mind to the psychic reaction of the woman toward whom his display is
directed. He seeks to cause an emotion which, probably in most cases, he
desires should be pleasurable. But from one cause or another his finer
sensibilities are always inhibited or in abeyance, and he is unable to
estimate accurately either the impression he is likely to produce or the
general results of his action, or else he is moved by a strong impulsive
obsession which overpowers his judgment. In many cases he has good reason
for believing that his act will be pleasurable, and frequently he finds
complacent witnesses among the low-class servant girls, etc.

It may be pointed out here that we are quite justified in
speaking of a penis-fetichism and also of a vulva-fetichism. This
might be questioned. We are obviously justified in recognizing a
fetichism which attaches itself to the pubic hair, or, as in a
case with which I am acquainted, to the clitoris, but it may seem
that we cannot regard the central sexual organs as symbols of
sex, symbols, as it were, of themselves. Properly regarded,
however, it is the sexual act rather than the sexual organ which
is craved in normal sexual desire; the organ is regarded merely
as the means and not as the end. Regarded as a means the organ is
indeed an object of desire, but it only becomes a fetich when it
arrests and fixes the attention. An attention thus pleasurably
fixed, a vulva-fetichism or a penis-fetichism, is within the
normal range of sexual emotion (this point has been mentioned in
the previous volume when discussing the part played by the
primary sexual organs in sexual selection), and in coarse-grained
natures of either sex it is a normal allurement in its
generalized shape, apart from any attraction to the person to
whom the organs belong. In some morbid cases, however, this
penis-fetichism may become a fully developed sexual perversion. A
typical case of this kind has been recorded by Howard in the
United States. Mrs. W., aged 39, was married at 20 to a strong,
healthy man, but derived no pleasure from coitus, though she
received great pleasure from masturbation practiced immediately
after coitus, and nine years after marriage she ceased actual
coitus, compelling her husband to adopt mutual masturbation. She
would introduce men into the house at all times of the day or
night, and after persuading them to expose their persons would
retire to her room to masturbate. The same man never aroused
desire more than once. This desire became so violent and
persistent that she would seek out men in all sorts of public
places and, having induced them to expose themselves, rapidly
retreat to the nearest convenient spot for self-gratification.
She once abstracted a pair of trousers she had seen a man wear
and after fondling them experienced the orgasm. Her husband
finally left her, after vainly attempting to have her confined in
an asylum. She was often arrested for her actions, but through
the intervention of friends set free again. She was a highly
intelligent woman, and apart from this perversion entirely
normal. (W.L. Howard, "Sexual Perversion," _Alienist and
Neurologist_, January, 1896.) It is on the existence of a more or
less developed penis-fetichism of this kind that the
exhibitionist, mostly by an ignorant instinct, relies for the
effects he desires to produce.

The exhibitionist is not usually content to produce a mere titillated
amusement; he seeks to produce a more powerful effect which must be
emotional whether or not it is pleasurable. A professional man in
Strassburg (in a case reported by Hoche[59]) would walk about in the
evening in a long cloak, and when he met ladies would suddenly throw his
cloak back under a street lamp, or igniting a red-fire match, and thus
exhibit his organs. There was an evident effort--on the part of a weak,
vain, and effeminate man--to produce a maximum of emotional effect. The
attempt to heighten the emotional shock is also seen in the fact that the
exhibitionist frequently chooses a church as the scene of his exploits,
not during service, for he always avoids a concourse of people, but
perhaps toward evening when there are only a few kneeling women scattered
through the edifice. The church is chosen, often instinctively rather than
deliberately, from no impulse to commit a sacrilegious outrage--which, as
a rule, the exhibitionist does not feel his act to be--but because it
really presents the conditions most favorable to the act and the effects
desired. The exhibitionist's attitude of mind is well illustrated by one
of Garnier's patients who declared that he never wished to be seen by more
than two women at once, "just what is necessary," he added, "for an
exchange of impressions." After each exhibition he would ask himself
anxiously: "Did they see me? What are they thinking? What do they say to
each other about me? Oh! how I should like to know!" Another patient of
Garnier's, who haunted churches for this purpose, made this very
significant statement: "Why do I like going to churches? I can scarcely
say. _But I know that it is only there that my act has its full
importance_. The woman is in a devout frame of mind, and she must see that
such an act in such a place is not a joke in bad taste or a disgusting
obscenity; _that if I go there it is not to amuse myself; it is more
serious than that!_ I watch the effect produced on the faces of the ladies
to whom I show my organs. I wish to see them express a profound joy. I
wish, in fact, that they may be forced to say to themselves: _How
impressive Nature is when thus seen!_"

