§ 53
The best parental environment, the one that gives the erotic its due, is that in which the child is allowed to remain a child until he is required to develop certain phases of the egoistic-social environment. The best home environment is that in which the parents are themselves, and particularly the father, emotionally, i.e. erotically, adult and not, as in so many homes, emotionally childish.
The emotionally childish status, in the erotic sphere of many parents, is due at least partly to fear, which is purely an egoistic-social emotion. Love has in its pure state no such emotion as fear but the fears that are so commonly associated with the expression of love are all of egoistic-social origin.
While love is properly identified with sex, there being no real expression of love that is not fundamentally a sex expression, there is every reason why love should be freed from acquired associations with fear; and if the fear which has, through puritanical views, attached to sex could be removed from sex and therefore from love, people today would be able to live a much more fully expressed life; for the inhibitions irrationally associated with sex have taken away from life an inestimable amount of health, strength and beauty.
The inference from this is that the only possible time to prevent the acquirement of inhibitions is early childhood, and the only possible people to do it are the parents.
The perfect love pattern will never spontaneously originate with the man of the world; but with his children it may if he will, if both parents will, practically refrain from interference. The parents know well enough, sometimes consciously but more often unconsciously, that their love pattern is a poor one—poor in conception and poor in execution. It is poor in joy and rich in misery. According to this perverted pattern they have lived their own love, and if they but pause to think, they will withhold their hands and their words from interfering with the illumination which is slowly reaching the younger generation, but which blinds the parents’ eyes to true life values.
§ 54
In order to be a wholesome one, the relation between the parent and child must involve a wholesome relation between the two parents.[15] You cannot prevent divorce and prostitution if you do not develop before the children’s eyes a marital pattern which will put both of these family evils out of commission. You cannot annihilate even an idea by repressing it into the unconscious. In order to obviate in the next generation the worst features of this, we must recognize them intellectually and react to them emotionally; and to be specific, in order to remove as far as possible the chances of divorce and prostitution in our own children, we must show them an environment in our own families in which the marital pattern is such that any deviation from it must be revolting to the little boy and the little girl who are now getting their first impressions of married life from their own parents.
§ 55
Instinct in Humans Generally Inadequate or Misleading
Instinctive reactions are adequate responses only in natural environments before civilization has set in. The more complicated life of modern civilization renders purely instinctive reactions more out of date than a twenty-year-old model of an automobile.
Not only is mere instinct not a good guide in the egoistic-social activities, but in the erotic life it is almost worse than useless. This is so because modern life is so different from the prehistoric environment that humans are today unable to follow erotic instinct, or even, on account of traditional inhibitions, to get at it in its purity.
We live today in an environment so preponderantly egoistic-social that the majority of motives for any act are egoistic-social ones, and only a small fraction of them erotic. This makes it as difficult to follow erotic instincts as for a compass to point north, when a magnet is lying three inches to the east of it.
Instinct alone would naturally prompt a boy and a girl to dwell long over the preliminaries to the love episode. If left together and alone, they would take some time to reach an erotic acme, and would instinctively find that out last of all, as is so beautifully described in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and so delicately suggested in Paul and Virginia.
Not only has the social convention of the present day tended more and more to inhibit the introduction, prelude, first and second acts of the love drama but it has raised such a barrier against the third act as to give it an entirely disproportionate value in comparison with the others.
§ 56
There are three separate fusions involved in any perfect heterosexual union: (1) the bodily fusion of the man and the woman, (2) the fusion of their souls each with the other and (3) the fusion of the soul and body of each more closely together.
The last comes from the man on his side and the woman on hers, each seeing the world more sub specie Amoris—as manifestation of erotic passion; but it also comes from the fact that the admission into consciousness of the innate erotic reactions, in spite of the opposition of environment—the legitimate admission of these feelings—vitalizes not only the physical body of man and woman, but also all the multitudinous and diversified contacts of both man and woman with people and things.
Instinct alone, if it were possible to follow it unchecked, would lead to those three fusions; but the sex instinct in men and women has been so submerged by various forms of prohibition that even in the married state most husbands and wives do not know of the joy of any of these three fusions.
§ 57
One type of instinctive behaviour is the almost universal tendency to reason by analogy which frequently turns out to be a reasoning by false analogy and by association of the contiguity type.
It would be quite as reasonable for a woman to say that, because a prostitute enjoys roast beef or lobster (or anything between), the pure wife should feel it a sin to enjoy good food.
Of course there are people who think it is wrong to enjoy anything, but while overgratification from food or drink has a certain essential sensuality about it and gluttony was one of the “seven deadly sins,” there is no psychological principle according to which intense enjoyment is rightly prohibited, providing the consumption of food does not exceed the necessity of the body for growth and restoration of tissue. Up to that point the more one enjoys one’s food the better for himself and incidentally for everyone else. If, however, the enjoyment has to come from an increase in the amount consumed or the cost of it, then a quite unjustifiable element of unsocial action surely enters.
One should enjoy food, and the more enjoyment the better, provided the enjoyment does not depend on the increase in amount or expensiveness of it.
Similarly there is every good reason why both women and men should enjoy sex and regard it as quite as necessary as food.
Instinctively both women and men would do so if their sexual instincts were accessible. Those men and women to whom their instincts are accessible do gain their greatest comfort if not their greatest happiness through the uninhibited expression of the sex instinct.
§ 58
If the greatest happiness in life be something other than the emotions incident to the fusion of man’s and woman’s beings in the love drama, then, whatever that greatest happiness may be said to be, it is surely conditioned on a happy marriage. Those who think otherwise are not happily married and they need to become so before their words can have any authority. Those not happily married have, of course, no means whatever of knowing at first hand what is, or should be, implied in that term.
