the
slightest inborn or acquired art of love, out of religious resignation or
sheer stupidity. But that attitude is now becoming less common. As we have
seen in the previous chapter, divorces are becoming more frequent and more
easily obtainable in every civilized country. This is a tendency of
civilization; it is the result of a demand that marriage should be a real
relationship, and that when it ceases to be real as a relationship it
should also cease as a form. That is an inevitable tendency, involved in
our growing democratization, for the democracy seems to care more for
realities than for forms, however venerable. We cannot fight against it;
and we should be wrong to fight against it even if we could.

Yet while we are bound to aid the tendency to divorce, and to insist that
a valid marriage needs the wills of two persons to maintain it, it is
difficult for anyone to argue that divorce is in itself desirable. It is
always a confession of failure. Two persons, who, if they have been moved
in the slightest degree by the normal and regular impulse of sexual
selection, at the outset regarded each other as lovable, have, on one
side or the other or on both, proved not lovable. There has been a failure
in the fundamental art of love. If we are to counterbalance facility of
divorce our only sound course is to increase the stability of marriage,
and that is only possible by cultivating the art of love, the primal
foundation of marriage.

It is by no means unnecessary to emphasize this point. There are still
many persons who have failed to realize it. There are even people who seem
to imagine that it is unimportant whether or not pleasure is present in
the sexual act. "I do not believe mutual pleasure in the sexual act has
any particular bearing on the happiness of life," once remarked Dr. Howard
A. Kelly.[377] Such a statement means--if indeed it means anything--that
the marriage tie has no "particular bearing" on human happiness; it means
that the way must be freely opened to adultery and divorce. Even the most
perverse ascetic of the Middle Ages scarcely ventured to make a statement
so flagrantly opposed to the experiences of humanity, and the fact that a
distinguished gynecologist of the twentieth century can make it, with
almost the air of stating a truism, is ample justification for the
emphasis which it has nowadays become necessary to place on the art of
love. "Uxor enim dignitatis nomen est, non voluptatis," was