nt for a high and sardonic form
of comedy and of man's infinite vanity. "I wooed and won her," says
Sganarelle of his wife. "I made him run," says the hare of the hound.
When the thing is maintained, not as a mere windy sentimentality, but
with some notion of carrying it logically, the result is invariably a
display of paralogy so absurd that it becomes pathetic. Such nonsense
one looks for in the works of gyneophile theorists with no experience of
the world, and there is where one finds it. It is almost always wedded
to the astounding doctrine that sexual frigidity, already disposed
of, is normal in the female, and that the approach of the male is made
possible, not by its melting into passion, but by a purely intellectual
determination, inwardly revolting, to avoid his ire by pandering to his
gross appetites. Thus the thing is stated in a book called "The Sexes
in Science and History," by Eliza Burt Gamble, an American lady
anthropologist:

The beautiful coloring of male birds and fishes, and the various
appendages acquired by males throughout the various orders below man,
and which, sofar as they themselves are concerned, serve no other useful
purpose than to aid them in securing the favours of the females, have by
the latter been turned to account in the processes of reproduction. The
female made the male beautiful _That She Might Endure His Caresses_.

The italics are mine. From this premiss the learned doctor proceeds
to the classical sentimental argument that the males of all species,
including man, are little more than chronic seducers, and that their
chief energies are devoted to assaulting and breaking down the native
reluctance of the aesthetic and anesthetic females. In her own words:
"Regarding males, outside of the instinct for self-preservation, which,
by the way is often overshadowed by their great sexual eagerness, no
discriminating characters have been acquired and transmitted, other
than those which have been the result of passion, namely, pugnacity and
perseverance." Again the italics are mine. What we have here is merely
the old, old delusion of masculine enterprise in amour--the concept of
man as a lascivious monster and of woman as his shrinking victim--in
brief, the Don Juan idea in fresh bib and tucker. In such bilge lie the
springs of many of the most vexatious delusions of the world, and of
some of its loudest farce no less. It is thus that fatuous old maids are
led to look under their be