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The Life of John Addington Symonds
The family bore arms; his grandfather, whom Symonds
remembered with fondness, was a sturdy Puritan from whom he inherited
a sense of
duty, and a Latin scholar with an enthusiasm for botany which inspired
the
detailed observation of plants in his own writings. His father was the
most
eminent physician in Bristol and the West of England, a Liberal of rare
culture
and talent whose dinner parties were attended by crowds of
distinguished people
and the aristocracy: Frederick Maurice the Christian socialist, Lord
Lansdowne
the Home Secretary and Member of the Cabinet, William Gladstone the
Liberal
Member of Parliament, Alfred Lord Tennyson the Poet Laureate, Benjamin
Jowett
the Master of Balliol College, Alfred Carpenter the Liberal Member of
Parliament
for North Bristol in 1886, Jenny Lind the singer, and a host of
scientists,
historians, Liberal curates and philosophers.
The family lived in the mansion of Clifton Hill House
with a view over Bristol and the mouth of the Severn, attended by a
small army
of servants. And Symonds duly went to the right school and the right
college:
first to a private tutor's in Clifton, then to Harrow, then to Balliol
and later
to Magdalen. He grew up with the friendly advice of the good and the
great. From
such soil he ought to have grown up into a liberal but dignified
physician or
lawyer, rather than a dilettante. Symonds summed up the three
generations of men
— his grandfather, his father and himself — as
corresponding "to
the transition from early pointed Gothic to Decorated to Flamboyant
architecture."
Symonds's mother died when he was only four years old,
and his father had a powerful influence upon the formation of his
character. The
fashionable Freudian theory that a man's homosexuality is caused by a
close-binding-intimate mother and a weak-or-absent father is put to
rout by
Symonds's childhood, in which the opposite was the case. Admittedly
there were
mostly women in the household, governesses, aunts, and eventually four
sisters,
but he records no sense of being overwhelmed by the feminine
atmosphere, and was
fairly indifferent to their presence. Strong bonds of sympathy would
develop
between him and his younger sister Charlotte, but it was the presence
of his
father that figured largely in his early life. Ironically it was his
father's
artistic taste, particularly his library, which stocked his imagination
with
images of Greek sculpture, Elizabethan paeans to Ganymedic youths such
as
Marlowe's Leander or Shakespeare's Adonis, and heroic figures by
Flaxman,
Raphael and Michelangelo. Photographs of the interior of Clifton Hill
House
reveal his father's opulently Italian taste for Bohemian glass, heavy
draperies,
velvet upholstery, statues in niches, densely flowered carpets, and
walls
covered by prints and paintings in wide gilt frames. His son would
simply refine
this taste to its more specifically Venetian aspects.
Like many Victorians, Dr Symonds worked at
culture: every morning before going to his medical practice, he devoted
two
hours to the study of art, literature, philosophy, or history. Symonds
conscientiously felt this duty to self culture throughout his own life,
and
everyone who knew him remarked upon the wonderful diligence with
which
he
pursued his life's work. Few people realized that he was a workaholic
partly to
escape his sexual anxieties and partly to assemble the material
necessary to
justify homosexual love to the world. His admission to his sister
Charlotte that
"I had hoped to make my work the means of saving my soul"
[Letter
to Charlotte Symonds Green, 16 September 1873. In The
Letters of
John Addington Symonds, 3 vols, ed. Herbert M.
Schueller
and
Robert L. Peters (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1967—1969)]
covers both these motives. He also knew that his life would be
shortened by
tuberculosis, and it was a race against time. His last work, his great
biography
of Michelangelo, was written at a killing pace, taking brief intervals
for food
and rest during the day, then working from 8.30 p.m. to 2.00 a.m. each
evening,
and he died soon after it was published, on 19 April 1893.
Symonds was plagued by ill health, and he would die of
tuberculosis at the age of 52. Some of his physical and mental
breakdowns betray
the symptoms of sexual repression, and anxiety quite often exacerbates
breathing
disabilities. But we must not underestimate the physical basis of the
disease,
common to his mother's family, which would eventually kill not only
him, but
also his grandfather, his sister Mary Isabella at the age of 46, and
his
daughter Janet at the age of 22. As a child he was sickly yet full of
nervous
energy, states of hyperactivity alternating with somnambulism, and he
was
subject to trance-like withdrawals from the physical world even in
later life.
During his last term at Oxford, in 1863 his health
collapsed altogether, partly due to stress caused by the spread of
rumours that
he was having a homosexual affair with one of the students. His
brilliant
academic career was at an end, and for three years he was unable to do
any work
requiring mental concentration or to use his inflamed eyes without
pain. He
thought he might study for the law, but in 1865 it was discovered that
his left
lung was diseased, and after a complete rest it was decided that he
could never
follow a profession, but would have to go to a warmer, or at least a
dryer,
climate and become a litterateur. For the next dozen years he
often
experienced chest pains, and for many weeks on end he was unable to
work due to
physical disability and pain in the spine. He had to learn how to sleep
without
the use of narcotics. He sometimes had to use a respirator, and was
embarrassed
to be seen in public using it. Nervous collapses were frequent.
In 1877 an attack of bronchitis was followed by a
violent haemorrhage, and he was told he dare not spend another winter
in
England. A journey aiming for Egypt was broken at Switzerland, and
Davos Platz would become his home for the
rest
of his
life, except for several months each winter spent in Venice. From his
late
forties he constantly referred to himself as a "decrepit" old
man, and
he rapidly grew old before his time. During the last few years of his
life he
suffered from diarrhoea, insomnia, headaches, and fevers, but grasped
at life
with increasing fervour as his health waned.
The main argument of his memoirs is that freedom and
strength can be achieved through self-discovery, and that the more he
accepted
his homosexuality the more healthy and vigorous he became. There is no
doubt
about the psychological validity of this claim: he experienced a
powerful sense
of liberation at each successive stage of his "coming out,"
which he
called "self-effectuation," but this was achieved after
periods of
tormented self-analysis. He felt an inner repugnance to sordid
behaviour, and
could not easily accept the sexual expression of his ideal love. Many
Victorians
of course felt the same way, but Symonds nearly developed a split
personality as
he attempted to lead the dual life without reconciling the real and the
ideal.
He sublimated most of his experiences throughout his life, possibly to
mould
them into virtues of which his father would have approved. He was both
excited
and repulsed by the sexual roughhousing all around him at Harrow.
"I
thought that I had transcended crude sensuality through the aesthetic
idealisation of erotic instincts. I did not know how fallacious that
method of
expelling nature is."
At Harrow he discovered that the very respected
headmaster Charles Vaughan was having an affair with one of the boys.
This
appalled him, partly because he detested Vaughan's hypocrisy, partly
because he
felt personal distaste at being the object of some of Vaughan's
overtures, and
partly because it threatened to spoil the sanction of his ruling
passion which
he had just found in the ennobling idealizations of Plato's
Symposium and
Phaedrus. Some years later, in 1859,
Symonds
revealed the story about Vaughan to his friend John Conington, during
an
argument about "Arcadian love"; Conington persuaded
Symonds
to tell
his father, which he did; Symonds would have let the matter drop, but
direction
of the affair was taken out of his hands and in due course Dr Symonds
forced
Vaughan to resign his headmastership, and also to reject two bishoprics
offered
to him by the government. Symonds's three best friends at Harrow broke
off
relations at this act of disloyalty. Rather too much significance can
be
attached to this dishonourable stain upon Symonds's character. It was
not a
deliberate act of treachery, but a revelation due to carelessness,
which he felt
could not be withdrawn once made. He (and his father) nevertheless did
prevent
the story from becoming public knowledge, and fewer than a dozen
people
ever
knew the truth of the affair. Symonds experienced some painful heart-
searching,
but his own hatred of hypocrisy and his father's scrupulous
determination to
assist the course of justice made the outcome inevitable.
