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other of some imaginary crime, – the more absurd the better. He is then
subject to an examination from his antagonist as to the circumstances of
the charge, his means of knowing it, the supposed motives, and anything
in heaven or earth that may be considered to be in any way connected with
it.” The interrogation and counterinterrogation are carried on by each
team member in turn, each being responsible for elaborating the charge or
defense in a consistent way. Any inconsistencies are challenged as “blots”
and referred to the judge; the side that ends up with the fewest blots wins.
In a letter to his close friend Graham Dakyns from March of ,
Sidgwick explains that he had nothing to do with the Macmillan’s article,
though he “assuredly” did invent the game. His close friend and fellow
Apostle Earnest Bowen was the one responsible for the published account,
though Bowen apparently thought it right to give Sidgwick his share of the
credit. Such inventiveness and creativity were also evident in Sidgwick’s
talent for improvising stories for children, who generally liked him, and in
this connection it is also important to note his love of poetry as a creative
outlet. According to the Memoir, although Sidgwick published only a few
of his poems, “he had in his early years, like many others, higher hopes
and ambitions in this line” (M ).
In , Sidgwick was sent off to a school in Blackheath, run by the
Thucydides scholar H. Dale, where his brother William was also a student.
William later recalled “the gaiety and vivacity of his disposition, which
made him a general favourite,” the “unusual cleverness which he showed
from the first in his studies,” and his nearly being killed by an accidental
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blow from a golf club (M ). But the school closed the following year, and
after a brief return to the Bristol day school, Henry was off to Rugby –
a somewhat surprising development, since his father “had always held
the strongest objections to the old public schools, from a rooted belief in
their low moral tone” (M ). His view, however accurate, had been formed
before Thomas Arnold’s reformism improved the reputation of Rugby,
producing the image of it as inspiring in students a high sense of duty and
social responsibility.
Sidgwick made many lifelong friends at Rugby – most notably Henry
Graham Dakyns, Charles Bowen, T. H. Green, F. E. Kitchener, Charles
Bernard, and C. H. Tawney – and he succeeded brilliantly in his studies,
working mainly under the classical scholars Charles Evans and Thomas
Evans. Bowen would later produce a charming and vivid reminiscence of
the young Sidgwick that serves as something of a corrective to Myers’s
recollections:
[W]ithin his first few years after leaving school there were but few branches of
knowledge and of human interest into which he had not plunged, and in many
with good results. Perhaps I should except the world of sport, which he regarded
not indeed for a moment with contempt, but with an amused and large-hearted
tolerance quite his own. In intellectual matters I should put down, as his first and
supreme characteristic, candour. It seemed to me then, as it does now, something
morally beautiful and surprising; it dominated and coloured his other great qual-
ities, those of subtlety, memory, boldness, and the tolerance of which I have just
spoken was in the next degree his most striking attribute. Perhaps pure laziness
was the shortcoming for which he had least sympathy; but he seemed to make,
as a very great mind does, allowances for everything; he was considerate and
large-hearted because he saw so much.
A younger generation cannot well realise how bright and cheerful a companion
he was in early years. In the spring of life he could be versatile and gay with the
rest: abundant in quiet humour: not boisterous, as many or most, but full of playful
thoughts and ready for the mirthful side of things as well as the serious. He was
small and not very strong; I doubt whether he excelled in any physical game, but
he could walk fairly, and I have a delightful recollection of a short knapsack tour
that we had together in South Wales.
The decision to allow Henry, and then Arthur, to attend Rugby was by
all accounts the result of a new force in the Sidgwick household: Benson.
