ly 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 leave