A Problem in Modern Ethics Part 6

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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual alloy from emotions raised to a high pitch of pa.s.sionate 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 s.e.xual 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 appet.i.te? It is difficult to answer this question; for the issue involved is nothing less momentous than the possibility of evoking a new chivalrous enthusiasm, a.n.a.logous to that of primitive h.e.l.lenic society, from emotions which are at present cla.s.sified 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 Chaeronea.[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, exalte, 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 sh.o.r.es of America, and along the sh.o.r.es 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, exalte, 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 enn.o.bling aspiration. While he expressly repudiates, disowns, and brands as "d.a.m.nable" 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. .h.i.therto 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 mediaeval chivalry of "amativeness." Still that mediaeval 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 appet.i.tes. In like manner, the democratic chivalry, announced by Whitman, may be destined to absorb, control, and elevate those darker, more mysterious, apparently abnormal appet.i.tes, 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 cla.s.sical a.s.sociations of corruption, ignoring the perplexed questions of a guilty pa.s.sion doomed by law and popular antipathy to failure, he begins anew with sound and primitive humanity.

There he discovers "a superb friendship, exalte, 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 n.o.bler 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 s.e.xual inversion are that its several manifestations may be cla.s.sified under the following categories: (1) Forced abstinence from intercourse with females, or _faute de mieux;_ (2) Wantonness and curious seeking after novel pleasure; (3) p.r.o.nounced morbidity; (4) Inborn instinctive preference for the male and indifference to the female s.e.x; (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 s.e.xual indulgence, and indifferent voluptuaries. It is possible that something morbid or abnormal usually marks this cla.s.s.

To the third we a.s.sign 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 pa.s.sions.[79]

The fourth includes the whole cla.s.s 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 s.e.xual proclivities, display no signs of insanity, and have no morbid const.i.tutional 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 h.e.l.las, by Persia, by Afghan, by the peoples of what Burton calls the Sotadic Zone.

However we may account for the origin of s.e.xual inversion, the instinct has through usage, tradition, and social toleration pa.s.sed 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 s.e.xual appet.i.te 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 circ.u.mstances. The members of the fourth category are abnormal through their const.i.tution. Whether we refer that abnormality to atavism, or to some hitherto unapprehended deviation from the rule in their s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sions are injurious to the tribe by checking propagation. Religion adopted this view, and, through the legend of Sodom and Gomorrah, taught that G.o.d 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 s.e.xual appet.i.te; 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 subst.i.tute 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 s.e.xes. 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 "d.a.m.nable."

This is how the matter stands now. The one thing which seems clear is that s.e.xual 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 s.e.xUAL 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.