Symonds, John Addington.

John Addington Symonds (1840-93), writer, poet, critic and scholar, is most remembered for his promotion of sexual reform in the late nineteenth century. His controversial A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883), of which only 10 copies were printed, was the first English book to study the history of homosexuality, and argues that if homosexual relations were considered honourable in the highly enlightened world of Ancient Greece, they could not be condemned as abnormal in modern times – homosexuals should be accepted rather as a natural “minority”. His earlier work, Studies of the Greek Poets, had impressed the young Oscar Wilde, who admired it for its “picturesqueness and loveliness of words” -- this phrase could equally apply to the present series. It was Symonds who captured for Wilde the essence of the word “aesthetic” when he related it to the Greeks, who “were essentially a nation of artists”: “Guided by no supernatural revelation, with no Mosaic law for conduct, they trusted their aesthesis, delicately trained and preserved in a condition of the utmost purity” (Studies of the Greek Poets, 1873, pp.416-7). Other works by Symonds, most notably his monumental history of the Renaissance in Italy, were inspired by his theories of sexual liberation and his generally atheistic view of history and art.

Although he described himself to Dakyns as “a slothful & nerve-exhausted man of the 19^th-century”, his literary output was prodigious: it included translations of The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella (1878), biographies of Shelley (1878), Sir Philip Sidney (1886) Ben Jonson (1886) and Benvenuto Cellini (2 volumes, 1888), travel sketches and several volumes of verse. One project which never materialised in his lifetime, however, was a proposed joint publication by himself and Havelock Ellis, namely a book on “Sexual inversion” (see lot 182 for notes on later publications). This was to follow his psycho-sociological analysis of homosexuality propounded in A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891), the public reception of which he describes in one of the present letters: “…I am 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…”

The most important biographical sources for Symonds, apart from his remarkably candid autobiography (posthumously published, with omissions, in 1984), are his beautifully composed letters. His regular correspondents included Walt Whitman, Edmund Gosse, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Sidgwick, Samuel Richards, Arthur Symons and of course, Henry Graham Dakyns.

the present series constitutes the entire corpus of letters addressed to dakyns, whom he described as “together with two or three in all the world my best & dearest friend”. Certainly these letters testify to an intense friendship based on both emotional and intellectual empathy. They met in 1863, shortly after Dakyns became master of Clifton College. He had been at Rugby with Symonds’ friends, Henry and Arthur Sidgwick, and had also been tutor to Tennyson’s sons.

Symonds treated his correspondence with Dakyns almost as a confessional. His earlier letters, written under the influence of what he later described as the “maladie de la jeunesse” (“that undefinable sickening of life before life has been tried or grasped”), often reveal a deep frustration with his physical weakness (a lifelong torment) and with his sense of spiritual isolation:

...The great fact of my life is that the spiritual cannot emerge from the material: I am thwarted in every way by mere physical weakness: and no one here understands the desirability of leading a spiritual life: they think study at best an amiable weakness, & keep suggesting the higher charms of open air & idleness…

…I vary so painfully with the circumstances in wh[ich] I am placed. Nor do I ever seem to live in time. Each moment is an Eternity to me, whether of pain or of pleasure. I do not see beyond it…This comes, I suppose, of having no faith, no firm recess of soul whither in stress of affliction or in gust of enjoyment to retire…

Depression and “oppression of the soul” are a recurring subject (“…What happens to me is that one tide of physical depression after another sweeps over me…Each weakens me; I feel my strength of mind & power of action & fancy & sense of beauty & capacity of loving & delight in life gradually sucked out of me…”) and inspire him to write “grotesque” letters of desperation (“…But I – I am as empty – as empty -- as…It is all a hollow horrid sham – a Marionette theatre – a bouge where the women are pasteboard if nothing worse -- & the wise man lives alone…”). He more than once refers to suicide. One letter ends with “Tear this up” (“…I hardly know why I write all this – phantasmal, unreal. Suicide or Madness: both most probably: this is the serious settled ending of such states…”).

