by Bart Schultz
Foucauldian) appreciation for the paradoxical stimulus to desire that re-
pression can bring. And he may have been more masculinist than Pater
in his readings of the Greeks, Whitman, and everything else. But for all
that, his life and explorations defy the stock Foucauldian and construc-
tivist categories for characterizing Victorian sexual discourse. Dellamora
has suggested how “a proliferation of sexual-cultural discourses after
provides rich resources for meditation on what, in the second volume of
The History of Sexuality, Foucault refers to as an ‘aesthetics of existence’
intimately related with a variety of male-male sexual practices, relation-
ships, and fantasies.” Indeed, Symonds and his circle are a wonderful
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case in point, and the vital and life-sustaining friendships among them
have scarcely even been noted, much less extensively researched. As im-
portant as Symonds’s paganistic partnership with Pater surely was, it was
quite secondary and less personal than his alliances with Graham Dakyns,
Arthur and Henry Sidgwick, and Horatio Forbes Brown.
There is a pleasant irony in the fact that witnessed Symonds
coming forward as a candidate for the professorship of poetry – in effect,
a public plea for the legitimation of his version of the Platonic Revival.
For in February of the very same year, just when he was in the thick of
his campaign for the professorship and soliciting the support of as many
influential friends and acquaintances as he could muster, he had also come
forward in an effort to rid himself of some of his old conflicts about his
tendencies. He had, for the first time, visited a male brothel, and become
truly fully sexually active with men. As his candid Memoirs explain:
In February , I think, I gave three lectures on ‘Florence and the Medici’ at
the Royal Institution. This took me of course to London; and, as it happened, an
acquaintance of old standing asked me one day to go with him to a male brothel
near the Regent’s Park Barracks. I consented out of curiosity. Moved by something
stronger than curiosity, I made an assignation with a brawny young soldier for an
afternoon to be passed in a private room at the same house. Naturally, I chose a day
on which I was not wanted at the Royal Institution. We came together at the time
appointed; the strapping young soldier with his frank eyes and pleasant smile,
and I, the victim of sophisticated passions. For the first time in my experience
I shared a bed with one so different from myself, so ardently desired by me, so
supremely beautiful in my eyes, so attractive to my senses. He was a very nice
fellow, as it turned out: comradely and natural, regarding the affair which had
brought us together in that place from a business-like and reasonable point of
view. For him at all events it involved nothing unusual, nothing shameful; and his
simple attitude, the not displeasing vanity with which he viewed his own physical
attractions, and the genial sympathy with which he met the passion they aroused,
taught me something I had never before conceived about illicit sexual relations.
Instead of yielding to any brutal impulse, I thoroughly enjoyed the close vicinity
of that splendid naked piece of manhood; then I made him clothe himself, sat and
smoked and talked with him, and felt, at the end of the whole transaction, that
some at least of the deepest moral problems might be solved by fraternity.
“Soldier Love” was destined to become Symonds’s special passion. But
it was much more than a personal affair. In a touching letter to Sidgwick
from September of , some years earlier, he had made clear how busy
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he was theorizing in advance of practice. Referring to their difficult, crit-
ical perspective on the work of another of their close, poetically inclined
friends, Roden Noel – who was in all probability the “acquaintance of old
standing” – Symonds wrote:
As for Noel and his controversy with you – some echoes of it I have heard. My
opinion about his actual achievement is not greatly altered, except that I think he
has improved in style and not lost in energy. But my admiration for him as a being
has vastly increased. I am sure I have said nothing to justify him in supposing
that I think him superior to Swinburne, or myself on a level with Morris. On the
contrary I vexed him much last June by telling him that I thought both he and I
had no chance in the long run against poets our superiors in delicacy of expression
and energy of imagination. Afterwards, alone among the hills, my Prophecy of
Love of Comrades as a future institution of Democracy came upon me; and I
began to believe more in my own poetic vocation.
Symonds also noted that he had read Sidgwick’s “‘Verification of Belief ’
at Mürren and was much impressed with its force, compression, and over-
whelming destructive accuracy of analysis. It is the most wholly sceptical
thing I have ever read. If you write a whole book in that way, it will be
about as hard as Aristotle. Oh for the precision of your well-thewed and
well-trained mind!” Sidgwick, as we shall see, had been challenged by
Symonds to prove that he was truly capable of skepticism.
