Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/374

 had a heart, given to Conway with an ardour hid from gossips about him. We are almost equally likely to doubt if the philosophic and often acid Pope could so betray himself, in spite of Pope's artificial gallantry to Lady Mary Wortley-Montague. The great satirist and social philosopher was outlawed from love,by disposition and bodily defects. Yet underneath Pope's cold cynicism smouldered the fires of sexual desire. Once the flame broke into life, for a young and beautiful man, who despised the poet, being indeed incapable of understanding him. Pope was perceptibly a dionysian-uranian; for his misfortune.

Lord Byron is a striking example of the literary Dionian-Uranian. During all his life, the great English poet was more or less temperamentally homosexual; an idealistic, hellenic, romantic homosexual. In Byron's boyhood and in his university-days, his homosexuality was the most really passional emotion of love which he knew. In maturity, it retained its psychic hold. To many readers will seem incredible the statement,—one nevertheless well based—that it is to be doubted if Byron really ever loved any woman, save in that superficial sense which he himself despised. He did not believe that he ever fully surrendered himself, could surrender himself, to any woman. Even as important and durable a liaison as that which was his final one, with the young, beautiful, intellectual and devoted Countess Guiccioli, became presently a burden of which he was tired, socially and sexually. Under that entanglement, Byron chafed, and was scheming how he could bring it to an end, "like a gentleman", with decency and honour, when the Greco-Turkish War gave him an an excuse, apart from his philhellenic enthusiasms. He would never have resumed the intimacy had he lived. His marriage with Miss Milbank had no passion in it. In nearly all his affairs with his mistresses, in Venice and everywhere else, a sort of sexual contempt pervades the