The Peirce Brothers, John Addington Symonds, Horatio Brown, and the Boundaries of Defending Homosexuality in Late- Nineteenth-Century Anglo-America

The Peirce Brothers, John Addington Symonds, Horatio Brown, and the Boundaries of Defending Homosexuality in Late-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-America

On 11 April 1895 the nation published one of its many anonymous reviews of recent scholarly books, Horatio Brown's biography of John Addington Symonds. Both the biography and the review are unusual. The biography, consisting to a large extent of lengthy passages from Symonds's letters and journals, says little about the great books on Renaissance art responsible for Symonds's reputation as one of the world's great art historians. Brown deals almost exclusively with Symonds's struggle to overcome inner demons and physical illnesses, find peace and satisfaction, and do his important work. The review in turn only evaluates in passing the quality of the book itself, near its conclusion. It centers instead on the reviewer's fascination with Symonds's life and discovery of Walt Whitman as the transforming influence that unleashed his genius and permitted him a modicum of happiness.¹

Why this matters for the history of sexuality is that the author of the review can be proven to be the important American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, pioneer in pragmatism and semiotics. Peirce praised both Symonds and Whitman effusively, knowing that they were attracted to men, even though, like Brown's biography, Peirce could not mention that they were "inverts" or homosexuals explicitly because of censorship. That one of history's seminal thinkers spoke about as positively in print as possible about homosexuality in an era when it was "the love that dare not speak its name" and that links can be made between that defense and his larger philosophy are matters of some importance.²

One reason to claim that Peirce knew about Symonds's and Whitman's sexuality is that, four years earlier, his brother James Mills Peirce had written a letter to Symonds, first correctly identified by Jonathan Ned Katz, approving of Symonds's two books on homosexuality, A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) and A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891), the first serious modern books in the English language arguing that the "pure" love of men for each other was a stimulus to the greatest civilizations, openly in the case of ancient Greece, secretly in modern times.³ Not many people would have known about these books, published privately in editions of ten and fifty copies, respectively, and circulated secretly.⁴

When in 1897 Havelock Ellis published James Peirce's letter (by "Professor X") in Sexual Inversion, a book he coauthored with the deceased Symonds, Symonds's family insisted that his name be removed from the title page, and a British bookseller was prosecuted for selling the volume. James Peirce was able to secure a rare copy of the edition with both Symonds's and Ellis's names—it was in his collection when he died. James would also have obtained copies of the earlier books—how else could he have responded to them?—from Thomas Sargent Perry, a common friend with Symonds. Scholar Hubert Kennedy has traced their personal contacts and possible visits in the early 1890s.⁵

An earlier attribution of Professor X's letter to Charles Peirce himself by the prominent scholar Leon Edel would likely have gone unchallenged had not Symonds's correspondence with James Peirce emerged. While Charles Peirce was not technically a mathematics professor at Harvard, as was his brother and as Symonds identified the writer of the letter, Charles had published enough on mathematics and spent enough time lecturing at or visiting Harvard that Symonds could easily have considered him to be one. The fact that James Peirce never published anything of a philosophical nature after his undergraduate days—he was a mathematician and helped set up the graduate school at Harvard University—might lead one to conclude that Charles [End...