John Addington Symonds

“ It shone with clear radiance in the gymnasium of Hellas, and nerved the dying heroes of Greek freedom for their last forlorn hope upon the plains of Chæronea. Endowed with inextinguishable life, in spite of all that has been done to suppress it, this passion survives at large in modern states and towns, penetrates society, makes itself felt in every quarter of the globe where men are brought into communion with men. ”

“ The Emperors felt obscurely that the main pulses of human energy were slackening; population all tended to dwindle; the territory of the empire shrank slowly year by year before their eyes. As the depositaries of a higher religion and a nobler morality, they felt it their duty to stamp out pagan customs, and to unfurl the banner of social purity. The corruption of the Roman cities had become abominable. The laziness and cowardice of Roman citizens threatened the commonwealth with ruin. ”

“ But, asks Ulrichs, is this consistent with humanity, is it consistent with the august ideal of impartial equity? Are people, sound in body, vigorous in mind, wholesome in habit, capable of generous affections, good servants of the state, trustworthy in all the ordinary relations of life, to be condemned at law as criminals because they cannot feel sexually as the majority feel, because they find some satisfaction for their inborn want in ways which the majority dislike? ”

“ Returning from the dream, the vision of a future possibility, it will at any rate be conceded that Whitman has founded comradeship, the enthusiasm which binds man to man in fervent love, upon a natural basis. Eliminating classical associations of corruption, 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." ”

“ Indeed, one might rather wonder why candid and curious observers of humanity have not attempted to fathom a problem which faces them at every turn in their historical researches and in daily life. Doubtless their neglect is due to natural or acquired repugnance, to feelings of disgust and hatred, derived from immemorial tradition, and destructive of the sympathies which animate a really zealous pioneer. Nevertheless, what is human is alien to no human being. ”

“ But whence, if not from some overwhelming appetite, do the demoralised victims of self-abuse derive courage for facing the obstacles which a career of sexual inversion carries with it in our civilisation? One would have thought that such people, if they could not approach a prostitute in a brothel, would have been unable to solicit a healthy man upon the streets. The theory seems to be constructed in order to elude the fact that the persons designated are driven by a natural impulse into paths far more beset with difficulties than those of normal libertines. ”

“ 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." ”

“ In the eyes of Ulrichs, society is engaged in sitting on a safety-valve, which if nature were allowed to operate unhindered would do society no harm, but rather good. The majority, he thinks, are not going to become Urnings, for the simple reason that they have not the unhappy constitution of the Urning. Cease to persecute Urnings, accept them as inconsiderable, yet real, factors, in the social commonwealth, leave them to themselves, and you will not be the worse for it, and will also not carry on your conscience the burden of intolerant vindictiveness. ”

“ In other words, an Englishman or a Frenchman who loves the male sex must be diagnosed as tainted with disease; while Sophocles, Pindar, Pheidias, Epaminondas, Plato, are credited with yielding to an instinct which was healthy in their times because society accepted it. The inefficiency of this distinction in a treatise of analytical science ought to be indicated. The bare fact that ancient Greece tolerated, and that modern Europe refuses to tolerate sexual inversion, can have nothing to do with the etiology, the pathology, the psychological definition of the phenomenon in its essence. ”

“ Lombroso arrives, then, at the conclusion that what civilised humanity calls crime and punishes, is the law of nature in brutes, persists as a normal condition among savages, and displays itself in the habits and instincts of children. The moral instinct is therefore slowly elaborated out of crime in the course of generations by whole races, and in the course of infancy and adolescence in the individual. The habitual criminal, who remains a criminal in his maturity, in whom crime is inborn and ineradicable, who cannot develop a moral sense, he explains at first by atavism. ”

