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things that alone give human life its value."[61] Yet we may well doubt
whether both these persons are "equally well-educated and broad-minded."
The savage feels that sex is perilous, and he is right. But the person who
feels that the sexual impulse is bad, or even low and vulgar, is an
absurdity in the universe, an anomaly. He is like those persons in our
insane asylums, who feel that the instinct of nutrition is evil and so
proceed to starve themselves. They are alike spiritual outcasts in the
universe whose children they are. It is another matter when a man declares
that, personally, in his own case, he cherishes an ascetic ideal which
leads him to restrain, so far as possible, either or both impulses. The
man, who is sanely ascetic seeks a discipline which aids the ideal he has
personally set before himself. He may still remain theoretically in
harmony with the universe to which he belongs. But to pour contempt on
the sexual life, to throw the veil of "impurity" over it, is, as Nietzsche
declared, the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost of Life.
There are many who seek to conciliate prejudice and reason in their
valuation of sex by drawing a sharp distinction between "lust" and "love,"
rejecting the one and accepting the other. It is quite proper to make such
a distinction, but the manner in which it is made will by no means usually
bear examination. We have to define what we mean by "lust" and what we
mean by "love," and this is not easy if they are regarded as mutually
exclusive. It is sometimes said that "lust" must be understood as meaning
a reckless indulgence of the sexual impulse without regard to other
considerations. So understood, we are quite safe in rejecting it. But that
is an entirely arbitrary definition of the word. "Lust" is really a very
ambiguous term; it is a good word that has changed its moral values, and
therefore we need to define it very carefully before we venture to use it.
Properly speaking, "lust" is an entirely colorless word[62] and merely
means desire in general and sexual desire in particular; it corresponds to
"hunger" or "thirst"; to use it in an offensive sense is much the same as
though we should always assume that the word "hungry" had the offensive
meaning of "greedy." The result has been that sensitive minds indignantly
reject the term "lust" in connection with love.[63] In the early use of
our language, "lust," "lusty," and "lustful" conveyed the sense of
wholesome and normal sexual vigor; now, with the partial exception of
"lusty," they have been so completely degraded to a lower sense that
although it would be very convenient to restore them to their original
and proper place, which still remains vacant, the attempt at such a
restoration scarcely seems a hopeful task. We have so deeply poisoned the
springs of feeling in these matters with medięval ascetic crudities that
all our words of sex tend soon to become bespattered with filth; we may
pick them up from the mud into which they have fallen and seek to purify
them, but to many eyes they will still seem dirty. One result of this
tendency is that we have no simple, precise, natural word for the love of
the sexes, and are compelled to fall back on the general term, which is so
extensive in its range that in English and French and most of the other
leading languages of Europe, it is equally correct to "love" God or to
"love" eating.
Love, in the sexual sense, is, summarily considered, a synthesis of lust
(in the primitive and uncolored sense of sexual emotion) and friendship.
It is incorrect to apply the term "love" in the sexual sense to elementary
and uncomplicated sexual desire; it is equally incorrect to apply it to
any variety or combination of varieties of friendship. There can be no
sexual love without lust; but, on the other hand, until the currents of
lust in the organism have been so irradiated as to affect other parts of
the psychic organism--at the least the affections and the social
feelings--it is not yet sexual love. Lust, the specific sexual impulse, is
indeed the primary and essential element in this synthesis, for it alone
is adequate to the end of reproduction, not only in animals but in men.
But it is not until lust is expanded and irradiated that it develops into
the exquisite and enthralling flower of love. We may call to mind what
happens among plants: on the one hand we have the lower organisms in which
sex is carried on summarily and cryptogamically, never shedding any shower
of gorgeous blossoms on the world, and on the other hand the higher plants
among whom sex has become phanersgamous and expanded enormously into form
and color and fragrance.
While "lust" is, of course, known all over the world, and there
are everywhere words to designate it, "love" is not universally
known, and in many languages there are no words for "love." The
failures to find love are often remarkable and unexpected. We may
find it where we least expect it. Sexual desire became idealized
(as Sergi has pointed out) even by some animals, especially
birds, for when a bird pines to death for the loss of its mate
this cannot be due to the uncomplicated instinct of sex, but must
involve the interweaving of that instinct with the other elements
of life to a degree which is rare even among the most civilized
men. Some savage races seem to have no fundamental notion of
love, and (like the American Nahuas) no primary word for it,
while, on the other hand, in Quichua, the language of the ancient
Peruvians, there are nearly six hundred combinations of the verb
_munay_, to love. Among some peoples love seems to be confined to
the women. Letourneau (_L'Evolution Littéraire_, p. 529) points
out that in various parts of the world women have taken a leading
part in creating erotic poetry. It may be mentioned in this
connection that suicide from erotic motives among primitive
peoples occurs chiefly among women (_Zeitschrift für
Sozialwissenschaft_, 1899, p. 578). Not a few savages possess
love-poems, as, for instance, the Suahali (Velten, in his _Prosa
und Poesie der Suahali_, devotes a section to love-poems
reproduced in the Suahali language). D.G. Brinton, in an
interesting paper on "The Conception of Love in Some American
Languages" (_Proceedings American Philosophical Society_, vol.
