ignoring the perplexed questions of a guilty passion doomed by law and popular antipathy to failure, he begins anew with sound and primitive humanity. There he discovers "a superb friendship, exalté, 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 nobler 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.[1]
- ↑ While these sheets were going through the press, I communicated Whitman's reply to a judicious friend, whose remarks upon it express my own opinion more clearly and succinctly than I have done above: "I do not feel that this answer throws light on the really interesting question; does the sentiment of 'Calamus' represent, in its own way, the ideal which we should aim at impressing on passionate affections between men, as certainly liable to take other objectionable forms? Is there sufficient affinity between the actual and the ideal for this to be practicable? That is what I have never felt sure about when we have discussed these matters. But I do not feel that my doubts have been resolved in any negative direction by Walt Whitman."
