parent, of parent to child. Everyone from his first
years retains
something of the child which cannot be revealed to all the world; everyone
acquires something of the guardian paternal or maternal spirit. Husband
and wife are each child to the other, and are indeed
parent and child by
turn. And here still the woman retains a certain erotic supremacy, for she
is to the last more of a child than it is ever easy for the man to be, and
much more essentially a mother than he is a father.
Groos (_Der Æsthetische Genuss_, p. 249) has pointed
out that
"love" is really made up of both sexual instinct and parental
instinct.
"So-called happy marriages," says Professor W.
Thomas (_Sex and
Society_, p. 246), "represent an equilibrium reached through an
extension of the maternal interest of the woman to
the man,
whereby she looks after his personal needs as she
does after
those of the children--cherishing him, in fact, as a
child--or
in an extension to woman on the part of man of the
nurture and
affection which is in his nature to give to pets and
all helpless
(and preferably dumb) creatures."
"When the devotion in the tie between mother and
son," a woman
writes, "is added to the relation of husband and
wife, the union
of marriage is raised to the high and beautiful
dignity it
deserves, and can attain in this world. It
comprehends sympathy,
love, and perfect understanding, even of the faults
and
weaknesses of both sides." "The foundation of every true woman's
love," another woman writes, "is a mother's
tenderness. He whom
she loves is a child of larger growth, although she
may at the
same time have a deep respect for him." (See also, for similar
opinion of another woman of distinguished
intellectual ability,
footnote at beginning of "The Psychic State in
Pregnancy" in
volume v of these _Studies_.)
It is on the basis of these elemental human facts
that the
permanently seductive and inspiring relationships of
sex are
developed, and not by the emergence of personalities
who combine
impossibly exalted characteristics. "The task is
extremely
difficult," says Kisch in his _Sexual Life of
Woman_, "but a
clever and virtuous modern wife must endeavor to
combine in her
single personality the sensuous attractiveness of an
Aspasia, the
chastity of a Lucrece, and the intellectual
greatness of a
Cornelia." And in an earlier century we are told in the novel of
_La Tia Fingida_, which has sometimes been
attributed to
Cervantes, that "a woman should be an angel in the street, a
saint in church, beautiful at the window, honest in
the house,
and a demon in bed." The demands made of men by
women, on the
other hand, have been almost too lofty to bear
definite
formulation at all. "Ninety-nine out of a hundred loving women,"
says Helene Stöcker, "certainly believe that if a thousand other
men have behaved ignobly, and forsaken, ill-used,
and deceived
the woman they love, the man they love is an
exception, marked
out from all other men; that is the reason they love
him." It may
be doubted, however, if the great lovers have ever
stood very far
above the ordinary level of humanity by their
possession of
perfection. They have been human, and their art of
love has not
always excluded the possession of human frailties;
perfection,
indeed, even if it could be found, would furnish a
bad soil for
love to strike deep roots in.
It is only when we realize the highly complex nature of the elements which
make up erotic love that we can understand how it is
that that love can
constitute so tremendous a revelation and exert so
profound an influence
even in men of the greatest genius and intellect and in the sphere of
their most spiritual activity. It is not merely passion, nor any conscious
skill in the erotic art,--important as these may be,--
that would serve to
account for Goethe's relationship to Frau von Stein, or Wagner's to
Mathilde Wesendonck, or that of Robert and Elizabeth
Browning to each
other.[420]
It may now be clear to the reader why it has been
necessary in a
discussion of the sexual impulse in its relationship to society to deal
with the art of love. It is true that there is nothing so intimately
private and personal as the erotic affairs of the
individual. Yet it is
equally true that these affairs lie at the basis of the social life, and
furnish the conditions--good or bad as the case may be--
of that
procreative act which is a supreme concern of the State.
It is because the
question of love is of such purely private interest that it tends to be
submerged in the question of breed. We have to realize, not only that the
question of love subserves the question of breed, but
also that love has a
proper, a necessary, even a socially wholesome claim, to stand by itself
and to be regarded for its own worth.
In the profoundly suggestive study of love which the
distinguished sociologist Tarde left behind at his
death
(_Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, loc. cit.),
there are
some interesting remarks on this point: "Society,"
he says, "has
been far more, and more intelligently, preoccupied
with the
problem of answering the 'question of breed' than
the 'question
of love.' The first problem fills all our civil and
commercial
codes. The second problem has never been clearly
stated, or
looked in the face, not even in antiquity, still
less since the
coming of Christianity, for merely to offer the
solutions of
marriage and prostitution is manifestly inadequate.
