Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Iv Part 10

[110]

Descent of Man, Chapters XIII and XIX.

[111]

"The Origin of Music" (1857), Essays, vol. ii.

[112]

Anyone who is in doubt on this point, as regards bird song, may consult the little book in which the evidence has been well summarized by Hacker, Der Gesang der Vogel, or the discussion in Groos's Spiele der Thiere, pp. 274 et seq.

[113]

Thus, mosquitoes are irresistibly attracted by music, and especially by those musical tones which resemble the buzzing of the female; the males alone are thus attracted. (Nuttall and Shipley, and Sir Hiram Maxim, quoted in Nature, October 31, 1901, p. 655, and in Lancet, February 22, 1902.)

[114]

Descent of Man, second edition, p. 567. Groos, in his discussion of music, also expresses doubt whether hearing plays a considerable part in the courtship of mammals, Spiele der Menschen, p. 22.

[115]

Fere, L'Instinct s.e.xuel, second edition, p. 137.

[116]

See Bierent, La p.u.b.erte Chapter IV; also Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, fourth edition, pp. 270-272. Endriss (Die Bisherigen Beobachtungen von Physiologischen und Pathologischen Beziehungen der oberen Luftwege zu den s.e.xualorganen, Teil III) brings together various observations on the normal and abnormal relations of the larynx to the s.e.xual sphere.

[117]

Moll, Untersuchungen uber die Libido s.e.xualis, bd. 1, p. 133.

[118]

J. L. Roger, Traite des Effets de la Musique, 1803, pp. 234 and 342.

[119]

A typical example occurs in the early life of History I in Appendix B to vol. iii of these Studies.

[120]

Vaschide and Vurpas state (Archives de Neurologie, May, 1904) that in their experience music may facilitate s.e.xual approaches in some cases of satiety, and that in certain pathological cases the s.e.xual act can only be accomplished under the influence of music.

[121]

Fere, L'Instinct s.e.xuel, p. 137. Bloch (Beitrage, etc., vol. ii, p. 355) quotes some remarks of Kistemaecker's concerning the sound of women's garments and the way in which savages and sometimes civilized women cultivate this rustling and clinking. Gutzkow, in his Autobiography, said that the frou-frou of a woman's dress was the music of the spheres to him.

[122]

The voice is doubtless a factor of the first importance in s.e.xual attraction among the blind. On this point I have no data. The expressiveness of the voice to the blind, and the extent to which their likes and dislikes are founded on vocal qualities, is well shown by an interesting paper written by an American physician, blind from early infancy, James c.o.c.ke, "The Voice as an Index to the Soul," Arena, January, 1894.

[123]

Long before Darwin had set forth his theory of s.e.xual selection Layc.o.c.k had pointed out the influence which the voice of the male, among man and other animals, exerts on the female (Nervous Diseases of Women, p. 74). And a few years later the writer of a suggestive article on "Woman in her Psychological Relations" (Journal of Psychological Medicine, 1851) remarked: "The sonorous voice of the male man is exactly a.n.a.logous in its effect on woman to the neigh and bellow of other animals. This voice will have its effect on an amorous or susceptible organization much in the same way as color and the other visual ovarian stimuli." The writer adds that it exercises a still more important influence when modulated to music: "in this respect man has something in common with insects as well as birds."

[124]

Groos refers more than once to the important part played in German novels written by women by what one of them terms the "bearded male voice."

[125]

Various instances are quoted in the third volume of these Studies when discussing the general phenomena of courtship and tumescence, "An a.n.a.lysis of the s.e.xual Impulse."

[126]

The Tasmanians, p. 20.

[127]

An early reference to the s.e.xual influence of music on women may perhaps be found in a playful pa.s.sage in Swift's Martinus Scriblerus (possibly due to his medical collaborator, Arbuthnot): "Does not aelian tell how the Libyan mares were excited to horsing by music? (which ought to be a caution to modest women against frequenting operas)." Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, Book I, Chapter 6. (The reference is to aelian, Hist. Animal, lib. XI, cap. 18, and lib. XII, cap. 44.)

[128]

E. Lancaster, "Psychology of Adolescence," Pedagogical Seminary, July, 1897.

II.

Summary-Why the Influence of Music in Human s.e.xual Selection is Comparatively Small.

We have seen that it is possible to set forth in a brief s.p.a.ce the facts at present available concerning the influence on the pairing impulse of stimuli acting through the ear. They are fairly simple and uncomplicated; they suggest few obscure problems which call for a.n.a.lysis; they do not bring before us any remarkable perversions of feeling.

