George Eekhoud, whose _Escal-Vigor_
(prosecuted at Bruges on its publication) is a book of special
power. The homosexual stories of Essebac, of which _L'Elu_
(1902) is considered the best, are of a romantic and sentimental
character. _Lucien_ (1910), by Binet-Valmer, is a penetrating and
scarcely sympathetic study of inversion. Nortal's _Les
Adolescents Passionnes_ (already mentioned, p. 325) is a notably
intimate and precise study of homosexuality in French schools. It
would be easy to mention many others.

In Germany during recent years many novels of homosexual
character have been published. They are not usually, it would
seem, of high literary character, but are sometimes notable as
being more or less disguised narratives of real fact. Body's _Aus
Eines Mannes Maedchenjahren_ is said to be a faithful
autobiography. _Der Neue Werther: eine Hellenische
Passions-geschichte_ by Narkissos (1902) is also said to be
authentic. Another book that may be mentioned is Konradin's _Ein
Junger Platos: Aus dem Leben eines Entgbeistes_ (1914). The
German belletristic literature of homosexuality, as well as that
of other countries, will be found adequately summarized and
criticised by Numa Praetorius in the volumes of the _Jahrbuch fuer
sexuelle Zwischenstufen_. See also Hirschfeld's _Die
Homosexualitaet_, pp. 47 and 1018 et seq.

It is by some such method of self-treatment as this that most of the more
highly intelligent men and women whose histories I have already briefly
recorded have at last slowly and instinctively reached a condition of
relative health and peace, both physical and moral. The method of
self-restraint and self-culture, without self-repression, seems to be the
most rational method of dealing with sexual inversion when that condition
is really organic and deeply rooted. It is better that a man should be
enabled to make the best of his own strong natural instincts, with all
their disadvantages, than that he should be unsexed and perverted, crushed
into a position which he has no natural aptitude to occupy. As both
Raffalovich and Fere have insisted, it is the ideal of chastity, rather
than of normal sexuality, which the congenital invert should hold before
his eyes. He may not have in him the making of _l'homme moyen sensuel_; he
may have in him the making of a saint.[263] What good work in the world
the inverted may do is sho