e adultery and divorce. We might
have been more surprised had it been otherwise.

The art of love is based on the fundamental natural fact of courtship; and
courtship is the effort of the male to make himself acceptable to the
female.[402] "The art of love," said Vatsyayana, one of the greatest of
authorities, "is the art of pleasing women." "A man must never permit
himself a pleasure with his wife," said Balzac in his _Physiologie du
Mariage_, "which he has not the skill first to make her desire." The whole
art of love is there. Women, naturally and instinctively, seek to make
themselves desirable to men, even to men whom they are supremely
indifferent to, and the woman who is in love with a man, by an equally
natural instinct, seeks to shape herself to the measure which individually
pleases him. This tendency is not really modified by the fundamental fact
that in these matters it is only the arts that Nature makes which are
truly effective. It is finally by what he is that a man arouses a woman's
deepest emotions of sympathy or of antipathy, and he is often pleasing her
more by displaying his fitness to play a great part in the world outside
than by any acquired accomplishments in the arts of courtship. When,
however, the serious and intimate play of physical love begins, the
woman's part is, even biologically, on the surface the more passive
part.[403] She is, on the physical side, inevitably the instrument in
love; it must be his hand and his bow which evoke the music.

In speaking of the art of love, however, it is impossible to disentangle
completely the spiritual from the physical. The very attempt to do so is,
indeed, a fatal mistake. The man who can only perceive the physical side
of the sexual relationship is, as Hinton was accustomed to say, on a level
with the man who, in listening to a sonata of Beethoven on the violin, is
only conscious of the physical fact that a horse's tail is being scraped
against a sheep's entrails.

The image of the musical instrument constantly recurs to those
who write of the art of love. Balzac's comparison of the
unskilful husband to the orang-utan attempting to play the violin
has already been quoted. Dr. Jules Guyot, in his serious and
admirable little book, _Breviaire de l'Amour Experimental_, falls
on to the same comparison: "There are an immense number of
ignorant, selfish, and brutal men who give themselves no trouble
to study the instrumen