Symonds’ relationship with Dakyns was intricate; the letters are often marked by emotive appeals (“…your letter is different from any you have ever written me, & I think your rod has blossomed. If I am mistaken, pardon me. But if not, write much & often as to one who yearns to you & who cannot hear too much…”), possessiveness (“…I long for you. When you come to see your father you remember you are partly mine & what you promised me: yet be sure you make good plans for y[ou]rself since I am a broken reed…”) and paternalistic advice (“…nor do I think of you, adding to personal kindness & love the devotion of your purse [to a Clifton College student], without mortification. It is one of those acts wh[ich] may entail bitter repentance by teaching you the extreme sordidness ingratitude & reptile selfishness of human nature. But I have no right to speak, myopically squinting at your life as I do…”). Their friendship was complicated further in October 1864, when Dakyns was rejected by Symonds’ father as a suitor to his daughter, and received the news from Symonds himself (“…Mere prudence would prevent a father from allowing his daughter to run such risks of an anxious & straitened life as might ensue from such a match…unless her affections were seriously implicated…”). Later on, however, it appears that both Dakyns and Symonds had close relationships with Clifton College students. One letter, in which Symonds uses a Socratic form of dialogue to examine the affection of one particular student (Arthur Carré), contains what appears to be a prototype of his view of homosexual love:

…Is this erwV Greek? No. If it were Greek, is it what Plato w[ould] allow? No. Is it established in modern society? No. Is it what the world at large w[ould] call romantic, sentimental, effeminate, on the verge of vice? Yes. Supposing the world wrong in a special instance, may not its general verdict be right? I think so. What is the source of Arthur’s love? Is it intellectual sympathy? No. Is it moral good? No…Is it chiefly aesthetical enjoyment & the pleasure of highly refined sensuousness? Yes. Are these likely to produce moral & intellectual strnegth? No. Are they capable of producing moral or intellectual debility? Yes, capable. What has y[ou]r experience been of this erwV? That if uncontrolled it is evil. In all cases of possible harm, what does Duty say? Avoid all appearance of evil. Is this Duty increased or diminished by Arthur’s position? Increased. In case moral injury were to accrue, where w[ould] the evil fall most heavily? On the boy, & if on him then through him on his fellow boys. Does Arthur expose himself to external danger? Yes, to a very g[rea]t extent…

Some letters, particularly those in which he enthuses about art, appear to serve as rehearsals for his theories on art and sexuality. Of the sculptures in the Vatican, for example, he writes:

…At one time you hang upon the godlike lips & murmur that their bloom so soon must pass away. At another the bold chest & hardened arms awake a thrill of heroic daring. You see the stuff that gods were made of. Then again the passion changes when the soft curves of the hips & thighs tell tales of love. And lastly should your glance alight upon those level eyes & short crisp locks, all Hellas moves before you with a sound of tragic pipe & festival sonorous verse & rapt oration in the porches of the gods…

References to his literary work are numerous. He often seeks encouragement (“…Literature is to be my vocation, it seems; verily a high one, a priesthood…Help me, my friends, with counsel, with exhortation…”), asks Dakyns for his opinion on his poems (“…Say clearly, as a critic, as one who has read here & there & also as one who has felt & thought, is it worth the hours spent in producing them? My subjects so possess me…I cannot judge & fear to make myself a fool…”), portrays himself as “a worn weary headachy croupy semi-asthmatic middle aged impostor reading out…drivel about Florentine Guilds”, remarks on his laziness (“…a thing for gods & men to marvel at. Opera interrupta jacent all over the place, & I sit philosophically or splenetically among the ruins of my own designs…”), and once asks Dakyns to edit his poems before sending them on to the publisher “with or sans testicular appurtenances” (January 1880). When Dakyns was working on his translation and life of Xenophon after his retirement in 1889, Symonds reflected on how best to render it palatable for the general public (“…How we are to dodge the public I hardly know. I never feel that I am going to do it when I write. I only resolve to fill my soul with enthusiasm for my subject, & love mingled with wholesome contempt for the capacities of my audience, & then to utter my matter in a series of propositions as unmistakeable as I can make them. In this of course I fail…”).

The early years of Symonds’ marriage to Catherine (née North), from 1864, were tainted by the strain of having to adapt to conventional life. The letters reveal Symonds’ stoicism, merged with regret (“…For me it has long been all over. I am quite calm, ready to bear the loss of what I sacrificed in the Past, content to believe that I was bound to dwindle & be thankful for it, & finally expectant of a happier & loftier future purged from the pangs of passion though drawing sweetness from its beauty…”), guilt (“…Catherine is well & sacred. My sin & misery is faithlessness…”) and repression (“…happiness, domestic felicity, & friends, good as they are, cannot make up for a vie manqueé…”). In 1869 Symonds and his wife settled into a platonic marriage, and she accepted that he would have male companions. He writes to Dakyns about these, especially Norman Moor, a Clifton schoolboy (“…Norman lives an odd fungoid life on some decaying branch of my soul. This is a fantastic way of saying a truth…Would God that he really loved me…”), Cecil Boyle, another student (“…I cannot talk kindly & nicely about [Norman] somehow. I always say something brutal, because I feel too much. But Cecil is assuredly superb – such magnificent shoulders, veins, & legs & such a head of breeding & of beauty & of goodness…”), and Christian Buol, whom he met at Davos after settling there permanently in 1880 (“…Je l’aime de tout mon coeur. It is a splendid sight to see him asleep with the folded arms & the vast chest of a young Hercules, innocent of clothing. A better way of satisfying the plastic sense than many others…”). In May 1881 he met Angelo Fusato, a Venetian gondolier who was to remain his companion until Symonds’ death (“…I have gained a complete blur of all merely literary preoccupations, & the entrance into a new stage of living…”).

