"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."