Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/341

 in its text-book, between King Solomon and his adored favourite, the young Assad, who falls under the spell of the hypocritical Queen, there is a delicate but certainly not unintentional Hauch of homosexualism. Mosenthal himself was wholly homosexual; and died in the arms of a male friend—"the being he loved best in the world."

Apart from quite medico-psychiatric studies of all sorts, now so innumerable in German, the Germanic essayist of belles-lettres class is not silent on the topic. A striking instance, which may or may not have been intended as homosexual literature, but which reads as a highly idealized kind, of plaidoyer—is that by Hermann Bahr, the distinguished Viennese psychic-dramatist, novelist, essayist, and critic in so many branches of æsthetics. In his charming little fantasy. "Die Hauptstadt von Europa", which appeared some years ago, in the Vienna "Neue Freie Presse", are subtle suggestions of hellenic homosexualism, on classical lines.

There are also numerous German fictions and other matters of belles-lettres by no means to be characterized as "homosexual novels", or approaching closely that category as to their emotional contents, plots, salient individualities and so on; which tales nevertheless contain brief episodes, types, or allusions that make them quite pertinent to notice in more minute studies of how far the uranian sentiment intrudes itself into the heterosexual romance in Germany.