Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/591

 love with the man and poet. But no woman's beauty of physique, no sexualism in a woman ever appealed to the mature Platen. What is more consistent, even when he was a lad only once is there to be traced anything like a sentimental intimacy and feeling for any female human being. There occurred during his relatively boyish officer-days, in Munich, a superficial attraction over him from a young French girl Mademoiselle Euphrasie de B—, visiting the Court with her mother. To his own riddlement, Platen thought that "at last" he was learning what other young men do not have to learn—the falling in love with a pretty girl. But in his lines about it, we see that he had not faith in the sentiment himself, even when it occupied him in an idle way. He knew that he was on the wrong track for him, no matter what was for others the right one. We find him soon returning to his natural, passionless and 'asexual' feeling for women. Euphrasie de B— faded utterly and swiftly out of his memory. There was never any sequel to this boyish illusion.

Yet a word, before we take up the entries in the Journal—to point out that in the comedies of Platen there is hardly a trace of his homosexualism. Not in stuff, not in types, not descriptively—nowhere! If he had written some of the tragedies that he planned, doubtless he now would have yet another literary aspect. We might have had a "Conrad von Hohenstaufen," from him that would have surpassed Schiller's "Don Carlos" in its suggestions. But only in the Diary and the poems does the homosexual passion speak out. The private (and very large) correspondence of the poet is not published, will probably never be published, so far as it is now accessible extant. From that correspondence we could expect many of the same strange chords as in the passional confessions of the Journal.

Another prefatory note to be made here, is allusion