“L’Amour de L’Impossible.”

This phrase, translated as “the love of the impossible,” has stuck in my mind. It’s a frequent flier in John Addington Symonds’s diction, especially throughout his Memoirs,but I can’t help but pause— even for a moment—whenever I encounter it. There’s a dance that plays out whenever the phrase steps onto the page: l’amour, or “the love,” on one side, and l’impossible, or “the impossible,” on the other. These two parts are not polar opposites,but when put together, they create tension. Love, a fluid, dynamic concept that I associate with passion and flame, mixes strangely with impossible, that icy, uncaring boundary.

The grammar of the phrase emphasizes this tension as well. “The love of the impossible” subordinates “impossible” to “love,” but the phrase also uses the adjective “impossible” as a noun and pairs it with the article “the,” creating visual parallels between it and “the love.” This verbal visual appears much the same in French: the adjective “impossible” becomes the noun-like l’impossible and grabs an article for itself, allowing it to dance in visual (but not grammatical) apposition with its partner, l’amour.

Of course, I don’t believe that Symonds’s connection to l’amour de l’impossible ends at a mere grammar lesson. First, I think we can better understand why the tension of l’amour de l’impossible matters to Symonds by contrasting it with the similar-sounding l’amour impossible, or “impossible love.” Consider the following quote from Chapter 3 of Shane Butler’s The Passions of John Addington Symonds regarding the contents of Symonds’s love poem, “The Passing Stranger”:

“The whole stretch of time, in other words, becomes for Symonds the canvas of what he famously, and repeatedly, calls l’amour de l’impossible, “love of the impossible,” which is not, though the subtlety is often missed, itself an impossible love” (Butler 122).

“The love of the impossible” is, by definition, possible, unlike an “impossible love.” However, the possibility suggested by “the love of the impossible” inevitably clashes with the impossibility that is also suggested by the phrase. Symonds, attempting to understand his own sexuality in the 19th century, grappled with this very tension between the possible and the impossible. His Memoirs tell us that he knew very well that he loved the men he fell in love with in his personal life, but he struggled throughout his public life to find a place in his world for sexual and romantic love between men. The love he feels is well-past possible, but the queerness inherent to this love goes hand-in-hand with his seemingly-impossible task of fitting a queer mode of love into 19th century English thought.

Ultimately, I think that Symonds’s connection to l’amour de l’impossible is exemplified by his work of the same name, “L’Amour de L’Impossible.” The work, a series of fourteen poems, is an extended meditation on love and the mind, and I argue that it is a semi-autobiographical work that encapsulates the tension inherent to “the love of the impossible.”

“L’Amour de L’Impossible” evokes the two-sided tension between “the love” and “the impossible.” through its overarching structure. Although the poem is ostensibly divided into fourteen parts, these parts can be divided by their contents into two larger sections, six parts each, with an interlude consisting of two parts in the middle. The first half calls forth the sparks of passion and fantasy that accompany the “possible,” while the second half evokes the feelings of anguish and wanting that come from a struggle with the “impossible.”

“Three times the Muse, with black bat wings outspread,

Darkening the night, with lightning in her eyes

And wrath upon her forehead, bade me rise

Where I lay slumbering in oblivion’s bed.

The first time I was young; and though I had shed

Hot tears for fear of that great enterprise,

I followed her, forth to the starless skies,

and sang her songs, wild songs of pain and dread.

The second time I listened and obeyed:

Presumptuous! for that same thick cloud of song

Dwelt on my manhood with a dreadful shade.

Once more she comes and calls me all night long.

Nay, Muse of Death and Hades! We have played

O’ermuch with madness! Ah, thou art too strong!” (“L’Amour de L’Impossible,” “Prooemium“)