xxiii, p. 546, 1886) states that the words for love in these
languages reveal four main ways of expressing the conception: (1)
inarticulate cries of emotion; (2) assertions of sameness or
similarity; (3) assertions of conjunction or union; (4)
assertions of a wish, desire, a longing. Brinton adds that "these
same notions are those which underlie the majority of the words
of love in the great Aryan family of languages." The remarkable
fact emerges, however, that the peoples of Aryan tongue were slow
in developing their conception of sexual love. Brinton remarks
that the American Mayas must be placed above the peoples of early
Aryan culture, in that they possessed a radical word for the joy
of love which was in significance purely psychical, referring
strictly to a mental state, and neither to similarity nor desire.
Even the Greeks were late in developing any ideal of sexual love.
This has been well brought out by E.F.M. Benecke in his
_Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek
Poetry_, a book which contains some hazardous assertions, but is
highly instructive from the present point of view. The Greek
lyric poets wrote practically no love poems at all to women
before Anacreon, and his were only written in old age. True love
for the Greeks was nearly always homosexual. The Ionian lyric
poets of early Greece regarded woman as only an instrument of
pleasure and the founder of the family. Theognis compares
marriage to cattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes to be
complimentary to the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his "female
boy-friends." Ęschylus makes even a father assume that his
daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. There is no
sexual love in Sophocles, and in Euripides it is only the women
who fall in love. Benecke concludes (p. 67) that in Greece sexual
love, down to a comparatively later period, was looked down on,
and held to be unworthy of public discussion and representation.
It was in Magna Gręcia rather than in Greece itself that men took
interest in women, and it was not until the Alexandrian period,
and notably in Asclepiades, Benecke maintains, that the love of
women was regarded as a matter of life and death. Thereafter the
conception of sexual love, in its romantic aspects, appears in
European life. With the Celtic story of Tristram, as Gaston Paris
remarks, it finally appears in the Christian European world of
poetry as the chief point in human life, the great motive force
of conduct.
Romantic love failed, however, to penetrate the masses in Europe.
In the sixteenth century, or whenever it was that the ballad of
"Glasgerion" was written, we see it is assumed that a churl's
relation to his mistress is confined to the mere act of sexual
intercourse; he fails to kiss her on arriving or departing; it is
only the knight, the man of upper class, who would think of
offering that tender civility. And at the present day in, for
instance, the region between East Friesland and the Alps, Bloch
states (_Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, p. 29), following E.H. Meyer,
that the word "love" is unknown among the masses, and only its
coarse counterpart recognized.
On the other side of the world, in Japan, sexual love seems to be
in as great disrepute as it was in ancient Greece; thus Miss
Tsuda, a Japanese head-mistress, and herself a Christian, remarks
(as quoted by Mrs. Eraser in _World's Work and Play_, Dec.,
1906): "That word 'love' has been hitherto a word unknown among
our girls, in the foreign sense. Duty, submission,
kindness--these were the sentiments which a girl was expected to
bring to the husband who had been chosen for her--and many happy,
harmonious marriages were the result. Now, your dear sentimental
foreign women say to our girls: 'It is wicked to marry without
love; the obedience to parents in such a case is an outrage
against nature and Christianity. If you love a man you must
sacrifice everything to marry him.'"
When, however, love is fully developed it becomes an enormously
extended, highly complex emotion, and lust, even in the best
sense of that word, becomes merely a coördinated element among
many other elements. Herbert Spencer, in an interesting passage
of his _Principles of Psychology_ (Part IV, Ch. VIII), has
analyzed love into as many as nine distinct and important
elements: (1) the physical impulse of sex; (2) the feeling for
beauty; (3) affection; (4) admiration and respect; (5) love of
approbation; (6) self-esteem; (7) proprietary feeling; (8)
extended liberty of action from the absence of personal barriers;
(9) exaltation of the sympathies. "This passion," he concludes,
"fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary
excitations of which we are capable."
It is scarcely necessary to say that to define sexual love, or even to
analyze its components, is by no means to explain its mystery. We seek to
satisfy our intelligence by means of a coherent picture of love, but the
gulf between that picture and the emotional reality must always be
incommensurable and impassable. "There is no word more often pronounced
than that of love," wrote Bonstetten many years ago, "yet there is no
subject more mysterious. Of that which touches us most nearly we know
least. We measure the march of the stars and we do not know how we love."
