The art of love is, indeed, only beginning with the establishment of sexual intercourse.  In the adjustment of that relationship all the forces of nature are so strongly engaged that under completely favorable conditions—­which indeed very rarely occur in our civilization—­the knowledge of the art and a possible skill in its exercise come almost of themselves.  The real test of the artist in love is in the skill to carry it beyond the period when the interests of nature, having been really or seemingly secured, begin to slacken.  The whole art of love, it has been well said, lies in forever finding something new in the same person.  The art of love is even more the art of retaining love than of arousing it.  Otherwise it tends to degenerate towards the Shakespearian lust,

“Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated,”

though it must be remembered that even from the most strictly natural point of view the transitions of passion are not normally towards repulsion but towards affection.[409]

The young man and woman who are brought into the complete unrestraint of marriage after a prolonged and unnatural separation, during which desire and the satisfactions of desire have been artificially disconnected, are certainly not under the best conditions for learning the art of love.  They are tempted by reckless and promiscuous indulgence in the intimacies of marriage to fling carelessly aside all the reasons that make that art worth learning.  “There are married people,” as Ellen Key remarks, “who might have loved each other all their lives if they had not been compelled, every day and all the year, to direct their habits, wills, and inclinations towards each other.”

All the tendencies of our civilized life are, in personal matters, towards individualism; they involve the specialization, and they ensure the sacredness, of personal habits and even peculiarities.  This individualism cannot be broken down suddenly at the arbitrary dictation of a tradition, or even by the force of passion from which the restraints have been removed.  Out of deference to the conventions and prejudices of their friends, or out of the reckless abandonment of young love, or merely out of a fear of hurting each other’s feelings, young couples have often plunged prematurely into an unbroken intimacy which is even more disastrous to the permanency of marriage than the failure ever to reach a complete intimacy at all.  That is one of the chief reasons why most writers on the moral hygiene of marriage nowadays recommend separate beds for the married couple, if possible separate bedrooms, and even sometimes, with Ellen Key, see no objection to their living in separate houses.  Certainly the happiest marriages have often involved the closest and most unbroken intimacy, in persons peculiarly fitted for such intimacy.  It is far from true that, as Bloch has affirmed, familiarity is fatal to love.  It is deadly to a love that has no roots, but it is the nourishment of the deeply-rooted love.  Yet it remains true that absence is needed to maintain the keen freshness and fine idealism of love.  “Absence,” as Landor said, “is the invisible and incorporeal mother of ideal beauty.”  The married lovers who are only able to meet for comparatively brief periods between long absences have often experienced in these meetings a life-long succession of honeymoons.[410]