dismissed, the Court being of opinion that "to grant relief in such a case
was not in the interest of public morality." The safest way in England to
render what is legally termed marriage absolutely indissoluble is for both
parties to commit adultery.

[343] Magnus Hirschfeld, _Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft_, Oct., 1908.

[344] H. Adner, "Die Richterliche Beurteilung der 'Zerruetteten' Ehe,"
_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. ii, Teil 8.

[345] Gross-Hoffinger, _Die Schichsale der Frauen und die Prostitution_,
1847; Bloch presents a full summary of the results of this inquiry in an
_Appendix_ to Ch. X of his _Sexual Life of Our Times_.

[346] Divorce in the United States is fully discussed by Howard, op. cit.,
vol. iii.

[347] H. Muensterberg, _The Americans_, p. 575. Similarly, Dr. Felix Adler,
in a study of "The Ethics of Divorce" (_The Ethical Record_, 1890, p.
200), although not himself an admirer of divorce, believes that the first
cause of the frequency of divorce in the United States is the high
position of women.

[348] In an important article, with illustrative cases, on "The
Neuro-psychical Element in Conjugal Aversion" (_Journal of Nervous and
Mental Diseases_, Sept., 1892) Smith Baker refers to the cases in which "a
man may find himself progressively becoming antipathetic, through
recognition of the comparatively less developed personality of the one to
whom he happens to be married. Marrying, perhaps, before he has learned to
accurately judge of character and its tendencies, he awakens to the fact
that he is honorably bound to live all his physiological life with, not a
real companion, but a mere counterfeit." The cases are still more
numerous, the same writer observes, in which the sexual appetite of the
wife fails to reveal itself except as the result of education and
practice. "This sort of natural-unnatural condition is the source of much
disappointment, and of intense suffering on the part of the woman as well
as of family dissatisfaction." Yet such causes for divorce are far too
complex to be stated in statute-books, and far too intimate to be pleaded
in courts of justice.

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

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

[351] So, e.g., Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_, vol. i, p. 237.

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

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

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

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

[356] Hobhouse, op. cit. vol. i, p. 237.

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

[358] This point of view has been vigorously set forth by Paul and Victor
Margueritte, _Quelques Idees_.

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

[360] See, e.g., P. and V. Margueritte, op. cit.

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

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

[363] Hobhouse, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 159, 237-9; cf. P. and V.
Margueritte, _Quelques Idees_.

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

[365] See, _ante_, p. 425.

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

[367] Nietzold, _Die Ehe in AEgypten zur Ptolemaeisch-roemischen Zeit_, 1903,
p. 3. This bond also accorded rights to any children that might be born
during its existence.

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

[369] Ellen Key, _Liebe und Ehe_, p. 168; cf. the same author's _Century
of the Child_.

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

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

[372] "Almost everywhere," says Westermarck of polygyny (which he
discusses fully in Chs. XX-XXII of his _History of Human Marriage_) "it is
confined to the smaller part of the people, the vast majority being
monogamous." Maurice Gregory (_Contemporary Review_, Sept., 1906) gives
statistics showing that nearly everywhere the tendency is towards equality
in number of the sexes.

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

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




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 cooeperation 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 (_Paedagogus_, 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
a Lasco, the Catholic Bishop who became a Protestant and settled
in England during Edward VI's reign, was following many mediaeval
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 (_Beitraege 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 Othman, 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 mediaeval 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 fuer 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 Gebraeuche der Suaheli,"
_Zeitschrift fuer 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
Bedolliere, _Histoire des Moeurs des Francais_, 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 Retif 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" (Retif de la Bretonne,
_Monsieur Nicolas_, reprint of 1883, vol. x, pp. 160-3). It may
be added that Duehren (Dr. Iwan Bloch) regards Retif as "a master
in the _Ars Amandi_," and discusses him from this point of view
in his _Retif 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