John Addington Symonds; a biographical study

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John Addir,gton Symonds; a bio^^^^^^^^

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

BY VAIf WYCK BROOKS
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
THE WINE OF THE PURITANS

A Study of Present-Day America
THE MALADY OF THE IDEAL

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY

BY

VAN WYCK BROOKS

NEW YORK

MITCHELL KENNERLEY

MGMXIV

E.V.

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Copyright igi4 by
Mitchell Kennerley

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Press of J. J. Little Sr Ives Company

East Twenty-fourth Street

New Tori

TO
MAXWELL EVARTS PERKINS

AND

LOUISE SAUNDERS PERKINS

from their affecticmate friend

the original of tliis book is in
tine Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013556943

PREFACE

NINETEEN years have now passed since
the death of Symonds. During that
period no study of his life and work has ap-
peared except the original Biography, com-
piled from his Autobiography, letters, and
diaries, by his friend, Mr. Horatio F. Brown,
the well-known author of Life on the Lagoons
and other works dealing with Venice. Mean-
while his reputation remains substantially un-
altered in the fields covered by his writings, and
he continues to hold a special and an honorable
place in late Victorian literature. No Enghsh
critic indeed is more universally known among
popular students of culture, both in England
and America. "There has, in our time," wrote
William Sharp, in the year of Symonds'
death, "been no mind more sensitive to beauty,
and that not only in one or even in two, but
in all the arts — in nature to an exceptional

vii

viii JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

degree, and in human life and human nature
to a degree still rarer." And Frederic Har-
rison, in an essay which remains the most sat-
isfactory summing-up of the man, says of
Symonds: "He has a wider and more erudite
familiarity with the whole field of modern
literature and art than had either Ruskin or
Matthew Arnold. Indeed we may fairly as-
sume that none of his contemporaries has been
so profoundly saturated at once with classi-
cal poetry, Italian and Elizabethan literature,
and modern poetry, English, French, and Ger-
man. Though Symonds had certainly not the
literary charm of Ruskin, or Matthew Arnold,
perhaps of one or two others among his con-
temporaries, he had no admitted superior as
a critic in learning or in judgment."

But although his writings are known every-
where and by all, the man is known very
slightly. And the man was, as his friend
Robert Louis Stevenson said, "a far more in-
teresting thing than any of his books." Only
a handful of his closest friends ever guessed
the peculiar spiritual tragedy which accom-
panied the development of a life in so many

PREFACE ix

ways outwardly tragic. As it is chronicled in
his private memoranda it presents the only
really close parallel to the more familiar trag-
edy of Amiel which is recorded in English
literature. Psychologically the case of Sy-
monds has a unique interest.

Aside from Mr. Brown's work, the literary
material bearing directly on Symonds is curi-
ously meagre. The publications of his daugh-
ter Mrs. Vaughn have proved helpful to me,
as also the various essays, reviews, notices, or
memorials by Frederic Harrison, Professor
Dowden, Walter Pater, William Sharp, Mr.
Hall Caine, Churton CoUins, and Professor
Villari. I have also made liberal use of the
Life and Letters of Jowett, the Letters of
Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mr. Horace
Traubel's great work, With Walt Whitman in
Camden. Dr. Symonds' Miscellanies con-
tributed to form my view of Symonds' father.
Aside from these sources, almost aU the
writings of Symonds himself are surprisingly
autobiographical to anyone who reads them
with some previous knowledge of the man.

Few readers of Symonds may realize the

X JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

obligation they are under to Mr. H. F. Brown,
his literary executor, who has devoted years of
entirely disinterested, patient, affectionate la-
bor, as biographer and as editor, to the mem-
ory and fame of his friend. I wish here to
record my own grateful sense of this indebt-
edness.

CONTENTS

Chapter I

tt BOY AT CLIFTON

T'age 1
Birth of Symonds at Bristol, 5 October, 1840 — His
grandmother Sykes — ^Puritan ancestry — His father's
character — Relation between father and son — His
mother — ^Lonely childhood — Susceptibility to trances —
Clifton Hill House — Early studies in art — The Greek
spirit — His suppressed character and morbid reserve — *
At Harrow School — Discovers Plato.

Chapter II

OXFORD : JOWETT

Page 28

Symonds enters Balliol College — Jowett's character — '
Influence of Jowett upon Symonds — Spiritual condition
of Oxford — First meeting with Jowett — Professor Con-
ington — ^^sthetic studies — Poor health — Jenny Lind —
Wins the Newdigate Prize — Tours on the Continent —
His early style — 111 effects of his Oxford training —
Lewes's Life of Goethe — L' Amour de I'lmpossihle —
Comparison of Symonds with Amiel.

XI

xii CONTENTS

Chapter III
youth: wanderings

Tage 62
State of mind on leaving college — Study of Venetian
painting — Confusion of creative and critical faculties —
Attitude toward music — Effects of introspection —
Elected FeUow of Magdalen — ^Wins the Chancellor's
Prize with an essay on the Renaissance — Breakdown in
health — ^An idyllic episode in Switzerland — ^With T. H.
Green — Richard Cangreve and Positivism — A dark in-
terval in London — Henry Sidgwick — Marriage — The
question of a vocation — First reading of Whitman —
Consultation with Jowett — Translates Zeller — Renais-
sance Studies — Woolner— Speculations on Handel —
Resolution to enter criticism — Attacked by tuberculosis
— Confused inner life — Speculative crisis at Cannes —
Struggle between doubt and faith — A final release.

Chapter IV

AT CLIFTON : LITERATURE

Page 84
Settlement at Clifton — Lectures at Clifton College —
Effect on his career — Death of Dr. Symonds — Intro-
duction to Dante — Begins The Renaissance — Pater's
review — Symonds and Pater — Symonds and Swinburne
— Greek Poets — Symonds's attitude toward scholarship
— Style — Italian Sketches — Want of sociological imagi-

CONTENTS xiii

nation — Seeing without feeling — The passion for the
picturesque — The peril of culture — Revises Mallock's
New Republic — A physical crisis — Effect on his charac-
ter — Goes to Davos — Convalescence — Many Moods —
Symonds as a poet — The Life of Shelley — Symonds and
Shelley.

Chapter Y
DAVos: "the renaissance": "animi figura"

Page 121
Davos in 1877 — Symonds and Davos — The Buols —
Settlement in Davos — Letter on Sanitary Reform — Am
Hof — The Renaissance in Italy — Symonds and Gibbon
— Historical method — Want of passivity — Confusion of
objective and subjective — Nature of Symonds's scholar-
ship — Mark Pattison — Scholarship and style — ^Faulty
proportions of The Renaissance — ^A critical creed —
Friendship of Symonds and Stevenson — "Opalstein" —
Animi Figura — ^Attempts to conceal self-revelation —
The story of Symonds's inner life — Wine, Women, and
Song — Its relation to his other books — His theory of
translation.

Chapter VI
SWISS life: whitman,

Page 156
Isolation — ^A modern Ovid — Swiss gaiety— rSymonds's
enjoyment of peasant life — His knowledge of Grau-
biinden — Whitman's Calamus — Symonds and Platonism
— Symonds on Whitman — Friendship of Symonds and

xiv CONTENTS

Whitman — Whitman's atitude toward Symonds —
^^^hdkspeare's Predecessors — The theory of the milieu —
Churton Collins on Symonds's style — A series of calami-
ties — Pessimism and happiness — Davos life — The cos-
mic enthusiasm — Henry Sidgwick's diary — Loses heart
in literature — His attitude toward poverty — ^A philan-
thropic campaign — His literary earnings — ^A productive
year — The Life of Sidney — The Life of Jonson —
Translation of Cellini — Cellini and the Renaissance —
Significance of Cellini — Encouraging letters from
Jowetl,

Chapter VII
I.AST years: death

Page 188
Carlo Gozzi — ^Activities in Davos — ^An impressive win-
ter — Autobiography — Essays Speculative and Sugges-
tive — Symonds as a thinker — Recklessness of Health —
Self -effectuation — The Life of Michael Angela- — Growth
of his critical method — Later relations with Jowett —
Breakdown in health — Premonitions of death — The
final journey — Last illness and death of Symonds —
Burial in Rome — Jowett's epitaph.

Chapter VIII

CONCLUSIOIT

Page 210
Physiological basis of Symonds's work — Religion his
chief subject of thought — Scepticism and stoicism —

CONTENTS XV

Position on leaving college — Goethe and scientific pan-
theism — Greek and Christian ethics — Three utterances
expressing his position — Symonds and evolution — Possi-
bility of a new religion — Whitman — Mental reservation
from the "cosmic enthusiasm" — Definitions of deity —
Dualism of Symonds's mind — Sentiment of the Alps —
The sense of "greatness" — Basis of Symonds's criticism
— Matthew Arnold — Modernity of Symonds's basic
principle — The optimism of science — His fundamental
defects — Relative position among his contemporaries.

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Chapter I

A BOY AT CLIFTON

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS was
born at Bristol on the 5th of October,
1840. The first eleven years of his life were
passed in a gloomy old house, facing a city
square, heavily respectable and associated to
the end of his days with nightmare terrors and
a troop of depressing relations.

The general spirit of these relations seems
to be summed up in his grim old grandmother
Sykes, in whose house, gloomier even than his
father's, he spent many a fearful night. Of
this lady and her following we have a fine por-
trait in the grandson's Autobiography. By
nature distant and aristocratic, she had been
converted to an evangelical sect and found
herself, as a person of substance and quality,
the acquiescent prey of a swarm of ill-con-

2 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

ditioned gospellers. "She delighted in the
Lamentations of Jeremiah, the minatory chap-
ters of the prophets, and the Apocalypse. In
a deep, sonorous voice, starting with a groan
and rising to a quaver, she used to chant forth
those lugubrious verses, which began or ended
with, 'Thus saith the Lord.' I remember hear-
ing nothing of the Gospel, or the love of
Christ for the whole human race. . . . She
concentrated her attention on the message to
the chosen people, with a tacit assumption that
all who lived outside the Plymouth fold were
children of wrath. . . . Heavy teas, like
those described by Dickens, were of frequent
occurrence, after which the Chadband of the
evening discoursed at a considerable length.
Then followed prayers, in the course of which
a particularly repulsive pharmaceutical chem-
ist from Broad Mead uplifted his nasal voice
in petition to the Almighty, which too often,
alas, degenerated into glorifications of the
Plymouth sect at Bristol, and objurgations on
the perversity of other religious bodies. My
grandmother came in for her due share of
fulsome flattery, under the attributes of De-

A BOY AT CLIFTON 3

borah or Dorcas. My father was compared to
Naaman, who refused to bathe in Jordan —
Jordan being Bethesda, or the meeting house
of the Plymouth Brethren." Pious old ladies
before and since have delighted in being thus
imposed upon, and I speak of this lady at
length only because she throws out in strong
relief that "dissidence of dissent and Protest-
antism of the Protestant religion" which en-
veloped Symonds' early childhood. One other
point in connection with her is worthy of note,
— ^her passion for flowers, which no end of
Lamentations could interfere with, and which
appears to have been a family trait.

The other side of the house indeed was more
enlightened, and Symonds traces with some
care the evolution of his father's family out of
a like dissenting gloom in which for two
centuries they had piously submerged them-
selves. There was a tradition of gentle-born
Symondses in some remote past, a Knight of
the Garter in Edward Ill's time, and of one
Elizabeth Symonds, heiress of Pyrton, who
became the wife of John Hampden. But

4 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

these vain memorials had been rudely scorned
by the intervening generations.

Medicine, meanwhile, had become the family
vocation, in which two of its members came to
something like eminence before the advent of
Symonds' own father. These were the critic's
great-great-uncle. Dr. John Addington of
Bristol, a racy old-fashioned radical of the
school of Hume; and his grandfather. Dr.
John Symonds, pharmacopula to the Univer-
sity of Oxford, who in his old age retired to
Clifton and taught the boy his first Latin.
"Remaining a Dissenter he became in mature
life what may best be described as a Christian
Stoic. He was a good Latin scholar, and
wrote voluminous diaries and meditations in
the style of Seneca. ... A severe uncom-
promising sense of duty, a grim incapability
of any transactions with the world, marked my
grandfather out as the lineal and loyal de-
scendant of his Puritan ancestors. These
moral qualities were transmitted to my father.
In my father they became transfigured and
spiritualized. The advanced ground reached
by my father was the soil in which I grew up.

A BOY AT CLIFTON 5

These three generations of men — ^my grand-
father, my father and myself — correspond to
the succession of ^schylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides, to the transition from early pointed
Gothic, through Decorated, to Flamboyant ar-
chitecture. Medio tutissimus ibis. The middle
term of such series is always superior to the
first, and vastly superior to the third. How
immeasurably superior my father was to me —
as a man, as a character, as a social being, as a
mind — I feel, but I cannot express."

This very unhumorous though modest sum-
mary is fairly suggestive, especially in the
third term of each series, for unquestionably
Symonds was something of a Euripides as re-
gards all that may be called Sophoclean, and
also without doubt there was something flam-
boyant about him. But I am half inclined to
suggest a third series, and to compare the suc-
cession to that of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius,
and Saint Augustine, the mundane moralist,
the spiritualized moralist, and the spiritualist
who has relegated morals to the social plane
and who illustrates the more ethereal tragedy
of the soul. There was nothing Roman about

6 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Symonds, everything Christian or Greek. The
stubborn will, the stoical persistence which he
afterwards developed were devoted to the
cause, not of duty but of self -effectuation,
and, although these qualities were without
doubt inherited from his Puritan forebears,
their aim and motive were not properly stoical.
I have said that his father was, relatively, a
kind of Marcus Aurelius. Perhaps I may add
that the attitude of the father toward the son
was like what might have been the attitude of
Marcus Aurelius to Christianity if he had
seen it in any more essential aspect than as a
political menace. He was one of those men
who seem to be perfect except for the lack of a
certain something — ^not exactly love, or ten-
derness, or sympathy, for Dr. Symonds pos-
sessed all these — ^but that special kind of en-
lightenment by which one is perpetually "born
again." Certainly Dr. Symonds never could
have been born again. He was far too dig-
nified, and too substantial; the place he filled
in the world was far too definite. Virtue and
man he measured on classic lines. "Tempera-
ment" was the one thing that did not exist for

A BOY AT CLIFTON fT

him. It is therefore the mark of great no-
bihty either in father or son, or both, that the
son entertained toward the father such an ex-
travagant devotion. Symonds' later devotion
to Marcus Aurehus was perhaps a reminis-
cence of this relation.

Dr. Symonds was in all ways a notable per-
son; the most famous doctor of his day in the
West of England, an infinitely hard-working,
patient, careful, generous man; liberal in pol-
itics at the expense of his early professional
standing in conservative parts ; one of the first
to embrace Darwinism, as he had been one of
the first to admire Shelley. He had removed
in 1831 from Oxford, his birthplace, to Bris-
tol; and had become a great figure in the town
and college, intimate with Francis Newman,
Carlyle's John Sterling and all others of note
— a vastly acquisitive, laborious mind which
very soon set itself to work, between hours, at
ethnology and Egyptian antiquities, military
science and the history of warfare, the topo-
graphy of Greece, "the mathematical laws of
musical proportion on which he believed beauty
in all objects to be based," Italian and Greek

8 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

art, sculpture, painting, engraving, the collect-
ing of books and filling of portfolios — beside
the most profound studies in medicine of all
branches, economics, public hygiene, psychol-
ogy and general science. He wrote also, and
rose each morning for two hours of composi-
tion before breakfast. His Miscellanies^ pub-
lished in the year of his death, include a num-
ber of original and translated poems, marked,
as his son says in the Introduction, "by cor-
rectness of expression, distinctness of idea,
precision of form, elevation of sentiment, har-
mony and serenity of intellect." In the eve-
ning he would read aloud to his children from
well-chosen English classics, of whom, as the
years passed, Milton came more and more to
be his favorite. Even his holidays were a la-
borious delight, undertaken in a spirit of al-
most pious responsibiUty. In summer he
would often take his family to the Continent,
where by travelling at night the greatest pos-
sible time was left free for study and sight-
seeing. "The habit of constant labor which he
had acquired in thirty years of hard profes-
sional work could not be thrown off. The

A BOY AT CLIFTON 9

holiday itself became a source of exhaustion;
nor was it surprising that the summers in
which he stayed at home proved, according to
his own confession, less fatiguing than those
in which he took a tour." Mill's Political
Economy, or some such book, he carried in his
bag for study on the trains, "while the rare
half -hours of idleness in wayside inns and
railway stations were often devoted to the
reading aloud of Milton or Tennyson," — an
admirably wretched habit, by the way, which
descended to his son. Becoming interested in
the principles of beauty, upon which he wrote
an essay, he "set himself to observe the nature
of sounds in harmony and discord, to interro-
gate the monochord, to describe ellipses, to
construct diagrams, and to calculate numbers.
. . . The bent of his mind was classical, its
most prominent features were firmness, solid-
ity, and soundness. . . . His taste was sound
and healthy. . . . He disliked the style of
Dante because of its repulsiveness and want
of form." For similar reasons he disliked Bal-
zac, Victor Hugo, and Goethe. Raphael he
admired, and Tennyson's elegance. "Form he

10 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

greatly preferred to color. . . . Owing to
this delicacy of taste he disliked emphatic
writing and extravagant incidents in works of
fiction." He took no interest in such memoirs
as those of Cellini or Rousseau, "because the
revelation of excessive or iU-ordered passions
grieved him." His religious philosophy too
was clear-cut and simple, as may be seen from
a kind of credo taken from a private letter of
his forty-fifth year, which is printed in his
Miscellanies: "God is the dentre of the moral
as of the physical world. It has pleased Him
to place our souls, like the starry spheres, in
orbits that are governed by centripetal and
centrifugal forces : the former draw us toward
Him; the latter propel us through those scenes
of outward life where our work and our duty
lie. Moved too centripetally, we become
ascetic or fanatical. Carried away too cen-
trifugally, it is well if we do not fly off at a
tangent into chaos, or to the devil, the lord of
that domain of lost intelligences."

Nothing could be more interesting than to
speculate on the relation between this father
and the kind of son he had, so essentially dif-

A BOY AT CLIFTON 11

ferent yet with so many elements in common.
Symonds, all his life, struggled to reach some
such equilibrium as that expressed so calmly
and assuredly in his father's creed. And all
the passionate enthusiasms of the son lie there,
embryonic, in the father's point of view — in
his pathetically mechanical straining toward
poetry and art, his laborious grasp of modem
culture, his insatiable curiosity. There exist
those eminent quahties which by the nature of
things the son could not attain, accuracy and
solidity of equipment in facts, pure taste, pa-
tience, calmness, strength. One observes
again the profound antinomy in other points
— ^the father classical, the son romantic; the
father a worshipper of form, the son a wor-
shipper of color; the father in close touch with
life and loving in literature precisely that
which is remote from life, the son living in
literature and straining to find in literature
that which is closest to life; the father instinc-
tively unfamiliar with art, struggling by logic,
by hard work, by patient investigation for
what can properly be grasped only by intui-
tion; the son, as it were, blossoming as the re-

12 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMQNDS

suit of this toilsome preparation in the father
and losing thereby all that calmness and
strength the father so certainly possessed; a
relationship so infinitely pathetic, and yet so
easily grasped by the analogy of everyday life
in epochs of quick social transition, between
fathers and sons when fathers are close-allied
to the social order and sons are children of the
muses.

The first eleven years of Symonds' life, I
have said, were unlovely enough. His mother
died when he was four years old and he could
recall nothing of her but "a pale face, a pink
silk bonnet, and beautiful yeUow hair," the
morning of her funeral, and her grave. "My
father never spoke to me much about her," he
says, "and only gave me a piece of her hair."
She must have been made of lighter, brighter
clay than the rest, a delicate creature over-
strained. Three of her children died, and
Symonds without doubt inherited from her his
neurotic temperament. There were three sis-
ters left to populate the nursery, which was
lively enough when the sun was up, but filled
with terrors after dark by the tales of two dis-

A BOY AT CLIFTON 13

mal old nurses, one of whom would stick her
needle into the little boy's piUow to frighten
him into sleep, while the other, Mrs. Leaker,
was a kind of gypsy sibyl conversant with
spells, phantoms, and haunted castles. No
wonder Symonds was early persuaded "that
the devil lived near the doormat in a dark cor-
ner of the passage . . . that he appeared to
me there under the shape of a black shadow
scurrying about upon the ground, with the
faintest indication of a swiftly whirling tail."
For a long time he believed that under his
bed lay a coffin with a corpse in it, which was
always on the point of rising up and throwing
a sheet over him. He dreamed constantly of a
disconnected finger that crept into the room
crooking its joints. Fancies of this kind were
stimulated by a collection of German murder
tales, which greatly impressed him, and by a
series of magazine articles on spectral illu-
sions. Gastric fever had contributed to make
him a nervous invalid from birth ; weak, puny,
morbidly timid and suspicious. Until he was a
grown man he believed hie filled everyone with
repugnance.

14 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Apart from these things, all notable in their
effect on his later life, two or three facts and
incidents of his early childhood seem to me
significant. Very early indeed traits of the
artist appear. He mentions in his Autobiog-
raphy the pediment of the front door in
Berkeley Square. "I had a particular affec-
tion for this pediment. It had style," Flow-
ers too he loved and distinguished. He took
long country walks with his grandfather, who
told him the names of plants. Here one traces
the beginning of that astonishing knowledge
of botany of which he makes such eif ective use
in his writings. At the same period he began
to fall into a peculiar kind of trance, which he
describes thus :

"It consisted in a gradual but swiftly pro-
gressive obliteration of space, time, sensation,
and the multitudinous factors of experience
which seem to qualify what we are pleased to
call ourself . In proportion as these conditions
of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the
sense of an underlying or essential conscious-
ness acquired intensity. At last nothing re-
mained but a pure, absolute, abstract self.

A BOY AT CLIFTON 15

The universe became without form and void of
content. . . . The apprehension of a coming
dissolution, the grim conviction that this state
was the last state of conscious self, the sense
that I had followed the last thread of being
to the verge of the abyss, and had arrived at
demonstration of eternal Maya or illusion,
stirred or seemed to stir me up again. The re-
turn to ordinary conditions of sentient exist-
ence began by my first recovering the power of
touch, and then by the gradual though rapid
influx of familiar impressions and diurnal
interests. . . . Often have I asked myself
with anguish, on waking from that formless
state of denuded, keenly sentient being, which
is the unreality? — ^the trance of fiery, vacant,
apprehensive, sceptical self from which I issue,
or these surrounding phenomena and habits
which veil that inner self and build a self of
flesh-and-blood conventionality ?"

Is it possible that mystical experience of
this kind prevents us from feeling that phe-
nomena have any very serious finality? This
mysticism in his nature may have been one of
the elements which interfered with Symonds'

16 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

special integrity as scholar and historian. It
is enough to say here that the confusion of
mundane and visionary values created in him
a kind of natural duplicity. The distinction
between "what we call true and what we call
false" was learned by him artificially. One
day he came home from school telling how he
had been set upon by robbers ; though the rob-
bers were entirely real to him, his father con-
vinced him that he must not confuse day-
dreams with literal experience. Thus he
learned "the all-importance of veracity — ^the
duty and the practical utility of standing on a
common ground of fact with average men and
women in affairs of life." It may be recalled
that Shelley even after his marriage was sub-
ject to hallucinations of precisely the same
kind, which have caused endless confusion to
his biographers.

In June, 1851, Dr. Symonds moved his
family to Clifton Hill House at Clifton, on
the heights above Bristol. Now for the first
time Symonds was able to expand. The house
itself was beautiful — a fine Georgian mansion,
built by an old merchant in the days of Bris-

A BOY AT CLIFTON 17

tol's glory: an ancient, liberal house, with great
windows that looked over the ridge of the hill,
over the city with its wharves and ships and
church-towers, over the river Avon to the
hills and distant villages. A garden was
laid out upon the slope, half wild again after
so many years, planted 'symmetrically with
stately elms and copper-beeches, tulip-trees
and cypresses overgrown with climbing roses.
"Two ponds, quaintly enclosed with wired
railings, interrupted at proper intervals the
slope of soft green turf. Each had a fountain
in its midst, the one shaped like a classic urn,
the other a Cupid seated on a dolphin and
blowing a conch. When the gardener made
the water rise for us from those fountains, it
flashed in the sunlight, tinkled on the leaves
and cups of floating lilies, and disturbed the
dragon-flies and gold fish from their sleepy
ways." The spacious, airy, lofty rooms,
flooded with light and filled with fragrance
from the garden, seemed a world of poetry to
the boy after his dolorous years in the city
square.

At Clifton he began to absorb the first im-

18 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

pressions of Greek and Italian poetry and art
which became the basis of his later studies;
turning over and over the contents of well-
assorted portfolios and teaching himself to
draw in desultory fashion after designs of
Flaxman and engravings from Raphael. He
seems to have been profoundly torpid, slug-
gish, half -awakened, still morbidly shy and
given over to nightmares and sleep-walking.
He describes himself as utterly wanting in will
and application, impatient and visionary. His
tutor was a kind of routine classicist, a dull
conscientious man, incapable of striking fire in
a boy. With him however Symonds began to
read Greek and from this hour dates the
formation of that Greek ideal of beauty which
pursued him through life. Let me give the
discovery in his own words: "With Mr.
Knight I read a large part of the Iliad.
When we came to the last books I found a
passage which made me weep bitterly. It was
the description of Hermes, going to meet
Priam, disguised as a mortal . . . The
Greek in me awoke to that simple, and yet so
splendid vision of young manhood, 'In the

A BOY AT CLIFTON 19

first budding of the down on lip and chin,
when youth is at her loveliest.' The phrase
had all Greek sculpture in it. The overpow-
ering magic of masculine adolescence drew
my tears forth. I had none to spare for Priam
prostrate at the feet of his son's murderer;
none for Andromache bidding a last farewell
to Hector of the waving plumes. These per-
sonages touched my heart, and thrilled a tragic
chord. But the disguised Hermes, in his prime
and bloom of beauty, unlocked some deeper
fountains of eternal longing in my soul." A
passage in which the man and the artist stand
plainly opposed already in their perpetual
dualism. At the same time he discovered a
photograph of the famous Cupid, the "Genius
of the Vatican," over which he was wont to
brood, somewhat to the discomfort of his fa-
ther, who asked him "why he did not choose
some other statue, a nymph or Hebe." This
passion for adolescent masculine beauty, con-
ceived in the true Greek spirit, was associated
with trains of sympathy which first attracted
him to Michael Angelo and to Walt Whitman,
who was greatly perplexed by it, and led also

20 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

to certain crass misunderstandings that have
hardly yet disconnected themselves from
Symonds' name. It formed one of the chief
strains in his extremely complex nature, quali-
fied almost all his ideas, and made him one of
the principals of the obscure neo-Platonic
movement of the later nineteenth century.
And in this early incident of Hermes we see
it illustrating in the boy a passion for ideal
beauty deeper than any passion he possessed
for sentiment, for human situations, for life.
Symonds indeed recognized at once the valid-
ity of the Greek spirit for us only as it is
capable of what he calls "democratic" uses,
"the divine spirit serving and loving in plain
ways of pastoral toil." And he composed
half -consciously, in daily walks to and from
his tutor's house, a kind of endless unwritten
poem on the theme of Apollo in exile, hvmibly
tending the stables of Admetus.