Part I (“Prooemium“) invokes a Muse, who introduces the speaker with a “great enteprise” which he will first sing uncertainly, then later with strength to the point of madness. Connecting this Muse to Symonds’s life, Symonds tells us in Chapter 2 of his Memoirs that one of his earliest memories of sexuality was a waking dream in which he “crouched upon the floor amid a company of naked adult men,” a dream which he believes was “so often repeated, so habitual, that there is no doubt about its psychical importance (Memoirs 100). This dream, which Symonds uses in his Memoirs to remove agency from his younger self regarding the development of his sexuality, mirrors the divine Muse which drives the speaker to sing the songs which would later “dwell on [his] manhood with a dreadful shade.” Symonds informs us throughout the following chapters of his Memoirs of his draining, life-long struggle living as a homosexual man in a society that is hostile to his sexuality, a conflict that he considered an “inexorable and incurable disease,” and his efforts to confront said struggle through his work in sexuality. Thus, the Muse of the “Prooemium” (“beginning,” or “prelude,” in Latin) reflects both the passivity which Symonds associates with his personal introduction to sexuality and the impossible struggle of reconciling his sexuality with the society in which he lived. Importantly, the “Prooemium” also reflects Symonds’s efforts to take on the challenge of said struggle.

“Chimaera, the winged wish that carries men

Forth to the bourne of things impossible

Maya, the sorceress, who meets them when

Their hearts with vague untameable longing

swell;

These wait on wrinkled Madness, in her den

Crouching with writhen smile and mumbled spell.

Dread sisters! Though thou hadst the strength of ten,

Down shalt thou go into the depths of hell,

Should one of those once make thy spirit her prize.

Who love what may not be, are sick of soul;

And sick of soul who seek with thirsting eyes

Wells where the desert’s mirage mist-wreaths roll.

Who wed discretion, they alone are wise;

And who place limits on their lusts, are whole.” (“L’Amour,” “The Furies”)

“ἐρᾶν ἀδυνάτων νόσος τῆς ψυχῆς

Childhood brings flowers to pluck, and butterflies;

Boyhood hath bat and ball, shy dubious dreams,

Foreshadowed love, friendship, prophetic gleams;

Youth takes free pastime under laughing skies;

Ripe manhood weds, made early strong and wise;

Clasping the real, scorning what only seems,

He tracks love’s fountain to its furthest streams,

Kneels by the cradle where his firstborn lies.

Then for the soul athirst, life’s circle run,

Yet nought accomplished and the world unknown,

Rises Chimaera. Far beyond the sun

Her bat’s wings bear us. The empyreal zone

Shrinks into void. We pant. Thought, sense rebel,

And swoon desiring things impossible.” (“L’Amour,” “Chimaera“)

Parts II (“The Furies”) and III (“Chimaera“) introduce the Chimaera (or “Chimera”), a figure which represents the love of the impossible. On one hand, the Chimaera of Greek mythology is a fantastic monster formed from the parts of various creatures. On the other hand, “chimera” also comes to mean “wild fancy” in English by the 16th century (Oxford English Dictionary). Thus, the Chimaera becomes the process of mind which offers that wild fancy, or as Butler puts it, a “chimerical erethism” (Butler 179), to those who become “sick of soul” and “soul athirst” from being starved of love. The “sickness” which the Chimaera alleviates calls to mind Symonds’s language regarding the dissonance between his sexuality and the society of 19th century England: an “inexorable and incurable disease” which he has dedicated his life’s work to. To expand on this connection, Symonds uses the exact phrase “ἐρᾶν ἀδυνάτων νόσος τῆς ψυχῆς” (“loving of the impossible (is) the disease of the soul” in Ancient Greek) to discuss the “love of the impossible” in both “L’Amour de L’Impossible”and in his Memoirs. Further, as Butler notes, this Greek phrase is in fact the “original” phrase, of which the French phrase is a translation: “The title phrase translates the first part of a pronouncement by the ancient Greek philosopher Bias of Priene that seems to have become proverbial” (Butler 177). The society which Symonds lives in rejects homosexuality, excluding him from the possibility of being able to engage in love freely. As Butler describes, such a free love is “a possibility [Symonds] depressingly admits for heterosexual love alone” (Butler 178). Thus, Symonds loves what is impossible in his society: free love between equal men.

“Man’s soul is drawn by beauty, even as the moth

By flame, the cloud by mountains, or as the sea,

Roaming around earth’s shore incessantly,

Ebbs with the moon and surges with her growth;

And as the moth singes her wings in fire,

As clouds upon the hillsides melt in rain,

As tides with change unceasing wax and wane,

Nor in the moon’s white kisses quell desire;

So the soul, drawn by beauty, nothing loth,

Burns her bright wings with rapture that is pain,

Faints and dissolves or e’er her goal she gain,

Flies and pursues that unclasped deity,

Fretful, forestalled, blown into foam and froth,

Following and foiled, even as I follow Thee! (“L’Amour,” “The Pursuit of Beauty”)

“There are who, when the bat on wing transverse,

Skims the swart surface of some neighbouring mere,

Catch that thin cry too fine for common ear;

Thus the last joy-note of the universe

Is borne to those few listeners who immerse

Their intellectual hearing in no clear

Paean, but pierce it with the thin-edged spear

Of utmost beauty which contains a curse.

