This æsthetic incitation by means of eroticism has, moreover, in it something =vitalizing=, something which spurs on the will, because its cause--eroticism itself--contains within it such an element of action and vital energy. The modern love ideals of the sexes have a peculiar impulsive force. Classical beauty taken by itself, and without the individual, personal characteristic element, is valueless. And woman herself also is no longer the patient Gretchen of yore. She must have temperament, character, passion--she must be a personality. More than by the beautiful are we allured by the characteristic, by the developed personality, by the passionate, the subjective in woman--by that which, in pursuance of a false connotation, is often now termed “nervous” beauty. The pale Josepha of the days of Heine’s boyhood is an example of this type. In her “Buch der Frauen” (“Book of Women”) (Paris and Leipzig, 1895), Laura Marholm has described in the figures of Marie Bashkirtzeff, Anna Charlotte Loeffler, Eleonore Duse, George Egerton, Amalie Skram, and Sonja Kowalewska, well-marked and characteristic types of modern woman as a personality. This attraction to the characteristic, to the personal, in the aspect of woman conflicts to some extent with the preference arising under the influence of the English “Pre-Raphaelites,” of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, for straight lines, for slender, ethereal, unduly spiritual, supersensual forms, which no longer express the free personality of the mature, complete woman, but approximate rather to the infantile, asexual habitus. In this case, however, we have to do with a mere transient fashion, which cannot countervail the above characterized general tendency towards the personal. This personal, individual has in man even greater importance than actual beauty. It is a distinctive fact that, throughout the history of civilization, men have always had a clearer understanding of “masculine beauty” than women. Women have preferred power, intelligence, energy of will, and marked individuality. Caroline Schlegel, in a letter to Luise Gotter, writes of Mirabeau: “Hideous he may have been--he says so himself frequently in his letters--but Sophie loved him, =for what women love in men is certainly not beauty=” (“Letters of Caroline Schlegel,” vol. i., p. 93; edited by G. Waitz, Leipzig, 1871). This conception also elucidates the words in the second part of Goethe’s “Faust”: “Women, accustomed to man’s love, Fastidious are they not, But cognoscenti; And equally with golden-haired swains Shall we see black-bristly fauns, As opportunity may serve, Over their rounded limbs Attain rights of possession.”