Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/206

 The naval and military atmosphere are highly aesthetic. They are full of colour, romance, life, grace, symmetry. They possess an outward and inward beauty, and dignity in their beauty. Severe practicalities do not deduct from it. In fact many such details expressly add to it. Courage and an aether charged with virile force fuse in the social atmosphere. Beauty of body, the effective uniforms that enhance the physique in constant appeal to the eye as well as to temperaments sensitive to masculine good-looks, the free and often tender intercourse, intimacies of specially fine psychic fibre between men, all make part of the aesthetic attraction.

The Biblical warrior meets us early with his uranistic personality. We find his type in the swift, passionate love, not to be construed as mere friendship, (if any one knows the Oriental) between David the beautiful boy-warrior—a mere shepherd-lad—and Jonathan; whose mutual attraction and tie is distinctly uranistic. One may surmise from the respective ages of the two, and from the accentuation of Jonathan's share, that it was pederastic on the part of Jonathan, who seems to have fallen in love at sight with the humble peasant-boy. The story is highly suggestive sexually, as we read it in the First and Second Books of Samuel, with its development of a sudden passion which … "knit the soul of Jonathan with the soul of David; and Jonathan loved him as his own soul" The lament of David after the tragedy of Mount Gilboa is in no common strain of even oriental bereavements, with its cry for the love "passing the love of women," a phrase which also suggests the character of Jonathan's sentiment. The story might be a page from Firdausi or from "Antar." Its dionian-uranian colouring is strong. A hint that Jonathan had inherited some traces of similisexualism occours [sic] in the Hebrew of the insult of the angry Saul to his