inversion seems paradoxical. At the outset it must be definitely stated
that he has nothing to do with anomalous, abnormal, vicious, or diseased
forms of the emotion which males entertain for males. Yet no man in the
modern world has expressed so strong a conviction that "manly
attachment," "athletic love," "the high towering love of comrades," is a
main factor in human life, a virtue upon which society will have to
rest, and a passion equal in its permanence and intensity to sexual
affection.
He assumes, without raising the question, that the love of man for man
co-exists with the love of man for woman in one and the same individual.
The relation of the two modes of feeling is clearly stated in this
poem:--
"Fast-anchored, eternal, O love! O woman I love!
O bride! O wife! More resistless than I can tell, the thought of you
Then separate, as disembodied, or another born,
Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation;
I ascend--I float in the regions of your love, O man,
O sharer of my roving life."
Neuropathical Urnings are not hinted at in any passage of his works. As
his friend and commentator Mr. Burroughs puts it: "The sentiment is
primitive, athletic, taking form in all manner of large and homely
out-of-door images, and springs, as anyone may see, directly from the
heart and experience of the poet."
This being so, Whitman never suggests that comradeship may occasion the
development of physical desires. But then he does not in set terms
condemn these desires, or warn his disciples against them. To a Western
boy he says:--
"If you be not silently selected by lovers, and do not silently seek
lovers,
Of what use is it that you seek to become eleve of mine."
Like Plato, in the Phædrus, Whitman describes an enthusiastic type of
masculine emotion, leaving its private details to the moral sense and
special inclination of the person concerned.[66]
The language of "Calamus" (that section of "Leaves of Grass" which is
devoted to the gospel of comradeship) has a passionate glow, a warmth of
emotional tone, beyond anything to which the modern world is used in
the celebration of the love of friends. It recalls to our mind the early
Greek enthusiasm--that fellowship in arms which flourished among Dorian
tribes, and made a chivalry for prehistoric Hellas. Nor does the poet
himself appear to be unconscious that there are dangers and difficulties
involved in the highly-pitched emotions he is praising. The whole tenor
of two mysterious compositions, entitled "Whoever you are, Holding me
now in Hand," and "Trickle, Drops," suggests an underlying sense of
spiritual conflict. The following poem, again, is sufficiently
significant and typical to call for literal transcription:--
"Earth, my likeness!
Though you look so impressive, ample and spheric here,
I now suspect that is not all;
I now suspect there is something fierce in you,
eligible to burst forth;
For an athletic is enamoured of me--and I of him,
But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me,
eligible to burst forth,
I dare not tell it in words--not even in these songs."
The reality of Whitman's feeling, the intense delight which he derives
from the personal presence and physical contact of a beloved man, find
expression in "A Glimpse," "Recorders ages hence," "When I heard at the
Close of Day," "I saw in Louisiana a Live Oak growing," "Long I thought
that Knowledge alone would content me,"[67] "O Tan-faced Prairie Boy,"
and "Vigil Strange I kept on the Field one Night."[68]
It is clear, then, that in his treatment of comradeship, or the
impassioned love of man for man, Whitman has struck a keynote, to the
emotional intensity of which the modern world is unaccustomed. It
therefore becomes of much importance to discover the poet-prophet's
_Stimmung_--his radical instinct with regard to the moral quality of the
feeling he encourages. Studying his works by their own light, and by the
light of their author's character, interpreting each part by reference
to the whole and in the spirit of the whole, an impartial critic will, I
think, be drawn to the conclusion that what he calls the "adhesiveness"
of comradeship is meant to have no interblending with the "amativeness"
of sexual love. Personally, it is undeniable that Whitman possesses a
specially keen sense of the fine restraint and continence, the
cleanliness and chastity, that are inseparable from the perfectly virile
and physically complete nature of healthy manhood. Still, we may
predicate the same ground-qualities in the early Dorians, those martial
founders of the institution of Greek Love; and it is notorious to
students of Greek civilisation that the lofty sentiment of their
chivalry was intertwined with singular anomalies in its historical
development.
To remove all doubt about Whitman's own intentions when he composed
"Calamus," and promulgated his doctrine of impassioned comradeship, I
wrote to him, frankly posing the questions which perplexed my mind. The
answer I received, dated Camden, New Jersey, U.S.A., August 19, 1890,
and which he permits me to make use of, puts the matter beyond all
debate, and confirms the conclusions to which I had been led by
criticism. He writes as follows: "About the questions on 'Calamus,'
&c., they quite daze me. 'Leaves of Grass' is only to be rightly
construed by and within its own atmosphere and essential character--all
its pages and pieces so coming strictly under. That the Calamus part has
ever allowed the possibility of such construction as mentioned is
terrible. I am fain to hope the pages themselves are not to be even
mentioned for such gratuitous and quite at the time undreamed and
unwished possibility of morbid inferences--which are disavowed by me and
seem damnable."
