After doing one last read-aloud to check for infelicitous phrasing, I just declared my junior paper (or, to translate that into non-Princeton terms, a partial first draft of my thesis that’s evaluated as part of my degree), which has assumed the title “J.A. Symonds and the Making of Male Homosexual Identity,” finished. Here is what it treats on:
And now it’s time to get to work on the thesis in earnest!
I think I remain faithful to Symonds because of how wonderfully comforting he can be when I am in the grasp of a crisis of existential loneliness. This is from his Memoirs:
So then, having rejected dogmatic Christinaity in all its forms, Broad Church Anglicanism, the gospel of Comte, Hegel’s superb identification of human thought with essential Being, and many minor nostrums offered in our time to sickening faith… I came to fraternize with Goethe, Cleanthes, Whitman, Bruno, Darwin, finding that in their society I could spin my own cocoon with more of congruence to my particular temperament than I discerned in other believers, misbelievers, non-believers, passionate believers, of the ancient and the modern schools. This is the way with all of us who, like the caddis worm, build houses around them. Men of a different stamp follow the ways of the hermit crab, and creep into solid shells which shelter them against the sea and assaults of neighbours. It comes to the same thing in the end; only the caddis worm is the pupa of that winged ephemeron the Mayfly, born to be eaten up by trout; while the shell into which the hermit crab has crept may last long after its tenant’s lonely death, until at last it perishes beneath the stress of elemental forces, pounding waves and churning sands.
But these things are metaphors; and there is a want of taste and sense in straining metaphors too far. Speaking simply I chose for my motto ‘to live resolvedly in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful’. I sought out friends from divers centuries—Marcus Aurelius, Cleanthes, Bruno, Goethe, Whitman, Darwin—who seemed to have arrived, through their life throes and ardent speculations, at something like the same intuition into the sempiternally inscrutable as I had. They helped me by their richer or riper experience, by flights beyond my reach, by knowledge denied to my poor studies, by audacities which thrilled the man in me….
Because these men were so, I elected them as the friends with whom my spirit chose to fraternize. From being in their company I derived solace, and their wisdom, like in kind, was larger than my own. It is good for the soul to dwell with such superiors; just as it is also good, in daily life, to live with so-called inferiors, to learn from them and love them.
I do not seek to preach this faith which animates me…. Certainly no one but myself knows how tentative and far from stable it is, how like a gaseous fluid, in the mind of him that lives by it. After admitting so much, I may anticipate ridicule by comparing my faith to something which lifts a balloon in air, to the fermentation of a fungus, to the sulphuretted hydrogen in a rotten egg. Still, being what it is, this faith has enabled me to do my duty in so far as I have done it by my family and friends; it has brought forth my literary work, and has sustained me active under the pressure of many grievous and depressing maladies…. The perorations of all that I have written are inspired by this faith, as the substance of my labour was for me made vital by it.
I have written here before that my mind has not developed into young adulthood with the synapses that program “faith” intact. But when I am sitting here in my room on Broad Street and I can hear the college clock strike midnight, and then one, and I am cripplingly alone, I can pull Symonds’ Memoirs off the bookshelf. I am sure he would never have countenanced that he could be a “friend from divers centuries” too. He is not my God, Symonds. He is not my lover. I have held his letters and notebooks in my hands; I do not need faith to believe in his existence. But when I do believe in him, I believe in myself. And I get out of bed in the morning, and I go to the library, and I come home in the evening, and on a good day maybe I’ll have taught someone something, however small.
We all make our own ways of getting through the world. Cultural narratives notwithstanding, we all make our own betters and betterings. If we have done our duties, we will have discovered mechanisms not only of coping, but also of human flourishing; we will have divined how we may purpose an ideal of Virtue and of Good to the work that we do and the ways we help others.
