Casper-Liman, from Krafft-Ebing and Ulrichs. What indeed has this "superb friendship, exalté, 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 ennobling aspiration. While he expressly repudiates, disowns, and brands as "damnable" 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."[1]
If this be not a dream, if he is right in believing that
- ↑ These prose passages are taken from "Democratic Vistas," cited above, p. 119, note.