No one who knows anything about Walt Whitman will for a moment doubt his
candour and sincerity. Therefore the man who wrote "Calamus," and
preached the gospel of comradeship, entertains feelings at least as
hostile to sexual inversion as any law-abiding humdrum Anglo-Saxon could
desire. It is obvious that he has not even taken the phenomena of
abnormal instinct into account. Else he must have foreseen that, human
nature being what it is, we cannot expect to eliminate all sexual alloy
from emotions raised to a high pitch of passionate intensity, and that
permanent elements within the midst of our society will emperil the
absolute purity of the ideal he attempts to establish.
These considerations do not, however, affect the spiritual nature of
that ideal. After acknowledging, what Whitman has omitted to perceive,
that there are inevitable points of contact between sexual inversion and
his doctrine of comradeship, the question now remains whether he has not
suggested the way whereby abnormal instincts may be moralised and raised
to higher value. In other words, are those instincts provided in
"Calamus" with the means of their salvation from the filth and mire of
brutal appetite? It is difficult to answer this question; for the issue
involved is nothing less momentous than the possibility of evoking a new
chivalrous enthusiasm, analogous to that of primitive Hellenic society,
from emotions which are at present classified among the turpitudes of
human nature.
Let us look a little closer at the expression which Whitman has given to
his own feelings about friendship. The first thing that strikes us is
the mystic emblem he has chosen for masculine love. That is the
water-plant, or scented rush, called Calamus, which springs in wild
places, "in paths untrodden, in the growth by margins of pond-waters" He
has chosen these "emblematic and capricious blades" because of their
shyness, their aromatic perfume, their aloofness from the patent life of
the world. He calls them "sweet leaves, pink-tinged roots, timid
leaves," "scented herbage of my breast." Finally, he says:--[69]
"Here my last words, and the most baffling,
Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting,
Here I shade down and hide my thoughts--I do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems."
The manliness of the emotion, which is thus so shyly, mystically
indicated, appears in the magnificent address to soldiers at the close
of the great war: "Over the Carnage rose Prophetic a Voice."[70] Its
tenderness emerges in the elegy on a slain comrade--:[71]
"Vigil for boy of responding kisses (never again on earth responding),
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain--vigil I never forget, how as day
brightened,
I rose from the chill ground, and folded my soldier well in his blanket,
And buried him where he fell."
Its pathos and clinging intensity transpire through the first lines of
the following piece, which may have been suggested by the legends of
David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, Oretes and Pylades:--[72]
"When I pursue the conquered fame of heroes, and the victories of mighty
generals,
I do not envy the generals,
Nor the president in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great house;
But when I read of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with them,
How through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long,
Through youth, and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how
affectionate and faithful they were,
Then I am pensive--I hastily put down the book, and walk away, filled
with the bitterest envy."
But Whitman does not conceive of comradeship as a merely personal
possession, delightful to the friends it links in bonds of amity. He
regards it essentially as a social and political virtue. This human
emotion is destined to cement society and to render commonwealths
inviolable. Reading some of his poems, we are carried back to ancient
Greece--to Plato's Symposium, to Philip gazing on the Sacred Band of
Thebans after the fight at Chæronea.[73]
"I dream'd in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole
of the rest of the earth;
I dream'd that was the new City of Friends;
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love--it led
the rest;
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words."
And again:[74]
"I believe the main purport of these States is to found a superb
friendship, exalté, previously unknown,
Because I perceive it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in
all men."
And once again:--[75]
"Come, I will make the continent indissoluble;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon;
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees all along the shores of America,
and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies;
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other's necks;
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am thrilling these songs."
In the company of Walt Whitman we are very far away from Gibbon and
Carlier, from Tardieux and Casper-Liman, from Krafft-Ebing and Ulrichs.
What indeed has this "superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown,"
which "waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men," that
"something fierce in me, eligible to burst forth," "ethereal
comradeship," "the last athletic reality"--what has all this in common
with the painful topic of the preceding sections of my Essay?
It has this in common with it. Whitman recognises among the sacred
emotions and social virtues, destined to regenerate political life and
to cement nations, an intense, jealous, throbbing, sensitive, expectant
love of man for man: a love which yearns in absence, droops under the
sense of neglect, revives at the return of the beloved; a love that
finds honest delight in hand-touch, meeting lips, hours of privacy,
close personal contact. He proclaims this love to be not only a daily
fact in the present, but also a saving and ennobling aspiration. While
he expressly repudiates, disowns, and brands as "damnable" all "morbid
inferences" which may be drawn by malevolence or vicious cunning from
his doctrine, he is prepared to extend the gospel of comradeship to the
whole human race. He expects Democracy, the new social and political
medium, the new religious ideal of mankind, to develop and extend "that
fervid comradeship," and by its means to counterbalance and to
spiritualise what is vulgar and materialistic in the modern world.
