LITMIR.BIZ

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1907. The arguments of Rivers are concisely stated in a pamphlet entitled Walt Whitman's Anomaly (London: George Allen, 1913). Both Bertz and Rivers emphasize the feminine traits in Whitman. An interesting independent picture of Whitman, at about the date of the letter to Symonds, accompanied by the author's excellent original photographs, is furnished by Dr. John Johnston, A Visit to Walt Whitman, 1898. It may be added that, probably, both the extent and the significance of the feminine traits in Whitman have been overestimated by some writers. Most artists and men of genius have some feminine traits; they do not prove the existence of inversion, nor does their absence disprove it. Dr. Clark Bell writes to me in reference to the little book by Dr. Rivers: "I knew Walt Whitman personally. To me Mr. Whitman was one of the most robust and virile of men, extraordinarily so. He was from my standpoint not feminine at all, but physically masculine and robust. The difficulty is that a virile and strong man who is poetic in temperament, ardent and tender, may have phases and moods of passion and emotion which are apt to be misinterpreted." A somewhat similar view, in opposition to Bertz and Rivers, has been vigorously set forth by Bazalgette (who has written a very thorough study of Whitman in French), especially in the Mercure de France for 1st July, 1st Oct., and 15th Nov., 1913.

[100] Lepelletier, in what may be regarded as the official biography of Verlaine (Paul Verlaine, 1907) seeks to minimize or explain away the homosexual aspect of the poet's life. So also Berrichon, Rimbaud's brother-in-law, Mercure de France, 16 July, 1911 and 1 Feb., 1912. P. Escoube, in a judicious essay (included in Préférences, 1913), presents a more reasonable view of this aspect of Verlaine's temperament. Even apart altogether from the evidence as to the poet's tendency to passionate friendship, there can be no appeal from the poems themselves, which clearly possess an absolute and unquestionable sincerity.

[101] Sir Richard Burton, who helped to popularize this view, regarded the phenomenon as "geographical and climatic, not racial," and held that within what he called the Sotadic Zone "the vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, while the races to the north and south of the limits here defined practice it only sporadically, amid the opprobrium of their fellows, who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation, and look upon it with the liveliest disgust." He adds: "The only physical cause for the practice which suggests itself to me, and that must be owned to be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments, a crasis which elsewhere only occurs sporadically" (Arabian Nights, 1885, vol. x, pp. 205–254). The theory of the Sotadic Zone fails to account for the custom among the Normans, Celts, Scythians, Bulgars, and Tartars, and, moreover, in various of these regions different views have prevailed at different periods. Burton was wholly unacquainted with the psychological investigations into sexual inversion which had, indeed, scarcely begun in his day.

[102] Spectator (Anthropophyteia, vol. vii, 1910), referring especially to the neighborhood of Sorrento, states that the southern Italians regard passive pedicatio as disgraceful, but attach little or no shame to active pedicatio. This indifference enables them to exploit the homosexual foreigners who are specially attracted to southern Italy in the development of a flourishing homosexual industry.

[103] It is true that in the solitude of great modern cities it is possible for small homosexual coteries to form, in a certain sense, an environment of their own, favorable to their abnormality; yet this fact hardly modifies the general statement made in the text.

[104] See especially Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität, chs. xxiv and xxv.

[105] Ulrichs, in his Argonauticus, in 1869, estimated the number as only 25,000, but admitted that this was probably a decided underestimate. Bloch (Die Prostitution, Bd. i, p. 792) has found reason to believe that in Cologne in the fifteenth century the percentage was nearly as high as Hirschfeld finds it today. A few years earlier Bloch had believed (Beiträge, part i, p. 215, 1902) that Hirschfeld's estimate of 2 per cent, was "sheer nonsense."

[106] Hirschfeld mentions the case of two men, artists, one of them married, who were intimate friends for a great many years before each discovered that the other was an invert.

[107] See articles by Numa Praetorius and Fernan, maintaining that homosexuality is at least as frequent in France (Sexual-Probleme, March and December, 1909).

[108] Dr. Laupts, L'Homosexualité, 1910, pp. 413, 420.

[109] Näcke, Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, 1908, Heft 6.

[110] It is a fact significant of the French attitude toward homosexuality that the psychologist, Dr. Saint-Paul, when writing a book on this subject, though in a completely normal and correct manner, thought it desirable to adopt a pseudonym.

[111] A well-informed series of papers dealing with English homosexuality generally, and especially with London (L. Pavia, "Die männliche Homosexualität in England," Vierteljahrsberichte des wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, 1909–1911) will be found instructive even by those who are familiar with London. And see also Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität, ch. xxvi. Much information of historical nature concerning homosexuality in England will be found in Eugen Dühren (Iwan Bloch), Das Geschlechtsleben in England.

[112] This: is doubtless the reason why so many English inverts establish themselves outside England. Paris, Florence, Nice, Naples, Cairo, and other places, are said to swarm with homosexual Englishmen.

      CHAPTER II.—THE STUDY OF SEXUAL INVERSION.

       Table of Contents

      Westphal—Hössli—Casper—Ulrichs—Krafft-Ebing—Moll—Féré—Kiernan—Lydston—Raffalovich—Edward Carpenter—Hirschfeld.

Westphal, an eminent professor of psychiatry at Berlin, may be said to be the first to put the study of sexual inversion on an assured scientific basis. In 1870 he published, in the Archiv für Psychiatrie, of which he was for many years editor, the detailed history of a young woman who, from her earliest years, differed from other girls: she liked to dress as a boy, only cared for boys' games, and as she grew up was sexually attracted only to women, with whom she formed a series of tender relationships, in which the friends obtained sexual gratification by mutual caresses; while she blushed and was shy in the presence of women, more especially the girl with whom she chanced to be in love, she was always absolutely indifferent in the presence of men. Westphal—a pupil, it may be noted, of Griesinger, who had already called attention to the high character sometimes shown by subjects of this perversion—combined keen scientific insight with a rare degree of personal sympathy for those who came under his care, and it was this combination of qualities which enabled him to grasp the true nature of a case such as this, which by most medical men at that time would have been hastily dismissed as a vulgar instance of vice or insanity. Westphal

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