Born, at Bristol, 5 Oct. 1840. At Harrow School, May 1854 to 1858. Matric. Balliol Coll., Oxford, 28 May 1858; Exhibitioner, 1859–62; Newdigate Prize, 1860; B.A., 1862; Fellow of Magdalen Coll., 1862–64; English Essay Prize, 1863; M.A. 1865. Student of Lincoln’s Inn, 1862. Married Janet Catherine North, 10 Nov. 1864. Settled in London. Frequent visits to Continent. Removed to Clifton, Nov. 1868. Removed to Davos Platz, Switzerland, for health, 1876. Resided there for greater part of each year, till his death. Died, in Rome, 19 April 1893. Works: “The Escorial,” 1860; “The Renaissance,” 1863; “An Introduction to the Study of Dante,” 1872; “The Renaissance of Modern Europe,” 1872; “Studies of the Greek Poets,” 1st series, 1873; 2nd series, 1876; “Sketches in Italy and Greece,” 1874; “The Renaissance in Italy” (5 pts.), 1875–86; (“The Age of the Despots,” 1875; “The Revival of Learning,” 1877; “The Fine Arts,” 1877; “Italian Literature,” 2 vols., 1881; “The Catholic Reaction,” 2 vols., 1886); “Many Moods,” 1878; “Shelley: a Biography,” 1878; “Sketches and Studies in Italy,” 1879; “New and Old,” 1880; “Animi Figura,” 1882; “Italian Byways,” 1883; “Shakspere’s Predecessors in the English Drama,” 1884; “Vagabunduli Libellus,” 1884; “Sir Philip Sidney,” 1886; “Ben Jonson,” 1886; “Essays” (2 vols.), 1890; “Our Life in the Swiss Highlands” (with his daughter Margaret), 1892; “Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti” (2 vols.), 1893 [1892]; “In the Key of Blue,” 1893; “Walt Whitman,” 1893. Posthumous: “Blank Verse,” 1894; “Giovanni Boccaccio as Man and Author,” 1895 [1894]. He translated: “The Sonnets of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella,” 1878; “Wine, Women and Song,” 1884; “Life of Benvenuto Cellini,” 1887; “Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi,” 1890. He edited: J. A. Symonds (the elder)’s “Miscellanies,” 1871; J. Conington’s “Miscellaneous Writings,” 1872; “Selected Works of Ben Jonson,” 1886 and contributed introductions to: Sir T. Browne’s “Religio Medici,” 1886; “The Best Plays of Christopher Marlowe,” 1887; “The Best Plays of Thomas Heywood,” 1888; “The Best Plays of Webster and Tourneur,” 1888; J. Van der Straet’s “Dante,” 1892. Life: by Horatio F. Brown, 1895.

Personal

  I believe that, psychologically, Symonds was constructed 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 à peu près…. “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…. 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…. It is no ignoble melancholy which overshadowed so large a part of Symond’s life. The passionate desire to reach God, to understand what we are, and why we are here, meeting with an equally powerful devotion to truth in its purest, simplest form, an 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 possible that many who met Symonds did not surmise behind the brilliant, audacious exterior, underlying the witty conversation, and the keen enjoyment of life and movement about him, this central core of spiritual pain.

  Symonds was one of the most lovable of men: brave in his outlook, courageous in the face of adverse and often disastrous circumstances, youthfully enthusiastic and enthusiastically youthful, generous, a nature of sweet human sunshine. Even casual acquaintances were wont to admit the charm of his personality, the grace and distinction of his conversation, the alertness of his spirit, his swift responsiveness and sympathy. He was a scholar in the best sense of the word: a man of catholic culture. There has, in our time, been no mind more sensitive to beauty, and that not only in one or even in two, but in all the arts—in nature to an exceptional degree, and in human life and human nature to a degree still rarer. In a word, Symonds was in several essential respects fitted to be a great writer, and certainly a great critic. He had a warm heart, an eager brain, an exquisite sensibility: his critical insight was often extraordinarily keen: and with an innate capacity for severe analysis he combined a trained synthetical faculty, which made him, potentially, one of the surest and brightest beacons in contemporary literature.