"Democracy," he maintains, "infers such loving comradeship, as its most
inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in
vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself."[76]
If this be not a dream, if he is right in believing that "threads of
manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long,
carried to degrees hitherto unknown," will penetrate the organism of
society, "not only giving tone to individual character, and making it
unprecedentedly emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having
deepest relations to general politics"--then are we perhaps justified in
foreseeing here the advent of an enthusiasm which shall rehabilitate
those outcast instincts, by giving them a spiritual atmosphere, an
environment of recognised and healthy emotions, wherein to expand at
liberty and purge away the grossness and the madness of their pariahdom?
This prospect, like all ideals, until they are realised in experience,
may seem fantastically visionary. Moreover, the substance of human
nature is so mixed that it would perhaps be fanatical to expect from
Whitman's chivalry of "adhesiveness" a more immaculate purity than was
attained by the mediæval chivalry of "amativeness." Still that mediæval
chivalry, the great emotional product of feudalism, though it fell short
of its own aspiration, bequeathed incalculable good to modern society by
refining and clarifying the crudest of male appetites. In like manner,
the democratic chivalry, announced by Whitman, may be destined to
absorb, control, and elevate those darker, more mysterious, apparently
abnormal appetites, which we have seen to be widely diffused and
ineradicable in the ground-work of human nature.
Returning from the dream, the vision of a future possibility, it will at
any rate be conceded that Whitman has founded comradeship, the
enthusiasm which binds man to man in fervent love, upon a natural basis.
Eliminating classical associations of corruption, ignoring the
perplexed questions of a guilty passion doomed by law and popular
antipathy to failure, he begins anew with sound and primitive humanity.
There he discovers "a superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown." He
perceives that "it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all
men." His method of treatment, fearless and uncowed by any thought of
evil, his touch upon the matter, chaste and wholesome and aspiring,
reveal the possibility of restoring in all innocence to human life a
portion of its alienated or unclaimed moral birthright. The aberrations
we have been discussing in this treatise are perhaps the morbid symptoms
of suppression, of hypertrophy, of ignorant misregulation, in a genuine
emotion capable of being raised to good by sympathetic treatment.
It were well to close upon this note. The half, as the Greeks said, is
more than the whole; and the time has not yet come to raise the question
whether the love of man for man shall be elevated through a hitherto
unapprehended chivalry to nobler powers, even as the barbarous love of
man for woman once was. This question at the present moment is deficient
in actuality. The world cannot be invited to entertain it.[77]
IX.
EPILOGUE.
The conclusions to which I am led by this enquiry into sexual inversion
are that its several manifestations may be classified under the
following categories: (1) Forced abstinence from intercourse with
females, or _faute de mieux;_ (2) Wantonness and curious seeking after
novel pleasure; (3) Pronounced morbidity; (4) Inborn instinctive
preference for the male and indifference to the female sex; (5) Epochs
of history when the habit has become established and endemic in whole
nations.
Under the first category we group the phenomena presented by schools,
prisons, convents, ships, garrisons in solitary stations, nomadic tribes
of marauding conquerors.[78]
To the second belong those individuals who amuse themselves with
experiments in sensual pleasure, men jaded with ordinary sexual
indulgence, and indifferent voluptuaries. It is possible that something
morbid or abnormal usually marks this class.
To the third we assign clear cases of hereditary malady, in which a want
of self-control is prominent, together with sufferers from nervous
lesion, wounds, epilepsy, senile brain-softening, in so far as these
physical disturbances are complicated with abnormal passions.[79]
The fourth includes the whole class of Urnings, who have been hitherto
ignored by medical investigators, and on whose numerical importance
Ulrichs has perhaps laid exaggerated stress. These individuals behave
precisely like persons of normal sexual proclivities, display no signs
of insanity, and have no morbid constitutional diathesis to account for
their peculiarity.
Under the existing conditions of European Society, these four categories
exist sporadically. That is to say, the members of them are found
scattered through all communities, but are nowhere recognised except by
the penal code and the medical profession. In the fifth category we are
brought face to face with the problem offered by ancient Hellas, by
Persia, by Afghan, by the peoples of what Burton calls the Sotadic Zone.
However we may account for the origin of sexual inversion, the instinct
has through usage, tradition, and social toleration passed here into the
nature of the race; so that the four previous categories are confounded,
or, if distinguished, are only separable in the same way as the vicious
and morbid affections of the ordinary sexual appetite may be
differentiated from its healthier manifestations.
Returning to the first four categories, which alone have any importance
for a modern European, we perceive that only one of them, the third, is
positively morbid, and only one, the second, is _ipso facto_ vicious.
