raines_, 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" (Retif de la Bretonne,
_Monsieur Nicolas_, reprint of 1883, vol. x, pp. 160-3). It may
be added that Duehren (Dr. Iwan Bloch) regards Retif as "a master
in the _Ars Amandi_," and discusses him from this point of view
in his _Retif 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.

Love-making is indeed, like other arts, an art