=Flattery.= The artist is at the mercy of the flattery lavished on him or her by a fellow artist and absolutely blind to the flatterer's ulterior motives. A great musician who died recently was an easy victim to every budding musician who would sycophantically sing his praises. The mere statement "if I could ever hope to sing a few notes like you" enabled any young exploiter who could approach him to negotiate a "loan."
For the reasons I have mentioned in the preceding pages, the woman artist is even more easily victimised, financially or sentimentally than the male artist.
Sexual jealousy wrecks the unions of artists with non-professional mates. Sexual jealousy and professional jealousy make the union of two artists a very problematical expedient for the attainment of happiness.
Fortunately, very few heartbreaks result from the steady grinding of the divorce mills in concert land, opera land or stageland.
The egotistical artist loves himself more than he could ever love any other human being. Separation from his life mate does not mean loneliness to him. He remains in his own company, to his mind, the best company on earth. And furthermore his egotism tells him, and rightly so in the majority of cases, that being as wonderful as he is, he cannot fail to meet soon "the great love" of his life. And he will probably embark upon another experiment with the same optimism and with the same results.
THE PERSONALITY BEHIND THE FETISHES. GLANDS
A man selects a mate because he finds in her fetishes the assurance of safety which those fetishes portended when observed in the appearance of his affectionate, devoted, self-sacrificing mother, whose intelligence and wisdom he never doubted when he was, let us say, ten or fifteen and she was thirty or thirty-five.
And likewise, a woman expects, consciously or unconsciously, that certain physical characteristics which once indicated, when observed in her father's appearance, power, protection, a gainful occupation, sympathy and understanding, etc., will mean exactly the same thing when she finds them reproduced totally or in part in a male human being of the marriageable age.
=The Parent-Child Relationship=, involving at first boundless devotion on the part of the strong parent to the helpless nursling, infant and child, and later, complete submission of the growing child and adolescent to the older and, supposedly world-wiser, parent, has very little, if anything, in common with the relationship of mate to mate.