Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/31

 within him hide!" is newly understood, in considering the biographical studies and confessions making part of this study. A man's whole existence, his schoolboy-days, his university life, business or professional career, his deathbed hours, can easily be nothing so much as a concealment of all that is most himself, psychologically. To hide it becomes a second nature, or rather a first one. Indeed, the more carefully the student of masculine character makes a practical study, gives the right clews for it, of his own sex, in all ranks and phases accessible to the average observer, the sooner he reaches a conclusion that a man's emotional center of gravity is a great deal less definite and stable than current impressions locate it. We can even believe—sometimes—that masculine humanity is likely to be far more the victim of its emotional tendencies than are women. Under a well-sustained (frequently a spendidly sustained) dissimulation, beneath intense reserves, veiled by pride or policy, there can exist sufferings from inborn temperamental causes, with emotional crises, that are fearful to meet. The closest friend may be the last to suspect them; may be the last one that the sufferer would wish to find suspecting. In getting into touch with such veiled personal tragedies as even this book liberally offers, we shall realize that in nothing is a man more completely inconsistent than in his relation to common theories of male emotional nature.

We have thus alluded to the psychologic and physiologic discrepancies that exist now, that ever have existed, between received and popular ideals of each of the two great sexual classes, and their current and real selves. With this, we come face to face with a matter of the first importance; of cosmic breadth of bearing. To point it out is not new; in enlarging on it here I follow the analyses and indeed the phrase of many a predecessor—of one brilliant German theorist in particular.