Victorian Homosexual

...Grosskurth has been allowed to read the Symonds autobiography and to make use of it without direct quotation...

...Morally, he was tortured from his schooldays by the knowledge that he was sexually abnormal, and his marriage, if not destroyed, was certainly warped by this knowledge...

...Symonds lacked the fire of creative originality that might have overleapt his defective scholarship...

...Phyllis Grosskurth admirably develops this theme in her biography of Symonds, The Woeful Victorian...

...In place of the autobiography he published his own misleading two-volume biography of Symonds which used only the less compromising passages of the original...

...It is an extraordinary picture of an agony ridden and highly complex social-moral situation which came to a head only shortly after the death of Symonds in the great scandal and the equally great tragedy of Oscar Wilde's trial...

...His literary executor, Horatio Brown, a fellow homosexual, decided, with the approval of the Symonds family, Dot to destroy the autobiography, but to leave it unpublished, and eventually he lodged it in the London Library with the proviso that it should not be released to the world until 1976...

...conversely, she herself uses her subject's writings-as distinct from his letters-too sparingly as clues to the nature of the man...

...Symonds wrote a self-revealing autobiography which he considered his most important work, since it discussed, as frankly as his feelings would allow, the struggle of the homosexual to live honestly and completely in a Victorian setting...

...She is also t00 willing to condemn Symonds's biographically based Victorian criticism from the viewpoint of the passing critical fashions of today...

...But these imperfections are a very small price to pay for a book which has the double virtue of being one of the best of recent literary biographies and also a fine study of Victorian manners...

...Like Gide he developed, as the years went on, an almost obsessive desire to justify the homosexual to a world which turned him into an outcaste, and in his last years, in collaboration with Havelock Ellis, he did contribute to the bringing of this profound social problem to the attention of a by no means appreciative public, In these respects Symonds was the tortured Victorian in his most extreme form...

...At times a little of the condescension which is the temptation of the unadulatory biographer enters her tone...

...Philosophically, he was plagued since young manhood by the doubts concerning the nature of the universe and of religious truths that assaulted the mid-Victorian mind, until in the end he reached the relative calm of a resigned rationalism...

...He was also an engaging personality whose letters are a great deal more lively than his mannered formal prose, and he lived on terms of personal friendship with many of the intellectual leaders of the closely knit Victorian upper middle class...

...Her approach, indeed, has minor flaws...

...Her approach, indeed, has minor flaws...

...Physically, his life was a constant struggle against the tuberculosis that killed him in his early 50s...

...she has also spent a great deal of time tracing all the available letters from Symonds and his friends...

...He was a Victorian man of letters of the best kind, intelligent, conscientious, broadminded and concerned with literary style, but in the long view his poems seem tepid and his major prose works, on Michelangelo and the Renaissance, while still eminently readable, have been superseded by other works of more careful learning...

...Above all, until recently large regions of his life have been deliberately shadowed by a mystery created by his relatives and friends...

...Reviewed By GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Writer and Politics" "He is a far better and more interesting thing than any of his books," said Robert Louis Stevenson of John Addington Symonds, and Dr...

...On a very few points of fact she appears to be inaccurate...

...There is, indeed, little reason to re-read or revive the actual writings of Symonds...

...Vaughan, the disciple of Thomas Arnold, was forced to resign the headmastership of Harrow...

...Grosskurth sketches her background with skillful, revealing strokes, she never forgets that, from her perspective, Symonds is the central figure of the group, and her portrait of this sensitive and extremely unhappy man of taste and talent is both penetrating and sympathetic...

...One finds prim and respectable literary figures like Edmund Gosse drawn into the tortured circle of the abnormal, and witnesses the rather astonishing connivance of Symonds' very Victorian wife in his homosexual relationships...

...Given the Victorian inclination to burn any documents that might throw a shadow on family honor, his action was about as liberal as one might expect...

...Grosskurth sketches her background with skillful, revealing strokes, she never forgets that, from her perspective, Symonds is the central figure of the group, and her portrait of this sensitive and extremely unhappy man of taste and talent is both penetrating and sympathetic...

...Lord Ronald Gower was surely the original of Basil Hallward in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and not of Lord Henry as Dr...

...The result is a book which not only gives us an entirely new view of Symonds himself, but in the process reveals a great deal about the manners and morals of the upper-middle-class world in which he moved...

...At times a little of the condescension which is the temptation of the unadulatory biographer If Dr...

...And the bookseller George Bedborough could not have been arrested, as she states, "on a charge of suspected anarchy," since "anarchy," suspected or otherwise, has never been in itself an offense in English law...

...As a man, on the other hand, he presents all the features that make a good biographical subject...

...If Dr...

...ironically, a morally tortured young Symonds was the instrument of his downfall...

...One learns for the first time how Dr...

...Grosskurth suggests...