One can easily see that the subtle danger
confronting Symonds was that of dilettantism.
Very early his sensibilities had been stimulated
far beyond any equally developed power of
surmounting them. He was already alive to

A BOY AT CLIFTON 21

poetry, to painting, sculpture and music, to
flowers, to historic states of mind, to nature
in many aspects, to color at the expense of
form, and to nuance more than color. Mean-
while his character remained nebulous, flaccid,
irresolute. This state of affairs continued un-
til he was past thirty, thanks to the grinding
miU of respectable education he was put
through. "So far as my father was con-
cerned," he says, "I grew up in an atmosphere
of moral tension, and came to regard work as
the imperative duty imposed on human be-
ings." Yes, but what kind of work? Nothing
is more entirely certain than this idea of work,
as a blind, wholesale, mechanical imposition of
conscience artlessly harnessed on human na-
ture, conceived as a sort of mass-wind, to con-
firm children of strong individuality in habits
of essential idleness. For nothing is done to
harmonize their work with their capacities.
Especially was this true in the case of Sy-
monds, a physically weak, nervous, susceptible
boy, who worshipped assurance and force in
others, and heroized precisely those who dealt
most stupidly with him: a trait of real nobility

22 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

in itself which postponed and permanently
warped his proper s,elf -development. As we
shall see, he fell out of the hands of his father
only to fall into the hands of Jowett, with hke
results. Through aU these years his fancy
ran one course, undirected, uneducated, chaotic,
helpless, while his outward life followed the
usual rut: and all the powers that be restrained
him, levelled him, coerced him, appealed to all
that was dutiful in him, to produce one more
English gentleman. Wanting in the sense of
a distinct personal purpose which might have
controlled his private activities, he merely re-
treated into a dim world of his own where he
felt growing somehow a kind of defiant pas-
sion to become something, to be his own man,
illustrious in some fashion; and he describes
himself in a phrase whose aptness we shall
come to see, as "impenetrably reserved in the
depth of myself, rhetorically candid on the
surface." That rhetorical candor, forced upon
him thus early as the only means of external-
izing himself in a social world so essentially
unreal to him, became at last a permanent lit-
erary habit, which destroyed the value of his

A BOY AT CLIFTON 23

writings from the point of view of enduring
art. Before Symonds was fourteen his out-
ward Hf e and his inward life had each defined
itself so sharply, with such mutual antagonism,
as to destroy forever the possibility of that
final coalescence between purpose and result,
between content and form, between thought
and style, from which true literature, true art
ensues. He was a ready writer, a clever pen-
man, a charming personality — ^but he remained
impenetrably reserved. There was a profound
Symonds which never got itself on paper : and
it may be the shame of art or the glory of
Hfe that Symonds was thus unable to attain
artistic sincerity as distinguished from per-
sonal sincerity. For artistic sincerity does,
without doubt, consist precisely of getting the
real self into art, of externalizing in forms
the profoundest intuitions of the heart. Sy-
monds was never an artist in the proper sense.
His life was apart: and he was an admirable
writer. Outwardly he was that high-spirited,
entertaining, engaging person who was to
write so many pleasant and valuable books —
the Symonds his generation knew and which

24 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

all but his intimate friends supposed was the
whole Symonds. But the tragedy underneath
is the modern story we ought to do our best to
unravel.

His father was too busy to direct his growth
or to guess its peculiar nature, though he took
him driving on his professional visits through
the countryside and introduced him to the bril-
liant circle of friends who had been attracted
by his growing fame, his character and tal-
ents. Symonds never ceased lamenting his
morbid reticence at this period of opportuni-
ties. He considered himself an Ugly Duck-
ling. Constantly reminding himself that a
doctor had no social position, he was persuaded
that his father's aristocratic friends treated
him only with flattering condescension.

In the spring of 1854 he was sent to school
at Harrow, after the machine tradition, to be
made a man of. I hardly think it necessary to
dwell on this dark lustrum so logically inter-
vening between his father's tutelage and that
of Jowett. "The situation," he says, "accen-
tuated that double existence . . . which was
becoming habitual." He took the discipline

A BOY AT CLIFTON 25

patiently and grew stubborner within. He
kept repeating to himself, "Wait, wait. I will,
I shall, I must. " He dreamed of Clifton con-
tinually. Meanwhile his studies advanced,
after his own heart and out of class. We find
him preparing his Greek by means of an
Italian Bible, wandering about the hills and
meadows in springtime; falling passively into
ritualism without any clear rehgious convic-
tions; detesting games of competition, yet
more of an athlete and more of a regular stu-
dent than he chooses to admit; forming one
notable friendship with a kindly, humble cler-
gyman, Mr, Smith, with whom he learned
masses of English poetry; writing poetry him-
self, two himdred lines in two hours on one
occasion, and forming the habit of that "fatal
facility" which dogged him to the end of his
days; rebelling against Butler's Analogy^
whose conclusive logic, parroted by rule, ap-
peared to him by no means conclusive at all;
winning a medal for excellence in studies and
also for two years the headship of his house,
where he exercised his cane in at least one
righteous cause. Yet on the whole it was all a

26 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

dismal mistake based on a misimderstanding,
for, as he says, his father had only sent him
to Harrow because he had never guessed that
he was "either emotional or passionate."

Just before the end of his final term he first
really discovered Plato. The experience local-
izes itself in a certain moment, which I may de-
scribe in his own words. In London one eve-
ning, after the theatre, he had taken the book
to bed with him. "It so happened that I stum-
bled on the Phcedrus. I read on and on, till
I reached the end. Then I began the Sym-
posium, and the sun was shining on the shrubs
outside the ground-floor in which I slept be-
fore I shut the book up. . . . Here in the
Phcedrus and the Symposium in the 'myth of
the soul,' I discovered the revelation I had been
waiting for, the consecration of a long-cher-
ished idealism. It was just as though the voice
of my own soul spoke to me through Plato.
Harrow vanished into unreality. I had
touched solid ground. Here was the poetry,
the philosophy of my own enthusiasm, ex-
pressed with all the magic of unrivalled style.
The study of Plato proved decisive for my

A BOY AT CLIFTON 27

future. Coming at the moment when it did,
it delivered me to a large extent from the tor-
pid cynicism of my Harrow life, and con-
trolled my thoughts for many years."

In the autumn of the same year, 1858, he
entered BaUiol College.

Chapter II
oxfoed: Uowett

SYMONDS was a born hero- worshipper,
and the adoration which hitherto had been
bestowed on his father was now, for some
years, to be bestowed equally on the Master
of Balliol.

Jowett's two outstanding traits were prac-
ticality and scepticism, a scepticism always in
the service of practicality. With an almost
unlimited power and prestige, he stood at the
crossways where so many young men had to
pass on their way to matiu-ity and, like a Soc-
rates grown worldly-wise, reasoned away their
vague dreams and overwhelmed them with
feasibilities. He was a great doctor of the
mundane, equipped with tonics and lotions for
all the miasmas of youth. Few indeed are the
poets, the dreamers, the artists who survived
Jowett's treatment. "Poetry and that sort of

28

OXFORD: JOWETT 29

nonsense," he would say: and is reported to
have found men of poetical temperament the
greatest of his difficulties. He was one of
those worldly men who seem to he justified by
their inexorable sense of duty. "The only way
in which a man can really rise in the world,"
he said, "is by doing good in it" — a sentiment
the world wiU always endorse, the most popu-
lar of all sentiments indeed, because by offer-
ing to the spirit the sleeping-potion of useful-
ness it permits men to be unspiritual with a
calm conscience. To Jowett, indeed, rising in
the world was almost the sole and conclusive
sign of having done good in the world; and
he was as unmercifully insistent that all his
young men should be successful as he was
careless whether the best of them should be,
in the right sense, victorious. So long as there
have to be wholesale professions which ignore
personahty, pubhc works, public persons, men
like Jowett have their important place. They
serve the majority, they reinforce the best ele-
ments in that rough amalgam we call society.
It is only in relation to poetry, to art, to re-

30 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

ligion, that they seem to miss the point of
life.

In these relations Jowett appears painfully
external. He was just enough martyr to his
religious beliefs to give piquant exception to
the rule he illustrated. As regards the old
metaphysical theology, as regards ritualism
and dogma, he was one of the brightest libera-
tors. But he did not fight with theology be-
cause it was the enemy of the soul, but be-
cause it was the enemy of society. Theology
he rejected not because it interferes with re-
ligion, but with the world, and he could not
see that between rehgion and the world there is
any essential opposition. He rejected theo-
logy because it seemed to him just as fanciful
as the vague aspirations of young men. To
him reason was the supreme law because rea-
son is the basis of the social contract, and he
avoided the eesthetic and the spiritualistic be-
cause in some degree reason could not operate
in them. One thing he retained stubbornly,
his belief in a definite, personal God. With
him it was a kind of foible which did not in the
least interfere with an all-corroding scepti-

OXFORD: JOWETT 31

cism that doubted everything else and above all
life. I think it is true that only men who in
their heart of hearts doubt life believe so em-
phatically, so exclusively in society and its
usages. Only those who are without faith in
anything else believe seriously in "the world,"
And Jowett was such a profound sceptic that
he found a very solid basis in things temporal.
He believed so strongly in duty, in work, in
government, in rank, system, form, the fait ac-
complij because he did not believe at aU in life,
in human nature, in the soul. "There was no
clinch in his mind," said Goldwin Smith, "he
would have doubted and kept other people
doubting forever. Whatever was advanced,
his first impulse was always to deny." And he
adds, "I cannot help thinking that Jowett
sought in translation a mental refuge." These
sentences will prove important when we come
to see his influence over Symonds. They show
us the man placed as a teacher of Greek and
philosophy in constant touch with speculative
matters, bringing to them no emotional re-
sponse, no human finality, and resorting al-
ways to a solid compromise, putting his ma-

32 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

terials to practical employment without any
sense of their ideal value. To Jowett Plato
meant politics, and politics meant the Parlia-
ment of England. With how much of a ten-
der, hidden irony must Symonds have read
that subtle parody of one of Jowett's sermons
in Mr. Mallock's New Republic, a book which
he himself was to revise in proof before its
appearance — ^that sermon in which Christ is
so fatuously reconciled with a world which
contains no real sorrow, no real sin, in which
the eye of faith discerns "the beautiful spec-
tacle of good actually shining through evil
. . . the well-being of the rich through the
misery of the poor, and, again, the honest in-
dustry of the poor through the idleness of the
rich": a sxifficiently cheap faith which pro-
claims glibly the difficult truth proclaimed
with equal glibness by Pope:

"All nature is but art unknown to thee ;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see ;
All discord, harmony not understood ;
All partial evil, universal good."

I am speaking of Jowett from a rather
celestial point of view, yet it is the point of

OXFORD: JOWETT 33

view that has to be emphasized to bring out
his relation to a certain sort of pupil. Sy-
monds had already heard much of work, of
the necessity of achieving something in the
orthodox way, of the prime necessity of util-
izing all culture in action. The habit of hard
work he had acquired, as also the fire in his own
heart, made plain now that he was in no ulti-
mate danger of shoddy dilettantism. A des-
tiny of outward achievement was already
marked out for him, which only his physical
weakness could interfere with. But his per-
sonality had had no guidance. Within he was
vague, impressionable, chaotic, ardent. His
inner self was all for poetry, for creation; his
outer circumstances more and more were bend-
ing him toward criticism, scholarship, "sub-
stantiality," toward everything that universi-
ties know how to deal with. This general ten-
dency Jowett confirmed.

Not alone Jowett, of course, but Oxford al-
together. Other Oxford poets, Clough espe-
cially, had broken their hearts with doubt and
patched them up again with work. The real
malady of Oxford was want of faith in hfe.

34 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Wanting that, theology had provided them
with something to believe in, and when at Ox-
ford theology fell an appalling vacuum re-
mained. Only by some such explanation can
we grasp the significance of that "cosmic en-
thusiasm" which took such hold on the succeed-
ing generation and made Walt Whitman the
prophet of a new religion. Wherever life is at
low ebb system flourishes. Therefore I find
significance in the remark of Goldwin Smith in
his Memoirs^ that he could never get much
from Emerson's writings because he could
"find no system" in them. Goldwin Smith
and his fellow-Oxonians of that day would
have been puzzled by Nietzsche's aphorism that
"the will to system is a lack of rectitude."
Such minds are bound to believe that the lack
of system in Emerson, or indeed in the Gospel,
is only a weakness. That it is the essential con-
dition of aU illuminated thought, from the
Analects of Confucius to Sartor Resartus,
they could not have divined at all. The will to
system built the Roman Empire, but that
is all one can say of it except that it built the
British Empire too. And Symonds, who

OXFORD: JOWETT 35

should have been in another world, was living
among the kind of men who build empires.

His first meeting with Jowett, though it an-
ticipated by a year the close and lifelong inti-
macy of master and pupil, is worth repeating
in his own words. In the autumn of 1858,
upon first enrolling at Balliol, Symonds bore a
letter to the great man from his father, who
had lately met him in Oxford. "I found him
dozing in an armchair over a dying fire. His
rooms were then in Fisher Buildings, looking
out upon the Broad. It was a panelled room,
with old-fashioned wooden mantel-piece. He
roused himself, looked at the letter, looked at
me, and said, half dreamily, 'I do not think I
know^our father.' Then, after an awkward
pause, he rose, and added, 'Good-bye, Mr.
Symonds.' " An inauspicious opening, cer-
tainly; but it appears that Jowett had a way
of dreaming over the fire and was by habit
short in manner and a silent man. To be in-
vited to his breakfast parties was the most cov-
eted honor in Oxford; yet nothing was said,
Jowett "stared vacantly," everyone was awk-
ward and unhappy — "the toast was heard

36 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

crunching under desperate jaws of youths ex-
asperated by their helplessness and silence."

Before he came into close contact with Jow-
ett, Symonds fell in with many of the older
Oxford men then or subsequently famous:
Goldwin Smith, Dean Stanley, Mark Patti-
son, his future brother-in-law T. H. Green,
and Professor Conington. With the last of
these he became almost immediately intimate.

Conington seems to have been a kind of in-
tellectual bully, a hard man, who tasked Sy-
monds unmercifully on the score of scholar-
ship without having the least opinion of his
powers. Here as elsewhere it was a case of
incompatible temperaments, and as elsewhere
Symonds exhibited his unhappy faculty for
stumbling into the wrong hands. Conington
knew and cared for nothing but hterature,
and in the strictly academic sense. Art, music,
nature, philosophy, life he passed by. Beside
the standard of human capacity set up in his
mind, Symonds appeared a very wavering, in-
effectual creature indeed, continually needing
to be reminded of his inaccuracy, languor, and
general vagueness. He criticised his pupil for

OXFORD: JOWETT 3T

wanting force and distinction in style and for
"shady fluency," and he was openly vexed
when that pupU won the Newdigate Prize.
Yet he never suggested any practicable way
in which his faults could be overcome. While
Symonds, already formulating the cosmic
principle "Though He slay me, yet will I
cleave to Him," in his turn no sooner learned
that his old master was dead than he set about
admirably editing his Miscellanies. That Con-
ington's influence, however limited, was most
helpful to him — and helpful because of its
limitation, because it more or less clubbed him
into form — is proved by his later statement
that, while Jowett taught him to write, Coning-
ton taught him to see that "literature is some-
thing by itself, not part of an iridescent neb-
ula, including all our cult for loveliness."
Without doubt he was dealing, however stu-
pidly, with a difficult case. "The association
with Conington was almost wholly good,"
wrote Symonds in his Autobiography/.

It was an atmosphere of criticism, and in a
more and more critical spirit Symonds threw
himself into assthetic studies : Greek poets, Ro-

38 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

man history, music, Plato, St. Augustine,
Goethe. Stirred to religious speculation by the
reactionary sermons of Bishop Wilberforce,
he fought bitterly against the sceptical ten-
dency of his own mind. It seemed, he said,
to "check the unity of thought and will, and
certainly to impair the a2sthetical enthusiasm."
This latter proved curiously the case with him,
and he discovered that his enjoyment of music
became less spontaneous. "I analyze and try to
enjoy more ; I have fewer ideas and less delight
in hearing." This he attributed to a weakened
faith in the supernatural. It was really caused
by the weakening of his emotional power
through his excessive mental activity. It is
worth noting incidentally that as his religious
speculation became acute he turned his back
on the aesthetics of religion which had drawn
him passively into ritualism. Perpetual read-
ing, writing, discussing, analyzing, criticising,
comparing notes — all this he had in feverish
abundance. He was constantly over-exerting
himself, writing an essay a day, on subjects
ranging from Swiss history — already one of
his fields of interest — ^to the Criminal Respon-

OXFORD: JOWETT 39

sibility of Lunatics ; as well as countless poems.
His diary meanwhile contains recurring notes
like this : "slept very ill — a night of overtaxed
brain, and constant weary dreams. I must be-
gin some strychnine, I feel so low," or "return
of old cramped head feeling," or "curious talk
of my want of sympathy, ambition, mad sui-
cidal fancies." Body and brain racked and
rushed, brought up against those hard, clear,
successful intellects, he was running riot
within. A profound nostalgia, deeper than
homesickness — ^what he called Seelensehnsucht
— ^possessed him. "The common defect of all
aesthetics," he writes, "is that they raise a
yearning which cannot be satisfied by them-
selves except in creation." He fluttered about
the arts, drawn almost equally to aU. For a
time music overshadowed the rest in his en-
thusiasm, and he believed that with proper
training he might ultimately find himself in
musical expression. This tendency must have
been stimulated by a visit to Clifton in 1862,
where he found Jenny Lind spending some
days in his father's house. In his diary he
reported his conversations with her: "She com-

40 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

ments on the charm of having a definite line
in life, an art to live for," and says much of
the kind of poetry which is suitable for -sing-
ing. "For singing we must have one feeling,
one harmony, not a series of broken lights."
So calm, intuitive, self-possessed — artist, not
sesthetician — the image of aU that Symonds
had not yet found and would never quite find
on his own horizon! One feels already that
this universal sesthetic ferment of his must
ultimately simmer down to criticism, that it is
too much a "series of broken lights" to lead
him into limited creation.

Of the suggestive events of his undergrad-
uate hf e only a few can be selected here. Ex-
amined in the spring of 1859, he failed to con-
jugate correctly, tense by tense, the verbs
iiiiC and e I ft I, a notable fact in one who was
to write what Frederic Harrison called the
classical and authoritative account of Greek
literature. It gives color to the statement
made by him and by his critics that he was by
nature inaccurate in rudiments. But it gives
more color to the charge against examinations
as a real test of knowledge in sensitive minds

OXFORD: JOWETT 41

which are easily confused, for as he said he
would have had no readier command of the
multiplication table. In the summer of that
year he joined a reading party to the east
coast, an experience repeated several times
later in the Lakes and North Wales — just
such reading parties, "bathing and reading
and roaming", as Clough describes in the
Bothie : Green sympathetically helping him in
Plato, Conington spurring, piquing, prodding
him in composition and language. And in
the summer of 1860 he won the Newdigate
Prize with his poem The Escorial, which he
recited on June 20 in the Theatre. Coning-
ton, as I have said, was vexed by this occur-
rence, having been twice xmsuccessful in the
same competition. Matthew Arnold, the Pro-
fessor of Poetry, chastened him with soimd
words which were to apply with considerable
accuracy to all of Symonds' verse: that he
had won "not because of his stylistic qualities,
but because he had intellectually grasped the
subject, and used its motives better and more
rationally than his competitors."

Short tours to the Continent were frequent

42 JOll^ ADDINGTON SYMONDS

throughout this period: in the autumn of 1860
through Belgium and again through Germany
to Vienna, in the spring of 1861 to Paris and
Amiens, and in the following June with his
father to Switzerland and Italy, — ^his first
visit to the home and studio of his later life.
Every detail of these tours is noted in his
diary, wild flowers, pictures, minute points in
iarchitecture. In Switzerland he found him-
self an agile climber and formed that com-
radely sympathy with Swiss peasants which
proved the great motive of his after years.
On the Mer de Glace his father took from his
pocket a volume of the Princess and read
"Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain
height" — ^the good, busy father, always finding
in Tennyson something to read aloud in ap-
propriate places. The bent of his own mind
is illustrated by his remarks on an English-
man in the train to Como, whose "cxmning cold
gray eyes, sharp pale face, fresh light hair
and thin lips" made evident that he had studied
physical science exclusively. To Symonds,
who had already begun to form for Switzer-
land that passion which led him to say subse-

OXFORD: JOWETT 43

quently, and with literal truth, "the Alps are
my religion", he seems to have appeared as
Tyndall appears in the famous remark, "At
sunrise we came among the Alps; they were
of sandstone, stratified very regularly." In
Ruskin alone, I think, do we find the two
points of view — ^the religious and the geolog-
ical — ^united in any eminent degree.

I have a mind in this place to quote from his
diary the description of a mountain storm wit-
nessed on his return to England. It illustrates
his feeling for natural scenery, his earliest sen-
timent for the Alps, and the degree to which,
at this period, all his lines of thought con-
verged in music. It illustrates too his early
style and his gift for highly colored prose:

"Friday, August 2 (1861). — Conington and
I walked through Redland to the Sea Walls
and home by the observatory. There we
watched a great thunder cloud, which for
majesty of shape, size and color surpassed the
Alps. Its change and progress was like a sym-
phony. Far away, from west to north it
stretched; above the channel the summits
were of the pearhest white; domes and peaks,

U JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

on which the sunlight rested; its middle was of
light ethereal blue, like the base of Monte
Rosa, but its feet were indigo, and a tawny
fringe of angry red was driven, mixed with
wind and tempest, aU along the van. First
it towered in simple beauty, transfigured with
the sunlight that sat upon it, pouring bands
of glory down its chasms, and shooting in
broad columns on the trees and rocks and
downs — ever changing with the changing wind
and scudding fleecy sands, fleeces that ran be-
fore the armaments of thunder. Soon this
aspect altered; more and more of the blue sky
was hidden as the masses rose — ^the cerulean
blue was changed to deepest purple, and the
indigo to sullen black. The wind swept furi-
ously, the cloud came onward in a crescent,
the sun was darkened, and scarcely flamed
upon the topmost edges, and in a breath the
gust of wind and rain were dashed upon us.
For a moment all was dark and the landscape
blurred, the vivid greens and delicately pen-
cilled outlines of the hills were gone, the wind
howled restlessly. But this again changed.
The cloud had broken with its own fury. Like

OXFORD: JOWETT 45

a squadron that rides upon the f oeman's guns
and sweeps them off, and then returns scat-
tered and decimated to its camp, so this pon-
derous mass of thunder-cloud was tattered,
rent, and dissipated by the fury of its onset
— its domes were ragged, and beneath its feet
shone streaks of lurid sky, on which the
jagged tops of the firs and beeches trembled.
Now came the last movement of the symphony
— all the landscape was grey, but clear, and
fuU of watery sunlight. An exhaustion like
that of a child fallen asleep from crying
seemed to hold the winds and woods and dis-
tant plain. All was cahn, but the broken
clouds went sailing on overhead, dizzy with
their own confusion, and, as it were, a ground
swell of its passion still rocked the upper air.
We turned and went homeward. In this sym-
phony, or sonata, call it which you like, there
were three distinct movements — an Adagio, an
Allegro, a Presto, and a Minuet. It should
have been written in D flat, and no passage
should have been free from agitation. But
the first part should have most beauty. It
should contain the germinal idea of the whole

46 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

in a tremulous thought constantly recurring,
and superinduced upon an air of calm ma-
jestic sublimity, which should be the basis of
the movement. This agitation should gradu-
ally usurp the place of the calm air in the
second movement. In the third it should reign
supreme — all mere beauty should be lost in the
tempestuous passion. In the last the calm air
of the first movement should return, but shorn
of any superfluous ornament, sad and melan-
choly, and often troubled by faint echoes of
the central spasm."

Meditations like this, more successful in les-
ser fragments, make one feel that in time
Symonds might have produced one lasting
book, a purely personal book. Had it not been
for circumstances which tossed him back and
forth between his inner self and the outer
world — dragging from him works which are
neither quite true to fact not yet quite true
to the poet's consciousness, he might have left
such a permanent book as the Opium Confes-
sions or Amiel's Journal. This kind of pro-
duction however meant nothing to Jowett and

OXFORD: JOWETT 47

Conington, and Symonds took their word
for it.

At Oxford his intellect had been rushed far
ahead of anything the total man could sup-
port. It was ten years before the rest of him
could grow up to his precocious ability, before
there was any coalescence between brain and
nerves. It may be doubted whether he ever
shook off, even in his last, most human, active
period in Switzerland, the burden of satiety
that results from such excesses of aesthetic
stimulation. His emotional nature was baf-
fled. He was in a state of anarchy. Work,
duty, cerebration had not been properly related
to his insistent need of self-expression. "I
could mention men," he says, "who might have
been musicians or painters, but who wasted
their time at Oxford in aimless strimiming on
the piano, or silly sketching, because there was
no career of industry provided for them. They
served the curriculum badly. Their natural
talents found no strengthening exercise.
. . . With this latter sort I can class my-
self. I went philandering around music, her-
aldry, the fine arts, and literary studies ruled

48 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

by sentiment. I wrote weak poetry. I
dreamed in ante-chapels. I mooned in canoes
along the banks of the Cherwell, or among
yellow water-lilies at Godstow. . . . But
in all these things I got no grasp on any
serious business."

The practicality and the scepticism of Jow-
ett were, in short, precisely those qualities to
which Symonds ought not to have been sub-
jected. Impracticality, properly guided, and
faith, in himself and in life, he needed. It
was impossible to make a good routine man
of him, but it was highly possible to turn him
out a wretched member of that modern
race which has been shipwrecked on the arts.
--Esthetic stimulation had made some sort of
expression an actual physiological need, while
his training had not provided him with
strength, faculty, or direction. In his diary
he notes the "brooding self -analysis without
creation" that afflicts him. And in another
passage (September 29, 1861) a propos of
Lewes's Life of Goethe, he pictures the exact
condition of his mind.

"Reading this life teaches me how much of

OXFORD: JOWETT 49

a poet's soul a man may have without being
a poet, what high yearnings may plague him
without his ever satisfying them, what a vast
appreciation and desire may exist where there
is no expression or formative will. And in all
these cases the force is wanting, power is ab-
sent, spontaneity is torpid. Susceptibility to
beauty, capabilities of acute pain and pleas-
ure, strong ffisthetical emotions, these do not
constitute a poet, though a poet must have
them. . . . Power, all-pervading power,
pushing the soul into activity beyond recep-
tive susceptibility, covering all deficiency by
concentrating itself on the passion of the
moment — ^this makes the difference between
the man of genius and the dilettante driv-
eUer."

An age that is, or has been, interested in
such characters as that of Amiel should note
well how they are produced, for Symonds is
the closest of all English equivalents of Amiel.
Intellectual and emotional sophistication,
poetry bottled up and fermenting in minds
that lack vitality — this produces that amour
de rimpossible ;^ith all its chimeras and in-

50 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

visible hippogriffs, just as, according to Vic-
tor Hugo, the Apocalypse sprang from a pent-
up virginity. The difference between Amiel
and Symonds is mainly a difference of will..
Incapable of that prolonged and chronic ten-
sion which brought the malady of Amiel to
such exquisite heights and has made it immor-
tal, Symonds was capable of compromise with
the ideal. In the very passage from which I
have just quoted he goes on to say: "A man
may have the susceptibilities of genius with-
out any of its creative power; but if he has
an atom of talent he cannot be without prac-
tical energy." This indicates his readiness to
accept a makeshift. It is true that Symonds,
to the end of his days, pursued the Absolute
with a hopeless passion. That alone is a mark
of ill-health; for men who find themselves live
gladly in the relative, and the greatest philos-
ophers content themselves with a working-plan.
Symonds himself in later years discovered a
working-plan, which enabled him to live with
assurance and to produce an immense quan-
tity of adequate work. But his life as man of

OXFORD: JOWETT, 51

letters was, I think, really incidental. It was
the expression of his natural energy, the satis-
faction of his impulse for style, the unburden-
ing of his tangible knowledge. His real self
was always hidden, essentially unexpressed.

Chapter III
youth: wanderings

WHEN Symonds took his degree on
June 22, 1862, he was truly, as he de-
scribed himself five years later, "like a sphere
in contact at all points with nature, poetry,
painting, philosophy, music, passion, yet with-
out a motive force within it." A far-sighted
reader might see in this very situation the per-
sonal tabula rasa upon which ultimately criti-
cism would appear. But the lack of a motive
force did not proceed from any tranquillity
within. Five years had yet to pass before the
mischievous ferment of Oxford reached its
agonizing climax, and five more before the
heated brain settled down to productive
activity. His first book was published in 1872 ;
but from 1867 onward he began to see more
and more clearly the possibility of a rational
existence. The ten years 1862-1871 may there-

52

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 53

fore be considered his period of probation. In
the first of these years he left college, in the
last his father died; and the death of his good
father, as we shall see, brought him perma-
nently to his feet. The crisis of 1867, midway
between these two events, marks the end of his
exclusively intellectual period. Thereafter, at
first weakly and lamely, but with growing
assurance and power, he made his peace with
life.

