ained unchanged. Only the female
portraits of Leonardo da Vinci are deserving of special mention; the
great artist was possibly the first who artistically divined, if he did
not achieve, the synthesis. The exceptional position always granted to
his women--particularly to his Mona Lisa--must doubtless be ascribed to
this premonition. We may be certain that Leonardo not only as artist,
but as lover also, was ahead of his time; but he must be regarded as an
isolated instance. The three stages apply to the eroticism of man only.
His emotion soared from brutality to divinity, and then gradually became
human; his feeling alone has a history. The force which seized, moulded
and transformed him, had no influence over woman. Compared to man, she
is to-day what she was at the beginning, pure nature. Her lover has
always been everything to her; never merely a means for the
gratification of the senses, nor, on the other hand, a higher being to
whom she looked up and whom she worshipped with a purely spiritual love;
but at all times he possessed her undivided love, unable in its naive
simplicity to differentiate between body and soul. The higher intuition,
the object of the supreme erotic yearning of man, for the possession of
which he has struggled for centuries, and even to-day does not fully
possess, has always been a matter of course to her. She whose truest
vocation is love, received from nature that which the greatest of men
have striven hard to win and only half succeeded in winning. Man's
profound dualism is alien to her; her greatness--but also her
limitation--lies in the simplicity and infallibility of her instinct,
which has had no evolution and is consequently not liable to produce
atavisms and aberrations. She is hardly conscious of the chasm between
sexual instinct and personal love. Wherever this is not so, we _may_
find intellectual greatness (as for instance in the case of the Empress
Catherine of Russia), but as a rule we find only morbidness, despondency
and callousness. To the normal woman the phenomena of dualistic
eroticism appear unintelligible, even unwholesome. The unity of love is
a matter of course to her, so that the third stage is practically male
acquiescence to female intuition.

Even in our time, when so much is said and written about modern woman
and her claims, her feeling is still perfect in itself; compared to the
discord and heterogeneity of man, she represents simplicity and harmony.
Both purely