CHAPTER XI.
THE ART OF LOVE.
Marriage Not Only for Procreation—Theologians on the Sacramentum
Solationis—Importance of the Art 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 other hand 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. (See e.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 the erotic 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 the sacramentum solationis, in
addition to proles, 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 psychic life." At an earlier period
also, Schleiermacher, in his Letters on Lucinde, had pointed
out the great significance of love for the spiritual development
of the individual.
Edward Carpenter truly remarks, in Love'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 his Clinique 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 outset regarded 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 the
moral 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 Garden of 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 so
dislocate 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's Ars Amatoria was 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 a wise
teacher put Ovid's Ars Amatoria into 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 is timid 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
his Logique 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 my Contemporaines, 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 the Ars Amandi," and discusses him from this point of view
in his Rétif 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 there is 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 from the 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.
This degenerate form of flirtation, cultivated not as a part of
courtship, but for its own sake, has been well described by Forel
(Die Sexuelle Frage, pp. 97-101). He defines it as including
"all those expressions of the sexual instinct of one individual
towards another individual which excite the other's sexual
instinct, coitus being always excepted." In the beginning it may
be merely a provocative look or a simple apparently unintentional
touch or contact; and by slight gradations it may pass on to
caresses, kisses, embraces, and even extend to pressure or
friction of the sexual parts, sometimes leading to orgasm. Thus,
Forel mentions, a sensuous woman by the pressure of her garments
in dancing can produce ejaculation in her partner. Most usually
the process is that voluptuous contact and revery which, in
English slang, is called "spooning." From first to last there
need not be any explicit explanations, proposals, or declarations
on either side, and neither party is committed to any
relationship with the other beyond the period devoted to
flirtage. In one form, however, flirtage consists entirely in the
excitement of a conversation devoted to erotic and indecorous
topics. Either the man or the woman may take the active part in
flirtage, but in a woman more refinement and skill is required to
play the active part without repelling the man or injuring her
reputation. Indeed, much the same is true of men also, for women,
while they often like flirting, usually prefer its more refined
forms. There are infinite forms of flirtage, and while as a
preliminary part of courtship, it has its normal place and
justification, Forel concludes that "as an end in itself, and
never passing beyond itself, it is a phenomenon of degeneration."
From the French point of view, flirtage and flirtation generally
have been discussed by Madame Bentzon ("Family Life in America,"
Forum, March, 1896) who, however, fails to realize the natural
basis of flirtation in courtship. She regards it as a sin against
the law "Thou shalt not play with love," for it ought to have the
excuse of an irresistible passion, but she thinks it is
comparatively inoffensive in America (though still a
deteriorating influence on the women) on account of the
temperament, education, and habits of the people. It must,
however, be remembered that play has a proper relationship to all
vital activities, and that a reasonable criticism of flirtation
is concerned rather with its normal limitations than with its
right to exist (see the observations on the natural basis of
coquetry and the ends it subserves in "The Evolution of Modesty"
in volume i of these Studies).
While flirtation in its natural form—though not in the perverted form of
"flirtage"—has sound justification, alike as a method of testing a lover
and of acquiring some small part of the art of love, it remains an
altogether inadequate preparation for love. This is sufficiently shown by
the frequent inaptitude for the art of love, and even for the mere
physical act of love, so frequently manifested both by men and women in
the very countries where flirtation most flourishes.
This ignorance, not merely of the art of love but even of the physical
facts of sexual love, is marked not only in women, especially women of the
middle class, but also in men, for the civilized man, as Fritsch long ago
remarked, often knows less of the facts of the sexual life than a
milkmaid. It shows itself differently, however, in the two sexes.
Among women sexual ignorance ranges from complete innocence of the fact
that it involves any intimate bodily relationship at all to
misapprehensions of the most various kind; some think that the
relationship consists in lying side by side, many that intercourse takes
place at the navel, not a few that the act occupies the whole night. It
has been necessary in a previous chapter to discuss the general evils of
sexual ignorance; it is here necessary to refer to its more special evils
as regards the relationship of marriage. Girls are educated with the vague
idea that they will marry,—quite correctly, for the majority of them do
marry,—but the idea that they must be educated for the career that will
naturally fall to their lot is an idea which as yet has never seemed to
occur to the teachers of girls. Their heads are crammed to stupidity with
the knowledge of facts which it is no one's concern to know, but the
supremely important training for life they are totally unable to teach.
Women are trained for nearly every avocation under the sun; for the
supreme avocation of wifehood and motherhood they are never trained at
all!
It may be said, and with truth, that the present incompetent training of
girls is likely to continue so long as the mothers of girls are content to
demand nothing better. It may also be said, with even greater truth, that
there is much that concerns the knowledge of sexual relationships which
the mother herself may most properly impart to her daughter. It may
further be asserted, most unanswerably, that the art of love, with which
we are here more especially concerned, can only be learnt by actual
experience, an experience which our social traditions make it difficult
for a virtuous girl to acquire with credit. Without here attempting to
apportion the share of blame which falls to each cause, it remains
unfortunate that a woman should so often enter marriage with the worst
possible equipment of prejudices and misapprehensions, even when she
believes, as often happens, that she knows all about it. Even with the
best equipment, a woman, under present conditions, enters marriage at a
disadvantage. She awakes to the full realization of love more slowly than
a man, and, on the average, at a later age, so that her experiences of the
life of sex before marriage have usually been of a much more restricted
kind than her husband's.[382] So that even with the best preparation, it
often happens that it is not until several years after marriage that a
woman clearly realizes her own sexual needs and adequately estimates her
husband's ability to satisfy those needs. We cannot over-estimate the
personal and social importance of a complete preparation for marriage, and
the greater the difficulties placed in the way of divorce the more weight
necessarily attaches to that preparation.[383]
Everyone is probably acquainted with many cases of the extreme
ignorance of women on entering marriage. The following case
concerning a woman of twenty-seven, who had been asked in
marriage, is somewhat extreme, but not very exceptional. "She did
not feel sure of her affection and she asked a woman cousin
concerning the meaning of love. This cousin lent her Ellis
Ethelmer's pamphlet, The Human Flower. She learnt from this
that men desired the body of a woman, and this so appalled her
that she was quite ill for several days. The next time her lover
attempted a caress she told him that it was 'lust.' Since then
she has read George Moore's Sister Teresa, and the knowledge
that 'women can be as bad as men' has made her sad." The
"Histories" contained in the Appendices to previous volumes of
these Studies reveal numerous instances of the deplorable
ignorance of young girls concerning the most central facts of the
sexual life. It is not surprising, under such circumstances, that
marriage leads to disillusionment or repulsion.
It is commonly said that the duty of initiating the wife into the
privileges and obligations of marriage properly belongs to the
husband. Apart, however, altogether from the fact that it is
unjust to a woman to compel her to bind herself in marriage
before she has fully realized what marriage means, it must also
be said that there are many things necessary for women to know
that it is unreasonable to expect a husband to explain. This is,
for instance, notably the case as regards the more fatiguing and
exhausting effects of coitus on a man as compared with a woman.
The inexperienced bride cannot know beforehand that the
frequently repeated orgasms which render her vigorous and radiant
exert a depressing effect on her husband, and his masculine pride
induces him to attempt to conceal that fact. The bride, in her
innocence, is unconscious that her pleasure is bought at her
husband's expense, and that what is not excess to her, may be a
serious excess to him. The woman who knows (notably, for
instance, a widow who remarries) is careful to guard her
husband's health in this respect, by restraining her own ardor,
for she realizes that a man is not willing to admit that he is
incapable of satisfying his wife's desires. (G. Hirth has also
pointed out how important it is that women should know before
marriage the natural limits of masculine potency, Wege zur
Liebe, p. 571.)
The ignorance of women of all that concerns the art of love, and their
total lack of preparation for the natural facts of the sexual life, would
perhaps be of less evil augury for marriage if it were always compensated
by the knowledge, skill, and considerateness of the husband. But that is
by no means always the case. Within the ordinary range we find, at all
events in England, the large group of men whose knowledge of women before
marriage has been mainly confined to prostitutes, and the important and
not inconsiderable group of men who have had no intimate intercourse with
women, their sexual experiences having been confined to masturbation or
other auto-erotic manifestations, and to flirtation. Certainly the man of
sensitive and intelligent temperament, whatever his training or lack of
training, may succeed with patience and consideration in overcoming all
the difficulties placed in the way of love by the mixture of ignorances
and prejudices which so often in woman takes the place of an education for
the erotic part of her life. But it cannot be said that either of these
two groups of men has been well equipped for the task. The training and
experience which a man receives from a prostitute, even under fairly
favorable conditions, scarcely form the right preparation for approaching
a woman of his own class who has no intimate erotic experiences.[384] The
frequent result is that he is liable to waver between two opposite courses
of action, both of them mistaken. On the one hand, he may treat his bride
as a prostitute, or as a novice to be speedily moulded into the sexual
shape he is most accustomed to, thus running the risk either of perverting
or of disgusting her. On the other hand, realizing that the purity and
dignity of his bride place her in an altogether different class from the
women he has previously known, he may go to the opposite extreme of
treating her with an exaggerated respect, and so fail either to arouse or
to gratify her erotic needs. It is difficult to say which of these two
courses of action is the more unfortunate; the result of both, however, is
frequently found to be that a nominal marriage never becomes a real
marriage.[385]
Yet there can be no doubt whatever that the other group of men, the men
who enter marriage without any erotic experiences, run even greater risks.
These are often the best of men, both as regards personal character and
mental power. It is indeed astonishing to find how ignorant, both
practically and theoretically, very able and highly educated men may be
concerning sexual matters.
"Complete abstinence during youth," says Freud
(Sexual-Probleme, March, 1908), "is not the best preparation
for marriage in a young man. Women divine this and prefer those
of their wooers who have already proved themselves to be men with
other women." Ellen Key, referring to the demand sometimes made
by women for purity in men (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 96), asks
whether women realize the effect of their admiration of the
experienced and confident man who knows women, on the shy and
hesitating youth, "who perhaps has been struggling hard for his
erotic purity, in the hope that a woman's happy smile will be the
reward of his conquest, and who is condemned to see how that
woman looks down on him with lofty compassion and gazes with
admiration at the leopard's spots." When the lover, in Laura
Marholm's Was war es? says to the heroine, "I have never yet
touched a woman," the girl "turns from him with horror, and it
seemed to her that a cold shudder went through her, a chilling
deception." The same feeling is manifested in an exaggerated form
in the passion often experienced by vigorous girls of eighteen to
twenty-four for old roués. (This has been discussed by Forel,
Die Sexuelle Frage, pp. 217 et seq.)
Other factors may enter in a woman's preference for the man who
has conquered other women. Even the most religious and moral
young woman, Valera remarks (Doña Luz, p. 205), likes to marry
a man who has loved many women; it gives a greater value to his
choice of her; it also offers her an opportunity of converting
him to higher ideals. No doubt when the inexperienced man meets
in marriage the equally inexperienced woman they often succeed in
adapting themselves to each other and a permanent modus vivendi
is constituted. But it is by no means so always. If the wife is
taught by instinct or experience she is apt to resent the
awkwardness and helplessness of her husband in the art of love.
Even if she is ignorant she may be permanently alienated and
become chronically frigid, through the brutal inconsiderateness
of her ignorant husband in carrying out what he conceives to be
his marital duties. (It has already been necessary to touch on
this point in discussing "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in vol.
iii of these Studies.) Sometimes, indeed, serious physical
injury has been inflicted on the bride owing to this ignorance of
the husband.
"I take it that most men have had pre-matrimonial
sex-relationships," a correspondent writes. "But I have known one
man at least who, up till the age of twenty, had not even a
rudimentary idea of sex matters. At twenty-nine, a few months
before marriage, he came to ask me how coitus was performed, and
displayed an ignorance that I could not believe to exist in the
mind of an otherwise intelligent man. He had evidently no
instinct to guide him, as the brutes have, and his reason was
unable to supply the necessary knowledge. It is very curious that
man should lose this instinctive knowledge. I have known another
man almost equally ignorant. He also came to me for advice in
marital duties. Both of these men masturbated, and they were
normally passionate." Such cases are not so very rare. Usually,
however, a certain amount of information has been acquired from
some for the most part unsatisfactory source, and the ignorance
is only partial, though not on that account less dangerous.
Balzac has compared the average husband to an orang-utan trying
to play the violin. "Love, as we instinctively feel, is the most
melodious of harmonies. Woman is a delicious instrument of
pleasure, but it is necessary to know its quivering strings,
study the pose of it, its timid keyboard, the changing and
capricious fingering. How many orangs—men, I mean, marry without
knowing what a woman is!... Nearly all men marry in the most
profound ignorance of women and of love" (Balzac, Physiologie du
Mariage, Meditation VII).
Neugebauer (Monatsschrift für Geburtshülfe, 1889, Bk. ix, pp.
221 et seq.) has collected over one hundred and fifty cases of
injury to women in coitus inflicted by the penis. The causes were
brutality, drunkenness of one or both parties, unusual position
in coitus, disproportion of the organs, pathological conditions
of the woman's organs (Cf. R. W. Taylor, Practical Treatise on
Sexual Disorders, Ch. XXXV). Blumreich also discusses the
injuries produced by violent coitus (Senator and Kaminer, Health
and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. ii, pp. 770-779). C. M.
Green (Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 13 Ap., 1893)
records two cases of rupture of vagina by sexual intercourse in
newly-married ladies, without evidence of any great violence.
Mylott (British Medical Journal, Sept. 16, 1899) records a
similar case occurring on the wedding night. The amount of force
sometimes exerted in coitus is evidenced by the cases, occurring
from time to time, in which intercourse takes place by the
urethra.