It is my belief that the five years of Sy-
monds' life during which he reaped the whirl-
wind of Oxford aestheticism form, as told in
his letters and diaries, the most appalling rec-
ord of its kind in English literature. But in
the midst of the whirlwind and almost un-
known to himself the critic was quite surely
beginning his true education, gathering his
materials, shaking down his impressions, form-
ing his method. During these chaotic years
the main lines of his after life were deter-
mined.

A tour through northern Italy aroused in a
much more definite way than heretofore his in-
terest in painting. The Venetian school espe-

54 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

cially captivated him because of its preoccupa-
tion with life. Returning in August to Clif-
ton, he began a book of private studies, labelled
Art and Literature, with an essay on the char-
acteristics of Venetian art. He was begin-
ning to feel his way into the theory of the
milieu, which was to underlie all his critical
writings. Music continued to occupy him.
After a performance of Haydn's Creation at
Gloucester we find him associating it with his
Biblical and Platonic studies and trying to es-
tablish a theoretical relation between music
and the other arts. But here, as in all his spec-
ulations, there is a significant conflict of mo-
tives. "It illustrates," as his biographer, Mr.
Brown, says, "the governing qualities of Sy-
monds' personality, acute sensibility and in-
tense intellectual activity; he felt profoundly
through his aesthetic sensibility, but his intel-
lectual vigor would not let him rest there; he
desired to know as well as to feel. . . . As
it was, the internal clash and conflict of two
such powerful appetites inside a delicate frame
were wearing and grinding the man to pow-
der." True criticism is not a second best, not.

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 55

as it is often supposed, a compromise in theory
on the part of men who cannot succeed in prac-
tice. It is a wholly different function, the in-
tellectual study of origins and relations. It
regards the work of art, not as a record per-
sonal to the critic, but as a specimen to be in-
vestigated dispassionately, intellectually, in its
relation both to art and to life. The difficulty
with Symonds at this period was that he could
not disentangle the objective and the subjec-
tive. He felt every work of art as a poet,
and at the same time could not refrain from
analyzing it. For this reason neither the one
impulse nor the other could function properly.
"I am discontented," he wrote, "because I do
not feel myself a poet, and do not see why I
should not be one." To the choruses and ora-
torios of Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, he
brought the touchstone, not of a rationale of
music, but of his own feverish religious diffi-
culties ; or rather the two were perilously inter-
twined. To quote Mr. Brown once more:
"The situation seems clear enough; in one re-
gion emotion and intellect are at war, in the
other thought and action. Emotions generate

56 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

a passion, an appetite; intellect analyzes the
emotions into thoughts; thought is unsatisfy-
ing to the appetite which emotion has created,
and that appetite demands the translation of
the thought into action, but health and con-
science bar the way." In those really penetrat-
ing sentences we have the whole story of Sy-
monds — that complex remained with him to
the last. And although it ultimately resolved
itself partially in action when he had gained
a semblance of health and discovered types of
action from which he was not debarred by
conscience, he never quite shook off the dead-
lock inherent in his nature. "It is one of the
most terrible results of introspection," he
wrote now, "that I find the weakness, vicious
tendencies, morbid sensibilities, and discontent
deepened and intensified by all that I have
learned in study and by all that I have lost
in faith. Old realities have become shadows,
but these shadows still torment me. There is
a restlessness of passion, an unending want of
what can never be, that seem the peculiar
Nemesis of a scholar's life. ... I hear
the great world of fact and action roaring for-

YOUTH: WANDERINGS S7

ever around me unintelligibly; my own sphere
is one of phantoms, and my own battle a mere
sciomaehy. Thoughts and words are the men
and things I deal with; but they are direful
realities, full of suasions to passion, and mad-
dening with impossible visions of beauty. This
constant contact with the intangible results, in
a word, in the state of Faust." Along with
this runs the unceasing undertone of bodily
ailment: "My scalp is sore and my bones
tingle"; "my head is full of neuralgic pains,
my eyes feel boiled and are regular centres of
agony, to move which is to set two instruments
of torture in motion"; "a strained feeling in
my head."

At the end of October, 1862, he was unani-
;mously elected Fellow of Magdalen, and on
the first of November he went into residence.
The episode of his fellowship was brief and
unhappy. We hear of his having a little group
of six pupils in philosophy and, what is more
significant, beginning a systematic study of
the Renaissance, which resulted presently in
his winning the Chancellor's Prize with an
essay on that subject. A former friend ma-

58 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

liciously sought to prove a charge against his
character. The charge was a complete fiasco;
but in his overstrained condition it naturally
increased his morbid shyness, rendering any-
thing like an easy friendship with the other
Fellows impossible, and served mainly in pre-
cipitating his final collapse. This seems to
have occurred in April. He awoke one morn-
ing after an unusually frightful dream with
the feeling that "something serious had hap-
pened to his brain." And indeed so it proved.
Thereafter for three years he was unable to
use either eyes or brain for severe study. What
effect this had on the ultimate work of a mind
naturally weak in its grasp of rudiments and
constantly impressionable may be imagined by
anyone who has formed an idea of Symonds'
place in English criticism. During the spring
of this year he struggled as well as he could
to complete his prize essay, which was finally
recited before the Prince and Princess of
Wales. It was the closing event of his Ox-
ford career.

On June 25 Dr. Symonds sent him to
Switzerland. This Alpine summer Avas a kind

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 59

of pastoral interlude — the only really poetical
episode in Symonds' vexed life. Miirren was
for some time his headquarters. Thither came
one day an English family, Mr. Frederick
North, member of Parliament for Hastings,
with his two daughters. The elder was Miss
Marianne North, the flower-painter, whose col-
lection of sketches from rare tropical plants
was housed after her death in a special build-
ing at Kew. The younger, Catherine, was de-
scribed by Symonds in his diary at the time
as "dark and thin and slight, nervous and full
of fun and intellectual acumen." And he
adds, "Alpine inns are favorable places for
hatching acquaintance and gaining insight
into character." The Norths went away at
the end of a week, but Symonds had formed
an impression which he was very soon to trans-
late into action. Another girl, meanwhile, had
taken his fancy as the special genius of the
place and the embodiment of aU its shining
suggestions. He calls her "Mile R — E — ,
daughter of a jeweller in Thun." She was a
friend of the innkeeper at Miirren, and she
helped him in the care of his guests. She wore

60 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

a charming Bernese costume, and after the
evening work was done she would sit with the
other girls on the balcony and they would all
sing together. For her each morning he
picked bouquets of Alpine flowers, "climbing
daily higher and higher up the mountains as
the summer flowers retreated, until at last
there were few left but white lilac crocuses and
deep blue harebells." She was the subject of
many sonnets; but when she found that Sy-
monds had come back again to Miirren pur-
posely to see her she kept shyly apart, not un-
derstanding "what all this meant." She con-
sented however to stand sponsor with him at
the christening of a little daughter of one of
the guides. At the christening too was T. H.
Green of Oxford, his future brother-in-law,
fresh from Heidelberg, his head swimming
with German metaphysics and poetry. With
Green he passed a week at the little wooden inn
of Uetliberg, above Zurich, writing and study-
ing at little beer-tables set beneath the beech-
trees, whose opening branches revealed the
far view below. Some of the poetry of this
true wander jdhr I find in an entry of August

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 61

22, which resembles in a striking way a charac-
teristic passage of Maurice de Guerin:

"At nine this morning the smi shone out.
We walked together in the deep snow, which
lay thick upon those late autumn flowers.
They, poor things, revived immediately be-
neath the genial warmth, and lifted their
pretty heads from wells of melting snow-
wreaths. The whole world seemed to feel re-
turning spring. Birds floated in dense squad-
rons overhead, whirling and wheeling on the
edges of the clouds, which kept rising and dis-
persing in the eager air above the valley. Far
away the mists rolled like sad thoughts that
dissolve in tears."

But the relief and happiness of this Alpine
episode was destined to be short. After a few
weeks in England, where he was received full
fellow at Magdalen, he set out for Italy racked
with neuralgia and unable to read or write
after dark. In Florence he had many conver-
sations with Richard Congreve, the English
representative of Positivism in its religious as-
pect. Symonds, whose faith in a personal God
had been grievously shaken, and whose faith

62 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

in humanity was gaining strength, could yet
find no foothold in the dogmatic religion of
Humanity, because he could not conceive col-
lective man as possessing personahty or con-
sciousness, and the essence of religion seemed
to him a personal relationship between the in-
dividual and the Whole. This need of a per-
sonality animating the universe he never shook
off ; later it modified, or tinged, his acceptance
of Spencerism, and it is significant to see it
emerging thus early, at the moment when his
secular worship of humanity was on the point
of blossomirig forth. Unable to use eyes or
brain for serious study, he was thrown upon
more sensuous resources, and in Florence and
Rome he gathered quantities of direct and in-
valuable experience from pictures and build-
ings. At Naples the old nostalgia for the im-
possible awoke again, and the careless, joyous,
idle existence of the Italians came over him as
a kind of condemnation. "The world is wide,
wide, wide; and what we struggle for, ten
thousand happy souls in one fair bay have
never dreamed of."

In March, 1864, he returned to London and

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 63

took lodgings with his old Oxford friend A.
O. Rutson at 7, Half Moon Street. Five
months passed, aimlessly. He could neither
sleep nor work, and the nervous need of in-
cessant activity preyed upon him. He wrote a
few brief articles for the Saturday Review and
took what exercise he could, rowing and rid-
ing. Subjected to an extremely painful treat-
ment of his eyes, he sat on one chair with his
feet upon another, in a dark room, unable to
read or to bear the light. London with its
noise and heat and the desolation of lonehness
brought him dreams of Miirren and of the
family he had met there. He formed a quick
resolution, called upon Mr. North, and in Au-
gust joined the latter 's family on the Conti-
nent. On the 10th of November he was mar-
ried to Catherine North at St. Clement's
Church, Hastings. Early in 1865 he returned
with his wife to London and settled in lodg-
ings at 13, Albion Street.

Symonds was now approaching twenty-
five. The desire to devote himself to htera-
ture had formed itself gradually and more and
more surely in his mind. Already he had fallen

■/

¥

^64 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

{ f\ into the three Hnes of study which were to oc-
cupy him chiefly as a man of letters — Greek
poetry, the Renaissance, and the Elizabethan
Drama. But the literary purpose was not to

j__^e_finally confirmed for. ajiother-five^jears.-
The true artist, it is said, will doubt himself to
the end of his days but will never doubt his
X\i vocation. Symonds doubted jboth, and it was^

1_ only natural./^ For he still believed more in
Jowett an^ his father than in himself: his
father doubted gravely that a man of his ex-
treme fragility could spare enough energy
from mere Hving to achieve anything of solid
worth in literature, while Jowett's cautious en-
couragement was vitiated by his incurable
doubt of everything. His education had un-
done faith, and his broken health seemed to
stand in the way of hope. At the same time he
was one of those men who cannot stand still.
The wheels of his life went on grinding, grind-
ing, and when they could not find grist with-
out they ground themselves. This condition
became acutely critical in the summer of 1865.
He had set up lawyer's chambers to give his
activity an ostensible object and went on with

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 65

his Elizabethan studies. But his physical con-
dition rather grew worse — eyes and brain al-
most paralyzed, the smallest excitement shat-
tering his whole system. "For a few hours,"
he wrote, "my heart has beat, my senses have
received impressions, my brain has coined from
them vigorous ideas. But vengeance follows
after this rejoicing. Crack go nerves and
brain, and thought and sense and fancy die."
And close following the physical comes the
spiritual condition: "To emulate others nobler
than myself is my desire. But I cannot get
beyond, create, originate, win heaven by pray-
ers and faith, have trust in God, and concen-
trate myself upon an end of action. . , .
Literature, with these eyes and brain? What
can I do? What learn? How teach? How
acquire materials? How think? How write
calmly, equably, judicially, vigorously, elo-
quently for years, until a mighty work stands
up to say, 'This man has lived. Take notice,
men, this man had nerves unstrung, blear eyes,
a faltering gait, a stammering tongue, and yet
he added day by day labor to labor, and
achieved his end I' "

66 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

In the midst of this, however, two powerful
restorative influences were taking hold upon
him — his wife and Walt Whitman. His wife
certainly calmed his nervous excitability and
made his life gradually more rational and hu-
man. And his discovery of Whitman's writ-
ings began to act upon his moral nature as a
strong tonic. In the Cambridge rooms of his
friend Frederic Myers, in the autumn of this
year, he first heard read aloud passages from
Leaves of Grass. "I can well remember," he
says in his Study of Whitman, "the eifect of
his (Myers') sonorous voice rolling out sen-
tence after sentence, sending electric thrills
through the very marrow of my mind." The
reading began with the words "Long I
thought knowledge alone would suffice me,"
and one might well pause on these words, so
profoundly symbolic of this moment in Sy-
monds' life. Knowledge, or in the larger sense
all that is implied in the word "cerebration,"
had occupied him almost exclusively. His
health and education had almost prevented him
from living, in the wide sense, at all. His
brain had Vt'hirled on regardless of nerves and

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 67

body, struggling to grasp the absolute, the in-
finite, the impossible. And Whitman, with his
lusty contempt for purely intellectual pro-
cesses, his robust sweep of realities, and the
mystical cosmic sense which held the world in
solution, came over the young student like a
wave of sea-water, invigorating, refreshing,
smoothing out the heated brain, re-stringing
the nerves, and giving him a new point of de-
parture, in some degree at least serene, hope-
ful, assured. It was to be some years still
before he could profit very tangibly from
Whitman's message, but for the moment it
brought him through a dark passage and
proved an antidote that cleared him forever of
Jowett's power.

To Jowett he had written about this time,
begging his advice in the choice of a vocation
and stating his belief that although the literary
life was and had always been his main desire
he realized that his bent was neither for the
purely artistic nor the purely philosophic in
letters. "The point seems to have been
reached," he wrote, "at which I must definitely
renounce writing, or make it the sole business

68 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

of my life." Jowett replied, asking him to
run down and have a talk with him at Oxford.
The Master was cautiously encouraging. He
had already expressed his opinion that Sy-
monds had it in him to become eminent in liter-
ature. Now he added makeweights to that
opinion, urging him to finish his legal studies
and get called to the Bar, to keep his eye on
politics as a solid possibility to fall back upon
and to translate ZeUer's history of Aristotelian-
ism. I cannot help adding that, when during
the conversation the question of de Musset's
tragic career came up, Jowett's comment was :
"Men should keep their minds to duty." The
whole abyss of Jowett's ineptitude lies in that
sentence and that context. And I may here
anticipate a little the fortunes of ZeUer's Aris-
totelianism. In a Symonds letter of 1867 oc-
curs the sentence: "ZeUer, that paradox of my
unequal existence, keeps on his caterpillar pace
from day to day. The slow muddy river of
translated speech indeed stagnates now and
then, forming into noisome pools and eddying
in slime about perplexing boulders. Yet volu-
minously thick it oozes on." And again at a

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 69

later point, in the Autobiography : "Much time
was wasted upon a translation of Zeller's his-
tory of Aristotle and the Aristotelian school.
This I undertook at Jowett's suggestion. Jow-
ett, I may say in passing, had a singular way
of setting his friends to do work undoubtedly
useful, but for which they are not suited. To
make me translate Zeller, instead of Cellini
or Boccaccio, was nothing short of a gaucherie.
I found it intolerably irksome. I did it abom-
inably ill. It retarded the recovery of my eye-
sight, and when it was done I abandoned it as
worthless." I pursue the development of this
little episode because it illustrates the Master's
more than venial failure as regards the pupil,
the pupil's dogged devotion to the Master's
will, and most important of all the pupil's final
sense of liberation from that wiU.

For Jowett's advice, accepted as to Zeller,
was negligible in the main, Symonds was rap-
idly determining his own future. With his
wife he was reading works on Michael Angelo
and the Renaissance— "I want to keep my
mind on that part of European history,"
he wrote in a letter. Visiting Chfton

70 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

in August he found Woolner the sculptor
making a bust of his father. Woohier
with his clear vocation, his vigor and single-
mindedness in art, impressed him deeply,
just as Jenny Lind had formerly done.
"Woolner," he noted in his diary, "likes
people to keep to their trade and not to med-
dle. He has a profound contempt for Jow-
ett's meddling criticism." The gulf dividing
artistic sensibility from artistic power occu-
pied his mind, but not quite with the old feel-
ing of impotence. Woolner, the stout-fibred
and opinionated sculptor, could yet compass
the miracle of art ; and after hearing Israel in
Egypt he ponders on such a man as Handel,
greedy, coarse and garrulous in conversation,
according to his biographer, fond of beer,
without passions and without one intellectual
taste, who could yet "express the feelings of
mighty nations, and speak with the voice of
angels more effectually than even Milton."
Symonds, we may note, had the characteristic
English enthusiasm for Handel. Throughout
this period his diaries are filled with specula-

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 71

tions on the nature of artists: one can see al-
ready that he was a born biographer.

Speculations of this kind led him to the con-
clusion that he was not, and could not become,
an originating artist himself. We find him
noting, on November 30, 1865, an important
date in relation to his ultimate career, his in-
tention to fit himself "for being a good vul-
gariseur." The one trait he could depend upon
was irrepressible energy, a kind of energy
which filled up every hour left vacant by
bodily ailment, weak eyes and treacherous
brain, — even those perhaps which might better
have been fiUed with passive reflection. If he
could not be a poet he could at least set him-
self, by industrious, persistent, eflFectual work,
to learn the craft of letters. He could let the
muses shift for themselves. And indeed for
Symonds this determination, baffled as it was
for some time to be, was highly essential. The
mere semi-physical exercise of putting to-
gether words and sentences was needed by him
as a tonic, and to his dogged perseverance in
this, often against medical orders, he attrib-
uted his prolonged life.

72 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

But now, when he had taken his resolve, a
fresh disaster hefell. His father, examining
him on Christmas eve, discovered that the apex
of the left lung was gravely affected. By
the strange displacement of energy which
often occurs in tubercular cases, the new
trouble no sooner asserted itself than the old
brain-weakness began to abate. The fresh
evil, so much more serious as regards his out-
ward life, enabled him to live more intensely
and more successfully within. He became
definitely happier and more capable of pro-
longed study. But this again was a new main
tendency which did not for some time exhibit
noticeable results.

On February 24, 1866, he set out for the Ri-
viera. At Mentone he set seriously to work
mastering Italian, of which he had had since
Harrow days only a convenient knowledge,
pressing through Dante, Boccaccio, and Ari-
osto, writing the first of his Greek studies —
that on Empedocles, struggling to purge his
style of purple patches and to grasp more in-
cisively the truth about men, works, places. A
stay in Switzerland on the way home brought

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 73

back all his old dreams of poetry. He was
growing more rapidly than he knew, but the
growth was leading him inexorably away from
what he chiefly longed for. In August he re-
turned with his wife to 47, Norfolk Square,
where ten months before his eldest daughter
Janet had been born. His complex and scat-
tered sympathies were gradually shaking down
to a more settled programme; and it already
appeared how much of that programme was
to be occupied with the Renaissance and its re-
lations. With Jowett, on a flying visit to Ox-
ford, we find him considering the idea of a
History of the Renaissance in England, which
he never relinquished and to which he contrib-
uted in his dramatic studies and his lives of
Sidney and Jonson.

Another journey through France, made
necessary by an attack of pneumonia and ag-
gravated brain-congestion, followed at the end
of May, 1867. His journal at this time is ex-
ceptionally full and illuminating: his varied
sympathies begin to assume forms character-
istic of his later complex though reasonably
coherent point of view. He longs continually

74 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

for the Alps, obscurely divining that among
them he would eventually find health and
strength. At Bayeux he finds, in the midst of
his architectural studies, that there is a greater
monotony among cathedrals than among
mountains, and he adds significantly, "Nature
increases, art diminishes, as we grow older."
Passing strangers — ^the theme of more than
one of his published poems — ^haunt him with
the mysterious fascination of unknown and un-
knowable destinies. "I hate the sophistication
of my existence," he writes, "the being penned
up in a cage of archasology and hterary pic-
ture-making." He is tormented with a sense
of idleness and wasted youth : the need of con-
stant reaction, activity, recording of impres-
sions grows upon him. He pours himself out
in letters, in diaries, notes, essays, poems. Ev-
erything that enters his brain tortures him un-
til it is recast and thrown forth again. He
seems to repeat feverishly over and over those
appalhng words of Marvell:

"And ever at my back I hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near."

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 75

A morbid fear of stopping, waiting, letting go
possesses him. He cannot content himself that
life, trusted a little, in its own mysterious,
blundering, compulsive way, fulfils itself after
a fashion which is from the beginning, in each
case, inevitable. No disciple of Goethe was
ever more fitted to profit by Goethe's paradox.
Was man in der Jugend hegehrt hat man im
Alter die Fullej that the life committed to na-
ture works itself out mechanically, while the
individual in becoming as disinterested as na-
ture views himself with all the cold indifference
of nature, passing through his seasons inexor-
ably as the year and indestructibly as the wind:
and takes a kind of artistic delight in the in-
evitableness of nature's fulfilment of him.
Some such faith as this — ^the really scientific
morale, so vitaUy needful, was beginning to
take form in him, fluctuating, vague, unac-
countable, but of ever-increasing strength.
"No one is happy," he says, "who has not a
deep, firm faith in some ideal far beyond this
world, in some law of majesty, beauty, good-
ness, harmony, superior to the apparent mean-
ness, ugliness, evil discord of the present

76 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

dispensation. . . . Those who are not 'ten-
oned and mortised' upon something inde-
structible must be rendered wretched by the
changefulness and barrenness of daily life."
Doubt and faith, agitation and calm, intel-
lect and emotion were struggling to gain the
mastery: and the struggle was to continue un-
til it reached its culmination in the great crisis
so soon to follow.

After this exhausting fortnight he returned
to Hastings and London, where presently an-
other daughter was born. The summer weeks
were still more exhausting; brightened, how-
ever, by the close friendship he now formed
with Henry Sidgwick. His diary and letters
become extravagantly rhetorical and incoher-
ent, though often acutely and awfully vivid.
How truly the virus of Amiel had poisoned
his heart may be seen from one passage: "I
seem to enter into a kind of Nirvana, thinking
of mutability and youth that flows away —
until the senses slip off one by one, and
thoughts slumber, and the conscious soul at
last stands naked and alone, environed by
eternal silence and everlasting nothingness. It

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 77

is the glacial region of the soul, the death of
all that warms or makes to move, the absolute
indifference to pain or pleasure, of what is or
what is not. From it I bring no message-
none at least that can be said in words— but
such a message as makes one feel what are the
solitudes of the womb and of the grave. No
doubt this state is— of the nerves— morbid; but
what does it not reveal to me of the uncolored,
universal I?"

Symonds was now passing through the bit'
terest, blackest season of his life. The maladie
de I'iciml, the demon of speculation, the thirst
for the absolute had to play itself out before
it was possible for him to strike the C-major
of this life, before the invigorating earthiness
of Whitman and the soothing calm of Goethe
could prevail with him.

The crisis canoe during a second tour in
France, whither he had repaired with his family
at the opening of September. At Melun dur-
ing a sleepless night be wrote the most im-
passioned of his poems, An Improvisation on
the Violin. It is a dramatic monologue, the
soliloquy of Beethoven during the performance

78 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

of what appears to be the C-minor symphony
or an improvisation based upon it. "The vic-
tory and majesty of the soul are wrought out
of its defeats and humihations," he had writ-
ten of this symphony only two weeks before.
And in the poem and this context is exhibited
the intensely personal and subjective nature of
his attitude toward music, toward all the arts
indeed. Nothing could illustrate more accu-
rately his incapacity as yet for rational criti-
cism. It seems to substantiate the theory that
artistic expression literally springs from dis-
ease — a kind of blood-letting, as Goethe con-
ceived it. For Symonds perpetually speaks of
the rehef he finds in writing out his miseries on
paper. He clings to his pen as a shipwrecked
man clings to a spar.

On October 24 he arrived at Cannes. There
were assembled some of his most brilliant
friends, among them Jenny Lind, Henry
Sidgwick, and Edward Lear, author of the
Book of Nonsense. Lear was busily occupied,
at this ironical moment, making rhymes and
pictures with little Janet Symonds; among
them the immortal Owl and the Pussycat who

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 79

went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.
Neuralgia, worn-out nerves, increased lung-
disturbances, shattered eyesight, digestive dis-
order, and a sprained ankle made such consola-
tions ludicrously impossible to Symonds. His
difficulties suddenly came to a head and he
passed through a kind of insanity. "All the
evil humors which were fermenting in my
petty state of man," he says in his Auto-
biography, "poignant and depressing memories
of past troubles, physical maladies of nerve-
substance and lung-tissue, decompositions of
habitual creeds, sentimental vapors, doubts
about the existence of a moral basis to human
life, thwarted intellectual activity, ambitions
rudely checked by impotence — all these miser-
able factors of a wretched inner life, masked
by appearances, the worse for me for being
treated by the outside world as mere accidents
of illness in a well-to-do and idle citizen, boiled
up in a kind of devil's caldron during those
last weeks at Cannes and made existence hell."
And again: "The last night I spent at Cannes
was the worst of my whole life. I lay awake
motionless, my soul stagnant, feeling what is

80 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

meant by Spiritual blackness and darkness. If
it should last forever? As I lay, a tightening
approached my heart. It came nearer, the
grasp grew firmer, I was cold and lifeless in
the clutch of a great agony." Such without
doubt is the state that in sensational natures
precedes "conversion."

Inscrutable and intangible as this crisis may
appear, its intense reality is made plain by its
very tangible effect upon his life from this
time forward. Nothing more surely proves
how really fortunate a man Symonds was than
that he was capable of this purging crisis.
Many men have lived— Amiel their chief ex-
emplar—nursing the maladies that afflicted
Symonds,, standing, as Hegel says of the
modern artist, in the midst of this reflecting
world and its relations and unable by any act
of will to withdraw from it. The dim and
voiceless pain of the overcultivated mind which
has lost its power of self-command creates a
special limbo of lost souls. To the mind which
has identified itself with Maya, which has ac-
customed itself to the universal reality,
phenomena possess only a wraithlike existence.

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 81

men and women are shadows projected on a
mist. lYet life with all its passions remains,
life which has lost its faculty of katharsis,
which cannot purge itself through action,
which cannot satisfy its own fundamental de-
mands, which is dead without being disem-
bodied. This is what occurs when, in psycho-
logical language, the motor activity has been
wholly supplanted by the sensory, when the
will has been fretted away by the imagination.
This tendency in Symonds was brought up
sharply. All the unhealthy, unguided, chaotic
stirrings of his youth could not prevail finally
against his truly amazing power of rebound.
His original faculty for pure artistic creation,
as I see it, had been very early swamped.
Three things had caused this: his lack of the
sheer physical power of self-assertion, the
sesthetic studies which had dissipated it and
diluted it with speculation, and the obtuse com-
punction-philosbphy of his father and Jowett.
All these combined, acting either as positive
or negative agencies, had turned him from art
into esthetics. The speculative element of;
aesthetics had gradually pursued its course.

