Chapter 26

It is on the basis of these elemental human facts that the permanently seductive and inspiring relationships of sex are developed, and not by the emergence of personalities who combine impossibly exalted characteristics. "The task is extremely difficult," says Kisch in his _Sexual Life of Woman_, "but a clever and virtuous modern wife must endeavor to combine in her single personality the sensuous attractiveness of an Aspasia, the chastity of a Lucrece, and the intellectual greatness of a Cornelia." And in an earlier century we are told in the novel of _La Tia Fingida_, which has sometimes been attributed to Cervantes, that "a woman should be an angel in the street, a saint in church, beautiful at the window, honest in the house, and a demon in bed." The demands made of men by women, on the other hand, have been almost too lofty to bear definite formulation at all. "Ninety-nine out of a hundred loving women," says Helene Stöcker, "certainly believe that if a thousand other men have behaved ignobly, and forsaken, ill-used, and deceived the woman they love, the man they love is an exception, marked out from all other men; that is the reason they love him." It may be doubted, however, if the great lovers have ever stood very far above the ordinary level of humanity by their possession of perfection. They have been human, and their art of love has not always excluded the possession of human frailties; perfection, indeed, even if it could be found, would furnish a bad soil for love to strike deep roots in.

It is only when we realize the highly complex nature of the elements which make up erotic love that we can understand how it is that that love can constitute so tremendous a revelation and exert so profound an influence even in men of the greatest genius and intellect and in the sphere of their most spiritual activity. It is not merely passion, nor any conscious skill in the erotic art,--important as these may be,--that would serve to account for Goethe's relationship to Frau von Stein, or Wagner's to Mathilde Wesendonck, or that of Robert and Elizabeth Browning to each other.[420]

It may now be clear to the reader why it has been necessary in a discussion of the sexual impulse in its relationship to society to deal with the art of love. It is true that there is nothing so intimately private and personal as the erotic affairs of the individual. Yet it is equally true that these affairs lie at the basis of the social life, and furnish the conditions--good or bad as the case may be--of that procreative act which is a supreme concern of the State. It is because the question of love is of such purely private interest that it tends to be submerged in the question of breed. We have to realize, not only that the question of love subserves the question of breed, but also that love has a proper, a necessary, even a socially wholesome claim, to stand by itself and to be regarded for its own worth.

In the profoundly suggestive study of love which the distinguished sociologist Tarde left behind at his death (_Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, loc. cit.), there are some interesting remarks on this point: "Society," he says, "has been far more, and more intelligently, preoccupied with the problem of answering the 'question of breed' than the 'question of love.' The first problem fills all our civil and commercial codes. The second problem has never been clearly stated, or looked in the face, not even in antiquity, still less since the coming of Christianity, for merely to offer the solutions of marriage and prostitution is manifestly inadequate. Statesmen have only seen the side on which it touches population. Hence the marriage laws. Sterile love they profess to disdain. Yet it is evident that, though born as the serf of generation, love tends by civilization to be freed from it. In place of a simple method of procreation it has become an end, it has created itself a title, a royal title. Our gardens cultivate flowers that are all the more charming because they are sterile; why is the double corolla of love held more infamous than the sterilized flowers of our gardens?" Tarde replies that the reason is that our politicians are merely ambitious persons thirsting for power and wealth, and even when they are lovers they are Don Juans rather than Virgils. "The future," he continues, "is to the Virgilians, because if the ambition of power, the regal wealth of American or European millionarism, once seemed nobler, love now more and more attracts to itself the best and highest parts of the soul, where lies the hidden ferment of all that is greatest in science and art, and more and more those studious and artist souls multiply who, intent on their peaceful activities, hold in horror the business men and the politicians, and will one day succeed in driving them back. That assuredly will be the great and capital revolution of humanity, an active psychological revolution: the recognized preponderance of the meditative and contemplative, the lover's side of the human soul, over the feverish, expansive, rapacious, and ambitious side. And then it will be understood that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps the most arduous of all, has been the problem of love."

FOOTNOTES:

[375] _Quæstionum Convivalium_, lib. iii, quæstio 6.

