QOTD (2011-10-15)

Sometimes Symonds writes these poems that are so thick with pathos that it makes me want to say “oh, sweetie,” and give him a big hug. This is entitled “The Fall of a Soul,” and it’s from the “juvenilia” section of his Vagabunduli Libellus:

I sat unsphering Plato ere I slept:
Then through my dream the choir of gods was borne,
Swift as the wind and lustrous as the morn,
Fronting the night of stars; behind them swept
Tempestuous darkness o’er a drear descent,
Wherethrough I saw a crowd of charioteers
Urging their giddy steeds with cries and cheers
To join the choir that aye before them went:
But one there was who fell, with broken car
And horses swooning down the gulf of gloom;
Heavenward his eyes, though prescient of their doom,
Reflected glory like a falling star;
While with wild hair blown back and listless hands
Ruining he sank toward undiscovered lands.

QOTD (2011-10-10); or, Princeton Sunday

From Plato’s Phaedrus, 251-252C, translated by Harold Fowler:

But he who is newly initiated, who beheld many of those realities, when he sees a godlike face or form which is a good image of beauty, shudders at first, and something of the old awe comes over him, then, as he gazes, he reveres the beautiful one as a god, and if he did not fear to be thought stark mad, he would offer sacrifice to his beloved as to an idol or a god. And as he looks upon him, a reaction from his shuddering comes over him, with sweat and unwonted heat; for as the effluence of beauty enters him through the eyes, he is warmed; the effluence moistens the germ of the feathers, and as he grows warm, the parts from which the feathers grow, which were before hard and choked, and prevented the feathers from sprouting, become soft, and as the nourishment streams upon him, the quills of the feathers swell and begin to grow from the roots over all the form of the soul; for it was once all feathered. Now in this process the whole soul throbs and palpitates, and as in those who are cutting teeth there is an irritation and discomfort in the gums, when the teeth begin to grow, just so the soul suffers when the growth of the feathers begins; it is feverish and is uncomfortable and itches when they begin to grow. Then when it gazes upon the beauty of the boy and receives the particles which flow thence to it (for which reason they are called yearning), it is moistened and warmed, ceases from its pain and is filled with joy; but when it is alone and grows dry, the mouths of the passages in which the feathers begin to grow become dry and close up, shutting in the sprouting feathers, and the sprouts within, shut in with the yearning, throb like pulsing arteries, and each sprout pricks the passage in which it is, so that the whole soul, stung in every part, rages with pain; and then again, remembering the beautiful one, it rejoices. So, because of these two mingled sensations, it is greatly troubled by its strange condition; it is perplexed and maddened, and in its madness it cannot sleep at night or stay in any one place by day, but it is filled with longing and hastens wherever it hopes to see the beautiful one. And when it sees him and is bathed with the waters of yearning, the passages that were sealed are opened, the soul has respite from the stings and is eased of its pain, and this pleasure which it enjoys is the sweetest of pleasures at the time. Therefore the soul will not, if it can help it, be left alone by the beautiful one, but esteems him above all others, forgets for him mother and brothers and all friends, neglects property and cares not for its loss, and despising all the customs and proprieties in which it formerly took pride, it is ready to be a slave and to sleep wherever it is allowed, as near as possible to the beloved; for it not only reveres him who possesses beauty, but finds in him the only healer of its greatest woes.

I avoided the Jowett translation this time, because Jowett changes the pronouns, but when Symonds had tutorials with Jowett when he was the age that I am now, he read the Phaedrus and he underlined this passage. Today, almost exactly one hundred and fifty years later, far from the city of dreaming spires where Symonds set pencil to page, it was Sunday. It was not an Oxford Sunday, and so I did not wake up to churchbells and, because the library was shut, pace my room all day while listening to Radio 3. But I did have two meals with friends today, and I did write eight pages of my thesis about when Symonds was my age and learning how to read and how to think and how to love, and I did think deeply today about matters of love, and what it means to love one’s friends, and what it means to love one’s neighbors as oneself.