82 JOHN ADDIKGTON SYMONDS

draining the imagination, the nerves, the will
until it had reached its logical climax and put
the last question to life. To this question there
is no intellectual reply. Life itself can reply
by continuing to roll on. The soul can reply
by submitting blindly or enthusiastically to
life. But for a few weeks it seemed to Sy-
nionds that he lacked the power of submission
to life — ^because the springs of his own life
were sapped. He had become for the moment
pure intellect, and intellect had reached its
barrier. Nerves and emotions appeared to be
in abeyance. In reality they were in a state
of hideous tension and, being so, he felt aU the
agony of the position which he seemed only to
know. It was, however, impossible for Sy-
monds to lose his mind. He possessed very
deep and strong recuperative powers whose ex-
istence he had never guessed, and these pres-
ently asserted themselves. It became quickly
evident how much wiser nature is than the
doubting brain. The total man surmounted
the erring part — quietly, without warning.
And Symonds was no sooner on his feet again
than he found himself in possession of some-

YOUTH: WANDERINGS 83

thing he had never possessed before — faith in
life. The sceptical, the speculative, the
analytical mind never left him, but it was never
again to interfere with a robust sense of life
in its totality, life which is more than cerebra-
tion — faith in the universe, in humanity, and
in himself. "I emerged at last," he says, "into
stoical acceptance of my place in the world,
combined with epicurean indulgence. To-
gether, these two motives restored me to com-
parative health, gave me rehgion, and enabled
me, in spite of broken nerves and diseased
lungs, to do what I have done in literature.
I am certain of this fact, and I regard the utter
blackness of despair at Cannes as the midnight
in which there lay a budding spiritual mor-
row."

His life was hke a book broken in the back,
which falls into two parts.

Chapter IVl

AT CLIFTON: LITEEATURE

IN the very midst of his ordeal at Cannes
Symonds did not hesitate in his studies.
We find him reading Richardson, Balzac, and
Heine's letters, plodding on with Zeller, and
projecting a sort of original version of Hegel's
Esthetics. The journey proceeded through
Corsica and Italy where Symonds, busy and
curious with renewed energy and hfe, resumed
the study of Italian and wrote his essays on
Aristophanes, Ariosto and Tasso. In Novem-
ber he took his family to Clifton, engaging a
house quite near his old home, where on Jan-
uary 15, 1869, his daughter Margaret was
born.

Symonds was now eager for action, and for
a time his activity took a social form. Clifton
College had recently been founded, largely
through the instrumentality of his father, and

84

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 85

he arranged presently to give lectures on
Greek Literature to the Sixth Form, which
he extended also to ladies' classes in Bristol.
This work I fancy was of great importance
to his chosen career of vulgariseur. For the
first time he learned the demands of an
audience — ^the kind of audience to which, per-
haps against his dearest wishes, the greatest
part of his writings have appealed and will
appeal. For it must be remembered that this
well-known apostle of culture to the majority
mistrusted and disliked all the sentimentalities
of culture, such as are not truly acclimated
to the natural self. However, he was now
required to find his level. Desultory, frag-
mentary, agitated piece-work was no longer in
the old way possible. He was forced to study
the art of presentation and to get his material
into shape. That the answering pull, the con-
criete presence of listeners was exhilarating to
him is evident from the fact that his first books
were the direct outcome of these lectures.
Whether, as he maintained, he lacked the art
of lecturing or not, it is significant that he
wrote in a letter of this time: "My emotions

86 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

are less occupied and my imagination more
exercised." The introspective habit was rapidly-
falling away, and he was consequently giving
himself more generously to life. Some of his
pupils have recorded the profound influence
upon them of his great power in dialectics, his
own tenacity of aim, and his wonderful sym-
pathy with young men. He lectured once a
week at the college, continuing the work talk-
ing and reading aloud in his own library.
"Get subjects outside yourself, he used to say,
if you wish to show that you are strong; and
if you intend to be a poet, you must begin
and end with strength." So writes one pupil
in a memorial notice of 1893. It exhibits
pathetically the eagerness with which Symonds
was himself endeavoring to get outside him-
self and to find strength. He was rapidly
assuming the position of public responsibility
which later became him so well at Davos. All
this fell in with the scheme his father had
formed for him, with so many affectionate,
mistaken, postponed hopes. And now that
kindly, repressive influence was to be removed.
On February 25, 1871, Dr. Symonds died.

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 87

His father's death was a profound shock;
yet Symonds almost immediately realized, with
chagrin, how hberating a shock it was. It
came at the moment when he had at last pre-
pared himself for work, and it enabled him
to carry out that work in his own way. "It
is true," he says in his Autobiography y "that
the independence I now acquired added a de-
cided stimulus to my mental growth. My
father had been so revered and so implicitly
obeyed by me that his strong personal influence
kept me in something like childish subjection.
I did nothing without consulting him, and
when I was unable to repress those parts of
my nature with which he could not sympathize,
I resorted to subterfuge, half -measures, and
concealments. Left without him, I had to act
for myself, and insensibly I became more
manly." And again, "I doubt whether I
could have written as freely, and published as
spontaneously, as I have done, had I been con-
scious of his criticism." Pietas was the one
strictly Roman virtue that Symonds pos-
sessed. It is a virtue which, in some condi-
tions, becomes the mother of many vices.

88 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

With his wife and three daughters he now
moved into his boyhood home, Clifton Hill
House, and presently began to assimae his
father's place in the responsibilities of the
town. He was elected to the Clifton College
Council, served as secretary to an Invahd
Ladies' Home, and was one of the founders
of Bristol University. He gathered together
a volume of Miscellanies by Dr. Symonds and
edited the Remains of Conington, who had
also died. In 1872 he pubhshed his first book.
An Introduction to the Study of Dante. This
was prepared from lectures given at Clifton
College and in Exeter: it forms an appropriate
opening to the long series of his publications
dealing with the Renaissance.

The idea of a monumental work on that sub-
ject had been brewing since the latter part of
1870. His friend Frederic Myers, with whom
he had first read Whitman, had proposed a
collaboration, which fell through; and Sy-
monds, doubtful and hesitant, determined to
proceed alone. "My heart bleeds," he wrote,
"to think of my own incapacity for a great
work. I must not think of it, for the thought

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE BS

paralyzes." Nevertheless, in February, 1871,
the month of his father's death, we find him
furiously at work upon the first chapter, a
rapid survey of the whole of Italian life and
history before Dante. This chapter seems to
be the second and a part of the first in the
volume called The Age of the Despots. Other
trains of thought were also taking form. A
long series of articles had been passing
through the magazines: those on Ravenna,
Orvieto, Christmas in Eomej Ajaccio, and
many others, rewritten from his journals of
travel; as well as Greek studies on The Gnomic
PoetSy Empedocles, The Idyllists, etc., some
of which had been given as lectures at Clifton
College. These appeared presently in book
form. Studies of the Greek Poets in 1873 and
Sketches in Italy and Greece in 1874. And
at about this time John Morley, much taken
with his Greek studies, invited him to form
a connection as regular contributor to The
Fortnightly Review, which he maintained dur-
ing the rest of his life.

To support his health and restrain him from
excessive study the Continental tours continued

90 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

regularly. In 1872 he was again in Switzer-
land, and in the spring of 1873 he went with
his wife to Greece. Athens, he notes, "is pure
light"; and his essay on Athens became an
elaboration of this phrase. Later in the same
year he visited Malta, Tunis, Sicily, and Italy
again, busily collecting material for his great
work. "I read chronicles and histories and
biographies on the very spot where the events
happened, and make notes for future use
which have the juice of life in them."

In 1875 the first volume of The Renaissance
in Italy appeared, dealing with the socio-
political aspect of the period. In his Auto-
biography Symonds deplores the declamatory
tone which obstinately remained in the book
after it was rewritten from his lectures. He
doubts whether he could ever have launched
his treacherous brain on so huge an enterprise
had he not taken the first step by lecturing.
Walter Pater, reviewing this first volimie in
The Academy, wrote: "The book presents a
brilliant picture of its subject. ... As
is the writer's subject so is his style — energetic,
flexible, eloquent, full of various illustrations.

AT CLIFTOlSr: LITERATURE 91

keeping the attention of the reader always on
the alert. . . . The imagination in his-
torical composition works most legitimately
when it approaches dramatic effects. In this
volume there is a high degree of the dramatic ;
here all is objective, and the writer is hardly
seen behind his work." To this hearty praise
he adds one significant qualification — the ab-
sence of reserve: "I note the absence of this
reserve in many turns of expression, in the
choice sometimes of detail and metaphor."

Between Symonds and Pater, I may men-
tion at this point, there was a strange want
of sympathy. Pater habitually referred with
a kind of pitying contempt to his fellow-
Platonist as "poor Symonds." Symonds,
writing in 1885 of Marius, shrinks from
"approaching Pater's style, which has a pe-
culiarly disagreeable effect upon my nerves —
like the presence of a civet-cat" ; and again, in
1890, "I tried Pater's Appreciations to-day,
and found myself wandering about among the
'precious' sentences, just as though I had lost
myself in a sugar-cane plantation." No one,
I dare say, could have b^^en so acutely annoyed

92 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

by Pater's style who was not himself on the
perilous edge of preciosity. This was indeed
somewhat the case with Symonds, who was
often preserved from preciosity only by the
other extreme of half heedless improvisation.
It is a little sadly notable to find the two best
contemporary workers in a field so largely
identical, so irreconcilable in temperament.
Perhaps the field itself was to blame. At any
rate, the gods of material progress may be
amused to find the Greek spirit reincarnated
so incompatible with itself, as if the modern
Hellenist could remain himself only in the
midst of barbarians.

As with Pater, so with Swinburne. Sy-
monds invariably wrote of Swinburne with the
respect proper to a great poet. Of Bothwell
he said, "I do not think anything greater has
been produced in our age. ... It seems
to me the most virile exercise of the poetic
power in combination with historic accuracy
that our literature of this century can show."
But elsewhere and of another poem he adds,
"He does not attend to the projection of his
thought enough, but splashes it out as if he

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 93

were upsetting a bucket." What Swinburne
thought of Symonds may be gathered from
one of the wickedest and most unjust of all
his wicked and unjust criticisms. In his recol-
lections of Jowett he writes of "such renascent
blossoms of the Italian renascence as the
Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers
who is now in Aretino's bosom. The cult of
the Calamus, as expounded by Mr. Addington
Symonds to his fellow-Calamites, would have
found no acceptance or tolerance with the
translator of Plato." What Jowett really
thought of Symonds we know well. Truly
there is something catlike about modern
pagans. ^^,--

The second series of Studies of the Gfreek
Poets followed rapidly. On these two volumes,
the most luxuriant of all his writings, I should
like to pause. "Some wiU always be found,
under the conditions of this double culture,"
Symonds had said, "to whom Greece is a lost
fatherland, and who, passing through hf e with
the mal du pays of that irrecoverable land upon
them, may be compared to visionaries, spend-
ing their nights in golden dreams and the

94 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

days in common duties." Only a man like
Symonds, perplexed by a thousand cross-cur-
rents of thought, thwarted from the pure
poetical faculty, could feel as a revelation that
majesty of the early philosophers, that fire and
sweetness of the early poets. The world has
squandered since their day genius beyond
measure; but they remain, immortal names,
pure and clear as drops of wine embossing
cups of crystal. Why? Because they are the
immemorial prototypes, the inventors of all
that usage and slovenly debasement have
brought to us in the form of platitude. They
lived when platitude was young and the dew
of early morning lay shining on the first and
simplest thoughts of men. They discovered
those "happy thoughts" which are the points
of departure for aU speculation. It is hard
for us to conceive the day when the idea that
"not-being has no existence" could, in itself
alone, fill the whole life of a philosopher, when
he could become victorious and majestic
through the discovery of it, when so simple
a notion could buoy up a man of gigantic
intellectual powers, satisfy him, enable him to

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 95

look back upon a well-filled and exuberant life
and bring him, as it brought Parmenides, the
reverence of the greatest thinkers of his world.
That is why the simplicity of the ancients is
so hard for us to understand. We cannot
grasp how pregnant that simplicity was — we
who grasp Goethe, Dante, and Shakespeare
and even then feel unsatisfied, and unex-
pressed. Happy is the man who, in our day,
can find a thought larger than himself! He
alone is capable of moral culture. But not
among the early philosophers alone do we find
that pregnant simplicity by which a little
thing can greatly fulfil a life. In all ages of
childhood and poetry we find it — in our own
Shakespearean age when Gabriel Harvey, the
Cambridge scholar, expressed as his ultimate
wish to have it written upon his grave that he
had "fostered hexameters on English soil."
No scholar could have had less of the sophisti-
cation of scholarship than is there expressed.
In reflections like these, in the passion of op-
posites, we find the true nature of such eclectic
affinities as those of Symonds with the Greeks
and the Elizabethans.

96 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Symonds' attitude toward scholarship seems
to me indicated in his chapter on mythology.
He there states carefully the seven main
philological explanations of the origin of
myths, and parries each in favor of a vaguer
explanation. He seems to feel that to get at
the true origin of myths one has to be a poet.
And indeed in the last analysis one can grasp
such a thing only by a sympathetic under-
standing of childhood; so that the method of
approach becomes rather psychological than
philological. Behind all study there lies a
mystery, and the origins of things can be
grasped only by clairvoyance. What is true
of the origins of things human is true in a
similar way of their definitions. One may
stumble about endlessly among scientific defini-
tions of the epic ; then one comes upon Shelley's
definition as the "summing-up of the spiritual
life of an age for the age that follows," and
at once a flood of light falls over everything.
Science covdd not have arrived at that defini-
tion. Why? Because it is only suggestive
and personal, not abstract and final. A hun-
dred poets might have stated it in as many

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 97

different ways and each way would have had
a higher finahty in it than exact scholarship
could achieve. This of course is only to say
that science provides a method, that it does not
pretend to penetrate essences, that the true
truth is the poet's. There are two kinds of
truth: ideal truth and practical truth — ^truth
by divination and truth by logic, and both,
alas! are mutually scornful. What must the
logical historian think of Carlyle's French
Revolution? And, on the other hand, what
would Ruskin have said of the art-criticism of
Mr. Bernhard Berenson? That is the ever-
lasting dualism between the prophet of an
ideal order and the interpreter of the fait
accompli. Symonds, with his divided heart, is
an example of the soul astray between two
worlds. His scholarship is never quite of the
orthodox kind. It is restless scholarship, seek-
ing always to do what only poetry can do, to
become poetry; scholarship not merely as hu-
manism but as mysticism. I do not wish to
emphasize this too much — it is only a touch,
which does not seriously vitiate the practical
solidity of his work. But it is the kind of

98 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

thing which, had it been done more courage-
ously, conclusively, whole-heartedly, would
have ruined Symonds' work as scientific pre-
sentation and might have lifted it out of the
scientific class altogether into the region of
truly poetical interpretation. That perilous
method results frequently in mere unsound-
ness of thought; occasionally it results in such
work as Carlyle's French Revolution, wherein
the lack of practical truth is counterbalanced
by a personality that makes it a piece of high
fantasy.

In the Greek Poets I think Symonds pro-
duced something more hke a work of genius
than he ever again achieved. The book is
vibrant with golden pictures and bright
phrases, such as this: "The sweetness of the
songs of Phrynichus has reached us like the
echo of a bird's voice in a traveller's narrative."
It cannot be denied that the style is often over-
studied and more often recklessly overblown.
But who that loves beauty in words and rebels
against our too unstudied and too sable English
prose, and prose of scholarship especially, can

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 99

regret a passage like this on Sappho and her
sister poets for all its tricks of rhetoric?

"All the luxuries and elegancies of life
which that climate and the rich valleys of
Lesbos could afford were at their disposal;
exquisite gardens, where the rose and hyacinth
spread perfume; river-beds ablaze with the
oleander and wild pomegranate; olive groves
and fountains, where the cyclamen and violet
flowered with feathery maiden-hair; pine-tree-
shadowed coves, where they might bathe in the
calm of a tideless sea; fruits such as only the
southern sun and sea- wind can mature ; marble
cliifs, starred with jonquil and anemone in
spring, aromatic with myrtle and lentisk and
samphire and wild-rosemary through all the
months; nightingales that sang in May; tem-
ples dim with dusky gold and bright with
ivory; statues and frescoes of heroic forms.
In such scenes as these the Lesbian poets lived,
and thought of love."

Passages like this, modulated in tone and
key to a whole pageant world of scenes and
characters, and all as blossoms of severe learn-
ing, cQrrobpratQ Frederic Harrison's opinion

100 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

that "Symonds was certainly far more widely
and profoundly versed in Greek poetry than
any Englishman who in our day has analyzed
it for the general reader. And it is plain that
no scholar of his eminence has been master of
a style so fascinating and eloquent."

The unending journeys back and forth were
making of the fugitive from ill-health, in
spite of his citizenlike position at home, a kind
of scholar-gypsy. The second volume of The
Renaissance feverishly went forward, at first
in Switzerland and then for some months of
1876 at San Remo, wherever in hotels or
casual inns a writing-table and a free hour
could be had. "I worked furiously, recklessly,
at this period," l^e writes, "devouring books
upon Italian history, art, scholarship, and
literature, writing continually, and pushing
one volume forward while another was going
through the press." The travel sketches also
proceeded between whiles, filled with exquisite
pages of color and scraps of history, biog-
raphy, criticism, picturesque word-painting.

These papers, collected finally in three
volumes which now bear the general title

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 101

Sketches, and Studies in Italy and Greece, are
so many chips from the workshop where the
weightier books were being laboriously put to-
gether. They bring us behind the scenes, and
show us the anxious travellings to and fro of
the quick-eyed scholar in search of the past.
They are fuU of informal autobiography, and
provide for us the ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic
background, shimmering and iridescent, of his
complex outer life. They are Symonds'
Beisebilder, and yet with a very significant
difference from those of Heine. F. Harrison
acutely remarks that these sketches are records
of things seen rather than of things felt. That
I think is true, and Symonds was a victim of
our modern passion for the picturesque. With
all his intense feeling for individual men and
women, his passion for comradeship, his cos-
mopolitan sympathies, he remains always a
subhmated tourist; unlike Heine and unlike
Byron, to whom ancient monuments, lovely
scenes, and all the grandeur of the past exist
primarily as stimulants to modern liberty.
Heine's sketches are the most exquisite that
have ever been written about Italy, yet Heine

102 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

never treats any phase of history or of art
as an end in itself. Had he travelled in Italy
in the days when Sjrmonds was travelling there
we feel that he would have had a great deal
to say about Mazzini and Garibaldi and
Cavour. But Symonds never once that I can
recall appears to have any sense, of the "Third
Italy." He never refers to Mazzini except in
one or two historical passages of The Renais-
sance. Of all the throbbing modern life of
the nation, social, religious, political, of all
that is Italy, he is almost as oblivious as the
holiday tripper. The very years during which
he was busily passing in and out of Italy,
with eager, open eyes, were the years of Italy's
greatest crisis. Yet the solitary published
reference in his diary to any sense of great
occurrences is a tell-tale entry of 1862. He
was in Milan, and the people had been stirred
to a demonstration against the Franco-
Austrian Government by a speech of Gari-
baldi. Four hundred were taken prisoners
under his hotel window; and he observes, "I
often wondered what a demonstration meant.
This is a pretty and picturesque specimen."

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 103

This amazing sociological insensibility might
be consistent in an artist; in a historian it is,
to say the least, singular. And it is all the
more singular when we recall the sympathy
of Symonds with historic liberators like
Savonarola and Campanella. Human evolu-
tion, the liberation of men was indeed an ani-
mating principle of his entire critical and re-
ligious philosophy. Are we forced to con-
clude then that his major sympathies were in
fact purely literary? His life at Davos seems
to belie that, but the self-conscious pursuit of
the picturesque is perilous to the most genuine
types of intellectual integrity.

Certainly this tourist attitude toward Italy,
as a kind of museum filled only with beautiful
dead things, gives a false perspective even to
his magnum opus. Professor Villari remarked
that he seems occasionally to forget that the
Renaissance was only a single period of Italian
literature and art, only one episode in a long
evolution which has not yet worked itself out.
He follows too rashly the historical method of
Taine in treating the traits of the Italians ex-
hibited in that epoch as essential and perma-

104 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

nent rather than temporary and evolving.
Even Ruskin, so fundamentally wanting in
sympathy with the spirit of the Renaissance,
brings to it a truer vision, because he thinks
of it always as an episode — ^however mistaken
he may be as regards the quality and value
of that episode — ^in human history. Without
doubt Symonds was so intensely occupied with
the golden age itself that he neglected some
of its wider aspects and ignored the modern
Italy with which it has so vital a connection.
The truth of this contention will be evident,
I think, to anyone who reads his informal
essays in their proper relation, as preliminary
or subsidiary sketches for his formal work. A
historian of old Italy so bhnd to young Italy
must necessarily be wanting somewhat in the
truest historical vision. For here the ItaUan
people are used mainly as an adjunct to the
picturesque, just as in his rather deplorable
essay In the Key of Blue (which led Swin-
burne brutally to characterize Symonds as the
"Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondo-
liers") he represents his gondolier Antonio
posed in various lights and with various back-

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 105

grounds to bring out the aspects of a color.
There preeminently we have the record of a
thing seen rather than of a thing felt — ^the
painter is at work rather than the poet. But
no one can read his Autobiography without
realizing how the poet was struggling in him
all this time to assert itself. It is one of the
deepest facts of his pathological condition that
he could never summon up the sufficient vitahty
to feel what he saw, to be the poet that he
wished to be. He seems to echo the words of
Coleridge, in his Ode to Dejection:

"I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are !"

And again:

"I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within."

Just this insufficient vitality gave an element
of truth to the harsh assertion of one of his
reviewers, that his poems were "the vocabulary
of passion served up cold." Symonds well
knew what it is to be a poet; he knew the
difference between pure emotional power and

106 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

the nervous power he possessed. The re-
viewers of his poetry rather wantonly told the
truth, which has to be emphasized about his
essays. For Symonds, who maintained as his
first principle that life is more than art, failed
here in the application of it. For him in Italy
life is wholly submerged beneath art ; with the
exception of the people of Venice, with whom
later he came into close, friendly contact, his
Italians have no life above their overwhelming
past.

Symonds provides so bright an illustration
of that morbid passion for the picturesque
which afflicted the world at the close of the
nineteenth century, that I feel I should say
more of it here. He describes the impulse in
his Autumn Wanderings: "Why is it that
Italian beauty does not leave the spirit so un-
troubled as an Alpine scene? Why do we here
desire the flower of some emergent feeling to
grow from the air, or from the soil, or from
humanity to greet us? This sense of want
evoked from southern beauty is perhaps the
antique mythopoeic yearning. But in our per-
plexed life it takes another form, and seems

AT CLII^TON: LITERATURE 107

the longing for emotion, ever fleeting, ever
new, unrealized, unreal, insatiable." This pic-
tures an obscure, iridescent state of mind which
must have haunted even the most casual tourist
in an Italy saturated with old passions that
seem strugghng to revive in us as we stand
among the memorials of them. We cannot
suppress these "echoes of an antenatal dream,"
In places where life has been lived so fully
death seems to lose its finality. Numberless
ghosts beset the traveller clamoring to regain
their old life in his life. One feels oneself
actually a cloud of many witnesses, a composite
of some phantom horde. One becomes the
passive agent through which old histories re-
enact themselves — congregations of the dead,
jealous of our trivial flesh and blood, struggle
within us to find once again their wonted
space and time. Symonds in one of his
Venetian sketches describes himself as trying
at the Lido to focus the spirit of it, when sud-
denly an immense, swarthy swimmer leaped
from the sea, like an incarnate Triton. There-
upon he observes: "I have always held that
in our modern life the only real equivalent for

108 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

the antique mythopoeic sense — ^that sense which
enabled the Hellenic race to figure for them-
selves the powers of earth and air . . .
under the forms of living human beings, is
supplied by the appearance at some fehcitous
moment of a man or woman who impersonates
for our imagination the essence of the beauty
that environs us." But one is rarely fortunate
to find satisfaction of this kind. The Circe of
travel in our day is the accumulation, beyond
our own power of recuperative integrity, of
these impressions which demand an embodi-
ment they cannot have except in creative
imaginations. Culture provides us with a
sympathetic knowledge of countless historic
hves and points of view, which only robust
personalities can subdue to themselves. The
peril of culture lies in its tendency to sap one's
own firm and present actuality, and vicarious
experience is not at all the same thing as real
experience. Symonds felt this, and he ex-
presses it in his reflection: "Passion, nerve
and sinew, eating and drinking, even money-
getting, the coarsest forms of activity, come,
in my reckoning, before culture."

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 109

The Sketches contain some of his most
beautiful writing, and I may not pass them
by without giving an example of it. One must
note, however, in the passage I have chosen,
a certain heaviness of effect which is due to
a characteristic abuse of the adjective and the
want of a certain vigor of reserve which comes
with tranquil recollection. It is to illustrate
not only this, but Symonds' perpetual con-
sciousness of it, his own consciousness of hav-
ing passed beyond art, the alternate swing of
his pendulum between rhapsody and journal-
ism, that I have added the final sentence of
qualification. It is a picture of Amalfi:

"Over the whole busy scene rise the gray
hills, soaring into blueness of air-distance,
terreted here and there with ruined castles,
capped with particolored campanili and white
convents, and tufted through their whole
height with the orange and the emerald of the
great tree-spurge, and with the live gold of the
blossoming broom. It is difficult to say when
this picture is most beautiful — ^whether in the
early morning, when the boats are coming back
from their night-toil upon the sea, and along

110 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

the headlands in the fresh light lie swathes of
fleecy mist, betokening a still, hot day — or at
noontide, when the houses on the hill stand,
tinted pink and yellow, shadowless like gems,
and the great caruba-trees above the tangles
of vines and figs are blots upon the steady
glare — or at sunset, when violet and rose, re-
flected from the eastern sky, make aU these
terraces and peaks translucent with a wondrous
glow. The best of all, perhaps, is night, with
a full moon hanging high overhead. Who
shall describe the silhouettes of boats upon the
shore or sleeping on the misty sea? On the
horizon lies a dusky film of brownish golden
haze, between the moon and the glimmering
water; and here and there a lamp or candle
burns with a deep red. Then is the time to
take a boat and row upon the bay, or better,
to swim out into the waves and trouble the re-
flections from the steady stars. The moun-
tains, clear and cahn, with light-irradiated
chasms and hard shadows cast upon the rock,
soar up above a city built of alabaster, or sea-
foam, or summer clouds. The whole is white
and wonderful; no similes suggest an analogue

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 111

for the lustre, solid and transparent, of
Amalfi nestling in moonlight hetween the gray-
blue sea and lucid hills. Stars stand on all
the peaks, and twinkle, or keep gliding, as the
boat moves, down the craggy sides. Stars are
mirrored on the marble of the sea, until one
knows not whether the oar has struck sparks
from a star image or has scattered diamonds
of phosphorescent brine.

"AU this reads like a rhapsody, but indeed it
is difficult not to be rhapsodical when a May
night of Amalfi is in the memory, with the
echo of rich baritone voices chanting Neapoli-
tan songs to a mandoline."

The second volume of his great work, on
the Revival of Learning, appeared in 1876,
and the third volume on the Fine Arts went
forward during the summer in Switzerland.
We find him working at the Riederalp, in com-
pany with his friend H. G. Dakyns and Oscar
Browning, "at feverish speed, in the midst of
damp fogs that crept into our rooms through
chinks in the log-built walls." Mr. Browning,
in his Memoirs, recalls that large packets of
proof sheets would arrive each morning on the

112 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

breakfast table. These proofs were of The
New Republic, which Symonds was revising
for Mr. Mallock. Early in 1877, whilst he was
lecturing on the Medici in the draughty
theatre of the Royal Institution, he caught a
severe cold, which passed into bronchitis. Dr.
Beddoe of Clifton (to whom The Renaissance
was dedicated) found that his left lung was
in a dangerous condition. Dispatched for
Greece, Symonds stopped in Lombardy and
as ever went recklessly on with his studies. The
malady grew worse and, realizing that a dis-
aster was impending, he hurried back to Clif-
ton. The next day a severe hemorrhage be-
fell.

Recovery was not believable. Supposing it
to be the end, Symonds put his aif airs in order
and then quietly went on with what compara-
tively simple work his condition rendered pos-
sible. This was a translation of the sonnets
of Campanella and Michael Angelo, already
begun before the attack and finished shortly
afterward in Switzerland. The account of this
all but mortal crisis in his Autobiography is
unusually touching, and he says that when

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 113

finally after weeks of calm resignation to death
life returned to him he seemed to have been
born again. "The struggle for mere life had
now absorbed and superseded the struggle for
what I sought in life. ... I was a child
in the hands of something divine, to which I
responded with an infinite gratitude." These
sentences are immediately followed by his own
account of his religious development and final
position. The tendency launched by his
former mental crisis was now confirmed by his
physical crisis at Clifton. His private struggle
was now largely replaced by an eager delight
in the whole of life.

