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 instrument which God has confided to them, and do not so much as suspect that it is necessary to study it in order to draw out its slightest chords....  Every direct contact, even with the clitoris, every attempt at coitus [when the feminine organism is not aroused], exercises a painful sensation, an instinctive repulsion, a feeling of disgust and aversion.  Any man, any husband, who is ignorant of this fact, is ridiculous and contemptible.  Any man, any husband, who, knowing it, dares to disregard it, has committed an outrage....  In the final combination of man and woman, the positive element, the husband, has the initiative and the responsibility for the conjugal life.  He is the minstrel who will produce harmony or cacophony by his hand and his bow.  The wife, from this point of view, is really the many-stringed instrument who will give out harmonious or discordant sounds, according as she is well or ill handled” (Guyot, Breviaire, pp. 99, 115, 138).

That such love corresponds to the woman’s need there cannot be any doubt.  All developed women desire to be loved, says Ellen Key, not “en male” but “en artiste” (Liebe und Ehe, p. 92).  “Only a man of whom she feels that he has also the artist’s joy in her, and who shows this joy through his timid and delicate touch on her soul as on her body, can keep the woman of to-day.  She will only belong to a man who continues to long for her even when he holds her locked in his arms.  And when such a woman breaks out:  ’You want me, but you cannot caress me, you cannot tell what I want,’ then that man is judged.”  Love is indeed, as Remy de Gourmont remarks, a delicate art, for which, as for painting or music, only some are apt.

It must not be supposed that the demand on the lover and husband to approach a woman in the same spirit, with the same consideration and skilful touch, as a musician takes up his instrument is merely a demand made by modern women who are probably neurotic or hysterical.  No reader of these Studies who has followed the discussions of courtship and of sexual selection in previous volumes can fail to realize that—­although we have sought to befool ourselves by giving an illegitimate connotation to the word “brutal”—­consideration and respect for the female is all but universal in the sexual relationships of the animals below man; it is only at the furthest remove from the “brutes,” among civilized men, that sexual “brutality” is at all common, and even there it is chiefly the result of ignorance.  If we go as low as the insects, who have been disciplined by no family life, and are generally counted as careless and wanton, we may sometimes find this attitude towards the female fully developed, and the extreme consideration of the male for the female whom yet he holds firmly beneath him, the tender preliminaries, the extremely gradual approach to the supreme sexual act, may well furnish an admirable lesson.