Editing John Addington Symonds (section)

==Legacy==
Symonds left his papers and his autobiography in the hands of Brown, who wrote an expurgated biography in 1895, which [[Edmund Gosse]] further stripped of homoerotic content before publication. In 1926, upon coming into the possession of Symonds's papers, Gosse burned everything except the memoirs, to the dismay of Symonds's granddaughter.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/suppress.htm |title=Infopt.demon.co.uk |access-date=15 November 2006 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061109170151/http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/suppress.htm <!-- Bot retrieved archive --> |archive-date=9 November 2006}}</ref>

Symonds was morbidly introspective, but with a capacity for action. In ''Talks and Talkers'', the contemporary writer [[Robert Louis Stevenson]] described Symonds (known as "Opalstein" in Stevenson's essay) as "the best of talkers, singing the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar." Beneath his good fellowship, he was a [[Depression (mood)|melancholic]].

This side of his nature is revealed in his [[gnomic poetry]], and particularly in the [[sonnet]]s of his ''Animi Figura'' (1882). He portrayed his own character with great subtlety. His poetry is perhaps rather that of the student than of the inspired singer, but it has moments of deep thought and emotion.

It is, indeed, in passages and extracts that Symonds appears at his best. Rich in description, full of "[[purple patch]]es", his work lacks the harmony and unity essential to the conduct of philosophical argument. His translations are among the finest in the language; here his subject was found for him, and he was able to lavish on it the wealth of colour and quick sympathy which were his characteristics.

===Homosexual writings===
[[Image:Symonds-a problem in greek ethics.gif|thumb|Front cover of the 1983 reprint edition, edited by [[John Lauritsen]]]]

In 1873, Symonds wrote ''A Problem in Greek Ethics'', a work of what would later be called "[[gay history]]". He was inspired by the poetry of [[Walt Whitman]], with whom he corresponded.<ref>Katz, ''Love Stories'', pp. 243–244. Katz notes that "Whitman's knowledge of and response to ancient Greek love is the subject for a major study" (p. 381, note 6).</ref> The work, "perhaps the most exhaustive eulogy of [[Greek love]],"<ref name="DeJeanSex">{{cite journal|ref=DeJean|author=DeJean, Joan|title=Sex and Philology|journal=Representations|volume=27 |issue=27|year=1989|pages=148–171|jstor=2928488|doi=10.1525/rep.1989.27.1.99p02997|doi-broken-date=2 November 2024 }}</ref> remained unpublished for a decade, and then was printed at first only in a limited edition for private distribution.<ref>Katz, ''Love Stories'', p. 244. ''A Problem in Greek Ethics'' was later published without attribution in [[Havelock Ellis]]'s ''Sexual Inversion'' (1897); see Eric O. Clarke, ''Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere'' ([[Duke University Press]], 2000), p. 144.</ref> Although the ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'' credits the medical writer [[Charles Gilbert Chaddock|C. G. Chaddock]] for introducing "homosexual" into the English language in 1892, Symonds had already used the word in ''A Problem in Greek Ethics''.<ref>[[#DeJean|DeJean]], pointing to the phrase "homosexual relations" in {{cite book|author=John Addington Symonds|title=A Problem in Greek Ethics: Being an Inquiry Into the Phenomenonof Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists|url=https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_FJETAAAAQAAJ|year=1908|publisher=Areopagitiga Society|pages=[https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_FJETAAAAQAAJ/page/n11 2]–}}</ref> Aware of the taboo nature of his subject matter, Symonds referred obliquely to pederasty as "that unmentionable custom" in a letter to a prospective reader of the book,<ref>Katz, ''Love Stories'', p. 262.</ref> but defined "Greek love" in the essay itself as "a passionate and enthusiastic attachment subsisting between man and youth, recognised by society and protected by opinion, which, though it was not free from sensuality, did not degenerate into mere licentiousness."<ref>As quoted by Pulham, ''Art and Transitional Object'', p. 59, and Anne Hermann, ''Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances'' (St. Martin's Press, 2000), p. 148.</ref>

Symonds studied classics under [[Benjamin Jowett]] at [[Balliol College, Oxford]], and later worked with Jowett on an English translation of Plato's ''Symposium''.<ref name="a78">[[Robert Aldrich (historian)|Aldrich, Robert]] (1993) ''The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art, and Homosexual Fantasy''. Routledge. 0415093120. p. 78.</ref> Jowett was critical of Symonds's opinions on sexuality,<ref>Dowling, Linda (1994) ''Hellenism and Homosexuality''. Cornell University Press. {{ISBN|0801481708}}. p. 74, notes that Jowett, in his lectures and introductions, discussed love between men and women when Plato himself had been talking about the Greek love for boys.</ref> but when Symonds was falsely accused of corrupting choirboys, Jowett supported him, despite his own equivocal views of the relation of Hellenism to contemporary legal and social issues that affected homosexuals.<ref>Dowling, Linda (1994) ''Hellenism and Homosexuality''. Cornell University Press. {{ISBN|0801481708}}. pp. 88, 91.</ref>

Symonds also translated classical poetry on homoerotic themes, and wrote poems drawing on ancient Greek imagery and language such as ''Eudiades'', which has been called "the most famous of his homoerotic poems".<ref name=a78/> While the taboos of Victorian England prevented Symonds from speaking openly about homosexuality, his works published for a general audience contained strong implications and some of the first direct references to male-male sexual love in English literature. For example, in "The Meeting of [[David and Jonathan]]", from 1878, Jonathan takes David "In his arms of strength / [and] in that kiss / Soul into soul was knit and bliss to bliss".  The same year, his translations of [[Michelangelo]]'s sonnets to the painter's beloved [[Tommaso Cavalieri]] restore the male pronouns which had been made female by previous editors. In November 2016, Symonds's homoerotic poem, 'The Song of the Swimmer', written in 1867, was published for the first time in the ''[[The Times Literary Supplement|Times Literary Supplement]]''.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/locked-up-beyond-reach/|title=The Private Writing of J.A. Symonds|last=Regis|first=Amber|date=2016|website=www.the-tls.co.uk|access-date=2016-11-25}}</ref>

By the end of his life, Symonds's bisexuality had become an open secret in certain literary and cultural circles. His private memoirs, written (but never completed) over a four-year period from 1889 to 1893, form the earliest known self-conscious gay autobiography.

Symonds's daughter, Madge Vaughan, was probably writer [[Virginia Woolf]]'s first same-sex crush,{{Citation needed|date=January 2022}} though there is no evidence that the feeling was mutual. Woolf was the cousin of her husband [[William Wyamar Vaughan]]. Another daughter, Charlotte Symonds, married the classicist [[Walter Leaf]]. [[Henry James]] used some details of Symonds's life, especially the relationship between him and his wife, as the starting-point for the short story "[[The Author of Beltraffio]]" (1884).

Over a century after Symonds's death, in 2007, his first work on homosexuality, ''Soldier Love and Related Matter,'' was finally published by Andrew Dakyns (grandson of Symonds' associate, [[Henry Graham Dakyns]]), in Eastbourne, E. Sussex, England. ''Soldier Love'', or ''Soldatenliebe'' since it was limited to a German edition. Symonds' English text is lost. This translation and edition by Dakyns is the only version ever to appear in the author's own language.<ref>''Soldier Love and Related Matter'' translated and edited by Andrew Dakyns.</ref>