Dead on their sense fall marches hymeneal,

Triumphal odes, hymns, symphonies sonorous;

They crave one shrill vibration, tense, ideal,

Transcending and surpassing the world’s chorus;

Keen fine, ethereal, exquisitely real,

Intangible as star’s light quivering o’er us. (“L’Amour,” “The Vanishing Point”)

Parts IV (“The Pursuit of Beauty”) and V (“The Vanishing Point”) engage heavily in the role of beauty as an inescapable force of attraction for humans. The speaker compares humanity’s attraction to beauty to a moth drawn to flame. Furthering the analogy, the speaker believes that this attraction to beauty is cursed, leading inevitably to pain, just as the moth “singes her wings in fire.” Applying Part IV’s attraction to beauty to a sexual/romantic attraction to people, Symonds refers many times to his early exposures to sexuality using the word “beauty”: Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis “gave form, ideality and beauty to my previous erotic visions” (Memoirs 101), Symonds describes the crux of the “anomaly” of his sexuality as being his “[admiration for] the physical beauty of men over women” (Memoirs 103), and he describes a recurring childhood dream he had of a young man as a “vision of ideal beauty under the form of a male genius” which “symbolized spotaneous yearnings deeply seated in my nature” (Memoirs 117-118). The “utmost beauty” which Symonds attributes his sexual/romantic love of men to would inevitably come into conflict with his society’s rejection of his sexuality: the “curse” which he would struggle with for the rest of his life.

“Seraph, Medusa, Mystery, Sphinx! Oh Thou

That art the unattainable! Thou dream

Incarnate! Thou frail iridescent gleam!

Fugitive bloom atremble on life’s bough!

Fade, prithee, fade; and veil thy luminous brow,

Chimaera! Let me ruin adown the stream

Of the world’s desolation! All things seem,

Mock, change, illude, from time’s first pulse till now.

Nothing is real but thirst, the incurable,

Thirst slaked by nought save god withdrawn from sight;

And God is life’s negation; with Him dwell

Souls swallowed in the ocean of blank night,

Where vast Nirvana drowneth heaven and hell,

And self-annihilation is delight.” (“L’Amour,” “The Tyranny of Chimaera“)

Part VI (“The Tyranny of Chimaera“) depicts the speaker turning against the Chimaera, begging it to release him from his longing for the impossible, an unquenchable thirst. The Chimaera, which can only offer transient dreams, has become a burden to the speaker. We can understand from the Memoirs that Symonds’s love of the impossible has become his own personal burden: the “incurable” disease, to repeat language from the Memoirs which also reappears in “The Tyranny of the Chimaera.” Living in a society where he cannot express love freely, Symonds’s Memoirs tell us that he consideredhis sexuality to be the “poison of his life.”

“Learn to renounce! Oh, heart of mine, this long

Life-struggle with thyself hath been for thee

Nought but renunciation! Souls are free,

We cry in youth, and wish can work no wrong.

Thus planted I the fiend of fancy strong

Within the palace of my mind, to be

Master and lord, for perpetuity

Of anguish, o’oer a fierce rebellious throng:

Those tyrannous appetites, those unquelled desires,

Day-dreams arrayed like angels, longing crude,

Forth-stretchings of the heart toward wandering fires,

Forceful imaginations, love imbued

With hell and heaven commingling, which have thrust

Hope, health, strength, reason, manhood in the dust. (“L’Amour,” “Renunciation”)

“He that hath once in heart and soul and sense

Harboured the secret heat of love that yearns

With incomunicable violence,

Still, though his love be dead and buried, burns:

Yea, if he feed not that remorseless flame

With fuel of strong though for ever fresh,

The slow fire shrouded in a veil of shame

Corrodes his very substance, marrow and flesh.

Therefore, in time take heed. Of misery

Make wings for soaring o’er the source of pain.