And however expert we have become in detecting and analyzing the causes,
the concomitants, and the results of love, we must still make the same
confession to-day. We may, as some have done, attempt to explain love as a
form of hunger and thirst, or as a force analogous to electricity, or as a
kind of magnetism, or as a variety of chemical affinity, or as a vital
tropism, but these explanations are nothing more than ways of expressing
to ourselves the magnitude of the phenomenon we are in the presence of.
What has always baffled men in the contemplation of sexual love is the
seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the
necessarily circumscribed region of mucous membrane which is the final
goal of such love and the sea of world-embracing emotions to which it
seems as the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has said, "the mucous
membranes, by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds all the
riches of the infinite." It is a mystery before which the thinker and the
artist are alike overcome. Donnay, in his play _L'Escalade_, makes a cold
and stern man of science, who regards love as a mere mental disorder which
can be cured like other disorders, at last fall desperately in love
himself. He forces his way into the girl's room, by a ladder, at dead of
night, and breaks into a long and passionate speech: "Everything that
touches you becomes to me mysterious and sacred. Ah! to think that a thing
so well known as a woman's body, which sculptors have modelled, which
poets have sung of, which men of science like myself have dissected, that
such a thing should suddenly become an unknown mystery and an infinite joy
merely because it is the body of one particular woman--what insanity! And
yet that is what I feel."[64]
That love is a natural insanity, a temporary delusion which the individual
is compelled to suffer for the sake of the race, is indeed an explanation
that has suggested itself to many who have been baffled by this mystery.
That, as we know, was the explanation offered by Schopenhauer. When a
youth and a girl fall into each other's arms in the ecstacy of love they
imagine that they are seeking their own happiness. But it is not so, said
Schopenhauer; they are deluded by the genius of the race into the belief
that they are seeking a personal end in order that they may be induced to
effect a far greater impersonal end: the creation of the future race. The
intensity of their passion is not the measure of the personal happiness
they will secure but the measure of their aptitude for producing
offspring. In accepting passion and renouncing the counsels of cautious
prudence the youth and the girl are really sacrificing their chances of
selfish happiness and fulfilling the larger ends of Nature. As
Schopenhauer saw the matter, there was here no vulgar illusion. The lovers
thought that they were reaching towards a boundlessly immense personal
happiness; they were probably deceived. But they were deceived not because
the reality was less than their imagination, but because it was more;
instead of pursuing, as they thought, a merely personal end they were
carrying on the creative work of the world, a task better left undone, as
Schopenhauer viewed it, but a task whose magnitude he fully
recognized.[65]
It must be remembered that in the lower sense of deception, love may be,
and frequently is, a delusion. A man may deceive himself, or be deceived
by the object of his attraction, concerning the qualities that she
possesses or fails to possess. In first love, occurring in youth, such
deception is perhaps entirely normal, and in certain suggestible and
inflammable types of people it is peculiarly apt to occur. This kind of
deception, although far more frequent and conspicuous in matters of
love--and more serious because of the tightness of the marriage bond--is
liable to occur in any relation of life. For most people, however, and
those not the least sane or the least wise, the memory of the exaltation
of love, even when the period of that exaltation is over, still remains
as, at the least, the memory of one of the most real and essential facts
of life.[66]
Some writers seem to confuse the liability in matters of love to
deception or disappointment with the larger question of a
metaphysical illusion in Schopenhauer's sense. To some extent
this confusion perhaps exists in the discussion of love by
Renouvier and Prat in _La Nouvelle Monadologie_ (pp. 216 _et
seq._). In considering whether love is or is not a delusion, they
answer that it is or is not according as we are, or are not,
dominated by selfishness and injustice. "It was not an essential
error which presided over the creation of the _idol_, for the
idol is only what in all things the _ideal_ is. But to realize
the ideal in love two persons are needed, and therein is the
great difficulty. We are never justified," they conclude, "in
casting contempt on our love, or even on its object, for if it is
true that we have not gained possession of the sovereign beauty
of the world it is equally true that we have not attained a
degree of perfection that would have entitled us justly to claim
so great a prize." And perhaps most of us, it may be added, must
admit in the end, if we are honest with ourselves, that the
prizes of love we have gained in the world, whatever their flaws,
are far greater than we deserved.