Eulenburg finds (Sexuale Neuropathie, p. 69) that vaginismus, a
condition of spasmodic contraction of the vulva and exaggerated
sensibility on the attempt to effect coitus, is due to forcible
and unskilful attempts at the first coitus. Adler (Die
Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, p. 160) also
believes that the scarred remains of the hymen, together with
painful memories of a violent first coitus, are the most frequent
cause of vaginismus.
The occasional cases, however, of physical injury or of
pathological condition produced by violent coitus at the
beginning of marriage constitute but a very small portion of the
evidence which witnesses to the evil results of the prevalent
ignorance regarding the art of love. As regards Germany,
Fürbringer writes (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in
Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 215): "I am perfectly satisfied
that the number of young married women who have a lasting painful
recollection of their first sexual intercourse exceeds by far the
number of those who venture to consult a doctor." As regards
England, the following experience is instructive: A lady asked
six married women in succession, privately, on the same day
concerning their bridal experiences. To all, sexual intercourse
had come as a shock; two had been absolutely ignorant about
sexual matters; the others had thought they knew what coitus was,
but were none the less shocked. These women were of the middle
class, perhaps above the average in intelligence; one was a
doctor.
Breuer and Freud, in their Studien über Hysterie (p. 216),
pointed out that the bridal night is practically often a rape,
and that it sometimes leads to hysteria, which is not cured until
satisfying sexual relationships are established. Even when there
is no violence, Kisch (Sexual Life of Woman, Part II) regards
awkward and inexperienced coitus, leading to incomplete
excitement of the wife, as the chief cause of dyspareunia, or
absence of sexual gratification, although gross disproportion in
the size of the male and female organs, or disease in either
party, may lead to the same result. Dyspareunia, Kisch adds, is
astonishingly frequent, though sometimes women complain of it
without justification in order to arouse sympathy for themselves
as sacrifices on the altar of marriage; the constant sign is
absence of ejaculation on the woman's part. Kisch also observes
that wedding night deflorations are often really rapes. One young
bride, known to him, was so ignorant of the physical side of
love, and so overwhelmed by her husband's first attempt at
intercourse, that she fled from the house in the night, and
nothing would ever persuade her to return to her husband. (It is
worth noting that by Canon law, under such circumstances, the
Church might hold the marriage invalid. See Thomas Slater's
Moral Theology, vol. ii, p. 318, and a case in point, both
quoted by Rev. C. J. Shebbeare, "Marriage Law in the Church of
England," Nineteenth Century, Aug., 1909, p. 263.) Kisch
considers, also, that wedding tours are a mistake; since the
fatigue, the excitement, the long journeys, sight-seeing, false
modesty, bad hotel arrangements, often combine to affect the
bride unfavorably and produce the germs of serious illness. This
is undoubtedly the case.
The extreme psychic importance of the manner in which the act of
defloration is accomplished is strongly emphasized by Adler. He
regards it as a frequent cause of permanent sexual anæsthesia.
"This first moment in which the man's individuality attains its
full rights often decides the whole of life. The unskilled,
over-excited husband can then implant the seed of feminine
insensibility, and by continued awkwardness and coarseness
develop it into permanent anæsthesia. The man who takes
possession of his rights with reckless brutal masculine force
merely causes his wife anxiety and pain, and with every
repetition of the act increases her repulsion.... A large
proportion of cold-natured women represent a sacrifice by men,
due either to unconscious awkwardness, or, occasionally, to
conscious brutality towards the tender plant which should have
been cherished with peculiar art and love, but has been robbed of
the splendor of its development. All her life long, a wistful and
trembling woman will preserve the recollection of a brutal
wedding night, and, often enough, it remains a perpetual source
of inhibition every time that the husband seeks anew to gratify
his desires without adapting himself to his wife's desires for
love" (O. Adler, Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des
Weibes, pp. 159 et seq., 181 et seq.). "I have seen an
honest woman shudder with horror at her husband's approach,"
wrote Diderot long ago in his essay "Sur les Femmes"; "I have
seen her plunge in the bath and feel herself never sufficiently
washed from the stain of duty." The same may still be said of a
vast army of women, victims of a pernicious system of morality
which has taught them false ideas of "conjugal duty" and has
failed to teach their husbands the art of love.
Women, when their fine natural instincts have not been hopelessly
perverted by the pruderies and prejudices which are so diligently
instilled into them, understand the art of love more readily than men.
Even when little more than children they can often completely take the cue
that is given to them. Much more than is the case with men, at all events
under civilized conditions, the art of love is with them an art that
Nature makes. They always know more of love, as Montaigne long since said,
than men can teach them, for it is a discipline that is born in their
blood.[386]
The extensive inquiries of Sanford Bell (loc. cit.) show that
the emotions of sex-love may appear as early as the third year.
It must also be remembered that, both physically and psychically,
girls are more precocious, more mature, than boys (see, e.g.,
Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, fourth edition, pp. 34 et
seq., 200, etc.). Thus, by the time she has reached the age of
puberty a girl has had time to become an accomplished mistress of
the minor arts of love. That the age of puberty is for girls the
age of love seems to be widely recognized by the popular mind.
Thus in a popular song of Bresse a girl sings:—
"J'ai calculé mon âge,
J'ai quatorze à quinze ans.
Ne suis-je pas dans l'âge
D'y avoir un amant?"
This matter of the sexual precocity of girls has an important
bearing on the question of the "age of consent," or the age at
which it should be legal for a girl to consent to sexual
intercourse. Until within the last twenty-five years there has
been a tendency to set a very low age (even as low as ten) as the
age above which a man commits no offence in having sexual
intercourse with a girl. In recent years there has been a
tendency to run to the opposite and equally unfortunate extreme
of raising it to a very late age. In England, by the Criminal Law
Amendment Act of 1885, the age of consent was raised to sixteen
(this clause of the bill being carried in the House of Commons by
a majority of 108). This seems to be the reasonable age at which
the limit should be set and its extreme high limit in temperate
climates. It is the age recognized by the Italian Criminal Code,
and in many other parts of the civilized world. Gladstone,
however, was in favor of raising it to eighteen, and Howard, in
discussing this question as regards the United States
(Matrimonial Institutions, vol. iii, pp. 195-203), thinks it
ought everywhere to be raised to twenty-one, so coinciding with
the age of legal majority at which a woman can enter into
business or political relations. There has been, during recent
years, a wide limit of variation in the legislation of the
different American States on this point, the differences of the
two limits being as much as eight years, and in some important
States the act of intercourse with a girl under eighteen is
declared to be "rape," and punishable with imprisonment for life.
Such enactments as these, however, it must be recognized, are
arbitrary, artificial, and unnatural. They do not rest on a sound
biological basis, and cannot be enforced by the common sense of
the community. There is no proper analogy between the age of
legal majority which is fixed, approximately, with reference to
the ability to comprehend abstract matters of intelligence, and
the age of sexual maturity which occurs much earlier, both
physically and psychically, and is determined in women by a very
precise biological event: the completion of puberty in the onset
of menstruation. Among peoples living under natural conditions in
all parts of the world it is recognized that a girl becomes
sexually a woman at puberty; at that epoch she receives her
initiation into adult life and becomes a wife and a mother. To
declare that the act of intercourse with a woman who, by the
natural instinct of mankind generally, is regarded as old enough
for all the duties of womanhood, is a criminal act of rape,
punishable by imprisonment for life, can only be considered an
abuse of language, and, what is worse, an abuse of law, even if
we leave all psychological and moral considerations out of the
question, for it deprives the conception of rape of all that
renders it naturally and properly revolting.
The sound view in this question is clearly the view that it is
the girl's puberty which constitutes the criterion of the man's
criminality in sexually approaching her. In the temperate regions
of Europe and North America the average age of the appearance of
menstruation, the critical moment in the establishment of
complete puberty, is fifteen (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, Man
and Woman, Ch. XI; the facts are set forth at length in Kisch's
Sexual Life of Woman, 1909). Therefore it is reasonable that
the act of an adult man in having sexual connection with a girl
under sixteen, with or without her consent, should properly be a
criminal act, severely punishable. In those lands where the
average age of puberty is higher or lower, the age of consent
should be raised or lowered accordingly. (Bruno Meyer, arguing
against any attempt to raise the age of consent above sixteen,
considers that the proper age of consent is generally fourteen,
for, as he rightly insists, the line of division is between the
ripe and the unripe personality, and while the latter should be
strictly preserved from the sphere of sexuality, only voluntary,
not compulsory, influence should be brought to bear on the
former. Sexual-Probleme, Ap., 1909.)
If we take into our view the wider considerations of psychology,
morality, and law, we shall find ample justification for this
point of view. We have to remember that a girl, during all the
years of ordinary school life, is always more advanced, both
physically and psychically, than a boy of the same age, and we
have to recognize that this precocity covers her sexual
development; for even though it is true, on the average, that
active sexual desire is not usually aroused in women until a
somewhat later age, there is also truth in the observation of Mr.
Thomas Hardy (New Review, June, 1894): "It has never struck me
that the spider is invariably male and the fly invariably
female." Even, therefore, when sexual intercourse takes place
between a girl and a youth somewhat older than herself, she is
likely to be the more mature, the more self-possessed, and the
more responsible of the two, and often the one who has taken the
more active part in initiating the act. (This point has been
discussed in "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in vol. iii of these
Studies.) It must also be remembered that when a girl has once
reached the age of puberty, and put on all the manner and habits
as well as the physical development of a woman, it is no longer
possible for a man always to estimate her age. It is easy to see
that a girl has not yet reached the age of puberty; it is
impossible to tell whether a mature woman is under or over
eighteen; it is therefore, to say the least, unjust to make her
male partner's fate for life depend on the recognition of a
distinction which has no basis in nature. Such considerations
are, indeed, so obvious that there is no chance of carrying out
thoroughly in practice the doctrine that a man should be
imprisoned for life for having intercourse with a girl who is
over the age of sixteen. It is better, from the legal point of
view, to cast the net less widely and to be quite sure that it is
adapted to catch the real and conscious offender, who may be
punished without offending the common sense of the community.
(Cf. Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time, Ch. XXIV; he
considers that the "age of consent" should begin with the
completion of the sixteenth year.)
It may be necessary to add that the establishment of the "age of
consent" on this basis by no means implies that intercourse with
girls but little over sixteen should be encouraged, or even
socially and morally tolerated. Here, however, we are not in the
sphere of law. It is the natural tendency of the well-born and
well-nurtured girl under civilized conditions to hold herself in
reserve, and the pressure whereby that tendency is maintained and
furthered must be supplied by the whole of her environment,
primarily by the intelligent reflection of the girl herself when
she has reached the age of adolescence. To foster in a young
woman who has long passed the epoch of puberty the notion that
she has no responsibility in the guardianship of her own body and
soul is out of harmony with modern feeling, as well as
unfavorable to the training of women for the world. The States
which have been induced to adopt the high limit of the age of
consent have, indeed, thereby made an abject confession of their
inability to maintain a decent moral level by more legitimate
means; they may profitably serve as a warning rather than as an
example.
The knowledge of women cannot, however, replace, the ignorance of men,
but, on the contrary, merely serves to reveal it. For in the art of love
the man must necessarily take the initiative. It is he who must first
unseal the mystery of the intimacies and audacities which the woman's
heart may hold. The risk of meeting with even the shadow of contempt or
disgust is too serious to allow a woman, even a wife, to reveal the
secrets of love to a man who has not shown himself to be an
initiate.[387] Numberless are the jovial and contented husbands who have
never suspected, and will never know, that their wives carry about with
them, sometimes with silent resentment, the ache of mysterious tabus.
The feeling that there are delicious privacies and privileges which she
has never been asked to take, or forced to accept, often erotically
divorces a wife from a husband who never realizes what he has missed.[388]
The case of such husbands is all the harder because, for the most part,
all that they have done is the result of the morality that has been
preached to them. They have been taught from boyhood to be strenuous and
manly and clean-minded, to seek by all means to put out of their minds the
thought of women or the longing for sensuous indulgence. They have been
told on all sides that only in marriage is it right or even safe to
approach women. They have acquired the notion that sexual indulgence and
all that appertains to it is something low and degrading, at the worst a
mere natural necessity, at the best a duty to be accomplished in a direct,
honorable and straight-forward manner. No one seems to have told them that
love is an art, and that to gain real possession of a woman's soul and
body is a task that requires the whole of a man's best skill and insight.
It may well be that when a man learns his lesson too late he is inclined
to turn ferociously on the society that by its conspiracy of
pseudo-morality has done its best to ruin his life, and that of his wife.
In some of these cases husband or wife or both are finally attracted to a
third person, and a divorce enables them to start afresh with better
experience under happier auspices. But as things are at present that is a
sad and serious process, for many impossible. They are happier, as Milton
pointed out, whose trials of love before marriage "have been so many
divorces to teach them experience."
The general ignorance concerning the art of love may be gauged by the fact
that perhaps the question in this matter most frequently asked is the
crude question how often sexual intercourse should take place. That is a
question, indeed, which has occupied the founders of religion, the
law-givers, and the philosophers of mankind, from the earliest times.[389]
Zoroaster said it should be once in every nine days. The laws of Manes
allowed intercourse during fourteen days of the month, but a famous
ancient Hindu physician, Susruta, prescribed it six times a month, except
during the heat of summer when it should be once a month, while other
Hindu authorities say three or four times a month. Solon's requirement of
the citizen that intercourse should take place three times a month fairly
agrees with Zoroaster's. Mohammed, in the Koran, decrees intercourse once
a week. The Jewish Talmud is more discriminating, and distinguishes
between different classes of people; on the vigorous and healthy young
man, not compelled to work hard, once a day is imposed, on the ordinary
working man twice a week, on learned men once a week. Luther considered
twice a week the proper frequency of intercourse.
