Studies in the psychology of sex, volume 2 by Havelock Ellis. - HTML preview

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part has ever

allowed the possibility of such construction as mentioned is

terrible. I am fain to hope that 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."

It would seem from this letter[96] that Whitman had never realized that

there is any relationship whatever between the passionate emotion of

physical contact from man to man, as he had experienced it and sung it,

and the act which with other people he would regard as a crime against

nature. This may be singular, for there are many inverted persons who have

found satisfaction in friendships less physical and passionate than those

described in _Leaves of Grass_, but Whitman was a man of concrete,

emotional, instinctive temperament, lacking in analytical power, receptive

to all influences, and careless of harmonizing them. He would most

certainly have refused to admit that he was the subject of inverted

sexuality. It remains true, however, that "manly love"

occupies in his

work a predominance which it would scarcely hold in the feelings of the

"average man," whom Whitman wishes to honor. A normally constituted

person, having assumed the very frank attitude taken up by Whitman, would

be impelled to devote far more space and far more ardor to the subject of

sexual relationships with women and all that is involved in maternity than

is accorded to them in _Leaves of Grass_. Some of Whitman's extant letters

to young men, though they do not throw definite light on this question,

are of a very affectionate character,[97] and, although a man of

remarkable physical vigor, he never felt inclined to marry.[98] It remains

somewhat difficult to classify him from the sexual point of view, but we

can scarcely fail to recognize the presence of a homosexual tendency.

I should add that some friends and admirers of Whitman are not

prepared to accept the evidence of the letter to Symonds. I am

indebted to "Q." for the following statement of the objections:--

"I think myself that it is a mistake to give much weight to this

letter--perhaps a mistake to introduce it at all, since if

introduced it will, of course, carry weight. And this for three

or four reasons:--

"1. That it is difficult to reconcile the letter itself (with its

strong tone of disapprobation) with the general

'atmosphere' of

_Leaves of Grass_, the tenor of which is to leave everything open

and free.

"2. That the letter is in hopeless conflict with the

'Calamus'

section of poems. For, whatever moral lines Whitman may have

drawn at the time of writing these poems, it seems to me quite

incredible that the possibility of certain inferences, morbid or

other, was undreamed of.

"3. That the letter was written only a few months before his last

illness and death, and is the only expression of the kind that he

appears to have given utterance to.

"4. That Symonds's letter, to which this was a reply, is not

forth coming; and we consequently do not know what rash

expressions it may have contained--leading Whitman (with his

extreme caution) to hedge his name from possible use to justify

dubious practices."

I may add that I endeavored to obtain Symonds's letter, but he

was unable to produce it, nor has any copy of it been found among

his papers.

It should be said that Whitman's attitude toward Symonds was

marked by high regard and admiration. "A wonderful man is

Addington Symonds," he remarked shortly before his own death;

"some ways the most indicative and penetrating and significant

man of our time. Symonds is a curious fellow; I love him dearly.

He is of college breed and education, horribly literary and

suspicious, and enjoys things. A great fellow for delving into

persons and into the concrete, and even into the physiological

and the gastric, and wonderfully cute." But on this occasion he

delved in vain.

The foregoing remarks (substantially contained in the previous

editions of this book) were based mainly on the information

received from J.A. Symonds's side. But of more recent years

interesting light has been thrown on this remarkable letter from

Walt Whitman's side. The Boswellian patience, enthusiasm, and

skill which Horace Traubel has brought to his full and elaborate

work, now in course of publication, _With Walt Whitman in

Camden_, clearly reveal, in the course of various conversations,

Whitman's attitude to Symonds's question and the state of mind

which led up to this letter.

Whitman talked to Traubel much about Symonds from the

twenty-seventh of April, 1888 (very soon after the date when

Traubel's work begins), onward. Symonds had written to him

repeatedly, it seems, concerning the "passional relations of men

with men," as Whitman expressed it. "He is always driving at me

about that: is that what Calamus means?--because of me or in

spite of me, is that what it means? I have said no, but no does

not satisfy him. [There is, however, no record from Symonds's

side of any letter by Whitman to Symonds in this sense up to this

date.] But read this letter--read the whole of it: it is very

shrewd, very cute, in deadliest earnest: it drives me hard,

almost compels me--it is urgent, persistent: he sort of stands in

the road and says 'I won't move till you answer my question.' You

see, this is an old letter--sixteen years old--and he is still

asking the question: he refers to it in one of his latest notes.

He is surely a wonderful man--a rare, cleaned-up man--a

white-souled, heroic character.... You will be writing something

about Calamus some day," said W. [to Traubel], "and this letter,

and what I say, may help to clear your ideas.