Compel thy spirit’s strife to strengthen thee:

And seek the stars upon that hurricane

Of passionate anguish, which beyond control

Pent in thy breast, would rack and rend thy soul. (“L’Amour,” “The Use of Pain”)

Parts VII (“Renunciation”) and VIII (“The Use of Pain”) portray burning passion as a ruinous hunger, which slowly poisons a man if not fed. Symonds, describing his struggles with the “poison of [his] life,” details how he would tend to his own “remorseless flame” in different ways, ranging from writing poetry to reading literature and observing bathers in the public baths (Memoirs 367-370). Ultimately, these methods could not make up for the fact that Symonds’s society did not permit him to freely engage with his sexuality: Symonds notes how he ended a period of his private compositions because they “kept [him] in a continual state of orexis [“appetite,” in Ancient Greek], or irritable longing” (Memoirs 367; 375).

Parts IX (“Limbo”) and X (“Wishes”) describe the pain of longing for something that has been denied, which humans want for even in death. Along the Lethe, the river where the dead go to wash away their memories, a crowd of souls, unable to move on, cries out: “We lived not, for we loved not! Dreams are we!” Symonds expresses that he believes that he “shall die without realizing what constitutes the highest happiness of mortals, an ardent love reciprocated with ardour. This I could never enjoy, for the simple reason that I have never felt the sexual attraction of women” (Memoirs 369). Symonds, as a homosexual man, longs for the ability to freely love other men, but that ability lies within the realm of the impossible, as the society he lives in denies him such freedom.

“The gaunt grey belfrey spake. Those crazy bells

Sent to my soul three divers messages.

The Bass said: Eat, drink, slumber; take thine ease;

Nothing abides; void are heaven’s promised wells!

The Tenor sang: Life flies; my music tells

Of human bliss; delay not, seek and seize!

Then, bat-like, shrill, borne on the twilight creeze

The Treble cried: Buy, buy what fancy sells!

Yet each voice taught me nothing. How shall I

Glut me on thy gross naquet, booming Bass?

And Tenor, youth was kind, but I was shy!

And thou, keen Treble, is the nightly chase

Of dreams that sting but do not satisfy,

Food for the soul that craves some living grace? (“L’Amour,” “Convent Bells”)

“Morning of life! O ne’er recaptured hour,

Which some have dulled with fumes of meat and wine;

And some have starved upon the bitter brine

Of lean ambition grasping place and power;

And some have drowned in Danae’s vulgar shower

Caught by keen harlot souls where ingots shine;

And some have drowsed with ivy wreaths that twine

Around Parnassus and the Muse’s bower;

And some exchanged for learning, pelf of thought;

And some consumed in kilns of passions hot

With lime and fire to sear the sentient life;

And some have bartered for high-blooded strife

Of battle;—where art thou? These have all bought

With thee their heart’s wise. Youth! I sold thee not.” (“L’Amour,” “Dove sono i bei Momenti“)

Parts XI (“Convent Bells”) and XII (“Dove sono i bei Momenti“) center around youth and how people struggle to spend it well. The speaker tells the talking bells, which act as inner dialogue for the speaker, that seizing the day and rejoicing in little victories can only do so much to satisfy a person’s life, and he describes different ways in which people spend their youth for the sake of said satisfaction, only to burn out. In turn, Symonds offers the following in his Memoirs: “Then again what hours and days and weeks and months of weariness I have endured by the alternate indulgence and repression of my craving imagination. What time and energy I have wasted on expressing it. How it has interfered with the pursuit of study. How marriage has been spoiled by it” (Memoirs 369). The Memoirs tell us that he has never been able to satisfy his soul’s yearnings, only being able to waver along a thin line between “indulgence” and “repression” for his imagination. The impossible which he loves weighs heavily on him, but he presses on, even so far past his younger days.

“God and the saints forgive us—we who blight

With mists of passion and with murk of lust

This wonderful fair world, and turn to dust

The diamonds of life’s innocent delight!

Who bear within our hearts black envious night,

Blunting the blade of joy with sensual rust,

Breaking vain wings against the stern Thou Must

Blazed in star-fire on Nature’s brows of light!—

Nature, thou gentle mistress, back to thee

Thy wandering children bring their cureless thirst!

Take them, and nurse them, mother, on thy knee!

