THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE

 
 
 ^ef 
 
 ■^€Jv- /^/D. 
 
 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
 
 BY THE LATE 
 
 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. New and Cheaper 
 Edition. In 7 vols. Large crown 8vo. 
 
 THE AGE OF THE DESrOTS. With a Portrait. 7.«. C,/. 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 7s. ed. 
 
 THE PINE ARTS. 7s. dd. 
 
 ITALIAN LITERATURE. 2 vols. 15s. 
 
 THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 2 vols. With a Portrait and Index 
 to the 7 volumes. I5s. 
 
 SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE. 
 
 3 vols. Large crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. each. 
 
 *** III preparing this New Edition of the late Mr. J. A. Symonds' three 
 volumes of Travel, ^Sketches in Italy and Greece,' ' Sketches and 
 Studies in Italy,' and ' Italian Uy-ways,' nothing has been changed 
 excejit the order of the Essays. For the convenience of travellers a 
 topographical arrangemetu has been adopted. 
 
 SHAKSPEKE'S PREDECESSORS IN THE ENGLISH 
 
 DRAMA. New and Cheaper Edition. Large crown 8vo. 7s. M. 
 
 «ji,* TTiis volume is uniform with the New Edition of Mr. Symonds' 
 ' Travel Sketches ' and ' The Renaissance in Italy.' 
 
 Loudon : SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place, S.W.
 
 J.SYMONDS AND HIS DAUCHTE:r-I89I
 
 JOHN ALDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 A BIOGBAPHY 
 
 COMPILED FROM HIS PAPERS AND CORRESPONDENCE 
 
 BY 
 
 HOEATIO F. BKOWN 
 
 WITH A FRONTISPIECE 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE, S.W. 
 
 1903 
 
 [All rigUtB rcservptl]
 
 c 
 
 -) i^
 
 PEBFACB 
 
 BY MRS. SYMONDS 
 
 Mr. Horatio F. Brown was, by my husband's will, 
 left his literary executor, and in a few pathetic last 
 words to me, written in a trembling hand on the last 
 day of his short illness at Rome, when I, unhappily, was 
 not by his side, he reminded me of this : 
 
 'Rome, April 18, 1893. 
 
 * There is something I ought to tell you, and being ill 
 at Eome, I take this occasion. If I do not see you again 
 in this life, you remember that 1 made H. F. Brown 
 the depositary of my published books. I wish that 
 legacy to cover all MSS., diaries, letters, and other 
 matters found in my books, and cupboard, with the 
 exception of business papers. . . . Brown will consult 
 and publish nothing without your consent. — Ever yours, 
 
 ' .T, A. Symonds. 
 
 ' You are ill at Venice, and I have fallen here.'
 
 vi JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 To make a selection among this mass of written 
 matter of all sorts has been a difficult task. No one 
 could have brought to it more perfect knowledge, deli- 
 cacy, and sympathy than the friend of twenty years, 
 to whom my husband had written, in almost daily letters, 
 all the various interests and problems with which his 
 active brain was filled, and I am well satisfied that the 
 portrait of him which the world will read should have 
 been drawn by that faithful hand. 
 
 J. \j. D,
 
 PEEFAOE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE SECOND EDITION 
 
 Messes. Smith, Eldek, & Co. having undertaken to 
 publish a second edition of ' John Addington Symonds ; 
 a Biography,' in the same form as the other works of 
 Symonds issued by that firm, it became my duty to 
 revise the first edition in the light of the criticism it 
 had received. 
 
 The chief objection taken by those who had met 
 Symonds was that the portrait was too uniformly 
 gloomy ; that the brightness, the sparkle, the play of 
 fancy, so characteristic of Symonds's conversation in 
 genial company, found no place in this record of himself 
 drawn from his autobiography, his diaries and his 
 letters ; that his power of feeding, stimulating, in- 
 vigorating his hearers, his sympathetic abandon is 
 missed. The most intimate friend of his school-days, 
 the Kev. Gustavus Bosanquet, declares that Symonds, 
 in his autobiography, ' gives an entirely wrong account 
 of himself, describing himself as an unlovable, un- 
 clubable boy ; he was anything but this. Gentle, bright, 
 attractive, intelligent, he could not fail to be loved and 
 admired by anyone who really knew him. But he was
 
 Vlll JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 not known.' The same criticism is applied to the 
 portraiture of Symonds in his later years. 
 
 The charge has some justification, for undoubtedly 
 Symonds was to those who knew him ' youthfully 
 enthusiastic, enthusiastically youthful ; generous, a 
 nature of sweet human sunshine,' and imparted the 
 gusto of life to all his conversation. But these conver- 
 sations were never recorded, either by himself or by 
 his friends, and even if they had been, it is to be feared 
 that the atmosphere of their setting, and the personality 
 of the speaker would have been wanting. Moreover, it 
 was true that, as Stevenson notes in his ' Talk and 
 Talkers,' in ' Opalstein's ' conversation one always 
 heard ' the barking of the Sphinx ' ; and Symonds 
 himself, setting out, as he says, ' to be as truthful as 
 mortal man may,' and ' aware that he alone possessed 
 sources of information as to his own nature,' rendered 
 this account of himself. 
 
 After going carefully through the material at my 
 disposal I came to the conclusion that I at least could 
 present no other portrait ; and so this second edition 
 differs in no essential outlines from the first. 
 
 H. F. B. 
 
 Venice : October 5, 1903.
 
 PEE FACE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE FIRST EDITION 
 
 The object which I proposed to myself in compiling 
 this book was twofold. I desired, if possible, to present 
 a portrait of a singular personality, and I hoped to be 
 able to achieve this object mainly by allowing Symonds 
 to speak for himself — to tell his own story. The book, 
 in short, was to be as closely autobiographical as I could 
 make it. 
 
 The material at my disposal was unusually abundant. 
 I imagine that few men of letters have left behind them, 
 in addition to some thirty published volumes, such a 
 mass of letters, diaries, note-books, and memoranda as 
 that which has passed through my hands. 
 
 This material is of two kinds — that which came into 
 my possession under Symonds"s will, and that which has 
 been supplied to me by relations and friends. My own 
 material consists of (1) diaries, introspective and emo- 
 tional ; (2) a series of note-books lal)elled spya Kal 
 r)fj,epai, in which he recorded day by day such external 
 facts as the books he read, the essays he wrote, the 
 dinner parties wliicli lie gave or attended, the bare out- 
 lines of journeys which he took ; (3) an autobiography ;
 
 X JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 (4) a miscellaneous collection of papers, including copies 
 of many of his letters which Symonds himself reckoned 
 important ; and (5) the whole of his correspondence 
 with me, which began in 1872, and was carried on most 
 copiously and regularly down to the very last. 
 
 The material supplied to me by relations and friends 
 consists of Symonds's voluminous correspondence with 
 his sister Charlotte, Mrs. Green, with Mr. W. R. W. 
 Stephens, with Mr. H. G. Dakyns, with Mr. Henry 
 Sidgwick and Mr. Arthur Sidgwick, besides smaller 
 collections of letters addressed to Mr. T. H. Warren, 
 President of Magdalen College, Oxford, to Mrs. Ross, to 
 Mr. Edmund Gosse (who also kindly procured me the 
 use of the letters to Mr. R. L. Stevenson), to the Honour- 
 able Roden Noel, to Lord Ronald Gower, and to many 
 others whose names will generally be found when letters 
 to them are quoted. My thanks are due to all of these 
 for so kindly allowing me to examine their correspond- 
 ence. Miss Margaret Symonds has also written an 
 account of her father's last journey, when she was, as 
 she had often been, his companion. This is printed in 
 the last chapter. 
 
 It may be asked why, as an autobiography exists, I 
 have not confined myself to the publication of that. 
 Apart from the ordinary and obvious reasons which 
 render the immediate publication of autobiographies un- 
 desirable, there is a consideration supplied by Symonds 
 himself, which induced me to adopt the course I have 
 taken. 'Autobiographies written with a purpose,' he 
 says in the autobiography itself, ' are likely to want 
 atmosphere. A man, when he sits down to give an
 
 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION XI 
 
 account of his own life, from the point of view of art 
 or of passion or of a particular action, is apt to make 
 it appear as though he were nothing but an artist, 
 nothing but a lover, or that the action he seeks to 
 explain were the principal event in his existence. The 
 report has to be supplemented in order that a true 
 portrait may be painted.' Under the circumstances, 
 it was possible from letters and diaries to furnish such 
 supplement. Furthermore, I felt that autobiographies, 
 being written at one period of life, inevitably convey 
 the tone of that period ; they are not contemporaneous 
 evidence, and are therefore of inferior value to diaries 
 and letters. To quote Symonds again, ' No autobio- 
 graphical resumption of facts, after the lapse of twenty- 
 five years, is equal in veracity to contemporary records.' 
 For these reasons, then, I have used diaries and letters 
 wherever that was possible ; holding that they portray 
 the man more truly at each moment, and progressively 
 from moment to moment. But at certain places, 
 notably at the very outset, the higher authorities, the 
 letters and diaries, are wanting ; and there I have been 
 obliged to use the autobiography as supplying what no 
 other authority ' could communicate with equal force.' 
 I take the letters and diaries as soon as they appear ; 
 but as the autobiography was written towards the 
 very end of Symonds's life, the reader can hardly fail 
 to be aware of a break in style when passing from one 
 source to the other, from autobiography to early letters 
 and diaries. This, however, is a defect which becomes 
 leas and less sensiljle as the biography advances and 
 Symonds's style begins to form itself. The auto-
 
 xii JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 biography being by far the best authority for the early 
 years of his life, I thought it advisable to accept this 
 slight drawback. 
 
 I must now say a word as to the method which I 
 have pursued in compiling the biography from the 
 materials described. As I have stated, I wished to 
 leave Symonds to tell his own story, as far as that was 
 possible, and at the same time I desired to construct 
 a consecutive narrative and a current page, in order to 
 avoid the awkward breaks which result from printing 
 in the text the superscriptions, subscriptions, and dates 
 of letters in full. It is hoped that in this way the 
 reader may be enabled to read straight on ; but should 
 he at any time desire to know the source of the passage 
 which he is reading — when that source is not already 
 mentioned in the text — he will only have to look at the 
 last footnote, and there he will find whether the 
 quotation is from autobiography, diaries, or letters, and 
 in the last case he will learn the superscription and date 
 of the letter. 
 
 It was my desire to add as little of myself as might 
 be ; but I found, in the course of compilation, that 
 it was impossible to disappear altogether from the 
 page. All that I have to say, however, is marked off 
 between square brackets, and when that includes 
 quotations from Symonds these are given within 
 inverted commas. 
 
 The biography of such a man as Symonds must 
 depend for its interest upon psychological development. 
 He was a man of means, and travelled for the sake of 
 his health or for the accumulation of knowledge ; but
 
 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION Xlll 
 
 his journeys were not of the kmd which led to external 
 adventures. For a biography of the psychological 
 order, however, the material is rich and varied, as rich 
 and varied as the temperament of the man who created 
 it. The question is, what was the nature of that 
 temperament ? Is it possible to find a clue to the 
 labyrmth of this complex human soul, laid bare with 
 unflinching fidelity ? Can we attain to a point of view 
 which will embrace and also explain the varied and 
 perplexing phenomena '? 
 
 It is hard for a man to know himself. It is almost 
 impossible for a friend, however ultimate, to reach the 
 inner truth of his friend's nature. But a biographer 
 is in duty bound to form and to express some co- 
 ordinating view upon the mass of material which he 
 is giving to the world, and which in some way or 
 other represents the man whose portrait he is seeking 
 to delineate. 
 
 A nature so rich, a temperament so varied as that 
 of Symonds, must inevitably have attracted by difierent 
 qualities, and attached by various ligaments, his many 
 friends ; and no doubt each one of these would describe 
 and explain the psychology of the man under slightly 
 diverse aspects. 
 
 I can only say that the view I am about to put 
 forward is one which I have held, more or less sub- 
 consciously, ever since 1 became his friend in 1872 ; 
 and that it has been forced home upon me with ir- 
 resistible conviction during the compilation of this 
 book. 
 
 1 believe that, psychologically, Symonds was con-
 
 xiv JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 structed thus : a highly analytical and sceptical 
 intellect, with which was connected a profound sense 
 of the one ultimate positive fact knowable to him — 
 himself ; a rich, sensuous, artistic temperament, with 
 which was united a natural vein of sweetness and 
 affection ; an uncompromising addiction to truth, a 
 passion for the absolute, a dislike of compromises, of 
 middle terms, of the a peu iwes. 
 
 The central, the architectonic, quality of his nature 
 was religious. By religious, I mean that his major 
 occupation, his dominating pursuit, was the interroga- 
 tion of the Universe, the search for God. 
 
 ' Theological ' his temperament certainly was not. 
 He had arrived early at the conviction that the 
 
 * theos ' about whom the current ' logos ' was engaged 
 must be a ' theos ' apprehended, if not created, by the 
 human intellect, therefore not the universal, all- 
 embracing ' theos ' for whom he was in search. 
 
 * Religious,' in so far as submission is implied by that 
 term, he was not by nature, though I think he was 
 being lessoned by life towards that issue. But if the 
 honest, courageous recognition of the Self confronted 
 with God, the soul with the universe, the struggle to 
 comprehend and be comprehended, is religious, then 
 Symonds was pre-eminently a religious man. 
 
 Emotionally he desired the warmth of a personal 
 God, intellectually he could conceive that God under 
 human attributes only, and found himself driven to say 
 ' no ' to each human presentment of Him. 
 
 I imagine that this is a temperament not altogether 
 uncommon, that it is even characteristic, to some extent,
 
 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION XV 
 
 of our century, post-revolutionary and scientific ; but I 
 feel confident that the manifestation of such a tempera- 
 ment has seldom been so complete. 
 
 On such a psychological basis it would not in any 
 case have been easy to construct a thoroughly happy or 
 restful life. And when we take into consideration the 
 burden of ill-health, and all the thwartings of a powerful, 
 ambitious, and determined nature implied thereby, that 
 note of depression which marks so many pages of diary, 
 letters, and autobiography alike, will hardly cause sur- 
 prise. 
 
 But it is no ignoble melancholy which overshadowed 
 so large a part of Symonds's life. The passionate desire 
 to reach God, to understand what we are, and why we 
 are here, meetmg with an equally powerful devotion to 
 truth in its purest, simplest form, and equally potent 
 resolve to accept no theory that is not absolute, final, 
 larger than ourselves, inevitably produced a spiritual 
 conflict, to witness which may make us sad, but can 
 hardly fail to raise both respect and love for the soul 
 which was its battle-field. 
 
 It is possil)le that many who met Symonds did not 
 surmise behind the brilliant, audacious exterior, under- 
 lying the witty conversation, and the keen enjoyment 
 of life and movement about him, this central core of 
 spiritual pain. But the old adage is true — Tradyjuara 
 fiadijfiara— And I believe that he owed much of his 
 singular charm, his attractiveness, his formative power 
 over youthful character, his wide sympathy and his 
 unfailing helpfulness, precisely to the pain, the bitter- 
 ness, the violence of this internal struggle, which vivified
 
 xvi JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 and made acutely sensitive a nature in its essence sweet 
 and affectionate. 
 
 It must be remembered, however, that though this 
 pain lay deep down at the root of his life, and finds 
 expression where the man is speaking to himself, as it 
 were, in diaries and letters to his most intimate friends, 
 it did not obscure the sparkling genialities of his daily 
 converse with the world, nor overlay the founts of human 
 sympathy and kindliness which welled up within his 
 nature. I am sure that his intellectual equals would 
 bear testimony to the brilliancy and vivacity of the 
 personality which he presented to them. I am equally 
 sure that the many to whom he brought material 
 assistance would testify to the abundance of his phil- 
 anthropy. ' Nemo te magis in corde amicos fovebat nee 
 in simplices et indoctos benevolentior erat.' His friend 
 and teacher, the late Master of Balliol, wrote these words 
 for his grave, and they are true. 
 
 I think that down to what Symonds alwaj-s called 
 * the crisis ' at Cannes, in the year 1868 — that is, when 
 he was twenty-eight years of age -this long internal 
 struggle to know, and refusal to know in part, this 
 unceasing interrogation of the Universe, had been con- 
 ducted mainly in the field of abstract thought, by a 
 continual cloud-war within the brain. After Cannes, 
 and down to the close of his life, this inquiry was 
 gradually removed from the region of the abstract to 
 the region of the concrete ; but the problem remained 
 the same, the desire to solve it quite as potent. At 
 times his philosophy of life may have appeared very 
 positive, almost material, but that was merely because
 
 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION XVU 
 
 the pure abstract had grown wearisome, not because the 
 ideal point of view had been abandoned, the gravitation 
 towards God arrested in its course. He seemed to me 
 to be always studying, studying, studying ; ' a terrible 
 fellow for diving to the roots of things,' whether those 
 things were the abstractions of the intellect or the 
 concrete of daily life among the people with whom his 
 lot was cast ; in either field he was in pursuit of an 
 answer to the riddle of existence, or, as he put it, ' living 
 in the whole.' Moreover, it was only when abstractions 
 were renounced that one large side of his nature was 
 brought fully into play. His artistic, sensuous temi)era- 
 ment found a satisfaction in actual life, which had been 
 denied it in the cloud-land of speculation. The devotion 
 to truth, the critical intellect, still maintained their 
 old activity, but now more of the whole man became 
 energetic, and he felt, and said he felt, wider, wiser, 
 more humane- and on the whole happier. 
 
 I do not think that Symonds ever expected the 
 problem to be solved, the struggle to be abandoned. 
 The renunciation of the quest would have seemed to 
 him spiritual death — the solution of the riddle, also, 
 most likely, death. In December 1889, he wrote : 
 ' When will the soul be at ease ? If it has to live for 
 ever, I believe mine will never be at ease.' Did he 
 want it to be ? I think so— but upon terms which we 
 suppose to be precluded by the limitations of human 
 nature, by the loss of its individual self-consciousness, 
 by absorption into the Universal consciousness. ' E 
 naufragar m'e dolce in questo mare.' 
 
 This is my view as to the central point in Symonds's 
 
 a
 
 XVlll JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 naturo ; whether the present vohmie will carry to the 
 reader the same conviction that the work of compiling 
 them has strengthened in me, I cannot say. They are 
 here to speak for themselves. 
 
 This volume has had the great advantage of 
 revision by Symonds's family, and by two of his older 
 friends, Mr. H. G. Dakyns and Mr. Henry Sidgwick. 
 I can never sufficient!}' thank them for the patience and 
 pains with which they have assisted me, in a task which 
 I might otherwise have found to be even more difficult 
 than it has proved. 
 
 HORATIO F. BROWN. 
 Ca' Torresella, Venice : 
 November 1894.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I'AGE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 CHILDHOOD 
 
 Birth — His mother — Early recollections — Drives with his father — 
 The Blind Asylum Chapel - The ' Ugly Duckling '—Early 
 illness — Nervous temperament — His nurse's tales — His first 
 appearance at children's parties — His grandmother, Mrs. Sykes 
 — The Plymouth Brethren — George Miiller — His paternal 
 ancestry — Dr. Symonds — Dr. Addington — -John Symonds of 
 Oxford — He learns Latin — First impressions of nature — Trance 
 conditions — Sent to a tutor's — The inculcation of truth . 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 BOYHOOD 
 
 Change to Clifton Hill House — Home life — Evening readings — 
 Clifton described — Tts effect upon hiw growth — Early education 
 — At his tutor's Learns Greek Composes English verses - 
 The legend of Apollo — Boyish games — Illness — Sent to Torquay 
 — Fishing for seaweed — His governess, Mdlle. Girard — Sleep- 
 walking — Recurrent dreams — Early perceptions of beauty — 
 Greek statuary and picture-books — Landscape — Love of Nature 
 — Mr. Vigor's portrait — Sensitiveness — His psychical condition 
 — Mdlle. Girard's account of him 24 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 BOYHOOD 
 
 Goes to Harrow — First impressions — Internal attitude — Intellectual 
 condition — Head of his house — Dislike of Harrow— Contrasted 
 with Clifton - Friendships The Kev. John Smith — Gustavus 
 Bosanquet— Confirmation Letters to his sister Charlotte — 
 Harrow sermons -Football Iveadin;.; in chapel - Debate oa 
 ghostfj - Speech day — An exeat to London — Heads Plato for 
 the first time — Result 47
 
 XX JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 CHAPTEK IV 
 
 YOUTH 
 
 Emotional development — Journeys in Scotland — Newhailes — 
 Eoslin — Hawthornden — Goes to Balliol — Friends at Oxford — 
 Conington — ' Ploughed ' for ' Smalls ' — Exhibitioner at Balliol 
 — Reading party at Whitby — Wins the ' Newdigate ' — Matthew 
 Arnold's criticism on the poem — First Class in ' Moderations ' — 
 Reading party at Coniston — First journey abroad — On keeping 
 diaries — His love of Bristol — Returns to Oxford — Mr. Jowett's 
 influence — Overwork — 111 health— Goes home to Clifton — Life 
 there — Back at Balliol — A day of his life — Attitude towards 
 religion — Health still bad — An exeat to Sonning — The Rev. 
 Hugh Pearson — Stories of Tennyson, Tatham, Jenkyns — 
 Journey to Amiens and Paris — Mario's singing— Giuglini — 
 Clara Novello— The Siabat Mater— The Venus of Milo— 
 Returns home — Goes up to Oxford — 111 health — How he 
 appeared to the outside world — Journey to Chamonix and 
 Italy — His diary of this journey — First impressions of 
 Switzerland and of Italy — The guide Auguste Balmat — Walks 
 on the Glaciers — Crosses the Simplon — Lago Maggiore — Como 
 — Milan — Novara — Bellinzona — The Gotthard — A nightmare 
 at Hospenthal — Description of a thunderstorm at Clifton — 
 Reading party at Bangor — 111 health — Home again — Lewes's 
 'Life of Goethe' — Its influence — His twenty-first birthday — 
 Reflections thereon — A visit from Jowett — Self -analysis — 
 Returns to Oxford - Visit to a phrenologist — 111 health — The 
 shadow of the schools — Mme. Jenny Liud Goldschmidt — Lady 
 Augusta and Dean Stanley — Wins the ' Jenkyns ' — Gets a 
 First in ' Greats ' — His remarks on the Oxford system and its 
 teachers 6-1 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 MANHOOD. FROM DEGREE TO FELLOWSHIP 
 
 Journey to Venice — Impressions of Venetian Art — Padua — Verona 
 — A rising in Milan — The books he read on the journey — 
 Illness at Visp — Home again — First intimations of a literary 
 career — Autobiographic poetry — Analysis of Haydn's ' Crea- 
 tion ' — His psychological altitude — Stands for a fellowship at 
 Queen's^A visit from Jowett at Clifton — Stands for a fellow- 
 ship at Magdalen — And elected — Offer of a travelling tutorship 
 — Attack upon him — Breakdown in health — Goes to Malvern 
 — Wins the Chancellor's prize with an essay on ' The Renais- 
 sance' 134
 
 CONTENTS XXI 
 
 I 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 MANHOOD. FELLOWSHIP TO MARRLA.GE 
 
 I'AGK 
 
 Sent to Switzerland by Dr. Symonds— Strasburg— EnRelberg 
 — Description of scenery — Interlaken — Miirren — Arrival of 
 the Norths — Technical training of the eye necessary for 
 sound criticism of painting — At Uetliberg with T. H. Green — 
 
 Goethe's Proem to 'Gott und Welt '—11 E — Symonds 
 
 at the christening of a Swiss peasant's daughter — Leipzig Fair 
 — deceived full Fellow at Magdalen — Health still bad — Journey 
 to Italy — At Castellamare — Lucretius on Ennui —Ill-health — ■ 
 Returns to England — Friendship with H. G. Dakyns — Settles 
 in London — Dread of solitude — Courts Miss North — Marriage 156 
 
 CHAPTEE VII 
 
 MANHOOD. DRAWN TOWARDS LITERATURE 
 
 13 Albion Street, London — Studies law— Question of a career — 
 Visit to Clifton— Conversations with Woolner- On Morality 
 in Art — Depression — 47 Norfolk Square, London — First 
 tsymptoms of pulmonary disease — Birth of a daughter — Deter- 
 mination towards literature — Consults Jowett — His advice — A 
 conversation with Jowett — Visit to Clifton — Dr. Symonds 
 declares the lungs to be affected — On Shakespeare's Sonnets — 
 His study of Clough — The Handel Festival - Sent abroad by 
 his father — Regrets for Clifton — Letters from the Riviera — 
 IMonte Carlo— On Elizabethan freedom and licence — Leaves 
 the Riviera for Tuscany and Ravenna — Returns by the Lakes 
 to Macugnaga — On landscape painting —Over the St. Bernard 
 to Switzerland —Miirren revisited — Symonds takes stock of 
 himself — Returns home 1^1 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 MANHOOD. SPECULATIVE LIFE 
 
 Return to London - On nictliod in writing poetry — Visits to Rugby 
 and Oxford — Visit to Clifton — Bad health -Goes abroad with 
 his sister- Rouen St. Onen — .SVwi/rar/rf iv/raiiiidnlia — The 
 Columbine — On Gothic architecture -Norman buildings — St. 
 Ktienne at Caen -Bayeux Depression St. Lo Coutances - 
 His philosophy — His religion —Mont St. Michel Emotional 
 strain — Returns to England— 111 health— Mr. Henry Sidgwick 
 — Writes poetry- -Longing for the Alps- The neces.sary condi- 
 tions of life - Speculations on life 220
 
 xxii JOHN ADDINGTON SYxMONDS 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 MANHOOD — A SPECULATIVE CRISIS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Birth of second child — Leaves Norfolk Square — The speculative 
 Abyss — On music, to Mr. Henry Sidgwick — Goes abroad — 
 Glion — Proven(;'e — The Eiviera — At Cannes — On writing poetry 
 — On llichardson and Balzac — Misery at Cannes — A crisis — 
 Journey to Corsica— Adventures — Bologna to Venice — On 
 Tennyson's ' Lucretius ' — On Scepticism — Returns home — 
 Settles at 7 Victoria Square, Clifton 245 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 MANHOOD — EMBARKED ON LITERATURE 
 
 The crisis at Cannes, and its results — Lectures to the Sixth Form 
 at Clifton College — Their effect — On ' Richard Feverel ' — 
 Settles in Victoria Square — The Hastings election petition — 
 Disraeli's speech in the Irish Debate — The Social Science 
 Association — On the religious attitude — On Euripides — A 
 journey through the Dolomites — At Heiligenblut — Translation 
 of Goethe's Proem to ' Gott und Welt' — Dr. Symonds's ill health 
 — Scepticism — The first idea of the History of the Renaissance 
 in Italy — Lectures on Dante — Death of Dr. Symonds — Moves 
 into Clifton Hill House — Publishes his first book— His own 
 estimate of his intellectual and literary powers . . . 270 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 MANHOOD — EMBARKED ON LITERATURE 
 
 At Clifton Hill House— Civic duties — Publishes his first book, 'An 
 Introduction to the Study of Dante' — Dr. Symonds's 'Miscel- 
 lanies ' — Conington's ' Remains ' — Experience under Anes- 
 thetics — Journey to Sicily and Athens — Impressions of Greece 
 — Home again— Fall from his horse — 'Studies of the Greek 
 Poets'- Its reception — Sent abroad again — Gathers material 
 for the History of the Renaissance — ' Sketches in Italy and 
 Greece '— Great literary activity — The first volumes of ' The 
 Renaissance ' — Failure of health — Sent abroad — Michael 
 Angelo's and Campanella's Sonnets — Breaks down . . . 288
 
 CONTENTS XXiii 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 MANHOOD — RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT 
 
 PAliE 
 
 Recovers slowly — Happiness — His statement of his religion — Child- 
 hood — Harrow — Oxford — ' Essays and Reviews ' — Comtism — 
 The cosmic enthusiasm — Goethe — Cleanthes — Walt Whitman 
 — Darwin — Conclusion 308 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 MANHOOD — FROM CLIFTON TO DAVOS 
 
 A change necessary — Question of where to go — Consults Sir 
 William Jenner — Ordered to the Nile — Takes Davos Platz on 
 the way, and stays there — Begins to recover — First weeks at 
 Davos — ' Sonnets of Michael Angelo and Campanella ' — Spring 
 journeys — Passage of the Fluela — Monte Generoso — ' Many 
 Moods ' — Christian Buol — Introduction to the real life of 
 Davos — The tenor of that life — Decision to settle at Davos — 
 Goes home — Ends his residence at Clifton Hill House . . 328 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 MANHOOD — SETTLEMENT AT DAVOS 
 
 The result of leaving Clifton — Beginning of a new lite— The 
 building of Am Hof — Lebcns PhilosopMe — Midnight tobog- 
 ganing — Visit to Venice -' Animi Figura ' — Back at Davos — 
 At Arosa — Am Hof -His views on charities — High spirits at 
 Davos — Death of T.H.Green — His visit to England — Declared 
 seriously ill again Returns to Davos — Moves into Am Hof — 
 A profession of faith . 35(5 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 MANHOOD — MIDDLE LIFE AT DAVOS 
 
 Spring in Venice — His eldest daughter ill —His sister ill — His 
 courageous attitude —An autumn drive through Graubiinden — 
 Notes of his Davos life -Visit to San Remo — Illness of his 
 daughter Margaret - Back at Davos— His walks among the 
 nifiunlaiiis On his literary isolation Working at the 
 'Catholic Reaction' -III health Discouragement -On 
 Giordano Bruno Work -On ' Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ' — An 
 expedition on the Diufli Berg — At Soglio in Val Bregaglia — 
 (Jn tlif relation of work to domestic life ' Depressed vitality ' 
 — On immortality and ethics -Death of his eldest daughter . 360
 
 xxi\- JOHN ADIHNGTON SYMONDS 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 MANHOOD^ — LAST YEARS AT DAVOS 
 
 PAfiK 
 
 Visit to England — Back at Davos — Work — Cellini's ' Autobiography ' 
 — ' Essays, Speculative and Suggestive ' — Walks among the 
 mountains — Life at Davos — ' Cellini ' appears, and he begins 
 ' Carlo Gozzi ' — Toboggan races and a great snowfall — On 
 Creighton's 'History of the Papacy' — A gradual failure of 
 physical force — Visit to Venice — Returns to Davos — 111 in the 
 summer and autumn — The Davos gymnasium — A spring drive 
 in the Vorder Rheinthal — 'Autobiography' — Journey to 
 Venice — Returns to Davos — Still unwell — Takes the influenza 
 — Publication of ' Essays, Speculative and Suggestive ' — 
 Proposals for the ' Life of Michael Angelo ' — Work upon that 
 book — Symonds's estimate of a literary life .... 4'23 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE END 
 
 The ' Life of Michael Angelo ' — Journeys entailed by it — The book 
 finished — ' Our Life in the Swiss Highlands ' — Decline in 
 strength — Leaves Davos — ' Lontan lontano ' — The last journey 
 — Illness and death in Rome — Funeral — Epitaph . . . 4()(j 
 
 Inhex 481 
 
 J. A. Symonds axp his daughter Margaret, 1891 . Frontispiece
 
 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 CHILDHOOD 
 
 Birth— His mother— Early recollections— Drives with his father— The 
 Blind Asylum Chapel— The ' Ugly Duckling '—Early illness- 
 Nervous temperament— His nurse's tales — His first appearance at 
 children's parties— His grandmother, Mrs. Sykes— The Plymouth 
 Brethren — George Miiller — His paternal ancestry — Dr. Symonds — 
 Dr. Addington — John Symonds of Oxford — He learns Latin— First 
 impressions of nature — Trance conditions — Sent to a tutor's — The 
 inculcation of truth. 
 
 I ' WAS bom upon October 5, 1840, at 7 Berkeley Square, 
 Bristol. Here 1 lived until June 1851, when our home was 
 changed for Clifton Hill House. 
 
 1 cannot say that I have a distinct memory of my mother. 
 She died of scarlet fever when I was four years old, and she 
 had been always too weak in health to occupy herself energeti- 
 cally in the household. Those who knew her intimately were 
 unanimous in saying that she combined rare grace and beauty 
 of person with singular sweetness of character and distinguished 
 mental endowments. 
 
 The one thing which I can clearly remember about her is, 
 that we were driving alone together in my father's carriage 
 (a chariot with glass windows at the front and sides, drawn 
 by two horses) down a steep hill by Cornwallis Terrace to the 
 Lower Crescent, when the horses plunged and broke into a 
 gallop. Her fright must liave made a deep impression on me. 
 
 ' Autubiugrapliy. 
 
 B 
 
 1840
 
 2 JOHN ADDIXGTON SYMONBS 1840 
 
 I can still see a pale face, a pink silk bonnet, and beautiful 
 yellow hair. These have for background in my memory the 
 glass windows of a coupe, and the red stone wall overhung 
 with trees which embanked the garden of Cornwallis Terrace. 
 I do not know now whether the road has been altered. It is 
 long since I walked there. But the instantaneous flash of that 
 moment on my brain persists as I describe it. 
 
 I can also remember the morning of my mother's funeral. 
 We children were plajdng in our nursery with tin soldiers and 
 clumsy wooden cannon, painted black and yellow. These were 
 on the floor beside us. We were dressed in black. The nurses 
 took us away to my grandmother's house in the Lower 
 Crescent. 
 
 This is all I recollect about my mother. I have been told 
 that my name was the last upon her lips when she was dying. 
 But my father never spoke to me much about her, and only 
 gave me a piece of her hair. 
 
 He sometimes took me with him to her grave. This was 
 in the Arno Vale Cemetery, high up upon a grassy hillside, 
 where harebells and thyme blossomed in the short turf of a 
 down. A plane-tree spread its branches over the tomb, and the 
 flat stone which marked her resting-place was enclosed by iron 
 railings. My father took jealous care that these railings should 
 be over-rioted with ivy, roses, and clematis, growing in unpruned 
 luxuriance. He wished to withdraAV the sacred sjrot from 
 vulgar eyes. I could not see inside it. It was our custom to 
 pluck leaves from the plane-tree and the creepers, and to return 
 in silence to the carriage which stood waiting by the gate. 
 These leaves, gathered from my mother's grave, were almost 
 all I knew about her — all I had of her. I used to put them 
 into a little book of texts called ' Daily Food,' which had belonged 
 to her, and which I read every night, and still read at all hours 
 of the day in the year 1889. 
 
 I cannot pretend that I greatly desired to have a clearer 
 notion of my mother, or that I exactly felt the loss of her. It 
 was all dreamy and misty to my mind. I did not even imagine 
 what she might have been to me. Sometimes I thought that 
 I was heartless and sinful because I could not want her much.
 
 1840 CHILDHOOD 3 
 
 But this was foolish, because I had never really felt the touch 
 of her. My father showed no outward signs of grief, and said 
 nothing. He was only more than usually reserved on these 
 occasions, and inspired me with a vague awe. Death was a 
 mystery, into which the mother I had never really known was 
 now for ever drawn away from me. 
 
 I doubt whether the following is worth recording. But 1842 
 since it is the first event of which I seem to have a distinct 
 recollection, I must do so. My sister Charlotte, younger than 
 myself by two years short of two months, was christened at 
 St. George's Church, Bristol. So far as I can now recall it, 
 the building is of pseudo Grteco-Eoman architecture, rectangular 
 in the body, faced ^nth a portico and surmounted with a 
 nondescript Pecksniftian spire in the bastard classic style. Of 
 its internal arrangement I remember nothing definite, and yet 
 I seem to see this picture vividly — an area of building, dim, 
 grey, almost empty ; a few people grouped about in my 
 immediate neighbourhood ; tall enclosed pews of a light yellow 
 colour round the groups ; something going on at no great 
 distance to our left, which makes the faces turn in that 
 direction looking backwards ; myself dressed in white, with a 
 white hat and something blue in the trimmings of it, half 
 standing, half supported, so as to look over the rim of the pew. 
 This is what I remember, or think I remember, of my sister's 
 christening. 
 
 It is surely impossible to be certain whether these very 
 early memories, definite as they may be, and not improbable, 
 are actual impressions of scenes left upon our senses, or 
 whether they are not rather the product of some half-conscious 
 act of the imagination working reflectively upon what has been 
 related to the child. 
 
 About another of these recollections I have not the same 
 kind of doubt. I was in the nave of Bristol Cathedral, during 
 service time, lifted in my nurse's arms, and looking througli 
 the perforated doors of the organ screen, which tlien divided 
 have from choir. The organ was playing, and the choristers 
 were singing. Some chord awoke in me then, which has gone 
 on thrilling through my lifetime, and has been connected with 
 
 B 2
 
 4 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1842-47 
 
 the deepest of my emotional experiences. Cathedrals, college- 
 chapels, ' quires, and places where they sing,' resuscitate that 
 mood of infancy. I know, when I am entering a stately and 
 time-honoured English house of prayer, that I shall put this 
 mood upon me like a garment. The voices of choiring men 
 and boys, the sobbing antiphones and lark-like soaring of clear 
 treble notes into the gloom of Gothic arches, the thunder of 
 the labouring diapasons, stir in me old deep-centred innate 
 sentiment. 
 
 So it is with another of my earliest experiences. When 
 I was still a little child, my father began to take me with him 
 on his long drives into the country. After jolting thi'ough the 
 city streets, we broke away at his quick travelling-pace into 
 unknown regions of field, and wood, and hedgerows, climbing 
 the Somersetshire hills, threading their deep lanes and bosky 
 combes, passing under avenues of ancient parks, halting at 
 low-roofed farm-houses. Then I used to leave the carriage 
 and wander for a while alone in fairyland — knee-deep in 
 meadow-sweet and willow-herb, bruising the water-mint by 
 shallow brooks, gazing at water-lilies out of reach on sleepy 
 ponds, wondering why all about me was so still, and who the 
 people were who dwelt there. The hush of sickness and 
 expected death sobered the faces of the men and women who 
 received my father ; and he was often very thoughtful when he 
 left their homesteads, and we journeyed back in silence. It 
 used to be late in the evening generally when we returned 
 from these excursions. Twilight added to the mystery of the 
 unknown, the shadow of the unintelligible sorrow I had felt. 
 The shimmer of moonlight blending with late sunset upon 
 boughs of wild roses or spires of foxglove, or hyacinths in 
 ferny hedges — a sallow western sky seen from the heathy 
 heights of Mendip or of Dundry, the heavy scent of clematis or 
 privet when the air is hot and moist in June, the grey front 
 of lonely farm-buildings flanked by yew-trees, the perfume 
 suddenly distilled from limes or laurels through darkness at 
 some turning of the road — such things have always brought 
 the feeling of those solemn evenings back. I used often to fall 
 asleep in the carriage, and woke up startled by a carter's shout
 
 1842-47 CHILDHOOD 6 
 
 as we swept onward, or by the glare of the city lamps, when we 
 broke at last away from the country roads, and rattled over the 
 pavement of the city streets. 
 
 I had no love for my birthplace, 7 Berkeley Square. I am 
 distinctly aware of the depressing effect produced upon me by 
 the more sordid portions of this town house, especially by a 
 dingy dining-room, and a little closet leading through glass 
 doors into a dusty back garden. The garden had one miracle, 
 however, to ennoble it. That was a cherry-tree, which clothed 
 itself in silver beauty once a year, maugre the squalor which 
 surrounded it. I ought also not to forget, that our back 
 windows looked out on Brandon Hill, from which a glorious 
 prospect over city, river, meadow, distant hills and wooded 
 slopes, could then be gained. 
 
 The front door of our house was fairly well proportioned, 
 and surmounted with a pediment boldly hewn, of Bath- stone, 
 grey and mossy. I felt a particular affection for this pediment. 
 It had style. The limes and almond-trees and bright berries 
 of the mountain ashes in the Square garden were also a great 
 consolation. But certain annuals — eschscholtzia, Virginia 
 stock, and minor convolvulus — have always remained un- 
 pleasantly associated with the forlorn ill-cared-for flower beds. 
 I found some difficulty in conquering my dislike for the 
 nasturtium, on account of the innumerable earwigs which its 
 gorgeous trumpet-blooms concealed. On the other hand, 
 certain dusky-green and brownish-pink hawk-moths, fluttering 
 about the limes on summer evenings, seemed to me like angels 
 from a distant land. 
 
 Trifling as these matters are, they indicate the spontaneous 
 development of powerful instincts. My long exile in the High 
 Alps has been rendered more than tolerable by the fact, that 
 nothing which man makes can wholly debase the mountains of 
 Graubiinden. Simplicity and purity and wayward grace in 
 natural things, strength and solidity and decent form in things 
 of art, were what my temperament unconsciously demanded. 
 
 The sense of meanness which annoyed mo in our house 
 afflicted me far more keenly in the chapol of the Blind Asylum, 
 where we attended service twice on Sundays. The bastard
 
 6 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1842-47 
 
 Gothic lancets, dead-grey, rough-cast walls and ugly painted 
 woodwork of that paltry building, gave me absolute pain. It 
 suffocated my soul, and made me loathe evangelical Pro- 
 testantism. Most of all, at night, when gas-lamps flared in 
 open jets upon the sordid scene, I felt defrauded of some dimly 
 apprehended birthright. 
 
 It is significant, in this respect, that two tales made a deep 
 impression at this period on my mind. One was Andersen's 
 story of the Ugly Duckling. I sympathised passionately with 
 the poor bird swimming round and round the duck-puddle. 
 I cried convulsively when he flew away to join his beautiful 
 wide-winged white brethren of the windy journeys and the 
 lonely meads. Thousands of children have undoubtedly done 
 the same ; for it is a note of childhood, in souls destined for 
 expansion, to feel solitary and debarred from privileges due to 
 them. The other tale was a kind of allegory called ' The Story 
 without an End,' translated, I think, by Lucy Duff Gordon 
 from the German. The mystical dreamy communing with 
 nature in wild woods and leafy places took my fancy, and 
 begat a mood of Sehnsucht which became habitual. 
 
 My sisters and I were riding one day upon a rocking- 
 horse which stood on the landing of the attic floor. I was 
 holding on to the tail, I remember, a little anxious lest the 
 tuft of grey horse-hair should suddenly give way and precipitate 
 me backward, as it often did. We were screaming out Scott's 
 lines upon the death of Marmion in chorus — 
 
 With dying hand, above his head, 
 He shook the fragment of his blade, 
 
 And shouted ' Victory ! ' — 
 ' Charge, Chester, charge ! On, Stanley, on ! ' 
 
 Were the last words of Marmion. 
 
 Suddenly I ceased to roar. A resolve had formed itself 
 unbidden in my mind, ' When I grow up, I too will be an 
 author.' 
 
 I was a very nervous child, and subject to many physical 
 ailments, which made me no doubt disagreeable to the people 
 around me. It seems that 1 suffered from a gastric fever soon 
 after my birth, and this left me weak. Being sensitive to the
 
 it^i)_47 CHILDHOOD 7 
 
 point of suspiciousness, I imagined that I inspired repugnance 
 in others, and my own condition not unfrequently made me 
 noisome lo myself. My constitutional dislike of squalor had 
 to suffer severe mortification. I became unreasonably shy and 
 timid. In connection with these childish illnesses, and what 
 follows about night terrors, it is proper here to say that I had 
 an elder brother, John Abdy Stephenson, who only lived seven 
 months, and died of cerebral inflammation. He had been 
 preceded by twin-sons, premature and still-born. My elder 
 sister Mary Isabella was born in 1837, the twins in 1838, John 
 Abdy Stephenson in 1839, myself in 1840. There is every 
 reason to suppose that my mother's constitution at this time 
 was inadequate to the strain of child-birth, and that she 
 transmitted a neurotic temperament to certain of her children. 
 
 At night I used to hear phantasmal noises, which blended 
 terrifically with the caterwauling of cats upon the roof. I often 
 lay awake for hours with my fingers in my ears. 
 
 I fancied there was a corpse in a cofiin under my bed, and 
 I used to wake up thinking it had risen, and was going to throw 
 a sheet over me. 
 
 Lights seemed to move about the room if I opened my eyes 
 in the dark. I feared them ; but I was forced to stare and 
 follow them about, until I either sank back hypnotised, or 
 rushed from the bed, and sat in my nightshirt on the staircase. 
 Yet I did not dread the dark so much as the light of a rush- 
 candle burning in a perforated cylinder of japanned metal, 
 which cast hideous patterns on the roof and walls of the 
 nursery. 
 
 When I slept, I was frequently visited with the following 
 nightmare. I dreamed that we were all seated in our well-lit 
 drawing-room, when the door opened of itself, just enough to 
 admit a little finger. The finger, disconnected from any hand 
 crept slowly into the room, and moved about through the air 
 crooking its joints and beckoning. No one saw it but myself. 
 What was the horror that would happen if it should touch m, 
 or any other person present, I never discovered, for I always 
 • woke before the catastrophe occurred. 
 
 My father, thinking, I suppose, that 1 needed to be looked
 
 8 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1842-47 
 
 after, took me to sleep with him in his own bed. He added to 
 my terrors by talking in his sleep. I remember one especially 
 grim night, when I woke up and saw a man seated by the bed, 
 and conversing with my father earnestly in a low voice about 
 some case of fever. I did not miss a word, though all that 1 
 can now recall of the conversation related to the swollen 
 blackness of the patient's tongue. 
 
 1847 In some way or another, perhaps by listening to the dismal 
 sermons of the Blind Asylum, I developed a morbid sense of 
 sin, and screamed at night about imaginary acts of disobedience. 
 My aunt or my father, hearing me sob and cry, left their chairs 
 in the drawing-room, and tried to reassure me. I can see him 
 on one occasion entering the bedroom with a yellow pamphlet 
 in his hand — a number of ' Vanity Fair,' which began to come 
 out in January, 1847. 
 
 I was persuaded that the devil lived near the doormat, in a 
 dark corner of the passage by my father's bedroom. I thought 
 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. 
 
 1848 When the cholera was raging in the year 1848, I heard so 
 much about it that I fell into a chronic state of hysterical fear. 
 Some one had told me of the blessings which attend ejaculatory 
 prayers. So I kept perpetually mumbling, ' God, save me 
 from the cholera.' This superstitious habit clung to me for 
 years. I believe that it obstructed the growth of sound ideas 
 upon religion ; but I cannot say that I was ever sincerely 
 pious, or ever realised the language about God I heard and 
 parroted. 
 
 Burglars entered my father's house in Berkeley Square one 
 evening while a dinner-party was going forward. They carried 
 off considerable booty from my aunt's and sisters' wardrobe 
 and trinket-boxes. It appeared that they had worked their 
 way through the attic-windows from an adjacent house, which 
 was empty at the time. We could see the marks of their dirty 
 clumsy hands upon the staircase wall next morning. I then 
 made the mental reflection that people who were afraid of 
 robbers could never have seen visions or dreamed nightmares.
 
 1848-51 CHILDHOOD 9 
 
 These men did not affect my imagination disagreeably. So far 
 as I thought about them at all, I sympathised with their 
 audacity, and felt my curiosity aroused. Neither then nor 
 afterwards did I fear anything so much as my own self. What 
 that contained was a terror to me. Things of flesh and blood, 
 brutal and murderous as they might be, could always be taken 
 by the hand and fraternised with. They were men, and from 
 men I did not shrink. I always felt a man might be my 
 comrade. Dreams and visions exercised a far more potent 
 spell. Nigh to them lay madness and utter impotence of self- 
 control. 
 
 These childish terrors, of which I have written thus much, 
 were stimulated by the talk of our head-nurse, Sarah Jones, 
 a superstitious country woman. She was not exactly kind in 
 her ways with us, and used to get drunk at times. Then she 
 would behave strangely, and threaten us children. I lived in 
 fear of her. Sarah's theory of discipline may be illustrated by 
 the following anecdote. We were passing some weeks of the 
 summer at an old inn on King's Weston Down — a very 
 delightful place for children, with a swing suspended from the 
 bough of a huge elm-tree, breezy downs where mushrooms 
 grew and blackberries were plentiful, a farm-yard, an old park 
 hard by, and shady copses of arbutus and juniper to wander 
 in. Indoors the furniture was deficient ; I found it difficult 
 to fall asleep in a stiff arm-chair, covered with black horse-hair, 
 and prolonged, I do not know how, into a make-shift for a 
 bedstead. Sarah sat beside me working in the evening light, 
 prodding the pillow and the mattress at intervals with her 
 needle, under the impression that she could frighten me into 
 slumber. 
 
 A very superior lacing to Sarah Jones was Mrs. Leaker, 
 head-nurse in the family of my cousins the Nashes. She had 
 much to do with fortifying and ennobling my sense of the 
 supernatural. Mrs. Leaker had been born and bred in a 
 Devonshire village on the sea-coast. She claimed gipsy-blood, 
 and belonged to a family of smugglers, so at least she told us. 
 Her physiognomy and complexion, and the legends with which 
 her head was stored, accorded with this account of her ancestry.
 
 10 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1848-51 
 
 She was a great reader of good literature, and had the plays of 
 Shakespeare and the history of our old English wars by heart. 
 Sitting round the nursery fire, we used to make her tell us 
 stories ; it was easy then to pass from Shakespeare and the 
 landing of IMonmouth in the West, to earlier traditions of the 
 country-side — haunted churches, whose windows burned at 
 night before a tempest ; East Indiamen from Bristol firing 
 distress guns in the offing ; the parson leaving his pulpit, and 
 the seamen stealing oft' to join the wreckers ; the avenue to 
 the old hall, up which a phantom lord rode in his chariot 
 drawn by six black horses, holding his head upon his knee ; 
 the yeoman belated on Dartmoor, following a white rabbit, 
 which disappeared when he arrived at home and found his 
 only daughter dead in bed there ; the wild carousings of 
 smugglers in their caves, and murderous conflicts with coast- 
 guardsmen ; the wicked gentlemen who sat up days and nights 
 at play, deep to their knees in scattered cards, losing fortunes, 
 and sallying forth to exchange shots upon a Sunday morning. 
 Ghosts naturally took a large place in these legends. But 
 Mrs. Leaker had a special partiality for presentiments and 
 warnings. She knew the dream of Lord Camelford before his 
 duel, and the clasp of the fiery hand upon Lady Tyrone's 
 wrist, and the bird which fluttered against the window of Lord 
 Lyttelton at Hagley. Tales like these she related in the 
 twilight with intense conviction of their truth, and with a 
 highly artistic sense for the value of vagueness. 
 
 Our earliest memories of words, poems, works of art, have 
 great value in our psychical development. They indicate 
 decisive points in the growth of personality. The first 
 English poem which impressed me deeply was Shakespeare's 
 ' Venus and Adonis.' I read it before I was ten years old. 
 It gave form, ideality, and beauty to my visions. I may 
 mention some other literature which took hold on my 
 imagination. We had a book of old ballads in two volumes, 
 illustrated by Maclise and other draughtsmen. The pictures 
 to ' Glenfinlas,' and ' Eve of St. John,' and ' Kempion,' made 
 me feel uncomfortable, but I think that Marley's Ghost in one 
 of Dickens' Christmas tales bit deeper. The most impressive
 
 ] 848-51 CHILDHOOD 11 
 
 books of all were not illustrated. These were a series of 
 articles on spectral illusions in ' Chambers's Miscellany,' and 
 a translation of a German collection of murder stories by some 
 name like Feuerbach. It is certain that I ought not to have 
 had access to these scientific or semi-scientific sources. They 
 worked potently and injuriously on my brain, but books 
 abounded in our house, and I was naturally drawn to literature. 
 I used even to examine the Atlases of Pathological Anatomy 
 in my father's cupboards, and to regard the skeletons of man 
 and beast \\dth awful joy. 
 
 The family consisted of my father, my aunt. Miss Mary 
 Ann Sykes, and my three sisters, Edith, Mary Isabella, and 
 Charlotte. I cannot recollect any bond of friendship between 
 me and my sisters, though we all lived together in amity. 
 One touch of sympathy drew me closer to Maribella than the 
 others. When I began to learn arithmetic I could not under- 
 stand the simplest sums. She noticed me crying over a sum 
 in long division, and vnth great gentleness and kindness 
 helped me through the task. 
 
 ^Ye used to go to children's parties together. On these 
 occasions I was reputed to have brought some confusion on 
 my elder sisters. Once, when I thought I was being neglected 
 at table, I pointed to a cake, and said, ' I never ask, but I 
 points.' At another party, impatient of waiting for supper, 
 I asked the mistress of the house, ' Lady, when are you going 
 to help ? ' 
 
 My grandmother, Sykes, played a considerable part in our 
 young lives. She was a handsome old lady with strongly 
 marked features, and a great air of blood and breeding. This 
 contrasted strangely with her material and social surroundings. 
 She had become a Plymouth Sister, and held the most 
 innocent amenities of life for sinful. Her house in Corn- 
 wallis Crescent, or the Lower Crescent, had nothing in it to 
 rejoice the eye, except flowers, to which she was devoted. 
 Yet it never impressed me with a sense of squalor. The 
 perfume of pot-pourri in a blue china bowl, and of Tonqiiin 
 beans exhaling from drawers and woi-k-buskels, gave distinction 
 to the rooms, and the old lady's stately person rendered it
 
 12 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1848-51 
 
 impossible to regard any of her possessions as beneath the 
 dignity of a gentlewoman. Nevertheless, all objects of taste 
 and luxm-y, all that delights the sense, had been carefully 
 weeded out of the grim, bare dwelling. And what company 
 my grandmother kept ! It was a motley crew of preachers 
 and missionaries, trades-people and cripples — the women 
 dressed in rusty bombazine and drab gingham — the men 
 attired in greasy black suits, with dingy white neckties — all 
 gifted with a sanctimonious snuffle, all blessed by nature 
 with shiny foreheads and clammy hands, all a\'id for buttered 
 toast and muffins, all fawning on the well-connected gentle- 
 woman, whose wealth, though moderate, possessed considerable 
 attractions, and was freely drawn upon. 
 
 I often went to stay with my grandmother when circum- 
 stances, generally some infectious ailment in our nursery, 
 made it desirable that I should be away from home. So I had 
 plenty of opportunities for studying these strange people, and 
 appreciating the marvellous figure which that formidable old 
 lady, aristocratic to the backbone and terribly ill-tempered, 
 cut among them. 
 
 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 
 chemist from Broad Mead uplifted his nasal voice in petitions 
 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 Deborah and Dorcas. My father was compared 
 to Naaman, who refused to bathe in Jordan — Jordan being 
 Bethesda, or the meeting-house of the Plymouth Brethren. 
 
 Sometimes I was taken to Bethesda, a doleful place, which 
 brought no healing to my soul, but seemed to me a pool of 
 stagnant pietism, and turbid middle-class Philistinism. This 
 chapel did not, however, afflict me so grievously as the Blind 
 Asylum. Partly, perhaps, because I knew it less, and it 
 always had a kind of novelty. Partly because nothing which
 
 1848-51 CHILDHOOD 13 
 
 my grandmother touched was wholly common-place or sordid. 
 I think, too, that I was even then capable of appreciating the 
 ardent faith and powerful intellect of George Miiller, who 
 preached there, and who founded the celebrated Orphanage at 
 Horfield, near Bristol. 
 
 My grandmother naturally made a strong point of family 
 prayers. She delighted in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, 
 the minatory chapters 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 hearing nothing of the Gospel, or the love of Christ 
 for the whole human race, either in her readings from Scripture 
 or in the extempore prayers which followed. 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. 
 
 She had one redeeming quality of great price. That was 
 her love of flowers. The public garden of the Lower Crescent 
 flourished under her assiduous care ; and the small plot 
 therein which was her own particular property abounded with 
 old-fashioned plants — grape hyacinths and double primroses, 
 auriculas and polyanthuses and oxlips, pyrus japonicus and 
 ribes and gum cistus, with its papery stained petals, heavy- 
 scented jessamine, and burly cabbage-roses. 
 
 My grandmother was a thorough Abdy, subject to chronic 
 insomnia, and irritable to the highest degree. She lived alone 
 with two servants, in a tolerably large four-storied house. 
 She slept upon the second floor, and no one was allowed to 
 inhabit the third. When I was thei-e I occupied a bedroom 
 next the drawing-room, on the first flooi-. There was no living 
 creature except a cat and cockroaches in the house below me. 
 Between me and the servants slept the imposing old lady in 
 her solitude, and the whole habitation during the long night 
 hours resounded to my fancy with the doleful litany of ' Thus 
 saith the Lord : Woe, woe lo th{! ungodly.' It may be 
 imagined how prolific of nightmares No. 14 Lower Crescent 
 was for me.
 
 14 JOHN ABDINGTON SYMONDS 1848-51 
 
 Some of my father's relatives were settled in Bristol, Clifton, 
 and the neighbourhood. I will now narrate what seems to 
 me at all noteworthy regarding my paternal kith. They were 
 excellent folk, distinguished by the virtues of the backbone of 
 the English nation — the great middle class. They also shared 
 its faults — faults inseparable from a Nonconformist ancestry 
 of several generations, complicated by ineradicable family 
 pride. How this pride had formed itself, I am incapable of 
 saying. They knew little about what is really interesting in 
 their genealogy. A tradition survived of ancient gentry, 
 sacrificed to a religious and political creed. They were proud 
 of being members of a family which had relinquished the 
 world and dedicated all its energies during two centuries to the 
 maintenance of an ideal. How narrow the ideal was, and how 
 inconsistent vnth the progress of modern thought it had 
 become, they did not stop to consider. 
 
 My father was a vara avis in this family. They looked 
 upon him with suspicion, modified by respect and admiration. 
 Intellectually he had joined the ranks of progress, and belonged 
 to the age of widening thought. Morally he held -with them, 
 and exemplified in his own life what was best and noblest in 
 the family tradition. To keep himself unspotted by the world, 
 to admit no transaction with base motives, to live purely and 
 act uprightly, to follow honour, to postpone mundane and 
 selfish interests to duty, to deal mercifully, sympathetically, 
 tenderly, justly with his brother men, to be unsparing in con- 
 demnation of rebellious evil, painstaking and long-suffering 
 Avith struggling good, these were the principles which ruled his 
 conduct. He transfigured in himself the inheritance he had 
 derived from six generations of Puritan ancestors, and he 
 retained something of their rigidity. But he also felt the 
 influence of the age in which he lived. He was open at all 
 pores to culture, to art, to archaeology, to science, to literature. 
 In a large and liberal sense, he yielded his spirit up to beaut}', 
 and imbibed the well-springs of modern philosophy. Judged 
 by the narrow standard of his kindred, he was unsound on 
 doctrine, dangerously allied with the revolutionary forces of 
 the century. They not unnaturally regarded him as a bird of
 
 1848-51 CHILDHOOD 16 
 
 different feather from themselves ; and, while they looked up 
 to him as the mainstay of their fortunes, the most eminent 
 example of the vigour of their race, they felt a certain aloofness 
 from this eagle born in the hencoop. 
 
 A son cannot speak adequately about his father. There is a 
 certain impiety in formulating sentences about the author of 
 our being and the moulder of our character ; though I cannot 
 express the truth of -what I feel, it is possible for me to state 
 the mature opinion that my father typified an exceptionally 
 interesting moment of English evolution. He had abandoned 
 the narrow standpoint of Nonconformist or Evangelical ortho- 
 doxy, but he retained what was ethically valuable in the 
 religious tradition. He opened his mind to every influence of 
 knowledge and of culture. He relinquished nothing which 
 affected character and principle. In this way he formed a link 
 between the past and the future, attaining to an almost perfect 
 harmony of conservative and liberal ideas. I, the product of a 
 younger period, regard his attitude with reverent admiration. 
 I have been unable to preserve the equilibrium which he 
 maintained, and which appears to me the flower of human 
 virtue. He helped to liberate my spirit, and, starting from the 
 point which he reached, I have been carried further, not so 
 wisely, not to a result so mellow, so morally and aesthetically 
 beautiful. We dare not regret the inevitable, we are impotent 
 to strive with fate. What I am, is what I had to be. But 
 these reflections do not prevent me from recording the con- 
 viction that my father was a man of plastically noble character 
 — plastic in the sense ascribed by Hegel to that word — all 
 functions of his nature meeting in a well-strung symphony 
 which made the powerful yet kindly- tempered personality he 
 had. 
 
 His constitution favoured liini, perliaps. The serious 
 obligations of his life, the duty of working for his family, 
 lielped him. And it must not be forgotten that his self- 
 emancipation from the narrowing conditions of his earlier 
 environment, absorbed a large pai-t of his oiergy. This is no 
 deduction from his merit. It only serves to show how natural 
 bias and circumstance contributed to make him the line
 
 16 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1848-51 
 
 specimen of English manhood, in the second half of the 
 nineteenth century, which he became. 
 
 How I, the son of such a father, came to be what I am, is 
 a problem I must leave to Francis Gallon and the students of 
 heredity. Of my propensities, of my sensibilities, of my 
 audacities, he had no share. They were inborn in me. 
 
 Two of his near relatives had helped to form my father's 
 character ; these were his own father and his great-uncle, Dr. 
 John Addington, a courtly and stately old gentleman, who 
 lived at Ashley Court on the northern side of Bristol. It was 
 mainly by Dr. Addington's advice that my father settled in 
 that city. Dr. Addington belonged to the small school of 
 advanced thinkers who formed themselves in England on the 
 type of the French philosophers and Hume and Hartley. He 
 boasted of ha\ing been present at the Bastille dinner. He 
 was a friend of Rammohoun Roy. He corresponded ^vith the 
 leading Liberals in politics, rehgion, and philosophy. His 
 carriage, conversation, and deportment combined aristocratic 
 hauteur with the sarcastic wit and frankness of expression 
 which characterised professed freethinkers at the beginning of 
 the nineteenth century. This was remarkable in the case of a 
 man whose father was a non-juror and Nonconformist minister, 
 who claimed kinship with Lord Sidmouth, and who had 
 acquired a moderate fortune by the practice of medicine in 
 London. He had no children ; and after his decease this 
 branch of the Addington family was represented by my 
 father. 
 
 The gradual emergence from narrow intellectual conditions 
 in a Puritan pedigree is always interesting. We see the 
 process going forward in the case of Quakers, and of Dissenters 
 who have acquired importance at the present time. The 
 annals of my own family furnish an excellent example. When 
 I broke up our home on Clifton Hill in 1881, I deUberately 
 burned the correspondence of five generations — that is to say, 
 the letters of my grandfather and of his immediate ancestors 
 through four descents. I had two good reasons at the time 
 for doing this. One was that I did not know where to deposit 
 these bulky documents, some of which contained matters too
 
 1848-51 CHILDHOOD 17 
 
 personal for publication or for transference to any public 
 library. The other was that the perusal of them left a deeply 
 painful impression on my mind. The intense pre-occupation 
 with so-called spiritual interests ; the suffocating atmosphere 
 of a narrow sect resembling that of a close parlour ; the grim, 
 stern dealing with young souls not properly convinced of sin ; 
 the unnatural admixture of this other-worldliness with mundane 
 marrying and giving in marriage and professional affairs, 
 caught me by the throat and throttled me. I could not bear 
 to think that my own kith and kin, the men and women who 
 had made me, lived in this haunted chamber, from which 
 'eternity's sunrise,' the Hooding radiance of Nature's light, 
 seemed ruthlessly excluded. So I committed an act of 
 vandalism, whereof I am now half-repentant and half-proud. 
 No doubt those documents, carefully sifted by successive 
 members of the family from other papers of less moment in 
 their eyes, epitomised the spiritual archives of a race who 
 scorned their ancient or decaying gentry, and who boasted — I 
 remember the phrase in one of those letters — that they had 
 been ' renowned for their piety through two centuries.' This, 
 by the way, was written l)y the head of the family about 1830 
 to one of its younger members, who innocently asked for 
 information about such insignificant trifles as Sir Richard 
 Fit/.-Sinion, K.G., temp. Edward TIL, and the quartering of 
 Mainwaring. He was told that seats and crowns in the 
 heavenly -Jerusalem had far more value, and were far more 
 iliflficult to win, than coronets or garters bestowed by kings, or 
 than arms inscribed upon the heralds' books by Clarencieux. 
 An undoubted truth. The man who penned those sentences 
 of scornful rebuke displayed no ignoble pride. Yet he was 
 proud and stubborn to the backbone in his unworldliness ; and 
 if I have any grit in me, I owe it to this proud humility of my 
 forefathers. 
 
 This brings me to speak of my gi-andfathcr, John Symonds 
 of Oxford, who was the first to react against the hereditary 
 naiTOwness of the family creed. Remaining a Dissentei-, he 
 became in mature life what may best be described as a 
 Christian Stoic. Tie was a good Latin scholar, and wrote 
 
 c
 
 18 JOHX ADDING TON SYMONDP 1848-51 
 
 voluminous diaries and meditations in the style of Seneca. 
 Not an elastic or optimistic nature — on the contrary, rigid and 
 circumscribed, depressed by a melancholy temperament and by 
 the gloom of Calvinism, which assumed in him the form of 
 philosophical fatalism. This comparative disengagement from 
 sectarian doctrine, combined with the study of the classics and 
 of English thought — from Bacon through Locke to Hume 
 and Adam Smith — formed a type of character well calculated 
 to start my father upon his own path of emancipation. A 
 SDvere uncompromising sense of duty, a grim incapability of any 
 transactions with the world, marked my grandfather out as the 
 lineal and loyal descendant of his Puritan ancestors. These 
 moral qualities were transmitted to my father. In my father 
 they became transfigured and spiritualised. The advanced 
 ground reached by my father was the soil in which I grew up. 
 These three generations of men — my grandfather, my father, 
 and myself — correspond to the succession of ^Eschylus, 
 Sophocles, and Euripides, to the transition from early pointed 
 Gothic, through Decorated, to Flamboyant architecture. 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. 
 
 My grandfather left Oxford and came to live with his 
 daughter, Mrs. James Nash, at Cossington Villa, Clifton. He 
 soon proposed to teach me Latin. I began to learn this 
 language before I was five years old, and can remember declin- 
 ing some Latin nouns to my father on my fifth birthday. It 
 was rather a long walk for a little boy from Berkeley Square 
 to Cossington Villa, which stood in its own garden not far 
 from Buckingham Chapel. 
 
 The grammar used for instructing me in Latin was, so far 
 as I can remember, one by Arnold. When we came to the 
 doctrine of the potential and subjunctive moods, I could not 
 comprehend the rules, and refused to learn them by rote. 
 Considering that I was an extremely docile and timid child, 
 this argued an extraordinary amount of intellectual repugnance.
 
 1848-51 CHCLDHOOD 19 
 
 My grandfather declared that he would not teach me any 
 more ; I was incorrigibly stupid or obstinate. I had to write 
 an apologetical letter, which I remem])er doing with mighty 
 solemnity and sense of importance, propped up on cushions at 
 a bia: hia:h. table. On these conditions he took me back as 
 a dull but repentant pupil. 
 
 The difficulty of grasping abstract statements made learning 
 very irksome to me. Some branches of knowledge I wholly 
 failed to acquire. Among these was arithmetic. I could not 
 do the sums, because the rules, which were never properly 
 explained, oppressed me with a nightmare sense of unreality. 
 Even when I got hold enough upon them to apply them, I was 
 sceptical about the result. The whole process seemed to me 
 like a piece of jugglery, which offended my intelligence. 
 Euclid, on the other hand, offered no obstacles. Geometry 
 gave me pleasure by its definite objecti\'ity, clear chains of 
 reasoning, and direct appeal to the senses. I could remember 
 the figures, and work a theme or problem out with ease. 
 I always learned best through the eyes, and I am convinced 
 that a tutor who discerned this bias in me for the concrete 
 could have taught me anything in mathematics. 
 
 As time went on, I used to take country walks with my 
 grandfather and cousins. What he told me then — the names 
 of plants, and the Latin words for things we saw — I have never 
 forgotten. 
 
 During our excursions on the Downs, nature began to 
 influence my imagination in a peculiar way. When the light 
 of evening was falling, or when we found ourselves in some 
 secluded corner, with a prospect toward the Bristol Channel 
 and the Welsh hills, I passed from the sense of a tangible 
 present into a dream. This was a very definite phase of 
 experience, approaching hypnotism in its character. I partly 
 dreaded the subjugation of my conscious will, and partly looked 
 forward to it with a thrill of exquisite anticipation. I learned 
 to recognise the symptoms of this on-coming mood. But 
 I could not induce it by an act of volition. It needed some 
 specific touch of the external world upon my sensibility. 
 
 I am not sure whether this was the rudimentary stage of 
 
 c2
 
 20 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1848-51 
 
 anothei- form of self-absorption, which afterwards, for many 
 years, recurred at intervals, giving me more of serious disturb- 
 ance than of pleasure when it came. That was a kind of 
 trance. Suddenly, at church, or in company, or when I was 
 reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, 
 I felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession 
 of my mind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and dis- 
 appeared in a series of raj)id sensations, which resembled the 
 awakening from anaesthetic influence. One reason why I dis- 
 liked this kind of trance was that I could not describe it to 
 myself. I cannot even now find words to render it intelligible, 
 though it is probable that many readers of these pages will 
 recognise the state in question. It consisted in a gradual but 
 swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and 
 the multitudinous factors of experience which seemed 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 consciousness acquired 
 intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, 
 abstract self. The universe became without form and void of 
 content. But self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, 
 feeling the most poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it 
 seemed, to find existence break as breaks a bubble round about 
 it. And what then ? The apprehension of a coming dis- 
 solution, the grim conviction that this state was the last state 
 of the 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 return to ordinary conditions of 
 sentient existence began by my first recovering the iwwor 
 of touch, and then by the gradual though rapid influx of 
 familiar impressions and diurnal interests. At last I i'elt my- 
 self once more a human being ; and though the riddle of what 
 is meant by life remained unsolved, I was thankful for this 
 return from the abyss — this deliverance from so awful an 
 initiation into the mysteries of scepticism. 
 
 This trance recurred with diminishing frequency until I 
 reached the age of twenty-eight. Though I have felt its
 
 1848-51 CHILDHOOD 21 
 
 approaches often, I have not experienced it fully now for many 
 years. It served to impress upon my gromng nature the 
 phantasmal unreahty of all the circumstances which contribute 
 to a merely phenomenal consciousness. Often have I asked 
 myself with anguish, on waking from that formless state of 
 denuded, keenly sentient being, which is the unreahty ? — 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 conven- 
 tionahty '? Again, are men the factors of some dream, the 
 dream-hke unsubstantiahty of which they comprehend at such 
 eventful moments ? What would happen if the final stage of 
 the trance were reached ? — if, after the abduction of phenomenal 
 conditions beyond recovery, the denuded sense of self should 
 pass away in a paroxysm of doubt ? AYould that be death and 
 entire annihilation ? Would it be absorption into the real Ufe 
 beyond phenomena? Could another garment of sensitive 
 experience clothe again that germ of self which recognised the 
 unsubstantiahty of all that seemed to make it human ? 
 
 It is obvious that I am straining the resources of language at 
 my disposal in the eilbrt to adumbrate the exact nature of this 
 trance. I find it impossible, however, to render an adequate 
 account of the initiation. Nor can I properly describe the 
 permanent effect produced upon my mind by the contrast 
 Ijctwoen tliis exceptional condition of my consciousness and 
 the daily experiences — physical, moral, intellectual, emotional, 
 practical — with which I compared it. Like other psychical 
 states, it lies beyond the province of language. 
 
 When I lust read Pindar, his exclamation — 
 
 iyrafj.epoi ' ti 6e ti9 ; ti 8" ov rts ; CTKtas ofap avOpwiros — 
 
 ' Things of a day. What is a man ? AVhat is a man not '? 
 A di'eam about a shadow is man ' — 
 
 awoke in me reverberating echoes. This was for me no casual 
 poet's question, no figure of rhetoric let fall to point the moral 
 of man's fleeting day on earth. The lyric cry pierced to the 
 very core and mai-row of my soul. 
 
 When I was eight years old, my father sent me to a tutor,
 
 22 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1848-61 
 
 the Rev. William Knight. This gentleman kept a school. 
 His house in Buckingham Villas (now part of the Pembroke 
 Eoad) was at least a mile from Berkeley Square. I used to 
 perform the journey, going and coming, four times in a work- 
 ing day. The institution was "probably not worse than the 
 majority of private schools. How bad it was I dare not say. 
 Mr. Knight had little to do with the teaching. The boys — 
 several of them sons of Somersetshire gentlemen, others like 
 me, day scholars — did pretty much as they liked. Bullying of 
 a peculiarly offensive sort took place there. But I am bound 
 to say that I was neither bullied nor contaminated in my 
 morals. I think that Mr. Knight, owing special obligations to 
 my father, insisted on my being treated with more considera- 
 tion than the other pupils. 
 
 It was rather a via dolorosa from Berkeley Square to 
 Buckingham Villas. The road led through a street of poor 
 people, among whom I became interested in a family of 
 mulattoes, the children of a negro sailor and a Bristol woman. 
 A narrow alley led to the Roman Catholic Church, then half 
 finished ; and this alley was always adorned on both sides 
 with obscene or blasphemous graffiti. Emerging at the top, I 
 passed through some dismal, decaying terraces and villas, and 
 then took a straight line along decent dwelling-houses, with a 
 great field on the right hand, until I eventually arrived at the 
 school. The whole line of march recurs to my mind's eye ; 
 but I am characteristically oblivious of the names of places. 
 
 Just before I reached Buckingham Villas there was a tall 
 house on the right, cresting the rising slope, and looking down 
 upon the large field I have mentioned. I think it was also 
 called Buckingham something. There was a grating in the 
 basement floor of this house, which gave light to a cellar of 
 some sort. I fancied that a magician hved in the semi-sub- 
 terranean apartment. I used to see him squatting by a fire 
 upon the floor, raking up embers, and stirring ingredients in a 
 caldron. He became a positive reality to my imagination ; 
 but I never attempted to converse with him, and did not feel 
 sure whether he was a wizard or an alchemist. The alternative 
 puzzled me.
 
 1848-51 CHILDHOOD 23 
 
 About this figment of my fancy I spoke freely at home, 
 and proposed to take my sisters to watch the magician at work. 
 My aunt, however, looked seriously on the matter, and re- 
 quested me not to tell lies. The same thing happened when 1 
 arrived one evening in a state of considerable excitement at 
 home, and declared that I had been attacked by robbers on the 
 way. The artlessness of my narration must have proved its 
 worthlessness. I was soundly scolded. Yet neither the 
 magician nor the robber are less real to my memory than most 
 of the people who surrounded me at that time. It was right 
 to treat me harshly about such waking dreams. I learned in 
 this way to distinguish what we call true from what we call 
 false. 
 
 To my father I owe a debt of gratitude for his sympathetic 
 treatment of quite a different occurrence. I sold my Latin 
 Dictionary to a comrade called Emerson for sixpence. When I 
 was asked at home where I had lost it, I said that I did not know. 
 Stings of conscience made me speedily confess the truth, and 
 I did so with no little trepidation to my father in his library. 
 He spoke gently and wisely on the topic, pointing out that lies 
 were not only wrong but ignoble. What he then said touched 
 my sense of honour, and struck my intelligence. I was 
 thenceforward scrupulous about telling the exact truth. 
 
 The occurrences I have recently related seem to me im- 
 portant in the development of my character. They saved me 
 from becoming a visionary, to which I was too prone by 
 temperament. They forced me to draw a sharp line of dis- 
 tinction between what happened in my dreaming self and what 
 impinged upon my senses from outside. They revealed 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. In other words, I became capable of 
 discriminating between fancies and things, and I learned to 
 abhor and scorn mendacity.
 
 24 JOHN ADDINGTON SYxMOXDS 1851-54 
 
 CHAPTEE II 
 
 BOYHOOD 
 
 Change to Clifton Hill House— Home life — Evening readings — Clifton 
 described — Its effect upon his growth — Early education— At his 
 tutor's — Learns Greek — Composes English verses— The legend of 
 Apollo — Boyish games — Illness — Sent to Torquay — Fishing for sea- 
 weed—His governess, Mdlle. Girard — Sleep-walking — Eecurrent 
 dreams — Early perceptions of beauty — Greek statuary and picture- 
 books — Landscape — Love of Nature — Mr. Vigor's portrait — Sensi- 
 tiveness — His psychical condition — Mdlle. Girard's account of him. 
 
 Up ^ to this point I have recorded memories of my life before 
 the age of ten, admitting only those which can be referred 
 by some clear local indication to that period. I now pass from 
 childhood to the first period of boyhood. The transition is 
 defined by the change of residence from 7 Berkeley Square to 
 Chfton Hill House. 
 1851 This stage, which extended from June 1851 until May 
 LS51, was one of greatly increased happiness. My health 
 improved. We were nearer the country, and our new house 
 satisfied my sense of what is beautiful. I had a pony and 
 began to ride. This I enjoyed, though I did not become 
 a good horseman, mainly, I think, because I was allowed to go 
 out riding alone before I had been trained by a groom. 
 
 My youngest sister Charlotte and I became great friends, 
 and we both profited by the companionship of her governess, 
 Mdlle. Sophie Girard, of whom I shall have more to say. We 
 three formed a little coterie within the household. 
 
 Hitherto, so far as people were concerned, my inner life 
 had been almost a blank. 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 18ol-o4 BOYHOOD 25 
 
 It is a great misfortune for a boy to lose his mother so 
 early as I did ; and my father was so busy in his profession 
 that he had very little time to bestow on me. Yet even in my 
 childhood his strong and noble character, his sense of honour 
 and duty, and his untiring energy impressed me. The drives 
 I took mth him were not thi'own away. In the evenings also, 
 when he had a spare hour, he iised to read to us, choosing 
 ballads, portions of Scott's poems, passages from Hood's ' Miss 
 Kilmansegg,' stories from Hans Andersen, adapted to our 
 intelligence. These readings stimulated my literary instincts. 
 
 So far as my father was concerned, I grew up in an atmo- 
 sphere of moral tension, and came to regard work as the 
 imperative duty imposed on human beings. 
 
 It was a great day for all of us when my father announced, 
 on one June morning, that he had bought Clifton Hill House, 
 and drove us in his carriage to visit our future home. 
 
 This house had been built by a Bristol merchant named 
 Paul Fisher. It carries on its garden front the date 1747, 
 together ^^^th the coat of Fisher empaling what other arms 
 I know not. Paul Fisher himself sleeps in Clifton church- 
 yard, and the vestibule to what is now the parish church 
 contains his defrauded and neglected monument. 
 
 At the time when this substantial piece of early Georgian 
 architecture was erected Clifton still remained a country 
 village. Paul Fisher's habitation had no rivals in antiquity 
 but the Church House and the ]\Ianor House, none in stateli- 
 ness except the fine suburban villa of the Goldney family. At 
 this i^eriod — a period anterior to ' Humphrey Clinker ' and 
 ' Evelina,' novels which have made the Hot Wells of Clifton 
 famous in literature — Bristol merchants had begun to plant a 
 few rare mansions in the immediate neighbourhood of the city, 
 while the overflow of Bath fasliion crowded the incommodious 
 lodgings which nestled beneath St. Vincent's rock upon the 
 sheltered banks ot Anoii. 
 
 In those days Clifton must have been beautiful and wild 
 indeed. The few housc^s oi the gentry clustered around the 
 humble village church— not that ugly building which now 
 perpetuates the bad taste of the incipient (.Jothic revival, the
 
 26 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1851-54 
 
 dismal piety of the Simeon trustees — but a rustic West of 
 England chapel, with narrow mndows and low sloping roof. 
 Grass -fields spread around this church, open to clear heavens 
 and pure breezes from the Bristol Channel. The meadows 
 merged in heathy downs, stretching along the Avon at the 
 height of some three hundred feet above the water, until the 
 land again broke into copse and pasture, sweeping with gentle 
 crests and undulations to the estuary of the Severn. 
 
 At a considerable distance below the village slept the great 
 city, which, next to London, was still at that epoch the most 
 important town in England. Bristol stands at the junction 
 of the rivers Frome and Avon, which from this point flow 
 together through a winding defile of high limestone cliffs to 
 the Severn. Sea-waters from the channel washed its walls, 
 and tided merchant vessels to the quays of antique commerce. 
 They brought with them the sugar and the spices, the tobacco 
 and rare timber of Virginia and the Indies, to be stored in the 
 warehouses of the city wharves. When Paul Fisher gazed 
 from the windows of his new-built mansion over an expanse 
 of verdure, he saw the streets and squares of the red-roofed 
 town threaded with glittering water-ways, along which lay 
 ocean-going ships, their tall masts vying with the spires and 
 towers of clustered churches. St. Mary de Redclyfie's broken 
 spire, the square tower of the cathedral (that old Abbey Church 
 of the Augustine monks, enriched by Barons of Berkeley 
 Castle), the sharp shaft of St. Nicholas, the slender column of 
 St. Stephen, surveyed from the altitude of Clifton Hill, were 
 all embedded in groves of limes and elms and masts with 
 pennons waving from the top. 
 
 CliftonjHill House, at the present day, turns a grim grey 
 frontage to the road. It is a ponderous square mansion, built 
 for perpetuity, with walls three feet in thickness, faced with 
 smooth Bath stone. But, passing to the southern side, one 
 still enjoys the wonderful prospect which I have described. 
 Time has done much to spoil the landscape. Mean dwellings 
 have clustered round the base of Brandon Hill, and crept along 
 the slopes of Clifton. The city has extended on the further 
 side towards Bedminster. Factory chimneys, with their filth
 
 1851-54 BOYHOOD 27 
 
 and smoke, have saddened the simple beauty of the town and 
 dulled the brightness of its air. But the grand features of 
 Nature remain. The rolling line of hills from Lansdown over 
 Bath, through Dundry, with its solitary church-tower, to Ashton 
 guarding the gorge of Avon, presents a free and noble space 
 for cloud shadows, a splendid scene for the display of sunrise. 
 The water from the Severn still daily floods the river-beds of 
 Frome and Avon ; and the ships still come to roost, like ocean- 
 birds, beside the ancient churches. ^loreover, the trees which 
 Paul Fisher planted in his pleasaunce have grown to a great 
 height, so that a sea of many-coloured foliage waves beneath 
 the windows of his dwelling-house. 
 
 On that eventful June morning, I entered the solemn front 
 door, traversed the echoing hall, vaulted and floored with solid 
 stone, and emerged upon the garden at the further end. An 
 Italian double flight of balus traded steps, largely designed, 
 gives access to the gravelled terrace which separates the house 
 from the lawn. For us it was like passing from the prose of 
 fact into the poetry of fairyland. 
 
 The garden, laid out by Paul Fisher in 1747, had not been 
 altered in any important particular, except that a large piece 
 of it was cut away at the bottom to build a row of houses 
 called Bellevue Terrace. Four great tulip-trees, covered with 
 golden blossoms, met our eyes at four points of vantage in the 
 scheme. Between them, on either hand, rose two gigantic 
 copper-beeches, richly contrasted with the bright green of the 
 tulip-trees. Eight majestic elms, four on each side, guarded 
 the terrace. They dated from an older period than the 
 foundation of the dwelling-house. The grove, which clustered 
 round the central grass-plot, was further diversified by ilexes 
 and mulberry trees, wych-elms and pear trees, a fragile ailanthus 
 and a feathery acacia, with cypresses from the black boughs 
 of which the clambering roses fell in showers. Sycamores, 
 beeches, and walnuts formed a leafy background to these choicer 
 growths, and masked the ugly frontage of Bellevue. 
 
 Two ponds, quaintly enclosed with wired railings, inter- 
 rupted at proper intervals the slope of soft green turf. Each 
 had a fountain in its midst, the one shaped like a classic urn ,
 
 28 .rOHX ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1851-54 
 
 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. Birds were singing, as they only 
 sing in old town gardens, a chorus of blackbirds, thrushes and 
 finches. Rooks cawed from the elms above. The whole scene 
 was ennobled by a feeling of respect, of merciful abstention 
 from superfluous meddling. When Paul Fisher planned his 
 pleasure ground he meant it, according to the taste of that 
 period, to be artificial, and yet to vie with Nature. Now Nature 
 had asserted her own sway, retaining through that century of 
 wayward growth something which still owed its charm to 
 artifice. 
 
 Although I am speaking of my home, and must of necessity 
 be partial, I do not think I violate the truth when I say, that 
 this garden possessed a special grace and air of breeding, which 
 lent distinction to the dignified but rather stolid house above. 
 It was old enough to have felt ' the unimaginable touch of 
 time,' and yet not old or neglected enough to have fallen into 
 decay. Left alone, it had gained a character of wildness, and 
 yet kind touches had been given which preserved it from squalor. 
 Wealthy folk had always inhabited the mansion, and their 
 taste respected the peculiar beauty of the place. Afterwards, 
 at New College and Ht. John's, among the Oxford College 
 gardens, I recognised the same charm. But the distinctive 
 feature of the Clifton Hill garden was that the ground fell 
 rapidly away from the terrace and the house, so tliat the 
 windows above enjoyed a vast prospect across its undulating 
 roof of verdure to the towered city, the glimpses of the Avon, 
 the sea-going ships, and, far away beyond all that, to the hills 
 of Bath, and the long stretch of Dundry. It was a remarkable 
 home for a dreamy town-bred boy of ten to be transported 
 into. 
 
 On that eventful morning the air hung heavy with a scent 
 of hidden musk. The broad flower-beds upon the terrace 
 and along the walls were a tangle of old-fashioned herbs in 
 bloom — mulberry-coloured scabious, love-in-idleness, love-in-a-
 
 1851-54 BOYHOOD 29 
 
 mist, love-lies-bleeding, devil-in-a-busb, bollybocks, carnations, 
 creeping-jenny, damask and cabbage, and York and Lancaster 
 roses. Tbe mingled perfume of musk and rose pervades my 
 memory wben I think of that day ; and when I come by 
 accident upon the scent of musk in distant places, I am again 
 transported to the fairyland of boyhood. The throat-notes of 
 thrush and blackbird, the music of tinkling fountains, the 
 di'owsy rhythm of hammers struck on timber in the city dock- 
 yards, blend in my recollection with pure, strong slumberous 
 summer sunlight and rich colours. 
 
 There was much in the mansion itself which satisfied my 
 craving for architectural solidity and stateliness. The pedi- 
 ment of stone above our front-door in Berkeley Square had, as 
 I have already mentioned, consoled my childish senses. The 
 style of that detail was here expanded through the whole 
 substantial edifice. The rusticated work upon the spacious 
 massive basements, the balustraded staircases descendinsr to 
 the terrace, the huge balls of Bath stone placed at proper 
 intervals upon the lower line of office-buildings, the well- 
 proportioned if too lofty rooms, the dignified waste of useful 
 space in the long passages ; all these characteristics of the 
 Georgian manner gave satisfaction to my instinct of what is 
 liberal in art, though of course they could not feed my fancy. 
 I did not then reflect how gloomy that square house might be, 
 how prosaic the inspiration of its builder was, how like prisons 
 the upper rooms with their high windows are, and how melan- 
 choly the vast prospect over city, sky, and stretching hills 
 would afterwards appear to me in moods of weariness. 
 
 Then there were stablos with hay-lofts, and a paved yard, 
 where my father generally kept eight horses ; a summer house, 
 upon the wall of which vines clambered and nectarines ripened ; 
 a kitchen-garden full of strawberries and cun-ant-bushes, 
 apricots, and plums and peaches. The top of the house itself 
 formed a capital playground for us children. A )'ambling attic, 
 which we called the loft, stretched away into mysterious 
 recesses and dark corners. Tn some of these oljscure chambers 
 cisterns were hidden, which supplied the house with rain 
 water ; from the narrow windows of others we could clamber
 
 30 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1851-54 
 
 out upon the voof, the sloping gables of which were covered 
 with solid lead, and fenced about with broad slabs of rough 
 clean chiselled stone. From this height the eye swept spaces 
 of the starry heavens at night ; by day, town, tower, and hill, 
 wood, field, and river lay bathed in light, and flecked with 
 shadows of the clouds. 
 
 The transition from Berkeley Square to Clifton Hill Honsp 
 contributed greatly, I am sure, to make me what I am. I 
 cannot, of course, say what I should have become had we 
 remained in our old home ; but I am certain that the new one 
 formed my character and taste at a period when youth is most 
 susceptible. My latent aesthetic sensibilities were immediately 
 and powerfully stimulated. 
 
 Some years after the time of which I am writing, I brought 
 a Balliol friend to stay vnth me at Clifton. On taking leave at 
 the end of the visit, he remarked, ' I understand you now, and 
 know what it is that made you what you are.' He was right, 
 I believe. Places exercise commanding influence in the 
 development of certain natures. Mine is one of them, and 
 Clifton, with the house we lived in, had a magic of its own. 
 Thirty-nine years have elapsed since I first went to live at 
 Clifton Hill. The place has changed to such an extent that 
 any one who knows it now might be excused for thinking I 
 am rhapsodising. He must bear in mind, however, that there 
 were few buildings then between the parish church and 
 Durdham Downs. The suburb which has grown up round the 
 College was a tract of fields, at the end of which lay the Zoo- 
 logical Gardens. Pembroke Road formed part of a narrow 
 footway between quickset hedges, bearing the agreeable title of 
 Gallows Lane. The Tyburn of old Bristol occupied a plot of 
 ground at the head of it toward the downs. Coal-smoke had 
 not contaminated the air to any appreciable extent. The sea 
 and river-fogs of November were fleecy-white. No ironworks 
 defaced the vale of Ashton. The thousands of middle-class 
 houses which now stretch from Clifton Church to Redland, 
 and which are crawling on from Redland to Westbury, were 
 then represented by two or three straggling terraces, by here 
 and there a villa enclosed in its own crofts and gardens, by the
 
 18ol-o4 BOYHOOD 31 
 
 long line of miscellaneous dwellings called ^^'hiteladies Road, 
 which extended from the top of Park Street to the sign of the 
 Black Boy, and there abruptly stopped before the silence 
 and the sohtude of the windy down. The downs, too, were wild, 
 heathy, and covered in the spring with flowers ; not, as now, a 
 kind of subm-ban park, but a real wilderness, a pleasure-ground 
 for the romantic soul. 
 
 My tutor, the Rev. William Knight, gave up his school, 
 and came to live at no great distance from our house. He 
 occupied a dreary abode in Wetherell Place ; the outer walls 
 rough-cast and painted a dull lilac ; standing in a stuffy plot 
 of shrubbery between a blank wall to the front and a tall row of 
 houses to the back. How any reasonable human being could 
 in Clifton — the very essence of which place was poetry in some 
 form or another — whether of the ancient town beside it, or of 
 the free nature on its northern borders — have selected to abide 
 in Wetherell Place, that region of shabby-genteel prose and 
 stifling dulness, I am not prepared to say. Probably there 
 were economical reasons, and social inducements, together 
 with conveniences of contigiiity to the Blind Asylum and 
 St. Michael's Church, which determined Mr. Knight in his 
 choice. 
 
 Mr. Knight could not be called an ideal tutor. He was 
 sluggish, and had no sympathy for boys. Yet he was a sound 
 scholar of the old type, and essentially a gentleman. He let 
 me browse, much as I liked, about the pastures of innocuous 
 Greek and Latin literature. He taught mo to write Latin 
 verses with facility. If I did not acquire elegance, that was 
 the defect of my own faculty for stylo. I think he might have 
 grounded mo better in grammar than he did ; and it would 
 have been an incalculable advantage to me if he had been able 
 to direct my keen, though latent, enthusiasm for books. In 
 this respect, I owe him one only debt of gratitude. Wc were 
 reading the sixth book of the ' Mneid.' He noticed what a deep 
 hold the description of Elysium took on my imagination, and 
 lent me Warburton's ' Divine Legation of Moses.' A chapter 
 in that book about the Mysteries opened dim and shadowy 
 vistas for my dreaming thoughts. I cannot remember any
 
 32 JOHN ABDTNGTON SYMONDS 1851-54 
 
 other instance of my tutor's touching the real spring of thirst 
 for knowledge in my nature. For the rest, he took care that 
 I should understand the Odes of Horace and be capable of 
 reproducing their various metres. This gave me a certain 
 advantage when I came to Harrow. 
 
 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 : 
 
 ^r] 8'teVat KOVfjw alavixinjTrjpL toiKws, 
 TrpwTOv vTnqvrjTTj, tov nep ^aptecrTaTT/ yj/3'>j. 
 
 The Greek in me awoke to that simple, and yet so splendid 
 vision of young manhood, ' In the first budding of the down on 
 lip and chin, when youth is at her loveliest.' The phrase had 
 all Greek sculpture in it. The overpowering 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 personages 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. 
 
 Somewhat later, I found another line which impressed me 
 powerfully, and unsealed hidden wells of different emotion. It 
 was in the Hippolytus of Euripides : 
 
 ■fj yXwcra ofjuit/jiO)^, tj oc cfiprjv dvoj/xoTos. 
 
 The sense of casuistry and criticism leapt into being at that 
 touch. I foresaw, in that moment, how pros and cons of 
 moral conduct would have to be debated, how every thesis 
 seeks antithesis and resolution in the mental sphere. 
 
 These were but vague awakenings of my essential self. For 
 the most part, I remained inactive, impotent, somnambulistic, 
 touching life at no edged point, very slowly defining the 
 silhouette of my eventual personality. 
 
 Walking to and fro between Chfton Hill and Wetherell 
 Place, I used to tell myself long classic stories, and to
 
 1851-54 BOYHOOD 33 
 
 impro^'ise nonsense verses on interminable themes. The 
 vehicle I used was chiefly blank verse or trochaics. I delighted 
 my sense of rhythm with the current of murmured sound. The 
 subject I chose for these peripatetic rhapsodies was the episode 
 of young Apollo, in his sojourn among mortals, as the hind of 
 King Admetus. What befell him there, I expanded into 
 nebulous epics of suffering and love, and sorrow-dimmed 
 deity involved with human sympathies. I declaimed the verse 
 sotto voce as I walked. But now I can recall no incidents in 
 the long poem, which, like a river, flowed daily, and might for 
 ever have flowed on. The kernel of my inspiration was that 
 radiant figure of the young Apollo, doomed to pass his time 
 with shepherds, serving them, and loving them. A luminous 
 haze of yearning emotion surrounded the god. His divine 
 beauty penetrated my soul and marrow. I stretched out my 
 arms to him in worship. It was I alone who knew him to be 
 Olympian, and I loved him because he was a hind who went 
 about the stables milking cows. I was, in fact, reading 
 myself into this fable of Apollo, and quite unconsciously, 
 as I perceive now, my day-dreams assumed an objective and 
 idealised form. Indeed, this preoccupation with the legend 
 of the discovered Phoebus casts vivid light upon my dumbly 
 growing nature. 
 
 It is singular that a boy should have selected any legend so 
 dim and subtle for treatment in the way I have desciibed. 
 But, what is far more curious, it seems that I was led by an 
 unerring instinct to choose a myth foreshadowing my peculiar 
 temperament and distant future. I have lived to realise that 
 obscure vision of my boyhood. Man loves man, and Nature ; 
 the pulse of human life, the contact with the genial eartli arc 
 the real things. Art must ever be but a shadow for truly 
 puissant individualities. In this way I have grown to think 
 and feel. And just for this reason, my boyish preoccupation 
 with the legend of Apollo in the stables of Admetus has 
 psychological significance. It shows liow early and instinctively 
 1 apprehended the truth, by the light of which I still live, that 
 a disguised goil, coniiiiiining with mortals, loving mortals and 
 beloved by them, is more beautiful, more desirable, more 
 
 D
 
 34 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1851-54 
 
 enviable, than the same god uplifted on the snow-wreaths 
 of Olympus, or the twin peaks of muse-haunted Parnassus. 
 
 Rightly or wrongly, the principles involved in that boyish 
 vision of Phoebus, the divine spirit serving and loving in plain 
 ways of pastoral toil, have ended by fashioning my course. It 
 has become my object to assimilate culture to the simplest 
 things in man's life, and to assume from human sympathy of 
 the crudest kind fuel and fire for the vivifying of ideas. By 
 means of this philosophy I have been enabled to revive from 
 mortal sickness, and what is perhaps more, to apprehend the 
 religious doctrine of democracy, the equality and homogeneity 
 of human beings, the divinity enclosed in all. It was not, 
 therefore, by accident, I think, that the prolonged daydream of 
 Apollo in exile haunted me during my somnambulistic boyhood. 
 Temperaments of my stamp come to themselves by broodings 
 upon fancies which prefigure the destiny in store for them, and 
 are in fact the symbols of their soul. 
 
 I took little pleasure in athletic sports of any kind. To 
 ramble over the downs and through the woods was enough for 
 me. I hated the exertion, rivalry, and noise of games. Want 
 of muscular vigour and timidity combined to make me solitary. 
 Yet I could run well, and jump standing the height of my own 
 shoulders. I liked riding also, but was neither a bold nor 
 expert horseman. 
 
 What I most enjoyed was leading a band of four boys, my 
 cousins, in wild scrambles over Durdham Downs, and on the 
 rocks that overhung the Avon. We played at defending and 
 attacking castles, which were located upon points of vantage 
 in the gully near the sea-walls and the steep descent of clifi" 
 beneath St. Vincent's rock. No harm came of these adventures, 
 although we defied each other to deeds of daring in places where 
 a fall would have been perilous exceedingly. Tired out and 
 panting with this kind of exercise, I used to fling myself upon 
 some grassy ledge among the lady's-bed-straw and blue hare- 
 bells, watching the ships coming floating down the Avon or 
 the jackdaws chattering in their ivy-curtained crannies. 
 
 For everything which I took up, whether study or amuse- 
 ment, I showed a languid dilettante interest, pursuing it without
 
 18.J1-54 BOYHOOD 35 
 
 energy or perseverance. Thus I played with an electrical 
 machine and microscope, collected flowers and dried them, 
 caught butterflies and pinned them upon corks ; but I was far 
 too dreamy and impatient to acquire any solid knowledge of 
 natural science. I crammed my memory with the names of 
 infusorial animalcules, sea-weeds, wild-flowers — a great many 
 of which still lie in the lumber-room of my brain. I got to 
 know the aspects of such things, and enjoyed the places where 
 I went to find my specimens. But of animal or vegetable 
 physiology I learned nothing. One reason was, perhaps, that 
 I had no one to teach me and no attractive text-books. The 
 real secret of my inefficiency lay, however, in want of ^^'ill and 
 liking for accurate study. I was a weakling in mind and body, 
 only half awake. 
 
 Early in the winter of one year I fell ill of chronic diarrhoea. 
 To this I had been subject at intervals from my earliest 
 infancy ; and now I poisoned myself by drinking some cheap 
 effervescing mixtures. My father sent me to stay with friends 
 at Torquay. They lived in a little cottage with a front garden 
 full of sweet-smelhng violets, fuchsias, and shrub veronicas 
 in bloom. I date a considerable mental progress from this 
 visit. There I learned the beauty of the sea — low tides and 
 pools upon the shore of Torbay. Dr. Tetley used to drive me 
 about the country in his carriage ; and a diminutive naturalist 
 was very kind to me. He took me with him out upon the reefs 
 to gather sea-weeds. I made a huge collection of such 
 things. 
 
 Even now I can remember the solemnity with "which my 
 friend exclaimed, when I hauled some spidery black weed out 
 of a pool, ' I do believe that you have captured Gigantea 
 Tcedii.' All through the remainder of the winter and spring, 
 after I returned to Clifton, hampers sent by a Torbay fisherman 
 used to arrive stuffed with the wrack of the shore. Charlotte, 
 Mdlle. Sophie Girard and I, divided the slimy mass into three 
 equal portions, floated our booty in three separate tubs, 
 and fished with eager fingers for Delesscria samjwinea, Padina 
 pavonia, or a fine specimen of Plocaria coccinea. 
 
 It was on my I'otiirn from this visit to Torquay that I first 
 
 D 2
 
 36 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1851-54 
 
 set eyes on Mdlle. Girard. She had arrived in my absence to 
 be my sisters' governess. They came back from a walk while I 
 was standing in the hall, between the dining-room and drawing- 
 room doors. Her bright face, rosy with the freshness of the 
 open air, her laughing eyes and abundance of glossy yellow 
 hair made a very pleasant impression on me. I felt at once 
 that she would be a great addition to our home circle ; and this 
 in truth she was, far more than I could then imagine. She 
 taught me German — the little German I know I owe entirely 
 to her. She had a gift for teaching, and was the first person 
 from whom I consciously learned anything whatsoever. 
 
 About this time I began to walk in my sleep. It seemed 
 to me that a corpse lay beside me in the bed. To escape from 
 it, I got up and roamed about the house ; but there were 
 corpses standing in the doorways as I hurried through the long 
 dark corridors. One night I wandered into the loft, and was 
 walking straight into an open cistern which collected the rain- 
 water from the roof, when I felt the hands of a great angel 
 with outspread wings laid upon my shoulders. For a moment 
 I woke up, and saw the moonlight glinting on the water 
 through some cranny. Then I fell asleep again, and returned 
 unconsciously to bed. Next morning my shins and thighs 
 were badly bruised, and the footman, who slept in the loft, 
 had a mysterious tale to tell, of a white being who had moved 
 about the furniture and boxes. It appears that the stupid 
 fellow had allowed himself actually to be shoved by me, bed 
 and all, from the door through which I passed into the remote 
 corner where the cistern lay. After this occurrence, my father 
 had me tied into bed by one of my ankles every night. When 
 the corpse came to expel me, I floundered on the floor until I 
 woke and crept back shivering between the sheets. This 
 Spartan discipline efi'ectually cured me of sleep-walking. 
 
 A recurrent dream of quite a new sort now visited my 
 slumbers. It was the beautiful face of a young man, with 
 large blue eyes and waving yellow hair which emitted a halo of 
 misty light. He bent down gazing earnestly till he touched 
 me. Then I woke and beheld the aureole fading away into 
 darkness.
 
 1851-54 BOYHOOD 37 
 
 Much might be written about the self-revealing influence 
 of dreams and the growth of the inner man in sleep. The 
 vision of ideal beauty, thus presented to me in slumber, 
 symbolised spontaneous yearnings deeply seated in my nature, 
 and prepared me to receive many impressions of art and 
 literature. 
 
 A photograph of the Praxitelean Cupid — 
 
 That most perfect of antiques 
 They call the Genius of the Vatican, 
 "\Miich seems too beauteous to endure itself 
 In this mixed world — 
 
 taught me to feel the secret of Greek sculpture. I used to 
 pore for hours together over the divine loveliness, while my 
 father read poetry aloud to us in the evenings. He did not 
 quite approve, and asked me why I would not choose some 
 other statue, a nymph or Hebe. Following the impressions 
 made by Shakespeare's Adljnis and the Homeric Hermes, 
 blending with the dream I have described, and harmonising 
 \\ith my myth of Phwbus in the sheepcotes, this photograph 
 strengthened the ideal I was gradually forming of adolescent 
 beauty. It prepared inn to receive the Apoxyomenos and 
 ^larlowe's Leander, the young men of Plato, and much besides. 
 I was certainly a rather singular boy. But I suppose, if other 
 people wrote down the histoi-y of their mental growth with the 
 same fi-ankness and patience, I should not stand alone. 
 
 What I really wanted at this period was some honest youth 
 for comrade. My equals repelled me. As it was, I liv(Ml into 
 emotion through the brooding imagination, and nothing is 
 more dangerous, more unhealthy than this. 
 
 I was very fond of picture-books, and di'ew a great deal 
 from Raphael, Flaxman, and Retzsch. Our house was well 
 stocked with engravings, photographs, copies of Italian pictures 
 and illustrated works upon Greek sculpture ; Lasinio's ' Campo 
 Santo of Pisa,' Sir William Hamilton's vases, the 'Museo 
 Borl)onico,' and the two large folios issued by the Dilettanti 
 Society were among my chi(if favourites. But I carried my 
 habitual indolence and irresolution into these studies, I had
 
 38 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1851-54 
 
 no artistic originality, and would not take the trouble to learn 
 to draw well. We went to an art-school just then established 
 in Bristol. The hexagons, cubes, patterns they gave me to 
 copy filled me with repugnance. 
 
 It is probable that the abundance of art material at home 
 was not an unmixed good. It certainly familiarised me with 
 a large variety of masterpieces, and taught me to discriminate 
 styles. But when I came to study critically, my mind was 
 stocked with a mass of immature associations and imperfect 
 memories. The sharp impression made on me by Botticelli, 
 Tintoretto, Signorelli, Mantegna, Bellini, Luini, and Gaudenzio 
 Ferrari, during my earliest Italian journeys, may be ascribed to 
 the fact that their works were almost entirely unrepresented in 
 my father's library. We had one piece of Signorelli's, by tlie 
 way. It was Macpherson's photograph of the ' Fulminati ' at 
 Orvieto. It had come by accident,, I think, and nobody knew 
 what it represented or who had painted it. I used to brood 
 over the forcible, spasmodic vigour of this tragic group — feeling 
 it quite different, far more penetrative, than anything in 
 Raphael or ]\Iichael Angelo. Yet, Duppa's large studies from 
 the Last Judgment in the Sistine were well known to me. 
 Toschi's admirable engravings of Correggio's frescoes at 
 Parma, which were sent to us at intervals by Colnaghi, as they 
 appeared, taught me to appreciate the melodic suavity of 
 design. I always connected them with the airs from Mozart's 
 Masses which my sister Edith used to play. 
 
 My sensibility to natural beauty meanwhile expanded. The 
 immersion in the mystery of landscape, which I have already 
 described, yielded to more conscious pleasure and a quicker 
 sympathy. Yet I grew but slowly, and disengaged myself with 
 difficulty from the narcotism of my mental faculties. 
 
 When the family was gone to bed, I spent hours alone in 
 my bedroom at the north-east angle of the house, watching 
 the clouds and mists of autumn drifting and recomposing 
 their flying forms around the moon, high up above the city 
 lamps. 
 
 I woke at dawn to see the sunrise flood the valley, touch 
 the steejDles of the town, shimmer upon the water where ships
 
 1851-54 BOYHOOD 39 
 
 lay, and glance along the stirless tree-tops of the garden, green 
 in dewy depths below me. 
 
 One morning in particular I can remember. On the pre- 
 ceding evening we had picked autumn crocuses in the fields by 
 Westbury. The flowers were placed in a great bowl outside 
 my bedroom door. The sunrise woke me, and I opened the 
 door to look again upon them. A broad, red ray of light fell 
 full upon their lilac chalices, intensifying and translating into 
 glowing amethyst each petal. 
 
 Winter ^mrise provided pageants of more fiery splendour. 
 From the dark rim of Dundry Hill, behind which the sun was 
 journeying, striving to emerge, there shot to the clear sappliire 
 zenith shafts of rosy flame, painting the bars of clouds with 
 living fire, and enamelling the floating mists, which slowly 
 changed and shifted across liquid spaces of orange, daffodil, and 
 beryl. 
 
 Lightning, in thunderstorms of summer nights, made the 
 wide world beneath me visible by flashes ; deluged the hissing 
 rain with palpitating whiteness ; brought into metallic clear- 
 ness leaf by leaf of the intensely verdant trees ; restored a 
 momentary scarlet to the geraniums and verbenas in the 
 flower-beds. 
 
 The evening-star, liquid, dilated, in pure sky-spaces above 
 the churchyard gate, or tangled in the distant trees of Ashton, 
 drew my soul out with longings such as melodies of Mozart 
 excite. 
 
 Once there was a comet, a thin rod of amber white, drowned 
 in the safiron of the sunset, which slowly sank, and disap- 
 peared into the western lulls beyond the channel. 
 
 Mellow mists above the Avon in October, veiling the 
 russet woods ; the masts of great ships slowly moving, scarcely 
 visible through pearly vapour ; glimpses of sea-gulls following 
 the barques from their far ocean-journeys ; knee-deep wander- 
 ings in Leigh Woods' bracken ; climbings of the grey St. 
 Vincent's Rocks in search of flowers, where the jackdaws flew 
 frightened from their holes as I came near them ; the panoply 
 of silver bloom with which the thorns on Clifton Downs 
 arrayed themselves in May ; the ripe horse-chestnuts found in
 
 40 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1851-54 
 
 drifts of rustling leaves in autumn — it is enough to rapidly 
 note such things, which bred in me the sense of natural beauty 
 and the love of colour. 
 
 After my recovery from the illness alluded to above, an 
 amateur artist, Mr. Vigor, painted the portrait of me in oil 
 which now hangs in the dining-room of Sidbury Manor. I 
 used to sit for this picture in his studio, which was a north 
 room of a house in the Eoyal York Crescent. The hkeness 
 was reckoned very good. It shows me to have been a slight 
 boy, with abundance of brown hair, soft brown eyes, delicate 
 hands, and a dreamy expression. 
 
 I am sure that I was not personally vain. Inside the 
 family I was twitted so unmercifully with my mealy com- 
 plexion, snub nose, and broad mouth, that I almost shrank 
 from sight, and felt grateful to people who did not treat me 
 with merited contempt. ' Oh, Johnnie, you look as yellow as 
 a lemon this morning ! ' ' There you go, with your mouth 
 stretching from ear to ear ! ' These were some of the 
 amenities, not unkindly meant, and only expressive of a real 
 concern about my weakly constitution, which developed in me 
 a morbid and unamiable self-consciousness. I had no power 
 of reacting vigorously, and did not set my back up or assert 
 myself. But I nourished a secret resentment, and proud 
 obstinate aloofness. 
 
 Physical weakness depressed me. I had more nervous 
 vitality than muscular robustness, a small share of bodily 
 pluck, and no combativeness. Naturally shy and timid through 
 sensitiveness, though by no means morally a coward, I sought 
 to be left alone, convinced that I could interest nobody. 
 
 But I developed some disagreeable qualities akin to vanity. 
 Being told that our name was ' so common,' the sound of it 
 became odious to my ears. We were also reminded, and I think 
 rightly, that the ease in which we lived, the number of servants 
 who waited on us, the carriages and horses, the large house and 
 its profuse objects of interest and beauty, the dinner-parties we 
 gave, and the crowds of distinguished people who visited our 
 home, were all contingent on my father's professional success. 
 Doctors, it was added, have no rank in society. This was
 
 1851-54 BOYHOOD 41 
 
 very true, and it argued something ungenerous in my nature 
 that I did not accept the fact cheerfully. 
 
 [It should be borne in mind, however, that this retrospect 
 was written late in Symonds' life, when many years of internal 
 struggle and physical suffering had thrown a shadow over the 
 past. The picture requires modification, and this it will 
 presently receive from the correspondence of Mdlle. Girard, 
 and, to some extent, from Symonds' own schoolboy letters 
 written from Harrow. Meantime the autobiography has to 
 be followed.] 
 
 I ^ soon perceived that my father's character, ability, and 
 many-sided culture separated him from the ordinary run of 
 medical men. He was sought after on his own rare merits by 
 men and women of birth, position, political and social im- 
 portance. The friend of John Sterling, Frederick Maurice, 
 Myers of Keswick, Lord Lansdowne, Hallam, Jowett, Lord 
 Monteagle, Principal Forbes, Lord Aberdare, Lady Dufierin, 
 Dean Elliot, Sir Edward Strachey, Dr. Carpenter, Dr. Prichard, 
 Sir Montagu Macmurdo, and scores of others I could mention, 
 was an exceptional physician, and his only son enjoyed excep- 
 tional advantages in the society of such people. 
 
 This did not, however, compensate to my own cross-grained 
 consciousness for the patent facts of my personal drawbacks. 
 I was a physically insignificant boy, with an ill-sounding name, 
 and nothing to rely on in the circumstances of my family. 
 Instead of expanding in the social environment around me, I 
 felt myself at a disadvantage, and early gained the notion that 
 I must work for my own place in the world — in Tact, that I 
 should have no place till I had made one for myself. The 
 result was that, instead of being flattered, I almost resented 
 the attentions paid me as my father's son, and was too stupid 
 to perceive how honovn-able, as well as valuable, they might be, 
 if I received thorn with a modest frankness. I regarded them 
 as acts of charital)le condescension. Thus I passed into an 
 attitude of haughty shyness, which had nothing respectable in 
 
 ' .\utobiof,'iapliy.
 
 42 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1851-54 
 
 it, except a sort of self-reliant, world-defiant pride, a resolution 
 to effectuate myself, and to win what I wanted by my exer- 
 tions. 
 
 The inborn repugnance to sordid things, which I have 
 already described as one of my main characteristics, now 
 expressed itself in a morbid sense of my physical ugliness, 
 common patronymic, undistinguished status, and mental 
 inefiectiveness. I did not envy the possessors of beauty, 
 strength, birth, rank, or genius ; but I vowed to raise myself, 
 somehow or other, to eminence of some sort. How this was 
 to be done, when there were so many difficulties in the way, I 
 did not see. Without exactly despairing, I felt permanently 
 discouraged. 
 
 My ambition took no vulgar form. I felt no desire for 
 wealth, no mere wish to cut a figure in society. But I thirsted 
 with intolerable thirst for eminence, for recognition as a 
 personality. At the same time I had no self-confidence, no 
 belief in my intellectual powers. I was only buoyed up by an 
 ixndefined instinct that there was stuff in me. Meanwhile, all 
 I could do was to bide my time, and see how things would go, 
 possessing my soul in silence, and wrapping a cloak of reserve 
 about my internal hopes and aims. 
 
 The state which I have just described began to define itself 
 during the first period of boyhood. But it grew and 
 strengthened with the following years. It was highly charac- 
 teristic of my temperament that, powerfully as I felt these 
 cravings, they did not take a very distinct form, and did not 
 stimulate me to any marked activity. 
 
 The depressing conviction of my own unattractiveness and 
 inefficiency saved me perhaps from some evil. If I had been 
 a little vainer, I might have become presumptuous, or vulgarly 
 ambitious. I might perhaps, too, have fallen into moral diffi- 
 culties. As it was, this conviction kept me aloof from 
 companions, and hedged me round with the security of isolation. 
 
 The result of my habitual reserve was, that I now dissembled 
 my deepest feelings, and only revealed those sentiments which 
 I knew would pass muster. Without meaning to do so, I came 
 to act a part, and no one knew what was going on inside me.
 
 1851-64 BOYHOOD 43 
 
 A boy wants a mother at such periods of uneasy fermentation. 
 I was ready enough in writing to communicate such portions of 
 my expei'ience as I chose to exhibit — impenetrably reserved in 
 the depth of myself, rhetorically candid on the surface. My 
 father, not unnaturally, misunderstood this complication. He 
 afterwards told me that he sent me with undoubting confidence 
 to Harrow, because he had no conception that I was either 
 emotional or passionate. The unconscious dissimulation 1 
 habitually practised blinded him to the truth. Feeling that I 
 was growing and must grow in solitude to an end I could not 
 foresee, which no one could help me to shape, and which I was 
 myself impotent to determine, I allowed an outer self of 
 commonplace cheerfulness and easy-going pliability to settle 
 like a crust upon 'my inner and real character. 
 
 Nothing is more diflticult than to analyse such psychological 
 conditions without attributing too much deliberation and 
 consciousness to what was mainly a process of spontaneous 
 development. Congenital qualities and external circumstance 
 acted together to determine a mental duality — or shall we call 
 it a duplicity ? — of which I became aware when it had taken hold 
 upon my nature. 
 
 On my twelfth l)irthday I went up as usual to kiss my father. 1852 
 He said gravely, ' Shake hands ; you are growing too old for 
 kissing.' I felt rather ashamed of having offered what my 
 twelfth birthday rendered unseemly, and took a step upon the 
 path toward isolation. But there was something savage in 
 me which accepted the remark with approval. Henceforth I 
 shrank from the exposure of emotion, except upon paper, in 
 letters, and in studied language. 
 
 I have drawn a somewhat disagreeable picture of my early 
 boyhood. It is very probable that I am, to some extent, im- 
 parting to this period qualities which were really developed l)y 
 my intense hatred for life at Harrow. I was boimd to do so, 
 because it presents itself under these aspects very vividly to 
 my mind, and because I lind that th(! recollection is confirmed 
 by a poem called ' Tlieodore,' which 1 wrote at Malvern in the 
 autninn (if ]8G2, wIkh (lie facts (if that period were still fresh 
 in luy memory.
 
 44 JOHN ADDTNGTON SYMONDS 1851-54 
 
 Still it must not be imagined that I was a moody, discon- 
 tented, miserable boy. I had high spirits enough, and knew 
 how to make myself agreeable in congenial society. I was 
 talkative, easily interested, ready to find amusement in all 
 sorts of petty things, so long as these were not school-games, 
 and involved no sort of physical competition. The inner 
 growth was so much more important to myself, and still 
 remains so, that I have failed to communicate a proper notion 
 of the whole. Indeed, no one can get outside himself and see 
 what he apjiears. He only knows himself inside, and knows 
 that aspect only in part. 
 
 One thing is certain. I acquired a passionate affection for 
 my home and Clifton, which included my family, although I 
 think I cared for them chiefly as forming parts of the delightful 
 environment. 
 
 I believe that Mdlle. Girard would correct the impression I 
 have conveyed through my sincere desire to record the truth of 
 my internal nature ; and at my request she has written the 
 following account of what she remembers of the first year of 
 her life at Clifton. 
 
 ' 37 Friedensgasse. 
 
 'My dear Johnnie, — I will endeavour to tell you what 
 you ask, and if I fail, it is not from want of remembering but 
 from general stupidity. Those early CUfton days stand in 
 their minutest details before me. I came to you in '53, when 
 I suppose you were twelve. We became friends at once over 
 a bundle of sea- weeds you had brought back. You were fond 
 of imparting knowledge, and I was glad to learn, so I very 
 soon became your devoted slave like the rest of the household. 
 We all vied in doing what you would like, and it was a pleasure, 
 a natural instinct, I may say. 
 
 ' Your temper was perfect, so it was not fear that compelled 
 us to submit to your rule. Wheii you were with us, you never 
 showed the least sign of the despondency that troubled you as 
 soon as you were away from home. Y''ou were always joyous 
 and bright, fond of teasing us in the manner of boys, and very 
 fond of sitting on other people and cutting them to pieces. It
 
 1851-64 BOYHOOD 45 
 
 was the besetting sin of us all, but certainly you were the 
 leader and were merciless to a set of frumps (your name for 
 them), which before each party Charlotte, you, and I were ordered 
 to amuse, while Edith and Maribella devoted themselves to 
 a more select company. When the decisive moment came, no 
 one could have been more suave and fascinating than you were, 
 and the frumps, one and all, adored you and had a happy 
 evening. 
 
 ' The acquirement of any kind of knowledge seemed equally 
 easy to you, and was pursued until conquered. Natural history 
 and poetry were then your favourite studies, and we never took 
 our walks abroad without either Chaucer or Southey. I speak 
 of quite the earliest days of our acquaintance, when I scarcely 
 knew enough English to understand everything you read to 
 me. How well I remember sitting by the pond at the 
 Zoological Gardens, and your reading " Thalaba " and the 
 "Curse of Kehama " to me, while Charlotte, who certainly had 
 no liking for the divine Muse then, fed the swans and ran about. 
 
 ' In those days you liked women's society, and abominated 
 boys. Woe to us if we dared, in order to tease you, express 
 admiration or liking for one of your friends. It was not to be 
 tolerated a moment, nor was it ever meant in earnest, for you 
 certainly were the most delightful, intelligent, cheerful, and 
 amusing companion. Your activity of mind and body were 
 wonderful, and as I was never so happy as when climbing a 
 tree or a precipitous rock, we got on admirably. 
 
 ' I must not forget to mention that you dearly loved 
 arguing, and that on Sunday evenings when we had tea instead 
 of dinner, and recited a poem to Miss Sykes afterwards, you 
 never missed the opportunity of having a religious argument, 
 and almost reduced her to tears with your inflexible logic. 
 We all thought you must become a barrister, and you actually 
 promised me a handsome Mausoleum when you became Lord 
 Chancellor. 
 
 ' I do not remember your wi'iting poeti'y or stories then. 
 Many years after, when we had " The Constellation," ' you wrote 
 of course. 
 
 ' A magazine compiled by tlie members of Clifton Hill House.
 
 46 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMOXDS 1851-54 
 
 ' These impressions relate to the time before you went to 
 Harrow. I can still feel the desolation and the void your 
 absence made. You went off bravely enough the first time, 
 but the second you cried and we cried, and there seemed no 
 pleasure in the house. How dull the schoolroom was until 
 the holidays. 
 
 ' Now, I hope, you will gather some notion of what you 
 were then. I could go on for a long time in the same strain. 
 Don't you really remember what you were like in the least ? '
 
 47 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 BOYHOOD {continued) 
 
 Goes to Harrow — First impressions — Internal attitude — Intellectual 
 condition — ^Head of his house — Dislike of Harrow — Contrasted with 
 Clifton — Friendships — The Rev. John Smith — ^Gustavus Bosanquet 
 — Confirmation — Letters to his sister Charlotte — Harrow sermons — 
 Football — Reading in chapel — Debate on ghosts — Speech day — An 
 exeat to London — Reads Plato for the first time — Result. 
 
 When ' I left home for Harrow in the spring of 1854 — it was 1854 
 the month of May — I had acquired a somewhat cnrious 
 personahty. Weakness and strength, stoicism and sensibiUty, 
 frigidity and tenderness, ignorance of the world, and stubborn 
 resistance to external influences were strangely blent in niy 
 raw nature. The main thing which sustained me was a sense 
 of self, imperious, antagonistic, unmalleable. But what that 
 self was, and why it kept aloof, I did not know. 
 
 My aunt and my sister Edith left me at the King's Head. 
 They drove back to London. I walked down alone to my 
 tutor's house. This was the house of the Rev. Robert Knight, 
 son of my Clifton tutor, and curate to the Vicar of Harrow. 
 He took, so far as I remember, three boys as lodgers : a son of 
 Abel Smith, the banker, a young Wingfield, and myself. We 
 slept in one room. 
 
 I felt that my heart would break as I scrunched the muddy 
 gravel, beneath the boughs of budding trees, down to the 
 house. ]5ut I said to my heart : ' I have to be made a man 
 here.' This was the one thought uppermost. 
 
 Sometimes, when I was alone in bed, I cried — thinking 
 of Clifton. I remember one night when I felt sure that I had 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 48 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONUS 1854-58 
 
 been at home, and stood in twilight at the end of the bedroom 
 corridor, looking through elm-branches into the grey south- 
 western skies ; 1 did not doubt that my spirit could somnam- 
 bulistically travel from the place I hated to the place I loved. 
 
 But this made no impression on my daily conduct. I 
 accepted life at Harrow as a discipline to be gone through. It 
 was not what I wanted. But being prescribed, it had its 
 utiUty. Thus from the commencement of my schooling 1 
 assumed an attitude of resistance and abeyance. Unutterably 
 stupid this, perhaps. Yet it could not have been otherwise. 
 Such was my nature. 
 
 I had never been thrown so entirely upon my own resources 
 before. The situation accentuated that double existence which 
 I have described, and which was becoming habitual. Internally, 
 as a creature of dreams, of self-concentrated wilfulness, of 
 moral force sustained by obstinate but undeveloped individuality, 
 I was in advance of my new comrades. Externally, compared 
 with them, I was a baby — destitute of experience, incapable of 
 asserting myself, physically feeble, timid, shrinking from 
 contact. 
 
 The imperious, unmalleable, uncompromising egotism, 
 which I felt unformed within me, kept me up. I did not 
 realise whither I was going. I felt that my course, though it 
 collided with that of my schoolfellows, was bound to be 
 different from theirs. To stand aloof, to preserve the inner 
 self inviolate, to await its evolution was my dominant instinct. 
 I cannot imagine a more helpless and more stiff- necked, a more 
 unsympathetic and more unlovable boy than I was. 
 
 To make the situation worse, I had no escapement from 
 self, no really healthful enlargement of nature at Harrow. 
 I shrank from games of every sort, being constitutionally unfit 
 for violent exercise, and disliking competition. I had no 
 inclination for cricket, football, racquets, and I even disliked 
 fencing. My muscular build was slight. I could not throw a 
 ball or a stone like other boys. And, oddly enough, I could 
 not learn to whistle like them. And yet I was by no means 
 effeminate. My father, judging rightly or wrongly of my 
 physical capacity, took measures for having me excused from
 
 ] 854-58 BOYHOOD 49 
 
 playing either cricket or football. I was placed too high in 
 the school for fagging. In this way I did not come into 
 salutary contact with my schoolfellows. It would assuredly 
 have been far better for me had I been cast more freely upon 
 their society. My dislike for games had more to do with 
 a dreamy and self-involved temperament than with absolute 
 physical weakness. I could jump standing to the height of 
 just below my own chin, and could run with the swiftest. 
 Fagging again would have brought me into practical relations 
 with the elder boys, and have rubbed off some of my fastidious 
 reserve. 
 
 Intellectually, in like manner, I did not prosper. I got a 
 remove from one form into the next above it every term, 
 and always at the head of the new detachment. But none 
 of my form-masters took hold upon my mind or woke me up. 
 I was a very imperfect scholar when I left Harrow in 1858 ; 
 and though I competed for the prizes — Latin and Greek verse, 
 English Essay and Poem — I invariably failed. Such mark as 
 I made was due to general ability and punctuality in work. 
 
 The spring for which my whole nature craved did not 
 come to me at Harrow. My tutor — to whose house, called 
 * Monkey's,' I went at the end of my first year— used to write 
 in his reports that I was ' deficient in vigour, both of body and 
 rnind.' I do not think he was mistaken. Want of physical 
 and cerebral energy showed itself in a series of depressing 
 ailments. I slept uneasily, and dreamed painfully. Repulsive 
 weaknesses — tedious colds, which lasted the whole winter — 
 lowered my stamina, and painfully augmented my sense of 
 personal squalor. I grew continually more and more shy, lost 
 my power of utterance, and cut a uiiscrablc figure in form. 
 I contracted the habit of stammering. This became so serious 
 that Vaughan left of!" putting me on to read and construe 
 Greek. The Monitors had to recite poems on Speech Day, 
 which were previously rehearsed before the scliool. On one 
 occasion I chose Raleigh's ' Lie ' for my piece. At tlio rehearsal 
 I got through the first stanza, well or ill. Then my mind 
 became a blank ; and after a couple of minutes' deadly silence, 
 I had to sit down discomfited. 
 
 B
 
 50 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONDS 1854—58 
 
 My external self, in these many ways, was being perpetually 
 snubbed, and crushed, and mortified. Yet the inner self 
 hardened after a dumb, blind fashion. I kept repeating, 
 ' Wait, wait. I will, I shall, I must.' What I was to wait for, 
 what I was destined to become, I did not ask. But I never 
 really doubted my capacity to be something. In a vagiie Avay 
 I compared myself to the ugly duckling of Andersen's tale. 
 
 Life at Harrow was not only uncongenial to my tastes and 
 temperament ; it was clearly unwholesome. Living Uttle in 
 the open air, poring stupidly and mechanically over books, shut 
 up for hours in badly ventilated schoolrooms and my own 
 close study, I dwindled physically. A liberal use of nerve- 
 tonics, quinine, and strychnine, prescribed by my father, may 
 have been a palliative ; but these drugs did not reach the root 
 of the evil, and they developed other evils which I afterwards 
 discovered. 
 
 It is no wonder that I came to be regarded as an un- 
 comradely, unclubbable boy by my companions. Yet I won 
 their moral respect. The following httle incident will show 
 what I mean. One day the mathematical master accused me 
 before the form of cribbing, or copying from my neighbour's 
 papers. I simply declared that I had not cribbed. He 
 punished me with 500 lines. I accepted the punishment in 
 silence. Thereupon some of the other boys cried loudly, 
 ' Shame,' and those who were sitting near me said I was a fool 
 to bear it. 
 
 In like manner, though I was neither intellectually 
 brilliant nor athletic, I acquired a considerable influence in my 
 house, of which I was the head for nearly two years. I main- 
 tained discipline, and on one occasion I remember caning two 
 bi" hulking fellows in the Shells for bullying. When I left 
 Harrow the boys at ' Monkey's ' subscribed to present me with 
 a testimonial. It was Muir's ' History of Greek Literature,' 
 handsomely bound, which my successor, Currey, handed to me 
 with a speech of kindly congratulation. 
 
 My tutor, I think, made a great mistake in not consulting 
 me with regard to the management of the house. According 
 to the Rugby system, which Vaughan applied with certain
 
 1854-58 BOYHOOD 51 
 
 modifications at Harrow, important duties devolved upon the 
 Sixth Form, and Monitors were theoretically held responsible 
 for the behaviour of their juniors. Yet I cannot remember 
 any act of personal friendliness or sympathy on my tutor's part 
 towards myself. He never asked me to breakfast or to walk 
 ynth him ; never invited me to talk with him in the evenings ; 
 never consulted me about the conduct of the lower boys, or 
 explained his own wishes with regard to discipline. I daresay 
 he did not feel the want of my assistance, for he was very well 
 served by his house-tutor, the Rev. John Smith. But he 
 missed an opportunity of discharging his duty toward the 
 ostensible head of his house with kindness, and through me of 
 making his authority felt. 
 
 A sign that Harrow did not suit me in any way was the 
 sentiment, approaching to aversion, which I felt for the fat 
 clay soil and pasture landscape of the country round it. 
 During long summer days, the slumberous monotony of grass- 
 land, hedge-rows, buzzing flies and sultry heat, oppressed me. 
 I could not react agaiiist the genius of the place, and kept 
 contrasting it with Clifton's rocks and woods and downy 
 turf. 
 
