316
G. S. ROUSSEAU
TO A GRECIAN URN
THE LEITERS OF JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS: VOL. I. Ed. Herbert
M. Schueller. Wayne State University Press. $17.50. VOL. II. Ed. Rob.rt
L.
Peters. Wayne State University Press. $17.50.
John Addington Symonds did not like the word homosexual.
He preferred Carl Heinrich Ulrich's (a German legal official) coinage,
"Urning." The word derives from Plato's Uranos in the
Symposium
and Symonds delighted in its poetic associations: it was not acid and
severe but sweet and magical. It suggested enchanted groves. Tolkienian
wonderlands. While composing his life of Michelangelo, Symonds wrote
to Edmund Gosse, "if he had any sexual energy at all he was a Urning."
This fetish characterizes the whole man and his style. Symonds'
self-deception - his intense yearning to lose himself in myriads of
words - is in fact the marvelous thing about his letters, which have
just been superbly edited by Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters
for the Wayne State University Press. Several aspects of his life have
been clarified previously by his biographers: his erotic infatuations in
the name of Platonic
amor;
his peregrinations from Harrow and Ox–
ford to Davos and Venice in search of health as well as in pursuit
of Swiss peasants and Venetian gondoliers; his connections with lit–
erary lights of the age: Gosse, Jowett, Dakyns and the Cloughs; Swin–
burne, Pater, Sidgwick; Horatio Brown, T. H. Green, Havelock Ellis
and R. L. Stevenson. But the quality and variety of his Leopardian
poses, his filtrations with deception, have remained as muddled as
was the man.
He was, of course, tragic from the start. Sickly in body and mind;
the victim of unending breakdowns; perpetually persuaded that there
was a more colossal demon in himself than there actually was. "I am
not what I look, tear off the clothes and flesh and find the death and
hell inside." He sensed that his poetry was execrable, his prose fustian
("Word-painting" was his term), and his history constructed upon a
shaky edifice.
Still he persisted in the vain belief, almost a myth, that rampant
scribosis could somehow distract him from
l'amour de l'impossible.