His English days were now, though he was
not yet aware of it, permanently ended. By
Sir WiUiam Jenner's advice he made arrange-
ments to spend the coming winter in a dahabieh
on the Nile, passing a few weeks in the High
Alps as a preliminary tonic. As it happened,
his sister Charlotte and her husband Professor
T, H. Green were staying at Davos Platz.
Enthusiastic letters about the place attracted
Symonds thither; and on August 7, 1877, he

114 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

arrived in the mountain village which was
destined for the rest of his life to be his home.
He was taken in hand by Dr. Ruedi, who
foxmd that his case required strict treatment.
For three weeks he sat motionless in the sun-
light, and was then permitted to lie in a ham-
mock slung between pine-trees in the wood. "I
lay watching the squirrels leap from pine to
pine over my head and the clouds sail through
the quiet places of the sky — listening to my
wife's reading of Boswell's Johnson — noticing
the children play, turning now and then a
couplet in my translation of Michael Angelo's
sonnets. I was not fit for work. Nature went
healthily to sleep in me, and the first sign of
convalescence was a slow dim sense of re-
awakening mental energy, very different from
the feverish and fretful activity of the past
years." At the end of a month he was allowed
a little exercise, driving first and then, more
and more ambitiously, climbing. As all went
hopefully he determined to ignore his English
doctor's advice and take the risk of giving up
the Egyptian plan. Sir William Jenner, in-
formed of this decision, replied, "If you like

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 115

to leave your vile body to the Davos doctors,
that is your aifair; I have warned you." He
had in fact warned him that a fresh cold would
mean the end. Certainly one motive actuating
Symonds was the desire for an at least tem-
porary abiding-place. Reviewing his life he
found that in all the twenty-three years since
he had gone to school at Harrow he had never
passed more than three consecutive months in
one place. Though he did not for tbree more
years relinquish hopes of returning eventually
to Clifton, he resolved now to stay where he
was, and stubbornly set pen and brain in mo-
tion again. The first fruits of this renewed
activity were the published Sonnets of Michael
Angela and 'Campanella, his first book of
poems. Many Moods, and the Liife of Shelley
for the English Men of Letters series.

Many Moods was dedicated to his friend
Roden Noel, of whom he speaks habitually in
his writings as one of the major Victorian
poets, the only worthy heir of the cosmic en-
thusiasm of Shelley, Wordsworth, and Goethe.
It is a collection of travel-scenes, tales in

116 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

rhyme, meditative sonnets, and songs, many
of them in learned metres. A considerable
number deal with aspects of Platonic love.
They are essentially scholar-poems, and if they
do not rise into the first order it is because they
do not spring convincingly from direct ex-
perience of life — the central human emotions
are over-subtilized and refracted through the
prism of culture. Nor have they the power
of precipitating the quintessential in remote
moods which marks the somewhat similar work
of Arnold and Clough. They suffer at every
point from Symonds' usual fault of wordiness,
his incapacity to seize quickly and victoriously
upon bright moments of emotion and fancy,
and his excessive use of unvitalized ornamenta-
tion. StiU, it is impossible to ignore, in this
volume and its successor, New and Old (1880) ,
his really astonishing faculty in descriptive
poetry. What he could do in calling up
natural scenery, settings, barbaric pageants
may be seen from The Valley of Vain Desires
and the opening pages of Odatis and
Zariadres:

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 117

. . . "Now the tread
Of elephants with vine leaves garlanded
Went crushing blossoms with huge feet; their gray
Lithe trunks were curled to snuff the scents of May,
And on their castled backs and shoulders vast
Flamed cressets ; on the live coals negroes cast
Spices of myrrh and frankincense, and boys
Like naked Cupids made a merry noise
Swinging from flank and dewlap, showering spray
Of cakes and comfits from gilt quivers gay.
Next came the priests, intoning as they went
Praises and prayers — their dusky foreheads bent
Beneath the weight of mitres stiff with gems;
And on their breasts and on the broidered hems
Of their loose raiment glittered runes that none
Might read, so far ago in ages gone
By men whose very memories are flown
Were those strange legends wrought in tongues un-
known.
Behind them followed oxen white as snow.
Large-limbed, with meek eyes wild and round and slow;
Lowing they went, and girls beside them held
Red rosewreaths on their necks and shoulders belled
With golden bubbles."

Yet this is less the work of a poet than of a
student of Italian painting. Of all the poems
in the two volxomes the most inevitably touched
seems to me that called To Rhodocleia, the

118 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

last two lines of which are adapted from a
Greek epigram of Rufinus :

"To thee whose name and fame are of roses,
Fair Rhodocleia, this wreath from me
Shall speak of youth when the bloom uncloses,
And speak of death and the days to be.

Here in narcissus the rathe rain-lover,
And here are wavering wind-flowers frail.

And here are roses that wreathe and cover
The foreheads of men by love made pale;

Violets blue as the veins that wander

O'er breasts we love when we dream Love true,
And lilies that laugh to the sunlight yonder

On meadows drenched with the morning dew.

But when this crown on thy brow reposes.
Learn from the blossoms, and be not vain;

For time fades thee, as he fades the roses;
Nor they nor thou may revive again."

I think this would not be out of place in John-
son-Cory's exquisite lonica.

Of the Shelley book little need be said ex-
cept so far as its subject throws light on Sy-
monds himself. It is merely a competent ab-
stract of previous records, like most of those

AT CLIFTON: LITERATURE 119

in the series to which it belongs. What its
publisher thought of it may be seen from a
letter of Alexander MacmiUan, November 22,
1878: "I like your book very much and think
it makes the clearest and simplest complete
presentation of the man we have. ... I
cannot help being gratified that we have had
the honor of publishing what is on the whole
the best, completest, and most rational account
of so noble, beautiful, if also very erratic and
perplexing, a character." There is something
suggestive in the writing of this life of SheUey
just at the moment when his own poetry was
first being published. Shelley had been from
earliest childhood one of the men to whose writ-
ings he had submitted himself with "slow,
dumb inhibition." With his own ruling passion
for poetry he must have learned from Shelley,
whose life was one long uninterrupted purga-
tion through love, how impossible it is to be a
poet when one's life is not poetical. He must
have observed what a small part was played by
taste in Shelley's education; devouring trashy
novels, political economy, promiscuous science
— ^literature being only incidental with him,

120 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

life appearing everywhere in the rough. That
was the training, so unlike his own, cautious,
respectable, directed by Jowett, overweighted
with sesthetics, which went to the making of
a poet of whom Symonds says: "A genuine
liking for Prometheus Unbound may be
reckoned the touchstone of a man's capacity
for understanding lyric poetry." One recalls
his remark at the close of his own Oxford
career: "The fault of my education as a
preparation for hterature was that it was ex-
clusively literary." We do only what we are,
and we are what life has made us.

Chapter Vi

DATOS: THE RENAISSANCE: ANIMI FIGITBA

DAVOS in 1877 was different indeed from
the Davos of to-day. An ancient village
with seven centuries of history, it had been, till
1799, when it was incorporated in the Swiss
Republic, a pohtical centre of the Graubiinden
or Gray League. Then at last its main fam-
ilies, who held titles of nobility from France,
Germany, and Austria and had provided gov-
ernors, field-marshals, podestas, and ambassa-
dors to most of the courts and armies of Eu-
rope, relapsed into the condition of hardy
peasants and frugal specimens of the mountain
democracy: farmers, vintners, herdsmen, inn-
keepers with immemorial pedigrees. Of its
old grandeur not a trace remained, except in-
deed the Rathhaus, the white church with tow-
ering spire, and a few panelled rooms and
family portraits in some of the substantial

121

122 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

scattered farmhouses. In 1862 the local
physician published in a German medical re-
view his observations of the fact that tuber-
culosis was unknown in the valley, while
Davosers who had contracted the disease in
foreign parts made speedy cures on their re-
turn. A weU-known German doctor, himself
gravely afflicted, resolved to make the experi-
ment, rash enough in those days when con-
sumption was coddled in close rooms. This
Dr. Unger, entirely cured himself, in a few
years turned the forgotten village into what
we know as an approved health-station. It
was at first known almost exclusively to Ger-
mans. Its ultimate fame among Enghsh and
Americans was due more to the presence and
activity of Symonds than to any other cause.
In course of time his position there became
almost patriarchal — so far as that word may
be used of an invalid artist dwelling among
true patriarchs. Patriarch he was however by
virtue of his reputation, his growing family,
the money that he spent with such wise care,
the sympathy, half brotherly, half fatherly,
which he extended to the natives of the place,

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 123

and the genial spirit of advertisement in whicK
he spread abroad the fame of the valley, its
robust life, its work and sports, its wines, and
its inns.

The first close friendship he formed among
the Davosers was with Christian Buol,
younger brother of Herr Buol, the innkeeper,
who became a sort of guide, servant, and com-
panion to him. Few noble houses of Europe
are so illustrious in their ancestry as this
peasant clan. Their cousins were Counts in
Austria and Freiherrs of the German Empire
and they retained a patent of nobility con-
ferred upon them by Henri IV of France.
The head of the clan, Herr Buol of the inn,
could assemble on New Year's eve his wife and
his mother, five brothers out of nine with four
sisters, and could seat below the salt a host
of porters, maids, serving-folk. Truly a sub-
ject for Sir Walter Scott. The continued
prosperity of the house was due to the wisdom,
tact, and power of Symonds. As often hap-
pens when an old and simple village is sud-
denly transformed into a fashionable resort,
the original inhabitants are deprived by shrewd

124. JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

promoters from sharing in the commercial
benefit. Symonds, who knew the world very-
well, insensibly became the wise and helpful
middleman between the two populations. He
made a detailed study of the situation, throw-
ing the weight of his influence on the side of
the peasants and scheming in every possible
way to place them in control. In a business-
like way he advanced enough money to the
Buols to place them abreast of the incoming
capital. His disinterested skill, thus displayed
so tactfully and successfully in a dehcate cause,
quickened his hold on Davos life, and he be-
came the friend and counsellor of the whole
village. Meanwhile he moved his family into
a suite of rooms at the Hotel Buol, which con-
tinued to be his home for three years and until
his own house was built.

Thriving so vigorously under his new condi-
tions that he was able, at the close of the first
winter, to take rough daylong jaunts through
the snow in open sledges, he did not give up
hope of returning to Clifton. We find him
writing in February, 1878, to Edmund Gosse
that he meditates "sending for a cartload of

: DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 125

books in order to go on with The Renaissance."
That year was interrupted by two journeys
into Italy, in April, when the invalid colony
was turned adrift by the doctors to avoid the
intermediate conditions of melting snow, and
in the autumn; and this became a part of his
yearly routine. The prospect of a second
winter, with its monotony, its imprisoned isola-
tion, and almost excessive quickening of the
spirit, was not easy; yet in November he
wrote, "I will still take the tree of beauty and
shake the apples on my head."

The opening of 1879 found him issuing his
twelfth book. In spite of renewed iU-health
and hours of pain more terrible than he had
ever endured, the year was a very active one.
Between February and November he wrote,
in their first draft, the entire two volumes on
Italian Literature which form the fourth and
fifth of The Renaissance. He also prepared
American editions of the Greek Poets and the
Italian Sketches, and revised the Age of the
Despots. It was with the plan already formed
of building a house at Davos and making it
perhaps a permanent home that he returned to

126 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

England in the early summer of 1880. The
unfavorable report on his health of the London
doctors now at last confirmed this prospect,
and he resolved to make the final break with
England. He went back to Clifton, dis-
mantled his old home, prepared it for sale, and
heaped a great bonfire in the garden with his
own papers and depressing family archives.
"It was rather pretty," he observes, "to see
Catherine and my four children all engaged in
tearing up the letters of a lifetime." Then,
with feelings not unlike those of Adam and
Eve in the last lines of Paradise Lost, sadly
but with a consoUng resolution, he returned to
Switzerland. He was now exactly forty years
old.

Settling for a permanent stay in the autumn
of 1880, Symonds began his new life with
accustomed energy. An enthusiastic magazine
article, Davos in Winter, which had more
effect probably than any other influence in
establishing the Anglo-American colony, was
now followed by a letter to The Pall Mall
Gazette calling attention to the urgent need
of sanitary reforms in the place. This letter

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 127

was reprinted in three principal French and
German newspapers, and brought down upon
him the fury of the village authorities.- Sy-
monds had foreseen the perils that were bound
to come, and have come, with a swift-increas-
ing population of invalids. His prompt ac-
tion led to a complete overhauling of the
town's drainage, and after the first ill-will had
blown over it established his position as a dis-
interested, energetic citizen and confirmed in
Davos the career of public usefulness which
had been cut short at Clifton. Having dis-
charged this message he set about building his
new home. Am Hof, a kind of glorified
chalet, with high-pitched roof covered with zinc
plates to shed the snow. Into this, at the end
of two years, the family moved on September
25, 1882.

The year 1881 saw the publication of the
fourth and fifth volumes of The Renaissance
in Italy. The work was now complete, for the
two final volumes on the Catholic Reaction
(1886) — in many ways the ablest of all — seem
to have been an afterthought. In its original
plan The Renaissance was to have comprised

128 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

probably only three volumes. The general
idea that it was to discuss all the aspects of
the period — ^politics, social conditions, fine arts,
literature, scholarship, religion — ^had been as-
sumed from the beginning. But this general
idea was not, properly speaking, animated with
any great coherent vision of the whole. From
this vital defect the work without question suf-
fers. It is a colossal patchwork, based on ele-
ments entirely adequate in themselves, but exe-
cuted in a casual fashion such as probably no
other equally ambitious work has ever been
subjected to. It is not, of course, intended to be
a continuous narrative. Each volume or pair
of volimies is complete in itself and sums up
independently the special phase which forms
its subject. In this way, and in the fact that
it consists of a series of bright pictiures, it re-
sembles the Main Currents of George Brandes.
The Renaissance, as we have seen, was the
main subject of Sjnmonds' study from Oxford
days. It was the theme of his Chancellor's
Prize essay in 1865. But for many years he
wavered in his choice of schemes between the
Renaissance in Italy and the Renaissance in

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 129

England. He always felt that the spiritual
connection between those two countries at that
period was closer than between any others,
English and Italian poetry being, as he said,
twin sisters; and he found in the English
drama and Italian painting the two most per-
fect instances of his theory of evolution in art.
The history of the English Renaissance was
never carried out, although Shdkspere's Pre-
decessors should be regarded as an introduc-
tory volume, complete in itself, while the lives
of Sidney and Jonson may be taken as fur-
ther fragments of the same long-projected
scheme. To the history of the Italian Renais-
sance, using that word in its wide sense, he con-
tributed in seven complete works in addition
to the magnum opus. Chronologically by sub-
ject these works are: Wine, Women and
Song, ballads of the wandering students in
whom, at the breaking-up of the Middle Ages,
the new spirit first blossomed; the Introduction
to Dante and the study of Boccaccio, the Ldfe
of Michael Angelo, the Sonnets of Michael
Angelo and Campanella, and the translation
of Cellini's Memoirs, to which may be added

130 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

the Memoirs of Gozzi, the dregs and lees of
the Renaissance spirit in the eighteenth cen-
tury. Taken together then, the fourteen
volumes, with countless isolated essays and
poems, represent a close study in aU its stages
of that parabola which, in Symonds' favorite
metaphor, describes the ascent and descent of
a nation's spiritual evolution.

Although almost every phase of this long
evolution is discussed with impartial sympathy,
and many of its moments are brilliantly pre-
sented, this great mass of writings was not, as
I have said, animated with any great coherent
vision of the whole. The Renaissance in Italy
is a work of almost the same compass as
Gibbon's Decline and Fall. But the very name
of Gibbon suggests the essential weakness of
Symonds as a historian. Gibbon's was a pas-
sive mind — a mind which for long years could
lie fallow, open to influences, inhibitive, capa-
ble of long and silent absorption, untroubled
by the furor scribendi. His history was the
subject of an almost unbroken meditation and
silent labor through twenty-four years, un-
folding itself out of an obscure but inflexible

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 131

purpose, minutely prepared before he ever put
pen to paper. Cotter Morrison tells of the
"cahn stretches of thorough and contented
work, which have left their marks on the
Decline and Fall. One of its charms is a con-
stant good humor and complacency; not a sign
is visible that the writer is pressed for time,
or wants to get his performance out of hand ;
but, on the contrary, a cahn lingering over
details, sprightly asides in the notes, which the
least hurry would have suppressed or passed
by, and a general impression conveyed of thor-
ough enjoyment in the immensity of the
labor." It is all this which made him what
Lamartine describes in the phrase "an empty
corridor through which the wind passes," the
self -unconscious vessel from which classic
works are distilled. A comparison with Gibbon
serves admirably to throw into relief the
method of Symonds. That method is de-
scribed in an entry of 1866, which closes with
a reference to the true method, so impossible
to him. "When engaged on a subject," he
says, "it is good to throw oif casual jottings
and short essays, infimce species^ as it were,

132 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

in the order of composition. These ought,
however, to be frequently inspected, so that
their results may be wrought into unity; in
time a number of preliminary sjnatheses, media
aodomata, would thus be gained, and all lead
up to the organic view. This, at least, is the
idea of my method. Another way would be
to keep all in solution in the mind until the
final process of crystallization. No doubt this
would be the most vigorous and artistic way."
It is easy to see that this idea of "prehminary
syntheses" in a large work is essentially a
vicious one; for, as a result, the organic view
springs from a combination of almost acci-
dental points discovered in composition.
Artistic truth is itself a whole, which is not
composed of partial truths.

The comparison of methods leads inevitably
to the comparison of lives and characters.
Gibbon could never have produced his work
had he not been a strong-fibred, single-minded,
complacent, sedentary man, in health and cir-
cumstances which permitted him to remain for
long periods in one place — ^had he not been, in
short, everything that Symonds was not.

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 133

With Symonds the "still air of delightful
studies" was broken by all the breezes of
Europe. His nature was almost infinitely
resonant, thrilled by all the cross-vibrations of
a complex age. He was neurotic, dissatisfied,
fretfully active, the theatre of a lifelong and
frantic battle between ambition and disease.
With time and death at his heels he poured
out book after book in the fearful hope of
depositing some record of his having Kved.
The "weU-ripened fruit of wise delay" could
never spring from such a withered bough.
Much of his life, moreover, was passed in in-
tellectual isolation, a very different thing from
intellectual solitude. Quick journeys back and
forth, when over and over again his Ufe was
a mere hazard, enabled him to catch frequently
the spirit of works and men with a poignant
and almost terrible intensity where he could
not remain to gather the more material sub-
stance. Snatching life himself he snatched
always at history; and the world became the
mirror of his own soul, hke him troubled,
iridescent, racing against inscrutable, over-
whelming forces, dominated by a few calm and

134 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

majestic intellects, Goethe, Marcus Aurelius,
Plato. Only men who feel, as Symonds felt,
the interminable flux of things, who see the
sky with its freight of worlds wheeling in-
exorably on, can so adore the few fixed stars
of the human firmament.

Moreover, Symonds was far more of a
writer than a thinker. I have already quoted
his incisive statement that he was "impene-
trably reserved in the depth of himself,
rhetorically candid on the surface," and I have
referred to Pater's comment that the Age of
the Despots was wanting in reserve. It must
have struck readers generally that his critical
writings, and especially his travel-essays, are
so far from reserved as to be even garrulous.
The outward circumstances of his life are re-
peated again and again, almost flaunted, in
such works as Our Life in the Swiss High-
lands. His passion for mere words was con-
tinually running away with him. He enjoyed,
required as a physical tonic, the sheer manual
labor of writing. What he called "the im-
possible problem of style" was with him the
problem of winning restraint. Preparing his

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 135

Introduction to the Study of Dante for a
second edition in 1890, he wrote in the preface,
"I have altered many turns of phrase which
seemed to me deficient in sobriety or dubious
in taste." He labored incessantly to prune
and chasten his overblown, luxuriant manner.
He speaks somewhere of Pohtian's "special
qualities of fluency and emptiness of content,"
and his natural affinity with just these qualities
is proved by the abundance of translations he
has made from Pohtian and by the fact that
precisely these translations are of aU that he
made surpassingly excellent. Politian, the gay
scholar, the fluent, facile poet, found in Sy-
monds his inevitable interpreter. It is plain
from all this that Symonds, like shy people
who talk too much through fear of them-
selves, used literature as a refuge from self.
"Heaven knows how difficult I find it to keep
my mind healthy when I am not working,"
he writes in a letter of 1873, which recalls the
complaint of Sainte-Beuve: "I eat my heart
out when I am not up to the neck in work."
And in a letter of 1867 he says, "We must
make the machine of the brain go. It does

136 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

not do to let it stop. Whatever happens,
energize." How far did this sheer pathological
necessity of turning out written words inter-
fere with, determine the quality of his work?
It produced twenty-five substantial volumes in
the space of fourteen years, but it certainly
prevented the composition of any one immor-
tal paragraph.

This is really the heart of the problem. The
lack of that final, absolute touch in any of his
writings is due, I think, to the confusion and
intertwining of the subjective and the ob-
jective—the impenetrable reserve and the
rhetorical candor. True literature strikes a
middle term, where self and theme coalesce.
In poems, essays, subjective work theme is
harmoniously submerged in personahty, just
as in really great histories and biographies per-
sonality is harmoniously submerged in theme.
Symonds, not in his biographies, not in his
magnum opus, reaches this point; certainly not
in his poems or essays. He is not quite the
true historian, the true biographer, who finds
satisfaction in a just view of objects. In all
his pseudo-objective books the history of the

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 137

man or the epoch is, one feels, continually be-
ing utilized, restlessly, half-consciously, in
place of strictly creative work, to test the point
of view of its author. As a corollary, in his
subjective work, his poems, his personal essays,
one feels that the author is trying to get away
from himself, to submerge himself in objects.
He cannot find himself because he cannot lose
himself. Hence this morbid shyness— getting
himself by a kind of blunder into the fore^
ground of his objective themes and on the
other hand failing to subdue objects to him-
self: neither the literature of knowledge nor
yet the literature of power, but always a fatal
mixture of both.

Symonds felt that settling in Switzerland
"put an end to his becoming a scholar in the
exact sense." In reality nature had made that
decision long before. Working through many
anxious years when he could snatch the oppor-
tunity, a fortnight now among the Perugia ar-
chives, a hasty visit in England, composing in
draughty village hotels, with treacherous eye-
sight, perpetually on guard against physical
collapse, he could be only what he called a

138 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

"literary viveur" At the same time, consider-
ing himself rather an artist than a scholar, he
believed that he was justified in producing
sympathetic studies where the paraphernalia
of scholarship were inadequate. Mark Patti-
son, the grim don, finding him at work on The
Renaissance in a hotel room at Davos, ob-
served, "Of course, you cannot be thinking of
writing a book here." To what was, under
the circimistances, a particularly supercilious
insult, Symonds replied: "Certainly I am;
since I write for my distraction and pastime,
I intend to make the best of my resources, and
I hold that a great deal of nonsense is talked
about the scholar's vocation; men who might
have written excellent books are sterilized by
starting with fastidious conceits." It was not
with any personal venom, we may believe, but
the expression of that clash of irreconcilable
temperaments and aims which may here be
read between the lines, that led Symonds later
to hold up Mark Pattison as an awful example
of the slovenly prose of English scholarship.
Both were entirely right, according to the
lights of each. Exact scholarship at any price

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 139

was the aim of Pattison: the art of letters to
Symonds was the great matter. Yet where
matters of scholarship were at stake the situa-
tion is itself the most illuminating kind of
criticism. Symonds had no continuous access
to any libraries but his own, and he had not
certainly the kind of memory which enabled
Macaulay (when he wished to do so) to turn
out extensive and accurate masses of fact on
shipboard or in foreign lands without the aid
of a single book. Circumstances of this kind
made his efforts more laborious and his results
less substantial than is conventionally the case,
and he was probably right when he said, "Few
writers, I take it, have undergone such pre-
paratory labor as I am obliged to go through."
So it is not surprising that The Renaissance
in Italy presents no calm sweep, no tnily co-
herent vision, and a perspective which the most
elementary student can see is at fault. Fred-
eric Harrison observes that it contains hardly
a word about the Science of the Renaissance,
the great progress then made in astronomy,
surgery, mechanics, geography, botany, medi-
cine. The names of Columbus, Galileo, Car-

140 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

dano are barely mentioned. The proportions
are gravely at fault. Cellini receives a special
chapter because his life illustrates the period:
yet Leonardo, whose character is far more sig-
nificantly typical, occupies only fourteen pages
and a few scattered references, Titian and
Tintoretto together hardly half that number,
while Signorelli has fifteen pages, or five more
than Raphael. These proportions, instead of
being architectural in the right way, are
whimsically personal. Celhni, for mainly ex-
tra-artistic reasons, was a special favorite of
Symonds; while Signorelli appealed to him
unduly as a precursor of his hero Michael An-
gelo.

In the thirteenth chapter of the seventh vol-
mne — that on the Eclectic painters of Bologna
— occurs the well-known passage wherein Sy-
monds sums up his critical creed. This pas-
sage, I may observe, was taken as a kind of
text, in his Criticism and Fiction^ by William
Dean Howells, who there remarks that the
solid ground taken by Symonds is "not essen-
tially different from that of Burke's Essay on
the Sublime and the Beautiful." After com-

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 141

meriting on the revolutions of taste which have
marked the history of aesthetics and which in
particular have brought so low the idols of
Sir Joshua Reynolds, he goes on:

"Our hope with regard to the unity of taste
in the future then is, that all sentimental or
academic seekings after the ideal having been
abandoned, momentary theories founded upon
idiosyncratic or temporary partialities ex-
ploded, and nothing accepted but what is solid
and positive, the scientific spirit shall make men
progressively more and more conscious of
those hleibende VerJidltnisse, more and more
capable of living in the whole; also, that in
proportion as we gain a firmer hold upon our
own place in the world, we shall come to com-
prehend with more instinctive certitude what
is simple, natural, and honest, welcoming with
gladness aU artistic products that exhibit these
qualities. The perception of the enlightened
man will then be the task of a healthy person
who has made himself acquainted with the laws
of evolution in art and in society, and is able
to test the excellence of work in any stage
from immaturity to decadence bjr discerning

142 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

what there is of truth, sincerity, and natural
vigor in it."

This passage recalls his earlier statement in
the Greek Poets that "no one should delude us
into thinking that true culture does not come
from the impassioned study of everything,
however eccentric and at variance with our
own mode of life, that is truly great." These
two passages, widely separated in date, may
then be taken as the permanent standpoint
upon which he based his critical writings. It
is notable to find so complex and over-subtle a
character emerging upon ground so simple and,
however true, so coromonplace. Yet, rightly
felt, such commonplace is of the true revolu-
tionary kind.

A book which, to illustrate the character of
Symonds, ought to be read in connection with
The Renaissance is Animi Figura, published
in 1882. But before I speak of this I must
resimie the preliminary circumstances.

During the previous winter Robert Louis
Stevenson had come to Davos, bearing with
him a letter of introduction from Edmund
Gosse. In Davos he remained two winters.

