Impossible Love and Victorian Values: J. A. Symonds and the Intellectual History of Homosexuality
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Impossible Love and Victorian Values: J. A. Symonds and the
Intellectual History of Homosexuality
Emily Rutherford
Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 75, Number 4, October 2014, pp. 605-627
(Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2014.0028
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/557235
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Impossible Love and Victorian Values:
J. A. Symonds and the Intellectual
History of Homosexuality
Emily Rutherford
On February 1, 1889, the British historian and essayist John Addington
Symonds (1840–93) wrote Benjamin Jowett a letter. Jowett was the Master
of Balliol College, Oxford, and Symonds’s former tutor; Symonds had been
helping him to revise his popular translation of Plato’s dialogues. The letter
asked how Jowett could be so ignorant of history as to regard homoerotic
love described in Plato as ‘‘mainly a figure of speech.’’ Symonds explained
what the ‘‘concrete facts’’ of love between men in ancient Athens could
mean to modern men innately predisposed to same-sex attraction. He
described the ‘‘heaven in hell’’ of reading about homoerotic love in Plato,
then seeing it disavowed by Jowett’s commentary. He emphasized the
duplicity and hypocrisy of educators who hid the truth about homoeroti-
cism, demonstrating themselves not to have their students’ best interests at
heart.1
This expression of frustration—passionate, but grounded in empirical
evidence—is characteristic of Symonds’s writing about same-sex desire.
Since the 1960s, scholars have richly detailed the fin-de-siècle European
literary and artistic community of men who desired men, and some have
1
Herbert Schueller and Robert Peters, eds., The Letters of John Addington Symonds
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967–69), 3:345–47. Hereafter Letters.
Copyright by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 75, Number 4 (October 2014)
605
PAGE 605
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recognized Symonds’s significance within it. But they have focused on cul-
tural context or sexual identity rather than on the origins of his ideas.2
Practitioners of ‘‘traditional’’ intellectual history have likewise breathed
new life into late-Victorian intellectuals who found self-understanding in
reading and scholarship. Yet those who have treated Symonds have tended
either to shy away from sexuality or, in focusing on the fundamental nature
of sex, to exclude the wider context.3 Though we now know much about
Symonds’s cultural milieu, his distinctive blend of scholarship and sexual
identity could be better understood. He was shaped by the same thinkers—
Hegel, Arnold, Ranke, Whitman—and used the same intellectual tools as
many others, but he stood apart in his conviction that modern thinkers had
wrongly suppressed the existence of same-sex desire, and in his ability to
conceive new possibilities for expressing it. By situating his ideas about
homosexuality within their intellectual context, this article hopes to cast
him in a new light: not as a sexual radical, but as a Victorian scholar whose
subject was love.
Like most educated men of his time, Symonds began as a classicist.
Taught Latin and Greek from the age of seven, he attended Harrow, where
he would have encountered the Iliad, the Republic, and other canonical
2
Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Cen-
tury to the Present (London: Quartet, 1977), and Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The
Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985); Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary
Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989); Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The
Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1990); Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer
Movement (London: Cassell, 1994); Jonathan N. Katz, Love Stories: Sex Between Men
before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); H.G. Cocks, Name-
less Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003);
Morris Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005); Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations
of Inversion, 1860–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Stefano Evangelista,
British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in
Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Brady, John Adding-
ton Symonds and Homosexuality: A Critical Edition of Sources (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012).
3
G.P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans,
1955); Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980);
Frank Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1981); Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann
to Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); cf. John Pemble, ed., John Add-
ington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2000).
606
................. 18638$ $CH4 09-30-14 15:30:48 PS PAGE 606Rutherford ✦ J. A. Symonds and the History of Homosexuality
classical texts.4 In mid-nineteenth-century Harrow, the masculine ideal of
‘‘muscular Christianity’’ held sway, and homoerotic sentiment was
expressed through furtive sexual explorations.5 But in his last year of
school, Symonds chanced upon the Symposium and the Phaedrus—and dis-
covered paiderastia, the social institution of erotic relationships between an
older and a younger elite Athenian man.6 Reverence for Plato and for the
Greeks generally prepared him to read these dialogues as faithfully as the
ones he had already encountered, and he found that they acknowledged a
kind of desire which he lacked the words to articulate in English—he
referred to it with a Greek phrase, ρως των δυν των, the love of impossi-
ble things. As he recorded in his Memoirs, he believed himself to have dis-
covered ‘‘the true liber amoris at last, the revelation I had been waiting
for.’’7 Symonds never lost his respect for the Greeks or his belief that they
could be a guide to ethical public life. Seeing new erotic possibilities in the
classical tradition did not mean rejecting its other aspects.8 But nor did he
forget—or forgive—the hypocrisy of the system that had taught him to view
Plato as the route to manliness and worldly success.
In 1858, Symonds matriculated at Balliol, entering a university con-
sumed by philosophical, moral, and pedagogical questions.9 Debates about
how to teach and learn, how to read, and how to believe in God shaped his
sense that same-sex love needed to be considered on both historical and
4
M.L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain, 1500–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1959), 74–97; Christopher Tyerman, A History of Harrow School 1324–
1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 249–59.
5
Phyllis Grosskurth, ed., The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1984), 97–98, 111–15, hereafter Memoirs; David Newsome, Godliness
and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal (London: John Murray, 1961),
216; Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 170–96; Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homo-
sexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 32–66; Kaplan,
Sodom on the Thames, 102–65.
6
Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1978); David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge,
1990); cf. James Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of
Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (London: Orion, 2007).
7
Symonds, Memoirs, 99.
8
Cf. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, 76–81; Paul Deslandes, Oxbridge Men:
British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 2005).