It is sometimes nigh-impossible to keep doing this, and to see why we must. If we did not reach adulthood with faith synapses, we may wonder on what grounds the need to become better rests. The best answer I can give, when even my non-faith synapses are much-frayed on this not-untroubled night, is that although there is no afterlife, there is a longer durée of human flourishing than we with our short lives may always recognize. You never know when, some generations hence, a young historian will discover not only her craft, but also her moral purpose, in your life. If this should happen in the case of the legacy you leave, neither her faith nor yours will have proven anything better, but you will have taught her how to better herself. And surely that is worth as much as any eternity.
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.”
Because Symonds is just that good. Here are some passages from his essay “Culture: Its Meaning and Its Uses,” which appears in In the Key of Blue and Other Essays (1893) and is one of my favorite things in the Symonds corpus.
I have no wish to enter here into the controversy which has been carried on between scientific men and humanists as to the relative educational value of their methods. Nor do I want to touch upon the burning question as to whether the classics will have to be abandoned in our schools…. Ideal culture involves both factors; and this ideal was to some extent realised in Goethe. Few men—none, indeed—can hope now to exercise themselves completely in both branches. We have to choose between the alternatives of a literary or a scientific training. Still, the points of contact between humanism and science are so numerous that thorough study compels us to approach literature scientifically and also to pursue science in a humane spirit. The humanist remembers that his department is capable of being treated with something like the exactitude which physical research demands. The man of science bears in mind that he cannot afford to despise imagination and philosophy. Both poetry and metaphysic, upon the one hand, contributed to the formation of the evolutionary hypothesis. Without habits of strict investigation, on the other hand, we should not possess the great historical works of the nineteenth century, its discoveries in comparative philology, its ethnological theories and inquiries into primitive conditions of society.
I must repeat that culture is not an end in itself. It prepares a man for life, for work, for action, for the reception and emission of ideas. Life itself is larger than literature, than art, than science. Life does not exist for them, but they for life.
True culture is never in a condescending attitude. It knows that no kind of work, however trivial, ought to be regarded with contempt. People who carve cherry-stones, dance ballets, turn rondeaux, are as much needed as those who till the soil, construct Cabinets, or fabricate new theories of the universe. True culture respects hand-labour upon equal terms with brain-labour, the mechanic with the inventor of machinery, the critic of poetry with the singer of poems, the actor with the playwright. The world wants all sorts, and wants each sort to be of the best quality.
This letter, which Symonds wrote to his sister on New Year’s Eve, 1882, is worth quoting in full. Charlotte Symonds was far more religious than her brother, and his letters to her often make use of a religious language that he doesn’t use with any of his other correspondents. I like that he takes this language—which he is certainly using not for himself, but to try to help out a sister mourning the recent death of her husband—and does something beautiful with it all the same:
Am Hof Davos Platz Dec. 31 1882
My dearest Charlotte
On this last day of the year, which has been so bitterly full of sorrow to you, and to myself has brought many sad things, I write to wish you the greater happiness which will assuredly come with time. I am not an orthodox Christian, as the word is understood. That is, I cannot cling to the historical interpretation of the Christian dogmas. But I try to cling to their spirit. And when St. Paul says that our life must be built upon faith hope & love, I cordially accept that definition. We must have faith that the world is ordered by a beneficent intelligence, a Father. We must have hope that we shall comprehend its scheme & our own trials better. We must have love for all that is so beautiful & vigorous in the world without & the human lives around us.
This creed appears to me the creed on which the earlier Church based its regeneration of society. A passionate belief in Christ was the coping-stone of their endeavour. We have lost something, possibly, of that passion. But we have lost nothing of the truth wh it contained & consecrated. The conditions of our existence are less dreadful. There is no tyrannous Roman Empire, no universal penetrating corruption of society. We understand the physical world better, & read the history of man upon this planet more precisely. And yet abide these three; by which yet let us live; & hoping believing loving wait the revelation of God’s greatness.
I am not sure; but I rather think that what I have here sketched would be in accord with what Tom [her late husband, TH Green] much more deeply felt & thought.
It has come to me from life. It came to him from life & from reflection upon life & from a far nobler experience of life than mine—less mixed with sordid passions.
But let us all arrive at it upon the paths appointed for us severally.
