truly possesses, who is willing, if need be, not to possess.  He is indeed a master of life who, accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body, and not refusing them, knows how to transform them at will into the most rare and fragrant flowers of human emotion.”

Beyond its functions in building up character, in heightening and ennobling the erotic life, and in subserving the adequate fulfilment of family and social duties, chastity has a more special value for those who cultivate the arts.  We may not always be inclined to believe the writers who have declared that their verse alone is wanton, but their lives chaste.  It is certainly true, however, that a relationship of this kind tends to occur.  The stuff of the sexual life, as Nietzsche says, is the stuff of art; if it is expended in one channel it is lost for the other.  The masters of all the more intensely emotional arts have frequently cultivated a high degree of chastity.  This is notably the case as regards music; one thinks of Mozart,[89] of Beethoven, of Schubert, and many lesser men.  In the case of poets and novelists chastity may usually seem to be less prevalent but it is frequently well-marked, and is not seldom disguised by the resounding reverberations which even the slightest love-episode often exerts on the poetic organism.  Goethe’s life seems, at a first glance, to be a long series of continuous love-episodes.  Yet when we remember that it was the very long life of a man whose vigor remained until the end, that his attachments long and profoundly affected his emotional life and his work, and that with most of the women he has immortalized he never had actual sexual relationships at all, and when we realize, moreover, that, throughout, he accomplished an almost inconceivably vast amount of work, we shall probably conclude that sexual indulgence had a very much smaller part in Goethe’s life than in that of many an average man on whom it leaves no obvious emotional or intellectual trace whatever.  Sterne, again, declared that he must always have a Dulcinea dancing in his head, yet the amount of his intimate relations with women appears to have been small.  Balzac spent his life toiling at his desk and carrying on during many years a love correspondence with a woman he scarcely ever saw and at the end only spent a few months of married life with.  The like experience has befallen many artistic creators.  For, in the words of Landor, “absence is the invisible and incorporeal mother of ideal beauty.”

We do well to remember that, while the auto-erotic manifestations through the brain are of infinite variety and importance, the brain and the sexual organs are yet the great rivals in using up bodily energy, and that there is an antagonism between extreme brain vigor and extreme sexual vigor, even although they may sometimes both appear at different periods in the same individual.[90] In this sense there is no paradox in the saying of Ramon Correa that potency is impotence and impotence potency, for a high degree of energy, whether in athletics or in intellect or in sexual activity, is unfavorable to the display of energy in other directions.  Every high degree of potency has its related impotencies.