 Sordid details, inseparable from a boy's school life in a 
 cheaply built modern house, revolted my taste — the bare and 
 dirty rough-cast corridors, the ill-drained latrines, the stuffy 
 studies with wired windows, the cheerless refectory. But these 
 things, I reflected, were only part of life's open-road, along 
 which one had to trudge for one's aft'airs — not worse, not 
 more significant to the indwelling soul of man, than the via 
 dolorosa from Berkeley Square to Buckingham Mllas had 
 been. 
 
 The uncongeniality of Harrow life and landscape made my 
 holidays at Clifton very charming by contrast. There were 
 long walks and talks with Charlotte and Sophie Girard, rides 
 on the downs or toward the Bristol Channel, drives with my 
 father through the Somersetshire lanes, discussions about poema 
 and pictures, ramblings in the city streets, prowlings around 
 the shelves of musty book shops, musings in the Cathedral and 
 St. Mary Kedclylle, dreamy saunterings in the alleys of our 
 
 i; 2
 
 52 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1854-58 
 
 garden, lonely hours upon the housetop with that wide and 
 varied scene outspread beneath me, dinner parties, and the 
 company of cultured men and women. 
 
 All this, as I have said, contrasted only too sweetly with 
 Harrow and the realities of school existence. In justice to 
 myself, I think I ought to say that, although I always returned 
 to Harrow unwillingly, I did so with the sense that Clifton 
 was a Capua, and Harrow the camp, where I had to brace 
 myself by discipline. 
 
 Meanwhile, I formed the habit of idealising Clifton, with 
 results which the history of my after-growth made apparent. 
 More and more it became for me the haunt of powerful 
 emotions, the stage on which my inner self would have to play 
 its part. 
 
 It would be absurd to pretend that I formed no friendships 
 at Harrow. In order to complete the picture of my life there 
 I must devote some paragraphs to sketching them. 
 
 The Rev. John Smith takes the first place. To his 
 generous sympathy, manly and wise, at a period when I sorely 
 needed sympathetic handling, I ascribe the only pure good of 
 my Harrow training. Doubtless, not I alone, but hundreds of 
 boys who came within the influence of that true Christian 
 gentleman, whether they are now alive or sleeping in their 
 graves upon all quarters of the habitable globe, would deliver 
 the same testimony. It is possible, however, that I enjoyed 
 a double portion of his kindly interest ; for he had recently 
 settled at Harrow, as form-master and house-tutor to ' Monkey's,' 
 at the time when I was cast adrift upon school life. He took 
 notice of me, and must have felt my special needs. Without 
 making any demonstrations of friendship he so arranged that 
 a peculiarly delightful comradeship should spring up between 
 us. We took long walks together through the fields. It was 
 our custom on these walks to repeat alternate passages from 
 Shelley, Tennyson, and Keats, which we had pre^dously learned 
 by heart. In this way I absorbed a stupendous amount of 
 good English verse. The house where his dear old mother 
 dwelt at Pinner was frequently the goal of our excursions. 
 Here we rested, after spouting the ' Skylark ' or ' The Palace of
 
 1854-08 BOYHOOD 53 
 
 Art,' ' The Two Voices,' and ' The Ode to the Nightingale,' diiring 
 our early morning or late evening passage over dewy fields and 
 high-built stiles. There was always a cold veal-and-ham pie 
 to be eaten with voracious appetite, strawberry-jam to follow, 
 and an excellent brew of tea with thick country cream. 
 Gradually I learned much about the history of this pure- 
 hearted friend, the deep humility of his strong, patient nature, 
 the calm and mellow touch of his religious philosophy upon 
 feverish things of human life. 
 
 Gustavus Bosanquet comes next. He joined the school 
 in the same term as I did ; and though I left him behind in 
 our progress through the forms, we remained firm friends until 
 the last. His parents, or rather his mother, had trained him 
 in narrow Evangelical principles. These did not sit quite 
 easily upon the boy. A strong religious bias formed the hard- 
 pan of his nature. Yet, in his own way, he felt the riddle of 
 the universe. His exuberant affectionateness, indomitable 
 humour, and generous devotion to a few friends raised him in 
 the moral sphere high above the ranks of mere intelligence. 
 Down to this day, I owe him a deep debt of gratitude for the 
 love he gave me, for the loyalty with which he sustained me 
 in my hours of self-abasement, and for the homely cheerfulness 
 of his familiar conversation. We chummed together, cooked 
 sausages together, played childish pranks, and called each other 
 by ridiculous nicknames, living a little life of comradeship 
 secluded from the daily round of lessons and school-business. 
 Gustavus had his feet more firmly fixed upon the common 
 ground of experience than I had. He saw the comic side of 
 things, and this was very helpful to me. With him I was 
 able to laugh and joke about incidents which angered or 
 depressed my solitary nature. In return I gave him something 
 from my ideality. Our fraternal love was very precious during 
 my school life ; and if I were asked who was my bosom friend 
 at Harrow, I should reply, ' Gustavus Bosanquet.' 
 
 There was another boy at ' Monkey's,' with whom Bosanquet 
 and T had much to do. He possessed what neither Bosanquet 
 nor I could boast of — the insect-like devotion to a creed. This 
 was Ritualism, then in its green infancy. Ilulf laughing at
 
 54 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1854-58 
 
 him and ourselves, we followed him to compline, donned 
 surplices and tossed censers, arrayed altars in our studies, spent 
 spare cash on bits of execrable painted glass to dull our dingy 
 window's, and illuminated crucifixes with gold dust and 
 vermihon. 
 
 In the company of these and other friends I was confirmed. 
 Confirmation ought, if it means anything, to exercise a decisive 
 influence over the religious life of the individual — to make a 
 new epoch in his spiritual progress. To some extent it did so 
 with me. The preparation for the Sacrament worked like a 
 ploughshare on the sub-soil of my piety. It turned up nothing 
 valuable ; but it stimulated my festhetical and emotional 
 ardour. I now inclined to a farcical ritualism, handling 
 pseudo-sacred vessels in a night-gown surplice before a pseudo- 
 altar. I laid myself open to enthu.siasms of the shrine and 
 sanctuary. In a dim way I felt God more. But I did not 
 learn to fling the arms of soul in faith upon the cross of Christ. 
 That was not in me. And it would be unfair to expect from 
 any sacrament of the Church that it should work a miracle on 
 catechumens. 
 
 [This period of Symonds' Harrow life is illustrated by extracts 
 from his letters to his sister Charlotte, afterwards Mrs. Green, 
 written during the years 1856-1858. These are the earliest of 
 those contemporary authorities upon which I shall rely more 
 and more as they become more frequent and full. They give 
 us Symonds as he expressed himself to his nearest, not the 
 Symonds of the reflecting mood — Symonds summing himself 
 up after the lapse of forty years :] 
 
 1856 ' I ^ should scarcely have hoped to survive to write to you. 
 
 The weather is melting. Never — not even last August — have 
 I felt so oppressed. I very nearly fainted in church, and was 
 on the point of going out, but got better by resolutely thinking 
 of something else. 
 
 ' It has been a tiring day. I have heard three sermons. Do 
 you not think that four serN-ices — three sermons and one school 
 — are too much in this hot weather ? 
 
 ' To his sister Cliarlotte. Harrow, May 17, 185G.
 
 1854-58 BOYHOOD 55 
 
 ' I find Edith's Italian Bible so nice. I take it to church 
 and read the lessons with it, and prepare my Greek Test, by it, 
 so that I pick up a good many words and phrases in an easy 
 and ungrammary way. 
 
 ' I have had a new cover and cushion made for my chair. 
 It is much fatter and more comfortable than the old one, which 
 used to lump up all in a heap. I find it pleasant to work in 
 while it is so hot. I think the nights are the worst part, where 
 you fry and then go and be stewed for breakfast by a morning 
 sun which beats in. I never, however, saw this place looking 
 so pretty before. The leaves are full sized, but of the most 
 delicate green, while the sky is cloudless and the atmosphere 
 perfectly clear, so that we see every speck on the plain from 
 Sydenham to the far-ofi' Surrey hills, with Windsor, Hampstead, 
 and Elstree. Is it not unusual to be so hot now ? I have 
 divested myself of all the clothes I can. It reminds me of 
 that splendid summer of '51 when we first came to Clifton 
 Hill. Do you remember the garden then ? It had a smell of 
 musk and roses and thick dew which it never has had since. 
 It used to be a miniature garden of the Hesperides, where those 
 Buddleia bosses were the golden apples. There was not even 
 the sleepy dragon to spoil our pleasure.' 
 
 [The Mr. .John Smith, who is so warmly eulogised in the 
 ' Autobiography,' is frequently referred to in the letters. It is 
 clear that his was the personality from which Symonds gained 
 most during his Harrow days. The walks and talks with this 
 friend are always recorded with enjoyment.] 
 
 'Yesterday' I had a delightful expedition. I started with 1857 
 Mr. Smith at half-past two from the station, and went by rail 
 to Watford, where we got out and walked to Cassiobury, a 
 place of Lord Essex. There are some splendid avenues and 
 parks filled with doer there. We stayed in the park about two 
 hours, and then walked on through woods and valleys until we 
 came to the most exquisite beech avenue I ever saw. It was 
 
 ' To hiw sister Charlotte, Harrow, June 1, 1857.
 
 56 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1857 
 
 narrow, but very long, and the trees were planted so closely 
 that they grew straight for some way without leaves, and then 
 met at the top, making an exquisite cathedral aisle. 
 
 ' I read to Mr. Smith a Latin Alcaic poem on Cato. He 
 seemed dissatisfied. My comi^osition has gone off two-thirds 
 
 since I was with Mr. . Mr. Smith asked Mr. Westcott 
 
 about a poem on the Rhine. His answer was, " It is the work 
 of a tired mind." I am extremely vexed at this, for I know 
 that he means a want of energy, freshness, and raciness, which 
 I once had, but have now entirely lost. I shall soon send papa 
 this same Cato. It is two hundred lines,, and I wrote it in 
 about two hours. It was certainly too fast. I am now just 
 looking through it, and by care I think I might make it 
 better.' 
 
 [Symonds, even as early as these Harrow days, began to 
 show that natural gift for descriptive writing which has made 
 him the delightful companion of so many travellers. His 
 weekly budgets to his sister, written on Sundays, with an 
 important postscript added usually on Monday, are full of 
 charming and often of amusing details, for which he possessed 
 a keen eye. Here is an elaborate description of the Confirma- 
 tion at Harrow :] 
 
 ' We ^ shall have a very tiring day to-day. First there is 
 the early service before breakfast. Then the Confirmation 
 lecture. Then the morning service and sermon. Then, after 
 dinner, school. Then the evening and Confirmation services, 
 and then the Bishop's address. 
 
 ^Monday morning. — Now I must tell you all about the 
 Confirmation. At school several notices were fulminated in 
 Dr. Y.'s obscurest style — highly calculated to confound and 
 disorder all the arrangements and to bamboozle the clearest 
 and most intelligent mind. One thing, however, appeared, 
 that we were to have the evening service at half-past eight, and 
 the Confirmation after. So, after school I set out for a walk 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Harrow, June 14, 1857.
 
 1857 BOYHOOD 57 
 
 ■s^ith a friend of mine ; we got into a discussion and found 
 ourselves nearly at Pinner, above two miles off. There we 
 beard tbe far-oft" tinkling of a bell. I looked at my watch, and 
 finding it was half-past four, conjectured that it was nothing. 
 After talking and sitting for half-an-hour more, another bell 
 was heard. This time we set off, and tore over ploughed fields, 
 hedges, ditches, and arrived at Harrow hot and miserable, at 
 5.15, to hear that the Confirmation service was to take place 
 at 5.30. I had a mash of confused notices in my head, but 
 found myself all right in the chapel at last. Then a dead 
 pause. Every one was assembled as it seemed. But tbe 
 Bishop was not there. Every moment fresh boys came drop- 
 ping in from their walks. The bell was ringing like a tocsin. 
 The organ played a melancholy air, and everybody was in 
 suspense. At last all the candidates for confirmation were 
 collected, and the Bishop, preceded by Dr. V., and followed by 
 a chaplain, walked in and ascended the pulpit, and commenced 
 the proceedings by an address. He looks taller and younger 
 than I expected. His face is quite colourless now, and marked 
 \nth deeper lines than I ever saw in anybody else. There was 
 a kind of fixed, inflexible determination in him. His voice was 
 very changeable, sometimes deep and harsh, at others soft and 
 musical. In his address he dwelt upon the sorrows of the 
 world, so surely to be suffered by all, the vows by which we 
 were bound, the condemnation of those who took them lightly, 
 and then, changing his tone, talked of the blessings of the 
 service. After the laying on of hands, he gave a second short 
 address on the Lord's Sacrament, standing with his cap in his 
 hand in front of the communion rails. We went up six by 
 six. Both addj-essGs were extempore. After the service he 
 and his chaplain departed, and we had the evening service. 
 He had been preaching before the Queen in the morning, and 
 had been invited suddenly in the afternoon to dine with her at 
 eight, so he posted down here at once, and the boys had thus 
 to 1)0 collected by these bells from over the country.' 
 
 [Althfjiigli Symonds in certain moods, perhaps the most 
 permanent moods, represents himself as shrinking mth dislike
 
 58 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1857 
 
 from all school games, the following passages show that he 
 took his part in them, and not without a dash of pleasm-e :] 
 
 ' I ' have been down this afternoon to football with the 
 school. The game was the Fifth Form against the School. 
 I found out the meaning of certain terms I had not hitherto 
 quite appreciated, such as that of a " squash." A squash is a 
 large collection of boys, about twenty, with the football in the 
 midst of them. They are all kicking it and each other in their 
 endeavours to extricate the ball, and woe to the unlucky wight 
 who falls. He is instantly trampled upon by every one. I, 
 to-day, when in a squash, was suddenly propelled by one of the 
 heaviest boys in the school. I rushed forward and stood in a 
 semi-upright position on another boy, whose thigh I was grind- 
 ing and pounding with my heavy boots, until the ball was 
 hurled out, and then every one came on the ground together. 
 On the whole, there is not so much real danger as I expected, 
 except from great boys dashing their weight against you, and 
 using you as a battering-ram or wedge for entering the 
 crushes. It is thus, I imagine, that most accidents occur. I 
 think it a very healthy exercise in fine autumn \\'eather like this, 
 but doubt its good in colder and damper days. Altogether, I 
 hope that I shall like it. I enclose some edicts, to give you an 
 idea of my kind of power in the management of the republic. 
 I sit here, like Hildebrand in the Vatican, and make my house 
 tremble as he did Europe with his thunders.' 
 
 [In a subsequent letter he records with obvious satisfaction 
 that — 
 
 ' Yesterday I played in a house match and distinguished 
 myself. I was the first to get what is called a base ; that is, 
 to carry a ball, kicking it into the enemy's goal in spite of the 
 attempts of the adverse party to stop you.' 
 
 The round of schoolboy life — reading in chapel for the 
 first time, the Debating Society, hampers from home, lessons, 
 Speech Day — finds ample illustration in Symonds' letters ; 
 the details are observed and recorded with a precision which is 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte, Harrow, Oct. 3, 18.57.
 
 1857 BOYHOOD c9 
 
 remarkable in a lad of seventeen. Characteristically, Symonds 
 says little about his achievements. It would be difficult to 
 gather from his correspondence that he was rising rapidly 
 through the school, and was about to reach the Sixth Form 
 far before the usual date. Indeed, even thus early in life what 
 he had not occupied his attention far more than what he had, 
 and there is foreshadowed that marked feature of his maturer 
 years, the ceaseless striving forwards towards something new, 
 to some region not yet explored.] 
 
 ' This evening ' I had to read the first lesson, Proverbs xii. 
 It was my first essay in the new chapel, and that, too, before 
 a number of strangers and Harrow people. The reading-desk 
 is a lectern. You stand one step above its base, and overlook 
 the congregation. Your back is turned to the altar, the 
 chancel, and all the people in it, so that you are between a 
 double fire of eyes. I felt rather like a noisy reading-machine, 
 and had very little appreciation of what I read. My fault was 
 not that of false intonation, I am glad to say, but of too little 
 strength of voice, which I hold to be no very great sign of bad 
 performance in a new place, and one so inexperienced. I did 
 not feel very nervous, only a coldness of the extremities, a 
 want of sensibility, and a kind of mental estrangement. I am 
 going on Tuesday to read with Mr. Smith in Pinner Church, 
 and so get a little practice, and hope to come out strong some 
 day or other. I think this is a good practice. It gives con- 
 fidence, and prepares for public speaking. 
 
 'I think I have never told you that I spoke in our debate 
 on Tuesday last, on the subject of "The Reality of Ghosts." 
 I defended them, and made my speech a definition of their (to 
 me) real character, which I upholded by papa's story of Crom- 
 well's ghost in his lecture on sleep and dreams. Although 
 I worked up the subject, and showed the growing influence of 
 that apparition on Cromwell's life, yet I am sorry to say that 
 my audience were too sceptical. They derided me for unfounded 
 assertions about females, and their influence on the fate of 
 mighty nations.' 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Harrow, Nov. 15, 1857.
 
 60 JOHN ADUINGTON SYMONDS 1858 
 
 ' Thank ^ Edith very much for the parcel, which arrived 
 quite safely on Friday. I can assure you we are doing justice 
 to the tongue, and (cousin) James was invited last evening 
 to partake of it. Also the biscuits were most delicious. Of 
 course the frost is broken, now that I have my skates. It 
 always does so, and yesterday I went down to football. It had 
 been pouring, and was then mizzling ^^dth a sort of Scotch 
 mist. The ground was in that condition that when the ball 
 fell it gave a ' thud ' into the water and mud, and spurted 
 up little fountains all the same all round. It was really too 
 much like pigs wallowing in the mire, and I thought of my 
 favourite quotation from the " Palace of Art " about " the swine 
 that range on yonder plain," which I used to recite with such 
 hearty goodwill, before I joined in the same wallowing. 
 
 ' This evening I have just done learning my Butler. He is 
 the stupidest old creature ever seen, and I do not see why 
 I should have all his ideas about the future state rammed down 
 my throat, or be forced to profess (in school) those things and 
 arguments conclusive and settled, which I do not at all see 
 to be such. I think that such a book tends towards Calvinism 
 or Atheism.' 
 
 ' Although "^ you will have a better account, I hope, of 
 our Speech Day in the Times, I yet send you a little description 
 of my own, with my own feelings. The day was glorious, but 
 so hot that it was the greatest exertion to move. I kept quiet 
 till twelve, and then, as the company began to arrive, went up 
 and saw them going into Speech Room. Among the distingues 
 present were the Bishops of Oxford, St. David's, and Jamaica. 
 Lord J. Russell, Lord Palmerston, Sir W. W. of Kars, Mme. 
 Goldschmidt, and several other titles not worth recording. 
 I then moved off and helped to join a double line from the 
 school to the chapel, through which the visitors had to pass. 
 The heat was awful. As soon as the visitors had passed, and 
 got seated in the wooden amphitheatre, prepared for them 
 to see the laying of the foundation stone of the new aisle, the 
 whole school rushed down together over a set of sloping 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Harrow, January 31, 1858. 
 ^ To the same. Harrow, June 28, 1858.
 
 1858 BOYHOOD 61 
 
 terraces that lead to the new buildings. We were then cooped 
 up in a small space and crushed, and, what was worse, glared 
 upon by the sun to a dreadful extent. The ceremony was very 
 interesting. Dr. V. read first a form of prayer for the occasion, 
 and then a list of those Harrovians who had fallen in the war. 
 Sir W. W. then mortared the stone and patted it, after which 
 he made a speech. It was very nice, but too hesitating to 
 sound well, and besides that I was nearly touching him. Lord 
 Palmerston then made a speech of much the same character, 
 but ^\ith greater fluency and style. His speaking disappointed 
 me, since it consisted of a series of commonplaces disposed of 
 in short barks ; perhaps this unfavourable impression was 
 owing to my near position and uncomfortable feelings. There 
 was immense cheering for the celebrities. We then returned 
 to Mr. R.'s dejeuner.' 
 
 [In his autobiography Symonds minimises both his athletic 
 and his intellectual achievement at Harrow\ He did not like 
 the place ; it did not suit his health, and he did not feel that 
 he was spiritually growing there. This conviction remained 
 throughout life, and was frequently expressed. But as we have 
 seen that his place in school games was probably higher than 
 he would acknowledge, so his record of intellectual honours 
 was far in advance of anything which his letters or reminis- 
 cences would lead us to suppose ; for example, that rare 
 distinction the medal, *ob studia uno tenore feliciter peracta,' 
 which he was the first to win, is not mentioned once. An 
 exceptionally l)rilliant boy he certainly was not, but one of 
 his masters, Mr. Coker Adams, recorded of him that he was 
 always a good and very painstaking pupil, far above the 
 average, though not expected to acquire that distinction which 
 he subsequently achieved. 
 
 The truth is that Hymonds, like many boys of imaginative 
 and intellectual temperament, was more concerned with his 
 own fancies, thoughts, feelings, than witli tlio main current of 
 school hfe about him.] 
 
 At ' this period of my Ijoyhood, I dreamed a great deal 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 62 JOHN ADDlNGTON SVMONDS 1858 
 
 of my time away, and wrote a vast amount of idiotic verses. 
 During the night-time I was visited by terrible and splendid 
 visions, far superior to my poetry. In the long slow evolution 
 of myself, it appears that the state of dreamful subconscious 
 energy was always superior to the state of active intelligent 
 volition. In a sense different from Charles Lamb's, I was 
 a dream-child, incapable of emerging into actuality, containing 
 potential germs of personality which it required decades to 
 develop. 
 
 In this respect I was probably by no means singular. The 
 situation might be summed up in one sentence : I was a slow- 
 growing lad. The memory of my experience at Harrow, of my 
 non-emergence, of my intense hidden life, of my inferiority in 
 achievement, has made me infinitely tender towards young 
 men in whom I recognised the same qualities of tardy laborious 
 growth. 
 
 [The autobiography of the Harrow period is not copious. 
 It closes upon the following incident, to which Symonds always 
 attached the highest importance :] 
 
 We 1 were reading Plato's ' Apology ' in the Sixth Form. I 
 bought Gary's crib, and took it with me to London on an 
 exeat in March. My hostess, a Mrs. Bain, who lived in 
 Regent's Park, treated me to a comedy one evening at the 
 Haymarket. I forget what the play was. When we returned 
 from the play I went to bed and began to read my Gary's 
 Plato. It so happened that I stumbled on the ' Phasdrus.' I 
 read on and on, till I reached the end. Then I began the 
 ' Symposium ' ; and the sun was shining on the shrubs 
 outside the ground-floor in which I slept before I shut the 
 book up. 
 
 I have related these insignificant details, because that night 
 was one of the most important nights of my life ; and when 
 anything of great gravity has happened to me, I have always 
 retained a firm recollection of trifling facts which formed its 
 context. 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 1858 BOYHOOD 63 
 
 Here in the ' Phaedrus ' and the ' Symposium ' — in the 
 ' Myth of the Soul,' I discovered the revelation I had been 
 waiting for, the consecration of a long-cherished 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, expressed with all the magic of unrivalled 
 style. 
 
 The study of Plato proved decisive for my future. Coming 
 at the moment when it did, it delivered me to a large extent 
 from the torpid cynicism of my Harrow life, and controlled 
 my thoughts for many years. 
 
 [It also begat a mood of dreaming which coalesced with the 
 powerful though vague impression of beauty awakened by his 
 Clifton home, and grew to be what Symonds himself in his 
 later diaries calls his ScelcnseJmsucht, a ' Cliftonian state of 
 yearning.' This mood became localised at Clifton, centred in 
 the Cathedral, and invariably returned whenever he came hack 
 to his home from Oxford term time, from Welsh or Yorkshire 
 reading parties, from tours in Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, or 
 France.]
 
 64 JOHN ADDINC4T0N SYMONDS 1858 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 YOUTH 
 
 Emotional development — Journeys in Scotland — Newhailes — Roslin — 
 Hawthornden — Goes to Balliol — Friends at Oxford — Conington - 
 ' Ploughed ' for ' Smalls ' — Exhibitioner at Balliol — Eeading party at 
 Whitby — Wins the ' Newdigate ' — Matthew Arnold's criticism on the 
 poem — First Class in ' Moderations ' — Reading party at Coniston — 
 First journey abroad — On keeping diaries — His love of Bristol — 
 Returns to Oxford — Mr. Jowett's influence — Overwork — 111 health — 
 Goes home to Clifton — Life there — Back at Balliol — A day of his 
 life — Attitude towards religion — Health still bad — An exaat to 
 Sonning — The Rev. Hugh Pearson — Stories of Tennyson — Journey 
 to Amiens and Paris — Mario's singing— Giuglini— Clara Novello— 
 The Stabat Mater —The Venus of Milo — Returns home— Goes up to 
 Oxford — 111 health — How he appeared to the outside world — Journey 
 to Chamonix and Italy — His diary of this journey — First impres- 
 sions of Switzerland and of Italy — The guide Auguste Balmat — 
 Walks on the Glaciers — Crosses the Simplon — Lago Maggiore — 
 Como — Milan — Novara — Bellinzona — The Gotthard — A nightmare 
 at Hospenthal — Description of a thunderstorm at Clifton — Reading 
 party at Bangor — 111 health— Home again — Lewes's ' Life of Goethe ' 
 — Its influence — His twenty-flrst birthday — Reflections thereon — A 
 visit from Jowett— Self -analysis — Returns to Oxford — Visit to a 
 phrenologist — 111 health — The shadow of the schools — Mme. Jenny 
 Lind Goldschmidt — Lady Augusta and Dean Stanley — Wins the 
 ' Jenkyns ' — Gets a First in ' Greats ' — His remarks on the Oxford 
 system and its teachers. 
 
 1858 March ^ came to an end, and brought this eventful term to its 
 conclusion. In April I went to Clifton for the Easter hoUdays. 
 The change from Harrow to my home always tranquillised and 
 refreshed me. It renewed that sense of dignity, repose, and 
 beauty in existence, which was absolutely necessary to my 
 spiritual being. 
 
 This time I felt the change more strangely than usual. 
 Clifton did not offer the same simple satisfaction as before. 
 The recent quickening of my intellect, the revelation I had 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 1858 YOUTH 65 
 
 found in Plato, removed me almost suddenly away from boy- 
 hood. I was on the verge of attaining to a man's self- 
 consciousness. My ritualistic pranks at Harrow hal had this 
 much of reality in them that they indicated a natural sus- 
 ceptibility to the aesthetic side of religion. I felt a real 
 affection, a natural reverence, for grey Gothic churches. The 
 painted glass and heraldries, Crusaders cross-legged on their 
 tombs, carved wood-work and high-built organ lofts, the monu- 
 ments to folk long dead, o\er all the choiring voices, touched 
 me to the quick at a thousand sensitive points. There was no 
 real piety, however, in my mood. My soul was lodged in Hellas. 
 
 At this period of my youth I devoured Greek literature, and 
 fed upon the reproductions of Greek plastic art with which my 
 father's library was stored. Plato took the first place in my 
 studies. I dwelt upon the opening pages of the ' Charmides ' 
 and ' Lysis.' I compared these with the ' Clouds ' of Aristo- 
 phanes, and the dialogues of Lucian and Plutarch. I explored 
 Theognis and the anthology, learned Theocritus by heart, 
 tasted fragments of Anacreon, and Ibycus, and Pindar. I did 
 not reflect upon the incongruity bchveen this impulse to absorb 
 the genius of the Greeks, and the other impulse which drew 
 me toward niedia?valism. The ' Confessions of St, Augustine ' 
 lay side by side upon my table witli a copy of the ' Phsedrus.' 
 
 This confusion of ideas was grotesque enough ; and 
 gradually it introduced a discord into my life. Yet it marked 
 a period of vigorous development. If the modern man is 
 destined to absorb and to appropriate the diverse strains which 
 make him what he is, some such fermentation cannot be 
 avoided. He emerges from it with a mind determined in this 
 way or that, and retains a vital perception of things that differ 
 grounded in his personal experience. 
 
 My mental and moral evolution proceeded now upon a })atli 
 which had no contact with the prescribed systems of education. 
 I lived in and for myself. ]\Iasters, and school, and methods 
 of ac'jiuring knowledge lay outside me, to be used or neglected 
 us I judged l)Ost. 1 passed my last term at Hai'row between 
 that April and tbe ensuing August in su])renie indillerence, 
 iind looked forward to the university without amliitifiii. 
 
 F
 
 66 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1858 
 
 In the summer vacation, before I went up to Oxford, I 
 made a tour through Scotland. There were the Forbeses at 
 Pitlochry, Dalrymple at Newhailes, Jamieson on the Gair 
 Loch, the Forrests at Edinburgh, to be visited. 
 
 ' We ^ have been to Roslin and are come back, and I 
 am sitting in my room. It is late and I am tired, there- 
 fore I shall not write much. We have had a charming 
 day. W^e set oft" at a quarter to one and got by train to 
 HaAvthornden. Mr. and Mrs. J. Fergusson have a place 
 on one of the sides of the glen at Hawthornden, looking 
 straight over to the Castle and Chapel of Roslin. There we 
 lunched. The woods are private property, and cover the whole 
 sides of that deep and narrow ravine through which the Esk 
 flows. Roslin stands at the head, Hawthornden at the foot of 
 the glen, each built upon a most precipitous rock, and 
 commanding a splendid view up their own parts of the ravine. 
 The path was very steep and went straight down to the Esk, 
 which we crossed by a bridge, whence a most splendid view of 
 Hawthornden is to be got. You look up to an immense red 
 cliff on Avhich stands this old and irregular Castle. The walls 
 go sheer down to the precipice and end in rocks beside the 
 water. On each side the trees rise thick and green to a great 
 height, broken occasionally by bits of cliff and caves. Every 
 sort of the rarest ferns grow in these woods. Some of them I 
 picked. These were Dryoptcris., Thegopteris, several kinds of 
 Cystopteris dilatata, Lady Fern, and many others I forget, all 
 growing as thick and rank as the commonest Filix Mas in 
 Leigh Woods. From the bridge we began to ascend, and 
 walked in a slanting direction by the water to Roslin. x\s we 
 passed along we had Wallace's and Bruce's caves pointed out 
 to us, though I confess I could not see them, for they were 
 high up on the other side and shaded with trees. However, I 
 hardly ever remember a more charming walk. Roslin Chapel 
 both exceeded and fell beneath my expectations. The architec- 
 ture is so late and debased that one cannot be enthusiastic 
 about it, but then its ornamentation and situation surpass 
 anything I had ever seen. I could not have conceived such an 
 
 ' To Miss Sykes. Newhailes, 1858.
 
 1858 YOUTH (37 
 
 immense variety and minuteness of tracery. Each arch antl 
 cohimn is different ; one part of the roof, spangled with goodly 
 stone stars, pleased me as much as any of the decorations. I 
 mounted on a horrid swinging ladder to the top, which was 
 being repaired. Having arrived there with some dizziness, I 
 found myself the centre of attraction to a nest of bees who 
 inhabit one of the pinnacles. The great height, the swing of 
 the ladder and the attacks of the bees (who did not, however, 
 sting me) almost made me lose my balance, and I beat a speedy 
 retreat. However, I secured some ferns from the very top for 
 ]\Idlle. G. Exquisite maiden's-hair grew on the roof inside in 
 festoons. It was a fatiguing day, and a long walk. But I 
 found it very pleasant. Wo were such a merry party, and 
 made so much fun. All the Misses F. are very nice girls, but 
 quite the most amusing is called ' Hetty ' (for Henriette). She 
 is a perfect Hetty, always laughing and making some joke or 
 other. I am so sorry to go to-morrow. They, too, had not 
 expected so early a departure, but I must not waste time, and 
 it is better to go ere people get tired of you. Good-night. 
 Best love to papa and all.' 
 
 [The Trossachs, seen in a great rain-storm, call forth an 
 observation upon grand scenery, ' It makes me melancholy to 
 look at it. I do not know why, but fine scenery has that effect 
 on inc. It seems to elevate and at the same time to depreciate 
 one's estimate of self.' The return journey was made by way 
 of Carlisle and Manchester, where Symonds saw the first great 
 loan collection of old masters. 
 
 'J'he close of the year 1858 brought the important change 
 from school to college. He was not yet eighteen ; he had 
 already been some time in the Sixth ; Harrow had little more 
 to give him ; ho himself was anxious to leave, and both liis 
 father and Dr. Vaughan concurred. Symonds entered J]alliol 
 as a Commoner, and tried, though unsuccessfully, for a scholar- 
 ship in NovenilK;r (jf his first term. He records his early 
 impressions of Oxford life as follows :] 
 
 My' first feeling upon coming up to Balliol in the autumn 
 
 ' Autobiography. 
 
 r2
 
 68 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS I808 
 
 of 1858 was one of relief. The greater freedom of university 
 as compared with school life, both as regards the employment 
 of time and the choice of studies, suited my temperament. I 
 was not one of those boys who, after hugely enjoying their 
 career at Eton or Harrow, leave their hearts to some extent 
 behind them. Nor, again, was I abandoning that prestige and 
 flattering sense of self-importance which a popular head of the 
 school resigns when he enters the ranks of freshmen in a first- 
 rate college. I, on the contrary, had everything to gain and 
 nothing to lose by the change. 
 
 Cambridge absorbed the majority of the Harrovians who went 
 up to the universities. Consequently I was but poorly furnished 
 with school friends. I began to make friends with freshmen — 
 Urquhart, Duncan (afterwards Lord Camperdown), Stephens ^ 
 (a nephew of the Lord Chancellor Hatherley), Malcolm (now 
 a partner in Coutts's bank), Cecil Bosanquet (the brother of 
 Gustavus), Cholmley Puller and Wright (two scholars of 
 Balliol), Lyulph Stanley, and others whose names I find 
 recorded in my diaries of that date. During my first term I 
 also became acquainted with Edwin Palmer, Robinson Ellis, 
 and Professor John Conington. These elder men introduced 
 me to their several sets. I came thus early in my career to 
 know people of distinction like Goldwiri Smith, Charles 
 Parker, Charles Pearson, Arthur Stanley, Albert Dicey, 
 T. PL Green, Mark Pattison, Francis Otter, A. 0. Rutson. 
 
 [As at Harrow so now at Oxford, Symonds' sister was still 
 his chief correspondent. To her he sent frequent accounts of 
 his rapidly expanding interests in life, his friends, his studies, 
 his social surroundings.] 
 
 1859 ' 1 2 think you must have been expecting to hear from me 
 lately, but I have been very busy the end of this week. Indeed, 
 I have only once heard from home, and had intended to warn 
 you that letters overweighted will in future be opened and 
 
 ' Late Dean cf W'incliester. 
 
 - To his sister Chailotie. Balliol, Febrnaiy 1859.
 
 18o9 YOUTH 69 
 
 returned to the writers. Very often the Sunday letters I get 
 from home are too heavy. 
 
 ' This last week I have been seeing a great deal of Mr. 
 Conington ; he is so kind as to look after my composition, and 
 still urges me to try for a scholarship at Corpus. Of course 
 papa's dislike to my doing that, and also my own liking for 
 Balliol, prevent me at present from so doing. I now know 
 well several men in college — Jamieson, Brodrick, Malcolm, 
 Jefferson, Campion and I are perpetually together, and I should 
 lose a great deal of them were I to change to C. C. They are 
 all Eton men, and very gentlemanly, quiet companions, though 
 not at all reading men. For this reason I see less of them 
 than .Jamieson. That is to say, I cannot be about with them 
 in the mornings, &c. 
 
 ' On the whole, I find it difficult to know what to do about 
 acquaintances here. One has either to keep up a great number, 
 or lose several that one would like to have, as well as Brodrick 
 and Company, who, on the other hand, are distracting from 
 their non-reading turn. At Harrow I existed almost without 
 associates till very late, and now I begin to despise myself, 
 because I find how much I care to have them, and how much 
 sacrifice this care is likely to produce. However, I suppose 
 things settle themselves down, and we are shaped by destiny 
 and circumstance in the choice of friends as in other things.' 
 
 ' I ' am writing to you in Puller's room on one of the most 
 lovely mornings we have yet had. The sun is quite warm, and 
 every trace of snow, "even to the last faint streak," has 
 disap^xiared, and I am beginning to think that I shall like 
 the incoming of sunnnor. You, I believe, sympathise with me 
 about the decided superiority of winter over every otlicr part of 
 the year ; yet I think it is the winter of December and the early 
 parts of Januai'y that I like. When the days grow longer and 
 no warmer, and one has a disagreeable uncertainty of light 
 about six o'clock — no firelight dusk before dinner, e.g. — is the 
 time that plagues me most, for I anticipate that gradual rising 
 of things, buds, and leaves, and flowers, and then a sultry 
 pause, and then fruits and corn, and then yellow Icayes, and all 
 ' To hib bibter Cbarlotte (ld5'J ?).
 
 70 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1869 
 
 that before the rest of winter comes again. It is the sense of 
 flux and progress that makes a prospect from spring to winter 
 so dreary ; and I always connect it in my mind with that 
 interminable Harrow Summer Term, and its all-pervading 
 " buzziness " of heat. 
 
 ' Do you think you could find out from Mrs. B where 
 
 and when Mr. Congreve preaches, and whether he does preach 
 regularly? Puller is very anxious to hear him, and wants me 
 to go with him some day to London for that purpose. As 
 the risk of my conversion to Positivism is extremely small, 
 I should not mind it.' 
 
 The ^ association with Conington was almost wholly good. 
 It is true that I sat up till midnight Avith him nearly every 
 evening, drinking cup after cup of strong tea in his private 
 lodgings above Cooper's shop near University. This excited 
 and fatigued my nerves. But his conversation was in itself a 
 liberal education for a youth of pronounced literary tastes. 
 
 My studies advanced so badly that I was plucked for 
 
 Smalls in the spring of 1859. The examiner, I). B of 
 
 Exeter, made me conjugate the Greek ei/u' ' to be,' and dfxi ' to 
 go,' tense by tense. This was perhajis rather severe upon any 
 candidate for his testamur in Responsions. The examination, 
 however, was meant to search our knowledge of the rudiments ; 
 and nobody can deny that an accurate knowledge of the Greek 
 auxiliary verbs is a rudimentary requisite of scholarship. I 
 failed to fulfil the condition, and deserved to be plucked. 
 
 The test selected by Mr. D. B discovered the weakest point 
 
 in my panoply, and paralysed a mind which, however quick 
 and sympathetic, was never very self-controlled or ready at a 
 pinch. To confuse me with the multiplication table would have 
 been equally easy. 
 
 I did not greatly mind this rebuff. I had been gathering 
 fritillaries in Magdalen meadows all the afternoon, and enjoying 
 the sunset from the top of Magdalen Tower. The memory of 
 that pleasant May day is fresher now than my recollection of 
 the disagreeable news that I was 'plucked.' But I greatly 
 
 ' Autobiogvapliy.
 
 18o9 YOUTH 71 
 
 disliked having to go down to Clifton and tell my father that 
 I had been ' ploughed in Smalls foi- Greek Grammar.' 
 Fortunately, before the end of June, I had been elected, 
 together with Charles Elton, to an open exhibition at Balliol. 
 My father's wounded feelings were soon soothed by quite 
 sufficient academical successes ; and my own sense of duty in 
 study was sharpened by the salutary snub inflicted on my not 
 too stubborn vanity. 
 
 [At the end of the summer term of 1859, Symonds, 
 T. H. Green, Rutson and Cholmley Paller went with Coning- 
 ton on a reading party to Whitby. They engaged a lodging- 
 house kept by a woman called Storm, whom Conington 
 christened XatAai/'. Symonds was deeply impressed by the 
 sternness of the place, ' the village churchyard ' (ho writes in 
 the autobiography), ' full of monuments erected to captains and 
 sailors of the name of Storm, many of whom had perished as 
 whalers and lishers on the northern seas. The church itself, 
 an old-fashioned edifice, built on the cliff's brow, with galleries 
 in which the choir droned out hynms and anthems to the 
 accompaniment of a stringed and brass band. It affected my 
 imagination with the feeling of generations of shipwrecked sea- 
 men, as tliough it had been itself a hulk stranded up there, and 
 redolent of marine reminiscences.' 
 
 The letters and diaries of the next year, 1860, show a 
 marked advance in firmness of tone. It is quite clear that 
 Symonds was growing rapidly, that his spirit was expanding 
 in the Oxford atmosphere, that Ik; keenly enjoyed its intel- 
 lectual attractiveness in the society of able and distinguished 
 men, its JBsthetic charm in the antique splendour of its college 
 services.] 
 
 'This morning,' when I went to fetch a book in Coning- 18G0 
 ton's room, there was a great assembly of distinguished people. 
 I found him seated with Monro, a Cambridge man, and Henry 
 Smith, who is the greatest universal genius Oxford has, and 
 Currey, and a Lord Strangford, wlio has just returned from 
 ' To his sister Chailotte. Fcbiuary 5, IHGO.
 
 72 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1860 
 
 Constantinople full of the forgeries of Simonides. Whilst we 
 were thus assembled, a Marlborough master, called Bright, son 
 of a Dr. Bright, came in, and shortly after Goldwin Smith, 
 bringing his lecture, which I am about to send to papa. This 
 completed the gallery of celebrities. Their conversation was 
 very interesting. G. S. speaks like a book, and delivered most 
 sententious dicta on many subjects, chiefly political. 
 
 ' I have to go off as fast as I can, chapel having intervened, 
 to dine at Pembroke.' 
 
 ' Yesterday ^ I had a very intellectual breakfast : Conington, 
 Eutson, Green, Tollemache, Dicey, Lyulph Stanley, and 
 Puller. I find these breakfasts formidable things ; for there is 
 a succession of meats, all of which I have to dispense, to change 
 plates, and keep people going with fresh forks and knives, &c. 
 It is not the custom for any scout to be in attendance, so that 
 the host has to do all menial offices. You would be amused 
 to see these intellectual men begin with fried soles and sauces, 
 proceed to a cutlet, then taste a few sausages or some savoury 
 omelette, and finish up with buttered cake or toast and 
 marmalade. Up to the sweet finale coffee is the beverage ; and 
 tea, coming when hunger has abated, prolongs breakfast ad 
 infinitum. 
 
 ' I went for a ride yesterday afternoon with Rutson, not 
 feeling very well. We were taken in the most furious snow- 
 storm I ever was in ; there was a strong wind driving, and the 
 snow came into our eyes and mouth, and down our necks and 
 up our arms. It was at its height when we were on Port 
 Meadow ; floods were out, and what with half-frozen bogs and 
 sheets of water, and the inability to see anything on account of 
 this snow, our chances of returning undrowned or with whole 
 horses were shght. We did, however, succeed in piloting our- 
 selves to Wolvercote, and thence spurred home in miserable 
 plight. It was vexatious, for when one does indulge in a ride, 
 one expects to get pleasure and good by it. 
 
 * I have been reading some of Kingsley's " Miscellanies," and 
 have been utterly disgusted with one on Shelley and Byron ; 
 he makes the most odious preferences for manly over senti- 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. March 11, 1860.
 
 1860 YOUTH 73 
 
 mental nces, and preaches on poor Shelley as full text and type of 
 the latter. Besides the injustice and the repulsiveness of the 
 matter, one felt insulted by the man's loose writing. These 
 Essays seem to have got together somehow, but to have 
 followed no distinct plan — maybe to have been jotted down in 
 the saddle by some cover. Such slap-dash writing is not un- 
 pleasant in other Essays, where he talks of sport and rural 
 delights, but it jars on my taste when used as the vehicle of 
 such wholesale and unfounded criticisms on poets like Shelley, 
 and on the age that reads him.' 
 
 ' I ' have just come from taking composition to Jowett, who 
 talked to me about my Moderations. He gave me hope, blow- 
 ing a trumpet-blast of determination. Such a man was never 
 found, so great to inspire confidence and to rouse to efforts. 
 Other people may prate for hours, and set the pros and cons 
 before you, yet never stir your lethargy. By a single word, 
 with no argument but a slight appeal to the natural powers of 
 most men, and a plea for work as work, he makes one feel that 
 to be successful is the only thing short of dishonour. 
 
 'It is good to hear a man of such broad and unprejudiced 
 views : Conington is the reverse ; great in his own way, but the 
 way narrow. Conington is stationary : he has cut out his 
 notions, and will obstinately keep to them. 
 
 ' Jowett says that my only thought till Mods, must be my 
 work. I sliull therefore not bring home with me any of my 
 genealogical apparatus ; the rules I laid down for reading must 
 be steadily adhered to, and herein help me ; all byways of 
 literature must be carefully eschewed, hard. 
 
 ' Such are the resolutions roused by Jowett's trumpet, how 
 long to last ? ' 
 
 [The letters from which the preceding extracts have been 
 gathered make it quite clear that Symonds thoroughly enjoyed 
 tb(! epistolary form of expression. Witness to this fact would 
 lie borne by those hundreds of correspondents with whom he 
 came into epistolary contact during his later years. Talking 
 and letter-writing were, indeed, the forms of intellectual 
 
 ' To liis bister Clmrlottc. Murch 10, IHGO.
 
 74 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1860 
 
 exercise which yielded him inotst delight. Even as early as 
 January 1858, while he was still at Harrow, he had professed 
 himself ' a great lover of old letters,' and upon letter- writing 
 in general he now puts out his views to his sister Charlotte as 
 follows :] 
 
 ' I ^ wish you would pay more attention to the writing of 
 letters. I am not the proper person to read you a sermon upon 
 this subject, because I do not think that the specimens I send 
 you are at all what letters should be. Yet I labour under the 
 disadvantage of writing to a mixed audience. You have only 
 me to talk to, and, moreover, being a lady, are perhaps more 
 bound to write good letters. I think you should consider more 
 to whom you are writing, in each instance, and try to say 
 something suitable to the tastes, &c. of the individual. It is 
 quite a mistake to suppose that one ever needs subject-matter in 
 writing a letter. I think those are most interesting which detail 
 least of daily affairs, but, taking one occurrence as a kind of 
 text, go on and discourse upon collateral points of interest. 
 The younger Pliny, who was one of the most graceful of all 
 letter-writers, recommends a friend to be careful not to write 
 journals in letters. I daresay you think this contradictory of 
 my craving after news ; it does sound so, but yet much news 
 may be conveyed without formal statement, the more so if you 
 are careful to select such news as will be especially interesting 
 to your correspondent. Letters might be raised into an intel- 
 lectual exercise ; and, if you took to view them in that light, I do 
 not think that an hour or so spent upon one w^ould be any waste. 
 You ought to be looking out sharp now for any mental fillip 
 or stimulus. I think you are very much like myself in 
 possessing a generally listless and inactive intellect, and one 
 which requires constant goading and keeping up to the mark. 
 I only hope that by lying in wait for it perpetually, and keeping 
 it in exercise, it may eventually become less flaccid than it is 
 at present. On the other hand, I doirbt whether inherent weak- 
 ness can be eradicated by any exercise. I always fancy that 
 want of concentration and feebleness of comprehension are the 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. May 27, 18G0.
 
 1860 YOUTH 75 
 
 result of some softness and nervelessness in the texture of my 
 brain ; so much has this idea sometimes possessed me that I 
 have wished to become a pliysiologist for the mere purpose of 
 studying the conditions of the brain and endeavouring to con- 
 nect them with mental energies, &c. 
 
 ' I should not be babbling so much were it not Sunday. 
 This afternoon I hope to hear " The Heavens are Telling " at 
 Magdalen. That chorus is the grandest interpretation of 
 " light " that has ever been conceived. Its restless radiation, the 
 full broad centre of sound from which those brilliant undula- 
 tions are continually darting forth, the bounding flux and 
 reflux of its changes — all this seems perfectly to represent the 
 vital energy and ceaseless motion of light, as coming from the 
 sun, or in the cycles of the planets. In Beethoven's great 
 Hallelujah we have the gradual development of infant worlds, 
 but in Haydn's Chorus the whole universe has just been set in 
 ceaseless motion by the first utterance, "Let there be light." 
 By the way, do you know how clergymen invariably proceed 
 to " And there was light " '? This should certainly be read, 
 " And there was— Light." ' 
 
 ' I' ought not to be writing just now, for last Sunday I did 
 nothing to the Gospels. Yet I cannot help scribbling a little 
 to tell you of a charming ride I had on Friday with Rutson. 
 It was a delicious summer day ; we started at half-past four, 
 riding along Port Meadow, and through lields that still skirted 
 the river, with Wytham Woods upon our left. By this route 
 we got about seven miles of uninterrupted grass land, covered 
 with cowslips and Ininiing marigolds. The fields seemed quite 
 deserted, and we saw nothing but pheasants or partridges 
 running from tlieir cover, with now and then a plover making 
 melancholy liuman cries. So, soon we came to Bablock 
 llythe, a place celebrated in Matthew Arnold's " Scholar 
 Gypsy," a solitary house guarding a ferry ; here we crossed in 
 a l)road horse boat, and rode on to Stanton Harcourt. I had 
 often wished to sec the graves of the Harconi-ts in tliis church, 
 tlie room where Po]k; is said to liave lived, and the great 
 inediiL'Val kitchen, still black with smoke. The lirst thing, 
 ' To hi:i sister Cluulotlc. Miiy (i, IHGU.
 
 76 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1860 
 
 however, was to get some dinner for ourselves, and stabling 
 for our horses. We found a little inn, but alas ! found neither 
 stablemen nor dinner. There were two stalls for horses in a 
 shed, one empty, the other filled with straw. Rutson's horse 
 was honoured with the empty stall ; I took a pitchfork, and 
 dispossessed the straw from the other for my beast. Having 
 taken off bridles and saddles we foraged for hay and corn, 
 which at last we found ; and so returned to the inn kitchen, 
 tired and dusty. Soon, however, we discovered that it provided 
 less accommodation for man than the stables for beast ; a loaf 
 of bread was its only eatable. Food for contemplation there 
 was plenty in the churchyard, and its splendid yew. The 
 church itself is beautiful — a much restored specimen of 
 pure Early English. Some of the Harcourt tombs are most 
 elaborate — one especially of ancient painted stone tabernacle- 
 Avork. Others were flat, with knights and ladies all in rows — 
 their dress and armour, shields and crests and helmets, 
 gorgeously emblazoned. Everywhere hung coronets, with the 
 Harcourt peacock drooping his long tail behind the helmet ; 
 the arms of Harcourt and of Byron shone conspicuous. They 
 give the most gorgeous combinations of colour that heraldry 
 can boast — gold and crimson, silver and crimson, in alternate 
 bars and bends. 
 
 ' As we returned, Bablock Hythe was even calmer and more 
 beautiful than it had been before. The perfect sunset reflec- 
 tion on the one hand, the moon on the other, as we crossed the 
 Weir, seemed to fill even our steeds with calm and poetry. 
 They went more gently. We reached Oxford a little before 
 ten. I was very tired and exhausted. The only eatable to 
 satiate my hunger (before a visit for composition to Jowett at a 
 quarter-past ten) was buttered toast and cofi'ee. On this 
 somewhat bilious diet I buoyed myself up to discuss my own 
 Iambics. 
 
 ' I enjoyed the expedition exceedingly ; it made me long 
 more and more that I had some friend of my own age at 
 Clifton. Had I my OAvn way, I would willingly transport 
 about three of my Oxford friends, and place one in the 
 Crescent and another in Cornwallis Grove ; that so I might
 
 1860 YOUTH 77 
 
 have companions for long walks, or that often-contemplated 
 moonlight expedition to Leigh Woods. The latter I must 
 accomplish in the summer. 
 
 ' Mind, what I say about wishing for Oxford friends at 
 Clifton does in no way diminish the full perfection of home. 
 I need some attendant in those places only where my dear 
 sister cannot go. As it is, if I had my choice between the two, 
 I would rather live at home, with solitude and cherub con- 
 templation, when I walk about, than stay at Oxford with fifty 
 devoted friends.' 
 
 ' I ' have been amused just now by the visit of a very High 
 Church acquaintance of mine, who came in redolent of incense. 
 He had been to a friend's rooms, who is of the same persuasion, 
 and found him at service. "Accordingly," said he, "I vested 
 myself in my sky-blue cassock, then I put on a white chasuble 
 with gold border ; after that the stole and maniple ; and, 
 lastly, the beretta. Thus attired, we went through the 
 service." To think of the absurdity of these men. He went 
 on to describe how he had a "triptych" with ruby-glass 
 doors, containing an ivory crucifix on an ebony stand, and how 
 his incense cost seven shillings the pound, and how he had 
 clothed a Welsh choir with " due vestments " as an ]*jaster 
 ottering, and how his cousin the Abbot had made seven pro- 
 selytes to the "true faith." I had thought the Tractarian 
 }iuiiil)ug had died, and given way to philosophical cant of 
 infidelity ; ])ut it seems that the very dregs and offscourings of 
 Oxford youth still rock themselves upon this nonsense. . . .' 
 
 'Tbis^ morning I went to hear Stanley preach the Assizes 
 sermon : the judges' procession and trumpets burst upon me 
 for the first time, but the clangour of the latter was inferior 
 to iny expectations, and decidedly surpassed by Stanley's brazen 
 bidding payer. There is a great charm to me in hearing 
 that gradual dissection of the Universal Churcb : it l)('C()iiies 
 sublime at the ' seminaries of sound learning,' ' and licrein 
 Oxford,' with tli(! long roll of Cbrist Cbui-cli b((n('f;ictors — 
 kings and cardinals, archljishops .uid iioblomen. Stanley has 
 
 ' To liis sistoi- Charlotte. .Tune 3, ISC.O. 
 '■' To the SiUiie, IHOO.
 
 78 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS I860 
 
 an unusually long list, for he prays likewise for University and 
 for Balliol — for " John cle Balliol and Dervorguilla his wife," 
 as well as for " Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 for Henry the Eighth, for Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal and 
 Archbishop of York, for the Lord Clarendon," for knights in- 
 numerable, and doctors of di\inity without limit. Such 
 enumerations come sweeping by with pall and sceptre, and 
 remind one of the line of Banquo's kings — our only ideas of 
 them being phantoms of our own creation. 
 
 ' I am so tired and so lamentably dismal about my work 
 for Moderations, that I do not know what will become of me. 
 I forget everything that I read and have read, and am now 
 unable even to read with understanding, so that I am beginning 
 to dread that my Mods, will have to be put off till the autumn.' 
 
 In ' the summer term of 1860 I won the Newdigate Prize 
 for an English poem on the Escorial. It was recited in the 
 Theatre on June 20. Conington, who did not believe (and 
 very rightly, perhaps, did not believe) in my gift as a poet, was 
 curiously perplexed by this occurrence. He had twice com- 
 peted for the Newdigate without success. Gifted with an 
 extraordinary memory, he declaimed to me, on one intermin- 
 able evening, his two unsuccessful poems, together v;ith the 
 two which won the prizes — four Newdigates in all — two 
 inedited and two in print. It was a colossal occasion, called 
 forth by the unexpected good luck of my littleness. When I 
 came to recite my poem in the rostrum, MattheAv Arnold, then 
 our Professor of Poetry, informed me very kindly, and in the 
 spirit of sound criticism, that he had voted for me, not because 
 of my stylistic qualities, but because I intellectually grasped the 
 subject, and used its motives better and more rationally than 
 my competitors. This sincere expression of a distinctive 
 judgment was very helpful to me. It gave me insight into my 
 own faculty, and preserved me from self-delusion as to its extent. 
 
 [Apropos of this success Symonds wrote to his friend 
 Mr. Stephens, ' I am reduced to the last stage of self-loathing 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 1860 YOUTH 79 
 
 by being lauded for wbat I cannot help despising. Yet I 
 succumb, and suffer people to read " The Escorial " as if it were 
 a new idyll with which Tennyson might electrify the Avorld. 
 Some people imagine that it is a final classical first : they have 
 to be undeceived.' 
 
 In the same term Symonds obtained a first-class in Modera- 
 tions, and so was immediately started upon his Avork for the 
 final schools in Litteras Humaniores — philosophy, logic, history. 
 For the summer vacation Conington formed a reading 
 j)arty, Avhich included Symonds and Green. They went to live 
 in a farmhouse upon the Lake of Coniston, facing the shore 
 which Ruskin has since made famous. Thence Symonds 
 writes to Mr. Stephens :■ — ' Green is coaching me in Plato. He 
 does it well, for he knows an immense deal about the Platonic 
 and Aristotelian philosophy, as well as about modern systems. 
 On the other hand, because he is a very original thinker, he 
 does not express himself quite as clearly and fluently as such 
 beginners as myself would like. The spirit of Plato's philosophy 
 is surprising to mo, who had never conceived to what an extent 
 Christianity had been anticipated Ijy Socrates, But it is the 
 constant search for the Ileal over the Seeming, for Truth as 
 Truth, which strikes me with such new light,' Here then, 
 from the study of Plato, we find Symonds imbibing for the 
 first time that passion for the absolute, that dislike of the 
 relative which controlled his intellectual growth, and to which 
 we shall find him recurring again and again in his niaturer 
 speculations upon Life and Conduct. 
 
 To ^Ir, Stephens be sent this further account of his work : 
 'My reading may be divided into three sections — "deep," 
 " middling," and " shallow," In the " deep " department the 
 " Phiedrus " and the "Pbicdo," and perhaps Theocritus, P.ion, 
 and Moschus, My " middling " studies have been chiefly in 
 Swiss history. Germany in the eleventh and twelfth centuries 
 was as tangled as the Gordian knot, and, in modern phraseology, 
 I am minded to " cut " the wliole thing. My " shallow " reading 
 has fiill(!n nmch on music, I>esid(!S " Consuclo," I have been 
 intercsttid in a strange novel oi Miss Disraeli's, It is called 
 " (!harle;< Anchestor " ; it is a romantic history of Mendelssohn,
 
 80 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1860 
 
 Hullah, and many eminent modern performers. I daresay 
 you have read the Shelley memorials. It seems impossible that 
 anything new can be said about him. " Requiescat in pace." 
 Let us hope they won't go on stirring up his bones.'] 
 
 A ^ trifling incident occurred at Coniston, when on this 
 reading party with Conington, which I shall relate, because it 
 is more powerfully imprinted on my memory than all the other 
 
 details of those weeks. I had been talking to S upon a 
 
 grey stone wall tufted with Cystopteris and Buta muraria, the 
 ordinary fern-grown sort of wall which divides fields in the 
 Lake District. When twilight fell he went off to his lodging 
 and his loves. I returned to the little room in the farmhouse 
 where I pursued my studies. There I sat and read. Conington 
 and Green were conversing in the paved kitchen, used by us 
 as a dining-room, and perhaps they were not conscious of my 
 presence. There was only a door between the two chambers. 
 Conington said — ' Barnes will not get his First.' (They called 
 me Barnes then, and I liked the name, because they chose it.) 
 ' No,' said Green, ' I do not think he has any chance of doing 
 so.' Tiien they proceeded to speak about my festhetical and 
 literary qualities, and the languor of my temperament. I 
 scraped my feet upon the floor and stirred the table I was 
 sitting at. Their conversation dropped, but the sting of it 
 remained in me ; and though I cared little enough for first- 
 classes, I then and there resolved that I would win the best 
 first of my year. 
 
 This kind of grit in me has to be notified. Nothing roused 
 it so much as a seeming slight, exciting my rebellious man- 
 hood. It was the same spur, as when my Harrow tutor wrote 
 home of me, ' wanting in vigour both of body and mind ' ; and 
 Conington once more, in the course of a long Clifton walk, 
 remarked upon my ' languor,' and Jowett told me I had ' no 
 
 iron to rely upon,' and F M said, I had 'worked 
 
 myself out in premature culture,' and an M.P. at Mr. North's 
 indulgently complimented me on ' writing for the magazines.' 
 All these excellent people meant little by what they said, and 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 1860 YOUTH 81 
 
 assuredly forgot soon what fell so lightly from their lips. 
 But they stimulated my latent force by rousing antagonism. 
 
 The autumn of this year, 1860, before I returned to Balliol, 
 was spent in a Belgian tour with Charles Cave, my sister 
 Edith his wife, and my sister Charlotte, and upon the top of 
 this, a rapid scamper with my father through Berlin, Prague, 
 Vienna, Salzburg, Munich. The diary of these travels I pos- 
 sess, and it shows how hard I worked at art and nature. 
 
 [The diary opens thus : ' I am going to begin a diary again 
 in order to record my doings. Last time I kept a journal was 
 between Jan. 17 and Sept. 25 of 1858. I have it still, and 
 love it as a record of many happy days. The pleasure I have 
 taken in it since ought to have made me more regular in 
 noting down the daily occurrences and feelings of these years. 
 Yet I think there needs unity of subject to keep up the interest 
 of a journal. I must hope that our travels will supply one.' 
 The book is an extraordinary record of activity and absorption. 
 Everything is studied, noted, compared, recorded to the full ; 
 nothing is omitted ; a headache which prevented Symonds 
 from being fully alive to the treasures of the Antwerp Museum, 
 is bitterly resented. Music, Architecture, and Italian pictures 
 are the main subjects of his descriptions and reflections ; and 
 through all runs a note of keen enjoyment, which was char- 
 acteristic of his nature when ill-health or overwork did not 
 interfere. It is thus that he appeared to others, and thus, no 
 doubt, he really was when not engaged in analysing himself. 
 This note of keen enjoyment remained with him through life, 
 and made him the Ijrilliant, vivacious, stimulating companion 
 he ever was. So careful, so accurate was his habit that this 
 journal, covering 238 pages of a small note-book, is indexed at 
 the end with a list of hotels, churches, public buildings, 
 pictures, and notes of expenditure. The diary, so diligently 
 kept, seems to have confirmed a natural tendency to tliis form 
 of self-expression. On Thursday, Octobei- 11, 18G0, or two 
 days after the close of his travel-records, he began a series 
 which was virtually never laid aside till the day before his
 
 82 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1B60 
 
 death. The diary of October 11 opens thus: 'It is rather 
 adventurous to begin keeping a journal, after so many failures, 
 and without the unity of subject which I thought so necessary 
 to make the trouble endurable. Yet, as I consider a diary 
 useful as a mechanical memory, and interesting personally for 
 the future, I shall attempt to keep one. The custom of 
 writing when abroad will make it easier to do so here, and my 
 "unity of subject" must be esoteric. The journey was 
 decidedly historical and exoteric. This I will try to make 
 more a record of what passes in myself and my more private 
 concerns. Herein, however, let me determine to avoid any 
 essay-writing on these pages. One journal begun at Oxford 
 failed thus. Also, let me not strive too conscientiously after 
 recording conversations. This bad habit made another too 
 tedious for continuance.' 
 
 Symonds had come back from his tour fully prepared to 
 test his beloved Bristol by the famous cities and buildings 
 which he had just visited. ' On entering the Cathedral,' he 
 writes, ' and seeing its beautiful bare aisles, I felt the whole 
 superiority of Enghsh architecture over Belgian, and even 
 over German. The massive mullions and exquisite tracery of 
 the windows, the grand roofing with its clustered spandrils and 
 lacy boss-work, the harmony of the parts produced by greater 
 length, the purity of the bay-arches and their moulded columns 
 —all combine to exalt Bristol Cathedral over any I have seen 
 abroad ' ; and he adds, what is obviously true at this time of 
 his life : ' " C*lum non animuni mutant qui trans mare 
 currunt.'' I tested the view from the roof of the muniment 
 room at St. Mary's, Redclyft'e, and remain convinced of its 
 superiority over Ghent or Bruges.' He enlarges on the same 
 topic to Mr. Stephens, in a letter which is overflowing with 
 affection for his home, for Chfton and Bristol. ' It gives me 
 more pleasure to sit in Bristol Cathedral than in the Duomoat 
 Milan, though the latter's transept aisles could hold the former, 
 roof and tower and all. ^Yhen you come to us I shall make 
 you understand why the peculiar intricacies of arch and 
 -roined vaults-subtle as a Mass in D by Beethoven-have 
 more influence over me than the bare illimitable space of
 
 1660 YOUTH 83 
 
 gorgeous foreign churches. I cannot understand why some 
 people think size necessary to magnificence. Quality alone 
 affects me ; I am ludicrously ignorant of quantity.' 
 
 The winter term of 1860 at Oxford which followed this 
 jovirney was one of very great strain, both mental and 
 emotional. The diary, with its constant records of breakfasts, 
 luncheons, dinners, abundantly prove that he was sought for 
 socially. The inner circle of his friends — Conington, Palmer, 
 Puller, Ollivant, Vickers, Green, Stephens — absorb an immense 
 amount of his time and energy. He sits with them till late at 
 night, or rather early in the morning, discussing such feverish 
 subjects as ' The Universe,' or ' Moral Conduct,' or ' Mesmerism,' 
 or ' Love,' with the result that entries like the following 
 become frequent : ' I am feeling very ill — my memory weak — 
 my head heavy — my limbs dragging — my whole being low.' 
 And no wonder. Intellectually two men, Conington and 
 Jowett, were working him very hard ; emotionally, his friends 
 were wearing him out, wliile the conduct of one of them 
 brought him face to face with a problem of morals which was 
 no longer abstract, but concrete, the solution of which compelled 
 him to define his own views, and precipitated all his earlier 
 speculations in the region of the affections. 
 
 It was at this pei'iod that the influence of Mr. Jowett began 
 to make itself markedly felt. As Symonds had already taken 
 a first in Moderations and was reading for the final schools, 
 he naturally came more directly under the notice and the 
 tuition of the Professor of Greek. He attended lectures on 
 the ' Republic,' of which he says little, and wrote frequent essays 
 to be read to his lectui-er. Of tliese he says mucli. The 
 figure of Mr. Jowett runs all through the diary cf tliis period ; 
 with his brief, weighty, pregnant remarks, and liis touclies of 
 kindlinfiis wliorc lie tb<nii.',lit that his trenchant criticism bad 
 wounded a sensitive nature. ' I took an essay on " Historical 
 Evidence " to Jowett. J Iiad spent pains upon it, and was 
 [Jcased on llie wliole witli iiis reception of il, Lliuiigh lie ciiid 
 me for ornaments and mannerisms of style.' There is more 
 about tliis essay a little further on. ' Afici- dinner the Essay 
 Society in my rooms. Green, Kutson, Jjidlci', IJiyco present.
 
 84 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1860 
 
 Dicey came in after I had read my essay on "Historical 
 Evidence." 1 felt its poverty as I read, and still more so when 
 we discussed. Perhaps this, and the cold way with which 
 Conington received some translations I had done my best by, 
 makes me feel so mentally inferior as I do to-night. I look 
 round me and find nothing in which I excel. It is desire for 
 many things and appreciation of some. Yet those who care 
 for such powers less and have them more, are strong and 
 happy. What is it ? and where is comfort ? Oh, not here— 
 yet if not here, then where ? Do I know anything beyond 
 this " here " and this " myself " ? In neither of them can I find 
 consolation, and I do not feel that there is aught beyond. 
 Perhaps I feel there is, but I know nothing ; and what I feel 
 is more a dread than a hope.' 
 
 ' After lunch to hear Mat. Arnold on Translating Homer. 
 A good lecture, and full of impudence.' ' Walk with Conington 
 to Bagley Wood. Interesting talk about religious doubts — I 
 thought all doubt led up to the great doubt about God.' ' Tait 
 and I met at eight to read essay on the Eleatics to Jowett. 
 Tait read first, Avhile Jowett gave me tea. Jowett was pleased 
 with his essay. Then I read mine, which was elaborate. He 
 interruptel me several times to talk, but at the end seemed 
 pleased ; he said : " That is very good, Mr. Symonds, a good 
 essay " ; nor did he make any strictures on the style or manner- 
 ism, with the exception of the use of " Generally " in opening 
 the subject. . . . Then he gave me a lecture on Hegel. He 
 thinks him marvellous in metaphysical distinction, practical 
 acumen, and poetry. His theory, one in Avhich the existence of 
 a universal God is to be seen in all things and thought. 
 Distinct personaHties are allowed by this God to exist under 
 and independent of Him. This I had not understood from 
 He^-el. The view I had got of our being limited parcels of 
 divinity, destined to be resolved, he called Spinozism.' The 
 next entry is : ' I passed a very bad night, and am feehng ill.' 
 That was on November 10, and six days later came a telegram 
 from his father. Dr. Symonds, ' Pray give up all study at once.' 
 The Master, Dr. Jenkyns, was quite wilhng to assent to this 
 proposal, and to allow Symonds to go down, and Mr. Jowett
 
 1860 YOUTH 85 
 
 promised ' to send me some of his lectm-es, and offered a large 
 book of them, clasped and locked.' 
 
 The strain of all this emotional and intellectual Hfe was 
 indeed more than Symonds's delicate constitution could support. 
 The only reliefs from the besetting problems of conscience 
 and the bewildering conundrums of philosophy were walks to 
 Bagley \Yood or Iffley, or in INIagdalen — where the process 
 was continued, not suspended — uncongenial gymnastics at 
 Maclaren's, and music at Magdalen and New, which, though it 
 soothed for the moment, really served to feed the emotional lires 
 which were consuming him. On November 24 he went home. 
 But that which was wearing him out could not be escaped 
 by a flight frcm Oxford. The process which was exhausting 
 him was tl e formation of his own character ; he carried all 
 the elements of the ferment with him to his home. ' In hopes 
 of keeping mens sana in corpore sano,' he says, 'I have made 
 these rules for home life : 
 
 ' 1. To walk to the Sea Walls, or at least that distance, 
 every day. 
 
 ' 2. To attend no cathedral service except on Sundays and 
 Christmas Day. 
 
 ' 3. To read (if I can) from 9.30 till 1, from 4.30 till 6, from 
 10 till 11. 
 
 '4. To go to bed at 11, rise at 7.30. 
 
 ' 5. To drink no strong tea or coftee, and take only one 
 glass of sherry at dinner.' 
 
 But in spite of these excellent resolves, he diil not grow 
 stronger. ' It is idle to record each of these languid days,' he 
 writes, ' the reading in the morning, the stupid walk in the 
 wet afternoon, and the dull evening.' 
 
 On December 10, term Ix'ing over at Oxford, Conington 
 came to stay at Clifton Hill House. ' After lunch walk to Sea 
 Mills, and round by river. Conington told me that he had 
 hoard from Ilalford Vaughan (who inspected the depositions 
 before Lord Eldon) that the judge could not have acted other- 
 wise, so immoral had Shelley's life been. This tallies with 
 what the Miss Shelloys said, that the less people inquired into 
 their brother's life the better.' A dinner party is recorded in
 
 86 JOHN ADDIXGTON SYMONDS 1860 
 
 which the conversation turned on t^'hosts, magic, witchcraft, 
 spirituaHsm, and curious astronomical theories, 'which of 
 course made Conington stonily silent. He can talk of nothing 
 but Oxford, books, and some sorts of poHtics.' 
 
 The life at Chfton was full and varied, had Symonds's 
 health been adequate to the enjoyment of it, had his whole 
 mind and all his feelings not been already engaged and 
 absorbed by the problems which Oxford life had brought to an 
 acute point. The walls of Clifton College were beginning to 
 rise, and young Symonds was taken to see the plans of those 
 buildings, with which he was subsequently so closely connected. 
 Dr. Symonds's house was always full of company, and that of 
 the best. But though these things are noted in the diary, the 
 record of ill health, ' bad, depressed headache,' ' painful reveries,' 
 ' weary dreams,' ' weak and melancholy,' occupy the prominent 
 place. He does his best to enjoy : ' I have spent my Christmas- 
 tide on the whole pleasantly. The cold clear weather, the 
 morning bells when dressing, the presents, the service — all 
 were cheery. But for this Seliusiicht I should be happy.' 
 But this is followed by ' Very nervous at night. Went to 
 Auntie and got some Nepenthe, which did not do much good.' 
 1361 So this vacation came to an end with the following entry : 
 
 'I go back to Oxford to-morrow, and have just concluded my 
 vacation's reading. Is it satisfactory ? Tolerably. I have 
 analysed the ' Republic,' read two books of Thucydides, written 
 an essay for the Stanhope, and three essays on Chatterton. 
 Considering my state of health, morbid condition of mind, and 
 many interruptions, this is good. I am very sorry to go away, 
 even though I have been so aAvfully dismal here.' 
 
 The effort he was making to go the way he thought right 
 is made abundantly clear through all the journal of this period. 
 As he himself notes : ' At the beginning of last vacation I made 
 rules, which I kept pretty well. Read as much as I intended, 
 I could and might not. Go to bed as regularly, I could not. 
 But I did not drink beer at dinner, nor did I ever go to a 
 morning cathedral service, much as I longed to. This term 
 let me make some rules. 
 
 ' 1. To go to bed at 11.
 
 1861 YOUTH 87 
 
 ' 2. To go to ]\Iaclaren's ^ when I can, and always take 
 some exercise. 
 
 ' 3. To read from 10 till 2, 5 till 5.30, 8 till 10. 
 
 ' 4. To drink no beer in hall, but try and take some at 
 lunch.' 
 
 How full his intellectual life at Balliol really was may be 
 illustrated by this account of a single day, taken from his 
 diary : 
 
 ' Sunday, Jan. 27, 1861. — Breakfasted with L. Stanley, and 
 had an amusing party. ]\Iet Owen — old Balliol man, re- 
 turned from Bombay College — ^Wordsworth, Green, Jackson, 
 Ford, Wright, White, Bethel. Talked about " Essays and 
 Reviews," and the storm brewing for them ; about Jowett's 
 parentage — Ford knows his mother and sister slightly, they 
 live at Torquay ; then of De Quincey, without some allusion 
 to whom I hardly remember any intellectual Oxford break- 
 fast go oft' ; then about historic portraits — Wycliffe's at 
 Balliol, Chaucer's from an old illumination, Dante's in the 
 Arundel Society's publications. Sat on till 11.15. I went and 
 wrote a long letter to papa about myself. 
 
 ' Green came up to lunch, and we went to hear the Bishop ^ 
 at St. Mary's. Full to overflowing. Preached from the text, 
 " For all that He did so many miracles, yet they believed not 
 on Him." I knew ho would level at the Essayists, and, from 
 the text, expected more than came. It was a general harangue 
 against neglect of Revelation, considered in four hghts — kinds, 
 causes, consequences, cures thereof. The kinds were three, 
 as resulting from pride of the world, pride of the flesh, pride 
 of intellect. And each of these three kinds he treated with 
 regard to the last throe divisions of his subject. Therefore the 
 Essayists only came in for the third part of the abuse ; but he 
 gave it them strong. His peroration to the consequences was 
 fine. He spoke of mnii who, trusting to their own reason, 
 thought they could elevate themselves into a purer atmosphere, 
 leave Ijohind for the vulgar a belief in the (!i'iiciiied, and hold 
 direct communion with the unapproachable God. 
 
 ' More oratory than argument. 
 
 ' Gymnasium. ■' Wilberforce.
 
 88 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1861 
 
 ' Then to Magdalen. Ser\-ice begins to-day. " Praise the 
 Lord, Jerusalem," Hayes. For voluntary, " Fallen is the foe." 
 
 ' After hall, read " Alastor " through, and felt its truth. 
 How strange it is that the pictures it produced in my mind 
 when I heard papa read it long ago, and could not have under- 
 stood it, are still vivid, nor do I get beyond them. Query, 
 would such vivid pictures be suggested by a new poem now ? 
 
 ' Went out to see C. B., who was not at home. Went to 
 Holford B.'s room, and heard him play Beethoven.' 
 
 Such a day as this, begun in keen conversation with the 
 best of his contemporaries, carried on through a powerful 
 sermon by Wilberforce, and ending with Shelley's ' Alastor ' 
 and Beethoven, is quite sufficient to account for the entry of 
 the following date : ' Very bad night. Unable to do anything 
 in the morning.' And the passages quoted above do not record 
 anything exceptional in the tenor of Symonds's Balliol career. 
 He is keenly alive to all that is going on round him, and every 
 event is recorded, often with a touch of humour in his im- 
 patience of dulness. ' Breakfast with Jowett. j\Iet a stupid 
 man called S S , who spoiled every effort at conver- 
 sation by insisting on talking about Miss Eagle and ventri- 
 loquists.' 
 
 About this time Symonds took to riding again. It was an 
 exercise which always gave him pleasure, and from it he 
 derived much benefit to his health. He writes to his aunt, 
 ]\Iiss Sykes : ' I am feeling the benefit of my rides ; they take 
 away the fanciful headaches and depression, making me more 
 fresh, but, I fear, more idle. I get sleepy, and read less than I 
 might ; enough, perhaps, to be good for me.' This is the 
 
 record of his second outing : ' Eode to Woodstock with R , 
 
 a short ride, and rather stupid, for he would talk about miracles 
 and Jowett, and would not ride fast ' ; and this is followed by 
 ' Rode alone to Stowe Wood, Stanton St. John, Forest Hill. 
 Stupid riding alone, both for man and beast.' 
 
 It would seem that at this period Symonds was in the 
 throes of religious contention, which, under the influence of 
 his philosophical studies for Greats, had assumed in him a 
 highly intellectual form.
 
 1861 YOUTH 89 
 
 ' Went to Communion, and found it seemed to do me good. 
 Immediately after to hear the Bishop preach. Very line 
 sermon directed against doubt of portions of Revelation, as 
 leading eventually to doubt of all Revelation — intellectual 
 paralysis, moral weakness.' 
 
 In the following letter to his sister, while regretting the 
 decline of his pleasure in music, he tries to estimate the loss in 
 the region of ipsthetic enjoyment, which results from the 
 admission of doubt : 
 
 ' None ' of the musical services are much worth hearing, for 
 Magdalen is not recommenced. After the inflexibility with 
 which I avoided our week-day Cathedral service, I feel half 
 inclined to make some such rule for Oxford. I must think 
 about it, liecause, though it takes up time to go to IMagdalen, 
 still it is sometimes a great refreshment. I have lost, to my 
 humiliation be it said, much of the pleasure I took in music. 
 The enjoyment is less spontaneous and less suggestive. 
 I analyse and try to enjoy more ; I have fewer ideas and less 
 delight in hearing. A great many things must have combined 
 to produce this result, but chiefly a less firm belief in the super- 
 natural. Airy music and dark aisles inspire far deeper 
 enthusiasm when the church is peopled with myriads of unseen 
 angels. I l)elieve that half of what may be called natural, 
 emotional poetry comes from a belief of something in the 
 Unseen. A tree is a tree, but when a Dryad haunts it, it 
 is something more. So a star is a star till one of Raphael's 
 angels guides it, or its spirit hovers over Hymcna-us. For the 
 same reason we feel that what Masson would call subjective 
 descriptions of nature are far higlior than any gorgeous word- 
 painting. The simple scene, " when sundown skirts the moor," 
 seen through the glass of Tennyson's melancholy doubt, is 
 worth a whole landscape of Tliompson's nature-copying, simply 
 because a power, a spirit, has been jjiit into the lonely heath, 
 and sinking sun, congenial with the poet's spirit.' 
 
 Symonds's speculations upon religious subjects were keenly 
 stimulated ])y the sermons of liisbop Wilberforce, and, as was 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. January 20, 18C1.
 
 90 JOHN ADDIXQTON SYMONDS j'861 
 
 habitual with him, in the vigour of his intellectual sincerity, 
 he carried those speculations fast and far. 
 
 ' The ' Bishop preached a magnificent sermon yesterday on 
 " doubting," I have never heard anything from him so power- 
 ful : indeed, I think I have never heard such a grand sermon 
 from any one. It was chiefly rhetorical — starting on the old 
 premises of the Church's dogmas and the Bible. From this 
 premise his conclusions were unassailable. However, it did 
 not pretend to be argumentative. It was an impassioned 
 warning to young men, bidding them not let in the thin end of 
 the wedge of scepticism. He told them that the admission of 
 doubts on subjects of pure criticism and history would lead to 
 metaphysical doubts, and end in doubt of God. This seemed 
 to me to be the line of his argument, when stripped of its 
 illustration. Therefore, the theory was that religion is a thing 
 of the heart, into which intellect may not penetrate without 
 blunting itself and killing the heart. 
 
 ' I think he is right here. Many a man begins by doubting 
 the eternity of punishment ; and then, believing in his right 
 to exercise private judgment, can find the doctrine of the 
 Trinity nowhere in the Bible. The habit of appealing to 
 Reason once gained, and strengthened and supplied with food 
 by philosophical studies, he comes to apply the test of Reason 
 to higher mysteries— that of the Incarnation ; that, finally, of 
 the existence of a God. Each step has been destructive — as it 
 must be, if men try to understand dogmas which their powers 
 pronounced unintelligible. For a time such a man lives without 
 God in the world. If he has a weak moral instinct, bad 
 training, a strong temptation, he may in this period give way 
 to sin and lead a life of careless crime. If he is earnest and of 
 moral purpose, he comes in the eAd " to find a higher faith his 
 own." He sees he cannot live Avithout God, and that Christianity 
 is the most satisfying human embodiment of this necessity of 
 God. All do not reach this higher faith ; and for this reason, 
 I suppose, the Bishop wages war against the beginning of even 
 a healthy scepticism.' 
 
 It is remarkable that Symonds, while occupied with the 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. February 4, 1861.
 
 1861 YOUTH 91 
 
 subject of dogmatic scepticism, should have turned his attention 
 instinctively, for a time at least, to natvu'al science, as though 
 he divined that the battle-ground lay there. . He writes to his 
 aunt : 
 
 ' Among my studies at present is a new one — that of brains. 
 I have been attending a course of RoUestone's lectures, and 
 feel pretty competent to differentiate a monkey's from a man's 
 " cerebral hemisphere," 
 
 ' To-morrow I am to go and inspect one closely, and dissect 
 a sheep's brain, and I intend to put many puzzling questions 
 about the "fissure of Silvius " and the "Island of Reil." 
 These two terms papa could explain better than I could at the 
 present moment, for though I have heard plenty of meta- 
 physical language about them, I do not quite understand their 
 bearing on the great question of mind and matter. I go to 
 these lectures as preparatory to Ethnology, which seems to me 
 a necessary vestibule to the sciences both of History and 
 Philology. Then I had a pet notion that a new psychology 
 might be constructed on a purely anatomical and physiological 
 basis, but Rollestone has upset that by assuring me that the 
 more he studies the less connection he sees between the mind 
 and the nerves.' 
 
 ' Jowett ^ I have not seen lately, except at lectures, and on 
 those pleasant occasions when he gives tea and discusses essays 
 with Tait and me. Tait last time was told that his essay was 
 " not quite good, had too much mannerism, and was gushing 
 in part." Having made these strictures, Jowett feared lest he 
 had hurt Tait's tender feelings ; so to compensate him, he rose 
 from his chair, lifted the teapot very high, and sent a long 
 amber stream of tea into a cup which he previously rinsed, 
 after himself di-inking from it, and exclaimed like Socrates — 
 " Now I will give you some tea, my good friend." ' 
 
 ' The '^ Bishop's sermon is creating a great sensation. Few 
 
 like it. R thought it repressive of that liberty of thought 
 
 which the Protestant belief allows. But R on this showing 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. February 12, IBGl. 
 '^ Diary.
 
 93 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1861 
 
 would let every man have a little creed of his own, barring any 
 of the great points, the Trinity and the Incarnation. He does 
 not see how metaphysical doubts of God can arise from critical 
 and historical questioning of the canon. St. again mis- 
 understood the Bishop. He thought the Bishop wished us 
 to exercise intellect in examining the authority of the Church 
 and of Revelation, and then receive all dogmas implicitly. 
 Here are two objections to this view : 
 
 ' 1st. If the Bishop said so, all we could test by intellect 
 would be the vahdity of the canon. Then the question 
 whether we could find the dogmas in Revelation would still 
 remain. 
 
 ' 2nd. The Bishop did not say this. He especially warned 
 those " who received Revelation as a whole, but began to doubt 
 it in parts." In a word, he opposed Luther's point of view. 
 Here the Bishop is no doubt repressive of the spirit of inquiry. 
 But he seemed to me to be so because he felt that even an 
 historical and critical doubt would lead to total religious 
 scepticism. This final state may not last long, but it will 
 eventuate either in "a higher faith," or in immorahty. The 
 alternative he felt, and warned any from exposing themselves 
 to the risk. His moral was " Don't meddle with edged tools." 
 Moreover, he seemed to think the sceptical state might continue. 
 It may, but I pray it do not for me. Non-recognition of a God 
 and of any fixed point weakens moral purpose, exposes one to 
 temptation, and may lead to a life of careless sinfulness. This 
 is the chief evil of a sceptical state. It also seems to check 
 the unity of Thought and Will, and certainly to impair the 
 a)sthetical enthusiasm.' This last sentence is of moment, for 
 it shows how Symonds imagined that religious doubts would 
 operate upon the two sides of his nature, the intellect and the 
 emotions. And in this context appears the following entry : 
 ' I find I must make another rule — not to talk of religious 
 doubts. It is so exciting to my mind that I am always 
 exhausted by it.' 
 
 But his rule of avoiding talk upon religious questions only 
 drove the conflict inward upon himself. His health, indeed, 
 did not improve under the strain of speculation. He writes in
 
 1861 YOUTH 93 
 
 his diary for February 21 : 'It is sad and strange this life of 
 ours. " We He on the knees of a mild mystery " — as mild as 
 the Egyptian goddess that holds the naked child. Why should 
 I say this, but that I have had an evil night ? The wind 
 howled and raged outside, peeling the scarred face of Balliol, 
 and blowing down one of oui* few trees. It is strange what a 
 symi^athy and spirit this life of the elements produces in one. 
 I must needs be rushing out into the night to see the moon 
 riding through the torn clouds, and to hear the trees grinding 
 one against the other. After one of these nights, I am 
 PapvyovvaTos in soul and limb, my brain is hot, and the mcdidla 
 uhloiujata feverishly weak.' He was right in using this purely 
 scientific expression, for, as we shall see presently, a mischief 
 was being set up in the brain which was to be the source of 
 trial and suffering for many years to come. 
 
 Symonds's sense of enjoyment, however, remained very 
 keen. The following notes of an exeat to Sonning are full of 
 life and interest : — ' March 5, 1H61 — Met A. Pearson at Didcot 
 and went with him to his uncle's (Hugh Pearson) at Sonning. 
 We drove from Reading, past Earley Court, through Sonning- 
 Walk till we came to the green gates of the vicarage. H. Pearson 
 welcomed us with " Well, my dear Albert," and I felt as if I 
 had known him all my life. He first gave us luncheon, and 
 we talked about Jowett. He is so sorry about the " Essays and 
 Reviews." Says Jowett has never been the same man since 
 ho missed his election to the Mastership by one. He feels that 
 in five years this book will be obscure, but Jowett will still be 
 !i marked man. Then we went out to see the church— a 
 Ijoaiitifiil specimen of restoration. Woodyear is the ai-chitcct 
 and Hai-dman lias done the decoi'ation in parts. T'wo windows 
 by him, and all the brazen chandeliers, were voi'y good. It is 
 a hue decorated IniiMing. Fi-om the carving of sonu; bosses, 
 and especially from a great arch over what may have been an 
 Ivistfr sepulchre, J think ;i, l''rench artist must have been at 
 work. 'I'herc is so much grace and ))rofiision. The arch is 
 lilled with seated figures, like the figures at St. Ouen. 
 
 ' Then wc saw the churchyard, school, river, garden, ami 
 Hugh's house. It has a fine old panelled drawing-room. I
 
 94 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1861 
 
 was surprised with the immense amount he has done here. 
 He has made the place. Besides restoring the church, he has 
 built two others in the parish. He has made reading-rooms, 
 and set up a rifle corps. Lastly, he has made his own house 
 a paradise. He showed me a Tennyson in which Tennyson 
 had written — 
 
 "^Eennyson (attonitus). 
 
 14 Feb. . . 50 + 1. 
 Souning." 
 
 It was one of the old editions with the "Palace of Art" 
 unaltered. One line in the "Lady of Shalott," "and her 
 smooth face sharpened slowly," Tennyson said he had left out 
 because it is so painfully an image of death. He (Tennyson) 
 came to Sonning twice, once with Kingsley. Then he was in 
 religious doubt, and made what H. P. thought a profound 
 remark : " The question of Christianity is a question of the 
 Kesurrection." At dinner came Austin, the curate of Sonning, 
 and Horn, the vicar of Earley. We had pleasant tallc about 
 Jenkyns and old Balliol days.' 
 
 Term came to an end, and soon after Symonds's return to 
 Clifton he started, on March 25, for a short tour with his aunt 
 and sister to Amiens and Paris. The diary of this journey is 
 as fresh and lively as ever, and again we feel that whatever 
 internal struggles may have been wearing the young man's 
 mind he was outwardly full of enjoyment, vivacity, verve. It 
 is impossible to give more than a faint indication of the 
 immense variety of interests, of the intellectual activity dis- 
 played. Amiens Cathedral is visited from floor to roof ; 
 triforium and clerestory galleries traversed at an ' aerial ' 
 height ; nothing is omitted, for certainly what the Symonds 
 family visited, they visited thoroughly ; desire to learn and 
 desire to enjoy taking equal part in the direction of their 
 journeys. Then came Paris, and the ' Stabat Mater ' at the 
 Italian Opera. ' IMario sang Ciijus aiiiinain, and his part of 
 Qitando corpus. He reahsed all I ever heard of his voice — it 
 is soft and pathetic, but seemed to pierce and thrill more than 
 a soprano's. He gave Cujits iuilinain with far greater feeling
 
 1861 YOUTH 95 
 
 than Giugiiui. Giuglini has more fluidity, more exquisite 
 mellowness of voice, ^^erhaps, but there is not that mastery 
 about him. The soprani were Mesdames Bertrani and Battu. 
 The latter was young and pretty, and sang with great effect. 
 She had a French hard voice, which seemed to rouse all the 
 enthusiasm of the vlciw garcons. The chorus and orchestra 
 were very good — the performers (as far as I could see) really 
 French.' Then comes a rhetorical De Quinceyan record of 
 the first impressions evoked by the Venus of ]\Iilo. ' As I 
 stood and gazed, it terrified me to feel that she had worn that 
 queen-like smile for nineteen centuries — that she had lain in 
 the darkness of the earth, and still had smiled — that her arms 
 had been broken in the crash of empires, and that still she had 
 smiled — that she had seen the slow decay of years grind her 
 fair breast and limbs, and yet had smiled — that now she rests 
 as victoriously as when she gazed on shouting worshippers, 
 and remains alone in majesty, unmoved by the adoration of 
 thousands. Time has not destroyed her. She cannot die. 
 Hers is the immortality of Thought. She lives for ever in the 
 mind of her creator ; she lives in the memory of all that once 
 behold her. Were this red fool-fury of the Seine to rise again 
 and shatter Paris, she would smile upon the tramp of armies ; 
 and though a Carmagnole of slaughter, led by Monads, raged 
 around her pedestal and crashed her to the ground, still would 
 she smile and disclaim her murderers with eyes calm gazing 
 forward.' 
 
 This journey ended on April 6 ; the party returning by 
 Rouen, Havre, and Southampton. Symonds dreaded the 
 resumption of his home and college life, with its speculations 
 and introspections, which were overlaid, for a time, by what he 
 called the ' objectivity ' of travel. 
 
 And, indeed, the old formulas begin again. ' I have had a 
 second bud night, and am feeling ill and nervous. Head in 
 the morning about the Criininal Jlesponsibility of Lunatics in 
 the " I'sychological Jxeview," and some notes of pa])a's. I am 
 going to write about it for the iOssay Society.' Tlie day 
 following the essay is completed, so active and diligent was he 
 in the execution of any intellectual scheme. But he adds a
 
 96 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONDS 1861 
 
 reflection which throws light upon his attitude towards the 
 practice of letters in his own particular case. ' Had I known 
 more about the subject, I should have said less and less quickly 
 — perhaps not so well.' 
 
 A2)ril 15. — ' Got up with the idea that I was going to Oxford 
 to-day. This did not make me feel too lively — I hate a 
 change.' And his return to Oxford did, in fact, renew all his 
 old difficulties as to conduct. The ill effects are seen at once 
 in such entries, as — ' Three bad nights in succession have made 
 me weak and nervous, and with a pain in the trapezoid 
 muscles.' It must be borne in mind, however, that these 
 entries only show what he himself felt ; how he struck the 
 outside world is a very difterent matter. Dr. vSymonds had 
 just received and forwarded to his son the following letter from 
 Dean Milman : 
 
 ' My dear Sir, — I cannot refrain from expressing the 
 pleasure which I received from reading your son's prize poem. 
 I have had much to do in my day with such compositions, 
 having adjudged them for ten years of my life — a decade not, 
 in that respect, of unmingled enjoyment. But " The Escorial " 
 seams to me to rank very highly among its class, and the 
 thought, feeling, and execution to promise better things here- 
 after.' 
 
 And soon after the Diary contains the following note : 
 ' Conington has been hearing good things of me from Bright 
 at Marlborough. His brother, Baliiol Bright, has been talking 
 enthusiastically about me to him. As Conington says, he had 
 got a very exaggerated idea of me. The thing is, that I am 
 accustomed to talk to people I do not know, and naturally 
 show my best paces the first few times we meet. But the 
 fount dries up, and in time people must see that one has a 
 stock of conversation ready to order, and power, gained by long 
 habit, of making the most of what little one knows. Poor 
 
 knew little enough, yet marshalled it so well that people 
 
 thought him clever and well-informed.' 
 
 At the close of this term Symonds joined his father in
 
 1861 YOUTH 97 
 
 London, and the two set off for what is described as ' an all- 
 delif^htfiil tour ' to Chamonix and then to Lombardy ; and as 
 this was Symonds's first visit to Switzerland and to Italy, with 
 both of which he was so closely connected in after-life, his 
 diary becomes of great interest, and shall be quoted at some 
 length. 
 
 Macon, Suudaij, Jiuie 16. — We left at five for Geneva, 
 where I now am. The journey from Amberieu to Belle Garde 
 was extremely fine. It winds through a pass cut by the 
 Rhone, between Jura and some other mountains. After 
 breaking fast we drove out to see Geneva. First we went to 
 the cathedral, a small and symmetrical building of most 
 interesting transition Romanesque. It has curious specimens 
 of the use of round and pointed arch in combination, and 
 borrows more from Roman models in the capitals than any I 
 have seen. There is the pulpit, beneath whose sounding-board 
 Calvin, Knox, and Beza preached. We sat in Calvin's chair. 
 The church is perfectly bare, and Protestant. It was more 
 injured in five weeks of French occupation, when 10,000 men 
 garrisoned Geneva and made it a hospital, than in its three 
 centuries of Protestantism. A little Roman Cathohc glass is 
 still left in the windows of the apse. 
 
 Monday, June 17. — Iluiel de r Union, Chavwnix. We 
 started at seven this morning in a carriage and two horses. 
 The journey has l)een one of uninterrupted beauty. The 
 natural splendour of tlic country was lieightened by the massy 
 clouds which kept ever clianging from peak to peak, altering 
 the effect of light and shade, and making the distance clear 
 and Itrilliant. The v»ild flowers are innumerable, orchids, 
 rhododendrons, columbines, saxifrage, salvias, vetches, pinks. 
 We broke the journey at Bonneville, where we liiid breakfast. 
 Up to this point the road was comparatively tame, tliougli 
 Itehind us rose the Jura, and in front tlie A1])S W(!re shadowy. 
 But at Bonneville is the very port of tli(! Mont Blanc Alps, 
 and (jf this stands sentinel tlie great green Mole. From 
 Bonneville to St. Murtirj, the valley of the Arve is narrow, one 
 series of vast precipices cut by rivulets iiiid pine; clad hills on 
 
 H
 
 98 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMDNDS 1861 
 
 either side. At St. i\Tartin we first saw Mont Blanc, swathed 
 in clouds, which slowly rose and left the monarch nearly bare. 
 He did not seem quite so huge as I expected. The amphi- 
 theatre of mountains from the bridge over the Arve is 
 splendid ; especially that corner where stands the Aiguille de 
 Varens. Here we learned that a bridge on the road to 
 Chamonix had been swept away by a torrent, and that no 
 carriages could pass. However, they telegraphed for carriages 
 to meet us on the other side of the temporary plank bridge, 
 and we set ofi", through avenues of apple-trees bordering 
 gardens of wild flowers, beneath the park-like swellings of the 
 hills, among whose walnut-bowered hollows slept innumerable 
 chalets. Soon the ascent began, every turn discovering some 
 great snowpeak or green mountain furrowed with the winter 
 streams. At the bridge we found a one-mule carriage, and 
 continued our journey, Mont Jjlanc growing on us momently. 
 As we came into the Valley of Chamonix the highest peak was 
 very clear, and all along the bold sharp crags swaddled in 
 clouds, and glorified by the far setting sun, were gorgeous in 
 their brilliancy and colours. We arrived at 7.30, and got two 
 high rooms with a good few of the mountains. 
 
 Tuesday, June 18. — About nine, M. A. Balmat, Professor 
 James Forbes's guide, to whom jiapa has an introduction, 
 arrived. He is a pleasant, intelligent man, of about fifty, who, 
 when he had read the Professor's letter, greeted us warmly. 
 He no longer acts as professional guide, but volunteered to 
 take us about for the sake of our friendship with Mr. Forbes. 
 Balmat is a curious instance of a man refined by the society 
 of great and philosophic men. Having begun life as a guide, 
 he is now the respected friend and guest of Forbes, Hooker, 
 Murchison, and many others. Indeed, he is intimate with all 
 the savants of Europe. We were surprised at the ease with 
 which he spoke to us, and to the commonest people. The 
 same bonhomie pervaded his address to both ; but in the one 
 he never fell into familiarity, nor in the other did he lose 
 dignity. Having got alpenstocks, we set off walking to the 
 Glacier des Boissons, wliich we crossed. I enjoyed jjicking 
 my way among the crevasses. The glare was just what I
 
 1861 YOUTH 99 
 
 expected, but it produced a curious effect of making the pine 
 hills seem quite black and sombre, adding to their majesty. 
 It is hard to estimate the height of these mountains, and this 
 is the one disappointing thing about them. They do not 
 displace as much sky as the summer thunder-clouds, nor can 
 we fancy that two Ben Nevises might be piled one on the top 
 of the other below snow level (wliich is at the foot of the 
 Aiguilles). However, the higher you get the more you can 
 estimate the height above. Mont Blanc is himself so far 
 retired that he appears small, while atmospheric diflt'erences, 
 the want of an Alpine standard, and the size of the pine trees 
 all tend to confuse English eyes, and lessen both height and 
 distance. Balmat told me just the contrary of himself. In 
 Wales and Scotland he always made mistakes, thinking, with 
 his Alpine standard, the heights and distances much greater. 
 He allowed some time to ascend Arthur's Seat, and found 
 himself immediately at the top of it. 
 
 Wednesday, June 19. — At eight this morning Balmat 
 called for us with two mules, and took us to the Chapeau rock, 
 which is on the other side of the Mer de Glace. Here we left 
 our mules and began to walk. The road to Montanvert led us 
 along the face of a shelving precipice, on the slope of which 
 were cut steps and footholds. This pass is called the Mauvais 
 Pas, and the precipice beneath is about 300 feet. A rope runs 
 along the path, by which people hold, l^ipa found it very 
 giddy and dared not look down, but my early experiences at 
 Clifton have seasoned me to climbing, and later on in the day 
 Balmat praised me for my agility. We crossed the Mer de 
 Glace and its western moraine, and climbed up to the inn on 
 Montanvert, wbere we had lunch. Beneath us is the frozen 
 river gliding majestically among vast pointed hills of rock, on 
 whose summits sleep eternal snows crowned with clouds. 
 They rise on either hand like vast armies guarding the realms 
 of Silence and of Frost. I longed for Charlotte, who would 
 have enjoyed this glorious panorama of ice and precipice, 
 though she would not have taken kindly to the Mauvais Pas 
 and the crevasses. 
 
 Thursday, June 20. — I passed a bad night. When Balmat
 
 100 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1861 
 
 came at five to tell me it was a glorious morning, I felt better 
 after breakfast — and truly it was a glorious morning. The 
 sun was still between the Aiguilles de Dru and Le Moine, nor 
 did his rays as yet interrupt the fresh repose of the atmosphere 
 upon the glaciers. The sky was of a deep grey blue, without 
 a cloud, and against it stood each peak and needle of the vast 
 amphitheatre distinct. Our road lay to Tacul, a rock that 
 juts upon the Mer de Glace, where the glaciers of the Geant 
 and Lechaud join. From this point on the left lies the road 
 to the Jardin, on the right to the pass of the Col de Geant. 
 The whole of the Mer de Glace is a vast lake of ice, shut in by 
 theatres and amphitheatres and vast recesses of untrodden 
 rock — the home of eagles, chamois, and marmots, where men 
 have never trod. 
 
 The air was clear and crisp, and the rain of last night was 
 frozen on the surface of the glacier. The view became more 
 sublime as we advanced, and when we were near Tacul, a 
 scene of inconceivable splendour burst upon our view. Stand- 
 ing in the middle of the ]\Ier de Glace we saw Tacul before us, 
 and on either hand the gorges of the Jardin and the Col du 
 Geant, deep in untrampled snow and blazing in the sunlight. 
 The sky above was like melted sapphire, deep and clear and 
 gorgeous, and against it stood the innumerable red pikes of the 
 Moine, the Geant, the Flambeau, Charmoz and Dru. I now 
 felt that I had seen the Alps. All my dreams were realised, 
 nor could there be anything more sublime. A little more 
 walking took us to the stone where Professor James Forbes 
 passed many nights at the foot of Tacul, and near here, at the 
 edge of a great snow-field, we had some lunch — bread and 
 cheese, and cura9oa mixed with glacier streams. 
 
 Friday, June 21. — We set off this morning at seven for the 
 Flegere. Papa and I rode mules — stupid beasts, that stopped 
 at every bush and rivulet to eat and drink. Balmat was 
 charming through the day. He is a perfect gentleman in 
 manners and feeUng, nor is there the least affectation or par- 
 venuism about him. When I compare him with [some] 
 specimens of English travellers, I blush for my countrymen. 
 Here is a guide of Chamonix, the son of a guide (who would
 
 1861 YOUTH 101 
 
 not allow him to go to school or to learn the geology for 
 which he has always had a passion, for fear he might leave 
 Chamonix), whose manners are better, sentiments more 
 dehcate, knowledge more extensive, views more enlightened, 
 than most of these soi-disant gentlemen and educated men. 
 It is a great pity that his father would not allow him to study 
 when young, for he might have become one of the first geologists 
 of Europe, such fine opportunities for discovery do these moun- 
 tains afford, and such an advantage his skill and intrepidity 
 have given him. Though a mountaineer, he never brags, and 
 is always considerate for weaker brethren like papa and me. 
 I like very much to see him walking before our mules with his 
 green spectacles, and old brown wideawake upon his grizzled 
 hair, nodding kindly to the old men and women, joking with the 
 guides, and smiling at the little children. He is patriarch of 
 the valley, and nothing can be done without the advice of 
 M. Balmat. After an ascent of two hours we arrived at 
 at La Flegere, and saw before us the whole Mont Blanc range. 
 For the first time wo appreciated the height of the king himself. 
 Now he towered above all the peaks. The names of most of 
 the aiguilles and glaciers I knew. Balmat told us the rest in 
 order. The Aiguille de Charmoz is still my favourite, guarding 
 the entrance to the Mer de Glace. Here papa read ' Come 
 down, maid,' from the ' Princess.' It was ajipropriate, for 
 never were mountains l)etter desci-ibed than in that idyll. 
 
 Arrived, with threatening thunder, and an avalanche from 
 Aiguille de Blaitiere, at about two. Rested till table-d'hote at 
 five. At half-past six Balmat called to take us to his house, 
 a nice chalet beneath Mont Brevent, commanding a fine view 
 of Mont Blanc. Here -he gave us coffee, with bread from his 
 own fields and cream and butter from his own cows. He lives 
 alone in the chalet with his sister — a fine, tall woman, with 
 a noble face worthy of the Ijrave Balmat stock. She; is far 
 supfjrior to any woman I have yet seen near Chamonix, and 
 though gaunt and hard witli toil, has yet a simplicity and ease 
 of manners that mark true good breeding, tliat is, go(jd feeling. 
 The room we sat in had two beds, and on the walls wore 
 portraits (Prof. Forbos's conspicuous), as well as three ugly R.C.
 
 102 ~ JOHN ADUINGTON SYMONDS 1861 
 
 coloured prints, kept for his sister's sake. He showed us his 
 books, chiefly presents from great savants, and the various 
 souvenirs he has received. The way in which he performed the 
 part of host, without fuss, and without talking about the 
 humihty of his dwelling, put us at our ease. His cat and dog 
 assisted at the feast. Then we walked back through his fields, 
 and papa gave him a letter, written partly by him, partly 
 by me, containing a ten-pound note, which he was to read 
 after leaving us to-night. He mentioned the case of a cousin 
 of his who had received some injury on the chest among the 
 mountains, and papa asked him to bring him to see him, 
 which he did while there was yet daylight. The young man 
 (of about twenty-five) has Balmat blood, and shared the same 
 respectful ease, good feeling, and delicacy which we had 
 noticed in Auguste. I acted as interpreter to the medical 
 questions and answers, but it was bunghng work. 
 
 Monday, June 24. — At seven we left Brieg and began the 
 ascent of the Simplon. The clouds were slowly drawing their 
 length like dragons up the hills, writhing through the gorges 
 that dripped with last night's rain. All the landscape was 
 clear and watery, and the valley of the Khone, as we ascended, 
 looked exquisitely blue. Between Berisal and Simplon the 
 finest view is that of the Bernese Alps. They lay behind us, 
 and their snow-capped horns were seen through a vista of pine 
 valleys. The sun had nearly sucked up all the clouds upon 
 them, and the few that remained glided like pearls along the 
 silver snow, and shed soft shadows on the grass beneath. It is 
 a superb chain of mountains, and continues visible for some 
 miles of winding ascent, till we reached the glaciers and the 
 galleries that keep ofl" avalanches. At the extreme height of 
 7,000 feet I found most lovely flowers — the larger and smaller 
 blue gentian, several pink primroses, a very large white saxi- 
 frage, the Banunculus globosus, and a sulphur-coloured 
 anemone, of great size and beauty, which gemmed the 
 meadows ; also the little grey snow-flower. Soon the descent 
 began, and at about one we came to Simplon — an ugly village, 
 in a dreary waste of hills, where we had luncheon. The 
 descent from Simplon was grand in the extreme. It is one
 
 1861 YOUTFI 103 
 
 long divine pass of granite walls, impending, towering, sloping, 
 polished, rifted, bare, tufted with pines, dry, seamed with 
 cataracts, now vn.de, now narrow, now sunny, now black and 
 gloomy — every change, in short, of the wildest and most 
 majestic cliff scenery presented in a long panorama of many 
 miles. At about six we came into the Italian valley, and our 
 snow-accustomed eyes were refreshed with vines and chestnuts 
 in full flower, and walnut trees — our torrent-deafened ears 
 with the soft Italian and strange patois of the people. 
 
 DoMO d'Ossola, Tuesday, June 25. — After breakfast we 
 set out at seven for Baveno, on the Lago Maggiore. It was a 
 beautiful morning, and the valley looked most richly coloured. 
 Some great hills of purple stone set thick with trees quite 
 came up to my ideas of Italian mountains. The road was 
 hned with mulberry and walnut trees, and the usual magnificent 
 Salvator Rosa Spanish chestnuts. The lake burst suddenly 
 upon us, sleeping in its green expanse with all the summer on 
 its shadowy hills. There is something peculiar in this Italian 
 outline — a softness of sweep and a woolliness occasioned by the 
 multitudinous trees that one recognises at once. We got very 
 good rooms at the Belle Vue, looking on the lake, and soon 
 after we set off to see Isola Bella, where the Borromeos have a 
 palace. We got into one of the picturesque boats, covered with 
 an awning of striped cotton, and were soon rowed across by 
 two men. The opaque green of the water, which looked as if 
 it could have been cut like chrysoprase, struck me greatly. 
 The gardens which we saw first are full of rare plants and 
 curious Louis Quatorze fountain work. What pleased me 
 most was one terrace, looking on the lake, with great cypresses 
 standing like sentinels l)eside the balustrades. Here I could 
 fancy ladies or moonlight lovers. The house is a specimen of 
 Italian villas — full of mai-bles and poor copies of pictures ; tall, 
 cold, gilded and comfortless. It has liardly any furniture in it, 
 but what there is is old, stately, and stiff-backed. On tlie 
 Walls are continually painted the armorials of the Jiorromeos, 
 with their mocking motto, ' Iliimilitas,' blazoned for ever 
 beneath coronets — not but wbiit it suited the aspect of the 
 sitting-rooms. The family occui)y this palace four )uonths
 
 104 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONJJS 1861 
 
 in the year, and are always liberal in allowing strangers to 
 visit it. 
 
 We returned and dined at two. Then we set out again, at 
 half -past three, for the Lago d'Orta, in a carriage. From 
 Orta we crossed to the Isola di San Giulio. By far the finest 
 fresco in the church was a niche by one of Gaudenzio Ferrari's 
 scholars, painted with St. George and St. Apollonia. Both 
 were fully beautiful, and the exquisite youth of St. George, 
 with his long yellow hair flowing over the breast-plate, was 
 worthy to be copied by the Arundel Society. On our way 
 home we saw innumerable fireflies. The sunset had been 
 sombre, and it felt cold ; but behind us was a clear green 
 evening light with Hesper, and as we came near the lake it 
 lightened over the eastern hills. The lightning increased 
 and played upon the lake, revealing at intervals the line of 
 mountains and a campanile in their dip. A great roof of 
 clouds rose into the middle of the sky, and occasionally we heard 
 very distant thunder, while the lake swelled with a sea noise. 
 It was a fine scene, and became still finer when the moon 
 slowly rose in a rift of sky between the hills and clouds, 
 sullenly red, making a long tawny path upon the waves. 1 
 can hardly think it is the same lake which I saw this morning, 
 basking in such blue summer mist and such ambrosial odours. 
 
 Baveno, Wednesday, June 26.— I had another bad night, 
 which has left me very weak and depressed. The electrical 
 state of the atmosphere must have something to do with it, for 
 it thundered when I woke, and now at twelve o'clock a great 
 storm is coming over us. We cannot leave for Lugano till 
 2.33. Meanwhile we rest. 
 
 To-morrow they open the cathedral. ' for the wings of 
 a dove.' 
 
 Lugano, Tliursdaij, June 27. — It was still wet, so we 
 decided to go to Milan, and to start for Como, on our way 
 there, at ten. After breakfast we went out again to see Luini's 
 frescoes in the Church of the Angeli. 
 
 The cathedral at Como surprised me. It is a good-sized 
 marble building of mixed Gothic and Palladian. Its fa9ade 
 contains some delicate sculpture, and the interior is liberal and
 
 1861 YOUTH 105 
 
 broad. In its windows is fine Milan glass, a kind of imitation 
 of the Munich, of very brilliant colours and designs. I wonder 
 how it is that our English artists have none of them this trick 
 of glass. 
 
 Saturday, June 29. — I have not much to record to-day 
 when I open this new book, which Sommerfeldt ^ got for me 
 last night. We left at 9.30 this morning for Como, where we 
 spent the day. It was a beautiful morning, and this lured us, 
 otherwise it would have been hardly worth spending a whole 
 day there. As it has turned out I do not think it has repaid 
 us. I, however, take more pleasure in the works of art than 
 of nature, and in seeing men moving than goats and cows. 
 In the train was an Englishman, who delighted me because 
 he so thoroughly came up to my theories about physical 
 science people. The instant I set eyes on him, I felt that such 
 a pair of spectacles, cunning cold grey eyes, sharp pale face, 
 fresh light hair and thin lips, with a generally intelligent but 
 self-satisfied look and style of dress, in which greys and drabs 
 prevailed, could not but belong to some one who had studied 
 physical science exclusively ; and his enthusiastic geological 
 remarks to papa, as well as the cold way in which he received 
 allusions to Camelot and Tristram Shandy, confirmed my ideas 
 of him. 
 
 At Como we took a boat, and were rowed on the water. 
 r>oth papa and I were struck with the strong resemblance this 
 lake presents to the Rhine. For beauty, as far as we could 
 sec, there is nothing to choose between them, but that Como's 
 water is more intensely green, and that its banks are dotted 
 with white villas and red roofs instead of grey castles. But I 
 ought not to speak disparagingly of Como, for I enjoyed its 
 cool listless air and slee))y sunlight very much, as I lay in the 
 boat, and heard papa read ' The Lady of Shalott,' and ' I\Iariana 
 in the South.' I read ' Qilnone,' and then wo i-cturned to 
 bmclioon, after which we drove to Camerlata, and so to Milan. 
 \\ e bad intended to shop after dinner, l)ut it is the Feast of 
 St. Peter, and all but the (sating shops arc closed. So we 
 strolled into the cathedral and then came back. Wo arc 
 
 ' The courier.
 
 106 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONUS 1861 
 
 disappointed at seeing so few pretty people. The women are 
 old-looking, sallow, and coarse-featured. Yet with all this 
 they are graceful when they wear the pretty black lace mantilla 
 and fan. The men are better looking, and of three types. The 
 first is a race of fair-complexioned gigantic soldiers, chasseur 
 and cavalry, a magnificently moulded set of men. The second is 
 a fair, pleasing, olive-coloured, large-eyed kind of youth, ' dis- 
 solutely pale and femininely fair.' The third is a regularly 
 Parisian, black-moustachioed, gross or withered abomination. 
 
 Sunday, June 30. — Breakfast at nine. Off at ten to San 
 Maurizio. This church is also called Monastero Maggiore, 
 from its having been an extremely rich foundation. On the 
 left hand wall of the chapel is a scene from the martyrdom of 
 St. Catherine. In the foreground she kneels bared for her 
 execution. Her hair falls about her, and her eyes are raised 
 to heaven with their usual expression of piteous yet uncom- 
 plaining loneliness. Behind are the shattered wheels and 
 slain soldiers, blasted by an angel, who leans with drawn 
 sword from a fiery cloud. On the right hand wall is the last 
 scene of her martyrdom. She is kneeling with her profile to 
 the spectator, and her hands meekly joined. A rich robe of 
 brocade clothes her as befits a princess, and her face is more 
 than queen-like in its sanctity of repose. So extremely 
 beautiful is this figure that one does not at once become 
 conscious of the brawny ruffian who swings his body round, 
 with clenched lips, to bring the drawn sword with all its 
 weight upon her neck. In the distance are some soldiers 
 looking on, and far away to the left we see two angels in a 
 mist of glory laying her sleeping body in the tomb. 
 
 Monday, July 1. — Beautiful morning. Set off by the 8.30 
 train for Arona. We passed Magenta on our way, and were 
 much entertained by the conversation of a sjnritnelle Italian 
 lady. At Novara we went up into the town, and from a high 
 terraced hill saw the immense amphitheatre of mountains 
 bounding the plain. They made a semicircle, rising on either 
 hand from shadowy blue hills, and gradually ascending with 
 peaks of dazzling white to the great mass of Monte Rosa, 
 standing highest of them all in the middle of the horizon.
 
 1861 YOUTH 107 
 
 Such a view for gorgeous colouring and overpowering beauty I 
 have never seen — not even at Salzburg. From our terrace 
 these mountains seemed impassable. They rose like an army 
 that had formed itself into a crescent to defend Switzerland 
 from Italian invaders, and from every solid base of blue 
 glittered a spear of ice and snow. At Arona we took the 
 steamboat. The day was glorious, and we fully enjoyed this 
 lake. 
 
 After dinner at Bellinzona came some musicians — two men, 
 a woman, and a boy — violin, violoncello, and guitar — and 
 played ' Ah ! che la morte ' with great spirit. I was touched, 
 for just so did Consuelo and Joseph Haydn play their way 
 through Germany. Papa gave them a franc, and I gave the 
 little boy some cherries and a cake. Papa has gone to see one 
 of the English ladies who is ill. 
 
 HosPENTHAL, Tuesdciij, July 2. — Up to breakfast at seven. 
 Started from Bellinzona at eight in a carriage, which is to take 
 us to Fluelen for 150 fr. A little before one o'clock we 
 stopped to luncheon at Faido. At Airolo it was a question 
 whether we should pass the night ; but as we arrived there 
 about 8.30, we decided to go on to Hospenthal, a short way 
 beyond the highest portion of the pass. So we had three 
 horses put into the Ciirriage, and began an ascent which, for 
 ingenious and multiplied windings, exceeded anything upon 
 the Simplon. Looking back, the valley, which had seemed so 
 monotonous, presented a wide and savage view, and to right 
 and left came out the snow peaks. But soon we left this valley 
 and struck into another still more barren and desolate. Such 
 a furious wind swept from the glaciers that we put on our 
 greatcoats, and were glad to shiver beneath two railway rugs. I 
 shall never forgot this July 2 for its alternations of heat and 
 cold, and for the curious experience of a sick headache under 
 the intensity of both. One advantage of being unwell in fine 
 Bcenery is, that it frets the views into your memory. We were 
 now driving through snow-wreaths, which, melted by day, were 
 beginning to freeze again at night. There was no vestige of 
 herbage, and the cold cruel cliffs rose impassable before and all 
 around us. Up them crept the road, winding in and out upon
 
 108 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1861 
 
 itself, and giving the appearance, with its strong walls, of a 
 succession of forts which we must storm and take. Our three 
 horses bore us bravely. Weary and piercingly cold was this 
 climb. Bastion frowned over bastion, and Alp on Alp arose. 
 The sun was lost to us, though his light still sat upon .the 
 hills ; and the strong north wind was always blowing a ragged 
 cloud from the eyebrow of the mountains, which, as it spread 
 into the valley, dissolved and flew about in fleecy foam. At 
 the top of the pass we entered into this cloud, and proceeded 
 through a hideous region of granite, sloppy snow, ice, and inky 
 pools. Not a vestige of anything more cheerful was there to 
 soothe the eyes. The cloud was all around us, and through its 
 rents we saw towering above us still more scornful crags. Here 
 I got my ideas of mountains satisfied. Ee-descent began, and 
 we left the cloud, journeying now beneath his skirts through a 
 valley rough with granite boulders. 
 
 We reached the H6tel de Meyerhof at Hospenthal about 
 7.30. The houses in the village are more picturesque than any 
 I have seen in Switzerland. They are old and very large, and 
 built on the Swiss cottage plan. But there is more variety 
 and decoration about them. The wood is more carefully carved, 
 and is arranged in curious patterns. 
 
 Wednesday, July 3. — I passed a very bad night, in the 
 course of which I had this dream. I thought that papa and I 
 were travelling, and were sleeping in adjoining rooms. We 
 were in some hot country, and I had just come to the end of 
 a night spent in great pain. Toward the morning I slept fairly, 
 and when I woke the sun was shining hot upon my darkened 
 room. For some reason or other papa had left his room, and 
 I was alone. As I rose a horrid sense of impending evil 
 oppressed me. I could hardly stand, and in great weakness 1 
 tottered to a chair that stood before a tall looking-glass. There 
 I saw myself a hideous sight. My skin was leprous white, like 
 parchment, and all shrivelled. From every pore burst a river 
 of perspiration, and ran to my feet. My feet were cramped 
 and blanched, and cockled up with pain. But the face was the 
 most awful sight. It was all white — the lips white and parted 
 — the eyes pale, and presenting a perfectly flat surface. They
 
 1861 YOUTH 109 
 
 were dilated, and shone with a cold hlue eerie light. I heard 
 a noise in papa's room, and knocked. He said ' Come in ' in 
 his usual tone, and I crept up to him. He was shaving and 
 did not see me, till I roused him by touching him and saying 
 slowly, ' Papa.' Then he turned round and looked intently 
 at me and inquiringly. I shrieked, ' Papa, don't you know 
 me ? ' but even while I cried the vision of my own distorted 
 features came across me, and filled me with my utter loneliness. 
 At last he cried, ' My son,' and, burying his face in his hands, 
 he added, ' All in one night.' In an ecstacy of deliverance I 
 clasped his neck, and felt that now I need not go back into 
 that twilight room with its bed and the mystery behind its 
 curtains. But he went on in a hesitating voice, ' My poor 
 boy ! what fiend — or demon '? ' I stopped the question with a 
 yell. Something seemed to tear me, and I awoke struggling. 
 Such was my dream — more horrible than it seems, for the 
 terror of dreams bears no relation to the hideousness of their 
 incidents, but to some hidden emotion. 
 
 We left at eight, and finished the St. Gothard in driving 
 mist and rain. I am not certain whether I did not like it best 
 so, for the grandeur half revealed left much to the imagination. 
 Passing through Altdorf we came to Fluclen, on the lake 
 Lucerne, and at 1.15 went on board the steamer. The clouds 
 were lifting, and we enjoyed a succession of beautiful views. 
 This lake is incomparably finer than any I have soon. 
 Maggiore is in quite a difierent style, and therefore shuns 
 comparison ; still I could not but feel how much more 
 positive beauty, not to speak of grandeur, there is in the; varied 
 mountain forms, craggy precipices, snowy heights, and smooth 
 green lawns of Lucerne. 
 
 [The Alps and Italy, reminiscences of bis journey, were 
 still in Symonds's mind, when, soon after reaching home, lie 
 makes the following entry :] 
 
 Friday,^ August 2. — Conington and I walked tbrougli 
 Redland to the Sea Walls and homo by the observatory. 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 no JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1861 
 
 There we watched a great thunder-cloud, which for majesty 
 of shape, size, and colour surpassed the Alps. Its change and 
 progress was like a symphony. Far away, from west to north 
 it stretched ; above the channel the summits were of the 
 pearliest white ; domes and peaks, on which the sunlight 
 rested ; its middle was of Ught ethereal blue, like the base of 
 Monte Rosa, but its feet were indigo, and a tawny fringe of 
 angry red was driven, mixed with mist and tempest, all along 
 the van. First it towered in simple beauty, transfigured with 
 the sunlight that sat above 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 before 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 furiously, 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 pencilled outlines of 
 the hills were gone, the wind howled restlessly. But this 
 again changed. The cloud had broken with its own fury. 
 Like a squadron that rides upon the foeman's guns and sweeps 
 them off, and then returns scattered and decimated to its 
 camp, so this ponderous 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 full of watery sunlight. An exhaus- 
 tion like that of a child fallen asleep from crying seemed to 
 hold the winds and woods and distant plain. All was calm, 
 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 symphony, or sonata, call it which you 
 like, there were three distinct movements — an Adagio, an
 
 1861 YOUTH 111 
 
 Allegro, a Presto, and a ]\Iinuet. 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 in a tremulous thought 
 constantly recurring, and superinduced upon an air of calm 
 majestic sublimity, which should be the basis of the movement. 
 This agitation should gradually 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 
 melancholy, and often troubled by faint echoes of the central 
 spasm. 
 
 [From Clifton, Symonds went on a reading party to North 
 \Yales. There had been a question as to whether he should 
 join a party at Ilkley, in Yorkshire, or should go to Bangor. 
 The advantages of having Mr. Eawlinson for a coach and Mr. 
 Stephens for a companion settled the question in favour of 
 North Wales, and the following are the notes of his stay there. 
 He was far from well. The relaxing air of Bangor did not 
 suit him, and he was oppressed by the prospect of tliu 
 ' Schools.'] 
 
 Wednesday,^ August 7. — Rose at G.30, and breakfast at 
 seven. Ch. was down to see me oft', so I said good-bye to her — 
 dear, good, darling sister^ — and went oft". How unselfish and 
 thoughtful she is. 
 
 A long dreary day by Birmingham and Chester to Bangor. 
 Drove to 11 Menai View Teri'ace. Mrs. Thomas can give us 
 three rooms— one sitting-room on ground floor, a good double- 
 bedded room above, and a tolerable l)edroom. 
 
 Thursday, Aiujmt H. — Passed the morning in shoppim^ 
 and seeing liawlinson. He has given us papers to do for liiiii. 
 
 Friday, August 9. — Went at nine after a second bad night 
 to coach with H. He gave me a good lectuie on the Indo- 
 European nations, and the people of early Italy. \V(! dined at 
 
 ' Diiuy.
 
 112 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1861 
 
 three, and then went out a little into the town with Law. It 
 was very wet, so we did no more than look for horses which we 
 could not find. Bangor seems to be a damp relaxing place. 
 I am in despair about Roman history. Livy seems, daily, 
 more confused, and Arnold does not help him. My memory 
 too is very weak. 
 
 Sunday, August 11. — Stephens and I walked round by 
 Garth to cathedral. Came there at 11, found it began 11.30. 
 Got a little well of a seat, and watched people come in — all 
 like parrots, mean, unhealthy, hideous. Service atrocious — 
 ' Venite,' a sort of catch, in which all the voices tumbled in at 
 the end one after another. No time or tune, or rhythm, or 
 attempt at enunciation. A few monosyllables spit out 
 viciously — all long words slurred over. Yet this choir sang 
 ' The king shall rejoice,' and ' When the ear heard her.' A 
 good old blind Dean, with an earthquake- shaken face, enjoyed 
 it all. Wet as usual— muggy, and depressing. Law and we 
 dined at George table-d'hote, such a skurry and bad waiting — - 
 English. 
 
 Stupid walk to Bridge. Read some ' Faust.' 
 
 Tuesday, August 13. — A beautiful day. Stephens and I 
 set out after dinner in a car, and were driven to the slate 
 quarries at Penrhyn. Hence we set out walking up the pass 
 to Capel Curig. This is a fine ampliitheatre of hills ; the 
 forms are bolder and more pyramidal than in Cumberland, 
 the golden gorse, purple heather, and blue air tints, made 
 a colouring that Maggiore did not surpass. Borradale, at the 
 top of the Stye head and Langdale Pikes, perhaps are better, 
 but I did not see them in such a flood of beautiful light. An 
 exhilarating day. 
 
 Wednesday, August 21. — Slept very ill — a night of over- 
 taxed brain, and constant weary dreams. I miist begin some 
 strychnine, I feel so low. 
 
 Stephens and I went to Carnarvon. We saw the Castle well — 
 old, perfect, interesting. It had been our intention to drive to 
 Llanberis, and walk back, but a return car we wanted to take 
 kept us waiting, and finally did not come. We walked about 
 two miles out, to a pretty stream, where I felt very depressed
 
 1861 YOUTH 113 
 
 and ill. I cannot read" to-day. Stephens is like a cart-liorae, 
 and I am very melancholy. 
 
 Friday, August 30. — I felt uncertain this morning whether 
 I should go with Stephens and Palmer, as the walk embraces 
 two first-class and several inferior mountains. The weather, 
 too, seemed uncertain. However, Palmer at eleven persuaded 
 me to go, and we set off in a car for Bethesda. The morning 
 was fresh and windy. From Bethesda we crossed the Ogwen, 
 and went straight up the first great hill on the right of the 
 valley. It is called Carnedd Filiast, and a stiff pull it was that 
 brought us to the top. The view over the plain of Carnarvon, 
 Bangor, Conway, and Anglesea was broad and sunny. From 
 this point we walked along the backbone of a great wedge of 
 mountain that separates the Ogwen and Llanberis valleys. On 
 the one side descended walls of breathless precipices to the Capel 
 Curig road, on the other lay the Llanberis lakes and the three 
 great peaks of Snowdon, ever changing as we moved. The 
 lights were perfect, clear and blue, with mazy moving clouds. 
 Palmer bad described the walk as being one ' along the ridge,' 
 by which it seemed he meant going up and down over the 
 various peaks of a considerable range. I got very tired at the 
 last and largest, Glyder Vawr, whose sides are steep and full of 
 rolling stones. The wind; however, aided and freshened us. 
 It carried Stephens's hat over an abyss, but that did not incom- 
 mode him. The tops of the (llyders Vawr and Vach are (juitc 
 barren, and strewed with gigantic piles of rock fallen from 
 aiguilles that still remain. Their titanic slabs reminded me of 
 Druid circles' as much as the cliffs of the Saxon Switzerland did 
 of Egyptian temples, Snowdon was very grand from here, as 
 was Ifcljog, and the distant sea and Cader Idris — a fine sweep 
 of hills. Thence, having gazed down beetling cliff's and 
 clambered dizzy pinnacles, we tramped down tlu'ougli bog and 
 moss on Capel Curig, which we reached about six. J was 
 famished, not having eaten since eight, and drunk only a little 
 sherry on Glyder Vawr. Besides, the walk was the longest 
 I ever took. We got slippers and I l)ought a pair of stockings, 
 and became comfortiible ff)r a good dinner. Then w(! dmvi 
 home in the yellowing gloom. Llynogwcn, and some lonely 
 
 I
 
 114 JOHN ADDINGTON SYxMONDS 1861 
 
 fishermen fishing in the cold clear starlight, struck me much. 
 Home about ten. 
 
 [The Bangor party came to an end on September 1, and 
 Symonds returned to Clifton with his friend Mr. Stephens, to 
 whom all his favourite places and things — the cathedral, Sea- 
 Walls, Cook's Folly, Nightingale Valley, the old oak in Leigh 
 "Woods — were shown, one by one, and the eflect recorded with 
 obvious contentment in such phrases as, ' Stephens everywhere 
 pleased.' From Clifton Symonds went on a visit to Wiltshire, 
 where ' we went out cub-hunting. Charlotte had a little white 
 pony. I was mounted on a splendid black called " Euxine." 
 I rejoiced to feel the strong spirited animal beneath me.' 
 
 Symonds 's intellectual life continued active as ever, and 
 its growth fostered the habit of self -analysis.] 
 
