Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/370

354 position or function, it left out love. Its goddess of wisdom was even a cold, inaccessible virgin. Who would nowadays hold up a woman as a model of wisdom who does not or cannot love? A woman without love, or ability to love, inspires as little interest as a man without valor and without aspiration. But as I have said before, woman's love ought, according to the more worthy conceptions of our age, not meet the passion of man passively, without intelligence, and without will; but in the consciousness of her equal sovereignty and dignity, she ought to demand and exchange choice for choice, passion for passion, devotion for devotion, adoration for adoration. But such a position can be thought of only as coupled with great intellectual endowment. Nevertheless the artists of our time still adhere to the models of antiquity, whose additional characteristic is that they celebrate feminine beauty more through sculpture than through painting, presumably because the former can better satisfy the sensual taste, by its plastic physical form, while the latter, with the same facial expression of intellectual insignificance, can produce only a very unsatisfactory effect. Were I to offer any suggestions to an artist, concerning the creation of a modern Venus, they would be something like the following:

For the physical form, as far as the head, you may choose among the customary models, if you will avoid excessive length of fingers, sloping shoulders,