It will be observed that, as we might expect, these estimates tend to
allow a greater interval in the earlier ages when erotic stimulation was
probably less and erotic erethism probably rare, and to involve an
increased frequency as we approach modern civilization. It will also be
observed that variation occurs within fairly narrow limits. This is
probably due to the fact that these law-givers were in all cases men.
Women law-givers would certainly have shown a much greater tendency to
variation, since the variations of the sexual impulse are greater in
women.[390] Thus Zenobia required the approach of her husband once a
month, provided that impregnation had not taken place the previous month,
while another queen went very far to the other extreme, for we are told
that the Queen of Aragon, after mature deliberation, ordained six times a
day as the proper rule in a legitimate marriage.[391]
It may be remarked, in passing, that the estimates of the proper
frequency of sexual intercourse may always be taken to assume
that there is a cessation during the menstrual period. This is
especially the case as regards early periods of culture when
intercourse at this time is usually regarded as either dangerous
or sinful, or both. (This point has been discussed in the
"Phenomena of Periodicity" in volume i of these Studies.) Under
civilized conditions the inhibition is due to æsthetic reasons,
the wife, even if she desires intercourse, feeling a repugnance
to be approached at a time when she regards herself as
"disgusting," and the husband easily sharing this attitude. It
may, however, be pointed out that the æsthetic objection is very
largely the result of the superstitious horror of water which is
still widely felt at this time, and would, to some extent,
disappear if a more scrupulous cleanliness were observed. It
remains a good general rule to abstain from sexual intercourse
during the menstrual period, but in some cases there may be
adequate reason for breaking it. This is so when desire is
specially strong at this time, or when intercourse is physically
difficult at other times but easier during the relaxation of the
parts caused by menstruation. It must be remembered also that the
time when the menstrual flow is beginning to cease is probably,
more than any other period of the month, the biologically proper
time for sexual intercourse, since not only is intercourse
easiest then, and also most gratifying to the female, but it
affords the most favorable opportunity for securing
fertilization.
Schurig long since brought together evidence (Parthenologia,
pp. 302 et seq.) showing that coitus is most easy during
menstruation. Some of the Catholic theologians (like Sanchez, and
later, Liguori), going against the popular opinion, have
distinctly permitted intercourse during menstruation, though many
earlier theologians regarded it as a mortal sin. From the
medical side, Kossmann (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease
in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 249) advocates coitus not
only at the end of menstruation, but even during the latter part
of the period, as being the time when women most usually need it,
the marked disagreeableness of temper often shown by women at
this time, he says, being connected with the suppression,
demanded by custom, of a natural desire. "It is almost always
during menstruation that the first clouds appear on the
matrimonial horizon."
In modern times the physiologists and physicians who have expressed any
opinion on this subject have usually come very near to Luther's dictum.
Haller said that intercourse should not be much more frequent than twice a
week.[392] Acton said once a week, and so also Hammond, even for healthy
men between the ages of twenty-five and forty.[393] Fürbringer only
slightly exceeds this estimate by advocating from fifty to one hundred
single acts in the year.[394] Forel advises two or three times a week for
a man in the prime of manhood, but he adds that for some healthy and
vigorous men once a month appears to be excess.[395] Mantegazza, in his
Hygiene of Love, also states that, for a man between twenty and thirty,
two or three times a week represents the proper amount of intercourse, and
between the ages of thirty and forty-five, twice a week. Guyot recommends
every three days.[396]
It seems, however, quite unnecessary to lay down any general rules
regarding the frequency of coitus. Individual desire and individual
aptitude, even within the limits of health, vary enormously. Moreover, if
we recognize that the restraint of desire is sometimes desirable, and
often necessary for prolonged periods, it is as well to refrain from any
appearance of asserting the necessity of sexual intercourse at frequent
and regular intervals. The question is chiefly of importance in order to
guard against excess, or even against the attempt to live habitually close
to the threshold of excess. Many authorities are, therefore, careful to
point out that it is inadvisable to be too definite. Thus Erb, while
remarking that, for some, Luther's dictum represents the extreme maximum,
adds that others can go far beyond that amount with impunity, and he
considers that such variations are congenital.[397] Ribbing, again, while
expressing general agreement with Luther's rule, protests against any
attempt to lay down laws for everyone, and is inclined to say that as
often as one likes is a safe rule, so long as there are no bad
after-effects.[398]
It seems to be generally agreed that bad effects from excess in
coitus, when they do occur, are rare in women (see, e.g.,
Hammond, Sexual Impotence, p. 127). Occasionally, however, evil
effects occur in women. (The case, possibly to be mentioned in
this connection, has been recorded of a man whose three wives all
became insane after marriage, Journal of Mental Science, Jan.,
1879, p. 611.) In cases of sexual excess great physical
exhaustion, with suspicion and delusions, is often observed.
Hutchinson has recorded three cases of temporary blindness, all
in men, the result of sexual excess after marriage (Archives of
Surgery, Jan., 1893). The old medical authors attributed many
evil results to excess in coitus. Thus Schurig (Spermatologia,
1720, pp. 260 et seq.) brings together cases of insanity,
apoplexy, syncope, epilepsy, loss of memory, blindness, baldness,
unilateral perspiration, gout, and death attributed to this
cause; of death many cases are given, some in women, but one may
easily perceive that post was often mistaken for propter.
There is, however, another consideration which can scarcely escape the
reader of the present work. Nearly all the estimates of the desirable
frequence of coitus are framed to suit the supposed physiological needs of
the husband,[399] and they appear usually to be framed in the same spirit
of exclusive attention to those needs as though the physiological needs of
the evacuation of the bowels or the bladder were in question. But sexual
needs are the needs of two persons, of the husband and of the wife. It is
not enough to ascertain the needs of the husband; it is also necessary to
ascertain the needs of the wife. The resultant must be a harmonious
adjustment of these two groups of needs. That consideration alone, in
conjunction with the wide variations of individual needs, suffices to
render any definite rules of very trifling value.
It is important to remember the wide limits of variation in
sexual capacity, as well as the fact that such variations in
either direction may be healthy and normal, though undoubtedly
when they become extreme variations may have a pathological
significance. In one case, for instance, a man has intercourse
once a month and finds this sufficient; he has no nocturnal
emissions nor any strong desires in the interval; yet he leads an
idle and luxurious life and is not restrained by any moral or
religious scruples; if he much exceeds the frequency which suits
him he suffers from ill-health, though otherwise quite healthy
except for a weak digestion. At the other extreme, a happily
married couple, between forty-five and fifty, much attached to
each other, had engaged in sexual intercourse every night for
twenty years, except during the menstrual period and advanced
pregnancy, which had only occurred once; they are hearty,
full-blooded, intellectual people, fond of good living, and they
attribute their affection and constancy to this frequent
indulgence in coitus; the only child, a girl, is not strong,
though fairly healthy.
The cases are numerous in which, on special occasions, it is
possible for people who are passionately attached to each other
to repeat the act of coitus, or at all events the orgasm, an
inordinate number of times within a few hours. This usually
occurs at the beginning of an intimacy or after a long
separation. Thus in one case a newly-married woman experienced
the orgasm fourteen times in one night, her husband in the same
period experiencing it seven times. In another case a woman who
had lived a chaste life, when sexual relationships finally began,
once experienced orgasm fourteen or fifteen times to her
partner's three times. In a case which, I have been assured may
be accepted as authentic, a young wife of highly erotic, very
erethic, slightly abnormal temperament, after a month's absence
from her husband, was excited twenty-six times within an hour and
a quarter; her husband, a much older man, having two orgasms
during this period; the wife admitted that she felt a "complete
wreck" after this, but it is evident that if this case may be
regarded as authentic the orgasms were of extremely slight
intensity. A young woman, newly married to a physically robust
man, once had intercourse with him eight times in two hours,
orgasm occurring each time in both parties. Guttceit (Dreissig
Jahre Praxis, vol. ii. p. 311), in Russia, knew many cases in
which young men of twenty-two to twenty-eight had intercourse
more than ten times in one night, though after the fourth time
there is seldom any semen. He had known some men who had
masturbated in early boyhood, and began to consort with women at
fifteen, yet remained sexually vigorous in old age, while he knew
others who began intercourse late and were losing force at forty.
Mantegazza, who knew a man who had intercourse fourteen times in
one day, remarks that the stories of the old Italian novelists
show that twelve times was regarded as a rare exception.
Burchard, Alexander VI's secretary, states that the Florentine
Ambassador's son, in Rome in 1489, "knew a girl seven times in
one hour" (J. Burchard, Diarium, ed. Thuasne, vol. i, p. 329).
Olivier, Charlemagne's knight, boasted, according to legend, that
he could show his virile power one hundred times in one night, if
allowed to sleep with the Emperor of Constantinople's daughter;
he was allowed to try, it is said, and succeeded thirty times
(Schultz, Das Höfische Leben, vol. i, p. 581).
It will be seen that whenever the sexual act is repeated
frequently within a short time it is very rarely indeed that the
husband can keep pace with the wife. It is true that the woman's
sexual energy is aroused more slowly and with more difficulty
than the man's, but as it becomes aroused its momentum increases.
The man, whose energy is easily aroused, is easily exhausted; the
woman has often scarcely attained her energy until after the
first orgasm is over. It is sometimes a surprise to a young
husband, happily married, to find that the act of sexual
intercourse which completely satisfies him has only served to
arouse his wife's ardor. Very many women feel that the repetition
of the act several times in succession is needed to, as they may
express it, "clear the system," and, far from producing
sleepiness and fatigue, it renders them bright and lively.
The young and vigorous woman, who has lived a chaste life,
sometimes feels when she commences sexual relationships as though
she really required several husbands, and needed intercourse at
least once a day, though later when she becomes adjusted to
married life she reaches the conclusion that her desires are not
abnormally excessive. The husband has to adjust himself to his
wife's needs, through his sexual force when he possesses it, and,
if not, through his skill and consideration. The rare men who
possess a genital potency which they can exert to the
gratification of women without injury to themselves have been, by
Professor Benedikt, termed "sexual athletes," and he remarks that
such men easily dominate women. He rightly regards Casanova as
the type of the sexual athlete (Archives d'Anthropologie
Criminelle, Jan., 1896). Näcke reports the case of a man whom he
regards as a sexual athlete, who throughout his life had
intercourse once or twice daily with his wife, or if she was
unwilling, with another woman, until he became insane at the age
of seventy-five (Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, Aug.,
1908, p. 507). This should probably, however, be regarded rather
as a case of morbid hyperæsthesia than of sexual athleticism.
At this stage we reach the fundamental elements of the art of love. We
have seen that many moral practices and moral theories which have been
widely current in Christendom have developed traditions, still by no means
extinct among us, which were profoundly antagonistic to the art of love.
The idea grew up of "marital duties," of "conjugal rights."[400] The
husband had the right and the duty to perform sexual intercourse with his
wife, whatever her wishes in the matter might be, while the wife had the
duty and the right (the duty in her case being usually put first) to
submit to such intercourse, which she was frequently taught to regard as
something low and merely physical, an unpleasant and almost degrading
necessity which she would do well to put out of her thoughts as speedily
as possible. It is not surprising that such an attitude towards marriage
has been highly favorable to conjugal unhappiness, more especially that of
the wife,[401] and it has tended to promote adultery and divorce. We might
have been more surprised had it been otherwise.
The art of love is based on the fundamental natural fact of courtship; and
courtship is the effort of the male to make himself acceptable to the
female.[402] "The art of love," said Vatsyayana, one of the greatest of
authorities, "is the art of pleasing women." "A man must never permit
himself a pleasure with his wife," said Balzac in his Physiologie du
Mariage, "which he has not the skill first to make her desire." The whole
art of love is there. Women, naturally and instinctively, seek to make
themselves desirable to men, even to men whom they are supremely
indifferent to, and the woman who is in love with a man, by an equally
natural instinct, seeks to shape herself to the measure which individually
pleases him. This tendency is not really modified by the fundamental fact
that in these matters it is only the arts that Nature makes which are
truly effective. It is finally by what he is that a man arouses a woman's
deepest emotions of sympathy or of antipathy, and he is often pleasing her
more by displaying his fitness to play a great part in the world outside
than by any acquired accomplishments in the arts of courtship. When,
however, the serious and intimate play of physical love begins, the
woman's part is, even biologically, on the surface the more passive
part.[403] She is, on the physical side, inevitably the instrument in
love; it must be his hand and his bow which evoke the music.
In speaking of the art of love, however, it is impossible to disentangle
completely the spiritual from the physical. The very attempt to do so is,
indeed, a fatal mistake. The man who can only perceive the physical side
of the sexual relationship is, as Hinton was accustomed to say, on a level
with the man who, in listening to a sonata of Beethoven on the violin, is
only conscious of the physical fact that a horse's tail is being scraped
against a sheep's entrails.
The image of the musical instrument constantly recurs to those
who write of the art of love. Balzac's comparison of the
unskilful husband to the orang-utan attempting to play the violin
has already been quoted. Dr. Jules Guyot, in his serious and
admirable little book, Bréviaire de l'Amour Expérimental, falls
on to the same comparison: "There are an immense number of
ignorant, selfish, and brutal men who give themselves no trouble
to study the instrument which God has confided to them, and do
not so much as suspect that it is necessary to study it in order
to draw out its slightest chords.... Every direct contact, even
with the clitoris, every attempt at coitus [when the feminine
organism is not aroused], exercises a painful sensation, an
instinctive repulsion, a feeling of disgust and aversion. Any
man, any husband, who is ignorant of this fact, is ridiculous and
contemptible. Any man, any husband, who, knowing it, dares to
disregard it, has committed an outrage.... In the final
combination of man and woman, the positive element, the husband,
has the initiative and the responsibility for the conjugal life.
