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 shown by the historical examples of distinguished inverts; and, while it is certainly true that these considerations apply chiefly to the finer-grained natures, the histories I have brought together suffice to show that such natures constitute a considerable proportion of inverts.  The helplessly gross sexual appetite cannot thus be influenced; but that remains true whether the appetite is homosexual or heterosexual, and nothing is gained by enabling it to feed on women as well as on men.