VI's reign, was following many mediæval theologians when he recognized thesacramentum solationis, in addition toproles, as an element of marriage. Cranmer, in his marriage service of 1549, stated that "mutual help and comfort," as well as procreation, enter into the object of marriage (Wickham Legg,Ecclesiological Essays, p. 204; Howard,Matrimonial Institutions, vol. i, p. 398). Modern theologians speak still more distinctly. "The sexual act," says Northcote (Christianity and Sex Problems, p. 55), "is a love act. Duly regulated, it conduces to the ethical welfare of the individual and promotes his efficiency as a social unit. The act itself and its surrounding emotions stimulate within the organism the powerful movements of a vast psychiclife." At an earlier period also, Schleiermacher, in hisLetters on Lucinde, had pointed out the great significance of love for the spiritual development of the individual.Edward Carpenter truly remarks, inLove's Coming of Age, that sexual love is not only needed for physical creation, but also for spiritual creation. Bloch, again, in discussing this question (The Sexual Life of Our Time, Ch. VI) concludes that "love and the sexual embrace have not only an end in procreation, they constitute an end in themselves, and are necessary for the life, development, and inner growth of the individual himself."

In modern times the tendency has been to exclude the factor of procreation, and to regard the relationship of marriage as exclusively lying in the relationship of the two parties to each other. Apart from the fact, which it is unnecessary again to call attention to, that, from the public and social point of view, a marriage without children, however important to the two persons concerned, is a relationship without any public significance, it must further be said that, in the absence of children, even the personal erotic life itself is apt to suffer, for in the normal erotic life, especially in women, sexual love tends to grow into parental love. Moreover, the full development of mutual love and dependence is with difficulty attained, and there is absence of that closest of bonds, the mutual coöperation of two persons in producing a new person. The perfect and complete marriage in its full development is a trinity.

Those who seek to eliminate the erotic factor from marriage as unessential, or at all events as only permissible when strictly subordinated to the end of procreation, have made themselves heard from time to time at various periods. Even the ancients, Greeks and Romans alike, in their more severe moments advocated the elimination of theerotic element from marriage, and its confinement to extra-marital relationships, that is so far as men were concerned; for the erotic needs of married women they had no provision to make. Montaigne, soaked in classic traditions, has admirably set forth the reasons for eliminating the erotic interest from marriage: "One does not marry for oneself, whatever may be said; a man marries as much, or more, for his posterity, for his family; the usage and interest of marriage touch our race beyond ourselves.... Thus it is a kind of incest to employ, in this venerable and sacred parentage, the efforts and the extravagances of amorous license" (Essais, Bk. i, Ch. XXIX; Bk. iii, Ch. V). This point of view easily commended itself to the early Christians, who, however, deliberately overlooked its reverse side, the establishment of erotic interests outside marriage. "To have intercourse except for procreation," said Clement of Alexandria (Pædagogus, Bk. ii, Ch. X), "is to do injury to Nature." While, however, that statement is quite true of the lower animals, it is not true of man, and especially not true of civilized man, whose erotic needs are far more developed, and far more intimately associated with the finest and highest part of the organism, than is the case among animals generally. For the animal, sexual desire, except when called forth by the conditions involved by procreative necessities, has no existence. It is far otherwise in man, for whom, even when the question of procreation is altogether excluded, sexual love is still an insistent need, and even a condition of the finest spiritual development. The Catholic Church, therefore, while regarding with admiration a continence in marriage which excluded sexual relations except for the end of procreation, has followed St. Augustine in treating intercourse apart from procreation with considerable indulgence, as only a venial sin. Here, however, the Church was inclined to draw the line, and it appears that in 1679 Innocent XI condemned the proposition that "the conjugal act, practiced for pleasure alone, is exempt even from venial sin."

Protestant theologians have been inclined to go further, and therein they found some authority even in Catholic writers. John à Lasco, the Catholic Bishop who became a Protestant and settled in England during Edward VI's reign, was following many mediæval theologians when he recognized thesacramentum solationis, in addition toproles, as an element of marriage. Cranmer, in his marriage service of 1549, stated that "mutual help and comfort," as well as procreation, enter into the object of marriage (Wickham Legg,Ecclesiological Essays, p. 204; Howard,Matrimonial Institutions, vol. i, p. 398). Modern theologians speak still more distinctly. "The sexual act," says Northcote (Christianity and Sex Problems, p. 55), "is a love act. Duly regulated, it conduces to the ethical welfare of the individual and promotes his efficiency as a social unit. The act itself and its surrounding emotions stimulate within the organism the powerful movements of a vast psychiclife." At an earlier period also, Schleiermacher, in hisLetters on Lucinde, had pointed out the great significance of love for the spiritual development of the individual.