Symonds had to come to terms with his own secret, for
soon after reading the Phaedrus in
March/April 1858,
he had fallen head over heels in love with Willie Dyer, a chorister at
Bristol
Cathedral three years younger than himself. "I saw ahead of me the
goal to
which I had been tending. ... For the first time in my life, I knew
that I must
take possession of the dream and clasp it." He dated the birth of
his real
self from the morning they first went for a walk in the spring
sunlight, and he
still trembled with emotion when he remembered it in his memoirs
thirty-two
years later. They did little more than kiss and hold hands in this
enchanted
garden of the Golden Age. This lasted for only a year, when the strain
of the
Vaughan affair caused him to confess his romantic affection to his
father. Dr
Symonds was a man of integrity and sincerity, and an honest friend and
confidant
to his son, ever solicitous of his son's health and interests. Symonds
"came
out" to his father, on several occasions, and the advice his
father gave
him was carefully considered, if not always possible to follow. Dr
Symonds
pointed out that their love could never come to anything because of the
difference in their social backgrounds, and because it was founded upon
an
emotion as doubtful as that of Vaughan. So Symonds was persuaded to
gradually
end the affair. Thus in a very short period of time Symonds had both
discovered
and denied his true self, and this cycle would recur several times
later in his
life.
At Oxford, Symonds fell in love with another cathedral
chorister, Alfred Brooke. This was an altogether more sensual and
feverish
affair, though his thirst for forbidden knowledge remained unslaked.
The Vaughan
affair had left its mark, for he now recognized that the love for which
he
longed was deemed wicked by society, and he attempted to repress it.
For several
years he experienced "a sustained conflict between desire and
conscience,
in which the will exercised a steady empire over action, while dreams
and
visions inflamed the fancy and irritated the whole nervous
constitution."
His longings were masked by outward self-control, but he brooded over
his
wet-dreams and produced some morbidly bitter-sweet poetry.
For many years Symonds's energy was wasted by trying
to suppress his homosexuality. At the advice of his father and his
father's
medical associates, he even allowed himself to be cauterized through
the urethra
in an effort to reduce an irritation in his sexual organs. His father
sent him
to Dr Spencer Wells, surgeon to the Queen's household, who diagnosed
his
disorders as the result of sexual repression. So in 1864, on medical
advice, he
attempted the "cure" of marriage, to Catherine North. The day
after
his marriage he knew he could never alter his original bent, and it is
terrible
to see his haggard features in photographs from this period, where the
strain of
accommodating himself to conventional heterosexual life is so painfully
visible.
Catherine did not enjoy sex, and she became more melancholic with each
pregnancy
(there would be four daughters), while Symonds racked his nerves with
obsessive
masturbatory poetry, storing up a malaise which it would take him many
years to
shake off.
In 1868, after another physical and nervous breakdown,
he took up the threads of the homosexual life from which he had failed
to untie
himself, and deliberately cultivated an affair with the Clifton
schoolboy Norman
Moor. Catherine and Symonds had a long discussion, and it was agreed
that he and
she would remain companions in the highest sense, while he would also
have male
companions in the slightly lower sense. He immediately grew in health
and vigour
as the great effort of deceit was lifted from him. Photographs seem to
bear this
out, and photographs of him in Venice, where he was most self-accepting
and
sexually promiscuous, show him to be youthful and vital, and almost
robust.
Symonds may have exaggerated the liberating effects of coming out or
self-effectuation upon the body as well as the spirit, for the climate
of Venice
hardly suited his condition, and each year he returned more exhausted
to
Switzerland. Yet one is left with the final impression that his sense
of
mission, his sense of noble purpose in celebrating the virtue of
comradeship,
gave him the strength necessary to prolong his life beyond its expected
course.
He liked the splendid description of himself in some periodical as
"the
indomitable invalid"
[Letter to Margaret Symonds, 14 November 1892].
Throughout his writings on the Italian Renaissance,
and in the memoirs, Symonds makes it clear that his aesthetic response
was
emotional, and that what he valued most was life rather than art
— the
more vivid and pulsating, the better. And yet his defense of the
superiority of
the real over the ideal must be understood in the context of his
natural impulse
to idealize reality. In his essay on "The
Model"
it is clear that he prefers the boy who modelled for Flandrin's
painting to the
painting itself, but in his essay on "Swiss
Athletic
Sports" it is equally evident that he admires the Swiss
wrestlers
through a pair of Michelangelesque spectacles. His erotic desires were
largely
visual, and as often satisfied by imagination as by experience. The
glimpse of a
young man with the body of Adonis and the presence of an animal was
sufficient
unto itself. Of a 22 year old cable layer with broad haunches whom he
met in a
coffee house in Falmouth he has this to say: "Passing stranger
— you
know not how I love you! The most toothed hubbed memories in my mind
are
evanescent romances of this sort"
[Letter to Henry Graham Dakyns, 10 December 1872].
One is never quite sure if he wants to realize the
ideal or to idealize reality: the conflicting pull is so strong in both
directions that in his writings he often changes his thrust between one
paragraph and another, sometimes with humorous effect. Essentially he
wished to
make homosexuality acceptable (both to himself and to society) by
idealizing it;
having achieved that, he could then feel less guilty about taking his
pleasure
in its less ideal acts. One feels rather sorry for a boy such as Alfred
Brooke
who could not possibly live up to this idealizing onslaught. The Swiss
and the
Italians coped best with this overcultivated Englishman, by tolerating
his
aestheticism as an eccentricity, and eventually their naturalness
rubbed off on
him. In his early forties he achieved the goal of taking the sexual
life as it
came, and not being unduly distressed by the discrepancy between the
real and
the idea. He became a healthy homosexual.
Despite his social background, and despite his solid
literary scholarship, Symonds regarded himself as "a born
Bohemian"
[Letter to Henry Graham Dakyns, 19 July 1890]. On the
practical
side, the strain of the conflict between homosexual instinct and
societal
restraint was eventually resolved by adopting a Bohemian lifestyle of
moderate
respectability. He was wealthy, and under no necessity of earning a
living,
which is just as well, for he earned very little from writing until the
last few
years of his life. His inheritance and regular income from investments
were
comfortable. In 1892 he told his wife that he had increased his capital
estate
by £22,000 since 1877, and that he had invested £2,200 during
the
year; most of his stocks were in land and railways. His earnings from
literature
that year were only £500, and he spent most of that setting up an
unidentified gondolier in business
[Letter to Mrs John Addington Symonds, 23 October
1892].
His own needs were not extravagant, particularly in
Switzerland, and he could easily afford to travel in the company of his
boyfriends while supporting a wife and four children in comfort. With
no
pressing need to be respectable, he could live in an unconventional
manner; he
and his wife came to an arrangement about him living en
garçon,
and after some initial resentment she eventually grew to regard some of
her
husband's boyfriends with affection. He very openly travelled and lived
with the
Venetian gondolier Angelo Fusato and the Swiss athlete and hotelier
Christian
Buol and other young men.
Symonds built his own home, named Am Hof after the
meadow in which it was built. In Davos he
gave
generously to local causes, and helped many young men get a foothold in
business. His lovers had the vitality which he lacked, but to which he
contributed by funding most of the cost of the Davos Gymnasium. His
love for the
Swiss peasant athletes prompted him to found the Davos Gymnastic Club,
and he
gave wine parties for its members; he acted for several years as the
President
of the Davos Winter Sports Club and the Davos Toboggan Club which he
helped to
form, and was president of the committee which organized the Davos
International
Toboggan Race 1888—89. Every member of the Buol family profited
by
his
relationship with Christian, and the Hotel Buol through his efforts
became the
favourite establishment in Davos.
