We are exceedingly glad that the horrible scandal which Reynolds’s Newspaper was the first to bring under the notice of the general public has at last come more prominently forward through the proceedings at Bow-’street Police-court. The police have been deliberately employed in attempting to hush up the whole matter. If they had displayed as much activity in their endeavours to discover the Whitechapel murderer, “Jack the Ripper,” in all probability he would now have met with his deserts.
Gay
Westphal, an eminent professor of psychiatry at Berlin, may be said to have been the first to put the study of sexual inversion on an assured scientific basis. In 1870 he published in the Archiv für Psychiatrie, of which he was for many years editor, the detailed history of a young woman who, from her earliest years, was sexually inverted.
Out, out, out into the night,
With the wind bitter north-east and the sea rough;
You have a racking cough and your lungs are weak,
But out, out into the night you go,
So guide you and guard you, Heaven, and fare you well!
We have been three lights to one another, and now we are two,
For you go far and alone into the darkness;
But the light in you was clearer and stronger than ours,
For you came straighter from God, and, whereas we had learned,
The analysis of these cases leads directly up to a question of the first importance: What is sexual inversion? Is it, as many would have us believe, an abominably acquired vice, to be stamped out by the prison? or is it, as a few assert, a beneficial variety of human emotion which should be tolerated or even fostered? Is it a diseased condition which qualifies its subject for the lunatic asylum? or is it a natural monstrosity, a human "sport," the manifestations of which must be regulated when they become antisocial?
As I go down the street
A hundred boys a day I meet,
And gazing from my window high
I like to watch them passing by.
I like the boy that earns his bread;
The boy that holds my horse’s head,
The boy that tidies up the bar,
The boy that hawks the Globe and Star.
Smart-looking lads are in my line;
The lad that gives my boots a shine,
The lad that works the lift below,
The lad that’s lettered G.P.O.
I like the boy of business air
That guards the loaded van with care,
Am I waking, am I sleeping?
As the first faint dawn comes creeping
Thro' the pane, I am aware
Of an unseen presence hovering,
Round, above, in dusky air ;
A downy bird, with an odorous wing,
That fans my forehead, and sheds perfume,
As sweet as love, as soft as death,
Drowsy-slow through the summer-gloom.
My heart in some dream-rapture saith,
It is she. Half in a swoon,
I spread my arms in slow delight.—
O prolong, prolong the night,
Will the hot sun never die?
He shines too bright, too long.
How slow the hours creep by!
Will the thrush never finish her song?
She is singing too merrily.
Oh when will the moon come, pale,
And strange? I am weary, I wait
For the sad sad nightingale
Ever sobbing insatiate.
Will the day-light never fail?
O youth whose heart is right,
Whose loins are girt to gain
The hell-defended height
Where Virtue beckons plain;
Who seest the stark array
And hast not stayed to count
But singly wilt assay
The many-cannoned mount:
Well is thy war begun;
Endure, be strong and strive;
But think not, O my son,
To save thy soul alive.
Sun burning down on back and loins, penetrating the skin, bathing their flanks in sweat,
Where they lie naked on the warm ground, and the ferns arch over them,
Out in the woods, and the sweet scent of fir-needles
Blends with the fragrant nearness of their bodies;
In-armed together, murmuring, talking,
Drunk with wine of Eros' lips,
Hourlong, while the great wind rushes in the branches,
And the blue above lies deep beyond the fern-fronds and fir-tips;
You, proud curve-lipped youth. with brown sensitive face,
Why, suddenly, as you sat there on the grass, did you
turn full upon me those twin black eye of yours
With gaze so absorbing so intense, I a strong man
trembled and was faint?
Why in a moment between me and you in the full
summer afternoon did Love sweep- leading after it in procession
across the lawn and the flowers and under the waving
trees huge dusky shadows of Death and the other world?
I know not