im he adopted the profession because it
would enable him to indulge his proclivity; but, on the whole, he
regards this tendency as due to "hitherto unconsidered
imaginative flexibilities and curiosities in the individual. The
actor, _ex hypothesi_, is one who works himself by sympathy
(intellectual and emotional) into states of psychological being
that are not his own. He learns to comprehend--nay, to live
himself into--relations which were originally alien to his
nature. The capacity for doing this--what makes a born
actor--implies a faculty for extending his artistically acquired
experience into life. In the process of his trade, therefore, he
becomes at all points sensitive to human emotions, and, sexuality
being the most intellectually undetermined of the appetites after
hunger, the actor might discover in himself a sort of sexual
indifference, out of which a sexual aberration could easily
arise. A man devoid of this imaginative flexibility could not be
a successful actor. The man who possesses it would be exposed to
divagations of the sexual instinct under esthetical or merely
wanton influences. Something of the same kind is applicable to
musicians and artists, in whom sexual inversion prevails beyond
the average. They are conditioned by their esthetical faculty,
and encouraged by the circumstances of their life to feel and
express the whole gamut of emotional experience. Thus they get an
environment which (unless they are sharply otherwise
differentiated) leads easily to experiments in passion. All this
joins on to what you call the 'variational diathesis' of men of
genius. But I should seek the explanation of the phenomenon less
in the original sexual constitution than in the exercise of
sympathetic, assimilative emotional qualities, powerfully
stimulated and acted on by the conditions of the individual's
life. The artist, the singer, the actor, the painter, are more
exposed to the influences out of which sexual differentiation in
an abnormal direction may arise. Some persons are certainly made
abnormal by nature, others, of this sympathetic artistic
temperament, may become so through their sympathies plus their
conditions of life." It is possible there may be some element of
truth in this view, which my correspondent regarded as purely
hypothetical.

In this connec