 Septemher 29.^ — Goethe's 'Life'^ is a well-sustained 
 biography. The genius of the man has an electrical effect 
 upon me, galvanising these dull nerves into something like 
 life and enthusiasm. Lewes's aim is to give a succession of 
 vivid pictures, and this he achieves. So good is the portrait 
 painting that every line thrills me. The reading is a 
 continual process of self-comparison, how impotent and 
 humiliating to myself. This discontent with my own 
 personality is weak. If I had a really great character I 
 could stand alone, and be content to remain what I am 
 without sighing for genius. If I had faith I should see my- 
 self as part of the divine scheme, and anticipate a time in 
 the hereafter when mere human ability would be all useless 
 and men stand on the same level. That, now, I cannot hold ; 
 and the belief that what we are we shall be, that the vital force 
 within us may be carried into fresh forms, but will never be 
 increased or diminished — prevents me from seriously enter- 
 taining thoughts of suicide. To rush from a state of 
 discontent I know, to one I do not know, and to be the worse 
 peradventure for the change, that is unreasonable. Reading 
 this life teaches me how much of a poet's soul a man may have 
 without being a poet, what high yearnings may plague him 
 ' Diary. ^ By Lewes.
 
 1861 YOUTH 116 
 
 w-ithout 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 absent, 
 spontaneity is torpid. Susceptibility to beauty, capabilities of 
 acute pain and pleasure, strong ffisthetical emotions, these do 
 not constitute a poet, though a poet must have them. Again, 
 deficient ability for mathematics, for history, for politics, an 
 impressionability that opens the mind to every subject with- 
 out allowing it to master them, melancholy dejection and 
 thoughts of suicide, the effervescence of sentimentalism, the 
 vacillation of religious doubt, these do not spoil a poet, though 
 they make a lesser man contemptible. Power, all-pervading 
 power, pushing the soul into activity beyond receptive suscepti- 
 bility, covering all deficiency by concentrating itself on the 
 passion of the moment — this makes the difference between the 
 man of genius and the dilettante driveller. Not so with men 
 of talent ; they differ from men of genius in kind ; and talent, 
 however small, is always definitely appreciable. A man may 
 have the susceptibilities of genius without any of its creative 
 power ; but if he has any atom of talent he cannot be without 
 practical energy. I may rave, but I shall never rend the 
 heavens : I may sit and sing, but 1 shall never make earth 
 listen. And I am not strong enough to be good — what is left ? 
 I do not feel strong enough to be bad. Then again of Love. 
 Oh ! woe is me ! for it seems that if I had but Love I might 
 get strength. 
 
 ' Ilir Anblick giebt den Engcln Starke.' 
 
 I wish I could concentrate all my vitality into three years, 
 and at the end perish, having lived a life of worth and energy 
 through that short time. 
 
 Saturday, October 5. — I am twenty-one to-day, the end and 
 goal I have 80 often thought of. Up to this point I havo 
 lieen struggling, saying, ' When I am a man 1 shall do this, 
 understand this, be great; now I am a Ijoy, and from a boy 
 little is expected.' I'hn huiti of intellectual progress I hoped 
 for lias lieen obtained, imt, Ikav mucli iiclow my hopes. My 
 character has developed, but in what p<my proportions, below 
 
 I '2
 
 116 JOHX ADDINGTOX SYMONDS 1861 
 
 my meanest anticipations. I do not feel a man. This book 
 is an evidence of the yearnings without power, and the brood- 
 ing self-analysis without creation that afflict me. I am not a 
 man. Papa gave me all De Quincey's works ; Auntie 5/. ; Ch., 
 Goethe's Autobiography and Faust, 3 vols. ; E. and M., a ring ; 
 Ch. and E., a thermometer ; Aunt M., a bookstand ; Aunt Ch. 
 a pair of candlesticks. Besides these, Edmond sent me some 
 flowers, and Mrs. Buchanan a pretty pencil-case and key for 
 my watch-chain. Ch., James, Lucy, and I walked down to 
 morning cathedral and heard the ' Benedictus ' from the 
 ' Requiem.' 
 
 Just before dinner Jowett arrived. I was sitting in my 
 study and heard him ask Newsome, ' Where is the drawing- 
 room ?' So like him to forget. And when N. said, 'Down- 
 stairs,' he answered, ' Oh, yes, to be sure.' Mr. Hill, Alfred, 
 and Florence, and Mr. Leech dined. Jowett, of course, did not 
 talk at dinner. Papa had to leave us about 8.30 on his way to 
 Torfcworth to see Lady Ducie. He will sleep, and return by 
 train to-morrow. 
 
 After the guests were gone I talked a little to Jowett. He 
 deplored the class-lists, but thought that there is no practicably 
 better way of electing examiners. 
 
 Sunday, October 6. — We breakfast at nine. I was glad of 
 this, for it is hard to entertain Jowett. His forte is an aurea 
 taciturnitas, and he has a habit of shutting up a subject by a 
 single sentence. The conversation is one conducted by 
 question and answer. I start a subject and ask a question. 
 He makes an answer and stifles the subject. Auntie and Ch. 
 do not aid. 
 
 At 10.30 we walked through the garden to the cathedral. 
 
 1 was amused with the sensation Jowett made. His beauty 
 would not fail to attract attention ; but besides this, peo2)le 
 recognised him from Richmond's portrait. We sat under the 
 organ. He admired the restoration and the choir. W^e just 
 looked at the Chapter House on the way home. Jowett and 
 I walked up and down the garden. I told him of my birthday. 
 He said the most important era in a man's life is when he 
 leaves college. Thefa to Mr. Rhind. Jowett was shy and
 
 1861 YOUTH 117 
 
 silent. He told us a little of his visit to Berlin, many years 
 ago, when he saw Schelling, Neander, and others. Jowett is 
 peculiarly sensitive about not being coddled. He will not be 
 sent out in a carriage if he can help it, and toiling up Constitu- 
 tion Hill from the cathedral, he said, ' Our young legs don't 
 mind this, do they ? ' puffing all the time. He told me 
 Tennyson had written little lately ; has been four months in 
 the Pyrenees ; his boys very beautiful ; not precocious. 
 Tennyson never writes letters. Jowett has only had two short 
 notes from him. He reads a great deal. He looks on ' INfaud ' 
 as on a young and misunderstood child — would be pleased 
 with papa's verdict, that it is his most subtle poem. Jowett 
 had mentioned some one as ' over-educated.' I asked what he 
 meant. He said that the intellect might be developed beyond 
 the character and will. It happens in the case of Germans 
 mostly. 
 
 October 7. — Jowett and I went to Seed's, where he had his 
 portrait taken. It was very good of him to let it be done, for 
 he hated it. He stood so funnily — like a doll, atraight and 
 stiff. The man tried to drill him into a position ; he was 
 meek, but awkward. I told him to stand naturally. The 
 man wanted him to set his necktie straight — trying to destroy 
 all personality ; but I would not let him. It took a long time, 
 and Jowett looked cross and uncomfortable. When we came 
 in, Jowett read out to Ch. and me the song of the Jews and 
 Karshish the Arab, from ] crowning. He reads quietly and 
 undramatically, but well. This nearly made us late for 
 dinner. He is very absent. In going to his room he tried the 
 backstair door first, and then wanted to come up to my 
 landing. One reason why he makes me shy, beyond his 
 own silent shyness, is that he is so uncommunicative of him- 
 s(;lf. I f(!(!l that he is self-wrappod, and tliat he will not lift 
 the curtain. Ho lives within a veil, and is all in all to liis own 
 thoughts. Egotistical people are easier to got on with, partly 
 Ijocause you despise their egotism. He has written the notes to 
 the whole of the 'Republic,' and is now re-writing them. Ho is 
 trying to raise as niiiny mod(!rn points of interest as lie can, and 
 the allusion to the dopondonco of intellectual and moral (jualilics
 
 lis JOHN ADDINGTOX SYMONDS 1801 
 
 nu each other is one. A lonq; discussion about the merits of 
 Bacon and Galileo, and about Pascal, occupied the greater part 
 of the evening ; Jowett refused to carry speculation beyond 
 the grave — the realm, he said, of faith. 
 
 October 9. — Jowett sat up late again Avith papa. He talked 
 about himself. He feels that he must go on in his work of 
 liberating the minds of men. He complains of headache, 
 powerlessness of brain, want of sustained thought, imperfect 
 memory, as I do. Jowett sees a danger of young men being 
 sentimentalised or criticised from production. His point of 
 view in all these things is evidently what young men can be 
 made into. At six we drove off ; Jowett looking very funny 
 in a barrel-bodied greatcoat. I put him into a carriage full of 
 people returning from an archery meeting. Jowett waved his 
 hand and smiled rather slightingly, and then he was gone. I 
 returned to myself. 
 
 ' Jowett ^ went off yesterday, looking very cherubic in a 
 barrel-bodied greatcoat, and a hat put back from his immense 
 forehead. The last sight I had of him was sitting in the railway 
 carriage, irradiated by the soft splendour of its lamp, and 
 hugging a chaotic mass of coats and umbrellas, from the 
 midst of which he waved a finny hand in token of good-bye. 
 I turned like Sir Bedivere, "revolving many memories," and 
 heard the first act of the " Colleen Bawn." But my inner life 
 was too perturbed, and the acting was too bad to admit of 
 any longer patience, so I left the theatre just as the plot 
 thickened, fully convinced that had I acted any one of the 
 parts, not excepting the Colleen's, I could have done better. 
 Then I came home and had it demonstrated to me by papa 
 that my income ^ was enough for any man to live on. I dare 
 say it is, and I could live on much less. After which I had a 
 very bad night, and woke this morning " a wiser and a worser 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Clifton, October 10, 1861. 
 
 ^ His income at this time amounted in all to three hundred and fifty 
 pounds a year. It was composed partly of allowances from his father 
 and his aunt, Miss Sykes, partly of income from some property of his 
 own .
 
 1861 YOUTH 119 
 
 man " — often the result of vivid phantasmagoria and strong 
 emotions suffered during sleep. If for two or three successive 
 nights I saw such a murder enacted as I saw last night, or felt 
 such a central passion, I must become a bad man. It would 
 be the beast within me gradually gathering strength for 
 madness. There now is my life inner and outer for you since 
 I saw you. I have asked James to ride with me this afternoon 
 to Sutton Court. This is a capital Jowettian pen.' 
 
 October 10} — One of the most provoking things about 
 ourselves is that we form pernicious habits, and do not know 
 they are so till they have become necessary. The cathedral 
 soothed me at first like a delicious opiate ; now it tyrannises 
 over me and irritates me like opium after long indulgence. 
 The common defect of all nesthetics is that they raise a yearning 
 which cannot be satisfied by themselves except in creation. 
 For a while the yearning is melancholically seductive. But 
 after a time the yearning remains when the pleasure of con- 
 templation has grown insipid, and we seek a ' human clement.' 
 
 [In October Symonds returned to Oxford. His Diaries, as 
 fully kept as ever, record the same round of breakfasts, 
 luncheons, dinners, intellectual talks, walks, rides, hard work 
 for Jowett — ' he asked about my work : said an essay a day 
 was too much ; I must be careful not to break my camel's 
 back ' — quantities of poetry, ballads and poems in the ' In 
 Memoriam ' stanza ; daily visits to Magdalen or New College 
 Chapel ; an interview with an electro-biologist, and another 
 with a phrenologist. 
 
 Much of the poetry remains unpublished, in the Diary; 
 these verses, for example, written on October 22, 18G1 : 
 
 love, sweet love, I sit and sing to thee, 
 
 And from sere reeds sought in tlie winter brake — 
 
 Hoarse reeds through which the winds wail niournl'nlly, 
 
 And the waves wash — a hineral pipe 1 make ; 
 
 For thou art dead, sweet love, and never more 
 
 Mi^odious iiioveinents (jf the hrr'nlliin;^ sjii'iiii^ 
 
 ' JJiuiy.
 
 120 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDR 1861 
 
 Shall thaw thj- blood, or spread thy pinions frore, 
 
 Or stir thy cold stiff throat to carolling. 
 
 These reeds shall bloom and rustle to the breath 
 
 Of minstrel winds in summer ; birds shall sweep, 
 
 And painted flies shall flicker ; but thy death 
 
 Is unrelenting as the marble sleep 
 
 Which holds Endymion, whose eternal swoon 
 
 Breaks to no kisses of the passionate moon. 
 
 There are jottings, too, of conversations with his numerous 
 friends, . as, for instance, these on Diaries : ' Diary good for 
 thoughts, not for things. Ordinary log-book a poor affair. 
 Useless to eliminate what others ought not to see. Danger 
 of overdoing emotion. Mrs. Clive might have made a most 
 powerful novel out of Haydon's Diaries.' As a groundwork 
 to all this life and activity, as a never-failing note of pain, run 
 the records of ill health : ' Still weak and unwell, I cannot 
 read, a cloud is over my brain ' ; ' return of old cramped head 
 feeling ' ; ' a long internal agony of doubts, analysis, question- 
 ings.' ' Curious talk about my want of sympathy, ambition, 
 mad suicidal fancies. God preserve me.'] 
 
 ' I ^ have not much to tell you. Last night I saw Jowett, 
 and asked him how he liked his portrait. He said " it was well 
 enough, he supposed," and that was all I could extort from his 
 modesty. He is ascetically unconscious of his appearance, and 
 does not possess more than a slip of looking-glass too narrow 
 for his chin, much to Green's annoyance in sha^•ing when he 
 occupied the rooms. Some people supposed that this is affected 
 to subdue youthful pride, for there is an old story of his being 
 detected, the night he got the Balliol, expatiating in a scholar's 
 gown and arranging his soft brown curls before a mirror in the 
 Master's lodge. 
 
 ' This morning I wrote to ]\Irs. B in answ^er to a note 
 
 from her, and said I should come on Saturday. Whether I 
 shall be able I still doubt, for, after a ride this afternoon, the 
 swelling on my face has so increased that I look ridiculous. 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Oxford, October 31, 1861.
 
 1861 YOUTH 121 
 
 If it does not abate sensibly to-morrow I cannot show my head 
 among strangers.' 
 
 ' 1 1 went to have my head examined by the phrenologist 
 the other day, and, though he gave me enough encouragement, 
 I think he is a great quack. 
 
 ' Some shrewd things he said. On first feeling my head he 
 pronounced that 1 came of a long-lived race, and booked me 
 for ninety. The first part of this judgment is true. Then he 
 proceeded to explain that my vitality was intense and worked 
 vehemently. He told me my historical memory was defective, 
 and that though I had tune I had no time. Both these 
 observations are true ; my memory for facts is lamentable, and 
 I cannot dance properly, though I am sensitive to music. 
 Here, I think, he stopped. The next was vague. And I have 
 noticed that phrenologists always guess pretty accurately about 
 memory, time, and tune. All the moral faculties were well 
 developed except faith. The sesthetical parts of the intellect, 
 form, size, colour, order, number, were large ; so was language, 
 causality, and comparison. My want of caution and acquisi- 
 tiveness seemed the most dangerous part of my character, 
 though a good secretiveness and firmness made up for them in 
 some measure. I asked the man many questions after he had 
 examined me, about Shelley's small head, &c., and here his 
 impotent quackery came out. He defined genius as scrofula. 
 After that I knew how much the man was worth.' 
 
 [To any one who reads this extraordinary record of a young 
 man's hfe, the courage, the persistence, the force of will which 
 enabled Hymonds to achieve what he did, must be a matter for 
 marvel and for admiration. He was riglit when ho wrote 
 much later in life, in Dcsc. 1HH9, 'People will eventually say, 
 tliis man did rmifh work', g( od work, umici' exti'aonlinary 
 difiiculties.' 
 
 In this term the shadow of the 'final schools' l)ogins to 
 
 make itself distinctly felt. Tb(! rcfoi-ences to class h'sts, 
 
 examiners and their qualities, become frequent. Symonds, a 
 
 confirmed Platoniat, is afraid of one of them whom ho calls a 
 
 ' To his sistfT Clmrlotte. Oxford, November 17, iHCl.
 
 122 JOHN ADDINGTON SY^rONDS 1861 
 
 ' little Aristotelian pedlar ' ; and remarks, ' The teaching of 
 -Jowett educates young men, but unfits them for the schools. 
 Plato is learned by them, and they are examined in Aristotle. 
 All we want is fair play for both. Conington thinks Jowett as 
 perverse in his own way, and unfair to Aristotle.' His walks 
 \\ith his two intimate friends, Mr. Stephens and ]\Ir. Courthope, 
 are largely occupied with the subject of the ' Schools.' The 
 Christmas vacation brought Symonds back to Clifton, and he 
 writes thus to his sister :] 
 
 ' You ' shall have a letter from me at the expense of 
 Conington (who ought to be written to) and of my essay on 
 the Helvetian Republic. 
 
 ' To-day I had a wondrous Sehisucht to hear our choir 
 once more. So I arose and went, not knowing what my lot 
 would be. I was fortunate, for I heard " The King shall 
 rejoice " ; given, I suppose, in honour of Canon Girdlestone, for 
 it must be his last Sunday. Afterwards there came Mendels- 
 sohn's Christmas Hymn ; holy song, ever associated with my 
 better feelings, and a sense of dreamy winter nights. Other 
 choirs may sing as loud, but none can sing so sweetly and so 
 softly as Mr. Corfe's. They brought the tears into my eyes, 
 as I called to mind " The days when I remember to have been 
 joyful and free from blame." It cannot be so again ; for doubts 
 have come up to blur my trust in much that Christmas tells us 
 of ; and I have long, long lost the strange early feeling that 
 hung about our cathedral music. Still, to-night I seemed to 
 go back to purer days, and the fresh children's voices smoothly 
 whispering the degradation, or loudly heralding the God-head 
 of Christ, brought back again odd memories. I shut my eyes, 
 and the old scene of the cathedral, years ago, came back upon 
 my sight. It seemed that I was standing in the sombre 
 shadows of the dimly lighted nave, and heard the organ sighing 
 and sobbing plaintively to some Beethoven melody. Then 
 came sweeping by the white-robed procession — canon, priest, and 
 chorister — led by the sacristan with his silver rod and the holy 
 dove upon it. The black mass of people divided to let the 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Clifton, December 9, 1861.
 
 1861 YOUTH 123 
 
 gleaming thread of waving surplices pass on. At the cloister 
 door they paused ; the choir parted, and standing, cap in hand, 
 they bowed while the canon walked between. Then the airy 
 band dissolved, and their flowing skirts went flitting here and 
 there amid the crowd. The cluster of globed lamps that swung 
 across the pillared gloom seemed hazy with its own imperfect 
 light. Vast caverns of the deepest black marked the branching 
 of the spandrils, where stray gleams of light rested on carved 
 angels' wings. Far off in the long north aisle, the kneeling 
 statue of that mourning lady glimmered on the silent windows. 
 Over all the dying organ made one deep harmony, and tuned 
 my soul to the solemn beauty of the scene. Then it ceased, 
 a shuffling of feet, and a moving of the people to the northern 
 door, and outside the -tt'inter night was grey on the gaunt and 
 leafless green ; behind us the prophet-painted panes shone 
 dimly in the waning lights within the choir. 
 
 ' All this I seemed to see, and I felt as young and awestruck 
 as I used to feel when papa took me on a winter afternoon 
 from Berkeley Square. But with this childish feeling was 
 mixed a deeper and a holier sense of sublimity, such as I felt 
 two years ago. 
 
 'Nothing more remains to tell, except that I feel "dree," 
 and that the Seclensehnsucht has rather coiled itself afresh. 
 
 ' Do not try to answer this ; you cannot write sentimental 
 letters such as Miss Girard and I delight in. A matter of fact 
 answer to a sentimental letter only irritates the receiver, who 
 wonders he could have written such trash as to call forth such 
 a contemptible reply. You may write a letter, but attempt not 
 an answer, unless Weston has revived holy memories and made 
 your soul melodious with melancholy pleasure. Good-night.' 
 
 [Synionds at this period came under the influence of two ih62 
 
 very remarkable jjeople, Mrs. B to whom he paid a short 
 
 visit at Cheltenham, and ^Ime. Jenny Lind Goldschmidt, who 
 visited his father at Chfton, and for whom he conceived the 
 highest enthusiasm and veneration. At Cheltenham the 
 emotional side of Syiuonds's religious temperament was pro- 
 foundly stirred by burning conversation — discussions upon
 
 124 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONUS 1862 
 
 faith, long analysis of mental sorrows and pains — which he 
 carried on in company of his distinguished hostess : ' She 
 talked vehemently of how she sufi'ered in her mind. As she 
 lay there exquisitely slender and mobile, full length on the sofa, 
 she did look torn by demons. She told me of the torture of 
 her thought, how religious, social, political doubt weighed on 
 her. She never lost her feeling of God, but could not help 
 thinking of Him as a tyrant. Sympathised with me, when 
 I said such thoughts goaded one on to suicide as a means of 
 finding out the truth.' The impression created by this visit to 
 Cheltenham was very great, and the result of it may be traced 
 through many subsequent days of the Diary. In a later con- 
 versation with his hostess, after drawing a picture of unsatisfied 
 ambition, he adds, ' The consciousness of genius is the only 
 thing desirable in life, and impotence is the strongest procuress 
 of suicide. I went away filled with the idea of the noblest 
 womanhood I had ever met. The most gorgeous golden sun- 
 set, and a perfect double rainbow made a fine background to 
 my thoughts of that great lady. Hope rose behind de- 
 spondency.' 
 
 An elaborate account of Mme. Goldschmidt's concerts, show 
 how deep a hold the great singer took upon the aesthetic and 
 emotional side of young Symonds's nature. 
 
 The following notes of Mme. Goldschmidt's conversation 
 must have been made soon after a visit which she paid to 
 Dr. Symonds at Clifton Hill House :] 
 
 ' Clifton, Ajn-il 23. 
 
 ' " If I had nothing but music in the world it would be 
 enough. 
 
 ' " I become a different thing when I sing — different body, 
 different soul. 
 
 ' " I cannot understand how people do not see how the 
 senses are connected. 
 
 ' " What I have suffered from my sense of smell ! My 
 youth was misery from my acuteness of sensibility. Very 
 sensitive people may go wrong, may make mistakes ; they
 
 1802 YOUTH 125 
 
 cannot be very wicked. I only learned what crimes were 
 possible by being accused of them. 
 
 ' " Some poetry will not do for music — not Shakespeare, nor 
 Shelley, nor Tennyson." I repeated " Blow, blow," and she 
 said, "That might be set to a Volkston." I repeated "I sang 
 of the dancing stars," and she said, " There is too much thought 
 there : it has all the passions of the heart — dancing stars, too, 
 how incongruous!" "Every line of Milton could be sung. 
 For music we must have one feeling, one harmony, not a 
 series of broken lights. Dryden can be sung, he is simple and 
 definite. Even Handel could not compose for Tennyson. 
 His thoughts are nice, but his words will not flow in music, 
 and he has too much condensation of ideas." "Tennyson 
 takes all the solid sharp words and puts them together. 
 Music cannot come between. He does not flow. He cannot 
 like music." "Heine's songs run into music at once; they 
 are music." " Italian is all music — every word." Noticed 
 how she dwelt on the connection of words and music' 
 
 April 27. — Papa read out ' Guinevere ' to-night. She 
 seized every strong point, and acted it in her features, following 
 the poetry with expression. She cried bitterly, and at the end 
 said, ' I feel like Arthui' or Guinevere. I must be one or the 
 other.' It had aflected her like tragedy. Then papa asked her 
 to sing, and at first she could not — ' The vibrations will clash,' 
 she said. You cannot modulate from poetry to music, in 
 other words. How deeply this remark lies at the root of art, 
 of the independence of the arts. 
 
 Soon, however, she got up and sang airs from the ' Penscroso,' 
 and an air of Mendelssohn's to Heine's song, 'Auf Fliigeln 
 des Gosanges.' She accompanied herself, and modulated most 
 exquisitely with various shades of melody. 
 
 Her hates are vivid as her likes. She takes both at first 
 sight, judging faces, she says, nncningly. Miss E. called to- 
 day ; she bowed, and instantly hdi the room. X came to 
 
 stay, and she saw his coarseness at once. He is incult but 
 
 clever ; like , a self-reliant, vigorous man, full of impudence, 
 
 a man who told Tennyson to his face that his ' Sea Dreams ' 
 had no artistic coherence.
 
 126 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMOXDS 1862 
 
 She is very humble and careless of self. ' My poor, humble 
 self,' oddly pronounced, is often on her lips ; but she never 
 cringes or loses dignity. Simple and unassuming, she does 
 and says what she likes, walks with countesses, tells Colenso 
 what she thinks of him, and queens it. 
 
 She comments on the charm of having a definite line in 
 life, an art to live for ; yet she would not have any of her 
 children brought up to music as a profession. 
 
 She cannot bear Goethe. His and Hegel's influences have 
 made the Germans, she thinks, irreligious. Biography she 
 does not like, because it destroys great men, revealing the 
 faults their valets see. ' What good can we get from seeing 
 how Bacon fell ? Ah, that did give me jDain. I would sooner 
 have known e%al of some near friend.' So terrible to her is 
 any blot on the ideal. 
 
 [On March 22, 1862, Symonds came out second to Caird 
 in the Jenkyns. And, on April 7, he left for Great Malvern 
 on a reading party with Mr. Stephens. Late in May he went 
 in for his ' Greats,' and, though ill and nervous, supported by 
 sleeping-draught and pick-me-up, he secured a first, with 
 papers which, as he had resolved at Coniston, were described 
 by an examiner as 'all that could be desired.' 'Among the 
 many letters of congratulation I got, Jowett's to papa was the 
 most pleasant. He says an examiner told him I was the best 
 man in.' He took his degree on June 26, and on June 29, on 
 the verge of starting for a foreign journey with his father and 
 sister, he makes the following characteristic entry : ' Certainly 
 Oxford honours are a poor thing. The glory of them soon 
 departs, the pleasure fleets away, and we have another struggle 
 rising up at once. Yet I can never be too thankful for having 
 been able to give papa so great satisfaction. All the trouble I 
 had was well compensated by bis pleasure, and the thought of 
 that is my most sohd gain.' 
 
 Here, at the close of Symonds 's undergraduate career, I may 
 introduce his own summing up of the advantages and dis- 
 advantages of the University system, as they presented them- 
 selves to him through his experience, and some characteristic
 
 1862 YOUTH 12 
 
 a 
 
 notices of the two minds, Conington's and Jowett's, which 
 most affected him in his midergraduato days.] 
 
 The ' fault of my education as a preparation for literature 
 was that it was exclusively literary. Neither at Clifton, nor 
 at Harrow, nor yet at Oxford, did I learn any one thing 
 thoroughly. I failed to grasp the merest elements of mathe- 
 matics, absorbed nothing of physical science, did not acquire 
 modern languages with accuracy, and even in Greek and Latin 
 scholarship (upon which I spent so many years), attained to 
 only superficial knowledge. The system of teaching at Harrow 
 was itself wretchedly inadequate. At Oxford I did much 
 harder work ; but there even philosophy was studied mainly 
 from the rhetorical point of view. We were taught to write 
 upon a vast variety of debatable topics, and to acquire some 
 smatterings of what the several schools had uttered on them ; 
 but there was no robust mental training, no process by which 
 the man was compelled to think. Worse than that, aspirants 
 after honours were habituated to deal cleverly with words and 
 phrases, and to criticise without substantial knowledge. They 
 never grew familiar with the solid facts of the world and 
 human nature, except by natural instinct and proclivity. This 
 absence of intellectual gymnastic prepared me for an amateur- 
 ishness in literature which has ever clung about me. 
 
 As I have said, there was an almost total defect of discipline 
 in tough studies, both at Harrow and at Oxford. In a sort of 
 blundering way the docile among us were made to recognise 
 the force of duty ; and that was pretty nearly all we gained. 
 In other words, we learned to work for less tangible rewards 
 than wages. But we learned very little else of solid value. 
 Yet I am bound to admit that this great educational defect had, 
 as the French say, its educational quality. This quality was 
 freedom ui choice, niodificd l)y sympathy and circumstance 
 in self-formation. We were comparatively unspoiled by drill 
 of !iny kind. Our minds were made less by the curriculum 
 than by our friends, the subjects we were instinctively fidapted 
 for, and our spontaneously selected lines of reading. Plodding 
 
 ' Aulubiognqjliy.
 
 128 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1862 
 
 along at the curriculum, and taking great interest in the whole 
 of it at points where it coincided with my literary bent, 1 
 obtained thus, not indeed the method of study, but the zeal for 
 study, and contracted habits which made study and production 
 of one sort or another the duty and necessity of my subsequent 
 existence. 
 
 The weakness of the training displayed itself, nevertheless, 
 even in this liberty of choice. Some of my contemporaries 
 were by nature provided with strong political interests. Out- 
 side the curriculum they grew and flourished, and evolved their 
 personalities by reading the newspapers and taking part in 
 Union debates. Others, like G. A. Simcox and A. C. Swin- 
 burne, pursued an ideal of more or less effective genius. But 
 many of the rest of us, who had proclivities but no command- 
 ing bias, Avandered too helplessly about between duty to the 
 curriculum and indulgence of individual undisciplined instincts. 
 I could mention men who might have been musicians or 
 painters, but who wasted their time at Oxford in aimless 
 strumming on the piano, and silly sketching, because there 
 was no career of industry provided for them. They served the 
 curriculum badly. Their natural talents found no strengthen- 
 ing exercise. 
 
 With this latter sort I can class myself. I went philander- 
 ing around music, heraldry, the fine arts, and literary studies 
 ruled 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-hlies at Godstow. I rode 
 across the country, larking on half-broken hacks. 1 indulged 
 day-dreams, and acted trivial tragedies of love, and hate, and 
 reconcilement with my miscellaneous set of friends. But in 
 all these things I got no grasp on any serious business. 
 
 It may be questioned here whether I was framed by 
 temperament to profit by a methodical system of education. 
 That, I admit, is a grave problem. But I do think that 
 there were forces in me which might have been more whole- 
 somely developed, and debilities which ought to have been 
 more austerely repressed.
 
 1862 YOUTH 129 
 
 [These opinions iipon the University system coincide to 
 a certain extent with those which Symonds records as being 
 held by Mr. Congreve, the Positivist Philosopher.] 
 
 Against ' the Oxford system generally Congreve spoke 
 strongly. ' Oxford,' he said, ' is a pleasant social place, but an 
 enervating intellectual atmosphere. JoAvett's habit of finding 
 "a kind of truth," the study of dreamers like Plato, the 
 making of verses, the pride of hot undigested philosophy ; all 
 tend to mere Saturday Reviewing, want of aim, and the sleet of 
 words which oppresses the world in the shape of magazines 
 and ephemeral literature. History is the proper training ; the 
 examination should be changed, men should be able to take up 
 distinct lines, and, as much as possible, should be examined by 
 their teachers. Coaching in Oxford is mere cramming by 
 young men without experience, of young men they do not 
 comprehend, and who themselves desire nothing beyond what 
 will pay in the schools, A Bachelor fresh from the pressure 
 of the Science Schools is a painful anomaly. But he settles 
 down after a time, for he finds that he must unload his brain 
 of its heated contents. The Balliol system of writing is bad ; 
 a man may use his pen in taking notes for his own purposes, 
 but he should never frame his thoughts in words for others till 
 he is mature, and has facts to tell the world. Magazining is 
 only a temporary disease. The great books of the world might 
 easily be read through, if people would consent to miss the 
 drifting mass of light literature.' 
 
 Meanwhile, the society of friends and counsellors whom 
 I was free to choose kept exercising a salutary inlluencc. 
 Though I could not share Green's powerful political and 
 philosophical interests, I felt the force of his character. 
 Conington directed me upon the path of literature hy principles 
 of common sense and manly prosaic taste, lie snubbed and at 
 the same time stiinulated my vague sensibilities to beauty. 
 He iiiude me reflect and distinguish in matters of art by 
 bringing clearly into prominence his scholar's sense of what is 
 great or delicate in prose and poetry, against the background of 
 
 ' Autobiograpliy. 
 
 K
 
 130 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1862 
 
 his insusceptibility to nature, music, painting, sculpture. I 
 began through him to see that literature is something by itself, 
 not part of an iridescent nebula, including all our cult for 
 loveliness. This lesson was salutary, and I owe much to the 
 years of close intimacy I passed with him. Yet I am glad 
 that I was created with a temperament less exclusively literary 
 than his. I am thankful that I preserved a sense of the 
 remote connections between all our sensibilities, for this has 
 prevented me from isolating literature, although I recognise its 
 independence. Jowett, when I came under his notice, proved a 
 far more potent master of my mind than Conington. I im- 
 mediately recognised something quite unique in his mental 
 and moral personality. He wore the halo then of martyrdom 
 around him, and dazzled young-eyed enthusiasts. ' Essays 
 and Reviews ' had made a scandalous success, and the Oxford 
 Conservatives were refusing to endow the Gi-eek chair which 
 Benjamin Jowett held. 
 
 I feel inclined to break this paragraph, and to indulge in 
 some detailed reminiscences of Jowett. When I went up to 
 Balliol, in the autumn of 1858, my father told me to call on 
 Professor Jowett. He was not my tutor, but my father had 
 recently sat next him at a Magdalen Gaudy. I think I took a 
 letter from my father to the great mysteriously reverenced man. 
 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 your 
 father.' Then, after an awkward pause, he rose, and added : 
 ' Good-bye, Mr. Symonds.' I had gone with all a boy's trepi- 
 dation to call on him. I took with me, moreover, something 
 over-added of the shyness which my dependence on my father 
 engendered. This dismissal, therefore, hurt me exceedingly. 
 
 I saw nothing more of Jowett for at least a year. But just 
 before I went in for Moderations, he sent for me, and asked me 
 to bring him Greek and Latin prose and verses. So far as I 
 remember, I was allowed to select pieces. The few evenings 
 in which he coached me made me feel, for the first time, what
 
 1862 YOUTH 131 
 
 it was to be taught. He said very little, gave me no 'tips.' 
 But somehow he made me comprehend what I had to aim at, 
 and how I had to go about it. In some now to me unappre- 
 hended way, he showed me how to use my reading in Greek 
 for the purpose of writing. I am sure that the iambics I pro- 
 duced for those few lessons were better than the thousands I 
 had laboured at before. Such influence, if continued, might 
 have educed the scholar in me, but I went into the Schools, 
 obtained a first-class in Moderations, and Greek iambics were 
 shelved. 
 
 Jowett's influence over my mind, however, continued and 
 strengthened. When I began to read for 'Greats,' I took him 
 an essay on some jihilosophical or historical subject every 
 week. The work for this essay absorbed the greater portion of 
 all my energies. I neglected everything, except my sentiments 
 and fancies, for its sole production. And, in a certain way, I 
 grew mightily under the discipline. I used to wait with 
 intense eagerness, after reading my composition aloud, for his 
 remarks. They were not much. ' That is very good, Mr. 
 Symonds ' ; ' That is not so good as what you read last w^eck ' ; 
 ' Yuu have been too prolix ' ; ' There are faults of taste in the 
 peroration ' ; ' You do not see the point about Utilitarianism ' ; 
 ' That is an admirable statement of Plato's relation to tlie 
 Eleatic philosophers.' I can hear him saying these sentences 
 now, bent before his fireplace in the tower-room of the new 
 buildings. I treasured each small word up, and somehow felt 
 the full force of them — expanded their leaves — until it filled my 
 mind and penetrated the substance of my own thouglit about 
 the essay. He taught me, indeed, to write ; not to think 
 scientifically, but to write as clearly as I could, !i,nd witli as 
 film a grasp as I possessed upon my subject. 
 
 When the essay was ovei-, Jowett made tea, or drank a glass 
 of wine with me — far more often we had tea of tlie uncomfort- 
 able! cf)llegc sort, lukewarm, out of a large metal pot, in l)ig 
 chmisy cups. Conversation did not flow. Occasionally the 
 sul)j('ct of the essay led to some reniaiks from Jowott, l)ut 
 rarely. More often there was spasmodic talking about things 
 in general —Jowott never suggesting a topic — I blunderingly 
 
 K 1
 
 132 JOHN ADUINGTON SYMONDS 1862 
 
 starting one hare after another — meeting silence or a quench- 
 ing utterance — feeling myself indescribably stupid, and utterly 
 beneath my own high level, but quitting the beloved presence 
 with no diminution of an almost fanatical respect. Obscurely, 
 but vividly, I felt my soul grow by his contact as it had never 
 grown before. That was enough, and more than enough. I 
 did not then, and do not now, know what the process may 
 have been. I almost think the paucity of speech, the sort of 
 i itellectual paralysis produced by what I knew to be not 
 unkindly and not stupid in the man I revered, was more 
 effective and more stimulative than lucid exposition or fluent 
 conversation would have been. 
 
 One evening he said to me : ' I cannot hear your essay this 
 evening, Mr. Symonds. I have just heard that Clough is 
 dead.' This was the first time, I believe, that the name of 
 Clough reached my ears. Jowett proceeded : ' He was the 
 only man of genius, whom I knew to be a man of genius, that 
 I have seen among the younger men at Balliol.' 
 
 On another evening he sat staring at the fire, and would 
 not speak, and yet did not seem to want me to go. At last he 
 said : ' When I don't say anything, people fancy I am thinking 
 about something. Generally I am thinking about nothing at 
 all. Good-night.' 
 
 At another time he said, a propos of nothing that I can 
 remember : ' Mr. Swinburne is a most curious young man. 
 He used to bring me long and eloquent essays. He had a 
 very remarkable power of language ; but it was all language. 
 I could never find that he was follomng any line of thought.' 
 
 Jowett's breakfast parties were more paralysing than his 
 coaching hours. Nothing is anywhere drearier than a lot of 
 people meeting at a breakfast. Here they met, stiff, awkward, 
 shy, from their very reverence for Jowett. He sat, sipped tea, 
 ate little, stared vacantly. Few spoke. The toast was heard 
 crunching under desperate jaws of youths exasperated by 
 their helplessness and silence. Nevertheless, it was a great 
 event to go — although nobody shone, neither host nor guest. 
 
 \Yalking out with .Jowett was, for me at least, no pleasure ; 
 yet I coveted the honour. It seemed always impossible to
 
 1862 • YOUTH 133 
 
 start a subject which would survive the exchange of four 
 remavlis. Jowett had the way of killing the innocent found- 
 Ungs of his own and his companion's brain by some crushing 
 and yet inconclusive observation. 
 
 Still, though Jowett had this influence over my mind, 
 though Conington had another of the same generic sort, and 
 though my father exercised one which was more penetrative 
 than any, I feel bound to record that the most controlling 
 influences of my life, the most enduring, those which are at 
 present potent over me, belonged to none of those three men.
 
 134 JOHN ADDINGTUN SYMUNDS 1862 
 
 CHAPTEK V 
 
 MANHOOD. FROM DEGREE TO FELLOWSHIP 
 
 Journey to Venice— Impressions of Venetian art— Padua— Verona — A 
 rising in Milan— The books he read on the journey— llhiess at Visp — 
 Home again — First intimations of a Hterary career — Autobiographic 
 poetry— Analysis of Haydn's ' Creation '—His psychological altitude 
 —Stands for a fellowship at Queen's— A visit from Jowett at Clifton — 
 Stands for a fellowship at Magdalen -And elected— Offer of a travelling 
 tutorship — Attack upon him— ^Breakdown in health— Goes to Malvern 
 — Wins the Chancellor's prize with an essay on ' The Kenaissance.' 
 
 .1862 [Immedl\tely after taking his degree, Symonds went 
 abroad with his father and sister ; this time through Munich, 
 Innspruck, and over the Finstermiinz to Venice. Though 
 the Diary of this journey is full, as usual, the Autobiography 
 passes it over in a few lines ; yet in various ways it was 
 important. For the first time Symonds ' touched the city of 
 the lagoons.' ' The magic of the place enthralled me,' he says, 
 'and it has never wholly lost that early fascination.' The 
 Symondses stayed at the Hotel Europa, occupying ' three bed- 
 rooms on a side street, and a sitting-room on the Canal aw 
 premier.' Venetian painting made the deepest impression on 
 Symonds, and he begins to annotate, analyse, marshal his 
 impressions on paper, as is his wont. 
 
 Sunday, July 13. — I ' am writing on Sunday morning 
 alone, papa and Charlotte being in the EngUsh Church. I 
 feel rather Hke the lady in the 'Palace of Art.' 
 
 Indeed the excellences of the Venetian School, like those 
 of the best music, seem at first sight rather to harmonise the 
 soul and impregnate it with beauty than to root themselves in 
 the memory. The Venetians have little beauty of form ; tliere 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 186-2 MANTlOOli 135 
 
 is no high ideal at which they aim ; and this distinguishes 
 them from the schools of Lionardo and Raphael. In the same 
 way their composition is not designedly symmetrical. They 
 present no artificial grouping. Like Rubens, life is their chief 
 study. To represent life and action is their aim. And like 
 Rubens, they feel the beauty of colour far more than that of 
 form. Tintoretto, for bis rapidity of execution and vast sweep 
 of brush, is the Venetian Rubens ; but he is surpassed in 
 colouring by Veronese, whose gorgeous hiies, lucid medium, 
 and splendid disposition of light and shadow, place him on a 
 par with the great Antwerpian. Yet in both Tintoretto and 
 Veronese there is a majesty and warmth of hue which Rubens 
 never reaches. Their rich amber hair and glowing flesh of 
 ivory morhidezza are more lustrous than the pure gold tresses 
 and rosy whiteness of the Flemish beauties. And though the 
 Venetians always represent life and Nature more than the 
 ideal, they do not fall into the disgusting excesses of Rubens ; 
 their passion is more refined, nor is their canvas ever defiled 
 \\'ith such brutality as the ' Murder of the Innocents ' at 
 Munich. It is the luxury of life in the burning South that 
 they have caught, the pomp and gardens and blue hills and 
 mighty palaces of Italy ; all these seem concentrated in the 
 sentiment and colour of their pictures. If we ask ourselves 
 why some of the greatest Venetian masters are so little known, 
 the answer is simple — the essence of their works cannot be 
 represented by engraving. Raphael is better often in a line 
 engraving than on canvas, because his chief power lies in form 
 and expression and not colouring. Michael Angelo's gigantic 
 figures and elaborate grouping can in like manner be easily trans- 
 ferred to copper. But the Venetians, wanting in ideal beauty 
 and wanting in composition, excelling as they do all artists in 
 the breadtli and colour and perfume of luxurious reality — in the 
 pomp and pride of life — become mere skeletons when se]iarated 
 from the hues they have thrown aidnml llicm lik<! an ulnio- 
 sphere. This I felt in the Accadeniia, which we visited after 
 dinn(;r. The names of Vivarini, Carpaccio, and Bonifa/io I 
 bad barely lieard of, Imt 1 found them great artists. Vivarini 
 is the Venetian Perugiuo ; his figures have a great dignity and
 
 136 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1862 
 
 sweetness ; in the Church of St. John and St. Paul is a fine 
 ' St. Christopher and St. Sebastian,' and above it a ' Pieta ' 
 exactly like the grand Mantegna at Berlin. Vittore Carpaccio 
 has painted a long series of pictures representing the history of 
 St. Ursula. There is no power of perspective in them, but 
 great beauty of colour, dignity of attitude, and grace of feature. 
 His ' Meeting of Ann and Joachim ' is a splendid piece of bright 
 colouring, and so is his apotheosis of St. Ursula. The details 
 of his pictures are full of those everyday incidents that we 
 remark in Benozzo Gozzoli and Pinturicchio. 
 
 The passage of the Venetian school from the Byzantine 
 influence is extremely interesting. One great enthroned 
 Madonna, by Giovanni d'Alemagna, illustrates the modifica- 
 tion of her grim visage and almond eyes in its earliest stage. 
 Scenes from the life of Christ, painted in the Missal style, with 
 gold markings for the drapery folds, carry on the growth. 
 Gian Bellini is still under its influence. Among the many 
 beautiful pictures of his in Venice, there is none in Avhich the 
 Virgin is not stiff and conventional, with a stern forbidding 
 aspect, and long narrow eyes. By far his finest work is in 
 the Church of St. John and St. Paul. Tl ere the saints and 
 Fathers of the Church about the thi-one are emancipated from 
 Byzantine ugliness. Madonna, as the most sacred personage, 
 retains most of the conventional aspect. Of Gentile Bellini, 
 there are one or two historical pictures, interesting because 
 they show how unchanged Venice is. Even the pigeons 
 flutter in those paintings about St. Mark's as they do now. 
 From Bellini to Titian is a vast leap. The Assunta wholly 
 satisfied me. Such pasturage of colour, such superb action, 
 such dignity of adoration I have never seen. I would sooner 
 have this picture than the San Sisto. Titian's Virgin, of 
 course, is not so unearthly, or even so beautiful. But she has 
 a full warm splendour, and a humanity which the other lacks. 
 The harmonies of colour and power of movement were intoxi- 
 cating. This is to me a far greater picture than ' Pietro Mar- 
 tire.' No engraving does it justice. The details are all perfect, 
 and the execution most careful. I think that the variety and 
 beauty of the cherubs surpass Correggio, and certainly no one
 
 1862 MANHOOD 137 
 
 l)ut Titian painted such a figure as St. John. The action of 
 the wounded monk in ' Peter Martyr ' equals, but does not 
 surpass it. 
 
 I wdsh I could give some notion of the luxury we enjoyed 
 in gliding through the narrow canals. There, though the sun 
 was blazing in an unclouded sky, those tall houses almost 
 meeting overhead gave a delicious shade. From light to 
 shadow we passed as the gondola swung round the corners to 
 the warning cry of the oarsmen. To feel the air so soft and 
 warm upon one's cheek, to feel the undulation of the green 
 smooth water, to see those ancient palaces and profound glooms 
 of deep-cast shadows over marble traceries of vines and eagled 
 lions and angels was truly Venice. Sometimes our black 
 gondola, Hke a great crocodile, dispersed a troop of little 
 swimmers. The boys here are amphibious, and run about 
 quite naked, but for a wrapper round the middle. They leapt 
 and ran on land, broadening their chests with play. In the 
 water they dived and swam and flung themselves about like 
 ducks. Without shame or restraint, fair to look upon, but oh, 
 how animal. One woman's face attracted me greatly. She 
 was leaning from an upper window ; against the dark back- 
 ground shone her light hair, tightly braided over a melancholy 
 white face, not thin and sallow like so many of the Italians, 
 but full and fresh-coloured, with blue eyes. From scenes like 
 these, which I cannot describe, we passed into the Scuola di 
 San Rocco. This is filled with pictures of Tintoretto, to the 
 number of seventy-five. They are all in oils, but so executed 
 as to take the place of frescoes, nor can much more time have 
 been spent upon them than upon the ordinary fresco. Their 
 impasto is very thin, and the stroke of the brush most rapid. 
 No detail is finished, but general effect is everywhere regarded. 
 They seem to have been injured by time and neglect, and their 
 hii riled painting has no douljt rendered them more susceptible 
 of light, for all are faded with the exception of one roof piece. 
 They display the usual fault of Tintoretto — no unity of design 
 or grouping— and his constant power of rapid action. Some 
 are very naturalistic, especially the carpenter's house, with its 
 broken wall and bods, which form the scene of the Annunciation,
 
 138 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMOXDS 1862 
 
 and the stable of the Nativity, The action of Might, and the 
 whole strength of angelic personages, are most remarkable 
 throughout. Satan in the ' Temptation ' is a proud beautiful 
 youth, with gaudy wings and bracelets. How different from 
 the Old Man in ]\Iilton and Rembrandt. The grand Cruci- 
 fixion seems to me devoid of unity, and excessively confused. 
 In detail it is very fine, and the power of action displayed is 
 enormous. One man engaged in nailing down the bad thief is 
 a study from Michael Angelo. Another raising the good thief 
 in the foreground presents a beautiful and bold line from arm 
 to arm. 
 
 Tuesday, Jtily 15. — We left about ten, highly satisfied. 
 Venice has fully answered my expectations, and has not been 
 hot or disagreeable, from the Canal water. 
 
 This day was scorching. I never felt so much misery and 
 relaxation from heat. We stopped at Padua during all the 
 midday. First we saw Giotto's Chapel. His colouring — pale 
 and serene — is very different from the stern drawing and 
 gorgeous hues of Vivarini. The expression in some of the 
 faces is wonderfully naive and well delineated. I noticed here, 
 also, that the most sacred personages are always least free from 
 conventionalism. 
 
 After seeing this chapel, we went into the Church of the 
 Eremitani close by. It is a fine, dark Gothic building, chiefly 
 remarkable for containing some grand frescoes of Mantegna. 
 These interested me greatly, for I was able to see what a 
 sudden emancipation from Byzantine forms and conventional 
 modelling Andrea had attained by pure study of the antique. 
 His figures are sharply defined, technically excellent, some- 
 what hard in colouring, and always remind one of statuary, 
 of bas-relief. After having luncheon papa and I went out, in 
 furious heat, to the old University, the halls and staircases of 
 which are decorated with the names and arms of centuries of 
 students and doctors. We saw some English there. At the 
 door of St. Anthony's — II Santo they call him here— we 
 bought pretty rosaries. This church is one of N. Pisano's, 
 fine and solemn. It is an attempt to unite the Gothic crucial 
 design with Byzantine cupolas, after the fashion of St. Mark.
 
 18(52 MANHOOD 139 
 
 Nor is the attempt unsuccessful — especially from the exterior. 
 Inside the church is white and bare, and severe, too much like 
 a Belgian building. Indeed, the arrangement of the false 
 chevet is wholly Belgian. Afterwards we dined, and then got 
 to Verona, where we found it stifling. 
 
 Milan, Wednesday, Juhj 16. — The people of Milan are 
 very unquiet to-night. They have been excited by a speech 
 of Garibaldi, in which he denounced Napoleon, called him 
 ' traditore,' ' mosso da libidine,' 'capo di briganti, di assassini.' 
 The Milanese hate the French, and are beginning to weary of 
 the Sardinian government, and because they have to pay 
 heavier taxes they regret the Austrians. This promulgation of 
 Garibaldi has roused them against France and Sardinia, and 
 made them furious for a Republic. To-night they propose a 
 demonstration ; all the soldiers — cavalry, infantry, and National 
 Guard — are in readiness to suppress it. While I was writing, 
 a confused murmur reached our ears. We got up and ran to 
 our -window, which looks both up and down the street. In- 
 stantly we perceived that a large band of men, with lighted 
 toi'ches, were rapidly advancing up the street. A crowd formed 
 in fi-ont of them. We saAV men behind and at the sides. The 
 bright red torches swayed about, burning and smoking with a 
 glare upon the houses crowded with faces. Something seemed 
 to interrupt their progress. A great noise arose, and the crowd 
 increased. It was picturesque to see them toss their flambeaux 
 up and down to make them shine, and in the distance each 
 uian looked Uke a shape of flame. Eschmann ' came up and 
 told us that this was one of four divisions of the demonstra- 
 tion ; '100 of another had been taken prisoners, and these were 
 surrounded with soldiers. The soldiers forced them to break 
 up, the crowd dropped away, and so ended the 6meute. I often 
 W(ui(iered what a demonstration meant. This is a pretty and 
 picturesque specimen. 
 
 I5AVEN0, July 17.— It may 1h; interesting to record the 
 Itooks I took with iin', bought and road during this toiii'. To 
 begin, I liiid, of course, my Bibl*; and Pniy(!r-hook in one, and 
 iiiy little ' I)aily Food.' Tlien, there were the ' lle\ elation ' a)id 
 
 ' Tlie Courier.
 
 UO JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1862 
 
 ' Job,' each separate, the Greek Bucolic poets, and ' Hermann 
 und Dorothea ' in one volume, Plato's ' Eepublic ' in Greek, 
 the ' EpistoliB Obscurorum Virorum,' Kugler's ' Handbook to 
 Italian Painters,' Shelley's minor Poems, 'La Comtesse de 
 Eudolstadt ' (Deuxieme Serie), Green's ' Essay on Novels,' one 
 volume of Shakespeare containing ' Cymbeline,' ' Lear,' and 
 ' Othello.' I bought ' Valvedre,' by George Sand, at Paris, at 
 Munich a German and Italian lesson-book, at Venice an Italian 
 Dictionary and a book called ' L'Art Moderne,' by Gautier. 
 Then also papa gave me a pretty Virgil. I have read more or 
 less of all these books except Green's ' Essay ' and ' Job,' and, 
 besides, I have read parts of the ' Cornhill,' ' Macmillan,' 
 'Murray,' one part of ' Orley Farm,' some of the 'Golden 
 Treasury,' Tennyson, ' La Jolie Cordiere,' by Saintine, some 
 ' Paradise Lost,' and ' Tom Jones.' 
 
 Friday, July 18. — Hotel dc la Poste, Isella on the Simj^lon. 
 Papa and I sat up rather late last night discussing Eubens and 
 the Venetians, after I had read a portion of my diary to him. 
 I had a bad night in consequence, for I revolved in my head 
 an essay on Art. 
 
 Tuesday, July 22. — Hotel Gibbon, Lausanne. I was so 
 unwell on Sunday that papa gave up the notion of Zermatt 
 and the Gemmi. We stayed at Visp all Sunday. I was in 
 bed most of the day. 
 
 Yesterday we left at ten and drove to Sion. I thought my 
 headache had come from the jolting of the carriage, or from 
 sitting with my back to the horses. So papa kindly gave me 
 a back seat, and I did not increase my headache. We arrived 
 here at nine. I was extremely wretched, as indeed I am this 
 morning, though now I can eat, which I could not before. 
 
 Hotel Byron, Villeneuve. — I am now feeling better, though 
 I have had a miserable day. Every inch of my body aches ; 
 the two mustard plasters, one on my back and one on my 
 stomach, which were put on at Visp, make every posture 
 uncomfortable ; my scalp is sore and my bones tingle ; queer 
 shudders run down my back ; 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.
 
 1861' 3IANH00D 141 
 
 On the whole, I have felt like a parboiled lobster, saved even 
 as a brand from the burning. 
 
 [It was necessary to record this last passage, because, as we 
 shall find later on, Symonds attached great importance to his 
 illness at Visp. Indeed, the whole journey was of moment in 
 his career, and led presently to a formal opening of his 
 ' artistic ' studies.] 
 
 By August 1 Symonds was home again, and on August 2 
 he is ' enjoying the calm air, the green leaves, and sunshine 
 of the place. Yet it feels cold. I began a book, lettered 
 " Art and Literature," to-day, with a long article on the 
 characteristic of the Venetian School.' On August 3 we find 
 this : ' Stayed in all morning, partly because of my cold, 
 partly to write " Theodore," a self-analytical expansion of my 
 verse of July 7. I wrote 200 at a sitting, so they are 
 doggerel.' August 4: 'Wrote at "Theodore."' August 5: 
 ' Left for Malvern. On my way I completed " Theodore." ' 
 
 I think that these entries, referring to Art and Literatui'e 
 on the one hand, to the writing of poetry on the other, are of 
 grei\t importance in the history of Symonds's career as a man 
 of letters. It seems that now, after his success at Oxford, 
 after the stimulus of a highly intellectual journey with his 
 father, he was beginning, unconsciously perhaps, to feel his 
 way along the path of litei-ature, and to test his natural bias 
 within that sphere of activity towards which he was being 
 insensiljly drawn. And the unconscious questioning continued 
 for some time. At Malvern he debates with his reading 
 friends, Mr. Rol)inson ' and Mr. Courthope,'-^ the subject of 
 ' Art !ind Originality.' It began with the question of how far 
 a painter migljt bori'ow from a ])oot or historian without being 
 a copyist. ' I contendcsd tliat all great poets were as much a 
 part of ih(; woil'l's (l(!V('lo])ment as original. I showed how 
 they took colour from their school, and affected it by llicir own 
 individuality. I wished due attention paid to the historical 
 jioidt of view. I do not feed certain aljout all this. The 
 
 ' Late Fr^llow and Bursiir of New Colloj^c, Oxford. 
 -■ Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford.
 
 142 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1862 
 
 history of the Van Eycks goes against it.' This is followed 
 on August 20 by this significant remark : ' I am discontented, 
 because I do not feel myself a poet, and do not see why I 
 should not be one. It is vain and foolish — in part a jealousy 
 of Conington's appreciation of C— — .' After this there is a 
 return to criticism, to artistic analysis — of music — as usual, 
 enriched by the knowledge of painting, wliich he had acquired 
 abroad ; and from Sutton Court, his b/other-in-law's house, 
 he writes to Conington the following remarks, suggested by a 
 fine performance of the ' Creation ' at Gloucester. ' As I sat 
 and thought of the first chapter of Genesis and heard Haydn's 
 music, it seemed to me that I listened to a wise commentary. 
 I called to mind Plato's definition of chaos, Milton's descrip- 
 tion of the angelic symphonies of light, and the chariot of 
 God's Christ. I tried to remember what Raphael and Michael 
 Angelo had modelled in form and colour to represent the 
 power of God in the Creation ; but there was nothing which 
 spoke to me of utter desolation at the beginning, of mysterious 
 breathing as the Spirit went forth upon the waters, of a low, 
 still, permeating voice that gave the fiat, and of a definite 
 blast of God's will, ending in the restless outgoing of intoler- 
 able light — like those strange inexplicable chords and com- 
 binations of symphonious instruments. Analysis of the 
 reason of this virtue resident in sound, seems to me impossible. 
 I can only mark out the province of sound from that of the 
 other arts, and say that it is most powerful wherever the idea 
 of motion is prevalent. Thus it would occupy a place like 
 that of Plato's astronomy, and its science would be the 
 science of motion, oral and visible, ruled by laws of abstract 
 harmony. Music is at the same time the abstract science of all 
 harmonious motion, and also its concrete expression to us. In 
 its latter character it communicates those impressions of 
 delight which are peculiar to it, and which still remain 
 unanalysed. As such it represents the motion of the heavens, 
 the life of the earth and the energy of man ; as such it 
 controls the tempest of the heart, the discord of anger and of 
 fear, the harmony of love and adoration, the windless calm of 
 obedience and contemplation. Further it cannot go. Form
 
 1862 MANHOOD 143 
 
 and colour it leaves to painting, sculpture, and architecture, 
 which are the geometry of art. Poetry is the uietaphysic of art, 
 deaUng A\ith the abstractions of music and the plastic arts, and 
 adding to them her own province of pure intellectual thought.' 
 
 [This is a highly characteristic passage ; it shows us the 
 man deeply affected through his senses, which produce in him 
 an emotion sublimated to its least definite and most pervasive 
 form in music, and then instantly turning round to analyse 
 this emotion. It illustrates the governing quahties of Symonds's 
 personality, acute sensibility, and intense intellectual activity ; 
 he felt profoundly through his aesthetic sensibility, but his 
 intellectual vigour would not let Mm rest there ; he desired to 
 know as well as to feel. This was his spiritual attitude at this 
 most important period of his life. Had it not been for the 
 grievous misfortunes which were so soon to overtake him, he 
 would have pressed forward toward some union and fusion of 
 these two qualities in him, his capacity for feeling, and his 
 desire to know — with what result we can only now surmise. 
 
 As it was, the internal clash and conflict of two such 
 powerful appetites inside a delicate frame, were wearing and 
 grinding the man to powder. The next night is disturbed by 
 violent dreams, and the day follo\\"ing his pain is poured 
 forth in a torrent of splendid Augustinian Latin. Then the 
 storm of passion dies away upon the close of this prayer : 
 ' Make me calm without stagnation, wise without the delirium 
 of little learning.' 
 
 It is not improbable that the resolution of his internal 
 ditticnlties would have been achieved thi-ough the victory of 
 the a'Sthetic and the absorption of the intellectual qualities, 
 that he would have reached his knowledge through feeling. 
 The following passage seems to indicate the advent of some 
 such amalgamation : — ' I felt in a good mood for musing '• (he 
 is in the cathedral) ; ' things came in upon me, as they some- 
 times do, rushingly. I could not analyse or dwell upon 
 impressions, but I felt past, present, and future bound in one, 
 and all around me full of hurrying suggestions. It is a 
 delightful but an exhausting condition, and one of much
 
 144 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1862 
 
 nervousness ; for the soul trembles, unable to grasp all, yet 
 desiring to hive sunshine for leaden days. The grandeur of 
 the Athanasian Creed, as Tallis's music rolled it forth in 
 sonorous ebb and flow and constant reconstruction of decaying 
 chords, seemed to me more soul-crushing and full of intellec- 
 tual pomp than I ever remembered it. The Greek spirit, 
 terrible in its decadence, swept on upon its metaphysical 
 chariot, bearing the image of a sublime creed, yet crushing 
 remorselessly the bodies of all upon its path.' There is the 
 Athanasian Creed intellectually grasped through the emotion 
 of music. On the other hand, the following analysis of Men- 
 delssohn's Motett on the 22nd Psalm seems to illustrate the 
 opposite process or tendency ; here the aesthetic import of the 
 music seems to be reached through an intellectual appreciation 
 of the words. 
 
 'I have just come from hearing Mendelssohn's divine 
 Motett on the 22nd Psalm. It is the most dramatic, sublime 
 efibrt of music that I ever heard. Mendelssohn seems to have 
 been inspired in writing it with the whole spirit of the Greek 
 tragedians — that spirit which he caught during his labours on 
 the ' Antigone,' that spirit which breathes throughout the con- 
 versation between the Chorus and the Princess as she is 
 journeying to the tomb. It always seemed to me that that 
 passage is the most pathetic in all the range of the Greek 
 drama — the solitary sadness of Antigone taken \ip and echoed 
 by the Chorus which repeats her lamentations in other words ; 
 the wail of misery, succeeded by the passion of momentary 
 struggling, and at last relieved by a sense of self-devotion, of 
 nobility in death, of heroic and mythological apotheosis — strikes 
 the deepest key which pagan music can command. Self-sacri- 
 flce to the gods, and obligations of kindred, and an equality of 
 fate with men renowned in story, are the theme of the ' Anti- 
 gone.' And if they can move us so, what are our emotions 
 when we gaze upon the desolation and hear the agonising cries 
 of Christ, when the interest involves the universe, when the 
 victory gained is for all time ? This passion, the deification 
 of suffering and conquest wrenched from agony, great painters 
 have attempted to describe in pictures as majestic as the
 
 1862 MANHOOD lA^ 
 
 ' Crucifixion ' of Tintoretto, or as desolate as the lonely ' Cross ' 
 of Rubens or Vandyke, sole against the lurid clouds with Him 
 that hangs thereon. It is not, however, the province of paint- 
 ing to evolve the various steps in a great dramatic conception, 
 to call up collateral points of interest, to suggest the com- 
 mencement of the passion, follow it to its climax, and finally 
 pronounce the moral of the conclusion. Painting arrests the 
 passion at one point, and leaves the imagination to do the rest 
 — it can never be consummately dramatic. Nor can poetry 
 alone. It needs the accompaniments of scenery or dress, or 
 the aid of music. But in such a situation as we are alluding 
 to music is supreme. The monotonous minor of the opening 
 cry, "My God, my God, look upon Me," introduces us to the 
 solitary suffering of Christ. The voice is low and wailing, 
 and we shudder till the attendant chorus takes up the theme, 
 " And art so far from the voice of My complaint? " For the 
 next two verses the same order is continued, the commos or 
 conversation between the solo and chorus, in which the chorus 
 acts as echo and interpreter of the lonely outpouring of the 
 tenor voice, being sustained. Then for two verses the Prot- 
 agonistes is silent, the theme of God's mercies in the olden 
 time being suited to the reflection of the chorus. He bursts 
 forth again with the words, " But as for Me, I am a worm," 
 commenting with true Greek feeling upon the sentiments of 
 the chorus, applying them to himself, and shoAving the futility 
 of their poor consolations. In the succeeding voice the agony 
 of lamentation is wrought to a terrific pitch ; we reel and 
 tremble beneath it, and feel that the sun is darkened and the 
 stars give no light. Then is apparent that power of synthetical 
 dramatic representation, which music possesses above all the 
 other arts ; for to heighten the passion, which must in poetry 
 and painting have been confined to the expression of agony in 
 the Sufferer, or sympathy in His friends, we have the chorus 
 of yelling Israelites represented to us, "He trust(!d in God 
 that He would deliver Him." Up swell the derisive minors, 
 clash tlie troblcjs in (sxiilting derision, a storm and fury of dis- 
 cord and triumph swells from oi'gan and contending voices, 
 it lulls, and the solitary tenor proceeds once more, supijorted
 
 146 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONUS 1862 
 
 by the sympathising chorus. In the words, " and then Thou 
 shalt bring Me to the very dust of death," we reach the lowest 
 point of abasement. But now it is time that the tragic horror 
 should be tempered, and again notice the resources of music. 
 Without altering the artistic unity of the piece, without bringing 
 down a Dcus ex machina, without revolting the judgment with 
 any sudden transition to premature victory, retaining the old 
 minor, out swells a solitary treble, the first treble which has 
 spoken alone during the whole anthem, and calls in an air 
 loaded with pathetic pleading and excess of beauty to God : 
 " Be not Thou far from Me, God." This is taken up by the 
 tenors and basses ; gradually the pleading air acquires a solemn 
 and almost triumphant beauty. Hoj)e has passed in like a 
 ray of light, but it is tempered and subdued. We feel that 
 victory though it is, it has been bought with intense woe, and 
 that the sorrow is not past. The hope is one of calmness and 
 resignation, more than of expectation or confidence. And this 
 feeling is kept up till the end of the piece, which concludes 
 with a chorus — "The earth is the Lord's," solemn and sub- 
 lime, yet still minor. The human will has been subdued, and 
 homage is paid to God, who out of pain works deliverance. 
 We are still before the cross, and He who hangs thereon is 
 still bleeding, panting, suffering. But He has bowed His 
 head, and knows the end, and feels that all is good and 
 merciful, and that He is one with God.' 
 
 No doubt it was the fineness of his brain-structure which 
 made Symonds at once so capable of aesthetic emotions, and so 
 analytic of those emotions. But in this very fineness lay a 
 danger. Throughout the Diary we begin to meet such 
 ominous entries as, ' a strained feeling in my head ' ; and notes 
 of this nature become more and more frequent. In fact, a 
 breakdown of brain-power was menacing his career. And the 
 struggle was the more wearing for Symonds, in that the 
 spiritual conflict between emotion and knowledge was being 
 carried over into the world of conduct and of action. A 
 passage from a letter to a friend indicates the position clearly 
 enough : ' It is one of the most terrible results of introspection 
 that I find the weakness, vicious tendencies, morbid sensi-
 
 1862 -AIANHOOr) 147 
 
 bilities, 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 envy you to be living in the world of things 
 and not of thoughts — that is, to use the former as your 
 battle-field of life, and to turn the latter round at times for 
 your recreation. I, on the other hand, hear the great world of 
 fact and action roaring for ever around me unintelligibly ; my 
 own sphere is one of phantoms, and my own battle a mere 
 sciomachy. Thoughts and words arc the men and things 
 I deal with ; but they are direful realities, full of suasions to 
 passion, and maddening with impossible visions of beauty. 
 This constant contact with the intangible results, in a word, is 
 the state of Faust. We must go from thought to action, from 
 the darkness of the study to the full light of the world— if we 
 are strong enough. And here is another Nemesis of study — • 
 bodily weakness. Oh, woe to such as make their own dreams 
 avenging Furies, and are unable to escape, to be at peace ! 
 Like Faust, life for such men is only found through vice, and 
 they ]>ocome human only after Mcdean baths of witchcraft and 
 sense-searing indulgence.' 
 
 The situation seems clear enough ; in one region emotion 
 and intellect are at war, in the other thought and action. 
 Emotions generate a passion, an appetite ; intellect analyses 
 the emotions into thoughts ; thought is unsatisfying to tlie 
 appetite which emotion has created, and that appetite demands 
 the translation of the thought into action, but health and 
 conscience bar the way. This is a state of mind known to 
 men like Leopardi ; but it was terrible that one so young as 
 Symonds should alieady have attained such lucid vision of the 
 case. This letter seems to me to prefigure his future life. 
 lie did take to action — to creative action — in the vast amount 
 of lit(;rary work which flowed from liiiii during the next 
 thirty years ; to civic action in the duties wliich he performed 
 so w(!]I, first at Clifton, and then at J)av()s; to enjoyment of 
 life in the unconventional freedom wiiich S\vit/,erlan<l and 
 
 i. -J
 
 148 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1862 
 
 Italy afforded to his active temperament. But there was a 
 long and dolorous journey to be taken before he attained to 
 the liberty of action which was in fact the full effectuation of 
 his own personality. 
 
 Three fellowships were open for competition during the 
 Autumn term of 1862. Jowett recommended Symonds to 
 stand for them in turn. Queen's came first. He entered for 
 it on October 3, and failed to get it. ' October 8. — Waited all 
 day for the election. At six, I heard that Elton and Maidlow 
 were elected. Facts are more significant than feelings. Reached 
 home about 1 a.m.' 
 
 While under examination, he wrote to his sister :] 
 
 ' Thank ^ you for your letter. It was very nice to get so 
 many birthday congratulations in my solitude. 
 
 ' Twenty-two years is a good age — an age certainly at which 
 I ought to be better, stronger, more fixed in character, and 
 more developed in organisation than I am. If birthdays are 
 of any use, they serve at least to remind us of such truths as 
 this ; and so little by little we become accustomed to take our 
 lowly places in life, and not to fret onwards for what is not to 
 be. I do not see any reason why we should expect un- 
 happiness in the future. Every year lessens our discontent, 
 hardens us to the chances of the world, dries up some spring 
 of yearning or vain fancy, and so makes us more equable, and 
 more ready for the future. It is not in what we have to bear, 
 but in the way that we can bear it, that our happiness or 
 misery consists. Nor do I believe that any pangs can be at 
 the same time so acute, and so disgraceful, as those which in 
 seasons of calm weather we create for ourselves in our own 
 hearts. The prayers that in youth we make for genius, wealth 
 and beauty, as we grow older become prayers for peace, so 
 that each year brings us nearer to the aspiration of St. 
 Augustine : " Lord, grant us Thy peace. Lord, grant us 
 the peace of Thy Sabbath. Lord, grant us the peace of 
 Thy Sabbath which has no evening." 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Oxford, October 5, 18G2.
 
 1862 MANHOOD 149 
 
 ' There is something strange and touching in these prayers 
 for rest, and in the passionate longing which, amid the noise 
 of business, or of pleasure, comes over all of us, for a windless 
 calm of dependence upon God. In the examination on Friday 
 afternoon, I could hardly translate one sentence of an old 
 Greek poem, it touched me so. A mother had been cast adrift 
 with her baby on the waters, and the child was sleeping, but 
 the mother strove with terror for a time, and then bent over 
 the little face, and cried : " Sleep, baby, and let the seas be still, 
 and let our woes unmeasured cease." It seemed to me that 
 this was a type of the useless unreasoning prayers which every 
 one is making on the waves of life. They know that the seas 
 must rage and the troubles must fall, but yet there is that 
 within them which bids them think of peace, and somehow 
 assures them that it is not far oft'. Nor is it far oft', for death 
 is always near, and we doubt not but that he comes as a friend 
 to all men, ringing vesper bells, and sounding no alarm in the 
 darkness of the night. 
 
 ' If these lines are too exalted and visionary, a birthday and 
 a solitary Sunday must excuse them. I have answered one 
 thought in your letter. For the other, if I am much to you, 
 you know that you are much to me — how much we neither of 
 us can calculate. Wait and see whether I be elected at Queen's 
 before you give me anything. A photograph for my rooms in 
 case of my getting them would be a most acceptable present. 
 If not, M. Midler is the book I should like. 
 
 ' r.S. — This letter need not be all read out ; for, though 
 no secret, it is too dithyrambic for tin; broakfast-table.' 
 
 [The next fellowship was at Magdakjn ; and in tlie mean- 
 time Jowctt came to stay at Clifton Hill House.] 
 
 Oc^j/^cr 15.'— Had a pleasant ictc-d-tetc with Jowett. lie 
 talked about fellowships, and aljout staying up at ()xf(jnl. 
 'I'hut he docs not wholly approve of. He calls it living in a 
 hothouse, and says men get braced in Loinlon. About health, 
 li'' thinks yoimg men of my age arc apt to pule. To road 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 150 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1862 
 
 conscientiously for years on one subject requires peculiar gifts. 
 Great perseverance and freshness are needed ; for after a time 
 the acquisition of knowledge becomes tedious, and its recon- 
 struction ceases to be anything but restitution. He spoke 
 about the habit some men acquire of using words without 
 thoughts. They write beautifully and cleverly, but neither 
 they nor their readers can tell what they mean. 
 
 [The examination at Magdalen began on October 21, and 
 the following entries occur :] 
 
 October 2o. — ' I have been doing a Latin Essay, " Ut 
 pictura poesis," a nice enough subject had it been English. I 
 noticed, when I was doing verses, that a little greenfinch had 
 got into the hall and could not find its way out. The bird's 
 feet were entangled -with cobwebs from the ceiling, and it 
 clung wildly to the wires of the oriel by the dais. I found the 
 poor thing tame and exhausted ; I took it in my hands, and 
 removed the cobwebs, and then I let it fly forth from the open 
 window into the clear autumnal sky, fresh with sunlight after 
 rain. The creature sat dazed ujion a battlement, and then 
 hopped to another, and pecked a little moss. At last it felt 
 its freedom, chirruped, and was away toward the woods. So 
 would that some one might release me.' 
 
 [Symonds very much wished to be elected at Magdalen ; 
 the stately buildings, the magnificent chapel services, the 
 aroma of the place suited his taste. *Quam dilecta sunt 
 templa Magdalen^e. Nunquam aliquid adeo desideravi,' he 
 had written during the examination ; and while waiting for 
 the announcement of the issue, he was highly nervous. 
 Characteristically he interjects : ' By the way, how ridiculous 
 Pantheism seems at a moment when I am so keenly indi- 
 vidualised ! ' 
 
 The susjDense was soon at an end ; Symonds was elected 
 unanimously. ' That night I dined in hall as a stranger. All 
 the Fellows took wine with me. It was the festival of the 
 restitution of the Fellows, and after hall the whole College,
 
 1862 MANHOOD 151 
 
 on and off the foundation, drank of a great cup, standing and 
 sa}'ing, "Jus suum cuique." In common room Knight made 
 me a short speech, which I answered with a few words. The 
 bells rang a merry peal for my election.' On the 27th he was 
 admitted Probationary Fellow, and on November 1st he went 
 into his rooms in College, cloisters 8, one pair left. He took 
 leave of his lodgings at Nalder's, 56 St. Giles, in this letter to 
 his friend, i\Ir. Stephens : ' It is a sad and solemn thing to 
 leave a house where one has thought, worked, and felt intensely, 
 with pain and with pleasure, with success and disappointment, 
 under depression and hope ; and where, for the most part, 
 solitude has been the condition of one's communings. The 
 recollection of your friendship will always make Nalder's a 
 pleasant place in my memory. Yet here I have been absolutely 
 at times alone, not in respect of company, but in spirit. And 
 this, I think, is what now appals me. ... As I grow my 
 sensibilities become more tender, and this year has been a 
 marvellous one for me. For its successes I have all reason to 
 be most humbly thankful, and for its soul-searching sorrows I 
 have also reason to thank God.' 
 
 Immediately after moving into Magdalen, Symonds received 
 the offer of acting as tutor to young Lord Pembroke, then at 
 Eton. He was uncertain what course to take, and went home 
 to consult his father. The conversation that evening naturally 
 raised the whole fjuostion of a careei". Symonds stated his 
 'ambition ralliei- for ]it(!i'ii,tnrc tlian for anything else, and 
 carelessness for pohtics and Pai'liamcnt.' The upshot was 
 that he determined to remain in Oxford, tiy to liiid tutorial 
 work, and to eat dinners in London.] 
 
 ' 1 ' will begin a leltei- to-day, and shall prolnihly not send 1803 
 till to-morrow. We had a solemn dinner last night in tiic 
 ]>nrsary, on the occasion of wliat is mysteriously called 
 "Pippin Audit"; of the; origin of this, iuid many other 
 phrases conncsctcid with the College, no one, not even Dr. 
 iiloxani, who has devoted a lifcstime to Magdalen Anti(]uities, 
 can give any account. Certain it is that, on the last day but 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Magdalen College, January 30, 18G3.
 
 152 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1863 
 
 two of January, there is a formal audit of the College accounts, 
 and in the evening a great festival is held, marked by a bowl 
 of roasted golden pippins. If the College business is treated 
 with no more lucidity than the steward evinced in his speech 
 last night, I am afraid that many incomprehensible questions 
 about our finances might easily be answered. Such a meeting 
 is pleasant in its way, it makes one feel the magnitude, and 
 I wish it made everybody feel the responsibility of such a body. 
 Thirty thousand pounds have been received by them for good 
 or ill as their annual revenue in the day time, and in the even- 
 ing they celebrated their society by a sumptuous festivity. I 
 was glad enough to escape a little before tea, and to walk with 
 Bramley round the walks in the moonlight. Indeed, if the 
 great gates were not always locked, or if I possessed a key, I 
 should often walk there at night. The broad meadow and the 
 cloister trees chequering the path with moonlight, the sparkle 
 of the water, the dim rows of elms in the park, and shadowing 
 deer beneath them, the tower rising alone against the clear 
 grey sky, all make a beautiful picture — a little too ghostly, 
 perhaps, for solitude — the long paths dimly illuminated on 
 each side, and diminishing into black shadow, seem always 
 instinct with spirits that might become visible, and across the 
 large field, with its wreaths of mist, one cannot help drawing 
 floating ghosts,' 
 
 [I must briefly refer to an event w^hich proved of most 
 serious consequence to a man of Symonds's sensitive and 
 febrile temperament. A quondam friend sought, by means of 
 garbled letters, to damage Symonds's character at Magdalen. 
 He entirely failed in his object, liut the unexpectedness of 
 the blow, and the treachery of a man he had trusted, the 
 annoyance at home, the odious necessity of defending himself, 
 so preyed upon his nerves and brain, worn by a perpetual 
 internal conflict, and excited by the recent strain of two fellow- 
 ship examinations, as to precipitate a physical crisis which was 
 already imminent. He bore up bravely, but, as he says him- 
 self : ' The long strain told upon me only the more powerfully, 
 I think, because the eftects were not felt at once. I do not
 
 1863 MANHOOD 153 
 
 think I should ever have got on well with the Magdalen 
 Fellows of that epoch ; and now I was so sorely wounded in 
 my soul, so sensitive and shy, that I could not dream of 
 admitting one of them to my intimacy.' In short, his 
 pleasure and his future in Magdalen were wrecked, as it 
 seemed to him. A brief journey to Belgium with his friend 
 Stephens, at the outset of which they were all b.^t drowned off 
 Calais pier, and contracted severe chills and rheumatism, did 
 nothing to restore his peace of mind or health of body. 
 During the journey he was reading books on the Kenaissance, 
 ' having in contemplation the writing of an Essay on that sub- 
 ject for the Chancellor's Prize.' In March of 1863 he began 
 the Lent Term with six pupils in philosophy, and Mr. Jowett 
 wrote to his father as follows : 
 
 ' My dear Dk. Symonds, — Though I was quite sincere in 
 not wishing my name (which is getting notorious) brought 
 before the public more than is necessary, I am very grateful 
 to you, and very sensible of the honour of having your Essay 
 ["On Waste "] dedicated to me. 
 
 ' I truly feel that during the last few weeks I liave much 
 to be thankful for, and I only hope that I shall be able to 
 repay the kindness and support of friends and pupils by 
 increasing devotion to the interests of young men. 
 
 ' I have read your Essay with great pleasure. Two 
 " wastes " occur to my mind — 1st. The waste of the promise 
 of youth from unfavourable soil and circumstances. I am 
 always sti'uck by the ability of a large number of the Oxford 
 undergraduates. And yet few of these appear to possess the 
 true seed of success in after life. 
 
 ' Tlie other waste is the waste of the lost classics, which, 
 I think, is nmch more than compensated by the criticism to 
 which Uieir loss has given birth. It seems to me really tru(! that 
 an iuicient Greek or Roman (even an histoi-iaii or phil()so[)li(!r), 
 willi all antiquity before liiiii, did not really know as much of 
 ancient history as we do. Perhaps ho sunk under the weight 
 of materials, and certainly, if all the classics had been pr(!- 
 aerved, it is difficult to understand bow modern literature
 
 ISi JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1863 
 
 would have sprung up. I think we have quite as much of 
 them as could really be of use. 
 
 ' I took a walk with John before he left. I thought him 
 very able, and much improved in ability since he went into the 
 schools. I do not think his ill health has been any disadvan- 
 tage to him mentally, but rather the reverse, although this 
 seems strange, — Ever yours sincerely, B. Jovvett. 
 
 ' Many thanks for the photographs.' 
 
 But after three weeks the crisis arrived ; Symonds's health 
 gave way suddenly, and, as he says, ' I have never been a 
 strong man since.'] 
 
 ' My ^ illness declared itself one night in the form of a 
 horrible dream, the motive of which was that I saw a weak old 
 man being gradually bruised to death with clubs. Next 
 morning I rose with the certainty that something serious had 
 happened to my brain. Nor was I mistaken. During the 
 next three years I hardly used my head or eyes at all for intel- 
 lectual work, and it was fully ten years before they recovered 
 anything like their natural vigour ; while in the interval I 
 began to be consumptive. I do not doubt that the larger part 
 of this physical distress was the result of what I suffered at 
 Magdalen, coming after the labour of reading for my degree, 
 and the obscure fever I had at Visp.' 
 
 [Immediately after this collapse he went to INIalvern, in 
 company with his sister.] 
 
 ' I - am very glad to hear that you so much like to go with 
 me to Malvern. I am sure I should enjoy it immensely ; and 
 though I ought to hope it will not be necessary, I cannot help 
 feeling that I should be disa^Dpointed were I to decide upon 
 staying here. It is hard for me to judge what I ought to do, 
 for, though I was very uncomfortable yesterday, I feel stronger 
 to-day, and so it goes on. Much of my time I spend in our 
 chapel. The calm of music, which once I used to enjoy, but 
 which I thought had vanished for ever, seems to have returned 
 
 ' Autobiogi'aphy. 
 
 - To his sister Charlotte. Magdalen College, Oxford, Feb. 25, 1863.
 
 1863 MANHOOD 155 
 
 to me, and I take advantage of our daily senices to employ my 
 time without exercising my mind. In the interval between 
 morning and evening prayers I ride — sometimes twice a day, 
 once to exercise my mare, Doefoot, gently, and again to stir 
 my own blood. There is a humility and resignation, and even 
 a kind of tranquillity in weakness, which seems to answer in 
 an unexpected fashion that prayer of " Dona nobis pacem, 
 Domine ! " which we are ever scattering in stronger moments. 
 I shall decide for myself on Friday about ]\Ialvern, unless papa 
 thinks it wiser at once to settle on our going, in which case I 
 should be glad of an authoritative letter, recommending a 
 fortnight's change. What will become of Doefoot I hardly 
 know.' 
 
 [At Malvern Hymonds and his sister lodged in Cleveland 
 House ; and there, though suffering acutely from his brain, 
 and with ' eyes weak and inflamed, so that he has to wear 
 shades and spectacles,' he completed the study of tlie Renais- 
 sance which won the Chancellor's Essay. With the recitation 
 of this composition he closed his residential career at Oxford. 
 The reference in his Diary is characteristic : ' June 24, 18G8. — 
 Since I wrote last in this book 1 have got the English Essay 
 Prize. Papa and Charlotte heard me recite it before the 
 Prince and Princess of Wales. I have made a new and 
 pleasant acquaintance, L. G. Mylne.']
 
 156 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1863 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 MANHOOD. FELLOWSHIP TO MAERIAGE 
 
 Sent to Switzerland by Dr. Symonds — Strasburg — Engelberg — Descrip- 
 tion of scenery — Interlaken — Miirren — Arrival of tlie Norths — 
 Technical training of the eye necessary for sound criticism of Paint- 
 ing—At Uetliberg with T. H. Green — Goethe's Proem to ' Gott und 
 
 Welt.' — 11 E . — Symonds at the christening of a Swiss 
 
 peasant's daughter — Leipzig Fair — Received full Fellow at Mag- 
 dalen — Health still bad — Journey to Italy — At Castellamare — 
 Lucretius on Emmi — 111 health — Returns to England — Friendship 
 with H. G. Dakyns — Settles in London — Dread of solitude — Courts 
 Miss North — Marriage. 
 
 My ^ health continuing miserable, I left Clifton, at my father's 
 bidding, and much against my own will, for Switzerland, upon 
 June 25, 1863. At that time, though I had enjoyed the 
 valley of Chamonix and the glaciers of Mont Blanc, I did 
 not care for Alpine scenery. The prospect of dragging my 
 pain and weariness and aching eyes among a crowd of tourists 
 through Swiss inns disgusted me. 
 
 In Cecil Bosanquet, brother of my Harrow friend Gustavus, 
 I had a kind and amusing travelling companion. He knew I 
 was ill, and must have seen that I had something weighing on 
 my mind. But I did not confide to him my troubles. I had 
 done so to no one, who was not brought into the affair by 
 necessity. 
 
 This summer in Switzerland turned out so decisive for my 
 future, that I shall dwell at length upon its incidents, drawing 
 from the diary I still kept pretty regularly. 
 
 The 30th of June we spent at Strasburg, and I was de- 
 termined to ascend the spire, after spending some hours reading 
 Plato's ' Symposium ' in the cathedral. It was necessary to 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 18(53 MANHOOD lo7 
 
 obtain a special permission from the Mayor, C. B. only got a 
 short way above the platform ; I persevered by an act of will, 
 remembering Goethe. The guide preceding me, we rose 
 through a spiral cage, very narrow, with open sides, down 
 which we looked into the streets of the town. A false step 
 might have sent one flying thither. This staircase narrowed 
 at each of eight stages ; and just at the top, in order to enter 
 the crowning canopy, one had to stand in empty air upon the 
 foliated apex of a pinnacle, and thence to take a spring, 
 clutching at a bar above, and swinging up to a little stone 
 platform. This gymnastic was trying to the head, especially 
 on the return, when the whole descent, forested with spires, 
 was seen naked beneath us. In the state of my health at that 
 time, ^vith the brain so troubled, this ascent of the Strasburg 
 spire taxed nerve and energy too much. But I was glad to 
 have made it at the expense of some headache. 
 
 Basel, Lucerne, Pilatus, nine days in the pine-woods of 
 Seelisberg, six days at Engelberg, Rosenlaui, Interlaken, such 
 was our route. These lines, written at Engelberg, describe my 
 inner mood ; 
 
 111 and alone on alien shores, 
 
 At noontide when the hot sun tires 
 
 With blinding light the silver spires 
 
 Of ice-tops, when the sick stream pours 
 
 His everlasting torrent down 
 
 The tumbled wreck of splintered stone, 
 
 And black impending pines alone 
 
 Assuage the mountain's horrid frown, 
 
 'Tis sad to sit and dream of thee, 
 
 Dear England, deep in greenery. 
 
 [And tliis letter to his sister describes his outer mood :] 
 
 ' My ' plan, if the weather permits, is to reach Meyringon 
 by the Joch to-morrow. Should the weather jji'ovo l)ad, 1 
 sballg0(;n at once to Interlaken from Meyringen. Tbis doubt 
 alKJut the weather V)Ogan yesterday, when we had a furious 
 storm of rain and wind. I find tbat the chief pleasure which 
 
 ' To his sister Chftrlotte. Engelberg, .Tnly 10. ]h(;h.
 
 1.^8 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1868 
 
 I take in scenery is derived from what artists call "effects," and 
 these are usually some peculiar aerial conditions of sunlight, 
 mist, or cloud, under which the landscape is viewed. When 
 the sun has reached a certain position with respect to our 
 valley it pours a full flood of light into the gigantic chasm, 
 and then every atom of craggy outline, every Alpine slope of 
 grass, and all the interminable depths of pine forests which 
 descend upon the pathway of a roaring stream are brought into 
 intense relief. The whole valley looks like a golden cup, 
 wonderfully embossed and chased within its concave, into 
 which has been poured liquid light. 
 
 ' Generally I avoid writing about mountains. Clear uni- 
 form sunlight fatigues me. It has a topographical utihty, for 
 it enables one to discriminate all the members of a range or 
 network of valleys. But it makes nature dead. And for 
 this reason I believe that a common English landscape contains 
 all the elements of the sublime and beautiful. No Alpine 
 views have touched my soul or elevated my feelings more than 
 certain aerial eftects of coming and departing storms which I 
 have watched at sunset on Shotover. None have so thrilled 
 me as the beauty of morning and of evening in the skies and 
 vapoury distances of Clifton. 
 
 ' I wish so much that there were some chance of your 
 coming abroad with papa. When several of us are away 
 together the unhomeliness of travelhng is not so felt as it 
 must be when one is alone, and has so many absent ones to 
 think of. I believe that nothing will induce me to leave 
 England again for Italy, when I once have got home. Please 
 thank papa for his letter, which was like "sun in winter." 
 I should have written to him to-day, but that I find my paper 
 full." 
 
 I ' did much walking every day, however, and found real 
 pleasure both in the Alpine scenery and glorious Alpine flowers. 
 The thought of Hesperus and Hymenaus, combining ^Wth 
 Goethe's ' Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Euh,' haunted me at 
 Engelberg, at Meyringen, at Interlaken. The evening star 
 was strong and beautiful in that warm summer-time ; and I 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 1863 MANHOOD 159 
 
 wrote ' prose sonatas ' on the theme of Hesper for each of those 
 places. I "\nll transcribe the last of them. 
 
 July 22. — The day has been dull and sultry. Clouds have 
 draped the mountains, and the sun has never shone, and in the 
 air is coming thunder. An hour after sunset we strolled forth 
 between two lakes, and leaving one behind us followed the 
 stream which joins them. Shortly before it finds the lake of 
 Thun there is a bridge on which we rested. Before us 
 stretched the leaden plain of water, bounded by shadowy hills. 
 The torrent rushed beneath, and all its tawny flood was livid 
 wilh the yellow glare reflected from a chasm in the clouds. 
 Between this sullen splendour and the calm grey hills there 
 ran a narrow tongue of land on which no gleam was thrown, 
 l^ismal and black it lay in the midst of two waters, the turbid 
 torrent and the distant lake. We stayed there long, watching 
 the light upon the changeful stream, and growing almost in 
 love with death. Surely this was the place to tempt a suicide. 
 Cool plashing water, dark and impenetrable, surface-gilt with 
 glare of sunset, dismal as decaying life, kept ever murmuring in 
 the sultry air, saying : ' The land is desolate, the skies are dull 
 and hot as a consuming furnace, but I am ever fresh and 
 dewy and forgetful ; I am Lethe ; come to me, bring nothing 
 of the world, and you shall find your rest.' So I pondered 
 and made the torrent speak ; for in my heart were thoughts too 
 deep for tears and woes too keen for utterance. Then far 
 above our heads, above the cove of buried sunlight, broke the 
 clouds, and Hesper swam forth, clear and hopefid, in his 
 liquid spaces of aerial gold. Pure were the heavens around 
 him, and their crystal chasms seemed cooler, happier than the 
 leaden waves. As I gazed into their brightness it was as 
 though I saw the choir of heaven's cathedral, wherein sat 
 angels innumerable, harping on Llu'Ir liaips and singing songs 
 aljove the reacli of words. Though I could not understand the 
 burden of those songs, the spiritual melody went to my heart, 
 and there translated its sweet message into mortal consolation. 
 ' S(!ek not the tomb,' my heart responded, ' live youi- life as 
 God shall give it. Trust in Hi in, and try to be of better cheer. 
 After the dull day comes glory and peace.' The dissolving
 
 160 JOHN ADDTNGTON SYMONDS 1863 
 
 saffron of the sunset glowed and faded to the tone of Men- 
 delssohn's music, ' If mth all your hearts ye truly seek Me.' 
 
 Next day we walked up to Miirren from Lauterbrunnen, 
 where I was destined to abide, with one brief interval, until 
 August 31, a memorable period for me. At Miirren I learned 
 to love the Alps with a strong passion, which, though it has 
 sobered in the course of years, still vibrates and endures. I 
 also came to appreciate the Swiss people, and to admire the 
 simple dignity and wholesome habits of the peasantry. IMy 
 health revived daily. In spite of frequent drawbacks and 
 persistent trouble in the brain, I grew stronger and lighter- 
 hearted. The promise of Hesper at Interlaken seemed in part 
 likely to be realised. 
 
 In those days there was only one little wooden inn at 
 Miirren, the Silberborn, kept by Herr Sterchi and his family. 
 Life was very primitive, few people staying in the house beside 
 ourselves ; troops of tourists coming up from Interlaken to 
 lunch, and going noisily away again. The George de Bunsens 
 were our companions for some time, and while they were still 
 there an English family arrived. I can remember looking out 
 of Cecil's ■window and spying their advent one bright afternoon 
 in early August. It annoyed us to think that the hotel would 
 now be fuller. ' They were Mr. Frederick North, M.P. for 
 Hastings, and his two daughters ' (so runs the Diary). 'Both 
 the young ladies were devoted to sketching. The elder was 
 blonde, tall, stout, good-humoured, and a little satirical. The 
 second was dark and thin and slight, nervous and full of fun 
 and intellectual acumen. The one seemed manager and 
 mother, the other dreamer and thinker. Neither was remark- 
 able for beauty, but the earnest vivacity of the younger grew 
 upon me, and I could soon have fallen in love with her. Her 
 name was Catherine. Mr. North is kind and easy-going. 
 They seemed to have travelled in most parts of Europe.' 
 Such is the entry in my precious priggish Diary about the 
 woman whom I was destined to marry. I carried the thought 
 of Catherine North, like a sleeping seed, in my mind through 
 the next ten months, sought her out in London then, and did 
 what will be afterwards related. The Norths stayed only a
 
 18H3 MANHOOD 161 
 
 week, I think, at Miirren, but that was time enough to form a 
 tolerably just conception of them. Alpine inns are favourable 
 places for hatching acquaintance and gaining insight into 
 character. 
 
 [Mr. Bosanquet having to return home, Symonds went 
 down to Zurich to join his future brother-in-law, T. H. Green. 
 He was fully resolved to bring Green back with him to 
 Miirren, and the reason peeps out in the following letter to 
 his sister :] 
 
 ' I ' found Green here last night. He wants us to try a 
 little inn near Zurich, called Uetliberg, which is only 1,000 feet 
 above the lake. I may try this place, but I confess that 
 already I regret Miirren. The heat to me seems intense, 
 maddening ; but it is nothing to what it has been, and people 
 laugh at me when I say I feel it. This shows how imprudent 
 it would have been to have gone to Munich now. Two or 
 three days even of this heat would have quite undone all the 
 good of Switzerland. I should not wonder if we returned to 
 Miirren. I cannot make Green go as far as the J^ggishorn, 
 which is strongly recommended ; and certainly Miirren's 
 monotony and beauty, and great internal comfort, are better 
 than semi-substitutes like Uetliberg. It is your birthday, and 
 I must send you, what you know I do most heartily, my very 
 best wishes. I wish I could also send you some souvenir from 
 Switzerland, but things cut in wood I hate. Would you care 
 to have one of the Bernese costumes ? I thought of getting 
 that for you. It is to me a most lovely dress. 
 
 ' At Miirren there was a young girl of the better class from 
 Than, who had come as a friend of the landlord for change of 
 air, and who liolpod his people in the waiting on their guests. 
 She always wore this dress when she di-essed for Sundays or 
 for dinner-time, and it suited her well ; for she was a blonde, 
 very slight and graceful, and very girlish. It annised me to 
 find my ideal of Margaret realiscid in her better than in 
 Gounod's " Faust " or Retzsch's otcliings. In the evenings, after 
 the servant girls had done their work, when tlie sky was clear 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Zurich, Au^UHt 12, 1803.
 
 162 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1863 
 
 and bright with stars, they used to sit upon the balcony and 
 sing their country songs. It was pretty to hear them passing 
 from high shrill shepherd ballads and mountain Lledcr, to low 
 soft chorales, then modulating all together a " Tra la la, tra la 
 la," in liquid notes rising from their throats, or thrilling deep 
 down in the chest, like the voice of a bird singing to itself at 
 night. The landlord and his servants in these country inns 
 treat travellers more as guests than anything else, and show 
 them attentions, as if they were bound to do so by the laws of 
 hospitality. I expect I had a very favourable instance of this 
 at Mlirren, for the simplicity and good manners of the people 
 seemed perfect.' 
 
 Green ^ and I next day walked up to Uetliberg, and set 
 ourselves down there in a little wooden tavern for a week. 
 He had just come from Heidelberg, and was full of German 
 philosophy, jDolitics, and the higher poetry. I think he had it 
 in his head then to translate a book of Baur's upon the first 
 century of Christianity. We both worked during the day, 
 sitting at wooden beer-tables under the thick beech trees, 
 which, here and there, were cut into vistas over the illimitable 
 landscape. I chose a gap from which the Bernese Oberland 
 was visible, while I penned an essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets 
 (it has not been published, but I possess the MS. still, and do 
 not think amiss of it). I used to send many thoughts on airy 
 wings to the Jungfrau, Eiger, Monch, and humbler Breithorn. 
 I could see them all distinctly when the vapour-veil allowed, 
 and could mark exactly the spot of Mlirren. Even the Schilt- 
 horn allowed itself to be observed upon the flank of that vast 
 snowy panorama. In the evenings we used to take long walks 
 among the glow-worms, beneath the stars, watching the lamps 
 of Zurich burn like earthly stars low down beside by the lake. 
 It was a monotonous but pleasant life, and I learned much 
 from Green. Here it was, I think, that he first showed me 
 Goethe's proemium to ' Gott und Welt,' a poem which took 
 deep hold upon me, and began to build my creed. 
 
 But a great longing came over me for Mlirren. I re- 
 membered its unrivalled purity of air — those walks upon the 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 1863 ]\IANHOOD 163 
 
 Schilthorn, in the Sefinenthal toward Trachsellauinen. I 
 heard the aerial echoes of the Alpenhorn ascending from 
 Lauterbrunnen, or floating from the Wengern Alp, and gaining 
 melody upon the way. I longed for the immediate presence 
 of the giant mountains with their glaciers. And the simple 
 
 folk kept calling to me. And R E was the soul and 
 
 centre of these things. 
 
 Green wanted us to go to Gais in Appenzell, but I over- 
 persuaded him. I must return to Miirren, and he must come 
 with me. We agreed then on these terms. He was to take 
 the route by Eapperschwyl, Einsiedeln, Schwyz. I hurried 
 
 straight to Thun. There I visited R 's home, and made 
 
 acquaintance with her mother, who seemed a little suspicious 
 of me. She had probably some right to do so, for I doubt not 
 that, in my simplicity, I let her infer that I was going back to 
 Miirren for her daughter's sake. 
 
 I walked up to Miirren on August 10, in drenching rain. 
 And it rained and snowed incessantly for three days when I 
 
 arrived. R , who knew that I had come again to see her, 
 
 and who did not understand what all this meant, kept severely 
 aloof, avoiding me on purpose. 
 
 ' Attgust 22. — Green came yesterday ; and at nine this 
 morning the sun shone out. We walked together in the deep 
 snow, which lay thick upon those late summer flowers. They, 
 poor things, revived immediately beneath the genial warmth, 
 and lifted their pretty heads from wells of melting snow- 
 wreaths. The whole world seemed to feel returning spring. 
 Birds floated in dense squadrons overhead, whirling and 
 wheeling on the edges of the clouds, which kept rising and 
 dispersing in the eager air above our valley. Far away the 
 mi-sts rolled like sad thoughts that dissolve in tears. 
 
 ' Later in the day we went to sit upon those rocks, the crests 
 of precipices fifteen hundred feet in height, whence the eye 
 plunges so giddily to the Lutschinen torrent, and where it is 
 .so pleasant to rest among the tufted stone-pinks (Stein- 
 Nelken) in the cool of afternoon. " Descendunt montibus 
 umbne." The shadow of the Schilthorn spread itself above 
 the hamlet. Jodelling goat-herds prepare to leave the upland 
 
 M 2
 
 164 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1863 
 
 meadows. Peace spreads abroad while the row of dazzling 
 giants, from the Eiger to the Blumlis Alp, still face the 
 western sun, and shine until they too fade into amber, orange, 
 rose.' 
 
 So the Diary goes on its way, minutely detaihng all the 
 tiny incidents of this slight idyll. I picked bunches of flowers 
 
 fresh every morning for E , climbing daily higher up the 
 
 mountains as the summer flowers retreated, until at last there 
 were few left but lilac crocuses and deep blue harebells. In- 
 numerable sonnets too were written. 
 
 The last day I spent at Miirren was a Sunday. Herr Feuz, 
 who then sold alpenstocks and little models of Swiss cottages, 
 asked me to stand godfather to a little girl of his, just born. 
 
 R and her friend were to be godmothers. Of course I 
 
 acceded willingly to his request. 
 
 [And this is the account of the ceremony sent to his 
 sister :] 
 
 ' The ^ reason that I have not written to you lately is, that 
 since Monday morning we have been travelling continuously by 
 Winterthur, Schaffhausen, Constanz, Friedrichshafen, and Ulm 
 to Munich. I tore myself away from Miirren on Monday, not 
 without a spasm. Certainly I must in some sense be slow to 
 take impressions, for last year I never could have believed it 
 possible to grow so deeply attached to mountains, or to feel 
 their spirit and their strength as I have done this summer. 
 Everything seems cold and tame and lowering now : Munich 
 and its art is bare and vulgar ; I cannot return into my old 
 self. 
 
 ' On Sunday I stood godfather, as I told you I had 
 promised, to the girl of one of the Miirren guides. My 
 
 " gossips " were Mile. R E , daughter of a jeweller in 
 
 Thun, and Mile. Katrine, daughter of a retired innkeeper at 
 Grindelwald. They had come to spend the summer at 
 Miirren as the landlord's friends, and to help his wife. One 
 of them is certainly the prettiest girl I have ever seen abroad, 
 and the other is what the German Swiss would call " ein recht 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Munich, Sept. 3, 1868.
 
 1863 MANHOOD 165 
 
 schones deutsches Miidchen." This being the case, and I 
 being an Englishman, you can fancy there was a httle eager- 
 ness among the people of Lauterbrunnen to witness the 
 baptismal ceremony. 
 
 ' We three had breakfast together, and then the ladies 
 got into a sledge, and I stood on the stand behind, and we 
 were dragged like lightning down the steep descent to Lauter- 
 brunnen, past the pine trees and the precipices, past the 
 Staubbach and its hundred sister streams, chattering all the 
 way in broken French, and screaming when the whirling of 
 the sledge excited our alarm. At Lauterbrunnen we found 
 the baby, and were entertained with wine by its father, and 
 then walked solemnly to church adorned with bouquets. All 
 the village stood ready to admire us, the Herr Pfarrer came 
 out with his great white ruft" and black bedgown, performed 
 the ceremony after almost English fashion, and preached a 
 sermon of which I understood but little. Then I took the 
 young ladies to the hotel and gave them a hnicheon, which 
 chiefly consisted of veal cutlets and champagne. I was much 
 pleased with the modesty and propriety of their behaviour. 
 There was no affectation or self-consciousness about them. 
 Enghsh girls of that condition would have giggled, blushed, 
 and nudged one another, or have been half-frightened and 
 speechless. But these maidens sat and ate their luncheon 
 with pei'fect ease and grace, slightly deprecating the trouble I 
 took about getting and serving them the meal, yet in nowise 
 appearing out of their element. During the middle of the 
 
 repast in walked Dr. B . I noticed that his eyes were fixed 
 
 on me with some curiosity. I suppose it was strange to see a 
 young Englishman of one's acquaintance seated between two 
 Swiss girls in their 13ernese dress without a chaperon. Of 
 course I talked to him, and told him of the christening, and ho 
 caine out to see us ofi' again to Miirren. When we reached 
 tbe hotel we dined. Green and the father of the l)al)y 
 joining us. It pleased Green's democratic pi'inciples to be in 
 such society ; Ijiit I found it no less wcill-conducted and far 
 more entertaining than tlua of my equals or superiors. More 
 wit flowed, better things were said, and a liner politeness
 
 166 JOHN ADDINGTON HYMOXDS 1863 
 
 shown, than I have generally met with at the dinner-table. 
 We sat together, as is the Swiss custom, till about nine, 
 talking, reading Goethe's ballads, playing at dominoes, and 
 sinofina;. Several of the other maids of the hotel were 
 imported to help the singing, and they gave us many good 
 mountain melodies which I wish I could remember. 
 
 ' I thought the account of this day would amuse you more 
 than a recital of everyday doings.' 
 
 [Switzerland, Miirren, and the idyll of R E left 
 
 a deep impression upon Symonds's tastes and emotions ; but 
 they had not done much to restore his health in any per- 
 manent fashion. He travelled to ]\Iunich, whose 'essential 
 tawdriness ' he began to perceive, and thence to Niirnberg, 
 Bamberg, Dresden, and Leipzig.] 
 
 ' This • piece of paper is enormous, and my pen is very 
 pinny. You may understand from this that I am travelling 
 with only a handbag, having sent on my heavy luggage by 
 express to London. If all be well, I hope to be at Clifton on 
 Wednesday. 
 
 ' We have amused ourselves here greatly. The Leipzig 
 fair is going on, and the whole town swarms with Jews and 
 German merchants. All the streets are laid out with booths, 
 and the ground floors of the houses seem occupied by dealers 
 from all parts of Europe. German, Italian, Polish, Russian, 
 and English names are mixed up with texts in Hebrew ; red- 
 capped Hungarians and black-bonneted Jews walk about arm 
 in arm. Our hotel is a great centre of commerce. Its ground 
 floor is a cloth exchange. Jew dealers in cloth and linen 
 occupy the flrst floor with shops. We live upon the third, 
 where there is also an enormous hall, decorated for the occasion 
 with arbours and grapes and river scenes, mountains, castles, 
 moonlight, the German muse, and great tuns of wine, to 
 represent Rhineland. Here at dinner and in the evening a 
 band plays, and the commercial travellers lead a jolly life. 
 Business and pleasure seem strangely mixed. I wonder where 
 all the people live.' 
 ; ' To his sister Charlotte. Sept. 27, 1863.
 
 1863 MANHOOD 167 
 
 [From Leipzig Symonds went home, and was received full 
 Fellow at Magdalen. But head and eyes still rendered any 
 serious studies impossible. ' At Clifton,' he says in the Auto- 
 biography, ' I saw much of Henry Graham Dakyns. He had 
 come to be an assistant-master at the recently-established 
 college. He was a Rugby-Cambridge man, the friend of 
 Arthur Sidg^nck, whom I knew, and of Henry Sidgwick, 
 whom I was destined to know. Of Graham I need only say 
 here that his perfervid temper of emotion, his unselfishness, 
 his capacity for idealising things and people, the shrewdness 
 of his intellectual sense, and the humour of his utterance 
 (style almost of Jean Paul Richter), made their immediate 
 impression on me.' 
 
 Symonds left England once more for Italy, journeying by 
 the Riviera di Levante to Pisa, Florence, and eventually to 
 Rome, which he reached in December. He had hoped that 
 Mr. Arthm' Sidgwick would be able to join him on his journey, 
 and in a letter of invitation, dated October 9th, he writes : ' I 
 have to-day a desire to embrace at once all that is beautiful 
 and deeply thought in Art, Philosophy, and Nature. . . . Thus 
 I am caught in a whirl, and I do nothing but feel intensely 
 a various and changing life.* 
 
 From Turin, Florence, and Rome he wrote these three 
 letters to ]\Ir. Dakyns, in which he describes his mental and 
 physical state :] 
 
 ' When ' Milton spoke about false poets drawing their 
 inspiration from "Dame Memory and her seven daughters," 
 though he meant Mnemosyne and the Muses, his contempt 
 arose from a lurking side glance at the Sehnsucht which clings 
 to them. SeJtnsucht is the passion which builds an ideal in 
 tbe future, or the world of possiljilities out of old and trans- 
 figured recollections. This is all I can now tell you about 
 her, though at other times I could say much more. 
 
 ' I have had a long and stupid journey. My eyes got worse 
 when I was at Oxford, owing probably to our habit of sitting 
 round a blazing fire after dinner ; they were again weakened 
 
 ' To H. G. Dakyns. Turin, November 3, 18G3.
 
 168 JOHN ADDIXGTOX SYMONDS 1863 
 
 by a stormy passage, and when I got to Paris I could hardly 
 see. Of course I can neither read nor look out of the window 
 when I am in the train, nor can I read or write during the 
 evenings at hotels, so you may fancy how much time I have 
 for reflection. This, since I find abstract reasoning fatiguing 
 and even impossible at most times, 1 consecrate to Dame 
 Memory, not after the projectile fashion of Sehnsncht, but in 
 a mildly retrospective mood. To these " sessions of sweet 
 silent thought " rise many forms, now divinised, and even 
 past pain and loss and terror assume a tragic beauty, while 
 the pleasures of the years gone by seem unimaginable. Life 
 flies before me like a symphony, and I choose to alter the old 
 adage thus : " Pra'sens, imperfectum ; plusquam perfectum, 
 perfectum ; futurum, infinitivum et optativum." When tired 
 of these I revolve verses which I know by heart. One great 
 source of amusement I have lately discovered, and that con- 
 sists in dwelling upon some historical scene and defining it 
 to my own imagination. From Paris to Macon I thought 
 incessantly of a passage in Suetonius descriptive of (1 think) 
 Caligula's wakefulness. It begins, " Incitabatur insomnio 
 maxime." The result was that, having fully realised his 
 position, I tried to write verses about it. I liked them at the 
 time, but when I put them on paper they were all monotonous 
 and feeble. I cannot get beyond the sensuous idea.' 
 
 ' I ' am ashamed to leave Florence without writing to you, 
 though how I am to keep all my epistolary engagements I do 
 not know. Your letter came to me some seventeen days ago, 
 as I was setting off one intensely cold morning for Vall- 
 ombrosa. I read it there among the brooks strewn with their 
 yellow chestnut leaves, and it made the place more vivid by 
 contrast with the scenes which it recalled to memory. Since 
 then I have seen, grown, and suffered much. I have seen 
 pictures enough to content my artistic yearnings. I have 
 grown in knowledge of my insufficiency and in resolves — a 
 barren growth. I have suffered from terrible physical and 
 mental weakness. An oppression, under which I hope you 
 may never groan, a darkness into which no angel can descend, 
 ' To H. G. Dakyns. Florence, December 9, 1863.
 
 1863 MANHOOD 169 
 
 has weiojhed nie to the earth. And neuralgia has gnawed me 
 until I am very feeble. " Quousque tandem ? " is all I cry — in 
 vain. Here I am burdened, and in England I have no rest. 
 I do not know what will become of me. Would that you and 
 others of my friends had known me years ago, when I was 
 fresh and young and capable of being and doing good. I have 
 seen much of Congreve here. Rutson and I take long walks 
 with him and make him discourse. You know, of course, 
 whom I mean — the Positivist priest in London. This is an 
 inadequate description of the man, but it denotes him. He is 
 divided from Littre and Mill and Lewes, and others whom the 
 world call Comtists, by his priesthood. They take the scientific 
 side of Comte, regarding the religious as a senile dream. He 
 hinges his theory of the future upon the new faith, that shall 
 reorganise society. I never saw a man more confident in his 
 own opinions under worse auspices. When I asked him how 
 far distant he thought the reign of Positive principles might 
 be, he answered, " To the unbelieving, I should place it at the 
 expiration of three or four centuries ; for myself, I believe that 
 our power will be established in hardly more than the same 
 number of generations." Everything according to his notions 
 points to the silent adoption of Positive principles and the 
 irresistible march of its unerring truth.- So far he agrees with 
 the enemies in his own camp. ]jut he goes beyond and says : 
 " Men need religion — the health of Europe is decaying because 
 there is no religion ; religion is necessary to bind society to- 
 gether. Why are our nerves weak, our bodies feeble, our 
 writings aimless, our whole constitutions brittle '? I'ccause 
 the moral organisation of religious faith has been dissolved, 
 no discipline exists ; each man thinks as he chooses, many 
 think nothing, others are Ijroken by a thousand doubts, litera- 
 ture expands into useless but exciting channels, stimulus 
 without an aim keeps up continual irritation — in short, there is 
 no centre or circumference to our society. In politics the 
 State is becoming disintegrated to the vciry individual. And 
 all this rottenness ensues from tlic want of a iiioni,! Iiond. If 
 I tbought that Oliristianity could supply this bond I would be 
 a Christian, though I should not believe the creed. Jiut it
 
 170 JOHN ADUINGTON SYMONDS 1863 
 
 cannot — it never did ; the religious bond of Europe has always 
 been more polytheistic than Christian ; and now we need 
 something stronger." I ask, does he think that Positivism 
 can supply to the affective parts of man an interest sufficient 
 to make each individual quiet in his sphere, confident of the 
 future, and vigorous for labour? "Certainly," he answers; 
 " men will relinquish the immoral and degraded yearning after 
 personal immortality ; science will teach them not to seek for 
 first causes like God." Humanity they will reorganise as their 
 great mother, as that without which they are nothing, to which 
 owing everything they are bound to render every service, as 
 the source of strength, the seat of aspirations, and the object 
 of prayer. He allows that humanity can have no conscious- 
 ness, and when I define prayer as implying the communion of 
 two conscious beings he glides away and talks of contemplation. 
 I have asked for bread, and he has given me a stone. Why 
 not deny me bread and say, " I have none : science has petrified 
 my store " ? I should be more content. But to offer me 
 religion, prayer, a Church, a liturgy, a stool to kneel on, 
 a pulpit to hear sermons from, and then to bid me fix my 
 hopes upon a siimmum genus which I help to make — it is too 
 absurd. If I ever become a Positivist, it will be of the Mill 
 kind. 
 
 ' In a week or two the cathedral at Bristol will echo to the 
 sound of Christmas anthems, and the most sacred, mythical, 
 and undogmatic mystery of Christian faith will be celebrated. 
 I love that pagan season of rejoicings, with its multitudinous 
 visions of bright-armed and clear- throated cherubim in the still 
 air. Yet it will come cheerless to me in the strangers' land, 
 for the spirit has departed, and the charm that lingers is one 
 of old association not to be unlinked from place. Besides, our 
 paganism in England is different from the rites of Rome 
 imperial, more suited in its dark, warm, mystic passion to 
 the children of knights who sought the Holy Grail, than the 
 thuribles and pontiffs of the Vatican. 
 
 'I wish I could be home again at Christmas, free from 
 Congreve, and the Sistine Chapel, with a child's belief in 
 angels. How they hurried in the " Gloria in Excelsis," after
 
 1863 MANHOOD 171 
 
 the low symphony, until the whole church rustled with their 
 swift-descending squadrons. 
 
 ' Good-night, Write to Rome, and tell me how you passed 
 Christmas.' 
 
 ' 1 1 shall be lea\-ing Rome \\'ithout writing to you unless 1864 
 I write soon. You cannot tell how hard I find it to say any- 
 thing to any one from abroad ; although I feel as if I ought to 
 he able to suit your tastes, with some subject of interest in 
 Rome, I cannot eliminate one from this tangled skein of rich 
 and rare experience that I have enjoyed. If I have ever wished 
 for you, and you must believe that my pleasure would have 
 at most times been increased by the presence of one so sym- 
 pathetic and so apt to feel the beauty and the glory of the 
 world, it has been in the Sculpture-galleries of the Vatican 
 and the Capitol, and upon the sea of the Campagna. The one 
 is full of beauty, more definite and musical and ever new than 
 anything that I have dreamed ; the other breathes a pantheistic 
 inspiration so lovely and indistinct, and yet so omnipresent in 
 its changeful tunes and half -heard melodies, that I learned to 
 gain a new insight into old mythologies and modern dreams 
 of nature's life. This language is so rhapsodical that you can 
 make nothing of it ; but if you were here I would defy you to 
 put your feelings for the Campagna into any words.' 
 
 From ■^ Rome Stephens [who had joined him after Mr. 
 Rutson went home] and I moved down to Naples and Sor- 
 rento. Feb. 11, back to Rome. Feb. 11, by post to Narni, 
 Todi, Perugia, and Assisi. Feb. 15, by Citta di Pieve 
 and Chiusi to Leghorn. Homo ])y Genoa, ^Marseilles, and 
 Paris. 
 
 I have a diary of this Italian journey ; but the best part of 
 my impressions was conveyed in a long series of letters to my 
 father and sister. He wished to arrange and publish them. 
 I>iit the plan, wisely, T think, foil ihi'oiigli ; and wlion 1 found 
 them, after his death, I burned the whole bundle. 
 
 Being unable to use my eyes for study, I read very little 
 and learned no Italian. On the othiu- hand, I was able to 
 
 ' To H. G. Dakyna. 107 Corso, Rome, Jan. 23, 1804. 
 '' Autobiography.
 
 172 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1864 
 
 walk as much as I liked, and could see everything which did 
 not involve mental strain. Accordingly, with indefatigable 
 curiosity, I drank in buildings, statues, pictures, nature — the 
 whole of the wonderful Italian past presented in its monuments 
 and landscape. I learned a great deal undoubtedly, which 
 proved of use to me in after years. And the life I led was 
 simple, reserved, free from emotional disturbances. 
 
 [The following passage from the Diary shows how Symonds 
 felt at Castellamare :] 
 
 February 1, 1864. — The ' people are not unworthy of this 
 land. They live a joyous life upon the slopes, between wind- 
 sheltering mountains and the land-locked sea. They are 
 different from the Neapolitans, more beautiful and lightly 
 built, retaining as it were some old Greek loveliness of shape 
 and dignity of carriage. Girls carrying pitchers on their heads 
 have the neck and bust of a statue, and the young men look 
 like athletes with deep ardent eyes. A peasant boy, like 
 Juvenal's servant, waited on us while we dined in the old 
 rustic fashion, and ate our dessert of dried figs, and plums, 
 and grapes, preserved in their own leaves, the produce of the 
 country. We found him playing bowls with oranges ; and 
 when our meal was finished he brought musicians, with violins 
 and pipes of a true rural kind. They played us Volkslieder, 
 love songs and fishing choruses. This Neapolitan music has 
 a peculiar richness of melody, depending on long lingering 
 cadences, and notes sustained until their passion breaks into 
 a shower of swift descending sound. The air is not elaborate 
 or subtly modulated, but simple, off- repeated, and full of 
 yearning beauty. When one remembers that Handel borrowed 
 his Pastoral Symphony and the melody of ' He shall feed His 
 flock,' from the shepherds of the Southern Apennines, one 
 understands how richly laden with pathetic loveliness these 
 songs can be. One especially pleased me. Neapolitan girls 
 sing it to their lovers, and its words begin, ' Ti voglio ben 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 1864 MANHOOD 173 
 
 assai.' With youth, health, ignorance, and beauty this land 
 would be perfection. Here I could bask in sunshine, 
 
 ' Till books, and schools, and courts, and honours seem 
 The far-otf echo of a sickly dream.' 
 
 Truly, they now sound leagues away on alien shores. The 
 world is vn.de, wide, wide ; and what we struggle for, ten 
 thousand happy souls in one fair bay have never dreamed of. 
 I would give much to live, and love, and pass my life within 
 the sound of these unvarying waves, and in the gorgeous 
 interchange of light and gloom which dwells for ever on the 
 furrowed hills. I know not why, but in Italy I feel a con- 
 tinual unsatisfied desire, and, therefore, ignorance must be an 
 element of happiness. Shelley calls the great god Pan ' a 
 want,' and all this beauty seems to me the sense of what can 
 never fully be our own. It rolls without us, and we include 
 it not ; it lives its life, and we intrude upon it for a moment : 
 it is serene and full of peace ; we hurry over it, and question 
 it and get no answer, and then we die. and still it is the same : 
 it sounds to us like ' the echo of an antenatal dream,' and 
 when we strive to arrest its fleeting loveliness, it disappears 
 far off on wings that follow on the paths of sleep. This love 
 of nature is modern ; or, perchance, the ancients felt it deeper 
 than ourselves, and hid beneath their moderate lines — 
 
 ' Hie ver perpetuum atque alienis nicnsibus sestas,' 
 
 a fount of passion drawn from blood-red suns above sapphire 
 seas, from gorgeous hues and heavy summer scents, from 
 ' swooning sounds ' upon the pathless hills, and springtide 
 chantings of innumerable choirs. Ruskin's paint-box of 
 delirious words, my ' orchestra of salt-box, tongs and bones,' 
 speiik nothing ; ovon Shelley's rainbow woof of aerial images 
 arc unintelligible till we find ourselves within the sphere of 
 inspiration. Silence and rest and voiceless enjoyment are the 
 soul of Art upon these shores ; here Nature lives her life, and 
 each man must penetrate it for himself ; she has no high 
 priest, but is unto herself both oraclo and Pythia, and even
 
 174 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1864 
 
 music can do no more than reproduce the passion which her 
 pulses stir. 
 
 [But Symonds was not well, mentally or physically ; nor, 
 indeed, was his travelling companion, Mr. Stephens. He 
 writes as follows about this journey :] 
 
 How ^ I dragged my illness and my ennui through that 
 wonderful world appears from some stanzas written at 
 Sorrento on February 5. They are printed in ' New and Old,' 
 under the title ' Looking Back.' It is noticeable that this 
 poem, undoubtedly the spontaneous utterance of a prevalent 
 mood, dwells upon Clifton, wholly omitting any mention of 
 the Alps [or of Italy]. One of the most sublime and 
 psychologically pregnant passages in the great Lucretian epic 
 is the description of ennui : 
 
 ' Ut nunc plerumque videmus 
 Quid sibi quisque velit nescire et quserere semper 
 Commutare locum quasi onus deponere possit. . . . 
 Hoc se quisque modofugit (at quem scilicet, ut fit, 
 Effugere haud potis est, ingratis haeret), et odit 
 Propterea, niorbi quia causam non tenet teger.' 
 
 Lucretius prescribes the study of the laws of Nature as a cure 
 for this disease of the soul. ' Live in the eternal thoughts and 
 things,' he tells us. And in some way or other this is the 
 right way, the only way, to escape. 
 
 I was deeply wounded in heart, brain and nerves ; and yet 
 I was so young. On February 5, 1864, I reckoned just 
 twenty-three years and four months. And like Alfred de 
 Musset, in his ' Nuit de Decembre,' I could speak of my 
 wanderings thus : 
 
 ' Partout ou, sous les vastes cieux, 
 
 J'ai lasse nion coeur et mes yeux, 
 
 Saignant d'une eternelle plaie ; 
 
 Partout ou le boiteux Ennui, 
 
 Trainant ma fatigue apres lui, 
 
 M'a promene sur une claie.' 
 
 Autobiography.
 
 1864 MANHOOD 175 
 
 The physical illness — that obscure failure of nerve-force, 
 -which probably caused a sub-acute and chronic congestion of 
 small blood-vessels in the brain, the eyes, the stomach perhaps, 
 and other organs— was the first source of this ennui. But 
 there was another and deeper source behind it, and of which, 
 in fact, it was but the corporeal symptom. I had not 
 
 recovered from the long anxiety caused by 's treacherous 
 
 attack. Then excessive headwork, superfluous agitation con- 
 cerning religion and metaphysics — the necessary labour of an 
 ambitious lad at college, and the vinwholesome malady of 
 thought engendered by a period of Sturm unci Drang in 
 England — depressed vitality, and blent the problems of 
 theology with ethical and personal difficulties. 
 
 Such, I think, were the constituent factors of my ennui. 
 It grew daily more and more oppressive. As the clouds had 
 rolled away in the congenial atmosphere of Miirren, so now 
 in the great cities of Italy they gathered again. I returned to 
 England weaker than I had left it. 
 
 o* 
 
 [On his return from abroad Symonds settled in London. 
 He rented rooms on the first floor at No. 7 Half Moon Street, 
 his friend Mr. Rutson living in the same house. His health 
 was still wretched, and he was unable either to do much 
 work, or to enjoy much society, in what he calls ' this great 
 grinding world of London.' Of his enforced leisure he writes 
 to his sister :j 
 
 ' It ' is a great pity that children are not always taught to 
 play some instrument. I should find music a great resource 
 now, when the periods of unemployed solitude are much more 
 frequent and more trying — owing to the weakness of jny eyes 
 and head— than I had reckoned on. I have it seriously in my 
 mind to take lessons o)i the piano, simply as a means of pass- 
 ing hours which must be devoted to reflection when the book 
 has been laid down. The josthetical element is sorely neglected 
 in all education, but its loss i.s felt most by those whose 
 temperament renders them sensitive to art, without enabling 
 
 ' To hib oibter Charlotte. 7 Half Moon Street, March 31, 1864.
 
 176 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1864 
 
 them to originate anything. I have felt very lonely, as you 
 may believe, plunged into this absolute solitude of London, 
 and capable of so little mental exertion during the day, and of 
 no continuous occupation in the evening, after the varied 
 and refreshing interests and pleasures of Clifton. I some- 
 times dread, when I am at home, that a time may come 
 when I shall have to call in vain for kindness such as is there 
 lavished on me, and find myself alone. Such desolation one 
 knows in nightmares, but I fancy that it surrounds many men 
 whose hearts are tender, and need love, but who have none to 
 love them. Therefore I desire to take my present happier 
 case as a man should take any great gift of God, which comes 
 to him and makes him live. He must not refuse it, or even 
 question it ; but if it ceases, he must not repine, or curse his 
 fate and waken to despair. It is very hard to bear both blind- 
 ness and weakness of brain in solitude, for thought and reading 
 are rendered equally injurious to the chance of future strength. 
 Indeed, when a man has accustomed himself to exclusively 
 intellectual pursuits, and his head and eyes fail him, he 
 becomes very dependent on the easy unexciting and unexhaust- 
 ing society of home. 
 
 ' But I am not going to croak, for I do not feel altogether 
 in a croaking humour. I have only been reckoning up the 
 difficulties of my position, which I consider to be grave, and, 
 therefore, all the more honourable to their conqueror if he can 
 conquer them. Farther acquaintance with London life will 
 teach me how to employ my evenings better ; though theatres 
 and lecture rooms, from their great heat as well as glare, are 
 bad for head and eyes to an extent that will oblige me to use 
 them very moderately. 
 
 'Mr. Fox is very attentive. He plays the part of valet 
 with the most punctilious, wearisomely punctilious, care. It 
 is impossible to have a wrinkle in one's clothes, or a book or 
 brush out of place about one's rooms.' 
 
 [Symonds, though suffering, writes to his friend Mr. 
 Stephens : ' But I am not daunted, and I look on this kind of 
 life as salutary in many ways, especially as a corrective of
 
 1864 MANHOOD 177 
 
 sybaritic habits, and also as a prelude to what must almost 
 inentably be the isolation of many years in the life of all 
 men.' He employed such respite as his ill-health allowed him 
 in writing articles for the ' Saturday Eeview ' ; in setting out 
 his thoughts upon theology in the form of a Commentary to 
 Goethe's ' Gott und Welt,' and reading the minor Elizabethan 
 dramatists. He read and thought at random in the Club ; 
 rode in the Park ; rowed on the Serpentine ; went sculling up 
 the river with a waterman of Surbiton ; when possible accepted 
 imitations to dinner parties and balls. But the letter just 
 cited shows that a dread of solitude — of a solitude that would 
 certainly increase \\dth age — was leading him toward the 
 thought of marriage. Music was still a solace to him, but as 
 this summer wore on, London became intolerable.] 
 
 ' What ^ have I been about all this long time when I have 
 seemed to forget you ? Do not ask me, but do not think I 
 have forgotten you. In this stifling city of bricks and dust 
 and iron, I have often seen you knee-deep in the blue-bells and 
 anemones of Leigh Woods, under the tender screen of fresh 
 green beech and hazel leaves, or in the solemn shadows of the 
 rocks at night, looking across to those deep cloven dells. 
 Longing, so intense that it supplies the sight it craves for, has 
 filled me for the valleys of Switzerland and the sweet, strange, 
 languid spirit of Clifton. If I were a painter I would draw 
 that \\'ild mysterious Syren — with her veils of moonlight 
 vapour, the flowers and leaves and streams about her feet, the 
 towers on her dusky hair, the passionate heaving of her hidden 
 breast, the languor of her smile, the sweet intoxication of her 
 kisses, and those eyes which I have never seen, but felt, prayed 
 to, and questioned restlessly from childhood. Or if I were a 
 poet, the same should live in song. Men should know how, in 
 the still green gardens of that lady, thoy might meet with love, 
 or melancholy more intense than love, dreams subtle and dis- 
 tinct of joys impossible, embroidered on the woof of common 
 life. I would tell them, too, how universal Pan in days gone 
 by had wooed her for her beauty, leaving in hv.v lap the gift of 
 
 ' To H. G. Dakyns. London, May l'>, IhM. 
 
