The deep-dyed Lesbian woman is a creature whose sensibilities are
over-balanced: whose imagination moves on mad low-flying wings: whose
brain is good: whose predilections are warped: who lives always in
unrest: whose inner walls are streaked with garish heathen pigments:
whose copious love-instincts are an odd mixture of mirth, malice and
_luxure_.
Its effects in me who am straight-made in nothing, but strongly
crooked, is to vivify tenfold or a hundredfold or a thousandfold in
my shaded vision the womanness of any woman whose inner or outer
beauty arrests and stirs my spirit.
I see in some woman, some girl, any who attracts me--be she a casual
acquaintance, or a Victorian poet dead fifty years whose poetry and
portrait live, or an actor in a play, or a sweet-browed friend, or
an Old Master--I see one such as if all her charm were newly painted
and placed near me shining wet with delicate fresh paint. It is
bewitching to look at: it has a deep seductive fragrance of smell:
it is luxuriantly aromatic to all my known senses--and two senses
unknown float from my deeps and rise at it. The Stranger becomes a
dearly poignant fancy to dream over. My Friend turns into a vivid
goddess whose fingers and hair I would touch tenderly with my lips.
Because of it a little flame, pale but primal, leaps from the
flattest details of life. In such a mood-adventure a window-shutter
blooms: a hair-brush glows: a sordid floor has gleams upon it. These
bewildering frightful beautifulnesses in this life--.
--withal the same inherence which makes me someway Lesbian
makes me the floor of the setting sun--strewn with overflowing
gold and green vases of Fire and Turquoise--a sly and piercing
annihilation-of-beauty, wonderful devastating to feel--oh, blighting
breaking to feel--oh, deathly lovely to feel!--It is the bewitched
obliquities that run away with me: grind, gnaw, eat my true human
heart like bright potent vitriol.
What God means me to do with such gifts and phases--I don’t and don’t
understand. I never get anywhere as I think it out. I don’t know
shades of rights and wrongs since that ancient witch-light has found
more trueness of human feeling in me than has any simplicity my life
knows.
It began, they say, with Sappho and her dreaming students in
the long-ago vales of Lesbos. It may be, I daresay. I know it
did not stop there. And I know that--Greek, French, Scotch,
Indian--Welch--Japanese--_all_ women sense its light lyric touch. For
myself, I know only it is part and parcel in my tangled tired coil.