letter” from Symonds.  “You will see that he harps on the Calamus poems again.  I don’t see why it should, but his recurrence to that subject irritates me a little.  I suppose you might say—­why don’t you shut him up by answering him?  There is no logical answer to that I suppose:  but I may ask in my turn:  ‘What right has he to ask questions anyway?’” W. laughed a bit.  “Anyway the question comes back to me almost every time he writes.  He is courteous enough about it—­that is the reason I do not resent him.  I suppose the whole thing will end in an answer some day.”

    The letter follows.  The chief point in it is that the writer
    hopes he has not been importunate in the question he had asked
    about Calamus three years before.

“I [Traubel] said to W.:  ’That’s a humble letter enough:  I don’t see anything in that to get excited about.  He doesn’t ask you to answer the old question.  In fact he rather apologizes for having asked it.’  W. fired up ’Who is excited?  As to that question, he does ask it again and again:  asks it, asks it, asks it.’  I laughed at his vehemence.  ’Well, suppose he does?  It does not harm.  Besides, you’ve got nothing to hide.  I think your silence might lead him to suppose there was a nigger in your wood pile.’  ’Oh, nonsense!  But for thirty years my enemies and friends have been asking me questions about the Leaves:  I’m tired of not answering questions.’  It was very funny to see his face when he gave a humorous twist to the fling in his last phrase.  Then he relaxed and added:  ’Anyway I love Symonds.  Who could fail to love a man who could write such a letter?  I suppose he will yet have to be answered, damn ‘im!’”

It is clear that these conversations considerably diminish the force of the declaration in Whitman’s letter.  We see that the letter which, on the face of it, might have represented the swift and indignant reaction of a man who, suddenly faced by the possibility that his work may be interpreted in a perverse sense, emphatically repudiates that interpretation, was really nothing of the kind.  Symonds for at least eighteen years had been gently, considerately, even humbly, yet persistently, asking the same perfectly legitimate question.  If the answer was really an emphatic no, it would more naturally have been made in 1872 than 1890.  Moreover, in the face of this ever-recurring question, Whitman constantly speaks to his friends of his great affection for Symonds and his admiration for his intellectual cuteness, feelings that would both be singularly out of place if applied to a man who was all the time suggesting the possibility that his writings contained inferences that were “terrible,” “morbid,” and “damnable.”  Evidently, during all those years, Whitman could not decide what to reply.  On the one hand he was moved by his horror of being questioned, by his caution, by his natural aversion to express approval of anything that could be called unnatural or abnormal.  On