Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/416

 Wagner's music-dramas can be directly an agent of seduction; of loss of sexual control and self-poise. A noted European physician, a dionysian-uranian, once told the writer that a performance of "Tristan and Isolde" was always sufficient to excite him sexually, and that he knew many individuals on whom Wagner acted as an aphrodisiac. A distinguished French student of psychiatrics has stated that the Bayreuth Wagner Festivals represent a kind of homosexual forcing-house. This topic has been treated by the philosophic art-writer Kufferath. Wagner himself, with adroit audacity, chose a covertly homosexual subject for his ripest and most sensuous music-drama, "Parsifal". A fine study of this matter has been written by the well-known American critic, James G. Huneker, in an American periodical, in course of a "Parsifal" analysis, unfortunately not printed entire in the authour's studies as collected in book-form.

The æsthetic Uranian, absorbed in belles-lettres, in the graphic arts, in sculpture, in music or what else, is more likely to maintain many ideals, to be sexually "consistent with himself," to achieve union with superiour types, than is the unæsthetic. However well-born, well-bred, educated, and whatever his own personal, intellectual or social grade, the Uranian (as we have seen) often wishes nothing of "the gentleman", when he seeks sexual satisfactions. Nevertheless a sensitive artist sometimes selects a clumsy, able-bodied workman, or a common soldier, rather than more refined types. The law of physical and psychic completion makes this logical. Walt Whitman alludes to such a relish for "powerful, uneducated persons"—an inconsistent selection unless we analyze its psychology of complements.

Composition is a relatively intellectual phase of musically. But if we descend to lower uranistic musical levels, the proportion of musical artists, vocal or