Statesmen
have only seen the side on which it touches
population. Hence
the marriage laws. Sterile love they profess to
disdain. Yet it
is evident that, though born as the serf of
generation, love
tends by civilization to be freed from it. In place
of a simple
method of procreation it has become an end, it has
created itself
a title, a royal title. Our gardens cultivate
flowers that are
all the more charming because they are sterile; why
is the double
corolla of love held more infamous than the
sterilized flowers of
our gardens?" Tarde replies that the reason is that our
politicians are merely ambitious persons thirsting
for power and
wealth, and even when they are lovers they are Don
Juans rather
than Virgils. "The future," he continues, "is to the Virgilians,
because if the ambition of power, the regal wealth
of American or
European millionarism, once seemed nobler, love now
more and more
attracts to itself the best and highest parts of the
soul, where
lies the hidden ferment of all that is greatest in
science and
art, and more and more those studious and artist
souls multiply
who, intent on their peaceful activities, hold in
horror the
business men and the politicians, and will one day
succeed in
driving them back. That assuredly will be the great
and capital
revolution of humanity, an active psychological
revolution: the
recognized preponderance of the meditative and
contemplative, the
lover's side of the human soul, over the feverish,
expansive,
rapacious, and ambitious side. And then it will be
understood
that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps
the most
arduous of all, has been the problem of love."
FOOTNOTES:
[375] _Quæstionum Convivalium_, lib. iii, quæstio 6.
[376] E.D. Cope, "The Marriage Problem," _Open Court_, Nov. 1888.
[377] Columbus meeting of the American Medical
Association, 1900.
[378] Ellen Key, _Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 24.
[379] In an admirable article on Friedrich Schlegel's
_Lucinde_
(_Mutterschutz_, 1906, Heft 5), Heinrich Meyer-Benfey, in pointing out
that the Catholic sacramental conception of marriage
licensed love, but
failed to elevate it, regards _Lucinde_, with all its
defects, as the
first expression of the unity of the senses and the
soul, and, as such,
the basis of the new ethics of love. It must, however, be said that four
hundred years earlier Pontano had expressed this same
erotic unity far
more robustly and wholesomely than Schlegel, though the Latin verse in
which he wrote, fresh and vital as it is, remained
without influence.
Pontano's _Carmina_, including the "De Amore Conjugali,"
have at length
been reprinted in a scholarly edition by Soldati.
[380] From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries Ovid was, in
reality, the most popular and influential classic poet.
His works played a
large part in moulding Renaissance literature, not least in England, where
Marlowe translated his _Amores_, and Shakespeare, during the early years
of his literary activity, was greatly indebted to him
(see, e.g., Sidney
Lee, "Ovid and Shakespeare's Sonnets," _Quarterly Review_, Ap., 1909).
[381] This has already been discussed in Chapter II.
[382] By the age of twenty-five, as G. Hirth remarks
(_Wege zur Heimat_,
p. 541), an energetic and sexually disposed man in a
large city has, for
the most part, already had relations with some twenty-
five women, perhaps
even as many as fifty, while a well-bred and cultivated woman at that age
is still only beginning to realize the slowly summating excitations of
sex.
[383] In his study of "Conjugal Aversion" (_Journal Nervous and Mental
Disease_, Sept., 1892) Smith Baker points out the value of adequate sexual
knowledge before marriage in lessening the risks of such aversion.
[384] "It may be said to the honor of men," Adler truly remarks (op. cit.,
p. 182), "that it is perhaps not often their conscious brutality that is
at fault in this matter, but merely lack of skill and
lack of
understanding. The husband who is not specially endowed by nature and
experience for psychic intercourse with women, is not
likely, through his
earlier intercourse with Venus vulgivaga, to bring into marriage any
useful knowledge, psychic or physical."
[385] "The first night," writes a correspondent concerning his marriage,
"she found the act very painful and was frightened and surprised at the
size of my penis, and at my suddenly getting on her. We had talked very
openly about sex things before marriage, and it never
occurred to me that
she was ignorant of the details of the act. I imagined it would disgust
her to talk about these things; but I now see I should have explained
things to her. Before marrying I had come to the
conclusion that the
respect owed to one's wife was incompatible with any
talk that might seem
indecent, and also I had made a resolve not to subject her to what I
thought then were dirty tricks, even to be naked and to have her naked. In
fact, I was the victim of mock modesty; it was an
artificial reaction from
the life I had been living before marriage. Now it seems to me to be
natural, if you love a woman, to do whatever occurs to you and to her. If
I had not felt it wrong to encourage such acts between us, there might
have been established a sexual sympathy which would have bound me more
closely to her."
