ted it. He only gets the full
glory who holds himself back a little, and truly possesses, who
is willing, if need be, not to possess. He is indeed a master of
life who, accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body,
and not refusing them, knows how to transform them at will into
the most rare and fragrant flowers of human emotion."

Beyond its functions in building up character, in heightening and
ennobling the erotic life, and in subserving the adequate fulfilment of
family and social duties, chastity has a more special value for those who
cultivate the arts. We may not always be inclined to believe the writers
who have declared that their verse alone is wanton, but their lives
chaste. It is certainly true, however, that a relationship of this kind
tends to occur. The stuff of the sexual life, as Nietzsche says, is the
stuff of art; if it is expended in one channel it is lost for the other.
The masters of all the more intensely emotional arts have frequently
cultivated a high degree of chastity. This is notably the case as regards
music; one thinks of Mozart,[89] of Beethoven, of Schubert, and many
lesser men. In the case of poets and novelists chastity may usually seem
to be less prevalent but it is frequently well-marked, and is not seldom
disguised by the resounding reverberations which even the slightest
love-episode often exerts on the poetic organism. Goethe's life seems, at
a first glance, to be a long series of continuous love-episodes. Yet when
we remember that it was the very long life of a man whose vigor remained
until the end, that his attachments long and profoundly affected his
emotional life and his work, and that with most of the women he has
immortalized he never had actual sexual relationships at all, and when we
realize, moreover, that, throughout, he accomplished an almost
inconceivably vast amount of work, we shall probably conclude that sexual
indulgence had a very much smaller part in Goethe's life than in that of
many an average man on whom it leaves no obvious emotional or intellectual
trace whatever. Sterne, again, declared that he must always have a
Dulcinea dancing in his head, yet the amount of his intimate relations
with women appears to have been small. Balzac spent his life toiling at
his desk and carrying on during many years a love correspondence with a
woman he scarcely ever saw and at the end only spent a few months of
married life with. The like experien