Calamus needs clear

ideas; it may be easily, innocently distorted from its natural,

its motive, body of doctrine."

The letter, dated Feb. 7, 1872, of some length, is then

reproduced. It tells how much _Leaves of Grass_, and especially

the Calamus section, had helped the writer. "What the love of man

for man has been in the past," Symonds wrote, "I think I know.

What it is here now, I know also--alas! What you say it can and

should be I dimly discern in your Poems. But this hardly

satisfies me--so desirous am I of learning what you teach. Some

day, perhaps,--in some form, I know not what, but in your own

chosen form,--you will tell me more about the Love of Friends.

Till then I wait."

"Said W: 'Well, what do you think of that? Do you think that

could be answered?' 'I don't see why you call that letter driving

you hard. It's quiet enough--it only asks questions, and asks the

questions mildly enough,' 'I suppose you are right--

"drive" is

not exactly the word: yet you know how I hate to be catechised.

Symonds is right, no doubt, to ask the questions: I am just as

much right if I do not answer them: just as much right if I do

answer them. I often say to myself about Calamus--

perhaps it

means more or less than what I thought myself--means different:

perhaps I don't know what it all means--perhaps never did know.

My first instinct about all that Symonds writes is violently

reactionary--is strong and brutal for no, no, no.

Then the

thought intervenes that I maybe do not know all my own meanings:

I say to myself: "You, too, go away, come back, study your own

book--as alien or stranger, study your own book, see what it

amounts to." Some time or other I will have to write to him

definitely about Calamus--give him my word for it what I meant or

mean it to mean.'"

Again, a month later (May 24, 1888), Whitman speaks to Traubel of

a "beautiful letter" from Symonds. "You will see that he harps on

the Calamus poems again. I don't see why it should, but his

recurrence to that subject irritates me a little. I suppose you

might say--why don't you shut him up by answering him? There is

no logical answer to that I suppose: but I may ask in my turn:

'What right has he to ask questions anyway?'" W.

laughed a bit.

"Anyway the question comes back to me almost every time he

writes. He is courteous enough about it--that is the reason I do

not resent him. I suppose the whole thing will end in an answer

some day."

The letter follows. The chief point in it is that the writer

hopes he has not been importunate in the question he had asked

about Calamus three years before.

"I [Traubel] said to W.: 'That's a humble letter enough: I don't

see anything in that to get excited about. He doesn't ask you to

answer the old question. In fact he rather apologizes for having

asked it.' W. fired up 'Who is excited? As to that question, he

does ask it again and again: asks it, asks it, asks it.' I

laughed at his vehemence. 'Well, suppose he does? It does not

harm. Besides, you've got nothing to hide. I think your silence

might lead him to suppose there was a nigger in your wood pile.'

'Oh, nonsense! But for thirty years my enemies and friends have

been asking me questions about the _Leaves_: I'm tired of not

answering questions.' It was very funny to see his face when he

gave a humorous twist to the fling in his last phrase. Then he

relaxed and added: 'Anyway I love Symonds. Who could fail to love

a man who could write such a letter? I suppose he will yet have

to be answered, damn 'im!'"

It is clear that these conversations considerably diminish the force of

the declaration in Whitman's letter. We see that the letter which, on the

face of it, might have represented the swift and indignant reaction of a

man who, suddenly faced by the possibility that his work may be

interpreted in a perverse sense, emphatically repudiates that

interpretation, was really nothing of the kind. Symonds for at least

eighteen years had been gently, considerately, even humbly, yet

persistently, asking the same perfectly legitimate question. If the answer

was really an emphatic no, it would more naturally have been made in 1872

than 1890. Moreover, in the face of this ever-recurring question, Whitman

constantly speaks to his friends of his great affection for Symonds and

his admiration for his intellectual cuteness, feelings that would both be

singularly out of place if applied to a man who was all the time

suggesting the possibility that his writings contained inferences that

were "terrible," "morbid," and "damnable." Evidently, during all those

years, Whitman could not decide what to reply. On the one hand he was

moved by his horror of being questioned, by his caution, by his natural

aversion to express approval of anything that could be called unnatural or

abnormal. On the other hand, he was moved by the desire to let his work

speak for itself, by his declared determination to leave everything open,

and possibly by a more or less conscious sympathy with the inferences

presented to him. It was not until the last years of his life, when his

sexual life belonged to the past, when weakness was gaining on him, when

he wished to put aside every drain on his energies, that--being

constitutionally incapable of a balanced scientific statement--he chose

the simplest and easiest solution of the difficulty.[99]

