Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/343

 antagonism with his sexual being; as with his intellectual existence. His incessant wanderings about the world bred a melancholy more and more emphasized in his verse, as well as in his own private records; and they never pacified the contrarieties of a secret Ego that terrified himself. His struggles culminated in Lenau's sudden, unexpected betrothal, in 1844; with the shattering by him of the engagement, almost as soon as it was undertaken; in the angonizedagonized [sic] scene with his betrothed, finished in the poet's frantic rushing from her presence with the cry, "One of two must go mad!"—as Lenau very soon did. After six years in an asylum, he died; the glooming-over of his career suggesting the fates of Hölderlin, NietscheNietzsche [sic] and Schopenhauer.

As a classic English poet has reminded us, "Great wits to madness surely are allied". The literary, imaginative and aesthetic similisexual all too easily gravitates across the border of unreason. His brilliancy is too frequently the precursor of shattered nerves, especially if an ignorant anxiety and the intellectual sense of his strange predicament increase his life-secret. The feverishly tense sense of physical beauty, vain desire for it, efforts to realize it in at least word and page, invite perilous agitations of the poetical temper in finer types of homosexuals. The longing for an unattainable companion, for the real friend not merely a romance of his own creation, who may be passing him undeclared in the crowd—the dread of social obloquy, the moral struggles!—one should not be much surprised when the intellectual homosexual throws aside his pen to take up a pistol or a flask of poison; or becomes the subject for a madhouse.



Among the antique Latin romancists of similisexual land was at least one Haul. Homosexual literature of the imagination is to day abundant