§ 59
Instinct has taught the woman to expect strength, physical or spiritual, or both, of the man. Let it not be forgotten that mental and spiritual strength is a perfect substitute for physical strength. It does not mean that intellectual ability is the equivalent of spiritual strength as the former may be coexistent with an emotional undevelopment which is the same as spiritual weakness. A man may, even a child may, be an intellectual prodigy as a chess player or mathematician without implying any emotional development in the direction of normal erotism.
In this the sexes are different, for woman’s instinct here guides her rightly. Biologically she is unconsciously forced, against her will, and quite without her knowing it to test her man continuously for some kind of strength. For some women indeed physical strength is all-satisfactory but in the majority of cases of civilized woman physical strength, without an accompanying spiritual strength, which will insure the necessary erotic control of her by her husband, will always leave her disappointed and discontented.
The qualities instinctively called for in the woman by the man are the opposite in some respects. He unconsciously, if not consciously, expects sweetness, docility, compliance, adoration in his wife, all qualities that are a necessary background and basis for his childish and autoerotic enjoyments. It is almost unheard of to find a man who takes pleasure in the negativism which characterizes the child and also many women, and in the opposition which alone, when deftly overcome, constitutes the only proof that he is or has been purely masculine and creative in his positive activities in effecting a change in that part of his environment.
It may be objected that this demand for compliance, softness and accessibility in woman may not be purely instinctive; but, if it is not, it is of such early origin as to be undistinguishable from true instinct. It is the common experience of every infant to be treated with the utmost tenderness by its mother.
§ 60
When the average unreflective man meets opposition, in any degree of strength, from his wife he tends to reënact the mother-infant situation in his own married life. This results in the husband’s reproducing more or less exactly the original infantile tantrum. Naturally he tends toward an explosive use of force when he does not find in his wife the qualities he has sensed in his mother. However much he may conceal or transform the outward manifestation of this infantile trend, the trend exists and is a positive factor in the situation which contains the wife’s opposition. From this it follows that instinct is a better guide for women than for men.
Woman is in every way justified in her demand for strength in her mate. Man is wholly unjustified in expecting sweetness, adoration and the other qualities except perhaps the docility implied in the susceptibility to male control in the erotic sphere which is undoubtedly innate in every woman. It does not occur to him that the negativistic opposition of woman is her means of testing his own strength, and that he has in it the best possibility of proving his essential masculinity. That he should totally ignore the opposition by the sole means of suggestive replacement of her antagonistic ideas by the ideas which he knows are the best ones in the situation, and that he should convince and persuade her through his perfectly confident attitude that this type of action on his part is exactly what she is instinctively trying to evoke in him by her apparent perversity, are too infrequently even glimpsed by the man who relies on his instinct.
§ 61
From the erotic viewpoint it makes no difference whether a woman is well dressed or not or even tidy, provided her ill-dressed condition does not interfere with her physical health. A woman in rags wielding a hoe or a rake or even a spade may be just as radiant and have just as fine and attractive physique as a lady in silks. It is a fallacy to suppose that erotic attractiveness consists only in the cosmetic art. This motive to keep herself in the pink of visual perfection appeals only to sight, and is at bottom more egoistic-social than erotic, however much the woman may think she is making an erotic impression by her appearance. The conscious appeal to sight is frequently only an overcompensation for her erotically unsatisfied condition.
As sight is only distant or vicarious touch, it is evident that the visual appeal is only a substitute touch appeal. That a woman with a homely face may be erotically attractive then is no paradox. The beautiful face is only the symbol of the “skin you love to touch.” The visible symbol may be absent and yet the kinesthetic quality be present. Furthermore all lovers who take pleasure from the sight of beautiful lines of the human form are only vicariating for kinesthetic sensations. The original sculptor is the caressing hand.
§ 62
In modern human civilized life instincts in general, even irrespective of the sex of the person in whom they are manifested, are the worst possible guides. The love instinct is also among the worst, simply because its present-day vestiges are so overlaid with restrictions and conventions that it cannot be seen clearly. It has been so inhibited that it needs an apologist.
When looking at the two broad divisions of egoistic-social and love instincts, one has to have demonstrated the essential superiority of the love instinct and its far greater ability to cause happiness, health, and, in the deepest sense, success.
Over two thousand years ago Aristotle saw, and said, that the greatest satisfaction comes from fullest use of all one’s powers. Today we are beginning to realize, after the study of the ductless glands, that there is a kind of reaction in the body not mediated by nerves, as are muscular reactions, and that we have, in the hormones, a mode of interaction between the parts of the body that has been as yet unnoted by physiologist and psychologist alike, an interaction that places marriage in the forefront as a necessity not only for health but for the fullest development of our latent powers.
§ 63
For among the dozen or so ductless glands, which Berman[16] has called an “interlocking directorate” of all the human activities, is the interstitial gland which places in circulation in the blood a hormone that vitalizes all the secretions of all the other glands, and which requires for its own perfect working the concomitant and synchronous perfect working of the homologous gland in the mate, in the other demi-human of the complete social unit. In other words perfect physiological health is secured in no better way than by marrying provided marriage is complete marriage and not merely a “Platonic” or business relation.
From these considerations it is evident that as motives for action that leads to happiness, the erotic instincts (if we can succeed in extracting their ore from the mine of our unconscious and refining it from the dross of egoistic-social accretions) are infinitely superior to the egoistic-social.