He is the minstrel who will produce harmony or cacophony by his
hand and his bow. The wife, from this point of view, is really
the many-stringed instrument who will give out harmonious or
discordant sounds, according as she is well or ill handled"
(Guyot, Bréviaire, pp. 99, 115, 138).
That such love corresponds to the woman's need there cannot be
any doubt. All developed women desire to be loved, says Ellen
Key, not "en mâle" but "en artiste" (Liebe und Ehe, p. 92).
"Only a man of whom she feels that he has also the artist's joy
in her, and who shows this joy through his timid and delicate
touch on her soul as on her body, can keep the woman of to-day.
She will only belong to a man who continues to long for her even
when he holds her locked in his arms. And when such a woman
breaks out: 'You want me, but you cannot caress me, you cannot
tell what I want,' then that man is judged." Love is indeed, as
Remy de Gourmont remarks, a delicate art, for which, as for
painting or music, only some are apt.
It must not be supposed that the demand on the lover and husband to
approach a woman in the same spirit, with the same consideration and
skilful touch, as a musician takes up his instrument is merely a demand
made by modern women who are probably neurotic or hysterical. No reader of
these Studies who has followed the discussions of courtship and of
sexual selection in previous volumes can fail to realize that—although we
have sought to befool ourselves by giving an illegitimate connotation to
the word "brutal"—consideration and respect for the female is all but
universal in the sexual relationships of the animals below man; it is only
at the furthest remove from the "brutes," among civilized men, that sexual
"brutality" is at all common, and even there it is chiefly the result of
ignorance. If we go as low as the insects, who have been disciplined by
no family life, and are generally counted as careless and wanton, we may
sometimes find this attitude towards the female fully developed, and the
extreme consideration of the male for the female whom yet he holds firmly
beneath him, the tender preliminaries, the extremely gradual approach to
the supreme sexual act, may well furnish an admirable lesson.
This greater difficulty and delay on the part of women in responding to
the erotic excitation of courtship is really very fundamental and—as has
so often been necessary to point out in previous volumes of these
Studies—it covers the whole of woman's erotic life, from the earliest
age when coyness and modesty develop. A woman's love develops much more
slowly than a man's for a much longer period. There is real psychological
significance in the fact that a man's desire for a woman tends to arise
spontaneously, while a woman's desire for a man tends only to be aroused
gradually, in the measure of her complexly developing relationship to him.
Hence her sexual emotion is often less abstract, more intimately
associated with the individual lover in whom it is centred. "The way to my
senses is through my heart," wrote Mary Wollstonecraft to her lover Imlay,
"but, forgive me! I think there is sometimes a shorter cut to yours." She
spoke for the best, if not for the largest part, of her sex. A man often
reaches the full limit of his physical capacity for love at a single step,
and it would appear that his psychic limits are often not more difficult
to reach. This is the solid fact underlying the more hazardous statement,
so often made, that woman is monogamic and man polygamic.
On the more physical side, Guttceit states that a month after
marriage not more than two women out of ten have experienced the
full pleasure of sexual intercourse, and it may not be for six
months, a year, or even till after the birth of several children,
that a woman experiences the full enjoyment of the physical
relationship, and even then only with a man she completely loves,
so that the conditions of sexual gratification are much more
complex in women than in men. Similarly, on the psychic side,
Ellen Key remarks (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 111): "It is
certainly true that a woman desires sexual gratification from a
man. But while in her this desire not seldom only appears after
she has begun to love a man enough to give her life for him, a
man often desires to possess a woman physically before he loves
her enough to give even his little finger for her. The fact that
love in a woman mostly goes from the soul to the senses and often
fails to reach them, and that in a man it mostly goes from the
senses to the soul and frequently never reaches that goal—this
is of all the existing differences between men and women that
which causes most torture to both." It will, of course, be
apparent to the reader of the fourth volume of these Studies on
"Sexual Selection in Man" that the method of stating the
difference which has commended itself to Mary Wollstonecraft,
Ellen Key, and others, is not strictly correct, and the chastest
woman, after, for example, taking too hot a bath, may find that
her heart is not the only path through which her senses may be
affected. The senses are the only channels to the external world
which we possess, and love must come through these channels or
not at all. The difference, however, seems to be a real one, if
we translate it to mean that, as we have seen reason to believe
in previous volumes of these Studies, there are in women (1)
preferential sensory paths of sexual stimuli, such as,
apparently, a predominence of tactile and auditory paths as
compared with men; (2) a more massive, complex, and delicately
poised sexual mechanism; and, as a result of this, (3) eventually
a greater amount of nervous and cerebral sexual irradiation.
It must be remembered, at the same time, that while this
distinction represents a real tendency in sexual differentiation,
with an organic and not merely traditional basis, it has about it
nothing whatever that is absolute. There are a vast number of
women whose sexual facility, again by natural tendency and not
merely by acquired habits, is as marked as that of any man, if
not more so. In the sexual field, as we have seen in a previous
volume (Analysis of the Sexual Impulse), the range of
variability is greater in women than in men.
The fact that love is an art, a method of drawing music from an
instrument, and not the mere commission of an act by mutual consent, makes
any verbal agreement to love of little moment. If love were a matter of
contract, of simple intellectual consent, of question and answer, it would
never have come into the world at all. Love appeared as art from the
first, and the subsequent developments of the summary methods of reason
and speech cannot abolish that fundamental fact. This is scarcely realized
by those ill-advised lovers who consider that the first step in
courtship—and perhaps even the whole of courtship—is for a man to ask a
woman to be his wife. That is so far from being the case that it
constantly happens that the premature exhibition of so large a demand at
once and for ever damns all the wooer's chances. It is lamentable, no
doubt, that so grave and fateful a matter as that of marriage should so
often be decided without calm deliberation and reasonable forethought. But
sexual relationships can never, and should never, be merely a matter of
cold calculation. When a woman is suddenly confronted by the demand that
she should yield herself up as a wife to a man who has not yet succeeded
in gaining her affections she will not fail to find—provided she is
lifted above the cold-hearted motives of self-interest—that there are
many sound reasons why she should not do so. And having thus squarely
faced the question in cool blood and decided it, she will henceforth,
probably, meet that wooer with a tunic of steel enclosing her breast.
"Love must be revealed by acts and not betrayed by words. I
regard as abnormal the extraordinary method of a hasty avowal
beforehand; for that represents not the direct but the reflex
path of transmission. However sweet and normal the avowal may be
when once reciprocity has been realized, as a method of conquest
I consider it dangerous and likely to produce the reverse of the
result desired." I take these wise words from a thoughtful "Essai
sur l'Amour" (Archives de Psychologie, 1904) by a
non-psychological Swiss writer who is recording his own
experiences, and who insists much on the predominance of the
spiritual and mental element in love.
It is worthy of note that this recognition that direct speech is
out of place in courtship must not be regarded as a refinement of
civilization. Among primitive peoples everywhere it is perfectly
well recognized that the offer of love, and its acceptance or its
refusal, must be made by actions symbolically, and not by the
crude method of question and answer. Among the Indians of
Paraguay, who allow much sexual freedom to their women, but never
buy or sell love, Mantegazza states (Rio de la Plata e
Tenerife, 1867, p. 225) that a girl of the people will come to
your door or window and timidly, with a confused air, ask you, in
the Guarani tongue, for a drink of water. But she will smile if
you innocently offer her water. Among the Tarahumari Indians of
Mexico, with whom the initiative in courting belongs to the
women, the girl takes the first step through her parents, then
she throws small pebbles at the young man; if he throws them back
the matter is concluded (Carl Lumholtz, Scribner's Magazine,
Sept., 1894, p. 299). In many parts of the world it is the woman
who chooses her husband (see, e.g., M. A. Potter, Sohrab and
Rustem, pp. 169 et seq.), and she very frequently adopts a
symbolical method of proposal. Except when the commercial element
predominates in marriage, a similar method is frequently adopted
by men also in making proposals of marriage.
It is not only at the beginning of courtship that the act of love has
little room for formal declarations, for the demands and the avowals that
can be clearly defined in speech. The same rule holds even in the most
intimate relationships of old lovers, throughout the married life. The
permanent element in modesty, which survives every sexual initiation to
become intertwined with all the exquisite impudicities of love, combines
with a true erotic instinct to rebel against formal demands, against
verbal affirmations or denials. Love's requests cannot be made in words,
nor truthfully answered in words: a fine divination is still needed as
long as love lasts.
The fact that the needs of love cannot be expressed but must be
divined has long been recognized by those who have written of the
art of love, alike by writers within and without the European
Christian traditions. Thus Zacchia, in his great medico-legal
treatise, points out that a husband must be attentive to the
signs of sexual desire in his wife. "Women," he says, "when
sexual desire arises within them are accustomed to ask their
husbands questions on matters of love; they flatter and caress
them; they allow some part of their body to be uncovered as if by
accident; their breasts appear to swell; they show unusual
alacrity; they blush; their eyes are bright; and if they
experience unusual ardor they stammer, talk beside the mark, and
are scarcely mistress of themselves. At the same time their
private parts become hot and swell. All these signs should
convince a husband, however inattentive he may be, that his wife
craves for satisfaction" (Zacchiæ Quæstionum Medico-legalium
Opus, lib. vii, tit. iii, quæst. I; vol. ii, p. 624 in ed. of
1688).
The old Hindu erotic writers attributed great importance alike to
the man's attentiveness to the woman's erotic needs, and to his
skill and consideration in all the preliminaries of the sexual
act. He must do all that he can to procure her pleasure, says
Vatsyayana. When she is on her bed and perhaps absorbed in
conversation, he gently unfastens the knot of her lower garment.
If she protests he closes her mouth with kisses. Some authors,
Vatsyayana remarks, hold that the lover should begin by sucking
the nipples of her breasts. When erection occurs he touches her
with his hands, softly caressing the various parts of her body.
He should always press those parts of her body towards which she
turns her eyes. If she is shy, and it is the first time, he will
place his hands between her thighs which she will instinctively
press together. If she is young he will put his hands on her
breasts, and she will no doubt cover them with her own. If she is
mature he will do all that may seem fitting and agreeable to both
parties. Then he will take her hair and her chin between his
fingers and kiss them. If she is very young she will blush and
close her eyes. By the way in which she receives his caresses he
will divine what pleases her most in union. The signs of her
enjoyment are that her body becomes limp, her eyes close, she
loses all timidity, and takes part in the movements which bring
her most closely to him. If, on the other hand, she feels no
pleasure, she strikes the bed with her hands, will not allow the
man to continue, is sullen, even bites or kicks, and continues
the movements of coitus when the man has finished. In such cases,
Vatsyayana adds, it is his duty to rub the vulva with his hand
before union until it is moist, and he should perform the same
movements afterwards if his own orgasm has occurred first.
With regard to Indian erotic art generally, and more especially
Vatsyayana, who appears to have lived some sixteen hundred years
ago, information will be found in Valentino, "L'Hygiène conjugale
chez les Hindous," Archives Générales de Médecine, Ap. 25,
1905; Iwan Bloch, "Indische Medizin," Puschmann's Handbuch der
Geschichte der Medizin, vol. i; Heimann and Stephan, "Beiträge
zur Ehehygiene nach der Lehren des Kamasutram," Zeitschaft für
Sexualwissenschaft, Sept., 1908; also a review of Richard
Schmidt's German translation of the Kamashastra of Vatsyayana
in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1902, Heft 2. There has long
existed an English translation of this work. In the lengthy
preface to the French translation Lamairesse points out the
superiority of Indian erotic art to that of the Latin poets by
its loftier spirit, and greater purity and idealism. It is
throughout marked by respect for women, and its spirit is
expressed in the well-known proverb: "Thou shalt not strike a
woman even with a flower." See also Margaret Noble's Web of
Indian Life, especially Ch. III, "On the Hindu Woman as Wife,"
and Ch. IV, "Love Strong as Death."
The advice given to husbands by Guyot (Bréviaire de l'Amour
Expérimental, p. 422) closely conforms to that given, under very
different social conditions, by Zacchia and Vatsyayana. "In a
state of sexual need and desire the woman's lips are firm and
vibrant, the breasts are swollen, and the nipples erect. The
intelligent husband cannot be deceived by these signs. If they do
not exist, it is his part to provoke them by his kisses and
caresses, and if, in spite of his tender and delicate
excitations, the lips show no heat and the breasts no swelling,
and especially if the nipples are disagreeably irritated by
slight suction, he must arrest his transports and abstain from
all contact with the organs of generation, for he would certainly
find them in a state of exhaustion and disposed to repulsion. If,
on the contrary, the accessory organs are animated, or become
animated beneath his caresses, he must extend them to the
generative organs, and especially to the clitoris, which beneath
his touch will become full of appetite and ardor."
The importance of the preliminary titillation of the sexual
organs has been emphasized by a long succession alike of erotic
writers and physicians, from Ovid (Ars Amatoria end of Bk. II)
onwards. Eulenburg (Die Sexuale Neuropathie, p. 79) considers
that titillation is sometimes necessary, and Adler, likewise
insisting on the preliminaries of psychic and physical courtship
(Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, p. 188),
observes that the man who is gifted with insight and skill in
these matters possesses a charm which will draw sparks of
sensibility from the coldest feminine heart. The advice of the
physician is at one in this matter with the maxims of the erotic
artist and with the needs of the loving woman. In making love
there must be no haste, wrote Ovid:—
"Crede mihi, non est Veneris properanda voluptas,
Sed sensim tarda prolicienda mora."