At the same time, the stimuli to s.e.xual excitement received through the sense of hearing, although very seldom of exclusive or preponderant influence, are yet somewhat more important than is usually believed. Primarily the voice, and secondarily instrumental music, exert a distinct effect in this direction, an effect representing a specialization of a generally stimulating physiological influence which all musical sounds exercise upon the organism. There is, however, in this respect, a definite difference between the s.e.xes. It is comparatively rare to find that the voice or instrumental music, however powerful its generally emotional influence, has any specifically s.e.xual effect on men. On the other hand, it seems probable that the majority of women, at all events among the educated cla.s.ses, are liable to show some degree of s.e.xual sensibility to the male voice or to instrumental music.

It is not surprising to find that music should have some share in arousing s.e.xual emotion when we bear in mind that in the majority of persons the development of s.e.xual life is accompanied by a period of special interest in music. It is not unexpected that the specifically s.e.xual effects of the voice and music should be chiefly experienced by women when we remember that not only in the human species is it the male in whom the larynx and voice are chiefly modified at p.u.b.erty, but that among mammals generally it is the male who is chiefly or exclusively vocal at the period of s.e.xual activity; so that any s.e.xual sensibility to vocal manifestations must be chiefly or exclusively manifested in female mammals.

At the best, however, although aesthetic sensibility to sound is highly developed and emotional sensibility to it profound and widespread, although women may be thrilled by the masculine voice and men charmed by the feminine voice, it cannot be claimed that in the human species hearing is a powerful factor in mating. This sense has here suffered between the lower senses of touch and smell, on the one hand, with their vague and ma.s.sive appeal, and the higher sense, vision, on the other hand, with its exceedingly specialized appeal. The position of touch as the primary and fundamental sense is a.s.sured. Smell, though in normal persons it has no decisive influence on s.e.xual attraction, acts by virtue of its emotional sympathies and antipathies, while, by virtue of the fact that among man's ancestors it was the fundamental channel of s.e.xual sensibility, it furnishes a latent reservoir of impressions to which nervously abnormal persons, and even normal persons under the influence of excitement or of fatigue, are always liable to become sensitive. Hearing, as a sense for receiving distant perceptions has a wider field than is in man possessed by either touch or smell. But here it comes into compet.i.tion with vision, and vision is, in man, the supreme and dominant sense.[129] We are always more affected by what we see than by what we hear. Men and women seldom hear each other without speedily seeing each other, and then the chief focus of interest is at once transferred to the visual centre.[130] In human s.e.xual selection, therefore, hearing plays a part which is nearly always subordinated to that of vision.

[129]

Nietzsche has even suggested that among primitive men delicacy of hearing and the evolution of music can only have been produced under conditions which made it difficult for vision to come into play: "The ear, the organ of fear, could only have developed, as it has, in the night and in the twilight of dark woods and caves.... In the brightness the ear is less necessary. Hence the character of music as an art of night and twilight." (Morgenrothe, p. 230.)

[130]

At a concert most people are instinctively anxious to see the performers, thus distracting the purely musical impression, and the reasonable suggestion of Goethe that the performers should be invisible is still seldom carried into practice.

VISION

I.

Primacy of Vision in Man-Beauty as a s.e.xual Allurement-The Objective Element in Beauty-Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Various Parts of the World-Savage Women sometimes Beautiful from European Point of View-Savages often Admire European Beauty-The Appeal of Beauty to some Extent Common even to Animals and Man.

Vision is the main channel by which man receives his impressions. To a large extent it has slowly superseded all the other senses. Its range is practically infinite; it brings before us remote worlds, it enables us to understand the minute details of our own structure. While apt for the most abstract or the most intimate uses, its intermediate range is of universal service. It furnishes the basis on which a number of arts make their appeal to us, and, while thus the most aesthetic of the senses, it is the sense on which we chiefly rely in exercising the animal function of nutrition. It is not surprising, therefore, that from the point of view of s.e.xual selection vision should be the supreme sense, and that the love-thoughts of men have always been a perpetual meditation of beauty.

It would be out of place here to discuss comparatively the origins of our ideas of beauty. That is a question which belongs to aesthetics, not to s.e.xual psychology, and it is a question on which aestheticians are not altogether in agreement. We need not even be concerned to make any definite a.s.sertion on the question whether our ideas of s.e.xual beauty have developed under the influence of more general and fundamental laws, or whether s.e.xual ideals themselves underlie our more general conceptions of beauty. Practically, so far as man and his immediate ancestors are concerned, the s.e.xual and the extra-s.e.xual factors of beauty have been interwoven from the first. The s.e.xually beautiful object must have appealed to fundamental physiological apt.i.tudes of reaction; the generally beautiful object must have shared in the thrill which the specifically s.e.xual object imparted. There has been an inevitable action and reaction throughout. Just as we found that the s.e.xual and the non-s.e.xual influences of agreeable odors throughout nature are inextricably mingled, so it is with the motives that make an object beautiful to our eyes.[131]