Benson was actually a cousin of the Rev. William Sidgwick, and another
product of Cambridge. In , when still an undergraduate, he had been
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stunned by the unexpected deaths of his mother and older sister, which
turn of events left him in charge of the family, which he in turn discovered
had not been provided for. Relief came from friends and relatives, among
them Mary Sidgwick, and Benson formed a close bond with her fam-
ily. Shortly after persuading her that Rugby under E. M. Goulburn had
undergone a great improvement in morals, and that Henry could safely
attend, Benson himself was offered a mastership there, so that he and
Henry headed to Rugby together. Benson would become, in succession,
Sidgwick’s first mentor, his occasional teacher, his brother-in-law, and, ul-
timately, archbishop. He nurtured Henry from the start, especially during
some unhappy times at Rugby, and the mentoring was made all the more
complete after June of , when Mary Sidgwick moved the family to
the “Blue House” on Newbold Road in Rugby. For the next two years,
Sidgwick could live at home, thus avoiding the “low morals” associated
with school life, and Benson also came to live there, with the result that
their contact was greater than ever. In Sidgwick’s words, “through his
talk in home life, his readings aloud, etc., his advice and stimulus abun-
dantly given tête-à-tête, his intellectual influence over me was completely
maintained.” All other influences paled beside that of Benson: “The
points in which Sidgwick differed from other boys – his unusual ability
and intellectual curiosity, his passion for reading, and his lack of interest
or aptitude for some of the more active pursuits of the ordinary boy – all
tended to make natural the close tie with one only a few years older, to
whom he owed much, whom he deeply admired, and whom it was his
strong ambition and hope, at this time, to follow and resemble” (M ).
As he wrote to his sister, Mary:
No one knows, my dearest Minnie, I do not think even you could tell, what Edward
has been to me – it is not merely that he has been my hero ever since I knew him,
and that my hero-worship of him has grown even as my admiration for goo
dness
& beauty & truth has grown – it is not merely that he has come to be as one of ourselves, a sharer of the firm & deep household affection that nothing else can
ever resemble – a deeper debt still than these and more than I can tell you now I
owe him. There is only one bond that could knit him closer to us, and I need not
say what that one is.
Henry was close to his sister, and to his younger brother Arthur, and
would forever be dispensing elder brotherly advice to them. The bond
referred to in this letter was of course the marital one, but it must be said
that, to judge from Mother, the memoir of Mary Benson assembled by
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her son Fred, this bit of brotherly advice may have reflected an excessive
deference to the hero rather than to his sister’s interests. Mary’s gentle
and sympathetic nature was fairly quashed by her marriage to the much
older Benson, who had apparently decided that Mary was to be his wife
long before Mary herself was mature enough to so much as consider the
matter in a serious way. The marriage was not a happy one, and Mary,
who was often depressed, and even suffered something of a breakdown,
apparently found some relief from her autocratic husband in intimate
female friendships.
What was the precise content of Benson’s influence on Henry? Decid-
edly non-Apostolic. The model that Benson afforded Sidgwick was one
that, after having first thoroughly assimilated it, would serve as the ob-
ject of rebellion for him for the rest of his life. Benson was a moderate
High Churchman, with few genuinely liberalizing tendencies. With later
hindsight, Sidgwick would describe his position thus:
For him, the only hope of effective and complete social reform lay in the increased
vitality and increased influence of the Christian Church: useful work might be
done by those outside – his recognition of the value of such work was always ample
and cordial – but it could only be of limited and partial utility. The healing of the nations could only come from one source; and any social science that failed to
recognize this must be proceeding on a wrong track. And the struggle for perfect
impartiality of view, which seemed to me an imperative duty, presented itself to
him – as I came to understand – as a perverse and futile effort to get rid of the
inevitable conditions of intellectual and spiritual life. I remember he once said to
me in those years that my generation seemed to be possessed by an insane desire
to jump off its own shadow: but the image was not adequate, for in the spiritual
region he regarded the effort to get rid of the bias given by early training and
unconsciously imbibed tradition, as not only futile but profoundly dangerous.
I do not mean that he failed to do justice to the motives of free-thinkers. Even in the sixties – when it was not uncommon for orthodox persons to hint, or even openly
say, that no man could fail to admit the overwhelming evidence for Christianity,
unless his reason was perverted by carnal appetites or wordly ambitions – I never
remember his uttering a word of this kind: and I remember many instances of his
cordial recognition of the disinterested aims and moral rectitude of particular free-
thinkers. Still, the paralysis of religious life, naturally resulting from the systematic and prolonged maintenance of this attitude of ‘unbiassed’ inquiry, seemed to him
fraught with the gravest spiritual perils; however well-intentioned in its origin, it could hardly fail to be seconded by the baser elements of human nature, the flesh
desiring to shake off the yoke of the spirit.
