the happiness of the human species is abandoned to chance; all the experience of women is individual, like that of animals; it is lost with those women who, being naturally amiable, might have taught others to become so.  Prostitutes alone make a superficial study of it, and the lessons they receive are, for the most part, as harmful as those of respectable Greek and Roman matrons were holy and honorable, only tending to wantonness, to the exhaustion alike of the purse and of the physical faculties, while the aim of the ancient matrons was the union of husband and wife and their mutual attachment through pleasure.  The Christian religion annihilated the Mysteries as infamous, but we may regard that annihilation as one of the wrongs done by Christianity to humanity, as the work of men with little enlightenment and bitter zeal, dangerous puritans who were the natural enemies of marriage” (Retif de la Bretonne, Monsieur Nicolas, reprint of 1883, vol. x, pp. 160-3).  It may be added that Duehren (Dr. Iwan Bloch) regards Retif as “a master in the Ars Amandi,” and discusses him from this point of view in his Retif de la Bretonne (pp. 362-371).

Whether or not Christianity is to be held responsible, it cannot be doubted that throughout Christendom there has been a lamentable failure to recognize the supreme importance, not only erotically but morally, of the art of love.  Even in the great revival of sexual enlightenment now taking place around us there is rarely even the faintest recognition that in sexual enlightenment the one thing essentially necessary is a knowledge of the art of love.  For the most part, sexual instruction as at present understood, is purely negative, a mere string of thou-shalt-nots.  If that failure were due to the conscious and deliberate recognition that while the art of love must be based on physiological and psychological knowledge, it is far too subtle, too complex, too personal, to be formulated in lectures and manuals, it would be reasonable and sound.  But it seems to rest entirely on ignorance, indifference, or worse.

Love-making is indeed, like other arts, an art that is partly natural—­“an art that nature makes”—­and therefore it is a natural subject for learning and exercising in play.  Children left to themselves tend, both playfully and seriously, to practice love, alike on the physical and the psychic sides.[381] But this play is on its physical side sternly repressed by their elders, when discovered, and on its psychic side laughed at.  Among the well-bred classes it is usually starved out at an early age.