won by the promise of pleasure.  The tendency of the male to inflict pain must be restrained, so far as the female is concerned, by the consideration of what is pleasing to her.  Yet, the more carefully we study the essential elements of courtship, the clearer it becomes that, playful as these manifestations may seem on the surface, in every direction they are verging on pain.  It is so among animals generally; it is so in man among savages.  “It is precisely the alliance of pleasure and pain,” wrote the physiologist Burdach, “which constitutes the voluptuous emotion.”

Nor is this emotional attitude entirely confined to the male.  The female also in courtship delights to arouse to the highest degree in the male the desire for her favors and to withhold those favors from him, thus finding on her part also the enjoyment of power in cruelty.  “One’s cruelty is one’s power,” Millament says in Congreve’s Way of the World, “and when one parts with one’s cruelty one parts with one’s power.”

At the outset, then, the impulse to inflict pain is brought into courtship, and at the same time rendered a pleasurable idea to the female, because with primitive man, as well as among his immediate ancestors, the victor in love has been the bravest and strongest rather than the most beautiful or the most skilful.  Until he can fight he is not reckoned a man and he cannot hope to win a woman.  Among the African Masai a man is not supposed to marry until he has blooded his spear, and in a very different part of the world, among the Dyaks of Borneo, there can be little doubt that the chief incentive to head-hunting is the desire to please the women, the possession of a head decapitated by himself being an excellent way of winning a maiden’s favor.[62] Such instances are too well known to need multiplication here, and they survive in civilization, for, even among ourselves, although courtship is now chiefly ruled by quite other considerations, most women are in some degree emotionally affected by strength and courage.  But the direct result of this is that a group of phenomena with which cruelty and the infliction of pain must inevitably be more or less allied is brought within the sphere of courtship and rendered agreeable to women.  Here, indeed, we have the source of that love of cruelty which some have found so marked in women.  This is a phase of courtship which helps us to understand how it is that, as we shall see, the idea of pain, having become associated with sexual emotion, may be pleasurable to women.

Thus, in order to understand the connection between love and pain, we have once more to return to the consideration, under a somewhat new aspect, of the fundamental elements in the sexual impulse.  In discussing the “Evolution of Modesty” we found that the primary part of the female in courtship is the playful, yet serious, assumption of the role of a hunted animal who lures on the pursuer, not with the object of escaping, but with the object of being