The end of the doctrine, the practical application of the creed, is that we should live triumphantly in faith, hope, love.
What remains of years to us upon this earth is numbered and is short. What awaits us beyond is unknown, unguessed; possibly, nay probably, stupendous. Let us in the intermediate space of time do our duty, and resign ourselves, in no sour spirit of dejection, but in joyful, God-embracing spirit of expectancy, to what the coming days shall bring us.
You say the prosperous people are rather trying. I think they are. I am not prosperous. I feel what you feel; but I try to bless God for their prosperity. It is part of the beauty of the world. We may stand aside and rejoice with them in their happiness. If they ever need our consolation, we can give it.
The great thing for us is to remember that the human soul contains God on this planet. It becomes a duty for us to preserve the soul, which is God’s temple and God’s revelation to the world, inviolate. Later or sooner, all of us shall surely meet in God. Of this I am persuaded. This faith gives me hope for myself and love for the most prosperous, the most abject and abandoned of my fellow-men.
If you ever want a change, a rest, come to us. I see that you have been half moved to come. I am not sure that you would find a bed of roses here. There are many thorns in our lot; not the least those thorns which our own indomitable passions thrust forth. I am irritable from ill-health and constant aspiration—kicking against the pricks of physical debility. You would find here no stagnant calm, rather the surf and surge of life in its intensity of suffering and action. I have ever doubted whether our home, with its dramatic vitality, isolated, uncircumscribed by rules and precedents, would not be more painful than restful to you. And yet I think it might be good. I think you might do good here.
God bless you. God grant us all, not peace, but activity in fuller certitude of His presence.
And as for me, my task is twofold. I must first live in hope and charity/love and faith-in-humanity with no such certainty, with no such belief in an afterlife or an eternal reward. And I must then understand another time, another way of thinking, when men like Symonds or Green looked out the window of the Upper Reading Room at the Radcliffe Camera, as I do now, and professed a faith in God that was inviolable.
Was there a boy (chances are it was a boy) who lived in this room decades ago before me, and sat like me at this desk (or one like it) in the heat and sunshine and the springtime sounds of Broad Street, with half a cup full of tea gone cold and Bach crackling on the radio, and pored over the pages of Calamus, seeking in himself the words to do justice to “the tender love of comrades”?
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there were an anonymous boy whom history has forgotten, whose name was not Symonds or Pater or Wilde, who was a member of this college which has not lent its name to anything particular in the history of homoerotic Oxford, but who thought all the same about who he was and what he was reading.
I wonder what he’d think if he could imagine 2011. I wonder what he’d think if he knew there was a girl now sitting at his desk.
The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular, to you; and here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met—maybe even someone long-dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
Symonds, “The Genius of Greek Art” in Studies of the Greek Poets:
Guided by no supernatural revelation, with no Mosaic law for conduct, they trusted their αἴσθησις (percipient reason), delicately trained and preserved in a condition of the utmost purity. This tact is the ultimate criterion in all matters of art—a truth which we recognize in our use of the word aesthetic, though we too often attempt to impart the alien elements of metaphysical dogmatism and moral prejudice into the sphere of beauty. This tact was also for the Greeks the ultimate criterion of ethics…. [W]e ought still to emulate their spirit by cheerfully accepting the world as we find it, acknowledging the value of each human impulse, and aiming after virtues that depend on self-regulation rather than on total abstinence and mortification.
He was no aesthete, that man—problems in Greek ethics, indeed.
Twenty years before Freud published his famous analysis of the Schreber case, arguing that Schreber’s extraordinary fantasies were a result of paranoia stemming from repressed homosexuality, John Addington Symonds published his A Problem in Modern Ethics. Therein, he highlights these lines from a case study of an anonymous “Urning” in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis:
… when he first becomes aware of the sexual stirrings in his nature, and innocently speaks about them to his comrades, soon finds that he is unintelligible. So he wraps himself within his own thoughts…. He imagines that he alone of all the people in the world is the subject of emotions so eccentric…. How many unexplained cases of suicide in young men ought to be ascribed to this cause!
