Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/435

 delighted him. naturally, and licensed the perversities and fantasies of his curious intersexualism. To Emil Mario Vacano, the famous "Miss Corinna" of the circus-rings of Europe, in the middle of the last century (to whom we have referred in citing from his novel "Humbug") something of the same capital and capacity for sexual mystification were notably developed, in course of Yacano's amazing Wanderjähre.

We should not forget, although the dictum is opposed by sentimental and popular theories, that the aesthetic life demonstrably does not stand for moral good, nor per se for healthfulness of mind or body to the individual or race. We may say that there is no demonstrable bond between the Good and the Beautiful, as we accept them. A profound psychic paradox faces us here. Pretty theorizings and a world-old lyrism on this topic are out of tune with daily facts. As we review dispassionately the history of nations, or study individuals, we are led to the conviction that in proportion as we find men and women arriving at a certain—or uncertain—degree of higher aesthetic sensibility they tend to become morally, intellectually and temperamentally decadent. Beauty thus stands before the thoughtful mind as not friend but enemy. Certain authorities in the study of homosexualism, including some who are not disposed to tolerances of its philosophic justifications, have gone so far as to consider the similisexual instincts as a distinctive trait of highly intellectual races; the tokens of advanced mentality in the individual. Germany and Italy here are much in evidence—so far as such argument is tenable.

In keeping with aesthetic sensitiveness in uranianism, we find that luxury, elegances, refinements, afford salient types of degenerate mankind. We have seen some already, under other headings of this study. The sensual, cruel