Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/321

 his relations to Katherine Fröhlich) had but a vague sexualism, or none at all. Grillparzer's sexualpsychic experiences of any real depth—dignity—were uranistic. From youth, until his sombre character had matured and aged, he was first and last, an Uranian, if now and then superficially "normal". Those interested in his type should not omit to peruse especially the record of how so proud, so secretive a heart could glow with uranistic fire, and how he repudiates by implication as foreign to him any other tender sentiment. Take one of his letters to his chiefest friend, to whom he was united by a classically uranistic bond, till the latter's death,—George Altmütter: where Grillparzer's troubled and unclear self-analysis is met:

"—You beg that I should describe to you "her" whom I love? "Her", whom I love, you put it? Would to God that my being were capable of that complete surrender, that self-forgetfulness, that attachment, that sinking of one's self in a beloved object! But—I do not know whether I must call it a highest grade of Egoism, or if it be the consequence of an unlimited striving after Art, and what to Art belongs, putting out of my vision all other matters which I momentarily grasp—in a word, I am not capable of love. However near a precious other existence may attract me, still there is always a certain Something that stands higher before me; and this Something's influence so works on all other feelings that after a To-day full of glowing tenderness, readily—without interval, without any particular cause—comes a To-morrow of the most removed coldness, of forgetfulness, I might say of enmity. I think I have already said that in 'the feminine Beloved' I love merely the image which my fancy has made out of her, so that the Actual becomes an artificial creation which, has charmed me by my making a sort of compact with just my intellectual side; only to be so much the more strongly cast back on the least decline of my mood. Can one call that 'Love'? Lament me, and lament any her who may deserve really, for her own sake, to be—loved."

"The consciousness of this unfortunate peculiarity of my nature has so worked that I have always as possible kept myself out of all relations with women; to whom my physique makes me rather inclined. Everywhere that I have allowed myself to yield, have come melancholy experiences; so much the oftener as a matter of