Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/623

 of "conscientious scruples;" as well as because he did not find in Platen the exact-type to satisfy him homosexually. The mysterious Bannwarth may have had a rôle, now past in the drama. At any rate, over in Erlangen, the two became again warm friends. Such they remained, though—so far as we can discover—they did not renew the sexual characteristics of their tie. (Eduard did not remain at Erlangen.) How aggressive Eduard Schmidtlein had been toward allowing Platen's passion to rise we divine by many allusions, including Platen's remark—after answering the "horrible letter" from Eduard—that he, Platen, did not once reproach Eduard even with what had been Eduard's fault … "exciting my senses by means only too efficacious," etc. etc. But that their love-drama was played-through seems less of a trial to Platen at Erlangen; because Platen while there grew interested in a wholly new—and a much, much happier—homosexual intimacy, that with Herman von Rotenhan. Then, too, after Rotenhan had left Erlangen, came the even more kindly and captivating Otto von Bülow liaison; then Liebig; then the ill-starred "Cardenio" passion; then Karl Theodore German—and so on. Schmidtlein's real spell ended in Würzburg. Again, Platen now ceased to struggle so conscientiously with his own natural, sexual-sensual nature. He ceased to expect that innermost loves were to be mere friendships; he ceased quite to wish the attainment of a simply spiritual "goal." He had learned his lesson—that "the body has its rights as well as the soul" in such loves; though he was never gross in yielding to the conviction. To the last, Platen was an idealist. Ever he demanded beauty of psychos as well as comeliness in a young man he loved. He and Eduard Schmidtlein saw each other, by accident, for the last time, as late as 1824, in Regensburg, when Platen was otherwise preoccupied; the charming Eduard already a young law-professor in Göttlingen. But there was then no spark of the Würzburg fire.