"Husbands, like spoiled children," a woman has written, "too
often miss the pleasure which might otherwise be theirs, by
clamoring for it at the wrong time. The man who thinks this
prolonged courtship previous to the act of sex union wearisome,
has never given it a trial. It is the approach to the marital
embrace, as well as the embrace itself, which constitutes the
charm of the relation between the sexes."
It not seldom happens, remarks Adler (op. cit., p. 186), that
the insensibility of the wife must be treated—in the husband.
And Guyot, bringing forward the same point, writes (op. cit.,
p. 130): "If by a delay of tender study the husband has
understood his young bride, if he is able to realize for her the
ineffable happiness and dreams of youth, he will be beloved
forever; he will be her master and sovereign lord. If he has
failed to understand her he will fatigue and exhaust himself in
vain efforts, and finally class her among the indifferent and
cold women. She will be his wife by duty, the mother of his
children. He will take his pleasure elsewhere, for man is ever in
pursuit of the woman who experiences the genesic spasm. Thus the
vague and unintelligent search for a half who can unite in that
delirious finale is the chief cause of all conjugal dissolutions.
In such a case a man resembles a bad musician who changes his
violin in the hope that a new instrument will bring the melody he
is unable to play."
The fact that there is thus an art in love, and that sexual intercourse is
not a mere physical act to be executed by force of muscles, may help to
explain why it is that in so many parts of the world defloration is not
immediately effected on marriage.[404] No doubt religious or magic reasons
may also intervene here, but, as so often happens, they harmonize with the
biological process. This is the case even among uncivilized peoples who
marry early. The need for delay and considerate skill is far greater when,
as among ourselves, a woman's marriage is delayed long past the
establishment of puberty to a period when it is more difficult to break
down the psychic and perhaps even physical barriers of personality.
It has to be added that the art of love in the act of courtship is not
confined to the preliminaries to the single act of coitus. In a sense the
life of love is a continuous courtship with a constant progression. The
establishment of physical intercourse is but the beginning of it. This is
especially true of women. "The consummation of love," says Sénancour,[405]
"which is often the end of love with man is only the beginning of love
with woman, a test of trust, a gage of future pleasure, a sort of
engagement for an intimacy to come." "A woman's soul and body," says
another writer,[406] "are not given at one stroke at a given moment; but
only slowly, little by little, through many stages, are both delivered to
the beloved. Instead of abandoning the young woman to the bridegroom on
the wedding night, as an entrapped mouse is flung to the cat to be
devoured, it would be better to let the young bridal couple live side by
side, like two friends and comrades, until they gradually learn how to
develop and use their sexual consciousness." The conventional wedding is
out of place as a preliminary to the consummation of marriage, if only on
the ground that it is impossible to say at what stage in the endless
process of courtship it ought to take place.
A woman, unlike a man, is prepared by Nature, to play a skilful part in
the art of love. The man's part in courtship, which is that of the male
throughout the zoölogical series, may be difficult and hazardous, but it
is in a straight line, fairly simple and direct. The woman's part, having
to follow at the same moment two quite different impulses, is necessarily
always in a zigzag or a curve. That is to say that at every erotic moment
her action is the resultant of the combined force of her desire (conscious
or unconscious) and her modesty. She must sail through a tortuous channel
with Scylla on the one side and Charybdis on the other, and to avoid
either danger too anxiously may mean risking shipwreck on the other side.
She must be impenetrable to all the world, but it must be an
impenetrability not too obscure for the divination of the right man. Her
speech must be honest, but yet on no account tell everything; her actions
must be the outcome of her impulses, and on that very account be capable
of two interpretations. It is only in the last resort of complete intimacy
that she can become the perfect woman,
"Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought,
Nor Love her body from her soul."
For many a woman the conditions for that final erotic avatar—"that
splendid shamelessness which," as Rafford Pyke says, "is the finest thing
in perfect love"—never present themselves at all. She is compelled to be
to the end of her erotic life, what she must always be at the beginning, a
complex and duplex personality, naturally artful. Therewith she is better
prepared than man to play her part in the art of love.
The man's part in the art of love is, however, by no means easy. That is
not always realized by the women who complain of his lack of skill in
playing it. Although a man has not to cultivate the same natural duplicity
as a woman, it is necessary that he should possess a considerable power of
divination. He is not well prepared for that, because the traditional
masculine virtue is force rather than insight. The male's work in the
world, we are told, is domination, and it is by such domination that the
female is attracted. There is an element of truth in that doctrine, an
element of truth which may well lead astray the man who too exclusively
relies upon it in the art of love. Violence is bad in every art, and in
the erotic art the female desires to be won to love and not to be ordered
to love. That is fundamental. We sometimes see the matter so stated as if
the objection to force and domination in love constituted some quite new
and revolutionary demand of the "modern woman." That is, it need scarcely
be said, the result of ignorance. The art of love, being an art that
Nature makes, is the same now as in essentials it has always been,[407]
and it was well established before woman came into existence. That it has
not always been very skilfully played is another matter. And, so far as
the man is concerned, it is this very tradition of masculine predominance
which has contributed to the difficulty of playing it skilfully. The woman
admires the male's force; she even wishes herself to be forced to the
things that she altogether desires; and yet she revolts from any exertion
of force outside that narrow circle, either before the boundary of it is
reached or after the boundary is passed. Thus the man's position is really
more difficult than the women who complain of his awkwardness in love are
always ready to admit. He must cultivate force, not only in the world but
even for display in the erotic field; he must be able to divine the
moments when, in love, force is no longer force because his own will is
his partner's will; he must, at the same time, hold himself in complete
restraint lest he should fall into the fatal error of yielding to his own
impulse of domination; and all this at the very moment when his emotions
are least under control. We need scarcely be surprised that of the myriads
who embark on the sea of love, so few women, so very few men, come safely
into port.
It may still seem to some that in dwelling on the laws that guide the
erotic life, if that life is to be healthy and complete, we have wandered
away from the consideration of the sexual instinct in its relationship to
society. It may therefore be desirable to return to first principles and
to point out that we are still clinging to the fundamental facts of the
personal and social life. Marriage, as we have seen reason to believe, is
a great social institution; procreation, which is, on the public side, its
supreme function, is a great social end. But marriage and procreation are
both based on the erotic life. If the erotic life is not sound, then
marriage is broken up, practically if not always formally, and the process
of procreation is carried out under unfavorable conditions or not at all.
This social and personal importance of the erotic life, though, under the
influence of a false morality and an equally false modesty, it has
sometimes been allowed to fall into the background in stages of artificial
civilization, has always been clearly realized by those peoples who have
vitally grasped the relationships of life. Among most uncivilized races
there appear to be few or no "sexually frigid" women. It is little to the
credit of our own "civilization" that it should be possible for physicians
to-day to assert, even with the faintest plausibility, that there are some
25 per cent. of women who may thus be described.
The whole sexual structure of the world is built up on the general fact
that the intimate contact of the male and female who have chosen each
other is mutually pleasurable. Below this general fact is the more
specific fact that in the normal accomplishment of the act of sexual
consummation the two partners experience the acute gratification of
simultaneous orgasm. Herein, it has been said, lies the secret of love. It
is the very basis of love, the condition of the healthy exercise of the
sexual functions, and, in many cases, it seems probable, the condition
also of fertilization.
Even savages in a very low degree of culture are sometimes
patient and considerate in evoking and waiting for the signs of
sexual desire in their females. (I may refer to the significant
case of the Caroline Islanders, as described by Kubary in his
ethnographic study of that people and quoted in volume iv of
these Studies, "Sexual Selection in Man," Sect. III.) In
Catholic days theological influence worked wholesomely in the
same direction, although the theologians were so keen to detect
the mortal sin of lust. It is true that the Catholic insistence
on the desirability of simultaneous orgasm was largely due to the
mistaken notion that to secure conception it was necessary that
there should be "insemination" on the part of the wife as well as
of the husband, but that was not the sole source of the
theological view. Thus Zacchia discusses whether a man ought to
continue with his wife until she has the orgasm and feels
satisfied, and he decides that that is the husband's duty;
otherwise the wife falls into danger either of experiencing the
orgasm during sleep, or, more probably, by self-excitation, "for
many women, when their desires have not been satisfied by coitus,
place one thigh on the other, pressing and rubbing them together
until the orgasm occurs, in the belief that if they abstain from
using the hands they have committed no sin." Some theologians, he
adds, favor that belief, notably Hurtado de Mendoza and Sanchez,
and he further quotes the opinion of the latter that women who
have not been satisfied in coitus are liable to become hysterical
or melancholic (Zacchiæ Quæstionum Medico-legalium Opus, lib.
vii, tit. iii, quæst. VI). In the same spirit some theologians
seem to have permitted irrumatio (without ejaculation), so long
as it is only the preliminary to the normal sexual act.
Nowadays physicians have fully confirmed the belief of Sanchez.
It is well recognized that women in whom, from whatever cause,
acute sexual excitement occurs with frequency without being
followed by the due natural relief of orgasm are liable to
various nervous and congestive symptoms which diminish their
vital effectiveness, and very possibly lead to a breakdown in
health. Kisch has described, as a cardiac neurosis of sexual
origin, a pathological tachycardia which is an exaggeration of
the physiological quick heart of sexual excitement. J. Inglis
Parsons (British Medical Journal, Oct. 22, 1904, p. 1062)
refers to the ovarian pain produced by strong unsatisfied sexual
excitement, often in vigorous unmarried women, and sometimes a
cause of great distress. An experienced Austrian gynæcologist
told Hirth (Wege zur Heimat, p. 613) that of every hundred
women who come to him with uterine troubles seventy suffered from
congestion of the womb, which he regarded as due to incomplete
coitus.
It is frequently stated that the evil of incomplete gratification
and absence of orgasm in women is chiefly due to male withdrawal,
that is to say coitus interruptus, in which the penis is
hastily withdrawn as soon as involuntary ejaculation is
impending; and it is sometimes said that the same widely
prevalent practice is also productive of slight or serious
results in the male (see, e.g., L. B. Bangs, Transactions New
York Academy of Medicine, vol. ix, 1893; D. S. Booth, "Coitus
Interruptus and Coitus Reservatus as Causes of Profound Neurosis
and Psychosis," Alienist and Neurologist, Nov., 1906; also,
Alienist and Neurologist, Oct., 1897, p. 588).
It is undoubtedly true that coitus interruptus, since it involves
sudden withdrawal on the part of the man without reference to the
stage of sexual excitation which his partner may have reached,
cannot fail to produce frequently an injurious nervous effect on
the woman, though the injurious effect on the man, who obtains
ejaculation, is little or none. But the practice is so widespread
that it cannot be regarded as necessarily involving this evil
result. There can, I am assured, be no doubt whatever that
Blumreich is justified in his statement (Senator and Kaminer,
Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. ii, p. 783)
that "interrupted coitus is injurious to the genital system of
those women only who are disturbed in their sensation of delight
by this form of cohabitation, in whom the orgasm is not produced,
and who continue for hours subsequently to be tormented by
feelings of an unsatisfied desire." Equally injurious effects
follow in normal coitus when the man's orgasm occurs too soon.
"These phenomena, therefore," he concludes, "are not
characteristic of interrupted coitus, but consequences of an
imperfectly concluded sexual cohabitation as such." Kisch,
likewise, in his elaborate and authoritative work on The Sexual
Life of Woman, also states that the question of the evil results
of coitus interruptus in women is simply a question of whether
or not they receive sexual satisfaction. (Cf. also Fürbringer,
Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, pp. 232 et
seq.) This is clearly the most reasonable view to take
concerning what is the simplest, the most widespread, and
certainly the most ancient of the methods of preventing
conception. In the Book of Genesis we find it practiced by Onan,
and to come down to modern times, in the sixteenth century it
seems to have been familiar to French ladies, who, according to
Brantôme, enjoined it on their lovers.
Coitus reservatus,—in which intercourse is maintained even for
very long periods, during which the woman may have orgasm several
times while the man succeeds in holding back orgasm,—so far from
being injurious to the woman, is probably the form of coitus
which gives her the maximum of gratification and relief. For most
men, however, it seems probable that this self-control over the
processes leading to the involuntary act of detumescence is
difficult to acquire, while in weak, nervous, and erethic persons
it is impossible. It is, however, a desirable condition for
completely adequate coitus, and in the East this is fully
recognized, and the aptitude carefully cultivated. Thus W. D.
Sutherland states ("Einiges über das Alltagsleben und die
Volksmedizin unter den Bauern Britischostindiens," Münchener
Medizinische Wochenschrift, No. 12, 1906) that the Hindu smokes
and talks during intercourse in order to delay orgasm, and
sometimes applies an opium paste to the glans of the penis for
the same purpose. (See also vol. iii of these Studies, "The
Sexual Impulse in Women.") Some authorities have, indeed, stated
that the prolongation of the act of coitus is injurious in its
effect on the male. Thus R. W. Taylor (Practical Treatise on
Sexual Disorders, third ed., p. 121) states that it tends to
cause atonic impotence, and Löwenfeld (Sexualleben und
Nervenleiden, p. 74) thinks that the swift and unimpeded
culmination of the sexual act is necessary in order to preserve
the vigor of the reflex reactions. This is probably true of
extreme and often repeated cases of indefinite prolongation of
pronounced erection without detumescence, but it is not true
within fairly wide limits in the case of healthy persons.
Prolonged coitus reservatus was a practice of the complex
marriage system of the Oneida community, and I was assured by the
late Noyes Miller, who had spent the greater part of his life in
the community, that the practice had no sort of evil result.
Coitus reservatus was erected into a principle in the Oneida
community. Every man in the community was theoretically the
husband of every woman, but every man was not free to have
children with every woman. Sexual initiation took place soon
after puberty in the case of boys, some years later in the case
of girls, by a much older person of the opposite sex. In
intercourse the male inserted his penis into the vagina and
retained it there for even an hour without emission, though
orgasm took place in the woman. There was usually no emission in
the case of the man, even after withdrawal, and he felt no need
of emission. The social feeling of the community was a force on
the side of this practice, the careless, unskilful men being
avoided by women, while the general romantic sentiment of
affection for all the women in the community was also a force.
