It may now be clear to the reader why it has been necessary in a discussion of the sexual impulse in its relationship to society to deal with the art of love.  It is true that there is nothing so intimately private and personal as the erotic affairs of the individual.  Yet it is equally true that these affairs lie at the basis of the social life, and furnish the conditions—­good or bad as the case may be—­of that procreative act which is a supreme concern of the State.  It is because the question of love is of such purely private interest that it tends to be submerged in the question of breed.  We have to realize, not only that the question of love subserves the question of breed, but also that love has a proper, a necessary, even a socially wholesome claim, to stand by itself and to be regarded for its own worth.

In the profoundly suggestive study of love which the distinguished sociologist Tarde left behind at his death (Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, loc. cit.), there are some interesting remarks on this point:  “Society,” he says, “has been far more, and more intelligently, preoccupied with the problem of answering the ‘question of breed’ than the ’question of love.’  The first problem fills all our civil and commercial codes.  The second problem has never been clearly stated, or looked in the face, not even in antiquity, still less since the coming of Christianity, for merely to offer the solutions of marriage and prostitution is manifestly inadequate.  Statesmen have only seen the side on which it touches population.  Hence the marriage laws.  Sterile love they profess to disdain.  Yet it is evident that, though born as the serf of generation, love tends by civilization to be freed from it.  In place of a simple method of procreation it has become an end, it has created itself a title, a royal title.  Our gardens cultivate flowers that are all the more charming because they are sterile; why is the double corolla of love held more infamous than the sterilized flowers of our gardens?” Tarde replies that the reason is that our politicians are merely ambitious persons thirsting for power and wealth, and even when they are lovers they are Don Juans rather than Virgils.  “The future,” he continues, “is to the Virgilians, because if the ambition of power, the regal wealth of American or European millionarism, once seemed nobler, love now more and more attracts to itself the best and highest parts of the soul, where lies the hidden ferment of all that is greatest in science and art, and more and more those studious and artist souls multiply who, intent on their peaceful activities, hold in horror the business men and the politicians, and will one day succeed in driving them back.  That assuredly will be the great and capital revolution of humanity, an active psychological revolution:  the recognized preponderance of the meditative and contemplative, the lover’s side of the human soul, over the feverish, expansive, rapacious, and ambitious side.  And then it will be understood that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps the most arduous of all, has been the problem of love.”

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