The history of civilization is the history of man’s effort to enrich the simple world he was presented with. He transforms handsome but monotonous primeval forests into complicated cities furnished with bathrooms and radios; he builds music up from a few primitive sounds to the elaborate symphony; in eating he progresses from the rending of raw meat and the consumption of wild berries to a dreamy dinner at Paillard’s. And you may be sure that he would have done the same with the sex-relationship had he been able. Alas, there he was baffled! The facts of sex are immutably simple. There are so few things that one can do. Heroic efforts have been made to increase on these, but, though many men have given their whole lives to the cause, without avail. New meats and vegetables for the table were continually being invented or discovered--_foie gras_, the grapefruit, the alligator pear; no satisfactory new ways of love were possible. Even so, man was not defeated. On the contrary, he won a great moral victory. The facts of sex were unalterably simple, but the atmosphere of thought and emotion surrounding those facts he discovered to be a luxuriant tropical forest. Three thousand years of thrilling exploration have not exhausted its richness or exorcized its dangers--for the forest breeds monsters as well as gods, and men have been lost and have gone mad there. In fact, in this rich region one may find anything one looks for (besides startling surprises), from harpies to shapes of serene loveliness. It is a Swiss-Family-Robinson kind of forest, save for the delightful uselessness of the discoveries. To this world pornography belongs. But it is not an earnest-minded art, and so does not concern itself with either the beauties or the horrors, both of which its mocking, reasonable, eighteenth-century nature finds excessive, but with all the minor mysteries of the wood--the fantastic tricks and illusions, the dainty mischievous sprites, the malicious imps who make faces from behind trees then vanish with a burst of clear laughter.