At 9pm in the Princeton chapel there is a high-church Episcopal choral eucharist, a service both familiar from the ritual from my Oxford Sundays and simultaneously very alien: American in unexpected ways, and in others much more demanding than an Oxford service is of a kind of devotion and religiosity that I am unwilling, unable, to give. But the sermons are smart, and today the sermon was, after a fashion, about loving one’s neighbor, about (as so many sermons are) really properly walking the walk of Jesus’s teachings and rejoicing in the love—the communion—between all the people who know and follow Christ.

Well, I channel this ecclesiastical language, but it’s not my own. Why, then, do I go to a service that reminds me whenever I go that it is not my religious tradition, not my spiritual community, not my place to take, eat the wafer and take, drink the wine? I go in part because I want to understand what the Eucharist means to the people who value it, and why it is so shrouded in mystery for them, which is something that seems important enough to western history to try to understand. But I also go because although the language of the Book of Common Prayer isn’t mine, it does give me some tools to access my own kind of religious tradition. Because this was a Princeton Sunday, when I walked down the chapel steps at a quarter past ten onto a silent, deserted plaza lit by a full moon, I immediately crossed the plaza and descended to a desk covered in books on the bottom floor of the library, and bent my head over a green Loeb volume that had something to say about love. Pagan love, idolatrous love, the love of ο παις καλος that a certain Anglican churchman who wrote about The Interpretation of Scripture once said was “mainly a figure of speech.” But you know what? It wasn’t until I started going to church in the old-fashioned atheist-humanist way of Oxford Sundays that I started to know what love, any love, could be: that it is a force with the power to transform souls and lives, to bring out all that is worst in people and all that is best, and that it is something that we can never fully apprehend but that inspires us to greatness all the same. Love can inspire us to worship gods, be they the Holy Trinity or beautiful boys, and to sacrifice ourselves—sometimes ill-advisedly, but sometimes wisely—to their might.

My Princeton Sunday ended at 11:45pm when, as deep as one can be in the bowels of the university library, the closing bell rang out once, twice, three times. I ascended from the land of beautiful boys out again into the night, and with a passing nod to the hulking figure of the land of Jesus Christ, its stained-glass murky in the moonlight, I trudged the all-too-familiar route back to my land, back to a room in college. I sit here now, the hour getting later, acutely aware that I have a 10am lecture I must not miss again, but wondering above all how to translate Phaedrus-love and Church-love into my love. For as often as I go to church, and as deep as I steep myself in the homoerotic literary tradition, neither faith is truly mine. Short a doctrine, the work of knowing what I live for, how I love, will take all the days of my life.

But I can’t help thinking that if Hellenism and Hebraism are in accord on this point, if John 13:34 (“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another”) rings out in harmony with Howard’s End (“Only connect”), the old-fashioned humanist might have a path through a lonesome valley to walk down. Term is marching on and the work is getting harder, but this week I am going to try loving: my work, my friends, my teachers, my students, my colleagues, my family far away—and maybe, in the very end, myself. I am going to mingle Hellenism and Hebraism, pleasure and pain, and try to wake up tomorrow morning strong in the desire to make myself and my world better.

QOTD (2011-09-24)

A new academic year brings new QsOTD. Plotinus, Ennead 1.3:

The musician we may think of as being exceedingly quick to beauty, drawn in a very rapture to it: somewhat slow to stir of his own impulse, he answers at once to the outer stimulus: as the timid are sensitive to noise so he to tones and the beauty they convey; all that offends against unison or harmony in melodies or rhythms repels him; he longs for measure and shapely pattern.

This natural tendency must be made the starting-point to such a man; he must be drawn by the tone, rhythm, and design in things of sense: he must learn to distinguish the material forms from the Authentic-Existent which is the source of al these correspondences and of the entire reasoned scheme in the work of art: he must be led to the Beauty that manifests itself through these forms; he must be shown that what ravished him was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere, not some one shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself….