Here we trace the presence of a feeling which recalls the
phenomena of the ancient and world-wide phallic worship, still
liable to reappear sporadically. Women sometimes took part in
these rites, and the osculation of the male sexual organ or its
emblematic representation by women is easily traceable in the
phallic rites of India and many other lands, not excluding Europe
even in comparatively recent times. (Dulaure in his _Divinités
Génératices_ brings together much bearing on these points; cf.:
Ploss and Bartels, _Das Weib_, vol. i, Chapter XVII, and Bloch,
_Beiträge zur Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil I, pp. 115-117. Colin
Scott has some interesting remarks on phallic worship and the
part it has played in aiding human evolution, "Sex and Art,"
_American Journal of Psychology_, vol. vii, No. 2, pp. 191-197.
Irving Rosse describes some modern phallic rites in which both
men and women took part, similar to those practiced in vaudouism,
"Sexual Hypochondriasis," _Virginia Medical Monthly_, October,
1892.)

Putting aside any question of phallic worship, a certain pride
and more or less private feeling of ostentation in the new
expansion and development of the organs of virility seems to be
almost normal at adolescence. "We have much reason to assume,"
Stanley Hall remarks, "that in a state of nature there is a
certain instinctive pride and ostentation that accompanies the
new local development. I think it will be found that
exhibitionists are usually those who have excessive growth here,
and that much that modern society stigmatizes as obscene is at
bottom more or less spontaneous and perhaps in some cases not
abnormal. Dr. Seerley tells me he has never examined a young man
largely developed who had the usual strong instinctive tendency
of modesty to cover himself with his hands, but he finds this
instinct general with those whose development is less than the
average." (G. Stanley Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. ii, p. 97.) This
instinct of ostentation, however, so far as it is normal, is held
in check by other considerations, and is not, in the strict
sense, exhibitionism. I have observed a full-grown telegraph boy
walking across Hampstead Heath with his sexual organs exposed,
but immediately he realized that he was seen he concealed them.
The solemnity of exhibitionism at this age finds expression in
the climax of the sonnet, "Oraison du Soir," written at 16 by
Rimbaud, whose verse generally is a splendid and insolent
manifestation of rank  adolescence:--

"Doux comme le Seigneur du cèdre et des hysopes,
Je pisse vers les cieux bruns très haut et très loin,
Avec l'assentiment des grands héliotropes."

(J.A. Rimbaud, _Oeuvres_, p. 68.)

In women, also, there would appear to be traceable a somewhat
similar ostentation, though in them it is complicated and largely
inhibited by modesty, and at the same time diffused over the body
owing to the absence of external sexual organs. "Primitive
woman," remarks Madame Renooz, "proud of her womanhood, for a
long time defended her nakedness which ancient art has always
represented. And in the actual life of the young girl to-day
there is a moment when by a secret atavism she feels the pride of
her sex, the intuition of her moral superiority, and cannot
understand why she must hide its cause. At this moment, wavering
between the laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely
knows if nakedness should or should not affright her. A sort of
confused atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing
was known, and reveals to her as a paradisaical ideal the customs
of that human epoch." (Céline Renooz, _Psychologie Comparée de
l'Homme et de la Femme_, p. 85.) It may be added that among
primitive peoples, and even among some remote European
populations to-day, the exhibition of feminine nudity has
sometimes been regarded as a spectacle with religious or magic
operation. (Ploss, _Das Weib_, seventh edition, vol. ii, pp.
663-680; Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth edition, p.
304.) It is stated by Gopcevic that in the long struggle between
the Albanians and the Montenegrians the women of the former
people would stand in the front rank and expose themselves by
raising their skirts, believing that they would thus insure
victory. As, however, they were shot down, and as, moreover,
victory usually fell to the Montenegrians, this custom became
discredited. (Quoted by Bloch, _Op. cit._, Teil II, p. 307.)

With regard to the association, suggested by Stanley Hall,
between exhibitionism and an unusual degree of development of the
sexual organs, it must be remarked that both extremes--a very
large and a very small penis--are specially common in
exhibitionists. The prevalence of the small organ is due to an
association of exhibitionism with sexual feebleness. The
prevalence of the large organ may be due to the cause suggested
by Hall. Among Mahommedans the sexual organs are sometimes
habitually exposed by religious penitents, and I note that
Bernhard Stern, in his book on the medical and sexual aspects of
life in Turkey, referring to a penitent of this sort whom he saw
on the Stamboul bridge at Constantinople, remarks that the organ
was very largely developed. It may well be in such a case that
the penitent's religious attitude is reinforced by some lingering
relic of a more fleshly ostentation.