Edward Carpenter truly remarks, inLove's Coming of Age, that sexual love is not only needed for physical creation, but also for spiritual creation. Bloch, again, in discussing this question (The Sexual Life of Our Time, Ch. VI) concludes that "love and the sexual embrace have not only an end in procreation, they constitute an end in themselves, and are necessary for the life, development, and inner growth of the individual himself."

It is argued by some, who admit mutual love as a constituent part of marriage, that such love, once recognized at the outset, may be taken for granted, and requires no further discussion; there is, they believe, no art of love to be either learnt or taught; it comes by nature. Nothing could be further from the truth, most of all as regards civilized man. Even the elementary fact of coitus needs to be taught. No one could take a more austerely Puritanic view of sexual affairs than Sir James Paget, and yet Paget (in his lecture on "Sexual Hypochondriasis") declared that "Ignorance about sexual affairs seems to be a notable characteristic of the more civilized part of the human race. Among ourselves it is certain that the method of copulating needs to be taught, and that they to whom it is not taught remain quite ignorant about it." Gallard, again, remarks similarly (in hisClinique des Maladies des Femmes) that young people, like Daphnis in Longus's pastoral, need a beautiful Lycenion to give them a solid education, practical as well as theoretical, in these matters, and he considers that mothers should instruct their daughters at marriage, and fathers their sons. Philosophers have from time to time recognized the gravity of these questions and have discoursed concerning them; thus Epicurus, as Plutarch tells us,[375]would discuss with his disciples various sexual matters, such as the proper time for coitus; but then, as now, there were obscurantists who would leave even the central facts of life to the hazards of chance or ignorance, and these presumed to blame the philosopher.

There is, however, much more to be learnt in these matters than the mere elementary facts of sexual intercourse. The art of love certainly includes such primary facts of sexual hygiene, but it involves also the whole erotic discipline of marriage, and that is why its significance is so great, for the welfare and happiness of the individual, for the stability of sexual unions, and indirectly for the race, since the art of love is ultimately the art of attaining the right conditions for procreation.

"It seems extremely probable," wrote Professor E. D. Cope,[376]"that if this subject could be properly understood, and become, in the details of its practical conduct, a part of a written social science, the monogamic marriage might attain a far more general success than is often found in actual life." There can be no doubt whatever that this is the case. In the great majority of marriages success depends exclusively upon the knowledge of the art of love possessed by the two persons who enter into it. A life-long monogamic union may, indeed, persist in the absence of the slightest inborn or acquired art of love, out of religious resignation or sheer stupidity. But that attitude is now becoming less common. As we have seen in the previous chapter, divorces are becoming more frequent and more easily obtainable in every civilized country. This is a tendency of civilization; it is the result of a demand that marriage should be a real relationship, and that when it ceases to be real as a relationship it should also cease as a form. That is an inevitable tendency, involved in our growing democratization, for the democracy seems to care more for realities than for forms, however venerable. We cannot fight against it; and we should be wrong to fight against it even if we could.

Yet while we are bound to aid the tendency to divorce, and to insist that a valid marriage needs the wills of two persons to maintain it, it is difficult for anyone to argue that divorce is in itself desirable. It is always a confession of failure. Two persons, who, if they have been moved in the slightest degree by the normal and regular impulse of sexual selection, at the outsetregarded each other as lovable, have, on one side or the other or on both, proved not lovable. There has been a failure in the fundamental art of love. If we are to counterbalance facility of divorce our only sound course is to increase the stability of marriage, and that is only possible by cultivating the art of love, the primal foundation of marriage.

