For the so-called sexual act the term love episode has been substituted in this book. Like a duet on an operatic stage it should be just as much a combination of the melody of the emotions of each of the two partners, and the harmony of both of their orchestras of emotions, as are the melody and harmony arranged by the composer of an opera score. The husband should be the composer.
It will be replied that the ordinary man is not of the intellectual calibre of the Wagners, Gounods, and Verdis, and that if the love life is to be so exalted in the ordinary marriage it would be a hopeless task, for so few men have the intellectuality to create a work of art of such dimensions.
But the greatness of composers and poets consists in their approaching so near to life with media so inorganic as sound and sight; and while music is enjoyed by most people, different styles and grades of music have the characteristic of bringing the melody and harmony to a definite and gratifying end. Music therefore essentially consists of the art of producing a tension and finally a relaxation of human emotions by means of sound.
Love as an art consists of the same production of tension and relaxation in a rhythm whose first pulsation begins even in childhood and whose last is coincident with the final heartbeat of the individual.
§ 75
Love, in the sense used above, practically includes every action of the husband or wife in relation to each other, from the beginning of the first act of love-living to the end of their joint life.
The love episode is not a violent activity for a brief space of five or ten minutes. In its highest form it begins when either of the pair thinks of any part of it. A true work of erotic art will progress from these thoughts, through all the phases of verbal mention, or actual carrying out of any preliminary—all the various verbal and other endearments, all the caresses and changing contacts, in multitudinous variety of external circumstances. It will progress through the purely physical part of it, or that part which is regarded as purely physical (but which never is, exclusively), and will continue for an hour to a day after the erotic acme.
During this post-acme time all the thoughts and emotions of each will be referred to the past episode and not to any future one. In the interim between the evanescence of these thought-reverberations, and the growing tension of another approaching love episode there may be a space of some hours or a day or two, but, where there is a fully expressed love life, never more than that.
§ 76
There is an unmistakable sign when the union of the two natures of a man and a woman has taken place. It is not the procreation of children, it is not living together only, it is not a joint bank account or any mere superficial unity or congeniality of external (egoistic-social) interests; but it is an emotional reaction at a time of intimate physical communion, a flood of feeling of an absolutely unique character, which, once experienced, leads true lovers to say that nothing in the world they have ever heard of could be in any respect like it—a flood of feeling, which, like the perigee tide, enters and fills every nook and cranny of the being of each, just as the waters of an estuary rise and fill and overflow when the sun and the moon both pull together and the wind blows into the river’s mouth.