To him this failure of his, this revulsion of feeling at the precise moment when he has entered the very lists of love, this slacker’s attitude, seems not a desertion on his part, not a failure of his, but a sudden loss of charm on her part. She is, upon trial, not what he had expected and longed for. But the failure, the loss of charm are his, not hers. He ought to be the charmer. He ought to have been informed that it is his privilege and power to attain the pleasure of putting his woman into another world of sheer exuberant joy—that his own pleasure in life can be attained by no other means; and that the consent of the woman to be his wife is a consent not to take one step with him, and then have him vanish, but to travel the path of life-love to its end—a path that is long and joyous, a path from which no seeing man, no man with eyes of love, can ever wish to depart. For with him is happiness personified and before him and leading him on is light. § 74 The acts and scenes and various episodes and strophes of this lifelong drama are never more than parts, and are organically related each to the other and to the whole life poem. No matter what one’s egoistic-social impulses and activities are, the racial theme, i.e., emotional culture and development, should be as far as possible continuous and its phrases related. The racial theme is organic, emotional. The narrower national, or sectional, theme in life is the intellectual one. For the so-called sexual act the term _love episode_ has been substituted in this book. Like a duet on an operatic stage it should be just as much a combination of the melody of the emotions of each of the two partners, and the harmony of both of their orchestras of emotions, as are the melody and harmony arranged by the composer of an opera score. The husband should be the composer. It will be replied that the ordinary man is not of the intellectual calibre of the Wagners, Gounods, and Verdis, and that if the love life is to be so exalted in the ordinary marriage it would be a hopeless task, for so few men have the intellectuality to create a work of art of such dimensions. But the greatness of composers and poets consists in their approaching so near to life with media so inorganic as sound and sight; and while music is enjoyed by most people, different styles and grades of music have the characteristic of bringing the melody and harmony to a definite and gratifying end. Music therefore essentially consists of the art of producing a tension and finally a relaxation of human emotions by means of sound. Love as an art consists of the same production of tension and relaxation in a rhythm whose first pulsation begins even in childhood and whose last is coincident with the final heartbeat of the individual. § 75 Love, in the sense used above, practically includes every action of the husband or wife in relation to each other, from the beginning of the first act of love-living to the end of their joint life.