  Notwithstanding his habitual association with men of the highest culture, no trait in his character was more marked than his readiness to fraternize with peasants and artisans. He always made a point of providing relief for others, when possible, from his own earnings as a man of letters, leaving his fortune intact for his family…. There are two men in Symonds whom it is hard to reconcile. His friends and intimates unanimously describe him as one endowed with an ardour and energy amounting to impetuosity, and their testimony is fully borne out by what is known of his taste for mountain-climbing and bodily exercise, his quick decision in trying circumstances, his ability in managing the affairs of the community to which he devoted himself, and the amount and facility of his literary productions. The evidence of his own memoirs and letters, on the other hand, would stamp him as one given up to morbid introspection, and disabled by physical and spiritual maladies from accomplishing anything. The former is the juster view.

General

  The student of the transitional period, extending from the thirteenth to the end of the sixteenth century, should apply himself to these “Renaissance in Italy” portly volumes with diligence. Though the author’s method is dignified and even severe, his style is graceful and at times brilliant…. As a whole, these works are among the most valuable of the many recent contributions to our knowledge of Italy.

  He has written a large number of sonnets, and one of his latest books—“Vagabunduli Libellus”—consists of poems in this form only. His sonnets are unequal, owing partly to his fondness for writing sonnet-sequences—a great mistake in nine cases out of ten. That Mr. Symonds is a true poet, a poet of generally high standing, no one will be prepared to deny after perusal of his verse. The author of that eminently critical, fascinating, picturesquely yet learnedly and carefully written magnum opus, “The History of the Renaissance in Italy,” has so great a power over words that his natural tendency, even in verse, is to let himself be carried away by them. Some of his later sonnets are very markedly of Shakespearian inspiration.

  Between the æsthetic epicure or exquisite literary voluptuary like Mr. Pater, and the purely intellectual connoisseur of men and books and epochs, like Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. Symonds occupies a place perhaps scarcely so well defined as theirs, but not less necessary to be filled; and he fills it worthily, by virtue of the trained judgment and varied erudition which he always has at command.

  I like the adjectives which Mr. Symonds has chosen to describe the essays contained in his recently published volumes. “Speculative and Suggestive.” They are eminently that; and they are eminently welcome just because they are that. In his Preface Mr. Symonds tells us that his surmises and suggestions are advanced in no dogmatic spirit. Perhaps their great merit is—to borrow a phrase from Kant—that they are admirably fitted to arouse readers out of dogmatic slumber. They are admirably fitted to make people think, or—which is the next best thing—to think of thinking. It is impossible for any moderately intelligent and cultivated reader to open these volumes anywhere, and not to find his intellect more or less stimulated. Whether Mr. Symonds is discoursing of “The Principles of Criticism,” or of “The provinces of the Several Arts,” of “Landscape,” or of “Nature Myths and Allegories,” of “The Pathos of the Rose in Poetry,” or of “Realism and Idealism,” he is always fertile in ideas and helpful to reflection. Always, moreover, whether we agree or differ with the views which he expresses, he wins our admiration by the soundness of his scholarship, the breadth of his culture, the opulence of his imagination, the fascination of his style…. Every page of his writings exhibits him as an accomplished master of style. In the “Notes” which he prints, in the present volumes, he discourses of the art which he so admirably exercises; tracing its history; formulating its laws; and illustrating its applications. I incline to think that Mr. Symonds has never given the world anything better than these “Notes” replete as they are with varied learning, judicious criticism, pregnant suggestion. Specially felicitous is the second part of them, in which he deals with “National Style.”

