All About The Penis
Havelock Ellis On the Art Of Love
There are many ways of regarding "marriage." In a bald and abstract elementary
form it may be defined as "legalized cohabitation. Under civilized conditions
it becomes a more complex part of the mores or moral customs (morality being
essentially custom) of a country, and is then a contract, and, as Max
Christian puts it, "not only a contract to exercise and maintain a sexual
relationship with economic and psychic foundations and moral (that is to say
social) obligations. Yet more intimately, however, it is the association by
free choice of two persons who suit each other, with the object of finding an
unhampered field of exercise for all the varied manifestations of love."
By a common euphemism the word "love" is used to cover any manifestation of
the sexual impulse. That is, needless to say, incorrect. We must distinguish
between lust, or the physiological sexual impulse, and love, or that impulse
in association with other impulses.
There is no verbal agreement as to the best definition of the distinction
between love and lust. It may, indeed, be said that many of the definitions
offered may be accepted as expressing some part of the distinction. Love may
be regarded, roughly speaking, as a synthesis of lust and friendship. Or
looking at the matter physiologically, we may say, with Forel, that love is
the sexual instinct as manifested through the cerebral centers. Or, with Kant,
we may say that love is the sexual impulse released from its bondage to
periodicity and made permanent through the help of the imagination. Pfister,
after devoting a long chapter to various definitions of love, concludes that
it may best be defined as "a feeling of attraction and a sense of
self-surrender, arising out of a need, and directed towards an object that
offers hope of gratification." It is an inadequate definition, and so are most
of such definitions.
While love apparently becomes in its most developed forms a completely
altruistic impulse, it springs out of an egoistic impulse and even when it
involves self-sacrifice there is still an egoistic gratification. Freud, among
others, has insisted in his Introductory Lectures on this egoistic source
(even stating elsewhere, about the same time, that love is primarily
Narcissistic), although recognizing that love later becomes detached from its
source. Putting aside the specifically sexual element, the mother, as Freud
and others hold, is the child's first real love-object, although later, in
subjects who are not neurotic, this primary love object falls into the
background, with the naturally growing prominence of other love-objects.
In developing into love, the sexual impulse, which at the outset is
predominantly egoistic, becomes also consciously altruistic. There are, under
normal and natural conditions, altruistic elements from the outset of its
sexual development. Without consideration for the other partner, even among
animals, courtship fails, and coitus cannot take place. But with the
development of love this altruistic element becomes conscious and highly
developed; it may even lead to the complete subordination of the egoistic
element.
This process by which love is developed may be said to be double. In part it
is due to the irradiation of the sexual instinct through the whole organism,
taking longer nervous circuits and suffusing regions which are outside the
sexual sphere so long as the sexual impulse attains its ends speedily and
without impediments. In part it is due to fusion with other psychic elements
of a more or less allied character.
At an early stage after full sexual development love is reinforced by the
allied emotions derived from the relationship of parents to offspring. The
woman's sexual love is thereafter mingled with the tenderness and patience
which have been evoked by her children, and a man's with the guarding and
protecting elements involved in the paternal relationship. Sexual love thus
becomes, in marriage, part of the structure of society, while in some of its
highest manifestations it may be allied with the impulses of religion and the
impulses of art. In this women seem often to have been pioneers. Letourneau
pointed out that in various parts of the world women have taken a leading part
in creating erotic poetry, and
sometimes seem even to have monopolized the emotion of love. In this
connection it may be mentioned that among primitive peoples suicide from
erotic motives seems to occur chiefly among women.
It must, however, be remembered that the evolution of love from lust has
proceeded but a little way among many lower human races, and is indeed
rudimentary among a large number of persons in civilization. While "lust" is
known all over the world, and there are everywhere words to designate it,
"love" is not universally known, and in many languages there are no words for
"love." The failures to find love are often remarkable and unexpected.
We may also find it where we least expect it. Sexual desire
became "idealized" even by some animals, especially birds, for when a bird
pined to death for the loss of its mate this cannot be due to the
uncomplicated instinct of sex, but must involve the interweaving of that
instinct with the other elements of life to a degree which is rare even among
the most civilized men. Some savage races seem to have no fundamental notion
of love, and (like the American Nahuas) no primary word for it, while, on the
other hand, in Quichua, the language of the ancient Peruvians, there are
nearly six hundred combinations of the verb munay, to love.
Brinton long since remarked that the words for love in some American Indian
languages reveal four main ways of expressing the conception: (1) inarticulate
cries of emotion; (2) assertions of sameness or similarity; (3) assertions of
conjunction or union; (4) assertions of a Wish, desire, longing. Brinton adds
that "these same notions are those which underlie the majority of the words of
love in the great Aryan family of languages." The remarkable fact emerges,
however, that the peoples of Aryan tongue were slow in developing their
conception of sexual love, while the American Mayas, going beyond the peoples
of early Aryan culture, possessed a radical word for the joy of love which was
in significance purely psychic.
