Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/280

 stincts which had always formed a leading element in his nature. Becoming intimately acquainted with the life of the small community around him, he took a leading part in its municipal business, and was able to render it service in many besides pecuniary ways, though here, too, he was most generous. Notwithstanding his habitual association with men of the highest culture, no trait in his character was more marked than his readiness to fraternise 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. Literary commissions thronged upon him. He had already written the life of Shelley (1878) for the ‘English Men of Letters’ series, and in 1886 the life of Sir Philip Sidney was added. Both are fully up to the average level, but neither possesses the distinction with which some writers of abridged biographies have known how to invest their work. His Elizabethan studies bore fruit in ‘Shakespeare's Predecessors’ (1884, new edit. 1900), in a ‘Life of Ben Jonson’ (1886 and 1888), and in several minor studies for the ‘Mermaid Series’ (prefixed to ‘Best Plays’ of Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, Webster, and Tourneur). The ‘History of the Italian Renaissance’ was completed in 1886 by four further volumes, ‘Italian Literature’ (London, 2 vols. 8vo, 1881) and ‘The Catholic Reaction’ (2 vols. 1886). He computed that the work, which was abridged by Lieut.-Col. A. Pearson in 1893, and reissued in 7 volumes in 1897–8, occupied him the best part of eleven years.

Meanwhile Symonds had followed up his translations of Michael Angelo's and Campanella's sonnets (London, 1878, 8vo) with several volumes of verse, a form of composition for which, conscious probably of the mastery which he had actually acquired over poetic technique, he felt more predilection than his natural gifts entirely justified. ‘Many Moods,’ a volume of poems, had been published in 1878. ‘New and Old’ followed in 1880, ‘Animi Figura’ (of special autobiographic interest) in 1882, and ‘Vagabunduli Libellus’ in 1884. His excellent translations from the Latin songs of mediæval students appeared, with an elaborate preface upon Goliardic literature, under the title ‘Wine, Women, and Song,’ with a dedication to R. L. Stevenson (London, 8vo, 1884 and 1889). He was next induced to undertake a prose translation of the ‘Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini,’ published in 1887 (London, 2 vols. 8vo; also 1890 and 1893). It is a masterly performance; a version of ‘The Autobiography of Count Carlo Gozzi’ (1890) is not inferior, and is accompanied by a valuable essay on the Italian impromptu comedy. He also contributed to the ninth edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ articles on Italian history, the Renaissance, and Tasso. In 1890 he published, under the title of ‘Essays, Speculative and Suggestive’ (London, 1890, 2 vols. 8vo, and 1893), a selection from the articles he had long been industriously contributing to reviews. Four of these essays are on ‘Style,’ a subject to which they pay a somewhat ambiguous tribute; but two at least of the total number are excellent, one on ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’ and the other a parallel between ‘Elizabethan and Victorian Poetry.’ In 1892 Symonds issued the ‘Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti’ (London, 2 vols. sm. 4to, 1892; 2nd edit. 1893). This was attempted on a scale involving an amount of toil in the collection of material from which, in his biographer's opinion, Symonds never recovered. The result was inadequate to the sacrifice; for although Symonds's work was meritorious, the new information he brought to light was not of paramount importance, and it was hardly worth his while to rewrite Michael Angelo's life unless he could treat it from a novel point of view. In 1893 he published another volume of detached criticisms, fancifully entitled ‘In the Key of Blue.’ This book was remarkable, among other things, for an essay upon Edward Cracroft Lefroy, an unknown poet whose merits Symonds had detected, and whom he generously snatched from oblivion. In 1893 also, and upon the very day of Symonds's death, appeared ‘Walt Whitman: a study’ (London, 8vo). It would hardly have been expected that such a rigid cultivator of poetic form as Symonds would find so much to admire in so amorphous a writer as Whitman, and in truth it was not so much the American's poetry that attracted him as identity of feeling on two cardinal points—democratic sympathy and the sentiment of comradeship.

The intellectual and even physical activity of Symonds's life at Davos was cheered by the society of many other invalid refugees. Of these Robert Louis Stevenson [q. v.] was the most remarkable. ‘Beyond its splendid climate,’ says Stevenson in an unpublished letter, ‘Davos has but one advantage—the neighbourhood of J. A. Symonds. I dare say you know his work, but the man is far more interesting.’ Stevenson celebrated Symonds as Opalstein (in ‘Talk and Talkers’ in Memories and Portraits, 1887, p. 164). But serious lapses into ill-health and sad domestic bereavements caused Symonds much de-