[376] E.D. Cope, "The Marriage Problem," _Open Court_, Nov. 1888.

[377] Columbus meeting of the American Medical Association, 1900.

[378] Ellen Key, _Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 24.

[379] In an admirable article on Friedrich Schlegel's _Lucinde_ (_Mutterschutz_, 1906, Heft 5), Heinrich Meyer-Benfey, in pointing out that the Catholic sacramental conception of marriage licensed love, but failed to elevate it, regards _Lucinde_, with all its defects, as the first expression of the unity of the senses and the soul, and, as such, the basis of the new ethics of love. It must, however, be said that four hundred years earlier Pontano had expressed this same erotic unity far more robustly and wholesomely than Schlegel, though the Latin verse in which he wrote, fresh and vital as it is, remained without influence. Pontano's _Carmina_, including the "De Amore Conjugali," have at length been reprinted in a scholarly edition by Soldati.

[380] From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries Ovid was, in reality, the most popular and influential classic poet. His works played a large part in moulding Renaissance literature, not least in England, where Marlowe translated his _Amores_, and Shakespeare, during the early years of his literary activity, was greatly indebted to him (see, e.g., Sidney Lee, "Ovid and Shakespeare's Sonnets," _Quarterly Review_, Ap., 1909).

[381] This has already been discussed in Chapter II.

[382] By the age of twenty-five, as G. Hirth remarks (_Wege zur Heimat_, p. 541), an energetic and sexually disposed man in a large city has, for the most part, already had relations with some twenty-five women, perhaps even as many as fifty, while a well-bred and cultivated woman at that age is still only beginning to realize the slowly summating excitations of sex.

[383] In his study of "Conjugal Aversion" (_Journal Nervous and Mental Disease_, Sept., 1892) Smith Baker points out the value of adequate sexual knowledge before marriage in lessening the risks of such aversion.

[384] "It may be said to the honor of men," Adler truly remarks (op. cit., p. 182), "that it is perhaps not often their conscious brutality that is at fault in this matter, but merely lack of skill and lack of understanding. The husband who is not specially endowed by nature and experience for psychic intercourse with women, is not likely, through his earlier intercourse with Venus vulgivaga, to bring into marriage any useful knowledge, psychic or physical."

[385] "The first night," writes a correspondent concerning his marriage, "she found the act very painful and was frightened and surprised at the size of my penis, and at my suddenly getting on her. We had talked very openly about sex things before marriage, and it never occurred to me that she was ignorant of the details of the act. I imagined it would disgust her to talk about these things; but I now see I should have explained things to her. Before marrying I had come to the conclusion that the respect owed to one's wife was incompatible with any talk that might seem indecent, and also I had made a resolve not to subject her to what I thought then were dirty tricks, even to be naked and to have her naked. In fact, I was the victim of mock modesty; it was an artificial reaction from the life I had been living before marriage. Now it seems to me to be natural, if you love a woman, to do whatever occurs to you and to her. If I had not felt it wrong to encourage such acts between us, there might have been established a sexual sympathy which would have bound me more closely to her."

[386] Montaigne, _Essais_, Bk. iii, Ch. V. It is a significant fact that, even in the matter of information, women, notwithstanding much ignorance and inexperience, are often better equipped for marriage than men. As Fürbringer remarks (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 212), although the wife is usually more chaste at marriage than the husband, yet "she is generally the better informed partner in matters pertaining to the married state, in spite of occasional astonishing confessions."

[387] "She never loses her self-respect nor my respect for her," a man writes in a letter, "simply because we are desperately in love with one another, and everything we do--some of which the lowest prostitute might refuse to do--seems but one attempt after another to translate our passion into action. I never realized before, not that to the pure all things are pure, indeed, but that to the lover nothing is indecent. Yes, I have always felt it, to love her is a liberal education." It is obviously only the existence of such an attitude as this that can enable a pure woman to be passionate.