CHAPTER V
THE LOVE EPISODE
§ 64
From the earliest ages seers and poets have glorified Love. The Bible says God is Love. Love as the perfect erotic control of the wife by the husband will be a strange concept to some minds that have been accustomed to the theory that woman is the Queen of Love, and to the ideas of men brought up under the Madonna influence.
This control is indeed the opposite of the attitude that many husbands have adopted (or in which they have been trained) toward their wives, to whom they act as they would toward idealized mothers, not of their own children, but of themselves.
A conviction derived from intimate knowledge of the marital relations of many people forces the conclusion that this current attitude not only is a false one, but is also one that gradually renders a husband impotent to take the part which a true male should take, in the highest type of human mating.
Love is the work of art of an entire lifetime. The calf love of the adolescent, the adoration of the betrothed and the first passionate outburst of the honeymoon are but preludes or overtures to an opera or drama that should continue as long as the two partners live together, and in which the husband is the protagonist.
§ 65
To denote the highest type of special scientific student of the art of love, the term erotologist is suggested in preference to the word sexologist, which would imply the study of only the physical side of sex.
If a modern erotologist can tell us that husbands using toward their wives one form of behaviour are themselves unhappy, and have too many children, or too few, we should certainly be broad-minded enough to admit that the chances are, we ourselves shall be unhappy if we do the same things in the same way.
If the erotologist tells us that a million husbands have used a certain technique in their erotic lives and have become supremely happy, and have had just as many healthy children as they wanted and no more, we should certainly be wise, if we could find out what was the felicitous technique of the happy million. If we saw their wives retaining their youth and beauty and vivacity, and being both loving wives and proud grandmothers at the same time, we should not let envy of these men inspire us with hatred and prejudice enough to say that their methods are iniquitous, and not mentioned in the Bible; but we should inquire exactly what these husbands did, to keep their wives and themselves so young and happy.
We should at the present day inquire mostly in vain. A good part of the million do not themselves know what they do that is different from the practice of the other millions. They just love their wives and them alone.
The erotologists, however, have been quietly studying the marital situation for some decades. They have compared, weighed, correlated and investigated thousands of cases. Some of the sexologists have been unscientific and biased with ancient superstitions. A few erotologists, notably Havelock Ellis and Dr. Marie C. Stopes of England, Dr. W. F. Robie of Baldwinsville, Massachusetts, Dr. H. W. Long of Peoria, Illinois, and some of the psychoanalysts, are scientists, ready and willing to look at facts as they are and not as they might wish them to be.
The erotologists have actually discovered definite facts about the more intimate nature of the marital relation. It implies the interaction, in every married pair, of four sets of tendencies: the husband’s conscious and his unconscious trends and the wife’s conscious and unconscious trends. Anyone looking only at the conscious factors is naturally puzzled by almost all the external phenomena of marriage, e.g., why they fell in love, what either could see in the other, why another pair fell out, what on earth was the matter with them.
§ 66
To the observer not looking beneath the surface with the scientific instrument of precision constituted by the study of the unconscious, the actions of two married people are as unaccountable as those of a tack sliding uphill on a piece of smooth paper. The erotologists have looked underneath and seen the magnet in the hand of another person and are not surprised.
To the erotologists marriage is in no sense a lottery, but a situation in which the causal factors are just as clearly natural as they are either in a twelve-cylinder automobile that runs smoothly or in one that snorts along with a couple of cylinders working. Anyhow a lottery is only a matter of chance; and chance is only cause to which we either have blinded ourselves or have not yet become sentient.
The erotologist can tell us definitely that in marriage the erotic situation should be controlled by the husband, as the husband is in every case the cause of the good or evil outcome of the match. Masculinity is the unquenchable yearning to control the woman emotionally, erotically. Femininity is the insatiable desire to be erotically controlled.
Everyone will admit that for a man to be erotically controlled by a woman does not represent the peak of masculine attainment and that a woman’s desire to control a man is, while common enough, not an expression of her love instinct but of her ego instinct by which women are just as much motivated as are men.
The erotologist tells us (the main thesis of this book) that the sole solid bond of union in marriage is just this erotic control of the wife by the husband. It is not complete and perfect if it does not, in all activities strictly marital, supersede all egoistic trends. A woman may as mother of her children, as lady of the house, as woman of business, display in those spheres as many expressions of egoistic-social instinct as she has opportunity for or as circumstances allow; but as wife she is due only to constitute the controlled member of the complementary fusion of the marital pair.
It is not without deep significance that the Anglo-Saxon word from which “wife” is derived is allied to the root WIB which means “to tremble.” It expresses an essential psychological truth. If the feminine element in the binary, as I have called the perfect marital union, is somewhat analogous to the surging sea on whose rocks or sand beaches it continues to break, we see in the rocks or the strand the solid, at least comparatively unwavering thing to which the surges conform themselves. There need only be a comparative steadiness on the part of the masculine element. He may tremble, too, but if only he tremble less than she, he will be the masculine and she the feminine element.
§ 67
The precipitate husband is over-precipitate only if he is or becomes more so than his wife. There is no norm except a comparative one. He must have control (and yet at the right time he may relinquish it); but at all times he must have more control over himself, and incidentally over her, than she has over his erotic reactions, or over her own.
A woman in perfect control of her own erotic reactions, in the sense of control through expression and not through repression or annihilation, probably does not exist. But if she did she would make the perfect prostitute. Such a woman could give any man the deepest satisfaction of which he was capable—until he found that she, and not he, was controlling her erotism. But the egoistic-social impulse operates as a repressive factor even in the prostitute, and renders the completeness of her positive control impossible for her; the more civilized the community the more repressive the control.