In Venice he passed his time with gondoliers, porters,
princesses and prostitutes. He loved living on the mezzanine floor of
the
palazzo owned by his friend Horatio Forbes Brown in the via Zattere
overlooking
the canal of the Guidecca: "I am just above a bridge ... up &
down
wh[ich] go divine beings: sailors of the marine, soldiers, blue vested
&
trowsered fishermen, swaggering gondoliers. I can almost see their
faces as they
top the bridge. By rising from the chair a little I do so at once and
get some
smiles from passing strangers"
[Letter to Edmund Gosse, 9 November 1890]. He slept
with
hundreds of men, nearly all of them in a class lower than his own,
which he
believed to be democratic. When he says in an offhand manner,
concerning his
affair with Angelo Fusato, "I
gave
him a
gondola," we cannot help but feel that Symonds was behaving in the
manner
of a born aristocrat. He once deliberately left Angelo behind in Milan
while he
went on to Davos, because he felt that Angelo was assuming "the
airs of a
spoilt & indispensable old servant" and he wanted "to
bring him
round to his bearings" and to assert his padroneship
[Letter to Janet Ross, 13 November 1891]. He
quixotically made a
point of earning by his own literary endeavour the money which he gave
to
Angelo, in order to impress upon Angelo's conscience the value of work.
Their
relationship lasted for twelve years, until Symonds's death.
Despite the occasional patronizing attitude, Symonds
established friendship with men of the working classes from the simple
and
straightforward motive of enjoyment and because he felt at ease in
their
company. He explained this in a letter to Dr J. W. Wallace, a fellow
Whitmanian,
on 2 March 1893:
Among my own dearest friends are a postilion, a stevedore, a
gondolier, a farm servant, a porter in a hotel. I find the
greatest possible relief & rest in conversing & corresponding
with
them. They do me so much good by their simplicity & manly
affection.
Their real life is such a contrast to that strange thought-world in
which my studious hours are past — Italian Renaissance, Greek
Poets,
Art, philosophy, poetry — all the lumber of my culture. In fact
the
greatest thing I owe to Walt is his having thoroughly opened my eyes
to comradeship & convinced me of the absolute equality of men. My
friends of this kind think me an exception to the rest of the world.
But,
having won their confidence, I see how enormously they appreciate the
fraternal love of a man socially & by education superior to them.
I
verily believe that the social problems would find their solution if
only
the majority of rich & cultivated people felt as I do, & acted
so.
We must not be too harsh upon Symonds for somewhat deluding
himself about the possibility of class-crossing. Equality of love
between
persons of very unequal backgrounds is a very difficult goal; it was
achieved by
Edward Carpenter and his lover George Merrill, but Carpenter began in
a lower
social strata than Symonds so he had less distance to span. Democratic
friendship was easier to achieve in America, as with Whitman and Peter
Doyle,
but there again Whitman did not begin as a gentleman. By all reports,
Symonds
did achieve a genuine rapport with the Swiss peasants. He moved very
easily
between different social sets, but he was more at ease with Augusto
Zanon in "a
little old- fashioned wine-shop in a garden of vines, where the
gondoliers
congregate"
[Letter to Charles Kains-Jackson, 30 October 1892]
than
with the
Empress Frederick (Queen Victoria's eldest daughter) and her circle of
Contessas, Marchesas and Princesses, or that modern
mélange of
aristocratic democrats the Dukes of Devonshire, Westminster, and Argyle
whom he
and Angelo Fusato visited while staying with Lord Ronald Gower and the
Earl of
Carlisle at Castle Howard in August 1892.
Walt Whitman recognized himself that "Symonds has
got into our crowd in spite of his culture: I tell you we don't give
away places
in our crowd easy — a man has to sweat to get in"
[Horace
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden
(Boston:
Small,
Maynard & Co., 1906), p. 388 (27 June 1888)]. Ironically
some of the
best analysis of Symonds's character is provided by the Old Grey Poet,
whom he
never met: "Symonds has always seemed to me a forthright man
—
unhesitating, without cant: not slushing over, not freezing up"
[Horace
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden
(New
York: D.
Appleton & Co., 1908), p. 278 (7 September 1888)]. Whitman
was very
fond of his English admirer, and thought that Symonds was heroic and
noble in
his fight with his body. Many of Symonds's letters and much of his
autobiography
show him to be a man of morbid introspection, but people who knew him
well also
knew that he was full of
joie de vivre. Jowett was to compose his Latin epitaph,
declaring that
no one cherished friends more than he. Robert Louis Stevenson, another
Bohemian
who spent two winters in Davos as an invalid, also testified to
Symonds's great
capacity for friendship. He found him to be one of the best of talkers,
with an
easy flow of conversation. "He is a far better and more
interesting thing
than any of his books"
[Cited by Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington
Symonds: A
Biography (London: Longmans, 1964), p. 211].
His daughter Margaret testified that life at their
home
Am Hof was free from taboos, though her
mother
was
reserved, and she knew the nature of her father's studies from the age
of six.
Homosexuality was a subject of family conversation as much as the
latest
toboggan race or the behaviour of their dogs chewing bones under the
table, and
words like "neurotic" and "psychopathic" were in
common
parlance at Am Hof long before they came into general use even in
medical
circles. Affectionate and long-lasting friendships were established
with women
as well as men, especially tomboys such as Margot Tennant, who
described him as
a superb conversationalist and an enchanting companion. Janet Ross said
that "Symonds's
brilliant conversation and great charm of manner are impossible to
describe; his
talk was like fireworks, swift and dazzling, and he had a wonderful
gift of
sympathy — even with the fads and foibles of others. No struggling
young
writer ever appealed to him in vain, both his brains and his purse were
at his
service" [Cited by Grosskurth, p. 304]. One day
he
might be
listless with a haunting melancholy, but the next day he would be
chumming with
an acrobat. As he summed up his life to his daughter Margaret, "I
was born
with a temperament wh[ich] has given me immense worry & distress
all through
my life. It is, luckily, mixed up with great capacity for enjoyment
& being
merry"
[Letter to Margaret Symonds, 16 July 1892].
It is for his studies in the history of art that
Symonds has been most highly praised and remembered. His prose was
infused with
a poetic sensibility, and though at times his style was too facile and
florid,
it was full of vivid images, such as his description of the hill-set
villages
around Rimini, "marly mountain-flanks in wrinkles and gnarled
convolutions
like some giant's brain, furrowed by rivers crawling through dry
wasteful beds
of shingle" ["The Palace of Urbino", in
The
Cornhill Magazine (July to December 1882), Vol. XLVI, p.
293].
Most of the chapters in his books began as self-contained articles for
literary
magazines, and were necessarily showy. When strung together in a
full-length
book, the heightened effects sometimes cloy. Most of his critics
recognized the
breadth and depth of his scholarship, but they felt that such serious
subjects
ought to be treated by dons rather than journalists. The attack upon
the "flamboyance"
of his literary style was a covert attack upon his suspected homosexual
lifestyle; a lack of restraint was detected in his morals as well as
his
writing. He was never "one of us," and it is not at all
surprising
that he failed to win the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in 1876,
when he was
violently attacked for his immoral defense of homosexuality in the last
chapter
of his
Studies of the Greek Poets.
