f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o and cunnilinctus, while they are not strictly methods of coitus, in so far as they do not involve the penetration of the p.e.n.i.s into the v.a.g.i.n.a, are very widespread as preliminaries, or as vicarious forms of coitus, alike among civilized and uncivilized peoples. Thus, in India, I am told that f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o is almost universal in households, and regarded as a natural duty towards the paterfamilias. As regards cunnilinctus Max Dessoir has stated (Allgemeine Zeitschrift fur Psychiatrie, 1894, Heft 5) that the superior Berlin prost.i.tutes 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 cla.s.ses, and while most often due to the wish to avoid conception, it is also sometimes practiced as a s.e.xual aberration, at the wish either of the man or the woman, the a.n.u.s 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 Astyana.s.sa, 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 p.o.r.nography 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 ill.u.s.trative 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 s.e.xual 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 fur Ethnologie, 1900, Heft 5, p. 414), though it must be remembered that the a.s.sociation of the s.e.xual act with darkness is much older than Christianity, and connected with early religious notions (cf. Hesiod, Works and Days, Bk. II), always have s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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); s.e.xual 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 (Traite 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 Generation 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 Furbringer (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 s.e.xual 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 superst.i.tions, 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 s.e.xes, I have dreamed, is ineffably beautiful, too fair to be remembered," wrote the chaste Th.o.r.eau. 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 a.s.sembled to witness it. For days it will take place in these valleys where the sun will rise on a dream of pa.s.sionate 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 repet.i.tion of Saint-Lambert"s at Mlle. Quinault"s table in the eighteenth century) serves to ill.u.s.trate the revolt which tends to take place against the unnatural and artificial degradation of the s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xuality 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.x had involved the placing of a pall of blackness and disrepute on the supreme s.e.xual act itself. It was shut out from the sunshine and excluded from the sphere of worship.
The s.e.xual 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 Pare, "make peace in the household." How this comes about we see ill.u.s.trated 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 p.r.o.nounced with the growth of civilization.[408]
The art of love is, indeed, only beginning with the establishment of s.e.xual 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 l.u.s.t,
"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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sociation 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 a.s.sociation 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 s.e.x. 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 Oth.e.l.lo 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 chast.i.ty and fidelity. Gesell, for instance, while admitting its anti-social character and acc.u.mulating quotations in evidence of the torture and disaster it occasions, seems to think that it still ought to be encouraged in order to foster s.e.xual 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 s.e.x will necessarily meet with checks and grave obstruction."
Ribot (La Logique des Sentiments, pp. 75 et seq.; Essai sur les Pa.s.sions, 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 pa.s.sion is a rupture in the normal life; it is an abnormal, if not a pathological state, an excrescence, a parasitism."
Forel (Die s.e.xuelle 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 s.e.xual 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 const.i.tution, 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 h.e.l.ls 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 s.e.x 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 circ.u.mstances, accompaniments, and results of domestic jealousy in their completely typical form, are well ill.u.s.trated 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 G.o.d"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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d," 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 G.o.d 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 wh.o.r.e, 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 s.e.xual 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 grat.i.tude, 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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.sure each of the pa.s.sion 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 prost.i.tution. Nearly all erotic writers, poets, and novelists, even physicians and psychologists, belong to this cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sion 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 n.o.ble-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 s.e.xual relationships, of the tendency of the monogamic to overpa.s.s 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 s.e.xual 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 l.u.s.t and friendship, friendship inevitably enters into the erotic sphere. Just as s.e.xual emotion tends to merge into friendship, so friendship between persons of opposite s.e.x, if young, healthy, and attractive, tends to involve s.e.xual 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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sion, 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 s.e.x. This is true in a far higher degree of the ultimate relationship, under fortunate circ.u.mstances, of husband and wife in the years after pa.s.sion has become impossible. They have ceased to be pa.s.sionate lovers but they have not become mere friends and comrades. More especially their relationship takes on elements borrowed from the att.i.tude 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 aesthetische Genuss, p. 249) has pointed out that "love" is really made up of both s.e.xual instinct and parental instinct.
"So-called happy marriages," says Professor W. Thomas (s.e.x 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 s.e.x are developed, and not by the emergence of personalities who combine impossibly exalted characteristics. "The task is extremely difficult," says Kisch in his s.e.xual 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 chast.i.ty 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 Stocker, "certainly believe that if a thousand other men have behaved ign.o.bly, 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 const.i.tute 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 pa.s.sion, 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 s.e.xual 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 prost.i.tution 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 t.i.tle, a royal t.i.tle. 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 n.o.bler, 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 a.s.suredly 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]
Quaestionum Convivalium, lib. iii, quaestio 6.
[376]
E. D. Cope, "The Marriage Problem," Open Court, Nov. 1888.
[377]
Columbus meeting of the American Medical a.s.sociation, 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.