The s.e.xual element in the const.i.tution of beauty is well recognized even by those writers who concern themselves exclusively with the aesthetic conception of beauty or with its relation to culture. It is enough to quote two or three testimonies on this point. "The whole sentimental side of our aesthetic sensibility," remarks Santayana, "-without which it would be perceptive and mathematical rather than aesthetic,-is due to our s.e.xual organization remotely stirred.... If anyone were desirous to produce a being with a great susceptibility to beauty, he could not invent an instrument better designed for that object than s.e.x. Individuals that need not unite for the birth and rearing of each generation might retain a savage independence. For them it would not be necessary that any vision should fascinate, or that any languor should soften, the prying cruelty of the eye. But s.e.x endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually toward another; makes it one of the dearest enjoyments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty? The attention is fixed upon a well-defined object, and all the effects it produces in the mind are easily regarded as powers or qualities of that object.... To a certain extent this kind of interest will center in the proper object of s.e.xual pa.s.sion, and in the special characteristics of the opposite s.e.x[131]; and we find, accordingly, that woman is the most lovely object to man, and man, if female modesty would confess it, the most interesting to woman. But the effects of so fundamental and primitive a reaction are much more general. s.e.x is not the only object of s.e.xual pa.s.sion. When love lacks its specific object, when it does not yet understand itself, or has been sacrificed to some other interest, we see the stifled fire bursting out in various directions.... Pa.s.sion then overflows and visibly floods those neighboring regions which it had always secretly watered. For the same nervous organization which s.e.x involves, with its necessarily wide branchings and a.s.sociations in the brain, must be partially stimulated by other objects than its specific or ultimate one; especially in man, who, unlike some of the lower animals, has not his instincts clearly distinct and intermittent, but always partially active, and never active in isolation. We may say, then, that for man all nature is a secondary object of s.e.xual pa.s.sion, and that to this fact the beauty of nature is largely due." (G. Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, pp. 59-62.)

Not only is the general fact of s.e.xual attraction an essential element of aesthetic contemplation, as Santayana remarks, but we have to recognize also that specific s.e.xual emotion properly comes within the aesthetic field. It is quite erroneous, as Groos well points out, to a.s.sert that s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual perversion.... Beauty is so s.e.xual that the only uncontested works of art are those that simply show the human body in its nudity. By its perseverance in remaining purely s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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.e.xes alike. It is certainly rare to find any aesthetic admiration of men among women, except in the case of women who have had some training in art. In this matter it would seem that woman pa.s.sively accepts the ideals of man. "Objects which excite a man's desire," Colin Scott remarks, "are often, if not generally, the same as those affecting woman. The female body has a s.e.xually stimulating effect upon both s.e.xes. Statues of female forms are more liable than those of male form to have a stimulating effect upon women as well as men. The evidence of numerous literary expressions seems to show that under the influence of s.e.xual excitement a woman regards her body as made for man's gratification, and that it is this complex emotion which forms the initial stage, at least, of her own pleasure. Her body is the symbol for her partner, and indirectly for her, through his admiration of it, of their mutual joy and satisfaction." (Colin Scott, "s.e.x and Art," American Journal of Psychology, vol. vii, No. 2, p. 206; also private letter.)

At the same time it must be remembered that beauty and the conception of beauty have developed on a wider basis than that of the s.e.xual impulse only, and also that our conceptions of the beautiful, even as concerns the human form, are to some extent objective, and may thus be in part reduced to law. Stratz, in his books on feminine beauty, and notably in Die Schonheit des Weiblichen Korpers, insists on the objective element in beauty. Papillault, again, when discussing the laws of growth and the beauty of the face, argues that beauty of line in the face is objective, and not a creation of fancy, since it is a.s.sociated with the highest human functions, moral and social. He remarks on the contrast between the prehistoric man of Chancelade,-delicately made, with elegant face and high forehead,-who created the great Magdalenian civilization, and his seemingly much more powerful, but less beautiful, predecessor, the man of Spy, with enormous muscles and powerful jaws. (Bulletin de la Societe d'Anthropologie, 1899, p. 220.)

The largely objective character of beauty is further indicated by the fact that to a considerable extent beauty is the expression of health. A well and harmoniously developed body, tense muscles, an elastic and finely toned skin, bright eyes, grace and animation of carriage-all these things which are essential to beauty are the conditions of health. It has not been demonstrated that there is any correlation between beauty and longevity, and the proof would not be easy to give, but it is quite probable that such a correlation may exist, and various indications point in this direction. One of the most delightful of Opie's pictures is the portrait of Pleasance Reeve (afterward Lady Smith) at the age of 17. This singularly beautiful and animated brunette lived to the age of 104. Most people are probably acquainted with similar, if less marked, cases of the same tendency.