Masturbation was unknown, and no irregular relations took place
with persons outside the community. The practice was maintained
for thirty years, and was finally abandoned, not on its demerits,
but in deference to the opinions of the outside world. Mr. Miller
admitted that the practice became more difficult in ordinary
marriage, which favors a more mechanical habit of intercourse.
The information received from Mr. Miller is supplemented in a
pamphlet entitled Male Continence (the name given to coitus
reservatus in the community), written in 1872 by the founder,
John Humphrey Noyes. The practice is based, he says, on the fact
that sexual intercourse consists of two acts, a social and a
propagative, and that if propagation is to be scientific there
must be no confusion of these two acts, and procreation must
never be involuntary. It was in 1844, he states, that this idea
occurred to him as a result of a resolve to abstain from sexual
intercourse in consequence of his wife's delicate health and
inability to bear healthy children, and in his own case he found
the practice "a great deliverance. It made a happy household." He
points out that the chief members of the Oneida community
"belonged to the most respectable families in Vermont, had been
educated in the best schools of New England morality and
refinement, and were, by the ordinary standards, irreproachable
in their conduct so far as sexual matters are concerned, till
they deliberately commenced, in 1846, the experiment of a new
state of society, on principles which they had been long maturing
and were prepared to defend before the World." In relation to
male continence, therefore, Noyes thought the community might
fairly be considered "the Committee of Providence to test its
value in actual life." He states that a careful medical
comparison of the statistics of the community had shown that the
rate of nervous disease in the community was considerably below
the average outside, and that only two cases of nervous disorder
had occurred which could be traced with any probability to a
misuse of male continence. This has been confirmed by Van de
Warker, who studied forty-two women of the community without
finding any undue prevalence of reproductive diseases, nor could
he find any diseased condition attributable to the sexual habits
of the community (cf. C. Reed, Text-Book of Gynecology, 1901,
p. 9).
Noyes believed that "male continence" had never previously been a
definitely recognized practice based on theory, though there
might have been occasional approximation to it. This is probably
true if the coitus is reservatus in the full sense, with
complete absence of emission. Prolonged coitus, however,
permitting the woman to have orgasm more than once, while the man
has none, has long been recognized. Thus in the seventeenth
century Zacchia discussed whether such a practice is legitimate
(Zacchiæ Quæstionum Opus, ed. of 1688, lib. vii, tit. iii,
quæst. VI). In modern times it is occasionally practiced, without
any theory, and is always appreciated by the woman, while it
appears to have no bad effect on the man. In such a case it will
happen that the act of coitus may last for an hour and a quarter
or even longer, the maximum of the woman's pleasure not being
reached until three-quarters of an hour have passed; during this
period the woman will experience orgasm some four or five times,
the man only at the end. It may occasionally happen that a little
later the woman again experiences desire, and intercourse begins
afresh in the same way. But after that she is satisfied, and
there is no recurrence of desire.
It may be desirable at this point to refer briefly to the chief
variations in the method of effecting coitus in their
relationship to the art of love and the attainment of adequate
and satisfying detumescence.
The primary and essential characteristic of the specifically
human method of coitus is the fact that it takes place face to
face. The fact that in what is usually considered the typically
normal method of coitus the woman lies supine and the man above
her is secondary. Psychically, this front-to-front attitude
represents a great advance over the quadrupedal method. The two
partners reveal to each other the most important, the most
beautiful, the most expressive sides of themselves, and thus
multiply the mutual pleasure and harmony of the intimate act of
union. Moreover, this face-to-face attitude possesses a great
significance, in the fact that it is the outward sign that the
human couple has outgrown the animal sexual attitude of the
hunter seizing his prey in the act of flight, and content to
enjoy it in that attitude, from behind. The human male may be
said to retain the same attitude, but the female has turned
round; she has faced her partner and approached him, and so
symbolizes her deliberate consent to the act of union.
The human variations in the exercise of coitus, both individual
and national, are, however, extremely numerous. "To be quite
frank," says Fürbringer (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease
in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 213), "I can hardly think of
any combination which does not figure among my case-notes as
having been practiced by my patients." We must not too hastily
conclude that such variations are due to vicious training. That
is far from being the case. They often occur naturally and
spontaneously. Freud has properly pointed out (in the second
series of his Beiträge zur Neurosenlehre, "Bruchstück" etc.)
that we must not be too shocked even when the idea of fellatio
spontaneously presents itself to a woman, for that idea has a
harmless origin in the resemblance between the penis and the
nipple. Similarly, it may be added, the desire for
cunnilinctus, which seems to be much more often latently
present in women than is the desire for its performance in men,
has a natural analogy in the pleasure of suckling, a pleasure
which is itself indeed often erotically tinged (see vol. iv of
these Studies, "Sexual Selection in Man," Touch, Sect. III).
Every variation in this matter, remarks Remy de Gourmont
(Physique de l'Amour, p. 264) partakes of the sin of luxury,
and some of the theologians have indeed considered any position
in coitus but that which is usually called normal in Europe as a
mortal sin. Other theologians, however, regarded such variations
as only venial sins, provided ejaculation took place in the
vagina, just as some theologians would permit irrumatio as a
preliminary to coitus, provided there was no ejaculation. Aquinas
took a serious view of the deviations from normal intercourse;
Sanchez was more indulgent, especially in view of his doctrine,
derived from the Greek and Arabic natural philosophers, that the
womb can attract the sperm, so that the natural end may be
attained even in unusual positions.
Whatever difference of opinion there may have been among ancient
theologians, it is well recognized by modern physicians that
variations from the ordinary method of coitus are desirable in
special cases. Thus Kisch points out (Sterilität des Weibes, p.
107) that in some cases it is only possible for the woman to
experience sexual excitement when coitus takes place in the
lateral position, or in the a posteriori position, or when the
usual position is reversed; and in his Sexual Life of Woman,
also, Kisch recommends several variations of position for coitus.
Adler points out (op. cit., pp. 151, 186) the value of the same
positions in some cases, and remarks that such variations often
call forth latent sexual feelings as by a charm. Such cases are
indeed, by no means infrequent, the advantage of the unusual
position being due either to physical or psychic causes, and the
discovery of the right variation is sometimes found in a merely
playful attempt. It has occasionally happened, also, that when
intercourse has habitually taken place in an abnormal position,
no satisfaction is experienced by the woman until the normal
position is adopted. The only fairly common variation of coitus
which meets with unqualified disapproval is that in the erect
posture. (See e.g., Hammond, op. cit. pp. 257 et seq.)
Lucretius specially recommended the quadrupedal variation of
coitus (Bk. iv, 1258), and Ovid describes (end of Bk. iii of the
Ars Amatoria) what he regards as agreeable variations, giving
the preference, as the easiest and simplest method, to that in
which the woman lies half supine on her side. Perhaps, however,
the variation which is nearest to the normal attitude and which
has most often and most completely commended itself is that
apparently known to Arabic erotic writers as dok el arz, in
which the man is seated and his partner is astride his thighs,
embracing his body with her legs and his neck with her arms,
while he embraces her waist; this is stated in the Arabic
Perfumed Garden to be the method preferred by most women.
The other most usual variation is the inverse normal position in
which the man is supine, and the woman adapts herself to this
position, which permits of several modifications obviously
advantageous, especially when the man is much larger than his
partner. The Christian as well as the Mahommedan theologians
appear, indeed, to have been generally opposed to this superior
position of the female, apparently, it would seem, because they
regarded the literal subjection of the male which it involves as
symbolic of a moral subjection. The testimony of many people
to-day, however, is decidedly in favor of this position, more
especially as regards the woman, since it enables her to obtain a
better adjustment and greater control of the process, and so
frequently to secure sexual satisfaction which she may find
difficult or impossible in the normal position.
The theologians seem to have been less unfavorably disposed to
the position normal among quadrupeds, a posteriori, though the
old Penitentials were inclined to treat it severely, the
Penitential of Angers prescribing forty days penance, and
Egbert's three years, if practiced habitually. (It is discussed
by J. Petermann, "Venus Aversa," Sexual-Probleme, Feb., 1909).
There are good reasons why in many cases this position should be
desirable, more especially from the point of view of women, who
indeed not infrequently prefer it. It must be always remembered,
as has already been pointed out, that in the progress from
anthropoid to man it is the female, not the male, whose method of
coitus has been revolutionized. While, however, the obverse human
position represents a psychic advance, there has never been a
complete physical readjustment of the female organs to the
obverse method. More especially, in Adler's opinion (op. cit.,
pp. 117-119), the position of the clitoris is such that, as a
rule, it is more easily excited by coitus from behind than from
in front. A more recent writer, Klotz, in his book, Der Mensch
ein Vierfüssler (1908), even takes the too extreme position that
the quadrupedal method of coitus, being the only method that
insures due contact with the clitoris, is the natural human
method. It must, however, be admitted that the posterior mode of
coitus is not only a widespread, but a very important variation,
in either of its two most important forms: the Pompeiian method,
in which the woman bends forwards and the man approaches behind,
or the method described by Boccaccio, in which the man is supine
and the woman astride.
Fellatio and cunnilinctus, while they are not strictly
methods of coitus, in so far as they do not involve the
penetration of the penis into the vagina, are very widespread as
preliminaries, or as vicarious forms of coitus, alike among
civilized and uncivilized peoples. Thus, in India, I am told that
fellatio is almost universal in households, and regarded as a
natural duty towards the paterfamilias. As regards cunnilinctus
Max Dessoir has stated (Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie,
1894, Heft 5) that the superior Berlin prostitutes say that about
a quarter of their clients desire to exercise this, and that in
France and Italy the proportion is higher; the number of women
who find cunnilinctus agreeable is without doubt much greater.
Intercourse per anum must also be regarded as a vicarious form
of coitus. It appears to be not uncommon, especially among the
lower social classes, and while most often due to the wish to
avoid conception, it is also sometimes practiced as a sexual
aberration, at the wish either of the man or the woman, the anus
being to some extent an erogenous zone.
The ethnic variations in method of coitus were briefly discussed
in volume v of these Studies, "The Mechanism of Detumescence,"
Section II. In all civilized countries, from the earliest times,
writers on the erotic art have formally and systematically set
forth the different positions for coitus. The earliest writing of
this kind now extant seems to be an Egyptian papyrus preserved at
Turin of the date B.C. 1300; in this, fourteen different
positions are represented. The Indians, according to Iwan Bloch,
recognize altogether forty-eight different positions; the Ananga
Ranga describes thirty-two main forms. The Mohammedan Perfumed
Garden describes forty forms, as well as six different kinds of
movement during coitus. The Eastern books of this kind are, on
the whole, superior to those that have been produced by the
Western world, not only by their greater thoroughness, but by the
higher spirit by which they have often been inspired.
The ancient Greek erotic writings, now all lost, in which the
modes of coitus were described, were nearly all attributed to
women. According to a legend recorded by Suidas, the earliest
writer of this kind was Astyanassa, the maid of Helen of Troy.
Elephantis, the poetess, is supposed to have enumerated nine
different postures. Numerous women of later date wrote on these
subjects, and one book is attributed to Polycrates, the sophist.
Aretino—who wrote after the influence of Christianity had
degraded erotic matters perilously near to that region of
pornography from which they are only to-day beginning to be
rescued—in his Sonnetti Lussuriosi described twenty-six
different methods of coitus, each one accompanied by an
illustrative design by Giulio Romano, the chief among Raphael's
pupils. Veniero, in his Puttana Errante, described thirty-two
positions. More recently Forberg, the chief modern authority, has
enumerated ninety positions, but, it is said, only forty-eight
can, even on the most liberal estimate, be regarded as coming
within the range of normal variation.
The disgrace which has overtaken the sexual act, and rendered it
a deed of darkness, is doubtless largely responsible for the fact
that the chief time for its consummation among modern civilized
peoples is the darkness of the early night in stuffy bedrooms
when the fatigue of the day's labors is struggling with the
artificial stimulation produced by heavy meals and alcoholic
drinks. This habit is partly responsible for the indifference or
even disgust with which women sometimes view coitus.
Many more primitive peoples are wiser. The New Guinea Papuans of
Astrolabe Bay, according to Vahness (Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie, 1900, Heft 5, p. 414), though it must be remembered
that the association of the sexual act with darkness is much
older than Christianity, and connected with early religious
notions (cf. Hesiod, Works and Days, Bk. II), always have
sexual intercourse in the open air. The hard-working women of the
Gebvuka and Buru Islands, again, are too tired for coitus at
night; it is carried out in the day time under the trees, and the
Serang Islanders also have coitus in the woods (Ploss and
Bartels, Das Weib, Bk. i, Ch. XVII).
It is obviously impracticable to follow these examples in modern
cities, even if avocation and climate permitted. It is also
agreed that sexual intercourse should be followed by repose.
There seems to be little doubt, however, that the early morning
and the daylight are a more favorable time than the early night.
Conception should take place in the light, said Michelet
(L'Amour, p. 153); sexual intercourse in the darkness of night
is an act committed with a mere female animal; in the day-time it
is union with a loving and beloved individual person.