We may well agree that in a certain sense not love alone but all the
passions and desires of men are illusions. In that sense the Gospel of
Buddha is justified, and we may recognize the inspiration of Shakespeare
(in the _Tempest_) and of Calderon (in _La Vida es Sueńo_), who felt that
ultimately the whole world is an insubstantial dream. But short of that
large and ultimate vision we cannot accept illusion; we cannot admit that
love is a delusion in some special and peculiar sense that men's other
cravings and aspirations escape. On the contrary, it is the most solid of
realities. All the progressive forms of life are built up on the
attraction of sex. If we admit the action of sexual selection--as we can
scarcely fail to do if we purge it from its unessential
accretions[67]--love has moulded the precise shape and color, the
essential beauty, alike of animal and human life.
If we further reflect that, as many investigators believe, not only the
physical structure of life but also its spiritual structure--our social
feelings, our morality, our religion, our poetry and art--are, in some
degree at least, also built up on the impulse of sex, and would have been,
if not non-existent, certainly altogether different had other than sexual
methods of propagation prevailed in the world, we may easily realize that
we can only fall into confusion by dismissing love as a delusion. The
whole edifice of life topples down, for as the idealist Schiller long
since said, it is entirely built up on hunger and on love. To look upon
love as in any special sense a delusion is merely to fall into the trap of
a shallow cynicism. Love is only a delusion in so far as the whole of life
is a delusion, and if we accept the fact of life it is unphilosophical to
refuse to accept the fact of love.
It is unnecessary here to magnify the functions of love in the
world; it is sufficient to investigate its workings in its own
proper sphere. It may, however, be worth while to quote a few
expressions of thinkers, belonging to various schools, who have
pointed out what seemed to them the far-ranging significance of
the sexual emotions for the moral life. "The passions are the
heavenly fire which gives life to the moral world," wrote
Helvétius long since in _De l'Esprit_. "The activity of the mind
depends on the activity of the passions, and it is at the period
of the passions, from the age of twenty-five to thirty-five or
forty that men are capable of the greatest efforts of virtue or
of genius." "What touches sex," wrote Zola, "touches the centre
of social life." Even our regard for the praise and blame of
others has a sexual origin, Professor Thomas argues
(_Psychological Review_, Jan., 1904, pp. 61-67), and it is love
which is the source of susceptibility generally and of the
altruistic side of life. "The appearance of sex," Professor Woods
Hutchinson attempts to show ("Love as a Factor in Evolution,"
_Monist_, 1898), "the development of maleness and femaleness, was
not only the birthplace of affection, the well-spring of all
morality, but an enormous economic advantage to the race and an
absolute necessity of progress. In it first we find any conscious
longing for or active impulse toward a fellow creature." "Were
man robbed of the instinct of procreation, and of all that
spiritually springs therefrom," exclaimed Maudsley in his
_Physiology of Mind_, "that moment would all poetry, and perhaps
also his whole moral sense, be obliterated from his life." "One
seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete;
one _is_ more complete," says Nietzsche (_Der Wille zur Macht_,
p. 389), "we find here art as an organic function: we find it
inlaid in the most angelic instinct of 'love:' we find it as the
greatest stimulant of life.... It is not merely that it changes
the feeling of values: the lover _is_ worth more, is stronger. In
animals this condition produces new weapons, pigments, colors,
and forms, above all new movements, new rhythms, a new seductive
music. It is not otherwise in man.... Even in art the door is
opened to him. If we subtract from lyrical work in words and
sounds the suggestions of that intestinal fever, what is left
over in poetry and music? _L'Art pour l'art_ perhaps, the
quacking virtuosity of cold frogs who perish in their marsh. All
the rest is created by love."
It would be easy to multiply citations tending to show how many
diverse thinkers have come to the conclusion that sexual love
(including therewith parental and especially maternal love) is
the source of the chief manifestations of life. How far they are
justified in that conclusion, it is not our business now to
inquire.
It is undoubtedly true that, as we have seen when discussing the erratic
and imperfect distribution of the conception of love, and even of words
for love, over the world, by no means all people are equally apt for
experiencing, even at any time in their lives, the emotions of sexual
exaltation. The difference between the knight and the churl still
subsists, and both may sometimes be found in all social strata. Even the
refinements of sexual enjoyment, it is unnecessary to insist, quite
commonly remain on a merely physical basis, and have little effect on the
intellectual and emotional nature.[68] But this is not the case with the
people who have most powerfully influenced the course of the world's
thought and feeling. The personal reality of love, its importance for the
individual life, are facts that have been testified to by some of the
greatest thinkers, after lives devoted to the attainment of intellectual
labor. The experience of Renan, who toward the end of his life set down in
his remarkable drama _L'Abbesse de Jouarre_, his conviction that, even
from the point of view of chastity, love is, after all, the supreme thing
in the world, is far from standing alone. "Love has always appeared as an
inferior mode of human music, ambition as the superior mode," wrote Tarde,
the distinguished sociologist, at the end of his life. "But will it always
be thus? Are there not reasons for thinking that the future perhaps
reserves for us the ineffable surprise of an inversion of that secular
order?" Laplace, half an hour before his death, took up a volume of his
own _Mécanique Celeste_, and said: "All that is only trifles, there is
nothing true but love." Comte, who had spent his life in building up a
Positive Philosophy which should be absolutely real, found (as indeed it
may be said the great English Positivist Mill also found) the culmination
of all his ideals in a woman, who was, he said, Egeria and Beatrice and
Laura in one, and he wrote: "There is nothing real in the world but love.