A man married to any woman who is in better control of herself than he is of himself is married to (but not mated with) a woman who is to him a prostitute by whatsoever proportion of control she exercises over herself more than he does over himself or over her. This is true both of the negative control of repression on her part and of the positive control of expression. For evidently if her repressive control makes her cold to his advances she is of the common prostitute type as far as he is concerned. He evokes no more real response from her than from the casual woman of the street. However much simulated responsiveness the prostitute may show, he knows unconsciously its unreality, and feels proportionately disgusted. In the wife who is cold because of environmental influences in her youth which the husband has not removed by his wholesome treatment of her, the objective result is the same as in the prostitute who is unresponsive from indifference or fear, or from the repression referred to.
§ 68
Quite as obviously if the wife shows a greater control over the erotic situation than the husband, a control through expression, he will be unconsciously repelled by this unnatural factor in the situation, no matter how much pleased he may be consciously by the rich, warm femininity he has discovered in her.
It is this positive or expressive control of the erotic factor which gives to some women the reputation of being designing, gives them the appearance of being more erotic than the husband or lover, and in some instances repels the man.
The possibility of greater erotic control on the part of the woman than the man possesses should be a provoking thought to all husbands who are overhasty in their handling of the love episode.
Any husband controls his wife erotically, if he actually does, only by means of controlling himself. At minimum his control of himself is just enough to secure his wife’s erotic acme preceding or at least synchronizing with his own. That is the one and only way by which he can attain and maintain marital success.
§ 69
The love drama is the term that applies to the relations of one man and one woman for the time when they devote themselves to each other. It may be an hour or a lifetime, but the hour-long period surely is a pitiful experience, a one-act farce, compared with the grandeur of the lifelong relation. A man who thinks he prefers a succession of short periods with different women condemns himself unnecessarily to a course of action which resembles the career of a tea-tester. He may become a connoisseur in various flavours but he cannot learn much about women. He is a narrow specialist with really no wide knowledge. Moreover such a man almost never tests his own effect on women, but merely the different effects of women on himself; and is therefore merely autoerotic, merely playing with himself; and his various instruments are virtually impersonal.
§ 70
Man is instinctively embarrassed upon rousing a woman to full passion, and finding it plays so much greater a part in her life than in his, and that it requires so much more attention on his part than he feels he has time to give.
That may explain why some men are so easily satisfied with a woman’s half love and shy from it when it begins fully to develop. They run from one woman to another, shirking the labour of drinking because they have not the stomach to drink love to the lees.
“Sippers,” they might be called, or “tea-testers.” The tester is doomed to a sample. He not only never consumes a full cup but never swallows a drop. He has not the power to hold out. No man could drink a hundred cups of different consignments of tea. Nor can one man thoroughly experience more than one woman. The sippers of women would be as disconcerted as a tea-tester who should be ordered to drink full cups of tea to report on a hundred samples, if they were expected really to know the women they sample. Their disconcertment would amount to an actual impotence.
§ 71
The essential unsatisfactoriness of the promiscuous sex life is experienced poignantly by most men who attempt it. One wealthy man who kept numerous mistresses, seventeen at one time, to be exact, came to an analyst to see if he could not get some help in unifying his life. It was not that he had any troubles coming from any acts on the part of the women. Most of them knew of his relations with the others, and professed, at any rate, to be free from jealousy. This is enough to show that he did not love any of them.
Half consciously he realized that he had lost or never learned the truly erotic art and though he attended to the large businesses he owned, he felt a complete dissatisfaction with his own life not because it was sinful and criminal but because it did not give him any real sense of accomplishment. He was unmarried and among his large acquaintance of marriageable young women there was one, whose femininity, he recognized, was so rich that while, for many reasons he would have liked to propose marriage to her, he knew he would be unable to control her erotism.
Knowing full well that he controlled the erotism of not a single one of his seventeen mistresses, he correctly inferred that his methods were faulty, and sought confidential help from the analyst to bring into full consciousness the reasons for his attempting in the future to cultivate a true and deep love for one woman.
His methods were shown to be faulty because of the fact that his clandestine relations with the numerous women were on a plane exclusively or too predominantly physical. He was made to realize that love is not love that does not include the entire personality of the lover, physical, mental and spiritual.
§ 72
The confrontation of a shallow sipper like this with really profound femininity is a test of virility in the highest erotic sense. The man perverted by traditional views of masculinity, which overvalue the physical side, and unenlightened by the modern psychology of love is face to face with a situation for which he is utterly unprepared.
A man’s so-called satisfaction, then, with the superficial surrender of a woman up to the point where she consents to let him try to control her erotism is not, however, satisfaction at all but a withdrawal from a test of virility. This primary consent on the woman’s part is not a submission but merely in effect a consent to examine or as it were to make a survey of his manliness. Of this she is, of course, entirely unconscious. If she were conscious of it she would have one of the traits of the promiscuous woman. But even if it is unconscious in her it is just as operative as if it were conscious. And the result of the test is also unconscious in the woman, if the test shows that the man is found wanting.
Her reaction to the man found wanting is as various as is the upbringing of women, from the immediate rejection in divorce on the grounds of incompatibility to the lifelong slavery in which she gradually withers.
Under the present inanely stupid method of bringing up women in total ignorance of sex, and in blindness to the truly erotic, a woman has no means whatever of estimating a man’s erotic virility before marriage and practically no standard of judging him after. If she had, she might do something to get him to learn of the existence of true mating.
And if she could know and could tell her husband how he failed, she would then have a chance of becoming happy. No really human man will choose the greater of two evils or refuse the greater of two good things, no matter when or how that choice is offered to him, although to him it may be humiliating whether first or last, to have it laid before him by the woman.
