In harmony with this passage from Regnier’s novel are the remarks of a correspondent who writes to me of the function of urination that it “appeals sexually to most normal individuals.  My own observations and inquiries prove this.  Women themselves instinctively feel it.  The secrecy surrounding the matter lends, too, I think, a sexual interest.”

The fact that scatalogic processes may in some degree exert an attraction even in normal love has been especially emphasized by Bloch (Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil II, pp. 222, et seq.):  “The man whose intellect and aesthetic sense has been ‘clouded by the sexual impulse’ sees these things in an entirely different light from him who has not been overcome by the intoxication of love.  For him they are idealized (sit venia verbo) since they are a part of the beloved person, and in consequence associated with love.”  Bloch quotes the Memoiren einer Saengerin (a book which is said to be, though this seems doubtful, genuinely autobiographical) in the same sense:  “A man who falls in love with a girl is not dragged out of his poetic sphere by the thought that his beloved must relieve certain natural necessities every day.  It seems, indeed, to him to be just the opposite.  If one loves a person one finds nothing obscene or disgusting in the object that pleases me.”  The opposite attitude is probably in extreme cases due to the influence of a neurotic or morbidly sensitive temperament.  Swift possessed such a temperament.  The possession of a similar temperament is doubtless responsible for the little prose poem, “L’Extase,” in which Huysmans in his first book, Le Drageloir a Epices, has written an attenuated version of “Strephon and Chloe” to express the disillusionment of love; the lover lies in a wood clasping the hand of the beloved with rapturous emotion; “suddenly she rose, disengaged her hand, disappeared in the bushes, and I heard as it were the rustling of rain on the leaves.”  His dream has fled.

In estimating the significance of the lover’s attitude in this matter, it is important to realize the position which scatologic conceptions took in primitive belief.  At certain stages of early culture, when all the emanations of the body are liable to possess mysterious magic properties and become apt for sacred uses, the excretions, and especially the urine, are found to form part of religious ritual and ceremonial function.  Even among savages the excreta are frequently regarded as disgusting, but under the influence of these conceptions such disgust is inhibited, and those emanations of the body which are usually least honored become religious symbols.