One grows tired of thinking, and even of acting; one never grows tired of
loving, nor of saying so. In the worst tortures of affection I have never
ceased to feel that the essential of happiness is that the heart should be
worthily filled--even with pain, yes, even with pain, the bitterest pain."
And Sophie Kowalewsky, after intellectual achievements which have placed
her among the most distinguished of her sex, pathetically wrote: "Why can
no one love me? I could give more than most women, and yet the most
insignificant women are loved and I am not." Love, they all seem to say,
is the one thing that is supremely worth while. The greatest and most
brilliant of the world's intellectual giants, in their moments of final
insight, thus reach the habitual level of the humble and almost anonymous
persons, cloistered from the world, who wrote _The Imitation of Christ_ or
_The Letters of a Portuguese Nun_. And how many others!
FOOTNOTES:
[45] _Meditationes Piissimę de Cognitione Humanę Conditionis_, Migne's
_Patrologia_, vol. clxxiv, p. 489, cap. III, "De Dignitate Animę et
Vilitate Corporis." It may be worth while to quote more at length the
vigorous language of the original. "Si diligenter consideres quid per os
et nares cęterosque corporis meatus egrediatur, vilius sterquilinum
numquam vidisti.... Attende, homo, quid fuisti ante ortum, et quid es ab
ortu usque ad occasum, atque quid eris post hanc vitam. Profecto fuit
quand non eras: postea de vili materia factus, et vilissimo panno
involutus, menstruali sanguine in utero materno fuisti nutritus, et tunica
tua fuit pellis secundina. Nihil aliud est homo quam sperma fetidum,
saccus stercorum, cibus vermium.... Quid superbis, pulvis et cinis, cujus
conceptus cula, nasci miseria, vivere poena, mori angustia?"
[46] See (in Mignes' edition) _S. Odonis abbatis Cluniacensis
Collationes_, lib. ii, cap. IX.
[47] Dühren (_Neue Forshungen über die Marquis de Sade_, pp. 432 et seq.)
shows how the ascetic view of woman's body persisted, for instance, in
Schopenhauer and De Sade.
[48] In "The Evolution of Modesty," in the first volume of these
_Studies_, and again in the fifth volume in discussing urolagnia in the
study of "Erotic Symbolism," the mutual reactions of the sexual and
excretory centres were fully dealt with.
[49] "La Morale Sexuelle," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan.,
1907.
[50] The above passage, now slightly modified, originally formed an
unpublished part of an essay on Walt Whitman in _The New Spirit_, first
issued in 1889.
[51] Even in the ninth century, however, when the monastic movement was
rapidly developing, there were some who withstood the tendencies of the
new ascetics. Thus, in 850, Ratramnus, the monk of Corbie, wrote a
treatise (_Liber de eo quod Christus ex Virgine natus est_) to prove that
Mary really gave birth to Jesus through her sexual organs, and not, as
some high-strung persons were beginning to think could alone be possible,
through the more conventionally decent breasts. The sexual organs were
sanctified. "Spiritus sanctus ... et thalamum tanto dignum sponso
sanctificavit et portam" (Achery, _Spicilegium_, vol. i, p. 55).
[52] _Pędagogus_, lib. ii, cap. X. Elsewhere (id., lib. ii, Ch. VI) he
makes a more detailed statement to the same effect.
[53] See, e.g., Wilhelm Capitaine, _Die Moral des Clemens von
Alexandrien_, pp. 112 et seq.
[54] _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xxii, cap. XXIV. "There is no need," he says
again (id., lib. xiv, cap. V) "that in our sins and vices we accuse the
nature of the flesh to the injury of the Creator, for in its own kind and
degree the flesh is good."
[55] St. Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xiv, cap. XXIII-XXVI.
Chrysostom and Gregory, of Nyssa, thought that in Paradise human beings
would have multiplied by special creation, but such is not the accepted
Catholic doctrine.
[56] W. Capitaine, _Die Moral des Clemens von Alexandrien_, pp. 112 et
seq. Without the body, Tertullian declared, there could be no virginity
and no salvation. The soul itself is corporeal. He carries, indeed, his
idea of the omnipresence of the body to the absurd.