It is by a pseudo-atavism that this phallicism is evoked in the
exhibitionist. There is no true emergence of an ancestrally inherited
instinct, but by the paralysis or inhibition of the finer and higher
feelings current in civilization, the exhibitionist is placed on the same
mental level as the man of a more primitive age, and he thus presents the
basis on which the impulses belonging to a higher culture may naturally
take root and develop.

Reference may here be made to a form of primitive exhibitionism,
almost confined to women, which, although certainly symbolic, is
absolutely non-sexual, and must not, therefore, be confused with
the phenomena we are here occupied with. I refer to the
exhibition of the buttocks as a mark of contempt. In its most
primitive form, no doubt, this exhibitionism is a kind of
exorcism, a method of putting evil spirits, primarily, and
secondarily evil-disposed persons, to flight. It is the most
effective way for a woman to display sexual centers, and it
shares in the magical virtues which all unveiling of the sexual
centers is believed by primitive peoples to possess. It is
recorded that the women of some peoples in the Balkan peninsula
formerly used this gesture against enemies in battle. In the
sixteenth century so distinguished a theologian as Luther when
assailed by the Evil One at night was able to put the adversary
to flight by protruding his uncovered buttocks from the bed. But
the spiritual significance of this attitude is lost with the
decay of primitive beliefs. It survives, but merely as a gesture
of insult. The symbolism comes to have reference to the nates as
the excretory focus, the seat of the anus. In any case it ignores
any sexual attractiveness in this part of the body. Exhibitionism
of this kind, therefore, can scarcely arise in persons of any
sensitiveness or æsthetic perception, even putting aside the
question of modesty, and there seems to be little trace of it in
classic antiquity when the nates were regarded as objects of
beauty. Among the Egyptians, however, we gather from Herodotus
(Bk. II, Chapter LX) that at a certain popular religious festival
men and women would go in boats on the Nile, singing and playing,
and when they approached a town the women on the boats would
insult the women of the town by injurious language and by
exposing themselves. Among the Arabs, however, the specific
gesture we are concerned with is noted, and a man to whom
vengeance is forbidden would express his feelings by exposing his
posterior and strewing earth on his head (Wellhausen, _Rests
Arabischen Heidentums_, 1897, p. 195). It is in Europe and in
mediæval and later times that this emphatic gesture seems to have
flourished as a violent method of expressing contempt. It was by
no means confined to the lower classes, and Kleinpaul, in
discussing this form of "speech without words," quotes examples
of various noble persons, even princesses, who are recorded thus
to have expressed their feelings. (Kleinpaul, _Sprache ohne
Worte_, pp. 271-273.) In more recent times the gesture has become
merely a rare and extreme expression of unrestrained feeling in
coarse-grained peasants. Zola, in the figure of Mouquette in
_Germinal_, may be said to have given a kind of classic
expression to the gesture. In the more remote parts of Europe it
appears to be still not altogether uncommon. This seems to be
notably the case among the South Slavs, and Krauss states that
"when a South Slav woman wishes to express her deepest contempt
for anyone she bends forward, with left hand raising her skirts,
and with the right slapping her posterior, at the same time
exclaiming: 'This for you!'" (Kryptadia, vol. vi, p. 200.)

A verbal survival of this gesture, consisting in the contemptuous
invitation to kiss this region, still exists among us in remote
parts of the country, especially as an insult offered by an angry
woman who forgets herself. It is said to be commonly used in
Wales. ("Welsh Ædoelogy," Kryptadia, vol. ii, pp. 358, et seq.)
In Cornwall, when addressed by a woman to a man it is sometimes
regarded as a deadly insult, even if the woman is young and
attractive, and may cause a life-long enmity between related
families. From this point of view the nates are a symbol of
contempt, and any sexual significance is excluded. (The
distinction is brought out by Diderot in _Le Neveu de Rameau:_
"_Lui:_--Il y a d'autres jours ou il ne m'en coûterait rien pour
être vil tant qu'on voudrait; ces jours-là, pour un liard, je
baiserais le cul à la petite Hus. _Moi:_--Eh! mais, l'ami, elle
est blanche, jolie, douce, potelée, et c'est un acte d'humilité
auquel un plus delicat que vous pourrait quelquefois s'abaisser.
_Lui:_--Entendons-nous; c'est qu'il y a baiser le cul au simple,
et baiser le cul au figuré.")

It must be added that a sexual form of exhibitionism of the nates
must still be recognized. It occurs in masochism and expresses
the desire for passive flagellation. Rousseau, whose emotional
life was profoundly affected by the castigations which as a child
he received from Mlle Lambercier, has in his _Confessions_ told
us how, when a youth, he would sometimes expose himself in this
way in the presence of young women. Such masochistic
exhibitionism seems, however, to be rare.