Symonds was a sensualist and a romantic rather than an
academic, and he made the Italian Renaissance his speciality partly
because the
exotic splendour and magnificence of the period matched the broad
gestures and
rich colouring of his style, and because in this period he could find
ample
references to homosexuality and celebrations of the male nude, and
these were
the not-so-secret themes of his massive
Kulturgeschichte. Andrew Lang reviewed The
Revival
of
Learning in The
Examiner (23
June
1877) and had many reservations, particularly the fact that Symonds
"seems
to us to be too fond of alluding to the unmentionable. He regards the
sensual
side of the Renaissance as of equal importance with its scholarship.
... We seem
to have a running chorus — 'Naughty, naughty, but so nice'."
Catherine Symonds in a letter to her sister Mrs Green humorously
referred to her
husband's interest in "the picturesquely wicked days of
middle-aged Italy."
The scholarly world was not much interested in the truth if it were
scandalous.
But Symonds enjoyed making mischief, and he was especially pleased at
his
discovery that Italian editors and biographers had conspired to conceal
Michelangelo's homosexual desires, just as they had suppressed
references to
Cellini's imprisonment for sodomy.
Symonds's cultural studies gave him the opportunity to
indulge his central aesthetic preoccupation with healthy naked men.
What
attracted him most in Greek poetry were descriptions of nude youths in
the
gymnasia; what attracted him most in Renaissance painting were the male
nudes of
Signorelli, Michelangelo, and a host of
others. He
was fascinated by the male nude, and collected numerous representations
of it.
He had twenty-one photographs of original drawings by the homosexual
painter
Simeon Solomon sent to him from London in 1868, "chiefly classical
subjects," and in 1885 he was trying to get a copy of Solomon's
Sintram,
a work (now lost) meant to symbolize homosexuality. Mme Marville the
French
photographer was enlisted to photograph Ingres' drawings of the male
nude in the
Louvre and send them to him. He commissioned Edward Clifford to copy
paintings
for him, and encouraged Clifford's endeavour to paint "heroic male
beauty."
He wrote to Henry Scott Tuke praising his
Perseus for its delicate yet vigorous
handling of
the nude, and asked him for photographs of his pictures of the nude
fisherboys
of Falmouth. He asked the critic and poet Edmund Gosse if he did not
agree that
Tuke's
Leander had "the
aura" [Letter to Edmund Gosse, 9
November
1890].
He collected an enormous quantity of photographs of
Greek and Roman statues, especially representations of Hadrian's
beloved
Antinous, about whom he wrote a lengthy biographical study, and
photographs of
the complete works of Michelangelo, which all curled up due to damp
weather and
covered the floor of his study like a nest of vipers. He engaged a
German artist
to photograph models posed in the impossible positions portrayed by
Michelangelo
in the Sistine Chapel. He had heard that William Hamo Thornycroft's
Mower
was "a Hermes in the dress of a working man," and he
eventually
acquired photographs of several statues by Thornycroft including the
Teucer
and Warrior Bearing a Wounded Youth,
which
were "the
delight of my eyes & soul" [Letter to Edmund Gosse,
23
October
1884]. In November 1872 he sent a bronze state of a gladiator
as a gift
to Cecil Boyle, former boyfriend of the classics master of Clifton
College Henry
Graham Dakyns, to both of whom he was attracted; on his own desk was
a
reproduction of
The Dying Gladiator, possibly a return
gift
from
Cecil. Horatio Forbes Brown gave him a reproduction of Cellini's
Perseus,
which also went into his study at Am Hof in Davos.
Symonds made impressionistic photo studies of the 20-year-old
Venetian facchino (porter) Augusto Zanon dressed
in various shades of blue against different coloured
backgrounds (described in In the Key of
Blue); "Of things like this, I have
always been doing plenty, and then putting them away in a
box. The public thinks them immoral. You ought not to be
attached to a young man in a blouse, and see how beautiful
he is combined with blacks and reds and golds, etc."
[Letter to Arthur Symons, 13 June 1892].
Symonds translated Bion's "Lament for Adonis"
while grieving over some serious "wound"
sustained by Augusto in 1890. Symonds had been criticized
for his camaraderie with working-class youths, as revealed
in his autobiographical essay "A Page of My Life"
published in The Fortnightly
Review in 1889, but he had withheld much from
that essay that he wanted to say on the subject of Augusto.
In an unpublished letter dated 12 July 1890 to Edmund
Gosse, he had this to say about the essay:
Symonds sent photographs of Augusto to several of his friends. I reproduce here a photograph of Augusto that was pasted into a copy of In the Key of Blue owned by Leonard Green, beside which he wrote that it was given to Charles Kains Jackson by Symonds and given to Green by Jackson, in March 1919.
In the field of literature, Symonds's antennae were always attuned to "the aura," which he sensed in Whitman's Calamus poems, Pierre Loti's Mon frere Yves ("It is written on the motif of a comradely attachment between a naval officer & a seaman — a refreshing change from the prevalent French motif") [Letter to T. S. Perry, 30 July 1884], and more obvious homoerotica such as Alcibiade fanciullo a scola and Monsieur Venus. He enthusiastically noted homosexual themes throughout Western literature and in the lives of artists and writers, and gathered together the material necessary for his vast project on the history of homosexuality: Alexander the Great, Poliziano, Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, Henri III, Frederick the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, Walt Whitman, Roden Noel, Charles Philip Kains-Jackson, Edward Cracroft Lefroy, Edward Carpenter, and the lives of Alcibiades, Hadrian and Antinous, Cellini, Michelangelo, Antonio Beccadelli, and the more disreputable popes and emperors, some of whom found their way into an appendix to Sexual Inversion, for which he also collected modern case histories in a systematic manner. He was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by men such as Lord Ronald Gower, who often visited him, who would "saturate one's spirit in Urningthum of the rankest most diabolical kind" [Letter to Edmund Gosse, 18 September 1891], and he found Verlaine "interesting" for similar reasons. Symonds was a healthy homosexual like Edward Carpenter, whose practice of "simplification" he admired. He was always uneasy about the sickly and scented aura he recognized in works such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and in the refined writing of Walter Pater: "His view of life gives me the creeps, as old women say" [Letter to Henry Graham Dakyns, 20 February 1873]. He nevertheless engaged in friendly correspondence with Wilde, and he and Pater favourably reviewed each other's books. He recognized "the aura" in the poetry of his friend Edmund Gosse, and was both heartened and saddened when Gosse sent him a poem on "The Taming of Chimaera" (this was also Symonds's code word for homosexual passion) which provided the secret key which was suppressed from Gosse's published poems, demonstrating a self-castration which distressed Symonds: "I feel very bitter about this. Quoque tandem Domine? [How long, O Lord?] How long are souls to groan beneath the altar, & poets to eviscerate their offspring, for the sake of what? — What shall I call it? — an unnatural disnaturing respect for middleclass propriety. — I find no phrase for my abhorrence" [Letter to Edmund Gosse, 25 March 1890]. He appreciated the "peculiar flavour" of Roden Noel's poetry, and praised Charles Kains-Jackson's "Doric lays" on Hylas, Hyacinth, Narcissus, et al, and wished such poetry could be made more public: "Do you think it would create a scandal if four or five people who have written lyrics in this vein should publish an anthology of chosen pieces?" [Letter to Charles Kains-Jackson, 4 March 1892]. Symonds was at heart a poet, and writing (and translating) verse was the literary work which gave him the greatest joy. He wrote poetry in two distinctly different modes, which illustrate the conflicting pulls of his personality. On the one hand there is a large body of "Uranian" verse, celebrations of masculine beauty in the manner of Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and of masculine love and comradeship in the manner of the Phaedrus interwoven with Leaves of Grass — descriptive, sensuous, and sprawling, printed in pamphlets for private circulation. On the other hand his published poetry consists largely of tightly knitted sonnets, gnomic, analytical, intellectual, in the manner of Michelangelo and the seventeenth- century metaphysical poets. Most of his poetry is too self- conscious and introspective, but his pagan verse has some delightfully sensuous imagery, while his nearly-Christian verse has moments of poignant candour. His Uranian verse is good of its kind. It drew its inspiration from themes of "Arcadian love" in which Symonds had immersed himself in the mid-1850s and 1860s, the dialogues of Plato, the Greek Anthology, and Ionica (1858) by William Johnson Cory, a kind of Pindar of the Eton playing fields, whose sentimental and idealized portraits of his boyfriends such as Charlie Wood (Lord Halifax), found echoes in Symonds's love for Alfred Brooke and Norman Moor. Symonds wrote to Cory while he was at Oxford and received in reply a lengthy defence of pederasty in modern times. Much of Symonds's erotic poetry was written following his marriage in November 1864, in an attempt to regain the joy of his homosexual adolescence and to compensate for the failure of his heterosexual experiment. It was frankly masturbatory, and paralleled the erotic daydreams he recorded in prose poems which exaggerated the excitement of viewing men bathing naked in the Serpentine. "Phallus Impudicus" describes the genitals of a lad from Sorrento:
This of course was not meant for the public, but soon Symonds's friends were being treated to privately printed pamphlets narrating "The Love-Tale of Cleomachus," "Theron," "The Clemency of Phalaris," "The Elysium of Greek Lovers," "Cratinus and Aristodemus," "The Tale of Leutychidas and Lynkeus," "Dipsychus Deterior," "Diocles," "Damocles the Beautiful," "Genius Amoris Amari Visio," "Callicrates," "Gabriel" and "The Lotos Garden of Antinous." The model for most of these mini-epics was the description of Leander in Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander; the influence of Theocritus was rather marginal. Symonds showed some of these poems to his friend Henry Sidgwick, who was horrified by their feverish eroticism. He persuaded Symonds to lock them all up in a black tin box and give him the key, which he flung into the river Avon. Some were eventually burned, but many survived in the copies given to Henry Graham Dakyns. All of these poems were intended to form part of "my big Book of Eros," a poetic cycle celebrating masculine love throughout the ages which he proposed to title, rather surprisingly, "John Morden." Although Symonds preferred mature young men to boys, he became something of a mentor for the first wave of Uranian or pederastic poets, and they knew some of his work through private circulation and also its appearance in Many Moods (1878) and In the Key of Blue (1893). He strived towards the equality of "adhesiveness," but never condemned the inequality of pederasty, and his Uranian friends included Charles Kains- Jackson, editor of the Artist and Journal of Home Culture and author of poems on Lysis and Antinous, with whom he exchanged photographs of nude youths by von Gloeden; Henry Scott Tuke (whom he very sensibly advised to leave off giving his paintings artificial classical titles); John Gambril Nicholson, author of Love in Earnest, whom he first met at Tuke's house; and especially Horatio Forbes Brown, whose house he shared in Venice and who would become his literary executor. He popularized the work of Edward Cracroft Lefroy, poet of muscular Christianity and Echoes from Theocritus whom he had never known; and he corresponded with Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he attempted to persuade to visit him. Bosie lamented his death in an obituary in the Spirit Lamp (4 May 1893): "he had not finished his work, there was more to do; there were chains he might have loosened, and burdens he might have lifted; chains on the limbs of lovers and burdens on the wings of poets." Horatio Brown was writing straightforward, honest, Uranian poetry that could never be published, and Symonds was "sorry that he has chosen to tread the wearifully barren & solitary & heart-saddening path of paiderastic poetry" [Letter to Henry Graham Dakyns, 5 June 1879[. Symonds desperately wanted to be courageous in public rather than merely daring in private. In order to test the waters, he printed five copies of Rhaetica in 1878 and asked his friends if he dared to publish it. Henry Sidgwick's advice was final; as summarized by Symonds to Dakyns, "the gist is that I am on the brink of a precipice, on the verge of losing my reputation & bringing disgrace on Henry & you & all who call me friend. Rhaetica, if smelt out by a critic, would precipitate me altogether. I think I ought to ask you, under these conditions, to destroy the peccant pamphlet, together perhaps with all my confounded verses in print or out of it" [Letter to Dakyns, 12 June 1879]. In order to publish, Symonds developed a set of code words to point to his secret subject tracing the movement from homosexual repression and self-loathing to self-realization and celebration: "unutterable things," "valley of vain desire," "the impossible," "Chimaera," "Maya" are the phrases that recur throughout the sonnet sequences in New and Old (1880), Animi Figura (1882), Fragilia Labilia (1884), and Vagabunduli Libellus (1884). He wished to stake his reputation as a poet upon these volumes, but he dared not provide the key to unlock their meaning. Each volume was received by the critics with varying degrees of indifference, ridicule, or abhorrence. They recognized the inadequacy of the motive force, as though it had been emasculated, and they sensed the Swinburnian unwholesomeness between the lines. In 1884 he abandoned the vocation of poetry, but it remained an avocation. He continued to write small pieces, and he continued polishing older poems for reprints in anthologies, and In the Key of Blue which was published the year he died contained one of his earliest homoerotic poems, "Clifton and a Lad's Love." In his non-Uranian verse, Symonds's preference for the sonnet form is rather unfortunate: his sonnets are too highly condensed, too studied, too intellectual and analytical; he has extracted all of the meaning from an experience without enough of its telling images. The sonnets are so personal and deeply felt as to be painful and, ultimately, embarrassing. At their best, his sonnets are beautifully subtle, but many of them are overwrought in more senses than one, and all too often they founder upon the rock of adolescent self-pity. Symonds set for himself a task that by its very nature could not be achieved: how could he fulfil his urge to utter the truest truths while at the same time disguising the fundamentally homosexual motivation of his passion? For him, candour was concomitant with self- discovery, but no reputable publisher would have printed his poetry had it been honestly presented. He is correct in more ways than one when he admits in the memoirs that "many of these sonnets were mutilated in order to adapt them to the female sex"; his whole life as a poet was mutilated by the attempt to adapt his emotions to the expectations of society. With almost childlike innocence, Symonds would post off his homosexual poems to his friends, quite unprepared for the effects they would produce. He was taken aback and hurt by their reactions. He sent copies of "The Love Tale of Odatis and Prince Zariadres" and other poems to Mrs Arthur Hugh Clough; she said she did not much care for "The Upas Tree," which he blandly defended as merely "an allegory of the attractions wh[ich] some forms of vice have for even the most beautiful natures" [Letter to Mrs Arthur Hugh Clough, 11 December 1871], though he invited her to burn them. He misjudged the emotional nature of Edward Clifford, to whom he sent poems such as "Eudiades" and "Love and Death," which Clifford regarded as evil temptations against which his Christianity was proof. Symonds advised him to consign the poems to the fire, but defended "With Caligula in Rome" as simply "the cold & frigid picture of an Emperor at his high jinks of lust & blood. It seems to me to belong to the Pompeian genre picture style of Alma Tadema" [Letter to Edward Clifford, 23 October 1871]. After a hiatus, their correspondence was resumed without Symonds having learned his lesson, except in so far as he began sending Clifford his specifically Christian homoerotic poems such as "David and Jonathan." In one of his earliest letters to Edmund Gosse, Symonds did not rest content with graciously thanking him for sending a copy of King Erik, but went on to bluntly observe "I note throughout this poem what I always feel as characteristic of your work, a strong & tender sympathy with the beauty of youth in men as well as women" [Letter to Edmund Gosse, 14 January 1876]. In return, he sent Gosse the inevitable copy of "Eudiades" with a note of encouragement, "Of course, this Greek love is different in quality from what can be expected to flourish in the modern world, & to attempt to replant it would be anachronistic. Yet I do not see, having the root of Calamus within our souls, why we should not make the Hellenic passion of friendship a motive in art" [Letter to Edmund Gosse, 16 January 1876]. Gosse was taken aback, and Symonds had to apologize for sending such a poem. Symonds would not allow any of his acquaintances to denigrate or dismiss homosexual love without a word of rebuke. As far as he was concerned, every intelligent person had a duty to recognize it and to accept it. He commended Mrs Arthur Hugh Clough's essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets, but criticized her dependence upon a book by Richard Simpson (1868) in which the author "in his attempt ... to screen Sh[akespeare] from a vile imputation has not noticed the palpable intensity of a personal, historically biographically personal, emotion the sonnets contain" [Letter to Mrs Arthur Hugh Clough, 1 January 1869]. He was quick to respond to scholars who ventured into what he came to regard as his field, and to set them on a less prejudiced path of investigation. He told Rev. Arthur Galton, who had written a book on Tiberius, that "congenital abnormality is not vice or crime, but imperfection, aberration from the standard," and referred him to studies by Krafft- Ebing, Ulrichs, Moreau, Lombroso, and the Italian Penal Code of 1889 which had decriminalized homosexuality [Letter to Arthur Galton, 10 October 1890]. Henry Scott Tuke's father, a specialist in mental illness, was a friend of Symonds's father; when he visited Symonds in Davos, Symonds "tried to draw him about 'Sexual inversion', but found that he preferred to discourse on 'hypnotism'" [Letter to Edmund Gosse, 15 November 1890]. He often adopted the role of schoolmaster in his letters, particularly with those whom he respected the most. The poetry of Walt Whitman transformed Symonds's life. He knew that any homosexual who read Calamus would see it as a justification of masculine love in the fullest possible sense, for Whitman accepted sex as a positive driving force in a way that Plato had not. Symonds was one of the earliest publicists of Whitman's poetry in England, and he did everything possible to establish a Calamite network of sympathizers. But Whitman left one thing unspoken, and for many years Symonds nagged him to be more explicit about the homosexual nature of "adhesiveness." Finally he pushed Whitman into a corner and got the answer he deserved: that the homosexual interpretation of Calamus was "damnable" and the great poet had six illegitimate children to prove his normality. Fortunately Calamus had by now assumed for Symonds an existence independent of its creator, and Whitman's violently reactionary response, though disappointing, failed to demolish his own firm belief in the rightness of his interpretation. He consoled himself by lecturing the Master on his obvious ignorance about homosexuality, and he expressed some surprise that Whitman failed to recognize that such inferences were natural and such love was wholesome. Similarly, when Jowett was preparing to publish his view that homosexual love in Plato was merely a metaphor, Symonds so very severely reprimanded him for delving into something of which he knew so little, that Jowett was persuaded to drop the project. Symonds's courage in defending homosexual love can be seen more clearly in the context of Victorian prudery. He was known to be an agnostic, and was suspected of immorality. His translations of Goliardic verse called Wine, Women and Song were coolly reviewed because of the risqué nature of the title alone. Symonds naively thought that Studies of the Greek Poets would be used as a textbook, whereas even the compositor was shocked by his statement that "even paiderastia had its honourable aspects," and wrote him an indignant letter; his defense of a Whitman type of Hellenism led to an attack upon him which forced him to withdraw his nomination for the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. He was severely criticized for his public defence of manly comradeship in works such as An Introduction to the Study of Dante, and for his review of the Geneva Turnfest which he knew to be "very bold in its plain proclamation of a passionate interest in masculine beauty" [Letter to Edmund Gosse, 18 September 1890]. In 1878 he asked R. S. Poole of the British Museum for information about medals portraying Antinous, and was infuriated to be told that "it was very courageous to ask even artistic questions about him"; he forced Poole to apologize for his impudence. He publicly defended Sir Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights, infamous for its "Terminal Essay" on homosexuality in the east, and rebuked the British for their hypocrisy. Symonds mistakenly believed that American men of letters were less narrow minded than the English: W. S. Kennedy, the leader of the pro-Whitman faction in America, said "We here in America were astounded that it seemed to [Symonds] necessary in his work ... to relieve the Calamus poems of the vilest of all possible interpretations. It was a sad revelation to us of the state of European morals" [Preface to Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, 1896[. Symonds's close friends at home advised him to burn his own homoerotic poetry, and one friend gravely suggested that one of his more erotic poems could be rendered publishable if he altered "young Achilles" into "Amaryllis" [Letter to Charles Kains-Jackson, 24 April 1892]. He did disguise the sex of his lover in Vagabunduli Libellus, but the reviewers saw that it contained something intimate that they did not wish to know about, and they panned it. He was always rather surprised that the public at large could read between the lines, and could recognize, with some distaste, what he was getting at." I have doubted myself upon the propriety of speaking out so fully without speaking out more. I rather feel that from the literary point of view, I fell between two stools" [Letter to Eleanor Frances Poynter, 30 July 1882]. Just as Symonds's aesthetic and erotic sensibilities were inextricably intertwined, so also his erudition was erotically motivated. The essays in Studies of the Greek Poets (1873) began as a series of lectures delivered to the Sixth Form boys at Clifton College. Their hidden agenda was to enable him to get close to Norman Moor, whom he met at a dinner party given by Graham Dakyns in December 1868, with whom he deliberately engaged in a sensual romance (excluding coitus). Norman returned his love, but was himself attracted to younger boys, so though their affair lasted for four years it was never quite satisfying. (Nor could it have been very satisfactory for Catherine and the children, who went to Ilfracombe while Norman and her husband visited Milan, Verona, Venice and the Tirol. Margaret observed that her mother was a woman of "singular Sibylline fortitude.") But the lectures were a great success, and prompted his intense research into Greek language, poetry, and history which became the foundation for his first publications. They continued for more than two years, and many of his students became his best friends, including Horatio Brown. His enthusiasm for Aristophanes and the Greek Anthology must have been infectious, and his personal commitment to Greek values as if they were modern values must have transformed the dry linguistic studies to which the boys were accustomed. The same lectures were delivered to the Society for Higher Education for Women, and the 80 ladies in his class were in fact more attentive than the boys. The first collection was successful enough for there to be demand for a second collection in 1876, and he was very proud of them. The research for these lectures lead inevitably to one of his most important works, A Problem in Greek Ethics, which was written in 1873, though not printed until 1883, in an edition of ten copies. It is the first extended historical and literary study of homosexuality in English. In 1890 Symonds sent a copy to Sir Richard Burton, after reading the latter's Terminal Essay to The Thousand Nights and a Night published in 1888. Burton's theory about "Sotadic Zones" in which climate determines sexual behaviour is a ludicrous excuse for titillating anecdote, whereas Symonds's book contains a carefully constructed argument supported by an enormously wide range of references. For sheer readability it has not been surpassed, and his translations from the Greek have few equals. His theory about the origin of pederasty in Dorian military custom has been generally accepted. The persuasive fluency of his style has not been matched by the more extended scholarly works of more recent decades. It is a subversive book in the sense that it uses conventional techniques to undermine contemporary conventions about sexual behaviour. Even after the advent of Gay Liberation, and even though the Classics no longer claim such a prominent place in our education, a reading of this work cannot but have a liberating effect. The writing of his memoirs from 1889 prompted him to extend his historical survey of homosexuality by a "scientific" psychological-sociological analysis, and throughout 1890 he systematically gathered information for A Problem in Modern Ethics, which went into proof stages in November, though it was not printed until mid-January 1891, in 50 copies. Symonds always paid too much heed to his friends' well-intentioned advice to be cautious, but as he grew older he mounted a single platform and spoke out more openly. It is worth noting that although his two Problem essays were privately printed, they were also privately reprinted, in larger editions of 100 copies, and they were so widely circulated as to be "published" to all intents and purposes. Symonds's homosexuality was an open secret for at least the last ten years of