[57] Rufinus, _Commentarius in Symbolum Apostolorum_, cap. XII.
[58] Migne, _Patrologia Gręca_, vol. xxvi, pp. 1170 et seq.
[59] Even in physical conformation the human sexual organs, when compared
with those of the lower animals, show marked differences (see "The
Mechanism of Detumescence," in the fifth volume of these _Studies_).
[60] It may perhaps be as well to point out, with Forel (_Die Sexuelle
Frage_, p. 208), that the word "bestial" is generally used quite
incorrectly in this connection. Indeed, not only for the higher, but also
for the lower manifestation of the sexual impulse, it would usually be
more correct to use instead the qualification "human."
[61] _Loc. cit._, _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan., 1907.
[62] It has, however, become colored and suspect from an early period in
the history of Christianity. St. Augustine (_De Civitate Dei_, lib. xiv,
cap. XV), while admitting that libido or lust is merely the generic name
for all desire, adds that, as specially applied to the sexual appetite, it
is justly and properly mixed up with ideas of shame.
[63] Hinton well illustrates this feeling. "We call by the name of lust,"
he declares in his MSS., "the most simple and natural desires. We might as
well term hunger and thirst 'lust' as so call sex-passion, when expressing
simply Nature's prompting. We miscall it 'lust,' cruelly libelling those
to whom we ascribe it, and introduce absolute disorder. For, by foolishly
confounding Nature's demands with lust, we insist upon restraint upon
her."
[64] Several centuries earlier another French writer, the distinguished
physician, A. Laurentius (Des Laurens) in his _Historia Anatomica Humani
Corporis_ (lib. viii, Quęstio vii) had likewise puzzled over "the
incredible desire of coitus," and asked how it was that "that divine
animal, full of reason and judgment, which we call Man, should be
attracted to those obscene parts of women, soiled with filth, which are
placed, like a sewer, in the lowest part of the body." It is noteworthy
that, from the first, and equally among men of religion, men of science,
and men of letters, the mystery of this problem has peculiarly appealed to
the French mind.
[65] Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, vol. ii, pp. 608
et seq.
[66] "Perhaps there is scarcely a man," wrote Malthus, a clergyman as well
as one of the profoundest thinkers of his day (_Essay on the Principle of
Population_, 1798, Ch. XI), "who has once experienced the genuine delight
of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been,
that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life,
where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates
with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again.
The superiority of intellectual to sexual pleasures consists rather in
their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their
being less liable to satiate, than in their being more real and
essential."
[67] The whole argument of the fourth volume of these _Studies_, on
"Sexual Selection in Man," points in this direction.
[68] "Perhaps most average men," Forel remarks (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, p.
307), "are but slightly receptive to the intoxication of love; they are at
most on the level of the _gourmet_, which is by no means necessarily an
immoral plane, but is certainly not that of poetry."
CHAPTER V.
THE FUNCTION OF CHASTITY.
Chastity Essential to the Dignity of Love--The Eighteenth Century Revolt
Against the Ideal of Chastity--Unnatural Forms of Chastity--The
Psychological Basis of Asceticism--Asceticism and Chastity as Savage
Virtues--The Significance of Tahiti--Chastity Among Barbarous
Peoples--Chastity Among the Early Christians--Struggles of the Saints with
the Flesh--The Romance of Christian Chastity--Its Decay in Medięval
Times--_Aucassin et Nicolette_ and the new Romance of Chaste Love--The
Unchastity of the Northern Barbarians--The Penitentials--Influence of the
Renaissance and the Reformation--The Revolt Against Virginity as a
Virtue--The Modern Conception of Chastity as a Virtue--The Influences That
Favor the Virtue of Chastity--Chastity as a Discipline--The Value of
Chastity for the Artist--Potency and Impotence in Popular Estimation--The
Correct Definitions of Asceticism and Chastity.
The supreme importance of chastity, and even of asceticism, has never at
any time, or in any greatly vital human society, altogether failed of
recognition. Sometimes chastity has been exalted in human estimation,
sometimes it has been debased; it has frequently changed the nature of its
manifestations; but it has always been there. It is even a part of the
beautiful vision of all Nature. "The glory of the world is seen only by a
chaste mind," said Thoreau with his fine extravagance. "To whomsoever this
fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery there are no flowers in
Nature." Without chastity it is impossible to maintain the dignity of
sexual love. The society in which its estimation sinks to a minimum is in
the last stages of degeneration. Chastity has for sexual love an
importance which it can never lose, least of all to-day.