9
M.G. Brock and M.C. Curthoys, eds., The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. VI
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality; A.J. Engel, From
Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-century Oxford
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1983); Heather Ellis, Generational Conflict and the University
Reform: Oxford in the Age of Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
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moral terms. Was it more valuable, for example, to uncover the truth about
texts or to impart their moral value to undergraduates? Symonds had men-
tors who held both views. At Balliol, he was taught by Benjamin Jowett,
the pre-eminent proponent of Hellenic high culture as a progressive and
civilizing influence and of Plato as a guide to all facets of life; and by T. H.
Green, an idealist philosopher committed to social causes, who introduced
Symonds to Hegel and led him to ponder broader moral and metaphysical
questions.10 Both believed that the classics prepared young men to lead vir-
tuous lives in the world beyond Oxford, and interpreted texts in that light.
Another of Symonds’s tutors was John Conington, whose approach was
more historical and philological. From Conington, in whom Symonds con-
fided about his ‘‘impossible’’ desires, he may have learned the value of clas-
sical scholarship as a tool for ferreting out the truth about distant times and
places.11
Oxford also hummed with debate about the role of religion in educa-
tion and public life. Symonds’s Memoirs recalled, ‘‘We talked theology at
breakfast parties and at wine parties, out riding and walking, in college
gardens, on the river, wherever young men and their elders met together.’’12
Intense discussion of theology—particularly in the wake of the publication
of the controversial, theologically progressive Essays and Reviews in
1860—shared elements with the Platonic pedagogical philosophy under-
girding the newly-formalized tutorial system, and even with the ‘‘Platonic
doctrine of eros’’ Symonds had begun to explore.13 Symonds worried about
the ‘‘goodness’’ of homoerotic desire in Hebraic as well as Hellenic terms,
engaged with a religiously-minded strand of mid-Victorian thought about
how to manage desires that threatened to make one lose control.
Accordingly, the final element of Symonds’s Oxford intellectual devel-
opment is to be found in Matthew Arnold’s approach to criticism. The
professor of poetry when Symonds was an undergraduate, Arnold was on
the committee that awarded Symonds the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, and
10
Symonds to Graham Dakyns and Henry Sidgwick, Letters, 2:51, 2:388; Sandra den
Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late-Victorian Thought
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 36–50.
11
Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, 247–53; Christopher Stray, Classics Trans-
formed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1998), and Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning, 1800–2000 (London:
Duckworth, 2007). See also Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love (London: Faber and
Faber, 1997).
12
Symonds, Memoirs, 244.
13
Frederic Hedge, ed., Essays and Reviews (London: Longman, 1861); Ieuan Ellis, Seven
Against Christ: A Study of ‘‘Essays and Reviews’’ (Leiden: Brill, 1980).
608
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it seems likely that his view of Hellenism as a progressive, civilizing influ-
ence helped to shape Symonds’s first literary success, Studies of the Greek
Poets.14 Symonds used the Arnoldian language of ‘‘Light, serenity, har-
mony, balance, definition, σωφροσνη [moderation]’’ to evoke the ‘‘Greek
Spirit,’’ which he associated with the ability to express a close relationship
between aesthetics and ethics.15 Like Arnold, he believed that understand-
ing the art, literature, and culture of ancient Greece would bring order and
beauty to the modern world, and that in a fully-realized culture, the
inspired, artistic, enthusiastic spirit of Hellenism would be tempered but
not subsumed by the moral tenor of Hebraism.
Symonds pulled these strands together in the margins of his undergrad-
uate copy of Gottfried Stallbaum’s commentary on the Phaedrus. Jowett
dismissed the love between men depicted in the dialogue as ‘‘a figure of
speech’’;16 Symonds’s marginalia show him testing this claim. He underlines
the passage in which Socrates speaks of the lover’s transformation upon
beholding the beautiful boy he loves,17 but also highlights Stallbaum’s com-
ments on Socrates’s enumeration of the dangers of loving too irrationally
and uncontrollably. Next to Socrates’s description of love as mania he
writes, ‘‘How can any one in their senses think that what they want, when
labouring in this disease, can be good?’’18 For someone taught to respect
the Plato of the Laws and the Republic as the guide to virtue, who then
found himself reading exaltations of beautiful boys amidst a culture that
denied them, Socrates’s discussion of mania must have been troubling. Yet
Symonds did not skirt these unsettling passages as Jowett did. His margina-
lia show him trying to understand them in context: how a lover might exer-
cise moderation, preventing his passion from spiraling out of control; how
one might put love of beautiful boys to virtuous use. It makes sense to read
Symonds’s marginal question not merely as rhetorical, but as the start of a
genuine search for possibility and truth that would occupy his life for years
to come.
Other classicists found a guide to their homoerotic desires in Plato,
but responded differently. The Eton master William Johnson Cory wrote
14
John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 2 vols. (1873; London: Smith,
Elder, & Co., 1873, 1876).
15
Symonds, Letters, 2:299; Symonds, ‘‘The Genius of Greek Art,’’ in Studies of the Greek
Poets, 1: 412–38.
16
Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato Translated into English with Analyses and
Introductions, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892), 486.
17
Phaedrus 251–52.
18
Platonis Phaedrus, ed. Godofredus Stallbaum (Gotha and Erfurt: Hennings, 1857),
Morgan Library (hereafter ML), 125969, iv, 26.