While the manifestations of exhibitionism are substantially the same in
all cases, there are many degrees and varieties of the condition. We may
find among exhibitionists, as Garnier remarks, dementia, states of
unconsciousness, epilepsy, general paralysis, alcoholism, but the most
typical cases, he adds, if not indeed the cases to which the term properly
belongs, are those in which it is an impulsive obsession. Krafft-Ebing[60]
divides exhibitionists into four clinical groups: (1) acquired states of
mental weakness, with cerebral or spinal disease clouding consciousness
and at the same time causing impotence; (2) epileptics, in whom the act is
an abnormal organic impulse performed in a state of imperfect
consciousness; (3) a somewhat allied group of neurasthenic cases; (4)
periodical impulsive cases with deep hereditary taint. This classification
is not altogether satisfactory. Garnier's classification, placing the
group of obsessional cases in the foreground and leaving the other more
vaguely defined groups in the background, is probably better. I am
inclined to consider that most of the cases fall into one or other of two
mixed groups. The first class includes cases in which there is more or
less congenital abnormality, but otherwise a fair or even complete degree
of mental integrity; they are usually young adults, they are more or less
precisely conscious of the end they wish to attain, and it is often only
with a severe struggle that they yield to their impulses. In the second
class the beginnings of mental or nervous disease have diminished the
sensibility of the higher centers; the subjects are usually old men whose
lives have been absolutely correct; they are often only vaguely aware of
the nature of the satisfaction they are seeking, and frequently no
struggle precedes the manifestation; such was the case of the overworked
clergyman described by Hughes,[61] who, after much study, became morose
and absent-minded, and committed acts of exhibitionism which he could not
explain but made no attempt to deny; with rest and restorative treatment
his health improved and the acts ceased. It is in the first class of cases
alone that there is a developed sexual perversion. In the cases of the
second class there is a more or less definite sexual intention, but it is
only just conscious, and the emergence of the impulse is due not to its
strength but to the weakness, temporary or permanent, of the higher
inhibiting centers.

Epileptic cases, with loss of consciousness during the act, can only be
regarded as presenting a pseudo-exhibitionism. They should be excluded
altogether. It is undoubtedly true that many cases of real or apparent
exhibitionism occur in epileptics.[62] We must not, however, too hastily
conclude that because these acts occur in epileptics they are necessarily
unconscious acts. Epilepsy frequently occurs on a basis of hereditary
degeneration, and the exhibitionism may be, and not infrequently is, a
stigma of the degeneracy and not an indication of the occurrence of a
minor epileptic fit. When the act of pseudo-exhibitionism is truly
epileptic, it will usually have no psychic sexual content, and it will
certainly be liable to occur under all sorts of circumstances, when the
patient is alone or in a miscellaneous concourse of people. It will be on
a level with the acts of the highly respectable young woman who, at the
conclusion of an attack of _petit mal_, consisting chiefly of a sudden
desire to pass urine, on one occasion lifted up her clothes and urinated
at a public entertainment, so that it was with difficulty her friends
prevented her from being handed over to the police.[63] Such an act is
automatic, unconscious, and involuntary; the spectators are not even
perceived; it cannot be an act of exhibitionism. Whenever, on the other
hand, the place and the time are evidently chosen deliberately,--a quiet
spot, the presence of only one or two young women or children,--it is
difficult to admit that we are in the presence of a fit of epileptic
unconsciousness, even when the subject is known to be epileptic.

Even, however, when we exclude those epileptic pseudo-exhibitionists who,
from the legal point of view, are clearly irresponsible, it must still be
remembered that in every case of exhibitionism there is a high degree of
either mental abnormality on a neuropathic basis, or else of actual
disease. This is true to a greater extent in exhibitionism than in almost
any other form of sexual perversion. No subject of exhibitionism should be
sent to prison without expert medical examination.


FOOTNOTES:

[54] Lasège first drew attention to this sexual perversion and gave it its
generally accepted name, "Les Exhibitionistes," _L'Union Médicale_, May,
1877. Magnan, on various occasions (for example, "Les Exhibitionistes,"
_Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle_, vol. v, 1890, p. 456), has given
further development and precision to the clinical picture of the
exhibitionist.

[55] B. Ball. _La Folie Erotique_, p. 86.

[56] Moll, _Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis_, bd. i, p. 661.

[57] "Exhibitionism in its most typical form is," Garnier truly says, "a
_systematic act_, manifesting itself as the _strange equivalent of a
sexual connection_, or its _substitution_." The brief account of
exhibitionism (pp. 433-437) in Garnier's discussion of "Perversions
Sexuelles" at the International Medical Congress at Paris in 1900
(_Section de Psychiatrie: Comptes-Rendus_) is the most satisfactory
statement of the psychological aspects of this perversion with which I am
acquainted. Garnier's unrivalled clinical knowledge of these
manifestations, due to his position during many years as physician at the
Depôt of the Prefecture of Police in Paris, adds great weight to his
conclusions.