[388] "To be really understood," as Rafford Pyke well says, "to say what she likes, to utter her innermost thoughts in her own way, to cast aside the traditional conventions that gall her and repress her, to have someone near her with whom she can be quite frank, and yet to know that not a syllable of what she says will be misinterpreted or mistaken, but rather felt just as she feels it all--how wonderfully sweet is this to every woman, and how few men are there who can give it to her!"

[389] In more recent times it has been discussed in relation to the frequency of spontaneous nocturnal emissions. See "The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity," Sect. II, in volume i of these _Studies_, and cf. Mr. Perry-Coste's remarks on "The Annual Rhythm," in Appendix B of the same volume.

[390] See "The Sexual Impulse in Women," vol. iii of these _Studies_.

[391] Zenobia's practice is referred to by Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, ed. Bury, vol. i, p. 302. The Queen of Aragon's decision is recorded by the Montpellier jurist, Nicolas Bohier (Boerius) in his _Decisiones_, etc., ed. of 1579, p. 563; it is referred to by Montaigne, _Essais_, Bk. iii, Ch. V.

[392] Haller, _Elementa Physiologiæ_, 1778, vol. vii, p. 57.

[393] Hammond, _Sexual Impotence_, p. 129.

[394] Fürbringer, Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 221.

[395] Forel, _Die Sexuelle Frage_, p. 80.

[396] Guyot, _Bréviaire de l'Amour Expérimental_, p. 144.

[397] Erb, Ziemssen's _Handbuch_, Bd. xi, ii, p. 148. Guttceit also considered that the very wide variations found are congenital and natural. It may be added that some believe that there are racial variations. Thus it has been stated that the genital force of the Englishman is low, and that of the Frenchman (especially Provençal, Languedocian, and Gascon) high, while Löwenfeld believes that the Germanic race excels the French in aptitude to repeat the sex act frequently. It is probable that little weight attaches to these opinions, and that the chief differences are individual rather than racial.

[398] Ribbing, _L'Hygiène Sexualle_, p. 75. Kisch, in his _Sexual Life of Woman_, expresses the same opinion.

[399] Mohammed, who often displayed a consideration for women very rare in the founders of religions, is an exception. His prescription of once a week represented the right of the wife, quite independently of the number of wives a man might possess.

[400] How fragile the claim of "conjugal rights" is, may be sufficiently proved by the fact that it is now considered by many that the very term "conjugal rights" arose merely by a mistake for "conjugal rites." Before 1733, when legal proceedings were in Latin, the term used was _obsequies_, and "rights," instead of "rites," seems to have been merely a typesetter's error (see _Notes and Queries_, May 16, 1891; May 6, 1899). This explanation, it should be added, only applies to the consecrated term, for there can be no doubt that the underlying idea has an existence quite independent of the term.

[401] "In most marriages that are not happy," it is said in Rafford Pyke's thoughtful paper on "Husbands and Wives" (_Cosmopolitan_, 1902), "it is the wife rather than the husband who is oftenest disappointed."

[402] See "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse," in vol. iii of these _Studies_.

[403] It is well recognized by erotic writers, however, that women may sometimes take a comparatively active part. Thus Vatsyayana says that sometimes the woman may take the man's position, and with flowers in her hair and smiles mixed with sighs and bent head, caressing him and pressing her breasts against him, say: "You have been my conqueror; it is my turn to make you cry for mercy."

[404] Thus among the Swahili it is on the third day after marriage that the bridegroom is allowed, by custom, to complete defloration, according to Zache, _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1899, II-III, p. 84.

[405] _De l'Amour_, vol. ii, p. 57.

[406] Robert Michels, "Brautstandsmoral," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Jahrgang I, Heft 12.

[407] I may refer once more to the facts brought together in volume iii of these _Studies_, "The Analysis of the Sexual Impulse."

[408] This has been pointed out, for instance, by Rutgers, "Sexuelle Differenzierung," _Die Neue Generation_, Dec., 1908.

[409] Thus, among the Eskimo, who practice temporary wife-exchange, Rasmussen states that "a man generally discovers that his own wife is, in spite of all, the best."

