When at
length the symbolist realizes his own aspirations--which seem to him for
the most part an altogether new phenomenon in the world--and at the same
time realizes the wide degree in which they deviate from those of the rest
of mankind, his natural secretiveness is still further reinforced. He
stands alone. His most sacred ideals are for all those around him a
childish absurdity, or a disgusting obscenity, possibly a matter calling
for the intervention of the policeman. We have forgotten that all these
impulses which to us seem so unnatural--this adoration of the foot and
other despised parts of the body, this reverence for the excretory acts
and products, the acceptance of congress with animals, the solemnity of
self-exhibition--were all beliefs and practices which, to our remote
forefathers, were bound up with the highest conceptions of life and the
deepest ardors of religion.
A man cannot, however, deviate at once so widely and so spontaneously in
his impulses from the rest of the world in which he himself lives without
possessing an aboriginally abnormal temperament. At the very least he
exhibits a neuropathic sensitiveness to abnormal impressions. Not
infrequently there is more than this, the distinct stigmata of
degeneration, sometimes a certain degree of congenital feeble-mindedness
or a tendency to insanity.
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