§ 73
But no whole man will be other than fired by this consent to test. If he is cloyed by it, his being so demonstrates his inadequacy; it proves his anesthesia, his insensibility, his blindness to the future possibilities of complete binary love-living.
To him this failure of his, this revulsion of feeling at the precise moment when he has entered the very lists of love, this slacker’s attitude, seems not a desertion on his part, not a failure of his, but a sudden loss of charm on her part. She is, upon trial, not what he had expected and longed for. But the failure, the loss of charm are his, not hers. He ought to be the charmer. He ought to have been informed that it is his privilege and power to attain the pleasure of putting his woman into another world of sheer exuberant joy—that his own pleasure in life can be attained by no other means; and that the consent of the woman to be his wife is a consent not to take one step with him, and then have him vanish, but to travel the path of life-love to its end—a path that is long and joyous, a path from which no seeing man, no man with eyes of love, can ever wish to depart. For with him is happiness personified and before him and leading him on is light.
§ 74
The acts and scenes and various episodes and strophes of this lifelong drama are never more than parts, and are organically related each to the other and to the whole life poem. No matter what one’s egoistic-social impulses and activities are, the racial theme, i.e., emotional culture and development, should be as far as possible continuous and its phrases related. The racial theme is organic, emotional. The narrower national, or sectional, theme in life is the intellectual one.
For the so-called sexual act the term love episode has been substituted in this book. Like a duet on an operatic stage it should be just as much a combination of the melody of the emotions of each of the two partners, and the harmony of both of their orchestras of emotions, as are the melody and harmony arranged by the composer of an opera score. The husband should be the composer.
It will be replied that the ordinary man is not of the intellectual calibre of the Wagners, Gounods, and Verdis, and that if the love life is to be so exalted in the ordinary marriage it would be a hopeless task, for so few men have the intellectuality to create a work of art of such dimensions.
But the greatness of composers and poets consists in their approaching so near to life with media so inorganic as sound and sight; and while music is enjoyed by most people, different styles and grades of music have the characteristic of bringing the melody and harmony to a definite and gratifying end. Music therefore essentially consists of the art of producing a tension and finally a relaxation of human emotions by means of sound.
Love as an art consists of the same production of tension and relaxation in a rhythm whose first pulsation begins even in childhood and whose last is coincident with the final heartbeat of the individual.
§ 75
Love, in the sense used above, practically includes every action of the husband or wife in relation to each other, from the beginning of the first act of love-living to the end of their joint life.
The love episode is not a violent activity for a brief space of five or ten minutes. In its highest form it begins when either of the pair thinks of any part of it. A true work of erotic art will progress from these thoughts, through all the phases of verbal mention, or actual carrying out of any preliminary—all the various verbal and other endearments, all the caresses and changing contacts, in multitudinous variety of external circumstances. It will progress through the purely physical part of it, or that part which is regarded as purely physical (but which never is, exclusively), and will continue for an hour to a day after the erotic acme.
During this post-acme time all the thoughts and emotions of each will be referred to the past episode and not to any future one. In the interim between the evanescence of these thought-reverberations, and the growing tension of another approaching love episode there may be a space of some hours or a day or two, but, where there is a fully expressed love life, never more than that.
§ 76
There is an unmistakable sign when the union of the two natures of a man and a woman has taken place. It is not the procreation of children, it is not living together only, it is not a joint bank account or any mere superficial unity or congeniality of external (egoistic-social) interests; but it is an emotional reaction at a time of intimate physical communion, a flood of feeling of an absolutely unique character, which, once experienced, leads true lovers to say that nothing in the world they have ever heard of could be in any respect like it—a flood of feeling, which, like the perigee tide, enters and fills every nook and cranny of the being of each, just as the waters of an estuary rise and fill and overflow when the sun and the moon both pull together and the wind blows into the river’s mouth.
And the first time that emotional flood tide is experienced is nothing to what later psychosomatic communion may attain. Man and wife looking back on their honeymoon thirty years before realize poignantly how infinitely more exalted and overwhelming is their present-day love communion than were the unsteady, brief and trembling, uncoördinated embraces of their early married life. True, they looked at each other with eyes of love long years before, but such simple, ignorant, artless infantile eyes, that looked without seeing half there was to see. They have learned each other as they never could have learned any two, much less three or more, of the other sex. Each has learned how to give, and that riches consist only in power to give, and that power to give is developed only by giving, just as skill in swimming comes from swimming and not from standing on the shore.
So they immerge each day into the invigorating ocean, and glory in the rise and fall of its surf, in its colour and in its refreshing coolness; and when they become too old to swim, they will sit by the open fire and exchange sweet reminiscences of bygone plunges, until their spirits together breast the waves of infinity and eternity forever.
§ 77
One of the factors of the general marital muddle that constitutes most marriages is the ignorance of husband or wife, or both, about whether their sex life, if they still continue it, is normal. What are the evidences that the consummation of marital life has taken place as satisfactorily as could be wished, or as could occur with the pair in question, or (as is supposed at any rate) takes place with the newly married lovers on their honeymoon?
It is not enough merely to be able to say they are happy, for they will sometimes say so whether they know they are or not, and they will in some cases not know. In fact few people in or out of the wedded state know whether they are truly happy or not or how to become happy if they are not so.
If a husband and wife are happy together they will have begun to make their marital life a love drama, by the frequent enactment of the love episode as described in these pages and their outlook upon life will be buoyant and positive.