Concerning another great modern writer--Paul Verlaine, the first of modern

French poets--it seems possible to speak with less hesitation. A man who

possessed in fullest measure the irresponsible impressionability of

genius, Verlaine--as his work shows and as he himself admitted--all his

life oscillated between normal and homosexual love, at one period

attracted to women, at another to men. He was without doubt, it seems to

me, bisexual. An early connection with another young poet, Arthur Rimbaud,

terminated in a violent quarrel with his friend, and led to Verlaine's

imprisonment at Mons. In after-years he gave expression to the exalted

passion of this relationship--_mon grand péché radieux_-

-in _Læti et

Errabundi_, published in the volume entitled _Parallèlement_; and in later

poems he has told of less passionate and less sensual relationships which

yet were more than friendship, for instance, in the poem, "_Mon ami, ma

plus belle amitié, ma Meilleure_" in _Bonheur_.[100]

In this brief glance at some of the ethnographical, historical, religious,

and literary aspects of homosexual passion there is one other phenomenon

which may be mentioned. This is the alleged fact that, while the phenomena

exist to some extent everywhere, we seem to find a special proclivity to

homosexuality (whether or not involving a greater frequency of congenital

inversion is not usually clear) among certain races and in certain

regions.[101] In Europe this would be best illustrated by the case of

southern Italy, which in this respect is held to be distinct from northern

Italy, although Italians generally are franker than men of northern race

in admitting their sexual practices.[102] How far the supposed greater

homosexuality of southern Italy may be due to Greek influence and Greek

blood it is not very easy to say.

It must be remembered that, in dealing with a northern country like

England, homosexual phenomena do not present themselves in the same way as

they do in southern Italy today, or in ancient Greece.

In Greece the

homosexual impulse was recognized and idealized; a man could be an open

homosexual lover, and yet, like Epaminondas, be a great and honored

citizen of his country. There was no reason whatever why a man, who in

mental and physical constitution was perfectly normal, should not adopt a

custom that was regarded as respectable, and sometimes as even specially

honorable. But it is quite otherwise today in a country like England or

the United States.[103] In these countries all our traditions and all our

moral ideals, as well as the law, are energetically opposed to every

manifestation of homosexual passion. It requires a very strong impetus to

go against this compact social force which, on every side, constrains the

individual into the paths of heterosexual love. That impetus, in a

well-bred individual who leads the normal life of his fellow-men and who

feels the ordinary degree of respect for the social feeling surrounding

him, can only be supplied by a fundamental--usually, it is probable,

inborn--perversion of the sexual instinct, rendering the individual

organically abnormal. It is with this fundamental abnormality, usually

called sexual inversion, that we shall here be concerned. There is no

evidence to show that homosexuality in Greece was a congenital perversion,

although it appears that Coelius Aurelianus affirms that in the opinion of

Parmenides it was hereditary. Aristotle also, in his fragment on physical

love, though treating the whole matter with indulgence, seems to have

distinguished abnormal congenital homosexuality from acquired homosexual

vice. Doubtless in a certain proportion of cases the impulse was organic,

and it may well be that there was an organic and racial predisposition to

homosexuality among the Greeks, or, at all events, the Dorians. But the

state of social feeling, however it originated, induced a large proportion

of the ordinary population to adopt homosexuality as a fashion, or, it may

be said, the environment was peculiarly favorable to the development of

latent homosexual tendencies. So that any given number of homosexual

persons among the Greeks would have presented a far smaller proportion of

constitutionally abnormal individuals than a like number in England.

In a similar manner--though I do not regard the analogy as

complete--infanticide or the exposition of children was practised in some

of the early Greek States by parents who were completely healthy and

normal; in England a married woman who destroys her child is in nearly

every case demonstrably diseased or abnormal. For this reason I am unable

to see that homosexuality in ancient Greece--while of great interest as a

social and psychological problem--throws light on sexual inversion as we

know it in England or the United States.

Concerning the wide prevalence of sexual inversion and of homosexual

phenomena generally, there can be no manner of doubt.

This question has

been most fully investigated in Germany. In Berlin, Moll states that he

has himself seen between 600 and 700 homosexual persons and heard of some

250 to 350 others. Hirschfeld states that he has known over 10,000

homosexual persons.

There are, I am informed, several large cafés in Berlin which are almost

exclusively patronized by inverts who come here to flirt and make

acquaintances; as these cafés are frequented by male street prostitutes

(Pupenjunge) the invert risks being blackmailed or robbed if he goes home

or to a hotel with a café acquaintance. There are also a considerable

number of homosexual _Kneipen_, small and unpretentious bar-rooms, which

are really male brothels, the inmates being sexually normal working men

and boys, out of employment or in quest of a few marks as pocket money;

these places are regarded by inverts as very safe, as the proprietors

insist on good order and allow no extortion, while the police, though of

course aware of their existence, never interfere.