The born lover, to whose degree the musician may also attain—and then either come to a stand or pass beyond—has a certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it: spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before some one embodied form; he must be led, under a system of mental discipline, to physical beauty everywhere and made to discern the One Principle underlying all, a Principle apart from the material forms, springing from another source, and elsewhere more truly present. The beauty, for example, in a noble course of life and in an admirably organized social system may be pointed out to him—a first training this in the loveliness of the immaterial—he must learn to recognize the beauty in the arts, sciences, virtues; then these severed and particular forms must be brought under the one principle by the explanation of their origin. From the virtues he is to be led to the Intellectual-Principle, to the Authentic-Existent; thence onward, he treads the upward way.

The metaphysician, equipped by that very character, winged already and not, like those others, in need of disengagement, stirring of himself towards the supernal but doubting of the way, needs only a guide. He must be shown, then, and set free, willing by his very temperament and long practised in freedom.

Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract thought and to faith in the unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led to make his virtue perfect; after the Mathematics he must be put through a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the science.

QOTD (2011-08-02)

Walt Whitman removed this verse from later editions of his “Calamus” cycle, but here it is, as it appeared in the first, 1860 edition:

Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice me—O if I could but obtain knowledge!
Then my lands engrossed me—Lands of the prairies, Ohio’s land, the southern savannas, engrossed me—For them I would live—I would be their orator;
Then I met the examples of old and new heroes—I heard of warriors, sailors, and all dauntless persons—And it seemed to me that I too had it in me to be as dauntless as any—and would be so;
And then, to enclose all, it came to me to strike up the songs of the New World—And then I believed my life must be spent in singing;
But now take notice, land of the prairies, land of the south savannas, Ohio’s land,
Take notice, you Kanuck woods—and you Lake Huron—and all that with you roll toward Niagara—and you Niagara also,
And you, Californian mountains—That you each and all find somebody else to be your singer of songs,
For I can be your singer of songs no longer—One who loves me is jealous of me, and withdraws me from all but love,
With the rest I dispense—I sever from what I thought would suffice me, for it does not—it is now empty and tasteless to me,
I heed knowledge, and the grandeur of The States, and the example of heroes, no more,
I am indifferent to my own songs—I will go with him I love,
It is to be enough for us that we are together—We never separate again.

Symonds first heard of Whitman when he went to visit FWH Myers (ODNB) in Cambridge in 1865. The two were sitting in Myers’ rooms at Trinity, and Myers read this verse aloud to Symonds. That moment changed the life of the 22-year-old budding scholar, who much later would write that, “had it not been for the contact of his fervent spirit with my own, the pyre ready to be lighted, the combustible materials of modern thought awaiting the touch of the fire- bringer, might never have leapt up into the flame of lifelong faith and consolation.”

Reading this poem again, it’s really not hard to see why.

QOTD (2011-07-22)

Found amidst the manuscript of Symonds’ Walt Whitman: A Study, in his hand:

Advice to a young man on the method of Reading. 1) A real love of knowledge, curiosity to examine thoughts and approach persons through books, is indispensable. 2) Submit to the author, get inside him by sympathy. Then return to criticize in detail. 3) Read with pencil in hand, jot down striking things and thoughts, trace argument in skeleton. 4) Write out abstracts or critiques of books read. 5) Or at least keep a list of books read. 6) Study over and over again one or two classics. 7) Exchange thoughts on what you read with persons engaged in the same pursuits, if possible of a different complexion of mind from your own.

I don’t have any context for it—I don’t even know whether it’s Symonds’ own advice or whether he copied it from somewhere else—but it’s delightful all the same.

QOTD (2011-07-15)

I like these lines that Symonds writes to Edmund Gosse in 1891, when he’s working feverishly at his biography of Michelangelo, because they kind of remind me of how I feel about working on Symonds himself:

With the man’s spirit I am intoxicated, and I have wrestled with his “psyche” so that I seem absorbed in him. But I cannot say that this close study makes me sympathetic to his artistic ideal. I think it has even dispelled some illusions I had formed.

One thing is certain, that if he had any sexual energy at all (which is doubtful) he was a U.[rning].