§ 78
In The Secret Places of the Heart, H. G. Wells has plainly indicated that the love episode has taken place between Sir Richmond Hardy and Miss Grammont. He writes only of the calm which follows the emotional storm, and in these words (p. 253):
“At the breakfast table it was Belinda (Miss Grammont’s companion) who was the most nervous of the three, the most moved, the most disposed to throw a sacramental air over their last meal together. Her companions had passed beyond the idea of separation; it was as if they now cherished a secret satisfaction at the high dignity of their parting. Belinda in some way perceived they had become different. They were no longer tremulous lovers. They seemed sure of one another and with a new pride in their bearing.”
§ 79
Some husbands treat their wives with a satisfactory erotic technique from the first, and a few continue it through their entire married life. Others err from the first, through ignorance, and still others are backsliders in the pursuit of the erotic art; and true love departs from these.
There have been others who by accident have found after years of wedded life the key to marital happiness, or have been instructed by some erotologist—some physician who knows or some intimate friend.
The story of one husband who happened to discover for himself a secret that had escaped him for years is here given:
It was in the twentieth year of their marriage. Their son was eighteen and their daughter sixteen. Another daughter was not yet born.
They were off for a week in the month of August in the Adirondacks. All the morning they had tramped over the hills until they came to a lake, solitary, shut in by forests, a mountain overtowering the side opposite them—reflected green and blue in the waters that met their eyes as they approached a beach of fine white sand.
Sitting awhile they rejoiced in having found so fine a place to eat their lunch. They were miles from any human habitation. A heron floated majestically through the air. A kingfisher hurried noisily athwart their view. A fish jumped out of the water a dozen rods away and made a circle of waves which slowly enlarged until it became lost to sight.
Instinctively they both threw off their clothes and stepped down to the water’s edge hand in hand.
“I’ll beat you in!”
“Let’s swim to that little island.”
In they splashed and swam the first few yards under water, he leading the way, she following, but his eyes closely watching for any indication on her part of fatigue.
“Stay near me, Matey, there’s nothing but water where I am.”
“All right, Naiade, put your hand on my shoulder and rest awhile. We’re almost there!”
He felt her warm hand on his shoulder and her thumb on the back of his neck, and the warmth of the sun on his rapidly drying hair—there in the pure water almost arrived at the wooded islet. He felt the impact of the water on his flank stirred by the leisurely motions of her other hand and arm as she made as if to help him tow her to shore.
They climbed up and sat on a mossy bank out of sight of every living thing, looking from a shady spot at the lake shimmering in the sunlight.
“Our lunch is over there. We should have brought it with us. Nevertheless I’ll feed upon thy lips, Corinna.
“What an experience this is! I never had a swim like this before. A perfect day and a perfect place. Isolation complete. Thou beside me singing in the wilderness, but this is a very Eden and we are undisputed owners of it for this hour. I’m rich in time. I’d just as soon stay here till sunset. An absolutely perfect place to rest and play. I feel as if I could do anything—omnipotent as the gods of old, dependent on nothing. It thrills me to think of myself—just me—and you—just you—the only humans in all the world we see. If I were a magician I’d turn this moss into a magic carpet and we’d fly through space.”
“Oh, Matey dear, I feel as if I were flying! Tell me more like that. Continue the story. Tell it softly close in my ear.”
“Up, out from this islet we are flying, without deafening roar of airplane engine, but just soaring, soaring, wheeling in the air like eagles, you and I together. Far subtler motion than the intermittent strokes with which we paddled to that green islet now so far below us. Blue sky all about and sunshine warm upon my shoulders and your breasts. See down below us now a cloud. See our silhouette dotting the grey mist of it. And look, dearest! That rainbow of which our shadow is the centre. It makes a complete circle. Did you ever seen the whole circle of iridescence like that? You never could on earth. Look again, for soon we shall pass that cloud. A perfect circle of perfect rainbow colours—symbol of infinite beauty.”
“Stop, Matey, this flight of yours is too thrilling. Take me down to earth.”
“Matey, dear, in all our twenty years of love, I never knew you till this day. Why did you not teach me about you before this?”
They were now slowly swimming through the placid waters of the lake toward the beach of white sand whence they had adventurously departed two hours before. The sun warmed their heads and the cool waters of the lake caressed their glowing bodies.
They stepped upon the sandy beach again.
They devoured their lunch with eagerness.
They now, while eating, having dried in the sun, by force of habit put on their conventional incumbrances of sex-differentiating toggery, took up their staffs and turned their backs upon the lake with its silvery waves and white sandy beach and slowly wended their way hand in hand through the forest, to the road leading to the inn.
As they walked along the mountain road slipping on stones and gravel each saw in the other’s eyes a new flame of love never lighted there before.
“I wonder, Matey, what it was that made this day’s adventure the grand adventure of my life? I never saw you look so fine before. I never felt closer to you than I do this minute. Why have you never before told me a story like that, that fired my imagination as yours seemed to be?”
“I suppose I never felt fired just that way myself. Ideas occurred to me I’d never had before. Besides, I’ve done a pile of thinking lately—and reading, too. I think I’ve succeeded in piecing out a pretty good fairy tale about us. It makes me much more interested in your view of the world than ever I was before. But I can tell you other stories now. I think I’ve learned how to fire your imagination.”
“You have, indeed! I’m eager for the next. When will it be?”
“Almost any time we have an hour or two alone. We need time to get up steam, so to speak. We don’t need to swim in a mountain lake every time either. I think you got your particular thrill because you had me and my mind absolutely all to yourself.”
“Can I ever get that again?”
