Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/378

 far enough on for swallowing such a thing neat. So I turned much of it into "Manfred" … Lord Byron then went on to give my grandfather some other observations on the abandoning of his original plan for the poem mentioned. My grandfather alluded to L…, and to the M… affairs … The conversation was interrupted, and before my grandfather had an opportunity to meet Byron again (though Byron expressed himself most cordially anxious to do so) Byron had left Venice."

We may then argue "Manfred" as, in a sense, an uranian drama, according to the foregoing; a sexual love between Manfred and a youth, or some more mature friend, as the burden on the conscience of Manfred—or rather the loss that oppresses him. Astarte thus becomes a psychic allegory; under her feminine personality is hidden a male relationship, which ( startling as is the idea of incest) was thought by Byron too audacious a motive for the British public. The structure and even the diction of the play require little changing to meet the idea of homosexual passion, on which, has descended a divine Nemesis; a vengeance on Manfred for what he still feels—however against his will—as a defiance to. earthly existence, to religion, to God, to human Being; all this, while he so adores the memory of it. He and that Other have been carried away, by their mystic and criminal mutuality. What part Manfred has in it can be expiated, forgotten, in only death. Perhaps not the transgression but some circumstances in it, of Manfred's fault, make him feel such remorse and longing for release. If this interpretation be correct, even in part, "Manfred's" vagueness as homosexual literature is a loss. In any case, the study is curious.

In the celebrated oriental novel, "Anastasius: or Memoirs of a modern Greek," by Hope, a work that maintains a respectable place in