It is by no means unnecessary to emphasize this point. There are still many persons who have failed to realize it. There are even people who seem to imagine that it is unimportant whether or not pleasure is present in the sexual act. "I do not believe mutual pleasure in the sexual act has any particular bearing on the happiness of life," once remarked Dr. Howard A. Kelly.[377]Such a statement means—if indeed it means anything—that the marriage tie has no "particular bearing" on human happiness; it means that the way must be freely opened to adultery and divorce. Even the most perverse ascetic of the Middle Ages scarcely ventured to make a statement so flagrantly opposed to the experiences of humanity, and the fact that a distinguished gynecologist of the twentieth century can make it, with almost the air of stating a truism, is ample justification for the emphasis which it has nowadays become necessary to place on the art of love. "Uxor enim dignitatis nomen est, non voluptatis," was indeed an ancient Pagan dictum. But it is not in harmony with modern ideas. It was not even altogether in harmony with Christianity. For our modern morality, as Ellen Key well says, the unity of love and marriage is a fundamental principle.[378]

The neglect of the art of love has not been a universal phenomenon; it is more especially characteristic of Christendom. The spirit of ancient Rome undoubtedly predisposed Europe to such a neglect, for with their rough cultivation of the military virtues and their inaptitude for the finer aspects of civilization the Romans were willing to regard love as a permissible indulgence, but they were not, as a people, prepared to cultivate it as an art. Their poets do not, in this matter, represent themoral feeling of their best people. It is indeed a highly significant fact that Ovid, the most distinguished Latin poet who concerned himself much with the art of love, associated that art not so much with morality as with immorality. As he viewed it, the art of love was less the art of retaining a woman in her home than the art of winning her away from it; it was the adulterer's art rather than the husband's art. Such a conception would be impossible out of Europe, but it proved very favorable to the growth of the Christian attitude towards the art of love.

Love as an art, as well as a passion, seems to have received considerable study in antiquity, though the results of that study have perished. Cadmus Milesius, says Suidas, wrote fourteen great volumes on the passion of love, but they are not now to be found. Rohde (Das Griechische Roman, p. 55) has a brief section on the Greek philosophic writers on love. Bloch (Beiträge zur Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil I, p. 191) enumerates the ancient women writers who dealt with the art of love. Montaigne (Essais, liv. ii, Ch. V) gives a list of ancient classical lost books on love. Burton (Anatomy of Melancholy, Bell's edition, vol. iii, p. 2) also gives a list of lost books on love. Burton himself dealt at length with the manifold signs of love and its grievous symptoms. Boissier de Sauvages, early in the eighteenth century, published a Latin thesis,De Amore, discussing love somewhat in the same spirit as Burton, as a psychic disease to be treated and cured.The breath of Christian asceticism had passed over love; it was no longer, as in classic days, an art to be cultivated, but only a malady to be cured. The true inheritor of the classic spirit in this, as in many other matters, was not the Christian world, but the world of Islam.The Perfumed Gardenof the Sheik Nefzaoui was probably written in the city of Tunis early in the sixteenth century by an author who belonged to the south of Tunis. Its opening invocation clearly indicates that it departs widely from the conception of love as a disease: "Praise be to God who has placed man's greatest pleasures in the natural parts of woman, and has destined the natural parts of man to afford the greatest enjoyments to woman." The Arabic book,El Ktab, or "The Secret Laws of Love," is a modern work, by Omer Haleby Abu Othmân, who was born in Algiers of a Moorish mother and a Turkish father.

The breath of Christian asceticism had passed over love; it was no longer, as in classic days, an art to be cultivated, but only a malady to be cured. The true inheritor of the classic spirit in this, as in many other matters, was not the Christian world, but the world of Islam.The Perfumed Gardenof the Sheik Nefzaoui was probably written in the city of Tunis early in the sixteenth century by an author who belonged to the south of Tunis. Its opening invocation clearly indicates that it departs widely from the conception of love as a disease: "Praise be to God who has placed man's greatest pleasures in the natural parts of woman, and has destined the natural parts of man to afford the greatest enjoyments to woman." The Arabic book,El Ktab, or "The Secret Laws of Love," is a modern work, by Omer Haleby Abu Othmân, who was born in Algiers of a Moorish mother and a Turkish father.