 N
 
 178 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1864 
 
 charm invisible ; of whispers half heard in the summer trees, 
 and shapes half seen at noontide in the shadows ; how Ocean 
 from his distant caves has filled her ear with indescribable 
 sea sounds, and in the midst of her primeval woods shed 
 mystery. Nor would I fail to interweave the many songs 
 which she has sung to me — the song of Linus, whom the 
 reapers loved, and whom they sent at sundown to the well, but 
 he returned not, and they sought him all a summer night 'svith 
 cries of, " Ah, for Linus " ; the song of Hymenfeus whom, a 
 shepherd boy on (Eta, the star Hesper loved, and drew him up 
 the heights and rapt him from the eyes of mortals in immortal 
 joy ; the song of young Endymion, of Hylas, and of Cyparis- 
 sus ; the woodland tales of Ida, where ffinone loved, and 
 Aphrodite met the sire of mighty Rome. I, too, would tell of 
 her deceitful moods, of the frowns and scourges which she has 
 in store for those who worship her, and of her pitiful relent- 
 ings when she goes abroad upon the sobbing winds and beats 
 against the window panes, entreating to be pardoned and to be 
 loved once more. Guileful spirit, beautiful and wicked, who 
 has raised thy veil and seen thee as thou art ? Who knows 
 thee in the cold, dark night, when moon and stars are hidden, 
 when no tempests are awake, when all is stern ? Who has 
 found thee in the open light of common day, or trodden unbe- 
 guiled among thy labyrinths ? Then he may seek but he will 
 find thee not, for thou dost dwell in the sunsetting and sunris- 
 ing, in luxurious summer evenings and in latticed shadows of 
 soft, silken leaves, spurning the real and palpable and hard 
 and open places of the world. 
 
 ' I do not know why I have run on like this. I often 
 think or dream aloud on paper, and you must take this for a 
 reverie. I do not know what to write to you, for 1 have 
 nothing to tell. My life has been monotonous, and I have 
 suffered as usual from weakness of eyes and head.' 
 
 ' Thank ^ you, my dearest Charlotte, for your kind and 
 
 affectionate letter. The pain which I have been suffering 
 
 during the last few days, the solitude in which I have lived, 
 
 and the multitudes of thoughts and feelings which have swept 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte, London, June 20, 1864.
 
 1864 MANHOOD 179 
 
 through my mind, have left me very weak and very sensitive to 
 all kind influences. I am better now, and able to get about 
 a little. 
 
 ' It makes me very sad to think I am to see so little of papa 
 again this summer, and that my health will not admit of my 
 coming to Clifton — which I have dreamed of, as most dear 
 and beautiful of all fair places, among the mountains of 
 Switzerland and the ruins of Rome. You offer me kind 
 consolation in saying that ill health improves and refines the 
 mind. But I do not feel it easy to look upon it as a blessing. 
 It does not seem to me far other in the intellectual world than 
 sin is in the moral — at least when it suspends activity so much 
 as in my case. It is only a true and earnest Christian, one 
 who lives for another world and believes in a life where 
 nothing is that is not perfect, who can be truly resigned under 
 the weakening of his physical and mental faculties.' 
 
 ' London ^ is like a brick oven seven times heated. The 
 pavements and the walls seem to hold caloric funded, day by 
 day increasing, radiating all the night, but not exhausted when 
 the sun gets up to fire them afresh. Everyone is going away. 
 The streets are comparatively thin of grand carriages. Operas 
 are being played at lower prices. The Ministerial lish-dinner 
 comes on soon. And of all things there is a beginning of 
 the end. It is rather dull. Lut I have come to like London 
 under almost every aspect. It is the only place where constant 
 relief from the agitations of one's own self may be found by 
 looking at other people ; because, in London, life never stops 
 by day or night, and whenever you choose to go forth and roam 
 about, you find people restless and energetically living in some 
 fashion. A little while ago I had a very sleepless night, audit 
 biinloued me to hear all through the darkness, and through 
 the still, cold approaches of the dawn, and through the 
 hot beginnings of tlic day, one ceaseless (lood of sound, 
 varying in intensity and kind, Imt never resting. It burdened 
 me. I'.iit if T bad l)(!(in well and living strongly, it would have 
 stiniiilated me with a sense of sympathy. How strangely 
 different is this cast of circumstances from that which 
 ' To his sister Cliarlotte. London, .July 17, 1804. 
 
 n2
 
 180 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1864 
 
 environs one in some place like Mlirren. There nothing is 
 heard but the sounds of innumerable waterfalls and never- 
 ceasing winds. The air is not less full of murmurs, but not 
 one recalls humanity. Here every sound attaches itself to 
 some human being. In the one place God somehow seems 
 close to one. In the other He is far removed, and seen but 
 dimly through the mass of men obscuring Him. Yet the Self 
 remains essentially the same. 
 
 ' I am quite alone, more alone, with the past and present to 
 myself, than perhaps I ever was. And writing to you is like 
 writing to another world. I seem to hear my own voice falling- 
 thin and dry and hollow on your ear, as it were over the waste 
 of a great water.' 
 
 The ' turbid amalgam of my life had reached a point at 
 which some sort of crystallisation was inevitable. It only 
 wanted a wire of resistance and support to be thrust into it. 
 
 [The thought of Miirren recalled, ' as by inspiration,' the 
 memory of that English family whose acquaintance he had 
 made there on the ledge above Lauterbrunnen, among Alpine 
 flowers, and face to face with the Jungfrau. With characteristic 
 impetuosity Symonds called on Mr. North, pursued the 
 acquaintance in London, asked and obtained leave to follow 
 the family to Pontresina in August, proposed and was accepted 
 on Sunday afternoon, August 14th ; on the 16th exchanged 
 betrothal rings with Catherine North on the top of Piz 
 Languard, accompanied the Norths to Venice in September, 
 and was married at St. Clement's Church, Hastings, on 
 November 10th.] 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 181 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 MANHOOD. DRAWN TOWARDS LITERATURE 
 
 13 Albion Street, London — Studies law — Question of a career — Visit 
 to Clifton — Conversations with Woolner — On Morality in Art — 
 Depression — 47 Norfolk Square, London — First symptoms of 
 pulmonary disease — Birth of a daughter — Determination towards 
 literature — Consults Jowett — His advice — A conversation with 
 Jowett — Visit to Clifton — Dr. Synionds declares the lungs to be 
 affected — On Shakespeare's Sonnets — His study of Clough — The 
 Handel Festival — Sent abroad by his father — Eegrets for Clifton — 
 Letters from the Riviera — Monte Carlo — On Elizabethan freedom 
 and licence — Leaves the Eiviera for Tuscany and Ilavenna — 
 Returns by the Lakes to Macugnaga — On landscape painting — Over 
 the St. Bernard to Switzerland — Mixrren revisited — Symonds takes 
 stock of himself — Returns home. 
 
 [After a few months the Symondses took lodgings at I86i 
 13 Albion Street, because it was quiet and near the park. 
 Symonds ostensibly intended to follow the law, but in reality 
 he was being steadily drawn towards literature. He writes to 
 his sister:] 
 
 ' I ^ have not written to you once since I left Clifton, but 
 you have written to me, ami T feel guilty. Nor can I plead 
 great stress of work, for in no way have I been occupied. Our 
 time passes ))leasantly when we are alone in the evenings, if 
 you were all here, I mean you and papa and auntie, and il' I 
 could qiKill those questions which continually rise in my mind 
 about life, I think I should be wholly happy. Women do not, 
 need not, pose themselves with problems about their own 
 existence, but a man must do it, unless he has a fixed impulse 
 in one definite direction, or an external force, compelling him 
 to take an inevitable line. I do not think, looking back upon 
 the past, that I half knew — I know I never half thanked you 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. ]:{ Albion Street, March 21, 1BG5.
 
 182 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1865 
 
 for — the help you gave me in music. I ought to have been 
 taught it, for I believe I have more natural taste for that than 
 for any other of the arts, and I should have taken the same 
 line that you do, of clear and intelligent and various in- 
 terpretation.' 
 
 ' You ' may see by this that I am in lawyer's chambers, 
 but how much law I am doing I will not reveal to you. It is 
 very little. My wife is well. I am well. The quarter of a 
 sheet concerning our doings shall be given you. We breakfast 
 at nine, and I begin to write as soon afterwards as possible. 
 If I do not go down to these chambers, the writing continues 
 till one. It is about the Dramatists at present, and will be for 
 a long while. After lunch we pay visits and see j)ictures. In 
 the evening, if there is no party to go to, no play to see, no 
 music to hear, we read aloud. We have read many books, the best 
 being Lewes's " Goethe," " Eomola," Villari's "Savonarola," 
 and now we are reading Grimm's "Life of M. Angelo." I 
 want to keep my mind on that period of European history. 
 Gaps are filled up by Dante, Heine's Songs, and the learning 
 of some poems of Goethe. With all this law does not agree. 
 I do not know whether it will ever suit me. At present my 
 coach cannot give me work. I am in a state of suspense 
 about law and literature. Am I to serve God or Mammon ? 
 Am I to study and write or to pursue this profession ? Am I to 
 be poor with letters, or to run the chance of being rich with 
 law ? Then, again, am I justified in assuming [myself] to be 
 one of the priesthood of art ? Am I a selected soul ? If 
 I give myself to literature, and find myself inadequate, can 
 I be content with a fastidious silence ? Is it my fate to be a 
 bluebottle fly buzzing in the courts, or a voiceless ephemera 
 upon the banks of an unfrequented river ? I have not faith, 
 which is the oxygen of life, and lets one breathe in spaces 
 howsoever cramped. You see I am settling the question of 
 life ; and if you can give me any definite ideas on these vague 
 problems, thanks to you. It is a terrible and a consuming 
 problem. I feel so weak, so unable to do anything, or to 
 take hold of any subject. In the room with me at this 
 ' To H. G. Dakyns. 5 Paper Buildings, Temple, March 23, 1865.
 
 1865 MANHOOD 183 
 
 moment are five men, all provided with clear brains for 
 business, all talking slang, and all wondering what strange 
 incapable animal I am who have thus come among them. 
 They can move stones with their little finger which my whole 
 strength will not stir. But is it likely that they could touch 
 the subjects which thrill my soul ? Would there were some 
 high court of equity to decide our vocations. It seems as if, 
 till this moment, I had lived apart and now am launched 
 among men. I have talked too long about a matter which, 
 after all, is and must be my own, to be decided by myself. It 
 is a hard world, my dear Dakyns, but a beautiful world if one 
 could feel oneself at liberty to enjoy it.' 
 
 [In the autumn of this year the Symondses were at Clifton 
 Hill House, on a \isit.] 
 
 Atcgust 7, 1865.'— To-day has been splendid. I worked at 
 Lyly all the morning, and in the afternoon went with C. and 
 Woolner to walk in Leigh Woods. They are just as beautiful 
 as when I used to roam there years ago. The lights fall still 
 as golden on those grey rocks streaked with red, on the ivy 
 and the trees, the ferns and heather, and the bright enchanter's 
 nightshade. Not a point is difterent except myself. This 
 beauty sinks into my soul now as then ; but it does not stir 
 me so painfully and profoundly. I do not feel the hunger 
 which I had ; nor am I conscious of the same power, the same 
 unlimited hopes, the same expectations solemn from their 
 vagueness. 
 
 C. has in a great measure effected this change. What is 
 good in it I owe to her influence, and to the happiness which 
 her love has brought mo. She has raised my moral nature 
 and calmed my intellectual irritability. But tliere is also a 
 change for the worse. This is simply attributable to my long- 
 continued physical weakness. No one who has not suiTered in 
 tlie same way can adequately feel how great is the sapi)ing, 
 corroding power of )iiy d(!l)iHty. Eyes for more than two 
 years useless, lii-ain for more than two years noai-ly pai-alysed 
 — never acutely tortured, but failing under the least strain and 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 184 JOHN ADDINGTON SYlAIONDS 1865 
 
 vibrating- to the least excitement. To feel as little as possible, 
 to think and work as slightly as I could, to avoid strong enjoy- 
 ments when they rarely offered themselves, has been my aim. 
 I have done nothing in this period by a steady effort. Every- 
 thing has come by fits and starts of energy, febrile at the 
 moment, and prostrating me for days when they are over. 
 Sometimes for weeks together I have not seen a ray of sun- 
 light. At Florence, at Rome, in London, at Chfton, I have 
 risen with the horror of these nights, have walked through the 
 day beneath the burden of dull aching nerves, and have gone 
 to bed in hopelessness, dry with despair and longing for death. 
 Suddenly, in the midst of this despair, a ray of my old capacity 
 for happiness has burst upon me. For a few hours 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. The leaden atmosphere of despair closes 
 around me, and I see no hope. Many are the men, no doubt, 
 who have suffered as I have suffered. Last summer I spent 
 six days in London, in Half-Moon Street. I had just [been 
 subjected to treatment] which gave great pain, and made me 
 very weak. If it succeeded it was to do wonders. In the 
 midst of my weakness I hoped. I sat upon one chair with 
 my legs upon another. I could not read. I could not bear 
 the light upon my eyes. I was too desolate and broken to see 
 friends. I scarcely slept, and heard all night London roar, 
 with the canopy of flame in the hot sky above those reeking 
 thoroughfares. At three or four day broke. In the evening 
 I sat idle, and it was dark. All the while I hoped. This 
 cure shall do wonders. 
 
 But the old evil broke out again. One night I woke. A 
 clock struck two — it was the Victoria clock at Westminster. 
 I bit the bedclothes, and bared myself upon the bed in anguish ; 
 and at last I sobbed. It was all over with me. I took up next 
 morning the old cross. 
 
 How long is it since I last kept a connected diary ? Three 
 years. When that blow came upon me in the spring of 1863, 
 I said, I will write no more in this book. And I did write no
 
 1865 MANHOOD 185 
 
 more. My happiness went first. Then my brain refused to 
 work. Then my eyes were blinded. I went to Switzerland, 
 How much of beauty I learned there. And at Miirren I saw 
 C. Then followed my summer in London, and those days of 
 mental, moral, physical annihilation. At the end of them I 
 arose and found C. at Pontresina. On the 10th of last Novem- 
 ber we were married ; and now we live together in our house, 
 both happy, and she will ere long give me a child. 
 
 God give me strength. Thou knowest how I love her, 
 Thou only ; and Thou knowest how she has made me happy. 
 But this is not all. Give me strength. Cast me liot utterly 
 away as a weed. Have I not longed and yearned and striven 
 in my soul to see Thee, and to have powei* over what is 
 beautiful ? 
 
 Why do I say * Lord, Lord,' and do not ? Here is my 
 essential weakness. I wish and cannot will. I feel intensely, 
 I perceive quickly, sympathise with all I see, or hear, or read. 
 To emulate things nobler than myself is my desire. But I 
 cannot get beyond — create, originate, win heaven by prayers 
 and faith, have trust in God, and concentrate myself upon an 
 end of action. Scepticism is my spirit. In my sorest needs I 
 have had no actual faith, and have said to destruction, ' Thou 
 art my sister.' To the skirts of human love I luive clang, 
 and I cling blindly. But all else is chaos — a mountain chasm 
 filled with tumbling mists ; and whether there be Alps, with 
 flowers and streams below, and snows above, ■nath stars or sun- 
 light in the sky, I do not sec. The mists sway hither and 
 thither, showing me now a crag and now a pine — nothing else. 
 
 Others see, and rest, and do. I'ut I am broken, bootless, 
 out of tune. 
 
 Sinews, strong nerves, strong eyes, are needful for action. 
 I )i!ive none of these ; and besides, I have a weakness ever 
 l)i-( sent. It eats my life away. . . . Truly this is no fable. 
 
 I want faith. ' Je suis venu trop tard dans un mnnde trop 
 vieux.' . . . 
 
 Yet I have ambition. Truly I wish and will not. Men 
 like Woolner and my father make mo blush. They will, they 
 do, they enjoy. They have a work in life. They have brains
 
 186 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1865 
 
 clear and strong, nerves equable and calm, eyes keen and full 
 of power. They have faith in God and in the world. 
 
 What is left for me to do ? As long as C. lives and loves 
 me, my home must be happy. There I am fully blest. But 
 in this home I shall languish if I do not work. And for what 
 work am I fitted? Jowett said, some time ago, for law or 
 literature. I say, after some months' trial, not for law. And 
 for 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, 
 eloquently 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 labour to labour, and achieved 
 his end ! ' Shall it, can it, be ? 
 
 Is this possible ? C. will help me. She is noble, loving, 
 true. But will I help myself ? Will this body bear me up 
 —this Will last out ? 
 
 To study, acquire facts, gain style, lose the faults of youth, 
 form a standard of taste, throw off dependence on authority, 
 learn to be sincere, try to see clearly, refuse to speak before I 
 feel, grow logical, must be my aim. 
 
 I have no faith, not even in myself ; and the last three 
 years have destroyed all sanguine expectations, all illusions, 
 but they have not brought me deadness or content. 
 
 August 9. — Woolner is doing a bust of my father. He is 
 a little man of great vigour — very clear in his perceptions and 
 opinions, strong-willed, determined, moral, finely fibred. I 
 like the outspoken sense of his remarks. He makes mistakes 
 of criticism, and is very bumptious. I, for instance, hear him 
 now through an open door : ' Carlyle says the language of my 
 poem is quite perfect . . . that's because it is so simple, and 
 has nothing strained ; idiomatic, just as one talks.' This 
 simplicity of self-satisfaction is amusing. He carries it so far 
 that one forgets it. I particularly admire his fresh, strong 
 expressions of dislike and approbation. He knows a great 
 many remarkable men. Tennyson is a great friend of his, and 
 so is Browning. Browning tells him that he writes straight
 
 I860 MANHOOD 187 
 
 down, and never looks again at what he writes. Tennyson 
 composes in his head, and never writes down until he is about 
 to publish. Tennyson has composed as much as he has ever 
 published and lost it again, owing to this habit. In particular, 
 he once wrote a Lancelot, and now only a few lines or words 
 come back upon his memory. Tennyson says form is im- 
 mortal, instancing the short poems of Catullus. Browning 
 hopes to live by force of thought, and is careless about form. 
 Tennyson, Palgrave, and Woolner went to Tintagel. The 
 poet there conceived four idylls about men, answering to his 
 four idylls about women. .Jowett put them out of his head by 
 wondering whether the subjects could be properly treated. 
 Tennyson makes mistakes about the poets he admires. He 
 once wrote to Bailey, and said he was a wren singing in a 
 hedge, while the author of ' Festus ' was an eagle soaring 
 above him. Woolner does not respect persons, but has a 
 masculine respect for character, and likes people to keep to 
 their trade and not to meddle. He has a profound contempt 
 for Jowett's meddling criticism. 
 
 August 10. — Woolner told me last night that he is thirty- 
 nine, Conington's age. At fourteen he began to dream of 
 poetry as the best thing in life, and he still likes it better, and 
 would rather cultivate it than any other art. His very correct 
 eye led him to adopt sculpture as the easiest means of getting 
 a livelihood. He cannot endure town life ; looks forward to 
 spending his days among trees, with a bit of water near him, 
 in the country, designing poems in form. He read us out, in 
 a coarse, deep, energetic voice, parts of ' My B. L.' 
 
 We had a ^pleasant afternoon in Leigh Woods, sitting on 
 the point from which the bridge, the observatory, and Clifton 
 Downs are seen. I read C. pieces from the ' Golden Treasury,' 
 comparing Wordsworth's, Shelley's, and Keats's love of nature. 
 We also discussed the morality of poetry — my ballad on the 
 ghost of the lady who seeks hor lover, Sebald and Ottinui, 
 Ford's Annabclla, came uppermost. It is most hard to fix the 
 limit of right and wrong in art. My father condemns Faust. 
 I hardly condemn AnnaV)ella. Where the treatment of passion 
 in poetry has the object of sliowing vice to bo odious and to be
 
 188 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1865 
 
 a Sodom's apple in its hollowness, I think great lengths are 
 allowable. Of course, Shakespeare's ' Venus and Adonis ' can 
 on no such theory be excused. The ' Pygmalion ' of Marston 
 and the ' Salmacis ' of Beaumont are unpardonable panderism, 
 no less odious than Latin Priapics or the Centos of Ausonius. 
 So, too, are the gross passages in ' Pericles ' and Fletcher's 
 plays — foisted in for the gratification of a prurient author or a 
 prurient public. The coarse jests of Aristophanes in many 
 cases were of this kind. In others satire cloaked their offence. 
 The mere beauty of such a scene as that between Ottima and 
 Sebald is not a ground against it. If it were not beautiful it 
 would not be art ; and if not art, it would be no better than a 
 filthy newspaper. Its moral purpose could hardly here avail 
 it : for a sermon would serve the end of ethics better than an 
 ugly piece of realistic drama writing. Still, it may be doubted 
 whether for the one who reads de tefabula in Sebald's loathing 
 after sin, there are not hundreds who dwell only on the glow 
 of passion in the picture, and think such joy but cheaply 
 purchased by the loss of innocence and happy virtue. 
 
 Had I as many souls as there be stars, 
 I'd give them all for Mephistopheles. 
 
 I talked a good deal about the two classes of artists : those 
 in whom feelings predominate, whose songs are wrenched out 
 of them by suffering ; and those who sit down to describe, 
 work up and labour at their fixed conceptions. Pangs of 
 intense emotion precede birth in the one case ; deliberate 
 intellectual labour in the other. Poetry with the one class is 
 an ichor which they will not staunch, but which consumes 
 them. They would rather die than cease to sing, and cannot 
 sing without a struggle of passion. With the other class it is 
 a true artistic genesis, contrived and carried out by strength of 
 mind. Compare Alfred de Musset and Tennyson, Byron or 
 Shelley, and Goethe, Beethoven and Handel, Raffaello and 
 Michael Angelo, When the struggles of the one class cease 
 they are silent : they only ' learn in suffering what they teach 
 in song,' Heine called De Musset, ' Un jeune homme d'un 
 bien beau passe.' He gave up his passions, struggles, yearnings,
 
 1865 MANHOOD 189 
 
 dreams at twenty-five, and ceased to be a singing bird till 
 fifty, because he had ceased to feel acutely. Poets of the 
 other class work on, thinking of their materials, careless of 
 themselves, requiring only the stimulus of thought, and need- 
 ing no preparatory storms. 
 
 [Symonds's depression, due no doubt to ill-health thwarting 
 a powerful and active nature, finds expression in the following 
 letter to Mr. Dakyns :] 
 
 ' Your ' letter was anything but meaningless. I under- 
 stood it, I think, quite well, and I can sympathise with your 
 despondent reflection on the "wasted idleness of existence." 
 In fact, that is what I suffer from, and what I thought of 
 when I told you that I was not well. What happens to me 
 is that one tide of physical depression after another SAveeps 
 over me, and not one leaves me as I was before. Each 
 weakens me ; I feel my strength of mind, and power of action 
 and fancy and sense of lieauty, and capacity of loving and 
 delight in life, gradually sucked out of me. At the present 
 moment I do not know what to do. Life is long for unnerved 
 limbs and l)rains which started with fresh powers, now 
 withered and regretful only of the past, without a hope for 
 the future. I do not write this because I am not happy in my 
 home. Far from that. But liappiness, domestic felicity, and 
 friends, good as they are, cannot make up for a vie manqude. 
 If a man has in his youth dreamed of being able to do some- 
 thing, or has rashly promised himself to strike a creed out of 
 the world, or else to be strong in scepticism — if setting forth 
 thus, he has failed upon the threshold . . . then he resembles 
 those for whom the poet wrote, " Virtutem videant intabes- 
 cantque relicta." But I am not in despair. No one should 
 give over hope. I am only disappointed at the failure of 
 anticipations, and sorrowfully convinced that the weakness of 
 which I have been conscious is inherent and invincible.' 
 
 [The whole of this summer of iHO.'j was unusually rainy. 
 
 From certain symptoms iti the IcfL side Syiiionds was, sub- 
 
 ' 'I'm II. <;. I^.ikyns. Sutton Court, Ponsfonl, Aug. 20, 1805.
 
 190 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1865 
 
 sequently, led to the conclusion that the seeds of puhiionary 
 disease were laid, during his visit to Clifton. The Symondses 
 had given up their lodgings in Albion Street, and on their 
 return to London from the West of England they settled into 
 No. 47 Norfolk Square, which Symonds had bought. The 
 quiet of the situation was the chief inducement ; but ' the 
 situation proved gloomy, and not by any means favourable to 
 health.' On October 22 their eldest daughter, Janet, was born 
 at Norfolk Square. Symonds, in the midst of London Hfe 
 and occupations, was paying too little heed to his health, 
 'which had been very delicate since the return to London. 
 The nurse warned me one day that my incessant cough was 
 what she bluntly called "a churchyard cough."' Yet the 
 diary all through this period is in reality highly vigorous, full 
 of active thought and acute criticism. Symonds, in spite of 
 difficulties which might well have daunted a less resolute 
 nature, was, in fact, walking rapidly towards a decisive choice 
 in life, as is indicated in this important extract.] 
 
 Nov. 30.' — My own wishes about the future become clearer. 
 I have talked to Eutson, who, on the whole, agrees with me. 
 To take up literature as a definite study — that is the kernel ; 
 to fat myself for being a good ' vulgariseur ' — I am not an 
 artist or originator. To do this I want study of literature and 
 language, long study, while the Temple clock is always saying 
 to me, ' Pereunt et imputantur.' Green thinks it would ba 
 base of me not to write, having some money and so clear a 
 vocation. Jowett long ago told me I might be eminent in 
 letters. Conington thinks I might write a history, but ' not 
 unless he knows more than he's likely to learn at present.' 
 Green and Eutson both see I am too much a mirror, lack 
 individuality, need a bracing subject, need to give up magazine 
 writing. I want to make my literature a business, to go down 
 to it daily, to Lincoln's Inn, e.g., to read steadily, putting on 
 an Italian or German coach for one portion of the day, analys- 
 ing Justinian for another, and writing hardly anything. If I 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 1865 MANHOOD 191 
 
 could do this, I have much time before me, and my home is 
 daily brighter and better.' 
 
 [In this doubt as to his vocation for literature Symonds 
 consulted his old friend, Mr. Jowett.] 
 
 ' Dear Mr. Jowett,' he wrote, ' I should very much value 
 your advice about a matter which is occup^dng my thoughts 
 at present. Since I left Oxford I have, as far as my health 
 permitted me, been reading law. I must allow that I have 
 not been able to read much, owing to weakness of eyes and 
 other ailments ; but these, I am thankful to say, seem to be 
 leaving me, and I am more capable of regular mental labour. 
 At the same time, I find that law is not a subject which 
 attracts me, or for which my powers seem to be specially 
 fitted. Indeed it is with difficulty that I can bring myself to 
 study it at all. I have never, since I had any definite wish, 
 ceased to desire a life of literary study, and this wish grows 
 upon me. I know I am not fitted for anything artistic in 
 letters, or for pure philosophy. The history of literature is 
 what I feel drawn to, and to this I should willingly devote nay 
 life. It does, in fact, require whole self-devotion, and I cannot 
 follow it together with any other occupation so exhausting as 
 law. Where, then, I need advice is here. Is it pj-udent for 
 me to give up a profession and to choose literature ? I do 
 not mean prudent in a pecuniary point of view, but in an 
 intellectual. Am I flying too high if I consecrate myself to 
 study ? I do not think that any one could give me better 
 a<lvice upon this point than you. What weighs with me in 
 favour of literature is — first, my health, which could be more 
 humoured in a life of study than at the l)ar ; secondly, my 
 inclinations, which are most decided in favour of study; 
 thirdly, my capacities, which seem to me ill-adapted for the 
 bar. Still literature is a service not lightly to be undertaken. 
 And the strong assurance, from one who knows me so well 
 as you do, and who knows all the difliculties of a student's 
 life, that I am unfitted for it, would weigh greatly with me. 
 
 ' I have been writing, at spare times, a history of our 
 Elizaljothan drama as an exercise, which is now about one-
 
 192 JOHN ADDIXGTON SYMONDS 1865 
 
 third finished. But the point seems to have been reached at 
 which I must definitely renounce writing, or make it the sole 
 business of my life. Please do not trouble to answer this 
 quickly. If I could speak to you ere long it would be better. 
 My father told me he had some hope of a visit from you, and 
 Miller said the same. — I am, ever yours most sincerely and 
 gratefully, J. A. Symonds.' 
 
 [The answer came.] 
 
 ' My dear Symonds, — I should like to have a talk \\ith 
 you on the subject of your letter. Could you run down and 
 see me this day week ? or if not, I will try to come up and 
 spend a day with you in London. 
 
 ' I think that you are very likely right about the desertion 
 of the Bar. Still I would urge you to be called, and to finish 
 the elementary study of Law as a branch of literature or 
 philosophy. In Hallam's " History of Literature" it strikes 
 me that you can see the advantage to be had from legal know- 
 ledge. But let me have a good talk over the matter next 
 Monday week, if you can come. I dine at 5.30, or any other 
 time that will suit you. — ^Yith kind regards to Mrs. Symonds, 
 ever yours in haste, ' B. Jowett.' 
 
 [That Symonds was already some way advanced along the 
 line of literature before he sought Jowett's advice, "and that 
 the issue was already virtually settled, seems clear from this 
 passage in the Diary :] 
 
 September 9, 1865. — I' am going on with the 'Dramatists.' 
 This study is something like picking pearls from a dunghill. 
 I sift and sift heaps of refuse, and find some real jewel. The 
 discovery gives me a thrill of pleasure when it comes. The 
 poetry of that period stills my soul like the sound of music. 
 But I doubt whether I can transfer my sensations to my 
 writing, and make others interested in what delights myself. 
 This doubt must attend purely hterary work. The artist sees 
 beauty and arrests his visions, feeling them to be a joy for 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 186o MANHOOD 193 
 
 ever. The historian of a period only tells what he has found, 
 and cannot flatter himself that many people will welcome his 
 discovery. What I should like to do would be to make my 
 history of the English Drama a monograph on the develop- 
 ment of the histrionic art. The literature of the English 
 stage is the only complete one we possess. The earliest 
 Athenian plays have perished. The Eoman was an echo. 
 The French received a violent twist, owing to the influence of 
 Richelieu and the Academy. The Spanish in no sense equals 
 ours. But the English Drama, from its germs in miracle 
 plays, through its infancy in moralities, and its adolescence in 
 Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and Fletcher, and its age in 
 Massinger and others, is a complete organic whole. It is a 
 flower of Art, national, perfect in its growth, as fit a subject 
 for the physiology of aesthetics as Italian painting. To do 
 this well, however, would require greater power and knowledge 
 than I have at present. I can sketch out and survey the 
 subject, but I cannot command it. 
 
 [The upshot of this visit to Jowett at Balliol was the] 
 advice,' that I should get called to the Bar, translate a book 
 Hke Zeller, try to connect myself with some hospital work in 
 London, and not lose sight of possible politics in the future. 
 He thought me very fortunate to be able to pursue my life, 
 but recognised the consequent responsibilities and dangers of 
 inaction. Literary life, he admitted, was, of all, the hardest, 
 and needed much intercourse with men to keep it from 
 pedantry and dulness : ' You have a very good memory, 
 remarkable facility, and considerable powers of thinking. It 
 depends on yourself to bring these to perfection.' He walked 
 to the station with me, talking all the way. I had spoken of 
 the difficulty of understanding wlmt passed betwcion the 
 Resurrection and the preaching of Paul. ' There may be 
 many ways of explaining that — some mystical, some psycho- 
 logical—hut we should leave certain subjects as necessarily 
 inexplicable. All historic criticism is so doubtful ; and if 
 wo got the whf)lo truth, we might not be able to sympatliise 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 194 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1865 
 
 with that past age. What is really painful is to think of the 
 structure of dogmas raised by men upon the one point of the 
 Kesurrection.' ' Yes, an inverted pyramid, the point remain- 
 ing and the base always broadening, with men walking on the 
 top, and fearing to tread too much on one side or another, 
 lest they should bring it all down.' ' I've read a good deal 
 lately of a French poet, Alfred de Musset.' ' Yes.' ' He 
 saturated himself with German ideas, lost his old faith, and 
 remained yearning after it and leading an impure life.' 'That's 
 the lowest state of human weakness.' ' So it is, perhaps ; but 
 De Musset was a great poet, and many run the risks which 
 lost him.' ' But men should keep their minds to duty.' 
 ' That comes as an afterthought. At first when they throw 
 off custom, they go groping and grovelHng among the ghosts 
 of dogmas. What you said at St. Andrew's about cUnging to 
 the great and simple truths as anchors has no meaning to 
 them then. They must run clear before they can appreciate 
 the value of those simple truths.' ' I daresay you're right.' 
 ' That's why they cling to Comte and such systems in a 
 modified sense.' ' Do you really think any young men get 
 good from Comte ? ' ' Yes, in a modified way ; it satisfies 
 them to find a system, repudiating dogma and basing morality 
 on an independent footing. Vivre j^our autrui, and scientific 
 exorcisms of old orthodox ghosts, restore their tone. They 
 don't go farther.' ' The fact is, if you throw oft' custom, you 
 must sink below it or rise above it. The club men you talked 
 about, and common conventional Christians, do not really 
 much differ.' 'But don't you think that connected with old 
 custom there are some hopes and aspirations, and fear of hell, 
 which raise people above it ? ' 'It does not do much for them. 
 They would rise far higher if they could abandon custom, and 
 look only to the great and simple things — if they would do 
 their duty and try to benefit people around them.' 'But the 
 means are not always ready.' ' I don't believe that's anything 
 but indolence and want of invention on the part of most men. 
 Every one must have somebody dependent on him or some 
 sphere of usefulness.' By this time we had reached the plat- 
 form, and I had to get my bags from the cloak-room. The
 
 1865 MANHOOD 195 
 
 train came up, I thanked Jowett heartily for his kindness, 
 shook him by the hand, saw his little form trot off among the 
 porters, and was whisked away — full of thoughts, with hope 
 and a purpose in me. 
 
 As ^ soon as my wife was able to move, a little before 
 Christmas, we went down to Clifton. There my father 
 examined me, and pronounced that there was mischief of a 
 very serious kind at work at the apex of the left lung. 
 
 [That was on December 24. Dr. Symonds applied severe 
 remedies, and kept his son indoors for some time. The 
 imprisonment and this fresh menace to his health were a 
 sharp trial for Symonds. Alone, indoors, looking over Bristol 
 on the evening of Christmas-day, his thoughts all run back to 
 his early Christmas memories, to his first strong affection ; 
 and the attraction of the cathedral where the others are — 
 where he may not be — sweeps over him in his reverie. But 
 however acute may have been the internal anguish, that high 
 courage which sustained him through life, that root of 
 determination and resistance which so pre-eminently charac- 
 terised him, begins at once to make itself apparent ; and when 
 he announces the evil news to his friend, Mr, H, G. Dakyns, 
 the message is cool, calm, brave. 
 
 ' I write to you most ausfiihrlich, and express myself 
 
 esoteric-ally ; so that when I should say to Miss , " I have 
 
 had a cold which kept me a few days in the house," to you I 
 word the same thing thus : " There is no danger, but it 
 cannot be forgotten that my grandfather, and an aunt on the 
 mother's side, died of consumption, and that my sister has to 
 winter out of England." ' 
 
 And yet, as Hymonds had occasion to remark later on, the 
 appearance of this lung troubl(3 began almost iinmediately, 
 though very slij^'litly at first, to relieve the brain trouble 
 from which he had suffered so acutely. His interest in 
 litfirary and psychological problems asserts itself with vigour. 
 He writes to Mr. Dakyns:] 
 
 ' Aiilobiogriiphy. 
 
 -2
 
 196 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONDS 1865 
 
 ' If 1 you go to Farringford, I wish you would manage to 
 talk to Tennyson about the " Sonnets of Shakespeare," and tell 
 me what he thinks about their emotional meaning. Palgrave 
 has just published them with the omission of the twentieth — in 
 some respects the most important of them all ; and in a few 
 words written by him at the end he appears to take the worst 
 possible view of them. I have read and re-read those sonnets, 
 and I have never been able to find any of the gross and shame- 
 ful passion in them which Hallam and Palgrave find, and I 
 may also add Coleridge. That they express humiliation and 
 consciousness of some sort of guilt on Shakespeare's part and 
 overmastering affection cannot be denied. It seems also clear 
 that he knew his friend to be unworthy of him, and a man 
 of loose life. Yet I find nothing shameful in the poems 
 themselves, nothing that indicates a disgraceful connection 
 
 between Shakespeare and Mr. W. H . Even the twentieth 
 
 stanza, which Palgrave omits, and which in point of language 
 is more gross than any others, seems to me to prove the exact 
 opposite — the purity, I mean, of Shakespeare's passion. I 
 cannot but think that Palgrave may have consulted Tennyson 
 about his edition of the sonnets, and it would interest me 
 greatly to hear whether the author of "In Memoriam " has 
 any views upon a subject so disputed. 
 
 ' You ask if the regime suits me. Six days indoors, 
 blisters, morphia, and partial starvation do certainly not suit 
 me ; but, on the contrary, produce a head heaviness and eye 
 weakness which is not enjoyable. The resurrection of power 
 which I was beginning to feel during the last two months, and 
 which had begun to express itself in the determination to 
 make continuous efforts after higher art, dwindles again. Yet 
 I am infinitely happier than I used to be, nor can I enough for 
 this be thankful.' 
 
 [No signs of intellectual languor are apparent throughout 
 the pages of the voluminous Diary ; the whole record is 
 intensely alive with sympathy for his friends, with minute 
 discussions on the possibility of substituting a true Moralitat 
 
 ' To H. G. Dakyns. Clifton, December 27, 1865.
 
 1865 MANHOOD 197 
 
 for mere SittUchkeit — an echo of Jowett's remarks upon 
 throAving off custom — with thoughts on art such as this : 
 ' Beauty stings a sensitive soul, and ichor flows from the 
 wound. In those who have artistic power this ichor forms a 
 pearl. In others it drops silently away. Both suffer.' On 
 friendship, such as this : ' It is a bad thing to base any 
 friendship on uncommon and merely emotional sympathies ; 
 they may wear out. Friendship ought to be a matter of day- 
 light, not of gas, red lights, or sky rockets.' 
 
 His attention was much occupied by Clough, whose works 
 he was subsequently to edit in conjunction with Mrs. Clough.] 
 
 ' This morning, being very dull, with snow, and my bad 
 night, I read through " Clough's Remains." This book is 
 more definite than Palgrave's Memoir in the Poems. The 
 letters belong principally to his ante-married life, but they are 
 not mcsfuhrlich. 1 am struck with this reticence, charac- 
 teristic of his dry poetic style and social taciturnity. His boy- 
 hood is the most interesting part of his life. When he left 
 Rugby he got into Ward's hands at Balliol, who upset his 
 notions about things — "asking you your opinions" (so he 
 speaks of him) " on every possible subject, beginning with 
 Covent Garden and Macready, and certainly not ending till 
 you got to the question of the moral sense and deontology." 
 Ward turned him inside out.' 
 
 [That is a process which Symonds was meanwhile applying 
 to himself ; for all through the Diary, underlying his studies, 
 underlying his affection for his friends, runs tlie perpetual 
 strain of self-analysis, comparison, criticism, reproach. I find 
 this characteristic entry : 
 
 ' January 81, 1866. — This is truly sad about me ; my IBOO 
 brain is teeming with thoughts that cannot be expressed, 
 because of ray physical weakness. Poems of some sort, could 
 I but work at them, would come from me. Yet, if I produce, 
 my thoughts tear me like vultures ; I have to leave the lines 
 unfinished, or to complete them with a spasm, from which I sink 
 back helpless. The poor palpitating fruits of this parturition
 
 198 JOHN ADUINGTON SYMONDS 1866 
 
 look but lean or rickety ; and yet I can never alter, nurse and 
 cherish them. If I died to-morrow, my name would truly, as 
 far as fame goes, be writ on water. On the hearts of some I 
 know it would be written, but they too must die.' 
 
 Yet the approach of that illness which was induced by 
 the damp summer of 1865, and declared itself in the winter, 
 though it accounts for much of the depression which pervades 
 the Diary, did not render Symonds incapable of much keen 
 enjoyment. A fine performance of the ' Israel in Egypt,' that 
 ' colossus of oratorios,' leads him to these vivid reflections.] 
 
 ' I ' was more lost in meditation on the nature of music 
 than I have ever been before. Here was a man Handel, a fat 
 native of Halle, in the Duchy of Magdeburg, articled at eight 
 years old to an organist, and from that moment given up to 
 music — a man who never loved a woman, who (to use the 
 words of his enthusiastic biographer) continued irritable, 
 greedy, fond of solitude, persevering, unaffectionate, coarse and 
 garrulous in conversation, benevolent, independent, fond of 
 beer, religious, without passions, and without a single 
 intellectual taste. He had never received any education 
 except in counterpoint. He had had no experience. Yet he 
 could interpret the deepest psychological secrets ; he could 
 sing dithyrambs to God, or preach moral sermons ; he could 
 express the feelings of mighty nations, and speak with the 
 voice of angels more effectually than even Milton ; he could 
 give life to passion, and in a few changes of his melody lead 
 love through all its variations from despair to triumph — there 
 was nothing that he did not know. The whole world had 
 become for him music, and his chords were co-extensive with 
 the universe. Raphael's capability to paint the " School of 
 Athens," after coming from the workshop of Perugino, was 
 perhaps less marvellous than Handel's to delineate the length 
 and breadth and height and depth of human nature in his 
 choruses. We shall never comprehend, 7ious autres, the 
 mysteries of genius. It is a god-sent clairvoyance, in- 
 explicable, and different in kind from intellect.' 
 
 ' To bis sister Charlotte.
 
 1866 MANHOOD 199 
 
 [Dr. Symonds wished his son to pass the cold spring 
 months at Mentone. Symonds left home with some of that 
 reluctance which always seized him when he had to part from 
 Clifton, and all that it implied for him.] 
 
 February 11, 1866.' — Of all things let me not fall into the 
 error of Sir Egerton Brydges, and incessantly distress myself 
 about my poetic gifts, complaining that they are not recognised, 
 wondering whether they are real, abusing those who deny 
 them, uneasily questioning myself and others as to their 
 vaUdity. Let me enjoy and be content with that. Poetic 
 feeUng is not artistic power. The emotions which I ex- 
 perience while hearing music, in beautiful scenery, before fine 
 pictures, in cathedrals, at the thought of noble men — these 
 enable me to understand and to enjoy, intensify the glow of 
 Ufe, and raise me to a higher sphere. But from them to actual 
 plastic art there is a mighty step to make. 
 
 Friday, February 16. — I am sick at heart for having to 
 leave Clifton — this room where C. and I have sat so happily 
 together in the mornings, with its city view ; where Ch. has 
 come to read with me — this country where C. and I have had 
 such glorious walks — these downs where H. G. D. and I have 
 had strange communings together, pacing up and down. 
 I have learned, lived, enjoyed, and grown much in freedom, 
 strength, and peace, and perhaps knowledge, here. Now we 
 must soon break up our camp. And how little I have done of 
 any sort ! What unattainable mountain-tops above me ! How 
 the aspect of Goethe, of Dante, of Parmenides, of Petrarch — the 
 great souls with which I have lived— of wind and rain and 
 sunlight and clouds and woods, has filled me with in- 
 extinguishable yearnings and an agony of impotency. 1 am 
 too full to give forth. ' Joy impregnates ; sorrows bring 
 forth.' 
 
 [Symonds started for the Riviera on February 21, 1H66, 
 and here began the long series of journeys in search of health, 
 and also a new phase in his Italian experience. He applied 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 200 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1866 
 
 himself to the serious study of the Italian language. He read 
 the ' Decamerone ' by himself, and Ariosto and Dante under 
 the guidance of his Italian master, Signor Belochetto, at 
 Mentone. He reported the progress of his studies to his 
 sister in letters written in Italian. From Mentone he moved 
 on to Bordighera and San Remo, whence he wrote to his 
 father :] 
 
 ' We ^ are all together now in the same hotel — Maribella, 
 Mrs. Moore, Catherine, and myself. It is very pleasant, 
 although we none of vis think this place can bear any com- 
 parison with Mentone in point of beauty. It is prosaic by the 
 side of so much romantic loveliness. I wish I could see little 
 Janet : do you think she might be photographed for us ? 
 Auntie wrote that she was small, but I hope she still looks as 
 pretty as she used to be, and that she is not wanting in in- 
 telligence for her age. I have been thinking so much of you 
 to-day, and longing to see you again. Life is never so good a 
 thing when I am separated from you by a long interval of 
 time, and what is more, by so complete a distance of daily 
 associations. Catherine made some lovely sketches at Bordi- 
 ghera, where we spent Monday and Tuesday. She has not 
 done anything since she came here, but I hope that we shall 
 not quit the Riviera without her making some studies of olive 
 trees. The palms at Bordighera took her fancy, and they 
 certainly are most beautiful — growing with an Oriental 
 luxuriance in groves, or leaning over the city walls. I have 
 also been doing some work — reading Italian and writing an 
 article on Empedocles, which I may try perhaps to publish in 
 the "North British Review." But as I have made use of the 
 translations which I did for Jowett, I cannot print this paper 
 unless I learn from him more accurately how he means to 
 employ them. I have not received any acknowledgment from 
 him of the arrival of my MS., but I daresay, as it is vacation 
 time at Oxford, that he may not yet have got it. Thank you 
 very much for sending me the " Edinburgh Courant." I was 
 
 ' To Dr. Symonds. Hotel de Londres, San Heme, Easter Sunday. 
 April 1866.
 
 1866 MANHOOD 201 
 
 extremely interested in the abstract of Jowett's lecture. The 
 allusions to the unpaid and persecuted labours of Socrates 
 made me think of Jowett himself. He always seems to me to 
 find a consolation for his own troubles in the thought of great 
 teachers — Socrates and Christ. Conington wrote me the other 
 day a long letter containing much gossip about his and other 
 people's translations, and also about the reception of " Ecce 
 Homo " at Oxford. Jowett's party seem to have made rather 
 light of it : Conington himself, as might have been expected 
 from its want of favour with the Jowett school, gives it many 
 kind words.' 
 
 [Of ' Ecce Homo ' he writes in a letter to a friend : ' We 
 have brought it out to read a second time together, for there is 
 much in its chapters which I need to dwell upon ; they seemed 
 to me so new and strange, and raised so keen a desire for real 
 assimilation in my mind.' 
 
 Passages in the Diary show how much he enjoyed the 
 scenery of the Riviera, and how carefully he noted its beauties 
 in pages which he worked up later on into his most popular 
 travel sketches. But the climate, which Symonds found 
 trying to his nerves, frequently provoked fits of internal 
 depression ; and the unrest was intensified by the continual 
 thwarting of his aspirations through ill health.] 
 
 March 18.' — I fret because I do not realise ambition, 
 because I have no active work,, and cannot win a position of 
 importance like other men. Literary success would compensate 
 me : yet, the first steps to this seem always thwarted. In- 
 tellectual, moral, and physical qualities in combination are 
 required for this success. I have the intellectual ; the physical 
 is always giving way without my fault, and the moral flags by 
 my cowardly inertia. I am an over-cultivated being, too alive 
 to all sensibilities to walk on one path without distraction, and 
 so keenly appreciative of greatness in art and literature that I 
 am disdainful of small achievements. Yet these gloomy 
 reflections serve as spurs to goad me on. ' Venture, and thus 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 202 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1866 
 
 climb swift to Wisdom's height.' A man has but one life to 
 lose : he can but strive ; and if he fails at last and dies with 
 nothing done, an unremembered weed, a sea-wrack on the 
 barren shore, why, so have lived and died, hoped and despaired, 
 petulantly struggled and then calmly sunk, thousands before 
 him. 
 
 [In reaction from this mood the solicitations of Monte 
 Carlo attract him ; but as in a dream.] 
 
 March 22. — After ' dawdling about Monaco itself we went 
 round to the ' Jeux ' — a large gambling-house established on 
 the shore near Monaco, upon the road to Mentone. There is 
 a splendid hotel there, and the large house of sin, blazing with 
 gas lamps by night. So we saw it from the road beneath 
 Turbia our first night, flaming and shining by the shore like 
 Pandemonium, or the habitation of (some) romantic witch. 
 This place, in truth, resembles the gardens of Alcina (? Armida), 
 or any other magician's trap for catching souls, which poets have 
 devised. It lies close by the sea in a hollow of the sheltering 
 hills. There winter cannot come — the flowers bloom, the 
 waves dance, and sunlight laughs all through the year. The 
 air swoons with scent of lemon groves ; tall palm trees wave 
 their branches in the garden ; music of the softest, loudest, 
 most inebriating passion, swells from the palace ; rich meats 
 and wines are served in a gorgeously painted hall ; cool corri- 
 dors and sunny seats stand ready for the noontide heat or 
 evening calm ; without are olive gardens, green and fresh and 
 full of flowers. But the witch herself holds her high court 
 and never-ending festival of sin in the hall of the green tables. 
 There is a passion which subdues all others, making music, 
 sweet scents, and delicious food, the plash of the melodious 
 waves, the evening air and freedom of the everlasting hills, 
 subserve her own supremacy. 
 
 When the fiend of play has entered into a man, what does 
 he care for the beauties of nature or even for the pleasure of 
 the sense ? Yet in the moments of his trial he must drain the 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 1866 MANHOOD 203 
 
 cup of passion, therefore let him have companions — splendid 
 women, with bold eyes and golden hair and marble columns 
 of imperial throats, to laugh with him, to sing shrill songs, to 
 drink, to tempt the glassy deep at midnight when the cold 
 moon shines, or all the headlands glimmer with grey phos- 
 phorescence, and the palace sends its flaring lights and sound 
 of cymbals to the hills. And many, too, there are over whom 
 love and wine hold empire hardly less entire than play. This 
 is no vision : it is sober, sad reality. I have seen it to-day 
 with my own eyes. I have been inside the palace, and have 
 breathed its air. In no other place could this riotous daughter 
 of hell have set her throne so seducingly. Here are the 
 Sirens and Calypso and Dame Venus of Tannhauser's dream. 
 Almost every other scene of dissipation has disappointed me 
 by its monotony and sordidness. But this inebriates ; here 
 nature is so lavish, so beautiful, so softly luxurious, that the 
 harlot's cup is thrice more sweet to the taste, more stealing of 
 the senses than elsewhere. I felt, Avhile we listened to the 
 music, strolled about the gardens, and lounged in the play- 
 rooms, as I have sometimes felt at the opera. All other 
 pleasures, thoughts, and interests of life seemed to be far ofi' 
 and trivial for the time. I was beclouded, carried off my 
 balance, lapped in strange forebodings of things infinite out- 
 side me in the human heart. Yet all was unreal ; for the 
 touch of reason, hke the hand of Galahad, caused the boiling 
 of this impure fountain to cease — the wizard's castle disap- 
 peared, and, as I drove homeward to Mentone, the solemn hills 
 and skies and seas remained, and that house was, as it were, 
 a mirage. 
 
 Inside the gaming-house play was going forward like a 
 business. Roulette and rouge et noir tables were crowded. 
 Little could be heard but the monotonous voice of the 
 croupiers, the rattle (jf gold under their wooden shovels, and 
 the clicking of the ball that spun round foi' roulette. Imper- 
 ii n-bable gravity sat on the faces of men who lost or won. 
 Several stern-faced, middle-aged women were making small 
 stakes, and accurately pricking all the chances of the game on 
 cards. A low buzz ran through the room, but this came
 
 204 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 18H6 
 
 chiefly from the lookers-on like ourselves. Occasionally a 
 more than usually loud trumpet or shrill clarionette sounded 
 from the music hall. Two men attracted my interest. One 
 was a terrier-faced Englishman, with reddish hair and a san- 
 guine complexion. He staked largely, and laughed at his 
 winnings and losings indifferently. A very astute man, who 
 did not play himself, seemed to be backing him up and giving 
 him advice. The other was a splendid-looking fellow — a tall, 
 handsome, well-made Piedmontese he seemed to be — at least 
 he had a favourable resemblance to Victor Emanuel. His 
 small head, with crisp brown hair, fresh colour, light moustache 
 and long imperial, cold bluish eyes, and steadfast frown, was 
 set upon a little muscular neck, and that upon the body of a 
 Hermes with most perfect hands. There was something 
 innocent in his face ; yet the whole man looked like a sleek 
 panther. It would be easy to love him ; the woman who 
 should love him would be happy for some days, and then 
 would most probably be broken. But strong determination 
 and cool devilry sat in his- face. He seemed once to lose 
 everything. Then he went out and soon returned with bank 
 notes, some of which he paid away and some of which he 
 staked. Then he gained gold, bank notes and rouleaux, but 
 he still continued playing with perfect sang froid. When the 
 rotige et noir stopped for a minute, he got up and made a large 
 stake at roulette, and left a serving man to watch it for him 
 when his favourite game began again. C. said he was like 
 Rolla. Certainly when he is ruined he will shoot himself. 
 At present he is fresh and fair and charming to look at, his 
 great physical and moral strength, though tempered wickedly, 
 being a refreshing spectacle. 
 
 The croupiers are either fat, sensual cormorants, or sallow, 
 lean-cheeked vultures, or suspicious foxes. So I term them ; 
 yet they only look like wicked bankers' clerks, like men 
 narrowed and made sordid by constant contact with money in 
 a heartless trade, and corrupted by familiarity Avith turns of 
 luck instead of honourable business rules. Compare them 
 with Coutts' men to note the difference. It is very discernible ; 
 for, though in externals much alike, these men of the gaming
 
 186H MANHOOD 205 
 
 bank show every trace of a dissolute youth and a \ile calling, 
 of low sensuality and hardened avarice, upon their faces. 
 
 We noticed that almost all the gamesters had light blue 
 eyes. No exhibition of despair was visible ; yet I saw many 
 very jaded young men, and nervous old men, blear-eyed fellows 
 staking eagerly five-franc pieces. My young Rolla was the 
 royal one— the prince of gamblers in that room — and but for 
 him the place would have had no romance for me. It must 
 be an odd life : lounging and smoking in the gardens, listening 
 to Verdi in the music hall, gormandising in the salle a manger, 
 and enjoying every beauty of southern spring, together with 
 the fiery pleasures of that hazard. Eschman says, he had 
 once to pawn his own clothes for a young fellow who gambled 
 away 2,000Z. at Homburg, and then wanted to go back to 
 England. I have not enough continuity of good spirits, of 
 self-deception, and of resolution, to gamble. Under the 
 influence of some kind of passion, I could fancy going into it 
 for a moment, but the yoke would be to me most odious. 
 How nerves can bear it I wonder. But my Rolla's nerves are 
 tigerish, and like the tickling which would rend me to atoms. 
 Perfect coolness and concentration of fever-producing calm 
 marked this man. His whole soul was in the play. 
 
 [This stimulation of the senses in the imaginative region is 
 worked out, harmonised, and laid to rest, for a time, in such 
 long flights of criticism as this which follows — criticism in 
 embryo, it is true, but interesting in itself as a singular to^ir de 
 force — for a single morning's work ; and valuable as showing 
 how, under the stress of strong feeling, Symonds projected the 
 thoughts which he subsequently wrought into his finished 
 critical judgments.] 
 
 Thursday, April 5.' — In Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, 
 Shelley, Coleridge, Tennyson, and Browning, the English 
 Renaissance, the Elizabethan age has revived, no longer 
 taking the dramatic or Epic form, but that of narrative and 
 lyrical poetry, passionate, reflective, egotistical, religious, 
 patriotic. The increased interest in Elizabethan authors — 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 206 JOHN ADDIXGTON SVMOXDS 186« 
 
 Charles Lamb, the Shakespearians — was a sign of this re\4val. 
 Poets sought Elizabethan phraseology, like Byron in the first 
 Canto of Childe Harold, or Elizabethan richness, like Keats. 
 All rules of art and French classicisms were discarded ; 
 Wordsworth preached a natural diction. The two ages [the 
 Italian and the English Eenaissance] are similar ; freedom 
 of religious thought, political freedom, a new impulse given to 
 all speculation, the movement of the French Revolution 
 answering to that of the Reformation. During the interval, 
 diplomacy had cramped politics, torpor had benumbed religion, 
 philosophy had crawled upon the lowest ground of calculation 
 and self-interest, poetry had ceased to be anything but a 
 mechanical arrangement of words in obedience to some 
 artificial standard of correct taste. Men strove in every 
 department to be as much alike as possible. The sixteenth 
 and nineteenth century spirit tends to individuality in art at 
 least. The seven names above are infinitely different in 
 everything except a common afflatus and common Eliza- 
 bethanism. Parallel to this English movement there has 
 been, in other countries, a return to the fountain-head of 
 literature. The Italians have studied Dante, Giusti, Leopardi. 
 The Germans have created a literature in affiliation to our 
 Elizabethan age. The French have their Romantic School. 
 What is the essence of Elizabethanism ? In the first place, 
 freedom. Freedom of thought ; freedom from bondage to 
 great names, like those of Virgil, or Cicero, or Voltaire ; or to 
 great languages, like the Latin ; or to great canons of criticism, 
 like the Aristotehan unities. Freedom from servility to 
 potentates and patrons — our playwrights are as liberal as the 
 wind of their words, their Elizabeth is England ; compare 
 them with an Ariosto inspired by flattery alone ; with the 
 dedicatory poets of the eighteenth century. Religious freedom ; 
 notice what Decker dared to say of Christ, what Heywood 
 spoke about the Bible in his Chronicle of Elizabeth. Pohtical 
 freedom — intolerance of foreign rule ; compare this with the 
 restoration, identification of popular liberties and royalty — of 
 royalty and popular religion. The freedom of youth, untram- 
 melled, with a boundless future and no past, with the luxuri-
 
 1866 MANHOOD 207 
 
 ance of young blood, the consciousness of youthful beauty, the 
 carelessness of young audacity, the fields untrodden and the 
 flowers unpicked — a virgin soil and lusty husbandmen to till 
 and sow and store unbounded harvests. Freedom from 
 precedent ; no great examples to weigh down the wings of 
 genius, no rules to hamper its flight, no academies to judge, 
 impose, condemn, and censure. The result of this freedom 
 was that every man wrote what he thought best, wrote from 
 himself, so that individuality marked every utterance. And 
 the tendencies of this freedom were regulated by a national 
 spirit, patriotic, highly moral, religious, intensely human, 
 animated by a firm belief in reality, careless of books, coura- 
 geous, adventurous, eager for scientific discoveries, ambitious 
 of acquiring wealth and power, conscious of its own energy, 
 martial yet jealous of domestic peace, assiduous in toil, quick 
 to overleap material barriers, and revel in the wildest dreams 
 of the imagination, manly, delicate, trained in long trials of 
 foreign and civil wars, of factions, of religious persecutions. 
 Elizabethanism is, in fact, the genius of a mighty nation 
 young and free, as manifested in its literature. Further than 
 this in analysis we cannot go, any more than we can analyse 
 the genius of Shakespeare or Beethoven in itself. Yet we may 
 show what circumstances favoured the origin and development 
 of genius, whether in a nation or in a man ; what characteristics 
 distinguish it from other kinds or instances of genius. Eliza- 
 bethanism is, then, the genius of England, as displayed in 
 literature when England was free and adolescent. 
 
 At every period, therefore, of freedom and adolescence, we 
 may expect to find Elizabethanism in England, if literature be 
 not altogether suppressed. And this is why we see it reappear- 
 ing in the nineteenth century, in that Pleiad, who were stirred 
 by the vast political renaissance of 1790, by the religious 
 renaissance inaugurated by French destructive scepticism, and 
 by the scientific renaissance which opened a new horizon to 
 the world. Freedom leapt aloft, and the English poets 
 answered to her call. New youth flowed in the mother's 
 ancient veins. The winter weeds of two dead centuries were 
 cast aside.
 
 208 JOHN ADUINGTON' SYMONDS 1866 
 
 But ' Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.' The 
 dreams of the sixteenth century have been exchanged for more 
 sober expectations ; there is no El Dorado now, but California, 
 Faith has succumbed to criticism ; religious liberty consists 
 in the right to doubt, not to believe as we hke ; and political 
 liberty in the tranquillity of the individual less than in the 
 majesty of the people. We ply our commerce and preachjnon- 
 intervention ; we do not seek to extend our empire or to carry 
 our crusades against the enemies of our religion or our peace. 
 We are readers and not hearers. There is no public for 
 theatrical display. The poetry of the outward world has been 
 exchanged for that of the inner life, of action for reflection, of 
 passions for analysis of passions. All these reasons, and many 
 more, explain why the renewed Elizabethanism is lyrical and 
 egotistical instead of dramatic and patriotic. We have youth 
 and freedom indeed ; but our youth is the youth of a man, our 
 freedom the freedom of a man — not the youth of a nation, or 
 the freedom of a nation. 
 
 As a result of illimitable freedom the Elizabethans fell 
 into the error of extravagance and exaggeration. This they 
 showed in the expression of their own sentiments, in their 
 language, in their indulgence of the fancy, in their profuse 
 ornamentation, in the characters of their drama, in their pre- 
 ference for striking incidents and rant, over good taste and 
 select diction. No force from without controlled them, and 
 they had no internal power of self-control. The motto ^itjSei' 
 ayav was peculiar to the Greek temperament ; it has been 
 assumed by other literatures advisedly and in imitation of the 
 Greek. Mediaevalism had nothing of it, and the Elizabethans 
 were children of the Middle Ages. When the Elizabethan 
 sj)irit in England gave place to the pseudo-classic, then the 
 good and bad effects of an imposed limit were produced. We 
 had our Dryden, and our Pope, and our writers of limpid prose. 
 But the true genius of our literature was in abeyance, and 
 when it reappeared it brought with it the evils of extravagance 
 and exaggeration. 
 
 Yet even in this exuberance and unmeasured fecundity we 
 find one of the excellent qualities of Elizabethanism. Such a
 
 1866 MANHOOD 209 
 
 wealth of suggestive thought, such a deep sympathy with 
 nature, such a power of expressing the secrets revealed by the 
 outward world to the percipient mind, such a clairvoyance into 
 the innermost chambers of the human soul, never belonged to 
 any other literature, and would not have belonged to ours had 
 the Hmitations of Art been more regarded, had men thought 
 of the form more, repressed the elan of their genius, and 
 sought to prune. Elizabethanism has the spirit of modern 
 Christian art, as typified in music. It is proiiuent, profuse of 
 emotion, unapt to restrain itself to one note or one series of 
 notes, eager to pour forth its passion in every variety, by means 
 of countless simultaneous instruments, by means of numerous 
 and subtle changes and developments of meaning. It is all 
 iridescent, Gothic, manifold. 
 
 Carelessness, want of balance, defective judgment in the 
 selection of materials or their management, bad taste, super- 
 fluities of every kind, mark the Elizabethan art. It is also 
 remarkable for energy, pomp of language, swelling sound, 
 magnificent improvisation, beauties tossed like foam upon the 
 waves of thought by means of mere colHsion, It has nothing 
 small or mean or calculated. Its vices are the vices of the 
 prodigal, not of the miser, and of the prodigal whose want of 
 prudence is more near to generosity than wanton waste. We 
 forgive its many faults for its inexhaustible fertiUty, and lose 
 ourselves in wondering at its wealth and strength and liberality. 
 Every word of this paragraph would need alteration were we 
 to apply it to the English of the pseudo-classic age. If not 
 miserly, then our genius was very thrifty. It erred by caution 
 rather than by haste. It doled its treasures out as one who 
 has a purse indeed, but cannot, like the Midas of the true 
 Elizabethan age, turn all it touched into gold. 
 
 Blank verse and prose are the two vehicles by whicli it 
 expresses itself — using both lyrically, governing the periods of 
 both by internal melody and rhythms, making blank verse 
 more harmonious than any rhymed metre, and prose more 
 poetical than the verse of other nations. The dramatists and 
 Milton for verse, the greatest divines, Sir T. Browne and 
 Milton, for prose, are the products of the first Elizabethan era ; 
 
 p
 
 210 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1866 
 
 De Quincey, Ruskin, and even the faulty ' fine writers ' of the 
 present day, incarnate the new Elizabethan spirit in prose 
 composition. Blank verse, too, has regained ascendancy after 
 the forced reign of the rhyming couplet. But we have few real 
 masters of blank verse. It is in lyric poetry that we excel now. 
 
 It is a sign of the Elizabethan spirit never to hesitate or 
 palliate. And the mantle in this also has fallen on the new 
 age. ' Don .Juan,' Shelley's ' Epipsychidion,' Browning's 
 ' Paracelsus ' and ' Pippa Passes,' ' Guinevere,' and "Wordsworth's 
 'Poems on Life,' set forth aspects of morality as various, as 
 original, as bold, as hazardous as those of the Elizabethans. 
 But they are more analytical, and subjective in obedience to 
 the temper of the age. We have never produced an Alfred de 
 Musset. 
 
 The Elizabethan genius first made Nature for her own 
 sake a study. The poems of Shakespeare are full of observa- 
 tions, allusions, elaborate pictures of natural phenomena, from 
 flowers up to the thunder. Nothing was too small or too 
 great for his muse. Seneca says of some hero — ' Non circum 
 flosculos occupatur,' using flosculos metaphorically ; but the 
 sentence may be applied directly ; a classic would disdain the 
 enumeration of flowers which we find in ' Winter's Tale.' This 
 quality has reappeared even to excess in Keats and Shelley, 
 but in admirable force in W^ordsworth, who gives life to the 
 miniitise of nature. Byron has been said to have followed her 
 with lust, and Wordsworth professed for her a raging passion 
 which toned down into philosophy. And the quality we speak 
 of is now seen most strongly in our school of landscape painters, 
 musicians, lyrists, writers of sounding prose and various blank 
 verse, in colours, not in words or tones ; indeed, wherever 
 the dominion of the Elizabethan spirit is felt, this quality 
 is apparent. In France, G. Sand, De Guerin, A. de Musset, 
 V. Hugo, are names enough to signalise the true union which 
 subsists between this devotion to nature for her own sake and 
 that essential freedom which we regard as the central point of 
 Elizabethanism. Music, landscape painting, and a pantheistic 
 sympathy with outer nature, more symbol-seeking and penetra- 
 tive than the old classic pantheism, meet in our Renaissance.
 
 1866 MANHOOD 211 
 
 A great difference between the old and new Elizabethan 
 spirit exists also in the form and range of thought. Refine- 
 ments and subtle-subtilisings of all sorts have succeeeded to 
 keen intuitions into nature, yet we have lost the euphuism of 
 the past ; we are more cultivated in a good and a bad sense, 
 less able to look directly at things, more on our guard against 
 mere mannerisms of expression. The earlier Elizabethans 
 had no ' Lazzaretto poetry.' We have very much. There is 
 now far more involution of sentences and laborious effort after 
 recondite phrases. Again, the subtleties of our rhythms — 
 Shelley's, e.g. — transcend that of the old Elizabethan ; the 
 Wordsworthian vein reveals a new kind of philosophical and 
 Chl-istian pantheism ; the man of thought is more, of action 
 less ; the problems of life are probed with more of casuistical 
 nicety, displayed with less of tragic pomp and human breadth. 
 These parallels might be extended to a tedious length. Read 
 ' Adonais ' side by side with ' Hero and Leander,' and note. 
 
 This diatribe, being very ill this morning, I wrote to 
 distract my mind from its troubles, to rouse me from a cling- 
 ing lethargy in which will, memory, physical force, and power 
 of thought seemed all exhausted. I could do nothing — fix my 
 attention on no book, endure no company, take interest in 
 nothing outside. It did me good ; and the afternoon spent 
 with C. among the gigantic olives, deep grass meadows, and 
 clear streams of the Val des Oliviers pleased me. I walked in 
 a dream. Scirocco was blowing. 
 
 [His fits of depression were cheered by letters from Jowett, 
 whose hopeful, vigorous tone proved now, as always, of 
 immense service to Symonds's diffident sensitiveness.] 
 
 ' My Dear Symonds, — Many thanks indeed for the trans- 
 lation of Empedocles. I think that it and the other transla- 
 tions will greatly add to my first volume for the appendix to 
 which I destine them. And if you will do me Democritus 
 I shall lie ^'reatly obliged. But I sha'n't expect this. There 
 is a separate book of Mullach's on Democritus which you 
 nii^'ht find an advantage in perusing. There is no hurry, as I 
 certainly sha'n't want to print them before the end of the year. 
 
 p2
 
 212 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1866 
 
 I often feel that I have undertaken too big a work, and can 
 only hope that I may survive to do something else. I hope 
 that you are better. I don't suppose that you were really in 
 any danger. But I am glad that you took the precaution of 
 going away. And I am glad that you have got a wife to take 
 care of you. 
 
 ' I think that you may look forward to a literary life with 
 good hope and prospect of success. To have nothing to do is 
 the best of all lives, if you only make something real to do. 
 You escape the narrowing influence of a profession, and what 
 you do for others is far more deeply felt. The point is, 
 I think, to get a position and occupation, and each year to look 
 as anxiously to one's own progress as you would to the 
 coming in of briefs at the bar. — Ever yours, 
 
 B. JOWETT.' 
 
 [As summer drew on the Riviera was left behind for 
 Genoa, Pisa, Lucca, Florence, Ravenna, Milan. Then the 
 travellers set their faces northward, and here are some notes 
 of their journey :] 
 
 ' I ' was glad to get your letter yesterday, and to know 
 that you are well. For the rest I wait until I see you, feeling 
 sure that you will tell me all I want to hear. The prospect is 
 very dull to-day. A thick raincloud has descended on the 
 Lago Maggiore, and the islands loom shivering from it with a 
 mournful cheerlessness. I have nothing to do but to sit and 
 think and write (if I had something to write about), and read 
 Italian. We are weatherbound in a corner of an old inn, 
 with some four or five other people. One of these is a physical 
 philosopher, a scientific man, to whose confession of faith I 
 have just been listening. Ah me ! how many faiths are there 
 in the world, and what gods do not ye worship, Israel. He 
 thinks it is but a question of time until we shall know God by 
 means of our senses, and until the Pantheistic Being be fully 
 developed through spontaneous generation. But what the 
 good of the knowledge, that he does not say, nor how the 
 
 ' To H. G. Dakyns. Baveno. May 25, 1866.
 
 1866 MANHOOD 213 
 
 Pantheistic Being subsists. We know just as little about such 
 matters as Empedocles. 
 
 ' Sunday. — I cannot write away from home. You say, and 
 say truly, that perfect communication subsists between people 
 living in the same place and writing to each other. Written 
 words then supplement spoken words. Looks, silences, and 
 tones of voice complete what these leave imperfect. The souls 
 then touch at all points, and, what is of grave import, their 
 physical surroundings are the same. Breathing one air, seeing 
 the same beautiful landscapes, enjoying the same sun, and 
 shivering under the same fogs, nothing from the world outside 
 destroys the sense of sympathy. But when we are so far away 
 — when I in Italy sit by the shore of Verbanus, among the 
 cool ferns, gazing at the distant snow overcast with thunder- 
 clouds — when you in England hear the thrushes, hanging over 
 those ravines of wood, or listen to the English sound of Sunday 
 prayer and praise — when I, poor I, far, far away, am frighted 
 by these madding powers of nature, incommunicable, sad, 
 weighed down by forebodings, unintelligible even to myself, 
 haunted by the past, feeling the present an impalpable night- 
 mare, fixing vacant eyes on the insupportable future — when 
 we are so, and the arrowy scents of narcissus and honeysuckle 
 mixed with nightingale music distract my brain if I sit down 
 to write — how on this Sunday morning can I feel at one with 
 you or any one in dear far-off England? I know what is 
 passing there. I can enter the cathedral at Bristol, where they 
 are now chanting Te Deum, and the coloured light streams 
 from those southern windows, as it did eight years ago. I 
 can He in darkness in the ante-chapel of Magdalen and listen 
 to the roaring of that tempestuous organ, or, last of all, I 
 know the stillness of our Clifton home, the silent pictures, the 
 grave books, the light and flowers and undefinable fragrance 
 of perpetual feminine possession. These things I see — see, 
 do I say ?— feel, handle, live among. But I am here, after all, 
 by the sounding shore of Verbanus ; and the charniel of 
 sympathy is cut off, and do what I will I cannot, by writing to 
 you, stir the load of mournful presage which weighs upon mv. 
 There is in Marlowe the image of an old king, dethroned and
 
 214 JOHN ADBINGTOiX SY:\10NDS 1866 
 
 discrowned, who, waking from sleep and talking with his 
 murderer, is reminded of his crown, whereat he cries, " Where 
 is my crown ? Gone, gone, and do I yet remain alive ? " 
 
 ' The word which tolls in my ears, night and day is " waste." 
 When I wake from sleep I cry like the wretch in Persius, 
 " Imus, imus prfficipites." My soul is stagnant, and I see no 
 God, no reason for the world, no vigour in myself, no content 
 in things around me, nothing but slow-sliding barren years. 
 Yet I do hate this barren curse of self-indulgent cowardice 
 and wasted youth. I struggle in my chains and shake the bars, 
 impotent maniac. Lord ! how long ! hast Thou forgotten 
 to be gracious ? Will not Christ come again ? " But if He 
 came," so says the voice of the Lord speaking from the depth 
 of this dead soul, " art thou one to take His cross, to preach 
 His creed, to lie in caves, to fight with beasts, to see the beauty 
 of the purity of holiness and naked truth, thou whose 
 small intelligence and little Will have been consumed in 
 useless questions, enervating feelings, over-cultivation, sick- 
 liness, and sin ? Go, saltless soul, go to the dunghill, rot 
 there thirty years, and wait My time." Arise : we will away 
 to the mountains and the snow, and will strive to forget, 
 moving restlessly from place to place, and frittering thought 
 away in little things.' 
 
 [To the mountains, accordingly, they went. The change 
 from the languid air of the Lakes to the bracing air of the 
 Alps is indicated at once by the rise of the spiritual mercury 
 in Symonds's sensitive structure.] 
 
 ' After ' two most brilliantly beautiful days our own 
 weather has returned, thunder, mists, and deluges of rain. 
 We are safely boxed up for the rest of the day in a little 
 mountain inn, with a torrent foaming beneath our windows, 
 and the crags towering up above us, wreathed with fleecy 
 clouds among the pines and beeches and brown chalets. It is 
 a real Alpine village, such as I used to long for in London 
 last summer. 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Fobello, Monday, June 4, 1866.
 
 1866 MANHOOD 215 
 
 * Since I last wrote we have been making a kind of royal 
 i^rogress through these valleys. It is quite absurd to see how 
 the people know and greet Catherine, and with what affection 
 they remember Mr. North. This began at Baveno, where the 
 landlord and landlady received us with effusion as old friends. 
 While we were there we wrote to Gaspard, whom perhaps you 
 may remember at our wedding. He is landlord of Macugnaga, 
 a very important person in those parts, and a Swiss of more 
 than common intelligence and gravity. He passed three 
 winters at Hastings, and never tires of discussing the North 
 family and its affairs. Well, Gaspard, when he heard that 
 we had come to Lago Maggiore, announced his intention of 
 walking down to see us. We, however, had gone on to Orta 
 before he arrived, and he had to follow us, which he did in 
 the incessant deluge. Catherine and I made an expedition from 
 Orta, and were returning across the lake. A squall had just 
 begun to rush down from the Simplon mountains, not a boat 
 was to be seen upon the lake, the waves were rising high, and 
 I was wondering whether we should not have to ta"k6 refuge on 
 the Island of San Giulio, when suddenly I spied another 
 nutshell of a bark upon the waters making way towards us. 
 A sedate man, with a yellow beard, sat alone inside it, and 
 Catherine soon recognised him for Gaspard. Our boats met 
 in mid-sea, and he sprang on board. He had crossed the 
 Motterone that morning, and was not content with waiting for 
 us at Orta, but must needs set out again to find us in the 
 middle of our excursion. The old proprietor of the inn at 
 Fobello, called Uccetta, is an old friend of the Norths, and 
 Uccetta's wife, Maddalena, has an almost romantic aflection 
 for Catherine. She is not an unimportant person in these 
 parts. She brought her husband, for her dower, the inn 
 which they have just sold, and have bought for themselves a 
 country-house high up among the pastures, with a garden and 
 an Alp for the cows. I wish you could see her tall straight 
 figure and handsome face — such dark bright eyes, and such a 
 beautiful complexion. I do not know how it is, but though 
 they work hard, and expose themselves continually to the sun, 
 the women of this valley have all of them the freshest colour,
 
 216 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1866 
 
 and keep their looks of youth and health far longer than any 
 other mountaineers whom I have seen. I wish also that I 
 could give you the least idea of their costume. You must 
 begin by fancying a Vivandiere, for a company of Fobello 
 peasant women resembles a regiment of soldiers in petticoats. 
 They wear trousers of a dark blue, blue shoes edged ^\'ith 
 red, a short blue skirt, also edged with red cloth, descending 
 to their knees. On their head they have a large red 
 kerchief and ribands, or " bindelle " as they call them, of 
 any colours that they choose. The dress is completed by a 
 white kind of Garibaldi and a stomacher, curiously wrought 
 with open work of coloured silks, and a strange ugly pouch in 
 front. This pouch contains everything — it is sometimes large 
 enough to carry a baby, like the pouches of the kangaroos ; but 
 I do not think the matrons of Fobello use it for this purpose 
 — keys and money and pocket-handkerchiefs, and knives and 
 thimbles and cotton, being the contents which Maddalena 
 showed us in her pouch. In wet or cold weather they put on 
 a short man's jacket of blue cloth over the Garibaldi, tuck up 
 the skirts to give their trousers freer play, and shoulder a 
 huge Gampish umbrella. Well, fancy the tall, handsome 
 Maddalena suddenly appearing in this dress, clapping her 
 hands, shrieking and laughing with surprise and pleasure, and 
 embracing Catherine. She took possession of us for the day. 
 Uccetta himself was- trout-fishing. So we went up to see 
 their new house, and there she sat us down to drink white Asti 
 and cream. Two bottles of Asti were opened, and a huge 
 cream-bowl with a ladle was produced from the dairy. Each 
 of us had a smaller basin for our share. To refuse her 
 hospitality was impossible ; to drink either Asti or cream in 
 the midst of walking on a hot day is against all my principles : 
 to drink the two together at any time shocks all my notions 
 of propriety. 1 had often discoursed to Catherine on the 
 unwholesomeness of sweet Asti, and the danger of drinking 
 uncooked milk when one is hot. Yet, here I had, with smiles 
 upon my face, to finish a huge basin of the one, together with 
 the larger jDortion of a bottle of the other. It was a ludicrous 
 situation, and no ill results followed. Maddalena kept talking
 
 1866 MANHOOD 217 
 
 and laii.c^hing all the time with that perfect absence of self- 
 consciousness and that true good-breeding which I have always 
 found among the peasants of the Alps. They get this freedom 
 of manners, combined with respect, from the condition of 
 society in the mountains, I suppose. Here there are no 
 differences of class, strictly speaking. All talk the same 
 patois, share the same interests, receive the same education, 
 wear the same dress. Wealth constitutes the only distinction 
 between man and man ; a youth born of poor parents may 
 make money abroad, and return to spend his later manhood as 
 a village magnate. These people are not unconscious of the 
 difference which subsists between them and us ; but the 
 difference of what we call rank is lost in the difference of 
 nation and habits — they neither presume upon familiarity, nor 
 do they take it ^\'ith that kind of cringing satisfaction which is 
 so odious in the vulgar of our own country. When Uccetta 
 returned from ffshing — we met him with his basket of trout 
 and long fishing-rod by the bank of the Mastalone — his 
 reception of Catherine was grave and almost paternal. Like 
 all truly great men, and it must not be forgotten that he is a 
 culinary artist " meritamente famoso," he is modest, not to say 
 timid and retiring. Such a huge broad-shouldered cook I 
 never saw : yet, he is gigantically soft in manner ; as if he 
 were pondering on confections, and as if the heat and study of 
 his art had made him prematurely grave and old. I ^^^sh you 
 could have heard the torrents of bad Italian which fell from 
 us four, Maddalena cackling and Uccetta drizzling, as it were, 
 in patois, Catherine and I stumbling and stuttering over our 
 villainous Italian. Yet we managed to make ourselves enough 
 understood on both sides. But the best was when Uccetta 
 began to talk about the new hands into which his hotel had 
 fallen. His melancholy touched the true sublime, when he 
 reflected that he could not cook our dinner for us, and that we 
 should be served at his own table by the inferior artist who 
 now lords it in his kitchen. Each time I have seen liim he 
 has pathetically renewed his complaint, and on my telling him 
 that 1 am sure the present landlord does his best, he shakes 
 his head, and says, " Vuole, e vero, ma non pu6." '
 
 218 JOHN ADUINGTON SYMONDS 1866 
 
 [The travellers reached the Val Anzasca, and the neigh- 
 bourhood of Monte Kosa ; the daily intercourse with that 
 superb mountain as seen from Macugnaga, where the 
 Symondses stayed, evoked the following disquisition, nomin- 
 ally on the art of landscape painting, really on the method of 
 art and criticism in general. It helps to explain that abund- 
 ance and charm of conversation which was so characteristic 
 of Symonds. The man who had stored all these reflections 
 for his own use on paper, could not fail to flow when tapped 
 by talk :] 
 
 Wednesday,^ June 13, 1866. — I talked a good deal to C. 
 last night about the way in which she ought to approach 
 painting, and, having sermonised so much, it is my duty to 
 render to myself an account of what she said, and see whether 
 it comes to anything. 
 
 It seems to me that she is one of those who willingly 
 ignore the human element, who have not recognised those 
 sentiments which alone can touch the hearts of men. They 
 are lost in admiration of pure nature ; the exceeding wonder 
 of the world seems enough for them ; they do not hear ' the 
 low sad music of humanity,' among the choruses of Alps and 
 sunlight ; they sit down before a Monte Rosa or a Jungfrau 
 and try to put it on their canvas. What is the result ? — a 
 more or less accurate portrait of the mountain, very dear to 
 those who know its face, because of the recollections it calls 
 up, but not a poem, not a work of human art, not an appeal 
 to human feelings, and wholly inadequate as a representation 
 of the original when judged by the standards of true criticism. 
 Poets often fall into similar mistakes — they fancy that their 
 admiration of some great scene, and their minute description 
 of the same, will constitute a poem. One such a line as — 
 
 ' Sur I'Hymette j'ai eveille les abeilles,' 
 or 
 
 ' Qui per saxa volutus 
 Clarior electro canipum petit amnis,' 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 1866 MANHO(^D 219 
 
 is worth all their eloquence. {N.B. — I am continually falling 
 into this error of cold description, mistaking my own enthusi- 
 astic sense of the beauties of a subject for the power of render- 
 ing the same to others. A word in season, a single touch, an 
 allusion to some universal vein of human sentiment, a delicacy 
 of cadence, are worth more than myriads of carefully-chosen 
 cataloguing phrases. George Sand will often put a picture on 
 her pages because she is steeped in sentiment, because her 
 characters have taken hold of you, and their emotions make 
 you see the landscape which she would describe.) C.'s sketches 
 are too much like these cold efforts of a poet to describe all 
 that he has admired, except that they have the solid advantage 
 of being topographically instructive and true portraits, of 
 beautiful things — whereas his are words — but in point of 
 poetry they do not rank high. A little scrap of larch or rock, 
 or rivulet or cloud, truly felt, would be worth more than 
 Eigers and Jungfraus white against blue sky. They would 
 act by suggestion, just as such a line as ' The scent of violets 
 hidden in the grass,' acts by suggestion. A Turner may 
 infuse into the whole of a vast picture the burning soul of 
 eloquence and poetry — he may make sunrise or sunset upon 
 his canvas more gorgeous than the real heavens ; but smaller 
 artists must be content to compass smaller subjects. To paint 
 Monte Rosa, so as to infuse into it true poetry, is almost as 
 great a task of genius as to write a true Pindaric ode. 
 
 But — here I touch upon the most difficult part of the 
 subject — what is this poetry of which I speak, how is it to 
 be attained, how is the transition to be made from prose to 
 poetry ? To begin with, I think there is no doubt that all 
 pictures ought to be the copies not of the landscape merely, 
 but of the landscape as reflected on the soul. And by 
 ' reflected on the soul,' I mean that the landscape must have 
 impressed itself upon the sensitive, creative mind of man, have 
 stirred ideas there, have gathered round its forms the prismatic 
 hues of fancy, memory, or Sehnsucht. The image impressed 
 is what the painter ought to represent, and, if he is successful, 
 he will stir the souLs of those who see his pictui'e as by the 
 reading of a poem. To illustrate this, I remember going out
 
 220 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1866 
 
 at Engelberg one evening, and seeing the evening star above 
 the mountains in a tract of watery sky, the lines, ' Ueber alien 
 Gipfeln ist Kuh,' came into my mind, striking the keynote of 
 a thousand deep emotions, and I had my picture poem. Again 
 by the sea, Timon's last words sound in my ears and transfuse 
 the beach, the foam, the rocks, the breakers, with a sentiment 
 which, if I were a painter, I would strive to set on canvas, 
 C. tells me that the psalms come into her head all through a 
 long day among the Alps. There is the same thing — she 
 ought to get some waif of them upon her paper ; but she 
 ascends at once to religion, to adoration, which are the highest 
 pinnacles of poetry, and not having power to express them, 
 falls back to earth and simple imitation. 
 
 Half our admiration of Nature is passive, inasmuch as we 
 render no account of it to ourselves, but are content to look 
 and wonder and rejoice and praise. This is all well ; nothing 
 is nobler than the quiet brimful delight of the soul in face of 
 what is beautiful. But I do not think that this is the artist's 
 attitude ; a work of art requires the full activity of the soul, 
 intense reflection on the capabilities of the subject, a steady 
 aim with regard to the single effect to be produced, definite 
 sentiments, and an idea that dominates. He who desires to 
 paint poetically must return frequently upon himself, must 
 sit down patiently before his landscapes, making clear the 
 thoughts that come into his mind, must never hope to paint a 
 poem unless some definite emotion throws new light upon the 
 object which he sees. He may cultivate the poetic insight in 
 many ways — first, by studying Art, which for this purpose 
 (supposing him to have the ' raw ' material of emotion, and to 
 need the power of expression chiefly) is better than Nature. 
 Nature is the order of God's world. Art of man's. Our study 
 of Art teaches us the mechanism by which man's soul is 
 moved, the great emotions which have always stirred it, and to 
 which all poets have recurred. Poetry is the most universal 
 of Arts. Frequent reading of poetry would be good, or 
 pondering on pictures, or feeling music. The habit of analysis 
 is also useful — to see how artists have wrought, how they have 
 selected their subjects, in what lights they have placed them.
 
 1866 MANHOOD -221 
 
 how far they have succeeded, what in them is chali', and what 
 is wheat. Next, there must be continual meditation, a constant 
 rendering of accounts to the soul of all that charms us, every 
 attempt to be definite. Again, the choice of subjects goes a 
 long way. An artist who mistrusts his powers should paint 
 nothing but what suggests to his mind some feeling — he 
 should choose the mists and glooms, and wild lights and 
 fantastic details, and suggestive wayside bits of Nature, which 
 are lyrical, instead of those great landscapes which are epical. 
 I pre-suppose that he has technical ability. Again, what is 
 very necessary is the study of style. Ruskin seems to me to 
 have done some harm by making people exchange style for 
 mere imitation. I do not want them to falsify Nature — I 
 would only have them remember that many poetical effects 
 are only to be produced by manipulating Nature, by suppres- 
 sing, heightening, deepening, in obedience to the inner rhythm 
 which desires to strike a peculiar chord. If Nature could be 
 perfectly copied — which would be the same as making a new 
 nature — that would be the best, perhaps. But we cannot do 
 that. We must be content with modification. Style consists 
 in making that necessary modification subserve poetic purposes. 
 Use your knowledge and technical ability, not merely for the 
 purpose of accuracy, which often impedes poetry, though it 
 makes honest prose, but also as the servants of an inner and 
 idealising faculty. Which is of more value, a yellow primrose 
 painted l)y Hunt, or a poem on a primrose written by Words- 
 worth ? Suppose we say the former — what is its value ? All 
 the spring days we have spent among mossy lanes and woods, 
 spring hopes, the valley by Mentone, etc. Yes ; but a primrose 
 itself would serve better. It would, if we could always get 
 one ; but the primroses only bloom in spring, and the picture 
 abides for ever. I grant you ; yet you can say no more of 
 Hunt's primrose. After all, it is but a substitute for the 
 flower, and as a substitute happens to remind you of pleasant 
 things. But there are hundreds, city-born, or men like Con- 
 ington, whom it reminds of nothing. Now the poem speaks 
 to all of these, is more imperishable than the flower, and is 
 just as suggestive of spring days. Moreover, those who see
 
 222 JOHN ADDING TON SYMONDS 1866 
 
 nothing in a flower get no instruction from the picture ; from 
 the poem they are taught to love flowers, to see more in them 
 than they saw before, at least are thrilled by the poet's moral. 
 
 I would give a by-word to the spirit of criticism. While 
 looking at a picture of the Sun god, the critic may say, his 
 muscles are too large, or his throat is too fat. ' Goodness ! 
 what does that matter now ? ' I cry ; ' I am trying to understand 
 how Raphael has conceived the Phoebus Apollo, the Greek god, 
 the fiery shooter of sunbeams.' Every boy who has gone 
 through his first course of anatomy knows that Raphael, or 
 the engraver of his pictures, has made the neck and muscles 
 wrong. Go to the poetry, the soul, seek the important things ; 
 don't tithe your mint and cummin, and forget the weightier 
 matters of the law. So of Claude. The critic sees Radicofani, 
 Cecilia Metella's tomb, a wood, a river, the sea, some Roman 
 soldiers on a bridge, the ruins of the Claudian aqueduct, sea- 
 weedy trees, and leather dock-leaves, all in one picture. At 
 these he turns up his nose, instructed by Ruskin and the spirit 
 of the nineteenth century. But the poem has escaped him, 
 the large peace, the bounteous air, the melody of afternoon. 
 Yet Claude has lived three centuries, and -will live. Our 
 grandchildren, who will know even better than om'selves all 
 about anachronisms, and the way to paint trees and docks, will 
 still admire Claude. Technical accuracy will seem to them so 
 trivial and easy and methodical, that they will forget that 
 Claude did not possess it, lost still in admiration of his sweet- 
 ness. I do not mean to say that criticism is not right, that 
 Ruskin is not right, to explain his defects in order to purify 
 style and break down what is pernicious in long-established 
 models. But, having once learned the lesson, let us be 
 humble ; seeking beauties rather than defects ; acknowledging 
 Claude's childishness, or Blake's extravagant sins against 
 anatomy and good taste — and trying to grasp the spirit of 
 poetry which lies above and beyond, and in spite of these 
 material defects. It is the privilege of the educated to ignore 
 defects, or rather to make allowance for defects without danger. 
 The imperfectly educated cannot afibrd to do so ; they must 
 throw away wheat and chaff together for fear of mistaking
 
 1866 MANHOOD 223 
 
 chaff for wheat. So none but the purest models should be 
 oiven to students. But havinj^ learned, we are able to part 
 and prove, and say, ' This is good in feeling, and, allowing for 
 its technical defects, a work of genius ' ; or, ' This is faultily 
 faultless, correct, but adds nothing to our ideas.' 
 
 But, after all, there are very few poems made in the world, 
 very few to be made. We are most happy if we feel a poem 
 once in four months, and thrice happier if we can succeed in 
 executing it, however imperfectly. The only duty is to try, to 
 try hard, ceaselessly. And this trying is so difficult — it ends 
 almost always in wishing. We are like men who sit at a 
 Avindow and want to get far away to a hill-top ; there they sit 
 and look, and seem to forget that the hill-top can only be 
 reached by Avalking — or, like those who beat their breasts and 
 long for salvation, but do not go into the convent and fast, 
 and pray, and watch, and scourge themselves. I know this — ■ 
 how hard it is to improve my style, to get fresh keenness of 
 insight, and more gravity of judgment, to purge away my 
 affectations, to brace up my language, to base my criticisms on 
 more fixed foundations. The only way is never to neglect the 
 question, to turn it over in the mind, to think often ' how can 
 I do better ? ' That asking ' how ' is of some good— one day 
 one side light, another day another side light comes. And, 
 after all, if you die with unaccomplished aims, and a name 
 written on water, it does not matter. To have felt poems, to 
 have striven for expression, to have done your best, that is 
 something. 
 
 [The stimulus of the Alps, and above all, the delight in 
 Macugnaga — ' a place where happiness has come upon us, we 
 luiglit almost say unawares,' is made sufficiently clear in the 
 joyous, vigorous, dithyrambic pages of the Macugnaga journal. 
 But it had to come to an end. The Symondses left on June 
 17th, and went by Ivrea to Courmayeur, and thence by Aosta 
 over the St. Bernard to Ouchy, and finally toTMiirren. There, 
 in a place which had proved of such importance in his life, 
 Syiiionds, as was very usual with him, takes stock of his position. 
 ' It is dangerous to revisit places which we have loved very
 
 224 JOHX ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1866 
 
 deeply, and at critical times of life. I felt this for a moment 
 here, but yesterday Miirren reassumed all its own power. I 
 find it hard to write about the mixed emotions which possess 
 me ; but one thing is clear — in three years I have grown older, 
 stronger, steadier, more contented, happier. I am neither so 
 dejected nor yet so ambitiously expectant as I was then. If 
 I consider what I have gained in point of knowledge and 
 intellectual power during these three years, I find it nothing. 
 But my views of life are more settled and defined. I wish 
 that I could command poetry : oh, how deeply, fervently I 
 wish it. Then I might speak out somewhat of that which is 
 within me.' In this important passage Symonds takes a 
 characteristically modest view of his intellectual achievement 
 so far. Writing towards the close of his life, however, he 
 judges this period more liberally and more justly ; he recognises 
 that the year 1866-67 was ' important for my literary develop- 
 ment. I did a great deal of careful, yet instructive work, 
 which helped to form my style.' And he approached the 
 three main subjects which were to be the field of his literary 
 labours, Italian history, Greek poetry, and Elizabethan Drama. 
 
 But the passage just cited is of higher moment in the 
 delineation of Symonds's intellectual and spiritual attitude, for 
 it shows us his major desire in the field of literature to be a 
 poet, to express what he had to say, not in the form of critical 
 analysis, but in the guise of creative art— and it indicated 
 expressly, for the first time, that strong conviction which 
 governed the whole of his career, that life is more than 
 literature. In the chapter wherein Symonds sums up his 
 literary achievement, it will be seen to what extent the 
 desire to be an artist, and the doctrine that life is more than 
 literature, crossed, thwarted, hampered each other. The whole 
 attitude is, indeed,highly characteristic of the man. He wished 
 to be and to do everything ; to be a poet, to be a critic, to be 
 a student ; to live a life of action, to live a life of pleasure ; 
 to know whatever has been known by men, to see, as he says, 
 ' I vizi timani ed i dolori ' — an attitude which he used to sum 
 up in the one word — curiosity. 
 
 This memorable journey ended intellectually in a second
 
 J 866 MANHOOD 225 
 
 reading of ' Ecce Homo,' and a critique on the nature of faith ; 
 emotionally, with these words, ' I am writing within sound of 
 the lapping Lake of Neuchatel — on the last verge of Switzer- 
 land. I love Switzerland as a second home— hoping to return 
 to it, certain that I am happier, purer in mind, healthier in 
 body there than anywhere else in the world. I would not 
 take Rome, Florence, and Naples in exchange for the chalets 
 of ^liirren.']
 
 226 JOHN ADDINGTON SYJMONDS 1866 
 
 CHAPTEK VIII 
 
 MANHOOD —SPECULATIVE LIFE 
 
 Eeturn to London — On method in writing poetry — Visits to Rugby and 
 Oxford — Visit to Clifton — Bad health — Goes abroad with his sister 
 — Eouen — St. Ouen — Saxifraga injramidalis — The Columbine — On 
 Gothic architecture— Norman buildings— St. Etienne at Caen — 
 Bayeux — Depression — St. Lo — Coutanees — His philosophy — His 
 religion — Mont St. Michel — Emotional strain — Returns to England 
 — Ill health — Mr. Henry Sidgwick — Writes poetry — Longing for the 
 Alps — The necessary conditions of life — Speculations on life. 
 
 [The house in Norfolk Sqiiare was not a favourite with either 
 Mr. or Mrs. Symonds. They had lived so little in it, that it 
 had never acquired the atmosphere of home. They reached it 
 on August 24, 1866, and the malaise of London settled down 
 again upon Symonds, and showed itself in such remarks as 
 these — ' To some men God's gifts come like dew and sunshine ; 
 whatever good others obtain is pressed from them by upbraid- 
 ings of conscience and throes of self-condemnation and 
 anguish, of self -disdain and jealousy and discontent.' As these 
 phrases will probably indicate to those who knew him, 
 Symonds was, at this time, writing a considerable amount of 
 poetry as well as prose, and this important passage on 
 method occurs — ' When engaged on a subject it is good to 
 throw off casual jottings, and short essays, infimce species, as it 
 were, 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 syntheses, media 
 axiomata, 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
 
 1867 MANHOOD 227 
 
 process of crystallisation. No doubt this would be the most 
 vigorous and artistic way.' 
 
 The London life was varied by visits to Rugby — of which 
 there is a glowing account — and to Balliol, where, on his 
 arrival, he finds Jowett ' half asleep on two chairs in the dusk ' ; 
 with .Jowett he discusses the idea of a ' History of the Renais- 
 sance in England.' The Diary of these visits closes thus : 
 ' These swallow flights ventilate my thoughts ; and the con- 
 cussion of ideas with Arthur [SidgwickJ, Jowett, Green, adds 
 to their depth, rapidity, and freshness.'] 
 
 In ' March, 1867, at Clifton, I caught a bad cold, from 18G7. 
 which I did not recover easily. Nevertheless, we went back to 
 47 Norfolk Square. My father was so anxious about my state 
 of health — I was suffering from the chronic trouble in my 
 head, a permanent malaise and nervous sensibility, which made 
 me incapable of steady work, together with the sub-acute 
 pneumonia in the left lung — that he thought it best to send 
 me off upon a journey at the end of May. ^ly wife was 
 unable to travel, expecting her second confinement in a few 
 months. So my sister Charlotte kindly volunteered to bear 
 me company ; and very good company she was during our 
 ramblings in Normandy. 
 
 I find a collection of letters written to my wife upon this 
 tour, parts of which she copied out into a MS. book. 
 From these I mean now to make extracts. They clearly 
 indicate the state of my mind and emotion at that epoch. 
 
 RouKN, May 29, 1867. — I never really enjoy a cathedral 
 without music. It seems to set the mute hyunis of the arches 
 and the clustered piers to melody, to interpret the stories of the 
 blazoned windows, and to fill the spaces of the aisles with 
 invisible presences. Without this living accompaniment and 
 commentary, architecture seems to me cold and dead. Are the 
 harmonic ratios of form and sound really so sympathetic as 
 mutually to elucidate each other ? Or is it a matter of 
 association — ^the religious purpose and solemn character of 
 organ music tuning our mind to the proper key for compre- 
 hending sacred architecture ? 
 
 ' Autobiography. 
 
 Q2
 
 228 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 The church of St. Ouen might be ahuost called provokingly 
 perfect — a full-sized, elaborately-designed Gothic cathedral, 
 finished on one plan down to its minutest details. Some of 
 the romance of old church building is lost by this complete- 
 ness. The precise way in which it has been isolated from 
 surrounding houses, and planted at one end with pleasant trees, 
 destroys the pathos of the picturesque. Nothing is left to the 
 imagination. But, for gaining an insight into the working of 
 the mediaeval brains which planned these structures, St. Ouen 
 is invaluable. Here the veriest child can see that the spirit of 
 Gothic art is not anarchy, but symmetry and order. Only the 
 parts here forced into correspondence are almost infinite — not, 
 as in the case of Greek work, select and few. 
 
 While I am writing, the curfew is tolling over the town — a 
 fine, deep, melancholy bell — and the towers of Notre-Dame, 
 just now so rosy, are fading like the Alps at sunset into a dead 
 greyness. Like the Alps ! it does not do to think too much 
 about them. Alas, I know that health is awaiting me there if 
 only I could get to them. It is pitiable to be so much feebler 
 than I was this time last year. Where were we then ? At 
 Macugnaga, reading Sainte-Beuve's ' Causeries de Lundi,' under 
 the scarcely fledged beech boughs, within sight of melting 
 avalanches fringed by crocuses and soldanellas. 
 
 May 80. — This morning (Feast of the Ascension) we heard 
 service in three churches. There seems to be a renascence of 
 old, dry, ecclesiastical music in France, as elsewhere. It fills me 
 with infinite sadness to stand in one of these naves, and to hear 
 these reiterated adorations and supplications, and to think of 
 the hundreds and thousands of colossal temples of the past — 
 Egypt and furthest Ind, the deserts of Palmyra and Baalbec, 
 Persia and China, and the tangled forests of Mexico — not to 
 speak of Judani and Pha?nicia and Greece and Carthage and 
 Italy, nor of all the regions of the north — fruitless altars and 
 vain prayer-stations, raised to the inscrutable, unapproachable 
 God, the sphinx of Being called by a myriad names. Those 
 rites have vanished — the voices of the priests and chanting 
 choirs are silent — the barl)aric bands are mute — the prayers 
 are forgotten — the ceremonies have ceased. Only our form of
 
 1867 MANHOOD 229 
 
 worship still exists for us — for us ' the foremost nation of the 
 ^vorld' — for us who think ourselves so wise, and dream our 
 creed the final one. Our particular small faith still lives, 
 destined ere long to be merged in other equally impotent 
 attempts to reach the source of aspirations. 
 
 I do not sleep much. Below my fourth-floor window are 
 roofs of all colours, jumbled up in all ways, flowers growing 
 on the sills of dormer windows, cats asleep ; above all, the 
 cathedral and its booming bell. 
 
 Caen, May 31. — Yesterday, while we were walking in the 
 flower-market at Rouen, something brought you [his wife] 
 vindly to my mind. I saw five or six pots in one stall, holding 
 what plant, do you think ? Our great saxifrage.^ Yes, there 
 it was, with its plume of flowers and cushion of green leaves. 
 But the w^onderful wild thing had been tamed by cultivation. 
 The leaves were more numerous, and sprawled asunder ; the 
 blossoms were whiter and less fantastically thick upon the 
 sprays ; the stalk itself had a duller, greyer hue. To complete 
 the poor plant's slavery, it was trained upright along a stick, 
 which the woman who sold it called a ' tuteur.' Horrid ped- 
 agogic name. I tried to tell her of the black gorges and river 
 l)anks and windy waterfalls where we had seen it last year.^ 
 Curiously enough, there were several large tiger-lilies in bloom 
 by the side of the saxifi-age ; so that all Varallo and the Val 
 Anzasca seemed to have been tamed and travestied together in 
 in that prosy Rouen flower-stall. 
 
 If I had to choose a flower, I think I should take the 
 columbine. It is so wonderfully finished in all its details, 
 both of leaves and blossom, so graceful in carriage, so varied 
 in colour, so perfect in drawing. Then the associations I have 
 with it are many. Luini's picture at Milan, the foreground of 
 Titian's ' Bacchus and Ai-iadne ' in our gallery, the dark-brown 
 garnet-coloured beauties of San Salvadore, the white ones of 
 the Colma, the lilac flowers in Leigh Woods. 
 
 The columbine has started me on sad reflections. If there 
 were hut f)nly one strong and perfect thing in me I should f(H'l 
 
 ' Saxifrnrja }iyramidalis, of which Symonds was particularly fond. 
 - In \'ul Aii/.ascii.
 
 230 JOHN ADDINGTON SYxMONDS 1867 
 
 worthier ; I might perhaps let youth ebb away, and weakness 
 get the upper hand more contentedly ; but when I regard my 
 past life, I find so many broken arcs and no full circle : so 
 much ignoble selfishness and the folly of sentimental ideality ; 
 at the same time, such vulgarity of soul, cunning, want of 
 faith in the highest things, that I am ready to sit down and 
 cry for my futihty. I am brought very low indeed now, 
 stretching out my hands and praying that this perpetual 
 weakness of the body, and this weary mental suffering, may 
 not quench my best chance of rising to nobler things through 
 life. 
 
 Caen, June 1. — This is a pretty little place, more homely 
 and friendly than Eouen, with several interesting churches. 
 Caen stone is of a pure rich white— in tone and colour like our 
 Bath stone, but harder in grain. It takes a pleasant mellowing 
 with age, so that the houses are not so dead-grey as those of 
 Bath. The town, too, is planted with avenues of limes just 
 coming into flower, which clasp the grim Norman turrets in 
 greenery and fragrance. 
 
 It seems almost incredible that the Normans, the Germans, 
 and the Italians — to omit other nations, Flemish, Spanish, &c. 
 — ^should have started from Romanesque as their common 
 point, and have run a parallel course upon the same lines to 
 similar conclusions, during the same period of time. What 
 Ave call the Gothic style, emerging from the Romanesque, 
 seems to have been developed independently by each people, 
 obeying one law of growth, and to have passed through the 
 same successive stages, in each case exhibiting the specific 
 genius of the race, together with the general characteristics of 
 the type. It would be interesting to analyse this matter in 
 detail, and to discover, if that were possible, what caused this 
 simultaneous progress from the Early Pointed to the Decorative 
 manner, and from the Decorative to the Decadent, until the 
 style was thoroughly worked out. Perhaps the last stage in 
 the evolution of Gothic would be the most instructive in its 
 bearing upon national character. We might select the formal 
 cross-bars and perpendicular lines of St. Mary Redclyfie, or 
 the flattened roof of King's College Chapel, the sinuous and
 
 1867 MANHOOD 231 
 
 flalne-like traceries of the fagade of Notre-Dame at Rouen, the 
 exquisitely graceful classic foliage of Siena, the thorny intricacies 
 of the Niirnberg Lorenz-Kirche, the vicious scrolls and writhing 
 lines of the to\YU-halls at Ghent and Louvain. I am sure that 
 the last chapter in the history of Gothic architecture, arrived 
 at in each case upon a line of parallel progression, in each 
 inevitable, and determined by the previous stages of the art, 
 reveals a deeply-rooted national quality of genius : English 
 prosiness and common-sense — French subtlety and plasticity 
 — Italian feeling for decorative beauty and the classic past — 
 German grotesqueness and idealising symbolism — Belgian 
 bourgeoisie and prosperous comfort. But this would involve 
 long studies, and technical acquirements, philosophical analysis. 
 I cannot hope to undertake it. I must content myself with 
 throwing out an apcrcu. 
 
 I do not feel as though I knew enough about the Normans, 
 or had enough sympathy with what I do know, properly to 
 appreciate the rude vigour and pride of strength in their great 
 churches hei-e. The forms of Romanesque in Italy— Lombard 
 fa(;ades, Tuscan pilastered rows of shallow galleries ascen'ling 
 to a peak, slumberous memories of decadent Papal and rudi 
 mentary Christian culture blent upon the Adriatic coast, mosaics 
 and marble panellings — they seem to me nearer than these 
 spruce, perfectly correct, humanly repellent structures, which, 
 in an odd sort of way, remind me of the Prussian Government. 
 
 St. Etienne is very simple. Its barren towers are so grand, 
 the interior is so impressive, that I am subdued by the exhibi- 
 tion of pure mental force and character. Charm has not to be 
 demanded. We feel that the sons of the old Norsemen knew 
 not the graces, or else that they refused to pay them homage. 
 The tale of the Niblungs, the story of Gudrun, survive in those 
 churches. Humanity is left to freeze and suiter, or to expand, 
 acc(jrding as it can — but mostly in a tragic way — among such 
 art surroundings ; just as it does amid bleak unsympathetic 
 nature. 
 
 What most attracted me at St. Etienne was the structure 
 of th(; towers ; tail, fearless, s(iuare towers surmounted by 
 beautifully shaped pyramids, and flanked with smaller turrets
 
 232 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 of the same spiry form. This ground idea, which is feebly 
 carried out in our Oxford Cathedral, serves for a distinctive 
 mark of the Caen churches. 
 
 Bayeux, June 2.— ^Ye came here to see the tapestry and 
 the cathedral. We have seen them. One cathedral does not 
 differ much from another, except to the antiquary. I hope I 
 shall never come to say that one mountain does not differ much 
 from another, except to the geologist. Nature increases, art 
 diminishes, as we grow older. 
 
 I cannot guess what so subtle poison it is that has passed 
 imperceptibly into me, and sucks out all my force. It is 
 terrible to face the prospect of a languid inadequate Hfe of 
 enforced idleness. You speak about my becoming, after all, 
 a strong man. That may be. It may even be that I shall 
 strangle ambition in myself, give up the desire to do and be 
 something, acquiesce in letting the years shp by in peace until 
 the peace of death comes. At present I am plagued by the 
 constant desire to use my brains for work, to store up knowledge 
 for future writings — baffled by the terrible incapacity of a 
 naturally weak constitution, and health broken by mismanage- 
 ment. I am twenty-six years of age this summer ; I have for 
 all intents and purposes been idle during the last three years, 
 those years in which I ought to have acquired stores of useful 
 knowledge ; and my enforced idleness has been an idleness of 
 pain and illness. Are we to look forward to endless ' peregrini- 
 ties,' and the Hngering death of me after some few years more 
 of flitting to and fro consumptively ? 
 
 St. Lo, June 3. — I did not do Bayeux justice. On a 
 second visit to the cathedral, by dint of staying there in quiet 
 for two hours, I harmonised my mind to its severe and heaven- 
 aspiring beauty. This church has the bloom and freshness of 
 adolescence ; the strength of the old Norman with the delicacy 
 and luxuriant lovehness of early Gothic. The huge round 
 arches of the nave are adorned with diapers and traceries, not 
 yet formed into flowers or foliage, but rich like figured 
 brocades. The transept and the choir expand into the beauty 
 of clustered columns, soaring to a vast height, and feathering 
 with fantastic leafage, while the long pointed windows of
 
 1867 MANHOOD 233 
 
 clerestory and chapel hold wheels, cut into hexagons and 
 quatrefoils by pure crisp cusps, the very models of expanded 
 summer blossoms. 
 
 Of all the places I have seen this journey, St. Lo appears 
 to me most capable of picturesque description. It stands on a 
 hill of solid grey rock overhanging the Vire, a stream not 
 unlike our Avon, which winds through wooded slopes of dark 
 red ironstone and limestone, curving a gentle course towards 
 the open plains and the not far distant sea. The valley, the 
 river, the woods, the gardens on the hill-slopes, and the richly- 
 meadowed land beyond, can all be surveyed from the cathedral 
 square. 
 
 This Val de Vire was one of the most favoured regions of 
 old Normandy. Here a local poetry flourished, not altogether 
 unlike that of the Provencals, a lyric poetry of spring and love 
 and flowers, with interludes of martial clangour. For 
 England was close at hand. You hear plenty about the 
 Enghsh in the songs of Val de Vire. 
 
 I have bought a collection of fourteenth and fifteenth 
 century songs of this country, the Cotentin and Val de Vire. 
 If, after reading them, I find they have sufficient substance, 
 I may write something about the town and its poets. 
 
 June 3. — In Coutances I have at last received a true and 
 profound impression from architecture. The cathedral is 
 superb; moreover, it is not 'swept and garnished,' but still 
 remains in its time-honoured state of cobwebs, dust, and green 
 mildew. Tlie windows are labyrinths of blue and ciimson, 
 not tapestried in gigantic pictures like the clerestories of 
 Rheims, but broken into jewellery and sparks of passionate dyed 
 flame. This is the kind of glass I love. There is some of the 
 same sort at Straslnn-g. It is finer even than the glowing 
 paradise of Floi-entine rose-windows, the one at S. Maria 
 Novella, you remember. 
 
 A citiz(!n of Coutances gave a large garden on i\\v. bill-slope 
 to his townsfolk. It is biid out in terraces and walks. Before 
 wo found it out, we met two old women sitting on tlie steps of 
 a church and gazing across the house roofs to the lands below. 
 Tlioy had a young man with them, slender and graceful, witli
 
 234 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 a wistful look in his grey eyes, as though they were sweeping 
 the horizon in search of something sweet and far away he had 
 not yet discovered. Charlotte asked them where the public 
 garden was. They rose at once to show us the way, and the 
 young man sauntered at their side, half bold, half shy. A 
 singularly magnetic youth, mth a force in him 'eligible to 
 break forth,' and only too ready to do so. The simplicity of 
 the two old women, in their prim white caps and blue check 
 gowns, formed a curious contrast to the passionate suppression 
 of the boy, alert for adventures. I hummed to myself ' Non 
 so piu cosa son, cosa faccio.' They grinned from ear to ear. 
 He, their son and nephew, as it turned out, kept appealing to 
 me with his eyes, and asking mutely whether I too did not 
 want something more than this. It was pleasant to see so 
 much enjoyment of the simplest things in the old women, such 
 gaiety and good humour, such kindly artless manners. Yet 
 I fancy that they have their troubles. The mother told me she 
 had only come to live in Coutances since la derniere St-Michel. 
 Her husband was an old man of seventy-five ; and her son had 
 a fancy for the town, he was a young man, a fils unique, and 
 this was his pleasure. Her sister still lived in the country. 
 She became so sad at this point, and the lad lowered so dis- 
 dainfully, that I changed the subject. However, I should have 
 liked to know more about him. He must have a story ; for 
 his manners were excellent, and he knew some English, and 
 his intelligence in seizing the nuance of what one said was 
 perfect. These meetings with passing strangers, these 
 magnetisms of one indifferent person by another, are among 
 the strangest things in life. Well, when the conversation 
 flagged between Charlotte and me and the old women, one of 
 them would say, ' Ah, quelle heureuse rencontre ! Nous nous 
 etions la assises sur les marches de I'eglise. Nous nous 
 attendions a rien. Et voila que vous etes venus. N'est-ce 
 pas, Francois ? ' And Francois only smiled a little sadly. 
 I, for my part, felt how idiotically human life is made. 
 Charlotte delighted in the kindly, hale, hearty, sweet-tempered, 
 plain-featured, innocent, hospitable, elderly old ladies. They 
 liked the amusement of walking with two English tourists.
 
 1867 MANHOOD 235 
 
 But the young man and 1, we wanted to be comrades, if only 
 for a day or two in passing — he to hear of my life, I of his. 
 And things are so arranged that this may not be, though I 
 cannot, for the soul of me, see why they should not be. 
 
 AvRANCHES, June 4. — We have had a day of diligences. 
 This morning we left Coutances in the interieure of a fusty old 
 omnibus, which jolted us to Grouville — a curious port, built 
 upon a mass of black granite projecting into the sea like a 
 formless Monaco. The houses are of grey granite and black 
 slate, sometimes whitened. That is all I remember of 
 Grouville. Yet I carried another memory away, a thought 
 rather than a recollection. It was a dreamy fancy of the 
 many young men who have set forth from this port for distant 
 voyages, for the fisheries, for Iceland perhaps, leaving their 
 mothers and their sweethearts behind them, and some of them 
 returnina: never, their beautiful strong bodies and Avhite faces 
 tossed to sleep on unfamiliar waves — the vast water-ways of 
 the monstrous world, which Grouville surveys unmoved from 
 her station on the sea-commanding promontory.' 
 
 I hope that this travelling does me good. I have more 
 of animal spirits than I had. But the least noise keeps me 
 awake, and we live in the midst of diligences. These paltry 
 country places are more full of foolish bustle than London 
 or Paris. Perhaps one attends to it more here. Perhaps it 
 would be better for me if I could fraternise with the people, 
 drink with them, and go to bed narcotised. The life of a mere 
 brain-being is bad. I do not touch, or else I shrink from the 
 coarse huma,n nature round me. Yet I cannot say how I long 
 to meet with a man, a comrade, the first face and hands 
 responsive to my own. Why ? I do not know. I hate the 
 sophistication of my existence, the being penned up in a cage 
 of archioology and literary picture-making. All this has 
 nothing to do with the ties, inviolably sacred, which bind me 
 to my home, and make me feel my centre theie in you, 
 
 AvRANCHES, June 5. — You forecast the future far too 
 much. For all the great occurrences of life i a.m strong 
 enough ; it is for the little things, the daily cnnibi of my tinsd 
 
 ' Peclieur d^Islaiule lia<l not hucii puhlisliod tlicii.
 
 236 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 brain and eyes, the helplessness and inability engendered by 
 my state of health, that I feel myself feeble. We ought not 
 to sit down like the German girl in the cellar, watching the 
 hatchet which might some day fall on her, forgetting the ale 
 that kept running from the cask. 
 
 No one is happy who has not a deep firm faith in some 
 ideal far beyond this world, in some law of majesty, beauty, 
 goodness, harmony, superior to the apparent meanness, ugliness, 
 evil discord of the present dispensation. How diihcult it is to 
 live the life of the spirit thoroughly, to be permanently 
 interested in the eternal things, the durable relations. This is 
 why so many of us are not happy. I have a great deal of 
 faith in my soul, vague, not reduced to a creed. But what I 
 have sustains me in the obscuration of my energies. To this 
 I owe my happy moments — to the support I draw from nature, 
 books, and art — the imperishable thoughts of men, the ever- 
 lasting mysteries and glories of the world — finally from that, 
 whatever that is, which underlies all this, and is the real 
 reality, the truth and unity of the whole. Those who are not 
 ' tenoned and morticed ' upon something indestructible, must 
 be rendered wretched by the changefulness and barrenness of 
 daily life. They may not know exactly that they are poor and 
 miserable. Or they feel it vaguely, like the sullen Roman 
 nobles, so magnificently painted for us by Lucretius, hurrying 
 from one palace to another to escape the gloom of boredom. 
 It is wonderful that we are at all contented with the transitory 
 interests and trivial occupations which fill up the inexorable 
 years — each year leading us, at so short a distance, to the 
 bourne of death, and after death, if anything, then either 
 endless change or continuity of eternal being. In either case 
 the soul needs a refuge from the things that pass like a show, 
 to some reality above them and beneath them. This I feel 
 with all the force I have. The all but mortal blow which 
 prostrated me three years ago, since when I have been like a 
 clock suddenly stopped, marking the time with moving fingers 
 no more, has taught me so much. 
 
 The misery of scepticism, of intellectual doubt, of wordliness, 
 of mental indolence, and moral inactivity, consists in this —
 
 1867 MANHOOD 237 
 
 that men have to suffer cares, ill-health, ennui, and often the 
 greater evils of life, without a calming prospect, without any 
 hope that the wrong will be made right, the broken pieces 
 joined into a perfect whole hereafter. I verily believe that a 
 robust vice, an energetic state of sinning, if it inspires 
 confidence in some reality, is better than the condition of 
 negation. If the world is to live without faith and to become 
 conscious of the vanity of things — that is, if men take to 
 seriously thinking upon the facts of this life without a religious 
 trust in God — a simultaneous suicide might almost be expected. 
 What people call pessimism — the philosophy of Schopenhauer, 
 for example — implies and virtually professes this conclusion. 
 
 Is it the misfortune or the fault of folk in this age that 
 they are so often denuded of belief in God — I mean of the 
 personal and vividly-felt God of Christianity? No one can 
 really doubt that some God animates the world. ' Quis Deus 
 incertum : est Deus.' I have no living God in constant rela- 
 tion to myself, no father, no future host and friend and master 
 in the immortal houses. At times this very disbelief appears 
 to me as an illumination and a martyrdom, because I know 
 that it has not been brought upon me by the desire to elude 
 the law of God, and because it is actually painful. At other 
 times I cannot maintain that attitude, when I consider how 
 poor the purposes of my life, what difficulty I find in rising 
 above trivial thoughts and passions. The ideal seems so far 
 away from me. Compared with other people, I may not appear 
 as sordid as I feel ; but every man ought to compare himself 
 with what he might be, with his own best self , before bethinks 
 of applying the standard of other people. 
 
 In these difficulties I fall back on a kind of stoical 
 mysticism — on the prayer of Clcanthi^s, the Proem to Goethe's 
 ' Gott und Welt,' the phrase of Faust, ' Entbehren sollst du, 
 sollst entbehren,' the almost brutal optimism of Walt Whit- 
 wwm. I cry to the Cosmos, ' Though thou slay me, yet will 1 
 trust in the(!.' Can a i-eligion Ite constructed out of tliese 
 olciiients ? Not a tangil)le one, ))erliaps, notliiiig com- 
 iniuiical)l(! to another lieart. But a religious mood of mind may 
 he engendered sufficient for tlic purpose of living not ignolily.
 
 238 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 I have no will to sprawl contentedly, or the reverse, like 
 the common herd and children. You shall see me die or 
 become idiotic through ennui or soul-sickness first. It is not 
 good for men to sprawl. Let us say : I 
 
 ' Je souffre ; il est trop tard ; le monde s'est fait vieux, 
 Une immense esperance a traverse la terre ; 
 Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.' 
 
 Let us say this and make the best of it we can. 
 
 You and I together must be strong in the world ; be it 
 what it is to be for us — -or if we are weak, we are still together. 
 I clench my fists, and refuse to be beaten. I gather strength 
 in myself, when flung down to the lowest, and find wings in 
 the futility of my nature. Pain, grief, despair raise men above 
 the condition of dumb creatures and infants. There is a 
 dignity in endurance. 
 
 Do not imagine that I am writing all this like a sermon on 
 commonplaces. I am feeling it very intensely. For to-day 
 has disappointed me much. I thought I was getting stronger. 
 But two hours of real interest and keen attention at the 
 Mont St. Michel brought back my worst brain-symptoms. 
 I sat for half-an-hour on the steps of the monastery, quite 
 stunned with mere nervous annihilation, staring at the stone- 
 crop, hyssops, and lichens ; and the drive back to Avranches 
 was very doleful. Grievous to have the very mainspring of all 
 sensations and thoughts broken. 
 
 A\'RANCHES, Jnne 6. — It was well that we went to Mont 
 St. Michel yesterday. To-day the rain descends in deluges, 
 and I shall employ my time in writing an account of one of 
 the most impressive places I have ever visited. I am afraid 
 that I cannot do justice to my own impressions. The wretched- 
 ness of yesterday still lasts, though it has abated more quickly 
 than I could have hoped for in London. 
 
 This letter has been the work of a long wet day. Tired as 
 I am, I feel the better for writing myself out. Had I not 
 written, the details of the Mount would have vanished from my 
 memory after some years. Nothing would have remained but 
 
 I
 
 1867 MANHOOD 239 
 
 the moment of pain when I sat exhausted on those granite 
 steps, and stared at the stonecrop, after trying to comprehend 
 and feel too much. What I have done by writing has only this 
 value — that I have been talking to you, and resisting my 
 besetting weakness. We must make the machine of the brain 
 go. It does not do to let it stop. Whatever happens, energise — 
 even if the result be only like a diluted page of Murray's 
 Handbook. This, by the way, 1 have not with me ; and what 
 I have said about Mont St. Michel is probably wrong in a 
 multitude of details. ' Mir ist's gleich,' as the Germans say. 
 Clumsily, heavily, I have recorded my impression, and put 
 pressure upon myself. 
 
 Chaktres, Jitne 9. — It is a blessing to be fond of books. 
 They are a resource and a relief when all else fails. I wish 
 you understood what it is to make a friend of such a book 
 as the ' Divine Comedy.' Nature is more refreshing ; but you 
 cannot always have recourse to her consolations. I repeat 
 what I said before, that nature becomes more to me and art 
 less. This is the secret of Walt Whitman's influence over my 
 mind. I do not quite know what you mean by art requiring 
 an effort. All great things make demands upon our sympathies 
 and our intelligence : none more than grand landscape, which, I 
 believe, requires a long and patient apprenticeship for'its compre- 
 hension. So do great characters, great statues, great buildings, 
 great symphonies, great pictures. I suppose it was the effort 
 you speak about which broke me down at Mont St. Michel. 
 
 ' We must, if I come to Hastings, try to sit together by the 
 sea and be quiet.' 
 
 Un the whole, I returned to England worse than I went. 
 Such a fortnight was enough to fatigue any one. Not only did 
 I try to feel and understand eveiything I saw, but I scrutinised 
 niy own soul at every spare moment. 
 
 After a short visit to Hastings, whei'e we stayed until 
 June 28, we returned to London, and lived at 47 Norfolk 
 Square. I could not shake the lung-mischief or the brain- 
 weariness off; but grew worse and worse during the hot weeks, 
 panting continually to be in Switzerland.
 
 240 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 Henry Sidgwick, whose acquaintance I had recently made, 
 was also staying in London, pliilosophising, going to spiritualistic 
 seances, and trying to support himself (for an experiment) on 
 the minimum of daily outlay. Our acquaintance ripened 
 rapidly into a deep and close friendship, which has been to me 
 of inestimable value during the last twenty-two years. It 
 would be difficult to say how much I owe to the rarely noble 
 character, the wisdom, the mental originality, the inexhaustible 
 sympathy and kindness of this most remarkable man. 
 
 This summer and the year that followed were of such 
 importance in my life, that I must relate the incidents in some 
 detail, and illustrate them by extracts from note-books and 
 letters in my possession. 
 
 I began writing poetry again during the hot summer 
 weather. The second half of ' John Mordan,' ' Diego,' ' Love 
 and Music,' ' The Headmaster,' together with a great number 
 of dithyrambic pieces in the style of Walt Whitman, belong to 
 those months. Yet I find myself constantly doubting my OAvn 
 literary faculties. 
 
 ' Art is very long. I have not yet vigour of nerve enough 
 to give to composition that patient and incessant application 
 which results in form. I have the molten fluid in my soul ; 
 but the strength to fashion the mould for it is wanting.' 
 
 ' Whether I am a poet or not, I am haunted by certain 
 situations and moral tragedies which demand expression from 
 me. I suppose that this arises from what I have myself 
 suffered in the past — emotional distress that has indelibly 
 impressed my nature, and which reproduces itself in the shape 
 of dreams or dreamlike images. Long ago I crushed the 
 tendency to write these situations into poetry, as being injurious 
 to my health of mind and body. Besides, I had no belief in 
 my artistic faculty. Yet, for all this, the tendency to do so 
 remains and gathers force ; the ideas have never left my mind, 
 but have acquired distinctness and durability with my growth.' 
 
 ' There is a passive and an active imagination. The one 
 creates, the other sympathises. The one makes new things for 
 the world, the other appropriates whatever has been made, 
 informing the past with something of fresh life. To men who
 
 1867 MANHOOD 241 
 
 are not in a true sense artists, it is a solace thus to retrace the 
 history of the world. Like Diirer's 'Melancholy,' they sit 
 brooding, their minds a mirror, their wings down-drooping, 
 their arms sinewless, their back unbraced.' 
 
 No wonder I grew weaker and more ill. It was my one 
 craving to be off to Switzerland. Instinct told me I should 
 regain health there ; for since those weeks I passed at Miirren, 
 in the year 1863, 1 had never failed to feel a peculiar well-being 
 among the mountains. This craving expressed itself in dithy- 
 rambic incoherent prose. 
 
 ' In London, when I rise in the morning, and go to bed 
 at night ; walking the streets and squares, deafened by the 
 roar and dazzled by their movement ; when I pace the hot hard 
 flags, or sit beneath the blackened branches of the trees ; when 
 the bricks at night give out their stifling odours, and the 
 breathless dawn goes forth through over-burdened air ; when 
 the passing crowds confuse me, and wretched faces, under wet 
 lamps, make me sick ; when the canopy of tawny smoke is 
 stretched all night above the noise and sin and worry of the 
 house-roofs ; but mostly while I lie awake and listen to my 
 laboured breathing — the thunder of the town is heard outside, 
 the gaslight slants sideways through the window-chink, there 
 is quarrelling and singing in a public-house hard by. But 
 before daybreak all is still, and the leaden-hearted morning, 
 sick and sorry, climbs the jaded sky — then, mostly then, do I fly 
 away on wings of thought to Switzerland. In my yearning I 
 exclaim : " Now creeps the rose of dawning down the snows of 
 Monte Rosa. A solitary watchman rings the dawn bell in he 
 church tower. Light mist lies along the flowers and streams 
 — the glacier rills have not begun to flow. Silently the glory 
 of the sunrise floods the snowfields ; the blue behind them 
 glows into violet ; the rose-bloom rises to gold, and, after gold, 
 the satt'ron and the white light of the morning come." I turn 
 on iny pillow and clasp my hands, but shed no tears, and find 
 no rest. It is of no use. I try to put these thoughts aside, 
 but they come crowding back again. " In the majesty and 
 simplicity of the high mountains tbcre is peace. The mowers 
 go to their labour o\er shadowy lawns. The goat-herds and 
 
 u
 
 242 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 the cow-hercls, who have seen the stars fade through the roof- 
 chinks of their chalets, lead their flocks afield. The dews dry 
 upon the flowers, the rills begin to trickle, from the valley rise 
 up fleecy mists and melt into the air." Then I remind myself 
 that the mountains are not always so idyllic, and tha I have 
 not always been happy or at rest among them. " Well am I 
 reminded of these things. I have not forgotten the misery of 
 Engelberg, the anguish on the Briinli, the self-abandonment 
 of grief at Unterseen. Pitiless are the everlasting hills in their 
 unsympathetic sunlight and sarcastic splendour, their imperial 
 immobility, inaccessibility, indifference to life, their cruelty 
 and wastefulness and never-ending dying. Inexorable are they 
 as nature's laws. The stars at night are not more cold, the 
 earth's rotation is not less friendly." And so I vainly interpose 
 a little censure of my own ideal. It is of no use. I love the 
 mountains as I love the majesty of justice. I adore God through 
 them, and feel near to Him among them. I cannot breathe in 
 this city.' 
 
