Modern man is beset by another peculiar temptation.  The beauty of woman, which in the days of the past was regarded as sacred, can be made a means of pleasure, and thus drawn from the realm of values into the realm of sensuality.  This is a breach with the principle of personal love, for to the latter the beauty of a woman is so much part and parcel of the whole personality that it cannot be enjoyed separately, that indeed it can hardly be noticed as a distinct element.  This cleavage has become so nearly universal that we are hardly conscious of its profound perversity.  It is the arch-sin of all higher eroticism to realise beauty not as the undetachable and self-evident outward form of a beloved soul, but as a means of heightening pleasure.  Although in its essence it is the same thing as the examination of a work of art merely for the sake of the pleasure it affords to the senses, the offence is here aggravated because personality is involved.  This degradation of the higher values, whether of nature, art, beauty, knowledge, kindness, religion or the human soul, to serve the ends of sensual pleasure is the expression of a perversity which is possibly the most radical and characteristic of our age.  To-day the soul of a woman has frequently the same effect on man as her physical beauty; he enjoys it as a subtile charm instead of respecting it as a mystery.

I can hardly expect to make my meaning quite clear to the multitude, but the tendency to enjoy beauty of form or soul as a distinct element represents a rupture with the principle of synthetic love, the love which does not separate but realises the personality of the beloved as an indivisible entity.  The enjoyment of beauty as a separate element pre-supposes a conscious, spiritual division, not only of the beloved, but also of the lover, and is therefore the destruction of the principle of unity.  Aesthete and libertine alike sink to the lower level of pleasure, and their emotions become obscene.  There is no question of a division when Tristan in his vision of Isolde exclaims, “How beautiful thou art!” For great love can create the beauty of the beloved out of its own soul.

Prudery is based on a similar duality.  It expresses a consciousness that the nude can only be alluring, obscene, “indecent,” and should therefore be feared and avoided.  It is the defensive weapon of sexually excited, for the most part, slightly hysterical women, against the purely sexual, whose sphere they often extend amazingly.  Prudery conceives sexuality as a distinct, restricted complex in consciousness.  Such division is alien to woman and, where it exists, a hysterical condition, a condition of inner discord, is clearly indicated.  We may take it that the obscene which affects normal men, affects only hysterical, inwardly discordant women who try to take shelter behind prudery.  To the normal woman the obscene does not exist as a spiritual principle; she turns with a feeling of displeasure from all the lower sexual manifestations, and even finds them absurd.  The elimination of personality of eroticism, the charm of which is felt by even the most highly differentiated man, has always been foreign to woman—­she lacks the duality of erotic emotion which man is slowly and laboriously striving to overcome—­a still further proof of the unbroken, synthetic emotion of woman.