For Christianity the permission to yield to the sexual impulse at all was merely a concession to human weakness, an indulgence only possible when it was carefully hedged and guarded on every side. Almost from the first the Christians began to cultivate the art of virginity, and they could not sodislocate their point of view as to approve of the art of love. All their passionate adoration in the sphere of sex went out towards chastity. Possessed by such ideals, they could only tolerate human love at all by giving to one special form of it a religious sacramental character, and even that sacramental halo imparted to love a quasi-ascetic character which precluded the idea of regarding love as an art.[379]Love gained a religious element but it lost a moral element, since, outside Christianity, the art of love is part of the foundation of sexual morality, wherever such morality in any degree exists. In Christendom love in marriage was left to shift for itself as best it might; the art of love was a dubious art which was held to indicate a certain commerce with immorality and even indeed to be itself immoral. That feeling was doubtless strengthened by the fact that Ovid was the most conspicuous master in literature of the art of love. His literary reputation—far greater than it now seems to us[380]—gave distinction to his position as the author of the chief extant text-book of the art of love. With Humanism and the Renaissance and the consequent realization that Christianity had overlooked one side of life, Ovid'sArs Amatoriawas placed on a pedestal it had not occupied before or since. It represented a step forward in civilization; it revealed love not as a mere animal instinct or a mere pledged duty, but as a complex, humane, and refined relationship which demanded cultivation; "arte regendus amor." Boccaccio made awise teacher put Ovid'sArs Amatoriainto the hands of the young. In an age still oppressed by the mediæval spirit, it was a much needed text-book, but it possessed the fatal defect, as a text-book, of presenting the erotic claims of the individual as divorced from the claims of good social order. It never succeeded in establishing itself as a generally accepted manual of love, and in the eyes of many it served to stamp the subject it dealt with as one that lies outside the limits of good morals.

When, however, we take a wider survey, and inquire into the discipline for life that is imparted to the young in many parts of the world, we shall frequently find that the art of love, understood in varying ways, is an essential part of that discipline. Summary, though generally adequate, as are the educational methods of primitive peoples, they not seldom include a training in those arts which render a woman agreeable to a man and a man agreeable to a woman in the relationship of marriage, and it is often more or less dimly realized that courtship is not a mere preliminary to marriage, but a biologically essential part of the marriage relationship throughout.

