The Arts of Courtship

'WHATEVER Saint Augustine may say, human creatures would not perform the work of generation if they did not find pleasure in it, and if there was not in that work an irresistible fascination for them," wrote Casanova.

It is a fair statement. It is also fair to say that much of this irresistible fascination has been stimulated, artificially, by human creatures themselves.

A full study of the ways in which man has sought, by the arts of courtship, to embellish, titillate or ennoble the instinct which populates the planet would run to many volumes. These pages set out merely to trace the progress of courting, in the western world, from, the day of the troubadour to the day of the crooner; to review some of the ways in which our forefathers sought to cozen and fascinate their mates; and to show how the manner of wooing has adjusted itself to changing conceptions of love, to new codes of manners and to subversive philosophies.

It may well be news to the average couple in love that the purpose of courtship in Nature (or so the biologists say) is to cloak the association of male and female with such enrichment and mystery that they shall be attracted to each other for a period long enough to produce and rear a family. Bertrand Russell adds that courtship is Nature's safeguard against sexual fatigue. We have traveled such a long way from Nature that both these functions seem to have been forgotten.

Today, with rare exceptions, a man courts a girl simply because he finds her enchanting and would like to be enchanted for the rest of his life. In George Jean Nathan's phrase, he has found a brand of beer that suits him and now he wants to go to work in the brewery. It is inconceivable that his taste for this brand will some day pall.