“Surely, dear heart, for when I saw for the first time that look in your eyes, which was not joy alone but pure fire, I learned something about you I never knew before. I realized that you yourself are a far more complex and interesting personality with infinitely more potentialities than ever I had dreamed of. Do you think now I would ever stop telling you stories like that?”
“I don’t remember a word of it except the perfect rainbow circle. The rest was silence. But it had somehow a world of meaning for me. I know we swam. I know we couldn’t fly, but you made me think we did, which is quite as good for me.”
§ 80
“Dear, why has it taken us twenty years to love each other as we do now?”
“It was our ignorance, which was so dense that it did not know it was ignorant. That’s the blackest kind. What we knew was that we had affection for each other, and for our children, but the lack of passion was not clearly sensed, because there was no article in our creed of love that declared passion to be a necessary factor in our marriage. We knew the phrase ‘all in all to each other’; we identified ourselves in countless superficial ways in addition to the really solid identification represented in our children, but while we did it with our intellects we really did not do it with our hearts. We have not been truly united, truly fused, until this day.
“It needn’t have taken us twenty years, or even one year, for there are people who instinctively soar in the same ecstatic flight in their honeymoon, that we achieved only after twenty years of external devotion and watchfulness. But those whose early married life is instantly complete in total physical and emotional fusion think everyone else is the same as they are and they don’t know what they have any more than we did not know what we did not have. A colour-blind man in a world of people all colour-blind would not suspect his affliction. Possibly it wouldn’t be an affliction. He might only laugh at the extraordinary persons who say they can see colours in things visible, just as we now consider people freaks who say they can see colour in sounds.”
“Do you think, dear, that most people are blind to the kind of love we see now?”
“I do, for the vision of the circular rainbow on top of the cloud is something that really requires a certain fine sensitivity that is the product of civilization, and depends on the many factors of civilized life. I could not, as my remote ancestors could, carry you off your feet in a literal sense, and dominate you by sheer physical strength, which would have been the only earthbound flight possible with men of that age. Civilization has transmuted physical strength into mental, moral and spiritual strength. And just as physical strength was sensibly evident in every action and motion of the body, so now, in our present state of civilization, it is obscured or obliterated and every mental reaction to our environment is taking its place. To some women the strength of this mental reaction is invisible, and even today they can love with passion only the physically perfect man. But the majority of women now have been educated to the point of realizing that physical strength may be present in men whose mental and moral development is very small and that mental and moral strength may exist even in the men whose physique is slight and even frail.”
“Do you think you’re so much stronger mentally, morally and spiritually than you were? Did you cultivate that strength consciously? Could you tell others how to do it?”
“Yes, dear one, to all three questions, and so are you. The thing that finally touched off this day’s passionate union was our realization, helped by the increasing frankness forced by modern science on all vital matters, that sex life is a part of the love life, and that not only is sex not exclusively physical, but it is more mental than physical. Men as ancient as Ovid knew that love is an art, but they did not know it as well as we do today. If it is an art, it can be taught, it must be taught. The reason it has not been taught is the taboo on sex. But that is being lifted gradually and people are beginning to realize that sexless love is as impossible as birth is impossible without the fusion of male and female germ cells. The ancient love manuals were all composed by men to enable men to get greater physical pleasure out of what they called love. The modern idea is that man and woman together are each to contribute an equal and complementary part to a spiritual fusion comparable to the fusion of two human germ cells, and that as the male cell causes a reaction on the entirety of the female cell, so the female cell causes a total reaction on the entirety of the male cell. To say that either absorbs the other is quite misleading. They stand side by side and merely melt together, forming another different cell which is the combination of all the properties of the two. This idea of love implies that the two lovers be equally frank and open in every way, concealing nothing of their own feelings from each other.”
“But, dearest, some women, I’m sure, are unable to express themselves, and others instinctively avoid revealing their true feelings, fearing perhaps to reveal because they may be giving away something it might be to their advantage to keep. They think that if they let any man, even their newly married husband, know how much they love him, they will cheapen themselves in their husband’s eyes, where they desire to be valued the most.”
“Do you think you would love me less if you felt you owned me less? If you did, your love has possibly too much of ownership in it. Love is not possession, any more than it is the inability to possess.”
§ 81
The erotic acme is the detumescence following a tumescence which activates, in order to secure, a repose which can exist in consciousness only by contrast with the intense activity, vivification and vitalization of spheres of experience otherwise remaining without or beyond one’s ken.
A kiss which is ever so little retarded, a youth laying softly his lips on those of a fair maiden, and, for the period of a breath or two not taking them away, feeling that not alone the lips touched hers nor yet only his arms embraced her, is filled with a natural response which tingles through his frame to his very fingertips and makes soft and undulating the sea crag on which they stand. More of her at once would be too keen a pleasure, would make him faintly dizzy with a joy to which he is unoriented.
The halo of that first kiss fades not in a day but lingers through his sleep, recurring poignantly like the after image of the sun caught by chance directly in his eyes.
All his being is pervaded by the sweet breathlessness of that virgin experience of a maiden’s lips, a touch that spreads like fire through his body and craves quenching by another kiss which but extends the influence of the first.
“Our lips have met, a touch compared with which our hand-clasp was a grinding of rocks in the mad surging of the ocean surf.
“Our lips have met, a fragrance above the honeysuckle and the roses of the hedge.
“Our lips have met, our breasts have asked us too, why should not they repose on one another. Our hands have known each other’s sides, and flanks have questioned why they also might not have the soft contact.
“Why should not all the remotest parts of us clamor to share in this meeting of two lovers’ lips? Each of us is whole and every part fired to yearn for what every other part feels.
