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 Natura_, 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