Sexual initiation is carried out very thoroughly in Azimba land, Central Africa. H. Crawford Angus, the first European to visit the Azimba people, lived among them for a year, and has described the Chensamwali, or initiation ceremony, of girls. "At the first sign of menstruation in a young girl, she is taught the mysteries of womanhood, and is shown the different positions for sexual intercourse. The vagina is handled freely, and if not previously enlarged (which may have taken place at the harvest festival when a boy and girl are allowed to 'keep house' during the day-time by themselves, and when quasi-intercourse takes place) it is now enlarged by means of a horn or corn-cob, which is inserted and secured in place by bands of bark cloth. When all signs [of menstruation] have passed, a public announcement of a dance is given to the women in the village. At this dance no men are allowed to be present, and it was only with a great deal of trouble that I managed to witness it. The girl to be 'danced' is led back from the bush to her mother's hut where she is kept in solitude to the morning of the dance. On that morning she is placed on the ground in a sitting position, while the dancers form a ring around her. Several songs are then sung with reference to the genital organs. The girl is then stripped and made to go through the mimic performance of sexual intercourse, and if the movements are not enacted properly, as is often the case when the girl istimid and bashful, one of the older women will take her place and show her how she is to perform. Many songs about the relation between men and women are sung, and the girl is instructed as to all her duties when she becomes a wife. She is also instructed that during the time of her menstruation she is unclean, and that during her monthly period she must close her vulva with a pad of fibre used for the purpose. The object of the dance is to inculcate to the girl the knowledge of married life. The girl is taught to be faithful to her husband and to try to bear children, and she is also taught the various arts and methods of making herself seductive and pleasing to her husband, and of thus retaining him in her power." (H. Crawford Angus, "The Chensamwali,"Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1898, Heft 6, p. 479).In Abyssinia, as well as on the Zanzibar coast, according to Stecker (quoted by Ploss-Bartels,Das Weib, Section 119) young girls are educated in buttock movements which increase their charm in coitus. These movements, of a rotatory character, are called Duk-Duk. To be ignorant of Duk-Duk is a great disgrace to a girl. Among the Swahili women of Zanzibar, indeed, a complete artistic system of hip-movements is cultivated, to be displayed in coitus. It prevails more especially on the coast, and a Swahili woman is not counted a "lady" (bibi) unless she is acquainted with this art. From sixty to eighty young women practice this buttock dance together for some eight hours a day, laying aside all clothing, and singing the while. The public are not admitted. The dance, which is a kind of imitation of coitus, has been described by Zache ("Sitten und Gebräuche der Suaheli,"Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1899, Heft 2-3, p. 72). The more accomplished dancers excite general admiration. During the latter part of this initiation various feats are imposed, to test the girl's skill and self-control. For instance, she must dance up to a fire and remove from the midst of the fire a vessel full of water to the brim, without spilling it. At the end of three months the training is over, and the girl goes home in festival attire. She is now eligible for marriage. Similar customs are said to prevail in the Dutch East Indies and elsewhere.The Hebrews had erotic dances, which were doubtless related to the art of love in marriage, and among the Greeks, and their disciples the Romans, the conception of love as an art which needs training, skill, and cultivation, was still extant. That conception was crushed by Christianity which, although it sanctified the institution of matrimony, degraded that sexual love which is normally the content of marriage.In 1176 the question was brought before a Court of Love by a baron and lady of Champagne, whether love is compatible with marriage. "No," said the baron, "I admire and respect the sweet intimacy of married couples, but I cannot call it love. Love desires obstacles, mystery, stolen favors. Now husbands and wives boldly avow their relationship;they possess each other without contradiction and without reserve. It cannot then be love that they experience." And after mature deliberation the ladies of the Court of Love adopted the baron's conclusions (E. de la Bedollière,Histoire des Mœurs des Français, vol. iii, p. 334). There was undoubtedly an element of truth in the baron's arguments. Yet it may well be doubted whether in any non-Christian country it would ever have been possible to obtain acceptance for the doctrine that love and marriage are incompatible. This doctrine was, however, as Ribot points out in hisLogique des Sentiments, inevitable, when, as among the medieval nobility, marriage was merely a political or domestic treaty and could not, therefore, be a method of moral elevation."Why is it," asked Rétif de la Bretonne, towards the end of the eighteenth century, "that girls who have no morals are more seductive and more loveable than honest women? It is because, like the Greek courtesans to whom grace and voluptuousness were taught, they have studied the art of pleasing. Among the foolish detractors of myContemporaines, not one guessed the philosophic aim of nearly everyone of these tales, which is to suggest to honest women the ways of making themselves loved. I should like to see the institution of initiations, such as those of the ancients.... To-day the happiness of the human species is abandoned to chance; all the experience of women is individual, like that of animals; it is lost with those women who, being naturally amiable, might have taught others to become so. Prostitutes alone make a superficial study of it, and the lessons they receive are, for the most part, as harmful as those of respectable Greek and Roman matrons were holy and honorable, only tending to wantonness, to the exhaustion alike of the purse and of the physical faculties, while the aim of the ancient matrons was the union of husband and wife and their mutual attachment through pleasure. The Christian religion annihilated the Mysteries as infamous, but we may regard that annihilation as one of the wrongs done by Christianity to humanity, as the work of men with little enlightenment and bitter zeal, dangerous puritans who were the natural enemies of marriage" (Rétif de la Bretonne,Monsieur Nicolas, reprint of 1883, vol. x, pp. 160-3). It may be added that Dühren (Dr. Iwan Bloch) regards Rétif as "a master in theArs Amandi," and discusses him from this point of view in hisRétif de la Bretonne(pp. 362-371).

In Abyssinia, as well as on the Zanzibar coast, according to Stecker (quoted by Ploss-Bartels,Das Weib, Section 119) young girls are educated in buttock movements which increase their charm in coitus. These movements, of a rotatory character, are called Duk-Duk. To be ignorant of Duk-Duk is a great disgrace to a girl. Among the Swahili women of Zanzibar, indeed, a complete artistic system of hip-movements is cultivated, to be displayed in coitus. It prevails more especially on the coast, and a Swahili woman is not counted a "lady" (bibi) unless she is acquainted with this art. From sixty to eighty young women practice this buttock dance together for some eight hours a day, laying aside all clothing, and singing the while. The public are not admitted. The dance, which is a kind of imitation of coitus, has been described by Zache ("Sitten und Gebräuche der Suaheli,"Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1899, Heft 2-3, p. 72). The more accomplished dancers excite general admiration. During the latter part of this initiation various feats are imposed, to test the girl's skill and self-control. For instance, she must dance up to a fire and remove from the midst of the fire a vessel full of water to the brim, without spilling it. At the end of three months the training is over, and the girl goes home in festival attire. She is now eligible for marriage. Similar customs are said to prevail in the Dutch East Indies and elsewhere.

The Hebrews had erotic dances, which were doubtless related to the art of love in marriage, and among the Greeks, and their disciples the Romans, the conception of love as an art which needs training, skill, and cultivation, was still extant. That conception was crushed by Christianity which, although it sanctified the institution of matrimony, degraded that sexual love which is normally the content of marriage.

