Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/588

 French, Italian or Portuguese, and with citations from Persian. German however predominates. The Journal has not been translated into English, nor is likely to be so. The two volumes now presenting it in print are a rather formidable piece of book-making—together there are some 2000 large pages to read. The last entry is at Siracusa, October 13, 1835. A few days after that date, the diarist passed from earth.

In his moral character a man of the most elevated and sensitive sort, in his religious belief a Protestant, in the daily aspects of life highly practical, possessed of an idealizing temperament that naturally shunned all that is ignoble and animal per se,—Platen presents a type of the ethical quite as firm as his intellectual personality. Along with this comes a third aspect—his inborn intersexualism, homosexual passion, and æsthetic uranianism, from youth upward. He was outwardly a man, a soldier; he had a virile mind in his body. Yet nevertheless only the male appealed to his sense of supreme human beauty, to his great capacity to love, to desire love, to his sexual longings. The surges of spiritual and bodily passion that swept over his heart, even the lighter currents of sexual admirations, the chances and changes of his ideals and his yearnings, the fleeting happinesses of love that fell to him, its jealousies, its concealments, its struggles for attainment, its uncertainties, its renunciations—always some man is the object and end of these matters; never a woman. And as he matured, more and more unequivocally sexual became their fire. Whole groups of his poems sprang into being solely through these homosexual inspirations. By Platen's discreet avoidance of names, of prepositions that point out sex, by Oriental colourings and so on, there is no open offence given to the reader who either knows nothing of homosexual sentiment or has a prejudice against it, even in Vergil or Hafiz or Shakespeare. Only by reading between the lines, as one well may