Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/382

 The sketch mentioned "Priest and Acolyte ", depicts the passion ot a young homosexual priest and a lad, and ends in their drinking poison together at the altar. It is an immature trifle, not distinguished for good taste in concept or elaboration. Its authour has since its date advanced far beyond such productions, and seems progressing to a position of some distinction in English belles-lettres.

When first was published Tennyson's memorial to his dead friend Arthur Hallam, the passionally sentimental elegy, "In Memoriam," exhaling elègiacally so much psychological uranism, it met a storm of British rebuke. The young poet's glorification of his unity with "my loved Arthur", his feminine lamentations and apostrophes, were called worse than merely "maudlin" sentimentalizings. Tennyson and his friends, were compelled to defend the poem ethically. Certainly "In Memoriam" is open to the charge of being a homosexual threnody. It offers, despite its reserves, aspects of a panegyric of the uranian-psychological bond between two idealistic young men. Of "In Memoriam", when it appeared (anonymously) one English reviewer said that the poem was certainly the work of a woman—"the widow of a military officer!" Hallam, who died suddenly in Vienna, was perceptibly of homosexual type.

Italianistic influences of uranian effect, in the Pre-Raphaelitish "school" of English verse have not been distinctly studied. They are not vivid. In the Pre-Raphaelists femininism was pronounced; idealized, neuroticized, Catholicized. They affected a mediaeval or early Renaissance pose toward woman, sexually, socially and spiritually. The label of personal homosexuality hardly attaches to any of the high-priests of the "Fleshly School" or to the studios of its epoch. They cultivated a pictorial feminism. To Rosetti's youth a vague episode of homosexuality—bisexuality?—attaches; and in the verse of Swinburne