I should like here to interpolate a few remarks on Walt Whitman, who is likewise one of the deities to whom the degenerate and hysterical of both hemispheres have for some time been raising altars. Lombroso ranks him expressly among ‘mad geniuses.’[226] Mad Whitman was without doubt. But a genius? That would be difficult to prove. He was a vagabond, a reprobate rake, and his poems[227] contain outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature could hardly be found with the author’s name attached. For his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces which first drew to him the attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime. ‘This is the deepest theory of susceptibility,’ he says in one place, ‘without preference or exclusion; the negro with the woolly head, the bandit of the highroad, the invalid, the ignorant--none are denied.’ And in another place he explains he ‘loves the murderer and the thief, the pious and good, with equal love.’ An American driveller, W. D. O’Connor, has called him on this account ‘The good gray Poet.’ We know, however, that this ‘goodness,’ which is in reality moral obtuseness and morbid sentimentality, frequently accompanies degeneration, and appears even in the cruellest assassins, for example, in Ravachol. He has megalomania, and says of himself: ‘From this hour I decree that my being be freed from all restraints and limits. ‘I go where I will, my own absolute and complete master. ‘I breathe deeply in space. The east and the west are mine. ‘Mine are the north and south. I am greater and better than I thought myself. ‘I did not know that so much boundless goodness was in me.... ‘Whoever disowns me causes me no annoyance. ‘Whoever recognises me shall be blessed, and will bless me.’ He is mystically mad, and announces: ‘I have the feeling of all. I am all, and believe in all. I believe that materialism is true, and that spiritualism is also true; I reject nothing.’ And in another still more characteristic passage: ‘Santa Spirita [_sic!_], breather, life, Beyond the light, lighter than light, Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping easily above hell, Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with mine own perfume, Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including Saviour and Satan, Ethereal, pervading all, for without me what were all? what were God? Essence of forms, life of the real identities ... Life of the great round world, the sun and stars, and of man, I, the general soul.’ In his patriotic poems he is a sycophant of the corrupt American vote-buying, official-bribing, power-abusing, dollar-democracy, and a cringer to the most arrogant Yankee conceit. His war-poems--the much renowned _Drum Taps_--are chiefly remarkable for swaggering bombast and stilted patter.