 I very rightly connected my present discomfort with past 
 experience of sorrow and repression. But I did not know how 
 to cure myself. Perhaps I could not just then have cured 
 myself in any way except the way I wanted — change of scene, 
 return to the. vital Alpine atmosphere. I find myself writing 
 thus to Henry Sidgwick : 
 
 ' Now that you are gone, and I am not to see you again 
 until we meet in the dim distance of the Riviera, I feel that 
 much which I have told you about myself must seem painful. 
 My past life has been painful in many ways, and I bear in my 
 body the marks of what I have suffered. With you, with my 
 wife, with friends like Arthur and Graham, or when I am 
 writing verses, I can treat those troubles of memory with 
 cheerfulness. But at times, when my nervous light burns low 
 in solitude, then the shadows of the past gather round, and I 
 feel that life itself is darkened. Oppressed thus, I am often 
 numb and callous ; all virtue seems to have gone out of me, 
 the spring of life to have faded, its bloom to have been rudely 
 rubbed away. I dread that art and poetry and nature are 
 unable to do more for what Dante, with terrible truth, called
 
 1867 MAMIUUD 243 
 
 "Li mal protesi nervi." These darknesses, which Arthur calls 
 my depression fits, assail me in splendid scenery, among pictures 
 and statues, wherever, in fact, I ought to enjoy most and be 
 viost alive. It is only the intercourse of friends which does me 
 really any good.' 
 
 Large portions of these diaries and note-books from which 
 I am now quoting, consist of criticisms, reflections upon art, 
 rehgion, morals, proving that, despite of so much physical and 
 mental vialaise, I was forming my own mind. 
 
 '"Im Ganzen Guten Schonen resolut zu leben," " To me 
 to live is Christ, and to die is gain." How much simpler is the 
 latter phrase ! It looks like a motto for children. But how 
 much larger, really sounder is the former. It is large as the 
 world, a motto for adult souls. We cannot in this aa:e believe 
 that St. Paul's utterance is the whole truth. We cannot burn 
 our books like the Ephesians ; we ought not probably to sell 
 our goods and give to the poor. Those were impulses of 
 incipient faith. We have now to co-ordinate ourselves to what 
 is, and accept the teaching of the ages.' 
 
 ' What is left for us modern men ? We cannot be Greek 
 now. The ages and the seasons of humanity do not repeat 
 themselves. The cypress of knowledge springs, and withers 
 when it comes in sight of Troy ; the cypress of pleasure like- 
 wise, if it has not died already at the root of cankering 
 Calvinism ; the cypress of religion is tottering, the axe is laid 
 close to its venerable stem. What is left ? Science, for those 
 who are scientific. Art, for artists ; and all literary men are 
 artists in a way. But Science falls not to the lot of all. Art 
 is Jiardly worth pursuing now, so bad are the times we live 
 in for its exercise, so faulty our ideas, so far more excellent the 
 cU'ar Ijright atmosphere of antifjue Hellas. What, then, is 
 left"? Hasheesh, 1 think; hasheesh, of one sort or another. 
 We can dull the pangs of the present by living the past again 
 in rtveries or learned studies, by illusions of the fancy and a 
 life of self-indulgent dreaming. Take down the perfumed 
 acrolls ; open, unroll, peruse, digest, intoxicate your spirit with 
 the flavour. Ijcihold, there is the Athens of Plato in your 
 narcotic visions ; Buddha and his anchorites appear ; the 
 
 ji 2
 
 -44 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 raptures of St. Francis, and the fire-oblations of St. Dominic ; 
 the phantasms of mythologies, the birth-throes of religions, 
 the neurotism of chivalry, the passion of past poems ; all pass 
 before you in your Maya-world of hasheesh, which is criticism. 
 And Music ? Ah, that is the best anodyne of all. 13ut, alas, 
 not even slumbers of the critic and dreams of the music-lover 
 are undisturbed by anguish. The world weighs on us. Nature 
 and conscience cry : " Work, while it is yet day ; the night 
 Cometh when no man can work." Heaven goads us with 
 infinity of secrets and torments of innumerable stars. The 
 spirit thrills us with its chidiugs. Hasheesh is good for a 
 se&son, /ante de mieux. But this is no solution of the problem. 
 Criticism, study, history, artistic pleasure will not satisfy the 
 soul. " Therefore to whom turn I but to thee the ineflable 
 name?" Ever onward toward infinity I voyage, demanding 
 only what is permanent, imperishable in the world of 
 reality.' 
 
 ' Drudgery, too, is a kind of goddess, worthy of worship for 
 the gifts she gives ungrudgingly. A Cinderella-sister of Semnai 
 Theai is she, clad in homespun, occupied with saucepans, 
 sweeping up man's habitation, a besom in her horny hands. 
 She is accessible, and always to be found. The anodyne of 
 fatigue is in the greasy leather wallet at her girdle. All 
 men should pay vows at her shrine, else they will surely 
 suffer. 
 
 ' I wonder what morality is ; whether eternal justice exists, 
 immutable right and wrong, or whether law and custom rule the 
 world of humanity, evolved for social convenience from primal 
 savagery. I am led in my actions by impulse, admiration, 
 regard for the opinion of my fellows, fear of consequences, 
 desire for what in moments of happiness I have recognised as 
 beautiful, dislike of what is vile, mistrust of low aiud impious 
 men, but never by fixed principles. I do not know what these 
 are, and I very much doubt whether any one is guided by them. 
 I pardon a vice for its sister virtue's sake. I feel coldly toward 
 a \-irtue because of its stolid insipidity.'
 
 1867 245 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 MANHOOD — A SPECULATIVE CRISIS 
 
 Birth of second child— Leaves Norfolk Square — The speculative Abyss — 
 On Music, to Mr. Henry Sidgwick — Goes abroad- Gliou Provence — 
 The Riviera — At Cannes — On writing poetry — On Eichardson and 
 Balzac — Misery at Cannes — A crisis — Journey to Corsica — Adven- 
 tures — Bologna to Venice — On Tennyson's ' Lucretius ' — On Scepti- 
 cism — Returns home — Settles at 7 Victoria Square, Clifton. 
 
 [On the 30th of July 1867 a second daughter Avas born, and 
 soon afterwards the Symondses left London, never to return 
 to 47 Norfolk Square for residence. 
 
 The fascination of the Absolute, the way in which Symonds 
 was pressing forward to the verge of speculative possibilities, 
 is indicated in the following extracts from his letters :] 
 
 ' 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 is the glacial region of the 
 soul, the death of all that warms or makes to move, the 
 absolute indifiVirence 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 - Init such a message as makes me feel what 
 are the sohtudes of the woml) and of the grave. No doubt 
 this state is — of the nerves — morliid ; but what does it not 
 reveal to me of the uncoloured, universal I ? ' 
 
 [Here the emotional side of this speculative audacity seems 
 to be expressed in language which we might liavc looked for 
 
 ' To Arthur Sidgwick. 47 Norfolk Square, Nov. IH, 18(5(3.
 
 246 JOHN ADDINCiTON SYMONDS 18b7 
 
 in the mouth of a meclifBval mystic, a Tauler or an Eckhart ; 
 the fascination of the abyss, ' I'abysme qui abysme en desabys- 
 mant,' is acknowledged. 
 
 On the other hand, the intellectual aspect of this same 
 emotion appears in the following letter to Mr. Henry 
 Sidgwick :j 
 
 ' 1 1 am not sure what you mean about the " feeble failure " 
 of the man who is in advance of his age. To be a Moses upon 
 Pisgah is not a "feeble failure." Nay, it is about the best 
 thing which one who believes in progress can at this moment 
 hope for. At all events, I feel, let us not acquiesce in anything 
 but Wholes ; let us feebly gasp, or powerfully bear, displaying 
 strength in our weakness ; until the Whole is made clear to 
 us. If it never is in this life revealed, n'imjMrte. There are 
 plenty more men to come, and nature is prodigal of her dear 
 ones ; " And Avhat is our failure here but a triumph's evidence, 
 for the fulness of the days ? " as Browning says. 
 
 ' By the way, the poem from which I have just quoted, 
 contains a line which applies to what I feel about Vcrsdhnung. 
 He makes Abt Vogler exclaim, "The rest may reason and 
 welcome, 'tis we musicians know." When I thought over 
 works of art which have Versohnung, I came back and back 
 again to music. After reading a tragedy, or experiencing some 
 mental conflict, or reflecting on the onisercs of the commonplace 
 and the miseries of an agitated existence, I feel a great symphony 
 or an organ voluntary can alone present the perfect reconcilia- 
 tion. "Where words end music begins " is a proverb, never 
 more true than in this application. The next thing to it, as 
 a means of expressing Versohnung, is nature — the wet, tired, 
 calm, clear skies and woods, and rocks and rivers after a 
 tempestuous day. 
 
 ' The truest Versohnung in art I know is to be found in 
 Beethoven's C Minor Symphony. There he first posits all the 
 contradiction of passions, aspirations, and sorrows, then com- 
 bines them without losing their separate individualities ; but 
 so transfiguring them that the termination is triumph ; the 
 
 ' To H. Sidgwick. 47 Norfolk Square, Aug. 22, 1867.
 
 l.<67 MANHOOD 247 
 
 victory and majesty of the soul are wrought out of its defeats 
 and humiliations. Music alone can do this. 
 
 ' Milton has given us a Vcrsohnttug in " Samson Agonistes." 
 The last chorus is very grand. But what the world desiderates 
 now is not a concluding strophe of sublime resignation, but 
 rather a trilogy, whereof the whole third part shall exhibit 
 " the height, the space, the gloom, the glory," of ultimate final and 
 perfect Ku^a/io-t?. And this as yet, I repeat, is only to be found 
 in the C Minor Symphony, Music's chef (Vceuvre.' 
 
 On ' the 4th of September, accompanied by Janet and her 
 nurse and our man-servant James, we crossed the Channel, 
 and went to sleep at Melun. During the night there, being 
 unable to rest, I wrote the great part of a poem on Beethoven, 
 called * A Violin Improvisation.' - From Melun we proceeded 
 to Dijon, and on the descent into the town I noticed, just 
 before sunset, what I had only once or t\\dce seen before, 
 prismatic colours very faint and delicately graduated on the 
 cirrus clouds above the sun. Their light and twisted strata 
 shone like pearl-shells, while the clouds around were white 
 upon a bright blue sky. On the 7th we entered Switzerland. 
 It was a good time for tired brain, sore eyes, and injured lungs. 
 
 [The themes of the two letters just quoted, mysticism and 
 music, are resumed in his letters to his friends.] 
 
 ' Your -^ squirrel moods gratify me immensely, for then, 
 hke .laques, you are full of matter. My obliteration is pro- 
 ceeding quickly. There are four oi/cctu KaKo. from which I 
 habitually suffer in the flesh — overworn nerves, weak eyes, 
 delicate lungs, and a peculiar derangement of the digestive 
 organs, whicli affects more subtle parts of the economy. All 
 these are in a bimch upon me now, so that rest and beauty 
 have but little meaning, and hke the happy man in Aristotle, 
 my chance of noble action consists in maintaining serenity 
 amid a crowd of evils. I do not walk, and I cannot enjoy life. 
 Yet for nil this I scarcely think I would exchange with 
 
 ' Autobiof-aapliy. - rublished in ' New and Old.' 
 
 ' To H. Sidgwick. lligi Vaudois, Hept. 20, 1807.
 
 248 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 whose health, fiihiess and vigour both of mind and frame, are 
 beautiful. I do not know how this is. I am far from bein» 
 hectically fond of suffering and jDrivation. I have, in some 
 ways, had, and have, too much. Nor am I bitterly con- 
 temptuous. But it seems to me quite impossible to wish to 
 be better off than I am in respect of mere circumstance. I 
 feel my own to be one definite human situation, and am 
 satisfied. It is only when the thought of a very early death 
 occurs to me that I feel regretful. I have seen so Httle into 
 the nature of anything here — I am so utterly bUnd to every- 
 thing hereafter — love and life have so many flowers for me 
 that I have not yet mortified myself into recognising a possible 
 early death as part of this human situation, which I would 
 not exchange. I hate diffusing the scent of the charnel. I 
 am doing it, however, in this letter. 
 
 ' It is surprising what calm there is in suffering. After 
 a time it becomes an angel and a companion. I do not marvel 
 at the mystics enamoured of their scourge and sackcloth, 
 especially as they had heaven in view and Christ to suffer for. 
 My open blisters and wakeful nights cannot be reckoned to 
 salvation, nor rise like a sweet savour to the cross. Yet they 
 consecrate and tranquillise. 
 
 ' It is curious you should have thought of Beethoven. Our 
 ideas coincide, for I make Beethoven triumph in transcendental 
 faith. At first he resists the invitation of the Muse, then she 
 seizes him, and the strokes of fate fall in massive chords. 
 These yield to hidden recollections, which lead to rapid and 
 ecstatic wanderings, broken by a sudden return of purely young 
 and sensual pleasure — the delight of youth in woods. Here 
 memory stirs the sense of present privation ; the lonehness of 
 deafness broods upon him, and his music groans. But the 
 soul rears her crest again, and finds in grief the chariot for 
 reaching heaven ; the artist recognises in himself the hiero- 
 phant of all the mysteries of human woe, and is content. 
 Then I break his soHloquy abruptly. A few lines at the end 
 describe how, as he improvised, his jangled vioHn made dis- 
 cords for all listening ears, his own soul hearing only spiritual 
 harmonies.
 
 1867 MANHOOD 249 
 
 ' The theme is good. In the expression I have sorely 
 failed. It remains a grand subject for a true lyrist.' 
 
 [Symonds really enjoyed his sojourn in the Canton Vaud. 
 In the Autobiography he writes : 
 
 ' When we left I made some notes about our pension life, 
 which may be inserted here, if only to show that I was not 
 incapable of healthy natural enjoyment. 
 
 ' We spent a very happy month. W. J. Courthope joined 
 us. His thorough happiness in living is a great enjoyment to 
 me, and the conversations we have had about literature were 
 always interesting. I cannot remember when we had more 
 fun and amusement together.'] 
 
 On 1 October 10 we came to Genoa. 
 
 By Grenoble, Avignon, Nismes, Aries, we travelled slowly 
 in wet autumn weather, seeing much, and profiting by what we 
 saw, till we came at last to Cannes upon October 24. Here 
 we stayed until January 30, in 1868 ; and, while it has been 
 my lot to pass many miserable weeks in various places, I can 
 truly say that I never passed any so wretched as those. It was 
 not that we were lonely. On the contrary, we had plenty of 
 friends — my sister Lady Strachey and her family, Edward 
 Lear the painter, Montagu Butler, the Otto Goldschmidts, 
 Miss Helen Paget, and Mrs. Hawkes, with whom my wife was 
 very intimate. Henry Sidgwick, too, came out from England, 
 and paid us a long delightful visit. But, for som(%inscrutable 
 reason, all my maladies became intense at Cannes. The 
 nervrjus irritation amounted at times to insanity ; and at last 
 I sprained an ankle very severely, which made matters worse, 
 by preventing mo from taking any exercise. There was no 
 doctor at Cannes capable of treating a simple though bad 
 sprain. Consequently, it assumed a chronic form. I had to 
 go about on donkey-back, hoi-se-back, or in carriages for the 
 next seven monihs, and was only cured eventually by my 
 father, when I got to Clifton. 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 2oO JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 ' I ' do not suppose you can understand what a painful 
 thing it is to be without physical power — not to be able to use 
 the eyes for assiduous study, or the head for that masculine 
 contention of prolonged thought which gives birth to books. 
 I am disheartened at everything I write. " What virile efibrts, 
 what effete results," comes into my mind ; for I am often con- 
 scious of a true sympathy with my subject, and a sort of 
 intuition into it ; but when I seek to express these in words 
 the outcome is very inadequate. This makes me feel great 
 admiration for men who obviously express the larger portion of 
 what they have conceived, or, more accurately speaking, whose 
 conceptions are so full and vast that one does not notice the 
 unavoidable shortcomings of expression. All language, what- 
 ever our art may be, is a restraint on thought. It makes the 
 thought or feeling less than what it was in the author's mind. 
 And so the idea which, when expressed, seems large, must, in 
 the creator's mind, have indeed been vast. I do not wonder at 
 so many men being content to remain unvocal, and to flatter 
 themselves that they are poets or philosophers, who have not 
 been moved to speak. I sometimes imagine that if I had force 
 enough to work over and over again at expression I might 
 produce more satisfactory results. But I dare not apply such 
 "improbus labor." My brain ^\'ill not stand it. I lose my 
 sleep. I am perplexed mth obscure pressure on the top and 
 front of the head. And this Umarheitung cannot well be 
 deferred until I have regained force. It is most effectual when 
 the iron is yet hot, and the enthusiasm of the first conception 
 remains plastic. Thus I am thrust by physical debihty into 
 the petty style. Yet even as it is, in this imperfect work, 
 I derive the greatest possible pleasure from the contemplation 
 of the great thoughts and splendid images presented to me, 
 which I try to put into my own language, and for the moment 
 feel assimilated to them. 
 
 ' Hay don used to say that the poorest sign-painter or house- 
 dauber had his moments of inspiration, and wAih. his forehead 
 struck the stars, when conscious of a wash of colour smoothly 
 
 ' To H. Sidgwick. Cannes, Nov. 17, 1867.
 
 1867 MANHOOD 251 
 
 laid, or the perfections of a pure untroubled coating of grey 
 paint. 
 
 ' 'Sly father has sent me out Buchanan on W. W./ Harrison 
 on Culture, and Swinburne's Roman poem. Buchanan is 
 sensible, but not deep. He says, e.g., that after " Children of 
 Adam " the verses of W. W. are vague and general. Yet 
 " Calamus " comes after " Children of Adam," the most remark- 
 able part of the book, that in which W. W. says he reveals 
 himself most. Harrison is good, jerky like himself, but keen- 
 Swinburne more than usually verbose, and unhappy in his 
 metre, which is a rare fault with him. He does not attend to 
 the projection of his thought enough, but splashes it out as if 
 he were upsetting a bucket.' 
 
 ' You 2 know it is crusliing to be told that one has neither 
 "force" nor "distinction," nothing but "shady Huency " 
 (Conington's words). 
 
 ' I do not mind being told that I am not a poet. I believe 
 that such poetical faculty as I have is restricted to the limpid 
 but not artistic expression of a few strong feelings — to the 
 painful sense of a few peculiar situations. But Conington's 
 verdict severs me from literature altogether. He who has 
 neither "force" nor "distinction" had better keep silence. 
 All this I used to feel acutely at Oxford, until I got golden 
 words from Jowett, and breathed atmosphere never drawn by 
 Conington — art, nature, philosophy, the literature of France 
 and Germany and Italy, books sealed to him one and all. 
 
 ' Then I began to see that, as a critic, he is purely verbal, 
 and that there is some defect of sensibihty in him, pi'obably 
 connected with his want of sense for landscape, music, painting, 
 sound, colour, form and life, in fact. I tested him with the 
 Eli/abelljans, and when I found that he pooh-poohed Fletcher, 
 was well content to be beneath his ban. 
 
 ' j'.iii 1 have a great respect for his judgment in matters of 
 style, and his scrupulous impartiality, and it disheartened mo 
 to find that I could never get a scrap of commendation. 
 
 'Now, if I did not fool the truth of much that he says, I 
 
 '' Walt Wyiitiiuiri. ' Tu 11. Hidgwick, October 18G7.
 
 252 JOHN ADDTNGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 should not say so much about it. But I do acknowledge my 
 " shady fluency." I need nervousness of style, compression, 
 and saliency. How to get it ? — Corpo di Bacco ! I will go 
 on trying. I know not whether it is not better to die panting 
 up Parnassus on the boulder-stones which clog its basement, 
 than to sit bay-crowned upon the breezy turf above the clouds, 
 with nothing but the sky overhead. Nothing will persuade 
 me to seek distinction by cultivating mannerisms. I believe 
 that purity is the true note of excellence. Distinction and force 
 must be found in thought, and not in new words or strange 
 combinations. 
 
 ' I need guidance, and feel that I might work, if well 
 counselled, to better purpose. My real grievance against 
 Conington ahvays has been that he has not thought it worth 
 while to say how I might aim at superior excellence. Yet 
 without this, adverse criticism, especially coming from a friend, 
 is merely useless — depressing when the subject is weak, irritat- 
 ing when he feels himself strong. 
 
 ' Please criticise me. I throw you as a corpus vile the 
 article on Theocritean landscape, which is to appear in the 
 " North British" of next month.' 
 
 ' I ^ am laid up on a sofa, and have been so ever since 
 Sunday afternoon, when I sprained my ankle out walking with 
 ]\Ir. Lear. I had to walk home nearly two miles after doing so, 
 with a great deal of pain, and when I shall get on my legs 
 again seems problematical. It is a nuisance, for Sidgwick will 
 come some day this week, and I shall not be able to show him 
 the country. I do not know how I came to twist my foot, 
 these accidents happen so suddenly. I was running down hill 
 among some brushwood to find a path, when I felt as if a 
 knife had run through my foot and up into my leg, and I fell 
 flat, quite helpless for some minutes. Mr. Lear, who is a 
 whimsical punster, had only just before invented this sorry 
 riddle : " Why is this hillside like an old-fashioned waistcoat? " 
 " Because it's a Httle jerkin'." I had no notion I was to afford 
 so painful an illustration of the conundrum's force. 
 
 > To his sister Charlotte. Cannes, January 1, 1868.
 
 1867 MANHOOD 253 
 
 'Miss Girard has not yet turned up here. Mme. G. 
 promised to send her as soon as she had arrived and rested. 
 I am anxious to see her, as she conies so fresh from Clifton. 
 Among other things, too, I am imj)atient to get the book on 
 Blake which papa is sending me. It is so hard to find read- 
 able English books at Cannes. C. and I were lately reduced, 
 by way of experiment in literature, to attempt " Clarissa 
 Harlowe." It is like a deluge of very weak and lukewarm 
 green tea, breakfast cup after breakfast cup. After the first of 
 the four volumes, into which the Taucbnitz edition is divided,' 
 we gave way. I was much interested with Richardson's 
 method, and admired the particularity with which he puts his 
 characters upon the canvas, and makes them live more in the 
 smallest circumstances of daily life. By force of accumulated 
 details they acquire fulness and reality. But when they come 
 to act, when all the minutife of their internal hesitations and 
 emotions are insisted on with wearisome prolixity, one begins to 
 feel that what one wants in Art is something other than the 
 infinite particulars of hfe. Then Richardson, to my mind, is 
 essentially a bourgeois, his imagination mediocre, his sentiment 
 mawkish. The device which Clarissa invents for her own tomb- 
 stone displays all these defects, a cockney kind of pathos and 
 vulgarity of invention. It is curious that English novel-writers 
 should number Richardson, Miss Austen, and Trollope : the 
 excellences and defects of each of them so nearly the same, 
 and so unlike those of any other nation's novelists. Balzac in 
 minuteness of details, and in the patient building up of 
 character, resembles Richardson ; but then Balzac is a poet 
 also, animated with profound and tragic enthusiasms ; he 
 reates characters that serve for types of human nature, liis 
 colours are gorgeous, his scenery as vivid as a world of dreams. 
 If he were not so fantastic, if he were less gross and cruel, if 
 he could believe in anything, if life w(!i-e not a hideous strife 
 of interests in which the stronger tramples on the weak, if he 
 did not love evil for its own sake, Balzac would certainly })e one 
 of the two greatest novelists of the world. Miss Evans theoth(!r. 
 As it is, he must always be admired with reservations, and 
 regarded as a ruthless pathologist. The higher jilace of a true
 
 264 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867-68 
 
 physiologist (such as I think Miss Evans is) cannot be claimed 
 for him.' 
 
 All ' the evil humours which were fermenting in my petty 
 state of man — poignant and depressing memories of past 
 troubles, physical maladies of nerve-substance and of lung- 
 tissue, decompositions of habitual creeds, sentimental vapours, 
 doubts about the existence of a moral basis to human life, 
 thwarted intellectual activity, ambitions rudely checked by 
 impotence — all these miserable 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. 
 The crisis I passed through then was decisive for my future 
 career. But I did not foresee the point to which it was about 
 to lead me. I only knew for certain that I must change my 
 course, and that I would never repeat, come what might, that 
 infernal experience of the Riviera. 
 1867-fi8 Among my papers of that period, written after I had escaped 
 from Cannes, is an incoherent document, from which I can 
 quote certain passages, to prove how terrible the crisis had 
 been. In another nature, acting under other influences, the 
 phenomenon of what is called ' conversion ' might have been 
 exhibited. With me it was different. I emerged at last into 
 stoical acceptance of my place in the world, combined with 
 epicurean indulgence. Together, these two motives restored 
 me to comparative health, gave me religion, 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 morrow. 
 
 ' I contemplated suicide. But death is not acceptable — 
 it offers no solution. I loathe myself, and turn in every 
 direction to find strength. What I want is life ; the source of 
 life fails me. I try to rest upon my will and patience. Doing 
 so, 1 faint ; for there is no force in me to keep the resolves I 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 1867-68 MANHOOD 25.5 
 
 form, and no content to make me acquiesce in present circum- 
 stances. "When I attempt to drown my self-scorn in mental 
 work, my nerves give way beneath me, and the last state is 
 worse than the first. 
 
 ' Those who are dying of starvation, or have lost name and 
 fame by some irrevocable crime, might think my troubles very 
 light. They might envy me my well-filled platter, my fair 
 repute, the love and the respect bestowed upon me. But, 
 humbly thankful as I am for these good things, I cannot stifle 
 the angry voice of conscience which accuses me of a void life 
 — they do not quench my internal thirst for peace and con- 
 fidence and unity with the world. 
 
 ' Then came the goddess Drudgery I had invoked, and 
 spoke to me, and I replied as follows : " It is my particular 
 source of misery that I cannot labour ; I am forced to be 
 inactive by my health ; if I could study for six or seven hours 
 a day, the intervals might be devoted to a well-earned relaxa- 
 tion. But now the whole day has to be devoted to encouraging 
 a cheerfulness and peace that rarely come. Eelaxation is 
 labour, and the untameable soul frets under its restrictions." 
 
 ' A little nervous strength might make all the difference — 
 a loosing of the bands about my forehead, a soothing of the 
 aching eyes. 
 
 ' Or some clear faith in things that are good and true and 
 pure and ctcraal, would make all the difference. 
 
 ' In my present state of entire negation I cannot get the 
 faith without the strength, or the strength without the faith, 
 lioth remain outside my reach. I have " Moses and the 
 prophets," and the sign of Jonah's gourd. But they avail 
 naught. " Virtutem video intabescoque relicta." 
 
 ' The last night I spent in Cannes was the worst of my 
 whole life. I lay awake motionless, my soul stagnant, feeling 
 what is meant by spiritual blackness and darknes.s. If it should 
 last for ever ? 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. If this were death ? C'ntherine, 
 who kept hold of me, seemed far away. I was alone, so utterly 
 desolate that I drank the very cup of the terror of the graN e.
 
 256 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867-68 
 
 The Valley of the Shadow was opened, and the shadow lies 
 still upon my soul. • 
 
 ' Now, I perceive, since the shadow of that night fell upon 
 me, what is the solitude, the impotence of the soul of man. 
 What is it that we call a soul ? If I have no soul, then let me 
 die. If I have a soul I shall not rest till I have brought it 
 into harmony with The Soul, the Universe. But abyss calls 
 to abyss, and the abyss of misery has murmurings which 
 harmonise with the abyss of joy. Until I found this Hell I 
 had no notion of the voice of God. The solitude of this despair 
 asserts Him. I am not alone.' 
 
 [This terrible and lonely communing of his spirit face to 
 face with the widest abstractions which his intellect could 
 compass, seems to me to contain the essence of Symonds's 
 psychological quality. He had carried speculation in the 
 abstract, and the audacious interrogation of the Universe, to 
 their utmost limits. It was inevitable that, if he survived the 
 strain, he would ultimately abandon the vacuum of abstractions 
 in which he was stifling, for the concrete world of men and 
 things about him. 
 
 Having boldly plunged into the ' abyss,' having learned that 
 when sounded by the plummet of the human intellect, it is 
 actually void and bottomless, the instinct of self-preservation, 
 the shrinking from the ' seuil de la folic ' — caused him tooling 
 to the antithesis of the void, the concrete manifestations of 
 life, actual, visible, sensible, as the one salvation in the viare 
 magmim of speculation. This is, probably, what he meant 
 when he said that ' the crisis at Cannes gave him a religion.' 
 He did not attempt to fill the void with some definite concept 
 of a Deity — that is what many have done — but Symonds's 
 twofold psychical structure debarred him from such a salvation. 
 Emotionally, he desired the warmth of a personal Deity ; 
 intellectually, he rejected as ipso facto inadequate any concept 
 of Deity which the human intellect could construct and there- 
 fore enclose. He abandoned the efibrt to grasp the Idee, and 
 accepted the Erscheinungen, by the study and interrogation of 
 which he might still reach all that was humanly knowable of
 
 1867-68 MANHOOD 2o7 
 
 God. But the analytical, inquiring, sceptical spirit, and the 
 passion for the absolute still retained the regency of his mind ; 
 therefore, for him all Erschcinuntjcn, all phenomena, are to be 
 studied, none neglected ; humanity is to be sounded to its 
 depths, life to be ' drunk to the lees.' The field of activity is 
 shifted from thoughts to things. The inquiry, the speculation, 
 the analysis which had hitherto been employed largely in the 
 region of metaphysic, came now to be concentrated on man, 
 on human life, and led the inquirer to investigate the varied 
 and manifold phenomena of that life — the effort to know, the 
 alleo-iance to truth never wavered. In the process, as was 
 inevitable, the emotional and artistic side of his nature, which 
 had suffered from want of nutrition, was brought into play and 
 received satisfaction ; more of his whole being became energetic, 
 vaih. the result that, in spite of continued ill-health and external 
 trials, he grew, and said he grew, larger, humaner, more 
 content. 
 
 How much of this mood Symonds uttered, and in what 
 form he expressed it to his friends, may be gathered from the 
 following letters :] 
 
 ' I ' do not know why, in my sohtude, I should keep silence 
 from speaking to my friends at a distance, and, while I often 
 commune with the idea of them, refuse the medium of pen and 
 paper. Sohtude begets solitude, and silence silence ; incestuous 
 and hateful hydras, that perpetuate their brood by hideous 
 interminglements and most abhorred embraces. I cannot 
 write. It is daily becoming clearer to me, and I do not know 
 what is left beyond " le toui'ment de I'impuissance, la soif de 
 I'iinpossible." I am like a sphere in contact at all points with 
 nature, poetry, painting, philosophy, music, passion, yet without 
 a motive force within it. I spin helplessly upon my poles, 
 and never stir a step forward. What is the use of all the 
 conglobated thoughts and feelings in my soul ? I would far 
 sooner have one little faculty of real productiveness, or else 
 have never known the thousand forms of beauty. " Malgre 
 moi I'infini me tourmente." And I cannot (Icfiiin it so ns to 
 
 ' To W. J. Courthope. Cannes, Dec. 28, 18G7.
 
 258 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867-68 
 
 become creative, and pass out of passive into active joys. The 
 forms of Greek life and art haunt me. They wait at my bedside 
 and follow me about my walks, and seem to say : " Make marble 
 for us out of words the world shall read, that we may live once 
 more." Then a great storm sweeps through my mind, and I 
 see Christ crowned with thorns and robed in purple, the blood- 
 dew on His forehead, and the reed in His right hand, colossal, 
 dark as thunder. Earth grows pale before Him, dark behind, 
 and the centm-ies and the spaces are traversed with swift 
 irresistible conquest. Yet what avails it that the themes of 
 poems and the germs of pictures swell my mind ? Then I am 
 miserable ; for days I do not think, or feel, or speak. The 
 phantasmagorias have vanished, and earth has nothing to show 
 me, not even in these olive-trees I love so much, and orange 
 rows and cypresses beside the cottage walls, above their still 
 clear pools, tressed wdth maidenhair. And in the midst of 
 fruitless tumults I live inactive. Vain and barren as they are, 
 they waste my intellect and make me sterile of the smallest 
 epistolary fancies. " Accipe banc apologiam pro litteris non 
 scriptis." Zeller, 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 per- 
 plexing boulders. Yet voluminously thick it oozes on. The 
 text Avill, I hope, get itself done by means of another month's 
 work. Then come the notes, ttoVos ttoVw. 
 
 ' After that qu'en penses-tti ? Since I have assumed the 
 pedant's mask, I am of mind to propose to Longman a 
 revised and annotated, and generally metamorphosed, version 
 of Hegel's " Aesthetik." This is what the aids are likely to 
 arrive at. For the aids are not forgotten — only like Arethusa, 
 another fluviose simile, they are burrowing for a while beneath 
 the ocean of my idleness ; and should they spring again in 
 that Hegelian Ortygia, would they not indeed be beautiful ? 
 
 ' There is a certain cripple of mine which, ha\ing got itself 
 put into print, will presumedly appear in native and artificial 
 deformity in the next " North British." Look at it. It is an 
 article on Theocritean landscape. Verily, T shall end with
 
 1867-68 MANHOOD 259 
 
 being what the French call a pohjgraphe feconcl — a jack of all 
 trades, jesthetical, and a humbug who has gorged and disgorged 
 Hegel. Jam satis jocati sitmus. From the subjective to the 
 objective, allons done et soyoiis un pen raisonnahlcs. It has 
 snowed, hailed, thundered much ; blown a keen north-east for 
 ten days irresistibly. The ice is thick upon the ponds. The 
 chimneys smoke. The keyholes and door-cracks emit dismal 
 wailings and piercing draughts. I have neuralgia in my cheek 
 and bhsters on my chest. " Voila de I'objective. Assez, 
 n'est-ce pas ? Essayons encore, et cette fois de meilleure facon." 
 ' I read with some interest an article on the Talmud, which, 
 simply because Enghs'.i people are bulls, terrified at the smallest 
 shred of red wool, seems to have sold six editions of the 
 ''Quarterly." It is what one had expected. That Christ in- 
 carnated His nation's spirit, and that those who worship Him 
 must henceforth study the life and not the doctrine, giving 
 new meanings to the Verbum Caro factum est — and defending 
 their faith on the ^■ital as distinguished from the intellectual 
 originality of .Jesus. You do not greatly care for the origin of 
 creeds. Yet, I think, if you have not yet read Doctor Deutsch, 
 you should study his Talmud article. 
 
 ' I have also been reading the correspondence of Heine. 
 Do you know him ? I mean, of course, the poet, or patriot, as 
 he preferred to be called. It is good to find anything so purely 
 fresh in this century — such a source of tears and laughtei", 
 bitter, sweet, ironical, and tender, ribald and religious, all in 
 one gush. Why do not the gods give humour to more of us, 
 and make a better world ? We do for the most part carry 
 about our sorrows and our pur})0ses in such sadness — like 
 Dante's hypocrites beneath their leaden cowls. What besides 
 have I reafl lately ? Well, two novels of Sir W. Scott, several 
 of Balzac, one of C. Bronte's, Miss B.'s life, the " Phaedrus " and 
 the " Symposium," none of Ariosto's for a long time, but poetry 
 of all sorts and sizes, and much German philosophy. The 
 novels, n.b., are read to me. We are starved here for want of 
 litf-rature, the library beginning and ending with Tauchnitz. 
 
 ' I was delighted with your last letter of (I am ashamed to 
 say) Nov. 2.'5. The quotation you asked for was, I believe 
 
 s2
 
 260 JOHN ADDIXGTOX SYMONDS 1867-68 
 
 from Hervey, and to this effect : " Ariosto's golden cantos and 
 Guicciardini's silver history are too stale for queasy stomachs, 
 but they must be having a Greene's ' Arcadia,' and now do long 
 impatiently for a Greene's 'Faery Queene'" — I only quote 
 from memory, nor did I ever charge my mind with the sentence, 
 so I cannot depend upon it, and indeed I suspect that it is 
 not correct. You will find it, however, in the notes to Dyce's 
 account of Greene, published in his edition of Greene and 
 Peele. Did I tell you Madame L. is enchanted with parts of 
 the poem ? I shrewdly suspect she does not understand it all. 
 But she writes tenderly about it. She is at Mentone, groaning 
 over the cold. .Janet is very well. It is good of you to be 
 hunting for her Struwwel-Peter. When he comes he will be a 
 very welcome guest. Mr. Lear, author of the " Book of Non- 
 sense," a great friend of ours, is here. He makes rhymes for 
 her and illustrates them ; one about " the owl and the pussy 
 cat," who " went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat," is 
 notable, and his pictures of " Sing a song of sixpence " would 
 greatly edify you. H. Sidgwick is coming to stay with me. 
 He amused me with an account of a dialogue he had with 
 Conington about my literary merits ; they seem to have 
 quarrelled over my remains.' 
 
 ' I ' am daily becoming more moderate in my expectations 
 both for myself and others. We have pens enough, miserable 
 pens, it is true, but can we show better ? I, for my part, feel 
 paralysed by the confusion round me, science and religion 
 clashing, no creeds emergent, social conditions shifting like 
 quicksands, the phantasmagorias of old literatures rising up to 
 mock our modern style, the whole fabric of humanity, within 
 and without, rocking and surging in earthquake throes. We 
 live in anni mirabiles ; and the nervous fluids of our brains, 
 instead of being concentrated upon single thoughts, are dis- 
 persed through a thousand channels. There is little productive 
 energy, much febrile excitement of interests ; apparent omni- 
 science, real blindness and impotent drifting, on all sides 
 
 ' To G. Miller. Dec. 20, 18fi7.
 
 186b MANHOOD '261 
 
 I am inclined to a\ rap uiy cloak round me, to Ihav my head 
 and wait, " though watching from a ruined tower " ; to die the 
 child of a turbid generation, with eyes clouded by the dust 
 kicked up around me, dust of falling creeds and systems and 
 new buildings, with ears deafened by all sorts of cries, war- 
 cries, costermongers' cries, demagogic eloquences, pulpit 
 vacuities, and innumerable other roarings of the vasty deep of 
 void sound. If there is a future for man, these things, from 
 the pinnacle of some immeasurably far-off star, may be co- 
 ordinated — the broken light resolved into one white beam.' 
 
 [On January 30, 1868, the Symondses went to Nice ; ' and 
 for a good part of the time we had again the cheering society 
 of Courthope.' On April 7, 1868, Symonds left the Riviera 
 for Corsica, and a journey through Tuscany, Yenetia, and 
 Lombardy back to the Alps. The Diary is copious, and large 
 portions of it were worked up into the sketches of ' Ajaccio,' 
 ' Ravenna,' ' Parma,' and ' The Love of the Alps.' The more 
 solid intellectual work of the period came to light in a study 
 of Aristophanes, in chapters on Ariosto and Tasso. ' Per- 
 plexed and foiled, the literary faculty never wholly failed me ; 
 and while I thought I was doing nothing toilsomely, I was 
 really laying the foundations for a good deal of my future 
 work.' The Diary loses its introspective tone. Objective life, 
 and his keen capacity for enjoying it, once more assert them- 
 selves ; affirmation assumes the place of negation in the 
 ceaseless flux and reflux of his nature. The record is brimful 
 of enjoyment, of observation, of historical acquisition ; notes 
 on the history of Corsica, the origin of Vendetta, the funeral 
 songs, the Voceri, an analysis of the Corsican heroes — Giudice 
 della Rocca, Sarapiero, and Paoli.] 
 
 Ajnil 10.' — Between 1821 and 1850 (thirty years) there 
 were 4,819 murders in Corsica. All men over twelve carried 
 guns, pistols, and knives as soon as they could get them, and 
 went armed in the streets. Tn 1853 the French Government 
 under the Profct Thnillio- routed the bandits out, and killed 
 
 ' Diary.
 
 262 JOHN ADDINGTON SYxMONDS 1868 
 
 between 200 and 300 of them. An edict was then promulgated 
 against bearing arms, and things have been better since. 
 
 The following is the letter of a bandit chief to the French 
 ioflficial engaged in building a barrack : 
 
 ' Dall' inospite mio soggiokno,' 
 ' n 15 giugno 1852. 
 
 ' SiGNOR Seta, — Malgrado mi si dia il nome di Malvace, 
 nonostante non ho mai operate male contro alcuno senza 
 giusta causa et senza prevenirlo ; I'istesso voglio operare con 
 voi. II dare I'ospitalita ai miei nemici e un offendermi. . . . 
 Percio, o voi tralasciate di fare la caserna, o voi incorrete il 
 mio sdegno. Iddio voglia che io non possa mai vedervi. — 
 Serapino Battini.' 
 
 This man at twenty-four years of age had killed twenty-two 
 persons. 
 
 Ajaccio, April 19 {Monday). — The day broke grey and 
 cloudy, promising rain. We tried to get our carriage post- 
 poned to another day, but the diligence officials refused, and 
 we had to leave soon after eight in fog and gloom. The mist 
 increased in density, and as we neared the mountains, broke 
 into steady rain. All we could see was the near country, 
 forlorn moorland, varied here and there with ilex trees and 
 macchie. Chestnuts began to show themselves as we rose, 
 and before reaching Bocognano we joined the course of a 
 beautiful mountain stream as green as emerald. Roaring round 
 granite boulders, and gliding over smooth slabs of polished 
 stone like the muscles on a strong man's arm (to use the 
 Theocritean simile which Tennyson has transferred to Enid), 
 and eddying into still deep pools, it ran its various course, and 
 we followed its windings upwards till the clouds, parting for a 
 
 ' ' Fkoji my inhospitable abode. 
 
 'Mr. Seta,— Although they have given me the name of Malvace 
 (bad'un), I have never hurt a man without just cause and warning given. 
 And so I mean to act by you. To lodge my enemies is to injure me ; and 
 so you will either stop building the barracks or incur my wrath. God 
 grant I never see you. — Serafino Battini.'
 
 1868 MANHOOD 263 
 
 moment, revealed snow heights above Bocognano — steep slopes 
 ragged with the leafless boles and branches of gigantic chest- 
 nut trees. This place, with its downward view along the 
 valley to Ajaccio and the sea, and its upward glance at Monte 
 d'Oro, must be a Paradise in summer when the thick chestnut 
 woods yield shade, and the river brings perpetual purity and 
 coolness from the hills. 
 
 Our road, after lea\ing Bocognano, ascended rapidly. The 
 fog increased, and the west wind, driving from the sea, blew 
 hurricanes of mist and rain into the narrow gorge. Beneath 
 there was nothing but a seething chaos of cloud foam, and 
 above some dripping branches of forlorn laurustinus and heath. 
 The torrent, raving far below, was all we heard. 80 dense was 
 the fog that we seemed to be skirting a sheer precipice, and the 
 road had no parapet. A certain monotony in the mist and 
 the straight line of the path we were pursuing, seemed to 
 indicate that we were skirting the vast wall of Monte d'Oro, 
 with nothing but a gorge between. The chestnuts now began 
 to be scarce, the ilex disappeared, and their place was taken by 
 huge beech trees overgrown with pink and silver lichen. The 
 wind increased as we neared the Foce, oi- highest pass of all, 
 into a iDerfect toumientc. Our carriage rocked upon the 
 narrow traverses of the ascending road, and the clouds swept 
 past us, visibly condensed into white fleeces by the furious 
 gusts. 
 
 At last the top was reached. It still rained a deluge, and 
 our driver, who had kept his spirits up with snatches of old 
 song and monotonous chaunts, now fell to cursing and 
 screaming at his horses. Down the horses dashed, and the 
 carriage followed, groaning and swinging round the corners, 
 jolting over wooden l)ridges, and careering along causeways 
 slightly elevated over brawling streams, without a parapet or 
 curb-stone to protect the edge. 
 
 Between Bocognano and Vivario there is not a village on 
 the road. It is the most solitary and stern mountain pass 
 that I have ever traversed. The miserable stables, huddled 
 up in snow, which we passed at one point of the Foce, only 
 served to make the forest solitude seem more intense.
 
 264 JOHN AUDINGTUN SYMONDS 1868 
 
 At Vivario we stopped to let the driver dry himself. In 
 
 this quaint little village, plastered upon the hill-side, a mere 
 
 wasp's nest of lank, lean houses, comfortless to look upon, 
 
 and even more barren than the native rocks which have their 
 
 lichen to adorn them, we found Coarthope, who had walked 
 
 from Bocognano. His night had not been spent without 
 
 adventures. The old man of the inn there has a face and 
 
 beard like an old grizzled wolf's. He wears a fur cap to 
 
 complete his villainous look. Courthoj)e heard him talking 
 
 to his wife about the Inglese, and caught only a few words of 
 
 Avhat he said — among them these, 'ho rubato.' Soon after 
 
 supper he went to bed, and fell to dreaming of the hillsides 
 
 above Bocognano, which he thought were peopled with huge 
 
 goats far bigger than the houses. These goats took it into 
 
 their heads to descend the mountains, turning somersaults. 
 
 As they threatened the village with destruction in the course 
 
 of this uncouth pastime, he got very frightened, and woke up 
 
 with a shout, to find himself sitting on the outside of his bed. 
 
 Soon after, he heard someone try his door, and then the old 
 
 man asked if he were couche. Courthope bade him begone, 
 
 but he kept fumbling and mumbling on, as if on evil thoughts 
 
 intent. By this time Courthope was awake to the terrors of 
 
 his situation, and keenly conscious of the ' ho rubato ' he 
 
 had overheard. He, in his turn, began to scold, and proved 
 
 himself so wide awake, that the old wretch, whether baulked 
 
 of his prey, or really only anxious for the comfort of his guest, 
 
 at last retired. 
 
 ' Time ' has gone very rapidly, and we have done and seen 
 a great deal since we left Florence. Bologna, jModena, 
 Ferrara, and Padua have all been seen and admived by us. 
 But the heat has sometimes exceeded all power of endurance, 
 and I have been very anxious for Janet. It does me more 
 good than harm, but it takes away her appetite, and makes it 
 hard to cure her of a cold which she caught while crossing the 
 Apennines. 
 
 ' Bologna gave us much more pleasure than it did when 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Venice, May 8, 1868.
 
 1868 MAM I ()()]) 26o 
 
 •we were there two years ago. It is a most picturesque place. 
 The heat and the weakness of my ankle made me lazy there, 
 and I was very glad to sit out on church steps in the 
 Piazza, watching the humours of the crowd and smoking 
 cigarettes, or talking with Courthope about Italian and 
 English literature. I have read the greater part of the 
 "Orlando Furioso " since I left Monaco, and this has given us 
 a great deal to discuss. It is a most splendid poem, and I wish 
 that its twenty thousand and odd lines were doubled. To get 
 so much splendid poetical genius combined with fantastic 
 humour is rare, and there is no one in the whole range of 
 Hterature like Ariosto for this union. When I meet you 
 I shall make you read some of the beautiful passages. It is 
 a pity that Ariosto cannot be put into the hands of ladies. 
 However much they may be fortified by the superior educa- 
 tion they are going to get, I doubt if they will ever appreciate 
 the mocking spirit of this poet. 
 
 ' In the midst of my Orlando reading you may fancy I was 
 glad to visit Ferrara, and to see Ariosto's house, &c. The 
 hbrarian of the town let me, as a great favour, handle the 
 autograph MS. of the Orlando, so that I had a good opportunity 
 of examining its multitudinous corrections. Long passages 
 are almost illegible from frequent rewriting, and the style, 
 which seems to be that of a swift impro\isatore, is the result 
 of most patient elaboration and deliberate art. At the same 
 time, I think those stanzas which he had repolished over and 
 over again do not run so smoothly or with the same impetuosity 
 as those which came straight from his brain in the heat of 
 insi-)iration.' 
 
 [In Venice, also, Symonds read Tennyson's ' Lucretius ' for 
 the first time, and sent the following appreciation of the poem 
 to a friend :] 
 
 ' I did the voluptuous verse of " Lucretius " full justice, for 
 I read it in my gondola as we glided jjy the Ducal Palace and 
 beneath the bridges of 8t. IMark's. It is splendid in rhythm 
 anfl in language, perhaps the most splendid of all Tennyson's
 
 266 JOHN ADDINGTOX SYMONDS 1868 
 
 essays in blank verse, and the most gorgeously coloured piece 
 of unrhymed English since Milton. But I do not like it as a 
 poem. The drama is undramatic. Its action is slow and 
 rotatory, not swift, simple, and straightforward, like tiger leaps 
 or lightning flashes, as it ought to be. The cftpovri^wv eTrto-racrci? 
 and ejaculations, which are introduced to give a dramatic ring 
 to the poem, strike me as stiff and frigid, ill-jointed and not 
 projected at a jet. The whole is very pictorial, a symbol 
 of our modern poetry, which has absorbed the spirit of the 
 picturesque, and which is like a bit of Watts in words. It 
 agreed singularly with the splendid sensualities of Veronese 
 and Titian and Giorgione. The picture of the Nymph and 
 Satyr translated itself at once for me into the language of 
 Venetian hghts and colours, the flying forms, di\inely, bestially 
 nude ; the sturdy growth of laurels and the " million myrtled 
 wilderness," the golden glare of level sunset, parting burnished 
 leaves from purple gloom and rounding the white limbs that 
 fled, the shaggy limbs that followed, and glowing in eager eyes 
 and gilding thick tressed coils of hair. There is great power 
 in that passage about the nymph. I think Tennyson has never 
 risen to so high a pitch of mere artistic excellence. The 
 pseudo-simphcity of the Prologue and Epilogue is ludicrous, 
 especially when it breaks out into the elaborate physiology of 
 the "A\acked broth" bit. 
 
 ' But what transcendent lines there are : — 
 
 A riotous contlucuce of watercourses .... 
 Ruinmg along the illimitable inane .... 
 
 and the piece about the placid gods and the sunrise, and the 
 repose of philosophic life. 
 
 ' They make me fancy that we moderns, with tamer fancy 
 and feebler thought, have a better trick of versifying than 
 Milton or Shelley. 
 
 ' With the purity of Italian literature in my mind, I see 
 how decadent and autumnal, how over-ripe and without 
 germ of future growth, is this gorgeous foliage of our poetic 
 \"ineyards.'
 
 18H8 MANHOOD 367 
 
 ' You ^ do not write in the best spirits, and you say you 
 have never felt scepticism really till now. I do not believe 
 that any man who is healthy and active can know the pinch of 
 scepticism — what there is wretched and weak and morbid in it. 
 Life is so good a thing to the strong, that no despair about the 
 essence underlying its pleasing shows can make them valueless. 
 It is only when the phantasmagoria of the world becomes sickly 
 or menacing that the intolerable burden of not knowing whence, 
 where, whither, how, &c., makes itself oppressive. I have been 
 for so long like a softer kind of Leopardi that I long to say 
 with sincerity — 
 
 Or- poserai per sempre, 
 
 Stance mio cor. Peri restrcino inganno, 
 
 Ch' eterno mi credei. Peri. Ben sento 
 
 In noi dei carl inganni, 
 
 Non die la speme, 11 desiderio e spento. 
 
 Posa per sempre. Assai 
 
 Palpitasti. 
 
 As for the garbage of the world, and the really good things in 
 it, I cannot weigh them against each other. In the infinity of 
 the universe they seem to merge and become as one. At all 
 events for me, who am a grain of clay upon this tiniest of little 
 worlds, and who live for less than a moment in the sliort 
 minute of its terraqueous a^ons, when I think of the chaos of 
 greater universes and the irrevocable circles of eternity, and 
 when I remember it was but yesterday that the like of me 
 imagined sun, moon, and stars made to give them light — I fold 
 the wings of aspiration and of discontent, and wait in patience 
 till the chemistry of the years resolves me into my elements. 
 I do not wish for death, since life has many beautiful things 
 
 ' To H. Sidgwick. Venice, Miiy 14, ]8C)H. 
 
 ''■ ' Now shall Ibou rest for ever, rest lill death, 
 Tircfl heart. Thy last ilkision jjcrisheth — 
 The dream thou wast eternal. Jt is gone. 
 Of all thy fond illusions none remain ; 
 The hope, the very wish to hope, is Hown. 
 Rest then for ever. Thou hast throhhcd thy till.' 
 Translated by Hymonds, under the initials 1*. M., in the Cliftoiiia)i, 
 the school magazine of Clifton College, in 1K72.
 
 268 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1868 
 
 in it. But I am incapable of living for any purpose, or of 
 raisin" my soul to the altitude of a delusion. Let us eat 
 and drink, for to-morrow we die. Let us weep and pray, for to- 
 morrow we die. Let us laugh and sing, let us paint pictures 
 and write poems, let us love and kill, let us improve our 
 species and disseminate disease, let us parade the destinies 
 of man and draw our lineage from the ape, for to-morrow we 
 die. "One is prone," you say, "in scepticism to make semi- 
 practical the idea that nothing matters." Yes ; and then you 
 proceed : " it is so easy to show the absurdity of this semi- 
 practicality." If it is so easy, show it me ; tell me what is 
 practical, if anything is practical, or if any sect except the 
 
 peisithanatoi were final and irrefutable. 
 
 Assai 
 
 Palpitasti. Non val cosa nessuna 
 I moti tuoi. 
 
 ' You will, I know, be glad to hear my head is stronger— 
 not strong. I read Itahan poetry— the 20,000 and odd lines of 
 golden Ariosto, Tasso, Dante, Tassoni, and more modern singers. 
 If I ever get capable of anything, I should like to write an 
 English history of Itahan poetry. Our poetry and theirs are 
 twin sisters, and the rest are all outside.' 
 
 [From Venice Symonds went homewards by Switzerland, 
 visiting Miirren, whence the discussion on scepticism is 
 continued.] 
 
 ' 1 1 found up here a letter of yours which had been at Milan, 
 Cadenabbia, Luzern, and Grindelwald. I do not know whether 
 twice crossing the Alps improves the quality of letters as it 
 may do of wines ; but certainly yours was very acceptable, and 
 I should have been sorry not to have received it. 
 
 ' Perhaps by this time you are out of scepticism and in 
 M'Cosh. So I will not discuss that part of your letter— except 
 to say that I think you hit the most intolerable part of the 
 world's riddle in the eternity a parte ante. But it oppresses 
 me just as much if I try to imagine no God, as if I state the 
 
 ' To H. Sidffwick. MiiiTen, June 21, 1868.
 
 1868 MANHOOD 269- 
 
 absurdity of a God emerging from somnolence into world- 
 creative actinty. I wish I could embrace Positi^dsm as a 
 creed. 
 
 ' It is just what I could not do. I feel that the instant I 
 endeavour to take the if.ioi and not the aTrAws point of view, I 
 resent the attempt to impose upon myself. No healthy reaction 
 takes place, but I am thrown back upon a moral helplessness 
 inclining to Materialism, and to the feeble hope (yearly more 
 vain) of perhaps living so as to enjoy myself without doing any 
 positive harm. 
 
 ' Then, again, as to wickedness ; your inclined plane is a 
 just statement; but what is to arrest one on this plane, and 
 (from another point of \dew) why should I seek to be arrested ? 
 I am here in the same see-saw as about scepticism, and end in 
 the same temporising, modified by an agonising sense of there 
 being somewhere a clear truth — a something aTrAws and not 
 kfioL, or even -oAet, but plain and unmistakable when once 
 perceived.' 
 
 [This journey ended at Clifton in July 1868. The London' 
 house was definitely abandoned ; and on November 17, 
 Symonds and his family settled into No. 7 Victoria Square, 
 Clifton, where, on January 15, 1869, his third daughter, 
 Margaret, was born.]
 
 270 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1869 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 MANHOOD — EMBARKED ON LITERATURE 
 
 The crisis at Cannes, and its results— Lectures to the Sixth Form at 
 Clifton College— Their effect — On 'Richard Feverel ' — Settles in 
 Victoria Square — The Hastings election petition — Disraeli's speech 
 in the Irish Debate — The Social Science Association— On the 
 religious attitude — On Euripides— A journey through the Dolomites 
 — At Heiligenblut — Translation of Goethe's Proem to 'Gott und Welt' 
 — Dr. Symonds's ill health — Scepticism — The first idea of the history 
 of the Renaissance in Italy — Lectures on Dante — Death of Dr. 
 Symonds— Moves into Clifton Hill House — Publishes his first book 
 — His own estimate of his intellectual and literary powers. 
 
 18G9 [8ymonds always wrote and spoke of the crisis at Cannes as 
 a veritable turning-point in his spiritual and intellectual life. 
 He could not see at once where the issue of that crisis was 
 about to lead him ; he feared that the ' gloom of the last two 
 months would project itself all over his life ' ; he writes : ' I 
 have found hell in this terrestrial Paradise ; and I have ceased 
 to believe in Paradises. The Alps are my only unexploded 
 illusion, and these I feel within me the potentiality of smirch- 
 ing ' ; to which came the cooling answer of a friend, ' that 
 when people talk of hell, they often mean a state of their 
 nerves.' 
 
 But these depths of Leopardesque despair and disillusion- 
 ment could not last long with a man of Symonds's essentially 
 active, vigorous, sanguine nature. It is true that he writes, on 
 March 6, 1869, ' I can never care for the actualities of life. 
 I cannot live without illusions ' ; but the subsequent remark : ' I 
 am not made for ennui, but for activity,' is really more expres- 
 sive of the central fibre and temper of the man. He rejoiced 
 in acti%ity. Nothing was more dangerous to his health than 
 boredom. And as a matter of fact, he was about to enter
 
 1S69 MANHOOD 271 
 
 upon a new period of his existence, in which action, worlc, 
 definite external employment begin slowly at first, and in spite 
 of ill-health, to assume an ever-increasing place in his life. 
 The moods of speculative negation, the abysses of depression 
 which had haunted him from boyhood, were never entirely 
 obhterated, and returned when any period of over-work, or too 
 high a pressure of living, reduced his nervous energy, but they 
 never again dominated his life as they had hitherto done. 
 
 Soon after settling down at Clifton, in No. 7 Victoria 
 Square, Symonds made arrangements with Dr. Percival, Head- 
 Master of Clifton College, to give lectures to the Sixth Form 
 upon Greek Literature. Symonds always talked with pleasure 
 of this work ; it served him as preparation for his own ' Studies 
 in the Greek Poets,' and it brought him into frequent and 
 delightful companionship with masters and boys ahke, many 
 of whom became his lasting friends. The Diaries dwell with 
 evident enjoyment on the walks, the talks, the concerts, the 
 debates, the essays which were the natural outcome of this new 
 activity. One of his pupils, writing of Symonds's lectures in 
 1872, records the strong intellectual stimulus which he im- 
 parted to his auditors in the following terms : 
 
 ' It is far from easy to express the quality of that powerful 
 influence which Mr. Symonds exercised upon all with whom 
 he came in contact, and more especially iipon lads just about 
 to enter the intellectual wrestling ground. The most striking 
 quality of that influence was its capacity to transport us into 
 a higher, a more rarified, intellectual atmosphere. It was not 
 so much the erudition and the culture of our teacher which 
 impressed us, it was rather the sudden stimulus conveyed 
 from that extraordinarily active brain, with an impact which 
 I still recall as something almost physical. His intellect set 
 ours on fire ; and this result was obtained, not merely by 
 what he said, but by that more potent method of education, 
 the sympathetic display of a powerful mind in movement. 
 .•\nd for some of us the consequence was that we became in- 
 lelleclually devoted to him. It was impossible to have too much 
 of hiiu. 'I'he hours spent in bis study that looked out on the 
 sLarply doHcending road, the long walks on the stately terrace
 
 272 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMOXDS 1869 
 
 which commanded the city, its spires and towers, and distant 
 Dundry closing all, were occasions to be sought for eagerly ; 
 the thrill of them remained long after they were passed, and 
 would keep more than one of us at the dormitory window, 
 sitting late into the summer twilight, drinking the western 
 breeze that blew across the downs, and seeming to catch uneasy 
 anticipations of life from the movement of the night wind. 
 
 ' And the secret of the intellectual domination that Mr. 
 Symonds exercised lay in his vast sympathy, peculiarly 
 sensitive as it was towards youth. This sympathy, the deepest 
 instinct of his nature, was the means whereby he arrived at 
 what he valued most highly in life — knowledge of the human 
 soul. It was amazing to watch the rapidity with which he 
 reached the core of people in whom his interest had been 
 awakened. x\nd this determination to probe to the bottom of 
 things, to be thorough, displayed itself through all his conduct, 
 and exercised upon the docile nature of many boys a most 
 salutary influence. 
 
 ' Among the many brilliant gifts of the mind which 
 fascinated us at that time, none was more striking than Mr. 
 Symonds's dialectic power. His conduct of an argument had 
 some of the pleasures of the chase, and was a delightful 
 exercise for us, the o-KuXaKe9, the young puppies of the Platonic 
 dialogue. He made it his endeavour that no conversation 
 should be left at a loose end, but that the course of the 
 argument should be resumed before it closed, and the conclusion 
 to which the argument had led should be carefully noted for 
 future use, and the foundation of a sound and reasoned view. 
 
 ' Nor was his courage less remarkable than his intellectual 
 sincerity. We had before us the continual example of a man 
 struggling mth ill-health, grievously handicapped in the career 
 of life, yet never complaining, rather rejoicing, dedicating 
 himself, obnously, heart and soul, mind and body, to the 
 achievement of the work he had taken in hand. 
 
 ' So then it seems to me that what Mr. Symonds taught us 
 boys, far and beyond any views about the Greek drama or any 
 appreciations of Greek poets, was intellectual sincerity and 
 tenacity of purpose. The medium through which he conveyed
 
 1869 MANHOOD 273 
 
 the lesson was sympathy, love. In this way, not consciously 
 perhaps, but instinctively, he enforced the doctrine which he 
 was never tired of inculcating in his latter years, that life is 
 more than hterature, the man himself than his handiwork.' . 
 
 What Symonds himself thought of his lectures, how he 
 regarded them, will be gathered from some phrases towards 
 the close of the following characteristic letter :] 
 
 ' We ' are still exiles from our house, which is at present a 
 chaos. The movers of my goods have lost above three boxes 
 of my favourite books, ingeniously selected from the beginnings 
 and ends of editions. 
 
 'I have finished "Richard Feverel." I kept constantly 
 telling myself that " this novelist is a poet," and when I came 
 to the chapter called " An Enchantress," I felt that the 
 nineteenth century was ever so far ahead of the Elizabethans. 
 Suddenly I remembered that these were both your ideas. The 
 man affects me terribly. I quite see why, in spite of his being 
 one of our greatest novelists, he is not read. The sense of 
 pain produced by R. F. is intense. My mind ached at passages. 
 I was stifled, and had to stop reading. Even Balzac does not 
 so affect me, for Balzac is more scientific on the one side, and 
 more in his subject on the other. What is terrible about 
 G. M. is, that he feels it as a poet, and stands aside from it as 
 an ironic showman. There is a great want of truth, verisi- 
 militude rather, about some of the characters. I don't realise 
 Sir Austin, or indeed Richard, except as a picture. 
 
 ' Since I last wrote things have not altered much, except 
 that my emotions are less occupied and my imagination more 
 exercised. It is difficult to do anything educationally, or 
 towards living in common here. But I grow and steady and 
 intensify in feeling. The lectures do pretty well, but I have 
 not the art of U^cturing ; and 1 do not believe in my own 
 lectures. Yet I keep a fair face and try to be impressive.' 
 
 [Besides teaching the Sixth Form, Symonds delivered his 
 lectures to ladies' classes in Bristol. He was invited to become 
 
 ' To Hi^iiry Sid^wick. Clifton Hill House, May 17, 18(i;t. 
 
 T
 
 274 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1869 
 
 Secretary to the Social Science Association, and though he 
 refused, he attended the meetings on that subject. In fact, he 
 was beginning to assume a place in the civic life of Bristol 
 which his father's position in the city and the county readily 
 secured for him. 
 
 At the end of May the Symondses were settled in No. 7 
 Victoria Square, after a great deal of trouble from lost cases of 
 books, and a fraudulent foreman, who, instead of putting their 
 furniture in order after bringing it down from London, 
 absconded with 68/. 10s., which he had received for its trans- 
 port. 
 
 While their own house was being got ready for them they 
 occupied Clifton Hill House, and Symonds was, to his own 
 great benefit, actively engaged in helping his father-in-law, 
 Mr. North, through the Hastings election petition, about which 
 he writes thus to his sister, at that time travelling in Italy with 
 Dr. Symonds, whose health had shown serious signs of 
 breaking down :] 
 
 ' I ' want to thank you for your very nice letter of the 19th, 
 and to tell you how delighted I am to hear of your enjoying 
 Kome, though I wish you had better weather. I fear that my 
 father has not at once felt the good of the change ; but I am 
 sure it must tell on him in time, and make him stronger. 
 I am here about the Hastings petition. I have been seeing 
 barristers, privy councillors, a judge, M.P.'s, and a police 
 magistrate about the tactics which ought to be followed. It is 
 hard to get Mr. North to take any definite line of self-defence. 
 But I hope we have at last committed him to the employment 
 of an agent, and through this agent I fancy it will be possible 
 to draw him into getting good counsel for the pleading and 
 cross-examination of witnesses. He hardly likes my inter- 
 ference, and yet he is pleased at the evidence of my interest. 
 I do not expect to be able to do much real service, except by 
 the testification of this readiness to help.-' 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. 
 
 -■ The petition was dismissed with costs, by Mr. Justice Blackburne, 
 on April 17, 1869.
 
 1869 MANHOOD 275 
 
 ' It is terribly wet and cold in London, most wretched 
 weather for bundling about in cabs, trying to catch people who 
 always seem to elude you. One lawyer I have to meet at 
 Wimbledon Station at 9.15 a.m. to-morrow. 
 
 ' Last night I dined with Dr. Lushington, Mrs. Norris's 
 father, and met there Jowett, who was in great force. We had 
 a long argument, after dinner, of course, about the Irish debate, 
 and Jowett and I were the only two ^\ho had been struck by 
 Dizzy's speech. I confess to having thought it a very able 
 piece of oratory, and to having felt the force of some of its 
 arguments. Mr. North, who heard it, said it lasted over two 
 hours, during which Mr. Dizzy drank two huge tumblers of 
 brandy and water, so that he got quite groggy at last. Yet he 
 did not give it in a telling way, raised no real cheers, and roused 
 the most manifest signs of boredom and contempt on the faces 
 of Gladstone and Bright. I hope to get home again to-morrow. 
 I am beginning to feel the colds and draughts of this nomad 
 life in London on my chest.' 
 
 [In the summer of 1869 Symonds went for a tour in 
 Switzerland, to Miirren, Grimsel, Furka, St. Gotthard, 
 ]Maderaner Thai, Engelberg, where he caught a cold and 
 brought it home with him, the effect of which is seen in the 
 depressed tone of these letters.] 
 
 ' Why ' I have not written is simply, I think, because my 
 nervous energy is diminished, and a letter costs me a good deal. 
 I have been taken up with a course of lectures I had written 
 on Greek poetry, from Hesiod to Pindar, which has interested 
 uie. It is for the college during the term. The pleasure was 
 great, for I knew that when the ladies' course began, I should 
 have to spend my time chiefly in the work of the second sets, 
 getting up lectures, giving them, and reading papers. I began 
 on Saturday with about eighty ladies. They seemed to me 
 pleasant to deal with, and more attentive and repaying than 
 boys. Also I had a highly intelligent audience -ladies like 
 the two Miss Winkworths Ijeing the high-water mark — a few 
 
 ' To Henry .Sidgwick. Clifton, Oct. 12, 18()'.». 
 
 X 2
 
 276 JOHN ADDINC4T0X SYMONDS 1869 
 
 school-girls the low. It is not easy to strike a balance between 
 'the twD exti'emes. 
 
 * The Social Science Association, as far as its talk went, 
 was extremely twaddling and boring. I should have blushed 
 to inilict on an educated audience all the papers I heard. 
 Some of the presidential addresses were mildly interesting. 
 But I approve of the whole thing, since it does certainly stir 
 people up, rub them together, and set them going by a dhect 
 appeal to their weaknesses — the love of notables : most 
 particularly Kingsleyolatreia was rampant. He seemed to me, 
 spite of ranting and raging and foaming, and swelling himself 
 to twice his natural dimensions, or perhaps because of all this, 
 to be the right man in the right place. He made an impression 
 on masses.' 
 
 1870. ' Since ^ your visit nothing very memorable has happened, 
 
 except a visit from Jowett. Jowett had much to say, chiefly 
 about my work on Elizabethan literature, which he wished me 
 to undertake in a severely historical spirit, also about more 
 grave matters, especially the future of religious feeling and 
 opinion in England. He complains bitterly of the " flabbiness " 
 of our religious consciousness, and rejects my facile belief, 
 that the civilised world must, in its present highly intel- 
 lectualised scientific condition, advance, after a needful period 
 of softening, towards a new synthesis. His firm conviction 
 of the possibility of continuing for centuries in a slough of 
 lightly worn and morally obstructive dogmas, prejudices, 
 permanent attitudes of traditional acceptance, &c., startled 
 and appalled me. I have grown to believe myself in the centre 
 of a transformation scene, and to expect that ere long (I don't 
 much care if I reckon by decades or by centmnes) the scenery 
 and figures will be fixed for a new action. 
 
 ' You ask me for an epigram on Euripides. I cannot make 
 one, except this : That he seems to me a sort of divine Beaumont 
 and Fletcher, what they would have been in a more genial atmo- 
 sphere. He, like them, adorns his strangest, most unnatural 
 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Clifton, Jan. 29, 1870. ' Too late at night 
 for writing.'
 
 1870 MANHOOD ii77 
 
 situation (that e.g., of Admetns) with exqiusite poetry. 1 felt 
 in reading him what I felt in reading them, that each play was 
 a grape from a ripe cluster ; if one seemed less good than another 
 I knew the next might restore my delight in the Havour of the 
 whole. These, however, are mei-e honbons and carved cherry- 
 stones of criticism. For my ladies I have to plough through 
 Medea and Alcestis, talking the common stuff. 
 
 ' I am very languid — brain, as usual, at about one quarter 
 working power ; but I rub on. ... It provokes me to think 
 of your enormous fertility of ideas and power of elaborating 
 thought, also of your memory, also of your mere than adequacy 
 to the ordinary burdens of life. I say it pro\okes me — not, 
 thank goodness, makes me ennous ; but if I had more of that 
 sort of thing I feel I could realise so much. My faculties 
 cannot be brought to valuable activity without interest, 
 application, concentration, and this I cannot give.' 
 
 [Ill-health, ' chest so weak,' once more compelled Symonds 
 to take a spring journey to Switzerland in May 1870. This 
 was prolonged by Monte Generoso, Genoa, Bassano to the 
 Dolomites, which he thought 'vastly overrated,' and then to 
 HeiUgenblut, from which place the letters are again happy. 
 There, on the glacier, Symonds made the following transla- 
 tion of Goethe's ' Proemium to God and the World,' a poem 
 which exercised a very strong influence upon his religious 
 opinions :] 
 
 Proj-Imium to God and the World. 
 
 To Him who from eternity, self-stirred. 
 Himself hath made by His creative word; 
 To Him who, seek to Uiune Him as we will. 
 Unknown within Himself ahideth still: 
 To Him supreme wlio niaketh 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 fliglit of Hame 
 btill trios to gauge tlie synil>ol and the name:
 
 278 JOHN ADDIXGTON SYMONUS 1870 
 
 Champed and compelled thou elimb'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 ow'n God — and with honour due 
 Surrenders to His sway both earth and heaven, 
 Fears Him, and loves, where place for love is given. 
 
 Pasterze Gr.AciEi{, June 27, 1870. 
 
 The dano:erons illness of Dr. Symonds caused the travellers 
 to shorten their journey. They returned to England with all 
 speed, and by September Symonds was back again in Clifton, 
 which seems to have set up the old malaise fi-oni winch he 
 periodically suffered. 
 
 This mood found heightened expression in the following 
 passage : 
 
 ' Hegel then is Nehushtan,' he writes to a friend. ' Does 
 not the devouring voice of the centuiies cry aloud to all creeds, 
 policies and structures, " Down with them " '? It is sad to see 
 these climbings to Olympus — giants that turn to cloud after 
 they have rolled to the top, irradiate with morn and evening — 
 and not meanwhile to see Olympus itself, or to know whether 
 there be indeed any such mountain. 
 
 ' Everything crumbles at my touch, and is dust. Even 
 love and friendship ring hollow ; no fault of theirs, but of 
 this grovelling self. What I read does not reach me. Nature 
 seems to hide her secret, or what is far worse, to have none. 
 Art becomes a matter of antiquarian interest. It is all cor- 
 ruption and putrescence in this world. 
 
 ' Then, behold, the next minute this world appears divine,
 
 1870 MANHOOD 279 
 
 and I love it, and know that the corruption and putrescence 
 are [only] in my soul.' 
 
 There is clearly something very much the matter here. 
 Undoubtedly the chief factor in this malaise is health ;. and 
 the sceptical attitude which is here expressed was due, in part 
 at least, to Symonds's determination to accept nothing relative 
 or partial {efjiOi) in his analysis of life, and to insist on attaining 
 the absolute and universal (aTrAoi?). In this respect he was a 
 Platonist of the Parmenidean side of Platonism. But this 
 integrity of speculation, this addiction to knowable truth, 
 brought its own sufferings. He was sceptical, but not 
 sceptical enough for peace or faith ; he believed absolute 
 knowledge to be attainal)le ; and so in the pursuit of knowledge 
 each acquisition is instantly tested, analysed, and flung aside 
 as not absolute, only partial. We cannot help suspecting that 
 had he seen Olympus he would have climbed it, and no sooner 
 had he reached the top than he would have doubted the solidity 
 of the peak, and begun to unjiick the mountain to see whether 
 it rested on a firm basis ; his determination to laiow would 
 have compelled him to this. 
 
 It seems, however, that there was still another factor in the 
 pain which expresses itself in such a terrible outci^. The 
 want of achievement, the failure in accomplishment — placed 
 as high as he placed it — entirely due to bad health and adverse 
 circumstances, were galling to Hymonds's ambition. Finally, 
 we must remember that such passages are the outcome of 
 moods which often exhaust themselves, as here, in the actual 
 expression. They indicate a deep dive into the abysses which 
 underlie life, and a rapid return to the surface ; as now' — for 
 almost immediately after writing the passage I have quoted, 
 the idea of his large work on the Renaissance is definitely 
 projected for the first time, in a letter dated October 24, 1870. 
 The scheme had, doubtless, slowly been taking shape ever 
 since Symonds won the Chancellor's Prize, with an essay on 
 this su])ject ; and all his subsequent studies on Elizabethan 
 drama, which he found ' twin sister ' to Italian poetry, had 
 gone to enrich his knowledge; and increase his desire for the 
 work. The first proposal, which came from Mr. F. Myers,
 
 280 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1871 
 
 was fov a joint work on the Renaissance. But that was 
 abandoned, Mr. Myers taking to other subjects. Symonds 
 then turned his thoughts more positively, though diffidently, 
 to the enterprise. ' My heart bleeds,' he writes, ' to think of 
 my own incapacity for a great work. I must not think of it ; 
 for the very thought paralyses. I am working but feebly, 
 being feebler than usual, but I hope to do some solid work in 
 the editorship of Conington's Miscellanies ; and I meanwhile 
 absorb Italian slowly, how slowly a brain like yours could not 
 conceive.' 
 1871. By February 1, 1871, Symonds is writing hard at his ' first 
 
 chapter, which is meant to contain a sweeping view of the 
 ethnology, political history, domestic habits, religious move- 
 ments, arts, learning and language of Italy before the age of 
 Dante. To get so much accumulated matter out of my head 
 is both a relief and an exhaustion. My Dante lectures began 
 on Saturday. I had a class of one hundred and fifty. I am 
 going to give the same course at Exeter next month. My 
 father is still very ill.' 
 
 This illness terminated fatally on February 25. Symonds, 
 who was deeply attached to his father, and was profoundly 
 influenced by him, felt the loss most keenly. To a friend he 
 writes : ' I hardly expected to feel the blow so crushing. I have 
 not only lost a father, but a best friend. In him the most 
 spontaneous and unselfish love for me was combined ^vith 
 sympathy for my tastes and occupations, pride in my success, 
 if ever I had any, interest in every undertaking. I could not 
 think of any other loss which could bring so much sense of 
 isolation, of having now truly been deprived of what hitherto 
 was vital.' 
 
 In the Autobiography Symonds says : — ' About a week 
 before his death he told me that all his thoughts upon " the 
 great questions " (so he always spoke) were resolved into the 
 one thought of God as good, and of trust in Him. He was 
 buried by the side of my mother, in Arno's Vale Cemetery, 
 near Bristol, on March 2. The scene, as we mounted the hill 
 and stayed under the plane tree by the ivy-covered grave, was 
 very lovely — such a blue, kind sky and laughing earth, with
 
 1871 MAXnnoI) 281 
 
 spring flowers everywhere. The slopes of the down above were 
 as dewy as some upland Alpine meadow. In my mind I 
 repeated, " And death once dead there's no more dying then." ' 
 
 The death of Dr. Symonds led to several important changes 
 for Symonds and his family. His sister Charlotte was married 
 from No. 7 Victoria Square, on July 1, to T. H. Green, of 
 Balliol College ; and, later in the year, Symonds moved into his 
 old home of CUfton Hill House, a place so full of memories 
 for him. 
 
 The change from Victoria Square to Clifton Hill House 
 coincides with an important development in Symonds's literary 
 career. He was just on the point of appearing before the 
 world as an avowed author by the publication of his ' Introduc- 
 tion to the Study of Dante,' and here it will be fitting to 
 introduce his own estimate of his Intellectual and Literary 
 Evolution.] 
 
 Since ' I have reached the point of my embarking on the 
 great wide sea of literature, it is right that I should attempt to 
 form some estimate of my natural and acquired faculties for 
 this branch of art. 
 
 From nature I derived a considerable love of books, an 
 active brain, a fairly extended curiosity, receptivity to ideas 
 above the average, an aptitude for expression, sensibiUty to 
 external objects in the world of things, and intense emotional 
 susceptibility of a limited and rather superficial kind. 
 
 My power of application was always small. What patience 
 I now possess in the acquisition of knowledge, or in the 
 exercise of my talents, has been gained with difficulty. Quick 
 and intelligent at the outset, I grew very slowly, and arrived 
 comparatively late at the control of my faculties for any definite 
 pin-pose. The large part of my early years was spent appaiently 
 in ineffectual dreaming. 
 
 Few people are contented with their memory, because all 
 of us feel the inevitable limitations of a faculty on which we 
 are continually making extraordinary demands. The more we 
 have of it the more we expect from it, and yet at the same 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 282 JOHN ADOTNOTOX SY^fONDS 1871 
 
 time there are few who train it systematically. In my own 
 case I am certain that my memory was originally weak and 
 unreliable. I remembered nothing definitely which I had not 
 either seen or acutely felt. Names, dates, numbers, historical 
 events entered my mind with facility, abode there for a short 
 space under the control of a deliberate volition, and vanished 
 again as though I had never possessed them. I could get a 
 subject up with tolerable ease, but I could not retain my 
 knowledge of it. This gave me some advantage for preparing 
 for examinations, but like the sieve used in the story of the 
 Forty Thieves, my memory caught in its meshes a piece of 
 gold here and there. Having an active brain and a lively 
 curiosity, I was always acquiring information, while the defect 
 of my retentive power made me continually lose the larger 
 portion of it. Yet in this way my intellectual furniture grew 
 to be a vague, ill-digested, inaccurate mass, rich in possibilities, 
 Ijut poor in solid stuff. I have never been able to overcome 
 the congenital inferiority of my brain in these respects. Yet 
 being aware of the deficiency, and resolving to make the best 
 of things, which might be worse or bettei-, I learned to utilise 
 the strength and to supplement the weakness of my memory. 
 I saturate my mind with rapid reading, devour multitudes of 
 books, and made voluminous notes, feeling sure that I shall 
 obtain a general conception of the subject under consideration. 
 Then I return again and again to the leading documents, check 
 every impression of fact by reiterated comparison of my notes 
 with their sources, verify dates and quotations, force myself to 
 attain accuracy by drudgery. Few writers, I take it, have 
 undergone so much preparatory labour as I am obliged to go 
 through. 
 
 For numbers I have absolutely no head. I do not \'isualise 
 except in the most rudimentary way. At best I can see the 
 digits scrawled upon a slate. I am unable to remember the 
 multiplication table ; and it is notorious in my family that I 
 constantly make mistakes between a ten and a hundred, a 
 hundred and a thousand, so feeble is my grasp upon the 
 symbol 0. If I have not been involved in pecuniary difficulties, 
 it is because I am conscious of this imbecility, and refer on
 
 1871 -MAXHOOD 283 
 
 every occasion to written memoranda. The same conseiovisness 
 made me, early in life, scale my expenditure considerably 
 below my income, in order that I might always have a fair 
 margin of cash to fall back on. 
 
 I cannot learn anything systematically. Grammar, logic, 
 political economy, the exact sciences, ofiered insuperable 
 obstacles to my mind. The result is, that I know nothing 
 thoroughly ; and I do not think this is so much due to laziness 
 as to cerebral incapacity. My brain was always impenetrable 
 to abstractions. When I attacked them, I felt a dull re- 
 sistance, a sense of benumbed and benumbing stupor stealing 
 like a fog over my intellect. I have had to circumvent 
 abstractions, to present them in the concrete, and to return 
 upon them by the path of metaphor or symbol before I was 
 able to approach them in the form of pure thought. 
 
 I have observed that visible objects — forms, colours, aspects 
 of nature, faces, buildings, statues, pictures — leave a keen and 
 durable impression on my sensibility. What I have once 
 regarded with curiosity I i-etain. And more than that, I 
 remember the atmosphere of these things, the feeling they 
 exhale, their specific quality so fai- as I am able to percei\e it. 
 This has helpenl me in the line of graphic writing, and has 
 given me such certainty of truth as I possess. 
 
 The same may be said of the other senses — touch, taste, 
 hearing, and smell — but in a less degree. In spite, however, 
 of this retentive receptivity to objects of sense, I am not strong 
 in the faculty of observation — that quality which makes the 
 novelist, the man of science, and the higher artist. Perhaps I 
 lack patience or interest in things for their own sakes. What 
 T observe and treasure up comes to me casually, by no premedi- 
 tated effort, but because it attracts me, and is correlated to my 
 tastes or sympathies. 
 
 Emotional states, whether paiuriilly poignant oi: fragile in 
 their evanescent lightness, I remember with unerring accuracy. 
 This, I think, has been useful tome in the exercise of criticism. 
 I possess a certainty with regard to past conditions of feeling, 
 which T find valnalile when attempting to pronounce judgment 
 upon works of art or literature, or to recall the sentiment
 
 284 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1871 
 
 evoked by places. At the same time, just as I am no deliberate 
 observer, i cannot claim to be an analyst of emotion. Retentive 
 receptinty is the quality I claim. Combined with a moderate 
 estimate of my own powers and a fair share of common sense, 
 together with an active curiosity, this receptive and retentive 
 susceptibility to various objects and emotions has given a 
 certain breadth, a certain catholicity, a certain commonplace- 
 ness to my aesthetic conclusions. 
 
 My powers of expression were considerable, yet not of 
 first-rate quality. Vaughan at Harrow told me the truth when 
 he said that my besetting sin was ' fatal facility.' I struggled 
 long to conquer fluency. Still, I have not succeeded. I find 
 a pleasure in expression for its own sake ; but I have not the 
 inevitable touch of the true poet, the unconquerable patience of 
 the conscious artist. As in other matters, so here, I tried to 
 make the best of my defects. Concentration lies beyond my 
 grasp. The right words do not fall into the right places at my 
 bidding. I have written few good paragraphs, and possibly no 
 single perfect line. I strove, however, to control the qualities 
 I knew myself to have, to train and curb them, to improve 
 them by attention to the details of style. If I have achieved 
 any success in literature, the secret of that success lies in 
 persistent effort, comlnned with a steady determination to 
 preserve the spirit of delight in labour and the spontaneity 
 of self. 
 
 Of moral qualities exercised in the same field of work I 
 may claim the following : — First, humility, developed by the 
 sense of insufficiency which over-clouded my earliest eftbrts. 
 Secondly, pride and self-respect, developed during the same 
 period of baffled aspirations. Blending their forces, these 
 qualities rendered me comparatively cold about the future of 
 my books, contented to compose for my own pleasure in a 
 spirit half-sanguine and half-pessimistic. I have never ex- 
 pected success or been fretful when I did not get it ; never 
 cared very much for praise or blame ; never curried favour or 
 sought to disarm opposition. In the third place, I think I 
 may ascribe to myself justice and open-mindedness, enabhng 
 me to take a ■svide survey of the fields I had to traverse. But
 
 1871 MANHOOD 285 
 
 perhaps this virtue is rather the outcome of indifference than 
 an active sense of Avhat is righteous. Fourthly, I have been 
 gifted with obstinacy in the face of physical and other dis- 
 advantages. This might also be described as courage or 
 tenacity, or a determination to make the best of things, or 
 a want of fastidiousness, impelling me to push my work 
 forward in spite of obstacles, and without caring greatly how 
 much it suffered owing to adverse circumstances. Experience 
 of life, often extremely bitter, at times unexpectedly blissful, 
 has taught me that there is nothing extraordinarily great in 
 the greatest of achievements, nothing mean in the meanest of 
 occupations ; briefly, that human life is not to be estimated by 
 what men perform, but by what they are. 
 
 The period of six years, between November 1862, when my 
 health broke down at Magdalen, and November 1868, when we 
 went to live at Clifton, forms the second main division of my 
 literary life. What I managed to do was done under great 
 dif^culties and in a desultory fragmentary manner. Moving 
 from one place to another, without access to libraries, and 
 always in depressed health, I could not undertake any im- 
 portant work or engage in any regular scheme of study. 
 Intellectually I lived from hand to mouth. The weakness of my 
 eyes rendered systematic reading impossible, and I depended, 
 in a great measure, upon my wife's unfailing kindness. She 
 read aloud to me for hours together. Curiously enough, 
 the lung troubles, which now threatened nay very existence, 
 seemed to relieve the misery of the brain. Gradually that 
 organ regained tone, although I suffered frequently from 
 attacks which proved that the disorder had not been lived 
 down. Sustained mental labour was out of the question. I 
 worked l)y fits and snatches. 
 
 Not having the strength for what the French call a ' work 
 of long breath,' I contented myself with swallow-flights. 1 
 wrote a great deal for the ' Cornhill,'. the ' Pall Mall Gazette,' 
 the ' North British,' and the ' Westminster.' In this way I com- 
 posed some of my Italian skfitches — ' Orvieto,' ' The Cornice,' 
 ' Siena and S. Catherine,' ' Ajaccio,' ' Christmas in Rome,' 
 ' The Love of the Alps,' ' i'rovcnyal Towns,' ' Ravenna,' and
 
 286 JOHN ADDING TON SYMONDS 1871 
 
 others which have been incorporated with the productions of a 
 later period. They were transcribed almost literally from the 
 diaries I kept during our winter and spring wanderings. 
 Some of the studies of Greek poets also belong to this time. 
 Among these I may mention ' Aristophanes,' ' Empedocles,' 
 ' The Idyllists,' ' The Gnomic Poets.' I also wrote those 
 essays on the English dramatists of which I have already 
 spoken. My little book on Ben Jonson in the ' English 
 Worthies ' series is mainly a rifacimento of the elaborate study 
 I then made of him. Much time was wasted upon a trans- 
 lation of Zeller's history of Aristotle and the Aristotelian 
 school. This I undertook at Jowett's suggestion. Jowett, 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 notliing short of a gauchcric. I found it 
 intolerably irksome. I did it abominably ill. It retarded the 
 recovery of my eyesight, and when it was done I abandoned it 
 as worthless. 
 
 Bad health and perpetual change of place forced me to 
 fritter my energies away. Yet the peculiar conditions of my 
 life were not without some counterbalancing advantages. I 
 learned, in that long tract of weariness and leisure, that Xtav 
 axoX-rj as Prometheus called his time on Caucasus, to take a 
 just measure of man's endeavour in the world. Enforced 
 abstinence and baffled ambition implanted in me a wise 
 indifference, a stoical sense of dSia^opta. I said to myself : 
 ' E}itbehrcn sollst da ; solht cntbahrcii.' I saw contem- 
 poraries pass me in the race of life ; and taught myself not 
 to envy this man's strength or that man's skill. In a word, 
 the stern school of adversity delivered me from many petti- 
 nesses. In a genial, if somewhat scornful, mood, I determined 
 to do what I could, however little and however worthless that 
 might be. I wrote for distraction, for enjoyment, for myself; 
 and did not cumber my soul with Avhat society or critics 
 thought about me. Hampered by so many disabilities, I 
 slowly but surely emancipated my soul from academical and 
 middle-class prejudices. The callings and the works of men
 
 1871 MANHOOD 287 
 
 appointed to different places in the world, assumed proper pro- 
 portions in my tired and disillusioned eyes. To wear the poet's 
 crown, to win the fame of the scholar, seemed to me on a par 
 with driving a straight furrow through the corn-land, or steer- 
 ing a ship to port through perilous waters under stormy skies. 
 I was disciplined into democracy Avith all its sympathies and all 
 its hauteur. Moreover, in proportion as I ceased to study 
 systematically, I learned to think and feel originally. In my 
 prostration I grew to be self-confident (without losing 
 humility). Daily experience told me what a slight difference 
 there is between a man handicapped as I was, and a man as 
 privileged as Southey. I mention Southey, because he is the 
 sort of man of letters I might have become if I had not been 
 thwarted by circumstance. On a lower level, it was no small 
 gain to acquire the knack of pursuing my studies, such as they 
 were, in hotels, in railway carriages, on steamboats, in lodging- 
 houses, in lonely Alpine chalets. The life of the spirit, a thin 
 thread, it is true, but tough and elastic, was carried on con- 
 tinuously under conditions which would have appalled an 
 armchair-student, or the habitue of a public library. What the 
 Italians call sprezzatura sustained me. I adored beauty, I 
 enjoyed mental energy, but I held opinion, as Farinata held 
 hell, in gran dispctto. Then there was the close communion 
 with nature in many fascinating and appealing places. This 
 surely was some equivalent for the loss of methodical investi- 
 gation, of physical vigour, of combative ambition, and of 
 opportunities for strenuous study. Lastly, I ought not to 
 neglect the benefit derived by a man of my temperament from 
 the slow, dumb, imbibition of a few books — Whitman, Theo- 
 critus, Shelley, Wordsworth, ]\filton, Marlowe, Dante, Browne 
 — in hours of inertia, face to face with Mediterranean seas or 
 Alpine summits.
 
 288 JOHX ADDIXGTON SYMONDS 1871 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 MANHOOD — EMBARKED ON LITERATURE 
 
 At Clifton Hill House — Civic duties — Publishes his first book, ' An 
 Introduction to the Study of Dante '—Dr. Symonds's ' Miscellanies ' 
 -Conington's ' Remains ' — Experience under Anesthetics — Journey 
 to Sicily and Athens — Impressions of Greece — Home again — Fall 
 from his horse — ' Studies of the Greek Poets ' — Its reception-^Sent 
 abroad again — Gathers material for the History of the Renaissance — 
 ' Sketches in Italy and Greece' — Great literary activity — The first 
 volume of 'The Renaissance ' — Failure of health — Sent abroad — 
 Michael Angelo's and Campanella's Sonnets — Breaks down. 
 
 1871. I ' HAD promised my father, before he died, to make Clifton 
 Hill House my home ; but we resolved to postpone our settling 
 there until the end of the summer. 
 
 It seems unfilial, almost impious, to say so, yet it is true 
 that the independence I now acquired added a decided 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 rej^ress 
 those parts of my nature with which he could not sympathise, 
 I resorted to subterfuge, half-measures, and concealments. 
 Left without him, I had to act for myself, and insensibly 
 I became more manly. 
 
 The events of the following years, in so far as they are not 
 connected with my rapidly expanding literary energies, might 
 be summed up in a series of foreign journeys and a succession 
 of civic duties. I was elected to my father's place upon the 
 Council of Clifton College. I helped to found the Bristol 
 University. I acted as secretary to an Invalid Ladies' Home 
 
 ' Autobiography
 
 1871 MA^'HOOD 289 
 
 at Clifton, and sat on the committee for Promoting the Higher 
 Education of Women. I connected myself with the Liberal 
 politicians of the city. Of public business and of social inter- 
 course I had enough and to spare during that period ; and 
 considering the rate at which I read and wrote, as is proved by 
 my publications, I was burning the candle always at both ends. 
 
 It has always touched me with a thrill of pathos to think 
 that my good, kind father died before I came before the world 
 as an avowed author. His ambition for his only son had been 
 checked and thwarted. He had suffered deeply by my failure 
 in health at the close of a brilliant academical career. Yet he 
 never uttered one peensh word to make me feel his disappoint- 
 ment. Shortly before his death, he expressed to me his 
 conviction, that I would never acquire the physical force to do 
 anything like solid work. ' You have one of those constitutions,' 
 he said, ' with just enough nervous strength for the common 
 requirements of life. You cannot draw upon the fund of 
 energy -without imperilling your health.' In fact he had 
 resigned all expectation of my making a mark in the world, 
 and herein he was amply justified, for I had now reached my 
 thirty-first year, with nothing to show but a somewhat misty 
 reputation as a writer of articles. Yet what I still contained 
 of slumbering force was now on the point of bursting out into 
 sudden activity. And nobody would have watched the eftbrts 
 of the next eighteen years, with more sympathy and satisfaction, 
 than my father would have done. Modest as my achievement 
 may have been, I am sure it would have gratified his fatherly 
 pride, and have compensated in his old age for the disappoint- 
 ment of the past. ' Dis aliter visum est.' And so strangely 
 are we mortals made, that God forgive me if I do not believe 
 my father's watchful supervision would have hampered my 
 energy. He exerted an extraordinary influence over those who 
 came within his sphere. Always benevolently exercised, this 
 was none the less despotic. I doubt whether I could have 
 written as freely, and published as spontaneously, as I have 
 done, had I been conscious of his criticism. 
 
 Anyhow, the year of his death coincided with a now and far 1^72. 
 more energetic phase of my literary life. For the rest of that 
 
 u
 
 290 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1872 
 
 year things went forward much as usual. In the spring of 
 1872, however, I made arrangements for publishing my lectures 
 on Dante under the title of ' An Introduction to the Study of 
 Dante.' The book was favourably received upon the whole, 
 and added to my reputation. At the same time, I collected 
 and published a volume of my father's ' Miscellanies ' (Arrow- 
 smith, Bristol, & Macmillan), and prepared Conington's 
 * Remains,' in two volumes, for the press (Longmans). Both 
 of these latter works I scamped, not wilfully or culpably, but 
 because I was still indifferent to the technique of literature. 
 I allowed my own articles to scramble into print as they could, 
 neglecting proofs, and not resenting misprints which would 
 now make my blood boil and the hair bristle on my head. 
 
 [While engaged upon this work, Symonds wrote thus to 
 Mr. Dakyns from Sutton Court :] 
 
 ' It ' is wonderfully beautiful in the country now. The 
 apple orchards are covered with pink and white bloom, and the 
 farm gardens are ablaze with tulips. But the real charm is in 
 the meadows and the hedges. One does not know whether to 
 fill one's hands with cowslips and orchises, or to sink into 
 a tangle of delicate fine grasses, from which bluebells here and 
 there tower up and starwort speckles the green with white. 
 These things, together -with the cawing of rooks and the sound 
 of a stream tumbling over the stones and the scent of wall- 
 flowers and early roses, send me to sleep. 
 
 ' I wonder whether we shall realise Venice this autumn. 
 Lying half asleep, I dream that we have reached Geneva hot 
 and dusty, and are gone to spend two nights at Glion — hot 
 sunlight blazing on the shield of water below, a silver shield 
 by day, a copper shield at sunset, and at night a steel-mirror 
 dotted with stars. Then I dream of a day's journey to the 
 hills beneath Zermatt. I have heard of a pass that avoids 
 Visp and that part of the Valais. The Moro makes another 
 dream ; and I loiter a little time at Macugnaga, and cross the 
 Baranca and get to Fobello, and see the Sacro Monte at 
 
 ' To H. G. Dakyns. Sutton Court, May 3, 1872.
 
 1872 MANHOOD 291 
 
 Varallo, and ride across the Colma between chestnut branches 
 and soft turf, and row over the little lake to Orta, and climb 
 the Duomo of Milan at daybreak, and at last I dream myself 
 into Venice itself. Then I seem to wake up, for when you are 
 at Venice it is like being in a dream, and when you dream 
 about Venice it is like being awake. I do not know how this 
 should be, but Venice seems made to prove that " La Vita c 
 till sogno." What the Venice dream is all the world knows. 
 Motion that is almost imperceptible, colour too deep and 
 gorgeous to strike the eye, gilding so massive and ancient as 
 to wear a mist of amber brown upon its brightness, white 
 cupolas that time has turned to pearls, marble that no longer 
 looks like stone, but like blocks cut from summer clouds, a 
 smooth sea that is brighter and more infinite than the sky it 
 reflects — these are some of the ingredients of the dream which 
 are too familiar for description. Nothing can describe the 
 elemental warmth of the days, the sea-kisses of the ^^'ind at 
 evening, the atmosphere of breathless tepid moonlight in the 
 night. Some people dislike this part of the dream. It just 
 suits me — only I dream of myself in it as dressed in almost 
 nothing and very lazy.' 
 
 [The way in which Symonds took unfavourable notices 
 of his first book is described in this letter to Mr. Henry 
 Bidgwick :] 
 
 • I ' will by this post send you a copy of my book on Dante, 
 in order to get the priceless precious gift you promise, which I 
 shall obtain at a wondrous cheap price if the " Athenjeum " is 
 right about my poor little volume. I have always wanted to 
 know what were the sensations of an author who seasoned 
 his breakfast with the perusal of a well-peppered review of his 
 first book. I have this morning experienced the emotions 
 peculiar to this condition, but, I fear, not with sufficient un- 
 bclf consciousness for exactly learning what I wished to learn. I 
 kept saying to myself : " That's a hard hit " ; " That's spiteful " ; 
 " I wonder whether it is making me twitch and shrink in the 
 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Clifton, Dec. 1, 1872. 
 
 u 2
 
 292 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1872 
 
 right way." But I expect that I had a pretty fair experience 
 on the whole. 
 
 'It is so disheartening to have had health and a bad 
 memory, and not in one's literary work to be able to attain by 
 any labov^r to Grundlichkeit and Genauigkeit. I do not like 
 uttering to you these little bat squeaks of a Troglodytic 
 creature ; and I am often so happy on my horse, scampering 
 at full gallop over the downs, so very happy when I am 
 translating Poliziano into English verse, and very tranquil 
 when I am hugging my baby.' 
 
 [Symonds's health was still in a very precarious state. As 
 he says himself : ' It was only by tours abroad that I kept 
 myself from a physical collapse.' In the late summer of 1872 
 he had taken a journey to Switzerland and Venice with 
 1873 Mr. Moor ; and in February of 1873, he was forced to place 
 himself in the hands of a dentist, with results which he 
 describes in the following remarkable letter to Mr. Sidgwick :] 
 
 ' I ^ have a strange, deep, inexplicable power of suftering 
 that belongs not to natures more finely strung than the 
 average, I think, but to those which require for their mere 
 existence some frequent tasting of the cqjrcs jouissances of 
 mere nature — savage and bitter to the taste. All the sweet 
 refined fruits, the grapes and the peaches, of poetry and art, 
 are mine ; and I care not for them one jot, if 1 may not press 
 from time to time against my lips the sharp, rough husk of 
 the wild drupe. As I must not pluck and taste these wilding 
 berries, I pine with a distempered appetite, and am cloyed with 
 over sua\ity. 
 
 ' I am going to write out for you the account of a curious 
 psychological experience I had the other day. On Tuesday I 
 was put under the influence of chloroform and laughing gas 
 together. I felt no pain ; but my consciousness seemed 
 complete, and I was occupied ^vith the strange thoughts which 
 you shall read. Tell me what you think about it. If this had 
 happened to a man in an uncritical age, would it not have 
 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Clifton, Feb. 20, 1873.
 
 1873 31ANII00D 293 
 
 carried con\-iction, like that of Saul of Tarsus, to his soul ? 
 A \iolent deepening of despair — a sense of being mocked and 
 cheated — remains with me.' 
 
 [Then follows Symonds's account of this experience.] 
 
 ' After the choking and stifling of the chloroform had 
 passed away, I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness : 
 then came flashes of intense light, alternating with blackness, 
 and with a keen -vision of what was going on in the room 
 round me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was 
 near death ; when, suddenly, my soul became aware of God, 
 who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, 
 in an intense personal present reality. I felt Him streaming 
 in like Hght upon me, and heard Him saying in no language, 
 but as hands touch hands and communicate sensation, " I 
 led you, I guided you ; you will never sin, and weep, and wail 
 in madness any more ; for, now, you have seen Me." My 
 whole consciousness seemed brought into one point of absolute 
 conviction ; the independence of my mind from my body was 
 proved by the phenomena of this acute sensibility to spiritual 
 facts, this utter deadness of the senses ; Life and Death seemed 
 mere names, for what was there then but my soul and God, 
 two indestructible existences in close relation. I could reason 
 a little, to this extent that I said : " Some have said they were 
 convinced by miracles and spirit-rapping, but my conviction 
 is a real new sense." I also felt God saying : " I have suft'ered 
 you to feel sin and madness, to ache and be abandoned, in 
 order that now you might know and gladly greet Me. Did 
 you think the anguish of the last few days and this experience 
 you are undergoing were fortuitous coincidences ? " I cannot 
 describe the ecstasy I felt. Then as I gradually awoke from 
 the influence of the ana;sthetics, the old sense of my relation 
 to the world began to return, the new sense of my relation to 
 God began to fade. I suddenly leapt to my feet on the cliair 
 where I was sitting, and shrieked out : " It is too horrible, it is 
 too horrible, it is too horrible," meaning that I could not bear 
 this disillusionment. Then I flung myself on the ground, and
 
 294 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1873 
 
 at last awoke covered with blood, calling to the two surgeons 
 (who were frightened), "Why did you not kill me? Why 
 would you not let me die ? " Only think of it. To have felt 
 for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all 
 purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then to 
 find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been 
 tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain. 
 
 ' Yet, this question remains : Is it possible that the inner 
 sense of reality which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to 
 impressions from without, to the ordinary sense of physical 
 relations, was not a delusion but an actual experience ? It is 
 possible that I, in that moment, felt what some of the saints 
 have said they always felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable 
 certainty of God ? ' 
 
 [In the spring of 1873, Symonds went with his wife to 
 Sicily and Athens. 
 
 ' Athens is not only the most spirit-shaking, but the most 
 purely beautiful place that exists. Here, one feels all that one 
 divined in England of the Greek spirit. It is pure light, 
 serenity, harmony, balance, definition, nothing too large, too 
 crushing, but all human and beautiful, and fit for the cradle of 
 the free Logos.' 
 
 So wrote Symonds to Mr. Dakyns, when at Corfu on his 
 way home. The rich impressions of this journey were published 
 in the first of the three series of ' Travel- Sketches,' inaugurated 
 in 1874. 
 
 After reaching England again the Symondses spent some 
 time together with Miss S. F. Alleyne in North Wales. On 
 their return from this journey Symonds fell in a fainting fit 
 from the saddle of his horse, while riding at full gallop on the 
 Durdham Downs. He writes of the accident to his sister 
 thus :] 
 
 ' I ^ should like to tell you myself about an accident which 
 happened to me on Friday, and which you may have heard of 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Clifton, Sept. 19, 1873.
 
 1873 MANHOOD 295 
 
 I was galloping my horse near the Sea Walls, when I fainted 
 and fell oft" backwards on to my head on the ground. Partly 
 through the faintness, and partly through the stunning, 1 
 remained insensible for nearly an hour, and was carried by my 
 two old college pupils, Pearson and Nash, into that house close 
 by the Sea Walls, which you may remember. They got Dr. 
 Fox from Clifton, and then brought me home, with no bones 
 broken or other injuries, thank God, but with a terribly shaken 
 brain. 
 
 ' I am told that I must attribute the cause of this accident 
 to weakness from overwork ; and I suppose this is true. 
 Though what surprises me is, that for the last month I have 
 been feeling more and more able to command my strength for 
 mental labour. 
 
 ' It seems, however, not to be my lot in life to be able to 
 work while it is yet day ; and Heaven knows how difficult I 
 find it to keep my mind healthy when I am not working. In 
 this way, by buffets and jerks, one comes at last to the great 
 silence, I suppose, where all ends.' 
 
 ' I ' fear I wrote to you in a querulous and desponding tone 
 before. In truth I do find it a hard trial to be thrown down 
 again, and by a blow which seems to carry the menace of 
 indefinite difficulties in the future. But I have many deep 
 sources of self-consolation. Foremost is the hope that either 
 I may recover strength enough to live as earnestly for the 
 nobler purposes as I wish, or else that I may now be too weak 
 to retain a thought or care for what is less worthy of a man. 
 The worst that could happen to me would be to retain physical 
 strength and the power of locomotion, &c. (so as to have idleness 
 and the capacity for filling it up badly), while mentally enfeebled 
 and morally hai'assed. This is a sort of nightmare from which 
 I have hitherto found escape in literary laboui'. 
 
 ' I do not so much regret my work. Other men can easily 
 do as well and better what I have set myself to do, and if they 
 do not, the world will not suflter. No ; I had hoped to make 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Clifton, Sept. 1873.
 
 296 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1873 
 
 my work the means of saving my soul, and therefore I 
 loved it.' 
 
 [While Symonds was upon his travels, his ' Studies of the 
 Greek Poets ' had been going through the press. He had left 
 the manuscript ready for printing, and soon after his return 
 the volume appeared. ' The success of the book,' he writes in 
 his Autobiography, ' was marked,' and he expresses his satisfac- 
 tion in the following letter to Mr. Dakyns :] 
 
 ' We ^ came yesterday to London, and in a small way I 
 found myself famous. Miss North had asked Newton, the 
 explorer of Cnidus and Hahcarnassus, Poole, the keeper of the 
 British Museum coins, Frank Galton, the Russell Gurneys, 
 who have just returned from Washington, and others to meet 
 us, and I was made to talk about the Greeks. I do not know 
 what stimulating and invigorating effect it produces to meet 
 with people, respectable in their several lines, who regard one 
 as an authority in one's own. But it seems to brace me, to 
 draw me together to a point, and to make me feel the duty 
 of self-culture more. It is no longer satisfactory to set down 
 vague thoughts in a pleasant way for my own delectation. It 
 becomes a duty to acquire more precision and extension of 
 thought. At the same time, there is an accession of strength.' 
 
 ' But ^ the main event of the year was the composition of a 
 long series of lectures on " The Renaissance in Italy." This 
 formed the kernel of my future labours.' 
 
 [The results of the fall at Clifton were still serious. His 
 friend and physician. Dr. Beddoe, had advised him to travel 
 again. It was the only way of keeping him from study. He 
 was on his way abroad when he wrote the preceding letter. 
 He had engaged a Courmayeur man as servant — Jean Tairraz 
 by name ; and in his company voyaged from Southampton to 
 Malta, visited Tunis and Sicily, and returned by Naples, Rome, 
 Perugia, Florence and Cannes. 
 
 Symonds's mental and emotional attitude is shown in the 
 following letters. His attention was already engaged upon 
 
 ' To H. G. Dakyns. Oct. 29, 1873. - Autobiography.
 
 1873 MANHOOD 297 
 
 the History of the Renaissance, and throughout this journey 
 he gathered material for his work.] 
 
 ' I ^ fear I shall not see you at Cannes. I should have 
 liked to linger in Umbria and Tuscany until you reached the 
 Ri^iera, and then to have joined you : for my life in this 
 middle region of Italy is most delightful. My long study of 
 the country gives me a firm hold on everything : I see nothing 
 that does not fortify or correct some opinion, or help to give 
 colour to some description. And I can work so well. 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. I have benefited by the 
 journey, and here at least I am not bored. But before I 
 touched the shore of Italy— i.e. in Malta, at Tunis, and in 
 Sicily, and on innumerable steamers — I was a little bored, and 
 thouf^ht the whole thing a sell. But I must break this 
 fair life short. Italy! How much more we owe to you 
 than to Germany. This is what I want to make the world see ; 
 but I fear it is rather like preaching the excellent qualities of 
 their grandmother to them. 
 
 ' The only thing that annoys me here is the defaut de vies 
 qualites. I am a poet, and poets have special sufferings. My 
 sympathy with the people I see about makes me understand 
 them in a kind of odd intuitive way and desire their company. 
 But I cannot cret close to them. I am like a statue walking 
 among men. As a form of art, their life is mine. It is I who 
 know all about their historical antecedents. It is I who have 
 set their songs to English cadences. But if I tried to reach 
 thorn they would find mc miintelligiblo. This is the great 
 grief of a poet : his agony of longing is a condition of his 
 sensibility. See on this subject Browning's " Clcon." And 
 all this goes deeper still. You are right in saying that nature 
 has given me great facility in acquisition and production. I'.ut 
 wth this there is a curse— the corresponding quickness and 
 keenness of emotion that perforce must lose itself in longing. 
 What I suffer I only know. And when this emotion becomes 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Cortona, Dec. 1-5, 1873,
 
 298 JOHX ADDIXGTOX SYMOXDS 1873 
 
 blunt, I shall know, not that I am freed, but that I am dying ; 
 for these intense pains are a condition of ^'itality in me. It is 
 all this which makes me alternate between feverish and voracious 
 work and exhausted idleness. I have intervals of clairvoyance 
 and intervals of stagnant blindness. 
 
 ' I hope to be one of the readers of your book — for this 
 reason : my meditations of late, carried on at night, mostly 
 between sea and sky, after reading bits of Helmholtz's Lectures, 
 which I have with me, make me beheve that on the method 
 of ethics vnll depend the future of the human race. One such 
 discovery as Newton's law of gra\itation in the field of morals 
 would advance us aeons forward in all that concerns spiritual 
 life. We beat about the bush so long because we have not 
 found the scientific starting-point of ethics. This is what I 
 meant when I said in my Greek book that Science was to be 
 our deliverer.' 
 
 [Another aspect of his emotions is expressed in the follow- 
 ing terms :] 
 
 * Je ^ ne pourrais pas te dire combien j'ai souffert et combien 
 j'ai joui pendant ces huit semaines de voyage — mais toujours, tu 
 I'entendras bien, par la seule pensee. La pensee dans cette soh- 
 tude est devenue plus que jamais ma \-ie tout entiere, ma consola- 
 tion et mon tourment,la cause de toutes mes maladies et au meme 
 temps la seule sante dont je puisse jouir. Eompre les liens du 
 reve et devenir un homme agissant dans le milieu des faits 
 reels, c'est ce qui m'est maintenant et pour toujours impossible. 
 Get atroce magicien, I'Atlante de la pensee, m'a enferme, 
 comme auparavant Ruggiero dans son palais, qu'il n'a forme 
 que d'air, mais duquel les murailles sont infranchissables. 
 Puis je travaille toujours a mon livre. Je veux approfondir 
 I'esprit de la Renaissance italienne. Et comme dit Georges 
 Sand, travailler pour la gloire est au meme temps un role 
 d'empereur et un metier de for9at. C'est en effet une vie bien 
 dure. La surexcitation de toutes les facultes intellectuelles, la 
 detente continuelle de I'imagination, le travail de la sympathie, 
 
 ' To H. G. Dakyns. Savona, Dec. 21, 1873.
 
 1873 MANHOOD 299 
 
 poussent a la manie et prodmsent des chutes inexplicables d'en 
 haut des sommites de I'ideal jusque dans les bourbiers de la 
 fantaisie le plus tristement ridicules. Je ne pourrais pas 
 t'ecrire toute la verite en rapport de ces degriugolades bizarres 
 et baroques. Un Mephistophele cynique se mele la-dedans 
 pour produire des metamorphoses de la pensee tourmentee. 
 Tu sais que les liaisons formees par le hasard tout seul sont ce 
 qu'il y a de plus agreable dans les voyages. Comme disait 
 Stendhal : " Tout est decouverte, tout est grace. II n'y a pas 
 de hen." ]\Iais le melancolique penseur, tant qu'il soit un pen 
 poete, porte dans ces liaisons son desesperant '' au grand serieux." 
 II veut que la bonne chance lui apporte quelque forte sensation 
 voulue d'avance, concue dans son cerveau travaille par les 
 passions de la fantaisie. II ne veut pas simplement jouir de la 
 bonne aventure, mais se creer une reahte correspondaute a ses 
 reves. Alors il brise I'etre fragile du moment, ou bien il ne se 
 sent pas assez de force pour faire eclore ces fleurs aux odeurs 
 enivrantes qu'il entrevoit sur la tige ombragee que la fortune 
 lui apporte. Et si par hasard il a de I'esprit, il voit qu'il n'y a 
 rien de plus ridicule que de chercher toujours des acteurs dans 
 un drame qu'il a concu de longue main dans sa pensee 
 maladive. II faudrait etre grand artiste pour tirer du marbre 
 de la reaUte cette forme de la pure fantaisie — de se faire un 
 poeme d'une aventure banale. 
 
 ' Cannes, December 26. — In the middle of my last laborious 
 sentence I had to stop short. This stopping short, breaking 
 threads of thought and fancy, is the real merit of travelling. 
 I hope to be home soon. It is very lovely here ; but I am 
 weary. I have read and thought more than I usually do 
 during the last month,' 
 
 [The period which followed the return from this journey, 
 in which, as the letters show, Symonds had been strongly 
 stirred in intellect and emotions, was one of almost feverish 
 literary activity. The fruits of his journeys, so far as they bore 
 upon the Renaissance, were now to be garnered, ready for use, 
 and he describes himself as ' working very hard in my study at 
 Clifton Hill House, and filling four or five thick books of
 
 300 .lOHX ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 manuscrij^t with fervid declamation.' But the strain was 
 severe, as the following letters prove :] 
 
 1874 ' 1 1 fear the whole horizon is changed for me, as usual. 
 Almost from the date I saw you in London I have been ill. I 
 had to give up my visit to Eton, and on arriving here to take 
 to bed. Bronchitis began the mischief, and the last three 
 days have been one protracted torment. I sometimes wonder 
 whether there are many men thwarted as much as I am by 
 a series of Protean small ailments ; and then I wonder with 
 a sort of vanity how many of the kind do as much as I do. 
 I have managed in this illness to write a long poem in ottava 
 rima on an Italian story, another in terza rima of a ghastly 
 kind, an elaborate essay on Hey wood's plays, a notice of 
 Brome's dramatic works, and a portion of an essay on the 
 Italian Eepublics of the Renaissance. But it is killing work. 
 I say to myself, like Macbeth, '• At least we'll die with harness 
 on our back." 
 
 ' Some men waste their life in the boredom of dull routine 
 duties, others in the accumulation of money they are too tired 
 to enjoy, others in the pursuit of pleasure that is never grasped, 
 others in sickness. And yet all, if they have any manliness, 
 do some pieces of imperishable work, in passion or in labour. 
 By the way, is it this by-seed that saves us ? ' 
 
 ' 1 2 have been ailing in health ever since the day I saw you 
 in London ; and till I can get to Switzerland, home is really 
 the best place for me. Catherine and I made out a little visit 
 to Lynton last week, which we should have thoroughly enjoyed 
 if I had not been so weak. I was thankful to return on 
 Tuesday, and to feel that I could creep about my own rooms 
 half asleep again. 
 
 ' These chest colds do not agree with sober work, but they 
 do not exactly disagree with some sorts of irregular intellectual 
 activity. So I have been in a blaze of poetry of late — reading 
 and writing. 
 
 ^t>' 
 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Clifton, March 10, 1874. 
 - To the same. Clifton, April 30, 1874,
 
 187i MANHOOD 301 
 
 ' 1 should not wonder if I published a volume of poems 
 after all. 
 
 ' I hope you got my last immortal work. I told Smith 
 to send you a copy ; and in this envelope, if I can find one, 
 I will send you a sonnet which I wrote as a dedication of the 
 book to Catherine. Miss Thackeray, writing from Freshwater, 
 says she has shown it to Tennyson, who approves — long- 
 suflfering old bard. 
 
 ' I am going to lecture again this term to the Clifton 
 College boys. How it will agree with my lungs I do not quite 
 know, but I must try. 
 
 ' I have enough of general sympathy for young souls left to 
 like it.' 
 
 'I' am reading "Both well" whenever I feel I have any 
 brains to read with, which is not often in many days. It is 
 surely a wonderful work of art. I do not think anything 
 greater has been produced in our age, in spite of its inordinate 
 length and strange affectation of style. However, one reads 
 oneself into a sympathy with his use of language, and then the 
 sustained effort of thought and imagination is overpowering in 
 its splendour. It seems to me the most virile exercise of the 
 poetic poAver in combination with historic accuracy that our 
 literature of this century can show. 
 
 ' My first volume, on the Political and Social Conditions of 
 the Renaissance in Italy, is just all but finished. The arts, 
 the literature, the discovery of the antique, and the beginnings 
 of philosophy under the form of scholarship, have yet to be 
 done, perhaps two volumes more.' 
 
 [Symonds records his literary activity during this period in 
 the following words :] 
 
 This '•^ year, 1874, saw the publication of my ' Sketches in 
 Italy and Greece.' These were reprints from magazines, 
 tfigether with pieces extracted from my Diary. The article on 
 Perugia, for instance, which now appeared for the first time, 
 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Glenthorne, June 2'.), 1874. 
 ■■' Autobiography.
 
 302 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1875 
 
 had been written at Arezzo in the previous December, I 
 remember how cold and dismal the Tuscan inn-room was, and 
 how my blood burned while I sat scribbling till the manuscript 
 was finished. I ought to say that in this year I began to work 
 for the ' Fortnightly Review,' at John Morley's express request. 
 He had been struck by the ' Greek Poets.' I also joined the 
 ' Academy ' newspaper, to which I promised my work gratis ; 
 and nothing that I sent there has been paid for. 
 1875 In 1875 I published the first volume of ' The Renaissance 
 in Italy.' It was entirely rewritten from lectures ; and the 
 defect of the method is clearly observable in its structure. 
 I believe that I should not have obtained the initiative for a 
 ponderous work unless I had begun by lecturing. The irri- 
 tability of my brain rendered me peculiarly intolerant of 
 sustained labour. But a rhetorical tone sur\ived my best 
 attempts to rehandle the material which had been designed 
 for declamation. Changes of style and purple patches 
 deformed the unity and gravity of a serious historical work. 
 Relief from thoughts which had become intolerable had to be 
 sought in brain-labour. That being so, I did not sufficiently 
 count the cost, or approach my theme in a calm artistic spirit. 
 This origin of my magnum opus is hinted at in sonnets called 
 ' Envoy to a Book ' in ' Vagabunduli Libellus.' 
 
 I worked furiously, recklessly, at this period, devouring 
 books upon Italian history, art, scholarship, and literature, 
 writing continually, and pushing one volume forward while 
 another was going through the press. The same year, 1875, I 
 sent out the second volume of ' Studies of Greek Poets,' a large 
 number of which were prepared from lectures, or written 
 expressly to fill up gaps in the series. The last essay in this 
 volume on the Greek spirit was a first attempt to deal 
 philosophically "vvith moral and religious problems. 
 
 [In the midst of all this vigorous production, it is interest- 
 ing to observe Symonds's attitude towards criticism and his 
 public, as he expresses it in the following passages :] 
 
 ' I ' am so habitually more moved by passionate impulses, 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Jan. 26, 1875.
 
 1875 MANHOOD 303 
 
 that I dare say I do not truly comprehend your attitude about 
 writing and study. I cannot quite picture to myself a 
 man who has done this, and will not for the love of the thing, 
 con amove, do more — moved by Eros, only son of Penia and 
 Poros. 
 
 ' I think it is dangerous to attach importance to the opinion 
 of people in print or otherwise, except in matters of personal 
 prudence, good taste, and so forth. The real thing is to 
 discover if you enjoy literary work. You will not cumber the 
 world with books more than you do already with your body, 
 and oblinon covers both quickly as far as both are perishable. 
 
 ' For a man to do what he likes best is the right course, 
 since his liking is the surest sign of his capacity — far surer 
 than the estimate of critics or of friends. Love is the only 
 law. This is the one great gospel that is true.' 
 
 In ' the spring of 1875, my wife and I set forth again for 
 Rome, Amalfi, Capri — lovely wanderings, of which a pale 
 shadow remains in my sketches. In the summer of the year 
 I again betook myself to the Rhone Valley, Bel Alp and 
 Chamonix with the two Dakynses. Here I worked hard at 
 the second volume of my ' Renaissance in Italy.' In the 
 wnter of 1875-76, my health, as usual, began to fail. Dr. 
 Beddoe recommended me to go to the Riviera. My wife and 
 I accordingly settled at San Remo in February. There I 
 wrote a large part of the second volume of my ' Renaissance 
 in Italy.' 
 
 [On his return to England Symonds spent some time in 
 London :] 
 
 ' Since ^ we left Clifton last Saturday week we have had a 1876 
 curious mixed eventful life, of which if I cannot render some 
 idea to you, as I feel impelled to do, I shall not send this 
 letter. 
 
 ' It is increasingly strange to me to notice how existence 
 
 ' Autobiofjr.'iphy. 
 
 * To H. G. Dakyns. London, May 31, 187G.
 
 304 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1876 
 
 proceeds by jerks — staccato movements, saccadc emphasis — 
 violent revolutions of subjective tone from extreme quiescence 
 to febrile excitement and back again, and all the while how the 
 internal self obeys its own forlorn laws, remaining within 
 the cage of prescribed limitations. This contrast between 
 the many-motived exterior machine of circumstance and the 
 inflexible interior monotony is a matter too deep for tears or 
 sighs, when the individual has no ulterior point like God, or an 
 idea whereby to steer his course. " Unstable as water thou 
 shalt not excel," seems to me a motto painfully applicable, and 
 yet shallow in its inadequacy to reach the central point of 
 instability — the self that apprehends so many things and seizes 
 none, that sets its final stake on no one square of all the 
 chequer board, but moves from square to square irresolute and 
 
 eager. 
 
 ' Now it seems to me that in this preamble I have said all 
 I had to say ; for of bright luminous pictures, detaching them- 
 selves against a grey background, I have none to give. In 
 many directions I have seen and heard and experienced things 
 which the uncritical would call remarkable and the philosopher 
 could morahse upon. 
 
 ' There is a walk, for instance, in Magdalen with Mrs. 
 Lewis, talking upon the fundamental truths of ethics, and the 
 way of adjusting the scientific instinct to sentiments sacred. 
 There is a midnight smoking dialogue with George Howard 
 about Art and Italy. There is a great recital given by 
 Rubinstein. There are two performances of " Tannhiiuser." 
 There is the "Hamlet" of Sahdni. There are innumerable 
 pictures seen and studied. There are sights and scenes of 
 London streets, each one of which would make a poem. There 
 is the entering into the sanctuary of Blake, filled with all he 
 wrought. There is the summer beauty of Cambridge, more 
 picturesque than anything these eyes have seen in England. 
 There is the dreary fading off into illimitable distance of the 
 thoughts I cherished for my book — the passing away to ghost- 
 land of my best imaginings. There is the final sense of 
 impotence to be effectual, most poignant, most crushing, most 
 persuasive, and yet unutterable.'
 
 1876 MANHOOD 305 
 
 The ' summer was spent in hard work upon the third 
 vohime of the ' Eenaissance,' and at the end of it I went with 
 H. F. Brown and J. E. Pearson to the Valais. Here I found 
 that my physical vigour was considerably abated. I took 
 severe colds, which left me exhausted, and I remember sufter- 
 ing considerable fatigue after a walk with Brown from Saas 
 over the flanks of the Fletschhorn and the Simli Col to the 
 Simplon Hospice. [From the Simplon Hospice we went to 
 the Riederalp, where we found Mr. and Mrs. Dakyns and Mr. 
 Oscar Browning. There, in the midst of damp fogs that crept 
 into our rooms through chinks in the log-built walls, the 
 ' Renaissance ' advanced rapidly, at' feverish speed, which told 
 of diminishing energy.] My ^ father's dying prediction had been 
 fulfilled. The tax upon my nervous strength during four years 
 of intense and feverish industry exhausted my constitution. 
 
 In February 1877, I think, I gave three lectures on 1877 
 ' Florence and the Medici,' at the Royal Institution. Very 
 dull lectures they were, for my soul was not in them. I had 
 composed the lectures especially for what I most abhor, an 
 audience of cultivated people. This is a paradoxical confes- 
 sion. I am nothing if not cultivated ; or, at least, the world 
 only expects culture from me. But in my heart of hearts I 
 do not believe in culture, except as an adjunct to life. ' Life 
 is more than literature,' I say. So I cannot, although I devote 
 my time and energy to culture (even as a carpenter makes 
 doors, or a carver carves edelweiss on walnut wood), regard it 
 otherwise than in the light of pastime, decoration, service. 
 Passion, nerve and sinew, eating and drinking, even money- 
 getting, the coarsest forms of activity — come, in my reckoning, 
 before culture. Little did I care what the gentlemen in frock- 
 coats, and the ladies in bonnets, thought of my lectures. I 
 did not care what they thought, because I knew that the real 
 arena for myself and the rest of them was not in that theatre 
 of disputations, elucidations, and plausible explications of all 
 sorts of theories. It lay outside, inside, in a world of things 
 which each carries about with him, and into which each pene- 
 
 ' Autobiography. '■' Ibid.
 
 306 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONDS 1877 
 
 trates when the voice of the lecturei- is no more heard in the 
 theatre. 
 
 The theatre of the Royal Institution — that dismal pit in 
 which a lecturer stands, under malign London light in Feb- 
 ruary, with a cold di'aught pumped upon his shoulders — took 
 its revenge upon me for the insolence I have declared, and my 
 indifference to culture. In short, I caught a bad cold in the 
 lungs, while engaged in that husky task of lecturing to drowsy 
 folk, on topics which they neither understood nor cared to be 
 instructed in. 
 
 This cold developed into a sharp attack of bronchitis when 
 I returned to Clifton. I had a long and tedious illness. My 
 good friend and doctor, John Beddoe, pronounced that the left 
 lung was now at last seriously and dangerously compromised. 
 He sent me off to Greece. I was to go there in the company 
 of F. Tuckett of the Alpine Club. But I only got as far as 
 Cannes upon the way. A certain daimon — or instinct of ab- 
 stention — which attends all open-minded human beings when 
 they have a choice between the possible and the impossible 
 in practical circumstances — told me that I was unfit to risk 
 a journey into Greece, and that it would be inflicting a too 
 serious responsibility upon my travelling friends if I should do 
 so ; and, without exactly knowing why, I determined to await 
 a coming crisis in regions which were better known to me. 
 
 So I pottered about Lombardy in the spring of 1877. 
 Chronic fever was upon me, and I had the recklessness of 
 disease — the curious fretful energy of some one tormented by 
 a persistent drain on his \itality. I trailed the skirts of my 
 physical and nervous unrest through those Italian cities, always 
 ahve to their monuments of art and history, always touching 
 human nature, and in no wise gaining satisfaction, and what 
 the soul gained or lost in the process of experience was a 
 levelling down until it touched the ground-pan of pauvre 
 hurtianite. What I discovered was that I could love and 
 fraternise "with the least, and last, and poorest, that I could 
 call the meanest my friends, my brothers and sisters. But I 
 had no gospel to preach to them. I only came to understand 
 them and their integrity with myself.
 
 1877 MANHOOD 307 
 
 On this tour I discovered Campanella's sonnets, and began 
 to translate them, together with Michael Angelo's, into 
 EngUsh. Terribly ill at last, I managed to reach CHfton 
 early in June ^\^thout a collapse. During a night spent in 
 great misery at Turin, 1 was probably on the verge of calamity. 
 Fortunately I reached home ; and the next day, while riding 
 on the downs, I was surprised by a sudden and violent hemor- 
 rhage from the lungs. 
 
 x2
 
 308 JOHN ADDTNGTON SYMONDS 1877 
 
 1877 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 MANHOOD — BELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Recovers slowly — Happiness — His statement of his religion — Childhood 
 — Harrow — Oxford — ' Essays and Reviews ' — Comtism — The cosmic 
 enthusiasm — Goethe — Cleanthes — Walt Whitman — Darwin — Con- 
 clusion. 
 
 A ^ GREAT peace came over me, as I lay for weeks in bed, 
 forgetful of the conflict, slowly and painfully recovering a 
 dram of strength. It was a blissful interlude in my life, those 
 weeks in which I lay resigned to death. But life returned ; 
 and though I was maimed and bruised, definitely convicted of 
 actual phthisis, I felt the call to live. When I got up at last 
 from my sick bed, I could hardly recognise myself as the same 
 person. The struggle for mere life had now absorbed and 
 superseded the struggle for what I sought in life. I seemed 
 for the moment like a man new born. I was a child in the 
 hands of something di\dne, to which I responded with an 
 infinite gratitude. So preoccupied was I with the difficulty of 
 existing that I did not then think what further existence would 
 imply — the resumption of the burden of my personality. I 
 employed myself to the best of my ability in setting my worldly 
 affairs in order — being conscious of impending death — and for 
 the rest I exercised my literary faculty in such light work as I 
 could do — translating the sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti 
 and Tommaso Campanella, which I had begun before my illness. 
 Never have I felt happier in the soul than during those weeks 
 when my life was hanging on a thread, and when the sensuous 
 faculties remained in abeyance — the real man, the self, which 
 
 ' Autobiography,
 
 1877 MANHOOD 309 
 
 is immortal, being left open to only intellectual influences, and 
 these pervading only a small portion of his total sensibility. 
 
 Religion is so important a factor in man's intellectual life, 
 and has so direct a bearing upon the growth of the emotions, 
 that I ought not to omit some account of my development, 
 
 I have already observed that I was not gifted by nature 
 with any strong sense of God as a Person near to me, nor was 
 I naturally of a pious disposition ; nor yet, again, endowed 
 ^\dth that theological bias which qualifies the metaphysical 
 thought of philosophers like my late brother-in-law. Professor 
 T. H. Green. 
 