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 143

living next door to Symonds — "at the foot of
my Hill Difficulty." This friendship of two
invalids, prolonged in letters till death in ad-
joining years, was charming, without, I judge,
being wholly sympathetic. Stevenson found
Symonds "a far better and more interesting
thing than any of his books," and Symonds
nicknamed Stevenson the Sprite, "most fantas-
tic but most human." Just how far Symonds
understood and just how far he failed to un-
derstand the special genius of Stevenson may
be guessed from his suggestion that the latter
should undertake a translation of the Charac-
ters of Theophrastus. It was never carried
out, but the suggestion is characteristic of Sy-
monds and not wholly inept as regards Ste-
venson. Another literary emblem of their
friendship missed fire in later years when Ste-
venson wrote and sent Symonds a very pretty
fanciful bit of prose designed for a dedicatory
letter of his book of South Sea Sketches: for
some reason when the book appeared the letter
did not appear with it. Cordial enough the
friendship undoubtedly was between two men
who so loved everything that is gay and were

144 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

as well such ardent followers of Whitman.
Under the name of "Opalstein," in his essay
Talk and Talkers, Stevenson has left an im-
pression of his friend's iridescent hidden fire.
In this picture of the "troubled and poetic talk
of Opalstein" we have a sidelight on Symonds
which no other record gives with equal vivid-
ness:

"His various and exotic knowledge, com-
plete though unready sympathies, and fine,
full, discriminative flow of language fit him
out to be the best of talkers ; so perhaps he is
with some, not quite with me — proxime accessit,
I should say. He sings the praises of the
earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine
and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner,
as to the light guitar ; even wisdom comes from
his tongue like singing ; no one is, indeed, more
tuneful in the upper notes. But even while
he sings the song of the sirens, he still hearkens
to the barking of the sphinx. Jarring Byronic
notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian hu-
mors. His mirth has something of the tragedy
of the world for its perpetual background; and
he feasts hke Don Giovanni to a double or-

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 145

chestra, one lightly sounding for the dance,
one pealing Beethoven in the distance. He is
not truly reconciled either with life or with him-
self ; and this instant war in his members some-
times divides the man's attention. He does not
always, not often, frankly surrender himself
in conversation. He brings into the talk other
things than those which he expresses; you are
conscious that he keeps his eye on something
else, that he does not shake off the world, nor
quite forget himself. Hence arise occasional
disappointments ; even an occasional unfairness
for his companions, who find themselves one
day giving too much, and the next, when they
are way out of season, giving perhaps too
little."

The two elements recorded here of Symonds
— ^the cryptic and the serenading — are con-
nected with Stevenson in two publications. It
was at his suggestion and heartened by his
bright praise that Symonds collected his meta-
physical sonnets into the little book Animi
FigurUj the most quintessential — and, as it may
be called, the nerve-centre — of all his writings.
Just as we have seen that The Renaissance:,

146 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

and indeed all his other books, display the
"rhetorical candor" of his nature, so this book
displays that other quahty of "impenetrable
reserve." In this Portrait of a Mind (the title
too, borrowed from the Agricola of Tacitus,
was a suggestion of Stevenson's) he tries for
once to delineate the true truth about himself;
yet, having resolved to unveil the sphinx of his
own nature, he seems to turn back hesitating,
and in the preface his impenetrable reserve
makes a final, desperate stand. There address-
ing students of sonnet-literature (not the
poet's world, observe) he says it will be readily
understood that he is not offering a piece of
accurate self-delineation, and again that the
sonnet-writer "shuns the direct outpouring of
individual joys and griefs by veihng these in
a complicated, artificial, stationary structure."
Then having drawn attention from himself
he launches into a technical discussion of his
use of sonnets in a sequence so framed that
the context in every case is necessary to the
comprehension of the individual strophe. This
he considered to establish a new precedent in
the English sonnet-tradition, and I believe it

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 147

was so taken with some shakings of the head
by Mr. Hall Caine, who in those days was
versed in matters of the kind. The point is not
a grave one ; but it provided Symonds with an
ingenious decoy-shelter and made it possible
for his soul to pass muster as an experiment in
versification. The truth is, after due allow-
ance for this rebuff to the inquisitive, that the
book formed as accurate a piece of self -por-
traiture as an introspective man could produce :
for it must be a truism that the best self-por-
traits — for example, those of Cellini and Gib-
bon — ^have been produced by men who were
not introspective at all, were indeed so hardily
objective that they could view themselves as
objects.

The mind here presented, he says, is that of
an artist whose sensibilities are stronger than
his creative faculty, a speculative mind. "The
craving for solitude which possesses the man
after vain attempts to realize his earlier ideal,
gives places to a conviction of sin and failure,
inseparable from over-confident application of
ethical theories to actual life." The only is-
sue for such a mind appears to be "self-subor-

148 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

dination to moral law. But the problem of
solving human difficulties by communion with
the divine idea is complicated in our age. The
whole series ends, therefore, with the soul's
debate upon the fundamental question of
man's place in the universe." After this preg-
nant little sketch it seems unwise to go too far
into detail. The hundred and forty sonnets
are divided into groups, some of a single son-
net, one comprising as many as twenty-two.
The Innovators discusses the pro and con of
"swerving from the way of kindly custom";
Ygdrasil, life's eternal subversion of system;
Personality^ the impotence of men to reach
out of themselves and really grasp one an-
other; The Passing Stranger^ a Platonic
theme which occurs repeatedly in Symonds'
other poems and essays; Paths of Life, the
relation between lasting and passing loves;
Debate on Self, the power of sin to awaken
life in the soul, the power of courage to sub-
due sin to the soul, the power of good deeds
over fate; Pro and Con, the faculty of cour-
age and good deeds, however powerless before
appetite, to rally by freely testing love which

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 149

purges lust ; Eros and Anteros, the seduction
of love, the pain of selfish love, the longing
for spiritual love; U Amour de I'Impossible, a
theme characteristic of Symonds, which may
be summed up in the Greek proverb, "To de-
sire impossibilities is a sickness of the soul";
Intellectual Isolation^ the opportunity of the
soul in solitude and its self -insufficiency ; Self-
Condemnation^ the soul humbled in weakness
seeking God and hearing his voice without
being able to find him; Amends, the soul crav-
ing the good, finding itself in debt to sin, yet
steadfastly resolving to strive upward; Ver-
sohnung, the soul needing God and preparing
to find him by forgetting the past and chas-
tening itself; An Old Gordian Knot, the soul
seeing that the former gods were only Brocken-
images of itself, questioning, though without
an answer, whether the sun which cast the
images may not be God indeed; On the Sacro
Monte, the death of gods and faiths, the en-
durance of God and the soul; The Thought of
Death,

"Will not the large life of the universe
Fulfill its children?"

150 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

and the cosmic principle, "Though He slay me
yet will I cleave to Him"; Mystery of Mys-
teries^ the necessity of rejecting all suggested
explanations of life, and of enduring in dumb
trust with hope.

As an example I select the fifth sonnet in
the group Intellectual Isolation, not perhaps
the best but certainly one of the most char-
acteristic:

"It is the center of the soul that ails :

We carry with us our own heart's disease;

And, craving the impossible, we freeze
The lively rills of love that never fails.
What faith, what hope will lend the spirit sails

To waft her with a light spray-scattering breeze

From this Calypso isle of Phantasies,
Self -sought, self-gendered, where the daylight pales?
Where wandering visions of foregone desires

Pursue her sleepless on a stony strand;

Instead of stars the bleak and baleful fires
Of vexed imagination, quivering spires

That have nor rest nor substance, light the land.

Paced by lean hungry men, a ghostly band !"

I have dwelt at length upon this little book
because it really tells the story of Symonds'
inner life, indicated even by the brief phrases

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 151

into which I have been obliged to compress it.
It is indeed the real Symonds, hidden from
his generation. Although many of the prob-
lems handled in it are discussed more philo-
sophically in his prose writings, notably the
Study of Whitman and the Essays Specula-
tive and Suggestive, he appears in these son-
nets as a spiritual force, in distinction from a
man of letters; and the fortunes of the book
suggest how little he was able to impress him-
self, in that aspect, upon the world. It never
passed into a second edition. Nor was Sy-
monds urgent; for, as he wrote on the title-
page of Many Moods, adapting a phrase of
Whitman, "The song is to the singer, and
comes back most to him." Two years after its
publication in 1882, he wrote to William
Sharp: "I have had it in my mind to con-
tinue the theme of Animi Figura, and to at-
tempt to show how a character which has
reached apparent failure in moral and spiritual
matters may reconstruct a life's philosophy
and find sufficient sources of energy and
health." The attempt was never made, and
one doubts if it could have been more conclu-

152 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

sive. For Animi Figura seems to show the
inevitable extent of his mental reservation
from the cosmic enthusiasm.

A book more appropriately connected with
Stevenson, to whom it was dedicated, was
Wine^ Women, and Song (1884) . This was a
collection of Goliardic ballads from the Car-
mina Burana and other sources, strung to-
gether by a prose commentary. "They cele-
brate," he says, "the eternal presence of mirth-
making powers in hearts of men." Profound
sympathy had Symonds, himself a kind of
scholar-gypsy, with these vagabond students
of the Middle Ages: perhaps he felt how much
truer a poet's education was theirs than his at
Jowett's Oxford. They at any rate were the
prototypes of our modern insatiable seekers of
picturesque adventure — ^the open road, gay
loves and poetry they had, and they were not
afflicted with archaeology. Above aU they had
life abundantly.

This mediasval anthology bears a definite re-
lation to aU of Symonds' writings. In one
way it serves as a kind of introduction to his
many books on the Renaissance, for it pictures

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 153

the first breaking up of the Ages of Faith,
the first stirring of the revived antique f eehng
about the world and conduct. Moreover it
strongly resembles in spirit the Elizabethan
song-books of which Symonds wrote so much;
and again, in its "truth to vulgar human na-
ture" it illustrates that favorite doctrine of his
that life is more than literature, which drew
him to the Elizabethan drama, to Cellini, and
to Whitman. Symonds was always fascinated,
as only a reserved, fastidious, intellectual man
can be, by Mfe in its rude, sheer, vulgar actual-
ity. How precisely he found in these songs, or
put into them, the Elizabethan spirit may be
seen from a single example :

"If she could love me when I love,
I would not then exchange with Jove:
Ah ! might I clasp her once, and drain
Her lips as thirsty flowers drink rain !
With death to meet, his welcome greet, from life re-
treat, I were full fain !
Heigh! full fain, I were full fain.
Could I such joy, such wealth of pleasure gain!"

I think we should not be surprised to find
that in Ben Jonson.

154 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

I find in the book a passage where Symonds
gives his theory of translation, and as it is
possible that he will live longer as a translator
than as an original writer, as his translations
are acknowledged by all to be among the best
in the language, it is well to quote what he has
to say:

"It has always been my creed that a good
translation should resemble a plaster cast; the
English being plaque upon the original, so as
to reproduce its exact form, although it can-
not convey the effects of bronze or marble,
which belong to the material of the work of
art. But this method has not always seemed to
me the most desirable for rendering poems, an
eminent quality of which is facility and spon-
taneity. In order to obtain that quality in
our language the form has occasionally to be
sacrificed. ... I am frequently enticed to
repeat experiments, which afterward I regard
in the light of failures. What allures me first
is the pleasure of passing into that intimate
familiarity with art which only a copyist or
translator enjoys. I am next impelled by the
desire to fix the attention of readers on things

DAVOS: THE RENAISSANCE 155

which I admire, and which are possibly beyond
their scope of view. Last comes that ignis
fatuus of the hope, forever renewed, if for-
ever disappointed, that some addition may be
made in this way to the wealth of English
poetry."

This passage gives not only his theory of
translation, but the reasons why that art so
repeatedly attracted him. Between the lines
we read the whole history of a baffled and con-
gested poet and the philosophy of what he him-
self called a vulgariseur.

Chapter VI
SWISS life: whitman

ONLY during the first four or five years
in Davos did Symonds maintain the com-
parative exuberance of health that succeeded
his collapse. It was indeed, as he said, a won-
derful Indian summer, a ripe autumn, rich in
fruit; but an autumn none the less declining
appreciably towards the end. He felt most
keenly the isolation from intellectual company
and from adequate libraries. Knowing that he
was out of the world's current, he imagined
that all the rest of his generation was forging
far beyond him. Achievements that look small
enough in the world where achievements are
common were magnified out of all proportion
to Symonds in his retreat. The reviewers ap-
peared to neglect or slight him or, as they
sometimes did, to take shameful advantages of
him. He tried to convince himself that for
156

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 157

him literature was only a pastime; in reality,
feeling that he had gained no foothold, he
was made more sensitive by isolation and soli-
tude. Naturally, under these circumstances,
he strove pathetically to be, and to be consid-
ered, one of the advance guard in criticism.
Feeling himself left behind, dropped outside,
he became more and more attentive to modern
thought, on which, except in a general way, he
had no very instinctive grasp.

On one side of his nature he was very like
Ovid: and his exile from the world of gaiety
was like Ovid's exile on the Euxine. Deprived
of the keener and more intimate wit of cities,
he consoled himself with the Gothic wit of the
moimtains. He was the ringleader at many a
village festival. He loved light music, and
there was no greater connoisseur, in Switzer-
land or Italy, of aU the friendly vins du pays.
"I supped with Cator last night," he writes.
"A zither and guitar player — two men — came
afterwards to make music for us. We had up

the two Christians and S , drank enormous

quantities of old wine, sang, laughed, danced,
and made a most uproarious noise until 2 A. M.

158 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Then the two Christians and I descended on
one toboggan in a dense snow-storm. It was
quite dark, and drifty beyond description. I
sprained my left side in the groin a little."
His friend Mr. Brown recalls an evening when
Herr Buol the innkeeper bade farewell to some
friends with a patriarchal supper: after which
the whole party, including Symonds, descended
to the cellars and each one strode a tun of
Veltliner, candle in hand, and sped the parting
guests.

The fascination of rude and heartily active
life led him to choose, even for study, the
smoke-room of the inn, crowded as it was with
burly working-men. He loved to sit in the
stables, in the dim candlelight, smoking his
pipe and talking with the herdsmen when the
day's work was done. He would go toboggan-
ing alone at midnight and in all weathers. He
loved the falling snow, the smell of hay, the
slow-breathing cattle.

He was the friend of half the Swiss hotel-
porters in Europe, knew their fathers and
brothers at home and all the circumstances of
their lives, so sympathetically indeed that he

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 159

wrote in their behalf what strikes me as a most
deplorable defence of the tipping system.
Probably no foreigner has ever known the
Graubiinden as he knew it, historically, geo-
graphically, industrially, and hvmianly; and
one of his long-cherished schemes was to write
a history of the canton. He studied the cli-
mate, and wrote voluminously on all the vari-
ous kinds of avalanches and the history of
memorable avalanches. And just as he had
been led into this profound sympathy with the
Davos peasantry, so now he began to study the
living Italians. During the spring journey to
Venice of 1881 he formed a friendship with
Angelo Fusatto the gondolier, the faithful ser-
vant and companion who was with him when
he died. Through Angelo he came to know
with an equal intimacy the familiar, water-side
life of Venice, which he describes in The Gon-
dolier's Wedding and other sketches. He cer-
tainly did not have the faculty, for instance,
of Stevenson, for communicating life ef this
kind in literature. He was too much the curi-
ous student, possibly, with a touch of social
conventionahty ; but there is no doubt of the

160 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

reality of his fellow-feeling in all such adven-
tures.

All this came about at the first through
Christian Buol. Christian enabled him to
bring into practice those ideas of comrade-
ship and democracy which had first drawn him
to Whitman. For Whitman had stirred him
chiefly at first and through many years by that
indefinite Platonic poem Calamus, the love of
comrades. The subject is extremely complex
in relation to a man like Symonds; yet per-
haps I can do something towards unravelling
it. It is clear that Whitman draws a distinct
line between "adhesiveness," or the love of man
for man, and "amativeness," or the love of the
sexes. The sentiment, or rather passion, which
he tries to adumbrate is something more spirit-
ual than sexual aif ection. This "manly attach-
ment," this "athletic love" is friendship raised
to a higher power and conceived as the welding
force of human democracy: a chivalrous en-
thusiasm like that of soldiers fighting in com-
mon for a great cause. At the same time one
feels that there was about Whitman some-
thing "soft," a something associated with his

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 161

notion of intimacy that strikes a false note.
This again is an extremely complex psycholog-
ical point, and the question must remain at
present de gustibus. I wish only to indicate a
very human mental reservation from what
everyone must recognize in candor as a truly
sublime idea. It is enough to say that the
Platonic idea, which has lately been a good
deal flourished about, assumed in Whitman a
sentimental form, and that with Symonds it
was primarily artistic. How obscure, how un-
defined in both men the impulse was may be
judged from Whitman's complaint that for
twenty years in letters Symonds had been pes-
tering and catechising him on the meaning of
Calamus. "My first instinct about all that
Symonds writes," he said to Horace Traubel,
"is violently reactionary — is strong and brutal
for no, no, no. Then the thought intervenes
that I maybe do not know all my own mean-
ings." Plainly it could not be reduced to the
dialectical form of the Charmides; and as
plainly, dim as it is, it cannot be ignored. It
takes us back to Symonds' childhood when, to
the discomfort of his father, he preferred to

162 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

fall in love with an engraving of the Genius
of the Vatican rather than with "some nymph
or Hebe." It accompanied him through life
in his passion for the aesthetic aspect of sports.
It formed the motive of a large number of
poems, many of which were published {Calli-
crates^ for instance, a copy of which he sent to
Whitman) . It drew him uneasily to the sub-
ject of Antinous, that beautiful, equivocal boy,
an emperor's Ganymede. In his essay on
Athens he tests it by the theory of the milieu.
It plays its part in his physical repulsion from
the style of Pater ("like the presence of a
civet-cat") and again where he speaks, in a
letter of 1878, of "something in the personality
of Keats, some sort of semi-physical aroma
wafted from it, which I cannot endure." The
corollary of this physical repulsion, which is
always a mark of neurotic people, is found in
his essay on Swiss Athletic Sports, where he
quotes the remark of one of the athletes,
a propos of the brotherliness of gymnasts:
"That is because we come into physical contact
with one another. You only learn to love men
whose bodies you have touched and handled."

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 163

Symonds' comment on this is, "True as I be-
lieve this remark to be, and wide-reaching in
its possibilities of application, I somehow did
not expect it from the lips of an Alpine peas-
ant."

This question belongs to the mysterious
depths of jesthetic psychology. I must only
add that it controlled Symonds in almost
every issue, that it led him into Greek studies,
attracted him to Whitman and the Davos peas-
antry, and certainly explains his lifelong en-
thusiasm for Michael Angelo, the supreme ar-
tist of the adolescent masculine body. And in
any case it provides us with a superb specimen
of that philosophy according to which the soul
with all its aspirations and activities is ex-
plained by physiology.

The friendship of Symonds and Whitman,
though they never met, lasted continuously for
nearly thirty years until the death of Whitman
in 1892. Of Whitman's influence on Symonds'
life I have already spoken and shall have oc-
casion to speak later. Of the nature of his
work, in Symonds' view, perhaps I may quote
an eloquent though somewhat inflated passage

164 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

from the Study of Whitman, published on the
day Symonds died, which illustrates alike his
power and misuse of words :

"He is Behemoth, wallowing in primeval
jungles, bathing at fountain-heads of mighty
rivers, crushing the bamboos and the cane-
brakes under him, bellowing and exulting in
the torrid air. He is a gigantic elk or buffalo,
trampling the grasses of the wilderness, track-
ing his mate with irresistible energy. He is an
immense tree, a kind of Ygdrasil, stretching
its roots down into the bowels of the world, and
unfolding its magic boughs through all the
space of the heavens. His poems are even as
the rings in a majestic oak or pine. He is the
circumambient air, in which float shadowy
shapes, rise mirage-towers and pahn-groves;
we try to clasp their visionary forms ; they van-
ish into ether. He is the globe itself; all seas,
lands, forests, climates, storms, snows, sun-
shines, rains of universal earth. He is all na-
tions, cities, languages, religions, arts, creeds,
thoughts, emotions. He is the beginning and
the grit of these things, not their endings, lees,
and dregs. Then he comes to us as lover, con^

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN, 165

soler, physician, nurse, most tender, fatherly,
sustaining those about to die, lifting the chil-
dren, and stretching out his arms to the young
men. What the world has he absorbs. For
him there is no schism in the universe, no force
opposed to God or capable of thwarting Him,
no evil ineradicable by the soul, no limit set on
human aspiration. Vice and disease he re-
bukes and pities. They are tainted, defective,
miserable; yet not to be screamed at; rather to
be cured and healed. He knows that purity
is best, and health is best. But he also shows
that what false modesty accounted unclean is
the cleanest and the healthiest of all. In his
return to nature he does not select inanimate
nature or single out the savage state. He takes
man first, as the height and head of things ; and
after man the whole tract that human feet can
traverse or human thought explore. Cities,
arts, occupations, manufactures, have a larger
place in his poetry than rivers or prairies ; for
these are nearer to man, more important to his
destiny and education. He is the poet of fact,
of the real, of what exists, of the last true,
positive, and sole ontology."

166 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

In this book and in his essay on Democratic
Art are summed up Symonds' views on Whit-
man as a gigantic spiritual force.

Whitman in his turn was deeply devoted to
Symonds. His first real recognition came
from a few English and Irish scholars, and
there is no doubt that he felt not only grateful
but flattered. The great man was, in fact, ab-
surdly and naively vain. He enjoyed the ex-
uberant praise of men, so-called of culture,
who seemed to have a kind of divine right to
speak of him in the same breath with Homer
and Dante. He did not stop to consider
whether they themselves were little or big, so
long as they satisfied him as crown-makers and
weavers of laurel for him. One finds his atti-
tude toward Symonds, as it is now revealed in
that truly great work, the greatest biographical
work in American literature, With Walt Whit-
man in Camden, in all ways wholly and hu-
manly delicious. Some of the things he said
to Horace Traubel are in clear, disinterested
praise of his friend; others illustrate his un-
conscionable habit of self-advertisement and
his utilitarian view of disciples; all exhibit the

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 167

American dialect and aroma of the man, as
strong and pervasive as the Scottish dialect
and aroma of Carlyle. In some cases the
three are intermingled, as here:

"Symonds surely has style — do you notice?
His simplest notes are graceful — ^hang ahout
sweetly after they are done — seem to be heart-
beats. I am very fond of Symonds — often re-
gret that we have never met: he is one of my
real evidences; is loyal, unqualifying — never
seems ashamed — ^never draws back — never
seems to be asking himself. Have I made a
mistake in this Walt Whitman? .
Symonds has got into our crowd in spite of
his culture; I teU you we don't give away
places in our crowd easy — a man has to sweat
to get in."

And again:

"Symonds is a royal good fellow — ^he comes
along without qualifications ; just happens into
the temple and takes his place."

And again when, as it appears. Professor
Dowden's first enthusiasm seemed to be letting
up a little:

168 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

"Symonds is a persistent fire; he never quails
or lowers his colors."

Symonds, who did not consider his admira-
tion for Whitman in the light of propaganda,
was a little nettled hy just this aspect of the
matter; but he had the good sense to overlook
it. And indeed Whitman, who viewed his own
cult almost as a disinterested worshipper, could
return compliments in his own queer way:

"Symonds could crowd all the literary fel-
lows oiF the stage for delicacy — directness —
of pure literary expression ; yes, honest expres-
sion. Symonds is cultivated enough to break
— ^bred to the last atom — overbred; yet he has
remained human, a man, in spite of all."

"Symonds is a craftsman of the first water
— pure as crystal — fine, fine, fine — dangerously
near the superfine in his weaker momentg."

And how he felt toward Symonds personally
may be gathered from the following :

"I am always strangely moved by a letter
from Symonds; it makes the day, it makes
many days, sacred."

"He is surely a wonderful man — a rare,
cleaned-up man — a white-souled, heroic char-

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 169

acter. I have had my own troubles — but
Symonds is the noblest of us all."

"On the whole I do not regret that I never
got to Europe, but occasionally it comes over
me that Symonds is alive — ^that we have never
met ; then I want to drop everything and start
at once."

And in one other passage he seems to assign
Symonds the chief seat in what he called the
temple :

"I suppose Symonds must always be first;
his loyalty takes such an ardent personal form;
it has not the literary tang, except incidentally.
. . . With Symonds everything is down —
we are face to face."

In 1883 appeared Shakspere's Predeces-
sors in the English Drama. Between 1862 and
1865, before definitely resolving to enter liter-
ature, he had begun as a private exercise a his-
tory of the Elizabethan drama. He did not
abandon the scheme for many years, and seems
to have intended to incorporate the work in
that history of the English Renaissance which
we find him discussing as late as 1870 with
Jowett, who urged him to undertake it in a

170 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

severely historical spirit. A mass of material
was collected and many written essays and
fragments were stored away in his "desolation
box" ; out of which at intervals came his life of
Jonson, his General Introduction to the Mer-
maid Series (1887), and his introductions to
the Mermaid editions of Heywood and Web-
ster and Tourneur (1888). Feeling that he
was improperly prepared and cut off from
sources of adequate investigation, he hesitated
to enter a field where so many eminent scholars
were at work. And he would probably never
have resumed these early studies had he not
been urged to do so by his nephew St. Loe
Strachey in 1882, at a time when his Italian
studies were practically finished.

The Ehzabethan drama attracted Symonds
first through his favorite paradox that it was
strongly anti-literary. Like Cellini's Memoirs
it was a native, uncultivated growth, produced
in sympathy with the whole people, demo-
cratic. Secondly, it appealed to his critical
sense as one of the few examples in the his-
tory of art of a complete, organic whole, a
spontaneous illustration of a people's growth,

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN m

unhampered by academies or by ecclesiastical
censorship — a free record of racial evolution.
Shakspere's Predecessors is therefore per-
haps the best example of Symonds' critical
philosophy, as that is indicated in his Essays
Speculative and Suggestive. His attempt was
to apply in England the method of Taine —
"the steady determination to regard all sub-
jects of enquiry from the point of view of de-
velopment." At the same time he found in
Taine "a something inconsistent with the
subtlety of nature" — something not quite
pragmatic, as we should say. He believed
that English criticism would run little danger
of carrying method and logic too far, little
danger of running to excess in the uncongenial
task of "shifting the centre of gravity from
men as personalities to men as exponents of
their race and age." The Carlylean idea of
great men, so much more characteristic of
English criticism, would provide a sufficient
makeweight to prevent that. In the English
drama, like the Greek sculpture, hke Italian
painting, he found one of those truly national
types of art "which have occupied the serious

172 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

attention of whole peoples for considerable
periods," and which thus enabled him to apply;
admirably the test of the milieu.

The style of this book was a great affliction
to Chiu-ton Collins, who made it the object of
a stately anathema in The Quarterly Review.
He found in it "every indication of precipitous
haste, a style which where it differs from the
style of extemporary journahsm differs for
the worse — ^florid, yet commonplace; full of
impurities; inordinately, nay, incredibly, dif-
fuse and pleonastic; a narrative clogged with
endless repetitions, without symmetry, with-
out proportion." Among the guilty phrases
which he attributes to the school of Swinburne
is Symonds' characterization of one play as
"an asp, short, ash-colored, poison-fanged,
blunt-headed, abrupt in movement, hissing and
wriggling through the sands of human mis-
ery." But how can it be asserted that Symonds
was in any way a follower of Swinburne?
Phrases like this are, after all, matters of tem-
perament. They are not classical; but they
are far more consonant with the Elizabethan
manner and the most nervous, native English

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 173

than is the style approved by Collins. And
they confirm the oft-suggested affinity between
Elizabethan and Victorian literature.

Throughout the year 1881 he had suffered
from a more than usual depression, crushing
fatigue, and morbid restlessness. This was ex-
plained by a visit to England in May, 1882.
Before leaving Davos he wrote, "My life
seems to have become suddenly hollow, and I
do not know what is hanging over me." In
London he was examined by Dr. Clark and
Dr. Williams, both of whom independently
pronounced that the ri^ht lung was now ac-
tively affected as well as the left and had been
so for at least a year. It was a deadly blow
to all his hopes and expectations, for he had
reasoned himself through all difficulties in the
belief that Davos was gradually curing his dis-
ease. Other trials befell. In March, 1882, his
dear friend and brother-in-law Professor
Green died. His sister Lady Strachey died.
His daughter Janet fell ill, more and more
hopelessly. Davos had lost its novelty and the
allurement of promised health. Isolation
preyed upon him, and he felt the pathological

174 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

nature of that access of youthful spirits which
accompanied the progress of his disease.
Davos, he told a friend, made him "quarrel-
some and conceited." Constant attacks of
fever kept him shut up in his bedroom with
ice-bags on his head. But energy and cour-
age — themselves without doubt symptoms and
effects of his malady — ^never failed him. "I
want to tell you," he writes out of the depth
of his miseries, "that my theory of existence is
to sustain the spiritual, the energetic, the re-
joicing element in self alive, as the one great
duty to the world, the one function for which
a man was framed"; and he brings to mind
Branwell Bronte, who died upright on his feet.
He took to reading James Thomson, whose
absolutely rayless pessimism satisfied his own
black broodings. Yet it is noticeable that he
breaks off a letter on Thomson to tell about
the international toboggan race which is oc-
curring at Davos and for which he wishes to
provide a cup: £15 is to be the cost of it,
and he desires a solid, old-fashioned college
tankard.

