Love as an art, as well as a passion, seems to have received considerable study in antiquity, though the results of that study have perished. Cadmus Milesius, says Suidas, wrote fourteen great volumes on the passion of love, but they are not now to be found. Rohde (Das Griechische Roman, p. 55) has a brief section on the Greek philosophic writers on love. Bloch (Beiträge zur Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil I, p. 191) enumerates the ancient women writers who dealt with the art of love. Montaigne (Essais, liv. ii, Ch. V) gives a list of ancient classical lost books on love. Burton (Anatomy of Melancholy, Bell's edition, vol. iii, p. 2) also gives a list of lost books on love. Burton himself dealt at length with the manifold signs of love and its grievous symptoms. Boissier de Sauvages, early in the eighteenth century, published a Latin thesis, De Amore, discussing love somewhat in the same spirit as Burton, as a psychic disease to be treated and cured.
The breath of Christian asceticism had passed over love; it was no longer, as in classic days, an art to be cultivated, but only a malady to be cured. The true inheritor of the classic spirit in this, as in many other matters, was not the Christian world, but the world of Islam. The Perfumed Garden of the Sheik Nefzaoui was probably written in the city of Tunis early in the sixteenth century by an author who belonged to the south of Tunis. Its opening invocation clearly indicates that it departs widely from the conception of love as a disease: "Praise be to God who has placed man's greatest pleasures in the natural parts of woman, and has destined the natural parts of man to afford the greatest enjoyments to woman." The Arabic book, El Ktab, or "The Secret Laws of Love," is a modern work, by Omer Haleby Abu Othmân, who was born in Algiers of a Moorish mother and a Turkish father.
For Christianity the permission to yield to the sexual impulse at all was merely a concession to human weakness, an indulgence only possible when it was carefully hedged and guarded on every side. Almost from the first the Christians began to cultivate the art of virginity, and they could not so dislocate their point of view as to approve of the art of love. All their passionate adoration in the sphere of sex went out towards chastity. Possessed by such ideals, they could only tolerate human love at all by giving to one special form of it a religious sacramental character, and even that sacramental halo imparted to love a quasi-ascetic character which precluded the idea of regarding love as an art.[[379]] Love gained a religious element but it lost a moral element, since, outside Christianity, the art of love is part of the foundation of sexual morality, wherever such morality in any degree exists. In Christendom love in marriage was left to shift for itself as best it might; the art of love was a dubious art which was held to indicate a certain commerce with immorality and even indeed to be itself immoral. That feeling was doubtless strengthened by the fact that Ovid was the most conspicuous master in literature of the art of love. His literary reputation—far greater than it now seems to us[[380]]—gave distinction to his position as the author of the chief extant text-book of the art of love. With Humanism and the Renaissance and the consequent realization that Christianity had overlooked one side of life, Ovid's Ars Amatoria was placed on a pedestal it had not occupied before or since. It represented a step forward in civilization; it revealed love not as a mere animal instinct or a mere pledged duty, but as a complex, humane, and refined relationship which demanded cultivation; "arte regendus amor." Boccaccio made a wise teacher put Ovid's Ars Amatoria into the hands of the young. In an age still oppressed by the mediæval spirit, it was a much needed text-book, but it possessed the fatal defect, as a text-book, of presenting the erotic claims of the individual as divorced from the claims of good social order. It never succeeded in establishing itself as a generally accepted manual of love, and in the eyes of many it served to stamp the subject it dealt with as one that lies outside the limits of good morals.
When, however, we take a wider survey, and inquire into the discipline for life that is imparted to the young in many parts of the world, we shall frequently find that the art of love, understood in varying ways, is an essential part of that discipline. Summary, though generally adequate, as are the educational methods of primitive peoples, they not seldom include a training in those arts which render a woman agreeable to a man and a man agreeable to a woman in the relationship of marriage, and it is often more or less dimly realized that courtship is not a mere preliminary to marriage, but a biologically essential part of the marriage relationship throughout.
Sexual initiation is carried out very thoroughly in Azimba land, Central Africa. H. Crawford Angus, the first European to visit the Azimba people, lived among them for a year, and has described the Chensamwali, or initiation ceremony, of girls. "At the first sign of menstruation in a young girl, she is taught the mysteries of womanhood, and is shown the different positions for sexual intercourse. The vagina is handled freely, and if not previously enlarged (which may have taken place at the harvest festival when a boy and girl are allowed to 'keep house' during the day-time by themselves, and when quasi-intercourse takes place) it is now enlarged by means of a horn or corn-cob, which is inserted and secured in place by bands of bark cloth. When all signs [of menstruation] have passed, a public announcement of a dance is given to the women in the village. At this dance no men are allowed to be present, and it was only with a great deal of trouble that I managed to witness it. The girl to be 'danced' is led back from the bush to her mother's hut where she is kept in solitude to the morning of the dance. On that morning she is placed on the ground in a sitting position, while the dancers form a ring around her. Several songs are then sung with reference to the genital organs. The girl is then stripped and made to go through the mimic performance of sexual intercourse, and if the movements are not enacted properly, as is often the case when the girl is timid and bashful, one of the older women will take her place and show her how she is to perform. Many songs about the relation between men and women are sung, and the girl is instructed as to all her duties when she becomes a wife. She is also instructed that during the time of her menstruation she is unclean, and that during her monthly period she must close her vulva with a pad of fibre used for the purpose. The object of the dance is to inculcate to the girl the knowledge of married life. The girl is taught to be faithful to her husband and to try to bear children, and she is also taught the various arts and methods of making herself seductive and pleasing to her husband, and of thus retaining him in her power." (H. Crawford Angus, "The Chensamwali," Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1898, Heft 6, p. 479).