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widely-read poetry that consigned idealized homoeroticism to an unrecov-
erable classical past, as inaccessible as golden youth to the old.19 Symonds
experimented with Cory-style elegiacs, but he resolved that scholarship
could recover the past, and could offer clues about how to live in the pres-
ent.20 Combining Jowett’s and Conington’s approaches to classics, Hegel’s
philosophy of history, a determination to ascertain foundations for ethics,
and Arnold’s presentation of culture (especially through the critical essay)
as a living thing that could shape those ethics, Symonds came to believe
that the historian could reconstruct—and the public learn from—the spirits
of past ages.21
This is most apparent in Symonds’s seven-volume history of the
Renaissance in Italy.22 Unlike his Oxford contemporary Walter Pater, whose
Studies in the History of the Renaissance highlighted homoerotically-inclined
artists’ struggle against the Weltgeist, Symonds argued that examination of
writers, artists, scholars, and key political figures and events could yield
understanding of ‘‘the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human
spirit manifested in the European races.’’23 He sought to ascertain why
intellectual and artistic endeavor flourished in Italy beginning in the four-
teenth century; elements of continuity between the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, and modernity; the role of Christianity in intellectual and cul-
tural life; and the writers and artists who best embodied the Zeitgeist. He
used a range of primary and secondary sources—though most of them were
printed and easily available in Britain—and his own observations of Italian
art and architecture. Like other English scholars of the period, Symonds
often synthesized or adapted the work of German and French scholars who
had done more extensive research. Yet he was one of the first people to
19
William Johnson Cory, Ionica (London: George Allen, 1858); Timothy d’Arch Smith,
Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from
1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge, 1970); Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames, 102–65. See
also William Shuter, ‘‘Pater, Wilde, Douglas and the Impact of ‘Greats,’ ’’ English Litera-
ture in Transition 46 (2003): 250–78; Stefano Evangelista, ‘‘ ‘Lovers and Philosophers At
Once’: Aesthetic Platonism in the Victorian Fin de Siècle,’’ Yearbook of English Studies
36 (2006): 230–44.
20
‘‘In Memoriam Arcadiae,’’ 1859, ML 225089; ‘‘Friendship, An Idyll,’’ August 1859,
Bristol University Library (hereafter BUL) DM393/1/5. Cf. Thomas Wright and Donald
Mead, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Oscar Wilde: The Women of Homer (London: Oscar Wilde
Society, 2008), 10.
21
Peter Holliday, ‘‘Symonds and the Model of Ancient Greece,’’ in Pemble, Culture and
the Demon Desire, 86–87.
22
John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 7 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, & Co.,
1875–86).
23
Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 1:4.
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write history in this style in English, and one of its most comprehensive
practitioners.
Symonds identified his approach as ‘‘Cultur geschichte [sic],’’ indicat-
ing that he situated it with respect to historiographical developments on the
Continent.24 In the first half of the nineteenth century, academic history was
transformed when German scholars like Leopold von Ranke created new
methods and genres, combining intensive study of sources with experiments
in narrative. They tried to reveal the past ‘‘as it really was.’’ Symonds’s
Renaissance reflects these developments. Arguing that the ‘‘Spirit of the
Renaissance’’ pursued a self-conscious process of becoming modern that
was visible in many areas of cultural expression, it had much in common
with the work of Ranke’s student Jacob Burckhardt, particularly his Die
Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), the preeminent example of Kul-
turgeschichte.25 Symonds claimed that he did not come across Burckhardt’s
work until he was writing his later volumes, but there are many parallels.26
Both focus on the Renaissance as a period of developing freedom and self-
realization, a step toward modernity—though Symonds saw this as an
unqualifiedly progressive teleology, while Burckhardt believed that modern
individual liberty was not so developed as it had been in the Renaissance.
Both focused on individuals and their ideas and emotions rather than on
institutions and social structures, and both were interested more in how
Renaissance Italians thought than what they did.27
Symonds’s civilizing teleology also had roots in the liberal English his-
torical tradition: whether represented by Thomas Arnold’s Anglican work
or by George Grote’s utilitarianism-influenced History of Greece. In Studies
of the Greek Poets, Symonds concurs with many of Grote’s assumptions
about the martial prowess and the moral virtues of Periclean Athens, and
24
Symonds, Letters, 2:359–60.
25
Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel: Schweighauser’schen
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1860). On Burckhardt’s Hegelianism, see E.H. Gombrich, In
Search of Cultural History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969); on Ranke and Burckhardt, see
Felix Gilbert, ‘‘Jacob Burckhardt’s Student Years: The Road to Cultural History,’’ Journal
of the History of Ideas 47 (1986): 249–74.
26
Symonds, Age of the Despots, 1:viii; W.K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical
Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 198–203;
cf. John Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance: The Growth of Interest in its History
and Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 141–42.
27
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middle-
more (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1890); Ferguson, Renaissance in Historical
Thought; Gooch, History and Historians, 529–33; Peter Bowler, The Invention of Prog-
ress: Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 44; Yvonne Ivory, The Homo-
sexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009), 13–48.
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attempts to identify specific historical precedents to the liberal civilization
enjoyed by Victorian people. Like Arnold, he takes seriously the contribu-
tions of Judeo-Christianity to the Geist of the Renaissance and therefore to
modern European culture.28 Symonds’s method is a synthesis of Kultur-
geschichte and liberal English historiography—and after all, both Matthew
Arnold’s criticism and Ranke’s history entailed seeing things ‘‘as they really
are,’’ applying a standard of empirical objectivity to matters of humanistic
inquiry.29
Scholars have related Symonds’s interest in the Italian Renaissance
directly to his sexuality.30 The homoeroticism in the Renaissance, however,
is just one part of a thorough overview of Italian culture from the four-
teenth through sixteenth centuries; Symonds took seriously the need for
‘‘[i]mpartial clearness of judgment’’ and ‘‘methodic scrupulousness’’ in his-
torical research. Still, he did use history to address the questions about
‘‘Greek love’’ he had first asked in the margins of Stallbaum’s commentary.