This has been widely recognized. The Greeks, as we gather from
Aristophanes in the Archarnians, regarded sunrise as the
appropriate time for coitus. The South Slavs also say that dawn
is the time for coitus. Many modern authorities have urged the
advantages of early morning coitus. Morning, said Roubaud
(Traité de l'Impuissance, pp. 151-3) is the time for coitus,
and even if desire is greater in the evening, pleasure is greater
in the morning. Osiander also advised early morning coitus, and
Venette, in an earlier century, discussing "at what hour a man
should amorously embrace his wife" (La Génération de l'Homme,
Part II, Ch. V), while thinking it is best to follow inclination,
remarks that "a beautiful woman looks better by sunlight than by
candlelight." A few authorities, like Burdach, have been content
to accept the custom of night coitus, and Busch (Das
Geschlechtsleben des Weibes, vol. i, p. 214) was inclined to
think the darkness of night the most "natural" time, while
Fürbringer (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation
to Marriage, vol. i, p. 217) thinks that early morning is
"occasionally" the best time.
To some, on the other hand, the exercise of sexual intercourse in
the sunlight and the open air seems so important that they are
inclined to elevate it to the rank of a religious exercise. I
quote from a communication on this point received from Australia:
"This shameful thing that must not be spoken of or done (except
in the dark) will some day, I believe, become the one religious
ceremony of the human race, in the spring. (Oh, what springs!)
People will have become very sane, well-bred, aristocratic (all
of them aristocrats), and on the whole opposed to rites and
superstitions, for they will have a perfect knowledge of the
past. The coition of lovers in the springtime will be the one
religious ceremony they will allow themselves. I have a vision
sometimes of the holy scene, but I am afraid it is too beautiful
to describe. 'The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is
ineffably beautiful, too fair to be remembered,' wrote the chaste
Thoreau. Verily human beauty, joy, and love will reach their
divinest height during those inaugural days of springtide
coupling. When the world is one Paradise, the consummation of the
lovers, the youngest and most beautiful, will take place in
certain sacred valleys in sight of thousands assembled to witness
it. For days it will take place in these valleys where the sun
will rise on a dream of passionate voices, of clinging human
forms, of flowers and waters, and the purple and gold of the
sunrise are reflected on hills illumined with pansies. [I know
not if the writer recalled George Chapman's "Enamelled pansies
used at nuptials still"], and repeated on golden human flesh and
human hair. In these sacred valleys the subtle perfume of the
pansies will mingle with the divine fragrance of healthy naked
young women and men in the spring coupling. You and I shall not
see that, but we may help to make it possible." This rhapsody (an
unconscious repetition of Saint-Lambert's at Mlle. Quinault's
table in the eighteenth century) serves to illustrate the revolt
which tends to take place against the unnatural and artificial
degradation of the sexual act.
In some parts of the world it has seemed perfectly natural and
reasonable that so great and significant an act as that of coitus
should be consecrated to the divinity, and hence arose the custom
of prayer before sexual intercourse. Thus Zoroaster ordained that
a married couple should pray before coitus, and after the act
they should say together: "O, Sapondomad, I trust this seed to
thee, preserve it for me, for it is a man." In the Gorong
Archipelago it is customary also for husband and wife to pray
together before the sexual act (Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib,
Bd. i, Ch. XVII). The civilized man, however, has come to regard
his stomach as the most important of his organs, and he utters
his conventional grace, not before love, but only before food.
Even the degraded ritual vestiges of the religious recognition of
coitus are difficult to find in Europe. We may perhaps detect it
among the Spaniards, with their tenacious instinct for ritual, in
the solemn etiquette with which, in the seventeenth century, it
was customary, according to Madame d'Aulnoy, for the King to
enter the bedchamber of the Queen: "He has on his slippers, his
black mantle over his shoulder, his shield on one arm, a bottle
hanging by a cord over the other arm (this bottle is not to drink
from, but for a quite opposite purpose, which you will guess).
With all this the King must also have his great sword in one hand
and a dark lantern in the other. In this way he must enter,
alone, the Queen's chamber" (Madame d'Aulnoy, Relation du Voyage
d'Espagne, 1692, vol. iii, p. 221).
In discussing the art of love it is necessary to give a primary place to
the central fact of coitus, on account of the ignorance that widely
prevails concerning it, and the unfortunate prejudices which in their
fungous broods flourish in the noisome obscurity around it. The traditions
of the Christian Church, which overspread the whole of Europe, and set up
for worship a Divine Virgin and her Divine Son, both of whom it
elaborately disengaged from personal contact with sexuality effectually
crushed any attempt to find a sacred and avowable ideal in married love.
Even the Church's own efforts to elevate matrimony were negatived by its
own ideals. That influence depresses our civilization even to-day. When
Walt Whitman wrote his "Children of Adam" he was giving imperfect
expression to conceptions of the religious nature of sexual love which
have existed wholesomely and naturally in all parts of the world, but had
not yet penetrated the darkness of Christendom where they still seemed
strange and new, if not terrible. And the refusal to recognize the
solemnity of sex had involved the placing of a pall of blackness and
disrepute on the supreme sexual act itself. It was shut out from the
sunshine and excluded from the sphere of worship.
The sexual act is important from the point of view of erotic art, not only
from the ignorance and prejudices which surround it, but also because it
has a real value even in regard to the psychic side of married life.
"These organs," according to the oft-quoted saying of the old French
physician, Ambrose Paré, "make peace in the household." How this comes
about we see illustrated from time to time in Pepys's Diary. At the same
time, it is scarcely necessary to say, after all that has gone before,
that this ancient source of domestic peace tends to be indefinitely
complicated by the infinite variety in erotic needs, which become ever
more pronounced with the growth of civilization.[408]
The art of love is, indeed, only beginning with the establishment of
sexual intercourse. In the adjustment of that relationship all the forces
of nature are so strongly engaged that under completely favorable
conditions—which indeed very rarely occur in our civilization—the
knowledge of the art and a possible skill in its exercise come almost of
themselves. The real test of the artist in love is in the skill to carry
it beyond the period when the interests of nature, having been really or
seemingly secured, begin to slacken. The whole art of love, it has been
well said, lies in forever finding something new in the same person. The
art of love is even more the art of retaining love than of arousing it.
Otherwise it tends to degenerate towards the Shakespearian lust,
"Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated,"
though it must be remembered that even from the most strictly natural
point of view the transitions of passion are not normally towards
repulsion but towards affection.[409]
The young man and woman who are brought into the complete unrestraint of
marriage after a prolonged and unnatural separation, during which desire
and the satisfactions of desire have been artificially disconnected, are
certainly not under the best conditions for learning the art of love. They
are tempted by reckless and promiscuous indulgence in the intimacies of
marriage to fling carelessly aside all the reasons that make that art
worth learning. "There are married people," as Ellen Key remarks, "who
might have loved each other all their lives if they had not been
compelled, every day and all the year, to direct their habits, wills, and
inclinations towards each other."
All the tendencies of our civilized life are, in personal matters, towards
individualism; they involve the specialization, and they ensure the
sacredness, of personal habits and even peculiarities. This individualism
cannot be broken down suddenly at the arbitrary dictation of a tradition,
or even by the force of passion from which the restraints have been
removed. Out of deference to the conventions and prejudices of their
friends, or out of the reckless abandonment of young love, or merely out
of a fear of hurting each other's feelings, young couples have often
plunged prematurely into an unbroken intimacy which is even more
disastrous to the permanency of marriage than the failure ever to reach a
complete intimacy at all. That is one of the chief reasons why most
writers on the moral hygiene of marriage nowadays recommend separate beds
for the married couple, if possible separate bedrooms, and even sometimes,
with Ellen Key, see no objection to their living in separate houses.
Certainly the happiest marriages have often involved the closest and most
unbroken intimacy, in persons peculiarly fitted for such intimacy. It is
far from true that, as Bloch has affirmed, familiarity is fatal to love.
It is deadly to a love that has no roots, but it is the nourishment of the
deeply-rooted love. Yet it remains true that absence is needed to maintain
the keen freshness and fine idealism of love. "Absence," as Landor said,
"is the invisible and incorporeal mother of ideal beauty." The married
lovers who are only able to meet for comparatively brief periods between
long absences have often experienced in these meetings a life-long
succession of honeymoons.[410]
There can be no question that as presence has its risks for love, so also
has absence. Absence like presence, in the end, if too prolonged, effaces
the memory of love, and absence, further, by the multiplied points of
contact with the world which it frequently involves, introduces the
problem of jealousy, although, it must be added, it is difficult indeed to
secure a degree of association which excludes jealousy or even the
opportunities for motives of jealousy. The problem of jealousy is so
fundamental in the art of love that it is necessary at this point to
devote to it a brief discussion.
Jealousy is based on fundamental instincts which are visible at the
beginning of animal life. Descartes defined jealousy as "a kind of fear
related to a desire to preserve a possession." Every impulse of
acquisition in the animal world is stimulated into greater activity by the
presence of a rival who may snatch beforehand the coveted object. This
seems to be a fundamental fact in the animal world; it has been a
life-conserving tendency, for, it has been said, an animal that stood
aside while its fellows were gorging themselves with food, and experienced
nothing but pure satisfaction in the spectacle, would speedily perish. But
in this fact we have the natural basis of jealousy.[411]
It is in reference to food that this impulse appears first and most
conspicuously among animals. It is a well-known fact that association
with other animals induces an animal to eat much more than when kept by
himself. He ceases to eat from hunger but eats, as it has been put, in
order to preserve his food from rivals in the only strong box he knows.
The same feeling is transferred among animals to the field of sex. And
further in the relations of dogs and other domesticated animals to their
masters the emotion of jealousy is often very keenly marked.[412]
Jealousy is an emotion which is at its maximum among animals, among
savages,[413] among children,[414] in the senile, in the degenerate, and
very specially in chronic alcoholics.[415] It is worthy of note that the
supreme artists and masters of the human heart who have most consummately
represented the tragedy of jealousy clearly recognized that it is either
atavistic or pathological; Shakespeare made his Othello a barbarian, and
Tolstoy made the Pozdnischeff of his Kreutzer Sonata a lunatic. It is an
anti-social emotion, though it has been maintained by some that it has
been the cause of chastity and fidelity. Gesell, for instance, while
admitting its anti-social character and accumulating quotations in
evidence of the torture and disaster it occasions, seems to think that it
still ought to be encouraged in order to foster sexual virtues. Very
decided opinions have been expressed in the opposite sense. Jealousy, like
other shadows, says Ellen Key, belongs only to the dawn and the setting of
love, and a man should feel that it is a miracle, and not his right, if
the sun stands still at the zenith.[416]
Even therefore if jealousy has been a beneficial influence at the
beginning of civilization, as well as among animals,—as may probably be
admitted, though on the whole it seems rather to be the by-product of a
beneficial influence than such an influence itself,—it is still by no
means clear that it therefore becomes a desirable emotion in more advanced
stages of civilization. There are many primitive emotions, like anger and
fear, which we do not think it desirable to encourage in complex civilized
societies but rather seek to restrain and control, and even if we are
inclined to attribute an original value to jealousy, it seems to be among
these emotions that it ought to be placed.
Miss Clapperton, in discussing this problem (Scientific
Meliorism, pp. 129-137), follows Darwin (Descent of Man, Part
I, Ch. IV) in thinking that jealousy led to "the inculcation of
female virtue," but she adds that it has also been a cause of
woman's subjection, and now needs to be eliminated. "To rid
ourselves as rapidly as may be of jealousy is essential;
otherwise the great movement in favor of equality of sex will
necessarily meet with checks and grave obstruction."
Ribot (La Logique des Sentiments, pp. 75 et seq.; Essai sur
les Passions, pp. 91, 175), while stating that subjectively the
estimate of jealousy must differ in accordance with the ideal of
life held, considers that objectively we must incline to an
unfavorable estimate "Even a brief passion is a rupture in the
normal life; it is an abnormal, if not a pathological state, an
excrescence, a parasitism."
Forel (Die Sexuelle Frage, Ch. V) speaks very strongly in the
same sense, and considers that it is necessary to eliminate
jealousy by non-procreation of the jealous. Jealousy is, he
declares, "the worst and unfortunately the most deeply-rooted of
the 'irradiations,' or, better, the 'contrast-reactions,' of
sexual love inherited from our animal ancestors. An old German
saying, 'Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft die mit Eifer sucht was
Leider schafft,' says by no means too much.... Jealousy is a
heritage of animality and barbarism; I would recall this to those
who, under the name of 'injured honor,' attempt to justify it and
place it on a high pedestal. An unfaithful husband is ten times
more to be wished for a woman than a jealous husband.... We often
hear of 'justifiable jealousy.' I believe, however, that there is
no justifiable jealousy; it is always atavistic or else
pathological; at the best it is nothing more than a brutal
animal stupidity. A man who, by nature, that is by his hereditary
constitution, is jealous is certain to poison his own life and
that of his wife. Such men ought on no account to marry. Both
education and selection should work together to eliminate
jealousy as far as possible from the human brain."
Eric Gillard in an article on "Jealousy" (Free Review, Sept.,
1896), in opposition to those who believe that jealousy "makes
the home," declares that, on the contrary, it is the chief force
that unmakes the home. "So long as egotism waters it with the
tears of sentiment and shields it from the cold blasts of
scientific inquiry, so long will it thrive. But the time will
come when it will be burned in the Garden of Love as a noxious
weed. Its mephitic influence in society is too palpable to be
overlooked. It turns homes that might be sanctuaries of love into
hells of discord and hate; it causes suicides, and it drives
thousands to drink, reckless excesses, and madness. Makes the
home! One of your married men friends sees a probable seducer in
every man who smiles at his wife; another is jealous of his
wife's women acquaintances; a third is wounded because his wife
shows so much attention to the children. Some of the women you
know display jealousy of every other woman, of their husband's
acquaintances, and some, of his very dog. You must be completely
monopolized or you do not thoroughly love. You must admire no one
but the person with whom you have immured yourself for life. Old
friendships must be dissolved, new friendships must not be
formed, for fear of invoking the beautiful emotion that 'makes
the home.'"