 The groundwork of my mental temperament might rather 
 be described as literary, resthetical, with a certain bias to scholar- 
 ship and curiosity. 
 
 In boyhood I received the usual kind of training in religious 
 matters at home. I learned the Catechism, the Collects of the 
 Prayer-Book, and considerable portions of the Psalms and 
 Gospels. My aunt. Miss Sykes, used to read the Bible with 
 us every morning ; and on Sundays we always went twice to 
 church. There was nothing in my early surroundings to evoke 
 the religious sentiment by any appeal to my peculiar nature. 
 And yet I believe that I went to Harrow with as strong a sense 
 of moral allegiance to the Deity, as God-fearing and as willing 
 to receive religious influences, as most boys of my age. 
 
 My father's mental and moral influence began to make 
 itself powerfully felt during my Oxford life. We were drawn 
 together, and exchanged thoughts upon the deepest problems, 
 with a freedom unusual, perhaps, in the intercourse of father 
 and son. Some of his most intimate friends had been, and 
 others still were, thinkers of the Broad Church school — John 
 Sterling, Rev. Frederic Myers of Keswick, F. D. Maurice, 
 Francis Newman, and Professor Jowett. Their ideas filtered 
 through my father's conversation into my head, together with 
 the criticism of his own clear logic. The conversation of the 
 three last whom I have mentioned, and also of that subtle 
 thinker, Sydney Dol)oll, familiariscjd me with lines of specula- 
 tion antagonistic to any narrow interpretations of Christian 
 dogma. The creeds which cling so lirmly to many minds hung
 
 310 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1850-90 
 
 loose on me. As they dropped off and melted away, I felt the 
 difficulty and the danger of li\ing in the world without a fixed 
 belief in God, Christ, the scheme of redemption, the immortality 
 of souls assigned to reward or punishment. I sympathised 
 much with Arthur Clough. But I soon perceived that it 
 would be impossible for me to rest in that halting-place which 
 men like my father, Maurice, Jowett, Stanley, had constructed 
 for themselves and fitted up according to the particular tone 
 and bias of their several dispositions. I understood and 
 respected their position, especially my father's. Still I felt 
 that their qualified adherence to Christianity and the Scriptures 
 had something illogical in it, which might be explained, and 
 excused by the circumstances of their emergence out of rigid 
 orthodoxy into liberalism. I was starting from the point which 
 they had reached, and I should be compelled to go further. 
 
 This does not mean that I became irreligious. On the 
 contrary, I now for the first time began to comprehend what 
 religion is, and to feel about for some faith whereby my own 
 soul might be supported. I took to examining my thoughts 
 and wishes with regard to the mysteries of the universe— God, 
 nature, man. This I did seriously, almost systematically, 
 during more than two years of reading for the final schools at 
 Oxford. The studies on which I was engaged — Plato, Aristotle, 
 the history of ancient and modern philosophy, logic — suppHed 
 me with continual food for meditation ; and in the course of 
 long walks, or midnight colloquies, I compared my own eager 
 questionings mth those of many sorts of men — Conington, 
 who professed himself a submissive Christian through terror ; 
 Hugh Pearson, one of the mellowest of the orthodox Broad 
 Church men [' a good man,' Symonds calls him elsewhere, 
 ' rooted in a fair soil, over whom chance and change have only 
 an external empire ' ] ; T. H. Green, the sturdy and yet 
 imaginative philosopher ; C. C. Puller, already fascinated by 
 the gospel of Auguste Comte ; W. R. W. Stephens ; 
 A. 0. Rutson, George Bright, J. S. Phillpotts, Albert Dicey, 
 Charles Parker, James Bryce, Edwin Palmer. A book called 
 ' Essays and Reviews ' attracted extraordinary attention at that 
 time ; and a vehement contest about the endowment of Professor
 
 1850-90 MANHOOD 311 
 
 Jowett's chair was raging between the Liberals and Conserva- 
 tives of the University. Theology penetrated our intellectual 
 and social atmosphere. We talked theology at breakfast-parties 
 and at wine-parties, out riding and walking, in college gardens, on 
 the river, wherever young men and their elders met together. 
 
 [I have taken the following letter to his friend, Mr. Stephens 
 — one of the longest, fullest, most concentratedly passionate 
 letters he ever wrote — out of its chronological order, and 
 inserted it here because its contents are particularly germane to 
 the subject of this chapter. The letter itself belongs to a 
 period posterior to the preceding passage of the Autobiography, 
 to that most important passage in his life, the speculative 
 crisis at Cannes : ] 
 
 ' I ' want to answer the more serious part of your letter, 
 and to thank you for it. When I wrote to you from Bayeux, 
 in great weariness and sickness of soul, I knew that I was 
 speaking to one who would understand. I felt certain that 
 your point of view would be such as you describe, and such 
 as I believe you rightly call a healthy one. But I would make 
 one remark upon the word health. I believe that health of 
 soul results from possessing a creed : I do not, however, think 
 that because, under peculiar circumstances, a man is denuded 
 of the ordinary creeds, it is a sign of his being unhealthy. 
 His negative condition by isolating him from men around him, 
 and by withdrawing from him the ordinary supports of life 
 and springs of action, is liable to render him restless, feeble, 
 melancholy, and ill. But this is very different from saying 
 that scepticism is a disease of which a man should msh to be 
 cured at all hazards. I premise so much, because I notice 
 that those who have a faith always treat those who do not 
 share it as morbid ; whereas sceptics are just as much justified 
 in retorting that it is a disease to believe what is unwarrantable. 
 In fact, I see the essence of belief in a poor fetish-worshipper, 
 and the essence of scepticism in a man, say, like De Musset ; 
 the one appears to me to have a morbidly redundant, the other 
 
 ' To W. K. W. Stephens. Hastings, June 16, 1807.
 
 312 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 a morbidly deficient, secretion of what we call faith. To find 
 the just medium, to have a reasonable faith, is the great point. 
 That is health perhaps ; but whether it can be obtained, this 
 evSaifiovta of the soul, and what it is exactly, appears to me as 
 yet unknown. Moreover, I do not believe that a religious, 
 or rather a theological, belief is necessary for the health. 
 Those who are animated with poUtical or philanthropic creeds, 
 like the Comtists, have quite enough to keep them in proper 
 tone. Even an festhetical faith, if very vigorous, might 
 suffice. But underlying all these secondary forms of soul- 
 supporting belief, I suspect there lurks the architectonic creed, 
 which gives some reason for the existence of the universe and 
 of man's place upon it. Comte truly is willing to leave 
 this problem alone and devote himself to mankind ; but 
 humanity with him becomes a deity, and all he does is to 
 return to the [pre-]Copernican system of anthropology, making 
 his universe for all human purposes revolve round the men 
 upon this planet. Jowett, as you say, believes very firmly in 
 an ordering God, a moral, personal, law-giving God. He 
 does so because he cannot help it, because it has been too 
 deeply stereotyped in his nature to be eftaced, because, when 
 questioning and parting with all else, he has never stirred this, 
 because, perhaps, he belongs to the generation of Newman and 
 not to its successor, because he is an ordained priest, because, 
 again I say, he cannot help it. 
 
 ' This established, you might say : why do you not believe 
 at least so much, and find the peace and power of Jowett ? 
 There we come to the disquietude of my soul. I will try to 
 give a few reasons : — 
 
 ' 1. I have not the sentiment of belief ; that original, 
 strong, unreasoned sentiment, by virtue of which Jowett 
 cannot help it. 
 
 '2. I do not acknowledge any principles, teleological or 
 otherwise, from which a God, in the old true personal creative 
 royal sense, can at present be proved. 
 
 ' 3. I find in my nature certain debilities which render me 
 incapable of ascending to ideals, and seizing them. I seem to 
 myself immersed in facts, incomprehensible facts.
 
 1867 MANHOOD 313 
 
 ' Each of these points requires some explanation, and may 
 as well be taken separately. As for the first, I speak here of 
 having lost the sentiment of belief in a providential, paternal, 
 ruling, judging God. I can perfectly remember the various 
 steps by which I have reached this state. The process began 
 while I was at school, by a refusal to accept the dogmas of 
 original sin and eternal damnation. It advanced steadily with 
 the growth of my mind ; for I carried out to its logical 
 conclusion the principle that I might test opinions or creeds, 
 and pronounce whether they were of human origin or not. 
 One after the other fell the constituent beliefs of Christianity, 
 and at last, when I considered the history of all religions, and 
 applied the canons of cold analysis to the central creed of all, 
 I was forced to acknowledge that the personal Deity might, 
 after all, be nothing but a mirage — a magnificent image of 
 humanity — or, as I expressed it, a Brocken spectre, projected 
 by the human consciousness upon the mists of the unknown. 
 The more I dwelt upon this thought, the more weight it 
 acquu-ed in my mind. I perceived that the deities of all races 
 have been the ideal or universal of the people who worshipped 
 them. The Greek Olympus contains the attributes of the 
 Greek race : each family of that race selects a special member 
 of that Olympus. And when Genesis says that God created 
 man in His image, I could not understand why the converse 
 might not be the more scientifically true. Certainly Jehovah 
 " blowing the pestilence before Him from the wilderness of 
 Paran " ; Jehovah guiding His people in the wilderness like 
 sheep, appeared to me the type and ideal of the virtues and 
 faults of the Hebrew race. Then came the miracle of the 
 character of Christ and its ascendancy over the modern world. 
 But side by side with this miracle I had to place that of 
 Buddha, that of Islam. That the master races of the world, 
 the modern Europeans, should have embraced and evolved the 
 purest and highest religion, appeared to mo natural. My 
 metaphor of the Brocken spectre covered this fact ; for a 
 giant creates a more splendid phantom than a dwarf. But 
 having reached this point hastily, eagerly, and full of zeal, 
 1 found that I was face to face with doatli and weakness. 1
 
 314 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 had destroyed the hypothesis of the paternal God, and had 
 found nothing to substitute for it. The burden of proof was 
 now thrown on me. I had to seek some formula which should 
 satisfy me about myself, the universe, the future. How have 
 these things come about ? what do they mean ? Science 
 spoke to me of innumerable myriads of years through which 
 this little globe of ours had gradually hardened to its present 
 state ; of countless generations of various life destroyed upon 
 its surface, and of the duration of the human family as a 
 " mere scape in oblivion." Moreover, it told of infinite globes 
 and constellations, and of a universe so vast as to crush all 
 contemplation. Everywhere science found law, but it dis- 
 covered no Lawgiver, and seemed inclined to think that the 
 craving for a Lawgiver was but a temporary and human weak- 
 ness, an idol of the cave [? tribe]. 
 
 ' Filled with these conceptions, I returned to Christianity 
 and found that, with the exception of its eternal morality, it 
 was adapted to the Ptolemaic and even a ruder system of 
 science. It imagined our globe central, created as the great 
 object of* God's designs, attended by the sun and moon and 
 stars as servants, fashioned at a stroke to be the dwelling- 
 place of man. It thought of Heaven as just above our heads, 
 a locality in which God and saints and angels sat enthroned. 
 It imagined Christ ascending through clouds to this place. 
 When I carried that dogma of the Ascension, on which the 
 peculiarly Christian idea of a corporeal immortality rests, to 
 science, science derided it. "For," she aptly said, "in infinite 
 space there is no height nor depth ; a body carried upwards 
 through the clouds beyond the force of gravitation, if that 
 were possible, is simply lost. Do you not perceive that the 
 Ascension was a beautiful myth, adapted to the simple con- 
 ception of the universe as it existed in those unscientific days, 
 the whole value of which is now historical, and which must 
 be placed with the other instructive and exquisite religions of 
 the world?" This reasoning I could not answer; in fact, 
 it seems to me unanswerable. And with the Ascension, which 
 is the master-miracle of Christianity, the minor miracles had 
 to give way. Christianity took its place among the religions
 
 18t)7 MANHOOD 315 
 
 of the world, and told me far more about the human than the 
 dinne nature. Still science, though it attacked Christianity 
 in the \dtal point of the Ascension, could give no satisfactory 
 account of the world. It could not tell me how it had all 
 come about. Comte ad\nsed me to not meddle about this — to 
 sit do^^^l contentedly, denying the immortality of the soul, 
 doing without God, and confining my energies to philanthropy. 
 But I could not do this. In spite of myself the infinite 
 tormented me ; in spite of myself I kept looking skyward, 
 sighing for illumination. I could not forego my hopes of 
 futiure Hfe, nor take interest in the creatures of a day around 
 me. If we were all, indeed, ■^dthout a God, without a future, 
 let us die, I murmured ; cry not peace where there is no peace ; 
 end the miserable farce of human life, and go down with the 
 saurians and mastodons — more perishable than they, because 
 of frailer bones — to corruption. But in the very act of thus 
 murmuring, the centuries arose before me ; I saw the proces- 
 sions of the races over the whole globe. I saw their temples 
 and great works ; I heard their poems and prayers ; I felt 
 within myself immortal thoughts ; and the miracle of what 
 we call the mind became pre-eminent. I know we are not in 
 the scale of saurians and mastodons. We cannot perish like 
 them. This world of ours, this wonderful microcosm of our 
 bodies and brains, cannot have come together by chance. The 
 soul of man, be it what it may be, demands more — it requires 
 a God. Then with my cries I beat against the blue heavens. 
 On the tops of mountains, among the Alps, feeling myself 
 alone and near to God, I have sent the passion of my spirit 
 upward. But not an echo answers me. I see nothing but the 
 facts of the miraculous universe, my brain and yours being 
 perhaps its chief miracle. Hitherto I have described the 
 course of scepticism gradually growing in my own mind. I 
 have tried to show how the sentiment of God disappeared from 
 me \vithout the need of God being destroyed. But this is not 
 a merely personal history, it is the history of the age in which 
 we live, of the ago of the disintegration of old beliefs. A man 
 like myself can only lose his religious sentiment because the 
 rehgious sentiment is weak in the men around him. Wo are
 
 316 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 undergoing the greatest cataclysm of thought that the world 
 has ever suffered, and in the midst of it some must perish. 
 Like Balaam, there are many who must prophesy of a star 
 they will not see. In this age it is almost the greatest faith 
 to have no faith, for the old faiths are passing away and the 
 new one has not come, and the men of this generation are like 
 travellers before daybreak, the majority asleep, the few awake 
 and watching anxiously in darkness. Of this I am convinced. 
 The cataclysm began with the Reformation. That was the first 
 and most powerful introduction of a scepticism which since has 
 never ceased to work, successively undermining in the world at 
 large, as I described its operation in my own mind, all creeds 
 from the most insignificant to the most vital. Science has 
 helped ; physical science, by showing that the old miracles are 
 untenable ; the science of histories and languages by compar- 
 ing religions, and putting them upon one footing. The most 
 powerful acids of every sort have simultaneously been applied 
 to the fabric of catholic belief, which is honeycombed through 
 and through, the only portion which resists all chemistry being 
 the noble life and helpful morality of Christ. That, which is 
 the most human part at the same time, still subsists. But the 
 metaphysics of belief, all the definition of the Deity, the 
 Plellenistic conception of the Trinity, the Hebrew conception 
 of Christ's atoning sacrifice, the Oriental doctrine of incarna- 
 tion, the Roman element of inexorable legality have been 
 purged out. Even the belief in the immortality of the soul 
 — a belief from which the millions of Buddhism shrink with 
 horror — rests vaguely upon the arbitrary basis of the intense 
 egotism and personality of the modern European races. 
 
 ' I have only sketched in outline a very few of the causes 
 which have contributed to enfeeble the religious sentiment. 
 Passing to the second point, it is clear that if the sentiment 
 has been destroyed, no arguments can prevail. The teleological, 
 I confess, is powerful. To lay the universe on chance like 
 Democritus at once appears to us impossible. We instinctively 
 look out for a Creator ; but whether this Creator is, like our- 
 selves, a moral and intellectual being, cannot be proved. It is 
 sentiment which convinces those which believe Him to be so.
 
 1867 MANHOOD 317 
 
 For a horse would think Him like a horse, a stone like a stone. 
 Perhaps He is everything — the Pantheistic scheme. This, 
 however, does not satisfy a true sceptic. It requires just as 
 much sentiment to be contented with an " anima mundi " as 
 vnih. a pro\-idential governor. I am so profoundly sceptical 
 that I cannot accept any hypothesis. Again the argument 
 quod semper et uhique seems to me to prove nothing. The 
 fact that all men have placed their creeds upon the notion of a 
 Deity may simply mean that this notion is an idol of the cave 
 [? tribe]. 
 
 ' As to the third point, I feel sure that the habitual con- 
 dition of scepticism enfeebles and debases the mind, so that a 
 long continuance in it renders the spiritual sight more and 
 more confused. It used to be urged against scepticism, that it 
 made men immoral ; but that scepticism must have been of a 
 very coarse and insincere kind ; such scepticism resembles 
 playing the truant from God, not an earnest search for truth in 
 painful God-forgotten wildernesses. But I feel that the most 
 genuine and noble form of scepticism, by withdrawing the 
 support of the paternal God, by obscuring the future after this 
 life ends, by denuding the soul of moral ideas and fixed 
 principles, renders a man more lax in his ethical conceptions, 
 more socially indolent, less capable of energetic efforts, less 
 angry against evil, less enthusiastic for good. He is always 
 saying like Montaigne : ' Ni comme ceci, ni comme cela, ni 
 meme autrement ' ; or again, ' Peut-etreoui, peut-etre non, peut- 
 etre nil'un ni I'autre.' Such scepticism is Hke a blighting wind : 
 nothing thrives beneath it. How can a man who has not 
 made up his mind about the world and immortality, who seeks 
 and cannot find God, care for politics, for instance? He is 
 thrown back on merely personal and selfish tastes or interests. 
 He is aimless in life. He has no i^oint cVapinii, no root, but 
 sprawls, lying like an uprooted plant which belongs to nothing, 
 can attach itself to nothing, and gapes for any chance drop of 
 rain to moisten its fast withering suckers. The longer this 
 scepticism continues, the dcopei- becomes the unrest, the more 
 worthless appear common sources of interest, the more vacant 
 seems the soul. I speak of those at least who are too noble to
 
 318 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 eat and drink and die, or who without being noble at all, can- 
 not eat and drink, because of the awfulness of vacancy around 
 them. 
 
 Je souffre, il est trop tard, le monde s'est fait vieux ; 
 
 Una immense esperanee a traverse la terre. 
 
 Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux. 
 
 ' That is the note of anxious, yearning, impotent, God- 
 desiring, hungry and thirsty, exiled, footsore, feverish, blind, 
 passionate, unhappy scepticism in the present day. Give a man 
 possessed by this fiend one creed, throw him a mustard seed of 
 faith, and he will move mountains. It does not much matter 
 what a man believes ; but for power and happiness he must 
 believe something — he must have his foot " tenoned and 
 morticed ' somewhere, not planted for ever on a shifting sand- 
 heap. Yet from the very abyss of such scepticism I find wings 
 and mount upwards. The chalice of this martyrdom of the 
 century is vouchsafed me — and shall I not drink it ? If I 
 suft'er and am weak, have I not also clairvoyance ? Can I not 
 see how others deceive themselves and anticipate, with Pisgah 
 raptures, the promise of a better country ? For myself nothing 
 — for the men around me nothing — but the heavens are yet tell- 
 ing the glory of God, and the hills are yet crying one to the other 
 with loud voices. I cannot understand their tale or their loud 
 voices. But it is enough for me that they are surely somewhere 
 understood. I would rather die from inanition, which seems 
 probable, than be fed on husks and adulterations and the 
 ground bones of antiquated mummies. If you see the next 
 "Cornhill," you will observe the bearing of what I say about 
 the Alps there on this point. I fear this letter will have wearied 
 you. Yours touched me with its profession of faith, sublimely 
 simple and sufficing. I could not but reveal to you the 
 troubled waters of my own soul. Perhaps very long and painful 
 watching may end in illumination. Some co-ordinating 
 principle may harmonise my discords, and bring cosmos out of 
 chaos ere I die. If so, what triumphs ! Oh, superb ! I see 
 what is coming. I hear the chorus of the symphony. Perhaps 
 not. These jangled and wailing minors may sing me to the
 
 1867 MANHOOD 319 
 
 grave. But, in either case, "Thy vnW, not mine, be done." 
 Good-bye.' 
 
 [From a slightly different, a more contemplative, less 
 emotional point of %iew, Symonds deals mth the same subject 
 in this letter to Mr. Sidgwick : ] 
 
 ' I ^ wonder what I have done to deserve being classed 
 among the infidels, who imagine human delusion to be the 
 origin of all religions. I am far too sceptical for that. The 
 explanation of Comte seems to me more puerile and less 
 consonant with the laws of our nature than Theism. But yet 
 I am not a Theist. I should like to know very much what 
 made you one, or whether you never ceased to be one. I would 
 give a great deal to regain the Christian point of view, or 
 rather, since all modern people are ethically Christian, to regain 
 the sentiment of belief in the Deity — the personal, creative, 
 conscious Deity. But I nowhere find Him. I 'see that this 
 age has no definition of Him. I cannot construct one. 
 Theists, each and all in different ways, continue the old 
 anthropomorphism and self-worship. They derive the Deity 
 from man, refining their conceptions proportionately to the 
 advancing refinement of the world. It is possible that this 
 may be good endence of the Deity : an innate impulse to 
 worship God in our own image may have been implanted in us 
 by Him. But scepticism requires evidence from the other 
 side. In a word, nothing appears to me satisfactory by way of 
 proof but revelation ; and I do not feel myself forced at present 
 to credit any revelation. All the revelations, like the Theistic 
 ideals, seem products of the human soil ; good, bad, or in- 
 different, according as clay, sand, peat, and the like are mixed. 
 I wonder whether you think you may lay your finger in 
 spiritualism on some point affecting revelation. If you do, 
 you have the secret. I could believe anything if somebody first 
 knocked me flat with a club — if all the conceit were taken out 
 of me by the proof of agencies beyond our experience revealing 
 God, I could prepare myself for mysticism. Here says the 
 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Hastings, .June 23, 18G7.
 
 320 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867 
 
 teleologist, are not thought, conceiDtion of seed, the growth of 
 plants, miracles enough for you ? Undoubtedly they are 
 miracles. But, in order to make me a Theist, connect them 
 with God, prove their inevitable emanation from Paternal 
 Intelligence — I am not Atheistic, or scoffing ; I am merely 
 helpless, painfully surrounded by miracles. My pen upon this 
 paper, these letters, and what they mean, assuredly these things 
 are miracles ; it is this very thing that distracts me ; miracles 
 are so plentiful. I turn aside and think of the past myriads of 
 centuries ; I look across the stars and see billions flying into 
 sight suddenly down the tubes of the telescopes ; are there not 
 more miracles than blackberries ? But not one teaches me 
 God. Or if I talk of God, worn out with these inexplicable 
 wonders, I feel this to be cowardice ; God, so spoken of, is 
 a merely otiose swnvmm genus, a general term to include 
 everything, the which ends an infinite series. In other 
 words, again, if God is everywhere He is as good as nowhere. 
 I have forgotten His definition. The world cannot supply me 
 mth one. I sprawl simply. Then what makes you a Theist ? 
 Is it the moral world ? Is it your intellect ? In the moral 
 and intellectual miracles I do not find more than in those of 
 the material world, except that, because my whole being 
 depends on them essentially, they seem to me more marvellous 
 and more inexplicable. Yet when I try to abstract them, and 
 when I throw myself into a state of trance, proceeding in my 
 ascent from infima species to the siimvmm genus, I eventually 
 eliminate everything but naked consciousness, which tells 
 absolutely no tale. It is an appalling solitude. My head reels, 
 my heart seems ceasing, I catch myself upon the verge of 
 madness, and roll down the mountain of meditation again, 
 only too glad to be among the infimce, species at the bottom. 
 Long ago, even as a child, I had the morbid faculty of such 
 self -abstraction, and when doubt first insinuated itself into my 
 mind this spiritual nakedness made itself horribly remembered. 
 I thought, will death be like that, and when our eyes are closed 
 for ever, will even that last sense of existence, naked, solitary, 
 formless, unimpressed, which I so much hate, be also lost ? I 
 can imagine annihilation thus. What I call my soul is simply
 
 1867 MANHOOD 321 
 
 the embroidery of sense upon this blankness. I can reduce it 
 to its primal blankness by abstracting sense ; and when sense 
 IS finally abstracted from me, what, to call " ]\Iyself," will 
 be left ? With the conception of the soul disappears that 
 of God. Then both irresistibly rush back and assert them- 
 selves. Then comes the problem of human history. The 
 philosophy of religion says its say. Physical science perplexes 
 more than it illuminates. Its new horizons are merely great 
 in be\\ilderment. The struggle of the soul begins to wax faint. 
 It ceases and atomic scepticism gets in. Therewith there is 
 nothing left to live for. Every faculty droops ; the whole 
 man becomes etiolated ; death intervenes, and at last — the 
 great secret. 
 
 ' But such a helpless condition is awful — d^eos iv tw koo-ixw. 
 Four words rarely meant more than these. Objectively they 
 contradict themselves, for " quis Deus incertum est, habitat 
 Deus " ; subjectively, in relation to the aching brain and 
 unsatisfied heart, and incomplete intelligence and weak moral 
 nature, they contain a volume of sad significance. " j\Ialgre 
 moi I'infini me tourmente." The whole question revolves on 
 the quis, quis Deus. If there be no other God, what Is is a 
 God — not Jah, but ov — yet who, ha\dng heard of Moses and of 
 Christ, can be satisfied with Parmenides ? Even Spinoza will 
 not do for me. I would sooner have Comte than the worshippers 
 of Ens. ]\Iy human weakness clamours for a personal God, 
 and — let not Congreve hear me — for some assurance of either 
 immortahty or annihilation. It is the indefinite which is so 
 cruel, the perpetual "perhaps," which will not be dismissed. 
 
 ' 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 bo the 
 discovery of some immaterial altitudes, some mountains and 
 temples 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 posterioi' to 
 man in time, beyond his thoughts, not of his creation, in- 
 dependent, )ial));ib]f', immovable, proved. The sense of the 
 
 Y
 
 822 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 18G7 
 
 Alps was a long time coming to me. Perhaps even now that 
 grander sentiment is on its way.' 
 
 The lines ^ of speculation which I followed led me to believe 
 that some radical change in the current conceptions of the 
 Divine Being was necessitated by the changes taking place in 
 modern thought ; and that this would eventually substitute 
 the ideal of a God immanent in the universe for the ideal of 
 a God external to it, creative of the world's machinery and 
 providentially controlling it. Goethe's Proemium to the poem 
 called ' Gott und Welt,' supplied me with a formula adapted 
 to my own emotional and rational forecast of this new phase, 
 on which I thought theology must enter. 
 
 During my I'eadings in the Greek philosophers, I came upon 
 the hymn of Cleanthes. 
 
 This suggested the moral attitude of willing submission to 
 universal law, which will have to supply a groundwork for the 
 conduct of the indi\'idual under the conditions of the new faith 
 I had conceived. The study of ]\farens Aurelius now absorbed 
 me. Eagerly and spontaneously, I grew to be penetrated with 
 what has since been called ' The Cosmic Enthusiasm.' 
 
 While this religion, composed of scientific pantheism and 
 of stoical morality, was forming in my mind, I read Seeley's 
 ' Ecce Homo.' The enthusiasm of humanity expressed in that 
 essay took no hold upon me ; just as Comte's worship of the 
 ' Eire Supreme ' (so eloquently advocated by Eichard Congreve 
 in my frequent walks with him about the Roman hills) had 
 been rejected, and as Renan's seductive portrait of ' Le doux 
 Galileen ' was somewhat contemptuously laid aside. They 
 struck me as ineffective attempts, each in its own way and on 
 its own line, to save something valuable from the mass which 
 had to be rejected. The first was a survival of evangelical 
 piety transmuted into philanthroi^y ; the second a sur%dval of 
 Catholicism in curious conjunction with scientific agnosticism ; 
 the third a survival of the old religious sentiment, denuded of 
 dogma, replaced by means of scholarship and romantic emotion 
 upon a treacherous ground of poetical sympathy. The 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 1867-90 MANHOOD 3:23 
 
 respectability of such efforts to modulate from the old to the 
 new, and of many other efforts made by many eminent persons, 
 I could not and did not vnsh to deny. But 1 felt that I should 
 not be saved by any of these palliatives. My soul needed 
 something more sincere than the first and third of those I have 
 named, something less pretentious and grotesque than the 
 second. It was surely better to abide upon the rock of 
 expectation I had found myself : however stern, arid, unhomely, 
 liie landscape might appear : however dolefully the waves and 
 winds of the eternal storm ra^ed round it. I therefore stuck 
 
 o 
 
 to the determination of singing my hymn of praise in Goethe's 
 Proemium, of breatliing my prayers at night in the verses of 
 Cleanthes. The religion of the Cosmic enthusiasm appeared 
 to me the only creed compatible with agnosticism forced upon 
 a candid mind. 
 
 Nothing but the bare thought of a God-penetrated universe, 
 and of myself as an essential part of it, together with all 
 things that appear in their succession — ether and inorganic 
 matter passing into plants, and creatures of the sea and beasts 
 rising to men and women like myself, and onward from us 
 progressing to the stage of life uni-calised by human reason — 
 nothing but the naked, yet inel:)riating \ision of such a cosmos 
 satisfied me as a possible object of worship. When this 
 thought flooded me, and filled the inmost fibres of my sentient 
 being, I discovered that I was almost at rest about birth and 
 death, and moral duties, and the problem of immortality. 
 These were the world's afi'airs, not mine. Having lost the 
 consolations of faith in redemption through Christ, and all 
 that pertains thereto, I liad gained in exchange this, that I 
 could 
 
 lay niyselT upon the knees 
 Of Duuuj, and take mine everlasting case. 
 
 So far T bad travelled on the path of self-construction, 
 when T came across the writings of Walt Whitman. I find it 
 diOicult to speak about ' Leaves of Grass ' without exaggera- 
 tion. Whitman's intense emotional feeling for the universe, 
 his acute sense of the goodliness of life in all its aspects, the 
 
 Y 2
 
 324 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867-90 
 
 audacity of his mood — as of one eager to cast himself upon 
 illimitable billows, assured that whether he sank there or swam 
 it would be well vnth him, confident the while that sink he 
 could not, that nothing can eventually come to naught. This 
 concrete passionate faith in the world, combined with the 
 man's multiform experience, his human sympathy, his thrill of 
 love and comradeship, sent a current of vitalising magnetism 
 through my speculations. The formulas of Goethe and Clean- 
 thes fell into their proper place. The stoical philosophy, like 
 Aaron's dry rod, put forth blossoms. The rock of expectation 
 I had found, and where I meant to stay, began to sprout with 
 herbage, rustle with forests, echo to the notes of singing-birds, 
 and gush with li\dng fountains. The waves and winds of the 
 eternal storm around it changed their message. If they 
 spoke not to my soul of peace, they roused me to the sense 
 of ' liberty, immensity, action.' In short, Whitman added 
 conviction, courage, self-reliance to my sense of the Cosmic 
 enthusiasm. What is more, he taught me, as no enthusiasm 
 of humanity could do, the value of fraternising with my 
 fellows — for their own sakes, to love them, to learn from 
 them, to teach them, to help and to be helped by them — not 
 for any ulterior object upon either side. I felt, through him, 
 what it really is to be a member of the universe I sought to 
 worship. 
 
 About this time I began to study Darwin's theory of 
 zoological development, and absorbed, so far as suited me, from 
 him and Herbert Spencer, the philosophy of evolution. With 
 the metaphysical idea of that j)hilosophy I was suflficiently 
 acquainted through my readings in the works of the Greek 
 sages, Bruno, Spinoza, Goethe, lastly Hegel. But I perceived 
 at once how the latest aspe'ct of the theory and the partial 
 proof of it squared with my religion and gave it substance. 
 I derived, as I suppose all men must do, only so much from 
 these teachers as might feed a self-forged faith. 
 
 So then, having rejected dogmatic Christianity in all its 
 forms, Broad Church Anglicanism, the gospel of Comte, 
 Hegel's superb identification of human thought %vith essential 
 PeinR, and many minor nostrums offered in our times to
 
 1867-90 MANHOOD 325 
 
 sickening faith — because none of these, forsooth, were adapted 
 to my nature — I came to fraternise 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. 
 
 Speaking simply, I chose for my motto ' To live re- 
 solvedly in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful.' 1 sought out 
 friends from divers centuries, who seemed to have arrived, 
 through their life-throes and ardent speculations, at something 
 hke 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, I 
 addicted myself to their society because they accepted the 
 whole, and were not trafficking or pettifogging about a portion. 
 They threw themselves upon the world and God with simple 
 self-devotion, seeking nothing extraordinary in this life or the 
 next, accepting things as they beheld them, attempting to 
 mould no institutions, leaving the truths they had discovered 
 to work like leaven, aiming at justice and a perfect clarity of 
 vision, discarding economies and accommodations of all kinds, 
 casting the burden of results upon that or hivi who called 
 them into being, standing unterrified, at ease, before time, 
 space, circumstance, and any number of sidereal systems. 
 
 Because these men were so, I elected them as the friends 
 with whom my spirit chose to fraternise. 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. As 
 a necessary part of my autobiography, I have described how 
 I came to form a certain religious creed. No one more than 
 myself is capable of criticising its inadequacy to satisfy other 
 minds. Certainly no one l)ut myself knows how tentative and 
 far from stable it is, how like a gaseous fluid in the mind of
 
 326 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1867-90 
 
 him who lives by it. 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. Through it, I think, with God's 
 blessing, I have been enabled to pull through consumption 
 preying on my vitals during the last quarter of a century. It 
 penetrates almost everything I have sent to press under my 
 own name. It will be found notably in the last essays of my 
 ' Studies of Greek Poets,' in the last two volumes- of my 
 ' Kenaissance in Italy,' in the epilogue to ' Palumba,' in the 
 last sections of ' Animi Figura,' in the whole of my latest 
 work, ' Essays Speculative and Suggestive.' The perorations 
 of all that I have written are inspired by this faith, as the 
 substance of all my labour was for me made vital by it. 
 
 How frail and insecure is any faith. I might adapt a 
 memorable sentence of Walt Whitman, and exclaim, ' Belief is 
 to the believer, and comes back most to him.' We know that 
 the solidest stronghold of faith, dogmatically built up, morticed 
 on granite, mortared into battlemenls, garrisoned by multitudes 
 of men militant, will crumble with the lapse of ages. The 
 form passes away ; and only the enduring relations which it 
 represented, partial adequacies to the wants and truths of 
 human nature, partial adequacies to the facts of the universe, 
 remain. These survive, accumulate, and are continually being 
 worked into the form and substance of new creeds. The 
 question for a man who has dared to innovate in any age is, 
 whether his religious instincts are at all concordant with the 
 coming belief. If they should be, he may reckon among 
 pioneers. If they are not, it will not signify for him so long 
 as he has lived by them. God is the only judge, and God 
 ' reveals Himself in many ways ' ; God is known to us as ever- 
 lasting variation, albeit ' God is the same, and His years do not 
 change.' 
 
 Let, then, the one man who has found his faith speak to 
 the rest of humankind, as a linnet sings to linnets. 
 
 The ever-during idea, independent of dogmas, of creeds, of 
 cocoons spun by the individual in order to protect his germ of
 
 1867-90 MANHOOD 3i>7 
 
 spiritual life against the cold — that idea, out of which religions 
 spring, is the same now as when Kant expressed it in his 
 pregnant imaginative phrase : ' Nothing stirs the sense of awe 
 in me except the stars at night and the soul of man.' The 
 soul and the universe, their apparent contradiction and their 
 ultimate solidarity— that is the ideal suhstance out of which all 
 creeds are carved. In both and each of the factors, as these 
 present themselves in apparent duality to us, God remains the 
 only reality, the unifying, constituting life. To transcend, to 
 circumvent, to transact with the law of the world, is impossible. 
 To learn anything final about it is probably denied the human 
 intellect. Yet the very consciousness of these limitations and 
 disabilities forces the soul back upon religion. It does not so 
 much matter which faith a man adopts, or what he fashions 
 for himself, yet hardly can he live to any purpose without faith.
 
 328 JOHN ADDINGTON SYM0ND8 1877 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 MANHOOD — FROM CLIFTON TO DAVOS 
 
 A change necessary— Question of where to go— Consults Sir William 
 jenner— Ordered to the Nile— Takes Davos Platz on the way, and 
 stays there— Begins to recover — First weeks at Davos — 'Sonnets of 
 Michael Angelo and Campanella ' — Spring journeys — Passage of 
 the Fluela— Monte Generoso-' Many Moods '—Christian Buol— 
 Introduction to the real life of Davos— The tenor of that life- 
 Decision to settle at Davos— Goes home— Ends his residence at 
 Clifton Hill House. 
 
 1877 It ' was impossible to think of remaining in England (after 
 such a serious illness) ; and the doubt was whither we should 
 wend our way — whether to the Canaries or Australia (for the 
 sake of the sea journey), or to Egypt. I decided against the 
 sea journey after short deliberation. I knew too much about 
 its inconveniences from invalids who were better able to 
 endure them than I was. We determined at last upon a 
 winter in a Dahabieh. We were to take Janet and Madge 
 and Isabella Gamble (now Mrs. Robert Otter) with us, leaving 
 Lotta and Katharine under the charge of their nurse with our 
 relations at Clifton and Oxford. But before we made the 
 move, I went up to London and consulted Sir William Jenner. 
 He told me very gravely that I must not leave England with- 
 out settling all my affairs, and that, in his opinion, a fresh 
 cold would render my recovery impossible. He also recom- 
 mended me to spend some weeks upon the way to Egypt in 
 the high Alps, in order, if possible, to gain a little strength. I 
 had every reason to trust in his judgment, for he knew the 
 circumstances of my family. 
 
 My youngest sister, Mrs. T. H. Green, and her husband 
 happened at this time to be staying at Davos Platz. They 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 1^77 MANHOOD 329 
 
 wrote a very favourable account of the place- — it was the first 
 time I heard of it — the doctors, appliances for illness, air, 
 hotels, and so forth. This induced me to prefer Davos to the 
 Engadine, especially as I should have her company there. 
 
 Accordingly I arrived, more dead than alive after the fatigue 
 of the hot journey, at Davos, on xlugust 7, 1877. As the 
 valley opened before me from the height of Wolfgang, veiled 
 in melancholy cloud, toward the close of a weary day, I 
 thought that I had rarely seen a less attractive place to live 
 in. Everything looked so bleak and bare ; and though I 
 loved the Alps, I discerned little of their charm in Davos, 
 What should I have thought, had I then been told that twelve 
 years afterwards, on the anniversary of that day, I should be 
 penning these lines in a house built for my habitation here ? 
 That I should have spent by far the longer part of those 
 intervening years in ever-growing and abiding love for Davos, 
 in strenuous literary work, and in the enjoyment of a society 
 singularly congenial to my peculiar nature ? On this August 7, 
 1889, while I am writing in the open air, under the shadow of 
 my Wandelbahn or ambulatory, I look back with a curious 
 mixed sense of gratitude, surprise, and self-abasement, over 
 those twelve years past. Whatever happens, I shall remember 
 that these years of my chequered and perturbed existence have 
 been the best, the healthiest, and the most active of the whole. 
 I may have to say with Job, ' Quare de vulva me eduxisti ? ' 
 ]>ut I shall not say, ' Quare me ad Davosias duxisti, Domine? ' 
 
 \)\-. Ruedi, wlien he came to inspect me the morning after 
 iny arrival, pronounced it a grave case. He gave me directions 
 which I scrupulously followed. Tlie first tln-ee weeks were 
 spent in sitting all day long in the open air upon a gravel 
 terrace in front of the Hotel Belvedere. Then I was allowed 
 to go into the wood. i\Iy man-servant took me up in a little 
 carriage, hung a hannnock between two pine-trees, carried and 
 placed me in the hannnock, and when the sun came near to 
 setting, fetched me again in the carriage. 
 
 Whenever I pass the place where they used to sling my 
 hammock a curious sense of reverence comes over me, a feeling 
 of the mystei-y surrounding liuman life. Then I seemed so
 
 ;^30 JOHN ADDTNGTON SYMONDS 1877 
 
 surely marked out for gradual declension, that my thoughts 
 assumed the grey and quiet tone of resignation. I lay watch- 
 ing the squirrels leap from pine to pine above my head, and 
 the clouds sail through the quiet spaces 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 trans- 
 lation 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 reawakening mental 
 energy, very different from the feverish and fretful activity of 
 the past years. This found its expression one day soon after 
 noon — I remember the hour, the place, the aspect of the sky 
 and valley well — when I felt impelled to write that series of my 
 Sonnets which are called ' Sonnets on the Thought of Death.' 
 Fortunately we were favoured with a wonderfully fine 
 autumn. About the beginning of Se2:)tember I was permitted 
 to walk a little, and to take drives. Then I began to explore 
 the beauties of Davos ; climbing by slow degrees higher and 
 higher up the Schatzalp, which I finally surmounted in 
 November, driving with my wife into Sertig Thai, Dischma 
 Thai, and the Ziige. I saw that Davos could be lived in, and 
 felt myself so well here that I resolved to give up Egypt and 
 complete my winter under Dr. Ruedi's care. I wrote on the 
 subject to Sir William Jenner, who replied that he must bid 
 me pause and reflect before I determined ' to give my vile body 
 to the Davos doctors.' Not intimidated by this, because I 
 knew that I was thriving, and greatly dreaded change, I stuck 
 to my plan, put aside our Nile outfit, and sent to England for 
 clothes and furs suited to an Alpine winter. 
 
 [The discovery that Davos and the Davos climate suited 
 Symonds's tastes and his health, led eventually to the forma- 
 tion of a permanent home in that high Alpine valley, though 
 he at first entertained hopes of returning to England, and the 
 final abandonment of Clifton Hill House as his residence did 
 not take place till the year 1880. How large a part of his 
 life at Davos was consecrated to study is proved by the long 
 list of books which were written in his Graubiinden home.
 
 1877 MANHOOD 331 
 
 The essential vigour, the courage, the libre of his character 
 must be felt by any one who considers for a moment the 
 adverse conditions of health, of absence from liliraries, of 
 intellectual solitude under which this vast and varied literature 
 was produced. But the books are there to speak for them- 
 selves, and it is not on his literary life in Davos that I wish to 
 dwell. Rather, by the help of letters to his friends, I desire to 
 display the broadening life and nature of the man, ever more 
 embracing, more cosmic, till the perfervid spirit^ burned the 
 body through ; to show how his friendships became closer ; 
 how his relations with his contemporaries in English literature 
 were expanded and fostered by a diligent correspondence and 
 occasional meetings ; how, with the growth of his reputation, 
 the younger generation of writers was attracted to him, and in 
 what genei'ous and genial measure he responded ; how his 
 sympathy with the hardy mountaineers, among whom his lot 
 was cast, struck root and grew profound ; how his patience, 
 his forethought, his assistance to these friends spread out in 
 ever widening circles, till now, from end to end of the canton, 
 on JuHer, on Albula, and on grim Fluela, in lonely Avers, or 
 by the orchards of Domleschg, the sound of his name will 
 brighten the faces of those to whom it is addressed, and wake 
 no feigned regrets that he is gone. 
 
 The process of recovery was slow. There were frequent 
 relapses and long tiresome hours of inactivity ; but on the 
 whole, progress was made. ' I attribute my gradual recovery,' 
 he writes, ' in no small measure to the fact that I resolutely 
 refused to give up study. Some hours of every day were 
 devoted to literature ; and thus I succeeded in piinting and 
 pubhshing " Sonnets of Michael Angelo and Campanella," and 
 "Many Moods." ' 
 
 ' You ask me how I am,' he writes to Mr. Sidgwick, on 
 Nov. 6, 1877 ; ' so I answer you thus. Subjectively 1 am 
 much l)etter, more capable of being amused and taking an 
 interest in things. And willi tin's internal improvement lias 
 returned my rapid desire to do something, i.e. to feel intensely, 
 and write vigorously; but as yet these motions only end in 
 irritation of tlie nerves by night and day.
 
 332 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1877 
 
 ' You would be surprised if you could have seen us to-day. 
 We drove en famille up a valley for two hours in bergwdgcli, 
 among frozen streams and over icy roads, with icicles hanging 
 from the branches, under a sun which, for clearness and 
 strength, surpasses anything I ever felt in England, The 
 snow has not come yet, but when it arrives, we are promised a 
 fortnight in the house, and then a return of this Olympian 
 weather. Who, dearest Henry, is to be happy about the 
 Universe, if you are not ? It is a bad bvisiness for every- 
 body if you feel as you say you do. I, for my part, try to live 
 without aslcing many questions. I do not want to be in- 
 different to the great problems of morals, immortality and the 
 soul ; but I want to learn to be as happy as my health and 
 passions will allow me, without raising questions 1 am con- 
 vinced no one will ever answer from our human standpoint. 
 You, however, have made it your business to inquire, and it is 
 aggravating to arrive at bewilderment ; only I feel you will do 
 the world good service if you stoutly proclaim this bewilder- 
 ment, and attack the false idols of knowledge. If we cannot 
 build, we can dissipate illusions.'] 
 
 ' Your ^ most acceptable letter has just come with laudable 
 speed up to this bare bleak Alpine valley, 5,200 feet above 
 civilisation. Here am I destined to spend the winter in the 
 snow. I started, at Sir William .Tenner's instance, for a 
 dahabieh on the Nile ; but on the way I halted here, and I 
 was so dilapidated by the journey, and I found the air so far 
 suit me, that I determined to abide here. 
 
 ' You have formed a rather roseate notion of my health. 
 
 ' Of course I do not drop my pen. That would be too 
 doleful. So you see me now and then in print. But real 
 " work " I cannot, may not do. 
 
 ' I was going to beg for a copy of your poems in return for 
 a little volume of mine (" Sonnets of Michael Angelo and 
 Campanella "), which I hope to print this winter. What 
 Turks and Eussians have to do with poems I can't conceive. 
 But Smith & Elder tell me the war has spoiled the sale of my 
 ' To Edmund Gosse. Davos, Nov. 8, 1877.
 
 1877 MANHOOD 388 
 
 "Renaissance." So I suppose the reading public keeps its 
 pockets buttoned in a state of uneasy expectation. 
 
 'Do send me the "Poliziano." I shall enjoy reading 
 some of his delightful miscellanies here. Thank you in- 
 finitely for thinking of me as to him. 
 
 ' I ought to congratulate you on the new arrival you 
 speak of. It is a queer business extending one's paternity in 
 the domestic circle. Somehow literary men don't get old and 
 solid fast enough. We are K(>'<f><i k-<u tttip^'i, as Plato says 
 somewhere.' 
 
 ' What very ' nice Christmas news you sent me. I am so 
 exceedingly glad about Tom's election, and I want to hear all 
 about it. 
 
 'We had " festivities " last night, a Christmas tree, which 
 amused the children much, and was reaUy very pretty, some 
 glees very nicely sung, two tableaux vivants, in one of which 
 the Belgian blonde played Aurora, and a little dancing. I did 
 not see much of the fun, for the room was hot and noisy, and 
 I preferred going to bed. Dr. Ruedi has been going his 
 rounds this morning ; for several of his patients are dilapi- 
 dated by the festivities. We are a strange cranky society, 
 keeping up a show of health and spirits so long as we go to 
 bed at nine, walk like snails, and live soberly. But this sham 
 won't stand so much excitement as there was last night. 
 
 ' I really don't know how I shall bear it much longer. 
 This vegetative existence stupefies and irritates me at the same 
 time. I am too stupid to attend to anything, and yet too 
 restless to go quietly off into a waking dream. If it ends in 
 keeping life at the expense of this regime, I shall break 
 through and take the consequences.' 
 
 ' I was'* really very glad to hear from you from C. H. H., l'^'^'^ 
 though it always gives me a twinge to think of our home now. 
 What is to happen about it in the future, I am too cowardly 
 to think. T do not believe^ T shall ever be able to live there. 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Davos, December 2.'), 1877. 
 '' To the same. Davos, .Iiuiuary '.), 1878.
 
 334 JOHN ADDIiNdTON SYMONDS 1878 
 
 But I hope Catherine and the children will before long be all 
 together there again ; and if I keep getting better, I shall, I 
 trust, be at least able to pass some months of the year at 
 home. That is the sort of future I think about. 
 
 ' I am amused to hear you still pine for a house on Ked- 
 clyfit'e Parade. It is a very lovely spot. My pinings are for a 
 Bcmerhaus (peasant's house) here, and I have already selected 
 two or three. I am making friends with a very nice and fine 
 young fellow, Christian Buol, the brother of the innkeeper. I 
 like the people here. Some permanent pied-d-terre in the 
 high Alps I shall have to get.' 
 
 ' I am ' going to bother you with two questions. The first 
 I know you can answer straight away. What is the origin of 
 the term " rhyme royal" in English metre? Do you know 
 when it was first applied '? In fact, I should like to be told 
 anything you choose to tell me about the stanza. 
 
 ' The second question is this, which, please, do not bother 
 about until you may happen to be going on your own account 
 to the Br. Mus. Has any one, German or other, written a 
 monograph on the story of Antinous, and the relics of sculpture 
 that bear his name ? 
 
 ' It seems rather cool to use friends as living dictionaries 
 of the most encyclopaedic information. But what is a poor 
 wretch, incarcerated in this frost-prison for five months, to do 
 when some problem he cannot solve passes across his brain ? 
 
 ' It is most horrible here now. We have been shut in the 
 house four days and four nights while it snowed incessantly ; 
 and now the average depth of snow is seven feet everywhere — 
 in the drifts and avalanches from ten to thirty feet. As I was 
 looking out of the window yesterday I saw an avalanche fall at 
 a short distance from the house, which swept away a cart with 
 three horses and two carters — buried them all. The men and 
 two horses struggled out ; but one horse was suffocated. The 
 cold at the present moment is 34° Fahr. of frost, i.e. 2 below 
 zero. It is sometimes 10 below zero. I think I am the better, 
 however, for the climate.' 
 
 ' To Edmund Gosse. Davos, Hotel Belvedere, .Tamiary 19, 1878.
 
 1878 MANHOOD 33r, 
 
 ' 1 • must have Keats 's " Love Letters " out ; though I con- 
 fess there is something in the personahty of Keats, some sort of 
 seiui-physical aroma wafted from it, which I cannot endure ; 
 and I fear these letters vdW be very redolent of this. What a 
 curious tiling is that undefinable flavour of personality — sug- 
 gestion of physical quality, odour of the man in his uncon- 
 scious and spontaneous self-determination, which attracts or 
 repels so powerfully, and is the very root of love or dislike.' 
 
 ' 1 2 am meditating sending for a cartload of books in order 
 to go on with the "Renaissance." If we stay here another 
 year it will be well worth while to get into real work again. 
 I sometimes feel the want of it. In no place where I ever 
 camped out have I felt so much at home, so tranquil in spirits, 
 so sane and so contented, as I do here. It was a blessed wind, 
 I think, which blew us hither.' 
 
 [The winter came to an end about April, and, according to 
 Davos custom, those who had spent the winter there were 
 ordered away during the snow-melting. Symonds and his 
 family took the first of those yearly journeys over the high 
 passes which lead towards the south. In the following letter 
 he notes the beneficial results of a winter at Davos :] 
 
 ' We ^ left Davos on Thursday — a party of six sledges, four 
 for Catherine and me and the children and Christian Buol and 
 a mai<l, and two for our luggage, to which was added a seventh 
 for an Italian gentleman and a Mr. Ash, who asked to join us. 
 
 ' The avalanches on Wednesday destroyed the road t) 
 Wiesen just by the Barentritt. So at the last minute we had 
 to decide on going over the dreaded Fluela, against which the 
 Buols and Busches and Herr Coester had been advising us 
 most strongly. We had meant to take Julicr and IMaloja. 
 
 ' It was indeed a perilous journey, Ijecause of the enormous 
 masses of fresh snow-di-ifts, and recent avalanches. The wind 
 was dreadful, and we plouglied through a vast wilderness of 
 
 ' To Edmund Gosse. Davos, Fobiuiuy IG, 1878. 
 
 2 To tbe same, February 22, 187H. 
 
 ■• To his sister Chiirioltc Cliiavi'iina, April 7, 1878.
 
 336 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1878 
 
 trackless snow, in some jDlaces galloping straight clown slopes 
 as steep as a house-roof, then making the horses put their four 
 feet together and slide, then traversing the tops of galleries 
 built to defend the road from avalanches, but now deep buried 
 in them. Some of the snow-mounds we crossed were said to 
 be sixty feet in depth, and the heaps of huge conglobated snow- 
 balls, scattered in every direction by what had fallen from the 
 ledges above us the day before, were horrid to look at. All 
 the way down the conductor would show me the places whei-e 
 friends and acquaintances of his had been killed during the 
 last two years ; and all the accidents that had happened in 
 April. However, we got down to Siis safe ; and then for live 
 hours drove up the Engadine in a thick snowstorm to Samaden. 
 On Friday it again snowed densely all over the IMaloja, and 
 we found a white Italy, of which we could see hardly anything. 
 
 ' It speaks volumes for Davos that these two rough days in 
 open sledges, one of twelve, the next of ten hours, did me no 
 perceptible harm. Of course I was tired, but that was all. 
 Everybody else arrived well and with much exhilaration. 
 The sun came out yesterday, and to-day we have been 
 gathering spring-flowers — snowfiakes, cowslips, red heath, 
 pink primulas, violets, hepaticas, forget-me-nots, pansies, 
 polygola. You can fancy how we revel in them. 
 
 ' I have found a very good friend and servant in Christian 
 Buol. He is a splendid fellow, and takes great care of me.' 
 
 [How keenly Symonds enjoyed the touch of literary appre- 
 ciation in this enforced exile is made very clear in this letter 
 to Mr. Gosse :] 
 
 ' Your ' words about " Lombard Vignettes " were wafted 
 to me by the breeze of Smith & Elder. It was kind of you 
 to write so. It is just this which does one really good amid 
 much that is both vain and tedious in life ; it makes writing 
 worth the while, independent of its own pleasures. 
 
 ' I am amazed that sentences, written with a bleeding heart 
 and failing health last year in a diary too often blotted with 
 
 ' To Edmund Gosse. Monte Generoso, June 9, 1878.
 
 1878 MANHOOD 337 
 
 tears, and copied last winter in the weariness of Alpine frost 
 for want of better stuff to do, should carry to you so much 
 scent of beauty. I almost believe sometimes that the suffering 
 of great mental pain gives quality to work we do in quite alien 
 regions. 
 
 ' I am now four thousand feet above the plain of Lombardy. 
 Milan is shining in sunset on those purple fields, and a hun- 
 dred cities flash back the last red light. I can see both Alps 
 and Apennines, and all the silvery lake over-canopied and 
 brought into one picture by flame-litten clouds. The bells are 
 rising from villages far below, and a hush of evening silence 
 creeps over all the ridges, cliffs, and forests of this billowy 
 mountain — breaking into wavelike crests and literally toppling 
 in its awful chasms over the blue water of Lugano. The 
 meadows are one drift of white lilies, narcissus and asphodel, 
 wanting only Proserpine or the figure of Dante's Matilda to 
 make them poems. Indeed they are poems, with that un- 
 changing background of history and romance and art and 
 human life, the plain against whose violet breadth they quiver 
 to the little winds. 
 
 'I hope S. and E. sent you "Many Moods." If you read 
 it, will you frankly say what you think, sometime '? You may 
 see from the dedication that I am not unprepared for plain 
 speech in my own critical mood. I notice that Kobert 
 Buchanan, in " Light " for June, thinks a critic ought not to 
 try verse, and that in any case I had made a poor business 
 it. I believe it is truly so ; and I shall be the better for 
 coming to be quite sure of this if it is so. If I live, I may 
 still do something with prose, for thought and feeling deepen 
 through suffering, and the hand does not lose its cunning, 
 obedient to the still aspiring brain." 
 
 [By midsummer Symonds was back again at Davos. That 
 his sceptical attitude in matters intellectual had not altered is 
 clear from the following letter addressed to his brother-in-law, 
 T. H. Green. But the tone of the letter is cooler, less 
 passionate, less personal than that which inspired his enrlier 
 formulation of doubt. Symonds is no longer a dweller iu tlie 
 
 z
 
 338 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1878 
 
 world of abstractions, but rather a spectator of operations 
 which take place therein :] 
 
 ' I have ^ been reading your sermon on Faith, with the 
 greatest interest and admiration. It makes me wish that I 
 had the privilege of " sitting under " you : not that you could 
 often produce, I should imagine, work of such intense feeling 
 and thought in combination, so brought within the needs of 
 the unscientific hearer. The first thing that struck me when I 
 resumed my impressions after reading it, was what M. Arnold 
 would call the urbanity of your tone — the eiritiiceia with which 
 you enter into divers points of view, setting Keason, Faith, 
 Science, Religion, Ethics, and even passionate revolt, in their 
 right relations, shedding light upon them in their several 
 places, and bringing out their contours and their harmony. 
 Of course, you will say that it is just this which philosophy 
 should enable her student to do : and so it is, especially your 
 philosophy. But few men could have so done it — with such 
 inner warmth, such gravity, and such command of material. 
 The next thing which came prominently forward, perhaps to 
 me the most valuable, was your power of reading a new life 
 into the old forms with which we are so familiar — -and that, 
 not by putting new constructions on them, but by demonstrat- 
 ing their permanent significance. 
 
 ' The only radical difficulty I feel about accepting your 
 presentation of the whole matter is inherent in what you 
 think a confusion of ideas, and what you have attempted to 
 meet on page 22. I always feel that theological philosophy 
 starts with a petitio principii about God, and that the sub- 
 jective proof to which you so eloquently appeal is unsatisfactory 
 to the very people who require to be convinced — those who 
 have it not. Nor can I follow you in your critique of Science 
 on page 13. Why Nature should not be without the thinking 
 subject {i.e. withoiit our thought to think it, for beyond our 
 thought is known to us no thinking subject), I could never 
 comprehend. I am so obtuse that I cannot get over the 
 reflection of what Nature must have been before man appeared, 
 
 ' To T. H. Green. Davos, June 10, 1878.
 
 1878 MANHOOD 339 
 
 and is where man is not. That the spirit of man is no part 
 of what we call Nature may be conceded arg. gr. without the 
 corollary that God is to be sought in it, or that it is the 
 creative principle of the Universe. It is just this latter 
 position : viz. that humanity is Deity in the sense of effectuat- 
 ing Nature by its thought, which seems to me to divide you, 
 and those who think with you, from those who, however they 
 feel the Divine in the Universe, do not venture to assert its 
 cognisability. 
 
 ' But I know that I speak foolishly when I try to handle 
 these matters ; and I am very well aware that the absence of a 
 bias toward theology, a contentment with suspended judg- 
 ment, and after all, a not intense desire to reach the attitude 
 of " faith " as defined by you, are the real conditions which 
 disqualify me from thinking or writing to the point. I am 
 forced to feel that the heroic attitude of faith, and the smug 
 dulness of agnosticism, are matters of original temperament : 
 and yet no one would choose the latter rather than the former, 
 any more than he would choose a stunted rather than a well- 
 developed body. 
 
 ' God bless you ; even a benighted being cannot do without 
 that formula, and does not 'do without most heartfelt prayers 
 and praise to the Unknown, yet known.' 
 
 [During the summer of 1878 Symonds's friendship with 
 Christian Buol, who had been his companion and servant 
 on his spring journey, grew closer. It forms an important 
 episode in Symonds's life, for through that friendship he came 
 to know the nature, quality, habits of the people among whom 
 his lot was now cast, and to admire and respect their dignity, 
 their simplicity, their pride. His curiosity was engaged by an 
 experience, as he says, * so new ' in his life of a highly 
 cultivated Englishman ; and his profound sympathy with 
 liumanity in its simplest and most direct manifestations — his 
 passion for the genuine, the absolute, was satisfied by being 
 brought into contact with the I'oot-stuff of mankind, un- 
 adulterated by convention — which he now discovered in the 
 sturdy peasanti-y of Clraubiiaden.
 
 340 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1878 
 
 Writing late in life, he thus sums up his feeling on this 
 point : * After many illusions have been rubbed away by inter- 
 course with the people of Graubiinden, I retain my sense of 
 their noble, because absolutely natural, breeding. It springs, 
 I think, from the self-respect of free men, for centuries 
 unqualified by caste, who have always lived plainly, battled 
 with a stepmotherly nature, and submitted to the discipline of 
 patriarchal authority, and severe social criticism in small 
 communities.' 
 
 Moreover, in the case of this friendship, he found that 
 which he always earnestly sought — an opportunity to be of 
 practical service to his fellows. The Buol family was at this 
 time in serious financial difficulties. The reputation of Davos 
 as a health resort was not yet established, and all speculations 
 upon the future of the place were risky. The Buols, natives 
 of the soil living on their own land there for centuries, were in 
 danger of being swallowed iip by the more experienced men of 
 business, who were endeavouring to create a monopoly for 
 themselves. This was a situation in which Symonds's 
 business ability took delight. With infinite pains he went 
 into the whole affair, and by the judicious use of a com- 
 paratively small sum, he not only cleared his friend's family 
 in a way which was ^Derfectly business-like and honourable to 
 them, but laid the foundation of their fortunes. A matter of 
 this sort was an intense joy to Symonds. I do not think 
 I ever knew him happier than when he was spending, and 
 spending ably, himself, his intelligence, and his substance 
 on behalf of friends. His desire for action, his sense of 
 power — all that he had been longing for down to the crisis at 
 Cannes— found satisfaction and accomplishment in the con- 
 duct of this and the miny other similar occasions on which he 
 came to the help of those about him. And the enjoyment 
 was heightened by the element of personal friendship, by the 
 binding power of fellow service — one the cause and the other 
 the result of this large, humane, devoted \'iew of his duty 
 towards his neighbour. 
 
 A successful operation, such as this of rescuing a falling 
 house, could not escape the notice of so shrewd a people as the
 
 1878 MANHOOD 341 
 
 peasants of Davos, li^'ing within a narrow circle, and keenly 
 alive as they then were to the speculative possibilities which were 
 being developed in their valley. Symonds's conduct on this 
 occasion established his reputation as a man of business, and 
 led to a long series of appeals for help and advice ; these 
 doubtless interfered to some extent with his literary occupa- 
 tions, but they led to a profound knowledge of the conditions 
 of the Canton. 
 
 One result of the assistance given to the Buol family was 
 that Symonds moved over to their hotel, where he settled into 
 a suite of rooms for himself and his family. These rooms 
 became his home at Davos for the present. It was not yet 
 decided that Davos should become his permanent residence, 
 l)ut the restorative effect of the climate upon his health was 
 already pointing in that direction, and eventually led to the 
 breaking up of the home at Clifton Hill House, and the 
 building of Am Hof in 1881. 
 
 For the Symondses life at Davos began gradually to shape 
 its general tenor upon those lines which it continued to follow. 
 Residence during the winter ; a journey in spring ; summer at 
 Davos or in England ; an autumn visit to Italy ; and a 
 housing at Davos again for the winter. Symonds employed 
 the time by intensely vigorous study and rapid writing ; by 
 enlarging his acquaintance among the people ; by taking a 
 Hvely part in the amusements of the place, tobogganing, &c. ; 
 by carefully nursing the interests of the growing health-resort ; 
 by the wonderfully sparkling, varied, vigorous conversation 
 which was always ' on tap ' for the friends who came to visit 
 him from England or elsewhere. I think this was the 
 brightest period of his life ; in the high air of the mountains — 
 which he loved from Miirren days — in the .free communion 
 witli a manly and wholesome population, his real nature 
 expanded and blossomed like a flower. If, in the letters from 
 which I am al)0ut to quote in illustration of this life, some 
 note of sadness still remains, its presence must be attributed 
 to that fatal accident of health which barred him from the full 
 enjoyment of his now accomplished powers, in part, perhaps, 
 also to the shadow of that long agony — that intellectual
 
 .■Ui> JOHN ALDINGTON SYMO^JDS 1878 
 
 martyrdom which marred his youth and earlier manhood, but 
 made him man.] 
 
 ' I have ^ left ray mountains for a holiday before the winter 
 snows us up again in Davos ; but I find that Italy as usual, but 
 more, alas ! now than ever, devours the body and the soul of me. 
 I can hardly stand it, and I lose my health at a ruinously rapid 
 rate. There is something truly tragic in this mal-adjusted 
 poise between enjoyment and the strength to take it. 
 
 'I begin to fear that nothing is left for me but isolation 
 in the midst of those grey mountains, where the feet of the 
 seasons pace so monotonously, and the spirit lives in thrilling 
 imprisonment, a thing alive and quick and apprehensive of all 
 joy, but flaming at the touch of joy into too keen consuming 
 jets of sensibility. 
 
 ' The Greeks in their myths imagined such sequestered 
 lives, because they imagined all things ; but it remains for us 
 to realise the bitterness. 
 
 ' We, therefore, after fourteen days spent among olives 
 and oleanders, at Lerici and Viareggio (where Shelley was 
 burned) and Spezia Avill have to turn our faces northward, and 
 put on our furs, and climb the frozen Alps in sledges, and shut 
 the door of that crystal castle, and seek sleep, aye, and dreams. 
 There's the rub. 
 
 ' Do not forget me ; though the snows should wrap me 
 round, I shall in the midst of them still have a burning 
 heart.' 
 
 ' We have ^ bitter winter here. I cannot stand it as I did 
 last year. But I must conquer. I will still take the tree of 
 beauty and shake the apples on my head. I will stiffen myself 
 in every joint and compel my brain to serve me. Whatever 
 you do, don't go and lose your health.' 
 
 [To a friend who had lost a friend he wrote this letter, 
 welling over with affection, from a heart which was ^\ddening 
 
 ' To Edmund Gosse. Florence, October 13, 1878. 
 ^ To H. F. Brown. Davos, Nov. 4, 1878.
 
 1878 MANHOOD 343 
 
 its sympathies till they should embrace all forms of life, of 
 love, of sufierings :] 
 
 ' Dearest,' come to me whenever you can. Come in 
 January, for that is the best month. You know that I only 
 want in letters now una stretta di mano, not words : though 
 the words were eloquent you sent me last. There is nothing 
 to my soul more beautiful than those last words of his you 
 heard. Send me his last letter and his father's, or wait and 
 show me them. I want nothing that you cannot give ; but I 
 want with a passion that is childish. 
 
 ' I cannot speak of these things. In life it seems to happen 
 that what we love, yet could dispense with, stays ; and what 
 our very soul was tied to, slips away. And thus it is perhaps 
 with you. I, the withered branch, remain ; and he, Apollo's 
 laurel branch, is burned. 
 
 ' I somehow think you may like some wild old Italian lines 
 to-night ! It will be morning when you read them. This is 
 what Death says to the Youth : — 
 
 gentil giovinotto, assai lui duole 
 Di torti il fior della tua gioventute ; 
 Ma sappi die null' altro durar suole 
 
 In questo mondo, so non la virtute . . . 
 
 And here is something from a man's heart : — 
 
 La prima volta che m' innamorai, 
 M' innamorai con uno sguardo solo. 
 
 And here again is a very violoncello chord of love and pain : — 
 
 Voglio fare un invito d' amatori, 
 Voglio invitar gli sfortunati auianti ; 
 Da niangiare vo' dar pene e dolori, 
 E da bere daro lagrinie e pianti. 
 
 1 sospiri saranno i servitori 
 
 Che serviranno a tavola gli amanti : 
 Poveri amanti, a che siete ridutti ! 
 Per un aniante a veto a inorir tiitti. 
 
 ' Davos, November 27, 1878.
 
 344 JOHN ADDINGTON SYISrONDS 1878 
 
 And here is yet another, deeper than all tears, and wilder than 
 these winds that bring the winter snows about us, now in 
 torrents of mad streams : 
 
 Sor.o stato all' Inferno e son tomato ; 
 Misericordia ! la gente che c' era. 
 V era una stanza tutt' illuniinata, 
 E dentro v' era la speranza mia. 
 Quaudo nii vidde gran festa mi fece, 
 E pel mi disse : Dolce anima mia, 
 Non t' arricoi'di del tempo passato, 
 Quando tu mi dicevi : Anima inia ? 
 Ora, mio caro ben, baciami in bocca, 
 Baciami tanto ch' io contento sia. 
 E tanto saporita la tua bocca. 
 Di grazia saporisci anche la mia, 
 Ora, mio caro ben, che m' hai baeiato, 
 Di qv;i non isperar d' andarne via. 
 
 ' So good night. It rains continually ; and the snow that 
 fell for ten days is melting in a horrid slush.' 
 
 1879 ' I have ' a great deal to be grateful for. When I review 
 
 the last eight years — say from February 1871, when our father 
 died — they seem to have been crowded with more than I ever 
 expected from my chosen line of work. I published my first 
 book in September 1872, and 1 am now printing my twelfth, 
 a collection of " Italian Studies and Translations." One of my 
 books is out of print (the Dante), and will not be republished. 
 One (the Greek Poets, 1st Series) has had a second edition. 
 Of another (Sketches in Italy) I am preparing now a second 
 edition. Of yet another (Fine Arts in Italy) I am revising the 
 Italian translation. Each new review of my poems shows a 
 steady advance in the popular favour given to them, and 
 encourages me to yet another venture of verse. All this has 
 happened rapidly— roughly speaking, in less than seven years. 
 ' I often think, remembering my father's love of literature 
 and respect for men of letters, how pleased he would have been 
 if he could have lived to share what has been pleasant in this 
 development. I do not mean that I have done more than I 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Davos, January 7, 1879.
 
 1879 MANHOOD 845 
 
 ought reasonably to have done, or have succeeded better than 
 was to have been expected from the moderate use of moderate 
 faculties. But when he died, I had, so to speak, done nothing ; 
 and the sort of thing he liked has come to me in plenty since, 
 so that if my health does not revive and I am to have no 
 further career, I may still think' (and he would have thought) 
 that pro V'irili parte, with the strength and parts allotted to 
 me, I have lived. . . .' 
 
 ' I ought ' to have thanked you for the sonnet that your 
 last letter contained. It is beautiful, and it touched me ^^ith 
 a strange thrill of pleasure and gratitude. Li\ing up alone in 
 those hUls, and getting old, makes me very sentimental and 
 terribly sensitive to kindness, to the touch especially of 
 spiritual hands and spirit voices coming to me from the world 
 of thoughts and deeds. 
 
 ' One cannot grow dead, though one grows old, to beauty 
 or to human emotion. Indeed I grow more intensely %ibratory 
 to the impact of all things that have these qualities.' 
 
 ' Your letter ^ of Sunday has just come, and though I have 
 not much to say I shall write to you again to-night, for I write 
 to almost no one now but you, and I want sometimes sfocjarmi. 
 
 ' Some things in your letter join on curiously, almost 
 cruelly, to my mood. There is no mistake stranger, no uii- 
 kindness of nature and ci\ilisation more wounding to our 
 sensibility, than the bar placed between individuals of a 
 different tradition and a different training. It is so much 
 easier for us to appreciate them than for them to understand 
 us. They cannot understand our outgoings of feeling, our 
 admiration for something they have and we have not. They 
 remain at arm's length, puzzled, suspicious, apprehensive, 
 dreading the incommensurable gap of culture and of habit 
 between us, which to us is really nothing, or is perhaps the 
 very allurement, the thing we feel it would be sweet to annihi- 
 late at the profit of a pure and unmixed humanity. 
 
 ' To Edmund Gosse. Bernerhof, Bern, February 4, 1879. 
 '^ To II. F. Brown. Davos, October 20, 1879.
 
 346 JOHN ADrUXGTOX SYMONDS 1879 
 
 ' I daresay they are right. With the clear instinct of 
 unreasoning but intensely apprehending personality, they 
 di^'ine the depth and breadth of the separation. We, ac- 
 customed to all forms of intellectual metamorphosis, to self- 
 suppression, to change of place, and scene, and mental climate, 
 inured to differences, locomotive, spiritualised, independent of 
 the centres and the traditions that started us on our career of 
 indi\aduality — we can afibrd to draw an resthetic or a transient 
 good from relations which they can only conceive of as holy 
 and permanent, or as momentary and vicious. 
 
 ' God help us, and forgive us all. God make it l)etter 
 somewhere else. 
 
 ' There is but one motto for us. " Entbehren sollst du, 
 sollst entbehren." On that and "Labor Improbus " we must 
 live till the sands of life are shaken out by palpitation of a 
 passion that sur^ives the decay of physical ^•igour. 
 
 ' I shall not be able to send you the poems for some while, 
 I fear. "Da questo carcere basso," looking up, and looking 
 out, I even wonder whether I vdW not fling that effort aside. 
 Is there not a juniper tree in this desert ? Would it not be 
 well to sit under it till death, or the ravens sent by God, come 
 to end the matter powerfully one or other way ? Do not think 
 worse of my state from all these words than it really is. I ■will 
 plant myself four-square still to the best of my ability. I will 
 not let myself be easily beaten. And in this very volition 
 there is the element of health — not flourishing or enduring, 
 but possibly sufficient for the present and even further needs.' 
 
 ' I ^ have got up to-day for the first time since last Friday. 
 I have had a strange attack, quite unlike anything I ex- 
 perienced before. From 2 p.m. on Friday to 4 p.m. on 
 Tuesday, I suffered from unintermittent pain of a really 
 horrible kind. I thought I must die or become insensible. 
 And, yet, my mind was lucid. It was a long hurricane of 
 torture ^vith short respites, got by triple doses of chloral, 
 lasting an hour and a half. 
 
 ' I live in dread, for the whole theatre of my former misery 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, November 6, 1879.
 
 lf«79 MANHOOD 347 
 
 throbs with a dull menace. It is not over, and I am so weak 
 that I can hardly form these words. 
 
 ' I never felt pain on so august, so colossal a scale. There 
 was something grand in it. ]\Iost pain has an element of the 
 nasty. This was like hell. It is worth the misery to have 
 registered the sensation.' 
 
 ' I think ^ an exaggerated report of my being ill has got 
 abroad. On the whole Ruedi believes my lung better than it 
 was last spring. But I have had six weeks of very bad health 
 lately. 
 
 ' He says that nature, outraged by my excesses in walking 
 and working, has recalcitrated. 
 
 ' Since last February, I have written two volumes of the 
 "Renaissance in Italy," all but three chapters. They are the 
 two final volumes on Italian literature. Of course this is only 
 the first rough composition ; for I always now write twice 
 when I am concerned with work requiring a wide sweep and 
 sustained energy. The great thing is to get the masses pro- 
 perly blocked out in the first redaction. 
 
 ' Besides this, I have had, in the same space of time, to 
 prepare American editions of my " Studies of Greek Poets," 
 and all my " Italian Sketches." Harper is going to bring out 
 these two works, each in two volumes ; and I have now 
 rearranged them in their right order. 
 
 ' There has, moreover, been the preparation of a new 
 English edition of the " Age of the Despots," to which I have 
 added 100 pages, as well as a great amount of minute 
 alteration. 
 
 ' Smith & Elder have also asked for a new volume of 
 poems, and I have been considering this. 
 
 ' So you see my hands have been full. If I did not work 
 with an almost abnormal facility, I should not have got 
 through the mere grind. But 1 am afraid that this facility 
 does not mean less, but only more rapid and instinctive cere- 
 bration than in the case of slower workers. Therefore I get 
 sudden and inexplicable collapses like this last.' 
 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Davos, November 18, 1879.
 
 348 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1880 
 
 1880 [By the spring of 1880 the idea of some permanent home 
 
 at Davos had acquired sufficient definiteness to induce 
 Symonds to begin looking about for a house. The exhilarat- 
 ing quality of the Davos climate was thoroughly enjoyed by 
 him, as the following phrases, written to his sister, show :J 
 
 ' We are sitting, blazing with open windows in an air 
 heavy with hyacinths and narcissus, after tobogganing before 
 breakfast all over the frozen meadows, from the waterfall down 
 to the Landwasser. It is very nice. I incline more and more 
 toward a house here.' 
 
 [But the question of buying or building was far from a 
 light one. Symonds was in favour of building, but he was 
 met by such difficulties as these : 
 
 ' My plans about the house here have been progressing. I 
 have got one designed to my liking, on the Bamrhans 
 principle, modified to suit an English family's requirements. 
 I will put a rough sketch of it into my envelope. I also chose 
 a site on Buol's meadow, at the edge of the wood, not far from 
 the waterfall. This is out of the wind ; but, after choosing it, 
 Buol casually told me that, in 1817, an avalanche swept from 
 the Schia-horn, destroyed the forest, filled up the ravine, boiled 
 over the opposing hill, and devoured the meadow, passing on 
 till it had crossed the Landwasser. If this ever happened 
 again, it would pour first down on my devoted house. The 
 people of the valley, like those of Portici, do not seem to care 
 much about such possibilities. They say it was a quite extra- 
 ordinary occurrence, and are satisfied, but we feel otherwise ; 
 so I am still at sea about the site, and may be altogether put 
 oft' the building.' 
 
 All the same, it was now pretty certain that Davos and not 
 CHfton, would become his fixed abode. 
 
 The prospect of permanent change from Clifton to Davos 
 led Symonds to make the following observations upon the 
 situation, as regards his literary and intellectual fife :] 
 
 A new ' period of mental work, under very peculiar con- 
 ditions, had now begun. My intellectual energy was rather 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 1880 MANHOOD 349 
 
 increased than diminished by the change ; but I had to sub- 
 sist upon such books as I could collect for myself. To carry 
 on the ' Renaissance in Italy,' seemed at first impossible. I 
 did not expect that the work would get beyond the first three 
 volumes, which were already published in 1877. Finding me 
 some time later employed upon it in a room of Hotel Buol, 
 Mark Pattison remarked : ' Of course, you cannot be thinking 
 of writing a book here.' He knew perfectly well that this was 
 precisely what I was about at the moment, and he felt it his 
 duty to protest against a proceeding so opposed to his own 
 notions. ' Certainly I am,' I replied ; ' since I write for my 
 distraction and pastime, I intend to make the best of my 
 resources, and 1 hold that a great deal of nonsense is talked 
 about the scholar's vocation ; men who might have written 
 excellent books are sterilised by starting with fastidious 
 conceits.' 
 
 Nevertheless, I felt that residence at Davos Platz put an 
 end to any hopes of my becoming a scholar in the exact sense. 
 I could no longer look forward to utiUsing public hbraries, to 
 examining original documents, and to working up a subject 
 ^^^th the fulness demanded by scientific criticism in our day. 
 The forces which, since my boyhood, had been directly and 
 indirectly moulding me for a particular kind of writing, were 
 once more operative. I had to remain a man of letters in the 
 looser sense of that term, choosing such useful or enjoyable 
 occupation as coixld be carried on without a large stock of 
 books. Literature more than ever came to be regarded by me 
 as a luiycoyi'i. On the other hand, the bracing climate and the 
 solitude of the mountains helped me to acquire a more forcible 
 style, enabled me to be as active as I liked without damage to 
 my health, and added to the vigour of my brain. Accustomed 
 as I was to compromise by the whole previous tenor of my 
 fife, I cheerfully accepted the situation, and fixed my thoughts 
 upon compensating advantages, instead of chewing the cud of 
 mortification. What I felt most was the separation from 
 friends of like interests and pursuits. I had to do without 
 the stimulus which conies from conversation. Whatever work 
 I did must be accomplished in solitude ; as it turned out, the
 
 350 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1880 
 
 continual production of books in that stern Alpine region — the 
 contrast between my life there among peasants and invalids, 
 with my growing reputation as a man of letters — acted some- 
 what unwholesomely upon my moral temperament. 
 
 [Before returning to Clifton on the painful task of breaking 
 up his home there, Symonds and his wife, and a Graubiinden 
 friend, went for a journey to Varese, Florence, Tuscany, Rome, 
 and Umbria. That he enjoyed the journey is evident from 
 this letter to myself, who had been his companion on a similar 
 journey in 1878 : 
 
 ' I have this scrap of paper left, and feel I ought to write 
 to you from here (Montepulciano, May 6, 1880), in the room 
 where you and Chr. Buol lay like Etruscan lares in your lofty 
 beds. The weather is better than it was then — though not 
 perfect. We are going to drive to Pienza and St. Quirico 
 to-day. Since I last wrote I have been improving in health 
 and spirits. A fortnight of rest at Perugia did me great good. 
 I found the public library fair, and read sixteen books of great 
 importance for my work on Italian literature. We have since 
 been to Cortona and Chiusi, driving whenever it was possible. 
 The drive from Perugia to Cortona is simply perfect for beauty 
 and interest, and we had one quite idyllic luncheon, off a great 
 eel, on the shore of Lake Thrasymene, just at the point where 
 Hannibal turned round to face Flaminius. 
 
 'Christian Palmy enjoys himself, and is an excellent com- 
 panion, and Catherine is well. So things are prospering. If 
 the weather seems right to-morrow, I think of Monte Amiata. 
 But it is too variable to be very safe. Otherwise we go on to 
 Siena, and thence to Castagnolo.' 
 
 But the weather did not prove favourable, and Symonds 
 reached Clifton far from well. The task of dismantling and 
 letting his old home was a severe trial, but he bore it with his 
 usual courage, steeling himself as far as might be with an 
 outward indifference, which masked an active internal ache. 
 
 He used to tell of a great bonfire prepared at the foot of 
 the garden, upon which basketfuls of papers were heaped. He
 
 1880 MANHOOD 3ol 
 
 recorded his regret in the autobiography, and to one of his 
 dearest friends he writes on July 8th : 
 
 ' To-day you have been very much with me. I have parted 
 with my past by destroying nearly the whole of my corre- 
 spondence. 
 
 ' Among this mass of papers were a great many of your 
 letters. I have kept a few. I was horribly unwiUing to part 
 with any. And yet they were so personal that, ha\ing resolved 
 to destroy all personal elements of correspondence, I would 
 not even exclude these. As I went through them, I felt that 
 I had never before appreciated their wisdom and beauty, their 
 clear-cut sincerity, their sweetness and strength. 
 
 ' Reviewing the whole long record of my life revealed in 
 these accumulated documents, I was struck very forcibly with 
 two things — First, with wonder that I should have retained 
 any energy at all after such prolonged ill-health, and mental 
 and physical suffering and strange experiences, as made up my 
 life between 1857 and 1863. The subsequent lung disease, 
 from which I am no suffering, is no doubt the result of 
 the strain of those years. But I marvel that I should have 
 borne it so comparatively well at the time. It shows how 
 powerful mere youth is. The second thing was a feeling of 
 having been singularly blessed in the love and friendship of 
 noble men and women, combined with a sense of my final 
 unworthiness of them. 
 
 ' There is one really sublime letter of yours, which shadows 
 forth a dread of change, of our — all of us — undergoing the 
 influences of the commonplace, and being doomed in middle 
 life to walk wrapped up in mantles of convention, hiding our 
 true selves. 
 
 ' Has something of the kind foreshadowed fallen upon some 
 of us ? That is what I now ask myself. It appears to me 
 that I have gained tranquilUty and comparative health by 
 accepting the ordinary, by transactions of many sorts with my 
 own nature, by ceasing to care as acutely as I did for either 
 good or evil, Ijy blunting my sensibilities and superinducing 
 the callosity of indifference or vulgar scorn u)ion my thrilling 
 fibres of sympatb}.
 
 352 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1880 
 
 ' I think this is so with me. Catherine, who helped me 
 in the work of destruction, kept saying that I have become so 
 much more healthy, calm, cheerful, good to live with. But, 
 though I recognise that she is right, I am aware that this 
 desirable result is, to a large extent, the form world-Aveariness 
 assumes with me. It is loss of something, not clear gain, 
 exhausted, not harmonised energies. 
 
 ' You are hardly in a position to compare experiences : for 
 you have doubled your resources in the interval between that 
 summer when we first talked together at 47 Norfolk Square, 
 and this July, whereas I have remained, in all domestic 
 relations (roughly speaking), stationary. 
 
 ' It was rather pretty to see Catherine and my four children 
 all engaged in tearing up the letters of a lifetime. We sat on 
 the floor, and the dead leaves grew above us mountains high. 
 
 ' By the same fell stroke I destroyed the correspondence of 
 my forefathers from the seventeenth century — from an old 
 Independent minister, who had known Bunyan, downward. 
 
 ' Psychologically, it interested me to notice the change of 
 tone in the letters of successive generations. Beginning with 
 the ardent faith of the Puritan impulse, passing into earnest 
 but formalised Methodism in the next two generations, feeling 
 the breath of the French Ke volution and physical science in my 
 grandfather, but remaining within the limits of strict Puritan 
 orthodoxy ; in my father's correspondence ^vith J. Sterling and 
 F. Newman and F. Maurice and Jowett, taking a robust 
 theistic complexion, and in mine with you and H. G. D., 
 expanding finally into a free atmosphere. The spiritual 
 problem was the main matter of all these letters. But how 
 that spiritual problem altered \vith each generation ! And 
 what, I said to myself, A\ill be its form in this, the rising 
 generation ? 
 
 ' I feel rather like a criminal to have burned the tares and 
 wheat together of this harvest. I was driven to do so by ha%ing 
 to break up this our home, and to go forth homeless. It is 
 difficult to have books enough in the nomadic life. Old 
 letters must have been })ut into a box to be rummaged and 
 destroyed by my executors.
 
 1880 MANHOOD 353 
 
 ' I preferred a solemn concremation in my garden, under- 
 neath the trees, attended with the conclamatio of my spirit ; 
 as I said to the flaming pages, Avete atqtie valete. 
 
 ' So you see we are about to leave Clifton Hill House 
 " To be let or sold." 
 
 ' I did not anticipate anything else when I went away from 
 it so ill, three years ago. Still,- in the interval since then, a 
 hope had arisen that I might live here. But I find myself 
 unequal to it.' 
 
 [In the same context, animated by that desire to help and 
 hearten younger men out of his own experience, which was so 
 marked a feature of his broad sympathies, he wrote to a friend 
 on August 13 :] 
 
 ' Looking over these stores, which I have now consigned to 
 perdition, I am quite sure that what I always preached to you 
 is right — i.e. that men must be willing to go through a great 
 deal of prentice work without result in publication, between 
 twenty and thirty. There is something good in all I have 
 now destroyed. Yet it was all imperfect, and the final out- 
 come of the labour can be seen in such work as I have since 
 put forth. 
 
 ' Of course this does not apply to the rarest type of literary 
 ability, where excellent achievement comes from the first 
 unsought and uncompelled. 
 
 ' I have walked a great deal on the downs lately between 
 8 and 10 p.m. It is very lovely up there in these clear summer 
 nights, with the boats on the river and the people about. I 
 must not, however, give myself this pleasure, since I catch 
 cold there. I have seen enough, too, to show that il mondo c 
 rotondo and Durdham Downs arc not different from the 
 Venetian Riva. We live in an odd world, where assuredly 
 people know most marvellously little about what is going on 
 around them.' 
 
 [The adieu to Clifton Hill House was taken upon this note, 
 su]j(lu(3(l, restrained, refiectivo, yet withal so passionate, in 
 
 A A
 
 354 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONDS 1880 
 
 which a large part of the man — his artistic sensibility, his 
 eager human sympathy, his present resignation, finds most 
 delicate expression.] 
 
 ' Deep ' incommunicable spirit-speaking power of voices. 
 I think now there is nothing like a voice for teaching me 
 about the soul. I think there is nothing I could fall in love 
 with but a voice. I think I love that best, and that reveals 
 most of the life I love. 
 
 ' I was sitting this evening at half-past eight, smoking 
 under the vine at the end of my terrace, when a beautiful thing 
 hai)pened. 
 
 ' A clear soprano voice, strong but not full, the untrained 
 voice of a girl, I thought, of about eighteen years, from behind 
 the wall, back to back with me, gave out a simple melody. 
 The melody was old, probably of Italian origin, either used for 
 hymns in the church service or caught up from some organ 
 recital. 
 
 ' She sang and paused. 
 
 ' Then she sang again ; but this time the same melody was 
 repeated on the second by a contralto of extraordinary force 
 and volume and vibration. It overwhelmed me with its 
 richness. I tremble when I remember it. But this was no 
 voice of woman or of man. It was a boy's voice on the point 
 of breaking — proved by its incomparable thrill, by a some- 
 thing indescribable, suggestive of chords resonant within the 
 larynx. 
 
 ' They sang together, against each other, in harmony, and 
 then at last in unison. And after I had listened breathless, 
 the melody was (for them at any rate) played out, and I heard 
 the noise of feet that moved upon the street, and words and 
 low laughter. 
 
 ' The yellow moon rose above the tulip trees. I shut up 
 my pipe, and moved slowly backward ; the jessamine was just 
 in bloom, white scented stars upon thick masses of a night-like 
 gloom of green. 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown July 21, 1880.
 
 1880 Manhood 355 
 
 ' I shall never know anything concerning those two lives — 
 the ripened womanhood of one so musically blended with the 
 broken boyhood and just budding manhood of the other. 
 
 ' You do not write to me. But it is well. I am not rest- 
 less for letters. I send you this leaf from an almost leafless 
 tree.' 
 
 A A
 
 3o6 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONDS 1880 
 
 CHAPTEE XIV 
 
 MANHOOD — SETTLEMENT AT DAVOS 
 
 The result of leaving Clifton — Beginning of a new life — The building 
 of Am Hof — Lcbens Philosophic — Midnight tobogganing — Visit to 
 Venice — ' Animi Figura ' — Back at Davos — -At Arosa — Am Hof — 
 His views on charities — High spirits at Davos — Death of T. H. 
 Green -His visit to England— Declared seriously ill again — 
 Returns to Davos — Moves into Am Hof — A profession of faith. 
 
 1880 [In July 1880 Symonds went to London, where both Sir W. 
 Jenner and Dr. Qnain gave a poor report of his health. 
 ' Nothing is left,' he writes to Mr. Sidgwick, ' but to sit and 
 moulder in the High Alps. If only my friends would fly 
 across and perch a day or two at Davos now and then. Well ! 
 perhaps they will. But I shall not make any new ones. We 
 ought to live in the stream of novelty as well as in the lakes 
 of loyalty.' That sounds like a programme of life ; and to a 
 certain extent Symonds proceeded to carry it into efiect. The 
 ' lakes of loyalty ' were never silted up ; his Davos home was 
 always open to the friends of his youth and manhood, and few 
 things gave him greater pleasure than their visits. On the 
 other hand, the ' stream of novelty ' certainly flowed wider and 
 deeper. New friendships, new acquaintances among all sorts 
 and conditions of men, began to occupy a large part of his 
 attention. After three long years, spent in the rigid vacuity 
 of abstract speculation, he took a keen delight in the fluidity, 
 the richness, the fulness of human life, with which, as the 
 following pages will prove, he now began to deal more freely 
 than he had ever before allowed himself to do. Symonds 
 returned to Davos in the autumn of 1880, aware that Davos 
 would now become his residence. The severance from 
 England, and the abandonment of his Clifton home, made a 
 strong impression upon his attitude towards life, and that
 
 1880 MANHOOD 357 
 
 impression he formulates in the following letter to Mr. 
 Sidgwick :] 
 
 ' My house ' was my home since I was ten years old, and 
 I have sold everything that it contained. For a long time I 
 felt very sore — like a soldier crah without his shell, molluscous 
 properties being detected in me which my adventitious habitat 
 had previously concealed. I am now getting sufficiently 
 callous. But I feel that a new chapter is opened in life. It 
 makes me younger, and at the same time less enthusiastic — 
 Bohemian, cynical, and capable of boredom — all in one. I 
 fancy I shall not care for any home again ; and yet I am sure 
 I don't want to return to the old one. Under these conditions, 
 if I also lost my interest in writing, I daresay I should go 
 mad. It often occurs to me to think with horror : what would 
 happen if literature failed me, if I did not care to' write ? I 
 hope to goodness I shall not lose this, and now my desire is 
 to think of something good to do when the " Eenaissance " is 
 over. I am inclined to cut the Italians for a while. I have 
 sometimes thought of writing a study of Graubiinden history ; 
 luU this would necessitate archive-hunting at Chur ; and 
 could I decipher raedineval MS. in Schweizer Deutsch and 
 Romansch ? ' 
 
 [Davos being chosen as a home, Symonds determined to 
 build a house for himself. The construction of Am Hof — a 
 long and furious battle with the local authorities upon the 
 question of sanitation in the rapidly expanding health-resort 
 — the formation of one or two now friendships, notably with 
 ]\Ir. R. L. Stevenson, who brought a letter of introduction 
 from Mr. E. Gosse — sledging, tobogganing, extending his 
 connection with the Davosers, the ' Encyclopjedia Britannica ' 
 article on Italian History (1880), vols. iv. and v. of the 
 ' Renaissance ' (1881) — all tbis bears testimony to the activity 
 of Symonds's outer life. He writes to H. F. Brown (Feb, 27, 
 1881), who had been paying him a winter visit : 
 
 ' The single bottle of Forzato, which survived your Trufiovo-iu, issi 
 
 ' To H. Sidgwick. Davos, October 26, 1880.
 
 358 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1881 
 
 has been devoted to the birthday feast of Christian Buol, in 
 next month, for which I have ready a really pretty English 
 claret- jug of glass and silver. I designed in fancy a little 
 fcsta for the occasion, as I know these people like that sort of 
 thing ; and I am glad that enough of the precious liquid 
 remains to inaugurate the opening glasses.' 
 
 And a few days later, on March 9, he wrote the following 
 characteristic letter, into which are packed warm-hearted friend- 
 ship, a whole Lebens Philosophic, and a vivid picture of 
 external life at Davos, conveyed in the few strokes which 
 portray a midnight episode : 
 
 ' I thank you, dear friend, for sending me the verses. I 
 will not flatter you with pretending they are excellent poetry, 
 except the outburst of the first two lines, which seem to me 
 the whole. And I will not touch upon the exaggeration which 
 your deeply stirred feelings drove you into about me. That, 
 though patently untrue to the reality of things, is generous 
 and beautiful. And that you should have felt it at that 
 moment enough to express it, is very sweet to me. Better 
 proof I could not have that you really understood me, and 
 that the subject of our stormy conversation on the lake was 
 absorbed in a still closer understanding. 
 
 ' I do wish you could have happiness ; but I cannot tell 
 you how to get it. I only remember how, at your age, as my 
 diaries, which I read out to you one day, reveal, I was haunted 
 with the same illusion of not being happy. I believe really 
 that it is an illusion, due in great measure to the slow 
 development and the retarded self-effectuation of people like 
 us, educated in a sophisticating way, and gifted with a some- 
 what complex nature. I can only have faith and hope. 
 
 ' No doubt life, by blunting our sensibilities and reducing 
 our demands upon the world, by degrading our expectations 
 to the a peu pres of things, secures for us such happiness as 
 is the best perhaps for mortals. 
 
 ' Do not dwell on the thought that it is locked up in a 
 grave. It is not. Dream by night and day, of course you 
 must ; but learn to " live resolvedly in the Whole, the Good, 
 the Beautiful." I believe very firmly that our end is to bring
 
 1881 MANHOOD 359 
 
 a solid, almost world-repelling, self into accord with this self- 
 merging in the Whole. It is just here that, at a certain point 
 in my life, \Yhitman, in combination with Goethe, with the 
 side-light of Marcus Aurelius, helped me so much. I am sure 
 I got out of a great ditch about the year 1869 by communion 
 with these three. The whole of Whitman, the marrow of 
 Aurelius, and Goethe's above-quoted maxim, with his lines on 
 " Eigenthum " and his Proemium to " Gott und Welt," helped 
 me amazingly, as men have been helped by the gospels. Of 
 course I do not mean that these are drugs which you can take 
 with just the same benefit, because I know that every person- 
 ality is different, with different needs, diseases, and ways out. 
 But the substance of what I say I adhere to. Self and God, 
 I and the Whole, the Soul and the World — these must be by 
 each of us accorded, and the accord is happiness. 
 
 ' I always enjoy the aroma of Antonio's remarks. Like so 
 many Italian utterances, they have so much of ancient here- 
 ditary wisdom and sense of beauty worked into the very stuff 
 of simplest speech. They are like something in a dream. 
 
 ' I supped ^\^th Cator last night. 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. 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 ; but I comfort myself with remem- 
 bering that you did much the same without bad result. Did 
 
 I tell you how, in meadow-sledging, I saw Miss L flung 
 
 from her toboggan across the road to the photographer's hut 
 over a mound of snow, with a drop of at least eight feet of 
 wall, on to the back of her head on the frozen post-road ? I 
 fully expected to find her dead. She was only stunned, 
 however.' 
 
 The spring joui-ney of tliis year (1H81) was made to 
 Venice. It was in many ways an important visit. That 
 interest in human nature which had found its field, to a
 
 360 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONUS 1881 
 
 certain extent, among the peasantry of Davos, was still in some 
 ways the strongest element in Symonds's life. The Venetian 
 people were not likely to waken less curiosity than the Grau- 
 biindners. As at Davos, Symonds had made friends with 
 Christian Buol, and had through him been introduced to the real 
 Davoser life ; so at Venice, he made friends with the man who 
 remained his faithful and devoted servant, Angelo Fusatto, 
 who was with his master when he died in Rome, and through 
 him came to know a part at least — the water-dwelling part — 
 of genuine Venetian life. 
 
 In the emotional and intellectual region, the result of 
 Davos and Venice displayed itself in that little book which, for 
 me at all events, is the most important of all the many 
 volumes which issued from that active brain — in ' Animi 
 Figura ' — begun soon after leaving Venice, and finished early 
 in the following year. 
 
 How healthy this intercourse with all sorts and conditions 
 of men really was for a man of Symonds's temperament, and 
 how freely and generously he began to pour out help for his 
 friends, now that he had arrived at a knowledge of himself and 
 planted his feet on fact, will be evident to anyone who reads 
 these following words of heartening, written to a younger 
 friend from Davos, on August 11, 1881 : 
 
 ' About your book : you must not be discouraged by so 
 slight a failure. I am just reading Lander's life. After years 
 before the public, he tried innumerable publishers, says Colvin, 
 before he found one to take his quite imperishable " Imaginary 
 Conversations " ; and even then the man insisted on cutting 
 out and toning down to suit an imaginary public. Whatever 
 becomes of your book, I want you to turn, with the immortal 
 youth of love, to literature again. Do not think too much of 
 actual achievement. Our race, like that of the believer, must 
 be run by casting behind us things past, and pressing forward 
 to the things to come. 
 
 ' Our little tour was this. On Monday we [a family party] 
 walked with Ardiiser over the Mayenfelder Furka, a wild pass 
 over 8,000 feet, to Arosa, and slept there. On Tuesday walked
 
 1881 MANHOOD 361 
 
 down the Arosa valley to Langwdes and back. Yesterday 
 crossed the Alteiu pass from Arosa (about 9,000 feet) to 
 Wiesen, and slept there, and to-day came back by carriage. It 
 was very pleasant, and the scenery of Arosa is really superb — 
 something like the head of the valley you are now in [the Val 
 d'Herens] — woods, streams, and Alps combined with the 
 most tremendous crags. Also the ^iew from the Altein, over 
 the range of Piz Aela and Piz Kesch, with Albula, Julier, 
 and Spliigen mountains, was desolately grand in a most 
 impressive way. We were rather troubled with weather — 
 fierce heat broken by thunderstorms. All yesterday we trod 
 those pathless hills in rolling mists of thunder, indescribably 
 splendid, and menacing and tragic. Ardiiser was very nice. 
 We slept each night in little wooden houses. My bad lung 
 is rather overdone with so much climbing, and my soul is not 
 satisfied with herself. If only we could be as good and calm 
 as Nature ; but this seems impossible. There are things too 
 deep in their unutterable sadness, too keen in their condemna- 
 tion of our own inadequacy to God's infinite goodness. 
 Addio.' 
 
 Meantime, the building of Am Hof proceeded steadily.] 
 
 ' The Union- Jack ' I brought with me for my dahabieh on 
 the Nile is now floating over the roof of my house. This is a 
 curious symbol. It was, like myself, to have moved upon 
 Egyptian waters, and been mirrored on the swirl of that most 
 ancient stream. It comes by accident to Davos, and now 
 celebrates the completion of what will, I hope, be an English- 
 man's fixed home. The last beams of the roof-frame were 
 placed this morning ; but it will take at least another week 
 before the roof is planked and covered with its metal plates. 
 Meanwhile, I fear the rain is coming at last. But I must not 
 grumble, for hitherto I have been singularly lucky in respect 
 of weather. The roof is so high-pitched that I shall have a 
 famous loft above the upper storey, and I trust the snow will 
 be thrown in masses off its zinc surface. The zinc I mean 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, August 12, 1H81.
 
 362 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONUS 1881 
 
 to paint a dark tile colour. Tiles themselves are said to be 
 out of the question in this winter cold. They freeze and 
 crack. 
 
 ' To-night I am to give my workpeojile a supper at the 
 Waldhaus. We shall be an odd mixture of Davosers and 
 Italians, with one Enghsh Bauherr. 
 
 [To a friend who had assured him of the stimulating, life- 
 giving power of his sympathy, Symonds characteristically 
 answers :] 
 
 ' Thank you greatly for your first letter since I left you. 
 It is true what you say, that letters are a poor substitute for 
 speech and presence. Yet they may be made to do almost as 
 much, partly by their reticences. Anyhow, yours comfort 
 me. I cannot understand how I communicate growth and life 
 when all seems chaos and decay within me. That I do com- 
 municate some kind of energy I can believe. But I take the 
 word you send me with trust ; I need to trust it, lest I fall 
 into despair of some sort.' 
 
 ' Tennyson ' has written a dismal poem called "Despair," 
 about an atheist's suicide, in the "Nineteenth Century." His 
 imagination has been taken by the fact recorded by Sir John 
 Lubbock of the dead suns. 
 
 ' What an age it is. Gran Dio, what an age ! I almost 
 feel as though I must write myself out, after your suggestion. 
 I am sanguine, if nothing better. And we do need now the 
 reaction of the spirit against all that chokes and cribs us 
 round. 
 
 ' P.S. — Sir J. Lubbock counts over seventy million solar 
 systems, and says there are many more extinct, one of which 
 causes intermittency of light in Algol. 
 
 We too shall fade and perish. That must be. 
 The fields of space with seventy million suns 
 Sparkle. For each, for all, time's hour-glass runs 
 Toward some fixed moment of mortality. 
 
 > To H. F. Brown. Davos, November 2, 1881,
 
 1881 MANHOOD 363 
 
 Look lip : 'tis night : there on that starry sea 
 
 The Pharos-flame of Algol ebbs and flows ; 
 
 Now shrinks to twilight, now intensely glows ; 
 
 Waxing and waning as the niinntcs flee. 
 For Algol had a comrade, whose clear song 
 
 Resounds no longer mid the angelic choir ; 
 
 Nameless and voiceless, round his brother's hre 
 He circles dark amid the luminous throng ; 
 
 And there are countless worlds which, dead like him, 
 
 Still roll through interstellar midnight dim. 
 
 [But Symonds's life at Davos was really too full, too active, 
 to admit ' despair.' He was immensely busy with the forma- 
 tion of bis sonnet sequence, called generically ' Vagabunduli 
 Libellus,' out of wbicb be first collected and published ' Animi 
 Figura.' On November 13 he writes to H. F. Brown : ' We 
 have the loveliest summer weather. I sit out and bask when 
 I do not write, and I walk at night ' ; and, on the 17tb, ' To- 
 day I have worked eight solid hours, from 9 a.m. till 6.30 p.m., 
 with interval for lunch. Such an awful sonnet came to me 
 at the lake one night. My hair bristled, and I felt cold from 
 the nape to the heels. But I daresay in words it Avill look to 
 you most tame.' 
 
 These walks to the lake were taken late at night. When 
 the ice was thickening in winter, or beginning to break up in 
 spring, the surface upon which one trod gave out most dread- 
 ful groaning sounds, as slight fissures ran along the ice. The 
 lake walk was a favourite one wdth Symonds, and there he 
 wrote and speculated alone, or ' discussed the universe ' with a 
 friend.] 
 
 ' I do ' not think you have got to the bottom of this wild 
 matter— why mastered, or rhythmic, or self-possessed emotion, 
 seems to us tame. I do not feel as though I could get to it 
 just now. 
 
 ' Nothing which does not include our whole nature will 
 
 ever satisfy us ; and the mastered, self-possessed emotion, by 
 
 very right of being mastered, being self-possessed, is already 
 
 less than the whole of us. We crave to lose self, or to realise 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, November 23, 1881.
 
 364 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONUS 1881 
 
 it all by merging it. We want to burn indefinitely, infinitely, 
 inimitably, everlastingly upwards. There are potentialities in 
 us of Avhich we are aware, which we need to bring into this 
 incandescence. In the old theosophies — so splendidly ex- 
 pressed by legends of Buddha, and by Canticles of Jacopone— 
 this infinite is God. There have been men who have absorbed 
 themselves in their entirety in the divine idea. But no 
 satisfied human feeling will yield this. It therefore falls upon 
 us to for ever dash ourselves on the unsatisfied unsatisfying ; 
 and as soon as we have apprehended the limit of a love, to 
 cease to burn toward it. 
 
 ' I do not myself regard the fight in the matter as all- 
 important. That is a condition of realisation in which we get 
 too often beaten and trampled down. I conceive the kernel 
 of the thing to lie in the infinity of our nature, the infinity of 
 our desire, and in the difficulty (generated by our consciousness 
 of life and vigour) of our ever believing that at some point or 
 other we shall not realise the intangible, impossible. I scribble 
 this in answer to yours of the 18th. The strong man ought 
 to go into the battle you wrote of, ought to attempt to realise 
 the impossible. But the strong man is too often tied up, like 
 Gulliver in Lilliput, by a thousand little threads which render 
 his experiment a total failure.' 
 
 [How practically helpful he was to those with whom his 
 habits and interests in life made him acquainted, would be 
 attested by many a native of Canton Graubiinden. But he 
 was not merely charitable, open-handed out of his own abund- 
 ance ; he went further than this, and constructed for himself 
 an ethic of charity, which was not only consonant with the 
 democratic views of life which he was carrying into practice, 
 but also added considerable zest to his own labours. Those 
 views are sufiiciently explained in the following letters, to his 
 sister and to a friend :] 
 
 ' I am ' working hard to raise 601. for a scheme of private 
 benevolence, as I wish to give this out of earnings. The 
 
 1 
 
 To his sister Charlotte. Davos, December 9, 1881.
 
 1881 MANHOOD 365 
 
 father of four children gets to feel his inherited wealth as a 
 trust. I don't quite know whether this feeling is right. But 
 I have it. I would rather give away what I gain. By the 
 way, if you see the "Cornhill," look out for an article by me. 
 This is one of my pot-boilers. 
 
 ' I am quite determined not to support any man in life by 
 daily doles. A lump-sum down, securing the workman bread 
 for self and family by labour, seems to me money spent in 
 the best way possible ; and I am grateful to the powers which 
 enabled me from time to time to do something of this sort 
 for a brother. If I were really rich, I would do this — not as 
 I now do it for tens, but for hundreds — and would always 
 take the same pains to study their characters, and see where 
 the cash can be profitably applied. 
 
 ' I dearly like thinking that I can devote the proceeds of 
 my labour to the furtherance of a good sort of man in the 
 development of his own energies. 
 
 ' I have reached this point, that I spend no money on 
 myself, except what is strictly necessary for the utensils of my 
 intellectual life (books, &c.), clothes, the decent maintenance 
 of my household. I allow myself only one pleasure, which is 
 that of gi^'ing out of the margin of my estate. 
 
 ' But why discourse on this topic? It is so simple. Some 
 day I must reduce my theory of afiection applied to fellow- 
 ser\-ice into some essay.' 
 
 [The principle here enunciated Symonds observed through- 
 out his life. I believe that of all the moneys which he spent 
 on others, by far the largest part was won by his own labour. 
 
 The stimulating quality of the Davos atmosphere kept life 
 at a very high nervous pitch, and occasionally provoked out- 
 bursts of spirits and escapades, which to a dweller at a lower 
 level might well seem incompatible with the life of an invalid 
 or a scholar. In a letter to Mr. J)akyns he talks of this 
 ' hilarity ' as ' a very temporary afi'air,' and explains it in these 
 terms : ' We have a good deal in this Davos life to battle up 
 against ; and, being a very weak vessel, I often, nay, always, 
 find resistance to depressing influence in my environment
 
 366 JOHN ADDIiNGTON SYMONDS 1881 
 
 produces an exaggerated mirth.' At the time of which I am 
 writing, there was still considerable novelty for Symonds in 
 the conditions of Davos life, and I think he did thoroughly 
 enjoy the odd situations in which a studious invalid might 
 suddenly find himself. I remember on one occasion adieu 
 was to be said to some friends bound southward for Italy. 
 Symonds and his party supped with the landlord of his hotel 
 in patriarchal fashion, the family and the guests above the 
 salt, the servants, both outdoor and in, below. As the evening 
 wore on an adjournment was made to the cellars, where the 
 great hogsheads of Veltliner stood in two long rows. There 
 I have a recollection of the strange scene, each of the party, 
 candle in hand, astride of his own particular tun, pledging the 
 parting guests. And so elastic was Symonds's fibre, in spite 
 of ill-health, that he was up early next morning to see his 
 friends set out over the Strela Pass, and later in the day he 
 took a long drive, ' quite far up under the Silvretta Glacier in 
 our boxes ' — (boxes being the chests in which coal was brought 
 to Davos in those days. A chest was filled -svith hay and 
 lashed on to a wood sledge, and into these boxes one or two 
 persons were packed, according to their size. I have seen a 
 procession of half-a-dozen wood sledges and boxes with their 
 respective occupants, headed by Symonds, defiling through 
 Davos on their way to some almost inaccessible hamlet, Sertig, 
 Monstein, or Diirrenboden). To the friend who crossed the 
 Strela after that strange evening in the cellar, Symonds wrote 
 as follows, referring to that necessary operation, the yearly 
 purchase of Valtelline wine, on which Davos householders 
 pride themselves :] 
 
 1882 ' I came ' here yesterday over Fluela. To-day I have been 
 
 buying a great deal of old Veltliner, which I hope you will 
 help me to drink — if the Kater which Herr Buol's strong 
 Grumello gave you has been quite rubbed out by your Strela 
 walk. I have also been to see the Kulm at S. Moritz, and I 
 wonder, more than ever, why so few people seek the Engadine 
 in winter. It is now so much more beautiful than in summer. 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Samaden, January 28, 1882. 
 
 1
 
 188-2 MANHOOD 367 
 
 ' Christian Buol is with me. We are going on into the 
 Valtellina to-morrow if the weather holds. But I doubt it 
 rather. 
 
 ' I hope you did not disturb yourself about the Dtomviheit 
 of your last evening. It was a pure accident. I felt you were 
 going away, and we had not had one of our old quiet times 
 together. I felt the (^Xty^aiiovaa irokiq of Davos [and the 
 Italians] altogether at that last moment mixed. And when I 
 get these mixtures on my brain, I madden people, turn their 
 stomachs, play the deuce with them. 
 
 ' Now you are back in your old life. I feel that we have to 
 hang on to work in order to get a good existence. I am too 
 loose and too infirm in health, and too unhinged in outside 
 circumstances, to work rightly. Therefore I am suffering. 
 But all the more I know I must hang on to work.' 
 
 ' I have ' found myself in such a mess of afltairs since I 
 returned that I have had no time or inclination to write. I 
 got both your Turin and two Venice letters, and thank you 
 much. I also hope that next time we shall be really more 
 together and have di^^ner converse. Somehow, all things this 
 winter have quite got off their old rails. Yet the weather goes 
 on as wonderful as when you were here. 
 
 'I am in horrible hot water about my " P. M. G." letter.^ 
 It has appeared in the " Freier Rhiitier," "Le Temps," and the 
 " Allgemeine Zeitung." Everybody here is furious, and my 
 dear Davosers look angrily at me. Only Christian Buol takes 
 it quite sweetly. As we drove up from Hoffnungsau in a post- 
 sledge, the conductor got up behind, and began swearing at the 
 writer of the article, not knowing it was I. Christian firmly 
 defended me on every point. No gentleman of the finest 
 water could have acted better. 
 
 ' One upshot of the matter has been a project to start a 
 company to work Wiosen, and I am literally in communication 
 
 with about it. I marched boldly at him, though I knew 
 
 he was seeking how to bring an action for libel against me. 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, February (>, 1HH2. 
 - On tlic Sanitary Conilitioii of DavoH.
 
 368 JOHN ADUINGTON SYMONDS 1882 
 
 I had to bully him at first a little, and then we got on 
 business. Whether anything will come of this I cannot say. 
 
 ' Meanwhile I have the proofs of ninety-six sonnets. When 
 they are all here, I shall send you the lot. They are a very 
 extraordinary collection, I think, now that I can see them in 
 sequence. I don't know what it is, whether it is because I 
 made them, but I find a new tone in them separate from that 
 of other sonnets. This makes it impossible for me to judge of 
 the effect they may produce. 
 
 ' They are working away in my house, and it is beginning 
 to look quite habitable, with its rough panels and floors. I 
 get to like it more and more. 
 
 ' I lead a sinful life apart from all spiritual or intellectual 
 things. And yet it is borne in upon me now that these 
 sonnets have been an adequate effort even for one whole year. 
 Considering the small effect they are likely to produce, this is 
 perhaps sad. Anyhow, I cannot just now take interest in 
 literary work.' 
 
 [Davos really owes a debt of gratitude to Symonds, and has 
 now acknowledged it by naming one of its roads after him — 
 for the agitation he roused by his article set the place upon a 
 course of sound sanitary reform. ' Meanwhile,' he says (Feb. 
 28, 1882), ' some very useful reforms are being set on foot here 
 for the improvement of drainage and the removal of obnoxious 
 trades below the village.' 
 
 But in the course of Symonds's inuch-tried existence, the 
 comparative brightness of the early Davos years did not last 
 long. In 1882 troubles began to close around him. His 
 eldest daughter's health gave cause for anxiety, and in March 
 of this year he lost his brother-in-law. Professor T. H. Green. 
 The blow was a very severe one, and his deep feeling found 
 expression in a long series of letters, from which the following 
 is taken :] 
 
 ' To-day ' at half-past one I got Charles's telegram. I 
 cannot say that it surprised me, because I knew how grave the 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Davos, March 27, 1882.
 
 1882 MANHOOD :369 
 
 case must be which made Horatio [Symonds] telegraph as he 
 did yesterday. But, all the same, the blow was very heavy, 
 for we had been hoping and making up all sorts of sanguine 
 nsions. 
 
 ' And now there is nothing left of him in this life — only 
 the certainty that if souls unite themselves by death with God, 
 as I believe they must do, no soul is more prepared to do so ; 
 none is already and at once more entered into the felicity of 
 fuller knowledge and an ampler hfe, than his. 
 
 ' When I think of your wedding-day, and remember that of 
 all this veneration he has been taken first, the fact overwhelms 
 me. There were then so many weaker in all ways. And of 
 these weak ones we remain. 
 
 ' It "(^all not do to dwell upon this train of thought. We 
 must live or die as it seems best to God. I comfort myself 
 with thinking what a wholly noble Hfe his was, what a memory 
 and example of noble living he has left us all, how he will live 
 with you in what is the best, the only imperishable part of us, 
 the soul ; until you meet him again, what a future of brave, 
 good, and strong existence there is before you. 
 
 ' j\Iy dear sister, these must seem to you cold words of 
 consolation. But they are the truth, the best. 
 
 ' He has not died. Such a man cannot die. Happy are 
 those who have the special right, by being his, to continue his 
 life in this world.' 
 
 [The reaction from the tension of Davos air and Davos life 
 was always acutely felt l)y Symonds. The very conditions of 
 life in that high, isolated valley, forced his nervous tempera- 
 ment in crescendoes to a point where violent reaction set in. 
 The loss of liis brother-in-law had touched him deeply ; he had 
 hem made anxious about his daughtei-'s health ; the battle over 
 Davos sanitation, though he enjoyed it and was victorious, 
 kept him in a continuous nervous strain ; he was called upon 
 to settle many small points in the construction of Am Hof ; 
 lie was preparing to put together ' Shakspere's Predecessors,' 
 and he was writing sonnets for ' Vagal)unduli Libcdlus.' 
 
 On March 5 bo writes : ' 1 luive ha(Ui great surprise to-day, 
 
 B 13
 
 .•370 JOHN ADDTNGTON SYMOXDS 1882 
 
 in the glad appreciation which Stevenson and his wife have 
 given to my sonnets. I sent them up the whole lot yesterday 
 in proof. They are enthusiastic about the dialectical ones. 
 Stevenson wants me to make a volume of about eighty-five, 
 omitting all the Davos ones — " Juvenilia," the " Sea Calls," and 
 Venetian series ; retaining all the ethical and metaphysical, and 
 altering the title. I believe he has suggested the way for pro- 
 ducing a book.' That advice was virtually accepted. ' I am 
 going to call the book now " Animi Figura," adding the psycho- 
 logical sonnets of my other books. It is an odd book ; but it is 
 all of one sort.' 
 
 Yet I doubt whether this great strain upon his resources 
 would have been sufficient to account for the depression under 
 which he left Davos in the spring of 1882, had he not been, 
 though unknown to himself, growing steadily weaker in his 
 lungs. At any rate, Symonds left Davos for London in May. ' I 
 take this journey,' he writes, ' with a heavy heart. Yet I hardly 
 know why. Probably I am ill. When the eyes and brain are 
 both disturbed, there is no happiness. But independently of 
 this, my life seems to have become suddenly hollow, and I do 
 not know what is hanging over me.' 
 
 In London a bitter disappointment awaited him, and very 
 naturally threw a shadow over his enjoyment of Davos. He 
 had believed that the place, whatever the drawbacks of its 
 intellectual atmosphere, whatever the dangers from its over- 
 stimulation of the nerves, was at least efiecting a cure in the 
 lungs :] 
 
 ' Two ^ days and two doctors sufficed to cause a change of 
 view. I returned so ill from Sidbury that I felt I must see 
 somebody. I went to Andrew Clark on Wednesday. He 
 detected active disease in the right, hitherto untouched, lung. 
 This he regarded as serious, and of at least a year's standing. 
 
 ' Yesterday I consulted Theodore Williams, telling him 
 nothing about Clark. His report was the same, except that 
 he spoke more gravely. He was also sure the mischief had 
 been going on for at least a year. 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. London, .June *23, 1882.
 
 188a 3IAXH00D -JTl 
 
 ' I have written very fully to you. Health is now once 
 more the absorbing preoccupation with me. I have suffered 
 dreadfully for more than a year from unrest, from mortal 
 fatigue, and from strange morbid irritabilities. At last, of late, 
 the sense of utter weariness has been crushing. The whole 
 explains itself now. 
 
 ' I trust I shall see you this summer on your way to 
 Promontogno. I ^x\\\ write as soon as I get back to Davos. 
 
 But I have had to tell R that I cannot receive him at 
 
 Davos this year. I must not have company there. You are 
 different, I need not say. 
 
 ' I have made you executor of my ^^^ll, ■v\'ith Eobert Otter, 
 H. N. Abbot, and Charley Cave. I hope I understood you 
 rightly that I might. You are specially indicated for the 
 literary department. 
 
 ' I am too stupid to write. This blow has stupefied me. 
 I somehow did not at all expect it. The struggle for Ufe is 
 now to be carried on with weakened force, and under worse 
 conditions. Davos is not a new place too, alas.' 
 
 [This was a terribly cruel blow to Symonds, and I do not 
 think he was ever quite the same man after it, though his 
 indomitable spirit and his elastic constitution enabled liim to 
 recover, and to carry on a life of literai-y and social vigour for 
 several years to come. He returned to Davos in June, and on 
 the 80th of that month he writes :] 
 
 ' If I ' am doomed to decline now, I can at least say that 
 in the five years since I came here dying, I have had a very 
 wonderful Indian summer of experience. The colours of life 
 have been even richer, my pci-sonal emotions even more glow- 
 ing, my perception of intellectual points more vivid, my power 
 over style more masterly, than when I was comparatively 
 vigorous. It seems a phase of my disease that I should grow 
 in youth and spiritual intensity inversely to my physical 
 decay. This may be a phenomenon of phthisis, and for this 
 reason noloworthy. T feel it in myself so forcibly that I 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Uiivos, .June 30, 1882. 
 
 B r. 2
 
 872 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMOXDS 1882 
 
 cannot refrain from writing about it, though this has the 
 semblance of excessive self-scrutiny. 
 
 ' Ah ! how I do love this beautiful world, and how keenly 
 I feel it all. It is almost pain to grasp its loveliness with this 
 intensity when the body is so dragging.' 
 
 [The recovery was slow though steady, and assisted by a 
 fine autumn. A spirit of resignation, almost of peace, such as 
 came over him after his last serious illness at Clifton, such as 
 enveloped him after any stunning blow, pervades the letters 
 which he writes.] 
 
 ' I have ^ chosen a large sheet because I have been rowed 
 this morning on the lake in sunshine after ten days' gloom, 
 and am hearing the band play Wagner after their fashion, 
 and am reading Aristotle's ' Poetics,' and am thinking all in 
 one thought about Venice and death, and want to copy out 
 for you a sonnet I wrote by the stove last evening. Here 
 it is : 
 
 THE GRAVE OF OMAR KHAYYAM. 
 
 Omar Khayyam, in life's calm eventide, 
 
 ^Yalked through his garden on a night of Jiane, 
 With one whose face shone like the rising moon ; 
 And spake these words : ' When earth on either side 
 Shall clasp this breathing clay, the Potter's pride ; 
 When all these songs are silenced, soon, too soon, 
 Then shall red rose-leaves, morning, night, and noon, 
 Blown by north winds, the dust of Omar hide.' 
 Listened the youth, and wondered ; yet, being sure 
 No wise man's words like snowflakes melt in vain. 
 After long years, with eld's slow steps, again 
 Tiurning towards Omar's home in Naishapur, 
 
 He sought that tomb ; but found, by wild winds blown, 
 Drift of red rose-leaves, deep on a hidden stone. 
 
 ' I have worked out the thread of energy which made me 
 take this paper up to write. Life burns very low. It is, how- 
 ever, a wonderful day, most intensely hot and sunny over 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, September 2, 1882. 
 
 ♦
 
 1882 MANHOOD 373 
 
 wood and field drenched with dew, the meadows turning to 
 golden and flecked with emerald green, the sky pure, and the 
 depth of the valley a blue bloom. A dying man does not 
 want more than this of beauty, if he were free to feel it, for 
 beauty is of that divine sort that the whole of it exists in 
 every atom. A larch upon the Jacobshorn is beauty's self for 
 the sentient spirit ; nor can the Bay of Naples go beyond it. 
 I have never been discontented on this chapter of things 
 beautiful. 
 
 ' I think to-day that emiui is the curse of happiness — the 
 curse, I mean, of those who have no other curse. Let man be 
 near to dying, and he will wonder at ennui — an alien fiend. 
 Let man, in plenitude of this life's common goods, of health, 
 feel ennui, and he will desire death. Death and ennui are 
 exclusive things. Praise God for life ; praise God for death. 
 Learn to live in the sunlight. Avoid the foe which turns life 
 into li^■ing death, with its black smoke between heaven's sun 
 and the sun-born soul of man. 
 
 ' Addio. I am dreaming. 
 
 ' The noonday drowsy note of yesterday waited by accident, 
 and there is time to add some words to-night. "We have 
 had a second good day. It almost seems as though we might 
 seize sunshine for a season before the snows come. I expect 
 before long, as a great pleasure, news from you from Venice. 
 I think meanwhile of you and things there more than of any 
 one or anything. 
 
 'I see my Venetian medley advertised in "Fraser," but I 
 have had no copy of it sent to me. For the " Palace of Url)ino " 
 I received twenty guineas — a largo sum for so slight a thing, 
 the work of three weak mornings. And yet, as I judge it 
 perhaps the best of any of my Italian sketches, I am glad it 
 should be so overpaid. It is almost as though even Smith & 
 Elder discerned its speciality. 
 
 ' I>ut what are these things worth, or why should I write 
 about them ? Just mjw it would be better to bo pacing the 
 Dogana Point with you, free for a moment from the sense of 
 pain, as young in body as my unquenchable soul is young. 
 
 ' What a strange new babe the soul is like to bo, if she
 
 374 JOH^' ADDINGTOX SY.MONDS 1882 
 
 escajDes with all her self inviolate into conditions where her 
 flight is free. I hardly dare to contemplate that side of the 
 vast problem when I think of death. It seems almost too 
 terrible, too turbulent a thought. And yet my soul keeps 
 sa}dng to me : " Wait, endure, for I am infinitely young, and 
 I am you, and that which you call you is not yourself, for I am 
 still yourself, and I am what you now cannot by fancy's utmost 
 force prefigure to your mind. Your mind I am not, nor your 
 sense, biit something far more deep and strong and perdurable ; 
 acquainted with all change, alert for changes indescribable to 
 come. Wait and believe in me. Wait, expect nothing. 
 Only wait." Good-bye. I miss the talks with you. Good- 
 bye.' 
 
 [The Symondses moved into Am Hof on September 25.] 
 
 ' This is ^ our first day in the new house. I have not slept 
 here yet, but Catherine, Madge, baby, and Mrs. White did so 
 last night. Janet, St. Loe [Strachey], I, and Miss Neef, who 
 seems very pleasant, are introduced to-day. The sun is 
 shining on us — for a wonder. I have all my books around 
 me ; the old table from Buol's, on which I have already written 
 so much, to write upon ; the Paris carpet chair to sit in ; an 
 Indian carpet on the floor ; your Perseus on my stove. It 
 looks already home-like. 
 
 ' I was quite dehghted with your letter about Venice in that 
 sciroccale. Now that I am settled here, I mean to give a 
 pigeon-hole in my cupboard to your letters ; and whenever you 
 come to see me, you shall resume what you like. I fear I 
 have lost a great many of your good letters, or, rather, have 
 deliberately destroyed them, because of the uncertainty at- 
 tending on the occupation of hotel rooms. 
 
 ' We have all been amused with your plague of scorpions. 
 
 ' Wish me good speed in my house. I am sure both you 
 and your mother wiW 
 
 [As was habitual with him, he turned at once to work. 
 
 • To H. F. Brown. Davos, September 25, 1882.
 
 1882 MANHOOD 375 
 
 ' I have ^ been silent because I plunged into Elizabethan 
 studies. Are they really worth doing, I wonder, in face of the 
 enormous mass already printed of such matter ? St. Loe 
 seems to have tempted me — and of course my own collections 
 of materials are a great temptation — as is also the contact, 
 after so long a space of time, with really vigorous English 
 poetry. Still I am in great doubt. If I carry out the scheme, 
 it wall mean at least a year's work, I suppose, and a suspension 
 of my mind from Italian subjects. 
 
 ' What do you say ? Give me your opinion. 
 
 ' Have you seen the comet ? It should be a most mar- 
 vellous sight above the lagoon. I rose at four this morning, 
 and saw its tail flaming away above the Dischma Thai. Then 
 I watched it. As the hills sank eastward with the earth's 
 revolution, the comet slowly ascended the sky. At last the 
 nucleus appeared. It rested on a horn (called the Brun-horn, 
 . I think), which is next the Schwartz-horn, and the tail 
 stretched upwards and above the Jacobshorn all across the 
 Dischma Thai. Some stars were tangled in the tail. Then 
 the pallor of the dawn appeared, and the comet slowly faded 
 into a thread of light. The valley was deep in snow after a 
 heavy fall — the hea\dest of all this wintry summer. The skies 
 were singularly lucid, and meteors flashed from time to time 
 across them. It was altogether a wonderful display. The 
 whole house was roused by me to gaze. 
 
 ' I am quite sure, if you come from Venice this winter to 
 stay mth me, you will like your life here, and feel that Davos is 
 again a place to be in. Our house does make a vast difference, 
 in spite of some drawbacks which I have detailed to you 
 before. To these I hope we shall get accustomed. 
 
 ' It is very sad to think of the suffering in the midst of 
 which you are and will be for some time. We must trust it 
 will not prove a very trying winter.' 
 
 [And the result of resumed literary work is seen in this 
 letter of encouragement, as usual, to a young friend who was 
 failing at tlie start :] 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Am Hof, Davos, October 10, 1882.
 
 376 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1882 
 
 ' You will understand me when I say that, except from the 
 point of view of money, I do not think the thing matters. 
 You must put the article into what you call your " desolation 
 box " ; and please remember, doing so, how large my "desola- 
 tion box " at your age was, and of what use it has been to me. 
 ' For the artist I know nothing better than to have a vast 
 and well-filled "desolation box." Mine contains not only 
 scores of miscellaneous essays, but the whole of this Eliza- 
 bethan history, which I may now possibly at last put into 
 shape. Out of the same box have already come my " Greek 
 Poets," two volumes of verse, and the larger portion of my 
 " Sketches in Italy." 
 
 ' I do not say this in any vulgar way of encouragement, 
 I hope. I think deliberately that a literary artist must work 
 after this method. 
 
 ' You can, if you choose, try for money's sake to please the 
 public. But then you must scent out likely, telling subjects. 
 But till you have somehow taken some incalculable sort of 
 start, you will find your " desolation box " a needful haven for 
 your best work. And even when you have made yourself some 
 name, you will still find (as I do) that there is an impenetrable 
 bar between you and the public. 
 
