Thesislog

“The morality of the Greeks, as I have tried elsewhere to prove, was æsthetic. They regarded humanity as a part of a good and beautiful universe, nor did they shrink from any of their normal instincts. To find the law of human energy, the measure of man’s natural desires, the right moment for indulgence and for self-restraint, the balance which results in health, the proper limit for each several function which secures the harmony of all, seem to them the aim of ethics. Their personal code of conduct ended in “modest self-restraint:” not abstention, but selection and subordination ruled their practice. They were satisfied with controlling much that more ascetic natures unconditionally suppress. Consequently, to the Greeks, there was nothing at first sight criminal in paiderastia. To forbid it as a hateful and unclean thing did not occur to them. Finding it within their hearts, they chose to regulate it, rather than to root it out. It was only after the inconveniences and scandals to which paiderastia gave rise had been forced upon their notice, that they felt the visitings of conscience and wavered in their fearless attitude.

“In like manner, the religion of the Greeks was æsthetic. They analysed the world of objects and the soul of man, unconsciously perhaps, but effectively, and called their generalisations by the names of gods and goddesses. That these were beautiful and filled with human energy was enough to arouse in them the sentiments of worship. The notion of a single Deity who ruled the human race by punishment and favour, hating certain acts while he tolerated others—in other words, a God who idealised one part of man’s nature to the exclusion of the rest—had never passed into the sphere of Greek conceptions. When, therefore, paiderastia became a fact of their consciousness, they reasoned thus: If man loves boys, God loves boys also. Homer and Hesiod forgot to tell us about Ganymede and Hyacinth and Hylas. Let these lads be added to the list of Danaë and Semele and Io. Homer told us that, because Ganymede was beautiful, Zeus made him the serving-boy of the immortals. We understand the meaning of that tale. Zeus loved him. The reason why he did not leave him here on earth like Danaë was that he could not beget sons upon his body and people the earth with heroes. Do not our wives stay at home and breed our children? “Our favourite youths” are always at our side.”

Here Symonds very clearly demonstrates how the discourse of “Modern Ethics” he and others were trying to establish on the 19th-century British intellectual scene was directly inspired by a discourse of “Greek Ethics.” The word “aesthetic” is here for a reason; it (and the citation of Pater’s Renaissance in the paragraph before this) is a tag which might suggest to a 19th-century reader the (implicitly homoerotic) contemporary intellectual movement with which Symonds is aligning himself and his thinking—but he is more explicit than a Pater or even a Wilde in spelling out his belief that aestheticism can be connected to the acceptance and embrace of paiderastia. But, while (I think) Symonds is new in articulating this, he is not new in *thinking* it. He and his contemporary pioneers of Uranian love may not have exercised the principle of “modest self-restraint” in their dealings with mary-annes and Guardsmen, but many of them did certainly articulate life philosophies centered on the worship of beauty over fear of God’s wrath, and did certainly walk the cities with their “favorite youths” while consigning their wives to “stay at home and breed… children” (Wilde, obviously, being the most classic example). But Symonds distinguishes himself by outing “Ganymede and Hyacinth and Hylas,” demanding that they, like Michelangelo or Whitman, be added openly to the historical record; he distinguishes himself not just in proclaiming, “Glory be to God for dappled things,” or in promoting the “House Beautiful,” but in a bold and unmistakeable declaration, incontrovertibly aligning the forces of 19th-century aestheticism with the forces of 19th-century homoeroticism: “If man loves boys, God loves boys also.” The final paragraph’s beginnings in the keyword “aesthetic,” and its ending in the repetition of the first-person plural pronoun, leave no doubt that Symonds is speaking not just for the ancient Greeks’ God, but also for his own.