Even if jealousy in matters of sex could be admitted to be an emotion
working on the side of civilized progress, it must still be pointed out
that it merely acts externally; it can have little or no real influence;
the jealous person seldom makes himself more lovable by his jealousy and
frequently much less lovable. The main effect of his jealousy is to
increase, and not seldom to excite, the causes for jealousy, and at the
same time to encourage hypocrisy.
All the circumstances, accompaniments, and results of domestic
jealousy in their completely typical form, are well illustrated
by a very serious episode in the history of the Pepys household,
and have been fully and faithfully set down by the great diarist.
The offence—an embrace of his wife's lady-help, as she might now
be termed—was a slight one, but, as Pepys himself admits, quite
inexcusable. He is writing, being in his thirty-sixth year, on
the 25th of Oct., 1668 (Lord's Day). "After supper, to have my
hair combed by Deb, which occasioned the greatest sorrow to me
that ever I knew in this world, for my wife, coming up suddenly,
did find me embracing the girl.... I was at a wonderful loss upon
it, and the girl also, and I endeavored to put it off, but my
wife was struck mute and grew angry.... Heartily afflicted for
this folly of mine.... So ends this month," he writes a few days
later, "with some quiet to my mind, though not perfect, after the
greatest falling out with my poor wife, and through my folly with
the girl, that ever I had, and I have reason to be sorry and
ashamed of it, and more to be troubled for the poor girl's sake.
Sixth November. Up, and presently my wife up with me, which she
professedly now do every day to dress me, that I may not see
Willet [Deb], and do eye me, whether I cast my eye upon her, or
no, and do keep me from going into the room where she is. Ninth
November. Up, and I did, by a little note which I flung to Deb,
advise her that I did continue to deny that ever I kissed her,
and so she might govern herself. The truth is that I did
adventure upon God's pardoning me this lie, knowing how heavy a
thing it would be for me, to the ruin of the poor girl, and next
knowing that if my wife should know all it would be impossible
for her ever to be at peace with me again, and so our whole lives
would be uncomfortable. The girl read, and as I bid her returned
me the note, flinging it to me in passing by." Next day, however,
he is "mightily troubled," for his wife has obtained a confession
from the girl of the kissing. For some nights Mr. and Mrs. Pepys
are both sleepless, with much weeping on either side. Deb gets
another place, leaving on the 14th of November, and Pepys is
never able to see her before she leaves the house, his wife
keeping him always under her eye. It is evident that Pepys now
feels strongly attracted to Deb, though there is no evidence of
this before she became the subject of the quarrel. On the 13th of
November, hearing she was to leave next day, he writes: "The
truth is I have a good mind to have the maidenhead of this girl."
He was, however, the "more troubled to see how my wife is by this
means likely forever to have her hand over me, and that I shall
forever be a slave to her—that is to say, only in matters of
pleasure." At the same time his love for his wife was by no means
diminished, nor hers for him. "I must here remark," he says,
"that I have lain with my moher [i.e., muger, wife] as a
husband more times since this falling out than in, I believe,
twelve months before. And with more pleasure to her than in all
the time of our marriage before." The next day was Sunday. On
Monday Pepys at once begins to make inquiries which will put him
on the track of Deb. On the 18th he finds her. She gets up into
the coach with him, and he kisses her and takes liberties with
her, at the same time advising her "to have a care of her honor
and to fear God," allowing no one else to do what he has done; he
also tells her how she can find him if she desires. Pepys now
feels that everything is settled satisfactorily, and his heart
is full of joy. But his joy is short-lived, for Mrs. Pepys
discovers this interview with Deb on the following day. Pepys
denies it at first, then confesses, and there is a more furious
scene than ever. Pepys is now really alarmed, for his wife
threatens to leave him; he definitely abandons Deb, and with
prayers to God resolves never to do the like again. Mrs. Pepys is
not satisfied, however, till she makes her husband write a letter
to Deb, telling her that she is little better than a whore, and
that he hates her, though Deb is spared this, not by any
stratagem of Pepys, but by the considerateness of the friend to
whom the letter was entrusted for delivery. Moreover, Mrs. Pepys
arranges with her husband that, in future, whenever he goes
abroad he shall be accompanied everywhere by his clerk. We see
that Mrs. Pepys plays with what appears to be triumphant skill
and success the part of the jealous and avenging wife, and digs
her little French heels remorselessly into her prostrate husband
and her rival. Unfortunately, we do not know what the final
outcome was, for a little later, owing to trouble with his
eyesight, Pepys was compelled to bring his Diary to an end. It is
evident, however, when we survey the whole of this perhaps
typical episode, that neither husband nor wife were in the
slightest degree prepared for the commonplace position into which
they were thrown; that each of them appears in a painful,
undignified, and humiliating light; that as a result of it the
husband acquires almost a genuine and strong affection for the
girl who is the cause of the quarrel; and finally that, even
though he is compelled, for the time at all events, to yield to
his wife, he remains at the end exactly what he was at the
beginning. Nor had husband or wife the very slightest wish to
leave each other; the bond of marriage remained firm, but it had
been degraded by insincerity on one side and the jealous endeavor
on the other to secure fidelity by compulsion.
Apart altogether, however, from the question of its effectiveness, or even
of the misery that it causes to all concerned, it is evident that jealousy
is incompatible with all the tendencies of civilization. We have seen that
a certain degree of variation is involved in the sexual relationship, as
in all other relationships, and unless we are to continue to perpetuate
many evils and injustices, that fact has to be faced and recognized. We
have also seen that the line of our advance involves a constant increase
in moral responsibility and self-government, and that, in its turn,
implies not only a high degree of sincerity but also the recognition that
no person has any right, or indeed any power, to control the emotions and
actions of another person. If our sun of love stands still at midday,
according to Ellen Key's phrase, that is a miracle to be greeted with awe
and gratitude, and by no means a right to be demanded. The claim of
jealousy falls with the claim of conjugal rights.
It is quite possible, Bloch remarks (The Sexual Life of Our
Time, Ch. X), to love more than one person at the same time,
with nearly equal tenderness, and to be honestly able to assure
each of the passion felt for her or him. Bloch adds that the vast
psychic differentiation involved by modern civilization increases
the possibility of this double love, for it is difficult for
anyone to find his complement in a single person, and that this
applies to women as well as to men.
Georg Hirth likewise points out (Wege zur Heimat, pp. 543-552)
that it is important to remember that women, as well as men, can
love two persons at the same time. Men flatter themselves, he
remarks, with the prejudice that the female heart, or rather
brain, can only hold one man at a time, and that if there is a
second man it is by a kind of prostitution. Nearly all erotic
writers, poets, and novelists, even physicians and psychologists,
belong to this class, he says; they look on a woman as property,
and of course two men cannot "possess" a woman. (Regarding
novelists, however, the remark may be interpolated that there are
many exceptions, and Thomas Hardy, for instance, frequently
represents a woman as more or less in love with two men at the
same time.) As against this desire to depreciate women's psychic
capacity, Hirth maintains that a woman is not necessarily obliged
to be untrue to one man because she has conceived a passion for
another man. "Today," Hirth truly declares, "only love and
justice can count as honorable motives in marriage. The modern
man accords to the beloved wife and life-companion the same
freedom which he himself took before marriage, and perhaps still
takes in marriage. If she makes no use of it, as is to be
hoped—so much the better! But let there be no lies, no
deception; the indispensable foundation of modern marriage is
boundless sincerity and friendship, the deepest trust,
affectionate devotion, and consideration. This is the best
safeguard against adultery.... Let him, however, who is,
nevertheless, overtaken by the outbreak of it console himself
with the undoubted fact that of two real lovers the most
noble-minded and deep-seeing friend will always have the
preference." These wise words cannot be too deeply meditated. The
policy of jealousy is only successful—when it is successful—in
the hands of the man who counts the external husk of love more
precious than the kernel.
It seems to some that the recognition of variations in sexual
relationships, of the tendency of the monogamic to overpass its
self-imposed bounds, is at best a sad necessity, and a lamentable fall
from a high ideal. That, however, is the reverse of the truth. The great
evil of monogamy, and its most seriously weak point, is its tendency to
self-concentration at the expense of the outer world. The devil always
comes to a man in the shape of his wife and children, said Hinton. The
family is a great social influence in so far as it is the best instrument
for creating children who will make the future citizens; but in a certain
sense the family is an anti-social influence, for it tends to absorb
unduly the energy that is needed for the invigoration of society. It is
possible, indeed, that that fact led to the modification of the monogamic
system in early developing periods of human history, when social expansion
and cohesion were the primary necessities. The family too often tends to
resemble, as someone has said, the secluded collection of grubs sometimes
revealed in their narrow home when we casually raise a flat stone in our
gardens. Great as are the problems of love, and great as should be our
attention to them, it must always be remembered that love is not a little
circle that is complete in itself. It is the nature of love to irradiate.
Just as family life exists mainly for the social end of breeding the
future race, so family love has its social ends in the extension of
sympathy and affection to those outside it, and even in ends that go
beyond love altogether.[417]
The question is debated from time to time as to how far it is possible for
men and women to have intimate friendships with each other outside the
erotic sphere.[418] There can be no doubt whatever that it is perfectly
possible for a man and a woman to experience for each other a friendship
which never intrudes into the sexual sphere. As a rule, however, this only
happens under special conditions, and those are generally conditions which
exclude the closest and most intimate friendship. If, as we have seen,
love may be defined as a synthesis of lust and friendship, friendship
inevitably enters into the erotic sphere. Just as sexual emotion tends to
merge into friendship, so friendship between persons of opposite sex, if
young, healthy, and attractive, tends to involve sexual emotion. The two
feelings are too closely allied for an artificial barrier to be
permanently placed between them without protest. Men who offer a woman
friendship usually find that it is not received with much satisfaction
except as the first installment of a warmer emotion, and women who offer
friendship to a man usually find that he responds with an offer of love;
very often the "friendship" is from the first simply love or flirtation
masquerading under another name.
"In the long run," a woman writes (in a letter published in
Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. i, Heft 7), "the senses become
discontented at their complete exclusion. And I believe that a
man can only come into the closest mutual association with a
woman by whom, consciously or unconsciously, he is physically
attracted. He cannot enter into the closest psychic intercourse
with a woman with whom he could not imagine himself in physical
intercourse. His prevailing wish is for the possession of a
woman, of the whole woman, her soul as well as her body. And a
woman also cannot imagine an intimate relation to a man in which
the heart and the body, as well as the mind, are not involved.
(Naturally I am thinking of people with sound nerves and healthy
blood.) Can a woman carry on a Platonic relation with a man from
year to year without the thought sometimes coming to her: 'Why
does he never kiss me? Have I no charm for him?' And in the most
concealed corner of her heart will it not happen that she uses
that word 'kiss' in the more comprehensive sense in which the
French sometimes employ it?" There is undoubtedly an element of
truth in this statement. The frontier between erotic love and
friendship is vague, and an intimate psychic intercourse that is
sternly debarred from ever manifesting itself in a caress, or
other physical manifestation of tender intimacy, tends to be
constrained, and arouses unspoken and unspeakable thoughts and
desires which are fatal to any complete friendship.
Undoubtedly the only perfect "Platonic friendships" are those which have
been reached through the portal of a preliminary erotic intimacy. In such
a case bad lovers, when they have resolutely traversed the erotic stage,
may become exceedingly good friends. A satisfactory friendship is
possible between brother and sister because they have been physically
intimate in childhood, and all erotic curiosities are absent. The most
admirable "Platonic friendship" may often be attained by husband and wife
in whom sympathy and affection and common interests have outlived passion.
In nearly all the most famous friendships of distinguished men and
women—as we know in some cases and divine in others—an hour's passion,
in Sainte-Beuve's words, has served as the golden key to unlock the most
precious and intimate secrets of friendship.[419]
The friendships that have been entered through the erotic portal possess
an intimacy and retain a spiritually erotic character which could not be
attained on the basis of a normal friendship between persons of the same
sex. This is true in a far higher degree of the ultimate relationship,
under fortunate circumstances, of husband and wife in the years after
passion has become impossible. They have ceased to be passionate lovers
but they have not become mere friends and comrades. More especially their
relationship takes on elements borrowed from the attitude of child to
parent, of parent to child. Everyone from his first years retains
something of the child which cannot be revealed to all the world; everyone
acquires something of the guardian paternal or maternal spirit. Husband
and wife are each child to the other, and are indeed parent and child by
turn. And here still the woman retains a certain erotic supremacy, for she
is to the last more of a child than it is ever easy for the man to be, and
much more essentially a mother than he is a father.
Groos (Der Æsthetische Genuss, p. 249) has pointed out that
"love" is really made up of both sexual instinct and parental
instinct.
"So-called happy marriages," says Professor W. Thomas (Sex and
Society, p. 246), "represent an equilibrium reached through an
extension of the maternal interest of the woman to the man,
whereby she looks after his personal needs as she does after
those of the children—cherishing him, in fact, as a child—or
in an extension to woman on the part of man of the nurture and
affection which is in his nature to give to pets and all helpless
(and preferably dumb) creatures."
"When the devotion in the tie between mother and son," a woman
writes, "is added to the relation of husband and wife, the union
of marriage is raised to the high and beautiful dignity it
deserves, and can attain in this world. It comprehends sympathy,
love, and perfect understanding, even of the faults and
weaknesses of both sides." "The foundation of every true woman's
love," another woman writes, "is a mother's tenderness. He whom
she loves is a child of larger growth, although she may at the
same time have a deep respect for him." (See also, for similar
opinion of another woman of distinguished intellectual ability,
footnote at beginning of "The Psychic State in Pregnancy" in
volume v of these Studies.)
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."
[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. |
