ly any such selection it must be put down
to other causes. No doubt, even in England the abstract aesthetic
admiration of fairness is justifiable and may influence the
artist. Probably also it influences the poet, who is affected by
a long-established convention in favor of fairness, and perhaps
also by a general tendency on the part of our poets to be
themselves fair and to yield to the charm of parity,--the
tendency to prefer the women of one's own stock,--which we have
already found to be a real force.[175] But, as a matter of fact,
our famous English beauties are not very fair; probably our
handsomest men are not very fair, and the abstract sexual ideals
of both our men and our women thus go out toward the dark.

The formation of a sexual ideal, while it furnishes a predisposition to be
attracted in a certain direction, and undoubtedly has a certain weight in
sexual choice, is not by any means the whole of sexual selection. It is
not even the whole of the psychic element in sexual selection. Let us
take, for instance, the question of stature. There would seem to be a
general tendency for both men and women, apart from and before experience,
to desire sexually large persons of the opposite sex. It may even be that
this is part of a wider zooelogical tendency. In the human species it shows
itself also on the spiritual plane, in the desire for the infinite, in the
deep and unreasoning feeling that it is impossible to have too much of a
good thing. But it not infrequently happens that a man in whose youthful
dreams of love the heroine has always been large, has not been able to
calculate what are the special nervous and other characteristics most
likely to be met in large women, nor how far these correlated
characteristics would suit his own instinctive demands. He may, and
sometimes does, find that in these other demands, which prove to be more
important and insistent than the desire for stature, the tall women he
meets are less likely to suit him than the medium or short women.[176] It
may thus happen that a man whose ideal of woman has always been as tall
may yet throughout life never be in intimate relationship with a tall
woman because he finds that practically he has more marked affinities in
the case of shorter women. His abstract ideals are modified or negatived
by more imperative sympathies or antipathies.

In one field such sympathies have long been recognized, espec