  These volumes of essays differ from the ordinary collection of miscellanies by men of letters. Some of the papers are old, some are new, and they deal with many topics; but they are so arranged as to constitute a continuous and for the most part analytical criticism of the art of expression, principally in literature, but also in architecture, sculpture, painting, and music. They comprise, moreover, the fruits of many years of experience in a wide range of scholarly interests, and sum up the reflections of their author on the whole mass of his intellectual acquirements…. The larger part of Mr. Symonds’s conclusions is consistent with other hypotheses than that form of pantheism which he regards as the logical conclusion of the evolutionist, and which he puts in the forefront of his work as its determining idea…. The metaphysical weakness of these volumes, which has been self-exposed, cannot but obstruct the reader’s sense of their many excellences in the department of literary criticism. It is, nevertheless, easy to disengage the really solid and valuable matter, which constitutes four-fifths of the work at least, from the vague and hybrid speculation which impairs it as a whole, and which is mainly of interest as an example of the working of an eclectic and assimilative mind amid the confusions of modern thought. As a critic of literature the author brings no inconsiderable matter of his own wide gathering, for he has been a student of culture all his life, and speaks from a various experience.

  It would seem impossible that anything new could be said about Style; yet here are four essays [“Essays”] on that subject richly repaying the closest attention. There is perhaps no other English critic whose appreciation of style is at once so wide in range, so just, and so penetrative.

  Mr. Symonds has the happy faculty of adorning whatever he touches, and the gates leading into Greek, Italian, and French fields, fast-locked to so many critical writers of the present day, open at his command.

  His magnum opus is, of course, his “Renaissance in Italy,” which appeared in no less than seven volumes between 1875 and 1886. But with all its learning, its insight, and its eloquence, this somehow fails to reach the standard of an ideal history. It is rather a series of aperçus than a continuous narrative. So, again, with his recent “Life of Michelangelo.” Despite the labour expended upon it, and the brilliance of the style, we seem to feel that the final word has not been spoken: that the author did not lose himself in his subject. The shorter biographies of “Shelley,” “Sir Philip Sidney,” and “Ben Jonson” are adequate to the series to which they belong, but not otherwise notable. The four or five volumes of verse show a graceful fancy and a competent technique; but their matter is chiefly of interest as revealing the emotions of the author. The two collections of “Sketches in Italy” together with “Italian Byways,” contain admirable descriptions of scenery, illuminated by historical associations and by sympathy with the realities of modern life. The two early books, “Introduction to the Study of Dante,” and “Studies of the Greek Poets”—both of which are immediately to appear in new editions—are excellently adapted to their purpose, of stimulating knowledge of classical masterpieces by criticism that is both scholarly and popular.

  Of the sonnet form he was a master, and the poems have that beauty of natural description with which most people are more familiar in his prose…. I consider the poetry of Symonds to have been quite unjustly underrated; but it is almost impossible, if a man has established a reputation in prose, to get a hearing for him in verse, the absurdity of which let Milton, Dryden, Cowper, Gray, Byron, Shelley, and Arnold prove. I shall say without reserve how highly I have always esteemed my friend’s poetry…. Symonds’ earlier volumes of poetry were not equal to the two last. They were, indeed, full of fire, colour and light; they contained gorgeous description, and occasionally tender sentiment; but as a rule, they were, perhaps, too much the books of a man of the study, verses that might have been derived from those of others, almost too facile, and fluent in their phraseology and versification. Yet they contained a few most notable poems, such as “Callicrates, a tale of Thermopylæ,” “In the Syracusan Stone Quarries,” “Le jeune homme caressant sa chimère,” and “The Valley of Vain Desires.” In the subject of comradeship, as also in that of flesh wrestling with spirit, Symonds ever found a real personal inspiration…. Of his prose writings I have little space to speak; they are better known than his poetry, very voluminous, and cover an extraordinarily large field. He was a discriminating, but very catholic and generous critic who enjoyed the beautiful wherever he found it, and whose taste led him rather to appreciate the good points than to gloat over his own “fine taste,” as evinced in the ready detection of defects; even the more or less conventional and unindividual verse of a minor poet he could say a gracious word for, if it were nicely put together. His long histories of the “Renaissance in Italy,” his “Life of Michael Angelo,” and his “Predecessors of Shakespeare” are monuments of erudition and industry, containing much that is of permanent value to the student, as well as many brilliant pages. Perhaps he was at his best in the short study or essay, in that unique kind of essay particularly which he made his own, combining the narration of some historical event or moving episode of private life characteristic of its epoch, with the described environment of natural scenery in the midst of which it occurred, all being portrayed by the loving and graphic pen of a poet, who was a master of language and of picturesque style. His translations from Benvenuto Cellini and Carlo Gozzi could not be bettered.

