Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/639

 found there generations of like exiles) a people who have long possessed, who ever will possess, more true, human, conceptions—nay, let us say more divine impulses and theories—as to life and love than any Protestant Teutonia or Anglia can understand or tolerate. He had found in Italy, as have found there so many other expatriates, his intellectual and sexual home. Silences as to his homosexualism and its adventures (apart from his reticence because the Diary would pass into other hands) became a process partly of sheer discretion, partly of his abandonment of "moral" struggles, partly because of the physical subsidence of his sexualism. The latter reason is important; for Platen's general health became gradually far from satisfactory. A chronic, malady of digestive sort beset him, and there is every evidence that his vita sexualis was prematurely weakened. He became more idealistic than realistic—again. He speaks in the last months of the Diary of feeling glad that the unwelcome glow of physical passion had given place to a gentle admiration of male beauty. He could wonder at it without—desire. Instead of recording loves, we find him writing page after page of the veriest "guide-book" memoranda, as to pictures, churches, art, and so on. His heart sinks wholly below the surface of his entries. We cannot hear it beat.

It soon wholly ceased to pulsate with real joy of life, did so—by a melancholy irony—there in Italy, just where it might have bounded freest! He became hypochondriac, unempfindlich and restless. He talked of "settling-down" in Italy. He never did so. His commonplace social records are many, but they are not written in high spirits. He seems to have grown "sinesexual," toward the end. He felt himself solitary, now bound to live and to die so. The sun was paling for him. In Germany, some of his best old friends had gone—Gruber and Perglas among them. Still, only a few days before the final entry in the Journal, before his death from cholera, at Siracusa, he