“ Descending, if we follow Krafft-Ebing's categories, from acquired to innate inversion, dividing the latter into psychopathic hermaphrodites and Urnings, subdividing Urnings into those who retain their masculine habit and those who develop a habit analogous to that of females, we come in this last class to the most striking phenomenon of inverted sex. Here the soul which is doomed to love a man, and is nevertheless imprisoned in a male body, strives to convert that body to feminine uses so entirely that the marks of sex, except in the determined organs of sex, shall be obliterated. ”

“ Only one great race in past ages, the Greek race, to whom we owe the inheritance of our ideas, succeeded in raising it to the level of chivalrous enthusiasm. Nevertheless, we find it present everywhere and in all periods of history. We cannot take up the religious books, the legal codes, the annals, the descriptions of the manners of any nation, whether large or small, powerful or feeble, civilised or savage, without meeting with this passion in one form or other. ”

“ If I have taken any vow at all, it is to fight for the rights of an innocent, harmless, downtrodden group of outraged personalities. The cross of a Crusade is sewn upon the sleeve of my right arm. To expect from me and from my fellows the renouncement voluntarily undertaken by a Catholic priest is an absurdity, when we join no order, have no faith to uphold, no ecclesiastical system to support. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Finally, if it be feared that the removal of legal disabilities would turn the whole male population into Urnings, consider whether London is now so much purer in this respect than Paris?
One serious objection to recognising and tolerating sexual inversion has always been that it tends to check the population. This was a sound political and social argument in the time of Moses, when a small and militant tribe needed to multiply to the full extent of its procreative capacity. It is by no means so valid in our age, when the habitable portions of the globe are rapidly becoming overcrowded. ”

“ Pæderasty is not punished by our laws. It can only come within the reach of the code by virtue of circumstances under which it may be practised. If the facts take place in the presence of witnesses, or in a place open to public observation, there will be an outrage to decency. If minors are seduced, there may be proof of the habitual incitement of minors to debauch, corruption, or even rape. But the passion itself is not subject to penalty; it is only a vice arising from one of the seven deadly sins. ”

“ The myths and heroic legends of prehistoric Hellas, the educational institutions of the Dorian state, the dialogues of Plato, the history of the Theban army, the biographies of innumerable eminent citizens—lawgivers and thinkers, governors and generals, founders of colonies and philosophers, poets and sculptors—render it impossible to maintain that this passion was either a degraded vice or a form of inherited neuropathy in the race to whom we owe so much of our intellectual heritage. ”

“ Those who are the unfortunate subjects of inborn sexual inversion shall not be allowed to indulge their passions, lest the mischief should spread, and a vicious habit should contaminate our youth. From the utilitarian point of view, society is justified in protecting itself against a minority of exceptional beings whom it regards as pernicious to the general welfare. From any point of view, the majority is strong enough to coerce to inborn instincts and to trample on the anguish of a few unfortunates. ”

“ Has society the right to punish individuals sent into the world with homosexual instincts? Putting the question at its lowest point, admitting that these persons are the victims of congenital morbidity, ought they to be treated as criminals? It is established that their appetites, being innate, are to them at least natural and undepraved; the common appetites, being excluded from their sexual scheme, are to them unnatural and abhorrent. ”

“ But young men are surely at least as capable of defending themselves against seduction and corruption as young women are. Nay, they are far more able, not merely because they are stronger, but because they are not usually weakened by an overpowering sexual instinct on which the seducer plays. Yet the seduction and corruption of young women is tolerated, in spite of the attendant consequences of illegitimate childbirth, and all which that involves. ”

“ Paul, penetrated with Hebrew ethics, denounced the corruption of the Gentiles in these words: "For this cause God gave them up into vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet."
Christ uttered no opinion upon what we now call sexual inversion. ”

“ Even in cases where no merciless blackmailer persecutes the Urning, but a connection has existed which lasted satisfactorily on both sides, still in these cases even discovery, or the dread of discovery, leads only too often to suicide. How many officers, who have had connection with their subordinates, how many soldiers, who have lived in such relation with a comrade, when they thought they were about to be discovered, have put a bullet through their brains to avoid the coming disgrace! ”

