at music has a marked influence in exciting the
specifically sexual instincts, neither are we entitled to find any similar
argument in the fact that music is frequently associated with the
love-feelings of youth. Men are often able to associate many of their
earliest ideas of love in boyhood with women singing or playing; but in
these cases it will always be found that the fascination was romantic and
sentimental, and not specifically erotic.[119] In adult life the music
which often seems to us to be most definitely sexual in its appeal (such
as much of Wagner's _Tristan_) really produces this effect in part from
the association with the story, and in part from the intellectual
realization of the composer's effort to translate passion into aesthetic
terms; the actual effect of the music is not sexual, and it can well be
believed that the results of experiments as regards the sexual influence
of the _Tristan_ music on men under the influence of hypnotism have been,
as reported, negative. Helmholtz goes so far as to state that the
expression of sexual longing in music is identical with that of religious
longing. It is quite true, again, that a soft and gentle voice seems to
every normal man as to Lear "an excellent thing in woman," and that a
harsh or shrill voice may seem to deaden or even destroy altogether the
attraction of a beautiful face. But the voice is not usually in itself an
adequate or powerful method of evoking sexual emotion in a man. Even in
its supreme vocal manifestations the sexual fascination exerted by a great
singer, though certainly considerable, cannot be compared with that
commonly exerted by the actress. Cases have, indeed, been
recorded--chiefly occurring, it is probable, in men of somewhat morbid
nervous disposition--in which sexual attraction was exerted chiefly
through the ear, or in which there was a special sexual sensibility to
particular inflections or accents.[120] Fere mentions the case of a young
man in hospital with acute arthritis who complained of painful erections
whenever he heard through the door the very agreeable voice of the young
woman (invisible to him) who superintended the linen.[121] But these
phenomena do not appear to be common, or, at all events, very pronounced.
So far as my own inquiries go, only a small proportion of men would
appear to experience definite sexual feelings on listening to music. And
the fact that in woman the voice is so slightly differentiated from that