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 of the child, as well as the very significant fact that among man’s immediate or even remote ancestors the female’s voice can seldom have served to attract the male, sufficiently account for the small part played by the voice and by music as a sexual allurement working on men.[122]

It is otherwise with women.  It may, indeed, be said at the outset that the reasons which make it antecedently improbable that men should be sexually attracted through hearing render it probable that women should be so attracted.  The change in the voice at puberty makes the deeper masculine voice a characteristic secondary sexual attribute of man, while the fact that among mammals generally it is the male that is most vocal—­and that chiefly, or even sometimes exclusively, at the rutting season—­renders it antecedently likely that among mammals generally, including the human species, there is in the female an actual or latent susceptibility to the sexual significance of the male voice,[123] a susceptibility which, under the conditions of human civilization, may be transferred to music generally.  It is noteworthy that in novels written by women there is a very frequent attentiveness to the qualities of the hero’s voice and to its emotional effects on the heroine.[124] We may also note the special and peculiar personal enthusiasm aroused in women by popular musicians, a more pronounced enthusiasm than is evoked in them by popular actors.