Thus, the future candidate for the Oxford professorship had been plan-
ning his platform for some years; his vision of the new Renaissance was
akin to Pater’s, but more Whitmanesque, more openly celebratory of the
love of comrades. Strange as it may seem, Symonds’s assignation really
was in his eyes politically freighted – a stimulation of comradeship across
the classes that represented the Whitmanian vision of the democratic fu-
ture. The new pagans thus aspired, like the old clerisy, to stimulate social
change through a new, revitalizing literature, a new poetic language, that
would transform human sensibilities. This was recognizably a version of
the old Apostolic tradition, even if brought into a demand for academic
reform. Certainly, it resonated deeply with Sidgwick’s aspirations. One of
Symonds’s dearest comrades, Sidgwick counselled him at every turn. To
him, Symonds confessed, after he withdrew from the running in favor of
Shairp:
I believe it is really better for me in some ways not to have the Chair; though for
my mental health I should have liked it. The Renaissance is an odd atmosphere to
live in and a bad milieu to live into. I seriously feel as if I were losing my sense of
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what is fitting & decorous in conduct & were adopting the moral indifferentism of those people. To all this the P. P. [Poetry Professorship] would have been a good
corrective.
“Moral indifferentism” could be a rather dangerous thing, especially in
the years leading to the Labouchère Amendment Act of , the law that
would be used to ruin Oscar Wilde a decade later. Even if Symonds was
guilty less of a “common-sense” moral indifferentism and more of a highly
ethical differentism, he often had a curiously weak grasp of how dangerous
public reaction to his work might be. On the very eve of the Wilde trials,
Henry James, who had ungenerously portrayed Symonds in “The Author
of ‘Beltraffio’,” wrote a shrewd assessment of him to their mutual friend
Edmund Gosse. In contrast to Pater, who had been “negative & faintly
grey,” a “mask without a face” for the purposes of public consumption,
Symonds had been “almost insane” in his “need of taking the public
into his intimissima confidence.” Fortunately for Symonds, his friend
Sidgwick was an expert on the limits of commonsense morality and the
casuistry of hypocrisy.
III. Arcadia and the Augenblick
This terrible and lonely communing of his spirit face to face with the widest
abstractions which his intellect could compass, seems to me to contain the essence
of Symonds’ psychological quality. He had carried speculation in the abstract,
and the audacious interrogation of the Universe, to their utmost limits. It was
inevitable that, if he survived the strain, he would ultimately abandon the vacuum
of abstractions in which he was stifling, for the concrete world of men and things
about him.
Having boldly plunged into the ‘abyss,’ having learned that when sounded by
the plummet of the human intellect, it is actually void and bottomless, the instinct
of self-preservation, the shrinking from the ‘ seuil de la folie’ – caused him to cling to the antithesis of the void, the concrete manifestations of life, actual, visible,
sensible, as the one salvation in the mare magnum of speculation. This is, probably what he meant when he said that ‘the crisis at Cannes gave him a religion.’ He did
not attempt to fill the void with some definite concept of a Deity – that is what many have done – but Symonds’s twofold psychical structure debarred him from such a
salvation. Emotionally, he desired the warmth of a personal Deity; intellectually,
he rejected as ipso facto inadequate any concept of Deity which the human intellect could construct and therefore enclose. He abandoned the effort to grasp the Idée, and accepted the erscheinungen, by the study and interrogation of which he might
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still reach all that was humanly knowable of God. But the analytical, inquiring,
sceptical spirit, and the passion for the absolute still retained the regency of his
mind; therefore, for him all erscheinungen, all phenomena, are to be studied, none neglected, humanity is to be sounded to its depths, life to be ‘drunk to the lees.’
Horatio Forbes Brown, John Addington Symonds, A Biography
. . . the Alps are my religion . . .
