Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Vi Part 30

[349]

Ten years ago, if not still, the United States came fourth in order of frequency of divorce, after j.a.pan, Denmark, and Switzerland.

[350]

Lecky, the historian of European morals, has pointed out (Democracy and Liberty, vol. ii, p. 172) the close connection generally between facility of divorce and a high standard of s.e.xual morality.

[351]

So, e.g., Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, vol. i, p. 237.

[352]

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

[353]

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

[354]

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

[355]

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

[356]

Hobhouse, op. cit. vol. i, p. 237.

[357]

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

[358]

This point of view has been vigorously set forth by Paul and Victor Margueritte, Quelques Idees.

[359]

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

[360]

See, e.g., P. and V. Margueritte, op. cit.

[361]

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

[362]

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

[363]

Hobhouse, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 159, 237-9; cf. P. and V. Margueritte, Quelques Idees.

[364]

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

[365]

See, ante, p. 425.

[366]

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

[367]

Nietzold, Die Ehe in aegypten zur Ptolemaisch-romischen Zeit, 1903, p. 3. This bond also accorded rights to any children that might be born during its existence.

[368]

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

[369]

Ellen Key, Liebe und Ehe, p. 168; cf. the same author's Century of the Child.

[370]

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

[371]

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

[372]

"Almost everywhere," says Westermarck of polygyny (which he discusses fully in Chs. XX-XXII of his History of Human Marriage) "it is confined to the smaller part of the people, the vast majority being monogamous." Maurice Gregory (Contemporary Review, Sept., 1906) gives statistics showing that nearly everywhere the tendency is towards equality in number of the s.e.xes.

[373]

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

[374]

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

CHAPTER XI.

THE ART OF LOVE.

Marriage Not Only for Procreation-Theologians on the Sacramentum Solationis-Importance of the Art of Love-The Basis of Stability in Marriage and the Condition for Right Procreation-The Art of Love the Bulwark Against Divorce-The Unity of Love and Marriage a Principle of Modern Morality-Christianity and the Art of Love-Ovid-The Art of Love Among Primitive Peoples-s.e.xual Initiation in Africa and Elsewhere-The Tendency to Spontaneous Development of the Art of Love in Early Life-Flirtation-s.e.xual Ignorance in Women-The Husband's Place in s.e.xual Initiation-s.e.xual Ignorance in Men-The Husband's Education for Marriage-The Injury Done by the Ignorance of Husbands-The Physical and Mental Results of Unskilful Coitus-Women Understand the Art of Love Better Than Men-Ancient and Modern Opinions Concerning Frequency of Coitus-Variation in s.e.xual Capacity-The s.e.xual Appet.i.te-The Art of Love Based on the Biological Facts of Courtship-The Art of Pleasing Women-The Lover Compared to the Musician-The Proposal as a Part of Courtship-Divination in the Art of Love-The Importance of the Preliminaries in Courtship-The Unskilful Husband Frequently the Cause of the Frigid Wife-The Difficulty of Courtship-Simultaneous o.r.g.a.s.m-The Evils of Incomplete Gratification in Women-Coitus Interruptus-Coitus Reservatus-The Human Method of Coitus-Variations in Coitus-Posture in Coitus-The Best Time for Coitus-The Influence of Coitus in Marriage-The Advantages of Absence in Marriage-The Risks of Absence-Jealousy-The Primitive Function of Jealousy-Its Predominance Among Animals, Savages, etc., and in Pathological States-An Anti-Social Emotion-Jealousy Incompatible with the Progress of Civilization-The Possibility of Loving More Than One Person at a Time-Platonic Friendship-The Conditions Which Make It Possible-The Maternal Element in Woman's Love-The Final Development of Conjugal Love-The Problem of Love One of the Greatest of Social Questions.

It will be clear from the preceding discussion that there are two elements in every marriage so far as that marriage is complete. On the one hand marriage is a union prompted by mutual love and only sustainable as a reality, apart from its mere formal side, by the cultivation of such love. On the other hand marriage is a method for propagating the race and having its end in offspring. In the first aspect its aim is erotic, in the second parental. Both these ends have long been generally recognized. We find them set forth, for instance, in the marriage service of the Church of England, where it is stated that marriage exists both for "the mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other," and also for "the procreation of children." Without the factor of mutual love the proper conditions for procreation cannot exist; without the factor of procreation the s.e.xual union, however beautiful and sacred a relationship it may in itself be, remains, in essence, a private relationship, incomplete as a marriage and without public significance. It becomes necessary, therefore, to supplement the preceding discussion of marriage in its general outlines by a final and more intimate consideration of marriage in its essence, as embracing the art of love and the science of procreation.

There has already been occasion from time to time to refer to those who, starting from various points of view, have sought to limit the scope of marriage and to suppress one or other of its elements. (See e.g., ante, p. 135.)