Those who have studied Freud in his historical context will be aware that, although his role in the formation of modern psychoanalysis was pivotal, he wasn’t the only person at the turn of the twentieth century thinking about the mind and mental health in relation to desire. Scientists like Krafft-Ebing who collected and edited personal narratives about individuals’ sexual histories (something which Symonds was himself very actively involved in in later life, though thanks to Edmund Gosse none of his research has survived) no doubt had specific pathological narratives in mind which they sought to highlight through their selection and organization of the case studies. The case study Symonds presents us with in Modern Ethics is no exception, but what’s striking is how this narrative maps onto the model of homosexual desire that Freud (in)famously gives us in Schreber. In the Krafft-Ebing case study, a severe mental-health risk (suicide) is instigated by the idea that someone would “wrap himself within his own thoughts”—in modern psychoanalytic terms, repress his sexual identification, covering it over with conscious thoughts—and that this coping mechanism would cause him to believe—as the paranoiac does—that he is the only person who feels as he does, and that therefore he is at risk of persecution from everyone. It’s the link between repression and paranoia that emerges in the Krafft-Ebing case study (and, in particular, in the bits Symonds highlights from it, performing his own editorial work!) that seems so strikingly to prefigure Freud. For we historians, this is an interesting muddling of the timeline: we whose scholarly duty seems to be to warn other critics against applying critical frameworks to historical moments prior to their invention need to keep in mind that critical frameworks do not suddenly come into being with the jolt of electric current that accompanies the flipping of an “on/off” switch. Rather, they develop—as all ideas and paradigms do—gradually over time, thanks to the contributions of many individuals. Freud may loom large in the history of psychoanalysis and indeed of sexology, but to a certain extent he is also affected by the way that people think and express their thoughts in the period at which he starts to think and write about the mechanisms of sexual desire. I haven’t done the reading to be able to do more than speculate, but I wonder in what ways Freud’s immersion in the genre of the case study, which has its narrative conventions just like any other genre, affected the nature of the frameworks he extrapolated from his own case studies!
These all may seem like very elementary points to be making, and I don’t need to do the JSTOR search to make an educated guess that they’ve been made before by readers of Freud more sophisticated than I. But the bottom line that any given intellectual figure is both shaped by his or her historical context and yet exists as an individual apart from it seems too often forgotten by scholars of all stripes. Every day I read secondary literature about Symonds and his circle which believes it appropriate to refer to Symonds as a gay liberationist (in the framing of one ’90s queer theorist I was reading yesterday, a sort of Foucault avant-la-personne) or for that matter to dismiss him as a “minor man of letters” whose form somehow camouflages into the prized Morris wallpaper of his drawing-room. For scholars whose discipline is all about questioning categories, I find that queer theorists aren’t always as perfect as they might be at distancing themselves for the categories they in turn have created, and the world-historical figures—the Freuds and the Foucaults—they have elevated. Of course, no one is perfect, nor should they be. It is rather the lack of interest in trying to see the world from their subjects’ point of view that irritates me.
But then, I suppose, that’s why I’m a historian, not a queer theorist. From each according to her abilities, to each according to her needs.
Sometime in the fall at Princeton, while conversationally performing in front of a dining-hall audience, I found myself solemnly intoning the injunction, “Remember to always be suspicious of binaries.” The gravity and earnestness with which I’d made that remark turned it into a catchphrase, a fact which I capitalized on as I continued to use it to undergird anything I had to say about queer theory and/or the history of sexuality for the rest of the semester. I also played a game last term of trying to see how often I could work the phrase, or variations on it, into my tutorial essays. I’m proud to say I was largely successful.
