Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/137

Rh ignoring the perplexed questions of a guilty passion doomed by law and popular antipathy to failure, he begins anew with sound and primitive humanity. There he discovers "a superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown." He perceives that "it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men." His method of treatment, fearless and uncowed by any thought of evil, his touch upon the matter, chaste and wholesome and aspiring, reveal the possibility of restoring in all innocence to human life a portion of its alienated or unclaimed moral birthright. The aberrations we have been discussing in this treatise are perhaps the morbid symptoms of suppression, of hypertrophy, of ignorant misregulation, in a genuine emotion capable of being raised to good by sympathetic treatment.

It were well to close upon this note. The half, as the Greeks said, is more than the whole; and the time has not yet come to raise the question whether the love of man for man shall be elevated through a hitherto unapprehended chivalry to nobler powers, even as the barbarous love of man for woman once was. This question at the present moment is deficient in actuality. The world cannot be invited to entertain it.