Even the Greeks were late in developing any ideal of sexual love. True love
for the Greeks was nearly always homosexual. The Ionian lyric poets of early
Greece regarded woman as only an instrument of pleasure and the founder of the
family. Theognis compares marriage to cattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes
to be complimentary to the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his "female
boy-friends." ,Eschylus makes even a father assume that his daughters will
misbehave if left to themselves. There is no sexual love in Sophocles, and in
Euripides it is only the women who fall in love. In Greece sexual love, down
to a comparatively late period, was looked down on, and held to be unworthy of
public discussion and representation. It was in Magna Graecia, rather than in
Greece itself, that men took interest in women, and it was not until the
Alexandrian period, and notably in Asclepiades, as Benecke maintained, that
the love of women was regarded as a matter of life and death. Thereafter the
conception of sexual love in its romantic aspects appears in European life.
With the Celtic story of Tristram, as Gaston Paris remarks, it finally appears
in the Christian European world of poetry as a main point in human life, a
great motive force of conduct. But such romantic conceptions still failed to
penetrate the European masses who continued to regard "love" as a crude act of
sexual intercourse.
When, however, love is fully developed it becomes an enormously extended,
highly complex emotion, and lust, even in the best sense of that word, becomes
merely a coordinated element among many other elements. Herbert Spencer, in an
interesting passage of his Principles of Psychology, has analyzed love into as
many as nine distinct and important elements: (1) the physical impulse of sex;
(2) the feeling for beauty; (3) affection; (4) admiration and respect; (5)
love of approbation; (6) self-esteem; (7) proprietary feeling; (8) extended
liberty of action from the absence of personal barriers; (9) exaltation of the
sympathies.
"This passion," he concludes, fuses into one immense aggregate most of the
elementary excitations of which we are capable." Even this comprehensive
analysis omits the element of love, already mentioned, based on the parental
impulse, yet that is a highly important element; when the specifically sexual
element in the conjugal relationship has fallen into the back ground the
emotional tone of the husband's love for his wife, and still more that of the
wife for her husband, becomes easily that of love for a child. Every analysis
of love serves to show that, as Crawley remarked, -love is as difficult to
define as life itself, and probably for the same reasons. In all its forms
love plays a part in society only less important than that of the instinct to
live. It brings together the primal elements of the family, it keeps the
family together, and it unites in a certain fellow-feeling all members of a
race or nation."
Even so brief a discussion of love may serve to indicate that it is foolish
for even the most superficial thinker to imagine that we are here concerned
with a romantic illusion that may be dismissed, or, as some would-be analysts
like to imagine, a mere transformation of hate. It is true, that, as Ibsen
said, "no word is so full of falsehood and fraud as the little word 'love' has
become today." Yet the thing the word stands for remains, and the extent of
the abuse of "love" is the measure of its inestimable values, for it is only
gold and diamonds and the most precious things that lend themselves to the
abuse of imitation in paint and paste and cheap alloys and substitutes of
every sort. There can be no self without others and the craving for others,
and we cannot put aside others and the emotions which others excite without
first putting aside the self. So that, properly speaking, love is involved in
life, and if love is an
illusion then life itself is an illusion. When, indeed, we consider further,
how love is bound up with the race as well as the individual, and with ends
not only natural but such as we term spiritual, it seems, as Boyce Gibson puts
it, "the great transforming and inclusive agency, the ultimate virtue of all
life." So that, as it has been said, "Love is the supreme virtue," and "Virtue
is love," or, as the early Christian epistolist sought to express it, "God is
love."
Why Love Is an Art
Love has been defined (as by Boyce Gibson) as a "sentiment" and a "passion,"
this varying with the point of view. In either case it is a stable and complex
organization of the emotional life, but when regarded as a sentiment it is a
more intellectual, refined, and subtle emotional feeling, and when regarded as
a passion it is an emotional complex of predominantly forceful kind, a
passion" being defined by A. F. Shand as "an organised system of emotions and
desires," that is, more than a system only of emotions. In every passion,
however, a system of self-control tends to arise,-by whatever mechanism we may
consider that it works,-whereby its intensity is more or less effectively
regulated. By reason of its systematic character and its unifying principle,
it is possible to regard the passion of love as stable, regulative, inclusive,
and instinct with a profound rationality."
But for its normal development - and at this point we discern the path with
which we are here mainly concerned - the essential...
to be continued |
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