[58] The symbolism of coitus involved in flagellation has been touched on
by Eulenburg (_Sexuale Neuropathie_, p. 121), and is more fully developed
by Dühren (_Geschlechtsleben in England_, bd. ii, pp. 366, _et seq._).

[59] A. Hoche, _Neurologische Centralblatt_, 1896, No. 2.

[60] _Op. cit._, pp. 478, et seq.

[61] C.H. Hughes, "Morbid Exhibitionism," _Alienist and Neurologist_,
August, 1904. Another somewhat similar American case, also preceded by
overwork, and eventually adjudged insane by the courts, is recorded by
D.S. Booth, _Alienist and Neurologist_, February, 1905.

[62] Exhibitionism in epilepsy is briefly discussed by Féré, _L'Instinct
Sexuel_, second edition, pp. 194-195.

[63] W.S. Colman, "Post-Epileptic Unconscious Automatic Actions,"
_Lancet_, July 5, 1890.




VI.

The Forms of Erotic Symbolism are Simulacra of Coitus--Wide
Extension of Erotic Symbolism--Fetichism Not Covering the Whole
Ground of Sexual Selection--It is Based on the Individual Factor in
Selection--Crystallization--The Lover and the Artist--The Key to Erotic
Symbolism to be Found in the Emotional Sphere--The Passage to Pathological
Extremes.


We have now examined several very various and yet very typical
manifestations in all of which it is not difficult to see how, in some
strange and eccentric form--on a basis of association through resemblance
or contiguity or both combined--there arises a definite mimicry of the
normal sexual act together with the normal emotions which accompany that
act. It has become clear in what sense we are justified in recognizing
erotic symbolism.

The symbolic and, as it were, abstracted nature of these
manifestations is shown by the remarkable way in which they are
sometimes capable of transference from the object to the subject.
That is to say that the fetichist may show a tendency to
cultivate his fetich in his own person. A foot-fetichist may like
to go barefoot himself; a man who admired lame women liked to
halt himself; a man who was attracted by small waists in women
found sexual gratification in tight-lacing himself; a man who was
fascinated by fine white skin and wished to cut it found
satisfaction in cutting his own skin; Moll's coprolagnic
fetichist found a voluptuous pleasure in his own acts of
defecation. (See, e.g., Krafft-Ebing, _Op. cit._, p. 221, 224,
226; Hammond, _Sexual Impotence_, p. 74; cf. _ante_, p. 68.) Such
symbolic transference seems to have a profoundly natural basis,
for we may see a somewhat similar phenomenon in the well-known
tendency of cows to mount a cow in heat. This would appear to be,
not so much a homosexual impulse, as the dynamic psychic action
of an olfactory sexual symbol in a transformed form.

We seem to have here a psychic process which is a curious
reversal of that process of _Einfühlung_--the projection of one's
own activities into the object contemplated--which Lipps has so
fruitfully developed as the essence of every æsthetic condition.
(T. Lipps, _Æsthetik_, Teil I, 1903.) By _Einfühlung_ our own
interior activity becomes the activity of the object perceived,
a thing being beautiful in proportion as it lends itself to our
_Einfühlung_. But by this action of erotic symbolism, on the
other hand, we transfer the activity of the object into
ourselves.

When the idea of erotic symbolism as manifested in such definite and
typical forms becomes realized, it further becomes clear that the vaguer
manifestations of such symbolism are exceedingly widespread. When in a
previous volume we were discussing and drawing together the various
threads which unite "Love and Pain," it will now be understood that we
were standing throughout on the threshold of erotic symbolism. Pain
itself, in the sense in which we slowly learned to define it in this
relationship--as a state of intense emotional excitement--may, under a
great variety of special circumstances, become an erotic symbol and afford
the same relief as the emotions normally accompanying the sexual act.
Active algolagnia or sadism is thus a form of erotic symbolism; passive
algolagnia or masochism is (in a man) an inverted form of erotic
symbolism. Active flagellation or passive flagellation are, in exactly the
same way, manifestations of erotic symbolism, the imaginative mimicry of
coitus.