In Abyssinia, as well as on the Zanzibar coast, according to Stecker (quoted by Ploss-Bartels, Das Weib, Section 119) young girls are educated in buttock movements which increase their charm in coitus. These movements, of a rotatory character, are called Duk-Duk. To be ignorant of Duk-Duk is a great disgrace to a girl. Among the Swahili women of Zanzibar, indeed, a complete artistic system of hip-movements is cultivated, to be displayed in coitus. It prevails more especially on the coast, and a Swahili woman is not counted a "lady" (bibi) unless she is acquainted with this art. From sixty to eighty young women practice this buttock dance together for some eight hours a day, laying aside all clothing, and singing the while. The public are not admitted. The dance, which is a kind of imitation of coitus, has been described by Zache ("Sitten und Gebräuche der Suaheli," Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1899, Heft 2-3, p. 72). The more accomplished dancers excite general admiration. During the latter part of this initiation various feats are imposed, to test the girl's skill and self-control. For instance, she must dance up to a fire and remove from the midst of the fire a vessel full of water to the brim, without spilling it. At the end of three months the training is over, and the girl goes home in festival attire. She is now eligible for marriage. Similar customs are said to prevail in the Dutch East Indies and elsewhere.
The Hebrews had erotic dances, which were doubtless related to the art of love in marriage, and among the Greeks, and their disciples the Romans, the conception of love as an art which needs training, skill, and cultivation, was still extant. That conception was crushed by Christianity which, although it sanctified the institution of matrimony, degraded that sexual love which is normally the content of marriage.
In 1176 the question was brought before a Court of Love by a baron and lady of Champagne, whether love is compatible with marriage. "No," said the baron, "I admire and respect the sweet intimacy of married couples, but I cannot call it love. Love desires obstacles, mystery, stolen favors. Now husbands and wives boldly avow their relationship; they possess each other without contradiction and without reserve. It cannot then be love that they experience." And after mature deliberation the ladies of the Court of Love adopted the baron's conclusions (E. de la Bedollière, Histoire des Mœurs des Français, vol. iii, p. 334). There was undoubtedly an element of truth in the baron's arguments. Yet it may well be doubted whether in any non-Christian country it would ever have been possible to obtain acceptance for the doctrine that love and marriage are incompatible. This doctrine was, however, as Ribot points out in his Logique des Sentiments, inevitable, when, as among the medieval nobility, marriage was merely a political or domestic treaty and could not, therefore, be a method of moral elevation.
"Why is it," asked Rétif de la Bretonne, towards the end of the eighteenth century, "that girls who have no morals are more seductive and more loveable than honest women? It is because, like the Greek courtesans to whom grace and voluptuousness were taught, they have studied the art of pleasing. Among the foolish detractors of my Contemporaines, not one guessed the philosophic aim of nearly everyone of these tales, which is to suggest to honest women the ways of making themselves loved. I should like to see the institution of initiations, such as those of the ancients.... To-day the happiness of the human species is abandoned to chance; all the experience of women is individual, like that of animals; it is lost with those women who, being naturally amiable, might have taught others to become so. Prostitutes alone make a superficial study of it, and the lessons they receive are, for the most part, as harmful as those of respectable Greek and Roman matrons were holy and honorable, only tending to wantonness, to the exhaustion alike of the purse and of the physical faculties, while the aim of the ancient matrons was the union of husband and wife and their mutual attachment through pleasure. The Christian religion annihilated the Mysteries as infamous, but we may regard that annihilation as one of the wrongs done by Christianity to humanity, as the work of men with little enlightenment and bitter zeal, dangerous puritans who were the natural enemies of marriage" (Rétif de la Bretonne, Monsieur Nicolas, reprint of 1883, vol. x, pp. 160-3). It may be added that Dühren (Dr. Iwan Bloch) regards Rétif as "a master in the Ars Amandi," and discusses him from this point of view in his Rétif de la Bretonne (pp. 362-371).
Whether or not Christianity is to be held responsible, it cannot be doubted that throughout Christendom there has been a lamentable failure to recognize the supreme importance, not only erotically but morally, of the art of love. Even in the great revival of sexual enlightenment now taking place around us there is rarely even the faintest recognition that in sexual enlightenment the one thing essentially necessary is a knowledge of the art of love. For the most part, sexual instruction as at present understood, is purely negative, a mere string of thou-shalt-nots. If that failure were due to the conscious and deliberate recognition that while the art of love must be based on physiological and psychological knowledge, it is far too subtle, too complex, too personal, to be formulated in lectures and manuals, it would be reasonable and sound. But it seems to rest entirely on ignorance, indifference, or worse.