Often he would join a singing-party of

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 175

young and old men, or would go driving with
his family for days together among the moun-
tain villages. At home the routine of work
occupied him till two or three in the morning.
Sitting in his study, with its carpet chair and
the cast of Cellini's Perseus upright on the
serpentine stove, he was ready at all hours for
a smoke and talk with the Davos natives,
whose counsellor he was. Late at night he
would go tobogganing in the moonlight or
walk, dreaming and speculating, along the
shore of the frozen lake and among the pines.
The air of the Alps induced more and more
constantly in his thought that mystical cosmic
enthusiasm which was to him the divine idea.
"We crave to lose self," he writes, "or to real-
ize it all by merging it. We want to burn in-
definitely, infinitely, illimitably, everlastingly
upwards. There are potentialities in all of us
of which we are aware, which we need to bring
into this incandescence." That spiritual mood
certainly is very closely allied to the hectic
stimulation of tuberculosis. Everywhere in
Symonds the mental, moral, and physical
spring from a transparently common source:

176 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

there is not, as in so many men, a deceptive
separation of faculties. In the same way are
to be explained those outbreaks of high spirits
during which he was the Horace of so many
peasant wine-festivals — ^mirth-making as Hor-
ace and a good deal more hilarious. How
exotically braced his vitality was may be gath-
ered from his habits of mountain climbing.
One night he walked by moonlight up the
Schwartzhorn, reaching the top just before
dawn: nor was this expedition exceptional.

His isolation was broken by a diary of news
and reflections, dispatched each month by
Henry Sidgwick, which brought him word of
the stirring intellectual world of England.
Yet this only confirmed his own sense of hav-
ing no niche, no remembered place among his
contemporaries. He consoled himself by feel-
ing that he had risen above literature and had
thereby become a more integral and contribu-
tory part in the sheer life-force. "I have
thrown off ambition and abandoned litera-
ture," he writes on Christmas day, 1884. . . .
"I am so very stupid, so proved thricefold
stupid by my acknowledged and obvious fail-

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 177

ure in the work I chose, that I cannot give
the least rational account of what I expect
from this Future. Only I will not take from
its hands what I have asked from the past —
literary success and literary hearing. I de-
mand from the Future something finer, some-
thing that concerns the naked soul." And
again: "I am weary of things that seem to
me so infinitely nugatory, face to face with
mere himaan suffering. And so far as any
energy is left in me, I strive now to spend
my force (of will, and thought, and purse)
in smoothing paths for happier people than
myself. I have many opportunities here."

Of these opportunities he made the most.
Feeling, with some misgivings, however, that
his large family of daughters made it neces-
sary for him to keep intact his inherited capi-
tal, he reduced his personal expenses to a mini-
mum and made a practice of devoting all the
proceeds of his literary work and everything
else that could be spared from his other income
to the welfare of Davos and his friends there.
He certainly lacked the sociological imagina-
tion; he knew nothing of economics and seems

178 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

never to have realized the true bearings of
wealth. He did not grasp anything beyond
a personal campaign; but this he carried out
with admirable science and unselfishness. It
gave him an incentive to work when every
other incentive failed him, and the skiU and
energy involved in schemes of practical affec-
tion invigorated him. He concocted all sorts
of ingenious measures to bring about, imper-
sonally and secretly, a balance of opportunity
between himself and those who were poorer
than he: studying private cases where men
could be helped to develop their proper facul-
ties and circumventing by all sorts of diplo-
matic wiles the obstacles of conventional pride.
His attitude toward poverty and himself in
relation to poverty exhibits in its best aspect —
both of heart and head— the old-fashioned
philanthropic idea.

Yet for a comparatively popular writer his
earnings were not large. At the end of 1885,
when he had arranged to publish the Catholic
Reaction^ he estimated that his total returns
for the seven volumes of The Renaissance in
Italy amounted only to £1100, the remunera-

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 179

tion for eleven years of steady, devoted labor ;
at least half of which had gone into books and
traveling expenses without which the work
would have been impossible. Although this
income was, of course, largely supplemented
from his other books and articles — mainly, no
doubt, those which cost him the least time and
effort — it remains that £50 a year had been
his average receipts from a work which had
involved his best energies, which had been the
fruit of many unremunerative years of study,
and was undoubtedly a popular classic in its
line.

The year 1886 was the most productive in
all Symonds' career as man of letters. He
published the two final volumes of The Re-
naissance; translated the whole of Cellini's
Memoirs; wrote his life of Sidney for the
English Men of Letters^ his life of Jonson
for the English Worthies^ and his article on
Tasso for the Encyclopcedia Britannica; and
edited Sir Thomas Browne and Selections
from Jonson. Most of this was merely the
quick and sufiiciently competent work of an
expert in a single literary period, who could

180 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

patch together in very short order an adequate
monograph or popular edition. He had cov-
ered the ground many times before. Yet, with
any but a pure hack-writer, the choice of
themes is never accidental — ^it is in itself
highly characteristic; and in Sidney and Jon-
son we may find special affinities with Sy-
monds which, with numerous others elsewhere,
in the aggregate determined his general major
sympathy with the Renaissance.

It is not fanciful to see how naturally he
was drawn to Sir Philip Sidney — "the very
essence of congruity," as Wotton said — when
his own soul had been for so many years the
very quintessence of incongruity. And re-
membering his favorite doctrine that fife is
more than literature and his own powerless-
ness to subdue the furor scribendi, we may
fancy with what half -envious satisfaction he
recalled Fulke GreviUe's opinion of his com-
rade that "his end was not writing, even while
he wrote." So when he observes: "The whole
tenor of Sidney's career proves his determina-
tion to subordinate self -culture of every kind
to the ruling purpose of useful public ac-

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 181

tion" — ^when he writes this we know that he
was putting on paper the cherished ideal of
his own, which Davos partially enabled him to
realize.

{ So, also, in Ben Jonson he found a man
freighted with learning who could breathe and
exert beneath it the free will of his personal-
ity, who could be monumentally a scholar and
yet remain essentially an artist. And when
he says, "It would not be impossible, I think,
to regard Jonson's genius as originally of the
romantic order, overlaid and diverted from its
spontaneous bias by a scholar's education, and
by definite theories of the poet's task, deliber-
ately adopted and tenaciously adhered to in
middle life" — ^we can see again that he writes
with one eye on his own career. It is this kind
of slip, or hazard, or half -confession which
makes the critical writings of Symonds never
quite passionlessly, objectively true, and al-
ways abundantly autobiographical. Incident-
ally his admiration for Jonson leads him into
a very unjust comparison with Dryden. A
"parasite of public caprice . . . impudently
confessing his mean and servile aims" is not

182 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

the whole truth about the author of that ques-
tionable line, "To please the people ought to
be the poet's aim." It is worth noting as the
only radically and deliberately unfair criticism
I have found anywhere in his writingiy

The translation of Cellini was more impor-
tant. It is probably the most popular of all
Symonds' works; and work of his it is by vir-
tue of its style. Here he had to reproduce
the "heedless animated talk" of a racy char-
acter, ignorant of literature, often ungram-
matical, but invariably sharp-witted, humor-
ous, lively, direct. Symonds has made an
English classic of the book which Goethe
naturalized in German and Comte thought
worthy as a human document of a place in
the Positivist Library. The style of his ver-
sion has all the nervous vitality, the mother-
wit, the native idiom of the great Elizabethan
translations: it is a masterpiece of literary
archaeology, electrically alive. The labor spent
in close intimacy with this book, coinciding
with his own increasing sense of actuality, his
ever-growing delight in human nature, had its
effect on all his later work. To it I trace, for

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 183

instance, the realism and vigor of his Auto-
biography, written three years later and re-
garded by him as the most successful of his
writings. And indeed almost all that he pro-
duced in later life had in style some of that
homely strength which is the genius of native
English prose.

To Symonds Cellini was a sort of human
touchstone for the Renaissance — a man who
expressed in action the whole age, its pagan-
ism, its brutality, its piety, its superstition, its
sensibihty, its curiosity, its passion for beauty.
He lived "in the Whole," and thus fulfilled at
least that third of Goethe's maxim which is
the most inaccessible to modern complex men.
The place that this translation holds among
Symonds' Renaissance studies is indicated by
a passage from his own Introduction to it:
"It is the first book which a student of the
Renaissance should handle in order to obtain
the right direction for his more minute re-
searches. It is the last book to which he
should return at the close of his exploratory
voyages. At the commencement he will find
it invaluable for placing him at the exactly

184 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

proper point of view. At the end he will find
it no less invaluable for testing and verifying
the conclusions he has drawn from • various
sources and a wide circumference of learning.
. . . His Memoirs enable us to comprehend
how those rarer products of the Italian genius
at a certain point of evolution were related to
the common stuff of human nature in the race
at large." This indicates the importance and
charm of the book to Symonds. And there
were more personal reasons to be explained
by that peculiar admiration of Symonds for
everything directly opposite to himself. Cel-
lini was objective and external, healthy,
natural, free from introspection and incapable
of brooding, a lover of form rather than color,
a hater of "that accursed music," a man of
action.

May it not also be said that, like all true
artists, Cellini was an ideal man? Transgress-
ing every moral law, he erred only in relation
to the social backgroxmd — and it is the task of
society, not of the individual, to provide the
proper background: living in the ideal society
Cellini would have responded with equal ful-

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 185

ness, mutatis mutandis^ to ideal conditions,
since he was one of those men who accept life
unreservedly as they find it. The important
thing to remember, and the thing which makes
aU-expressive human nature always ideal, is,
that it can with spiritual — or, in Cellini's case,
artistic — integrity accept life whole-heartedly
and glorify it. That ideal faculty of the in-
dividual is society's chief earnest, society's
chief incentive to provide the proper back-
ground. And if, as John Stuart MiU says,
the peril which threatens the world is a de-
ficiency of personal impulses and preferences,
then it is easy to understand why the Memoirs
of this immortal ruffian was regarded by
Goethe and Comte as among the few all-
important hvmian records.

It is astonishing to find Symonds amid the
overwhelming work of this year — eight vol-
umes, either seen through the press, written,
edited, or translated^— still energetically climb-
ing, exploring, traveling. In September he
made a tour of several days with his wife
through the Lower Engadine and the Splii-
gen. But the strain had been too great. His

186 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

eyes gave way, he fell into another period of
depression, his old habits of speculation and
introspection came back, aggravated by his
want of power to work. And in the midst of
all this distress his eldest daughter Janet died,
on April 7, 1887. Only a month before he
had written to Henry Sidgwick, "a subhme
system of ethics seems to me capable of being
based upon that hope of extinction." And
now at this critical moment he seemed able to
prove for himself that love does not require
the "bribe of immortahty."

During these years his old master Jowett
had been in constant touch with him, spurring
him on in letters and occasionally visiting him
in his solitude. On March 2 he writes :

"I was very glad to hear that you thought
of having a period of retirement from litera-
ture and of rest and thought before you pub-
lish again. It is the only way to gain strength
and escape from mannerism. You have great
stores of knowledge and a wonderful facility
and grace of style. But I want you to write
something stronger and better, and in which
the desire to get at the truth is more distinctly

SWISS LIFE: WHITMAN 187

expressed. You told me once that some words
of mine produced a great impression on your
'green, untutored youth.' Let me add, what
I am equally convinced of, that you may not
only 'rise to eminence' — that is already ac-
complished — ^but that you have natural gifts
which would place you among the first of
English contemporary writers, if you studied
carefully how to use them."

And a letter of March 30 contains this sen-
tence :

"I have no doubt that if you cotild concen-
trate yourself and have a couple of years'
average health, you might leave a name that
would not be forgotten in hterature."

Jowett, it may be said, had accepted as well
as given advice, for it was through Symonds
that he was led to undertake the four years'
task of revising his Plato.

Chapter VII
LAST years: death

THE period of retirement from literature
was more apparent than real. Symonds
for two years published no fresh book, but the
more inglorious phase of his craft went on as
usual. After a brief spring visit in England
he returned in July, 1887, to the drudgery of
the Cellini proofs, a five months' labor, at the
same time reducing to system his aesthetic
principles in a series of papers that were sub-
sequently published as Essays Speculative and
Suggestive. And an autumn visit to Venice,
coinciding with the great success of his Cel-
lini, determined him to translate the Memoirs
of Count Carlo Gozzi, the eighteenth century
Venetian playwright.

Gozzi continued to occupy him through
1888, with ever-diminishing enthusiasm. His
heart was never in it, he said. In a moment

188

LAST YEARS: DEATH 189

of light fascination he had engaged himself
to the year-long company of the Venetians in
their most corrupt, ghttering, tawdry period
with, for daily converse, what he calls "an odd
unsympathetic bastard between Don Quixote
and a pettifogging attorney" : certainly a dis-
illusioning postscript to his Renaissance
studies.

Although it became presently evident as the
year wore on that the physical basis of his life
was very gradually beginning to ebb away, he
grew nervously and in human intercourse
more and more active. He received visits
from Jowett and his old friends Arthur Sidg-
wick, H. G. Dakyns, and Horatio F. Brown.
His correspondence had enormously increased
with his growing fame and had brought him
into touch especially with the younger genera-
tion of English men of letters, with scholars
in Italy, France, and Germany, and with the
circle of Whitman's admirers in America. As
President of the Davos Turrwerein he was all-
responsible middleman between the natives
and the foreign colony. He had already con-
tributed much to the building of a gymna-

190 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

slum, and in 1889 he offered to give 10,000
francs to clear it of debt and place it in the
hands of the commune, reserving to the Turn-
verein the right of special use. It was only
after a general meeting of the communal as-
sembly and many intricate negotiations that
the burghers were prevailed upon to accept it.
"I never got rid of £400 with more diplo-
macy," said Symonds. In the summer of 1888
he was chosen as one of the three delegates
from the University of Oxford to the eleventh
centenary of the University of Bologna.
"With me," he writes, "life burns ever more
intense, as my real strength wanes and my
days decrease. It seems to me sometimes
awful — ^the pace at which I live in feehng —
inversely to the pace at which myself is ebbing
to annihilation. ... I never seem to have
lived until quite lately."

During the winter of 1887-88 the snow fell
in the Highlands in quantities exceeding all
recorded seasons. Six hundred avalanches
fell, thirteen lives were lost, one hundred and
seventy-two buildings wrecked. Symonds,
who, like Cowper, had an "awful admiration"

LAST YEARS: DEATH 191

for great storms, was deeply stirred by the
experience. He had come, as he said, to "love
the sternest things in life best," and storms,
he wrote two years later, are "the kind of
things which do the soul good: like most of
the disturbances of nature." In a season hke
this he felt the culmination of that intensity
of upper mountain air, that sense of abiding
universal relations to which his own shattered
mind had moored itself. His impressions of
the winter and of his thrilling journey south-
ward to Venice with his daughter Margaret
through the whirling April snow are told in
his essay, Snow, Frost, Storm, and Avalanche.
Driving over thirty feet of snow they could
touch the telegraph wires. All traces of the
road were obliterated. "Now we must trust
to the horse," observed the postillion; "if he
misses, it is over with us." Even the sledge
bells had been left behind lest their faintest
tinkling should dislodge an avalanche. In
Venice they settled in an apartment which
Symonds had engaged for a term of years in
the house of H. F. Brown. How much he
enjoyed his visits in Venice, full of amusing

192 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

adventures among the water-dwelling folk
with whose ways he had become familiar by-
long training among corresponding types in
Switzerland, may be seen from his Venetian
sketches. As a man he was certainly much
more at home in scenes of this kind than as a
writer. The free gaiety, the sensuous charm
of Italian life showed him how starred he had
been on certain sides in his icebound retreat
and how much his feverish brain-activity had
resulted from the congestion of a naturally
expansive nature.

In March, 1889, he began to write his Auto-
biography. This work, which covered mi-
nutely his early years and analyzed his later
intellectual progress, has never been com-
pletely published, although it forms the
groundwork of the great biography by H. F.
Brown. Certainly it strikes a tone almost con-
sistently dark, and one of his closest friends
maintained that he had given an "entirely
wrong account of liimself" and that the lova-
ble, bright, gay, enthusiastic man known to
his friends in conversation did not appear at
aU. Symonds himself lamented that one can

LAST YEARS: DEATH 193

appear so differently to others than to oneself.
Without doubt he succeeded in presenting
faithfully the image in his own mirror: only
the social phase was lacking — all that is called
up in company. And it is a question whether,
in so complex a nature, it may be said with
more truth that happiness or unhappiness was
the predominating fact. The Autobiography,
considered by him the most successful of his
writings, is notable for concrete attention to
fact, cool deduction, calm, direct, unwavering
style, and general objectivity.

These traits of strength are apparent also
in the Essays Speculative and Suggestive,
issued in 1890. "This," he wrote in a letter,
"is in many ways the most important book I
have written for publication." And again:
"I am interested in this book more than I have
been in any other." It was natural, for he had
put on record his reasoned convictions in all
the lines of thought which had occupied his
life — philosophy, rehgion, criticism, art, style.
He regarded it as the fruit of a long and con-
scious self-discipUne towards wisdom, during
which he had ruthlessly cut away personal am-

194 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

bition and liberated himself from the bondage
of words. For once he stood before the pub-
lic with mind unveiled, as a sheer thinker, not
a man of letters. It is a revelation almost
equally of strength and weakness — strong as
an earnest of the man's power of self -conquest
and sincerity of principle, weak as an absolute
contribution to thought. For the eminence of
Symonds is based upon certain extra-intellec-
tual qualities, sympathy, style, impression-
ableness; and as often happens when these
are shorn away or reduced to their lowest com-
mon factor, the result is commonplace. Sy-
monds was primarily an artist, and few artists,
when all the glamour of the soul falls from
them, can contribute anything very serious to
pure thought. So here: although he believed
he was breaking fresh ground, it was fresh
mainly as regards himself; and although he
considered some of his deductions almost reck-
lessly in advance of his time, there must be
few readers to whom they are not elaborate
truisms. It is certainly a truism that the phi-
losophy of evolution instead of routing the
religious aspirations of men has reanimated

LAST YEARS: DEATH 195

our spiritual and spiritualized our physical life
as dogmatic theology never did; a truism that
science and religion are mutually explanatory;
that natural law, by involving all the func-
tions of man, quickens the soul as no imagined
law could ever .do which appealed only to one
or two functions; that our sense of identity
with nature elevates our view of nature rather
than lowers respect for ourselves ; that private
aspiration gains from its coalescence with so-
cial duty; a truism that art, morality, lan-
guage have to be explained on biological prin-
ciples, and that age and race largely determine
works and men ; that great works remain dom-
inant because of their grasp of abiding rela-
tions, their hold on the perennial aspirations
of men; a truism that Realism and Idealism
instead of being antagonistic are both inevita-
ble phases of any work of art. These are
all truisms of the synthetic philosophy: the
important matter being personal, that Sy-
monds arrived at them not by intellectual ac-
ceptance alone, but by the labor and suffering
of a lifetime, and held them as convictions of
experience. That fact alone elevates the

196 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

truism into a human document, and places
the essays, defective in bright ideas and re-
dundant in illustration as they are, high
among his writings. I should point especially
to the paper on National Style as one of the
most suggestive, learned, and eloquent of
English essays. For the understanding of
Symonds himself the essays on the Philosophy
of Evolution^ Nature Myths and Allegories,
Landscape, and Notes on Theism are indis-
pensable. Of the book in general Frederic
Harrison observes: "For grasp of thought,
directness, sureness of judgment, the Essays
of 1890 seem to me the most solid things that
Symonds has left." No doubt: but certainly
not the most characteristic and therefore not
the most admirable as literature. They show
the steady growth of his mind toward ex-
ternality and impersonal thought, and they
speak from a happier and more contented Ufe.
But Symonds was essentially an artist, and a
thinker only incidentally.

As time went on and his malady left him
with less and less hope he became extremely
reckless of his health. Over and over again

LAST YEARS: DEATH 197

he sprained his ankles by heedless impetuosity ;
once he did so in scrambling over the ice-
coated tree-trunks after a bout of wood-
cutting. He would spend days and nights in
peasant huts, washing at the pump — once
when it was so cold that even a vial of quinine
and sulphuric acid froze in his bedroom. He
never missed a gynmastic meet, and would
often clear the coiirse and time the racers, din-
ing and making merry and driving home at
midnight in an open sledge against the icy
glacial Avind. "To-day," he writes to Mr.
Gosse, "I started with my girls and our to-
boggans, and ran a course of four miles,
crashing at lightning speed over the ice and
snow. We did the journey in about eleven
minutes, and I came in breathless, dead-beat,
almost fainting. Then home in the railway,
with open windows and a mad crew of young
men and maidens excited by this thrilling ex-
ercise." . . . "Not a cure for bronchitis," he
observes.

Under conditions of this kind the disease
in his lungs was constantly fanned and the
fuel was rapidly burning up. Only his brain

198 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

was calmer, clearer, stronger than ever. Life
had taken its last seat there and gathered force
for a few vigorous efforts. Never had his
work been so substantial.

The constant aim which had buoyed him up
for so many years found expression in a char-
acteristic letter to Mr. Brown (July 2, 1891) :
"You know how little I seek after fame, and
how little I value the fame of famous men.
You also know how much I value self-eflfec-
tuation; how I deeply feel it to be the duty
of a man to make the best of himself, to use
his talents, to make his very defects serve as
talents, and to be something for God's sake
who made him. In other words, to play his
own note in the universal symphony. We
have not to ask whether other people will be
affected by our written views of this or that;
though, for my part, I find now, with every
day I live, that my written views have had a
wide and penetrating influence where often
least expected. That is no affair of mine, any
more than of a sunflower to be yellow, or a
butterfly to flutter. The point for us is to
bring all parts of ourselves into vital correla-

LAST YEARS: DEATH 199

tion, so that we shall think nothing, write
nothing, love nothing, but in relation to the
central personality — ^the bringing of which
into prominence is what is our destiny and
duty in this short life. And my conclusion
is that, in this one life, given to us on earth,
it is the man's duty, as recompense to God who
placed him here, or Nature, Mother of us all—
and the man's highest pleasure, as a potent in-
dividuality — ^to bring all factors of his being
into correspondence for the presentation of
himself in something. Whether the world re-
gards that final self -presentation of the man
or not seems to me just no matter. As Jenny
Lind once said to me, 'I sing to God,' so, I
say, let us sing to God. And for this end let
us not allow ourselves to be submerged in pas-
sion, or our love to lapse in grubbery ; but let
us be human beings, horribly imperfect cer-
tainly, living for the best effectuation of
themselves which they find possible. If all
men and women lived hke this, the symphony
of humanity would be a splendid thing to
listen to." Magnificently true and memorable

200 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

words, which indicate the unwavering aim, in-
dividual and social, of his vexed life.

At the suggestion of two different pub-
lishers he undertook a small book on Boccac-
cio, which was carried through with little ef-
fort, and his great Life of Michael Angela.
The latter work occupied almost the whole of
the years 1891-92. He approached it not
only with a lifelong and profound sympathy
with its subject, but with more patient and
laborious research probably than he had ever
specifically bestowed on any previous work;
and he brought to it all the broad experience,
the calmness and strength acquired in his later
and more impersonal years. The archives of
the Casa Buonarroti in Florence had been
thrown open on Michael Angelo's fourth cen-
tenary in 1875; and Symonds was the first
student to utilize the voluminous correspond-
ence, manuscripts, notes, and other papers in
a great enterprise. His method of treatment
is appropriately austere. How very far he
had traveled in criticism may be gathered
from his chapter on the Sistine frescoes, where
in former years he would have revelled in sub-

LAST YEARS: DEATH 201

jective interpretation, after the fashion of
Michelet, indulging in rapturous soliloquy
over their hidden meanings. Here as else-
where he searches dispassionately in a purely
artistic spirit, no longer with any of the spirit
of literature. Similarly in writing of the
Medici tombs he casts aside the more con-
genial, modern, Rodinesque notion, that the
blocked-out forms were deliberately left un-
finished to gain through their vagueness, as
"sentimental, not scientific criticism." At the
same time, as a student of Plato and a trans-
lator of Michael Angelo's sonnets, he meas-
ured everything by the spiritual touchstone
of the master's mind. Like uEschylus, Uke
Goethe, like Whitman, Michael Angelo ap-
pealed to him as a superb tonic force, which
"arrests, quickens, stings, purges, and stirs to
uneasy self-examination."

The Life of Michael Angelo involved, of
course, journeys to Florence and Rome and
through the Casentino, in the company of his
Venetian servant Angelo. The condition of
his nerves, largely from overwork, seems to
have kept him in a state of constant irritabil-

202 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

ity; and he complains of the repellent, heart-
less, prosaic Apennines and the "twangle,
wrangle, jangle" of the southern folk. Twice
he dreamed of Jowett: "the deepest, strangest
dreams, in which he came to me, and was
quite glorified, and spoke to me so sweetly and
kindly — as though he understood some ancient
wrong he had not fathomed in me before, and
blessed me and made me feel that this and
all else would be right. . . . These two
dreams have haunted me with a sense of atone-
ment and softness." When he reached Rome
he found a letter from his sister, Mrs. Green,
who was nursing the old man at Balliol: he
was very ill and, as it seemed, near death,
though he was to live long enough to write
the inscription for Symonds' grave. Jowetf
in later years had become infinitely more ten-
der and sympathetic, and his biographers re-
mark that he had come to feel the need of
fusing intellect with emotion. The "inexora-
ble mentor" who could give his friends no rest
while any defect remained unreproved appears
sweet-souled indeed in his letters to Charlotte
Symonds, who was his god-daughter. "What

LAST YEARS: DEATH 203

a temple of peaceful industry!" he writes,
early in 1892, "in which father and mother
and you and Madge are aU writing books.
The world will not contain the books that are
written in that house."

In the autumn of 1891 Symonds' practice
was to write from 9 :30 to 12 :30 in the morn-
ing, to sleep two hours in the afternoon, dine
at 6:30, and then resume work from 8 in the
evening till 1 or 2 in the morning. His
daughter Margaret served as his amanuensis.
In this way Michael Angela was finished by
December. It left him exhausted. Through-
out 1892 he struggled on, attacked by influ-
enza and constant fainting fits, and feeling,
as he observed, threadbare. "I am writing in
my study on a cold morning, before the sun
has climbed the Jacobshorn. Out there — in
the void infinite, the unexplored, intangible —
what is to become of a soul so untamably
young in its old ruined body, consuming its
last drop of vital oil with the flame of
beauty?" With Margaret Symonds he pub-
lished Our Life in the Swiss Highlands. The
great success of his Michael Angela cheered

204 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

him. His chief work during the year was the
Study of Whitman, suggested by the poet's
death in March. In the summer he made his
farewell visit to England. He knew now that
he had but a short time to live, and he was
haunted by premonitions of death:

"Last Sunday night I was lying awake,
thinking of death, desiring death; when, lost
in this sombre mood, to me the bedroom was
at a moment filled with music — ^the 'Lontan
lontano,' from Boito's Mefistofele, together
with its harp accompaniment . . . 'Lontan
lontano' has not yet left my auditory sense —
stays behind aU other sensations — seems to in-
dicate a vague and infinite, yet very near . . ."

This was written on February 22, 1893,
only a few days before his departure from
Davos on that final journey which has been
described in the now celebrated narrative by
Margaret Symonds, Mrs. Vaughn. From
this narrative, so minutely circumstantial, so
tender, vivid and pathetic, I can only condense
the final record.

