The following will show how obtuse the view of those is who persist, with unconscious cynicism, in maintaining the identity of love and sexual impulse. Sexual attraction increases with physical proximity; love is strongest in the absence of the loved one; it needs separation, a certain distance, to preserve it. In fact, what all the travels in the world could not achieve, what time could not accomplish, may be brought about by accidental, unintentional, physical contact with the beloved object, in which the sexual impulse is awakened, and which suffices to kill love on the spot. Then, again, in the case of more highly differentiated, great men, the type of girl desired, and the type of girl loved but never desired, are always totally different in face, form, and disposition; they are two different beings.
Then there is the “platonic love,” which professors of psychiatry have such a poor opinion of. I should say rather, there is only “platonic” love, because any other so-called love belongs to the kingdom of the senses: it is the love of Beatrice, the worship of Madonna; the Babylonian woman is the symbol of sexual desire.
Kant’s enumeration of the transcendental ideas of love would have to be extended if it is to be held. For the purely spiritual love, the love of Plato and Bruno, which is absolutely free from desire, is none the less a transcendental concept; nor is its significance as a concept impaired, because such a love has never been fully realised.
It is the problem put forward in “Tannhäuser.” We have Tannhäuser, Wolfram, Venus, and Maria. The fact that two lovers, who have found each other once for all—Tristan and Isolde—choose death instead of the bridal bed, is just as absolute a proof of a higher, maybe metaphysical, something in mankind, as the martyrdom of a Giordano Bruno.
“Dir, hohe Liebe, töne Begeistert mein Gesang, Die mir in Engelschöne Tief in die Seele drang! Du nahst als Gott gesandte: Ich folg’ aus holder Fern’,— So führst du in die Lande, Wo ewig strahlt dein Stern.”
Who is the object of such love? Is it woman, as she has been represented in this work, who lacks all higher qualities, who gets her value from another, who has no power to attain value on her own account? Impossible. It is the ideally beautiful, the immaculate woman, who is loved in such high fashion. The source of this beauty and chastity in women must now be found.
The question as to whether the female sex is the more beautiful, and as to whether it deserves the title of “the” beautiful, has been much disputed.
It may be well to consider by whom and how far woman is considered beautiful.
It is well known that woman is not most beautiful in the nude. I admit that in pictures or statues the nude female may look well. But the sexual impulse makes it impossible to look at a living woman in a nude condition with the purely critical, unemotional eye, which is an essential feature in judging any object of beauty. But apart from this, an absolute nude female figure in the life leaves an impression of something wanting, an incompleteness, which is incompatible with beauty.
A nude woman may be beautiful in details, but the general effect is not beautiful; she inevitably creates the feeling that she is looking for something, and this induces disinclination rather than desire in the spectator. The sight of an upright female form, in the nude, makes most patent her purposelessness, the sense of her purpose in life being derived from something outside herself; in the recumbent position this feeling is greatly diminished. It is evident that artists have perceived this in reproducing the nude.
But even in the details of her body a woman is not wholly beautiful, not even if she is a flawless, perfect type of her sex. The genitalia are the chief difficulty in the way of regarding her as theoretically beautiful. If the idea were justified that man’s love for woman is the direct result of his sexual impulse; if we could agree with Schopenhauer that “the under-sized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-limbed sex is called beautiful only because the male intellect is befogged by the sexual impulse, that impulse being the creator of the conception of the beauty of woman,” it would follow that the genitalia could not be excluded from the conception of beauty. It requires no lengthy exposition to prove that the genitalia are not regarded as beautiful, and that, therefore, the beauty of woman cannot be regarded as due to the sexual impulse. In fact, the sexual impulse is in reality opposed to the conception of beauty. The man who is most under its influence has least sense of female beauty, and desires any woman merely because she is a woman.
A woman’s nude body is distasteful to man because it offends his sense of shame. The easy superficiality of our day has given colour to the statement that the sense of shame has arisen from the wearing of clothes, and it has been urged that the objection to the nude arises from those who are unnatural and secretly immorally-minded. But a man who has become immorally-minded no longer is interested in the nude as such, because it has lost its influence on him. He merely desires and no longer loves. All true love is modest, like all true pity. There is only one case of shamelessness—a declaration of love the sincerity of which a man is convinced of in the moment he makes it. This would represent the conceivable maximum of shamelessness; but there is no declaration of love which is quite true, and the stupidity of women is shown by their readiness to believe such protestations.
The love bestowed by the man is the standard of what is beautiful and what is hateful in woman. The conditions are quite different in æsthetics from those in logic or ethics. In logic there is an abstract truth which is the standard of thought; in ethics there is an ideal good which furnishes the criterion of what ought to be done, and the value of the good is established by the determination to link the will with the good. In æsthetics beauty is created by love; there is no determining law to love what is beautiful, and the beautiful does not present itself to human beings with any imperative command to love it. (And so there is no abstract, no super-individual “right” taste).
All beauty is really more a projection, an emanation of the requirements of love; and so the beauty of woman is not apart from love, it is not an objective to which love is directed, but woman’s beauty is the love of man; they are not two things, but one and the same thing.
Just as hatefulness comes from hating, so love creates beauty. This is only another way of expressing the fact that beauty has as little to do with the sexual impulse as the sexual impulse has to do with love. Beauty is something that can neither be felt, touched, nor mixed with other things; it is only at a distance that it can be plainly discerned, and when it is approached it withdraws itself. The sexual impulse which seeks for sexual union with woman is a denial of such beauty; the woman who has been possessed and enjoyed, will never again be worshipped for her beauty.
I now come to the second question: what are the innocence and morality of a woman?
It will be convenient to start with a few facts that concern the origin of all love. Bodily cleanliness, as has often been remarked, is in men a general indication of morality and rectitude; or at least it may be said that uncleanly men are seldom of high character. It may be noticed that when men, who formerly paid little attention to bodily cleanliness, begin to strive for a higher perfection of character, they at the same time take more trouble with the care of the body. In the same way, when men suddenly become imbued with passion they experience a simultaneous desire for bodily cleanliness, and it may almost be said of them that only at such a time do they wash themselves thoroughly.
If we now turn to gifted men, we shall see that in their case love frequently begins with self-mortification, humiliation, and restraint. A moral change sets in, a process of purification seems to emanate from the object loved, even if her lover has never spoken to her, or only seen her a few times in the distance. It is, then, impossible that this process should have its origin in that person: very often it may be a bread-and-butter miss, a stolid lump, more often a sensuous coquette, in whom no one can see the marvellous characteristics with which his love endows her, save her lover. Can any one believe that it is a concrete person who is loved? Does she not in reality serve as the starting point for incomparably greater emotions than she could inspire?
In love, man is only loving himself. Not his empirical self, not the weaknesses and vulgarities, not the failings and smallnesses which he outwardly exhibits; but all that he wants to be, all that he ought to be, his truest, deepest, intelligible nature, free from all fetters of necessity, from all taint of earth.
In his actual physical existence, this being is limited by space and time and by the shackles of the senses; however deep he may look into
