indeed an
ancient Pagan dictum. But it is not in harmony with modern ideas. It was
not even altogether in harmony with Christianity. For our modern morality,
as Ellen Key well says, the unity of love and marriage is a fundamental
principle.[378]

The neglect of the art of love has not been a universal phenomenon; it is
more especially characteristic of Christendom. The spirit of ancient Rome
undoubtedly predisposed Europe to such a neglect, for with their rough
cultivation of the military virtues and their inaptitude for the finer
aspects of civilization the Romans were willing to regard love as a
permissible indulgence, but they were not, as a people, prepared to
cultivate it as an art. Their poets do not, in this matter, represent the
moral feeling of their best people. It is indeed a highly significant
fact that Ovid, the most distinguished Latin poet who concerned himself
much with the art of love, associated that art not so much with morality
as with immorality. As he viewed it, the art of love was less the art of
retaining a woman in her home than the art of winning her away from it; it
was the adulterer's art rather than the husband's art. Such a conception
would be impossible out of Europe, but it proved very favorable to the
growth of the Christian attitude towards the art of love.

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 (_Beitraege 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