the union of marriage is raised to the high and beautiful dignity it deserves, and can attain in this world.  It comprehends sympathy, love, and perfect understanding, even of the faults and weaknesses of both sides.”  “The foundation of every true woman’s love,” another woman writes, “is a mother’s tenderness.  He whom she loves is a child of larger growth, although she may at the same time have a deep respect for him.” (See also, for similar opinion of another woman of distinguished intellectual ability, footnote at beginning of “The Psychic State in Pregnancy” in volume v of these Studies.)

It is on the basis of these elemental human facts that the permanently seductive and inspiring relationships of sex are developed, and not by the emergence of personalities who combine impossibly exalted characteristics.  “The task is extremely difficult,” says Kisch in his Sexual Life of Woman, “but a clever and virtuous modern wife must endeavor to combine in her single personality the sensuous attractiveness of an Aspasia, the chastity of a Lucrece, and the intellectual greatness of a Cornelia.”  And in an earlier century we are told in the novel of La Tia Fingida, which has sometimes been attributed to Cervantes, that “a woman should be an angel in the street, a saint in church, beautiful at the window, honest in the house, and a demon in bed.”  The demands made of men by women, on the other hand, have been almost too lofty to bear definite formulation at all.  “Ninety-nine out of a hundred loving women,” says Helene Stoecker, “certainly believe that if a thousand other men have behaved ignobly, and forsaken, ill-used, and deceived the woman they love, the man they love is an exception, marked out from all other men; that is the reason they love him.”  It may be doubted, however, if the great lovers have ever stood very far above the ordinary level of humanity by their possession of perfection.  They have been human, and their art of love has not always excluded the possession of human frailties; perfection, indeed, even if it could be found, would furnish a bad soil for love to strike deep roots in.

It is only when we realize the highly complex nature of the elements which make up erotic love that we can understand how it is that that love can constitute so tremendous a revelation and exert so profound an influence even in men of the greatest genius and intellect and in the sphere of their most spiritual activity.  It is not merely passion, nor any conscious skill in the erotic art,—­important as these may be,—­that would serve to account for Goethe’s relationship to Frau von Stein, or Wagner’s to Mathilde Wesendonck, or that of Robert and Elizabeth Browning to each other.[420]