In 1873, he wrote an essay called A Problem in Greek Ethics in order to
explore ideas he was unable to address in more public forums.31 It docu-
ments how love between men was practiced in ancient Greece, attempts to
determine ethical principles governing same-sex sexual behavior, and
shows that such principles varied across times and cultures. He thought it
‘‘one of the few adequate works of scholarship I can call my own,’’ and it
remains one of his most compelling.32
28
George Grote, A History of Greece, from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Genera-
tion Contemporary With Alexander the Great (London: John Murray, 1869); Thomas
Arnold, Lectures on Modern History (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1842); Duncan Forbes, The
Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); Turner,
Greek Heritage, 94–115; Gooch, History and Historians, 294–95; Whitney Davis, Queer
Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), 133–34.
29
Ferguson, Renaissance in Historical Thought, 198; cf. Peter Allan Dale, ‘‘Beyond
Humanism: J.A. Symonds and the Replotting of the Renaissance,’’ Clio 17 (1988):
109–37.
30
Grosskurth, Woeful Victorian, 162; Davis, Queer Beauty, 99–134; Brady, Symonds
and Homosexuality, 16; Ivory, Homosexual Revival.
31
A Problem in Greek Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion.
Symonds privately printed ten copies in 1883, which he circulated among friends. His
own copy is held by the British Library (CUP.402.c.2). He subsequently revised the text
(see below); the new version was published in two pirated editions (1901, 1908). Where
the text is consistent across editions, I cite the widely-available 1901 edition; where not,
I cite the BL copy. The 1883 text has now been reprinted in Brady, Symonds and Homo-
sexuality.
32
Symonds, Memoirs, 232.
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Symonds uses literary sources to argue that the Greeks alone in West-
ern history distinguished between ‘‘vulgar’’ and ‘‘heroic’’ forms of ‘‘mascu-
line passion,’’ subjecting them to ethical scrutiny.33 His claim rests on
Pausanias’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, which distinguishes what Jowett’s
translation terms the ‘‘common’’ (π νδημος) and ‘‘heavenly’’ (ορ νιος)
loves—the one carnal, the other spiritual.34 To Symonds, Pausanias was sug-
gesting that aesthetic appreciation of the male form was less important than
the spiritual and social purpose behind it—sexual gratification was second-
ary. Symonds argues that his own culture, by denying same-sex love public
recognition, reduced homoeroticism to merely sexual contact. He praises
love between men guided by ‘‘modest self-restraint,’’ and the sublimation
of sexual desire to intellectual, spiritual, and comradely ends.35 This is the
resolution of the title ‘‘problem’’: the Greeks valued paiderastia because it
was a force for ethical good. Then, by analyzing the oration of Aeschines
against Timarchus, an Athenian citizen accused of having prostituted him-
self in his youth,36 Symonds illustrates the practical application of Pausani-
as’s distinction: Athenian law separated honorable love between men from
love that was dishonorable because it involved the exchange of money or
the use of another’s body purely for sex. He also argued that Athenians did
not agree about the rules for managing homoerotic behavior, a conclusion
that escaped writers who relied only on idealizing literary sources.37
Symonds’s citations from canonical authors implicitly question
whether Oxford ‘‘Greats’’ could teach morality while pretending paideras-
tia did not exist. His quotation of Jowett’s translations shows his interest
in bending conventional Hellenism to the inclusion of a particular kind of
masculine desire. Challenging Jowett’s dismissal of Pausanias’s speech as
‘‘sophistic and confused in view,’’ Symonds writes that it ‘‘is precisely on
this account that it is valuable’’: if readers approached the classics with the
right critical and historical eye, they would find the truth about antiquity’s
views on homosexuality. The Greeks’ confusion and contradictions could
teach as much as their ideals.38 The essay concludes, ‘‘It is not imaginable
that humanity, after the discipline of the last eighteen centuries, should
revert to the conditions of Greek life’’; the moral improvement promised
33
Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual
Inversion (London: privately printed, 1901), 19, 44.
34
Jowett, Dialogues, II:30.
35
Symonds, Greek Ethics (1883), 69.
36
Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 19–20.
37
Symonds, Greek Ethics (1901), 44–47.
38
Ibid., 31. For Jowett’s dismissal, see Dialogues, II.15.
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by Pausanias’s ‘‘heavenly love’’ had ‘‘failed.’’39 Yet, by translating his
undergraduate questions of the Phaedrus into a historical investigation,
Symonds transformed Greek love into something he could consider analyti-
cally, drawing connections between past and present.
In 1878, suffering from tuberculosis and seeking to improve his health,
Symonds moved his family to the Swiss Alps, where they would live until
his death in 1893. The move isolated him from many developments in
English thought, but provided greater access to European books and
ideas—notably the burgeoning German-language sexological literature.40
Symonds believed in science’s ability to advance human understanding, and
seized upon the literature on ‘‘sexual inversion,’’ which, he felt, was ‘‘just
beginning to receive the attention it deserves.’’41 He began to translate, pop-
ularize, and reinterpret Sexualwissenschaft in the same way he had Kultur-
geschichte. He valued and criticized the methods of sexologists in equal
parts, but one point was clear: cultural history provided empirical evidence
that men had loved men in the past; sexology showed that they still did.
Working same-sex desire into a sense of self was no longer hypothetical. In
this period, the phrase ‘‘ρως τω ν δυν των’’ dropped out of Symonds’s
writing.
In 1890, inspired in part by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s efforts to write
frankly about the condition of the ‘‘Urning’’ in modern Germany, Symonds
undertook A Problem in Modern Ethics, which surveyed recent writing on
‘‘sexual inversion’’ in a variety of genres.42 He sent copies to readers from
the explorer and Kama Sutra translator Richard Burton to Henry James,
drawing theorists of inversion into an international conversation notable
for appealing rigorously to humanistic and scientific fact alike.43 Symonds’s
use of the term ‘‘sexual inversion’’ is telling: an English rendering of con-
träre Sexualempfindung, it was the standard medical expression for the
39
Symonds, Greek Ethics (1883), 96–97.
