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 Othman, 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 re