It is quite true that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many
men of high moral and intellectual distinction pronounced very decidedly
their condemnation of the ideal of chastity. The great Buffon refused to
recognize chastity as an ideal and referred scornfully to "that kind of
insanity which has turned a girl's virginity into a thing with a real
existence," while William Morris, in his downright manner, once declared
at a meeting of the Fellowship of the New Life, that asceticism is "the
most disgusting vice that afflicted human nature." Blake, though he seems
always to have been a strictly moral man in the most conventional sense,
felt nothing but contempt for chastity, and sometimes confers a kind of
religious solemnity on the idea of unchastity. Shelley, who may have been
unwise in sexual matters but can scarcely be called unchaste, also often
seems to associate religion and morality, not with chastity, but with
unchastity, and much the same may be said of James Hinton.[69]
But all these men--with other men of high character who have pronounced
similar opinions--were reacting against false, decayed, and conventional
forms of chastity. They were not rebelling against an ideal; they were
seeking to set up an ideal in a place where they realized that a
mischievous pretense was masquerading as a moral reality.
We cannot accept an ideal of chastity unless we ruthlessly cast aside all
the unnatural and empty forms of chastity. If chastity is merely a
fatiguing effort to emulate in the sexual sphere the exploits of
professional fasting men, an effort using up all the energies of the
organism and resulting in no achievement greater than the abstinence it
involves, then it is surely an unworthy ideal. If it is a feeble
submission to an external conventional law which there is no courage to
break, then it is not an ideal at all. If it is a rule of morality imposed
by one sex on the opposite sex, then it is an injustice and provocative of
revolt. If it is an abstinence from the usual forms of sexuality, replaced
by more abnormal or more secret forms, then it is simply an unreality
based on misconception. And if it is merely an external acceptance of
conventions without any further acceptance, even in act, then it is a
contemptible farce. These are the forms of chastity which during the past
two centuries many fine-souled men have vigorously rejected.
The fact that chastity, or asceticism, is a real virtue, with fine uses,
becomes evident when we realize that it has flourished at all times, in
connection with all kinds of religions and the most various moral codes.
We find it pronounced among savages, and the special virtues of
savagery--hardness, endurance, and bravery--are intimately connected with
the cultivation of chastity and asceticism.[70] It is true that savages
seldom have any ideal of chastity in the degraded modern sense, as a state
of permanent abstinence from sexual relationships having a merit of its
own apart from any use. They esteem chastity for its values, magical or
real, as a method of self-control which contributes towards the attainment
of important ends. The ability to bear pain and restraint is nearly always
a main element in the initiation of youths at puberty. The custom of
refraining from sexual intercourse before expeditions of war and hunting,
and other serious concerns involving great muscular and mental strain,
whatever the motives assigned, is a sagacious method of economizing
energy. The extremely widespread habit of avoiding intercourse during
pregnancy and suckling, again, is an admirable precaution in sexual
hygiene which it is extremely difficult to obtain the observance of in
civilization. Savages, also, are perfectly well aware how valuable sexual
continence is, in combination with fasting and solitude, to acquire the
aptitude for abnormal spiritual powers.
Thus C. Hill Tout (_Journal Anthropological Institute_,
Jan.-June, 1905, pp. 143-145) gives an interesting account of the
self-discipline undergone by those among the Salish Indians of
British Columbia, who seek to acquire shamanistic powers. The
psychic effects of such training on these men, says Hill Tout,
is undoubted. "It enables them to undertake and accomplish feats
of abnormal strength, agility, and endurance; and gives them at
times, besides a general exaltation of the senses, undoubted
clairvoyant and other supernormal mental and bodily powers." At
the other end of the world, as shown by the _Reports of the
Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_ (vol. v, p. 321),
closely analogous methods of obtaining supernatural powers are
also customary.
There are fundamental psychological reasons for the wide
prevalence of asceticism and for the remarkable manner in which
it involves self-mortification, even acute physical suffering.
Such pain is an actual psychic stimulant, more especially in
slightly neurotic persons. This is well illustrated by a young
woman, a patient of Janet's, who suffered from mental depression
and was accustomed to find relief by slightly burning her hands
and feet. She herself clearly understood the nature of her
actions. "I feel," she said, "that I make an effort when I hold
my hands on the stove, or when I pour boiling water on my feet;
it is a violent act and it awakens me: I feel that it is really
done by myself and not by another.... To make a mental effort by
itself is too difficult for me; I have to supplement it by
physical efforts. I have not succeeded in any other way; that is
all: when I brace myself up to burn myself I make my mind freer,
lighter and more active for several days. Why do you speak of my
desire for mortification? My parents believe that, but it is
absurd. It would be a mortification if it brought any suffering,
but I enjoy this suffering, it gives me back my mind; it prevents
my thoughts from stopping: what would one not do to attain such
happiness?" (P. Janet, "The Pathogenesis of Some Impulsions,"
_Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, April, 1906.) If we understand
this psychological process we may realize how it is that even in
the higher religions, however else they may differ, the practical
value of asceticism and mortification as the necessary door to
the most exalted religious state is almost universally
recognized, and with complete cheerfulness. "Asceticism and
ecstacy are inseparable," as Probst-Biraben remarks at the outset
of an interesting paper on Mahommedan mysticism ("L'Extase dans
le Mysticisme Musulman," _Revue Philosophique_, Nov., 1906).
