Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/371

 We do not arrive at any conclusion of Milton as uranian in examining not over-clear details of his personality and history, in England or when he lived abroad. There are however indirect, vague suggestions; his domestic life, his social theories, his passion for Italianism, and Hellenism, and the accents of his most lyric verse, which seem not merely imitative notes. Never was an Anglo-Saxon—albeit a Roundhead in so many affiliations—tuned finer to the harp of Greek pederasty, than was the authour of "Lycidas" (Milton's threnody on his dead friend Edward King so intensely beloved), of "Hylas" or of episodes in "Comus". One can half-forget in reading them, the luridly epic Milton, the Michel-Angelo of Christian themes in verse.

With the Restoration, and the gross sexual-sensualism of the Court and epoch of Charles II, uranistic passions came into removed public notice. Private "friendships" were full of the quality. It was the same sort of "platonic" atmosphere that pervaded the French Regency. But even debauched French conceptions became more vulgar in the English air. We have only to look into memoirs and correspondence of the time, into yet unprinted pages of Pepys, the letters of Rochester and Sedley, to know what was male to male love in the Restoration, exactly as love for woman had become lust. In all countries, in all lands, the homosexual passion takes colours of refinement or crudity, its aesthetic or grossly opposite, according to the social civilization about it. It does not degrade or elevate social morals, so much as become degraded or elevated by social morals. In the licentious dramas of the English Restoration epoch, though we do not find them plotted on the passions of the Uranian, are plain references. Perhaps the most outrageously open allusion to homosexuality in any theater, since the days of Greek and Roman comedy, even to presenting a homosexual in a state of excitement on the stage,