Teach them, with vain insatiate longing cursed,

To cool life’s ardent anguish at thy breast;

And thy law that limits give them rest! (“L’Amour,” “Natura Consolatrix“)

“Sleep, that art named eternal! Is there then

No chance of waking in thy noiseless realm?

Come there no fretful dreams to overwhelm

The feverish spirits of o’erlaboured men?

Shall conscience sleep where thou art; and shall pain

Lie folded with tired arms around her head;

And memory be stretched upon a bed

Of ease, whence she shall never rise again?

O sleep, that art eternal! Say, shall love

Breathe like an infant slumbering at thy breast?

Shall hope there cease to throb; and shall the smart

Of impossible things at length find rest?

Thou answerest not. The poppy-heads above

The calm brows sleep. How cold, how still thou art!” (“L’Amour,” “To the Genius of Eternal Slumber”)

Parts XIII (“Natura Consolatrix“) and XIV (“To the Genius of Eternal Slumber”) personify nature and sleep, two forces beyond the control of humankind, in the futile hope of finding repose from longing and want. Symonds also personifies Nature in the Memoirs: “Nature is a hard and cruel stepmother. Nothing that I could have done would have availed to alter my disposition by a hair’s breadth” (Memoirs 369). The Memoirs imply that the “Consolatrix” (“comforter,” in Latin) in “Natura Consolatrix” (“Nature, the comforter,” in Latin) is ironic. Nature, which does not care for the mores of human society, is cold comfort for the wanting souls it creates, and eternal sleep offers nothing but eternal sleep. It is up to Symonds’s own strength to wrestle with the impossible which he loves.

We can be confident that “L’Amour de L’Impossible” held great personal meaning to Symonds. After all, as Butler points out, “Symonds in his Memoirs reveals that its first six sonnets were written “about” his lover (and gondolier) Angelo Fusato” (Butler 177). While the ending of “L’Amour de L’Impossible” is certainly grim, I think it also betrays a strong resilience in the speaker, who forges ahead even though he knows he will find no rest in life or death. Symonds called his sexuality the “poison of his life,” but I think “L’Amour de L’Impossible” suggests that he never gave up on love, despite all the hardship he endured. Ultimately, the poem calls to mind the intense, life-long enterprise that Symonds endeavored in order to find a place for the love of the impossible in the world in which he lived.

Works Cited

Butler, Shane. The Passions of John Addington Symonds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

“Chimera.” Apulian red-figure dish, ca. 350-340 BCE, Louvre, Paris. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chimera_Apulia_Louvre_K362.jpg

“Chimera | Chimaera, N.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1187663075.

Symonds, John Addington. “L’Amour de L’Impossible.” Animi Figura, Smith, Elder & Co., 1882. Retrieved from HathiTrust, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001020153.

Symonds, John Addington. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition, edited by Amber K. Regis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

At the end of A Problem in Greek Ethics, John Addington Symonds maps out a timeline that describes how different ideas of love were favored across time in the Mediterranean (and western Europe). What he called “Greek love” (or, in Ancient Greek, paiderastia) flourished in the Greek world. Republican and early Imperial Rome shared the notion of the “boy-lover” but filtered out the specific customs of paiderastia, while the Christians of the Late Roman Empire sought to suppress the “sensuality” of its contemporaries (Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics XX). Finally, the Christians of medieval Europe brought chivalry, or courtly love, into prominence:

“The mythology of Mary gave religious sanction to the chivalrous enthusiasm; and a cult of woman sprang into being which, although it was romantic and visionary, we owe the spiritual basis of our domestic and civil life. The modus vivendi of the modern world was found” (Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics XX).

That passage consists of the final words of the essay. When I first read A Problem in Greek Ethics, I found this ending to be peculiar. It’s a sudden ending, one that at first seems to merely rush some vague notion of futurity into an essay that is otherwise firmly fixed in Ancient Greece. However, having considered this ending further, I believe that it suggests profound revelations about how Symonds explored the matter of love.

By placing Greek love at the beginning of the “timeline” and medieval chivalry at the end, Symonds implictly places the two in dialogue (though he does not necessarily argue for a causal relationship). Both involve a form of love that follows very specific social customs: in short, they are systems of love, which are bound to the societal mores of their time and place.