Asceticism is the necessary ante-chamber to spiritual perfection.
It thus happens that savage peoples largely base their often admirable
enforcement of asceticism not on the practical grounds that would justify
it, but on religious grounds that with the growth of intelligence fall
into discredit.[71] Even, however, when the scrupulous observances of
savages, whether in sexual or in non-sexual matters, are without any
obviously sound basis it cannot be said that they are entirely useless if
they tend to encourage self-control and the sense of reverence.[72] The
would-be intelligent and practical peoples who cast aside primitive
observances because they seem baseless or even ridiculous, need a still
finer practical sense and still greater intelligence in order to realize
that, though the reasons for the observances have been wrong, yet the
observances themselves may have been necessary methods of attaining
personal and social efficiency. It constantly happens in the course of
civilization that we have to revive old observances and furnish them with
new reasons.
In considering the moral quality of chastity among savages, we
must carefully separate that chastity which among semi-primitive
peoples is exclusively imposed upon women. This has no moral
quality whatever, for it is not exercised as a useful discipline,
but merely enforced in order to heighten the economic and erotic
value of the women. Many authorities believe that the regard for
women as property furnishes the true reason for the widespread
insistence on virginity in brides. Thus A.B. Ellis, speaking of
the West Coast of Africa (_Yoruba-Speaking Peoples_, pp. 183 _et
seq._), says that girls of good class are betrothed as mere
children, and are carefully guarded from men, while girls of
lower class are seldom betrothed, and may lead any life they
choose. "In this custom of infant or child betrothals we probably
find the key to that curious regard for ante-nuptial chastity
found not only among the tribes of the Gold and Slave Coasts, but
also among many other uncivilized peoples in different parts of
the world." In a very different part of the world, in Northern
Siberia, "the Yakuts," Sieroshevski states (_Journal
Anthropological Institute_, Jan.-June, 1901, p. 96), "see
nothing immoral in illicit love, providing only that nobody
suffers material loss by it. It is true that parents will scold a
daughter if her conduct threatens to deprive them of their gain
from the bride-price; but if once they have lost hope of marrying
her off, or if the bride-price has been spent, they manifest
complete indifference to her conduct. Maidens who no longer
expect marriage are not restrained at all, if they observe
decorum it is only out of respect to custom." Westermarck
(_History of Human Marriage_, pp. 123 et seq.) also shows the
connection between the high estimates of virginity and the
conception of woman as property, and returning to the question in
his later work, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_
(vol. ii, Ch. XLII), after pointing out that "marriage by
purchase has thus raised the standard of female chastity," he
refers (p. 437) to the significant fact that the seduction of an
unmarried girl "is chiefly, if not exclusively, regarded as an
offense against the parents or family of the girl," and there is
no indication that it is ever held by savages that any wrong has
been done to the woman herself. Westermarck recognizes at the
same time that the preference given to virgins has also a
biological basis in the instinctive masculine feeling of jealousy
in regard to women who have had intercourse with other men, and
especially in the erotic charm for men of the emotional state of
shyness which accompanies virginity. (This point has been dealt
with in the discussion of Modesty in vol. i of these _Studies_.)
It is scarcely necessary to add that the insistence on the
virginity of brides is by no means confined, as A.B. Ellis seems
to imply, to uncivilized peoples, nor is it necessary that
wife-purchase should always accompany it. The preference still
persists, not only by virtue of its natural biological basis, but
as a refinement and extension of the idea of woman as property,
among those civilized peoples who, like ourselves, inherit a form
of marriage to some extent based on wife-purchase. Under such
conditions a woman's chastity has an important social function to
perform, being, as Mrs. Mona Caird has put it (_The Morality of
Marriage_, 1897, p. 88), the watch-dog of man's property. The
fact that no element of ideal morality enters into the question
is shown by the usual absence of any demand for ante-nuptial
chastity in the husband.
It must not be supposed that when, as is most usually the case,
there is no complete and permanent prohibition of extra-nuptial
intercourse, mere unrestrained license prevails. That has
probably never happened anywhere among uncontaminated savages.
The rule probably is that, as among the tribes at Torres Straits
(_Reports Cambridge Anthropological Expedition_, vol. v, p. 275),
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