And so, after all that, it is rather perturbing that binaries seem to be undergirding a lot of the ideas central to Emily “Suspicious of Binaries” Rutherford’s JP. So much about the development of male homosexuality in Victorian context seems to be best expressed as dualities: there are the “Two Loves” of Wilde trials fame, the double lives led by men who acted clandestinely on their desire for other men, and the concept of “double-mindedness” which was popular in pre-Freudian psychological conceptions of homosexuality, and is discussed a lot by Symonds in his Memoirs. (The psychoanalytic binary is one that you can deconstruct, as Whitney Davis does in a cool book called Queer Beauty that I read yesterday: people like Symonds seem at the same time to have conceived of their sexual desires as regressive in the Freudian sense but also progressive, on whose basis it was possible to found a freer, more democratic society. Symonds didn’t express it that way, though, so the binary still holds.) In the wider culture, and in cultural criticism as the Victorians practiced it, there is the wildly popular Arnoldian dialectic of Hellenism and Hebraism; and there are also two competing notions of what “Hellenism” means to Victorian culture, as Linda Dowling discusses in Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford: the martial, imperial, virtuous, Republic sense, the Arnold-and-Jowett sense; or the sensuous, boy-loving, Phaedrus sense used as a basis on which to argue for the ethical goodness of same-sex love in the 19th century. This last binary lends itself particularly to suspicion: the myth of Achilles and Patroclus bridges the two Hellenisms, for instance; furthermore, there is a strong argument to be made that there are at least three Hellenisms, if not more, as the Hellenism in which Symonds finds space to justify homoerotic desire has a lot more in common with Arnold’s and Jowett’s rather prescriptive understandings of culture and ethics and what the Greeks had to do with them than it does with the consciously sexualized Winckelmannian tradition that seems to attract Pater and to a certain extent Wilde.
It is in being suspicious of this last binary in particular that I, too, find myself of two minds: re-reading Dowling yesterday for the first time since the very beginning of this project, before I knew half of what I know now about Victorian intellectual culture and sexuality’s place within it, I found myself wondering about the political implications of placing Symonds so polemically in the Arnold/Jowett camp. Writing in 1994, Dowling understandably goes the other way—tying Symonds together with Pater as Wilde’s two key influences (which, to be fair, they probably were, but in a more dialectical way than Dowling’s equation suggests), and slotting all three writers into a teleological, liberationist story of the development of homosexuality. When I first happened upon Symonds, almost two years ago now, I wholeheartedly believed this teleology, and in fact it’s what drew me to Symonds. I loved the idea of someone creating the language of homosexuality, of practically bringing it out of the closet, and like Dowling could see a lot of parallels between the culture Symonds creates seemingly out of whole cloth and the matrix of today’s gay male culture.
But now, I think, I’ve come to be as suspicious of teleologies as I am of binaries—and just as I’ve gone off pouring my energy into state-by-state same-sex-marriage politics, I’ve gone off thinking that Symonds is some kind of Victorian Harvey Milk, or even some kind of equally-easily-canonized Wildean martyr à la Ellmann’s biography. Instead, I find myself believing that writing the kind of history I want to write involves understanding what it meant to be like a Victorian and to think like a Victorian, and therefore doing that kind of thinking myself. I no longer know, then, whether the work Symonds did to create a new discourse of homosexuality, and to live within it himself, counts as the Victorian version of gay liberation. I no longer know whether the pathos-ridden desperate seeking that pervades his correspondence with Whitman is about a sort of proto-closet. It might be, or it might not. It’s a bit of a Schroedinger’s Cat syndrome—and if anything is a metaphor for the problems of binaries, surely it is Schroedinger’s poor bedraggled Cat.
Round about the time that I thought it was funny to go round Princeton telling everyone to be suspicious of binaries, I found myself sitting with a friend in the Rocky dining hall late one night, having a minor freakout because I’d been assigned for class to read an essay by Eve Sedgwick that I didn’t understand. That night, what Sedgwick had to say about what she calls “reparative reading” went way over my head, and I cried to my friend about how, after all these years, I still don’t “get” literary theory; the next day in class, I stayed, unusually, mostly silent for a class discussion I felt as if I couldn’t follow. The last day of class, when we were recapping and making connections between all the material we’d covered that semester, I prefaced a comment I made about Sedgwick’s theory of reparative reading with “I still don’t know if I understand what ‘reparative reading’ means, but…” And I felt well and truly at sea.
