“It seems extremely probable,” wrote Professor E.D.  Cope,[376] “that if this subject could be properly understood, and become, in the details of its practical conduct, a part of a written social science, the monogamic marriage might attain a far more general success than is often found in actual life.”  There can be no doubt whatever that this is the case.  In the great majority of marriages success depends exclusively upon the knowledge of the art of love possessed by the two persons who enter into it.  A life-long monogamic union may, indeed, persist in the absence of 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 indeed an ancient Pagan dictum.  But it is not in harmony with modern ideas.  It was not even altogether in harmony with Christianity.  For our modern morality, as Ellen Key well says, the unity of love and marriage is a fundamental principle.[378]