Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/377

 affection for one of his young body-servants, the lad Robert, are other refléts of no common regard. That Greece, and everything Hellenic appealed to Byron from the first, is appropriate. Greek in his intellectual and sexual nature, he was Englishman by birth but Athenian by heart.

Is there no uranianism in the mature Byron's verse? The writer of these pages has received, from a source that claims strong private authority in discussing Byron's homosexualism, a pertinent comment on "Manfred". Among all Byron's dramatic poems, none remains more a subject of speculation. What exactly is the mysterious burden on Manfred's conscience? that unspeakable sin, to bind him and the dead Astarte together?—a sin inseparable from passion. That it was sexual is indicated. It is the expression of a feeling out of key with ethical and social toleration, yet with a fearful beauty, and in near relation to some strange, resistless under-current of our mortal natures. Are Manfred and Astarte brother and sister?—or what else? Is incest their crime? Manfred's moral horizon is not circumscribed by any Church or theologies. He is in revolt against all. An exceptional deflection burdens this exceptional type.

From a letter before the writer he quotes the followin: "… When my grandfather had finished his account, which you can imagine was done with great embarassment, Byron said after a moment—"Pooh, I don't think any the worse of you for such an affair …… Why, let me tell you I expected awhile ago to write a drama on Greek Love—not less—modernizing the atmosphere—glooming it over—to throw the whole subject back into nature, where it belongs now as always—to paint the struggle of the finer moral type of mind against it—or rather remorse for it, when it seems to be chastized … But I made up my mind that British philosophy is not