 ' Is it our defect ? That is what we shall probably never 
 know. Meanwhile, we are artists, and live for the beautiful, 
 and our own satisfaction in commerce with that. 
 
 ' I fear I have been writing to you letters lately of attenuated 
 excitement. My work has strung me up, and your letters 
 have stirred \'lbrations. But I believe that I have settled 
 down into the jog-trot of the work — mentally I know I have ; 
 the only bore is, that the friction of thus settling has stirred 
 my lungs up, and I am again very far from well. I have a 
 hea^'y head-cold, which makes contact with the frozen air 
 horrible. 
 
 ' I am crowded up with in\itations to do literary work. 
 Fancy, "Harper's Magazine" wrote three weeks ago, begging 
 me to go to India at their cost, with a special artist to make 
 pictures for me. I was to write descriptive articles. He was 
 to illustrate. I was to be paid according to my demands. If
 
 1882 MANHOOD 377 
 
 you could be the artist, I would go. Otherwise Nenni ! 
 Nenni ! ' 
 
 ' I have ^ had eight days of remorseless hard grind on a 
 "Dissertation upon Masques at Court in Italy and England." 
 Just this noontide it is finished. I escape to smoke and chat 
 a quarter of an hour with you. 
 
 ' I have taken your toboggan from a family to which the 
 Buol people lent it, and have housed it, and have used it often. 
 It goes very well. And the road has hitherto been splendid, 
 owing to a combination of considerable snowfall with the 
 passage of wood sledges from the Alps above. 
 
 ' We have very indifferent weather, but such as I do not 
 resent, as it goes out in frosty cloud and somewhat scanty 
 snow. 
 
 ' I am going to write to old Erba for Christmas roses from 
 the Lake [Como]. Our rooms are filled now with roses and 
 tuberoses from Cannes, \dolets and chrysanthemums from 
 Sidbury. It is so strange. In fact, this new house of mine, 
 simple as it is, to me, who know every detail of it, and who 
 cannot refrain from piercing dead things with inbreathed 
 sense, is already a very singular cocoon, spun by two silk- 
 worms. 
 
 ' Walking along the post-road at night, I can see in my 
 study, gleaming through tlio window, your cast of Cellini — 
 infinitely graceful — poised upon a stove of serpentine. The 
 white, slim figure, discerned at that distance through the 
 gloom, afi'ects my fancy tyrannously.' 
 
 [This important year of 1882 closed upon a solemn note 
 of profound religion, of all-pcsrvading faith, which I believe to 
 have been the very core and centre of Symonds's spiritual 
 being.] 
 
 ' On this '^ last day of the year, which has been so bitterly 
 lull of sorrow to you, and to myself has brought many sad 
 things, I write to wish you the greater happiness which will 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown, December 10, 1882. 
 
 ■^ To his sister Charlotte. Davos, December 31, 1882.
 
 378 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1882 
 
 assuredly come -svith 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 up on faith, hope, and 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 and our own trials better. 
 We must have love for all that is so beautiful and vigorous in 
 the world without, and 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 endeavours. We have 
 lost something possibly of that passion ; but we have lost 
 nothing of the truth which it contained and 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, and read 
 the history of man upon this planet more precisely. And yet 
 abide these three, by which let us live ; and 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 much more deeply 
 felt and thought. 
 
 ' It has come to me from life. It came to him from life 
 and from reflection upon life, and 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 apphcation 
 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
 
 1882 MANHOOD 379 
 
 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 revela- 
 tion 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, uncircumscribcd 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.'
 
 380 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1883 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 MANHOOD — MIDDLE LIFE AT DAVOS 
 
 Spring in Venice — His eldest daughter ill — His sistei- ill — His courageous 
 attitude — An autumn drive through Graubiinden — Notes of his 
 Davos life — Visit to San Eemo — Illness of his daughter Margaret — 
 Back at Davos — His walks among the mountains — On his literary 
 isolation — Working at the ' Catholic Reaction ' — Ill-health — Dis- 
 couragement—On Giordano Bruno — Work — On 'Dr. Jekyll and 
 Mr. Hyde ' — An expedition on the Dorfli Berg — At Soglio in Val 
 Bregaglia — On the relation of work to domestic life — 'Depressed 
 vitality ' — On immortality and ethics — Death of his eldest daughter. 
 
 1883 [The later years of Symonds's life, the period of his sojourn 
 at Davos, occupy a comparatively small space in his Autobio- 
 graphy. The tenor of his days, his spring and autumn 
 journeys ; the trials and loss he endured inside his family 
 circle ; the movement of his own personality, tending steadily 
 to a more and more externalised life ; his friendships, ever 
 increasing and spreading ; his relations with the Swiss people 
 among whom he lived, with American strangers, attracted by 
 the personality which his books revealed, with the younger 
 generation in England, which divined his ready sympathy 
 with youth ; his literary labour, the solid basis of his outward 
 life — all this must be gathered from his letters, whose volume 
 increased as the years flowed on. 
 
 The year 1883 was one of unusually severe trial in 
 Symonds's sorely tried life. Many of the previous letters 
 show quite clearly how bright and lively, how full of life his 
 nature was, when given even a bare chance. But he had come 
 back from England with a bad report on his own health ; he 
 had lost his brother-in-law ; in the spring of 1883 he went to 
 Venice with his family, and, immediately after their return, 
 his eldest daughter was pronounced to be seriously ill ; his 
 
 *
 
 1883 MANHOOD 381 
 
 faith in Davos was shaken ; his sister Lady Strachey died. 
 Of this year he writes in his note-book : ' A summer at Davos 
 of much anxiety about health, and very little work ' ; yet 
 ' Shakspere's Predecessors ' was published before the year 
 was out. 
 
 ' I am far ^ from well now. Very tired. It is a great 
 fatigue, more of the self than of the bodily organs. How odd 
 it is. I write even these words with that weird and super- 
 natural feeling of my unreality. What is this hand that 
 moves the pen ? What is this self that dictates the words ? 
 What are the words, and what is it that they imply ? What, 
 oh what, oh what is thought ? It is the only thing — yet 
 nothing. In moments Uke this, the real thing is somewhere 
 so far beyond all these phenomena, so tragically, so sarcastic- 
 ally, incognisable. The world is a dream, but who is dream- 
 ing it ? 
 
 ' No one ever expressed this mood. But it is the deepest, 
 truest mood of man's existence : the mood which has made 
 me an impassioned sceptic, so hard. But Heaven knows what 
 softness, feebleness, and weakness underlies the coarse, rough 
 hide I force upon myself.' 
 
 ' The 2 last time I saw you was in London at 3 Victoria 
 Street. I was very ill. I came back wretched to Davos, and 
 had four months which even an optimist could not call worth 
 living. It was only protracted physical fatigue and intellectual 
 prostration. But it was very bad. Then I mended, and the 
 last five months have been comparatively vigorous. T dare 
 not, however, say what it costs both my wife and myself to 
 live on in this tension of unnatural surroundings. A curious 
 unreality is introduced into habitual life by it. I combat this 
 with literature. But, all the same, I get into unhealthy states 
 of psychological experience, and find myself growing inversely 
 to my years and physical force — growing younger in ex- 
 pansibility of psychical emotion as I older grow and dwindle. 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, Maicli 23, 1883 
 ■^ To Hfniy Sidgwick. Davus, March 24, 1883.
 
 382 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1883 
 
 This sometimes terrifies me — sometimes lifts mc up to im- 
 mortality. The soul seems indestructible. 
 
 'You see there is nothing to retard or deaden here— no 
 business — no trivial daily occupations — no commonplace 
 society.' 
 
 [Symonds expressed a similar opinion in even stronger 
 terms when writing — as he was wont — a joint letter to Mr. 
 and Mrs. R. L. Stevenson. ' The long monotony of life,' 
 he says, ' in that very exciting climate of Davos produces some 
 peculiar differentiation of the man's quality, which is only 
 
 partly beneficial. Lord L , who is interesting and amusing, 
 
 and is here [at Venice], asked me last night how Davos agreed 
 Avith me. I replied in two words, that it made me " quarrel- 
 some and conceited." He said he wished he could be made 
 conceited ; but that the only thing which produced that desir- 
 able change in him was too dangerous to be indulged in.' 
 
 The Symondses passed April and May at Venice, ' two 
 delightful months in a palace [Palazzo Gritti] on the Grand 
 Canal,' Symonds calls them in a letter to Mr. R. L. Stevenson, 
 But bad news waited his return.] 
 
 ' I fear • you will have to come to a house overshadowed 
 with a great anxiety. We have just heard from Dr. Ruedi 
 that he thinks Janet's case a very serious one. 
 
 ' There is not anything to add to this. It is a great 
 sorrow, a great anxiety, a great responsibility. But I do not 
 see that any human being can expect life to be a brilliant 
 thing for anybody. We must bear it, and make the best of it. 
 
 ' That there is no way of vicarious self-immolation for the 
 sake of others seems the hardest thing. It would be so good, 
 for instance, if a weak and ailing father could lay down the 
 remnant of his life to purchase ordinary chances for a child. 
 The conception is too absurd and sentimental to be worth a 
 moment's thought. Life, as it is, inculcates far sterner 
 lessons. It even tempts me to feel a certain severity for those 
 who will not bear its burdens. Who knows what his neigh- 
 bour's burden is ? 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Davos, June 14, 1883.
 
 1883 MANHOOD 383 
 
 ' We iiiiTst, at all costs, keep the sweetness of faith and 
 hope, even though our own lives be broken by encroaching 
 sickness, and we see those dearest to us stricken down, 
 
 * Do not be irritated with me if nay troubles take fantastic 
 moods you cannot sympathise ^nth. All philosophies and all 
 religions are not of the same temper, and neither the one nor 
 the other is of ultimate avail to fortify the soul. They have 
 passed over men, and made men better than they would have 
 been ^^-ithout them. But they have never revealed a secret to 
 the heart which was not also beautiful illusion. 
 
 ' P.S. — Beautiful illusion — I do not mean that too strictly. 
 What I mean is, that certain habits of hope and of endurance 
 are generated by religions and philosophies, which in them- 
 selves leave the reason in the dark — that these habits of 
 hoping and enduring are the profitable outcome of our creeds 
 and systems. The creeds and systems are pretty much alike 
 in lack of firm reality.' 
 
 [It is not uninteresting to note that some years earlier in 
 his hfe he had expressed to his friend, Roden Noel, the same 
 %-iews as to the ' duty to oneself to be sanguine, and careless, 
 and young, in spite of all things — to "live in Eternity's 
 sunrise," if even by some desperate effort at self-delusion.' 
 The con\'iction of the duty to be sanguine still remains, but 
 that attitude is now to be attained through disillusionment, by 
 the sterner, nobler path of submission to the naked truth— 
 ' resignation without giving the battle up.' 
 
 Anxiety about his daughter, however, was not the sole 
 source of Symonds's pain. His sister. Lady Strachey, was very 
 dangerously ill Through the wording of the following letters 
 we can feel the strain, the effort, the resolution, to keep a 
 brave front to ' the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ' :] 
 
 ' You will ^ see that, in spite of considerable pressing 
 anxieties and personal weakness, I am tolerably calm now. 
 
 ' Out of this calm and chastened mood I want to tell you 
 that my theory of existence is to sustain the spiritual, the 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, .July 0, 1883.
 
 384 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 energetic, the rejoicing element in self alive, as the one great 
 duty to the world, the one function for wlaich a man was 
 framed. 
 
 ' To do this in face of physical and domestic perplexities is 
 no easy matter. The attempt is easily, and not unjustly, 
 criticised as a determination to make the -will paramount. It 
 leads to irritable outbreaks. But tested as I am at present, I 
 think it is right — right for me. As one might say, Branwell 
 Bronte was right to die upright on his feet.' 
 
 ' I have ' been in bed two days with a sharp attack of 
 fever — ice-bags on my head, and that sort of thing — and am 
 now up for a few hours. 
 
 ' And so the summer is over for me. I had so longed to 
 see something of the higher hills this year, to get at least upon 
 the Alpine paths and pastures above the forest. But it will 
 not be. I do not think much that it will ever come again for 
 me to feel the elasticity of mountain turf or the crisp edge of 
 the high rocks, or to gather the mountain flowers on solitary 
 breezy places. 
 
 ' Resignation and renunciation are two words with a wide 
 scope in human life ; and it is hard to base our daily conduct 
 on them without gi\^ng the battle up. But this, I believe, is 
 precisely what we ought to aim at. I, for instance, here 
 almost alone in the high Alps, must be resigned to renounce, 
 not merely society and the pleasure of cities, but also the best 
 things which the Alps contain, and which I dearly love ; and 
 at the same time I must try every day to do something within 
 the sphere (though daily narrowing) still left to me. And 
 that is principally — to write.' 
 
 [A few weeks later (October 23, 1883) he wrote thus to a 
 friend, whom he thought inclined to take suffering too hard :] 
 
 ' There is so very much more worth interesting oneself in 
 
 than one's troubles and bereavements. There is such a vast 
 
 amount of the world's beautiful, vigorous, awful, passionate 
 
 life ; by comparison with which our own aches and atrophies 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, July 19, 1883.
 
 1883 MANHOOD 38o 
 
 seem next to nothing. I do not feel that you yet are living 
 resolutely "/?;i Ganzen Guten Schonen" — that is, not in 
 yourself and in the dark atmosphere which your own trouble 
 has thrown round you, but in the world and in its luminous 
 exhilarating ether. It seems to me blasphemy for any one, 
 with health and good means, to take pleasure in coming to 
 " realise that life after all is not so very long." I have not a 
 very defined religion ; but that attitude of mind strikes me as 
 distinctly irreligious. Suppose you were to die and find 
 yourself out there alone, vnth what is called eternity before 
 you, where would you then be if your life on earth had not 
 pro\dded you vnth courage and unselfish sympathies, but had 
 taught you only to expect the end — the end then of something 
 which, ex hypothcsi, could never end ? The fact is, we ought 
 to learn to live outside our own lives in something.' 
 
 [In the autumn of 1883 Symonds took an extended drive 
 through a considerable part of the canton.] 
 
 ' We left Davos — Catherine, Madge, Dr. Beddoe and I — 
 last Friday morning. We got that day to Eeichenau, at the 
 meeting of the Khines, and had a pleasant night above a great 
 flower-garden of zinnias and daturas and asters and cannas, in 
 the richness of autumnal bloom, relieved against solid masses 
 of lime and sycamore and beech above the brawling Rhines — 
 really a very beautiful and restful place. 
 
 ' Next day we ascended the Vordcr Eheinthal, by one of 
 the most strange cornice roads conducted along shaly precipices 
 I have ever seen — a road that for some two miles beats the 
 Tete Noire and the Schyn, then breaks into immeasurable 
 forests, and, lastly, lands the wayfarer in an upland region of 
 green lawns and prosperous villages, beneath the peaks of 
 Todi and Piz Cristallina. 
 
 ' We slept at Dissentis in the cold. Yesterday crawled up 
 the Lukmanier, through a series of rock galleries suspended 
 above the gorge of the Mittel Rhein — a very dismal but im- 
 pressive passage, like some vast cloister, leading up to a broad 
 weary granite pass. It rained and blew disconsolately at the 
 
 c c
 
 386 JOHN ADDING^TON SYMONDS l88JJ 
 
 top ; but when we passed the water-shed all heaven was blue, 
 with flying clouds dispersing from the north in streamers and 
 long trailing threads of whiteness. The Italian hills, as usual, 
 purpler and more precipitous. The descent abrupt and head- 
 long. Vast forests of cembra, gradually merging into spruce, 
 and yielding at last to groves of walnut and chestnut, in the 
 midst of which was Olivone. 
 
 ' At Olivone we slept ; and to-day came down, through the 
 Italian enchantment, to Biasca, and up again to Airolo. 
 
 ' It has been greatly interesting to Avatch, from outside it, 
 the working of the Gotthard Kailway. From the line itself 
 one forms no adequate concejDtion of its hugeness — the fierce 
 human effort there effectuated in a giant work ; also to watch 
 the dragon-trains, coiling in and out of their tunnelled caverns, 
 was impressive. 
 
 ' We said good-bye to Beddoe at Biasca. He has gone to 
 England. Ourselves hope to cross Gotthard on wheels to- 
 morrow to Andermatt ; thence by Oberalp into Vorder Rhein 
 Thai again, and so home. 
 
 ' I have not been well upon this journey — I feel fatigue so 
 much more than I did. Beddoe examined me at Dissentis, 
 iind, being a truth-speaking man, told me no good. He thinks 
 that life hangs upon a chain of favourable circumstances. 
 Only the most limited amount of mental work can be justified 
 by the condition of the physique. With due limitation of 
 brain work, and the absence of accidents, like colds, &c., life 
 may be prolonged. But how can he, or I, or anybody, value 
 the wear and tear of emotions, the fret of ennui, and the 
 \dolence of rebellion against fate ? ' 
 
 [Some notes of Symonds's outward life, flung like the 
 pealing of the New Year's bells from the high and tAvisted 
 Davos spire, may be caught in the folloAving extracts from his 
 letters :] 
 
 ' The bells ^ are ringing now the death of this year — those 
 bells which have tolled the old year out so many centuries for 
 the simple peasant folk of this valley, and now are tolling it 
 
 » To Miss Sykes. Davos, December 31, 1883.
 
 1883 MANHOOD 387 
 
 out once more to-night, from the tall straight tower, for us 
 poor waifs and strays from England, Holland, Germany, 
 France, I know not where else. 
 
 ' How strange it is. It seems to matter so little to that 
 church-tower and to those deep-toned bells what we do or fail 
 to do in life. And to the stars above us, flaming in this frozen 
 night, how little matter even the old church-tower, and even 
 the pine-clad hills above it. 
 
 ' God is over all. That is what the tolling bells- are saying 
 to me this night. God is over all. Over the church-tower 
 and the bells, over the mountains and the peasants who seem 
 part of them, over me also, and my newly builded house, and 
 my wife and my children. 
 
 ' The luggage of Catherine and Janet stands piled up in 
 the hall. They are to go away from me at seven to-morrow 
 morning — at seven o'clock of the first morning of 1884. 
 
 ' Janet is very ill. We are sending her as a last chance to 
 the Riviera. I remain here to keep house with Lotta and 
 ]\Iadge. 
 
 ' Forgive me if my thoughts go out to you, the eldest and 
 the best of those I love, at this last moment of so sad a year. 
 
 ' As I write, the bells in the church-tower come ever fainter 
 to me across the snow. The last minutes of 1883 are running 
 out. Three years ago I was up in the church-tower among 
 the bells at this moment. All the young men of the place 
 were there, rejoicing in their strength, with wine and jokes. 
 The wind whistled through the tower windows, blowing snow 
 upon us. But it was warm in our hearts. I was thankful to 
 be there, and they were full of life. The young men are up in 
 the tower to-night, ready to grasp the great bells with their 
 arms and ring the New Year's welcome from them through 
 the valley. 
 
 ' In three minutes I shall hoar that welcome rung. But I 
 am alone here in my study, and somehow hope seems almost 
 broken in my heart to-night. 
 
 ' Yet I will hear, in the bells of 1884 — the clangour which 
 is just now to wake — the same word : God is over all. Yes. 
 That is the only word l>y which a man can live. 
 
 c c 2
 
 388 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1883 
 
 ' There they go. God bless you, dearest auntie, and give 
 you a blessed year,' 
 
 1884 * January 28, 1884. — I had a very charming party of Davos 
 
 men here last Tuesday, who sang part songs capitally. One 
 phrase — for a very high tenor — struck me as " fragrant " : 
 
 Draussen ist Eeif und Schnee ; 
 Frilhling bei mir, ji;che ! 
 
 ' It is a woodman in his cottage calling to a girl in the 
 forest. How very different this misty, infinite German music is 
 to the Italian ; and how bad, when it attempts the definition of 
 Italian sentiment. 
 
 ' We are enduring another most violent storm — snow and 
 whirlwind — to-day. We are mounded up in snow, weltering 
 in a chaos of snow. You have no idea what sort of thing 
 Davos is in such weather ; for till this winter I had no idea. 
 Just now I believe we are in considerable peril of avalanches 
 from the Schia-horn. Every channel is getting choked with 
 snowdrifts ; the steep slopes of that horn are deep with snow, 
 and this storm-wind is calculated to dislodge the vast inde- 
 pendent masses in one deluge — that dreadful Staub-Lavinc, 
 of which no peasant ever speaks without a quivering of the 
 eyebrows.' 
 
 ^January 30, — I was prepared for the worst last night. 
 It had snowed again hea\dly for three days and nights, when 
 the most furious tornado rose, blending the snow that fell in 
 dense flakes, with snow whirled off the peaks and forests, 
 scurfing the drifts up from the meadows, and confounding all 
 together in a raving hurly-burly. There was something very 
 impressive .in it. It was the night for a great crime, or the 
 indulgence of a pent-up life-decisive passion. I fully expected 
 the Staub-Lavincii to descend from all the Alpine slopes above 
 Davos. But I believe it was too cold — about 15° Fahr. They 
 tell me to-day that such a catastrophe happens at a higher 
 temperature — in fact, it needs a Fohn rather than a North 
 wind.'
 
 1884 MANHOOD 389 
 
 ^February 9. — I am very melancholy to-night. I have 
 been tobogganing alone in the clear moonlight from the wood 
 — and thinking how strangely the years have gone here, the 
 years which have made so many things familiar, the snow-life 
 and the stars and frost, and the unchangeable small valley, in 
 comparison with which — in spite of our supposed infinity of 
 soul — a human life is so incalculably small. 
 
 ' Then 1 had your letter of the 7th to think about. That 
 helped to tone me into sadness. Not pea-soupy wealthy 
 London — though that somewhat too. No, I think it was the 
 touch on Venice, strange to say. The midnight parting at the 
 end of that old dreary hideous station, which seems made to 
 force upon your mind that you are leaving poetry for prose, 
 the largo of our life for some staccato squalor. 
 
 ' Nay, why should I sit down to write like this, instead of 
 going quietly to bed and sleeping heavily, or reading half the 
 night through, as I am wont to do ? 
 
 Ich weiss nicht was soil es bcdeuten 
 
 Dass ich so tvaurig bin ; 
 Ein Miirchen aus alten Zeiten, 
 
 Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn. 
 
 ^February 11. — During the last few weeks I have been 
 studying the poetry and prose of James Thomson, a very 
 remarkable writer, who lived at ' the bottom of the deep sea of 
 oblivion, " silent and shrouded with the sense of fate." But 
 there is no English poet now hving, except Tennyson, Brown- 
 ing, Swinburne, and ]\Iorris, who comes near him ; and he has 
 qualities which raise him to a level at least with these, though 
 he is not so all-round as any one of them. I will bring you 
 acquainted with him when you come here. He is a pessimist 
 of the deepest dye, even more poignantly pessimistic than 
 Leopardi, not so sublime and calm. Well, well. Things run 
 on here smoothly enough. Wo have had a very good inter- 
 national toboggan race. And by the way, would you do 
 something for me anent that ? I want to give a cup for this 
 race. T should like a silver tankard, if I can get one for about 
 10/. Will you go to Elkington and tell tlicni to send me some
 
 390 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1884 
 
 dra^\angs of plain tankards fit for engraving? You will be 
 able to make a choice of two or three which you think proper. 
 Solid, strong, plain, old-fashioned college shape is what I 
 want. 
 
 [In the spring of 1884, Symonds went with his family to 
 join his daughter Janet at San Kemo. There his third 
 daughter, Margaret, fell ill of a fever caught at Genoa. 
 Symonds, with characteristic promptness, moved his wife, his 
 daughter, nurses, and himself into a large unfurnished villa, 
 made all arrangements for the proper treatment of the illness, 
 and then sat down to translate his volume of Goliardic songs, 
 which he dedicated to Mr. K. L. Stevenson.] 
 
 ' I have • still a shadow of hope that the fever may not be 
 typhoid, but one of those nondescript chills people get in the 
 South. 
 
 ' It seems ridiculous to translate loose Goliardic verses at 
 this time, doesn't it ? But I am shut up in one wretched little 
 bedroom, and cannot go out, and must do something. So I 
 want you to take down " Gaudeamus," look at p. 97, and when 
 you go to the library supply for me the fifth stanza, which is 
 missing. You will see from the index to " Gaudeamus," p. 
 \iii., that the poem is to be found in the " Anthologia Latina " 
 of Eiesens, a book which the Marciana probably possesses. 
 
 ' Reading over this letter, I am struck with the apparent 
 coldness of it, in comparison with my usual exaggerated 
 epistolary expression. I feel this trouble too much to swear 
 about it, as I do about my own imaginary or imaginative 
 diseases. Poor little girl. She has been taken away from 
 Davos, and was so glad to go upon her holiday, only to fall 
 into the foul sewer of this detested Italy, and be laid up on a 
 sick-bed in this most despicable dreary watering-place. It is 
 the fever of rage against this fate which made me calm.' 
 
 ' There '^ is no doubt about Madge now. She has typhoid, 
 and this morning I hired a large empty unfurnished villa (the 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. San Eemo, April 18, 1884. 
 ■ To the same. San Eemo, April 19, 1884,
 
 1884 MANHOOD 391 
 
 old villa of Mv. Lear, which you may vemember), and I have 
 spent the day in procuring servants and furniture to fill the 
 part that my wife and I and Madge and the sick-nurse will 
 occupy. 
 
 ' You must think of us now, encamped like rats in the 
 angles of that big villa, with its studio, &c. We are not there 
 to-night, but by the time you get this I hope we shall be.' 
 
 ' I am ^ so glad to be out of the hotel, that were it not for 
 the cause which has driven me into this villa, I should be 
 happier than I was before. 
 
 ' And I have some hopes that I may still come to see you, 
 and Angelo, and Antonio, and Luigi, and Paron Piero, and 
 Richetto. 
 
 ' I suppose any schemes I had of Adriatic wanderings will 
 have to be abandoned. But I care most for human beings. 
 I want to see you. There are many things to talk about. I 
 fancy that your recent Istrian journey was an event — not to 
 be written about, but perhaps, as you suggest, to be talked 
 over. I should like a good talk with you in the Venetian 
 night. 
 
 ' How far more plastic, fluid, sensitive, variable, human 
 emotions are here than up there, where they get frozen into 
 fixed desires and permanent pre-occupations. Addio. Yours, 
 without words.' 
 
 [As soon as his daughter's recovery allowed him to leave 
 the Ri\dera, Symonds paid a flying visit to Venice, and 
 returned to Davos by Monte Generoso. His work was always 
 to him, as it were, a fortalice, into which he could withdraw 
 when the troubles of life weighed heavy upon him. Already 
 by summer he had translated his selection of the ' Carmina 
 Burana,' and put together his volume of sonnets, ' Vagabun- 
 duli Libellus ' ; and now on his return to Davos, he began the 
 last two volumes of the ' Renaissance in Italy.' But trouble, 
 pain, anxiety, still pursued him, and this autumn was saddened 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. San Kemo, April 22, 1H84.
 
 392 JOHN ADDINGTON 8YM0NDP 1884 
 
 by the dangerous and eventually fatal illness of a friend for 
 whom he entertained the deepest regard — Miss Alleyne. 
 While anxious as to the issue, Symonds characteristically 
 reacted against oppressive thoughts by flinging himself out 
 upon the external world. ' I had a sublime walk,' he writes 
 to his sister, ' a few nights ago up the Schwartzhorn by moon- 
 light. I reached the top an hour before dawn, and watched 
 the gradual approach of day illuminating all the Alpine peaks 
 in their priority of height. It was excessively cold.' And this 
 expedition is more fully described in the following postscript 
 to a letter addressed to H. F. Brown, August 11, 1884 :] 
 
 * By some accident I forgot to post this yesterday. So I 
 shall tell you of my expedition up the Schwartzhorn, from 
 which I have returned to-day. I drove alone to Fluela Hospiz, 
 and got four hours' sleep after supper, before twenty-eight 
 gymnasts burst upon the stillness of the night. The weather 
 was undoubtedly good. My friend Hold pulled me out of a 
 deep sleep to drink a cup of coffee ; and at 1.30 we all started 
 in moonlight. It was very still and solemn, winding gradually 
 up to the snow-slopes and the little glacier ; all sounds having 
 so peculiar a value — especially the rushing of a stream beneath 
 a mass of boulders which we crossed. Behind us, hung above 
 the lower Engadine, was a marvellous star of dawning — which 
 " flamed in the forehead of the morning sky," ascending ever 
 over peak and precipice, as flying from the long reluctant day. 
 The moon was nearly full, and shed a very clear light on the 
 path. There is nothing to equal the solemnity of these mid- 
 night walks upon the hills. Nor did the gymnasts break the 
 spell ; for they marched like soldiers, and with the temperate 
 good breeding of peasants. There is a great deal more snow 
 than usual this year on our mountains. I was glad to quit 
 the slippery frosted rocks, for hard slopes of snow leading to 
 the summit. Then on the East first came a band of white, 
 which looked like moonshine on a belt of mist, but was the 
 dawn — for as the pyramids of Piz Linard and Buin cut it with 
 their silvered cones, it gradually toned to green, and passed 
 into a mellow orange, widening, broadening, and crept round
 
 1884 MANHOOD 393 
 
 about the circuit of the sky, leaving the moon awhile still mis- 
 tress of the upper heavens. By the time we stood upon the 
 top, at 3.45, Bernina, and Ortler, and Todi were glowing with 
 a faint half-conscious rose. And so the light stole gradually 
 onward, fading the star and moon, disclosing all the hills of 
 Switzerland and Tyrol, through that incalculably prolonged 
 space of time which the sunrise always occupies. When I 
 thought the sun must rise, there fell with bold impulsive 
 sweep, from the zenith right into the cone of hidden fire, a 
 white majestic meteor — a strange thrilling sight — as though 
 some star had left her station, yearning to engulf herself in 
 our terrestrial flame. At last a crest in Tyrol dazzled with 
 true light ; and in a few moments, the whole of the Alp world 
 was bathed in rosy golden day. I then discerned, far, far 
 away, a tiny blue pyramid upon the verge of the Italian plain 
 — a certain Dolomite, beyond the Etzsch Thai. It was freezing 
 hard all this while. But the sun brought warmth, and showed 
 how hoary the Schwartzhorn was with night's frost — which 
 melted literally like a dream away. The accentuation of the 
 highest Alpine peaks, in their priority of stature, by the rose 
 of dawn before it reached our lower eminence, was very beauti- 
 ful to see. 
 
 * I am glad I went. I have often been on Schwartzhorn — 
 never enjoyed it so much.' 
 
 [Symonds's great physical energy was certainly one of the 
 most remarkable and surprising things about him. No one 
 who shared one of those expeditions with him would ever have 
 suspected the invalid in that lithe elastic figure, which breasted 
 the hills with such apparent ease, and left many a sounder 
 man behind him. It was his intense spiritual vitality, his 
 nervous energy, his keen enjoyment of lovely sights, which 
 supplied the motive power. These walking expeditions, of 
 which he took several in the autumn of the year 1884, would 
 have proved no slight tax on the resources of most men. A 
 few days before the ascent of this Schwartzhorn, wliich is 
 10,300 feet high, lie had enjoyed what he calls ' three splendid 
 days ' on the hills.]
 
 394 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1884 
 
 ' Saturday morning^ I left early with a young man, Hold, 
 who is a friend of mine, and Simeon Buol ; walked over 
 Strela to Langwies, and then up to Arosa — that romantic 
 hidden valley, 6,500 feet above the sea, between Davos and 
 the Lenzerheide. 
 
 ' We spent Sunday in seeing the place and attending a 
 village festival, or kilbi. Yesterday we rose at four, and 
 recrossed the mountain barrier by a high sublime pass which 
 skirts the Kupfenfluh. It was a long day ; but except for the 
 tightness of my chest in the ascent, which always makes me 
 anxious as well as uncomfortable, I experienced no fatigue, and 
 woke quite fresh this morning. 
 
 ' Give auntie my best love. If you go to Pyrton, I should 
 like to know whether there are any remains of the old manor- 
 house, in which Elizabeth Symonds lived before she married 
 Hampden, any moniiment in the church or churchyard to our 
 family, and any traces of arms about the house or church. Of 
 course I should also Mke to know if the parish registers contain 
 entries.' 
 
 ' Like ^ you, we have thunderstorms nearly every day. 
 This makes it difficult to plan expeditions. Yet I have just 
 returned from another very good one. Catherine, Warren,^ 
 and I left Davos at eleven on Sunday, drove from Klosters to 
 Sardasca Alp, and walked up to the Club hut on the edge of 
 the Silvretta glacier. There we slept on the hay. Yesterday 
 we started at 4 a.m. traversed the glacier — which is a very 
 large plateau of ice, rising about 2,000 feet to its summit, and 
 sweeping away in all directions over a broad upland, from 
 which bold broken pyramids emerge in picturesque groups — in 
 about four or five hours, and got down to Guarda in the 
 Engadine at eleven. We had meant to go on to Scanfs and 
 return to-day by Scaletta. But a violent thunderstorm at Siis, 
 and the arrival of the Fluela diligence, made me think it wiser 
 to retire across that pass, and we reached home at nine last 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Davos, August 5, 1884. 
 2 To H. F. Brown. Davos, August 19, 1884. 
 ^ President of Magdalen College, Oxford,
 
 1884 MANHOOD 395 
 
 evening — that is, Catherine and I did. Warren, who does not 
 fear weather, went on to Scanfs, and is not yet back. 
 
 ' I am very proud of having been on a regular glacier again, 
 and that is a really fine one — easy to traverse, but sublime 
 in scenery. The distant %'iews of Bernina and Ortler, seen 
 between those huge crags of Buin and Linard, with other 
 views of the far-off Todi range and Scesaplana, framed in 
 similar masses of broken rock, were extremely beautiful as well 
 as grand. The Silvretta reaches 10,000 feet or rather more — 
 about 10,200 — and the peaks rise about 2,000 feet above that ; 
 all of them finely shaped, and some of them most brilliantly 
 coloiired with iron pyrites and copper ore. 
 
 ' Kuedi says he thinks these walks do me good ; and I 
 certainly feel as though they did. 
 
 ' Alas, alas ! the news came to-day that Fanny Alleyne 
 died on Saturday afternoon. It is very sad that so blameless 
 and devoted a nature should have been exposed to this 
 dreadful sufiering in the close of her good life. The mystery 
 of the world seems brought home cruelly to our ignorance by 
 such a fate.' 
 
 [However much Symonds might enjoy these long rambles 
 among the mountains and the company of his Davoser friends, 
 it was impossible that he should not feel the isolation of his 
 life when his thoughts were drawn to literature, as in this 
 letter to Mr. Gosse :] 
 
 ' I am ^ delighted to hear from you to-night, that you will 
 accept the gift of my book in its edition dc luxe, and that by 
 this arrangement the copy, for which you paid a price, will 
 pass as your gift into the hands of a poet who, in his own line, 
 is facile princeps among Englishmen. Austin Dobson does 
 what some of my poor Goliardi in their dark age were 
 l)lundei'ingly feeling after. They made verses of society, and 
 life, and feeling, with a form that to their epoch seemed 
 refined. 
 
 ' The large paper copies of " Wine, Women, and Song," 
 
 ' To Edmund Gosse, Davos, October 11, 1884,
 
 396 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1884 
 
 came to me by rail to-day. I have kept No. 1 for myself, 
 inscribed No. 2 to you. But though it is so slight, it has got 
 into such a fearfully large size in its edition de luxe that, 
 while it came to me by rail, I doubt whether I can send it 
 back by post. 
 
 ' In my last letter I did not congratulate you on the 
 Lowell lectureship. Let us remember that we address an 
 incalculably large audience when we use the English tongue. 
 It grows larger every day, l)y the recent development of 
 relations between England and the United States of America 
 in literature. 
 
 ' Perhaps you may tell me that I do not act up to the high 
 sense of the vocation I have just expressed. If you do so 
 speak, I cannot plead other excuse than my curious isolation 
 from the society of artists, and cultivated men, and the strange 
 sense of life's fragility, the nonchalant feeling of being " out of 
 the big swim," which attaches to my uncomfortable position, 
 with one and a quarter lung here. 
 
 ' However, no more of this. I must try to gird myself up 
 for severer work than the Goliardi or the Sonnets of the last 
 year. 
 
 ' But think of me without any but my own library. I 
 would not willingly pass for too pathetic on the score of my 
 own limitations, yet I may observe that constant weak health, 
 no literary friends, no library of reference, are three very 
 depressing conditions for a man constituted like myself. 
 
 ' It was a true pleasure to meet Miss Zimmern and Miss 
 Thomas in that remote valley of Arosa, whither I had escapaded 
 off across the hills from Davos against my doctor's orders. 
 I dread lest I should fall upon such pleasant guests with the 
 rapacity of a mosquito upon a griffin at Calcutta — you know 
 the Anglo-Indian illusion. 
 
 ' This is a long scribble. When you go to Boston you will 
 see Perry, one of the most bright-souled students of literature, 
 the biggest helluo lihrorum in America. Salute him from me.' 
 
 [He expresses another aspect of his isolation — the being 
 * out of the swim ' — in the following terms] : —
 
 1884 MANHOOD 397 
 
 ' I think ' I am nearly dead to the public, " the world for- 
 getting, by the world forgot," through prolonged life up here. 
 There has been just one re\iew of " Wine, Women, and Song " 
 in the " P. M. G.," and no more. One of " Vag. Lib." in the 
 "Academy," and a handful of mud thrown at it in the " St. 
 James's Gazette." 
 
 ' But I can sincerely say that I do not very greatly care for 
 this want of interest in my work. I am just sorry to have 
 won so little ground, and sad to think that this neglect is 
 added to the other disadvantages of my exile — -chiefly because 
 it withdraws what would have been an incentive to more 
 strenuous endeavour. Also I regret that the opportunities of 
 publishing what I produce vnll be necessarily limited. Still, 
 I love my art ; and I believe that something of me will be re- 
 discovered w^hen I am dead. 
 
 ' Only I feel sure that if I had been permitted to make 
 the trial of personally influencing the English public by 
 my presence and my uttered words in any position like 
 that of a professor, I should have obtained a hearing, and 
 should have been aroused, through sense of duty and responsi- 
 bility, to something stronger than has yet been tried by me. 
 
 ' Ah well ! iirafiEpoL' Ti If. TiQ ; ri ^' ov tic ; (tkiu(: oiap 
 
 'This is- Christmas Day, and I wish you my heart's 
 wishes for the New Year, which comes in a week. 
 
 ' My writing of last night was sad, and to-night's shall be 
 glad. I have thrown off ambition and abandoned literature. 
 This has come to me slowly, as the germ grows and develops ; 
 and now, in humility of soul and lessoning by experience, it 
 has become flower and fruit. I regard myself as a failure in 
 what I have attempted ; not through any fault of others, but 
 my own — my own fault of wilfulness and egotism ; probably 
 through my fault of want of power. It is over. I have 
 suffered, as men will always sufler from sin or misdirected 
 energy. But there is the future. What a fine word that is 
 to write upon the threshold of a New Year ! 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, December 24, 1884. 
 ' To the same. Davos, December 25, 1884.
 
 398 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1884 
 
 ' I am so very stupid, so proved thricefold stupid by my 
 acknowledged and obvious failure 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 demand from the Future something finer, something that 
 concerns the naked soul. 
 
 ' Musicians in their last manner have been unintelligible. 
 I seem to comprehend the reason. Souls bent on sincere 
 expression become idiotic even to themselves. Yet I am 
 yours.' 
 
 [The nervous strain of life at the altitude of Davos, 
 frequently produced in Symonds a violent reaction, which 
 showed itself in a touch of irritability, which, however, was 
 only revealed to his most intimate friends — passing moods, 
 which he was all the better for working off. Deeper down in 
 his nature, I think there was a growing withdrawal from the 
 hopes and the speculations of life, which brought with it a 
 note of resignation, weariness, submission, which is new in 
 Symonds 's agonising, pugnacious, battle-loving temperament.] 
 
 1885 ' It is true ^ that we are here rather severely tried, but not 
 
 more, nay, rather far less, than many, how many, better 
 people than ourselves. I do not lose the light that guides me, 
 and this light is a submissive belief in the order of the world, 
 for which I am not responsible. I know that I sin daily 
 against my belief ; but I think that my will is to obey its 
 judgment, whatever that may be. 
 
 ' Madge has gone off, ill, to Join her sister at San Kemo. 
 I hope and trust it will go well with her. I do not give the 
 game up. But I am weary of things that seem to me infinitely 
 nugatory, face to face with mere human 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. 
 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Davos, February 5, 1885.
 
 1885 Manhood 399 
 
 ' You see I cannot write well. So Addio. I love to hear 
 about your life and all that it contains,' 
 
 ' We have ^ been ha^'ing very bad weather — strong Fohn, 
 snowstorms, torrents of rain. It is very depressing to health 
 and spirits. Inside and outside all is gloomy vaih. me, and 
 life does not become easier to live. If I could do it, I should 
 like to go into a cloister, and spend the rest of my days in 
 literary labour appointed by a superior. What a contrast 
 there is between the man as he knows himself, and the man 
 as he appears to the world. 
 
 ' I have seen more of C , a profoundly gloomy man — 
 
 nursed in the most terrible literature, the fleur de mal of 
 which he lends me — awful books. If Heine's was Lazaretto- 
 literature, this is madhouse ditto. Good-bye. Coraggio, amico. 
 
 ' Going to St. Moritz, we crossed the Julier by starlight in 
 open sleighs. Most impressive. Such stars. And long into 
 the night, a fan sent up from the buried sun aloft among the 
 constellations,' 
 
 [He said truly, ' What a contrast there is between the man 
 as he knows himself, and the man as he appears to the world,' 
 To the world he was the joyous and stimulating companion, 
 giving ever of his intellectual best ; the audacious, paradoxical 
 speculator ; the historian of the ' Renaissance in Italy,' the 
 genial student of Greek poetry and Italian culture ; the 
 brilliant conversationaHst, the ' Opalstein ' of Mr. Stevenson's 
 Essay— an appreciation which Symonds did not endorse, and 
 even to some extent resented ; but which was true in so far as 
 it bears testimony to the ever present sphinx.] 
 
 * I was '^ glad to get your last letter. It was good of you 
 to write to me. The account, on the whole, seemed to be re- 
 assuring as to your intellectual condition — and the physical, 
 though so puzzling, may perhaps be better than " Cough o' the 
 lungs." If you remember, Webster's Duchess of Malfi told 
 Bosola that that uncertain thing could kill as well as his cord. 
 
 » To H. P. Brown, February 20, 1885. 
 
 ■' To II. L. Stevenson. Davos, Mareli '28, 1885.
 
 400 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1885 
 
 ' I should have liked to talk and take issue with you on 
 some of your points. Why is Cole a hero ? I am charmed 
 to hear that you dedicate your next book to him. Probably 
 you have learned to respect his excellent qualities in private 
 life. But a man who has been wounded upon duty is hardly 
 a hero. At least, I hope England is not sunk so low that we 
 have to call the common discharge of paid-for obligations to 
 the State heroic. Then I should like to ask you why you 
 burn for piety so much ? Do you mean the piety of my 
 snuffling Puritan ancestors and the piety of your Scotch 
 dissenting ancestors, or the piety of Calvinist Geneva, which 
 liurned Servetus ; or the piety of Lutheran Germany ; or the 
 piety of reactionary Rome, which burned Bruno ; or do you 
 mean the imtas of ancient Rome, devotion to principle, 
 patriotic pride, and obstinacy combined with sharp business 
 faculty, the inetas of Bismarck as things go ? Which do you 
 mean ? 
 
 ' See you not that " Opalstein " would like to talk to you 
 to-night — to you, quick shining Firefly ? 
 
 ' I am very considerably ill just now with lung inflamma- 
 tion. I won't say more. But this may explain the tone of 
 my letter — a tone which you who live in sprite regions will 
 not take amiss from an old friend. Aclclio. My bookseller 
 sends me to-night your verses. I am just going to peep into 
 the book.' 
 
 [His friend, Mr. Henry Sidgwick, by means of a monthly 
 budget or diary, which he sent to Davos, did something to 
 remove some of the drawbacks of Symonds's isolation, by 
 keeping him acquainted with much that was taking place in 
 the world of English thought, and Symonds always expressed 
 great gratitude for the pleasure in this monthly packet.] 
 
 ' The post ' has brought me to-night your month's diary, 
 which is a particularly interesting number to me. It makes 
 me, as usual, rather wistful — this window opened for me by 
 your friendship into a life so full of human interests, so active, 
 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick, Apiil 5, 1885.
 
 188o MA"XHOOT) 401 
 
 so well-filled. I would not miss it now for the world. It has 
 been, the last year, of real value to me. If I am ever self- 
 satisfied, it is in a reckless, fierce, defiant way. I am improved 
 by seeing how a man can be actually superior, calm in survey, 
 conscious of the length and breadth and depth of himself, and 
 kept in healthful equilibrium by frequent contact with the best 
 of his own kind. This does me good, and monthly you keep 
 alive in me the dying spark of mental life. It is rather bitter 
 this fate. 
 
 ' " Marius " I have not read. I suppose I must. But I 
 shrink from approaching Pater's style, which has a peculiarly 
 disagreeable effect upon my nerves — like the presence of a 
 civet cat. Still, I believe I must read it. 
 
 ' My studies have, as usual, been chiefly in the past. I 
 have taken much pleasure since September last in working at 
 the counter Reformation period in Italy ; and have got six 
 chapters of my "Italy and the Council of Trent" roughly 
 committed to paper. This book will form a sequel, if I can 
 produce it, to " Renaissance in Italy." 
 
 ' But Ruedi informs me that I have broken down again in 
 health. The old wound in the lung is active again for mis- 
 chief. A chronic invalid cannot work in right conditions. 
 Climate is good ; but solitude from all society congenial to 
 my work is pernicious. The work detaches itself against too 
 vacant a background, which I am impelled to fill up by stupid 
 distractions. MachiavelU's account of his life in banishment 
 at San Casciano represents mine. And I am too weak to bear 
 the isolation of absorbing intellectual occupations mitigated by 
 peasants.' 
 
 [Symonds was seriously ill, and it was doubtful whether 
 he would be able to take his usual spring journey to Venice. 
 One cause for his illness is given in the following phrases, 
 written to H. F. Bro'svn on April 8 :] 
 
 ' I am astonished, when I now regard it, at the amount of 
 work produced since the end of last September. Six respect- 
 able chapters of "Italy and the Council of Trent" are ranged 
 before me. The l)oc)k has been organised, and the main 
 
 P D
 
 402 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1885 
 
 positions have been attacked. Of course these chapters are 
 only in the rough ; but the design is there, and of course 
 there is about as much still to produce ; and then there will 
 be the whole to go over, filing and filling in. But I always 
 find that to organise a big book drills the holes in my lung. 
 The other part of the business bores the body, but does not 
 destroy tissue. A good holiday would do me worlds of good 
 now, if I could take it without serious risk. 
 
 * I am sure you are right to take the minute pains you do 
 about your house. I feel frequently how much I have lost in 
 mine here by leaving the details — as my health compelled — to 
 architect and builder. It is not merely that I disbursed 15 or 20 
 per cent, more than the just cost, but my work was not properly 
 carried out. L' occhio del 'padrone is the thing. And you can 
 give it. But then you have an Antonio. There is no such 
 functionary in these parts to be had for love or money, or 
 both combined. 
 
 ' I am carrying on land speculation on the lake here. 
 Have taken a large farm on mortgage, in addition to the one 
 I bought just before you came to Davos last. This mortgage 
 is of a nature to make me the owner when the farm comes to 
 sale. Altogether I have spent a good deal of money this 
 spring. 
 
 ' Good-bye. I want to see Venice and you ; but I harden 
 my soul for a not improbable disappointment.' 
 
 [The visit to Venice did take place, but the results were 
 unfortunate. On June 10 Symonds writes from Davos, where 
 he is once more :] 
 
 ' I feel sure you will sympathise with me when you hear 
 that Ruedi says the mischief in my lung (present actively last 
 March) has considerably advanced during my visit to Venice. 
 I was aware that I was not doing well, from the great languor 
 and lassitude I felt, which I could only throw off by working 
 myself into gaiety, and which I persistently ignored while 
 sitting up late. Now, I suppose, I must pay again for all that. 
 The truth is, I am in that dangerous state for an invalid of 
 my temperament, that being ill so long has at least wearied
 
 1885 MANHOOD 403 
 
 my patience. My will, the volition to maintain feeble health 
 at its maximum, has broken down. I am thoroughly bored, 
 and boredom has betrayed me into petulance. Bad habits 
 have been formed, and the whole man runs a risk unless he 
 can pull himself vigorously together. Whence to draw the 
 impetus for such an effort is my problem. I understand self- 
 abandonment to a pleasureless deterioration. But I must 
 remember how I have condemned that, and be still a man. 
 
 ' I am quite alone here. Davos is most radiant in the 
 beauty of fresh young summer. Janet and Madge must stay 
 awhile at Klosters still.' 
 
 And again, on June 18 : 
 
 ' My Davos life and climate are working their usual effects 
 of stringing me up and pulling me together, making a nervous 
 man of me, but curing the old lung trouble for the moment. 
 
 ' What a helter-skelter human life is — a hurrying to reach 
 the tomb — a retardation by refinements of the process — an 
 inevitable decadence in all of us when we have touched the 
 thirty years — a choice of means to save the maximum and 
 pare the minimum of what we know that life has put within 
 our reach. It is all a matter of saving and spending — as the 
 fearful allegory of the " Peau de Chagrin " puts it ; and the irony 
 of the whole business is that when we think we save we often 
 spend ; and spending sometimes find that unexpectedly we 
 have made a gain. We cannot calculate. We want too many 
 things, self -contradictory and diverse, to make a balance.' 
 
 And again on June 21 : 
 
 * It is snowing hard here this evening — the whole valley 
 white — and the grey twilight of the longest day in the year 
 gradually fading through grey brooding clouds. 
 
 ' I don't think I have more than this to say to-night. It 
 seems funny, when I think of you in your casino at La 
 Favorita, with your brick floor and the little acacia bushes 
 round you. Probably it is not hot there, but damp and chilly. 
 
 * I have nearly finished my studios in Bruno. Difficult to 
 seize. But I think he is the only great Italian of the sixteenth 
 
 D V 2
 
 404 JOHN ADDINCtTON SYMONDS 1885 
 
 century, and perhaps the greatest mind in Europe — I am really 
 afraid to say what I am inclined to think — well, I will out with 
 it, the greatest pure intelligence since Aristotle. 
 
 * As he was but a little past thirty when his light went out 
 in the dungeons of the Inquisition, Aristotle with his long 
 life had a long pull over him. But might have beens can't 
 count. So I can't go on to say that he probably would 
 have beaten Aristotle if he had lasted another quarter of a 
 century. 
 
 ' I have come very slowly to form this opinion of Bruno ; 
 and I do not see my way to expounding it.' 
 
 ' Your diary, ^ acceptable as ever, came this morning. 
 
 ' It fills me as usual with a kind of melancholy envy. 
 Your life is so well filled, and your mind ripens in so much 
 genial society. I cannot help contrasting one of your months 
 with one of mine. I squander existence. My literary labour 
 is the only backbone left to support the tottering frame of 
 intellectual life. So I will talk about it. 
 
 ' I set to work just a year ago, after seeing " Vagabunduli 
 Libellus " and "Wine, Women, and Song " through the press, 
 at two volumes on the Catholic Revival in Italy. This book 
 is part of my "Renaissance in Italy " ; and if Smith will let 
 me, I shall bring it out in sequence. Nine chapters are now 
 written. Three more are on the stocks. Revision and re- 
 writing will probably occupy me onward through the winter. 
 I cannot say that I am not interested in the subject. There is 
 something sublime in the spectacle of national ruin. The 
 heroism of Bruno, the maladie cle I'dme of Tasso, the im- 
 penetrable stoicism of Sarpi, the malign fervour of Loyola, 
 the infernal machinery of the Index Libr. Prohib., the delirium 
 of society asphyxiated by Spanish etiquette, the galvanisation 
 of Latin Christianity into paralytic movement by the Triden- 
 tine Council, are all in their way striking. Yet the w^ord joy 
 cannot be uttered. I sit down daily to my desk as an anatomist 
 to the dissecting table — and each subject in turn is patho- 
 logical. I have to deal with only two really healthy souls 
 ' To Henry Sidgwiclc. Davos. Sept. 3, 1885.
 
 1885 MANHOOD 405 
 
 upon the road of progress — Bruno and Palestrina. Palestrina, 
 as you know, started music on the modern track. Bruno, 
 before he was forty, had divined in a sort of incoherent way 
 the whole of modern thought, and was burned for this audacity 
 of vision. The extent to which Spinoza, Leibnitz, and the 
 German idealists have lived upon his ideas without, until 
 Schelling, avowing their obligation, is quite amusing. There 
 is a good new German book about him by a man called 
 Brunhofer. It ought to be translated into English for such 
 folk as are curious about the SictSox'i of philosophical thought. 
 Had it not been for the Catholic Revival, I believe that the 
 Italian Renaissance, mainly through the work of thinkers 
 in ]\Iagna Grfecia, Telesio, Campanella, Bruno, Vico, men 
 born on the old soil of Parmenides and Pythagoras, would 
 have saved transalpine searchers after systems a good deal of 
 trouble.' 
 
 ' I took ^ Lotta and Madge to-day up to Fluela Hospiz, 
 starting at 7.45 a.m. We tobogganed down the Fluela to Siis 
 at a most furious speed — lunched there — took horses again at 
 1.45 — arrived in a divine sunset of crimsons, oranges, and 
 blues and beryls at the top again about 4.45 — tobogganed back 
 to Dorfli in the dark over snowy, soundless paths, through 
 wood and meadow ; reached our home at 6.45. It was a long 
 day, and we covered I cannot reckon how many miles in the 
 toboggan saddle — some passages extremely dangerous, owing 
 to unprecedented pace of running.' 
 
 [The year closed with arrangements for the publication of 
 the last volumes of the ' Renaissance in Italy,' and this gives 
 occasion to the following remarks on the business aspects of 
 literature as a profession :] 
 
 ' I have 2 just heard from Smith &. Elder about the publica- 
 tion of my two volumes on the Catholic Revival. They offer 
 me 1501. In respect to " Renaissance in Italy," I have 
 already received 950/. When, then, I have brought out these 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, Nov. 11, 1885. 
 ■-' To the same. Duvob, Dec. 2(), 1885.
 
 406 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONUS 1885 
 
 two volumes, I shall have had in all 1,100Z. for this long bit 
 of work. Allowing for periods in which I was unfit to work, 
 periods in which I sought a change of work, I find that I have 
 spent eleven years upon this task — and pretty hard years of 
 daily labour. The education which enabled me to attempt it 
 was a very costly one, and the abilities which qualified me for 
 it, though not first-rate, were at least unusual in their com- 
 bination of many-sided intelligence with acquired knowledge 
 and literary style. I have, then, been paid at the rate of lOOl. 
 per annum ; but I must deduct at least 501. per annum from 
 my gains for books and travel, quite indispensable to the pro- 
 duction. This I reckon as really far below the just allowance. 
 Say, then, I have received 50^. a year, during the eleven best 
 years of life, for the execution of a laborious work, which 
 implied an expensive education and unusual cast of intellect. 
 The pay is about equal to the wages of a third-class merchant's 
 clerk, or a second-class butler, the latter being also found in 
 food and lodging. 
 
 ' These considerations are worth attending to. Few young 
 men who projected such a book — (I say such a book, because 
 there are many books to be written on more obviously attractive 
 subjects ; these will pay better) — as mine, could venture to 
 anticipate for it a much more substantial success. Mine has 
 been accepted in England, reprinted in America. It has given 
 me a certain reputation. A young man, then, undertaking such 
 a task, would, unless he were conscious of the commanding 
 powers of a Macaulay, have to anticipate some such reward for 
 some such labour as I have had. How many young men 
 could aflford to give eleven years of their lives between 33 and 
 45 for the net sum of 550Z. ? 
 
 ' The circulating libraries, intervening between the author 
 and publisher on the one hand, and the reading public on the 
 other, have limited the demand for copies of such books. The 
 public has become a bad patron and paymaster. 
 
 ' Only one set of institutions in England subsidise such 
 literature. These are the universities, who make it worth a 
 man's while to compete for professorships by literary pro- 
 duction of the sort I am discussing. But they dispense these
 
 1885 MANHOOD 407 
 
 rewards very uncertainly, and nearly always to members of 
 their own body, and for the most part to such members as 
 have been engaged in education. 
 
 • ' The Crown does something small in the way of pensions 
 from the ci\dl list ; but these are meagrely doled out to cases 
 of proved destitution, or, as in the case of the 300/. a year 
 voted to M. Arnold, are acquired by powerful interest with 
 ministers. 
 
 ' The best adnce to give to a young man contemplating 
 unremunerative literature is, then, stick to a university, be 
 prepared to do its educational work, and when you write, take 
 care to hit the academical keynote ; else you may acquire a 
 modest reputation, but you will hardly gain enough to pay the 
 rent of two rooms in an imfashionable street. 
 
 ' At the end of this year, upon the termination of my long 
 task, I have taken stock of the whole position, and have poured 
 my reflections out into your not uninterested ears.' 
 
 [Yet, in spite of these adverse considerations, and as a relief 1886 
 from the continual state of anxiety about the health of his 
 eldest daughter, the year 1886 proved the most active of all 
 the years in Symonds's extremely active literary life. The list 
 of his work during this year is as follows : — Volumes vi. and 
 \i\. of the ' Eenaissance in Italy,' seen through the press ; 
 ' Sidney,' written for ' English Men of Letters,' and ' Ben 
 Jonson,' for ' English Worthies ' ; a volume of ' Selections 
 from Jonson,' and an edition of ' Sir Thomas Browne ' ; an 
 article on Tasso for the ' Encyclopedia Britannica.' During 
 the summer and autumn the translation of ' Cellini's Auto- 
 biography ' was begun and finished. Such a vast amount of 
 work, upon the top of an ever-present anxiety, and in combina- 
 tion with the nervous tension of the Davos climate, would have 
 worn any man thin, and some effect of the strain naturally 
 appears in the letters.] 
 
 'I doubt' whether anyone has the right so to scrutinise 
 " the abysmal deeps of personality." You sec 1 have been 
 
 ' To l\. L. Stevenson. Davos, March 1, 188G.
 
 408 JOHN ADUINGTON SYMONDS 1886 
 
 reading " Dr. Jekyll." At least I think he ought to bring more 
 of distinct belief in the resources of human nature, more faith, 
 more sympathy with our frailty, into the matter than you have 
 done. The art is burning and intense. The " Peau de Chagrin " 
 disappears, and Poe's work is water. Also one discerns at 
 once that this is an allegory of all twy-natured souls who yield 
 consciously to evil. Most of us are on the brink of educating 
 a Mr. Hyde at some epoch of our being. But the scientific 
 cast of the allegory will only act as an incentive to moral self- 
 murder with those who perceive the allegory's profundity. 
 Louis, how had you the "ilia dura, ferro et a?re triplici 
 duriora," to write Dr. Jekyll? I know now what was meant 
 when you were called a sprite. 
 
 ' You see I am trembling under the magician's wand of 
 your fancy, and rebelling against it with the scorn of a soul 
 that hates to be contaminated with the mere picture of vic- 
 torious evil. Our only chance seems to me to be to maintain, 
 against all appearances, that evil can never and in no way be 
 victorious. 
 
 ' I would that you would tell me whether you only used 
 your terrible motif as a good ground-work for a ghastly tale, 
 or whether you meant it to have a moral purpose. But I 
 suppose you won't tell me. 
 
 ' I seem to have lost you so utterly that I can afford to 
 fling truth of the crudest in your face. And yet I love you 
 and think of you daily, and have Dew Smith's portrait of you 
 in front of me. 
 
 ' The suicide end of Dr. Jekyll is too commonplace. Dr. 
 Jekyll ought to have given Mr. Hyde up to justice. This 
 would have vindicated the sense of human dignity which is so 
 horribly outraged in your book.' 
 
 'Your^ diary for February 7 has just come. Though 
 brief, it has things Avhich interest me deeply. Watching, " as 
 from a ruined tower" out here, "how goes the day of 
 England's power," I get more and more impressed with a 
 sense of impending disaster, of some dark and dreadful place 
 
 • To Henry Sidgwick. Davos, March 10, 1886.
 
 1886 MANHOOD 409 
 
 into which we are insensibly drifting. I keep telling myself 
 that it is wrong to yield to alarmism, natural to take gloomier 
 and more conservative views with growing years, and only too 
 painfully reasonable for a man so separated as I am from his 
 peers to become bizarre in opinion. 
 
 ' You echo back my apprehensions from the centre of 
 English life. How sad it is that all our study of history, all 
 our reflection upon principles in politics, never helps us at a 
 pinch. We cannot apply what we feel we have learned, and 
 the green tree of life laughs at our grey theories. Nay, worse, 
 the unexpected evolutions of the organism force us to doubt 
 what we confidently thought we had learned. 
 
 ' Surely England has reached a crisis at which, if ever, 
 principles ought to suggest the way to right solution. And 
 yet none are applicable. Sternly, blindly, patiently, perhaps 
 sufl'eringly, we shall have to live it out — just like the meanest 
 mollusc. 
 
 ' I should nmch hke to get some lucrative literary work. 
 I really feel anxious to that extent about the social and 
 poHtical prospects of England that I want to make literature, 
 so far as in me lies, remunerative. 
 
 * Pray keep this in mind, in case you should hear of an 
 opening however humble, provided paying, for the talents 
 you know me to possess — such as they are. 
 
 ' As it is, I have lately neglected the money side of my 
 art.' 
 
 [The depression wears off, however, when he can get out 
 among the mountains on some such expeditions as these.] 
 
 'Mrs. Symonds,' Madge, and I walked up the Dorfli Berg 
 to-day in pretty deep snow — an hour or so up to our waists. 
 We nearly lost Cio [their black Spitz dog from Venice] in a 
 torrent. We got over it splashily but safely. He was getting 
 sucked in under a roof of ice by the water, when I beheld him 
 going, and Madge, in answer to my shouts, pulled him from 
 the frozen cavern by the scruff of his neck. We descended 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Duvoa, xMarch 25, 188G.
 
 410 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONUS 1886 
 
 the mountain gloriously, if perilously. On steep, but also 
 well-selected slopes, we set avalanches going, and rode them 
 downwards till they heaped themselves in masses six feet deep. 
 Of course I knew what we were about, and took care there 
 should be no extraordinary danger. We only devoted our- 
 selves to a total wetting and a partial smothering. It was very 
 exhilarating. The Dorfli Berg is furrowed with long tri- 
 angular fan-shaped avalanches, indicating the points we 
 severally selected for our start, and the wild animals we rode 
 in the descent. The snow helps this method of progression 
 just now, for the ground is frozen into ice, and upon that icy 
 bottom lies a foot of melted snow, which slides off with a 
 human being's weight upon it, accumulating volume and 
 spreading as it goes. It was enjoyable, and we all of us have 
 a thrill of quickened life in us to-night. I never experienced 
 this sort of glissading in the summer on glaciers. The state 
 in which we walked back from Dorfli to our house leaves itself 
 to be imagined. There was not a dry thread on the three of 
 us, and our hands were bleeding. Life here is funny ; that 
 one can turn so easily out of our home into a four hours' 
 madness of the sort.' 
 
 ' I cannot ^ tell you how much I am enjoying this escape 
 from the " narrowing nunnery walls " of Davos. It is the first 
 time, for I know not how long, that I have got away without 
 preoccupations, without work to be done, without the demands 
 that friendship with humble folk of different breeding from 
 oneself entails. 
 
 ' After we parted at Samaden, Catherine, Madge, and I 
 spent some hours at St. Moritz, and then walked by a 
 beautiful lake-jjath from Sils Maria to Maloja. There we met 
 no less than seventeen English acquaintances of all sorts and 
 descriptions. But on Monday we broke away from these for a 
 seven hours' walk up the sublime Muretto-thal and on the 
 Forno Glacier — a really stupendous piece of high Italian, not 
 Swiss, scenery. The valley, though it starts upward from 
 Maloja, drains into Bregaglia ; and the Muretto pass leads 
 ' To H. F. Blown. Soglio, Val Bregaglia, Sept. 16, 1886.
 
 1886 MANHOOD 411 
 
 easily, past Disgrazia, to Sondrio in Valtellina. This, I 
 suppose, accounts for the wild exuberance of vegetation and 
 the romance of cloven rocks in the ra\dne. Such cedar-like 
 cembras I have nowhere seen. 
 
 ' Next day we explored the immediate neighbourhood of 
 the ]\Ialoja, which, too, is far richer in detailed beauty than the 
 winter led me to expect. A walk of about two hours' winding 
 along the precipices above the pass, in spite of its hideous 
 name, " Promenade des Artistes," is certainly one of the finest 
 things in the Alpine region. 
 
 ' Paul had come up to see me ; so I took him on Tuesday 
 to Soglio ; and here we have been since. I don't know how 
 long we shall stay. It is quite one of the most remarkable 
 places I have ever been in. Just 1,000 feet above Pro- 
 montogno on a precipitous grassy bracket between chestnuts 
 and pines, it commands the whole Bregaglia — to N.E. the 
 mountains of Maloja, to S.W. the mountains heading Lago 
 di Como. In front expand the marvellous jagged outlines of 
 the Albigna and Bondasca glaciers and their peaks, of which 
 one sees a part at Promontogno. 
 
 ' The inn is a corner of an old Salis palace, with its 
 panelling, stoves, pictures, armour, beaten iron-work and 
 furniture intact ; very well kept in a somewhat negligent 
 Italian way — picturesque and characteristic and untourist-like 
 to heart's content. 
 
 ' I walked this morning through one huge forest of chest- 
 nuts, over those turfy swards you know, and among the purple 
 granite boulders, to Castasegna. It was a long dreamy idyll, 
 of the most musical poetry, in fact. 
 
 ' Yesterday I spent wholly basking on the rocks that 
 dominate Bondo— plunging my eyes downward those sheer 
 thousand feet, and lifting them to the airy pinnacles of ice and 
 crag men call Bondasca. 
 
 ' I wish in many ways that it had suited your plans to 
 come with us here. I am certain it would have fas- 
 cinated you — the thoroughly Italian feeling, the grand old 
 palace to live in, and the wild intolerable l)eauty of nature. I 
 specially aifect chestnut forests, and have seen and loved many ;
 
 412 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1886 
 
 but I never [saw one equal to this between Soglio and Casta- 
 segna.' 
 
 [The return to Davos was made over the Spliigen, and, as 
 Symonds writes to Koden Noel, the party had ' three jolly 
 days at Keichenau, exploring the demesne of the old castle of 
 Ehaziins,' a place which fascinated Symonds by its grim 
 situation above the valley of the Hinter Rhein. The autumn 
 ended with an attempt to penetrate the Averserthal.] 
 
 ' I have ^ been wandering again, partly for my eyes' sake. 
 Walked one day up to Fluela. Had a superb night ascent 
 of the Schwartzhorn, with an indescribably splendid morning 
 star, and a long autumnal dawning round the Alpine circle. 
 Walked -with Catherine over the Kuhalpthal and Tuorsthal to 
 Bergiin — seven hours — the finest piece of scenery in this 
 neighbourhood, and I have only accidentally stumbled on it. 
 Drove to Stalla on the Julier in order to penetrate into the 
 mysterious valley of Avers — a valley about thirty miles in 
 length, blocked by the Septimer at the head and by terrific 
 gorges (so they say) at the exit into Spliigen. There the 
 weather broke, and the good old host told us we might be 
 snowed up in Avers for at least a fortnight, perhaps six 
 months, and must certainly then live on rye and milk and 
 cheese and dry flesh without wine. Like the old man in 
 "Excelsior," he warned us off. We rushed back with extra 
 post, and here we are again. 
 
 ' October 15. — I have just made a discovery of this and 
 another unfinished letter, the second to the Editor of the 
 "Fortnightly," both of which I thought I had completed and 
 sent to their addresses. This, I fear, is only too characteristic 
 of me, and of the state in which I keep my papers, to demand 
 more than the ordinary apologies. 
 
 ' Well, what I thought I had already written to you was an 
 
 apology for my hasty remark to A , that you had from me 
 
 so and so much money for him. He shall hear from me how 
 it is, and that I have plenty of things to do with my money 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, October 8, 1886.
 
 1886 MANHOOD 418 
 
 besides sending him lump sums of two or three hundred francs 
 four or five times a year. Only, I cannot jabber tliis out in 
 Italian as fluent as that which I heard you producing last 
 nisfht in a dream I had of you and some Venetian workmen. 
 You overwhelmed the fellows with voluble argument, ex- 
 postulation, and abuse — mingled a la Cellini. 
 
 ' Of course the humour of my brain came out of this 
 Cellini translation, which I have been pushing vigorously 
 forward till, last night, I completed half of the whole. I find 
 it a stift' exhausting job. It makes demands upon every 
 department in the faculty of language. 
 
 ' Could you do me this service ? Ask your locksmith, the 
 man who made your staircase railings, what the exact mean- 
 ing of " bandelle," when used in relation to a prison door, may 
 be. I want to hit the precise significance of this feature in a 
 door, in order to explain some hazy points about Cellini's 
 escape from St. Angelo. 
 
 ' And now, since I have asked one service, I will ask 
 another. It is this. Do you know of any book which treats 
 of the old modes of reckoning time in Italy ? They reckoned 
 differently in different places, and at diflterent seasons of the 
 year. Half the picturesque value of a narration, in which 
 the exact hour of day or night means something, is lost if 
 one cannot present the moment in time to an English 
 reader. 
 
 * You ask me a question which I will at this late season 
 answer. It was whether I know of anybody who has treated 
 the ethics of tyrannicide in Italy outside my book. I can 
 point to no source. I collected all I could find, scattered in 
 the histories I read, upon the subject ; but, except the few 
 pages in Machiavelli, to which I must have given reference, 
 I have never come across a treatment of the subject on 
 principles. The Jesuits at a somewhat late date, Mariana, for 
 example, did so in the polemical works of ethical philosophy 
 they prepared against Protestant princes. But the far more 
 interesting question of tyrannicide in Renaissance Italy was 
 discussed partly upon the records of Plutarch, &c., and partly 
 upon the authority of Thomas Aquinas.'
 
 414 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1886 
 
 ' I have ' just finished the translation of Cellini, just 
 before midnight. And I remember that on this 10th of 
 November, in the year 1864, I married my wife at Hastings. 
 
 ' Strange and curious reminiscence — for me at least. How 
 little did I then think what the twenty-two years now elapsed 
 would bring me ; how much of physical weakness through 
 long early times of waiting, how much of struggle and of 
 pleasure ; how much in the last fourteen years of this long 
 period (since I first began to print books) of perpetual literary 
 labour. 
 
 ' God be praised for it all. Looking back over that long 
 space of time, I see how I have been inevitably moulded into 
 the sort of artist which I am. The work which I have done, 
 when compared with my then expectations, is enormous ; but, 
 compared with what it ought to have been, if my life had not 
 by ill-health been continuously warped, and by will con- 
 tinuously directed to the most convenient channels, appears in 
 my eyes very poor. I see its defects far more than its qualities ; 
 for the defects remain inherent in the production, while no one 
 but myself can estimate the cost of that production. 
 
 ' So will it probably be with any one who takes a candid 
 reckoning of all his doings after such a lapse of time. 
 
 ' Pardon me if I write thus much about myself. I have 
 been living into a personality which was nothing if not self- 
 expressive. Also, I want someone to speak to, here alone, 
 when the moon is sailing out there through turbid clouds 
 above the chary snow. Alone to-night, however, I was not, 
 while I brought my work to its conclusion. My wife sat by 
 me — for she is interested in Cellini — having often held the 
 pen while I dictated. 
 
 ' The whirligig of time astounds me at whiles. I do not 
 know how it is, we do not seem to heed it for weeks, and 
 months, and years ; and then, on some occasion, its inevitable, 
 slow, sly, swift, progressive, many-featured movement makes 
 itself appallingly felt. At such moments I know not verily 
 whether I am one man or a hundred men, dead, living, and to 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, November 10, 1886.
 
 1886 MANHOOD 415 
 
 be, compacted in a something I call I, which is not I, but 
 rather an expression of unapprehended forces.' 
 
 [On the proper relation of a man's work to his human 
 surroundings ; on the duty of keeping unselfishly humane in 
 the midst of the centripetal tendencies of literary work, he 
 expresses the following ^news, which are in reality an expansion 
 of his favourite axiom, that ' life is more that literature ' :] 
 
 ' I am averse to calling any life, which is lived out to the 
 full, either selfish or useless. It is tantamount to blaming 
 God, in my opinion, to be critical of human activity in its 
 various forms. But I often recognise in myself, and some- 
 times in people round me, the error of making what we call 
 our work, which is usually our easiest form of occupation, an 
 excuse for laziness in discharging the kindly offices of kinship, 
 society, and friendship. The fact, of course, is that any sphere 
 of activity which absorbs a man or woman, demands the whole 
 being's forces. 
 
 ' The spirit in which people do the work they have chosen 
 is undoubtedly much ; but I seem to divine a nobler type of 
 character, which constantly makes sacrifice even of the chosen 
 work to what I will only describe as geniality, kindliness, 
 sympathetic presence, the diffusion of affection over all sur- 
 rounding it.' 
 
 [The excessive literary acti^•ity of the year 1886 was 1887 
 followed by a period of great vital depression, from the New 
 Year onwards into April. As was so often the case with 
 Symonds, the lowering of his ntality seems to bring the deep- 
 lying preoccupation of the man, the ground-work and centre 
 of his nature, into its proper prominence. As after his illness 
 at Clifton in 1877, after his disappointment in London in 1882, 
 so now his speculations revert to the great questions of life 
 and conduct. His remarks are called forth by the receipt of 
 Mr. Sidgwick's Diary.] 
 
 'If I ' have not written to you earlier respecting your 
 Diai'y for January 7, it is not through lack of interest and 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Davos, March .'5, 1887.
 
 416 JOHN ADDINGTON 8YM0XDS 1887 
 
 sympathy. When I come to speak about myself, I will tell 
 you the hindrances I have had to contend against, and the 
 difficulties in which I still find myself placed. 
 
 ' You will of course know that I am alluding to the passage 
 of your Diary, in which you announce your expectation of 
 having to abandon in this life the hope of obtaining proof of 
 the individual soul's existence as a consciousness beyond death. 
 What this implies for yourself, in its bearings I mean, upon 
 Moral Philosophy, and its bearings upon the sustained quest 
 of twenty years, I am able to appreciate. 
 
 ' And I may add that it was for myself also a solemn 
 moment, when I read that paragraph in the Diary, through 
 the measured sentences of which a certain subdued glow of 
 passion seemed to burn. I do not pretend that I had ever 
 fixed my %dews of human conduct clearly or hopefully upon 
 the proof of immortality to our ordinary experience. I do not 
 deny that I never had any confidence in the method you were 
 taking to obtain the proof. I will further confess that, had 
 you gained the proof, this result would have enormously 
 aggravated the troubles of my life, by cutting off the possibility 
 of resumption into the personal-unconscious which our present 
 incertitude leaves open to my sanguine hope. 
 
 ' Ethics, I feel, can take care of themselves — that is to say, 
 human beings in social relations will always be able to form 
 codes of conduct, profitable to the organism and coercive of 
 the individual to the service of its uses. In humanity, as in 
 nature, " est Deus, quis Deus incertum." 
 
 ' I have no apprehension for civil law and social and 
 domestic institutions, even though the permanence of personal 
 consciousness after this life remain undemonstrated. Those 
 things are necessary for our race, of whose position in the 
 universe we are at present mainly ignorant ; and a sanction of 
 some sort, appealing to imagination, emotion, unformulated 
 onward impulses, will always be forthcoming, Man has only 
 had about 6,000 years of memory upon this planet ; and the 
 most grudging physicists accord him between ten and twenty 
 millions to come. Dislocations of ethical systems, attended 
 by much human misery, possibly also by retrograde epochs of
 
 1887 MANHOOD 417 
 
 civilisation, are likely to ensue. History, if it teaches any- 
 thing in its little span of past time, prepares us to expect such 
 phases in the incalculably longer future. But our faith lies 
 in this : that God, in the world, and in humanity as a portion 
 of the world, effectuates Himself, and cannot fail to do so. 
 I do not see, therefore, why we should be downcast if we 
 cannot base morality upon a conscious immortality of the 
 individual. 
 
 ' But I do see that, until that immortality of the individual 
 is irrefragably demonstrated, the sweet, the immeasurably 
 precious hope of ending with this life the ache and languor of 
 existence, remains open to burdened human personalities. 
 
 ' A sublime system of ethics seems to me capable of being 
 based, in its turn, upon that hope of extinction. Demonstra- 
 tion, ex argumcnio ipso, will not here be attained. But I am 
 of opinion that the persuasion, if it conies to be reasonably 
 entertained, of man's surcease from consciousness when this 
 life closes, will afford quite as good a basis for submission to 
 duty as any expectation of continuance in its double aspect of 
 hope and fear has lately been. 
 
 ' This long monologue is only the expression of that interest 
 and sympathy whereof I spoke at the beginning of my letter, 
 and of the deep feelings which your Diary aroused in me. 
 
 ' Our points of view with regard to the problems in question 
 are so different, you being the critic and constructor of philo- 
 sophy, I the creature of intense personal instincts, and the 
 student more as poet than historian of the past, that I can 
 well believe I shall have bored you with flimsy reveries. 
 
 ' Now I will come back to the affairs of this Natunvesen. 
 Ever since you left us in the summer, I have been suffering 
 from a chronic inflammation of the eyes. This made my 
 literary work painful. And I was under obligations to do a 
 heavy bit before the end of the year. I translated Cellini's 
 " Memoirs " into English. Under this pressure I broke down, 
 and I have been serio usly ill for more than two months with 
 a very exhausting fever. It is of the nature of ague, I think, 
 and has implicated tlie lungs. The result is that now 1 spend 
 wretched days of helpless prostration without brain, suffering 
 
 E E
 
 418 JOHN ADDINdTON SYMONDS 1887 
 
 in every joint, alternately icy cold and burning hot, sleepless 
 at night or pursued by tedious dreams, incapable of moving 
 beyond my house and its wooden shed outside, the mere 
 shadow and vision of a man. 
 
 ' I really do not know why any one who has to suffer in 
 this life should wish to go on living. I know that I am hardly 
 the man to say this ; for I have had exceptional good things 
 here compared with myriads of my fellow- creatures. But in 
 so far as I have suffered, it has always been borne in upon me 
 that not to have to live again would be the boon for which I 
 would bless God, and for the certitude of which I would more 
 contentedly agree to do my duty. 
 
 ' Our two girls, Lotta and Madge, are in London with Miss 
 North, learning and enjoying greatly. Here it goes on as 
 usual with the small remnant of us. Adclio.' 
 
 'I have' just come home and found your March Diary, 
 which is intensely interesting on several grounds. What 
 interests me most is your meditation called forth by a letter I 
 wrote about the relation of morality to our belief in immortality. 
 •I wrote that in the hope that you might answer. I cannot 
 see why we should attempt to demonstrate such felt things as 
 Morality, Beauty, God, or why we should cumber ourselves 
 with searchings after a life " im seligen Jenseits." It is, no 
 doubt, quite idiosyncratic on my part to prefer the prospect of 
 extinction. But I am no more sure o£ getting this than you 
 are of getting a prolongation of conscious being. 80, as far 
 as morality goes, we are just at the same point ; and if I be- 
 have worse than you, which I assuredly do, it is not due to my 
 not having a firm expectation of immortality. 
 
 ' Why should not morality rest upon legality, as it does 
 always in the first place, and on the social need of approval — 
 self-respect ? 
 
 ' So far as I am moral at all, it is not from a sense of Duty. 
 I think a great deal of humbug has been talked about this 
 word, which in the course of some centuries will be analysed 
 away into the real principles of action it has masked. 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Davos, April 6, 1887.
 
 1887 MANHOOD 419 
 
 ' The only sure thing is that we have to live and have to 
 die — why either we do not now know ; if we come to know, well ; 
 and there is no harm in seeking to discover the why and the 
 whereto ; but meanAvhile we ought to be able to q-et on with- 
 out it. Least of all ought we to rely upon an unproved bribe 
 and unproved deterrent for right action. The problem about 
 this bribe and this deterrent being insoluble, as you observe, 
 by all methods, were it not well to accept the fact boldly, and 
 leave ourselves resolutely in the hands of that power which 
 put us here ? This is not Comtism. The miserable spectre of 
 humanity is quite dc trap. He calls this the Grand Etrc, 
 doesn't he ? 
 
 ' I am so indebted to you for writing what you think about 
 these matters, that you must excuse the crude tone I take in 
 order to elicit more of the same sort. 
 
 ' Indeed I do not think of the problem without great tender- 
 ness and deep searchings of heart now. 
 
 ' I have been ill since Christmas, and a long sojourn away 
 from Davos Avas recommended. I left last Thursday, but was 
 too weak to travel fast. I meant to go to Venice after spend- 
 ing a week at Ragatz. At this latter place I heard alarming 
 news about Janet on Sunday. I came here to-day. 
 
 ' How am I to help her if she asks for help ? I have my 
 own answer : which is unlimited submission to the Supreme 
 will, resolute abstention from all imaginative efforts to forecast 
 the future, sustained belief that come what may the world is 
 not diabolically ordered. This is only what Socrates in Plato 
 told liis judges. But is this not enough to live and be a man 
 and act and die by ? 
 
 ' The impulse of curiosity I am not such a fool as to ignore, 
 and I honour every eflbrt which may render mankind clearer 
 upon the great issue. But 1 cannot divest myself of the 
 Ahnung that such solution of tlio jiioblem as our very limited 
 reason may arrive at will not greatly allect either our conduct 
 or our happiness. And at present, at all events, we have to 
 live and die without the gratification of our curiosity. 
 
 ' There is something grim in all this. But everything has 
 a grim side. The; hopeful j^oint is that the total sum of 
 
 Ji E 2
 
 420 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1887 
 
 things has so many sides which are not fri'im. This hypo- 
 thesis of immortality seems to me also to be a phase in 
 morality out of which we are passing.' 
 
 [Writing about this time to Eoden Noel, he says : ' 1 should 
 call my own attitude a spiritualised stoicism rather than 
 Calvinism ; the latter assumed inequality in the divine deal- 
 ings with man. All my notions about law and the homo- 
 geneity of the universe lead me to expect absolute equality. I 
 am therefore in the peculiar position of an optimist, who is 
 prepared to accept extinction. This enables me to feel a 
 really passionate interest in the spectacle of the universe, and 
 a firm con\'iction that its apparent injustice and inequalities 
 must have a meaning, imply a good in inoccss. At the back 
 of my thought lie. two perceptions — (1) our incapacity to 
 formulate the future and what we want in it ; (2) our right to 
 assume that manly acquiescence, combined %\dth continued 
 effort to get the utmost out of our lives by work in our own 
 way, is the best preparation for any grace that may be granted 
 to us.' 
 
 On April 7 the long-dreaded blow fell upon Symonds and 
 his family. His eldest daughter died at Davos. How this 
 event, coming in the middle of his earnest correspondence with 
 his friend, upon the profoundest of all topics, brought to light 
 the innate, passionate addiction to the barest, nakedest, purest 
 Truth, stripped of all integuments, of all that was removable, 
 of all that might be suspected as attractive ornamentation, 
 Truth as it appeared Truth to his intelligence, is clear in the 
 following words, so passionate in their icy coldness :] 
 
 ' The pain ^ of losing Janet was very great, and the 
 desiderium will remain permanent. There seems to be some- 
 thing pitiful in this extinction of a nature formed for really 
 noble life. It is extraordinary from how many unexpected 
 quarters the echo of her personality, the impression she made 
 on those who knew a little of her, comes to us. 
 
 ' You tell me that you have " no consolation to offer." 
 
 ' To Henry Sidgwick. Davos, April 14, 1887.
 
 1887 MANHOOD 421 
 
 But really I do not want any. I know that I cannot get any. 
 The loss is there, and may not be made up to me. I have 
 long since bent and schooled myself to expect no consolation 
 of the ordinary sort. And I do not think I feel less brightly 
 and less resignedly than those who are basing their hopes 
 upon unimaginable re-uniting with their loved ones, in heaven 
 only knows what planet. You go on to say that " despair in 
 our ignorance is the prompting of blind passion, not of 
 reason." I have no comprehension what "despair" is. I 
 have ceased to wish for immortality, and therefore ceased to 
 hope for it. If I am to have it, I have it at the hand of the 
 same Power which gave me mortal life. If I am not to have 
 it, is a matter of contentment to me ; for I have found that 
 all life is a struggle, and neither for myself nor my fellow- 
 creatures do I desire the prolongation of the struggle. Being 
 what we are, it is obvious that the continuation of conscious- 
 ness in us must entail a toilsome Enhvickelung. 
 
 ' So I am content to leave these things until the very end, 
 until the very new beginning if that comes, upon the knees of 
 It, of Him, who is for me responsible. 
 
 'Such a word as "despair," the counterpart of hope in 
 personal immortality, does not exist in my vocabulary. Thih 
 fact I have tested while sitting by my daughter's corpse, while 
 consigning it to the earth. And I want to utter this now, 
 because, as you observe, " the perplexities of theory have 
 strangely entwined themselves with the inexorabilities of life 
 in our correspondence." 
 
 ' The net result of my present experience is to corroborate 
 my previous opinions. It has roused in me no new longings, 
 no new regrets, laid its finger on no lurking hope and no con- 
 cealed despair. Only it has confirmed my conviction that the 
 main point in the whole position is that of Euripides, toi'c 
 'C,C)VT(u: tu cpur. Upon this point I have only the purest 
 satisfaction with regard to Janet. She attained to spiritual 
 perfection in her life. What troubles me about myself is the 
 sense of shortcomings, rendering the part I play in life less 
 worthy of man's station in the world. 
 
 'I have proved in my own person that St. Baul was wrong 
 
 s
 
 422 JOHN ADDTNGTON SYMONDS 1887 
 
 when he exclaimed, " If Christ be not risen, then are we of 
 men most wretched." We may be happy and cahn and 
 submissive to the supreme order, to Zeus and // -iriTfxo^iyi], 
 without a resurrection. I perceive that his argumenta ad 
 Iwminem in 1 Cor, xv., " Else what shall they do that are 
 baptised for the dead," &c., " If after the manner of men I 
 have fouo-ht with beasts at Ephesus," &c., are blots upon the 
 splendid inspiration of his rhetoric, appeals to human love of 
 profit. Love and good, and the desh's for righteousness, do 
 not need the bribe of immortality, and have to be reasoned 
 now upon quite difi'erent principles. 
 
 ' I would not willingly bore you Avith these observations, 
 but it is incumbent upon me to tell you how the last week of 
 severance from my first-born has acted like a test upon the 
 convictions I began to express some weeks ago.'
 
 428 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 MANHOOD — LAST YEARS AT DAVOS 
 
 Visit to England — Back at Davos — Work — Cellini's ' AntobioRraphy '• — 
 'Essays. Speculative and Suggestive' — Walks among the moun- 
 tains — Life at Davos — 'Cellini' appears, and he begins 'Carlo 
 Gozzi'- Toboggan races and a gi'eat snowfall — On Creighton's 
 ' History of the Papacy ' — A gradual failure of physical force — 
 Visit to Venice — Eeturns to Davos — 111 in the summer and autumn 
 — The Davos gymnasium — A sjiring drive in the Vorder Rhein- 
 thal — ' Autobiography ' — Journey to Venice — Returns to Davos — 
 Still unwell— Takes the influenza — Publication of 'Essays, Specu- 
 lative and Suggestive' — Proposals for the 'Life of Michel Angelo' — 
 Work upon that book — Symonds's estimate of a- literary life. 
 
 [Symonds, his wife, and youngest daughter went to England 1*^87 
 in the late spring of 1887. As a corrective for the tension of 
 life at Davos, Symonds found these English journeys most 
 salutary. ' Now that I no longer am stirred up by the bustle,' 
 he writes from Davos, ' England seems to have brought me 
 back to normal tone — the ordinary mode of being and thinking 
 proper to people of our condition and education.' 
 
 When he settled down again at Davos, in the middle of 
 July, it was to the round of Davos life which had now grown 
 habitual to him — hard work, long walks, lively interest in the 
 place and the people. 
 
 The translation of Cellini's 'Autobiography ' was occupying 
 most of his attention, but he was also beginning to put in order 
 his ' Essays, Speculative and Suggestive.'] 
 
 ' If • I had known beforehand what a trouble this transla- 
 tion of Cellini would have been, I do not think I should have 
 
 ' To H. 1'. Blown. Davos, .luly i5l, 1887.
 
 424 JOHN ADDIXGTON SYMONDS 1887 
 
 undertaken it. I have now been working pretty hard for four 
 months at the proofs, and have still one-third of the whole to 
 do. I suppose I must reckon on the whole of August being 
 devoted to it. I do not believe that such a translation is worth 
 all this labour, especially as I hear that the edition is to be 
 restricted to five hundred copies. My chief satisfaction is that 
 I am at least more accurate than Roscoe. To count his bad 
 blunders would be impossible. 
 
 ' I think I told you that I have begun some Essays on the 
 Principles of Art and Criticism. These I can push forward 
 when there are no proofs. I have already got four pretty well 
 finished, viz. Realism and Idealism ; The Model ; Beauty, 
 Composition, Expression, Characterisation ; On the Application 
 of Evolutionary Ideas to the Study of Art and Literature. 
 Then there is another on The Validity of Nature-Myth and 
 Allegory, and another on Arnold's paradox, "Poetry is a 
 Criticism of Life," ready. I am thinking of a short study on 
 Landscape, and another on Democratic Art, in which I shall 
 try to say my say about the lines for future art-work opened 
 out by Whitman. I am also vaguely planning one on Hybrids, 
 which might, I think, be curious. 
 
 ' We had a very violent thunderstorm on Friday evening, 
 the finest I have ever known here. The rain fell in volumes ; 
 and suddenly, in the middle of the uproar, a great noise made 
 itself felt — like a dozen express trains tearing through a deep 
 cutting. We could hear some obviously human shrieks also. 
 What they call a Rilfe or sudden swelling of the torrent from 
 the Jacobshorn, which comes down above Huldi, the carpen- 
 ter's Avorkshop, had taken place. Usually this is a thin thread 
 of water. But now it was bringing down thousands of tons of 
 rock per minute. I went to examine the scene this morning, 
 and saw some really incredibly huge blocks of granite which 
 the miserable little rivulet had brought from above. It only 
 lasted fifteen minutes. But in that time many acres of grass- 
 land were ruined, and several homesteads inundated. 
 
 ' I have just been to hear a sermon in the Davos Church. 
 They have a new clergyman, to go to listen to whom is now 
 the fashion among the young men. He preached on the king-
 
 1887 MAXHOOD 425 
 
 dom of God ; implied that Christ was a man ; said that you 
 could not be sure of Christ's own words from the contradictory 
 statements of the Gospels ; denounced the theory of the 
 Church ; poured contempt upon Bibliolatry. I never heard 
 such a bombshell of Rationalism— very eloquently expressed 
 too. Curiously enough, the Davos peasants are keen on the 
 new theology. I heard of this clergyman by accident at a 
 Wirthschaft, where the whole conversation turned upon his 
 definition of the Deity. I used to imagine that the young men 
 at least cared about none of these things. It appears now that 
 they did not care about the humdrum orthodoxy of their 
 previous teachers.' 
 
 ' On ' Monday I gave myself a holiday by taking a new Avalk. 
 It was the ascent of a mountain called " Pischa," 9,300 feet, 
 which rises from the Fluela Thai, S.E., and connnands a finer 
 view, in my opinion, than the Schwartzhorn, since by its 
 position the whole Landwasser valley, as far as the Julier and 
 Schyn, is surveyed, together with Prattigau ; and the huge 
 pyramidal peaks of the Silvretta group are seen immediately 
 in front. From this peak we scrambled down very rocky 
 places to the head of the Yereina Thai, where a Club-hut has 
 just been built in a most romantic place — the meeting of four 
 vales, with roaring cataracts pouring down into a tangle of 
 dwarf pine. Then to Klosters — -about three and a half 
 hours' descent, rapid walking. The whole expedition had 
 more of the picturesque and romantic than is common in these 
 hills ; and, though long, it was not difficult. I was out 
 twelve hours ; nine hours pretty hard walking, the rest divided 
 between a rest on the peak and a rest in the Club-hut. 
 
 ' It does me good morally to take a walk of this sort — 
 I mean it keeps my sense of living up ; and I do not think it 
 hurts me physically, though I got a slight chill from being 
 wetted by a storm of rain. 
 
 * I have made friends with a guide at Klosters called Guler, 
 whom I like.' 
 
 ' To H, F. Brown. Davos, September 14, 1B87.
 
 420 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1887 
 
 ' I ' told you in iny last letter that I was thinking of an 
 excursion into the Averserthal. This is what I have done now ; 
 and it has quite repaid me. Without going into details of 
 description I will say that I have never seen anything in the 
 way of high river scenery to equal this. The Averser Khein 
 beats the Sesia and the Mastalone hollow, and has long odds 
 against the streams of the Dolomites, which I have always 
 thought enchanting. It has a tremendous volume of the purest 
 azure water, which sometimes hides itself in cembra- tufted 
 gorges, sometimes swims through grassy meadows with wide 
 swirling curves that hollow out the turfy margin to their liking, 
 sometimes carves a narrow monumental way through solid 
 marble pure as Parian or Pentelican, sometimes falls thun- 
 dering in cataracts encircled with a dozen changeful rainbows, 
 sometimes glides deep and solemn in dark pools, which make one 
 dream of death and long to dive in them and find the mystery. 
 
 ' It is a long valley — forty kilometres. I had not thought 
 that this Canton held anything so highly poetical. And 
 tourists have not touched it. I slept with my guide in a room 
 which held the Archives of the valley in one chest, and had the 
 Eucharistic vessels of ancient pewter on a window-sill. There 
 was nothing to eat but eggs and bread. This, however, signi- 
 fied little. 
 
 ' Well, I will not tell you more of Avers. It is enough 
 to have mentioned the stream, and to that deity I sacrifice.' 
 
 [Cellini was finished, and in the interval before it appeared 
 Symonds took a journey to Venice with his daughter Margaret, 
 in the month of October. The immediate success of the 
 ' Cellini ' greatly pleased him, and he was soon embarked upon 
 the translation of another series of Memoirs, those of Carlo 
 Gozzi. Though he really enjoyed the study of decadent 
 Venetian life, he did not escape the chill of authorship, which 
 he expresses thus :] 
 
 1888 ' Something ^ has happened to me lately, whether temporary 
 
 or permanent remains to be seen, which has reduced my vitality 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, Sept. 22, 1887. 
 ■ To the same, Davos, .Jan. 21, 1888,
 
 1888 MANHOOD 427 
 
 and indiiced a sort of somnolence by no means natural. 
 However, without somnambulising upon paper, the upshot is 
 that I am uneasy on reflecting, in a wakefiil interval, how 
 much time has elapsed since I wrote you a letter, and how you 
 may have interpreted my inattention. 
 
 * I am doing no good in my literary work. I believe this is 
 the secret, or a secret, of my state. Gozzi will not do. And 
 yet I do not see my way to getting out of Gozzi. Excellent to 
 read through rapidly for a student of roha italiana, his IMemoirs 
 are hardly worth translating, and their interest depends upon 
 such tri^•ialities — the decadence of Venetian society in a 
 putrid mass of political corruption, Brummagem French philo- 
 sophy aped by Italians with no revolutionary force inside them, 
 prostitution, theatrical cabals, vain efforts to rehabilitate Dante 
 in the city of Casanova, Baftb, and the Doge Renier, bad style, 
 bad morals, effeminacy, hypocrisy, sloth, dappocagcjinc of every 
 sort— with an odd unsympathetic bastard between Don Quixote 
 and a pettifogging attorney, a man of cramped genius and of 
 respectable sentiments turned sour, to serve as central figure — 
 all this is so irrelevant to the main current of world-history, so 
 bizarre, so involved in masses of petty details which have lost 
 the accent of humanity, that I despair of making anything out 
 of my work. And yet I am engaged. 
 
 ' Basta ! I enjoyed the visits of A. Sidgwick and Dakyns 
 three weeks. But it was a tiring time, from the vast amount 
 of talk. And there is all the tobogganing business afloat now : 
 squabbles, petty arrangements, &c., &c. Every scrap of the 
 small affair comes eventually to this house. Since I began 
 this letter I have had a 'solemn deputation to attend to from 
 the natives of Clavadel, where we shall run the International 
 Race, intimating that, unless their particular demands are 
 met, they mean to shut the road up ; and the race is next 
 Thursday.' 
 
 ' Our ' luck in tol)ogganing has been indeed great. We 
 arranged to hold the International Race at Clavadel, providing 
 a mile course, and running two heats. This was fixed for 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, Jan. 28, 1888.
 
 428 JOHN ADDINGTOX SYMONDS 1888 
 
 10 A.M. on the 26th, and thirty-two competitors of all sorts 
 and nations entered. The usual public luncheon for one 
 hundred and twenty people was ordered in the Rathhaus. I 
 saw on the morning of the race by my barometer, and a strange 
 look in the sky, that the weather would change. However, we 
 had it fine up to 1.30, when the race was at last over — fancy 
 how long ! And I was standing all that while upon the snow, 
 helping to record the time, identify the racers, and keep the 
 course clear. 
 
 ' Then a furious wind swept down the valley, tearing the 
 snow from the forests and house-roofs, and tossing a tempest 
 of finely powdered snow-sand up into the clear blue sky against 
 the blazing noonday sun — a striking and splendid sight, as the 
 swirl of snow shifted, and took various effects of light, 
 
 ' The race was a very good one. An American, called Child, 
 who rides head-foremost on a flat toboggan, came in first, 
 beating two old racers. Freeman and Austin equal, by three 
 seconds, while Minsch, ^ who came on purpose from Montreux, 
 where I have placed him to learn French, ran in fourth at 
 another interval of five seconds. I am always happy when 
 this race and all that belongs to it is well over. On Thursday 
 I did not get home till seven, having started in the morning at 
 nine, and never stopped talking all the time ; and then I had 
 to entertain here until midnight. Such a day. 
 
 ' As President of the Club, known alike to English and 
 Swiss, everything falls eventually on my shoulders, and I am 
 held responsible for anything which may go wrong. I have 
 resigned the post, and trust that my resignation will be 
 accepted. 
 
 ' But about our luck ; if the weather had changed two hours 
 earlier, the whole thing would have come to grief. And the 
 valley is in such a state now, that no running will be possible 
 for days, weeks perhaps. The higher passes are blocked, Fluela 
 impassable, and those dreadful creatures, "dust-avalanches," 
 Staub-lavinen, playing at will upon the mountains. 
 
 ' The University of Oxford has chosen me as one of its 
 
 ' A native of Klosters, in whose career Symoncls interested himself. 
 He is now condnctor in the postal service.
 
 1888 MANHOOD 4:29 
 
 three delegates to Bologna, for the festival which begins on 
 June 13, to celebrate the eleventh centenary of that University. 
 I doubt whether I shall accept. It is risky to think of anything 
 so late in the summer.' 
 
 ' It ^ began to snow last Saturday at 2.30 p.m., and it has 
 been snowing almost incessantly since then. Our only safe 
 communication with the rest of the world is by the Priittigau. 
 Avalanches are streaming down both sides of the valley below 
 Frauenkirch. One man was killed on the road near Glaris 
 yesterday ; another, whom I know, was blown by the blast 
 of an avalanche from the road near Tschuggen on the Fluela, 
 right across the stream to the other side of the valley, and then 
 buried in the torrent of snow which followed him. It is very 
 difhcult to get out of our house, though I have three men 
 always working, cutting us out. And I begin to feel uneasy 
 about the masses of snow upon the Schiahorn right above our 
 heads. If the snow does not stop, I think seriously of 
 migrating to Hotel Buol to-morrow ; that house is in a safer 
 place than ours. This state of things does not agree with 
 mental activity. I am stupefied merely by gazing at the 
 perpetual whirl of snow-flakes, the gradual ascent of snow-walls 
 round me, and the recurrent noise of snow descending with 
 a heavy thud from the house-roof. 
 
 'I always wanted to see a "great snow" here; and now 
 I have my wish, so I ought not to grumble. There has been 
 nothing like it since I came in 1877. 
 
 'I wonder what part Lord Salisbury is playing in the 
 European crisis. The suspense is terrible, something like the 
 expectation of a " Staub-Lavine " from the Schiahorn.' 
 
 ' . . . I ^ see that you and 1 fully agree about Creighton. 
 The book has been one of absorbing interest to me, not only in 
 these last two volumes, but also in the first couple. I think it 
 a really great book, which does honour to the school of English 
 historians. The grasp of the whole field shown in his treat- 
 ment, his power of turning from a Pope in Rome to the same 
 
 ' To H. ¥. Brown. Davos, Feb. 9, 1H8H. 
 ■■' To the biime. Davoa, Feb. 29, 1888.
 
 430 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1888 
 
 Pope in Europe, is very remarkable. And I think that we may 
 in part ascribe his rehabilitation of men like Sixtus IV. and 
 Alexander VI. to his feeling that their personal conduct ought 
 to be reduced to scale with their cosmopolitan importance. 
 Here, however, I should make two observations. One is, that 
 their personal behaviour was decisive in the germination and 
 development of Reforming Teutonic antagonism, and that 
 therefore the main problem of his book becomes more difficult 
 to solve in proportion as he whitewashes the protagonists, the 
 Popes. The second is, that he has hitherto overlooked a large 
 sphere of Pontifical activity : e.g. Sixtus IV. 's part in the 
 Spanish treatment of Jews and Moors, and Alexander's part in 
 the formation of what became the Index Expurgatorius, and 
 with it the suppression of free thought in Catholic kingdoms. 
 He alludes to these points, but so faintly that the anomaly 
 of the Papacy, that anomaly which justified the insurgence 
 of Reform and liberal science, and brought about the Catholic 
 Reaction in its historical form, is unexplained. 
 
 'I look forward with much interest to the next portion 
 of his work, when we shall see how he solves the problem 
 of the Reformation after having weakened the old lines of 
 explanation. I doubt not but that he will be able to state the 
 phenomenon by using forces extant in Germany which were 
 independent of Papal scandals. 
 
 ' I am very dull, brain -tired, engaged in correspondence 
 of all sorts. An English D.D. writes to consult me about the 
 ways of reconciling Providence and Natural Law. Is not that 
 odd ? This is only one among many instances of corre- 
 spondence which has fallen on me through my article in the 
 July " Fortnightly." ' 
 
 [In two phrases of the letters just quoted — ' something has 
 happened to me lately, whether temporary or permanent 
 remains to be seen, which has reduced my vitality and induced 
 a sort of somnolence,' and ' I am very brain-tired ' — seem, 
 regarded in the light of what I subsequently knew, to be 
 indicative of a gradual diminution of physical force which set 
 
 ' ' On the Pioi'iess of Thought in our own time.'
 
 1888 MANHOOD 431 
 
 in now and continued to the end. The spiritual activity never 
 diminished, the intellectual flame burned brighter and brighter, 
 the interest in all the varied relations of friendship and 
 sympathy with human beings grew more vivid and full as 
 the end approached. His published work alone would be 
 sufficient to prove this : ' Essays, Speculative and Suggestive ' ; 
 'Michael Angelo ' ; the elaborate ' Study of Walt Whitman,' 
 into whose short compass he has poured so much of his life, 
 thought, and philosophy. But more than this, certain remarks 
 in letters to his intimate friends seem to show that he was 
 himself conscious of the movement which was taking place. 
 Some time later, it is true, but in the spirit of reflection upon 
 the past, he writes :] 
 
 ' I hope to be in England about two months. Short time 
 enough, considering all I ought to do^desire to do — in it. 
 With me life burns ever more intense, as my real strength 
 wanes and my days decrease. It seems to me sometimes 
 awful — the pace at Avhich I live in feeling — inversely to the 
 pace at which myself is ebbing to annihilation. 
 
 ' I shall have a great deal to say to you if only it can 
 be said. I never seem to have lived until quite lately ; and 
 just when the times are out of joint for self-externalising life, 
 I seem drawn into it. It is true I go on writing books, and 
 even poems. But literature has long since lost for me reality 
 of interest. One reads certainly, and copious reading fills the 
 vacuum which remains when feeling and sensation are abeyant.' 
 
 [The extraordinary snowfall of the winter of 1887-88 
 fascinated Symonds's imagination. He refers to it again and 
 again in his letters, and he eventually worked the subject out 
 in an Essay on Avalanches, which was published in ' Our Life 
 in the Swiss Highlands,' the joint work of himself and his 
 daughter Margaret, who was so often her father's companion 
 on his journeys, and his helper in his studies. The spring 
 outing to Venice led them over several of the passes, and 
 allowed Symonds to see much that had taken place during 
 this memorable winter.]
 
 432 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1888 
 
 ' Madge ' and I settled finally to leave Davos alone. We 
 had a tremendous journey over -Julier and Maloja, but arrived 
 here safely yesterday. I telegraphed to you, but was so stupid 
 that I did not also write. I hope, however, that this will 
 arrive before we do. 
 
 ' I wish I could tell you something of our journey. It was 
 in many respects very impressive. The descent from the top 
 of the Julier to Silvaplana in perfect darkness and a blinding 
 snowstorm, with whirling drift and the road buried, was 
 particularly so. The postillion at one point said : " We must 
 now trust to the horse, and if he does not find the road, as ist 
 mit WIS 2om — it is over with us." The horse did find the way, 
 pausing, feeling each step with his hoof, putting his nose down 
 to smell, sometimes hardly stirring from the spot, and some- 
 times breaking into a trot for a few minutes. His bells were 
 taken off for fear of avalanches. The snow is so deep up there 
 that you can touch the telegraph wires with your fingers. 
 They made the most hideous shrieks in the wind close to our 
 ears, like the voices of Banshees and wailing women, with 
 a curse in them. 
 
 ' We are resting here to-day. This place, which I always 
 admire, looks very beautiful in the stormy April sunlight.' 
 
 ' I '^ do not want to speak about my own psychological 
 circumstances, more than, in a parenthesis, to observe that life 
 at Davos has become for me a permanent sort of tunnel. 
 When friends come there, as A. and G. did last Christmas, I do 
 not think they notice this, because they polarise and externalise 
 me by their own being. But when friends are not there, I live 
 in the worst sort of tunnel I know, which is the burrowed 
 gallery in the middle of a marble-hard avalanche, fifty feet 
 beneath the frozen air of Alpine winter in a stony ravine. 
 
 ' Well, I return from this parenthesis to your letter of 
 April 8. What you proceed to say there is very deeply 
 interesting, and I have been thinking about it all along. I am 
 sure that I can contribute nothing to the solution, feeling 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Chiavenna, April 7, 1888. 
 
 '' To Henry Sidgwick. Venice, 5G0 Zattere, May 11, 1888.
 
 1888 MANHOOD 433 
 
 confident that you have exhausted every pro and con of the 
 problem as it appears to you. But, frankly, it does not appear 
 to my mind as a problem. The object is to arrive at truth, if 
 that can be arrived at ; at any rate to search after it. A 
 negative result may be discouriiging and disappointing, though 
 I for one do not find it so. I am so sure that sooner or later 
 morality must be based upon analysis of the growth to-us-ward 
 of human opinions and institutions, must enter the sphere of 
 evolutionary philosophy and discover principles a posteriori, 
 that it seems to me a pity for a thinker of authority not to 
 accept and proclaim this. 
 
 * But here, probably, we come to a radical difference of 
 opinion, as I think we did about a year ago, when I contended 
 that the immortality of the soul was not a necessary postulate 
 for moral science, even though in course of time we should 
 obtain the certainty of this, and ethics gain the force which 
 comes from the conception. " Magna est Veritas, et prj^valebit." 
 Surely the truth at present is, that while the moral law is a 
 fact persistent under all its human variations, we cannot 
 account for the fact any more than we can account for our 
 existence. If we do not know w^hy we are, how can we expect 
 to know why we difterentiate our behaviour as right and 
 wrong ? All we ought to expect is that we should learn how 
 we exist and how we differentiate. 
 
 ' I have been staying during the last five weeks with Madge 
 at Venice, in an apartment of my friend H. F. Brown's house, 
 which I have taken for some years. It is a pleasant change 
 from the terribly severe winter in Graubiinden, when we were 
 literally drowned in snow. I hope to be able ere long to give 
 an extended account of this great snow, and of the play of the. 
 avalanches, which exceeds anything I had imagined. I kept well 
 through the winter, and took many driving journeys, in order 
 to see those dreary wildernesses and ruins caused by nature in 
 her wildest, cruellest moods. Now, though I enjoy the colour 
 and the vault of heaven above these waters, I am not good for 
 much in health.' 
 
 [That Symonds and his daughter enjoyed Venice and the 
 
 V V
 
 434 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMOXDS 1888 
 
 expeditions to Asolo, Marostica, the Euganean hills, which 
 they made during the remarkably fine months of April and 
 May, seems clear from such phrases as these, which occur in 
 his correspondence :] 
 
 ' I do not know whether it can be good to be mentally and 
 morally starved. But I do know that, if people who are worth 
 anything have been starved so, their sudden invitation to a full, 
 refined, passionate and sympathetic banquet of the most varied 
 delights, exercises a very peculiar influence. 
 
 ' We are neither of us apt to take things elegiacally, or to 
 ignore the substantial advantages of any situation in which we 
 find ourselves. The extraordinary cleanliness and comfort of 
 our little house, the splendid air and water, the resuscitated 
 energy communicated by the climate — Aveigh with us, and are 
 appreciated ; biit we know that we want something else, some- 
 thing which we had at Venice.' 
 
 ' I have been doing the most incongruous of things since I 
 arrived here [Davos, June 13, 1888] last Friday. After setthng 
 my affairs, which you know takes some time after a nine weeks' 
 absence, I have been writing the history of last winter's 
 avalanches. 
 
 ' I can tell you that this is precious difiicult to do. You 
 have to paint with a palette on which there are no colours — 
 pure grisaille — absolute monotony. And yet I think I have 
 succeeded ; and therefore I suppose I shall not get my essay 
 printed. 
 
 ' It is funny, coming back from that variegated life in 
 Venice into the fresh beauty of the Alps — and they are quite 
 coquettishly attired this early summer ; it is funny that a man 
 should sit down and sweat his brains out over a description of 
 the grim ascetic winter, which is past. I think this shows — 
 and perhaps you will agree with me — that, in the long run, we 
 really love the sternest things in life best. They seem to cling 
 to us, and wrap us round, and haunt us. The rest we take and 
 leave, as recreation prompts. Facile ephemeral pleasures — 
 deep penetrating sadnesses.
 
 1888 MANHOOD 435 
 
 ' I am not reconciled yet to Yeltliner Wein. I fear that 
 the various facile vintages, Verona, Valpolicella, Venosa — these 
 many V's are good — have seduced me. Yet there is a V in 
 the Valtellina, and a V in Venice, which is innocent of vint- 
 ages. So perhaps I shall hecome reconciled to my Veltliner 
 after all. 
 
 ' But I have played on the letter V enough, and I ask you 
 to notice that I am now using the Fabbriano paper (Campo 
 S. Luca) which you recommended. I like it greatly, and shall 
 see to getting a supply here. Eighty of these pages have gone 
 into the article upon the avalanches. Good gracious, what a 
 subject ! Yet I flatter myself that I am about the first to 
 polish that rough diamond.' 
 
 [The summer of 1888 proved excessively wet, owing, no 
 doubt, to the previous heavy snowfall. The effect on Symonds 
 was decidedly bad ; it kept him indoors employed on work, 
 and induced an attack of that dipsychia which resulted as a 
 reaction from intellectual labour.] 
 
 ' I hoped to spend this morning (Sept. 25) on the 
 Schwartzhorn. It has turned out one of the worst days of all 
 this dismal summer. So I am here at Am Hof, and have been 
 making acquaintance with a young Russian, instead of sweeping 
 the horizons of the Alps. 
 
 ' I finished my Essay on Elizabethan and Victorian Poetry. 
 What it will be like, under the conditions of its composition. 
 Heaven only knows, 
 
 ' One brain is more than one man ought to have to put up 
 with. But a couple of brains, pulhng in different directions, 
 such as I possess at present, is distracting.' 
 
 ' I am afraid [October 2] I must have disgusted you with 
 the flippancy of my last letters. The fact is, I was falling ill. 
 The usual thing happened. 1. Too much writing for a long 
 space of time — Cellini, the Essays, Gozzi, the Essay on 
 Victorian Poetry. 2. Too much sitting up and talking with 
 Jowett and you ; I cannot fill my friends' Leyden jars, if I do 
 so, as you say, without a great expenditure. 8. A super- 
 
 1' i.\2
 
 436 JOHN AUDINGTON SYMONDS 1888 
 
 excitability of emotions, a physical restlessness, attaching itself 
 to this or that object, as a first result of failing energy.* 
 
 ' I have been unfortunate this summer. The weather 
 prevented me from getting proper air and exercise. If I could 
 have taken those mountain walks with Guler I had planned, 
 to explore the Silvretta glacier and the valleys of the upper 
 Vorarlberg, I should have kept my health. 
 
 * The weather is terribly against me. It storms and rains 
 perpetually, so that I cannot get out enough, and always run a 
 risk when I do so.' 
 
 ' I have chosen the strongest hour of my day to write this, 
 and here is the result. Go some times on credit with me. I 
 must emerge. But it is difficult. I cannot put myself just 
 now into the C major key of this life, in which you are living. 
 It is serious, this physical, mental, spiritual struggle of the 
 nervously strong man at odds with malady. People think — I 
 dare say you think — that I yield too easily to passing illness, 
 and flit away hypochondriacally from Venice or from London. 
 No, no, no.' 
 
 ' I must ' write to you one line to-night to send you my 
 wishes for Christmas. Something this year makes me think 
 of the old years in our childhood, when we used to go with 
 Sophie into Leigh Woods and bring back loads of ivy for 
 wreaths. It is so dififerent here. My little Katherine collects 
 frozen moss in small quantities from the roots of trees where 
 the snow is not too deep — to make a church decoration. 
 
 ' At any rate, I am thinking of you now. And I want to 
 thank you for the book of Tom's life, which found me in 
 Venice. I read the biography with very great interest, and it 
 left upon my mind the sense of having been extremely well 
 done — as well as pains, and love, and sympathy with his high 
 aims and noble character, could do it. Yet the man is not 
 there. He cannot be there. Nothing which we can write about 
 anybody is worth much. It is certainly worth no more than 
 a copperplate engra\dng from the live man's face we knew — 
 
 ' To his sister Charlotte. Davos, December 20, 1888.
 
 1888 MANHOOD 437 
 
 and that is better than a staring photograph. (That is not 
 true. One of the things that I love best here is Tom's face 
 in the large photograph you gave us. I often go to this face 
 in my troubles.) 
 
 * The older I get, and the more I learn to know folk, the 
 more I feel it is not what a man thinks about the universe, 
 and poUtics and art and social questions, and all the rest of 
 such matters, which signifies — but what we are, personally are ; 
 that is the great fact. And that is always incommunicable. 
 That is how we touch the people whom we mould in life unto 
 our likeness. And that, the real essential man, lives onward 
 in a way which no species of photogravure or copperplate 
 engraving in words will manifest. 
 
 ' What was Christ, as an individuality, I wonder ? We 
 know well what has been made of His reported Avords, and of 
 the loA'ing portraits drawn by His disciples. 
 
 ' I have been very ill since I came back from Venice at the 
 end of November. If you had been here, I should have liked 
 to talk to you about my state of health. It is a case of 
 overwrought nerves and painful disturbance of the ordinary 
 thought-functions. I do not think it can be written about 
 with any profit. And I do not expect much from doctoring ; 
 more from self-discipline. Good-night, dearest sister. — Ever 
 yours. 
 
 ' P.S. — In this letter I want to add a word of Christmas 
 greetings to my dear Auntie. I am thinking to-night of our 
 old Clifton home. I see and feel and even smell the winter 
 there — and am so far away from England. Give her my best 
 love, and tell her that the thought of England and the past 
 is always for me connected with a thousand memories of her. 
 I hope for her many years of happy life.' 
 
 * I must ' write, lest you should think I am more actually i889 
 dead than I really am. Time has become for me a category 
 
 of no value whatsoever. I gain in this life a relative concep- 
 tion of life in the eternities. I don't want to discourse. So I 
 will bind myself down to facts. 
 
 ' To II. F. Ui-own. Diivos, Feb. IC, I881t.
 
 488 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1889 
 
 ' We had a long visit from Cadogan, which was in all ways 
 pleasant. He is a good fellow, enjoyed every minute of his 
 time here, made us feel that he did so, which is a great thing 
 in guests, and let me learn him very intimately. 
 
 ' I have been writing, with immense toil and grief, four 
 essays upon Style. I don't know what devil has got possession 
 of my own style and dried its Avells up. 
 
 * Just now I am negotiating the transfer of a gymnasium, 
 which I have helped to build here, into the hands of the 
 Commune. I have offered the sum of 10,000 francs, as a free 
 gift, in order to effect the consolidation of the debts and other 
 financial interests involved. This keeps me up to the chin in 
 small transactions, and I discover how difficult it is to spend 
 money generously and yet effectively. That I knew before. But 
 I did not anticipate quite the same rebuffs as 1 am experien- 
 cing now. Yet I hope to bring affairs to a right conclusion. 
 Only I never got rid of -iOOl. with more diplomacy and more 
 management than I am doing now. I doubt whether anybody 
 ever Hung so much money away, so virtuously, and so 
 irksomely. All this makes me appreciate the grit and pride 
 of my beloved Graubiindeners. I love this people for the 
 obstacles they put before me ; and I hope they will appreciate 
 what I am doing, when they fully comprehend my scope. 
 These are the main facts of the moment. 
 
 ' There are other things beside what I have written of — 
 longings, experiences, sympathies with my growing children, 
 anxieties about Miss North, readings in books, correspond- 
 ences with the four quarters of the globe. But the whole 
 is got mixed up for me and blurred with Maya. I have not 
 recovered, and perhaps shall never recover, from four months 
 ago. — Yours ever, so xvic so.' 
 
 [As a relief and a change, Symonds took a sledging drive 
 with his daughter Margaret, which he enjoyed, though his 
 constitution showed less elasticity for recovery than was usual 
 with him.] 
 
 ' Madge ^ and I had a good time in the Vorder Rheinthal 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown, March 3, 1889.
 
 I 
 
 1889 MANHOOD 439 
 
 We drove about incessantly in sledges for seven days. Both 
 came back to Davos, and had severe colds on our arrival. 
 I am still sunk below the surface of vitality in a deep sea of 
 cold. 
 
 ' But, such is the oddness of man's nature, I have chosen 
 this particular moment to begin a new hterary work of the 
 utmost importance — my " Autobiography " — and at the same 
 time I am overwhelmed with Gozzi proofs, which keep pour- 
 ing in by every post, so that I have to spend at least four 
 hours a day upon theuj, and look forward to a speedy comple- 
 tion of the printing. I shall be glad when it is done. My 
 heart was never in that subject. And yet I think it is a 
 workmanly performance. The book will be about eight 
 hundred pages, of which two hundred pages are original 
 essays, the rest translation of Gozzi's " Memoirs." 
 
 ' God bless you, dear friend. Looking to times less dark 
 and less confused than these, which overwhelm me with 
 innumerable cares and miseries of health, I am your ever 
 lo\ing. 
 
 'P.S. — I have not yet persuaded the Gcmcinclc to accept 
 my 10,000 francs.' 
 
 ' Gozzi ^ has been literally pouring. Torrents of proofs 
 come daily. I worked literally ten hours at them yesterday, 
 and have just had another bout of three hours this morning. 
 The result is that the book is nearly all in print. There only 
 remain some pages of my continuation of the life and an essay 
 on Longhi to complete it. The whole will be longer, I think, 
 than Cellini. 
 
 ' I have also had a good deal of business about my donation 
 to the Commune. At last I believe that I shall force my 400/. 
 down their throat, and put them thereby into the position of 
 buying an excellent gymnasium, which cost over 1,000/. to 
 Ijuild, for the comparatively small outlay of 160/. 
 
 ' I cannot quite understand, and am rather mortified by, 
 their reluctance to accept my offer. My object was to secure 
 
 ' To H. 1''. Brown. Davob, Muich 21, 188'.J.
 
 440 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1889 
 
 the gymnasium for the public, and at the same time to retain 
 for the Turnverein their right of using it, while I relieved the 
 latter of a serious debt. Their debt amounts to 14,000 francs. 
 I offer 10,000, on condition the Gemclnde discharges the 
 balance of 4,000, by which means the building becomes the 
 property of the Gemeinde, with rights of use reserved for the 
 Verein. 
 
 ' There was a three hours' meeting at the Rathhaus yester- 
 day about it ; and now a plan, arranged between the members 
 of the Council of the Commune, the managers of the Verein, 
 and myself, will be submitted to the Landsgemeinde, or 
 general assembly of the burghers of Davos. 
 
 ' In the interval of other things, I have written a good deal 
 of Autobiography. I should like to talk to you about my plan, 
 and I vdll certainly bring the work to Venice if I come. 
 
 ' I am [April 3] writing away at my Autobiography, and 
 have reached the age of thirteen. It is interesting work, but 
 I see that it tends ad infinitum, and that it will be hardly fit 
 to publish. 
 
 ' On the eve of departing [April 10] from Davos, if spring 
 storms permit, across the dreary and now dilapidated Fluela 
 snow-road, my thoughts turn to you. 
 
 ' All this winter my health has been very queer. It is one 
 of the reasons why I have corresponded with you infrequently 
 and reticently. And just now I feel upon the brink of an 
 absolute collapse. A diurnal drive of from eight to twelve 
 hours in fine scenery ought to do me good. 
 
 ' The Autobiography has been going on. I have written a 
 decent octavo volume, and got down to my nineteenth year, 
 rather beyond it. According to my conception of such a work, 
 the years of growth are the most important, and need the most 
 elaborate analysis. But if I do not fling the whole thing 
 aside, I see my opportunity for " panning out " considerably 
 de omnibus rehus in the future. It is a fascinating canvas, 
 this of a Lebensschilderung, for a man who has been 
 hitherto so reticent in writing, and who is so naturally egotis- 
 tical and personal as I am. Heaven knows what will come of 
 it, and what will be done with it.'
 
 1889 MANHOOD 441 
 
 [Symonds and his wife started for Venice on April 12, and 
 ^\^th this journey he resumed his habit of keeping a full and 
 elaborate diary, a habit which had been partially abandoned 
 under the pressure of much writing at Davos, more especially 
 of the Autobiography. This new Diary differs greatly in 
 quality from the earlier journals. It is a minute record, not 
 of emotions, not of spiritual moods, but of external facts. We 
 have already seen how interest in the concrete had gradually 
 assumed the place in Symonds's mind once occupied by specu- 
 lations in the abstract ; and that important change of psychical 
 attitude reveals itself now in the new Diary, in its style, for 
 which ' Essays, Speculative and Suggestive,' as well as the 
 ' Autobiography,' had been preparing the way. The Diary opens 
 Avith a dangerous adventure on the Fluela Pass :] 
 
 AjJril 12, 1889. — After some days of indecision, Catherine 
 and I left Davos this morning for Siis by the Fluela. It was 
 misty, yet I thought with the promise of a fine day in it. A 
 large post and four passengers, and six luggage sledges, with 
 only four drivers to all the ten horses. We were in the con- 
 ductor's sledge. Up to the Hospiz things went well, and the 
 heat was absolutely awful. It burned more than I ever felt it 
 burn, except upon the neve of a glacier in midsummer. A 
 splendid liquid sky, full of the spring, seeming to portend 
 storm. The road to Siis combines all the dangers of an 
 Alpine road^avalanches, upsettings, falling stones ; and they 
 were all imminent to-day. When the first four sledges 
 plunged into the great gallery I felt comparatively safe, but 
 the rest did not arrive. After about ten minutes a fifth 
 horse came plunging down the dark passage over the ice, with 
 a pack-sledge and no driver. When he reached our train, he 
 kept whinnying, neighing, and looking back as though to tell 
 us that something had happened. We waited another five 
 minutes, and still the rest did not arrive. The conductor had 
 sent the chief postillion back. He could not leave the five 
 horses alone in the tunnel — yet he was now anxious. Accord- 
 ingly, I proposed to run Ijack and sec what had happened. 
 The tunnel was pilch dark and as slippery as glass. It took me
 
 442 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1889 
 
 some time to slip along with my gouties on.' When I 
 emerged into the blaze of sunlight and snow, I saw nothing at 
 first ; then met Herr Lendi of Davos Dorfli walking to me. 
 One of the sledges (with a driver) had been upset. The two 
 passengers, a man and woman, and the postillion, had all been 
 flung over a wall on to snow and rocks, and had fallen and 
 rolled about fifty feet down the steep place. The woman was 
 badly cut about the head ; the young man, a Swiss, had 
 sprained his hand ; the postillion was all right. 
 
 ' Fortunately,' added Lendi, ' the horses and sledges 
 remained above the wall, else they would all have been smashed 
 together.' I saAV the girl, dazed and faint, and the place where 
 she had fallen ; then ran back to tell the conductor. But it 
 was bad going in that tunnel with my gutta-percha shoes, and 
 soon I heard the rest of the sledges come thundering into the 
 pitch dark passage. I tried to keep close to a wall, and in 
 moving shufflingly onward as fast as I could go, fell once 
 heavily upon the rock and ice, bruising my right arm and loins. 
 I did not think much of it at the time, being eager to get 
 to my own sledge before the rest of the train arrived. 
 
 I ought to mention the curious optical phenomenon in this 
 black gallery — black because fallen avalanches had stuffed up 
 all its apertures with snow. On entering it, with eyes dazzled 
 by the brilliance of the outer day, any object which caught 
 a reflex of light from behind looked as green as emerald or 
 sun-illuminated lake-water. In the middle there was no colour, 
 nothing but night. Toward the end, when light again caught 
 icicles and snow-heaps from the furthermost opening, these 
 points shone bright crimson, as though a score of red Bengal 
 lights had been lighted far ahead. 
 
 We reached Siis without further accidents. There, while I 
 was talking to Herr Patt, I found that I had lost a ring from 
 my watch-chain, to which was hung these objects — 1, funeral 
 gold ring of John Symonds, my great-grandfather ; 2, alliance 
 ring of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother Sykes, two 
 clasped hands opening, one heart inside ; 3, a ring belonging 
 
 ' ' Gouties ' are felt and gutta-percha shoes, much worn at Davos and 
 in the Engadine.
 
 1889 MANHOOD 44.'] 
 
 to Admiral Sykes;, with the name of his friend Captain 
 Gathorne ; 4, my father's guard-ring ; 5, my seal ring of 
 bloodstone engraved with the crests of Symonds and Sykes ; 
 
 6, my gondolier's ring engraved with the arms of Symonds ; 
 
 7, a Napoleon ' Rep. Fr.' 1848 ; 8, a cow-bell given me by Patt. 
 
 Drove up Engadine in diligence to Samaden. Reached 
 it at 7. 
 
 Aijril 13. — Up at 4. On at 4.50 in diligence to Silvaplaua. 
 There changed to sledges, in which we drove over Maloja 
 to the wood beyond Casaccia. Then changed to diligence 
 again, and reached Chiavennaat noon. A glorious spring day, 
 very cold at first, so that beards and faces, Sec, were frosted 
 over. But the sun w^as glorious, and the mountains shone like 
 crystals. Piz Badile especially beautiful. Picked flowers 
 with C . 
 
 April 19. — A restless night. Resolve to stay this day in 
 
 Chiavenna and keep quiet. Went with C to look at the 
 
 old Salis house. The great hall dignified in French style. 
 Little French oil panels let into some of the rooms. Extremely 
 picturesque \dews from the garden fruit trees, brown hedges, 
 and a church tower rising in front of dazzling white hills with 
 peaks and broken crests. 
 
 It is the purest, loveliest spring weather. The spires and 
 pinnacles of the mountains, which stand about Chiavenna, 
 shoot into liquid blue air, softer and more luminous, less hard, 
 than the skies of our high Alps. They are still powdered with 
 fresh fallen snow^on their rocky ledges and upper line of forest, 
 solid at their tops and in their ravines with the snow of winter. 
 Fleecy white clouds curl about them, and travel slowly, like 
 wandering flakes of swan's down, across the open spaces. 
 These clouds will gather volume after mid-day, and toward 
 evening will roll upon the ridges of the hills in masses, 
 threatening thunder, or with flying tresses of rain-coloured 
 storm, SAvept out behind their hurrying squadrons. The 
 commotion of the spring is in heaven and earth, a restlessness 
 like the approach of some great delivering passion. The 
 enormous granite boulders, which rise up in front of this Hotel 
 Coniadi, lialf in sun and lialf in sluidow, glow duskily like
 
 444 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1889 
 
 deep red purple velvet. Here and there they glisten with the 
 drip of trickling streams, and everywhere they are plumed with 
 young trees putting forth their foliage. When you approach 
 them nearer, you find that the darkest, gloomiest rocks are 
 tufted over with crimson and magenta primulas, fragile 
 blossoms on slender stems, starting from cushions of green 
 viscous leaves. These flowers and the rich red heath, with its 
 black eyes, shine like jewels upon that mossy purple back- 
 ground. 
 
