il for
love to strike deep roots in.

It is only when we realize the highly complex nature of the elements which
make up erotic love that we can understand how it is that that love can
constitute so tremendous a revelation and exert so profound an influence
even in men of the greatest genius and intellect and in the sphere of
their most spiritual activity. It is not merely passion, nor any conscious
skill in the erotic art,--important as these may be,--that would serve to
account for Goethe's relationship to Frau von Stein, or Wagner's to
Mathilde Wesendonck, or that of Robert and Elizabeth Browning to each
other.[420]

It may now be clear to the reader why it has been necessary in a
discussion of the sexual impulse in its relationship to society to deal
with the art of love. It is true that there is nothing so intimately
private and personal as the erotic affairs of the individual. Yet it is
equally true that these affairs lie at the basis of the social life, and
furnish the conditions--good or bad as the case may be--of that
procreative act which is a supreme concern of the State. It is because the
question of love is of such purely private interest that it tends to be
submerged in the question of breed. We have to realize, not only that the
question of love subserves the question of breed, but also that love has a
proper, a necessary, even a socially wholesome claim, to stand by itself
and to be regarded for its own worth.

In the profoundly suggestive study of love which the
distinguished sociologist Tarde left behind at his death
(_Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, loc. cit.), there are
some interesting remarks on this point: "Society," he says, "has
been far more, and more intelligently, preoccupied with the
problem of answering the 'question of breed' than the 'question
of love.' The first problem fills all our civil and commercial
codes. The second problem has never been clearly stated, or
looked in the face, not even in antiquity, still less since the
coming of Christianity, for merely to offer the solutions of
marriage and prostitution is manifestly inadequate. Statesmen
have only seen the side on which it touches population. Hence
the marriage laws. Sterile love they profess to disdain. Yet it
is evident that, though born as the serf of generation, love
tends by civilization to be freed from it. In place of a simple
method of procreat