A Thought on James's Beast

I wonder if anyone saw a similarity between James's Marcher and Chekhov's Ryabovich -- two sensitive men both largely unable to go on with their lives, almost traumatized as it were, by either a mysterious encounter (Ryabovich) or an imminent one (Marcher), or at least that in Marcher's case, one that he feels is or may be imminent. In both cases, the encounter is, like coming across a beast in a jungle, something totally unexpected and, although frightening (and in that sense, perjorative) also totally exhilirating and hence largely positive. It is no accident, I believe, that Oscar Wilde describes his most provocative homosexual exploits as "sleeping with panthers."

Here in the conclusion of the last essay written by the great American essayist and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, "On Walking" (published posthumously in 1862) is a wonderful paean to wildness, with just a hint of its deep connection to sexuality: 

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice — take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance, — which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.