40
Robert Beachy, ‘‘The German Invention of Homosexuality,’’ Journal of Modern His-
tory 82 (2010): 801–38.
41
Symonds, Letters, 3:506–7; Symonds, ‘‘The Philosophy of Evolution,’’ Essays Specula-
tive and Suggestive (London: Chapman & Hall, 1890), 1–26.
42
Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics (London: privately printed, 1896). The original
fifty-copy edition of Modern Ethics (1891) is rare; I cite here the 1896 pirated reprint.
The pirated text is identical, though the pagination differs: see Edward Carpenter’s 1891
copy, ML 125900. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmänn-
lichen Liebe, ed. Hubert Kennedy (Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel, 1994); Symonds, Letters,
3:814–15.
43
Symonds, Letters, 3:488; Rayburn Moore, ed., Selected Letters of Henry James to
Edmund Gosse, 1882–1915: A Literary Friendship (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 90.
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condition of a man who desires men. Symonds thought it the only ‘‘neutral
nomenclature’’ for a condition widely believed to be immoral.44 This faith
in the ability of the scientific profession to circumvent prejudice suffuses
Modern Ethics. Most of the essay is devoted to disproving ‘‘vulgar errors’’
about inverts’ depravity, criminality, and tendency to pedophilia, and to
highlighting pieces of the medical literature that had addressed such issues
particularly poorly or well.
Symonds’s footnotes indicate the range of his reading in non-English-
language literature that, due to obscenity law, was not readily available in
Britain.45 When his English audience read his analyses of writers like Ulrichs
and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, they may have been encountering them for
the first time. Symonds believed that such literature could demystify inver-
sion and reframe the public discourse around pathology instead of criminal-
ity.46 He disagreed with Ulrichs about the nature of classical homoerotic
desire, but sided with him in championing positivist methods—using data
from the case histories in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis or his and
his friends’ experiences to test sexologists’ claims.47 He saw enough ‘‘techni-
cal value’’ in sexologists’ different categories of inversion to create tables
helping the reader to visualize their taxonomies, and to echo them when
dividing ethical from unethical exercises of same-sex desire.48
Nonetheless, Modern Ethics’ introduction frames Symonds’s method
as historical.49 He uses comparisons to antiquity and the Renaissance to
criticize contemporary prejudice against inverts, and to discredit the work
of scientists with a limited historical sense.50 He also highlights instances in
which science is insufficient to understand inversion: whether in the case
of ‘‘taste, fashion, preference’’ (which he believed could affect tendency to
44
Symonds, Modern Ethics, 3.
45
Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in
Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 163.
46
Cf. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, 130–31.
47
On Ulrichs’s idiosyncratic readings of classical texts, see Sebastian Mätzner, ‘‘Literary
Criticism and/as Gender Reassignment: Reading the Classics with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’’
(paper presented at the Gender and Literature Seminar, Oxford, November 15, 2012);
Mätzner, ‘‘From Uranians to Homosexuals: Philhellenism, Greek Homoeroticism, and
Gay Emancipation in Germany 1835–1915,’’ Classical Receptions Journal 2 (2010): 60–
91. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, with especial reference to Anti-
pathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study, trans. F.J. Rebman (Chicago: W.T.
Keener & Co., 1901); Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychia-
try, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
48
Symonds, Modern Ethics, 60, 89, 126–28.
49
Ibid., 1–4.
50
Ibid., 5, 9–15, 37.
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inversion), or when castigating Richard Burton for his claim that same-
sex sexual relations in the Arab world or the South Pacific are caused by
geographical and climatic factors.51 He criticizes sexologists’ inability to
perceive cultural differences, and his classical and historical background is
evident when he structures his explication of Ulrichs’s theory of ‘‘Urning-
love’’ on Platonic lines.52 Writing as a sympathetic observer of rather than
a participant in the sexological discourse, Symonds introduced complexity,
historicism, and emotion to sexual science.53
Gradually, this work reshaped his approach. In 1892, he decided to
collaborate with the radical writer and doctor Havelock Ellis on a study
that would eventually be published, four years after Symonds’s death, as
Sexual Inversion.54 They corresponded at length.55 Symonds promised to
provide historical material and suggested that Ellis might ‘‘criticize the
crudest modern medical . . . theories.’’56 However, the collaborators dif-
fered on method, tone, and scope. Ellis stuck to the then-standard ‘‘morbid-
ity’’ hypothesis, while Symonds held that inversion was a deviation from
the norm, not an illness. Neurosis in inverts, he argued, might stem from
the strain of having to hide one’s inversion from society.57 They disagreed
about the role of history. Symonds initially proposed that the first half of
the book be a history of inversion from ancient Greece to the present.58
While Ellis admired Symonds’s erudition, he remained unconvinced that
the past necessarily illuminated the present, and worried that historical dis-
cussion would distract from claims about sexual inversion as a physiologi-
cal or neurological phenomenon.59 By the time Symonds died, the historical
material had been reduced to a brief preface and a revised version of A
Problem in Greek Ethics, printed as an appendix to the main text.60 Finally,
51
Ibid., 28, 80–81.
52
Ibid., 34, 106–14; see Brady (2005), 190.
53
See Suzanne Raitt, ‘‘Sex, Love and the Homosexual Body in Early Sexology,’’ in Sexol-
ogy in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 1998), 135–49.
54
Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition, ed. Ivan Crozier (London: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2008).
