Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/161

Rh but also in art. But we are not only in advance of them in the wealth of our world of conceptions, of knowledge, of ideas, of means, but also in more beautiful human ideals. It is that which is generally overlooked in adhering to our stereotyped school education and imitation. Not only in intellectual and spiritual but also in a physical respect our age can show more beautiful human beings than the Greek. The intermingling of the nations, from which the Greeks were still very much excluded, and which, besides, could only take place very gradually, is a means for the perfection not only of the intellectual but also of the physical man.

I have had opportunity to make manifold observations among both sexes of the most diverse nations. The most beautiful women — in order to speak of these — I have found in America and England, at least in so far as concerns color and contour of face. But what is generally wanting to those finely cast although sometimes somewhat stereotyped features is the soul. They are, in spite of their purity, too sharp, without softness, intellectual penetration, plasticity, and poetry. They look at us, as it were, like cold crystallizations of beauty, in which there is no active ferment of passion, or of feeling, or of imagination; in short, no deep soul-life. This beautiful dough of human development is generally destitute of the real yeast of feeling and soul. That