his life, and even his children would parody him for falling in love so quickly with one handsome young man after another. Symonds was in constant correspondence with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs about "the slave-cause of the Urnings." Ulrichs pioneered the defence of homosexuality in Germany in writings under the name of Numa Numantius from the early 1860s, in which he popularized the term "Urning" to describe a man born with a woman's soul which prompted him to love men. (In the German manner, he outlined a host of categories and subcategories, including the "Mannling" who prefers effeminate men, the "Zwischen-Urning" who prefers adolescents, and the "Weibling" who prefers strapping young fellows, the category in which Symonds would have classed himself but for the fact that he was not effeminate). Symonds did not use the term in any specific sense, but merely as a synonym for "homosexual"; depending upon his audience, Symonds would use the terms "homosexual," "unisexual," "masculine love," "democratic love," "Urningthum" (homosexuality), "die Conträre Sexual Empfindung" (contrary sexual sense), or "sexual inversion," with a preference for "invert" and "homosexual" in his last writings. He tackled the Problem in Modern Ethics in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, exposing vulgar errors by a well-judged mixture of sarcasm, science, and common sense. The essay was circulated to all his friends and to many prominent men, and was very well received. He was "quite surprised to see how frankly ardently & sympathetically a large number of highly respectable persons feel toward a subject which in society they would only mention as unmentionable" [Letter to Henry Graham Dakyns, 20 May 1891]. Henry James praised his gallantry for taking a stand, but felt that "one ought to wish him more humour, it is really the saving salt. But the great reformers never have it — and he is the Gladstone of the affair" [H. Montgomery Hyde, Henry James at Home (1969), p. 50]). He received many "confessions" from homosexuals in England, and from Benjamin Osgood Pierce, Harvard mathematician, some "sharply-defined acute partisanship for Urningthum" (i.e. homosexuality). The new information prompted him to revise and expand his essay, and this new material appeared in the posthumous pirated 1896 edition. Symonds came to acquire so much knowledge about homosexuals in contemporary life that it made him even more committed to liberating other homosexual men from the miseries which he had experienced. Quietly, in correspondence and at dinner parties, he argued against the Labouchere amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which made "gross indecency" between men punishable by up to two year's imprisonment (under which Wilde would be convicted). He believed that legal reform was of paramount importance, though he was pessimistic about the outcome: "only I fear that a free legal course, with social sympathy attending, will not be given to my brethrern — the Urnings" [Letter to Henry Graham Dakyns, 23 January 1891]. Symonds was impressed by the sympathetic interpretation of Whitman in Havelock Ellis's The New Spirit (1890), and began corresponding with him. In June 1892 he asked Ellis if he would publish a book by him on Sexual Inversion for the Contemporary Science Series of books which Ellis was editing, because the subject "is being fearfully mishandled by pathologists and psychiatrical professors, who know nothing whatsoever about its real nature" [Letter to Arthur Symons, 13 June 1892]. He did not realize that Ellis was already contemplating doing such a study himself, and it was quickly agreed that they would collaborate, with Ellis providing the psychological parts and Symonds providing the historical arguments plus case studies. He felt it was absolutely necessary to discuss homosexuality in ancient Greece in order to show how ludicrous it was to diagnose homosexuality in modern times as something morbid. "The ignorance of men like Casper-Liman, Tardieu, Carlier, Taxil, Moreau, Tarnowsky, Krafft-Ebing, Richard Burton is incalculable, and is only equalled to their presumption. They not only do not know Ancient Greece, but they do not know their own cousins and club-mates" [Letter to Havelock Ellis, 20 June 1892]. The theory of morbidity was more humane, but just as false as theories of sin or vice. Symonds believed that homosexuality "will eventually be regarded as a comparatively rare but quite natural and not morbid deflection from the common rule," rather like colour blindness [Letter to Havelock Ellis, 29 Sept 1892]. He insisted that in any case they must come to an agreement about the legal aspects of the subject, because "I should not like to promulgate any book, which did not show the absurdity and injustice of the English law" [Ibid.]. He had obviously decided to speak out: "I should certainly give my name to anything I produced," and he would publish it by himself if necessary, although he felt that their two names would help the book reach a wider audience and receive serious attention. Ellis kept backsliding towards the theory of neurosis, but Symonds did what he could to tone this down. "I think sex- inverts can only be called "abnormal" in so far as they are in a minority, i.e. form exceptions to the large rule of sex" [Letter to Havelock Ellis, 7 July 1892]. He was not sure how much one could be influenced by habit and custom and surroundings, but he felt that boys who responded to homosexual advances did so because they "were previously constituted to receive the suggestion. In fact, suggestion seems to play exactly the same part in the normal and abnormal awakening of sex" [Letter to Havelock Ellis, 1 December 1892]. The theories of neurosis and congenital abnormality had the advantage that they could be used to gain sympathy and tolerance from the public, whereas a theory involving either free choice or influence could be used to argue for suppression and restraint. In order to achieve the fundamental goal of law reform, Symonds decided to try to turn the tide rather than vainly swim against it. "Whatever view the psychologist may take of homosexual passions, every citizen of a free country must feel that Labouchere's Clause is a disgrace to legislation, because of its vague terminology & plain incitement to false accusations" [Letter to Dr J. W. Wallace, 19 December 1892]. For many years, anal intercourse between men had been punished by imprisonment for terms from ten years up to life (the death penalty was not abolished until 1861), and an attempt to commit sodomy was punished by two years' imprisonment (as well as pillorying until 1816). Labouchere's amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill did not increase the penalties for homosexual acts, nor did it make acts such as fellatio criminal for the first time. The ambiguous term "gross indecency" technically extended its application to a wide range of unspecified acts including soliciting, fondling, and even kissing in public, but all of these had been prosecuted during the previous two centuries as the misdemeanor, "a conspiracy to commit sodomy". The issues of consent and privacy were specifically excluded as a defence, though this had always been true in practice - the concept of "privacy" had had no validity in the preceding centuries. Though the Labouchere Amendment was called "the blackmailers' charter," homosexuals had been regularly blackmailed since the early eighteenth century. The amendment did not change the law; it merely restated it for a new generation of intolerance. Unfortunately Symonds died before the project could take final shape, though he did manage to revise and enlarge the two Problem essays on Greek Love and Modern Love, some cursory material was got up to cover homosexuality in the intervening centuries, particularly during Roman times, and many notes and case histories were gathered together. Symonds was indifferent to lesbianism, and this section was left to Ellis. Ellis was frankly relieved that the collaboration had ended. After finishing his own Man and Woman, he picked up where they left off, and obtained permission from Horatio Brown to include Symonds's material in his book. An English publisher could not be found, and it was not published until 1896, in Leipzig: Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl von Havelock Ellis und J. A. Symonds. It was praised as a pioneering work, but when Wilson and Macmillan published the English version in 1897 as Sexual Inversion By Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Horatio Forbes Brown bought up nearly the entire edition in order to avoid a scandal accruing to the Symonds family. Brown had probably given Ellis permission to use the Symonds material before the Oscar Wilde trials in 1895. Later in 1897 it was republished as Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol. I. Sexual Inversion. By Havelock Ellis, but in this edition, Symonds's named was expunged; the material from many of his footnotes was silently absorbed into the text, and his essay on Greek Ethics, which Ellis thought unscientific, was dumped altogether. (Fortunately the essays on