55
Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1980), 111–13,
173–75; Symonds, Letters, 3:98, 3:458–59, 3:587; letters from Ellis to Symonds, July 10,
1891 (Havelock Ellis Papers, British Library Add MS 70524 f. 82), June 18, 1892 (BL
Add MS 70524 f. 84), July 1, 1892 (f. 86). Cf. Joseph Bristow, ‘‘Symonds’s History,
Ellis’s Heredity: Sexual Inversion,’’ in Sexology in Culture, 79–99.
56
Symonds, Letters, 3:709–10.
57
Ibid., 3:755. See also 3:753; BL Add MS 70524 f. 90.
58
Symonds, Letters, 3:755.
59
Ellis to Symonds, December 21, 1892, BL Add MS 70524 f. 91; January 3, 1893, f. 94;
March 3, 1893, BUL DM376.
60
Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 36n118, 43, 85 and passim.
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Ellis had to exhort Symonds to remember the ladies. Ellis’s wife’s affair
with a woman had prompted him to undertake the project, and so he
sought some balance with Symonds’s similarly self-driven interest in male
inversion, asking Symonds to add discussion of female inversion to his
Greek section.61 Ellis provided all the data on female inversion: for instance,
the case histories of the writer Vernon Lee and her long-term partner Mary
Robinson, as well as of his wife and her friends.62
Indeed, one thing on which the collaborators could agree was the col-
lection of case histories from a range of British inverts. At first, Ellis had to
persuade Symonds to grant these equal weight with historical and literary
sources, pointing out that the existing literature did not include cases from
Britain.63 Symonds took the point, and provided his own history and those
of friends and acquaintances, drawing up a standardized questionnaire to
aid the collection of data.64 Gradually he concluded that contemporary
material was as vital as classical: less-informed sexologists, he declared,
‘‘not only do not know Ancient Greece, but they do not know their own
cousins and club-mates.’’65 Symonds and Ellis cobbled together a list of 52
famous men whom they judged to be inverts—‘‘many of them honourably
known in Church, State, Society, Art, & Letters,’’ but the only ones in the
country whom they could definitively claim.66 Ellis wrote to the socialist
and self-identified Urning Edward Carpenter for help, and he provided his
own case and those of working-class men from the north of England to
whom Symonds had no access.67 The book eventually contained 36 cases;
Case 17 was Symonds’s own.68
The book went to press with Symonds’s name after Ellis’s on the title
page, but Symonds’s widow and friends expressed reservations. Symonds’s
literary executor asked Ellis to remove Symonds’s name, and bought up
the first edition.69 Subsequent editions bore no visible trace of Symonds’s
involvement. When Henry Sidgwick reviewed the second edition in 1899,
61
Symonds, Letters, 3:816–18.
62
Ellis to Symonds, January 3, 1893, BL Add MS 70524 f. 94; Ellis, Sexual Inversion,
46.
63
Ellis to Symonds, February 9, 1893, BUL DM376.
64
Symonds, Letters, 3:816–18.
65
Ibid., 3:693–94.
66
Preface to Sexual Inversion (1897), reprinted in Crozier edition (2008), 94.
67
Ellis to Carpenter, December 17, 1892, BL Add MS 70536; Ellis to Symonds, January
18, 1893, BUL DM376.
68
Ellis, Sexual Inversion (2008), 181. On sexological case studies see Oosterhuis, Step-
children of Nature, 127–209.
69
Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: A Biography, 181–83; see also Ellis to Carpenter, August
3, 1897, BL Add MS 70536.
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he called it a ‘‘solid and valuable contribution’’ to sexual science, but did
not mention its co-author, one of his closest friends.70
Yet Symonds’s stamp on Sexual Inversion remains, not least because
his urging likely led Ellis to see the study to fruition.71 Thanks to Symonds’s
criticisms of morbidity theory, Sexual Inversion abandoned the organizing
divide between ‘‘normal’’/procreative and ‘‘abnormal’’/non-procreative sex
acts and sexualities characteristic of earlier sexology. Symonds was also
behind the book’s case for reform of Britain’s ‘‘gross indecency’’ law—a
bold claim so soon after Oscar Wilde’s conviction under it.72 Above all,
thanks to Symonds, the first edition bridges the divide between scientific
and humanistic ways of understanding sexuality. Symonds’s close reading
of Leaves of Grass, addressing the nature of Walt Whitman’s ‘‘manly love,’’
sits alongside Ellis’s attempts to make precise determinations as to, for
instance, the ‘‘first appearance of homosexual instinct.’’73 Symonds signifi-
cantly revised Greek Ethics to fit the generic constraints of a scientific text.74
In addition to composing a section on love between women, translating
Greek quotations for a non-classicist audience, and excising some of the
most ribald anecdotes, Symonds added a new introduction that addressed
‘‘medical psychologists and jurists,’’ stressing that historical analysis was
intrinsic to a neutral, tolerant perspective on inversion.75 He also deleted
the conclusion in which he argued that, ‘‘It is not imaginable that humanity
. . . should revert to the conditions of Greek life.’’76 Perhaps the range of
case studies he had gathered resembled enough ‘‘the conditions of Greek
life’’ to change his mind. No longer the romantic ideal of ‘‘impossible’’
love, it was something that had really happened in history and continued
to happen between contemporary men.
Symonds’s contributions to Sexual Inversion complicate Ellis’s medical
view of homosexuality, particularly his claims that homosexuality is con-
genital (not cultural), and that it is usually connected to gender inversion.77
70
Henry Sidgwick, review, International Journal of Ethics 9 (1899): 261–62; Bart
Schultz, Henry Sidgwick: The Eye of the Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
71
Preface to Sexual Inversion (1897), reprinted in Crozier edition (2008), 92.
