Jan., 1896).  Naecke reports the case of a man whom he regards as a sexual athlete, who throughout his life had intercourse once or twice daily with his wife, or if she was unwilling, with another woman, until he became insane at the age of seventy-five (Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft, Aug., 1908, p. 507).  This should probably, however, be regarded rather as a case of morbid hyperaesthesia than of sexual athleticism.

At this stage we reach the fundamental elements of the art of love.  We have seen that many moral practices and moral theories which have been widely current in Christendom have developed traditions, still by no means extinct among us, which were profoundly antagonistic to the art of love.  The idea grew up of “marital duties,” of “conjugal rights."[400] The husband had the right and the duty to perform sexual intercourse with his wife, whatever her wishes in the matter might be, while the wife had the duty and the right (the duty in her case being usually put first) to submit to such intercourse, which she was frequently taught to regard as something low and merely physical, an unpleasant and almost degrading necessity which she would do well to put out of her thoughts as speedily as possible.  It is not surprising that such an attitude towards marriage has been highly favorable to conjugal unhappiness, more especially that of the wife,[401] and it has tended to promote adultery and divorce.  We might have been more surprised had it been otherwise.

The art of love is based on the fundamental natural fact of courtship; and courtship is the effort of the male to make himself acceptable to the female.[402] “The art of love,” said Vatsyayana, one of the greatest of authorities, “is the art of pleasing women.”  “A man must never permit himself a pleasure with his wife,” said Balzac in his Physiologie du Mariage, “which he has not the skill first to make her desire.”  The whole art of love is there.  Women, naturally and instinctively, seek to make themselves desirable to men, even to men whom they are supremely indifferent to, and the woman who is in love with a man, by an equally natural instinct, seeks to shape herself to the measure which individually pleases him.  This tendency is not really modified by the fundamental fact that in these matters it is only the arts that Nature makes which are truly effective.  It is finally by what he is that a man arouses a woman’s deepest emotions of sympathy or of antipathy, and he is often pleasing her more by displaying his fitness to play a great part in the world outside than by any acquired accomplishments in the arts of courtship.  When, however, the serious and intimate play of physical love begins, the woman’s part is, even biologically, on the surface the more passive part.[403] She is, on the physical side, inevitably the instrument in love; it must be his hand and his bow which evoke the music.

In speaking of the art of love, however, it is impossible to disentangle completely the spiritual from the physical.  The very attempt to do so is, indeed, a fatal mistake.  The man who can only perceive the physical side of the sexual relationship is, as Hinton was accustomed to say, on a level with the man who, in listening to a sonata of Beethoven on the violin, is only conscious of the physical fact that a horse’s tail is being scraped against a sheep’s entrails.