Tomorrow I am moving from London to Bristol: staying very near to the house where Symonds grew up, and where he lived until he moved to Switzerland; working in his archives at the university he helped to found, and which now owns said house; living in a place that was important to him becoming the person he became. My relationship with this long-dead man continues to walk a fine line between hagiographical admiration and scholarly disinterest. It is strange to think that these next three weeks will be—for the moment—my last three weeks in England, a country in which in the past several months I have come to feel very much at home. But I am excited to see what they will bring me Symonds-wise, and quite content to end this transatlantic sojourn as I began it seven months ago, when I jetlaggedly dragged three suitcases down Broad Street: feeling my way through the places that shaped the man whom I will, back in my old haunt in the basement of a university library in darkest New Jersey, spend the next year writing about.

QOTD (2011-06-15); or, Symonds and Sexual Liberation

Here’s something nice and liberationist for Pride Month: In this footnote from the first edition of Symonds’ and Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (cut from ensuing editions that revised out more obvious Symondsiana), Symonds argues for the legalization of same-sex sexual relations:

In this case the strength of sin is the law. No passion, however natural, which is scouted, despised, tabooed, banned, punished, relegated to holes and corners, execrated as abominable and unmentionable, can be expected to show its good side to the world. The sense of sin and crime and danger, the humiliation and repression and distress to which the unfortunate Pariah of abnormal sexuality are daily and hourly exposed—and nobody but such a Pariah may comprehend what these are—inevitably deterioriate the best and noblest element in their emotion. It has been, I may say, the greatest sorrow of my life to watch the gradual declining and decay of emotions which started so purely and ideally, as well as passionately, for persons of my own sex in boyhood; to watch within myself, I repeat, the slow corrosion and corruption of a sentiment which might have been raised, under happier conditions, to such spiritual heights of love and devotion as chivalry is fabled to have reached—and at the same time to have been continually tormented by desires which no efforts would annihilate, which never slumbered except through during weeks of life-threatening illness, and which, instead of improving in quality with age, have tended to become coarser and more contented with trivial satisfaction. Give abnormal love the same chance as normal love, subject it to the wholesome control of public opinion, allow it to enjoy self-respect, draw it from dark places into the light of day, strike off its chains and make it free—and I am confident that it will develop analogous virtues, to those with which we are familiar in the mutual love of male and female. The slave has of necessity a slavish soul. The only way to elevate is to emancipate him. There is nothing more degrading to humanity in sexual acts between a man and a man than in similar acts between a man and a woman. In a certain sense all sex has an element which stirs our repulsion in our finer nature….

Nor would it be easy to maintain that the English curate begetting his fourteenth baby on the body of a worn-out wife is a more elevating object of mental contemplation than Harmodius in the embraces of his friend Aristogeiton—that a young man sleeping with a prostitute picked up in the Haymarket is cleaner than his brother sleeping with a soldier picked up in the Park.

Obviously, this was a radical and dangerous sentiment to express in 1897, when English scholars of sexuality (and homosexuals themselves) were still shaken from the Wilde trials. It’s no wonder that Ellis, Horatio Brown, and Catherine Symonds all wanted to see sentiments like this erased from subsequent editions of Sexual Inversion.

QOTD (2011-06-06)

My sister reminded me that the Wilde tragedy narrative may be, to a certain extent, contrived; but it is also beautiful. Here is A.E. Housman, “Oh who is that young sinner”:

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

‘Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;
Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair
For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.

Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare,
And they’re hauling him to justice for the colour of his hair.

Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet
And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he had to spare
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.

I don’t think we can underestimate the extent to which the Wilde trials brought a love that was only just becoming able to speak its name crashing into the public eye. This poem unsurprisingly and obviously wasn’t published during Housman’s lifetime, but it’s striking that after the trials he could write this poem, with its elegant nudging metaphor and its (as I read it) barely-suppressed rage. You wouldn’t call Housman a figure of liberation, at all—and yet here you have him articulating a change in the emotional tenor of homosexual identity politics—a change to anger and to outrage.

Happy Birthday, Walt!

I’m a day late, I’m afraid, but I do want to make sure to wish Walt Whitman a very happy belated 192nd birthday. I think the only other person whom I have ever wished a happy birthday on this blog is Pete Seeger, and the comparison is apt. Seeger and Whitman are/were both artists who tell the American story, who through love of country but simultaneous unstinting criticism do not hesitate to illustrate the points at which America has failed to live up to the ideals it promises; and yet who never waver in their conviction that their country can, by dint of purpose, better itself and do better by all who are born on its soil and all who wash up on its shores.

