Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/27

 history as emphatically male, exercising great influence on their associates as absolute men! In all classes and all epochs we meet curious discrepancies, startling inconsistencies, especially as we go upward, in the scale of aesthetic sensitiveness. We meet with the prince in whose nature the arrogance of Lucifer is contrasted with a want of dignity of character that would put to shame a peasant in a pothouse. We find the great statesman who turns from the working-out of a treaty, or the fight over a great parliamentary measure, to adore his mirror, or to concoct a wash for his complexion. We smile at the brave soldier who hates to go to bed in the dark, who quivers before a cat or a dentist. We come upon the eloquent divine, apparently much nearer heaven than earth, who has avance as a master-passion, and to whom a gourmand's table is a necessity. The philosopher who loses his temper as he loses his game of cards; the jurist that, off his bench, is stocked with unjust and silly prejudices; the athlete who embroiders; and the pugilist to whom a touch of fur is a nervous distress—all these are to be encountered. And yet we can go on. For, in the more aesthetic walks of life occur striking temperamental inconsistencies from any perfect moulds of virility. There is the poet whose verse shakes the world with its vigor but who cannot look you in the eyes, and who relishes perfumes and sweets like a cocotte: the painter of roses and lilies whose greatest recreation is a prize-ring or a guillotining; the composer of delicate harmonies who loves the obscene oaths of bargees; the religious allegorist who haunts the bull-fight. So could we proceed through a thousand examples of inconsistent male making-up; met in all civilizations, and of record in every public library.

We begin to wonder, after we have thus reflected, exactly what is the proportion of really manly, masculine, symmetrical men in the world; if there ever has been so large a proportion of them as we have taken for