CHAPTER IX
At the present day, notwithstanding all the adverse opinions and jeremiads of infatuated apostles of morality, the epoch of our amatory life through which we are passing is by no means one of decadence. On the contrary, we are now actually engaged in its re-constitution, reform, and ennoblement. All the tendencies of the time proceed towards such a radical perfectionment of love, towards its free, individual configuration, not by the unchaining of sensuality, but by its idealization; and when we have once attained a natural view of sensuality, it loses all its terrors. We fight at first against the elemental force of the wild impulse, and against the elemental force of life-denying asceticism. In this struggle the artistic element in modern love plays a notable part. By this we do not signify “sugary” æstheticism, nor yet the completely non-sensual Platonic Eros, but that æsthetic tendency in human love, bringing about an intimate association of the bodily and spiritual, which W. Bölsche denotes by the term “rhythmotropism.” It is “an impulsive, forced reaction of the higher animal brain to rhythmical beauty,” to which art also owes its origin. This æsthetic natural impulse is of great importance to love, as Darwin recognized many years ago. It was he who expressed the great thought that beauty is love become perceptible.
The sexual is in no way hostile to æsthetic contemplation, as the unhappy Weininger quite erroneously maintained in the confused chapter “Erotism and Æsthetics” of his book. He curtly denies that sexuality has any æsthetic value whatever, yet Plato himself deduced from the physical Eros the highest æsthetic contemplation of a spiritual nature. In the world of the senses he discovered the reflection of the Divine.
The well-known fact that with the awakening of the sexual life, spiritual creative activity also awakens, and an artistic tendency becomes kinetic, that at the time of puberty every youth is a poet, confirms the suggested existence of this intimate relationship between sexual and æsthetic perception.
“There appears to me to be no doubt,” says J. Volkelt in his “Æsthetics” (vol. i., p. 523; Munich, 1905), “that in the youth or the maiden the awakening of sexuality induces an individualization and invigoration of artistic perception. Hand in hand with the first love of youth, somewhere about the sixteenth or seventeenth year, the sense of grace and beauty in the landscape, the appreciation of the charm of poetry, painting, and music, are strengthened and refined to such a degree, that in comparison with what is now felt, all earlier experiences and enjoyments seem to be as nothing.”
Sensuality first gives life colour, brings out the nuances and the finer tones of feeling, without which life would be tinted a uniform grey, would be a monotonous waste, and lacking which the joy of existence and creative activity would be annihilated, or, at least, would be reduced to a minimum. Even the most ideal love must be nourished upon sensuality, if it is to remain poietic and full of vitality. Of this Annette von Droste-Hülshoff is an interesting example—a woman and poet in whom in other respects sexual influences can have played only a very modest part. But she lost on the instant all poetic capacity, all artistic creative power, when her lover, Lewin Schücking, became engaged to Louise von Gall. The mere idea of the possibility of physical possession was to her a spur to poetic activity without its being necessary for this possibility to be translated into reality. But when the possibility was for ever removed, her muse at once became dumb.
An absolutely convincing proof of the intimate connexion between sexuality and æsthetics is the fact that great artists and poets have, in the majority of cases, possessed thoroughly sensual natures. The previously described relationship between the sexual impulse and the poietic impulse, comprised in the “function impulse” of Santlus, is especially manifest in the case of artists. In these artistic natures the perceptive æsthetic power is associated with an ardent sensuality, which derives its most powerful impulse directly from the beautiful. We agree with von Krafft-Ebing when he denies the possibility of genius, art, and poetry except upon a sexual foundation. We do not believe in a so-called purely æsthetic contemplation and perception without any sexual admixture. Even Volkelt, who is inclined to sever art and the sexual impulse each from the other, is unable to deny the genetic connexion between the two. Oskar Bie makes the interesting observation that “in æsthetic relationships the cord of the will does not become thinner to the breaking point, but stronger, until it becomes blind passion” (Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 1894, p. 479). Nietzsche and Guyau have also declared themselves opposed to Schopenhauer’s theory regarding the absence of a will-element in æsthetic perception. Nietzsche speaks even of an “æsthetic of the sexual impulse.” Guyau bases his æsthetic upon the love of life and upon sexual love (“Les Problèmes de l’Esthétique Contemporaine,” Paris, 1897). Magnus Hirschfeld alludes in his “Wesen der Liebe” (“The Nature of Love”), p. 48, to a work by G. Santayana entitled “The Sense of Beauty,” in which the theory is propounded that “for human beings the whole of nature is an object of sexual perception, and it is chiefly in this way that the beauty of nature is to be explained.” Finally, Gustav Naumann (“Sex and Art: Prolegomena to Physiological Æsthetics,” Leipzig, 1899) says most convincingly that the sexual is the root of all art, of all æsthetics.
But whatever view may be held regarding the relationship between sexuality and art, it is a quite incontestable fact that our latter-day life is characterized by a need “for erotic illusion” (to use the expression of Konrad Lange), that the slighter degree of eroticism, as it exhibits itself in social intercourse between the two sexes, is principally of an artistic nature. I do not speak here merely of the dance as the artistic transfiguration of the erotic phenomena of courtship, or of dress and fashion and the whole milieu as æsthetic means of expression of the personality (as they were described in earlier pages of this work), but I refer above all to social intercourse as a whole, which to-day represents a free and facile æsthetic element, in which modern love receives its most manifold suggestions.
Emerson, in his essay on Love, has very beautifully described the importance to our civilized life of these slight, imponderable influences of an erotic-æsthetic nature; and Konrad Lange, in his “Wesen der Kunst” (vol. ii., p. 23; Berlin, 1901), refers the pleasure of social intercourse ultimately to the sexual impulse, even though therein sensuality is mitigated by illusion and is elevated to a purer sphere. Erotic enjoyment is modified into a “love-play,” sensuality is refined, spiritualized, dematerialized. It is precisely this æsthetic eroticism which at the present day becomes of increasing importance in the emotional life of civilized humanity, in the life of those engaged in the hard struggle for existence, to whom time and leisure are lacking for the “great” love-passion. For such as these, these gentler suggestions constitute the true charm of life, into the dreary monotony of which they bring light and colour.
In his excellent “Remarks on Goethe’s Stella,” Wilhelm Scherer has assigned its true value to this erotic æstheticism and æsthetic eroticism of society and social intercourse. He speaks of a charm of personal presence, which brings out all that is best in two human beings. He speaks of an enthusiastic and complete surrender of the spirit and the emotions, in which the souls seem to enter into inseparable union—and yet only seem. For in reality this surrender occurs for weeks, for days, for minutes, for moments, and to various persons. These frequent, individual, purely spiritual contacts between the two sexes have completely the character of æsthetic joy; they give rise to a perception of freedom, of liberation from the power of the senses. Who does not know the happy freedom of spirit which is aroused by the glance of a beautiful girl, by the smile of a sympathetic face?