But. But I had to go to Oxford to learn that being suspicious of binaries isn’t always the most useful permanent state of mind. Sure, it’s nice when you want to make puns by sticking deconstructive slashes into the middle of compound words, and is really quite useful to keep in the back of your mind whenever you find yourself spurred to generalize or be presentist about big categories like women or non-white people or working-class people or, for that matter, homosexual men. But thinking like a Victorian to understand how Victorians thought sometimes means accepting having two loves, being of two minds, organizing ideas according to discrete taxonomies or dialectics. It means knowing that people have embraced Pausanias’s binary of the base and the heavenly loves, or Aristophanes’ story of how we got two sexes, or even Adam and Eve or Darwinian separate spheres. It means reading The Nature of Gothic and Unto This Last even though Ruskin wasn’t too nice to women in Sesame and Lilies. It means (in a metaphor I came up with the other day that I’m rather taken with) standing in the middle of Parks Road with Keble College Chapel on your left and the University Museum of Natural History on your right, knowing that the Victorian Gothic can stand for High-Church reactionary conservatism and the march of scientific progress alike. It means Symonds and Wilde both loved their wives and children, of a fashion, even as they had appallingly little consciousness of what their own quests for self-definition put their families through. It does, to be sure, mean being able to know when a binary is Victorian and when it’s modern, and how to disavow teleologies like Dowling’s that seem largely to be retrospectively and too-neatly constructed.
I still can’t claim to understand Sedgwick. But to me reading non-paranoiacally, reading reparatively, means reading ethically, giving your sources the benefit of the doubt, forgiving them their trespasses, giving them the chance to tell you what they meant. It means knowing that being a late-Victorian critic entails very different thought processes and very different ethical prescriptions to being a critic in the post-poststructuralist age. It means worrying that being suspicious of suspicion just digs you deeper into the critical-theory hole. It means believing that caring for and inhabiting your sources can make you as good a historian as knowing what to say in response when theorists talk. And it means, in addition to being of two minds, that one must be of two times as well: to carry out this project, I must be able to move seamlessly between a Victorian mindset and a 21st-century mindset—to have it both ways, and perhaps to be more credulous than suspicious of both.
In his Walt Whitman: A Study, Symonds blockquotes, but doesn’t really discuss, this passage from Whitman’s preface to the 1880 edition of Leaves of Grass:
To this terrible, irrepressible yearning (surely more or less down underneath in most human souls), this never-satisfied appetite for sympathy and this boundless offering of sympathy, this universal democratic comradeship, this old, eternal, yet ever-new interchange of adhesiveness, so fitly emblematic of America, I have given in that book [Leaves of Grass], undisguisedly, declaredly, the openest expression. Besides, important as they are to my purpose as emotional expressions for humanity, the special meaning of the “Calamus,” cluster of “Leaves of Grass”… mainly resides in its political significance. In my opinion, it is by a fervent accepted development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west—it is by this, I say, and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it, that the United States of the future (I cannot too often repeat) are to be the most effectually welded together, intercalated, annealed into a living union.
Symonds goes off on a tangent about the Phaedrus in response to this, and of course it isn’t totally ridiculous to compare Whitman’s vision of democracy to ancient Athens’. But I have been thinking a lot about mentalités in the past few days, and about clashes of cultural context. Just as we in the 21st century seem to have an awfully hard time “getting” what it was like to think like a Victorian, haphazardly imposing our understandings of sexual identity and morality on the Victorians’, I wonder if it is impossible, or at least really quite awfully difficult, for Symonds to ever get to grips with what democracy and politics and These States mean to a man who knows that adhesiveness and the love of comrades have a political significance, but who is not a classical scholar. Of course the parallels to Hellenism would seem obvious to Symonds, but I can’t help that think that he’s letting his sentiment get away from his discipline as a cultural historian when he assumes that Whitman, who was not nearly so well-versed in Plato, would have agreed.
Samuel Rutherford 
You must be logged in to post a comment.