Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXsituation isnew husband isrequired to meet the new wife.All life, as I have often had occasion to point out, isart.mainly one with which men have to deal. AThe statement has been denied bythose who haveconfused art with aesthetic sensibility, which isquite anothermatter. All making and doing is of the nature ofart, which is not confined to man's activities alone, andmay even be said to be unconsciously true of all Nature.To say that life is art ought, indeed, to be a mere truism,and would be so if it were not so often denied or indiffer-Asently ignored, even by those who profess to accept it.it is, one istempted to say that if life is art, life ismostlybad art.There isperhaps no field of life in which one may bemore tempted thus to qualify the statement than in thatof love. It is often said that it is the male rather than thefemale who reveals in Nature the stronger impulse to art,and there is no doubt that this is so in various zoologicalgroups (it is only necessary to think of birds) but such a,generalization could hardly have been reached, as regardsmodern man in the field of love, by reading the resultsrecorded in the pages of Hamilton and Davis and Dickinson.This is unfortunate, because love, considered as thepsychic side of sexual relationship, is life itself, the gesturewithout which, so far as we are concerned, life wouldcease. We can see today and coldly enumerate all thecauses which led to the art of love falling into reprobation,neglect, and contempt: religious, moral, spiritual, aestheticcauses. We can also see today on how shallow a foundationall those causes worked. That vision is a necessary conditionfor the improvement of our art. We know that it isalready becoming influential, even though not always inaccordance with right knowledge. Some, indeed, havesoughtnot as had once often been done by unreasoning[344]