or less conscious sympathy with the inferences
presented to him. It was not until the last years of his life, when his
sexual life belonged to the past, when weakness was gaining on him, when
he wished to put aside every drain on his energies, that--being
constitutionally incapable of a balanced scientific statement--he chose
the simplest and easiest solution of the difficulty.[99]

Concerning another great modern writer--Paul Verlaine, the first of modern
French poets--it seems possible to speak with less hesitation. A man who
possessed in fullest measure the irresponsible impressionability of
genius, Verlaine--as his work shows and as he himself admitted--all his
life oscillated between normal and homosexual love, at one period
attracted to women, at another to men. He was without doubt, it seems to
me, bisexual. An early connection with another young poet, Arthur Rimbaud,
terminated in a violent quarrel with his friend, and led to Verlaine's
imprisonment at Mons. In after-years he gave expression to the exalted
passion of this relationship--_mon grand peche radieux_--in _Laeti et
Errabundi_, published in the volume entitled _Parallelement_; and in later
poems he has told of less passionate and less sensual relationships which
yet were more than friendship, for instance, in the poem, "_Mon ami, ma
plus belle amitie, ma Meilleure_" in _Bonheur_.[100]

In this brief glance at some of the ethnographical, historical, religious,
and literary aspects of homosexual passion there is one other phenomenon
which may be mentioned. This is the alleged fact that, while the phenomena
exist to some extent everywhere, we seem to find a special proclivity to
homosexuality (whether or not involving a greater frequency of congenital
inversion is not usually clear) among certain races and in certain
regions.[101] In Europe this would be best illustrated by the case of
southern Italy, which in this respect is held to be distinct from northern
Italy, although Italians generally are franker than men of northern race
in admitting their sexual practices.[102] How far the supposed greater
homosexuality of southern Italy may be due to Greek influence and Greek
blood it is not very easy to say.

It must be remembered that, in dealing with a northern country like
England, homosexual phenomena do not present themselves in the same way as
they do in southern Italy today, or in ancient Greece. In Greece the
homosexual impulse was recognized and ide