[386] Montaigne, _Essais_, Bk. iii, Ch. V. It is a
significant fact that,
even in the matter of information, women,
notwithstanding much ignorance
and inexperience, are often better equipped for marriage than men. As
Fürbringer remarks (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and
Disease in Relation
to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 212), although the wife is
usually more chaste at
marriage than the husband, yet "she is generally the better informed
partner in matters pertaining to the married state, in spite of occasional
astonishing confessions."
[387] "She never loses her self-respect nor my respect for her," a man
writes in a letter, "simply because we are desperately in love with one
another, and everything we do--some of which the lowest prostitute might
refuse to do--seems but one attempt after another to
translate our passion
into action. I never realized before, not that to the
pure all things are
pure, indeed, but that to the lover nothing is indecent.
Yes, I have
always felt it, to love her is a liberal education." It is obviously only
the existence of such an attitude as this that can
enable a pure woman to
be passionate.
[388] "To be really understood," as Rafford Pyke well says, "to say what
she likes, to utter her innermost thoughts in her own
way, to cast aside
the traditional conventions that gall her and repress
her, to have someone
near her with whom she can be quite frank, and yet to
know that not a
syllable of what she says will be misinterpreted or
mistaken, but rather
felt just as she feels it all--how wonderfully sweet is this to every
woman, and how few men are there who can give it to
her!"
[389] In more recent times it has been discussed in
relation to the
frequency of spontaneous nocturnal emissions. See "The Phenomena of Sexual
Periodicity," Sect. II, in volume i of these _Studies_, and cf. Mr.
Perry-Coste's remarks on "The Annual Rhythm," in Appendix B of the same
volume.
[390] See "The Sexual Impulse in Women," vol. iii of these _Studies_.
[391] Zenobia's practice is referred to by Gibbon,
_Decline and Fall_, ed.
Bury, vol. i, p. 302. The Queen of Aragon's decision is recorded by the
Montpellier jurist, Nicolas Bohier (Boerius) in his
_Decisiones_, etc.,
ed. of 1579, p. 563; it is referred to by Montaigne,
_Essais_, Bk. iii,
Ch. V.
[392] Haller, _Elementa Physiologiæ_, 1778, vol. vii, p.
57.
[393] Hammond, _Sexual Impotence_, p. 129.
[394] Fürbringer, Senator and Kaminer, _Health and
Disease in Relation to
Marriage_, vol. i, p. 221.
[395] Forel, _Die Sexuelle Frage_, p. 80.
[396] Guyot, _Bréviaire de l'Amour Expérimental_, p.
144.
[397] Erb, Ziemssen's _Handbuch_, Bd. xi, ii, p. 148.
Guttceit also
considered that the very wide variations found are
congenital and natural.
It may be added that some believe that there are racial variations. Thus
it has been stated that the genital force of the
Englishman is low, and
that of the Frenchman (especially Provençal,
Languedocian, and Gascon)
high, while Löwenfeld believes that the Germanic race
excels the French in
aptitude to repeat the sex act frequently. It is
probable that little
weight attaches to these opinions, and that the chief
differences are
individual rather than racial.
[398] Ribbing, _L'Hygiène Sexualle_, p. 75. Kisch, in
his _Sexual Life of
Woman_, expresses the same opinion.
[399] Mohammed, who often displayed a consideration for women very rare in
the founders of religions, is an exception. His
prescription of once a
week represented the right of the wife, quite
independently of the number
of wives a man might possess.
[400] How fragile the claim of "conjugal rights" is, may be sufficiently
proved by the fact that it is now considered by many
that the very term
"conjugal rights" arose merely by a mistake for
"conjugal rites." Before
1733, when legal proceedings were in Latin, the term
used was _obsequies_,
and "rights," instead of "rites," seems to have been merely a typesetter's
error (see _Notes and Queries_, May 16, 1891; May 6,
1899). This
explanation, it should be added, only applies to the
consecrated term, for
there can be no doubt that the underlying idea has an
existence quite
independent of the term.
[401] "In most marriages that are not happy," it is said in Rafford Pyke's
thoughtful paper on "Husbands and Wives"
(_Cosmopolitan_, 1902), "it is
the wife rather than the husband who is oftenest
disappointed."