Binet and also Krafft-Ebing[64] have argued in effect that the whole of
sexual selection is a matter of fetichism, that is to say, of erotic
symbolism of object. "Normal love," Binet states, "appears as the result
of a complicated fetichism." Tarde also seems to have regarded love as
normally a kind of fetichism. "We are a long time before we fall in love
with a woman," he remarks; "we must wait to see the detail which strikes
and delights us, and causes us to overlook what displeases us. Only in
normal love the details are many and always changing. Constancy in love is
rarely anything else but a voyage around the beloved person, a voyage of
exploration and ever new discoveries. The most faithful lover does not
love the same woman in the same way for two days in succession."[65]

From that point of view normal sexual love is the sway of a fetich--more
or less arbitrary, more or less (as Binet terms it) polytheistic--and it
can have little objective basis. But, as we saw when considering "Sexual
Selection in Man" in the previous volume, more especially when analyzing
the notion of beauty, we are justified in believing that beauty has to a
large extent an objective basis, and that love by no means depends simply
on the capricious selection of some individual fetich. The individual
factor, as we saw, is but one of many factors which constitute beauty. In
the study of sexual selection that individual factor was passed over very
lightly. We now see that it is often a factor of great importance, for in
it are rooted all these outgrowths--normal in their germs, highly abnormal
in their more extreme developments--which make up erotic symbolism.

Erotic symbolism is therefore concerned with all that is least generic,
least specific, all that is most intimately personal and individual, in
sexual selection. It is the final point in which the decreasing circle of
sexual attractiveness is fixed. In the widest and most abstract form
sexual selection in man is merely human, and we are attracted to that
which bears most fully the marks of humanity; in a less abstract form it
is sexual, and we are attracted to that which most vigorously presents the
secondary sexual characteristics; still narrowing, it is the type of our
own nation and people that appeals most strongly to us in matters of love;
and still further concentrating we are affected by the ideal--in
civilization most often the somewhat exotic ideal--of our own day, the
fashion of our own city. But the individual factor still remains, and amid
the infinite possibilities of erotic symbolism the individual may evolve
an ideal which is often, as far as he knows and perhaps in actuality, an
absolutely unique event in the history of the human soul.

Erotic symbolism works in its finer manifestations by means of the
idealizing aptitudes; it is the field of sexual psychology in which that
faculty of crystallization, on which Stendhal loved to dwell, achieves its
most brilliant results. In the solitary passage in which we seem to see a
smile on the face of the austere poet of the _De Rerum Naturâ_, Lucretius
tells us how every lover, however he may be amused by the amorous
extravagances of other men, is himself blinded by passion: if his mistress
is black she is a fascinating brunette, if she squints she is the rival of
Pallas, if too tall she is majestic, if too short she is one of the
Graces, _tota merum sal_; if too lean it is her delicate refinement, if
too fat then a Ceres, dirty and she disdains adornment, a chatterer and
brilliantly vivacious, silent and it is her exquisite modesty.[66] Sixteen
hundred years later Robert Burton, when describing the symptoms of love,
made out a long and appalling list of the physical defects which the lover
is prepared to admire.[67]

Yet we must not be too certain that the lover is wrong in this matter. We
too hastily assume that the casual and hasty judgment of the world is
necessarily more reliable, more conformed to what we call "truth," than
the judgment of the lover which is founded on absorbed and patient study.
In some cases where there is lack of intelligence in the lover and
dissimulation in the object of his love, it may be so. But even a poem or
a picture will often not reveal its beauty except by the expenditure of
time and study. It is foolish to expect that the secret beauty of a human
person will reveal itself more easily. The lover is an artist, an artist
who constructs an image, it is true, but only by patient and concentrated
attention to nature; he knows the defects of his image, probably better
than anyone, but he knows also that art lies, not in the avoidance of
defects, but in the realization of those traits which swallow up defects
and so render them non-existent. A great artist, Rodin, after a life spent
in the study of Nature, has declared that for art there is no ugliness in
Nature. "I have arrived at this belief by the study of Nature," he said;
"I can only grasp the beauty of the soul by the beauty of the body, but
some day one will come who will explain what I only catch a glimpse of and
will declare how the whole earth is beautiful, and all human beings
beautiful. I have never been able to say this in sculpture so well as I
wish and as I feel it affirmed within me. For poets Beauty has always
been some particular landscape, some particular woman; but it should be
all women, all landscapes. A negro or a Mongol has his beauty, however
remote from ours, and it must be the same with their characters. There is
no ugliness. When I was young I made that mistake, as others do; I could
not undertake a woman's bust unless I thought her pretty, according to my
particular idea of beauty; to-day I should do the bust of any woman, and
it would be just as beautiful. And however ugly a woman may look, when she
is with her lover she becomes beautiful; there is beauty in her character,
in her passions, and beauty exists as soon as character or passion becomes
visible, for the body is a casting on which passions are imprinted. And
even without that, there is always the blood that flows in the veins and
the air that fills the lungs."[68]

