Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/388

all—with an abundant growth of hair on the face, they represent their ideal of manliness, the god of light, of beauty and of the muses, without a beard. They spared him all the cheap, martial distinctions that remind one of coarseness, in order to let his intellect and character speak undisguised in all his lines and forms. The whole Apollo would now be distasteful to us if we were to conceive of him like one of our modern men, with cheeks, mouth and chin covered by a growth of hair, beneath which the lips would open like a hidden fissure in a rock that led into an underground cave, while the nose would protrude like a wind-brokey tree trunk from the underbrush. And now the aesthetic reflections to which such a hairy god of the muses would stimulate us, if, with the help of the achievements of our modern civilization, we should equip him: with all the consequences of a beard, among others such as remnants of food adhering from the just completed divine meal, flavored with the juice of the Olympian cigar, smoked after dessert, and perfumed with infernal tobacco-smoke—and then imagine this divine mouth, enriched by this threefold cosmetic, pressed upon the unsoiled lips of a horrified muse. Alas, our women submit to such kisses without being horrified. They are as great sufferers as their tobacco perfumed lords are aesthetic barbarians. Is there any more hostile contrast in the world than a tender kiss on a beautiful mouth, by the lip adorned with a tobacco-saturated brush? But they meet,