Homosexual cafés for

women are also found in Berlin.

There is some reason for believing that homosexuality is especially

prominent in Germany and among Germans. I have elsewhere referred to the

highly emotional and sentimental traits which have frequently marked

German friendships. Germany is the only country in which there is a

definite and well-supported movement for the defense and social

rehabilitation of inverts. The study of sexual inversion began in Germany,

and the scientific and literary publications dealing with homosexuality

issued from the German press probably surpass in quantity and importance

those issued from all other countries put together. The homosexual

tendencies of Germans outside Germany have been noted in various

countries. Among my English cases I have found that a strain of German

blood occurs much more frequently than we are entitled to expect; Parisian

prostitutes are said to be aware of the homosexual tastes of Germans; it

is significant that (as a German invert familiar with Turkey informed

Näcke), at Constantinople, the procurers, who naturally supply girls as

well as youths, regard Germans and Austrians as more tending to

homosexuality than the foreigners from any other land.

Germans usually

deny, however, that there is any special German proclivity to inversion,

and it would not appear that such statistics as are available (though all

such statistics cannot be regarded as more than approximations) show any

pronounced predominance of inversion among Germans. It is to Hirschfeld

that we owe the chief attempt to gain some notion of the percentage of

homosexual persons among the general population.[104] It may be said to

vary in different regions and more especially in different occupations,

from 1 to 10 per cent. But the average when the individuals belonging to a

large number of groups are combined is generally found to be rather over 2

per cent. So that there are about a million and a half inverted persons in

Germany.[105] This would be a minimum which can scarcely fail to be below

the actual proportion, as no one can be certain that he is acquainted with

the real proclivities of all the persons comprising a larger group of

acquaintances.[106] It is not found in the estimates which have reached

Hirschfeld that the French groups show a smaller proportion of homosexual

persons than the German groups, and a Japanese group comes out near to

the general average for the whole. Various authorities, especially

Germans, believe that homosexuality is just as common in France as in

Germany.[107] Saint-Paul ("Dr. Laupts"), on the other hand, is unable to

accept this view. As an army surgeon who has long served in Africa he can

(as also Rebierre in his _Joyeux et demifous_) bear witness to the

frequency of homosexuality among the African battalions of the French

army, especially in the cavalry, less so in the infantry; in the French

army generally he finds it rare, as also in the general population.[108]

Näcke is also inclined to believe that homosexuality is rarer in Celtic

lands, and in the Latin countries generally, than in Teutonic and Slavonic

lands, and believes that it may be a question of race.[109] The question

is still undecided. It is possible that the undoubted fact that

homosexuality is less conspicuous in France and the other Latin countries

than in Teutonic lands, may be due not to the occurrence of a smaller

proportion of congenital inverts in the former lands, but mainly to

general difference in temperament and in the social reaction.[110] The

French idealize and emphasize the place of women to a much greater degree

than the Germans, while at the same time inverts in France have much less

occasion than in Germany to proclaim their legal grievances. Apart from

such considerations as these it seems very doubtful whether inborn

inversion is in any considerable degree rarer in France than in Germany.

As to the frequency of homosexuality in England[111] and the United

States there is much evidence. In England its manifestations are well

marked for those whose eyes have once been opened. The manifestations are

of the same character as those in Germany, modified by social and national

differences, and especially by the greater reserve, Puritanism, and

prudery of England.[112] In the United States these same influences exert

a still greater effect in restraining the outward manifestations of

homosexuality. Hirschfeld, though so acute and experienced in the

investigation of homosexuality, states that when visiting Philadelphia and

Boston he could scarcely detect any evidence of homosexuality, though he

was afterward assured by those acquainted with local conditions that its

extension in both cities is "colossal." There have been numerous criminal

cases and scandals in the United States in which homosexuality has come to

the surface, and the very frequently occurring cases of transvestism or

cross-dressing in the States seem to be in a large proportion associated

with homosexuality.

In the opinion of some, English homosexuality has become much more

conspicuous during recent years, and this is sometimes attributed to the

Oscar Wilde case. No doubt, the celebrity of Oscar Wilde and the universal

publicity given to the facts of the case by the newspapers may have

brought conviction of their perversion to many inverts who were before

only vaguely conscious of their abnormality, and, paradoxical though it

may seem, have imparted greater courage to others; but it can scarcely

have sufficed to increase the number of inverts. Rather, one may say, the

development of urban life renders easier the exhibition and satisfaction

of this as of all other forms of perversion. Regarding the proportion of

inverts among the general population, it is very difficult to speak

positively. The invert himself is a misleading guide because he has formed

round himself a special coterie of homosexual persons, and, moreover, he

is sometimes apt