Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/413

 homosexual artists of the first importance in art of to-day The list is not limited to the less practical of aesthetic arts. Architecture, that almost uniquely virile and intellectual of aesthetic professions; designing applied in commercial connections; the finer industries, where the intimate sense of the beautiful has essentially a large part—these callings offer the practical uranian abundant fields for his gifts.

Reviewing all artistic temperaments and genetic classes, we find that music and the dramatic stage present the greatest census of uranians. Singers, players, composers, amateurs "passionately fond of music", actors of all ranks—they seem genetically homosexual. A crude saying among the observers of uranianism is—"Show me a Jew and you show me an—Uranian." A like statement might run "Show me a musician and show show me a homosexual." Doubtless music is preeminently the Uranian's art. His emotional nature goes out to it and in it, as in no other. This occurs though his understanding of music as an art may be most limited.

Not superficially is music among finer aesthetics; it is the most neurotic, the most "essential", the most subtly nerve-disturbing of arts. Music, as a mystery in aesthetics, unites logically with uranianism as a deep problem in psychology. Precisely what music "says", when we think it "says" something, and has such or such a "message" to us, we really do not in the least know. The dog who howls during a symphony or a waltz, in what we call his canine "nervousness" perhaps understands music far better than the greatest composer that has ever lived. The more complex music has become, the less appears its beneficence; originally doubtful. The neurotic character of music reaches its contemporary height in Wagner and Richard Strauss. Nerve-exciting as are the scores of many other operatic giants, none have quite so concrete an action on the nervous system,