Symonds with his daughter left Davos in
the middle of March and passed a few days

LAST YEARS: DEATH 205

in Venice, where he was occupied with his
Whitman proofs. There Angelo joined them.
On March 21 they travelled by express to Bari.
Spending a day at Taranto, Symonds busied
himself with a pickaxe, rooting up and pack-
ing a great number of anemone and iris bulbs
for a friend in the North. In the evening he
joined the natives in a rough pizzica dance.
Then they travelled northward to Salerno.
They had one splendid day at Pgestum, where
Symonds tried to work out some theory of his
about the roofing of the temples. They drove
to Amalfi and thence to Naples, a visit of five
days. Their mornings were passed in the
museum. They ascended Vesuvius, where Sy-
monds observed that Michael Angelo must
have studied his figures for the Last Judg-
ment from the writhing lava upon the slopes.
Heedless of the damp chill, he spent hours in
the crypts of the churches, fascinated by the
southern architecture, which was unfamiliar
to him.

From Naples, early in April, they jour-
neyed to Rome. The silver wedding of the
King and Queen was approaching and the

206 JOHN^ ADDINGTON SYMONDS

city was in an uproar of preparation. So
crowded were all the hotels that only after
considerable delay did they procure rooms on
the fifth storey of the Hotel d'ltalia. They
found many friends in Rome, and accepted a
number of invitations. Symonds' conversa-
tion was unusually brilliant, his mind intensely
active and buoyant. He went the roxmd of
the galleries, drove along the Appian Way, to
the Palatine and the Trastevere Gardens. It
was very warm; the sun blazed overhead, and
the flowers ran riot everywhere. Symonds ex-
plored the ruins, adventurous and happy.

On Sunday, the 16th, he was especially ani-
mated, and took an almost childish delight in
certain effects of wisteria and yellow-berried
ivy. That evening he felt ill and went to bed
at once upon returning to the hotel. There
was much influenza in Rome, and he had been
recklessly imprudent. The next morning his
throat suggested diphtheria. He received a
visit from his old school friend, Mr. Corbett,
but he felt very tired and suffered from dif-
ficulty in breathing. In the afternoon his
mind wandered a little. In the evening the

LAST YEARS: DEATH 207

doctor talked to him about his books, and,
turning to his daughter, remarked jestingly,
"Your father is already immortal." The
damp Roman night air made it increasingly
difficult for him to breathe. He seemed to
know that his end was approaching. On
Tuesday, the 18th, he wrote a brief letter to
his wife, who had fallen iU at Venice and
could not come. His throat was too swollen
to admit food or drink. He asked for a little
book of texts which had been his mother's and
in which from childhood he had read every
day. In the afternoon an English nun came
in to nurse him. He talked without inter-
mission to himself. His daughter observes
that he seemed to be wandering back through
the thoughts, not the experience of his old life.
The heat was excessive, and the city was in a
tumult.

On Wednesday, April 19th, it was evident
that pneumonia had settled in both lungs and
was gradually paralyzing them and the heart.
He continued to talk incessantly to himself,
but in a very faint voice. His face grew sud-
denly much younger, and in the last hour his

208 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

expression was almost that of a boy. He
died quietly and peacefully, at the end of ex-
haustion. It was the middle of a cloudless
day. Outside, in the blazing sunlight, the fes-
tivities went on tumultuously. In the evening
the air was filled with the noise of music and
salutes and brightened with innumerable fire-
works.

The first one to bring flowers to the death-
room was the hotel porter, a Graubiinden
peasant, who came with Roman lilacs for the
friend of his people. They were followed by
numerous wreaths, sent by strangers who
knew Symonds through his books. In Eng-
land, the same day, his Study of Walt Whit-
man was published.

A little plot was procured for him in the
Protestant Cemetery, close to the grave of
Shelley. At three o'clock on Thursday morn-
ing his body was carried across the city and
deposited at dawn in the mortuary chapel.
The funeral took place at four o'clock on
Saturday afternoon. It was a day of splen-
did sunshine; the grass was full of April
flowers and the birds sang in the cypress trees.

LAST YEARS: DEATH 209

The epitaph was written by Jowett, so soon
to follow his old pupil in death; and on the
gravestone it is followed by the prayer of
Cleanthes the Stoic, in the version of Symonds
himself.

Infra Jacet

JOHANNES ADDINGTON SYMONDS

vir luminibus ingenii multis

et industria singulari,

cujus animus

infirmo licet in corpore

literarum et historiae studio ardebat.

Bristolii natus V. Oct. MDCCCXL.

Requievit in Christo XIX Ap. MDCCCXCIII.

Ave carissime

nemo te magis in corde amicos fovebat

nee in simplices et indoctos benevolentior eyat.

Lead thou me, God, Law, Reason, Motion, Life!

All names for Thee alike are vain and hollow :
Lead me, for I will foUow without strife.

Or if I strive, still must I blindly follow.

Chapter VIII

CONCLUSION

THE life, work, and philosophical position
of Symonds illustrate one another as in
few recorded cases. Seldom has intellect so
clearly reflected character, and character ma-
terial facts. I think it would be possible to
trace the man's peculiar quality, style, method,
influence, and choice of themes in an unbroken
chain to sheer physiological necessity. Neu-
rotic from birth, suppressed and misdirected
in education, turned by early environment and
by natural afiinity into certain intellectual and
spiritual channels, pressed into speculation by
dogmatic surroundings and aesthetic study,
his naturally febrile constitution shattered by
over-stimulation, by wanting vitality denied
robust creation, by disease made a wanderer,
by disease and wandering together aroused to
an unending, fretful activity — the inner his-

glO

CONCLUSION 211

tory of Symonds could be detailed and charted
scientifically. A little imagination will serve
as well to call up the human character of a
development which is uncommonly fitted for
psychological study.

One cannot read extensively in Symonds
without discovering two facts: first, that the
matter of ever-uppermost concern with him is
religion, the emotional relation which man
bears to the whole scheme of things ; and, sec-
ondly, that his way of conceiving this rela-
tion repeats itself constantly in similar state-
ments and in references to a clearly defined
circle of historic thought. With hardly an
exception his critical volumes close on a com-
mon note, which forms the kernel of his poems
and speculations. I cannot say how often he
refers to Goethe's Proemium to Gott und
Welt and the prayer of Cleanthes, to Marcus
Aurelius and Giordano Bruno, and above all.
Whitman. This circle of recurring references
expressed the emotional and vital elements in
a point of view which found its purely intel-
lectual basis in the evolution philosophy. A
natural affinity thus predisposed him to estab-

212 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

lish his theory of criticism upon the wider
philosophical basis empirically provided by the
nineteenth century. A natural affinity, I say,
because I wish to show plainly that his accept-
ance of evolution was not merely intellectual
and that his writings were really the out-
growth of his character and his fundamental
emotions towards life.

From that laborious, dutiful father of his
he inherited a stoical habit of mind, at vari-
ance indeed with his early tendencies, which
yet in mature life became practically domi-
nant. But in the son stoicism — the sentiment
of work and duty — was wholly separated
from its dogmatic and theoretical applications
in the father. For Symonds was a conscious
sceptic long before he was a conscious stoic.
His scepticism seems early to have been se-
cretly fostered by just the dogmatic nature
of his father's stoicism. His youth was like
the insurrection of a Greek province against
the Roman Empire. JEsthetic study, dialec-
tics, neurotic activity destroyed for him the
logical texture of Christianity and, combined
with the scepticism of Jowett which questioned

CONCLUSION 213

life without questioning God, destroyed in him
the sentiment of faith : for losing faith in life
he could not, as Jowett paradoxically did, re-
tain belief in God.

By the time he left college, then, his posi-
tion was reasonably clear. With a substratum
of stoicism, of which he was not yet aware,
his mind was packed with miscellaneous
knowledge of European culture and had a
strong bias toward Greek thought. But the
centre of his heart was not occupied. There
was a void, a vacuum, and of this the man
was desperately aware. Just here he differs
from really small men, just in this fact lies
whatever power of personality and achieve-
ment finally marked him out. His heart
would not let him rest. His mind was unable
to occupy him calmly, to allow him to exercise
a soulless hterary gift. He was paralyzed
by the want of a central animating principle.
And with all his natural talent, his facility in
words, his abundant learning, he covdd pro-
duce nothing. It took him longer than most
men to find himself, because his niche in the
universe was more essential to him than his

214 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

niche in the world. During all the years in
which he was storing up knowledge he was a
man passionately in search of reUgion. Natur-
ally, then, he found this religion, and as
naturally it had to be one consonant with his
peculiar physical condition and the stock of
his brain. In these respects he was a member
of the post-Darwinian group at Oxford, who
felt so keenly the vacuum which remained
when the dogmatic elements of the old faith
had been swept away. This point enables us
to understand the English influence of Whit-
man and that vague but powerful cult first
called by Henry Sidgwick the "cosmic en-
thusiasm."

We must grasp the idea of a natural mys-
tic, deprived of dogmatic outlet, an eclectic of
culture, a man physically weak, intellectually
sophisticated, over-educated, strangely suscep-
tible to beauty, strength, powerful influences.
Such a man finds his first foothold in Goethe,
because Goethe is almost the only- character
which, as it were, includes a man of such wide
range, and provides a generous margin, points
out a path of cohesion. For Symonds, Goethe

CONCLUSION 215

was an elaboration, a modern instance of the
spirit which had drawn him into Greek
studies — ^the spirit of scientific pantheism. In
Greek thought he found, first of all, a moral
attitude. In their sense of a cosmic order,
an aU-embracing law, their sense of harmony
with nature and of divinity in nature, he dis-
covered the ground-plan of a modern creed
which required only to be confirmed by experi-
ment and animated by emotion. He found
that in their submission to law they had sur-
mounted the enervating elements of fatalism
by resolutely facing and absorbing the sad
things of life, including them in selected types
of predominant beauty and strength. The
logical apex of Greek ethics he found in Mar-
cus Aurelius : its obedience to the common rea-
son of the universe, its social virtue, its faith
in the rightness of things we cannot see. This
attitude, except for its lack of compelling
force, its inadequacy to men who have been
indulged with a more celestial dream, seemed
to him consonant with modern science, as
Christian theology could not be. For Chris-
tian theology made man an exile from nature,

216 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

dependent for salvation upon a being external
to the universe and controlling it from with-
out. The crucial utterances of Christian the-
ology — such, for example, as St. Paul's "For
if Christ be not risen indeed, then are we of all
men most miserable," or Thomas a Kempis'
"For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,"
are contradictory to the idea of a divinity im-
manent in nature of which man's conscious-
ness forms a part.

This moral attitude Symonds found ex-
pressed in three utterances, to aU of which he
constantly recurs. The first, which he called
his motto, is the maxim of Goethe, "To live
resolvedly in the Whole, the Good, the Beauti-
ful." The second is the prayer of Cleanthes
the Stoic, which in his own version was written
over Symonds' grave:

Lead thou me, God, Law, Reason, Motion, Life!

All names for Thee alike are vain and hollow:
Lead me, for I will follow without strife.

Or if I strive, still must I blindly follow.

The third is Goethe's Proemium to Gott
und Welt, Faust's confession of faith; trans-
lated thus by Symonds:

CONCLUSION 217

To Him who from eternity, self-stirred.
Himself hath made by His creative word ;
To Him who, seek to name Him as we will.
Unknown within Himself abideth stiU:
To Him supreme who maketh faith to be.
Trust, hope, love, power, and endless energy.

Strain ear and eye till sight and sound be dim,

Thou'lt find but faint similitudes of Him;

Yea, and thy spirit in her flight of flame

Still tries to gauge the symbol and the name:

Charmed and compelled, thou climb'st from height to

height
And round thy path the world shines wondrous bright ;
Time, space, and size and distance cease to be.
And every step is fresh infinity.

What were the God who sat outside to see

The spheres beneath His finger circling free?

God dwells within, and moves the world and moulds;

Himself and nature in one form enfolds:

Thus all that lives in Him and breathes and is.

Shall ne'er His presence, ne'er His spirit miss.

The soul of man, too, is an universe;
Whence follows it that race with race concurs
In naming all it knows of good and true,
God — yea, its own God — and with honor due
Surrenders to His sway both earth and heaven.
Fears Him, and loves, where place for love is given.

218 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Characteristically this translation was writ-
ten on the glacier at Heiligenblut, June 27,
1870. I shall have occasion presently to con-
nect it with his feeling about the Alps.

This philosophical position, I have said,
formed for him the ground-plan of a modern
creed which required only to be confirmed by
experiment and animated by emotion. The
first of these requisites he found in the evolu-
tion theory, the setond in Whitman.

Symonds' use of the word evolution has
been severely criticised on the ground that he
too laxly identifies it with growth. Whatever
truth may be in the charge I think is due to
two causes — ^first, that he approaches the prob-
lem rather imaginatively than in the spirit of
exact science, and secondly that his data are
historical and aesthetic rather than biological
or geological. In short, the aspect of evolu-
tion he has always in mind is the evolution of
the human spirit, which is not yet so accu-
rately determinable as the primary physical as-
pects of life. In his application of evolution
to criticism, in his eif ort to show that science
and religion are complementary, he was a pio-

CONCLUSION 219

neer and he had, so to speak, the pioneer's
axe to grind; so that what he wrote on these
themes must be taken, in his own spirit, as
personal suggestions and speculations. Intel-
lectually the evolution theory proved to him
what the Greeks and Marcus Aurelius had di-
vined, how truly man is part of nature and
how "nature everywhere, and in aU her parts,
must contain what corresponds to our spiritual
essence."

There is, however, a long step to take from
the philosophy of nature to the religion of
nature — ^the step from what may be called the
cosmic sense to what has been called the cosmic
enthusiasm. The prayer of Cleanthes is a
statement of submission:

Lead me, for I will foUow without strife.
Or if I strive, still must I blindly follow.

Indeed that is what man does whether he will
or no; therein he still remains in bondage to
fate, because he does not yet with hearty con-
fidence affirm, "In Thy will is our peace."
Powerless as man's wiU is before cosmic law,

220 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

he may still believe that his happiness lies in
opposition to cosmic law. His acquiescence is
not yet enthusiastic. And as Symonds wrote
in his Greek Poets: "The real way of achiev-
ing a triumph over chance and of defying
fate is to turn to good account all fair and
wholesome things beneath the sun, and to
maintain for an ideal the beauty, strength and
splendor of the body, mind and will of man."
The way to hold one's own in the swift-flow-
ing stream is to swim with it, using the current
for one's own progress. Under these condi-
tions the possibiUty of a new religion is indi-
cated in the following passage: "Through
criticism, science sprang into being; and sci-
ence, so far as it touches the idea of deity,
brought once more into overwhelming promi-
nence the Greek conception of God as Law.
On the other hand, the claims of humanity
upon our duty and devotion grew in impor-
tance, so that the spirit and teaching of Christ,
the sufi'ering, the self-sacrificing, the merciful,
and at the same time the just, survived the
decay of his divinity. In other words, the
two factors of primitive Christianity are again

CONCLUSION 221

disengaged, and again demand incorporation
in a religion which shall combine the concep-
tion of obedience to supreme Law and of de-
votion to Hmnanity, both of which have been
spiritualized, sublimed, and rendered positive
by the action of thought and experience.
What religion has to do, if it remains theistic,
is to create an enthusiasm in which the cosmic
emotion shall coalesce with the sense of social
duty." [The Philosophy of Evolution.^

Here then the fire was laid, ready to be
lighted. Whitman touched the match. I have
already told how in 1865 Symonds dis-
covered Whitman. Years afterward he wrote :
"Leaves of Grass, which I first read at the
age of twenty-five, influenced me more per-
haps than any other book has done, except the
Bible; more than Plato, more than Goethe.
It is impossible for me to speak critically of
what has so deeply entered into the fibre and
marrow of my being." In Whitman aU these
smouldering theories, these gently, passively
emotional thoughts sprang up as a flame
warming and lighting all the implications of
the cosmic idea: the universe, the individual.

222 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

sex, friendship, democracy. Whitman's pas-
sionate behef in hfe, stout subordination of
the world's experience to the forthright soul,
superb emotional grasp of the principle of
development, glory in health, disregard of
cerebration, innocence of the sinister power of
creeds, customs, human laws to swamp the
cosmic energy in man — all this, on a dozen
scores, was calculated to electrify a man like
Symonds. He accepted the whole of Whit-
man as he had never accepted the whole of
anything before. And with Whitman he
came to accept the whole of life.

Was there something a little hectic about
all this? The sheer physical health which un-
derlay Whitman's exultation was just what
Symonds did not possess. The question arises,
can the cosmic enthusiasm, which is reaUy the
joy of living, exist healthily in those who are
not healthy? And if the joy of living is to
be identified with religion, can any but healthy
people be truly religious? It is open to seri-
ous question whether any man can love the
universe whose digestion is faulty. The ques-
tion is perhaps insoluble, yet in it lies the na-

CONCLUSION 223

ture of Symonds' inherent sincerity, taking
that word in its absolute sense. From his ac-
ceptance of Whitman sprang the animated
point of view which controlled his later life
and underlay his writings. That alone is an
earnest of sincerity! and yet I accept it with
misgivings, because he never eradicated his
even more fundamental scepticism, he never
ceased interrogating the sphinx even in the
midst of his adoration. Or perhaps I should
say the cosmic law remained for him a sphinx,
the projection of his own sphinxliness (I think
Plato would forgive this word) — instead of
the more obvious, blunt, vital force Whitman
felt it to be: which means merely that both
men created the cosmos in their own image.
I mention it because it qualifies our notion of
this discipleship. It enables us to see that for
Symonds the cosmic enthusiasm could really
be only a working-plan, a literary and intel-
lectual synthesis and a social platform, while
the quintessence of the man remained as vola-
tile, as evanescent, as unremoved and un-
expressed as ever. The real Symonds — ^the
"Opalstein" of Stevenson — could never flash

224 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

itself into the rough colors of critical prose
and common life. Behind the calm sweep of
a more and more fruitful actuahty, the mys-
tery of life, dim, inscrutable, hidden away,
seemed continually surging to the surface,
questioning, warning, perplexing, troubling,
like a soul seeking a body and always baffled.
But for us, who can be students only of the
fait accompli, the working-plan is there and
must suffice.

That the cosmic enthusiasm did not indeed
altogether absorb or satisfy him is proved by
certain notes and miscellaneous papers he pub-
lished on the question of God. He was
plainly not contented with the impersonality
of Cosmic Law. He described himself as an
agnostic leaning toward theism, which may be
taken as a precise way of shadowing forth his
need of a devotional object. Of the definition
of deity he says: "What must of necessity
remain at present blank and abstract in our
idea of God may possibly again be filled up
and rendered concrete when the himian mind
is prepared for a new synthesis of faith and
science." [Notes on Theism.']

CONCLUSION 225

To me it seems that the words agnostic and
Whitman can hardly be uttered in the same
breath: for the whole hopeless tangle of cold
metaphysical processes involved in words like
agnostic withers away before one luminous,
heartfelt glimpse into the infinite. But this
again illustrates the dualism of Symonds —
his incapacity to accept a soul-stirring intui-
tion without submitting it immediately to
analysis. It illustrates the lifelong struggle
in him of the poet and the critic. A man who
could write, near the close of his hfe, "If there
is a God, we shall not cry in vain. If there is
none, the struggle of hfe shall not last
through all eternity. Self, agonized and tor-
tured as it is, must now repose on this alterna-
tive" — a man who could write this could not
have possessed essentially the spirit of the cos-
mic enthusiasm. He could not have been so
troubled with definitions, he could not have
wavered so in faith.

So far as he possessed it he f ouiid it imaged
in the Alps. His feeling for the Alps once
more illustrates the physical basis of religious
emotion — ^it was the longing of stifled lungs

226 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

for oxygen, literally as well as figuratively.
So far back as 1858 we find him speaking of
grand scenery as an elevating influence which
depreciates one's estimate of self. Visiting
Switzerland for the first time at twenty-one,
he fills his mind with haunting pictures and
memorable sounds — ^the murmurous air of
waterfalls and winds, wild flowers that call
to him more and more compellingly through
days and years of illness and heated study in
England. "I love Switzerland as a second
home," he writes already in 1866, "hoping to
return to it, certain that I am happier, purer
in mind, healthier in body there than anywhere
else in the world." A year later in London,
in the roaring, dazzling summer streets, he
dreams of sunrise over the snow-fields, the
church bells ringing in the valleys, the dew
upon the flowers ; and without forgetting their
pitiless indifference to man he says, "I love the
mountains as I love the majesty of justice. I
adore God through them, and feel near to Him
among them." At Miirren in 1863 he first
read Goethe's Proemium; on the Pasteuze
Glacier seven vears later he translated it. In

CONCLUSION 227

1869 he describes the Alps as his "only un-
exploded illusion." Gradually the Alpine
sentiment becomes central in him. He con-
nects it with all his major impressions — ^with
Prometheus on Caucasus, with Beethoven and
Handel, Cleanthes and Plato, Bruno and
Whitman, Michael Angelo and Goethe — just
those men, observe, who became the subjects
of his criticism. In 1867 he writes : "The only
thing I know which will restore my physical
tone and give me health is living in the Alps.
The only prospect of obtaining spiritual tone
and health seems to be the discovery of some
immaterial altitudes, some mountains and tem-
ples of God. As I am prostrated and rendered
vacant by scepticism, the Alps are my religion.
I can rest there and feel, if not God, at least
greatness — greatness prior, and posterior to
man in time, beyond his thoughts, not of his
creation, independent, palpable, immovable,
proved."

Here, then, is indicated the relation between
his physical condition, his religious attitude,
and his controlling motive in criticism. The
Alps which could give him health could give

228 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

liim also, and for the same reason, faith. And
they gave him that sense of "greatness," the
importance of which in his own work is
indicated by a passage in one of his Greek
studies : "No one should delude us into think-
ing that true culture does not come from the
impassioned study of everything, however
eccentric and at variance with our own mode
of life, that is truly great." There we have
the logical basis for his literary, as well as his
religious, enthusiasm for Whitman. In the
Alps he not only found, as Obermann had
found, an outlet for his mystical pantheism,
but he found, what Tyndall admitted as a pos-
sibility, the laboratory for placing some such
pantheism on a scientific basis. He found
moreover practical democracy among the
peasants, he found his ideal of the human
body, which drew him to Michael Angelo ; and
he came to feel that "elevating influence which
depreciates one's estimate of self" — which
troubled him at eighteen — as a bUssful relief.
Years of introspection had given him too much
of himself, and he was glad enough to be
"sweetly shipwrecked on that sea."

CONCLUSION 229

It is not surprising, then, that Symonds
came to look in literature for everything that
has tonic value. Health, moral and intellec-
tual, and aU that nourishes a high normality
in man, was the object of his quest in art, his-
tory and literature : not sensations that console
the pessimist, nor distinction that imphes a
dead level to throw it into rehef, nor the
restoration of past ages loveher than ours in
specific points at the cost of true democracy.
His vision was wide and sane: power and clair-
voyance might have made it prophetic. For
the underlying principle of his critical the-
ory — ^that life is deeper than thought — ^is only
in our day, after centuries of philosophical
delusion, becoming recognized once more. It
was a principle far more "modern" than that
of a greater than Symonds, Matthew Arnold.
Prose of the centre was Arnold's criterion,
meaning prose of the social centre. But the
criterion of Symonds, held with however much
defect of power, was a more fundamental cen-
tre than that of taste : one in which even taste,
even the social centre, becomes provincial and
which admits Rabelais, Burns, Thoreau, Whit-

230 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

man and a hundred others who have no other
centre at all than native humanity. "Life is
deeper than thought"— a contemporary plati-
tude which with Symonds was notable for two
reasons. In the first place it was with him
a true discovery of experience, and that al-
ways elevates a platitude. Secondly, it stands
almost unique in an age of culture and in a
man who contributed so much to culture in
its popular aspects. "I am nothing if not
cultivated," wrote Symonds once, "or, at least,
the world only expects culture from me. But
in my heart of hearts I do not believe in cul-
ture, except as an adjunct to life. . . . Pas-
sion, nerve and sinew, eating and drinking,
even money-getting — come, in my reckoning,
before culture." In his day perhaps only a
man deprived of hf e and submerged in litera-
ture could have proclaimed that. Robust
minds like Arnold or Browning could not feel
so keenly the tonic element in thought. Life
in its own abundance was tonic enough. To
them it was a commonplace from the outset
that life is deeper than thought — they could
not feel it as a revelation. It was from ex-

CONCLUSION 231

cess of vitality that they were able, without
losing their personal equilibrium, to emphasize
the purely intellectual. In everything written
by these men health and strength were im-
plicit, and for this reason they were seldom
exphcit. Browning could afford to occupy
himself with intricate psychological cases, and
Arnold with writers of exquisite prose; but
Symonds required vital forces like Michael
Angelo and Whitman.

Symonds again was one of the first of Eng-
lish men of letters to grasp what may be called
the optimism of science. To Tennyson, Rus-
kin, Carlyle, Arnold, Clough, science ap-
peared in one way or another as an enemy, a
negative agent, a cause of melancholy, pessi-
mism, or resignation, subverting God, revela-
tion, personal immortality. To them it
brought with it an overwhelming sense of loss,
Arnold and Clough consoled themselves with
duty and work, Carlyle and Ruskin passion-
ately recalled the past, Tennyson credulously
snatched at the hope that it might after all
be theology in another form. Browning pro-
claimed a totally unreasonable optimism. The

232 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

positive aspects of science meanwhile remained
hidden, impopularized, micompromisingly
"scientific." Such an aspect as that of euge-
nics, for example, has only in the last few
years, and chiefly through Continental influ-
ences, begun to take its place in our literature.
Science, not as a destroyer, but as a builder,
Symonds divined, and his training enabled him
to hnk that modern view with the thought of
the past. He would have gladly recognized
the truth that doubt and faith are attitudes
toward life itself, not toward figments of the
brain, that states of mind like scepticism and
pessimism are to be explained rather by ex-
periments in circulation and digestion than
by abstract metaphysical questions of immor-
tality and God. And he would have recog-
nized that this, instead of debasing our view
of the human soul, glorifies our view of the
human body.

These, I say, are aspects of science that
Symonds divined, largely because the prob-
lem of his own life and consequently the na-
ture of his experience was, unlike that of his
greater contemporaries, more physical than in-

CONCLUSION 233

tellectual. There was only a defect of power
in the man to make it memorable, in the sense
in which the teachings of Carlyle, or Ruskin,
or Arnold are memorable.

A defect of power; and also a defect of
coherence. The writings of Symonds do not
stand together as do those of Arnold or Rus-
kin. There has never been a collected edition
of his works, and the idea of such a thing is
inconceivable. With aU their community of
tone and subject, their marked evolution of
style, their consistently delivered message, they
lack that highest unifying bond of personal-
ity. Some of them are isolated popular hand-
books, others are esoteric and for the few,
others again are merely mediocre and have
been forgotten. Individually they appeal to
many different types of mind. Taken to-
gether they do not supply any composite
human demand, nor are they powerful enough
to create any such demand. They are indeed
rather the product of energy than of power.

The conclusions of Symonds reduce them-
selves, upon analysis, to sanity and common-
sense: and it appears certain that nothing is

234. JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

more perilous to long life in literature than
sanity and common sense when they are not
founded upon clairvoyance. Only the su-
preme geniuses — Goethe and Tolstoy — ^have
been able to carry off the pabn with platitude.
That is because they not only see and experi-
ence the truth in platitude, but feel it, with
a dynamic and world-shaking passion. Sy-
monds, in specific traits the equal of Arnold,
or Ruskin, or Carlyle, falls short of their
finality partly at least because more than any
of them he saw life steadily and saw it whole.
He saw life neither through the spectacles of
the Zeit-geist nor of the Hero. To him Eng-
land was not accurately divided into Barbari-
ans, PhiUstines, and Populace, nor was the
world wholly a world of Plausibilities. And
he was obviously more sensible in his hard-
won faith in human evolution than that nobler
prophet who strove so tragically to restore the
Middle Ages. But common sense unhappily
is the virtue of equilibrium: and equihbrium
is a state of the mind which has no counterpart
in life or in men who, in the profound sense,
in the normal sense, grasp life — that is to say,
the prophets.