accomplishment of the procreative act, with the pleasurable relief it
affords to himself, as the whole code of love. We have to treat with
contempt the woman who abjectly accepts the act, and her own passivity
therein, as the whole duty of love. We have to understand that the art of
love has nothing to do with vice, and the acquirement of erotic
personality nothing to do with sensuality. But we have also to realise
that the art of love is far from being the attainment of a refined and
luxurious self-indulgence, and the acquirement of erotic personality of
little worth unless it fortifies and enlarges the whole personality in all
its aspects. Now all this is difficult, and for some people even painful;
to root up is a more serious matter than to sow; it cannot all be done in
a day.

It is not easy to form a clear picture of the erotic life of the average
man in our society. To the best informed among us knowledge in this field
only comes slowly. Even when we have decided what may or may not be termed
"average" the sources of approach to this intimate sphere remain few and
misleading; at the best the women a man loves remain far more illuminating
sources of information than the man himself. The more one knows about him,
however, the more one is convinced that, quite independently of the place
we may feel inclined to afford to him in the scale of virtue, his
conception of erotic personality, his ideas on the art of love, if they
have any existence at all, are of a humble character. As to the notion of
play in the sphere of sex, even if he makes blundering attempts to
practice it, that is for him something quite low down, something to be
ashamed of, and he would not dream of associating it with anything he has
been taught to regard as belonging to the spiritual sphere. The conception
of "divine play" is meaningless to him. His fundamental ideas, his
cherished ideals, in the erotic sphere, seem to be reducible to two: (1)
He wishes to prove that he is "a man," and he experiences what seems to
him the pride of virility in the successful attainment of that proof; (2)
he finds in the same act the most satisfactory method of removing sexual
tension and in the ensuing relief one of the chief pleasures of life. It
cannot be said that either of these ideals is absolutely unsound; each is
part of the truth; it is only as a complete statement of the truth that
they become pathetically inadequate. It is to be noted that both of them
ar