[410] "I have always held with the late Professor Laycock," remarks Clouston (_Hygiene of Mind_, p. 214), "who was a very subtle student of human nature, that a married couple need not be always together to be happy, and that in fact reasonable absences and partings tend towards ultimate and closer union." That the prolongation of passion is only compatible with absence scarcely needs pointing out; as Mary Wollstonecraft long since said (_Rights of Woman_, original ed., p. 61), it is only in absence or in misfortune that passion is durable. It may be added, however, that in her love-letters to Imlay she wrote: "I have ever declared that two people who mean to live together ought not to be long separated."

[411] "Viewed broadly," says Arnold L. Gesell, in his interesting study of "Jealousy" (_American Journal of Psychology_, Oct., 1906), "jealousy seems such a necessary psychological accompaniment to biological behavior, amidst competitive struggle, that one is tempted to consider it genetically among the oldest of the emotions, synonymous almost with the will to live, and to make it scarcely less fundamental than fear or anger. In fact, jealousy readily passes into anger, and is itself a brand of fear.... In sociability and mutual aid we see the other side of the shield; but jealousy, however anti-social it may be, retains a function in zoölogical economy: viz., to conserve the individual as against the group. It is Nature's great corrective for the purely social emotions."

[412] Many illustrations are brought together in Gesell's study of "Jealousy."

[413] Jealousy among lower races may be disguised or modified by tribal customs. Thus Rasmussen (_People of the Polar North_, p. 65) says in reference to the Eskimo custom of wife-exchange: "A man once told me that he only beat his wife when she would not receive other men. She would have nothing to do with anyone but him--and that was her only failing!" Rasmussen elsewhere shows that the Eskimo are capable of extreme jealousy.

[414] See, e.g., Moll, _Sexualleben des Kindes_, p. 158; cf., Gesell's "Study of Jealousy."

[415] Jealousy is notoriously common among drunkards. As K. Birnbaum points out ("Das Sexualleben der Alkokolisten," _Sexual-Probleme_, Jan., 1909), this jealousy is, in most cases, more or less well-founded, for the wife, disgusted with her husband, naturally seeks sympathy and companionship elsewhere. Alcoholic jealousy, however, goes far beyond its basis of support in fact, and is entangled with delusions and hallucinations. (See e.g., G. Dumas, "La Logique d'un Dément," _Revue Philosophique_, Feb., 1908; also Stefanowski, "Morbid Jealousy," _Alienist and Neurologist_, July, 1893.)

[416] Ellen Key, _Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 335.

[417] Schrempf points out ("Von Stella zu Klärchen," _Mutterschutz_, 1906, Heft 7, p. 264) that Goethe strove to show in _Egmont_ that a woman is repelled by the love of a man who knows nothing beyond his love to her, and that it is easy for her to devote herself to the man whose aims lie in the larger world beyond herself. There is profound truth in this view.

[418] A discussion on "Platonic friendship" of this kind by several writers, mostly women, whose opinions were nearly equally divided, may be found, for instance, in the _Lady's Realm_, March, 1900.

[419] There are no doubt important exceptions. Thus Mérimée's famous friendship with Mlle. Jenny Dacquin, enshrined in the _Lettres à une Inconnue_, was perhaps Platonic throughout on Mérimée's side, Mlle. Dacquin adapting herself to his attitude. Cf. A. Lefebvre, _La Célèbre Inconnue de Mérimée_, 1908.

[420] The love-letters of all these distinguished persons have been published. Rosa Mayreder (_Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit_, pp. 229 _et seq._) discusses the question of the humble and absolute manner in which even men of the most masculine and impetuous genius abandon themselves to the inspiration of the beloved woman. The case of the Brownings, who have been termed "the hero and heroine of the most wonderful love-story that the world knows of," is specially notable; (Ellen Key has written of the Brownings from this point of view in _Menschen_, and reference may be made to an article on the Brownings' love-letters in the _Edinburgh Review_, April, 1899). It is scarcely necessary to add that an erotic relationship may mean very much to persons of high intellectual ability, even when its issue is not happy; of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most intellectually distinguished of women, it may be said that the letters which enshrine her love to the worthless Imlay are among the most passionate and pathetic love-letters in English.