Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/387

 committedly, to uranian love. There is here some interest in noticing how frequently certain British novelists have made "passional friendship" a vehement factor in their stories, even to its being the most vital trait of a book. Thus Dickens, in a series of his stories and their characters: David Copperfield and the handsome Steerforth—Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood in "Our Mutual Friend"—and Sydney Carton in the tragic "A Tale of Two Cities". There is a touch of the same "passional" inspiration in Reade's "The Cloister and the Hearth." A more recent British novelist, the-late David Christie Murray, in his fine tale "Val Strange," practically builds all the story on an intensive sentiment of the sort, and utilizes it perceptibly in others of his novels.

Those who enter into the study of uranianism in literature and in arts, whether as to Anglo-Saxons or other races naturally must be solicitous in guarding against the idea (and not less so against the statement) that because such or such an authour deals with intersexual love in a story, poem, or what else, the authour himself is uranian. Many instances which will recur to the mind of the reader of this book as pertinent to be categorized in it in one way or another, do not have clearly any association of personal homosexuality, despite more or less merely literary suggestiveness.

A few years ago appeared a distinctively homosexual story in English; referred to in the eighth chapter of this book, and from the same hand. In this is depicted, with more serious purpose than entertainment, the homosexual sentiment in two highly virilized uranians, one of them a young Hungarian officer. The story takes its course against a background of Magyar soldier-life. Both the young men are of strong moral and