  There is no corner of history on which the human spirit has left its impress that is not eloquent to him, and to which he is without some answering sympathy. His is the insatiable curiosity to experience the best that has been thought and done in the world, but the artist’s rather than the mere scholar’s: the passionate inquisitiveness of the Renaissance, when the mere acquisition of learning was tinged with romance. And, consequently, whatever subject he writes upon, we feel a confidence that he treats it with a full knowledge of all its relations, its antecedents, and all its various conditions. Culture has done its perfect work, and endowed him with its greatest gift—the sense of proportion.

  Symonds cannot be said to have reached the rank of poet, to which he aspired, if we confine poetry to the art of versifying; but of the higher mission of poetry, the imparting of form and beauty and human interest to the crude materials and fragments of knowledge, whether of history, science or art, which lacked these in their isolation, few modern writers afford so happy an example. As a verse writer his achievements are indeed far from inconsiderable. His fine sense of form and melody enabled him to present with a large measure of their original beauty the voluminous extracts from classical and Italian poets which his works contain. He has been the chief interpreter to English readers of the Sonnets of Michel Angelo, and in treating these he reveals his own susceptibility to the magic spell of that most subtle and most powerful of all poetic forms.

  Our only objection to Mr. Symonds’s treatment here [“Art Essays”] is that he does not sufficiently distinguish between the ostensible “subject” of a work of art and its true theme or motive and assumes them to be one. This is not necessarily the case, and is often the reverse of true, and this is why the believers in art for art’s sake and the believers in a meaning to be expressed in the language of art misunderstand each other so constantly.

  There is much in this volume [“Shakespeare’s Predecessors”] which will, we fear, be of ill precedent in the future. What we expected, and what we felt we had a right to expect, in so ambitious a work, were some indications of the meditatio et labor in posterum valescentes, something that smacked, as the ancient critics would put it, of the file and the lamp. What we found was, we regret to say, every indication of precipitous haste, a style which where it differs from the style of extemporary journalism differs for the worse—florid, yet commonplace; full of impurities; inordinately, nay, incredibly diffuse and pleonastic; a narrative clogged with endless repetitions, without symmetry, without proportion.

  Mr. Symonds was all his days “in trouble about his style,” as some other men are about their souls. He examined it as regularly and as severely as a devotee examines his conscience. He confessed its sins to himself and refused them absolution. In short he was almost to the hour of his death in travail with artistic perfection without, in his own opinion, having “the strength to bring forth;” and it may therefore soothe his departed spirit if it can still be touched by mortal things, to know that he has at least left behind him a portrait of himself which comes as near to perfection as literary skill, analytic subtlety, and the invaluable quality of an utterly fearless egotism can succeed in raising it…. Partly in the autobiographic memoir which he has left behind him, and partly in his carefully composed correspondence during his later years with his literary friends in England, Mr. Symonds bequeathed materials for a history of his inner life, as minute as Amiel’s, without his tediousness, and as outspoken as Marie Bashkirtseff’s, without that young woman’s continual and comically obvious sacrifices of truth to theatrical effect. A comparison of the book with Rousseau’s “Confessions” might be misunderstood. Mr. Symonds had none of Rousseau’s sins to confess, and certainly none of his morbid propensity to the invention of sins for the purpose of confessing them. It is not to moral but to physical weaknesses that I refer: but I doubt whether anyone since the “self-torturing sophist” has ever made such full and unreserved disclosures on these delicate matters as Mr. Symonds.