 It is Palm Sunday, and a procession has just passed across 
 the square from the cathedral under the dreary ruined palace 
 of De Salis. First went women and children, in their many- 
 coloured shawls and petticoats and kerchiefs, mixed with men 
 in black cloaks. Then came a Confraternitd in white and 
 blue ; then another in white and red ; then a third in white 
 and lilac ; then the deacons, acolytes, and priests in variegated 
 dalmatics and copes, and bright crimson tippets. Great 
 banners with sacred pictures waved at intervals, breaking the 
 long line of steady-moving figures. But the most beautiful 
 detail of the procession is, that everybody held a branch of 
 olive — the children tiny sprigs, the elderly men great stems 
 and boughs, which glinted in the flooding sunlight, each glossy 
 spikelet of the foliage catching an ephemeral spark of bright- 
 ness. The train crossed from the cathedral, and disappeared 
 into the darkness of the street beyond. 
 
 There are two trees in the garden here, one is a Pyrus 
 Japonica in full bloom, a standard, about twelve feet high, 
 which has far more of clustered red flowers upon its stout 
 stems and slender branches than of delicate green leaves. 
 If you stand under it, and look up into the clear flat blue of 
 the sky above, and watch the bees at work among the petals, 
 you feel the very wealth and perfectness of colour — pure 
 colour, bathed in light, satisfying the soul by simple plenitude 
 and jocund beauty. What a Japanese plant it is, and how it 
 justifies the realism of Japanese decorative art ! You can 
 scarcely note a trace of shading. The masses of scarlet are 
 defined against the mass of blue by outline felt in the colour 
 rather than enforced by contrast. The other tree is a large
 
 1«89 MAXITOOD 445 
 
 cherry, only jiist coming into bloom ; the bright chniips of buds 
 and half-formed blossoms ready to expand into a cloud of 
 silvery whiteness ; the unfolding leaves, still brown and golden, 
 only here and there half-fledged. These trees taught me 
 much about myself. As I looked at them with peaceful pleasure, 
 I felt that my incessant brain-work and amusements at Davos 
 are in a true sense occasioned by the total lack there of free 
 sensuous beauty and delight inflowing from the outer Avorld. 
 j\Iost of us who are not born mountaineers have been bred to 
 the enjoyment of such things as the pyrus and the cherry 
 symbolise. ^Yithout perhaps being aware of it, they are driven 
 too much in upon themselves by the monotony of snow 
 through seven months of winter, and the austerity of that 
 brief summer of the mountains. The tension becomes at last 
 too great. They react against it by debauches of brain-work, 
 stimulation, company. 
 
 (ioing to bed to-night, and crossing the open gallery which 
 gives upon the garden, I say to myself, ' How noble is this 
 Chiavenna landscape ! How grandly do the mountains soar 
 above the city ! How beautiful is all that detail on the 
 opposite hillside.' It is true, indeed, that Chiavenna, under 
 the naked light of a full moon, is superhumanly romantic. 
 
 [How the rest of the journey was accomplished may be 
 gathered from the folloAving letter to Mr. Gosse :j 
 
 ' I have ^ got so far on a long drinng journey from Davos 
 to Venice, having traversed the Engadine and the Valtellina, 
 and the Val Camonica and the Lago d'Iseo, in seven days of 
 snow and sunshine and rain. 
 
 ' Your book on " Eighteenth Century Literature " has been 
 my companion. I always take a book or two to feed upon 
 slowly during these journeys ; and I find that I never enter 
 so thoroughly into the spirit of an author as when I do so. 
 The matter of the book detaches itself in quite a peculiar way 
 against the background of avalanches, wayside hostolries, 
 and postillions, with whom one drinks litres of red wine in 
 
 ' To Edmund Gosse. Brescia, April 19, 1h«9.
 
 446 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1889 
 
 sundry chimney-corners. This being the case, I reserve for my 
 wallet a couple of books which I desire to study. 
 
 ' I must write to you my gratitude for the good company 
 during these laborious and eminently picturesque days which 
 you have unconsciously given me. I like your book greatly, 
 and have learned from it very much indeed. It seems to me 
 most admirable in its analytical power — the precision and the 
 justice and the novelty of critical observation applied to 
 the problem of unravelling what looks, to less accurate and 
 learned students of the epoch than you are, like a confused 
 skein. In your preface you apologise for the abundance of 
 dates. I bless you for your copious use of them. Dates, in 
 so intricate a matter of inquiry, are like the kilometre stones 
 upon the long and perplexed roads I have been travelling. 
 They are the final measures for sites and fountain-heads, for 
 paths of origin and paths of divergence. With some of your 
 unorthodox points of view I Avarmly sympathise, especially 
 in your bold thrusting of Addison back into the second rank, 
 and your no less audacious but quite genial recognition of 
 Goldsmith as a reversion to previous ideals. 
 
 ' I wish I had enjoyed the privilege of reading this book 
 before I wrote an article upon Elizabethan and Victorian 
 Poetry for the " Fortnightly." It would have enabled me, 
 under your auspices, and with, reference to your work, to have 
 brought out less crudely the point of neo-Elizabethanism in 
 our century. By the way, when you spoke of Pepys, I think 
 you might have said a word about Roger North. I regard his 
 "Lives of the Norths" and his own Autobiography as 
 remarkable essays in the composition of memoirs. Jowett 
 used to tell me, twenty years ago, that, next to Boswell, Eoger 
 North was the best biographer in English. Exaggerated, 
 certainly, but the man has some right to " a niche." Thank 
 you again. I am so sleepy and so shaken with posting that 
 I must say good-night.' 
 
 After Symonds's return to Davos from Venice, the letters 
 do not indicate any alle^dation of that mental trouble which 
 he did not himself understand, but which was, in all likelihood,
 
 1889 MANHOOD 447 
 
 clue to the gradual diminution of physical force and the 
 concentration of ntality in the strongest part 'of the man, 
 his brain. The outward conditions of Davos life remained as 
 they were ; Symonds applied himself to fresh literary work ; 
 he still enjoyed his life among the people of his Canton, 
 he was still able to take journeys to England. But, as he 
 wrote to Mrs. Ross on November 26, 1889 : — 'In some strange 
 way, " J'ai perdu ma force et ma vie " ; I wonder whether they 
 will ever come back again.' 
 
 [That Symonds still loved, and loved increasingly, the 
 country in which he had made his home, is clear from the 
 following passage, also addressed to ]\Irs. Ross : 
 
 'Many as are the drawbacks of spending one's life at 
 Davos, it has, aesthetically and sensually, the greatest pleasures 
 Avhich an epicure can hope for. 
 
 ' All the Apennines, from Consuma to La Vernia, through 
 Eieti, Aquila, Sulmona, Tivoli, have not a single line of beauty 
 in them equal to what lies about us everywhere in this region. 
 The beauty here, of line and profile, is so overwhelmingly rich, 
 that artists cannot deal with it. I understand their seeking 
 after poorer districts, where "bits" make a distinct pictorial 
 efi'ect, and where atmospheric influences and varieties of 
 vegetation suggest subjects. But here we have the greatest 
 beauty, that which defies art. The only supreme beauty in 
 nature which art can grapple with is the human nude.' 
 
 That he still enjoyed the life of the place is also clear, 
 whether he was making expeditions to Nisit friends in out-of- 
 the-way valleys, or assisting at those gymnastic meetings for 
 which the Swiss are celebrated. 
 
 ' I went off last Monday for an escapade to Ems, in order 
 to be present at the wedding of my friend, Franz Willy. It 
 lasted from 8.30 a.m. until 2.30 a.m. Tuesday and Wednesday 
 mornings. I at least went to bed at 2.30. The other guests 
 did not go to bed at all. The whole aftair, though exceedingly 
 fatiguing, was interesting and amusing. It will help to form 
 a "page of my life."
 
 448 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1889 
 
 ' On Thursday I was driven to Thusis, where I met a friend, 
 called Anton Juon, who took me to his home in Reuschen, on 
 the hills above Andeer. There I stayed, in one of the most 
 perfect peasant houses I have seen, until this morning, when 
 he and his handsome brother came up with me to Davos. 
 They are staying here now ; and I am to give a banquet to the 
 Turnverein to-morrow evening in one of the Wirthschafts here. 
 So you see I have been going it. 
 
 It was very cold on this journey, and I am rather the worse 
 for wear in my breathing apparatus. But I shall try to bold 
 out until to-morrow night is over. 
 
 ' The Via Mala at 5 a.m. to-day was ghostly-glorious. The 
 undefined light of approaching dawn dilated all its heights and 
 depths ; and a waning moon hung far away to westward in 
 a melancholy space of sky between the crags. I have been 
 living for these five days with Romansch-speaking folk, which 
 has added to the usual nervous tension of conversing with 
 natives. But it has been a good time on the whole — yet 
 a cold time — so cold that I could not wash except at the pump. 
 Every fluid in my bedroom froze — down to a mixture of 
 quinine and sulphuric acid. 
 
 ' If you are still ill, this will read to you like madness ; and 
 it was somewhat mad of me to take a frolic which made such 
 constant demands upon my nervous force.' 
 
 ' We reached Davos last Friday [June 11, 1889], after four 
 pretty hard days from Schio. I had business here all Saturday. 
 On Sunday, Chr. Buol drove me down to Thusis, in company 
 with twenty-five of the Davos gymnasts, who went with music 
 and banners in two five-horse brakes. It was a merry party. 
 
 ' The Turnfest at Thusis on Monday was exceedingly 
 pretty — on a long level upraised grassy terrace, wdth that fine 
 theatre of valley and wood and precipice. There were some 
 130 competitors, many of them extremely fine men. 
 
 • •••••• 
 
 ' It is time to close this letter, for the night is far advanced, 
 and I am very tired. That Turnfest on the top of a long 
 journey was pretty steep upon my strength. I stood about
 
 1889 MAA'HOUD 449 
 
 upon the ground yesterday from 7 a.m. till 8 p.m., and then sat in 
 company till 1 a.m., and these excellent Swiss lads are noisy.' 
 
 And with the plastic sense, the feeling for sculpturesque 
 beauty thus stimulated, he writes, a i^ropos of a subsequent 
 gymnastic tournament, to Lord Eonald Gower : ' If ]\lichael 
 Angelo could have learned anything about muscles and postures, 
 he might have picked up a crumb at this feast.' 
 
 Of his English journeys he says : ' Contact with England 
 only intensihes the feeling for what has subtly made itself the 
 home of my predilection.' That is true, certainly, of his 
 affection for Davos. But there was another side of him which 
 missed the contact with the larger world, and that side speaks 
 out in the following close of an address which was read for him 
 at Toynbee Hall in April 1890 : 
 
 ' At the end of my lecture I should like to say a few words 
 to you from myself. I sympathise deeply with your work 
 at Toynbee Hall. I congratulate you heartily on the success 
 you have achieved. Your association for objects of study, 
 of athletic exercise, of foreign travel, seems to me one of the 
 best and brightest signs of our complex modern civilisation. 
 It is worthy of the noble man whose name you bear, and whom 
 it was my pri\ilege in former days to know. It only grieves 
 me that I cannot meet you face to face, to address you with 
 my own voice, and take part occasionally in your smoking 
 conferences. I utter the last regret because I am a devotee of 
 the pipe. I have always found it conducive to good fellowship 
 and sober thinking, when friends meet for the discussion of 
 such exciting topics as political and social problems. It has 
 been my fate for the last twelve years to be almost wholly 
 isolated in this distant Alpine valley, where I am now writing. 
 I have done my best to maintain intellectual activity by 
 historical studies, by literary work, and miscellaneous reading. 
 But I sorely miss the clash of mind with equal mind, the 
 vitalising and exhilarating contact of men engaged in the same 
 pursuits as myself. It seems to me that a man must inevitably 
 rust among these silent snows and sombre pine-woods. It 
 seems impossible that I should not have lost touch with young 
 men like yon, who are moving in the main currents of the 
 
 G G
 
 4o0 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1889-90 
 
 great world. Pardon me, then, if what I have written to be 
 read to you smacks of antiquity and obsolete tradition on the 
 one hand, or of a solitary's vain imaginings on the other. 
 Accept the wish to serve and converse with you for the deed. 
 Believe that, according to my poor capacity, I will respond to 
 calls you make for dissertations like the one I send you now. 
 From the mountains of the Grisons I stretch forth my hand to 
 you in London.' 
 
 But deep down, at the very root of himself, he was not 
 well ; the vital energy was running low.] 
 
 ' In ^ this day and yesterday, I have taken a fast grip upon 
 my work — the remodelling of those " Essays, Speculative and 
 Suggestive.' But I do my task with reluctance. I hate the 
 uncertainties of these critical determinations. They are good 
 enough to talk out, with a pipe or a cigar, among acquaint- 
 ances. But to write and print them ? 
 
 ' " Griin ist der Baum des Lebens, grau ist alle Theorie.' 
 That will be a motto for my next book. The uncertainties of 
 even occasional contacts with human beings seem to me now 
 so far more pregnant and more real than what we can achieve 
 with thought. At my age, this is like standing on one's head ; 
 for I ought to have got to the point when ideas are para- 
 mount, and I have only just arrived at the point where things 
 of life and sense appear at all significant. It has therefore 
 been for me troublesome to finger again the old Gordian knot 
 of what we mean by criticism, and whether there is any sub- 
 stratum for its exercise. 
 
 ' I know your woods and vales and meadows on the slope 
 at Serravalle — a gracious landscape, a sweet place to breathe 
 again in. I thought it, last spring, one of the most attractive 
 spots I had ever visited — if the Bersaglieri bugles had not 
 rung so shrilly there at night.' 
 
 1890 [In the early days of 1890 Symonds suffered from a severe 
 
 attack of influenza, which contributed to lower his physical 
 forces. ' What I resent most,' he says, ' is that I cannot 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, June 20, 1889.
 
 1890 MANHOOD 451 
 
 write — literature, I mean — and I cannot follow a difficult 
 book. 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.' 
 Nor did a spring visit to ^'enice do much to restore his health. 
 From his room on the Zattere he writes to Mr. Gosse :] 
 
 ' I cannot ' describe the curious mosaic of this Venetian 
 existence. I write the " pages of my life " in a diary ; but I 
 do not suppose they will see the light. It is a jumble of hours 
 and hours by day upon the lagoons, hours and hours by night 
 in places of the most varied description. Work does not enter 
 into the scheme, and "das was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine," 
 is almost wholly excluded. 
 
 ' . . . I do not know whether I do not envy you. I have 
 never had the sobering influences of routine. The last twelve 
 years of Swiss-Italian life, most necessary to my physical 
 health, have detached me from ambition, society, everything 
 that is not a mode of my self -effectuation, subordinate to the 
 prime duties and engagements of life. . . .' 
 
 ' I felt - at Venice, and I feel here, very deeply the injustice 
 of the world — that a man like myself, who has no merits to 
 distinguish him from the rest, should be, through luck of 
 birth and money merely, enabled to play upon the lyre of life 
 so largely to his satisfaction — sea, city, islands, pictures, 
 palaces, there ; here, mountains, fine air, forests, homely 
 houses, flowers — and in both situations, intellectual enjoy- 
 ment, responsive human beings, energies of heart and head. 
 
 ' Should you care to have a copy of two volumes of 
 "Essays, Speculative and Suggestive" by me, which are 
 announced ? Essays, I find, are rather poor stuff; twice 
 removed from talk in energy, and thrice from life in substance. 
 But I should be glad to give you anything I do, which you 
 think worthy of acceptance.' 
 
 ' To Edmund Gosse. 5fj0 Zattere, Venice, May 12, 1890. 
 ■' To the same. Diivos, •lime 13, 1890. 
 
 (i G 2
 
 452 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1890 
 
 [How much he was interested in these Essays, appears 
 from the following letter :] 
 
 ' I ' envy you that storm in the Piave valley. Those are the 
 kind of things which do the soul good — in some obscure way ; 
 like most of the disturbances of nature, external or internal. 
 It is also very pleasant to hear that you are reading my book, 
 and that you find it so far stimulating. I am interested in 
 this book more than I have been in any other ; not in its 
 success, that must take care of itself, and really does not 
 matter, but in what people think of it, for I put a great deal of 
 myself into it, and what they think of it is what they think of 
 me, the man here. So I hope you will some time tell me 
 where you find me " flinging out " in a way you do not like. 
 I thought I had only indulged in one fling — in a passage on 
 the bourgeois in the essay on Democratic Art. But it seems 
 I must have already done so in the first four essays. This, 
 for me, is a very important point, and I want much to be 
 enlightened on the subject. For my aim at present in writing 
 is not to "fling out," except when the occasion makes it 
 necessary. And yet I know that, living so much alone, I am 
 not always in proper rapport to my audience, and probably I 
 take many things for accepted truths which may appear to 
 others sallies of my own humour. So tell me, if you will do 
 me this service, where you felt the personal kick-out or the 
 " privy nip." It is of the utmost value to me to know. 
 
 ' I hope you will not think I am boring you for mere 
 opinions, which I shall afterwards discuss with you. That I 
 promise not to do ; it is not what I am after. But I do want 
 to see with your eyes, and feel with your senses, what impres- 
 sion my way of obtruding myself has made. The mere 
 indication of pages where the " flinging out " occurs, will 
 suffice for my intelligence. The rest must be left to my judg- 
 ment, the lesson to my capacity for profiting by it.' 
 
 [And later still, on July 29, he continues :] 
 ' You make me feel that the long discipline I gave myself 
 ' To H. V. Brown. Davos, July 15, ISyO.
 
 1890 MA>;H00D 453 
 
 in preparing that book — altering my nature, correcting my 
 proclivities, working toward a conscious aim — has not been 
 thrown away. For I have lived a strange life in many ways 
 of late ; and all the time I have striven to gain preciser views 
 and methods of expression — I have wanted to be as sincere in 
 sense, and in thought and sympathies, and in the training of 
 the intellectual moral part of me, as I could hope to be. I 
 thank you very gratefully for all you write. It makes me feel 
 that I have rather grown than lost in the process of self- 
 effectuation, which is the only business of an individuality. 
 
 'Who can judge for himself? We must see ourselves in 
 the mirror of others. Not in the mirror of the reviews. They 
 have their place in forming the jury which condemns or 
 acquits the inner man. But they do not enable one so 
 narrowly to test the decline or the growth in himself, as what 
 a friend who knows and loves him says. 
 
 ' Henry Sidgwick here has helped me in the same way, or 
 a similar. These Essays have suggested for twelve days con- 
 stantly recurring conversations, and have set speculation on 
 the wing. They would not have done so with him, had they 
 not had stuff. And do you know, 1 was beginning to fear I 
 had no stuff" left in me ? So through my friends I feel that, 
 if I am allowed some years of energy, I may go on to new 
 things ■\\ath freshly trained faculties. Thank you, and God 
 bless you.' 
 
 [The reception accorded in the press to these volumes, by 
 which, as we have seen, Symonds set great store, hurt him 
 more than he was ever hurt before or after. He looked upon 
 the book as in some ways a new departure in his literary 
 career, and he felt that in it he had given more of himself to 
 the public than in any previous work except ' A.nimi Figura.' 
 To H. F. Drown he writes, in September, 1890 :J 
 
 ' I have been in bed since Thursday with continuous fever. 
 I only get an hour or two in the morning when I can use my 
 head. 
 
 ' The review of my Essays in the Athencnum, last number, 
 please read if you can. This is the kind of review which
 
 454 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1890 
 
 makes one wish to publish nothing agcain, which blights any 
 pleasure one may have had in one's work, and which puts 
 truths about one's self, apparent as soon as expressed, in a way 
 to dishearten. 
 
 ' It does not matter after all. The day's headache has 
 begun, and I must stop. That is worse than the " privy nip." 
 
 ' It was really kind of you to tell me what Sir James Hannen 
 3aid about my Essays. When I get better again, I shall be 
 glad of any reassurance as to that book.' 
 
 [And again, on September 28 :] 
 
 ' It is time, I think, to end the tedious scene. I am a 
 failure in the one thing I have tried to do — literature. The 
 way in which that book of Essays has been received shows 
 this. Did you see the " P. M. G. " ? It cannot be the mistake 
 of so many people. It is my own fault ; and I am old and 
 stupid.' 
 
 [But it was not in the structure of Symonds's spirit to remain 
 for long in this condition of depression, which, I think, was 
 due quite as much to health as to reviews. The reaction soon 
 began, and on October 18 he writes to Mr. Sidgwick :J 
 
 'I have overlived my interest in those two volumes of 
 Essays, and do not care what the Press says. I think I made 
 a mistake in supposing that I could do things of that sort well, 
 and that I could acquire distinction by pruning off my personal 
 procli\ities toward certain kinds of rhetoric — perhaps the only 
 point I had in literature. What do books matter in relation 
 to the soul, when life is trembling in the balance, and the days 
 and nights have no savour in them ? Even so, I have love 
 still, and am ypurs.' 
 
 [And a change to Venice clearly assisted the upward move- 
 ment. From 560 Zattere, he writes to Mr. Gosse, on 
 November 9 :] 
 
 ' I left Davos this day fortnight, worn out with my long 
 illness in that narrow valley (two months and three weeks just 

 
 1890 MANHOOD 455 
 
 sponged out of active and enjoyable existence). I have been 
 here since, alone in niv own little heiise, with An^elo and his 
 vdie to look after me, and a great many friends of ditierent 
 nations near. The change has been beneficial to nerves and 
 brain ; but I am not myself yet. . . . Burton's death was a 
 sad blow. Had I been able to get to Venice as early as I 
 wished, I might have seen him again, for I was going to 
 Trieste to stay with him. I had a heartrending letter from 
 Lady Bnrton the other day. She says nothing about his 
 books, papers, and immense collection of notes ; nor does his 
 doctor, Baker, who has also written, give me a full account of 
 his last hours. At Davos I feared such a catastrophe was 
 inevitable. Balcer told me he never left him for ten minutes 
 together ; and as he spoke of gout, I suspected that the muscles 
 of the heart must be affected. 
 
 ' . . . My window here, where I write, is so charming : the 
 whole riva of the Zattere and the canal of the Giudecca, in 
 front, crowded with all kinds of craft, yellow and red sails, &c., 
 leading on to the distant mainland and the Euganean Hills, 
 behind which the sian sets. I am just above a bridge (it is an 
 entresol I live in), up and down which go sailors of the 
 marine, soldiers, fishermen, swaggering gondoliers. I can 
 almost see their faces as they top the bridge ; by rising from 
 the chair a little, I do so at once. A Princess Dolgorouki has 
 a house next ours (across a canal or rio), which stands behind 
 an old walled garden ; the trees of this garden, cypresses, 
 maritime pines, olives, kc, make an excellent side foreground 
 to the expansive water-victw. . . .' 
 
 [To Mr. Sidgwick, from the same address, he wrote on 
 November 27 this letter, in which the desire for work is felt 
 once more, and Michael Angelo is mentioned for the first 
 time :] 
 
 ' You see I am in Italy : and to-day the whole of Venice 
 is under snow. It looks like a bad imitation of Davos in July 
 bad weather, while the ships along the canal of the Giudecca, 
 seen from my windows, present the appearance of blurred 
 illustrations to a book of Arctic exploration,
 
 -loH JOHN ADDINGTUN SVMONDS 1890-91 
 
 ' I only came here yesterday. I have been staying in the 
 Tuscan country, not far from Florence, with Mrs. Boss ; and 
 then at Vescovana, near the Euganean Hills, with the Contessa 
 Almoro Pisani. 
 
 ' I can't say that these Italian " peregrinities " (as Carlyle 
 calls such wanderings in " Sterling's Life ") have done me much 
 good. Three months of illness at Davos, continual fever, and 
 a general disturbance of the whole system, including brain, 
 lungs, and stomach, pulled me down terribly ; and I find at 
 fifty that the recuperative force, with which I was once singu- 
 larly gifted, is upon the wane. Thank God I have been brought 
 to mortification, and now am willing to accept the advent of 
 old age. I do not even hanker feverishly after Koch's 
 miraculous lymph. If it be of any good, it comes for me too 
 late, and I shall only regret it did not come when Janet first 
 began to fade. But at present I suspend my judgment, and 
 refuse to be sanguine for my fellow-sufi'erers. 
 
 ' Ah, me ! what stufi" Tolstoi has taken to write. " Work 
 while ye have the light," says nothing toward instruction and 
 edification. The "Kreutzer Sonata" is of course full of true 
 things ; but you cannot eradicate sex from human nature. 
 
 ' Publishers want me to write all sorts of things. I found 
 three letters here yesterday : one clamouring for a Uttle book 
 on Boccaccio ; one offering me something like 500 guineas for 
 a new grand "Life of Michael Angelo " ; the third suggesting 
 that a prose version of the " J^neid " from my pen would be 
 a certain success. If I were more elastic, I would bite at 
 Michael Angelo, rewrite the history of Tuscan art, and illustrate 
 my aesthetic principles by reference to that colossal manifesta- 
 tion of wayward force. But I do not know ; I want to sleep 
 more than to think.' 
 
 1891 [In the winter of 1890-91, the ' Life of Michael Angelo ' was 
 
 definitely taken in hand, and carried on with all Symonds's 
 wonted impetuosity. By ]\Iarch 6, he writes :] 
 
 ' I have been working hard at ' Michael Angelo,' and have got 
 through a great deal of preliminary business. The analysis of 
 his correspondence taught me much about him.
 
 1891 MANHOOD 457 
 
 ' You tell me I oiight to come to Venice, and not to wring 
 something out of my life here. But I do not think I should 
 be better there. I like Davos quite as much as I do Venice, 
 and far more, inasmuch as it has so far more enjoyable a climate. 
 Still I shall not be sorry to getaway into Italy — Tuscany, most 
 likely — at the end of this month. This, because I have been 
 a good deal bothered, as you know, here ; and every place in 
 which one does not live seems a rest. 
 
 ' The problem of life and self is not, however, to be solved 
 by change of place. One place is as good as another for the 
 soul, though some are far better for the body, and I find that 
 the people in all places are equally attractive and almost equally 
 annoying. On the whole, I am better satisfied with Grau- 
 biinden than with any other region I have dwelt in. And that 
 is good. 
 
 ' As I once wrote in a Sonnet, 
 
 It is the centre of the soul that ails. 
 
 'Like you, if you are speaking truth, I do not know what 
 ennui is. I know what a lot of other disagreeable states of the 
 spirit are. But I never suffer from vacancy. Unsatisfied 
 hungers of the heart are not emubi. 
 
 ' I have invested 2,400/. out of income in various ways 
 since January 1. This business takes up some time and 
 thought. But my old age and failing strength are what really 
 fatigue me. Literature is but a side matter. I don't do it as 
 easily as I used to do — in some ways more carefully and 
 conscientiously — but not with the same pleasure. I get num- 
 bers of letters now from strangers about my work. It seems 
 that one must live to be old and rather indifferent to such 
 things, before they come to one.' 
 
 [His correspondence was, indeed, becoming very volu- 
 minous and wide. His study of Michael Angelo brought him 
 into touch with such German scholars as Von Sclielller, such 
 Itahans as Guido Biagi,such Englishmen as Professor IMiddle- 
 ton. His interest in Walt Whitman opened to him a lively 
 exchange of views with that poet's admirers in America and
 
 4o8 JOHN ADDIXGTON SYMONDS 1891 
 
 England. The younger generation of poets were sending him 
 their vohimes, and in the midst of his own studies he found 
 time to write letters of warm encouragement like this which 
 follows :] 
 
 ' I find it diflicult to express all the feeling which your 
 little book of poems has aroused in me to-night. I took it up, 
 curious, expecting to find things rare in it ; but I was not 
 prepared for " infinite riches in a little room." These, having 
 rapidly read the book, I find there ; and then I begin to 
 meditate : why is it possible that I should not have discerned 
 the book before, in all the nine years of its printed and 
 published life ? What is the function of the critical press, if 
 it failed to force it on my vision and my sense of hearing ? 
 What spilth and waste of melody and genius must be going 
 on, if these lyrics fail to arrest attention ? 
 
 ' Such, indeed, is the first tide of emotions roused by read- 
 ing your j)oetry. 
 
 ' I am not going to pretend that I regard your poetry as 
 very vnde in range, and so forth, or to seek in it a philosophy 
 of life, &c. I do not think it aims at that, or has it. But it is 
 the real note of a really poetical, gifted, sensitive, and ex- 
 quisitely cadenced individuahty. 
 
 ' It is like the poetry of some of our most beloved Eliza- 
 liethans ; with a smack of the decade (or two decades) which 
 produced it, a touch of Swinburne, a grace from the French, 
 fused in the alembic of the writer's self. 
 
 ' To-night I am bee-drunken with the harmless honey of 
 your song. But if morning hours, and another reading, 
 do not alter my opinion, I will send these unpremeditated 
 words to you. 
 
 ' I should so much like to make an ehicle of your poems. 
 But I am ignorant — I do not know whether they are not already 
 far more widely known than I could make them known, and 
 loved than I could teach men hoAv to love them. 
 
 ' Tell me if you would like me to write what I think about 
 their excellence — not dithyrambically, as here, but soberly 
 as art requires. If you would, are you willing to tell me
 
 1891 MANHOOD 459 
 
 something about yourself, and how your lyrics came out of 
 your heart and life, and whether you go on writing still ? 
 
 ' How I envy you your gift of rhythm, and inevitable melodic 
 phrase. No, envy is not the word ; but if God had given me 
 that gift I could have said what I wanted, and what I must 
 never say through want of magic' 
 
 [There are certainly no signs of ennui in the following 
 description of the way in which Symonds took relief from the 
 strain of this constant appHcation. To Mr. Gosse he wrote on 
 February 23, 1891 :] 
 
 ' , . . I have lost my power of living like an invalid. The 
 constant effort of a lifetime to control my health and create 
 the best conditions for repelling disease, has worn my faculties 
 of endurance out. So I do things now which are not pnulent. 
 I drove yesterday to a village two hours away from here; 
 attended a peasant theatre, which was tremendous fun ; dined 
 with three good companions, Swiss ; and drove home at midnight 
 in an open sledge under the most glorious moon and icy wind 
 from the glaciers. This is not a cure for bronchitis. And 
 again, to-day, I started with my girls and our toboggans, and ran 
 a course of four miles, crashing at lightning speed over the 
 snow and ice. 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 
 yoimg men and maidens excited by this thrilling exercise. It 
 was solemn and beautiful upon the run. The sun had set, but 
 all the heavens were rosy with its after-glow, and the peaks 
 and snowfields which surrounded us shone in every tone of 
 crimson and saffron. Then from behind the vast black bulk of 
 a mountain mass, the rising full moon swam rapidly upon our 
 sight, a huge transpicuous dew-pearl of intensest green, bathed 
 in the warm colours of the burning skies. People who 
 summer in the Arctic circle describe these luminous effects. 
 Our rapid motion through the celestial wondei-s and over the 
 myriad-tinted snowpath, added an intoxicating glory to the 
 vision — until, as we descended from the u])per height, the 
 splendours and the path we sped upon were swallowed up in
 
 460 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1891 
 
 vast chasms of primeval pine-forests, whence we emerged 
 again into the flooding silver of the moon, which at a lower 
 level strove victoriously with the sunset-incandescence we had 
 left behind. But this again was no cure for bronchitis, I 
 have just supped at 11 p.m., and am writing to you with pipe 
 in mouth before I turn into bed.' 
 
 [The intensely hard work on ' j\lichael Angelo,' which was 
 carried on throughout the summer, strung Symonds up to a 
 very high pitch of emotional speculation.] 
 
 ' There ' are some things in your last letter (June 80) 
 which make me want to respond at once ; and I hope this will 
 follow you to England, and that you ■v\dll think over a friend's 
 word there. It is about the relation of passion to intellectual 
 energy. 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- effectuation : 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 aft'ected by our written \iews 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 
 correlation, so that we shall think nothing, write nothing, love 
 nothing, but in relation to the central personality— the bring- 
 ing 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 him 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 individuality — to bring 
 all factors of his being into correspondence for the presentation 
 of himself in something. Whether the world regards that 
 
 ^t?* 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown, Davos, July 2, 1891,
 
 1891 MANHOOD 461 
 
 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 passion, or our love to lapse in 
 grubbery ; but let us be human beings, horribly imperfect 
 certainly, living for the best ettectuation of themselves which 
 they find possible. If all men and women lived like this, the 
 symphony of humanity would be a spleixlid thing to listen to. 
 ' I have been writing out of the heart's depth. And as 
 Achilles says in Shakespeare — 
 
 My soul is troubled like a fountain stirred, 
 And I myself see not the bottom of it. 
 
 * But, after all, dear friend, do not do what you seem 
 inclined to do ; do not let your intelligence imagine that any 
 work you can produce is useless ; do not delude your con- 
 science with the seductive dream of becoming corrupt. Corrup- 
 tion is too terrible a Siren. Some part in us loves her so. 
 You must keep your intelligence alive to its humble function, 
 as a necessary energy for your own diurnal happiness. And 
 you must make your conscience feel that, living for unselfish 
 and no ignoble ends, you do not sink into corruption. 
 ' At the end of the whole matter I say this : 
 ' Brain work, whatever its value may be, is the best balance 
 to passion ; and passion, however despised it may be, is whole- 
 some when it helps the man to will and labour with his mind.' 
 
 [Upon this grave note I should like to pause. Little 
 remains to be said about Symonds's literary career, and that 
 will be found in the following chaptei-. The success which his 
 ' Life of Michael Angelo ' immediately achieved was a source 
 of great satisfaction to him, and his attention was being called 
 to the execution of a scheme whicli had long lain in his head, 
 a history of the Canton he knew so well. The death of Walt 
 Whitman diverted him for a time to the composition of a 
 study (jf the American poet who had exercised so strong an 
 influence over his spiritual life. This study was published on 
 the day that Symonds died in Konie. Here, then, at the close
 
 462 JOHN AUDTNGTON SYMONDS 1877-91 
 
 of this chapter, is the proper place to insert Symonds's own 
 estimate of the ultimate results of his literary career upon 
 himself as a man,] 
 
 I ' have often endeavoured to formulate my conception 
 of the influence, physical and moral, which this literary work, 
 prolonged for a quarter of a century, exerted over me. In the 
 first place, it greatly contributed to enjoyment, since it gave 
 me that pleasure and exhilaration which is the concomitant of 
 any energy unimpaired in its exercise. I always liked writing, 
 and never disliked reading. In the second place, it afforded 
 me an occupation which could be carried on with more or less 
 convenience under the peculiar conditions of my unsettled life. 
 Had I not already formed myself for literature, when I was 
 compelled to settle at Davos Platz in 1877, I doubt whether I 
 should have even partially recovered health. The habit of 
 writing rendered me independent, and sustained my spirits 
 under circumstances which would have been unutterably 
 depressing to a barrister or merchant checked in his career. 
 In the third place, it brought me a fair amount of distinction, 
 and a certain kind of consideration. Without being ambitious 
 or over-valuing the sort of reputation I have gained, I am not 
 insensible to this advantage. 
 
 On the other hand, I cannot pretend to think that literature, 
 in the way I have pursued it, is exactly wholesome for a man 
 of my peculiar temperament. ' Travailler pour la gloire,' says 
 George Sand, ' est un role d'empereur ou le metier d'un for9at.' 
 I have never indeed laboured for glory, because I have always 
 thought less of results than of pleasurable exercise and 
 innocent pastime. Yet study and composition are none the 
 less exhausting to the nerves, when taken from this point 
 of view, than when a man is consciously ambitious. Often 
 I have felt myself as tired and worn with writing ' as the 
 tanned galley-slave is with his oar.' Reaction follows, and the 
 fatigue of labour craves the distraction of amusement. The 
 subjects with which I have been occupied — Greek poetry, 
 Italian culture in one of the most lawless periods of modern 
 
 ' Autobiography.
 
 1877-91 MANHOOD 463 
 
 history, beauty in nature and the human form — stimulate the 
 imagination. They excite cravings which cannot be satisfied 
 by simple pleasures. Long after work is over, the little ocean 
 of the soul is agitated by a ground-swell. The pulses beat, 
 the nerves thrill and tingle. For any one who may have read 
 my sonnets in ' Animi Figura ' and ' Vagabunduli Libellus,' 
 this state of the emotions needs no further exposition. 
 
 It may be questioned whether the pursuit of literature — as 
 that mode of life which secures its end by employing energy 
 and occupying leisure agreeably to the individual — renders 
 a man really happy. Literature takes a second place in my 
 estimation, and for this reason, although I have persevered in 
 it for solace and escape from fretting care, I have never been 
 able to regard it very seriously. In a certain sense I do not 
 condemn this habit of mind. It enables a man to keep in 
 view the truth that literature exists for life, not life for 
 literature — a truth which less half-hearted men of letters 
 do not sufficiently recognise. It delivers him from the conceit 
 of authorship by constantly reminding him how trivial any 
 literary successes and achievements are in comparison with the 
 solid good things of a comely and contented existence ; how 
 little talent, or even genius, weighs in the scale against 
 character, strength of will, goodness, and tranquillity of mind ; 
 how men ought really to be reckoned, not by what they think, 
 or write, or create in art, but by what they are and what they 
 have enjoyed. This attitude, however, is not without counter- 
 balancing disadvantages. It precludes that centrahsing force 
 of enthusiasm which springs from self-dedication to a single 
 great conception. The literary viveur cannot hope to become 
 a scholar or to produce a monumental work. In so far as be 
 shares the scientific spirit of our age — in so far as he is sensible 
 of possessing faculties above the average, and is oi)en to the 
 animating ideas of the modei-n world — he will bavo to endure 
 a life-long recurrent regret for sterner paths abandoned, and 
 for nobler triumphs carelessly foregone. 
 
 It were a thesis worthy of discussion whether the scholar — 
 such a scholar as Mark Pattison idealised, and Robert Browning 
 sung in 'A Grammarian's Funeral' — be happier and more
 
 I 
 
 464 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1877-91 
 
 useful than the man of letters I have been describing. The 
 former may loom more largely on the mists of time, unless he , 
 
 fritter his force away as Wolf did. But in order to feel at his 
 life's end that he has fulfilled the whole duties of a man, 
 he must possess the feHcitous and self-complacent nature of a 
 Gibbon. Otherwise he runs the risk of awaking too late to the 
 consciousness of Goethe's ' Faust,' that knowledge is but vanity, 
 and that the best fruits of the tree of hfe have never been 
 
 plucked : 
 
 Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, 
 
 Und griin des Lebens goldiier Baum. 
 
 Then he exclaims, like Louis Bouilhet, on his death-bed : 
 
 Une voix dit, une voix lamentable : 
 ' Je suis ton coeur, et je n'ai pas aime.' 
 
 Or, like Michael Angelo, reviewing the past years expended 
 in self -consecration to the noblest service of the sublimest art, 
 he sighs : — 
 
 Now know I well how that fond phantasy, 
 Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall 
 Of earthly art, is vaui. 
 
 The exclusive pursuit of science, of scholarship, of art, 
 leaves some portion of a man's nature unemployed and un- 
 satisfied. When the doleful days arrive, the days of spent 
 creative powers and waning energy, those unexpended elements 
 of his nature awake from slumber. They are still young, 
 because they have remained unexercised ; but it is now too late 
 for them to expand within the crumbling palace of man's 
 mortal frame. If he is sanguine, he exclaims : ' Other heights 
 in other hves, God willing.' If he inclines to hopelessness, he 
 meditates the end of Ecclesiastes, and embitters the evening of 
 life with regret more poignant than that we feel for a renounced 
 ideal. I speak only of the more generous souls. There are 
 men enough who placidly beheve they could not have been 
 better than they are— simply because they are themselves. 
 But this egotism is vanity ; vanity more ignoble even than the
 
 1877-91 MANHOOD 465 
 
 vanity of reoretting misused opportunities of enjoyment or 
 abandoned paths of heroical ambition. 
 
 Who shall be contented with his life when he looks back 
 upon it ? 
 
 It is not possible upon this path or that to satisfy the 
 insatiable within the mind. That is the frank-pledge of the 
 soul's infinity — if not of personal immortality. It were as 
 easy to drink the ocean up as to exhaust man's capacity for 
 curiosity and desire for enjoyment. Therefore the only con- 
 tentment we dare hope for here is that which comes from being 
 satisfied with limitation and inured to imperfection. From 
 this point of view it signifies extremely little at our life's end 
 whether we have been a Virgil, a Titian, a Gibbon, or a literary 
 vivenr. In the scheme of the universe all sorts and conditions 
 of men have their inevitable place. Nothing is known to us 
 about their relative importance or the issue of their acti\'ities. 
 
 H H
 
 i66 JOHN ADDIXGTON SYMOXDS 1891 
 
 CHAPTEE XVII 
 
 THE END 
 
 The 'Life of Michael Angelo ' — Journeys entailed by it — The book 
 finished — ' Our Life in the Swiss Highlands ' — Decline in strength — 
 Leaves Davos — ' Lontan lontano^ — The last journey — Illness and 
 death in Rome — Funeral — Epitaph. 
 
 1891 [The ' Life of Michael Angelo ' employed the whole of the year 
 1891, and part of 1892. It entailed journeys through the 
 Casentino, and to Rome and Florence for the study of works 
 of art, or the examination of documents. Symonds's Venetian 
 servant was with him on most of these expeditions, of which 
 he sent some account to H. F. Brown :] 
 
 ' Angelo ^ and I arrived here to-day, after making a very 
 good journey in spite of mixed weather, something trying by 
 reason of scirocco. 
 
 ' We saw a good part of the Casentino : Poppi, a thoroughly 
 grand old Tuscan eyrie (of the Conti Guidi), and Bibbiena, a 
 milder hill- set city, where the inn is kept by the Fratelli 
 Amorosi, and the wine is " Tuscan Burgundy." We drove 
 over the most breakneck roads to La Vernia, and then rode to 
 Chiusi and Caprese (Michael Angelo's birthplace) on the water- 
 shed of Arno and Tiber, a ride of five and a half hard hours 
 over stones and through cataracts. Of course we \dsited 
 the sacri luoghi of S. Francis, and spent the night in a 
 filthy charming inn, crooning over the open kitchen fire with 
 contadini working their way to a distant market. 
 
 * After this Orvieto, and its sense of ancient wickedness. 
 
 • To H. F. Brown. Rome, Oct. 29. 1891.
 
 1891 THE END 467 
 
 I wonder why that place has such a strong moral pungency, 
 for me at least. And why Signorelli dominates my imagination 
 so cruelly. 
 
 'Next, by Orte and Terni, into the very heart of hearts 
 of Apennines, to Aquila below the Gran Sasso d'ltalia. They 
 are ugly mountains, with no grace but that of rarely manifested 
 atmospheric charm. Still Aquila is worth a long journey. It 
 has great character, and some unexpected beauties of art. The 
 main thing there was Ulrichs. I spent a whole afternoon and 
 evening in his company. Ulrichs is CJinjsostomos to the last 
 degree, sweet, noble, a true gentleman and man of genius. He 
 must have been at one time a man of singular personal 
 distinction, so finely cut are his features, and so grand the 
 lines of his skull. 
 
 ' I left Aquila yesterday for Sulmona (0\dd's birthplace), a 
 dirty place, hardly worth a visit, except for its position among 
 those heartless and prosaic Apennines. Repellent, stupid 
 mountains at the best ; at the worst, abominably mediocre and 
 vulgar. I have travelled just now through so many hundred 
 miles of them that I may abuse them with knowledge. Below 
 Umbria, I do not see any good in them at all ; and the people 
 are ugly — loud — like the twangle, wrangle, jangle music of the 
 shallow South. 
 
 ' To-day we came in seven hours from Sulmona to Rome, 
 passing through Tagliacozzo (memorable historic name, but 
 nothing else), and Tivoli, into the sullen Roman Campagna. 
 all indigo and Venetian red, under a heavy cold sky of imminent 
 rain. I found your letters here. 
 
 ' I expect to stay in Rome long enough to see the principal 
 things of M. A. B. again with care, and if possible to examine 
 the codex of his poems in the Vatican Library. This big 
 Americano-Germanico cosmopolitan caravanserai, with an 
 English Bil)le in each bedroom, does not please me. In fact, 
 it is just what I loathe, and brings out the worst side of my 
 temper. I had a bitter passage of wordy arms with a patronis- 
 ing polyglot head-waiter just now, while eating a fifteen francs 
 dinner d la carta. It was about a bottle of wine, which 1 had 
 not ordered, and he thought fit to bring instead of the one 
 
 II H 2
 
 468 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1891 
 
 I chose. " Satis et super satis." But you know how nasty I 
 can be in my mood, and how I regret it afterwards. 
 
 ' Probably I shall go to Carrara from here, and then again 
 to Florence, Poggio Gherardo. Tell Eonald Gower where 
 I am, and write to me here once again, if you feel the impulse — 
 if not, to Poggio Gherardo, to wait for me. After that 1 hope 
 to come to Venice. 
 
 ' You know, perhaps, that Jowett is very ill ? My sister, 
 Mrs. Green, is nursing him in Balliol. She writes me (a letter 
 I found here) that the prospects are almost hopeless. 
 
 ' Once at Aquila, again at Sulmona, I had the deepest 
 strangest dreams of him, in Avhich 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. 
 
 ' I cannot say that I have been much occupied with the 
 thought of him, though I knew him to be ill. M. A. B., and 
 the places I saw for the first time, absorbed my energies and 
 sympathies. Still, these two dreams have haunted me with a 
 sense of atonement and softness. I am deeply touched to find 
 by my sister's letter how near to death he was when she wrote.' 
 
 ' You ' are having the same change of weather as we are. 
 It is very mild. At the same time it is well that I am here. 
 Davos is safer than Venice, and I have had a sharp warning. 
 I have not been out of doors since I arrived last Saturday. 
 The time is spent oddly enough. I begin work at 9.80, and 
 go on till 12.30. After lunch, at 2.30, I go to bed and sleep 
 two hours ; have tea in bed and talk to my wife. Dine at 6.30. 
 Begin work again at 8 p.m., and go on with it till 1 or 2 a.m. 
 Then to bed and sleep again. 
 
 ' I have written one difficult chapter since I came here, 
 upon the Sistine and M. A. B.'s design — conception of form 
 in general. Of course I had brooded over this during my 
 Italian journey. Now I am tackling his architectural work 
 at S. Lorenzo and the Medicean sacristy. 
 
 ' To H. F. Brown. Davos, Nov. 20, 1891.
 
 1891 THE END 469 
 
 ' i\Iaclge acta as my secretary all the forenoon. She copies 
 out the quotations and translations from Mab's letters. 
 Ronald always calls him " Mab," and Angelo calls him "II suo 
 Vecio." ' Hhe is getting through all the chapters under my 
 direction, and I think she really likes the work. 
 
 ' There will really be very little of importance to do when 
 this last aesthetic chapter and the copying are finished. The 
 routine suits my health. I feel already to be better, with more 
 power of breathing in the lungs.' 
 
 [In the following letter Symonds records the effect of 
 finishing such a laborious piece of work as Michael Angelo's 
 Life had been to him :] 
 
 ' The ^ abrupt finish,' he says, ' of my M. A. B. work is 
 rather trying to my nerves. How can a writer escape from 
 being neurotic ? He has such tremendous changes of mental 
 climate and revulsions of emotion. He is always vehemently 
 growing or being violently amputated, and he is not a vine, 
 to suffer these alternatives in the due course of natural seasons. 
 If genius is connected with insanity, this must be due in many 
 cases, not merely to a congenital diathesis, but also to the 
 abnormal vibrations set up in the nervous system of an author 
 by the conditions of his labour. A pendulum has rhythmic 
 action, so long as the motive force lasts, but here the creative 
 rhythm is suddenly suspended, just when the nervous energy 
 is over-stimulated to its utmost. I feel the fact acutely at 
 the present moment, and am tinghng, jumping. 
 
 ' The only way out is to begin some now work, liut how 
 exhausting all that is to \atal resources.' 
 
 ' . . . The Blacks of Edinburgh, meanwhile, are going to 
 publish Madge's and my book on our Life here, and Nutt is 
 going to publish a volume of Poems and Translations by me. 
 In spite of spiritual bankruptcy, it seems, then, that the first 
 people I offer a book to, take it without questioning. It is 
 likely, then, that if I live during the next six months, I shall 
 
 ' ' Vecio,' Venetian for ' Vecchio ' : 'your old man. 
 ■' To H. F. Brown, Davos, Dec. 10, 18'Jl.
 
 470 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1891-92 
 
 be engaged in printing three books — M. A. B., Life in the 
 Swiss Highlands, Verses. . . . 
 
 ' So I sit groaning on this awful night's glacier, thirty 
 degrees below zero. 
 
 ' Life of the Universe, God, everlasting Law, from which 
 no soul can flinch, soon must I go back to you, bruised, 
 maimed, afflicted in my sense of dwarfdom. My hope is that 
 you made me thus, and that I play a part in the unknown 
 drama. Blind and stupid, like a cockchafer, I have buzzed 
 in crepuscule. Brain and heart, with all their light and heat 
 in me, are inefficient. Yet I have striven in my own gross 
 way. And, after all, a man may be tested by strife, even 
 though he feels at life's ending that strife is only one line, 
 and not the finest line of action.' 
 
 1892 [The ' Life of Michael Angelo,' written as- it had been at a 
 
 very high pressure, was a strain too severe for Symonds's 
 reduced vitality. I do not think he ever properly recovered 
 from it. In February he complains of ' fainting or falling fits.' 
 ' I have been very ill' He was in England in the summer of 
 1892, paid many visits, saw many friends, enjoyed it all with 
 that power of keen enjoyment which was so characteristic of his 
 external life. But his letters of this year are full of phrases 
 which show that he himself took no sanguine view of his 
 health. ' The way in which my nerves, as well as lungs, have 
 been attacked looks like influenza ; but, on the whole, I think 
 it is a reaction from M. A. B.' He complains too of fainting 
 fits, and numbness in the brain. ' Literature has pretty well 
 come to an end with me. It loses its attractiveness, and I 
 feel threadbare. Fate has made me much too young to grow 
 old properly.' ' 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 be- 
 come of a soul so untamably young in its old ruined body, 
 consuming its last drop of vital oil with the flame of beauty ? ' 
 His life closes as it began, with a question, an interrogation 
 flung out from the Self, the Soul, to the Universe, God. 
 
 The farewell to Clifton had been taken on a note of music
 
 1892-93 THE END 471 
 
 — the singing boy and girl : the farewell to Davos also (an 
 unconscious farewell, it is true) was conveyed upon a note of 
 music, wherein the spirit which had so persistently scrutinised 
 the limits of this life seemed now to discern, not far away, the 
 opening portals of a wider universe, the promise of a larger 
 existence as the region of its ceaseless quest.] 
 
 ' . . . Last ^ Sunday night, I was lying awake, thinking of 1893 
 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 all other sensations — seems to indicate a vague 
 and infinite, yet very near . . .' 
 
 [A few days after writing this presentient passage, Symonds 
 and his daughter Margaret left Davos for Venice, whence they 
 started upon a journey of which Miss Symonds says :] 
 
 ' The spring of 1893 was cold and wet. We left Davos 
 earlier than usual, and plunged straight down into the extreme 
 south of Italy. Instead of finding the climate milder there, it 
 was, as is often the case, even chillier than the frozen snow- 
 fields of the Alps. The country which we visited was all 
 unknown to my father, and with his usual indomitable energy 
 he explored it thoroughly. He was interested in the strange 
 architecture of the churches ; he went into their crypts and 
 round their choirs, regardless of the icy and almost deathly 
 chill which lingered there. At night he walked through the 
 streets of Taranto, Bari, and of Naples, when it would have 
 been well to linger by the side of a hot pine fire. He always 
 said that new places were best seen and understood at night — 
 that the truest impression of a city could be gained by the 
 light of its gaslights, or under the moon. He was always a 
 delicate, almost a fragile, human being, but he drew upon his 
 scanty store of physical strength in a way which the most 
 
 • To H. F. Brown. Davos, February 22, 1893.
 
 472 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1893 
 
 robust would shrink from ; and during that last journey, 
 although conscious himself of a certain increasing weakness, 
 he ran risks which were often excessive, and used his time and 
 eyes to see the very utmost of the new sights round about him. 
 
 ' Indeed, I had the sort of impression that we were running 
 a race. It was a splendid race — there were beautiful things 
 by the way. Leaving Venice on March 21, we went straight 
 down the whole length of Italy by the express train to Bari, 
 and thence the next day to Sir James Lacaita's place outside 
 Taranto. Of this journey my father wrote an account, which 
 was published in the " Fortnightly " for October 1893. Spring 
 was scarcely awakened in the land, but there was a strange 
 shimmer of buds and blossoms in all the country round the 
 barren. Eastern-looking towns. The asphodels were out in 
 millions. There were fields quite filled with these flowers 
 amidst the olive yards of Leucaspide. My father delighted in 
 them. He would select the tallest spike which he could see, 
 pick it, and carry it with him on his walk. He was always 
 interested in every sort of thing which grew. He procured a 
 big pickaxe (for spades did not exist at Leucaspide), and went 
 into the fields with Angelo to hoe up the bulbs of huge white 
 squills, anemones, and irises, which he packed and sent to a 
 friend in the North of Italy. At night he joined the pizzica 
 dance, and danced it as vigorously as any of the vigorous 
 natives. 
 
 ' From Taranto we journeyed straight to Salerno. The 
 weather continued fine, but intensely cold. All day the sun 
 shone brightly, but the wind whirled through the streets and 
 crept through the windows and round the passages of the 
 ramshackle old palace which was our inn. We called this inn 
 the Cave of Care, and were glad to leave it two days later ; but 
 from its inhospitable roof we escaped upon two glorious and 
 happy expeditions. The first of these was to Psestum. It 
 was a real spring day, and warm at last. The sun blazed 
 fiercely, and the whole earth seemed to throb with the first 
 strong pulse of heat. My father was very happy, and interested 
 in working out once more some old theory of his about the 
 roofing in of the temples. The lizards all came out and
 
 1893 THE END 473 
 
 whisked across the yellow baking stones, amongst a tangle of 
 pale periwinkles, orchises, and small white lilies. Far away, 
 and framed between the golden pillars of the temples, we saw 
 the sea glittering like glass. It was hard to tear oneself away 
 in time to catch the little bustling train, and with the full 
 remembrance of those groves of roses which formerly had 
 scented all the air round Pfestum's temples, to be dragged in 
 a stuffy carriage across the desolate marshes where buffaloes 
 were grazing. A German gentleman sat opposite to us. He 
 had stolen a fragment of the Temple of Neptune, and wrapped 
 it up in his old plaid shawl. I shall not forget my father's 
 expression as he realised this scene — it was one of deUghted 
 humour rather than of disgust. This strong and never failing 
 sense of humour was one of the things which made my father 
 so delightful a companion both on journeys and at home. 
 
 ' The next day we drove along the coast to Amalfi, and the 
 next we went to Naples. We stayed five days in Naples ; the 
 weather continued fine and cold — so cold that we did not go 
 out to the islands. ^Most of our mornings were spent in the 
 museum, and one afternoon we sailed in the bay. There was 
 a very high wind, and our boatman was young and reckless. 
 He put in to shore too quick, and did not calculate the force 
 or the way of the wind. We were just under the rocks, and 
 must inentably have capsized, had it not been for the prompt 
 skill of my father, who caught the filing sail, and pulled it 
 down at the very instant when we were heaving over. One 
 day we went up Vesuvius. It was fine, the fields were full of 
 lovely flowers, Httle blue lupins and lilies, and all the copses 
 flushed with pink and yellow ; but when we got to the station 
 the mist and smoke came down in a black cloud from the 
 summit, shutting out the sunlight, so my father did not 
 attempt the last ascent. He said he thought that Michael 
 Angelo must have studied the figures for his " Last Judgment " 
 on the slopes of Vesuvius — that he saw distinctly a tangle of 
 writhing human forms within the lava. 
 
 ' From Naples we journeyed straight to Rome. It was 
 April, but \'esuvius was deep in snow, right down to the first 
 vineyards. As we came through the hills above Rome the aii-
 
 474 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1893 
 
 felt warm and still, and the vision of sunset over the city and 
 over the Campagna was gorgeous indeed. The whole valley 
 of the Tiber was flooded with a seething golden light ; only 
 the dome of St. Peter's stood up black and distinct, and framed 
 in the burning globe of the sun as it rested on the horizon. 
 In the immediate foreground great aqueducts, purple and 
 black, rose up like things seen in one's dreams. My father 
 was deeply impressed by this spectacle. He was strangely 
 strung up, and very full of nervous vigour — yet he was coming 
 to Rome to die. 
 
 * Rome was in a state of indescribable commotion. The 
 German Emperor, and many other royalties, were expected, 
 and the grand fetes to celebrate the silver wedding of the King 
 and Queen of Italy were all in preparation. Every hotel was 
 crowded, and it was almost impossible to get rooms. After 
 some delay, however, we got good rooms, at the top of the 
 Hotel d' Italia, five stories up, where the air felt fresh and 
 pure ; but by that time I think that my father had already 
 taken the illness which finally killed him. There was a great 
 deal of influenza in Rome; and there had been cases of it in 
 the hotel. He did not, however, think of resting — he always 
 Avent on working and learning to the very last. He found 
 many friends in Rome, and was forced to accept several 
 invitations. He took me to the Vatican, St. Peter's, and many 
 galleries. To the Corsini Palace, I remember that we went on 
 purpose to see Albert Dilrer's " Rabbit," a sketch which had 
 always delighted my father. His mind seemed more than 
 usually clear on those days ; his conversation was brilliant and 
 sparkling above the average. It was, as I have said before, as 
 though he were running a race with life. He loved life, and he 
 never ceased to live it while it lasted. On Friday afternoon we 
 
 drove out with the C 's along the Appian Way, and looking 
 
 to the hills my father spoke of the places we would visit there 
 after we left Rome. 
 
 ' On Saturday afternoon we drove to the Palatine Hill. 
 The heat had really set in, the air seemed to be thawing, and 
 warming itself through. A splendid bath of sunlight poured 
 down upon the waving grasses, the poppies, and tall spikes of
 
 1893 THE END 475 
 
 golden fennel. My father was full of energy. ^Ye wandered 
 about the dusty ruins, and climbed high up upon the colossal 
 walls and immemorial rubbish heaps. We left the beaten 
 track, and pushing through a thicket of arbutus shrub, we 
 emerged upon a sort of arete or spine of ruined wall, which 
 overhung the race-course they were digging out. It was a 
 giddy place, e.-ctremely wild and beautiful. Rare plants of the 
 wild mignonette grew below us on the crumbling rags of turf 
 and brickwork. The old boyish spirit of adventure was 
 engrafted deep down in my father's nature. He loved the 
 wild mignonette as he had loved the wallflowers on the clifi's 
 at Clifton. I remember holding tight to his coat as he bent 
 forward to gather the yellow spikes of flow^er. He was happy 
 and excited. He always loved and sought adventure as keenly 
 as any of his children. 
 
 ' The next day, Sunday, we drove out early round the 
 gardens of the Trastevere. We went into the church of 
 S. Onofrio. There my father found the tomb of a cardinal, 
 with an inscription which greatly pleased him. It ran thus : 
 "Labor et gloria vita fuit, mors reqiiies." He read it over 
 several times, and said that when he died he would like a thing 
 like that to be written upon his grave. He told me much 
 about Tasso, and how the old poet, broken in spirit and in 
 health, and sick with the strife of hving, had come one evening, 
 out of the rush of the city, to die in the convent on this hill. 
 My father was always anxious to gather together both the past, 
 the present, and the general meaning of everything he saw. 
 He stopped the carriage to point out to me some of the peculiar 
 points which went to produce the essential charm of Rome. 
 He showed me that it was the breadth of sky, the quality 
 of the air, and, above all, the Campagna and the hills, and not 
 the buildings, which make the city beautiful. It was a very 
 hot morning. The hills rose up, so sharp, so clear, that you 
 could trace their slightest folds. An extraordinary blue grey 
 haze fell through the sky. There was a tall Judas tree in the 
 immediate foreground of the panorama ; its branches were all 
 studded and aflame with purple ilowers. A plant of wisteria 
 had grown around its root, and, climbing up the trunk, it
 
 476 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1893 
 
 wreathed itself and fell in pale festoons of lilac blossoms from 
 the branches of the purple Jndas tree. This extraordinary 
 combination of colour, backed by the blue of the sky, interested 
 my father immensely. It amused him. He laughed at it, and 
 he walked up and down, wondering whether it would be 
 possible to paint it right in a picture, for it was both wrong 
 and right in nature. As usual, he had a bit of new literature 
 in his pocket, the MS. roll of a set of poems received from 
 a friend that day. He read them eagerly.; these tokens of 
 confidence and friendship were always the source of extreme, 
 almost childlike, pleasure to him. We went back to lunch 
 
 with the P 's in their beautiful palazzo on the Corso. After 
 
 lunch we drove round the gardens of the Pincio. To his great 
 joy my father saw a large bush of the yellow-berried ivy, 
 a plant which had always had a peculiar charm for him. He 
 pointed out the golden ivy ; it pleased him, but he was feeling 
 ill then, and when he got back to the inn he went to bed. He 
 never got up again. 
 
 ' That was Sunday evening. On Monday his cold was 
 worse, and his throat very bad — almost a form of diphtheria. 
 In the evening his old Harrow friend, Mr. Corbett, came to see 
 him. They talked a good deal. My father was bright, 
 interested, insisting on accuracy as always, but very tired ; and 
 the night was bad. He suffered most from want of breath. 
 With his weak lungs he could not breathe in the clammy 
 Eoman night air, and in Eome it was impossible for him to 
 overcome an illness, which in itself need not have been fatal. 
 The place suffocated him. At night the air was damp and 
 chill ; at dawn a thick white mist rose up round the roofs 
 of the houses. It seemed as though the interminable deaths 
 of all Rome's history rose with the dawn to crush the living 
 city. And all day and all night the troops and the country 
 people poured in through the streets like an army. There was 
 no rest. If my father could but have been taken straight away 
 then, even into, the hills, he might perhaps have recovered; 
 but it is not given us to foresee. 
 
 ' On Monday afternoon his mind began to wander very 
 slightly. When the doctor came in the evening, he talked
 
 1893 THE END 477 
 
 to my father about his books : then, half in jest, he turned 
 and said, " Your father is ah'eady immortal." No one knew 
 how ill he was, but I think he knew it himself. On Tuesday 
 afternoon he gave me a little letter which he had written to my 
 mother. His hand was very weak. He had drawn his three 
 trefoils over the envelope for a seal. He was always neat — he 
 never forgot to finish anything. I think he did not suffer 
 actual pain, but his throat was very much swollen, and it was 
 impossible for him to eat or drink. The heat was increasing, 
 the days were long and noisy. He had a big airy room, and a 
 good English nun came to nurse him on Tuesday afternoon. 
 We read to him, but although he seemed to like the voice, 
 he could not follow the words. He asked for the small book 
 of prayers which he always had kept near him since he was 
 a child, and which had belonged to his mother. This he had 
 with him till he died. 
 
 ' He never once complained either of the heat or the noise, 
 or of his own terrible weariness. He talked quietly and 
 incessantly to himself. He seemed to be wandering back 
 through the tliouglits, not the experience of his old life. His 
 body was exhausted, but his mind, though detached from the 
 present surroundings, was strangely strung. Though delirious 
 with fever, he maintained that extraordinary command over 
 his brain, which only years of protracted suffering can procure. 
 He thanked us very gently when we gave him anything. ]\Iy 
 father was one of those people whom it is a joy to serve. 
 
 ' On Wednesday morning we saw that he was dying. 
 Another doctor came, and everything was done which could be 
 done, but he himself wanted to rest. His throat was well then, 
 but pneumonia had set in, attacking both lungs, and leading to 
 paralysis of them and of the heart. He sank very gently, 
 talking always to himself, but in a voice so low and weak 
 I could not catch the words. Only I felt certain that he was 
 happy and content, and very glad to rest. He had worked 
 bard— harder than most mortals— and against terrible odds ; 
 but always he worked in the heat and in the cold of life. The 
 nearer he came to death, the younger he seemed to grow. The 
 look of extreme youth which came into his face during the last
 
 478 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1893 
 
 hour of his life was literally extraordinary. Apart from the 
 smoothing of the lines, the head was that of a very young 
 man, almost of a boy. Towards midday he changed his bed. 
 He was terribly tired ; he only wanted to be cool and to sleep. 
 I put my arm round him to hold him up, for he could not 
 breathe, and soon his head fell back against my shoulder. His 
 eyes were shut as though he really slept, and there was a 
 strange sweet smile around his mouth. 
 
 ' He died in the very heat and the height of the spring-day. 
 There was no cloud in all the sky. The sun blazed passion- 
 ately above the roofs of Home, as his spirit went out through 
 the open window, out into the Light which he had loved so 
 well, which he had always striven to reach, to Avhich he 
 now belonged. 
 
 ' Eome was in an uproar all that day, but the penetrating 
 peace of eternity was stamped upon my father's quiet face ; and 
 so deep and so profound was his repose, that those who loved 
 him best dared not regret for his sake. Matthew Arnold's 
 lines, written about Clough, who died in Florence much in 
 the same way, ring in my head as I think of that last hour 
 of his life : 
 
 Why faintest thoi; ? I wandered till I died ; 
 Pioam on ! the light we sought is shining still. 
 
 ' It was a strange coincidence, and one which would have 
 pleased my father well, that the first person who brought 
 some flowers to put beside him was one of his Swiss friends, 
 the porter of the hotel. Soon after my father's death he came 
 up to the room with a big bunch of Roman lilacs to put by 
 his English friend. He was a great strong man, bred in the 
 heart of the Graubiinden mountains. His sorrow was very 
 genuine ; he knew quite well what this death would mean, not 
 only to himself, but to all his people at home. Large wreaths 
 of rare and beautiful flowers, sent by Romans and by English 
 people, who loved my father chiefly through his books, followed 
 through the day, but none of those were as sweet a token of 
 friendship for the dead man as that bunch of purple lilacs put in
 
 1898 THE END 479 
 
 his arms by the strong Swiss mountaineer, who had probably 
 never heard of his writings, but who loved him for himself. 
 
 ' In the afternoon I went out to the Protestant Cemetery 
 to choose a place for my father. The whole air seemed to sing 
 with Shelley's immortal lines on Adonais. It was April. 
 The grass and the graves were full of flowers, and the birds sang 
 and twattered in the cypress trees above them. They gave us 
 a little piece of ground close to the spot where Shelley lies 
 buried. In all the world there surely is no place more pene- 
 trated with the powers of poetry and of natural beauty. 
 
 ' Rome seemed half mad with rejoicings arid revelry all that 
 night. There was a thunder and a buzz of fireworks up on 
 the Capitol, and the whole air felt electrified with lights, with 
 music, and noises. Little lamps were hung round the shrines 
 in the streets, and red lights blazed upon the cornices of Pagan 
 temples. But something of the cool of the night crept down 
 fi'oni tlie sky and into the room where my father lay. 
 
 ' His own faith was so large, so broad. He had thirsted 
 for knowledge and space. It seemed as though his spirit were 
 already far away upon the paths he longed in life to tread, and 
 it was good to remember that, in passing into the Infinite, it 
 had gone straight over the City of Eome, and that his last 
 days had been lived amongst the sights and places which were 
 dear to him.' 
 
 [A friend who reached Rome too late to find Symonds alive, 
 sent the follo^^nng account of his funeral to Mr. Dakyns : — ' I 
 left for Rome by the first train which started on Wednes- 
 day morning. When I got there, past midnight, Angelo took 
 me back from the station to the hotel, and we went upstairs. 
 Johnnie's face was very quiet and beautiful, especially about the 
 foi-ehead. The window was open, and the hot damp air of tlie 
 city crept into the room. At 3 a.m. the men came. Angelo and 
 I helped to lift him. He was as light as a feather. Then we 
 two went down, and in an open cab we followed the hearse all 
 across dark and dreaming Rome to the cemetery of Caius 
 Cestius. I think that was Ids real funeral, and that he would 
 have liked it. Dawn was beginning to whiten the sky over the
 
 480 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 1893 
 
 Aventine as we reached the cemetery gates. Some birds 
 twittered in the cypress trees. We followed him to the 
 mortuary chapel. As we drove back, low white mists wavered 
 close along the ground, and the day began to make itself fully 
 felt through the arches of the Colosseum. Mrs. Bymonds and 
 Lotta arrived by the night train. Dr. Munthe embalmed the 
 body ; and so the funeral could be delayed till Mrs. Green 
 arrived. It took place at 4 p.m. on Saturday. The grave is- 
 within a pace of Trelawney's, and a hand touch of Shelley's 
 Cor Cordium, in the embrasure of the ancient city walls. 
 The coffin was covered with masses of purple irises and other 
 flowers. The sun shone most brilliantly, and the birds sang 
 in jubilation.' 
 
 On the grave is carved the following epitaph, written by 
 Mr. Jowett : 
 
 INFRA JACET 
 
 JOHANNES ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 VIR LUMINIBUS INGENII MULTIS 
 
 ET INDDSTRIA SINGULARI, 
 
 CUJUS ANIMUS 
 
 INFIRMO LICET IN CORPORE 
 
 LITERARUM ET HISTORIC STUDIO ARDEBAT. 
 
 BRISTOLII NATDS V. OCT. MDCCCXL. 
 REQUIEVIT IN CHRISTO XIX AP. 3IDCCCXCIII. 
 
 AVE CARISSIME 
 
 NEMO TE MAGIS IN CORDE AMICOS FOVEBAT 
 
 NEC IN SIMPLICES ET INDOCTOS BENEVOLENTIOR ERAT. 
 
 And below is Symonds's own translation of Cleanthes's hymn- 
 Lead thou nie, 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 ! 
 
 i
 
 INDEX 
 
 A , Mk., 412 
 
 Abbott, H. N., 371 
 
 Abdy family, 13 
 
 Abertlare, Lord, 41 
 
 • Academy,' 302, 3;»7 
 
 Adams, Mr. Coker, 01 
 
 Addington, Dr. John, 1(5 
 
 Addison. Joseph, 44() 
 
 .3iggishorn. 161 
 
 Aiguille de Blaiticre. 101 
 
 Aiguille de Charmoz, 100-101 
 
 Aiguille de Dru, 100 
 
 Aiguille de Varens, 98-99 
 
 Aiguille le Moine, 100 
 
 Airolo, 107. 386 
 
 Ajaccio, 261-263, 285 
 
 Albigna Glacier, 411 
 
 Albula, 331, 361 
 
 Alexander YI., Pope, 430 
 
 Alleyne, Miss S. F., 294, 392, 
 395 
 
 ' Allgemeine Zeitung,' 367 
 
 Alpine Club, 306 
 
 Altdorf, 109 
 
 Altein Pass, 361 
 
 jVm Hof, 341, 357, 361, 369, 374- 
 375, 402, 435 
 
 Amalfi, 303, 473 
 
 Amberieu, 97 
 
 Amiens, 94 
 
 Amorosi, Fratelli, 466 
 
 Anacreon, 65 
 
 Andermatt, 386 
 
 Andersen, Hans, 25 ; ' Ugly Duck- 
 ling,' 6, 50 
 
 Angelo (servant). (See under Fus- 
 atto) 
 
 Angelo, Michael, 38, 135, 138, 142, 
 188, 307-308, 330, 391, 449,473; 
 
 Life of, 182, 455-457, 460-461, 
 468-470 ; quoted, 464 
 
 Anglesea, 113 
 
 Antinous, 334 
 
 Antonio Sahn, 391 
 
 Antwerp Jluseum, 81 
 
 Aostii, 223 
 
 Appenzell, 163 
 
 Aquila, 467-168 
 
 Aquinas, Thomas, 413 
 
 Ardiiser, 360-361 
 
 Arezzo, 302 
 
 Ariosto, 200, 206, 259-261; 'Or- 
 lando Furioso,' 265, 268 
 
 Aristophanes, 65, 188, 261, 286 
 
 Aristotle, 122, 247, 310, 372, 404 
 
 Aries, 249 
 
 Arno Vale Cemetery, 2, 280 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 18, 78, 112, 338, 
 407 ; ' Scholar Gipsy,' 75 ; ' On 
 Translating Homer,' 84 ; quoted 
 424, 478 
 
 Arena, 106-107 
 
 Arosa, 360-361, 394, 396 
 
 Arthur's Seat, 99 
 
 Arundel Society, 87, 104 
 
 Arve, river, 97 98 
 
 Ash, Mr., 335 
 
 Ashlev Court, 16 
 
 Ashton, 27, 30, 39 
 
 Asolo, 434 
 
 Assisi, 171 
 
 ' Athenajum,' 291, 453 
 
 Athens, 294 
 
 Aurelius, Marcus, 322, 359 
 
 Austen, Miss, 253 
 
 Austin, Mr., 428 
 
 Austin, Rev. , 94 
 
 Avers, 331, 412, 426 
 
 1 1
 
 482 
 
 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 Avignon, 249 
 
 Avon, river, 25-27, 34 
 
 Avranches, 235, 238 
 
 B , Dr., 165 
 
 B , Mrs., 70, 120, 123, 124 
 
 B , C, 88 
 
 B , D., 70 
 
 B ,Holford, 88 
 
 Bablock Hythe, 75-76 
 
 Bacon, Lord, 18, 118, 126 
 
 Biirentritt, 835 
 
 Bagley Wood, 84-85 
 
 Bailey, poet, 187 
 
 Bain, Mrs., 62 
 
 Baker, Dr., 455 
 
 BaUiol College, 67-71, 78, 81, 87, 
 93, 120, 129-132, 193, 197, 227, 
 281, 468 
 
 BaUiol, John de, 78 
 
 Balmat, M. A., 98-102 
 
 Balzac, 253, ,259, 273 
 
 Bamberg, 166 
 
 Bangor, 111-114 
 
 Baranca, river, 290 
 
 Bari, 471-472 
 
 Basel, 157 
 
 Bassano, 277 
 
 Bath, 25, 27, 230 
 
 Battini, Serafino, 262 
 
 Battu, Madame, 95 
 
 Baur, 162 
 
 Baveno, 103-104, 139, 212, 215 
 
 Bayeux, 232, 311 
 
 Beaumont, Francis, 276 ; ' Sal- 
 macis,' 188 
 
 Becket, Thomas a, 78 
 
 Beddoe, Dr. .John, 296, 303, 306, 
 385-386 
 
 Bedminster. 26 
 
 Beethoven, 88, 122, 188, 207, 248 ; 
 ' Hallelujah,' 75 ; C Minor Sym- 
 phony, 246-247 
 
 Bel Alp, 303 
 
 Belle Garde, 97 
 
 Bellini, 38 
 
 Bellini, Gentile, 136 
 
 Bellini, Gian, 136 
 
 Bellinzona, 107 
 
 Belochetto, Signor, 200 
 
 Ben Nevis, 99 
 
 Bergiin, 412 
 
 Berisal, 102 
 
 Berlin, 81, 117, 136 
 
 Bern, 345 
 
 Bernese Alps, 102 
 
 Bernina, mountain, 393, 395 
 
 Bertrani, Madame, 95 
 
 Bethel, Mr., 87 
 
 Bethesda, 113 
 
 Beza, 97 
 
 Biagi, Guido, 457 
 
 Biasca, 386 
 
 Bibbiena, 466 
 
 Bion, 79 
 
 Birmingham, 111 
 
 Bismarck, Prince, 400 
 
 Black, A. & C, 469 
 
 Blackburne, Mr. Justice, 274 
 
 Blake, William, 222, 253, 304 
 
 Blind Aslyum Chapel, 5, 8, 12, 31 
 
 Bloxam, Dr., 151 
 
 Blumlis Alp, 164 
 
 Boccaccio, 286, 456 
 
 Bocognano, 262-264 
 
 Boito's ' Mefistofele,' 471 
 
 Bologna, 264, 429 
 
 Bombay College, 87 
 
 Bondasca Glacier, 411 
 
 Bondo, 411 
 
 Bonifazio, painter, 135 
 
 Bonville, 97 
 
 Bordighera, 200 
 
 Borradale, 112 
 
 Borromeo family, 103 
 
 Bosanquet, Cecil, 68, 156-157, 160- 
 
 161 
 Bosanquet, Gustavus, 53, 156 
 Boswell's ' Johnson,' 330, 446 
 Botticelli, painter, 38 
 Bouilhet, Louis, 464 
 Bramley. Mr., 152 
 Breithorn. mountain, 162 
 Brescia, 445 
 Brieg, 102 
 Bright, Dr., 72 
 Bright, George, 310 
 Bright, John, 275 
 Bright, Mr., 72, 96 
 Bristol, 1, 3, 10, 12, 14, 26, 38, 82, 
 
 195, 273 
 Bristol Cathedral, 3, 26, 51, 63, 82, 
 
 170, 213 
 Bristol University, 288 
 British Museum, 334
 
 INDEX 
 
 483 
 
 Brodrick, Mr., 09 
 
 Brorne, dramatist, 300 
 
 Bronte, Branwell, 384 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 259 
 
 Brown, H. F., 305 ; letters to, 342, 
 et seq. 
 
 Browne, Sir T„ 209, 287 
 
 Browning, Oscar, 305 
 
 Browning, Robert, 117, 186-187, 
 205, 389 ; ' Paracelsus ' and 
 ' Pippa Passes,' 210 ; quoted, 
 246 ; ' Cleon,' 297 ; 'A Gram- 
 marian's Funeral,' 463 
 
 Bruges, 82 
 
 Brunhofer, Mr., 405 
 
 Brunhorn, 375 
 
 Briinli, 242 
 
 Bruno, Giordano, 324-325, 400, 
 403-405 
 
 Bryce, James, 83, 310 
 
 Brydges, Sir Egerton, 199 
 
 Buchanan, Robert, 337 ; on Walt 
 Whitman, 251 
 
 Buchanan, Mrs., 116 
 
 Buin, Piz, 392, 395 
 
 Buller, Mr., 83 
 
 Buol, Christian, 334-336, 339, 348, 
 350, 358-360, 367, 448 
 
 Buol family, 340-341, 377 
 
 Buol, Herr, 366, 374 
 
 Buol Hotel, 429 
 
 Buol, Simeon, 394 
 
 Burton, Sir Richard and Lady, 
 455 
 
 Busche family, 335 
 
 Butler, 60 
 
 Butler, Montagu, 249 
 
 Byron, Lord, 72, 76. 188, 205, 210; 
 ' Childe Harold,' 206 
 
 C- 
 C 
 
 - FAMILY, 474 
 
 -, Mr., 399 
 
 Cadenabbia, 268 
 Cader Idris, 113 
 Cadogan, Henry, 438 
 Caen, 229-232 
 Caird, Mr., 126 
 Calais, 153 
 California, 208 
 Calvin, 97 
 Cambridge, 68, 304 
 Cainclfoid, Loid, 10 
 
 Camerlata, 105 
 
 Campanella, Tommaso, 307-308, 
 
 405 
 Camperdown, Lord, 68 
 Campion, Mr., 69 
 Cannes, 249-257, 270, 296-299, 
 
 306, 311, 340. 377 
 Capel Curig, 112-113 
 Caprese, 466 
 Capri, 303 
 Carlisle, 67 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 186 ; quoted, 456 
 Carnarvon, 112, 113 
 Carpaccio^ Vittore, 135-136 
 Carpenter, Dr., 41 
 Carrara, 468 
 Cary's Plato, 62 
 Casaccia, 443 
 Cassiobury, 55 
 Castagnole, 350 
 Castasegna, 411-412 
 Castellamare, 172 
 Cato, 56 
 Cator, 359 
 Catullus, 187 
 Cave, Charles, 81, 371 
 Cave, Edith, 81, 116. (See also 
 
 under Symonds, Edith) 
 Cellini, Benvenuto, 286, 377 ; 
 
 Autobiography, 407, 413-417, 
 
 423, 426, 435, 139 
 ' Chambers' Miscellany,' 11 
 Chamonix, 97-100, 156, 303 
 Chartres, 239 
 Chatterton, 86 
 Chaucer, 45 ; portrait, 87 
 Cheltenham, 123 124 
 Cherwell, river, 128 
 Chester, 111 
 
 Chiavenna, 335, 432, 443-445 
 Child, Mr., 428 
 Chiusi, 171, 350, 466 
 Christ Church College, 77 
 Chur, 357 
 Cicero, 206 
 
 Cio (black Spitz dog), 409 
 Citta della I'ieve, 171 
 Clarendon, Lord, 78 
 Clark, Sir Andrew, 370 
 Claude, painter, 222 
 Clavadcl, 427 
 Cleanthes, 322-325 
 Clifton, 14, 18, 25, 26, ;i(), 1 i,cl acq. 
 
 I 1 2
 
 484 
 
 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 Clifton College, 86, 267, 271, 301 
 
 Clifton Downs, 187 
 
 Clifton Hill House, 1, 16, 24, 55, 
 
 ct seq. ; purchase of, 25 
 ' Cliftonian,' 267 
 Clive, Mrs., 120 
 Clough, Arthur, 132, 310, 478; 
 
 ' Eemains,' 197 
 Clough, Mrs., 197 
 Coaster, Herr, 335 
 Col de Geant Pass, 100 
 Cole, 400 
 Colenso, 126 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 196, 205 
 ' Colleen Bawn,' 118 
 Colnaghi, 38 
 Colvin, Sidney, 360 
 Como, 104-105, 377, 411 
 Conite, Auguste, 169, 194, 310-324 
 Congreve, Kichard, 70, 129, 169, 
 
 170, 321-322 
 Conington, Professor John, 68- 
 
 73, 78-86, 96, 109, 122, 127-133, 
 
 142, 187, 190, 201, 221, 251-252, 
 
 260, 310; Miscellanies, 280; 
 
 ' Eemains,' 290 
 Coniston, lake, 79, 80, 126 
 Constances, 233-235 
 Constantinople, 72 
 Constanz, 164 
 ' Constellation, The,' 45 
 Conway, 113 
 ' Cook's Folly,' 114 
 Cooper, Mr., 70 
 Corbett, Mr., 476 
 Corfe, Mr., 122 
 Corfu, 294 
 ' Cornhill Magazine,' 140, 285, 318, 
 
 365 
 Corpus Christi College, 69 
 Correggio, painter, 38, 136 
 Corsica, 261 
 Cortona, 297, 350 
 Courmayeur, 223, 296 
 Courthope, W. J., 122, 141, 249, 
 
 257, 260, 264-265 
 Coutts' Bank, 68, 204 
 Creighton, 429 
 Currey, Mr., 50, 71 
 
 ' Daily Food,' 2, 139 
 Dakyns, Henry Graham, 199-200, 
 242, 305, 352, 427, 479 ; letters 
 
 to, 167-171, 177, 182-183, 189, 
 195-196, 212, 290, 294-298, 303, 
 365 
 
 D'Alemagna, Giovanni, 136 
 
 Dalrymple, Mr., 66 
 
 Dante, 87, 182, 199, 206, 259, 268, 
 287, 337, 427 ; ' Divine Comedy,' 
 239 ; quoted, 242 ; lectures on, 
 280 ; ' Introduction to the Study 
 of,' 281, 290-291, 344 
 
 Dartmoor, 10 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 324-325 
 
 Davos Platz, 147, 328 et scq. 
 
 DeBunsen, George, 160 
 
 De Guerin, M., 210 
 
 De Musset, Alfred, 174, 188, 194, 
 210, 311 
 
 De Quincey, 87, 116, 210 
 
 ' Decamerone,' 200 
 
 Decker, Mr., 206 
 
 Democritus, 211, 316 
 
 Deutsch, Dr., 259 
 
 Dicey, Albert, 174, 188, 194, 210, 
 311 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 10, 12 
 
 Didcot, 93 
 
 Dijon, 247 
 
 Dilettanti Society, 37 
 
 Dischma Thai, 330, 375 
 
 Disgrazia, mountain, 411 
 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, 275 
 
 Disraeli, Miss, 79 
 
 Dissentis, 385-386 
 
 Dobell, Sydney, 309 
 
 Dobson, Austin, 395 
 
 ' Doefoot ' (mare), 155 
 
 Dorfli, 405, 410 
 
 Berg, 409, 410 
 
 Dolgorouki, Princess, 455 
 
 Domleschg, 331 
 
 Domo d'Ossola, 103 
 
 ' Don Juan,' 210 
 
 Dresden, 166 
 
 Dryden, 125, 208 
 
 Ducie, Lady, 116 
 
 Diirer, Albert, 241, 474 
 
 Diirrenboden, 366 
 
 Dufferin, Lady, 41 
 
 Dundry, 27-28, 272 
 
 Dundry Hill, 39 
 
 Duppa, painter, 38 
 
 Durdham Downs, 30, 34, 294, 353 
 
 Dyce, Mr., 260 
 
 
 i
 
 INDEX 
 
 48o 
 
 E , Mdlle. E., It)3-1GC 
 
 E , Miss, 125 
 
 Eagle, Miss, 88 
 
 Earlev. 94 
 
 Earley Court, 93 
 
 ' Ecce Homo," 201, 225, 322 
 
 Edinburgh, 66 
 
 ' Edinburgh Courant,' 200 
 
 Eiger, mountain, 162, 164, 219 
 
 Einsiedehi, 163 
 
 Eldon, Lord, 85 
 
 Elkington & Co., 389 
 
 ElHot, Dean, 41 
 
 Ellis, Robinson, 68 
 
 Elstree, 55 
 
 Elton, Charles, 71, 148 
 
 Emerson. Mr., 23 
 
 Empedocles, 200, 211, 213, 286 
 
 Ems, 447 
 
 ' Encyclopedia Britannica,' 357, 
 
 407 
 Engelberg, 157-158, 220, 242, 275 
 Erba, Mr., 377 
 
 Eschmann (courier), 139, 205 
 Esk, river, 66 
 ' Essays and Reviews,' 87, 130, 
 
 310 
 Essex, Lord, 55 
 Eton, 68-69. 151, 300 
 Etzsch Thai, 393 
 Euganean Hills, 455-456 
 Euripides, 32, 276, 421 
 Evans, Miss, 253-254 
 ' Eve of St. John,' 10 
 ' Evelina,' 25 
 Exeter, 280 
 
 Faido, 107 
 
 Farinata, , 287 
 
 Farringford, 196 
 
 Fergusson, Mr. and Mrs. J., 66 
 
 Fergusson, Henriette, 67 
 
 Ferrara, 264^ 265 
 
 Ferrari, Gaudenzio, 38, 104 
 
 ' Festus,' 187 
 
 Feu 7., Herr, 164 
 
 Fielding's ' Tom Jones,' 140 
 
 Fisher, Paul, 25-28 
 
 Fitz-Simoii, Sir Richard, 17 
 
 Flambeau, mountain, 100 
 
 Flaminius, 350 
 
 Flaxman, 37 
 
 Fletcher, dramatist, 188, 193, 251, 
 
 276 
 Fletschhorn, mountain, 305 
 Florence, 167-168, 184, 212, 225, 
 
 264. 296, 342, 350, 456, 466, 468, 
 
 478 ; lectures on, 305 
 Fluela, 331, 335, 366, 412, 428,440 
 Fluela Hospiz, 392, 405 
 Fluela Pass, 441 
 Fluela Thai, 425 
 Fluelen, 107-109 
 Fobello, 214-216, 290 
 Forbes, Professor James, 41, 98- 
 
 101 
 Forbes family, 66 
 Ford, Mr., 87 
 Forest Hill, 88 
 Forno Glacier, 410 
 Forrest family, 66 
 'Fortnightly Review,' 302, 412. 
 
 430, 446, 472 
 ' Forty Thieves,' 282 
 Fox, Mr., 176 
 Fox, Dr., 295 
 ' Eraser's Magazine,' 373 
 Frauenkirch, 429 
 Freeman, Mr., 428 
 Freshwater, 301 
 Friederichshafen, 164 
 ' Freier Rhatier,' 367 
 Frome, river, 26-27 
 Furka, 275 
 Fusatto, Angelo, 360, 455, 466, 469, 
 
 472, 479 
 
 Gair, Loch, 66 
 
 Gais, 163 
 
 Galileo, 118 
 
 Galton, Francis, 16, 296 
 
 Gamble, Isabella (afterwards Mrs. 
 
 Roberi Otter), 328 
 Garibaldi, 139 
 Garth, 112 
 Gaspard, M., 215 
 Gathorne, Captain, 4i3 
 ' Gaudeamus,' 390 
 Gautier's ' L'Art Moderne,' 140 
 G6ant Glacier, 100 
 Geneva, 97, 290, 400 
 Genoa, 171, 212, 249, 277, 390 
 Ghent, 82, 231 
 Giorgione, painter, 266
 
 486 
 
 JOHN ADDINOTON SYMONDS 
 
 Giotto, painter, 138 
 
 Girard, Madame, 253 
 
 Girard,Mdlle. Sophie, 24, 35-36, 41, 
 51, 67, 123, 253, 436; quoted, 
 44-46 
 
 Girdlestone, Canon, 122 
 
 Giudice della Rocca, 261 
 
 Giuglini, singer, 95 
 
 Giusti, author, 206 
 
 Glacier de Boissons, 98 
 
 Gladstone, W. E., 275 
 
 Glaris, 429 
 
 ' Glenfinlas,' 10 
 
 Glenthorne, 301 
 
 Glion, 290 
 
 Gloucester, 142 
 
 Glyder Vawr, 113 
 
 Godstow, 128 
 
 Goethe, 126, 157-158, 166, 188, 
 199, 359; 'Faust,' 112, 116, 
 147, 187, 237, 464; 'Life of,' 
 114, 116, 182 ; ' Gott und Welt,' 
 162, 177, 237, 277, 322-325, 359 
 
 ' Golden Treasury,' 140, 187 
 
 Goldney family, 25 
 
 Goldschmidt, Madame Jenny 
 Lind, 60, 123-126 
 
 Goldschmidt, Otto, 249 
 
 Goliardi, poet, 390, 395-396 
 
 Gordon, Lucy Duff, 6 
 
 Gosse, Edmund, 357 ; letters to, 
 332-336,34*2, 345, 395, 445, 451, 
 454, 459 
 
 Gotthard Railway, 386 
 
 Gounod's 'Faust,' 161 
 
 Gower, Lord Ronald, 449, 468-469 
 
 Gozzi, Carlo, Memoirs of, 426-427, 
 435, 439 
 
 Gozzoli, Benozzo, 136 
 
 Graubiinden, 5, 330, 339, 340, 357, 
 433, 457 
 
 Great Malvern, 126 
 
 Green, Professor T. H., 68, 71-72, 
 79-80, 83, 87, 120, 129, 161-165, 
 190, 227, 309-310, 333, 337-338 ; 
 marriage, 281 ; death, 368 ; life 
 of, 436-437 
 
 Green, Mrs. T. H., 328, 468, 480 ; 
 letters to, 294-295, 333, 335, 344, 
 364, 368, 377, 382, 394, 436. 
 (See also under Symonds, Char- 
 lotte) 
 
 Green's ' Essays on Novels,' 140 
 
 Grenoble, 249 
 
 Grimm's ' Life of Michael Angelo,' 
 
 182 
 Grimsel, 275 
 Grindelwald, 164, 268 
 Grouville, 235 
 Guarda, 394 
 Guicciardini, 260 
 Guler (guide), 4'25, 436 
 Gurney, Russell, 296 
 
 H- 
 
 Mr. W., 196 
 
 Hagley, 10 
 
 Hallam, 41, 196; 'History of 
 
 Literature,' 192 
 Halle, 198 
 
 Hamilton, Sir William, 37 
 Hampden, 394 
 Hampstead, 55 
 
 Handel, 125, 188 ; ' Pastoral Sym- 
 phony,' 172 ; ' Israel in Egypt,' 
 
 198 
 Hannen, Sir James, 454 
 Hannibal, 350 
 Harcourt family, 75-76 
 Hardman, 93 
 Harper Bros., 347 
 ' Harper's Magazine,' 376 
 Harrison on Culture, 251 
 Harrow, 32, 41-74, 80, 127, 284 
 
 309 
 Hartley, 16 
 Hastings, 160, 180, 216, 239, 274, 
 
 319, 414 
 Hastings Election Petition, 274 
 Hatherley, Lord Chancellor, 68 
 Havre, 95 
 Hawkes, Mrs., 249 
 Hawthornden, 66 
 Haydn, Joseph, 107 ; ' The Heavens 
 
 are telling,' 75 ; ' Creation,' 142 
 Haydon's Diaries, 120 
 Haymarket Theatre, 62 
 Hebog, 113 
 Hegel, 84, 126, '278, 324 ; quoted, 
 
 15 ; ' Aesthetik,' 258-259 
 Heidelberg, 162 
 Heiligenblut, 277 
 Heine, Heinrich, 125, 182, 188, 
 
 399 ; ' Correspondence,' 259 
 Helmholtz's Lectures, *298 
 Henry VHL, 78
 
 INDEX 
 
 487 
 
 ' Hermann and Dorothea,' 140 
 Hervey, 260 
 Hesiod, 275 
 
 Heywood's ' Chronicle of Eliza- 
 beth,' 206 ; Plays, 300 
 Hill, Mr., 116 
 Hoffnun!J:sau, 367 
 Hold. Mr., 392, 394 
 Honiburg, 205 
 Homer, 32, 37 
 
 Hood's ' Miss Kilmansegg,' 25 
 Hooker, Mr., 98 
 Horace, 32 
 Hortield Orphanage, 32 
 
 Horn, Kev. , 94 
 
 Hospenthal, 107-108 
 Howard, George, 304 
 Hugo, Victor, 210 
 Huldi (carpenter), 424 
 Hullah, musician, 80 
 Hume, 16, 18, 
 ' Humphrey Clinker,' 25 
 Hunt, painter, 221 
 
 Ibycus, 65 
 
 Iffley, 85 
 
 Ilkley, 111 
 
 Innspruck, 134 
 
 Interlaken, 157-160 
 
 Invalid Ladies' Home, 288 
 
 Isola Bella, 103 
 
 Isola di San Giulio, 104 
 
 Ivrea, 223 
 
 Jackson, Mr., 87 
 
 Jacobshorn, mountain, 373-375, 
 
 424, 470 
 Jacopone, Canticles of, 364 
 James (manservant), 247 
 Jamieson, Mr., 66, 69 
 Jardin, George, 100 
 Jefferson, Mr., 69 
 Jenkyns, Dr., 84, 94 
 Jenner, Sir William, 328-331, 356 
 Johnson, Dr., ' Life of,' 330 
 Jones, Sarah (nurse), 9 
 Jonson, Ben, 193, 286 ; ' Life of,' 
 
 330, 407 
 Jowett, Benjamin, 41, 73-93, 116 
 
 127, 186-201, 227, 251, 275-276, 
 
 286, 309-312, 352, 435, 446, 468, 
 
 480 ; anecdotes of, 129-133 ; 
 
 letter to Dr. Symonds, 153-154 ; 
 
 letters to J. A. Symonds, 192, 
 
 21U212 
 Julier, Pass, 331, 335, 361, 399, 
 
 412, 432 
 Jungfrau, 162, 180, 218-219 
 Juon, Anton, 448 
 Jura, 97 
 Justinian, 190 
 
 Kant, quoted, 327 
 
 Katrine, Mdlle., 164 
 
 Keats, 52, 187, 205-206, 210; ' Love 
 Letters,' 335 
 
 ' Kempion,' 10 
 
 King's College Chapel, 230 
 
 King's ^Yeston Down. 9 
 
 Kingsley, Charles, 94 ; ' Miscel- 
 lanies,' 72-73 
 
 Klosters, 394, 403, 425, 428 
 
 Knight, Mr., 151 
 
 Knight, Eev. Robert, 47 
 
 Knight, Rev. William, 22, 31-32 
 
 Knox, 97 
 
 Koch, Dr., 456 
 
 Kugler's ' Handbook to Italian 
 Painters,' 140 
 
 Kuhalpthal, 412 
 
 Kupfenfluh, 394 
 
 L- 
 L- 
 L- 
 
 LoRD, 382 
 Madame, 260 
 Miss, 359 
 
 140 
 
 ' La Comtesse de Rudolstadt 
 
 La Flegere, 100-101 
 
 La Vernia, 466 
 
 Lacaita, Sir James, 472 • 
 
 Lago d'Orta, 104 
 
 Lago Maggiore, 103, 109, 112. 212 
 
 216 
 Lamb, Charles, 62, 206 
 Landor, W. S., 360 
 Landwasser Valley, 348, 425 
 Langdale Pikes, 112 
 Langwies, 361, 394 
 Lansdown, 27 
 Lansdowne, Lord, 41 
 Lasinio, 37 
 Lausanne, 140 
 Lautorbrunnen, 160, 163, 165 
 
 180
 
 488 
 
 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 Law, Mr., 112 
 
 ' Le Temps,' 367 
 
 Leaker, Mrs., 9, 10 
 
 Lear, Edward, 249, 252, 260, 391 
 
 Lechaud Glacier, 100 
 
 Leech, Mr., 116 
 
 Leghorn, 171 
 
 Leibnitz, 405 
 
 Leigh Woods, 39, 66, 77, 114, 177, 
 
 183, 187, 229, 436 
 Leipzig, 166-167 
 Lendi, Herr, 442 
 Lenzerheide, 394 
 Leopardi, 147, 206, 267, 389 
 Lerici, 342 
 Leucaspide, 472 
 Lewes, G. H., 169 ; ' Life of Goethe,' 
 
 114, 182 
 Lewis, Mrs., 304 
 ' Light,' 337 
 Lind, Jenny, 461 
 Lionardo, 135 
 Littre, M., 169 
 Livy, 112 
 Llanberis, 112-113 
 Llynogwen, 113 
 Locl^e, 18 
 Louvain, 231 
 Loyola, 404 
 
 Lubbock, Sir John, 362 
 Lucca, 212 
 
 Lucerne, 109, 157, 268 
 Lucian, 65 
 
 Lucretius, quoted, 174, 236 
 Lugano, 104, 337 
 Luigi, 391 
 
 Luini, painter, 38, 104, 229 
 Lukmanier, 385 
 Lushington, Dr., 275 
 Lynton, 300 
 Lyttelton, Lord, 10 
 
 M- 
 
 F , 80 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, 406 
 Macchiavelli, 401, 413 
 Machse, 10 
 
 Maclaren's gymnasium, 85, 87 
 'Macmillan's Magazine,' 140 
 Macmurdo, Sir Montagu, 41 
 Macon, 97, 168 
 Macpherson, Mr., 38 
 Macready, 197 
 
 I Macugnaga, 215, 218, 223, 228, 
 
 290 
 I Maderaner Thai, 275 
 Magdalen College, 70, 75, 85, 88- 
 
 89, 119, 148, 150-154, 167, 213, 
 
 285. 304 
 Magenta, 106 
 Maidlow, 148 
 Malcolm, Mr., 68, 69 
 Maloja, 385-336, 410-411, 432, 
 
 443 
 Malta, 296-297 
 Malvern, 43, 141, 154-155 
 Manchester, 67 
 Mantegna, painter, 38, 138 
 Mariana, 413 
 Mario, singer, 94 
 Marlborough, 72, 90 
 Marlowe, 213 
 Marlowe, poet, 37, 287 
 Marostica, 434 
 Marseilles, 171 
 Marston's ' Pygmalion,' 188 
 Martire, Pietro, 136-137 
 Massinger, 193 
 Masson, 89 
 Maurice, Frederick D., 41, 309, 310, 
 
 352 
 Mauvais Pas, 99 
 Mayenfelder Furka, Pass, 360 
 Melun, 247 
 
 Mentone, 199-203, 221, 260 
 Mendelssohn, 79, 122, 125, 144, 
 
 160 
 Mer de Glace, 99-101 
 Meyringen, 157-158 
 Middleton, Prof., 457 
 Milan, 82, 104-105, 139, 212, 229, 
 
 268, 291, 337 
 Mill, J. S., 169, 170 
 Miller, G., 192, 260 
 Milnian, Dean, 96 
 Milton, John, 125, 138, 142, 167, 
 
 198, 209, 266, 287; 'Paradise 
 
 Lost,' 140 ; quoted, 247 
 Minsch, Peter, 428 
 Modena, 264 
 Monch, mountain, 162 
 Monaco, 202, 265 
 Monro, Mr., 71 
 Monstein, 366 
 Mont Blanc, 97-100, 156 
 Mont Brevent, 101
 
 INDEX 
 
 489 
 
 Mont Pilatns. 157 
 
 Mont St. Michel, 238-239 
 
 Montaigne quoted, 317 
 
 Montanvert. 99 
 
 Monte Amiata, 350 
 
 Monte Carlo, 202-205 
 
 Monte d'Oro, 263 
 
 Monte Generoso. 277, 330, 391 
 
 Monte Eosa, 106, 110, 218-219, 241 
 
 Monteagle, Lord, 41 
 
 Montepulciano, 350 
 
 Montreux. 428 
 
 Moor, Mr., 292 
 
 Moore, Mrs., 200 
 
 Morley, John, 302 
 
 Morris, William, 389 
 
 Moschus, 79 
 
 Mozart. 38-39 
 
 Miiller, George, 13 
 
 Miiller, M., 149 
 
 Miirren. 160-166, 175, 180, 185. 
 223-225, 241, 268, 275, 341 
 
 Muir's ' History of Greek Litera- 
 ture,' 50 
 
 Mullach's Democritus, 211 
 
 Munich, 81, 105, 134-135, 140, 161, 
 164. 166 
 
 Munthe, Dr., 480 
 
 Murchison, Mr., 98 
 
 Muretto-Thal. 410 
 
 •Murray's Magazine,' 140 
 
 Myers, Rev. F., 41, 279-280 
 
 Mvlne, L. G., 155 
 
 N.\LDER, Mr., 151 
 
 Naples, 171, 225, 296, 373, 471- 
 
 473 
 Narni, 171 
 Nash family, 9 
 Nash, Mr., 295 
 Nash, Mrs. James, 18 
 Neander, Mr., 117 
 Neef, Miss, 374 
 Neuchatel, 225 
 New College, 141 
 New College Chapel, 85, 119 
 Newhailes, 66 
 
 Newman, Francis, 309, 312, 352 
 Newsome (servant), 116 
 Newton, Mr., 296 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 298 
 Nice, 261 
 
 Nightingale Valley, 114 
 
 ■ Nineteenth Century,' 362 
 
 Nismes, 249 
 
 Norris, Mrs., 275 
 
 Noel, Hon. Koden, 383, 412, 420 
 
 North, Catherine, 160, 180. (See 
 also under Symonds, ]\Ir.'^. Cath- 
 erine) 
 
 North, Frederick, 80, 160 180, 215, 
 274-275 
 
 North, Miss, 296, 418, 438 
 
 North, Eoger, 446 
 
 ' North British Review,' 200, 252, 
 258, 285 
 
 Novara, 106 
 
 Niii-nberg, 166, 231 
 
 Nutt, D., 469 
 
 Oberalp, 386 
 
 Ogwen, river, 113 
 
 Olivone, 386 
 
 Ollivant, Mr., 83 
 
 • Orley Farm,' 140 
 
 Orta, 215, 291 
 
 Orte, 467 
 
 Ortler, mountain, 393-395 
 
 Orvieto, 38, 466 
 
 Otter, Francis, 68 
 
 Otter, Mrs. Robert, 328 
 
 Otter, Robert, 371 
 
 Ouchy, 223 
 
 Ovid, 467 
 
 Owen, Mr., 87 
 
 Oxford, 18, 28, 63, 66-71, 76-77, 
 82-89, 96, 119, 126-129, 141, 
 149, 151, 155, 167, 190, 200-201, 
 251, 309-310, 328 
 
 Oxford Cathedral, 232 
 
 Oxford University, 428 
 
 F.VMILY, 470 
 
 Padua, 138, 264 
 
 Paget, Miss Helen, 249 
 
 Palestrina, 405 
 
 Palgrave, INIr., 187, 196-197 
 
 ' Pall Mall Gazette,' 285, 397, 454 
 
 letter to, 367 
 Palmer, Edwin, 68, 83, 113, 310 
 Palmerston, Lord, 00-61 
 Palmv, Christian, 350, 359 
 I'&oVi, 261
 
 490 
 
 JOHN ADDTXGTON SYMONDS 
 
 Paris, 94-95, 140, 168, 171 
 
 Parker, Charles, 68, 310 
 
 Parma, 38, 261 
 
 Parmenides, 199 
 
 Pascal, 118 
 
 Pasterze Glacier, 278 
 
 Pater's ' Marius,' 401 ; ' Apprecia- 
 tions,' 451 
 
 Patt, Herr, 442-443 
 
 Pattison, Mark, 68, 349, 463 
 
 Pearson, A., 93, 295 
 
 Pearson, Charles, 68 
 
 Pearson, Hugh, 93-94, 310 
 
 Pearson, H. E., 305 
 
 Pembroke College, 72 
 
 Pembroke, Lord, 151 
 
 Penrhyn, 112 
 
 ' Penseroso,' 125 
 
 Pensford, 189 
 
 Pepys, Samuel, 446 
 
 Percival, Dr., 271 
 
 Perry, Mr., 396 
 
 Perugia, 171, 296, 301, 350 
 
 Perugino, 198 
 
 Petrarch, 199 
 
 Pfarrer, Herr, 165 
 
 Phillpotts, J. S., 310 
 
 Piave Valley, 452 
 
 Pienza, 350 
 
 Piero, Paron, 391 
 
 Pindar, 21, 65, 275 
 
 Pinner, 52, 57 
 
 Pinner Church, 59 
 
 Pinturicchio, painter, 136 
 
 Pisa, 167, 212 
 
 Pisano, 138 
 
 'Pischa,' mountain, 425 
 
 Pitlochry, 66 
 
 Piz Aela, 361 
 
 Piz Badile, 443 
 
 Piz Cristallina, 385 
 
 Piz Kesch, 361 
 
 Piz Languard, 180 
 
 Piz Linard, 392, 395 
 
 Plato, 37, 62-63, 65, 79, 122, 129, 
 131, 142, 243, 310; 'Republic,' 
 140; 'Symposium,' 156; quoted, 
 333, 419 
 
 Pliny (the younger), 74 
 
 Plutarch, 65, 413 
 
 Plymouth Brethren, 11-13 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allen, 408 
 
 Poliziano, 292, 333 
 
 Pontresina, 180, 185 
 
 Poole, Mr., 296 
 
 Pope, Alexander, 75, 208 
 
 Poppi, 466 
 
 Port Meadow, 72, 75 
 
 Portici, 348 
 
 Prague, 81 
 
 Prattigau, 425, 429 
 
 Prichard, Dr., 41 
 
 Prometheus, 286 
 
 Promoutogno, 371, 411 
 
 Puller, Cholmley, 68-72, 83, 310 
 
 Pyrton, 394 
 
 ' Psychological Review,' 95 
 
 QuAiN, Dk., 356 
 
 ' Quarterly Review,' 259 
 
 R , Mr., 61, 88, 91 
 
 Ragatz, 419 
 
 Raleigh's 'Lie,' 49 
 
 Raphael, 37, 89, 135, 142, 188, 
 
 198, 222 
 Rapperschwyl, 163 
 Ravenna, 212, 261 
 Rawlinson, Mr., Ill 
 Reading, 93 
 Redland, 30, 109 
 Reichenau, 385, 412 
 Reisen's ' Anthologia Latina,' 390 
 Rembrandt, 138 
 Renan, 322 
 Retzsch, 37, 161 
 Reuschen, 448 
 Rhaziins Castle, 412 
 Rheims, 233 
 Rhind, Mr., 116 
 Rhine, 105 
 Rhone, 97 
 
 Rhone Valley, 102, 303 
 ' Richard Feverel,' 273 
 Richardson's 'Clarissa Harlowe,' 
 
 253 
 Richelieu, 193 
 Richetto, 391 
 Richmond, artist, 116 
 Richter, Jean Paul, 167 
 Riederalp, 305 
 Rigi Vaudois, 247 
 Robinson, Mr., 141 
 RoUestone, Mr., 91
 
 INDEX 
 
 491 
 
 Rome, 167, 171, 179, 184, 225, 274, 
 
 285, 296, 302, 350, 360, 400, 
 
 466-480 
 ' Romola,' 182 
 Roscoe's ' Cellini,' 424 
 Rosenlaui, 157 
 Roslin, 66 
 
 Ross, Mrs., 447, 456 
 Rouen, 95, 227-231 
 Roy, Rammohoun, 16 
 Royal Institution, 305-306 
 Rubens, painter, 135, 140, 145 
 Rubinstein, musician, 304 
 Ruedi, Dr., 229-230, 333, 347, 382, 
 
 395, 401-402 
 Rugby, 50, 197, 227 
 Ruskin, John, 79, 173, 210, 221- 
 
 222 
 Russell, Lord John, 60 
 Rutson, A. O., 68, 71-72, 75-76, 
 
 83, 169, 171, 175, 190, 310 
 
 S , Mr., 80 
 
 S , Mr. S., 88 
 
 Saas, 305 
 
 St ,Mr., 92 
 
 St. Augustine's ' Confessions,' 65 ; 
 
 quoted, 148 
 St.-Beuve's ' Causeries de Lundi,' 
 
 228 
 St. Dominic, 244 
 St. Etienne, 231 
 St. Francis, 244 
 St. Gothard, 109, 275 
 ' St. James's Gazette,' 397 
 St. Lo, 232-233 
 St. Martin, 97 
 St. Mary de Redclitfe Church, 26, 
 
 51, 82, 230 
 St. Moritz, 366, 399, 410 
 St. Nicholas' Church, 26 
 St. Ouen, 93, 228 
 St. Quirico, 350 
 St. Stephen's Church, 26 
 Saintine's ' La .Jolie Cordiere,' 140 
 Salerno. 472 
 Salisbury, Lord, 429 
 Salvini, 304 
 Salzburg, 81, 107 
 Samaden, 336, 366, 410, 443 
 Sampiero, 261 
 San Casciano, 401 
 
 San Giulio, island, 215 
 
 San Maurizio Church, 106 
 
 San Remo, 200, 303. 390-391, 398 
 
 Sand, George, 140, 210, 219, 298, 
 462 
 
 Sardasca Alp, 394 
 
 Sarpi, Fra Paolo, 404, 425 
 
 ' Saturday Review,' 1'77 
 
 Savona, 398 
 
 Scaletta, 394 
 
 Scanfs, 394-395 
 
 Scesaplana, 395 
 
 Schaft'hausen, 164 
 
 Schatzalp, 330 
 
 Scheffler, M. von, 457 
 
 Schelling, 117, 405 
 
 Schia-horn, 388, 429 
 
 Schilthorn, 162-163 
 
 Schio, 448 
 
 Schwartz-horn, 875, 392-393, 412, 
 435 
 
 Schwyz, 163 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 6 25, 259 
 
 Seeds, photographer, 117 
 
 Seeley's ' Ecce Homo,' 201, 225, 
 322 
 
 Seelisberg, 157 
 
 Sefinenthal, 163 
 
 Seneca, 210 
 
 Serravalle, 450 
 
 Sertig, 366 
 
 Sertig Thai, 330 
 
 Seta, Signor, 262 
 
 Servetus, 400 
 
 Severn, river, 26-27 
 
 Shakespeare, WiUiam, 125, 140, 
 193, 207, 210, 461 ; 'Venus and 
 Adonis,' 10, 37, 188 ; ' Sonnets,' 
 196 r ' Hamlet,' 304 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 52. 72-73, 
 80, 85, 121, 125, 173, 187-188, 
 205, 210-211, 266, 287, 342, 
 479-480 ; ' Alastor,' 88 ; ' Poems,' 
 140 ; ' Epipsychidion,' 210 
 
 Shotover, 158 
 
 Sicily, 294-297 
 
 Sidbury, 370, 377 
 
 Sidbury Manor, 40 
 
 Sidgwick, Arthur, 167, 227, 242- 
 
 245, 427 
 Sidgwick, Henry, 167, 240, 242, 
 453; letters to, 246252, 2()7- 
 268, 273-276, 291-292, 297, 300- 
 
 I
 
 492 
 
 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 302, 319-322, 331, 347, 356-357, 
 381, 398, 400, 404, 408, 415, 418, 
 420, 432, 454, 455 ; visit to 
 Symonds at Cannes, 249, 252, 
 260; Diary, 400,404, 408, 415, 
 418 
 
 Sidmouth, Lord, 16 
 
 Siena, 230, 350 ; article on, 285 
 
 Signorelli, 38, 467 
 
 Siis Maria, 410 
 
 Silvaplana, 432, 443 
 
 Silvretta, 395, 425 
 
 Silvretta Glacier, 366, 394, 436 
 
 Simcox, G. A., 128 
 
 Simli Col, 305 
 
 Simonides, 72 
 
 Simplon, 102, 107, 140, 215 
 
 Simplon Hospice, 305 
 
 Sixtus IV., Pope, 430 
 
 Smith, Abel, 47 
 
 Smith, Adam, 18 
 
 Smith, Dew, 408 
 
 Smith, George, 301, 404 
 
 Smith, Goldwin, 68, 72 
 
 Smith, Henry, 71 
 
 Smith, Rev. John, 51-56, 59 
 
 Smith, Elder, & Co., 332, 336-337, 
 347, 373, 405 
 
 Snowdon, 113 
 
 Social Science Association, 274, 
 276 
 
 Socrates, 79, 201, 419 
 
 Soglio, 410-412 
 
 Sommerfeldt (com'ier), 105 
 
 Sondrio, 411 
 
 Sonning, 93-94 
 
 Sorrento, 171, 174 
 
 Southampton, 95, 296 
 
 Southey, Eobert, 45, 287 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 324 
 
 Spezia, 342 
 
 Spinoza, 321, 324, 405 
 
 Spliigen, mountain, 361, 412 
 
 Stalla, 412 
 
 Stanley, Dean, 68, 77, 310 
 
 Stanley, Lyulph, 68, 72, 87 
 
 Stanton Harcourt, 75 
 
 Stanton St. John, 88 
 
 Stendhal, quoted, 299 
 
 Stephens, W. R. W., 68, 83, 122, 
 310 ; letters to, 78-79, 82, 151, 
 176, 311-319 ; visits to North 
 Wales, 111-114 ; Great Malvern, 
 
 126; Belgium, 153; Italy, 171, 
 174 
 
 Sterchi, Herr, 160 
 
 Sterling, John, 41, 309, 352 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., 357, 371, 382, 
 390, 399 ; ' Dr. Jekyll,' 407-408 
 
 Stevenson, Mrs., 382 
 
 Storm, Mrs., 71 
 
 ' Story without an End, The,' 6 
 
 Stowe Wood, 88 
 
 Strachey, Sir Edward, 41 
 
 Strachey, Lady, 249, 381, 383. 
 (See also uncles- Symonds, Mary 
 Isabella) 
 
 Strachey, St. Loe, 374-375 
 
 Strangford, Lord, 71 
 
 Strasburg, 156-157, 233 
 
 Strela Pass, 366, 394 
 
 ' Struwwel-Peter,' 260 
 
 Siis, 336, 394, 405, 441-442 
 
 Suetonius, 168 
 
 Sulmona, 467-468 
 
 Surbiton, 177 
 
 Sutton Court, 119, 142, 189, 290 
 
 Swinburne, A. C, 128, 251, 389, 
 458 ; Jowett on, 132 
 
 Sydenham, 55 
 
 Sykes, Mrs. (J. A. Symonds's grand- 
 mother), 11-13 
 
 Sykes, Mrs. (J. A. Symonds's great- 
 grand-mother), 442 
 
 Syices, Admiral, 443 
 
 Sykes, Miss Mary Ann, 11, 45, 86, 
 94, 116, 118, 200, 309, 437; 
 letters to, 66, 88, 91, 386 
 
 Symonds, Dr. (J. A. Symonds's 
 father), 4, 8, 151, 155, 171, 185, 
 187, 192, 251, 443 ; character, 
 14-16; hospitality, 86, 118, 123- 
 124, letter from Dean Milman, 
 96 ; tour in Switzerland and 
 Italy, 97-111 ; influence on his 
 son, 133, 288 ; visit to Venice, 
 134-141 ; letter from Jowett, 
 153-154 ; orders his son to 
 Switzerland, 156 ; his bust by 
 Woolner, 186 ; attends his son, 
 195, 199, 227, 249 ; letters from 
 his son, 200 ; ill-health. 275, 278 ; 
 death, 280 ; ' Miscellanies,' 290 
 
 Symonds, Mrs. (J. A. Symonds's 
 mother), 1-3, 280 
 
 Symonds, Mrs. Catherine (wife of
 
 INDEX 
 
 493 
 
 J. A. Symonds), 187, 192, 199. 
 204, 211, 220, 226, 253, 303, 
 334-335, 350, 352, 374, 385, 387, 
 394-395. 409-412, 423-441, 443, 
 480 ; marriage. ISO ; influence on 
 her husband, 183-18(3 ; sketch- 
 ing at Bordighera, 200, 219 ; at 
 Monaco, 204 ; popularity in 
 Switzerland, 215-218. (See also 
 under North, Catherine) 
 
 Symonds.Charlotte (J. A. Svmonds's 
 sister), 3. 11, 24. 35, 45, 51. 81, 
 99, 111. 114-117. 199 ; letters to, 
 54-60. 68-78, 89-91, 118-122, 
 148, 151, 154-157, 161, 164-166, 
 175. 178-181, 198, 214, 252, 264, 
 274 ; at Venice, 134 ; at Malvern, 
 154-155 ; visit to Normandy 
 with J. A. Symonds, 227-234"; 
 marriage, 281. {See also tmder 
 Green, Mrs. T. H.) 
 
 Symonds, Elizabeth, 394 
 
 Symonds, Edith (J. A. Symonds's 
 sister), 11, 38, 45, 47, 55, 60. {See 
 also under Cave, Mrs.) 
 
 Symonds, Horatio, 369 
 
 Symonds. Janet (J. A. Symonds's 
 daughter), 190, 200, 247. 260, 
 264, 328, 374, 380, 382, 387, 390, 
 403, 419, 456 ; death, 420-421 
 
 Symonds, John, of Oxford (J. A. 
 Symonds's grandfather), 17-18 
 
 Symonds, John (J. A. Symonds's 
 great-grandfather), 442 
 
 Symonds, John Abdy Stephenson 
 (J. A. Symonds's brother), 7 
 
 Symonds, John Addington, works 
 by : — ' Theodore,' 43, 141 ; 'Art 
 and Literature,' 141 ; ' New and 
 Old,' 174, 247 ; ' On Elizabethan 
 Dramatists,' 191-192, 286 ; pro- 
 posed ' History of the llenais- 
 sance in England,' 227 ; Poems, 
 240, 300-301 ; ' A Violin Impro- 
 visation,' 247 ; articles in ' North 
 British Beview,' 200, 252, 258 ; 
 Italian Skc'pbf.^. 261, 285 ; 
 'Studies in the tireek Poets,' 271, 
 285, 296, 302, 326, 376, first 
 series, 344, American edition, 
 347 ; Goethe's ' Proiimium to 
 God and the World,' 277 ; ' History 
 of thelienaissance in Italy,' 279, 
 
 297-305. 326, 333-335, 344. 347, 
 349, 357, 391, 399-407 ; lectures 
 on, 296 ; ' Ben Jonson ' (' English 
 Worthies ' series), 286, 407 ; ' In- 
 troduction to the Study of Dante,' 
 281, 290-291, 344; 'Travel 
 Sketches,' first series, 294 ; 
 essay on Heywood's plays, 300 ; 
 notice of Brome's dramatic 
 works, 300 ; ' Sketches in Italy 
 and Greece,' 301, 344, 376, 
 American edition, 347 ; sonnets, 
 302, 363, 368, 370 ; lectures on 
 ' Florence and the Medici,' 305 ; 
 sonnets of Campanella, 307, 
 331; sonnets of Michael Angelo, 
 307 308, 330-331, 431 ; ' Animi 
 Figura,' 326, 360, 363, 370, 453, 
 463 ; ' Palumba,' 326 ; ' Essays 
 Speculative and Suggestive,' 326, 
 423-4-24, 43.1, 441, 450-454; 
 ' Sonnets on the Thought of 
 Death,' 330; 'Many Moods,' 
 331, 337; ' Lombard Vignettes,' 
 336 ; ' Italian Studies and Trans- 
 lations,' 344; 'Fine Arts in Italy ' 
 (ItaHan translation), 344 ; 'Age 
 of the Despots,' new and en- 
 larged edition, 347 ; Italian 
 literature, 350; article on 
 Italian history in ' Encyclopaedia 
 Britannica,' 357; 'Dissertation 
 upon Masques at Court in Italy 
 and England, '377; ' Vagabunduli 
 Libellus,' 363, 369, 391, 397, 
 404, 463 ; letter to ' Pall Mall 
 Gazette,' 367 ; ' Shakspere's 
 Predecessors in the English 
 Drama,' 369, 381 ; ' The Grave of 
 Omar Kliayyam ' (sonnet), 372 ; 
 ' Palace of Urbino,' 373 ; Goliar- 
 dic songs, 390, 306 ; transla- 
 tions of ' Carmina Burana,' 391 ; 
 ' Wine, Women and Song,' 395- 
 397, 404; 'Sidney' ('English 
 Men of Letters'), 407; 'Selections 
 from Jonson,' 407 ; ' Sir Thomas 
 Browne,' 407; article on Tasso 
 in ' Encyclopoedia Britannica,' 
 407 ; translation of ' Cellini's 
 Autobiograpiiy,' 407, 413-417, 
 423, 426, 435. 439 ; translation 
 of the ' Memoirs of Carlo Goz/.i,'
 
 494 
 
 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 
 
 426-427, 435, 439 ; article on 
 ' The Progress of Thought in 
 our own Time ' in ' Fortnightly 
 Eeview,' 430 ; ' Study of Walt 
 Whitman,' 431, 461 ; ' Our Life 
 in the Swiss Highlands ' (jointly 
 with Margaret Symonds), 431, 
 469-470 ; essay on Avalanches, 
 431-434 ; essay on Ehza- 
 betlian and Victorian Poetry 
 in the ' Fortnightly Review,' 485, 
 446 ; four essays on Style, 438 ; 
 'Autobiography,' 439-440; 'Life 
 of Michael Angelo,' 182, 456-457, 
 460-461, 466-470 ; proposed 
 history of Graubiinden, 461 ; 
 Poems and Translations, 469- 
 470 
 
 Symonds, Katharine (daughter of 
 J. A. Symonds), 328, 436 
 
 Symonds, Lotta (daughter of J. A. 
 Symonds). 328, 387, 405, 418, 
 480 
 
 Symonds, Margaret (daughter of 
 J. A. Symonds), 269, 328, 387, 
 898, 403, 405, 409-410, 418, 426, 
 432 ; tours in Graubiinden, 
 885-386, 438; illness at San 
 Eemo, 390-891 ; visit to Venice, 
 426, 433 ; ' Our Life in the Swiss 
 Highlands,' 431, 469-470 ; assists 
 her father with ' Michael An- 
 gelo,' 469 ; account of her 
 father's last journey, 471-479 
 
 Symonds, Mary Isabella (J. A. Sy- 
 monds's sister), 7, 11, 45, 116, 
 200. (See also under Strachey, 
 Lady) 
 
 Tacul Kocks, 100 
 
 Tagliacozzo, 467 
 
 Tairraz. Jean, 296 
 
 Tait, Mr., 84, 91 
 
 ' Talmud,' 259 
 
 ' Tannhauser,' 203, 304 
 
 Taranto, 471-472 
 
 Tasso, 261, 268, 404, 407, 475 
 
 Tassoni, 268 
 
 Telesio, 405 
 
 Tennyson, Lord, 52, 89, 94, 125, 
 
 140, 186, 188, 196. 205, 262, 301. 
 
 389; 'Princess,' 101; 'Lady of 
 
 Shalott ' and ' (Enone.' 105 ; 
 'Maud,' 117; ' In Memoriam,' 
 119 ; ' Sea Dreams,' 125 ; ' Guine- 
 vere,' 210; ' Lucretius,' 265-266 ; 
 'Despair,' 362 
 
 Terni, 467 
 
 Tetley, Dr., 35 
 
 Thackeray, Miss. 301 
 
 Theocritus, 65, 79, 287 
 
 Theognis, 65 
 
 Thomas, Miss, 396 
 
 Thomas, Mrs., Ill 
 
 Thompson, painter, 89 
 
 Thomson, James, 389 
 
 Thrasymene, lake, 350 
 
 Thucydides, 86 
 
 Thuillier, Prefet, 261 
 
 Thun, Lake of, 159-164 
 
 Thusis, 448 
 
 ' Times,' 60 
 
 Tintagel, 187 
 
 Tintoretto, 38, 135, 137, 145 
 
 Titian, 136-187, 229, 266, 465 . 
 
 Todi, mountain, 171, 385, 393-395 
 
 Tollemache, Mr., 72 
 
 Tolstoi, 456 
 
 Torquay, 35, 87 
 
 Tortworth, 116 
 
 Toschi, 38 
 
 Toynbee Hall, 449 
 
 Trachsellauinen, 163 
 
 Trelawney, 480 
 
 Trieste, 455 
 
 Trollope, Anthony, 253 
 
 Trossachs, 67 
 
 Tschuggen, 429 
 
 Tuckett, F., 306 
 
 Tunis, 296-297 
 
 Tuorsthal, 412 
 
 Turin, 167, 807, 367 
 
 Turner, painter, 219 
 
 Tyrone, Lady, 10 
 
 UccETTA, Maddalena, 215-217 
 
 Uccetta, M., 215-217 
 
 Uetliberg, 161-162 
 
 ' Ugly Duckling, The,' 6, 50 
 
 Ulm, 164 
 
 Ulrichs, 467 
 
 University College, 78 
 
 Unterseen, 242 
 
 Urquhart, Mr., 68
 
 INDEX 
 
 495 
 
 Vach, 113 
 
 Val Anzasca, 218, •229 
 
 Val BreKaglia, 410-411 
 
 Val de Voie, 233 
 
 Val des Oliviers, 211 
 
 Val d'Herens, 361 
 
 Vallombrosa, 168 
 
 Van Eycks, painters, 142 
 
 Vandyke, 145 
 
 ' Vanity Fair,' 8 
 
 Varallo, 229, 291 
 
 Varese, 350 
 
 Vaughan, Dr., 49, 56-57, 61, 67, 
 284 
 
 Vaughan, Halford, 85 
 
 Venice, 134-140, 180, 264-268, 
 290-292, 359-360, 367, 372-375, 
 380, 382, 389, 391, 401-402, 419, 
 426, 431-437, 440-441, 446, 451, 
 454-457, 468, 471-472 
 
 Verdi, composer, 205 
 
 Vereina Thai, 425 
 
 Verona, 139 
 
 Veronese, painter, 135, 266 
 
 Vescovana, 456 
 
 Vesuvius, 473 
 
 Viareggio, 342 
 
 Vico, 405 
 
 Vickers, Mr., 83 
 
 Victor Emmanuel, 204 
 
 Vienna, 81 
 
 Vigor, Mr., 40 
 
 Villari's ' Savonarola,' 182 
 
 Villencuve, 140 
 
 Virgil, 140, 206, 465 
 
 Visp, 140-141, 154, 290 
 
 Vivarini, 135, 138 
 
 Vivario, 263-264 
 
 Voie, river, 233 
 
 Voltaire, 206 
 
 Vorder Rheinthal, 385-386, 438 
 
 Wagner, composer, 372 
 
 \\'arburton's ' Divine Legation of 
 Moses,' 31 
 
 Ward, Mr., 197 
 
 Warren, T. H. (President of Mag- 
 dalen), 394-395 
 
 Watford, 55 
 
 Watts, poet, 266 
 
 Webster, 399 
 
 Wengern Alp, 163 
 
 Westbury, 30, 39 
 
 Westcott, Mr., 56 
 
 ' Westminster Review,' 285 
 
 Weston, 123 
 
 Whitby, 71 
 
 White, Mr.. 87 
 
 White, Mrs., 374 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 237-240, 251 
 287, 324-325, 359, 424, 457, 461 ;' 
 ' Leaves of Grass,' 323 ; quoted, 
 326 ; ' Study ' of, 431, 461 
 
 Wiesen, 335, 361, 367 
 
 Wilberforce, Bishop, 87-92 
 
 Williams, Dr. Theodore, 370 
 
 Williams, Sir W., of Ears, 60-61 
 
 Willy, Franz, 447 
 
 Wimbledon, 275 
 
 Winchester, Dean of, 68 
 
 Windsor, 55 
 
 Wingfield, Mr., 47 
 
 Winkworth, Misses, 275 
 
 Winterthur, 164 
 
 Wolf, Mr., 464 
 
 Wolfgang, 329 
 
 Wolsey, Cardinal, 78 
 
 Wolvercote, 72 
 
 Woodstock, 88 
 
 Woodyear, architect, 93 
 
 Woolner, sculptor, 183-187 
 
 Wordsworth, W., 87, 187.205-206, 
 211, 221, 287; 'Poems on Life,' 
 210 
 
 Wright, Mr., 68, 87 
 
 Wyclilfe's portrait, 87 
 
 Wytham Woods, 75 
 
 X 
 
 Mr., 125 
 
 Zellek, 258. 286 
 Zermatt, 140, 290 
 Zimmern, Miss, 396 
 Ziige, 330 
 Zurich, 161-162 
 
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 3 1?in ni 101 ooiir