[99] While the homosexual strain in Walt Whitman has been more or less definitely admitted by various writers, the most vigorous attempts to present the homosexual character of his personality and work are due to Eduard Bertz in Germany, and to Dr. W.C.  Rivers in England.  Bertz has issued three publications on Whitman:  see especially his Der Yankee-Heiland, 1906, and Whitman-Mysterien, 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 Preferences, 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.”