recognize also that specific sexual emotion properly
comes within the aesthetic field. It is quite erroneous, as Groos
well points out, to assert that sexual emotion has no aesthetic
value. On the contrary, it has quite as much value as the emotion
of terror or of pity. Such emotion, must, however, be duly
subordinated to the total aesthetic effect. (K. Groos, _Der
AEsthetische Genuss_, p. 151.)
"The idea of beauty," Remy de Gourmont says, "is not an unmixed
idea; it is intimately united with the idea of carnal pleasure.
Stendhal obscurely perceived this when he defined beauty as 'a
promise of happiness.' Beauty is a woman, and women themselves
have carried docility to men so far as to accept this aphorism
which they can only understand in extreme sexual perversion....
Beauty is so sexual that the only uncontested works of art are
those that simply show the human body in its nudity. By its
perseverance in remaining purely sexual Greek statuary has placed
itself forever above all discussion. It is beautiful because it
is a beautiful human body, such a one as every man or every woman
would desire to unite with in the perpetuation of the race....
That which inclines to love seems beautiful; that which seems
beautiful inclines to love. This intimate union of art and of
love is, indeed, the only explanation of art. Without this
genital echo art would never have been born and never have been
perpetuated. There is nothing useless in these deep human depths;
everything which has endured is necessary. Art is the accomplice
of love. When love is taken away there is no art; when art is
taken away love is nothing but a physiological need." (Remy de
Gourmont, _Culture des Idees_, 1900, p. 103, and _Mercure de
France_, August, 1901, pp. 298 et seq.)
Beauty as incarnated in the feminine body has to some extent
become the symbol of love even for women. Colin Scott finds that
it is common among women who are not inverted for female beauty
whether on the stage or in art to arouse sexual emotion to a
greater extent than male beauty, and this is confirmed by some of
the histories I have recorded in the Appendix to the third
volume of these _Studies_. Scott considers that female beauty has
come to be regarded as typical of ideal beauty, and thus tends to
produce an emotional effect on both s
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