Though J.A. Symonds’ different cultural background led him to misread the erotic valance of Whitman’s hope for Union, it is clear that what attracted the Victorian gentleman-historian to the working-class New Yorker was his promise of utopic possibility. I’ll let Symonds take it away, from the very end of his Walt Whitman: A Study:

As I have elsewhere said in print, he taught me to comprehend the harmony between the democratic spirit, science, and that larger religion to which the modern world is being led by the conception of human brotherhood, and by the spirituality inherent in any really scientific view of the universe. He gave body, concrete vitality, to the religious creed which I had been already forming for myself upon the study of Goethe, Greek and Roman Stoics, Giordano Bruno, and the founders of the evolutionary doctrine. He inspired me with faith, and made me feel that optimism was not unreasonable. This gave me great cheer in those evil years of enforced idleness and intellectual torpor which my health imposed upon me. Moreover, he helped to free me from many conceits and pettinesses to which academical culture is liable. He opened my eyes to the beauty, goodness and greatness which may be found in all worthy human beings, the humblest and the highest. He made me respect personality more than attainments or position in the world. Through him, I stripped my soul of social prejudices. Through him, I have been able to fraternise in comradeship with men of all classes and several races, irrespective of their caste, creed, occupation, and special training. To him I owe some of the best friends I now can claim—sons of the soil, hard-workers, “natural and nonchalant,” “powerful uneducated” persons.

Only those who have been condemned by imperfect health to take a back-seat in life so far as physical enjoyments are concerned, and who have also chosen the career of literary study, can understand what is meant by the deliverance from foibles besetting invalids and pedants for which I have to thank Walt Whitman.

What he has done for me, I feel he will do for others—for each and all of those who take counsel with him, and seek from him a solution of difficulties differing in kind according to the temper of the individual—if only they approach him in the right spirit of confidence and open-mindedness.

And for edificatory purposes, here’s a fantastic reading of an excerpt of “Song of Myself” from a PBS documentary on Whitman’s life (h/t MP):

QOTD (2011-05-19); or, In Which Symonds Does a MySpace Survey

If you were born sometime around 1990, give or take a few years, you probably remember back when everyone was on MySpace and filled in those endless stupid surveys that asked you your favorite everything and the last time you did various things and whether you had ever kissed in the rain. Courtesy of Phyllis Grosskurth and the Symonds papers at Bristol, this was the Victorian equivalent, as Symonds completed it. He was 27:

Your favourite virtue
Loyalty
Your favourite qualities in a man
Strength & Tenderness
Your favourite qualities in a woman
Tenderness & strength
Your favourite occupation
Writing
Your chief characteristic
Doublemindedness
Your idea of misery
Waking in the morning after some sorrow
Your favourite colour & flower
Green[,] Brown[,] Gentian
If not yourself, who would you be?
Nobody
Where would you like to live?
At home
Your favourite prose authors
Balzac[,] Fielding
Your favourite poets
Dante[,] Goethe
Your favourite painters and composers
Michael Angelo[,] Beethoven
Your favourite heroes in real life
Pericles[,] Spinoza
Your favourite heroines in real life
My baby
Your favourite heroes in fiction
Hamlet[,] Oedipus
Your favourite heroines in fiction
Antigone[,] Cordelia
Your favourite food and drink
Cream
Your favourite names
N or M [Grosskurth: “The ‘N or M’ of the catechism provided him with a sombre jest for these were Norman Moor’s initials as well…” Norman Moor was the young man with whom Symonds was in love at the time.]
Your pet aversion
Ennui
What characters in history do you most dislike?
Caligula
What is your present state of mind?
Thinking of my own mind
For what fault have you most toleration?
Moral weakness
Your favourite motto
In mundo immundo sim mundus [In an impure world may I be pure]

I assume this was before Symonds famously adopted as his motto the line from Goethe, “Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen/Resolut zu leben.”