The first is immoral in the same sense as all incontinence, including
self-abuse, fornication, and so forth, practised _faute de mieux_, is
immoral; but it cannot be called either morbid or positively vicious,
because the habit in question springs up under extra-social
circumstances. The members of the fourth category are abnormal through
their constitution. Whether we refer that abnormality to atavism, or to
some hitherto unapprehended deviation from the rule in their sexual
conformation, there is no proof that they are the subjects of disease.
At the same time it is certain that they are not deliberately vicious.
The treatment of sexual inversion by society and legislation follows the
view taken of its origin and nature. Ever since the age of Justinian, it
has been regarded as an unqualified crime against God, the order of the
world, and the State. This opinion, which has been incorporated in the
codes of all the Occidental races, sprang originally from the conviction
that sterile passions are injurious to the tribe by checking
propagation. Religion adopted this view, and, through the legend of
Sodom and Gomorrah, taught that God was ready to punish whole nations
with violent destruction if they practised the "unmentionable vice."
Advancing civilisation, at the same time, sought in every way to limit
and regulate the sexual appetite; and while doing so, it naturally
excluded those forms which were not agreeable to the majority, which
possessed no obvious utility, and which _prima facie_ seemed to violate
the cardinal laws of human nature.
Social feeling, moulded by religion, by legislation, by civility, and by
the persistent antipathies of the majority regards sexual inversion with
immitigable abhorrence. It does not distinguish between the categories I
have indicated, but includes all species under the common condemnation
of crime.
Meanwhile, of late years, we have come to perceive that the phenomena
presented by sexual inversion, cannot be so roughly dealt with. Two
great nations, the French and the Italian, by the "Code Napoleon" and
the "Codice Penale" of 1889, remove these phenomena from the category of
crime into that of immorality at worst. That is to say, they place the
intercourse of males with males upon the same legal ground as the normal
sexual relation. They punish violence, protect minors, and provide for
the maintenance of public decency. Within these limitations, they
recognise the right of adults to deal as they choose with their persons.
The new school of anthropologists and psychological physicians study
sexual inversion partly on the lines of historical evolution, and partly
from the point of view of disease. Mixing up atavism and heredity with
nervous malady in the individual, they wish to substitute medical
treatment for punishment, life-long sequestration in asylums for terms
of imprisonment differing in duration according to the offence.
Neither society nor science entertains the notion that those instincts
which the laws of France and Italy tolerate, under certain restrictions,
can be simply natural in a certain percentage of male persons. Up to the
present time the Urning has not been considered as a sport of nature in
her attempt to differentiate the sexes. Ulrichs is the only European
who has maintained this view in a long series of polemical and
imperfectly scientific works. Yet facts brought daily beneath the notice
of open-eyed observers prove that Ulrichs is justified in his main
contention. Society lies under the spell of ancient terrorism and
coagulated errors. Science is either wilfully hypocritical or radically
misinformed.
Walt Whitman, in America, regards what he calls "manly love" as destined
to be a leading virtue of democratic nations, and the source of a new
chivalry. But he does not define what he means by "manly love." And he
emphatically disavows any "morbid inferences" from his doctrine as
"damnable."
This is how the matter stands now. The one thing which seems clear is
that sexual inversion is no subject for legislation, and that the
example of France and Italy might well be followed by other nations. The
problem ought to be left to the physician, the moralist, the educator,
and finally to the operation of social opinion.
X.
SUGGESTIONS ON THE SUBJECT OF SEXUAL INVERSION IN RELATION TO LAW AND
EDUCATION.
I.
The laws in force against what are called unnatural offences derive from
an edict of Justinian, A.D. 538. The Emperor treated these offences as
criminal, on the ground that they brought plagues, famines, earthquakes,
and the destruction of whole cities, together with their inhabitants,
upon the nations who tolerated them.
II.
A belief that sexual inversion is a crime against God, nature, and the
State pervades all subsequent legislation on the subject. This belief
rests on (1) theological conceptions derived from the Scriptures; (2) a
dread of decreasing the population; (3) the antipathy of the majority
for the tastes of the minority; (4) the vulgar error that antiphysical
desires are invariably voluntary, and the result either of inordinate
lust or of satiated appetites.
III.
Scientific investigation has proved in recent years that a very large
proportion of persons in whom abnormal sexual inclinations are
manifested possess them from their earliest childhood, that they cannot
divert them into normal channels, and that they are powerless to get rid
of them. In these cases, then, legislation is interfering with the
liberty of individuals, under a certain misconception regarding the
nature of their offence.
IV.
Those who support the present laws are therefore bound to prove that the
coercion, punishment, and defamation of such persons are justified
either (1) by any injury which these persons suffer in health of body or
mind, or (2) by any serious danger arising from them to the social
organism.
V.