John Addington Symonds to Henry Sidgwick, June ,
The year marked a turning point for Symonds, and the turn was
toward a healthier and happier existence – a coming out of sorts, and a
coming to terms. His failure to join the Oxford faculty, and his success
with his soldier, made it that much easier for him to distance himself from
the English environment that was, both psychologically and physically,
proving increasingly hazardous to his health. Indeed, it was later in the
very same year that chance would carry him to Davos, Switzerland, where
the bracing Alpine climate was considered particularly salubrious for those
who, like Symonds, suffered from tuberculosis. Ever afterward, he would
live much of his life in Davos, punctuated by long visits to Venice, where
his friend, former student, and literary executor Horatio Brown lived a life
of liberal scholarship and sexual liberty that would have been impossible
in liberal England. If Symonds was often dangerously out of touch with
the prejudices of the English, that was no doubt because he had gone far
to remove himself from them. Sidgwick would be a frequent visitor to
Davos, as would Dakyns.
As the passage from Brown’s biography suggests, the roots of Symonds’s
mature philosophy, the Whitmania he would have carried with him into
academia, are to be traced to an earlier psychological crisis – the “crisis in
Cannes,” which took place in late . It was then that the Platonism of his
youth imploded into something close to a Jamesian love of worldly partic-
ulars, into his own idiosyncratic mix of paganism and proto-pragmatism,
in which the Greek and Goethean ideal got transformed into a Cosmic
Enthusiasm fired by real-world male love and a Darwinian sense that the
world was enough. As always, Sidgwick was there. Their friendship, an
intense intermingling of the philosophical, the theological, and the per-
sonal, was for both an inquiry into the “deepest problems” like no other.
This was what “soaring” meant, even when it involved subjecting the
Platonic to some very serious reversals. For the “true self” that Symonds
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was obsessed with trying to understand and come to terms with was the
sexual self beneath the veneer of consciousness.
Symonds was an experiment in ethics and intuitive theism who chal-
lenged Sidgwick’s hopes to the very core, in a way so powerful that he would
make it into James’s Varieties of Religious Experience as well as Havelock
Ellis’s Studies in Sexual Inversion (originally as a coauthor). To under-
stand Sidgwick, with all his yearning for immortality and concern over
the rationality of egoism and the fate of his own hypocritical civilization,
one must understand Symonds, who debated these matters with him in
journals and letters unmatched in their intense candor and intimacy. With
Symonds, one finds, in the shape of an intimate friend, the challenge that
had troubled Sidgwick ever since his undergraduate Apostolic days, when
he wrote about the “symmetrical people,” such as the ancient Athenians,
who could be happy with the world as it is, needing no comforting re-
ligious thoughts about immortality. And with Symonds, one finds the
new paganism inexorably moving toward both the new pragmatism and
the new depth psychology, the depth psychology that would, paradoxi-
cally, in short order produce a medicalized d
iscourse about sexuality that
would classify the “homosexual” as “pathological,” a sickness rather than
a sin, albeit a rare criminal disease. As it transpired, the new psychologi-
cal science would embody the clinical attitudes of Symonds’s father – an
eminent physician for whom the disease model came easily – rather than
the liberationist dreams of his son. The inaugural discourse of heterosex-
ual/homosexual binarism, worked into medical classifications of character
types and pathologies, was virtually a Symonds family affair.
Earlier on, however, everything was in the air, and Symonds could
legitimately hope, in a way parallel to Sidgwick’s hope for parapsychology,
that “fresh facts” and scientific authority could befriend the poetics of the
new religion and the yearnings of the “true self.” Just as Sidgwick would
seek to redeem his deeper religious self with parapsychology, so Symonds
would seek to redeem his deeper sexual self with depth psychology (and
cultural history). Like Myers, whose work on the subliminal self he so
admired, Symonds knew well the trouble with normal. But to appreciate
just how the “crisis in Cannes” came about, and what it meant for the
Symonds–Sidgwick friendship, a good deal of fleshing out of the Symonds
biography is necessary.
Dr. Symonds was a very accomplished, prominent, and successful
Bristol physician and a man of cultivated tastes, a mix of science and
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poetry, medicine and art, combined with a steadfast political liberalism.
He had had to be both father and mother to his children, since John
Addington’s mother had died of scarlet fever in , only four years after
his birth.
Although Symonds senior had grown into a fairly enlightened, latitu-
dinarian form of faith, away from his familial Puritanical and Evangelical
rigorism and open to “the influence of the age in which he lived,” his son
developed a “morbid sense of sin and screamed at night about imaginary
acts of disobedience.” Symonds was to suffer from forms of visionary