In 1176 the question was brought before a Court of Love by a baron and lady of Champagne, whether love is compatible with marriage. "No," said the baron, "I admire and respect the sweet intimacy of married couples, but I cannot call it love. Love desires obstacles, mystery, stolen favors. Now husbands and wives boldly avow their relationship;they possess each other without contradiction and without reserve. It cannot then be love that they experience." And after mature deliberation the ladies of the Court of Love adopted the baron's conclusions (E. de la Bedollière,Histoire des Mœurs des Français, vol. iii, p. 334). There was undoubtedly an element of truth in the baron's arguments. Yet it may well be doubted whether in any non-Christian country it would ever have been possible to obtain acceptance for the doctrine that love and marriage are incompatible. This doctrine was, however, as Ribot points out in hisLogique des Sentiments, inevitable, when, as among the medieval nobility, marriage was merely a political or domestic treaty and could not, therefore, be a method of moral elevation.

"Why is it," asked Rétif de la Bretonne, towards the end of the eighteenth century, "that girls who have no morals are more seductive and more loveable than honest women? It is because, like the Greek courtesans to whom grace and voluptuousness were taught, they have studied the art of pleasing. Among the foolish detractors of myContemporaines, not one guessed the philosophic aim of nearly everyone of these tales, which is to suggest to honest women the ways of making themselves loved. I should like to see the institution of initiations, such as those of the ancients.... To-day the happiness of the human species is abandoned to chance; all the experience of women is individual, like that of animals; it is lost with those women who, being naturally amiable, might have taught others to become so. Prostitutes alone make a superficial study of it, and the lessons they receive are, for the most part, as harmful as those of respectable Greek and Roman matrons were holy and honorable, only tending to wantonness, to the exhaustion alike of the purse and of the physical faculties, while the aim of the ancient matrons was the union of husband and wife and their mutual attachment through pleasure. The Christian religion annihilated the Mysteries as infamous, but we may regard that annihilation as one of the wrongs done by Christianity to humanity, as the work of men with little enlightenment and bitter zeal, dangerous puritans who were the natural enemies of marriage" (Rétif de la Bretonne,Monsieur Nicolas, reprint of 1883, vol. x, pp. 160-3). It may be added that Dühren (Dr. Iwan Bloch) regards Rétif as "a master in theArs Amandi," and discusses him from this point of view in hisRétif de la Bretonne(pp. 362-371).

Whether or not Christianity is to be held responsible, it cannot be doubted that throughout Christendom there has been a lamentable failure to recognize the supreme importance, not only erotically but morally, of the art of love. Even in the great revival of sexual enlightenment now taking place around us thereis rarely even the faintest recognition that in sexual enlightenment the one thing essentially necessary is a knowledge of the art of love. For the most part, sexual instruction as at present understood, is purely negative, a mere string of thou-shalt-nots. If that failure were due to the conscious and deliberate recognition that while the art of love must be based on physiological and psychological knowledge, it is far too subtle, too complex, too personal, to be formulated in lectures and manuals, it would be reasonable and sound. But it seems to rest entirely on ignorance, indifference, or worse.

Love-making is indeed, like other arts, an art that is partly natural—"an art that nature makes"—and therefore it is a natural subject for learning and exercising in play. Children left to themselves tend, both playfully and seriously, to practice love, alike on the physical and the psychic sides.[381]But this play is on its physical side sternly repressed by their elders, when discovered, and on its psychic side laughed at. Among the well-bred classes it is usually starved out at an early age.

After puberty, if not before, there is another form in which the art of love is largely experimented and practised, especially in England and America, the form of flirtation. In its elementary manifestations flirting is entirely natural and normal; we may trace it even in animals; it is simply the beginning of courtship, at the early stage when courtship may yet, if desired, be broken off. Under modern civilized conditions, however, flirtation is often more than this. These conditions make marriage difficult; they make love and its engagements too serious a matter to be entered on lightly; they make actual sexual intercourse dangerous as well as disreputable. Flirtation adapts itself to these conditions. Instead of being merely the preliminary stage of normal courtship, it is developed into a form of sexual gratification as complete as due observation of the conditions already mentioned will allow. In Germany, and especially in France where it is held in great abhorrence, this is the only form of flirtation known; it is regarded as an exportation fromthe United States and is denominated "flirtage." Its practical outcome is held to be the "demi-vierge," who knows and has experienced the joys of sex while yet retaining her hymen intact.

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