The saint, also, is here at one with the lover and the artist. The man who
has so profoundly realized the worth of his fellow men that he is ready
even to die in order to save them, feels that he has discovered a great
secret. Cyples traces the "secret delights" that have thus risen in the
hearts of holy men to the same source as the feelings generated between
lovers, friends, parents, and children. "A few have at intervals walked in
the world," he remarks, "who have, each in his own original way, found out
this marvel.... Straightway man in general has become to them so sweet a
thing that the infatuation has seemed to the rest of their fellows to be a
celestial madness. Beggars' rags to their unhesitating lips grew fit for
kissing, because humanity had touched the garb; there were no longer any
menial acts, but only welcome services.... Remember by how much man is the
subtlest circumstance in the world; at how many points he can attach
relationships; how manifold and perennial he is in his results. All other
things are dull, meager, tame beside him."[69]

It may be added that even if we still believe that lover and artist and
saint are drawing the main elements of their conceptions from the depths
of their own consciousness, there is a sense in which they are coming
nearer to the truth of things than those for whom their conceptions are
mere illusions. The aptitude for realizing beauty has involved an
adjustment of the nerves and the associated brain centers through
countless ages that began before man was. When the vision of supreme
beauty is slowly or suddenly realized by anyone, with a reverberation that
extends throughout his organism, he has attained to something which for
his species, and for far more than his species, is truth, and can only be
illusion to one who has artificially placed himself outside the stream of
life.

In an essay on "The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life," Edward
Carpenter, though in somewhat Platonic phraseology, thus well
states the matter: "The youth sees the girl; it may be a chance
face, a chance outline, amid the most banal surroundings. But it
gives the cue. There is a memory, a confused reminiscence. The
mortal figure without penetrates to the immortal figure within,
and there rises into consciousness a shining form, glorious, not
belonging to this world, but vibrating with the agelong life of
humanity, and the memory of a thousand love-dreams. The waking of
this vision intoxicates the man; it glows and burns within him; a
goddess (it may be Venus herself) stands in the sacred place of
his temple; a sense of awe-struck splendor fills him, and the
world is changed." "He sees something" (the same writer continues
in a subsequent essay, "Beauty and Duty") "which, in a sense, is
more real than the figures in the street, for he sees something
that has lived and moved for hundreds of years in the heart of
the race; something which has been one of the great formative
influences of his own life, and which has done as much to create
those very figures in the street as qualities in the circulation
of the blood may do to form a finger or other limb. He comes into
touch with a very real Presence or Power--one of those organic
centers of growth in the life of humanity--and feels this larger
life within himself, subjective, if you like, and yet intensely
objective. And more. For is it not also evident that the woman,
the mortal woman who excites his Vision, _has_ some closest
relation to it, and is, indeed, far more than a mere mask or
empty formula which reminds him of it? For she indeed has within
her, just as much as the man has, deep subconscious Powers
working; and the ideal which has dawned so entrancingly on the
man is in all probability closely related to that which has been
working most powerfully in the heredity of the woman, and which
has most contributed to mold _her_ form and outline. No wonder,
then, that her form should remind him of it. Indeed, when he
looks into her eyes he sees _through_ to a far deeper life even
than she herself may be aware of, and yet which is truly hers--a
life perennial and wonderful. The more than mortal in him beholds
the more than mortal in her; and the gods descend to meet."
(Edward Carpenter, _The Art of Creation_, pp. 137, 186.)

It is this mighty force which lies behind and beneath the aberrations we
have been concerned with, a great reservoir from which they draw the
life-blood that vivifies even their most fantastic shapes. Fetichism and
the other forms of erotic symbolism are but the development and the
isolation of the crystallizations which normally arise on the basis of
sexual selection. Normal in their basis, in their extreme forms they
present the utmost pathological aberrations of the sexual instinct which
can be attained or conceived. In the intermediate space all degrees are
possible. In the slightest degree the symbol is merely a specially
fascinating and beloved feature in a person who is, in all other respects,
felt to be lovable; as such its recognition is a legitimate part of
courtship, an effective aid to tumescence. In a further degree the symbol
is the one arresting and attracting character of a person who must,
however, still be felt as a sexually attractive individual. In a still
further degree of perversion the symbol is effective, even though the
person with whom it is associated is altogether unattractive. In the final
stage the person and even all association with a person disappear
altogether from the field of sexual consciousness; the abstract symbol
rules supreme.

Long, however, before the symbol has reached that final climax of morbid
intensity we may be said to have passed beyond the sphere of sexual love.
A person, not an abstracted quality, must be the goal of love. So long as
the fetich is subordinated to the person it serves to heighten love. But
love must be based on a complexus of attractive qualities, or it has no
stability.[70] As soon as the fetich becomes isolated and omnipotent, so
that the person sinks into the background as an unimportant appendage of
the fetich, all stability is lost. The fetichist now follows an impersonal
and abstract symbol withersoever it may lead him.