“ The problem is too delicate, too complicated, also too natural and simple, to be solved by hereditary disease and self-abuse. When we shift the ground of argument from acquired to inborn sexual inversion, its puzzling character will become still more apparent. We shall hardly be able to resist the conclusion that theories of disease are incompetent to explain the phenomenon in modern Europe. Medical writers abandon the phenomenon in savage races, in classical antiquity, and in the sotadic zone. They strive to isolate it as an abnormal and specifically morbid exception in our civilisation. ”

“ From the point of view of morality and law, he argues, it does not signify whether we regard the sexual inversion of an Urning as morbid or as natural. He has become what he is in the dawn and first emergence of emotional existence. You may contend, that he derives perverted instincts from his ancestry, that he is the subject of a psychical disorder, that from the cradle he is predestined by atavism or disease to misery. I maintain that he is one of nature's sports, a creature healthy and well organised, evolved in her superb indifference to aberrations from the normal type. ”

“ Man, Woman, and Urning—the third being either a male or a female in whom we observe a real and inborn, not an acquired or a spurious, inversion of appetite—are consequently regarded by him as the three main divisions of humanity viewed from the point of view of sex. The embryonic ground-stuff in the case of each was homologous; but while the two former, Man and Woman, have been normally differentiated, the Urning's sexual instinct, owing to some imperfection in the process of development, does not correspond to his or her sexual organs. ”

“ Consequently, the light which he has thrown upon the subject of this treatise only illuminates the dark dens of male vice in a big city. He leaves us where we were about the psychological and ethical problem. He shows what deep roots the passion strikes in the centres of modern civilisation, and how it thrives under conditions at once painful to its victims and embarrassing to an agent of police.
Writers on forensic medicine take the next place in the row of literary witnesses. It is not their business to investigate the psychological condition of persons submitted to the action of the laws. ”

“ Moreover, the substance of human nature is so mixed that it would perhaps be fanatical to expect from Whitman's chivalry of "adhesiveness" a more immaculate purity than was attained by the mediæval chivalry of "amativeness." Still that mediæval chivalry, the great emotional product of feudalism, though it fell short of its own aspiration, bequeathed incalculable good to modern society by refining and clarifying the crudest of male appetites. ”

“ He knows indeed now that he is by no means the only individual in the world who harbours these abnormal emotions; he opens his eyes, and marvels to discover how numerous are his comrades in all social spheres and every class of industry; he also soon perceives that Urnings, no less than normal men and women, have developed prostitution, and that male strumpets can be bought for money just as easily as females. ”

“ That is to say, violence and outrages to public decency are punished, and minors are protected, but adults are allowed to dispose as they like of their own persons. The experience of nearly a century shows that in France, where sexual inversion is not criminal per se, there has been no extension of it through society. Competent observers, like agents of police, declare that London, in spite of our penal legislation, is no less notorious for abnormal vice than Paris. ”

“ In the first place, replies Ulrichs, I demur in this case to the phrases egoistic desires, social duties, just claims of our fellows. I maintain that in trying to rehabilitate men of my own stamp and to justify their natural right to toleration I am not egoistic. It is begging the question to stigmatise their inborn desire as selfish. The social duties of which you speak are not duties, but compliances to law framed in blindness and prejudice. The claims of our fellows, to which you appeal, are not just, but cruelly inequitous. ”

“ Studying his works by their own light, and by the light of their author's character, interpreting each part by reference to the whole and in the spirit of the whole, an impartial critic will, I think, be drawn to the conclusion that what he calls the "adhesiveness" of comradeship is meant to have no interblending with the "amativeness" of sexual love. Personally, it is undeniable that Whitman possesses a specially keen sense of the fine restraint and continence, the cleanliness and chastity, that are inseparable from the perfectly virile and physically complete nature of healthy manhood. ”