Symonds’ health required constant travelling, which generated many evocative descriptions of places and people. From Enna in Sicily he writes: “…The people too are ineffably strange – old men with rigid faces of cast iron gazing fixedly before them as though they had seen Medusa in their boyhood – white haired old women with the sinister set features of the Fates -- & young people who never smile, but seem to be looking forth upon a world in which there is nothing for them but endurance & the fierceness of passions that delight in blood…”). However, he would at times feel oppressed by his illness and enforced nomadic life

…Have you reflected what it is to be a XIXth Century Nomad…the effete product of an agricultural race, condemned by circumstance to wander – sans lungs, sans teeth, sans nerves, sans sentiments – weighted down with superincumbent filth of old habits – lugging his family about by diligence & rail in quest of nutritious localities, weighted with baggage, over-wrought with sordid cares? Even such am I; & to me the condition of this artificial wandering life are as a ghastly grey-haired poisonous stepmother…It is too ghastly – this to be a toothless, bleeding-gummed old lion, a naked shivering mirth-making houseless crab…”)

The numerous other subjects discussed by Symonds include, to name a few: Greek literature, philosophy and mythology; the Victorian intellectual and social scene, the main personalities of which include Tennyson, Kipling, R.L. Stevenson, Jowett, Henry Sidgwick and Thomas Woolner (“…has been at our house for the last fortnight modelling my father’s head…); music and opera; corruption at Harrow ("…As to the boys themselves, they are drawn from the lower aristocracy & the moneyed classes for the most part; idleness, plethoric wealth, hereditary stupidity & parvenu grossness combining to form a singularly corrupt amalgam. The seeds of vice sown long ago in this fruitful soil continue to propagate themselves like mushrooms on a dunghill…"); Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (“…It is not a book…it is a man, miraculous in his vigour & love…& omniscience & animalism & omnivorous humanity…Tennyson spoke as a prude when he condemned Walt Whitman. I find the man as pure & clean & natural as nakedness…”); tutoring; marriage (“…an upsetting thing at first: it is oddly differentiated from free erwV…”); the “paiderastic demoralization of Spain, Switzerland & France (“…If you want the devil’s own etaireia [companionship] you have apparently only to sell all you possess & settle in Malaga…”); the fate of other homosexual men, for example, that of the student from Eton who, after being expelled from Cambridge for writing an innocent love letter to a chorister, “laid his neck upon the rails before an Express train & was killed” (“…Eton hearing of it said in its high places Poor Boy! & went on living the aesthetic life…”) -- see next lot for Rhaetica, a volume of verse which contains a poem by Symonds inspired by this story ("A Tragedy of Our Days"); research for his biography of Michael Angelo (“…There is something inexpressibly pathetic in turning over the passionate letters & verses, indited by aged genius & youthful beauty, after the lapse of four centuries and a half…”); the third edition of Studies of the Greek Poets (“…My friend R.L. Stevenson used to tell me how he read the Studies when they first appeared, & how lamentably, it seemed to him, the style sank here & there from literary charm & distinction to pedestrian commonplace…It has a note of its own, a way of feeling & seeing things which seems to me fresh, & which maturer criticism sometimes lacks…”); his lectures on the Philosophy of Music, Dante, the Popes from Paul II to Leo X (“such a procession of villains & wild beasts”), Florence, and other topics.

…I talk of [sex] from human documents, myself, the people I have known, the adulterers and prostitutes of both sexes I have dealt with over bottles of wine & confidences…Shall we ever be able to see human nature from a really central point of view!...we must be content to remain with pores & tentacles wh[ich] find no sympathetic response in our dearest brethren – nay in the wife of our bosom, the comrade who sleeps beside us & the children who grow up separately from ourselves; all of whom, soul & body, in their several ways we passionately love…

The greater part of these letters is published in The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters, 3 volumes, Wayne State University Press, 1967-69. However, over 80 letters and notes by Symonds to Dakyns, including some early and significant letters, remain entirely unpublished.

a highly informative collection documenting the life and works of a major figure in the history of sexual reform.