On one hand, as described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the patriarchal structure (and homosocial structure, reinforcing said patriarchal structures) of Classical Greek city-states heavily shaped Greek paiderastia: the erastes (“lover”) must be an adult male citizen, while the eromenos (“beloved”) must be an adolescent male who temporarily assumes a lower social position (i.e. positions of women, enslaved persons) (Sedgwick, Between Men 4).

On the other hand, the worship of Mary in medieval Christianity heavily shaped medieval European chivalry, or courtly love: the loving knight exalts the loving lady as the Christian exalts Mary, and this love cannot coexist with marriage, as the lady “might be a maiden or a married woman” (Symonds, “Ideals of Love” 75).

Thus, Symonds has established a comparative link between Greek love and medieval chivalry: they are systems of love that are shaped and enforced by societal norms. I found this to be an interesting comparison by itself when I first noticed it, but I believe that Symonds goes further than mere comparison.

By placing Greek love and medieval chivalry together, Symonds posits a particular question about the nature of “love”: how does love—as a broadly-defined, yet profound attachment to someone else—manifest outside of the societal norms of marriage (as a legal and/or social binding between people) and sexuality (as including but not limited to sexual acts, attraction, and/or reproduction)?

Symonds’s answer is that passion, as a form of “raw” emotional affection for another that is not bound to those particular societal norms, does not require the permission of said norms to manifest itself.

Ultimately, Symonds posits that passion can exist separately from and/or in direct conflict with societal norms of marriage and sexuality and that, as a result, forms of love end up being excluded from social structures built around love. In “The Dantesque and the Platonic Ideals of Love,” Symonds discusses how passion collides with societal norms of marriage and sexuality in the respective historical contexts of Greek love and medieval chivalry:

“In theory, then, chivalrous love of both types, the Greek and the mediaeval, existed independently of the marriage tie and free from sensual affections. It was, in each case, the source of exhilarating passion; a durable ecstasy which removed the lover to a higher region, rendering him capable of haughty thoughts and valiant deeds” (Symonds, “Ideals of Love” 77).

For Symonds, the role of chivalry in exemplifying passion highlights certain limitations in systems of love. On one hand, love is not inherent to marriage, and passion is not inherent to sex. On the other hand, forms of passion such as Greek love and medieval chivalry are excluded from socially stable institutions of marriage.

Throughout “The Dantesque and the Platonic Ideals of Love,” Symonds utilizes this complication in order to discuss how chivalry affects the interpretation of Dante and his love for Beatrice. He argues that Dante’s extraordinary, almost unreal love for Beatrice can be better understood as the elevated passion that marked chivalry (and can be compared to Greek love).

“By comparing [Greek love and chivalrous love], we may come to understand more of that peculiar enthusiasm which they possessed in common, which made love in either case a ladder for scaling the higher fortresses of intellectual truth, and which it is now well-nigh impossible for us to realise as actual” (ibid. 60).

In the face of disbelief of Dante’s love for Beatrice and doubt of Beatrice’s very existence, Symonds argues that models of chivalry and Greek love can supplement the notions of passion necessary to understand Dante. By adding passion back into reading, he is able to reconcile Dante’s intellectual, truth-seeking mind and his seemingly unreal love for Beatrice. Symonds posits that for Dante, his powerful mind derives from his passion for Beatrice, not the other way around.

Searching through Symonds’s “lost library,” we can find another potential key to his research on systems of love: Richard Hovey‘s Launcelot and Guenevere, a Poem in Dramas (New York, 1891). Hovey’s work, a retelling of parts of the Arthurian legend, engages heavily with the dissonance between marriage and passion which Symonds discusses in both A Problem in Greek Ethics and “Ideals of Love.” Deeply embedded within the historical context of chivalrous love, Hovey’s Guinevere (“Guenevere,” in Hovey) brings the separation of marriage and passion into palpable view:

Life and custom close us in
Between such granite walls of circumstance
That, when we choose, it is not as we would
But between courses where each likes us not
I shall not love. But sometime I must wed.
It is the law for women that they marry;
Else they endure a scorned inactive fate…
As for Arthur, he is a very princely gentleman,
One whom at least I never shall despise
(Hovey 128).

