Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/26

 trifles, of the important as the important, also the decided sexual instinct mentioned—does the widest circle of our acquaintance offer us many men that conform closely to these specifications? Is the reader of these pages a man? Let him review himself, to decide on his conscience, how far he is normal in the due measure. Is one at all struck by the fact that his Ego, even if he has never remarked it before, is particularly deficient in essential details of psychical masculinity? With the same thoughtfulness, will the reader think over this or that group of his friends?—analyzing them narrowly, with regard to the outward and inward traits and manners I have set down. We are surprised to discover how continually we have friends and acquaintances that are more or less failures in the way of some plain characteristic that belongs to a manly personality. In fact, true, typical manliness, or, if the reader prefer another term, typical masculinity, seems all at once to be a far more elusive attribute than we had thought it. We are astonished to find how successfully a good many men pass for thoroughly masculine individualities who are imperfect examples of even quite commonplace models of men.

From the circle of our own aquainthance, we will turn to the pages ot history, biography, memoirs, correspondence and travel. Also let us consider many sorts of literature, apart from obvious fiction, in which men have written themselves down in portraitures more or less sincere and true, or have so depicted others. The class of records I mean (and it is especially inclusive of the most intimate of human chronicles) is not to be mixed with conventional and secondhand studies of the kind, where the subject has been put into poses-plastiques by editors of more art than sincerity. Out of true human documents, what surprising divergencies from a fully masculine image in our minds do many men show!—having passed through the world, and into