VIII.
LITERATURE—IDEALISTIC.
To speak of Walt Whitman at all in connection with Ulrichs and sexual 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:—