In modern times the tendency has been to exclude the factor of procreation, and to regard the relationship of marriage as exclusively lying in the relationship of the two parties to each other. Apart from the fact, which it is unnecessary again to call attention to, that, from the public and social point of view, a marriage without children, however important to the two persons concerned, is a relationship without any public significance, it must further be said that, in the absence of children, even the personal erotic life itself is apt to suffer, for in the normal erotic life, especially in women, s.e.xual love tends to grow into parental love. Moreover, the full development of mutual love and dependence is with difficulty attained, and there is absence of that closest of bonds, the mutual cooperation of two persons in producing a new person. The perfect and complete marriage in its full development is a trinity.

Those who seek to eliminate the erotic factor from marriage as unessential, or at all events as only permissible when strictly subordinated to the end of procreation, have made themselves heard from time to time at various periods. Even the ancients, Greeks and Romans alike, in their more severe moments advocated the elimination of the erotic element from marriage, and its confinement to extra-marital relationships, that is so far as men were concerned; for the erotic needs of married women they had no provision to make. Montaigne, soaked in cla.s.sic traditions, has admirably set forth the reasons for eliminating the erotic interest from marriage: "One does not marry for oneself, whatever may be said; a man marries as much, or more, for his posterity, for his family; the usage and interest of marriage touch our race beyond ourselves.... Thus it is a kind of incest to employ, in this venerable and sacred parentage, the efforts and the extravagances of amorous license" (Essais, Bk. i, Ch. XXIX; Bk. iii, Ch. V). This point of view easily commended itself to the early Christians, who, however, deliberately overlooked its reverse side, the establishment of erotic interests outside marriage. "To have intercourse except for procreation," said Clement of Alexandria (Paedagogus, Bk. ii, Ch. X), "is to do injury to Nature." While, however, that statement is quite true of the lower animals, it is not true of man, and especially not true of civilized man, whose erotic needs are far more developed, and far more intimately a.s.sociated with the finest and highest part of the organism, than is the case among animals generally. For the animal, s.e.xual desire, except when called forth by the conditions involved by procreative necessities, has no existence. It is far otherwise in man, for whom, even when the question of procreation is altogether excluded, s.e.xual love is still an insistent need, and even a condition of the finest spiritual development. The Catholic Church, therefore, while regarding with admiration a continence in marriage which excluded s.e.xual relations except for the end of procreation, has followed St. Augustine in treating intercourse apart from procreation with considerable indulgence, as only a venial sin. Here, however, the Church was inclined to draw the line, and it appears that in 1679 Innocent XI condemned the proposition that "the conjugal act, practiced for pleasure alone, is exempt even from venial sin."

Protestant theologians have been inclined to go further, and therein they found some authority even in Catholic writers. John a Lasco, the Catholic Bishop who became a Protestant and settled in England during Edward VI's reign, was following many mediaeval theologians when he recognized the sacramentum solationis, in addition to proles, as an element of marriage. Cranmer, in his marriage service of 1549, stated that "mutual help and comfort," as well as procreation, enter into the object of marriage (Wickham Legg, Ecclesiological Essays, p. 204; Howard, Matrimonial Inst.i.tutions, vol. i, p. 398). Modern theologians speak still more distinctly. "The s.e.xual act," says Northcote (Christianity and s.e.x Problems, p. 55), "is a love act. Duly regulated, it conduces to the ethical welfare of the individual and promotes his efficiency as a social unit. The act itself and its surrounding emotions stimulate within the organism the powerful movements of a vast psychic life." At an earlier period also, Schleiermacher, in his Letters on Lucinde, had pointed out the great significance of love for the spiritual development of the individual.

Edward Carpenter truly remarks, in Love's Coming of Age, that s.e.xual love is not only needed for physical creation, but also for spiritual creation. Bloch, again, in discussing this question (The s.e.xual Life of Our Time, Ch. VI) concludes that "love and the s.e.xual embrace have not only an end in procreation, they const.i.tute an end in themselves, and are necessary for the life, development, and inner growth of the individual himself."

It is argued by some, who admit mutual love as a const.i.tuent part of marriage, that such love, once recognized at the outset, may be taken for granted, and requires no further discussion; there is, they believe, no art of love to be either learnt or taught; it comes by nature. Nothing could be further from the truth, most of all as regards civilized man. Even the elementary fact of coitus needs to be taught. No one could take a more austerely Puritanic view of s.e.xual affairs than Sir James Paget, and yet Paget (in his lecture on "s.e.xual Hypochondriasis") declared that "Ignorance about s.e.xual affairs seems to be a notable characteristic of the more civilized part of the human race. Among ourselves it is certain that the method of copulating needs to be taught, and that they to whom it is not taught remain quite ignorant about it." Gallard, again, remarks similarly (in his Clinique des Maladies des Femmes) that young people, like Daphnis in Longus's pastoral, need a beautiful Lycenion to give them a solid education, practical as well as theoretical, in these matters, and he considers that mothers should instruct their daughters at marriage, and fathers their sons. Philosophers have from time to time recognized the gravity of these questions and have discoursed concerning them; thus Epicurus, as Plutarch tells us,[375] would discuss with his disciples various s.e.xual matters, such as the proper time for coitus; but then, as now, there were obscurantists who would leave even the central facts of life to the hazards of chance or ignorance, and these presumed to blame the philosopher.