72
Ellis, Sexual Inversion (2008), 220–23; see also Crozier’s introduction, 28, 34.
73
Ibid., 110–11, 183.
74
Brady, John Addington Symonds, 31. See also Ellis, Sexual Inversion (2008), 52.
75
Ellis, Sexual Inversion (2008), 229; see also Symonds, Greek Ethics (1901), 1. The
pirated editions of Greek Ethics use the text from Sexual Inversion, aside from the
replacement of Greek quotations with Symonds’s English translations and small discrep-
ancies attributable to fallible typesetters.
76
Symonds, Greek Ethics (1883), 97.
77
See Ellis, Sexual Inversion (2008), 52.
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Yet the interaction between Ellis’s and Symonds’s approaches is multidirec-
tional, and Symonds cannot be enlisted as a resistance fighter against an
oppressive medico-legal discourse.78 Symonds saw that science could help
him to elucidate the origins and the evolution of same-sex sexual behavior,
but that it could not answer all of his questions. He insisted on giving
history its due weight in Sexual Inversion because an all-encompassing sci-
entistic vision would ‘‘render the universe a machine.’’79 A theory of homo-
sexuality needed to address complex questions about the nature of love, the
management of desire, and their relevance to the general good. This
required reading texts carefully and seeing people as individuals with inner
lives and human fallibility.
Symonds’s views on such matters were unlike those of his friends who
were more engaged with new epistemological developments. Comparing
himself to Henry Sidgwick, he wrote that ‘‘[h]e talks of sex, out of legal
codes, & blue books [government reports]. I talk of it, from human docu-
ments, myself, the people I have known. . . .’’80 The case studies Symonds
contributed to Sexual Inversion, which illuminated and particularized
Ellis’s diagnostic statements, were such ‘‘human documents.’’ Symonds
believed that the public should care about inverts and their ethical quandar-
ies precisely because, as he quoted from Terence, ‘‘what is human is alien
to no human being.’’81 He displayed the same impulse in his Memoirs,
which—weighted less towards sex than the abridged published edition
suggests—make clear that his sense of homosexual identity had more to do
with self-knowledge than with sex.82 Like the life-writing of other Victorian
intellectuals who formed identity through scholarship, such as the Oxford
don Mark Pattison, they illustrate how reading, friendships, and family
shaped Symonds’s development—even of his sexual identity.83 In the
78
Cf. Koestenbaum, Double Talk, 44–45; Bristow, ‘‘Symonds’s History, Ellis’s Hered-
ity’’; see also Ellis, Sexual Inversion (2008), 84.
79
Symonds, Letters, 2:986; Symonds, ‘‘The Philosophy of Evolution’’; Lorraine Daston
and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007); Carlo Ginzburg, ‘‘Clues:
Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,’’ in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce,
ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983),
81–118.
80
Symonds, Letters, 3:475–76.
81
Symonds, Modern Ethics, 4.
82
‘‘Autobiography’’ manuscript, 1885, London Library; Sarah Heidt, ‘‘ ‘Let JAS’ Words
Stand’: Publishing John Addington Symonds’s Desires,’’ Victorian Studies 46 (2003):
7–31.
83
Mark Pattison, Memoirs (London: Macmillan, 1885); H.S. Jones, Intellect and Charac-
ter in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2007), 105, 114; Anthony Grafton, ‘‘The Mssrs. Casaubon: Isaac
Casaubon and Mark Pattison,’’ in Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community
in the Modern West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 216–30.
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twentieth century, life-writing may have had a special significance for
homoerotically-inclined men seeking to understand themselves; in a culture
that prized narratives of moral progress, it had a more universal appeal.84
But to imagine how homoerotic love might be part of a wider, chivalric
ideal, Symonds needed to consider the future instead of the past.85 He
turned to Walt Whitman, whose homoerotic ‘‘Calamus’’ poems he had dis-
covered as a student. Many English reformers were inspired by Whitman’s
vision of equality, but Symonds was particularly enthusiastic about ‘‘the
manly love of comrades.’’ He expressed his admiration in fan letters (in
which he wrote of ‘‘longing,’’ ‘‘burning,’’ ‘‘panting,’’ and ‘‘the inevitable
shafts of your searching intuition’’) and a critical book called Walt Whit-
man: A Study.86
Symonds mythologized the poet as a prophet ‘‘like Christ in the Gos-
pels,’’ whose teachings of comradeship, democracy, and love he proposed,
evangelist-like, to spread.87 Like many English readers, Symonds was
attracted to the spiritual elements of Whitman’s worldview. The democracy
he wrote about in patriotic, pro-Union poems became to Symonds ‘‘a new
and more deeply religious way of looking at mankind.’’88 The ‘‘mystic
value’’ with which Whitman invested the body could form the basis of an
idealistic moral framework for ‘‘an intense, jealous, throbbing, sensitive,
expectant love of man for man . . . a saving and ennobling aspiration’’ with
as much value as chivalry.89 Symonds’s late writing about Whitman evinces
a clear decision to interpret ‘‘the gospel of Comradeship’’ as the bedrock of
Whitman’s heterodox oeuvre.
Symonds’s marginalia in his copy of the 1884 edition of Leaves of
Grass show him developing this reading.90 The first poems feature sparse
underlinings, but they become thicker on the page as Symonds moves on
to ‘‘Song of Myself,’’ drawing attention especially to passages that invoke
84
Paul Robinson, Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington
Symonds to Paul Monette (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jones, Intellect
and Character, 128–29; David Amigoni, Life-Writing and Victorian Culture (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006). See also Lisa Sigel, Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identi-
ties in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012).
85
Symonds, Modern Ethics, 123–25.
86
Symonds, Letters, 2:201–3; Symonds, Walt Whitman: A Study (London: J.C. Nimmo,
1893); Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008), 146.