Greek Ethics and Modern Ethics, as revised and expanded for this venture, were surreptitiously printed by Leonard Smithers in 1896, and again in 1901.) Although this edition has been reprinted several times, and about a third of the material in it was contributed by Symonds, his name was never reinstated, and his place in the history of the sexual reform movement has never become as openly acknowledged as he intended it to be. Brown correctly judged the temper of the times, for the bookseller was prosecuted for selling this "obscene" publication, and the aura of pornography has hung about this book ever since. Ellis came down in favour of "inborn constitutional abnormality," and argued strongly against social persecution and legal prosecution; specifically he argued that homosexuals should not try to become normal heterosexual men, and that homosexual activity in private should be legalized. But the medical model prevailed, and the view that homosexuality was curable rather than congenital lent support to those opposed to law reform. Edward Carpenter would advance Symonds's arguments in Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1895) and other essays collected as The Intermediate Sex (1908), but when a friend asked him "Will there be a Revolution?" he had to answer "No such luck!" [Cited by Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, Melbourne, New York: Quartet Books, 1977), p. 73.] The law remained unaltered until 1967. Symonds felt that his Memoirs would be "the most considerable product of my pen" [Letter to Henry Graham Dakyns, 27 March 1889]. But again he was foiled even in his posthumous coming out. It is a shame they were not published within a reasonable time after his death, for he certainly intended them to appear soon enough to be "relevant" to the society in which he lived. Symonds was regarded as "a man of our time" at least until the First World War, and these self-revelations could still have had a dramatic impact upon the Edwardians; they could have helped a generation of homosexuals to overcome their feelings of guilt and isolation, and they may have made the early medical theories of causation more difficult to sustain. There would at least have been an intellectual debate, whereas modern psychiatric theory has become too dogmatic to give him an ear. The careful self scrutiny with which he demonstrates that his homosexuality is inborn and innate goes for nought as far as his modern biographer Phyllis Grosskurth is concerned; she would rather grasp at any Freudian "contributory factor" showing a negative response to women than catalogue the abundant evidence showing his positive response to men. Symonds's last letter, written to Catherine from his death bed in Rome, 19 April 1893, expresses the value he placed upon his memoirs:
Catherine withheld her consent. She sent a copy of Symonds's letter to Henry Graham Dakyns, acknowledging the importance of his memoirs: "You see how the great question was supreme in his mind to the very last. Are we right in being cowardly & suppressing it?" She also omitted the penultimate line of this letter when she published it in her preface to Brown's biography, written two years later. Brown fully understood the importance Symonds attached to the memoirs, and that they must be saved from destruction after his death, but Symonds had also instructed him "to reserve its publication for a period when it will not be injurious to my family" [Letter to Horatio Forbes Brown, 29 December 1891]. Brown was in a difficult position and had no alternative but to obey the wishes of Catherine and her adviser Henry Sidgwick, and to edit the material as best he could for his biography. Brown does not bear the sole responsibility for totally removing all homosexual references from Symonds's apologia pro vita sua. Sir Charles Holmes, who was working at the publishers (Nimmo) at the time, said that Brown "exercised little more than ordinary discretion in cutting out the most intimate self-revelations. But a straiter critic had then to take a hand. The proofs, already bowdlerized, were completely emasculated, so that frank "Confessions," which might have made some little stir in the world (indeed that was generally expected), emerged as pure commonplace." [Cited by Timothy d'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English 'Uranian' Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). p. 15.] This "straiter critic" was probably Edmund Gosse, to whom Brown eventually bequeathed the memoirs and papers when he died in 1926. Gosse and the librarian of the London Library made a bonfire in the garden and burned everything except the memoirs, which were deposited in the London Library with injunctions that they were not to be made available or published for fifty years, an unnecessarily long period of time. The papers that were destroyed probably included Symonds's sexual diary and material collected for his project with Ellis. Symonds's granddaughter Janet Vaughan was nauseated by the "smug gloating delight" with which Gosse informed her what he had done to preserve Symonds's good name. The memoirs were not published until 1984, long after the Kinsey Report, the Wolfenden Report, and the Stonewall Riot — too late to be much more than a period piece.
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John Addington Symonds was born on 5 October
1840
into a
thoroughly middle-class and archetypically Victorian family; he would
never
reject the solider aspects of this background, and it was by Victorian
standards
that he valued many of his own achievements: "When the committee
of the
Athenaeum elected me to that club in 1882, I became aware that I had
the right
to consider myself one of the men of our time." 
Whitman also recognized
that "Symonds is a man
whose range of production is extraordinary: he is a critic scholar of
the first
international all-time rank" [Horace Traubel,
With
Walt Whitman in Camden (Southern Illinois Press, 1959),
10
February 1889]. During a writing career of about twenty years,
Symonds
wrote nearly two books a year, plus dozens of unpublished or privately
printed
long poems, hundreds of magazine articles and reviews, and thousands
of
letters.
He published seven large volumes in the history of the 
Symonds advised
Vernon Lee to look at "photographs from the nude published by
Giraudon,
which proves how little correction is needed ... to convert a soldier
or
mechanic into a hero or ephebus" [Letter to Vernon Lee,
20
June
1884]. For more private uses he collected nude photographs by
Wilhelm
von Gloeden, and he was a personal friend of Guglielmo Plüschow
whose plein
air photographs of nude boys he would send to friends such as
Charles
Kains- Jackson: "The model you seem to have liked best is a Roman
lad
called Luigi"
[Letter to Charles Kains- Jackson, 2 January 1892]. He
exchanged
packets of these photographs with Gosse, who kept stealing glances at
one all
through the funeral service held for Browning at Westminster Abbey. In
March
1890 he proposed to the Julian School of Art in Paris a prize
competition for
drawings of the male nude, for which he would contribute three prizes
of 200
Francs each, and for which he would retain the right to publish the
winning
entries together with photographs of the live models. He drew after
models whom
he hired to pose for him as he convalesced, and he photographed them
in
poses
from famous statues or paintings such as the study by Hippolyte
Flandrin which
formed the subject of his essay on 
The whole raison d'etre of the
memoirs was to chart the emotional and intellectual growth, the
"coming
out," of a homosexual man, but this backbone was missing from the
excerpts
published in 1895. Most readers concluded that Symonds was tormented
by
religious doubts, like many of his generation, though they were puzzled
by the
intensity of his malaise. Religious anxiety was rather commonplace, and
the
memoirs missed out on the enormous interest that their real subject of
sexual
anxiety would have generated — particularly in conjunction with
the trials
of Oscar Wilde that year. Symonds was seen as a philosopher pondering
the riddle
of life, rather than the riddle of homosexual self-discovery. The
anguish was
unrelieved by any references to the joy with which he seized upon each
stage of
his affirmation of his love of men. With his affirmation of the value
of sex
wholly removed, only his self- denial was left, and the humourless
pathos of the
truncated memoirs did his reputation more harm than any scandal that
may have
been caused by the truth. Henry James drew from them an extraordinary
impression
of Symonds's gifts, but recognized that they failed to reach any tragic
heights
because the self-pity seemed to be based upon no specific grief. T. E.
Brown did
not recognize in them the Symonds he knew, and he challenged Horatio
Brown's
presentation: "Are you quite sure that, through some co-affinity
of
temperament or experience, you have not exaggerated this [sceptical
agony]? ...
I fancy I can recollect a different Symonds, full of enthusiasm for
favourite
authors, outspoken, critical, of course, but brimming with love for
those he
preferred. What has become of this rapture?"