Guinevere elucidates how, in the matter of love, institutions of marriage can very much fail the desires of individuals. She speaks in the context of her looming marriage to King Arthur, but the institutions of marriage and religion of Symonds’s time and place most certainly failed queer individuals, as well. Thus, Guinevere’s lament may have proven helpful to Symonds in conceptualizing a system of love in dialogue with, yet distinct from those of the Greeks and the medieval Europeans—a system with room for homosexuality in the institutions of society.

Further, I believe that there is a certain character from the Arthurian legend who can help to elaborate how chivalry in medieval literature defines systems of love. This character, who features in Hovey’s Launcelot and Guenevere, but not to the same extent as in the Prose Lancelot, is Galehaut (“Galahault,” in Hovey; “Galehot,” in Mieszkowski), the half-giant knight and chivalrous partner of Lancelot. Gretchen Mieszkowski argues throughout “The Prose Lancelot‘s Galehot, Malory’s Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature” for a queer reading of Galehaut’s love for Lancelot through the context of chivalrous love—a methodology similar to Symonds’s reading of Dante.

Symonds likely knew who Galehaut was, as the latter is mentioned in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno as a simile for the story of Lancelot that inspired Francesca and Paolo’s affair (Dante, Inferno V:137). Further, I.C. Wright’s translation of the Inferno, which points out this simile in a footnote (Wright, Dante 23), was one of the books in Symonds’s personal library. Although it is uncertain if Symonds encountered Galehaut’s love for Lancelot (based on what we know of the Arthurian works in his personal library), Galehaut’s story nevertheless serves as a meaningful companion to a discussion of how chivalry manifests in Symonds’ study of love.

Mieszkowski notes how Galehaut’s instant, absolute devotion for Lancelot, his willingness to abandon everything for him, and his longing for him, despite him never being able to match Guinevere as Lancelot’s lover, all exemplify the values of chivalry relevant during the medieval time during which the Prose Lancelot was written:

“Galehot expresses his love of Lancelot by renouncing on his account the most important conquest of his own professional life… Like a traditional courtly lover, Galehot falls in love at first sight of Lancelot, and Galehot the conquerer is overcome by Galehot the lover… Galehot’s love story is a tragedy… the only love in the story that matches Galehot’s for Lancelot is Lancelot’s for Guinevere…” (Mieszkowski 28, 34).

In this way, Mieszkowski’s description of Lancelot and Galehaut’s chivalrous partnership resembles Symonds’s description of the social positions of courtly lovers in “Ideals of Love”:

“The lady whom the knight adored and served, who received his service and rewarded his devotion, could never be his wife” (Symonds, “Ideals of Love” 75).

Galehaut’s love for Lancelot manifests as courtly love through his undying devotion to someone out of his league. Thus, Mieszkowski elucidates how the institution of marriage fails Galehaut’s own passion. Guinevere asks Galehaut to marry the Lady of Malohaut, and he obliges, but this marriage fails to satisfy or supplant his love for Lancelot:

“It is at Guinevere’s request that he consents to become the lover of her confidante, the Lady of Malohaut… when [Galehaut and the Lady of Malohaut] are portrayed as a couple, they are always a kind of faint, passionless echo of Lancelot and Guinevere. Lancelot is Galehot’s one real love” (ibid. 40-41).

As Hovey depicts Guinevere, marriage does not presuppose passion for Galehaut in the Prose Lancelot. Further, although Galehaut’s marriage fails to satisfy his love for Lancelot, it cannot prevent it, either. Thus, the tragedy of Galehaut’s marriage exemplifies the dissonance between marriage and passion.

Ultimately, medieval chivalry afforded Symonds (in tandem with his research on Greek love) an avenue to reconstruct a system of love—to explore what he called l’amour de l’impossible (“love of the impossible”). Although chivalry could not function as that system, it helped define the meaning of passion, and it demonstrated how societal institutions can fail love.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. Dante. Translated by I.C. Wright, London, 1855.

Hovey, Richard. Launcelot and Guenevere, a Poem in Dramas. New York, 1891.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. “The Prose “Lancelot’s” Galehot, Malory’s Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature,” Arthuriana. Scriptorium Press, 1995.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Symonds, John Addington. A Problem in Greek Ethics. London, 1897-1901.

Symonds, John Addington. “The Dantesque and the Platonic Ideals of Love.” In the Key of Blue and Other Prose Essays. London, 1893.