“I look into your eyes and see the world. All that invites to do and feel and learn. There’s not a drop of blood within my veins that does not hurry on its joyous course, to tell the uttermost confines of me, that here in you I find a counterpart, for every region of my living self.
“We cannot part for hours. This sandy shore, warm with an August sun, shall be our couch, remote from interruption. You are mine and I am yours for now and evermore. Not till I know you all, and you feel me pervading all the regions of your soul, shall we be able then to take anew the threads of our existence in the world and weave with them a common robe for both in which enclosed we act toward our fellows, a single person binary in form.”
“My breathing now is calm like yours; our blood is throbbing softly in our veins, we two went through a fire together, keen, that welded our two spirits into one—inseparable, self-contained, at rest.
“Are other men and women thus close fused, each through the other’s eyes beholding life? If not, dear one, the only other joy, not yet by us slow tasted, is to look and see how we can make them also feel the deep-down inner satisfaction pierce the very roots of their own being too, without which we should lack companionship, and feel ourselves unique and lonely. Thus, by throwing this same brilliant light of life with which we have ourselves been newly filled, about us, we can see what ne’er before we saw back in the times when naught we knew of this glad melting each in other’s soul here on the sandy rock-bound ocean shore, where wave and gravel mingle, air and sea and sun and sky; one universal touch and penetration of each other’s heart. Now we are whole that fragments were before.”
§ 82
The rationalistic thought may occur to some men that a woman’s all can be taken at one love episode. It may come from her uttering words to the effect that she is all his. If his means with his destructive mark on it she is utterly his, to be sure, if he has ruined her. But by a perfect love episode one can ruin only the egoistic-social value of this woman for some other man. For any other man her sexual value would be only increased by the proper kind of love episode.
But her erotic value is something that can exist only for the man whom she loves and who loves her. The first properly erotic love episode can never destroy or ruin but only create, or begin the creation, of a woman out of a gynecoid female. A true woman according to the use of the term in this book is a female who has become fused with a male. Then she becomes a woman and he a man. The nature of this fusion has been discussed elsewhere.
§ 83
As a woman’s all cannot be taken at one love episode, except that “all” which is constituted by her strictly egoistic-social property value, it follows that in the true erotic sense, nothing is taken unless possibly as one should chip a piece of marble from a block out of which one was to carve a statue of the Goddess of Love. The fragment of marble chiselled away at the first stroke of the hammer is no part of the statue.
§ 84
The thought that the husband is getting an egoistic-socially valuable possession by the exercise of his rights at the first love episode is therefore quite absurd. He is performing an act which is in the nature of a creation, if rightly carried out, but which is destruction if he does not himself hold his instincts under absolute control.
That the love episode does not take away from woman anything that makes her poorer is indicated by the fact, noticed by Ellis and others, that woman’s erotic nature is deeper and stronger than man’s. For the development of this great erotic nature it is as absolutely necessary for her to be controlled by a man quite master of his own sex instincts, as it is necessary for an ovum to be met by a zoösperm, if it is going to develop any further than its ovum condition.
At a single love episode, neither can the woman’s all be taken by a man nor can her development be completed. The first episode is only the beginning of a development, that needs the entire excess energies of her man for the rest of their joint lives. In the sections on virginity it will also appear that except in a superficial egoistic-social sense, her psychical virginity cannot always be terminated at the first love episode.
§ 85
The thought that she has given her all to him is worked out still further in the irrational conclusion, which comes to some men’s minds, that there may be nothing left for himself for a future occasion. Therefore he will not take all this time, so as to leave a little for next time.
Possibly getting all of her at one stroke may be the root thought in Don Juanism. Jus primæ noctis may have originated from the idea that the noble lord should get all there was in the vicinity to get; and he was exercising his right to own and get everything in sight. The men who cool in their affections (or whose passions cool) immediately after the possession of the persons of their love objects may be inspired by exactly this egoistic-social thought, that there is a possession that may be acquired by means of one love episode, after which the woman has no more to give.
§ 86
In phantasying, in his own ecstasy, the complete surrender of the woman (cf. § 158), a man may also phantasy her being exhausted, dry like an eaten orange, or, like a flower, drained of its honey by a bee; not realizing that the beginning of a woman’s love is only the beginning of an infinite growth, which he alone is able to develop for himself, and which no other man can develop for him—that, in short, a man who deserts one woman after another is simply showing an essentially perverted appetite.
What any one of these tasted and rejected women might later be developed into, in the shape of a full-blooded rich, warm femininity, he has not the intelligence to conceive. Possibly the cynical roué might say—look at the older women, are many of them attractive? To which we should reply no, but the reason they are not is simply that they were not properly loved into a state of full erotic development, in which they would have preserved the attractiveness of youth.
§ 87
The only true human love drama is one that has an organic relation to a whole lifetime of love. To the Don Juan type of ravisher of virgins the love episode, as part of a life drama with unity in it, does not exist. He satisfies himself with beginnings, with staking out foundations for other people to build and live in the homes constructed by their hands, not realizing, for his imagination is poor and weak, how soon his little stakes will be pulled up and thrown away by the first workers on the house, even if they do not entirely reject his plan’s outlines.
The only true love of a man for a woman is that in which he studies her reactions to his own behaviour, and cultivates that power of his, which is the innate power residing in any whole man, to control the entire emotional life of one woman, let her intellectual life be what it may.
“Why,” the man of the world may say, “should any man be satisfied with only one woman, when, if he has personal attractiveness, he may find hundreds of women ready to fall into his arms, and may drink the love life to the dregs?” What Enobarbus said of Cleopatra may be said of any woman, if she be developed by a man, as she should be.