  One subject Mr. Symonds made his own, and by his work done upon that subject he will be chiefly remembered. The Italian Renaissance has had historians of more minutely accurate scholarship, and its separate phases have perhaps found occasional treatment subtler and more profound than it was in his power to give them. But the period as a whole, its political and domestic life, its literature and art, received at his hands a treatment that lacks neither grasp nor sympathy, that is distinctly the best and most attractive in English literature.

  Symonds was certainly far more widely and profoundly versed in Greek poetry than any Englishman who in our day has analysed it for the general reader. And it is plain that no scholar of his eminence has been master of a style so fascinating and eloquent. He has the art of making the Greek poets live to our eyes as if we saw in pictures the scenes they sing. A fine example of this power is in the admirable essay on Pindar in the first series, when he describes the festival of Olympia as Pindar saw it…. Whenever Symonds is deeply stirred with the nobler types of Greek poetry, this dithyrambic mood comes on him, and he gives full voice to the god within…. In all these seven volumes [“Renaissance in Italy”] there is hardly one word about the science of the Renascence. Now, the revival for the modern world of physical science from the state to which Science had been carried by Hippocrates, Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hipparchus in the ancient world was one of the greatest services of the Renascence—one of the greatest services ever conferred on mankind. And in this work Italy held a foremost part, if she did not absolutely lead the way…. A whole chapter might have been bestowed on Leonardo as a man of science, and another on Galileo, whose physical discoveries began in the sixteenth century. And a few pages might have been saved for Christopher Columbus. And it is the more melancholy that the great work out of which these names are omitted has room for elaborate disquisitions on the Rifacimento of Orlando, and a perfect Newgate Calendar of Princes and Princesses, Borgias, Cencis, Orsinis, and Accorambonis. Symonds has given us some brilliant analyses of the Literature and Art of Italy during three centuries of the Renascence. But he has not given us its full meaning and value in science, in philosophy, or in history, for he has somewhat misunderstood both the Middle Ages which created the Renascence and the Revolution which it created in turn, nor has he fully grasped the relations of the Renascence to both.

  Both in prose essays (which he wrote in great numbers, chiefly on Greek or Renaissance subjects) and in verse (where he was not so successful as in prose) Mr. Symonds was one of the most characteristic and copious members of the rather foolishly named “æsthetic” school of the last third of the century, the school which, originally deriving more or less from Mr. Ruskin, more and more rejected the ethical side of his teaching…. But for the redundance above mentioned, which is all pervading with him both in thought and style, and which once suggested to a not unfriendly critic the remark that he should like to “squeeze him like a sponge,” Symonds would probably or rather certainly occupy a much higher place than he has held or ever will hold. For his appreciation both of books and of nature was intense, and his faculty of description abundant. But the ventosa et enormis loquacitas of his style was everywhere, so that even selection would be hard put to it to present him really at his best.

  The perusal of Mr. Symonds’s letters is not a pleasurable occupation. They are too intense to be restful reading. But to possess ourselves of the essence of that life in his works is a pleasure which no scholar has given us in a greater degree. He has, with subtle and fluent eloquence, presented every phase, responded to every wave of thought and feeling in that capricious moment of world-development. On the other hand, Mr. Symonds was guilty of certain weaknesses which generally evidence themselves in all intense natures. He went to extremes not only in his measure of people and events, but in his literary expression. The element of partisanship was too strong. A judge may not indulge in enthusiasms. He possessed, in a superlative degree, the one thing which Miss Martineau accused Macaulay of lacking. “Thomas Macaulay wanted heart: this was one deficiency which lowered all his other gifts,” she wrote upon the statesman’s death. The result in the latter’s case was a shell-like brilliancy, while Symond’s warm-hearted enthusiasm produced a richness of tone which made him generous oftentimes when he should have been critical.