[402] See "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse," in vol. iii of these
_Studies_.
[403] It is well recognized by erotic writers, however, that women may
sometimes take a comparatively active part. Thus
Vatsyayana says that
sometimes the woman may take the man's position, and
with flowers in her
hair and smiles mixed with sighs and bent head,
caressing him and pressing
her breasts against him, say: "You have been my
conqueror; it is my turn
to make you cry for mercy."
[404] Thus among the Swahili it is on the third day
after marriage that
the bridegroom is allowed, by custom, to complete
defloration, according
to Zache, _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1899, II-III, p.
84.
[405] _De l'Amour_, vol. ii, p. 57.
[406] Robert Michels, "Brautstandsmoral," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_,
Jahrgang I, Heft 12.
[407] I may refer once more to the facts brought
together in volume iii of
these _Studies_, "The Analysis of the Sexual Impulse."
[408] This has been pointed out, for instance, by
Rutgers, "Sexuelle
Differenzierung," _Die Neue Generation_, Dec., 1908.
[409] Thus, among the Eskimo, who practice temporary
wife-exchange,
Rasmussen states that "a man generally discovers that his own wife is, in
spite of all, the best."
[410] "I have always held with the late Professor Laycock," remarks
Clouston (_Hygiene of Mind_, p. 214), "who was a very subtle student of
human nature, that a married couple need not be always together to be
happy, and that in fact reasonable absences and partings tend towards
ultimate and closer union." That the prolongation of passion is only
compatible with absence scarcely needs pointing out; as Mary
Wollstonecraft long since said (_Rights of Woman_,
original ed., p. 61),
it is only in absence or in misfortune that passion is durable. It may be
added, however, that in her love-letters to Imlay she
wrote: "I have ever
declared that two people who mean to live together ought not to be long
separated."
[411] "Viewed broadly," says Arnold L. Gesell, in his interesting study of
"Jealousy" (_American Journal of Psychology_, Oct., 1906), "jealousy seems
such a necessary psychological accompaniment to
biological behavior,
amidst competitive struggle, that one is tempted to
consider it
genetically among the oldest of the emotions, synonymous almost with the
will to live, and to make it scarcely less fundamental than fear or anger.
In fact, jealousy readily passes into anger, and is
itself a brand of
fear.... In sociability and mutual aid we see the other side of the
shield; but jealousy, however anti-social it may be,
retains a function in
zoölogical economy: viz., to conserve the individual as against the group.
It is Nature's great corrective for the purely social
emotions."
[412] Many illustrations are brought together in
Gesell's study of
"Jealousy."
[413] Jealousy among lower races may be disguised or
modified by tribal
customs. Thus Rasmussen (_People of the Polar North_, p.
65) says in
reference to the Eskimo custom of wife-exchange: "A man once told me that
he only beat his wife when she would not receive other men. She would have
nothing to do with anyone but him--and that was her only failing!"
Rasmussen elsewhere shows that the Eskimo are capable of extreme jealousy.
[414] See, e.g., Moll, _Sexualleben des Kindes_, p. 158; cf., Gesell's
"Study of Jealousy."
[415] Jealousy is notoriously common among drunkards. As K. Birnbaum
points out ("Das Sexualleben der Alkokolisten," _Sexual-Probleme_, Jan.,
1909), this jealousy is, in most cases, more or less
well-founded, for the
wife, disgusted with her husband, naturally seeks
sympathy and
companionship elsewhere. Alcoholic jealousy, however,
goes far beyond its
basis of support in fact, and is entangled with
delusions and
hallucinations. (See e.g., G. Dumas, "La Logique d'un Dément," _Revue
Philosophique_, Feb., 1908; also Stefanowski, "Morbid Jealousy," _Alienist
and Neurologist_, July, 1893.)
[416] Ellen Key, _Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 335.
[417] Schrempf points out ("Von Stella zu Klärchen,"
_Mutterschutz_, 1906,
Heft 7, p. 264) that Goethe strove to show in _Egmont_
that a woman is
repelled by the love of a man who knows nothing beyond his love to her,
and that it is easy for her to devote herself to the man whose aims lie in
the larger world beyond herself. There is profound truth in this view.
[418] A discussion on "Platonic friendship" of this kind by several
writers, mostly women, whose opinions were nearly
equally divided, may be
found, for instance, in the _Lady's Realm_, March, 1900.
[419] There are no doub