but only before food.  Even the degraded ritual vestiges of the religious recognition of coitus are difficult to find in Europe.  We may perhaps detect it among the Spaniards, with their tenacious instinct for ritual, in the solemn etiquette with which, in the seventeenth century, it was customary, according to Madame d’Aulnoy, for the King to enter the bedchamber of the Queen:  “He has on his slippers, his black mantle over his shoulder, his shield on one arm, a bottle hanging by a cord over the other arm (this bottle is not to drink from, but for a quite opposite purpose, which you will guess).  With all this the King must also have his great sword in one hand and a dark lantern in the other.  In this way he must enter, alone, the Queen’s chamber” (Madame d’Aulnoy, Relation du Voyage d’Espagne, 1692, vol. iii, p. 221).

In discussing the art of love it is necessary to give a primary place to the central fact of coitus, on account of the ignorance that widely prevails concerning it, and the unfortunate prejudices which in their fungous broods flourish in the noisome obscurity around it.  The traditions of the Christian Church, which overspread the whole of Europe, and set up for worship a Divine Virgin and her Divine Son, both of whom it elaborately disengaged from personal contact with sexuality effectually crushed any attempt to find a sacred and avowable ideal in married love.  Even the Church’s own efforts to elevate matrimony were negatived by its own ideals.  That influence depresses our civilization even to-day.  When Walt Whitman wrote his “Children of Adam” he was giving imperfect expression to conceptions of the religious nature of sexual love which have existed wholesomely and naturally in all parts of the world, but had not yet penetrated the darkness of Christendom where they still seemed strange and new, if not terrible.  And the refusal to recognize the solemnity of sex had involved the placing of a pall of blackness and disrepute on the supreme sexual act itself.  It was shut out from the sunshine and excluded from the sphere of worship.

The sexual act is important from the point of view of erotic art, not only from the ignorance and prejudices which surround it, but also because it has a real value even in regard to the psychic side of married life.  “These organs,” according to the oft-quoted saying of the old French physician, Ambrose Pare, “make peace in the household.”  How this comes about we see illustrated from time to time in Pepys’s Diary.  At the same time, it is scarcely necessary to say, after all that has gone before, that this ancient source of domestic peace tends to be indefinitely complicated by the infinite variety in erotic needs, which become ever more pronounced with the growth of civilization.[408]