87
Symonds, Walt Whitman: A Study, 11, 135.
88
Ibid., 100.
89
Symonds, Modern Ethics, 123.
90
Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1884), BUL DM1254/A400e.
Symonds’s annotations in ‘‘Song of Myself’’ are dated 12–13 August 1884.
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sentiments of pantheistic naturalism or celebrate the industry and physical
beauty of working people. The underlined passages become longer,
Symonds seemingly more involved in the reading process, until—skipping
over the ‘‘Enfans d’Adam’’ poems about man’s love for woman, often
believed too shocking for women’s and children’s eyes, and cut out of
Symonds’s copy91—they climax in ‘‘Calamus,’’ a third of the way through
the book. They taper off quickly, but ‘‘Calamus’’ is covered in pencil scrib-
ble. On an earlier reading of Leaves of Grass, Symonds had been more
shocked by graphic representations of heterosexual sex in ‘‘Children of
Adam’’ than compelled by the ‘‘love of comrades’’ in ‘‘Calamus.’’92 But by
1884, it seems that he placed ‘‘Calamus’’ at the heart of the book, seeing it
as the key to the text.
Symonds states this explicitly in a note on the first page of ‘‘Calamus.’’
He writes that Whitman ‘‘clearly thinks’’ the cycle ‘‘the most original and
important part of his prophecy. Its theme is what he calls ‘adhesiveness,’
the fraternity of human beings in comradeship’’ which ‘‘has the intensity of
passionate emotion.’’93 That Whitman thought ‘‘comradeship’’ the most
important aspect of his work is not apparent in hundreds of pages that
touch on the bodies and souls of men and women in reasonably equal mea-
sure. But since Whitman’s statements about ‘‘adhesiveness’’ echoed Symon-
ds’s own conception of a ‘‘higher’’ same-sex love, he hastened to write
Whitman into his history of homosexual ethics.
To this end, many of the marginalia explicitly connect ‘‘love of com-
rades’’ to a longer tradition. Symonds reads ‘‘When I Peruse the Conquer’d
Fame’’—which contrasts great men of American history and politics with a
transhistorical ‘‘brotherhood of lovers’’—as being about the more histori-
cally specific ‘‘Envy for the Comrades of the past—Hellas!’’94 He compares
‘‘Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances’’ to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29.95 He
connects Whitman’s praise of the comradeship of Civil War soldiers to clas-
sical legends about groups of military comrades such as the Sacred Band
of Thebes.96 Despite his interest in science, Symonds sought a theory of
homosexuality that could unite mythical ancient heroes with modern Amer-
ican poets.
91
Robertson, Worshipping Walt, 61–65.
92
Symonds’s marginalia in Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Chapin, 1867), Fales
Library, NYU, 95.
93
Symonds’s copy of Leaves of Grass (1884), 95.
94
Ibid., 107.
95
Ibid., 101.
96
Ibid., 99.
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Symonds sent Whitman letters for twenty years, prodding him about
the ‘‘true meaning’’ of ‘‘Calamus.’’ When Whitman proved evasive,
Symonds grew more insistent. In 1890, he asked, ‘‘In your conception of
Comradeship, do you contemplate the possible intrusion of those semi-
sexual emotions and actions which no doubt do occur between men?’’
Whitman professed shock: ‘‘That the Calamus part has ever allowed the
possibility of such construction as mentioned is terrible.’’ He ‘‘disavowed’’
such ‘‘morbid inferences,’’ which, he insisted, ‘‘seem damnable.’’97
Symonds thanked Whitman—and enclosed a long discourse on Greek
love—but never wrote again.98 He felt obliged to clarify that Whitman ‘‘has
nothing to do with anomalous, abnormal, vicious, or diseased forms of the
emotion which males entertain for males.’’99 Critics have suggested that
Whitman was trying to defend himself against the dangerous allegation of
homosexuality.100 But it is not clear that this allegation would have had
cultural resonance for Whitman, damning or otherwise. Instead, Whitman
may have felt that Symonds’s project shared no ground with his poetry and
its contemporary political significance. Symonds asked Whitman to agree
that his democratic ideal represented both a throwback to ‘‘ancient Hellas’’
and a way out of the inconceivability of ethical male-male sexual relation-
ships in the modern world.101 But while Symonds believed that classical
Athens should matter in modern America, Whitman sought to sever such
ties. The working-class poet, who knew no Greek or Latin, who believed
that ‘‘the main purport of these States is to found a superb friendship,
exalté, previously unknown,’’ did not see eye-to-eye with Symonds on the
nature of comradeship past, present, and future.102 Whitman’s experience
as a Civil War nurse, central to his life, was lost on Symonds; in Whitman’s
America, ‘‘chivalry’’ was a value of the Southern plantation aristocracy—to
97
Grosskurth, Woeful Victorian, 273–74.
98
Symonds, Letters, 3:493.
99
Symonds, Modern Ethics, 115.
100
Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (New
York: New York University Press, 1967), 535–36; Bristow, Effeminate England, 141;
Katz, Love Stories, 272–87; C. Carroll Hollis, ‘‘Krieg, Joann P., ed., Walt Whitman: Here
and Now; and Eve Sedgwick, Between Men [review],’’ Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
3 (1986): 31–38; cf. M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality,
Politics, and the Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 167–73;
David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf,
1995), 396–97, 578–79; Betsy Erkkila, Walt Whitman’s Songs of Male Intimacy and
Love (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2011), 147–48.
101
Symonds, Modern Ethics, 123–25.
102
Whitman, ‘‘To the East and to the West,’’ in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose and
Letters, ed. Emory Holloway (London: Nonesuch Press, 1938), 123.
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