It has been seen that there are an extraordinary number of forms in which
erotic symbolism may be felt. It must be remembered, and it cannot be too
distinctly emphasized, that the links that bind together the forms of
erotic symbolism are not to be found in objects or even in acts, but in
the underlying emotion. A feeling is the first condition of the symbol, a
feeling which recalls, by a subtle and unconscious automatic association
of resemblance or of contiguity, some former feeling. It is the similarity
of emotion, instinctively apprehended, which links on a symbol only
partially sexual, or even apparently not sexual at all, to the great
central focus of sexual emotion, the great dominating force which brings
the symbol its life-blood.[71]

The cases of sexual hyperæsthesia, quoted at the beginning of this study,
do but present in a morbidly comprehensive and sensitive form those
possibilities of erotic symbolism which, in some degree, or at some
period, are latent in most persons. They are genuinely instinctive and
automatic, and have nothing in common with that fanciful and deliberate
play of the intelligence around sexual imagery--not infrequently seen in
abnormal and insane persons--which has no significance for sexual
psychology.

It is to the extreme individualization involved by the developments of
erotic symbolism that the fetichist owes his morbid and perilous
isolation. The lover who is influenced by all the elements of sexual
selection is always supported by the fellow-feeling of a larger body of
other human beings; he has behind him his species, his sex, his nation, or
at the very least a fashion. Even the inverted lover in most cases is soon
able to create around him an atmosphere constituted by persons whose
ideals resemble his own. But it is not so with the erotic symbolist. He is
nearly always alone. He is predisposed to isolation from the outset, for
it would seem to be on a basis of excessive shyness and timidity that the
manifestations of erotic symbolism are most likely to develop. When at
length the symbolist realizes his own aspirations--which seem to him for
the most part an altogether new phenomenon in the world--and at the same
time realizes the wide degree in which they deviate from those of the rest
of mankind, his natural secretiveness is still further reinforced. He
stands alone. His most sacred ideals are for all those around him a
childish absurdity, or a disgusting obscenity, possibly a matter calling
for the intervention of the policeman. We have forgotten that all these
impulses which to us seem so unnatural--this adoration of the foot and
other despised parts of the body, this reverence for the excretory acts
and products, the acceptance of congress with animals, the solemnity of
self-exhibition--were all beliefs and practices which, to our remote
forefathers, were bound up with the highest conceptions of life and the
deepest ardors of religion.

A man cannot, however, deviate at once so widely and so spontaneously in
his impulses from the rest of the world in which he himself lives without
possessing an aboriginally abnormal temperament. At the very least he
exhibits a neuropathic sensitiveness to abnormal impressions. Not
infrequently there is more than this, the distinct stigmata of
degeneration, sometimes a certain degree of congenital feeble-mindedness
or a tendency to insanity.

Yet, regarded as a whole, and notwithstanding the frequency with which
they witness to congenital morbidity, the phenomena of erotic symbolism
can scarcely fail to be profoundly impressive to the patient and impartial
student of the human soul. They often seem absurd, sometimes disgusting,
occasionally criminal; they are always, when carried to an extreme degree,
abnormal. But of all the manifestations of sexual psychology, normal and
abnormal, they are the most specifically human. More than any others they
involve the potently plastic force of the imagination. They bring before
us the individual man, not only apart from his fellows, but in opposition,
himself creating his own paradise. They constitute the supreme triumph of
human idealism.


FOOTNOTES:

[64] Binet, _Etudes de Psychologie Expérimentale_, esp., p. 84;
Krafft-Ebing, _Op. cit._, p. 18.

[65] G. Tarde, "L'Amour Morbide," _Archives de l'Anthropologie
Criminelle_, 1890, p. 585.

[66] Lucretius, Lib. IV, vv. 1150-1163.

[67] Burton, _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Part III, Section II, Mem. III,
Subs. I.

[68] Judith Cladel, _Auguste Rodin Pris sur la Vie_, 1903, pp. 103-104.
Some slight modifications have been made in the translation of this
passage on account of the conversational form of the original.

[69] W. Cyples, _The Process of Human Experience_, p. 462. Even if (as we
have already seen, _ante_, p. 58) the saint cannot always feel actual
physical pleasure in the intimate contact of humanity, the ardor of
devoted service which his vision of humanity arouses remains unaffected.

[70] "To love," as Stendhal defined it (_De l'Amour_, Chapter II), "is to
have pleasure in seeing, touching, and feeling by all the senses, and as
near as possible, a beloved object by whom one is oneself loved."

[71] Pillon's study of "La Mémoire Affective" (_Revue Philosophique_,
February, 1901) helps to explain the psychic mechanism of the process.