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Of course, such insights and distance were a Cambridge development,
and could hardly have been manifest in the years when Benson was
Sidgwick’s ego ideal, providing the (male) intellectual and moral guidance
that had been missing from his home life. Benson provided the willing,
earnest pupil, and the “extraordinary intellectual diet” of Cambridge pro-
vided the conflict. As Rothblatt explains, the Apostles must have “both
stimulated and depressed” Sidgwick, “since the questions raised by his
reading could never be purely academic. Rugby had sent him into the
world to be useful, but as he turned over in his mind the implica-
tions of higher criticism, neo-epicureanism, positivism and Darwinian
science, little seemed left of the Rugby world of service, responsibility and
certainty.” The Apostles were no respecters of orthodoxy. At the least,
what they tended to seek was some ideal union of Jesus and Socrates. The
conflict was complete; the whole manner of conversation was in contrast.
As Sidgwick perceptively observed of Benson:
I think he had little taste for arguing out methodically points of fundamental
disagreement where the issues were large and vital. At any rate I think he would
rather do this with comparative strangers than with intimate friends: in the case
of the latter, the sense of profound divergence, which such discussions inevitably
intensify, was painful to him. The disposition to avoid such discussions was,
indeed, only the negative side of the sympathetic quality that constituted the
peculiar charm of his conversation, – the quickness and tact with which he found
topics on which his interlocutor’s mind was in general harmony with his own, and
the spontaneous buoyancy and force of sympathy with which he threw himself
into full and frank discussion of these topics.
Any such attitude was in marked contrast to the Apostolic demand for
sympathetic intimacy and truth, for the conversation that put everything
on the line. Consequently, and not surprisingly, Benson could be of little
intellectual help to Sidgwick during his years of religious doubt. The most
intimate friends of Sidgwick’s adult life would also be, in Apostolic fashion,
the most intellectually significant and demanding ones. Admirably, his wife
would count among them.
Ironically enough, Benson himself would set Sidgwick on the very path
that would lead to their doctrinal – though never personal – alienation
from each other. With Benson’s aid, Sidgwick’s Rugby career flourished.
Goulburn wanted him to try for the Balliol scholarship, for which promis-
ing Rugby students traditionally competed. But Sidgwick knew that
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Benson, without directly saying as much, wanted him to go to his own
Cambridge. Even an unexpressed Benson wish was sufficient, of course,
and in October of
, Sidgwick began his life at Trinity College. Until
the year , when the cancer that would end his life forced him to resign,
he would be present there every single term save one.
III. Little Systems
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, are more than they.
Alfred Lord Tennyson,
In Memoriam
Sidgwick tells another story about his Cambridge self-creation, in ad-
dition to the one about joining the Apostles. It was not a whimsical letter
to Minnie in which he recounted how “he had always been rather a selfish
being,” until in he was taken seriously ill: “Suddenly my attention
was concentrated on My Digestion.” With this, he realized how selfish he
was, meaning not that he was absorbed in his “own pleasures and pains,”
but in his “own notions and dreams.” At first he tried to shape himself
directly, “by conscientious struggles, efforts of Will,” but eventually he
came to a very Millian insight about the indirect pursuit of happiness,
realizing that direct effort “does not answer for an invalid; one has not to
fight oneself in open battles, but to circumvent oneself by quietly encour-
aging all the various interests that take one out of self.” And for him, “the
great artifice was the direct and sympathetic observation of others. I used
to try and think how they were feeling, and sometimes to prophesy what
they would say. I think most of my little knowledge of my fellow-creatures
comes from that period of my life.” (M )
That Sidgwick’s indigestion may have thus contributed to his Apostolic
conversational abilities may seem a silly, low-minded gloss on such high-
minded activity, but the significance of such invalidism – or of the body
generally – cannot be lightly dismissed. Recall Maitland’s observation
that Sidgwick’s “range of sympathy was astonishingly wide. He seemed
to delight in divining what other people were thinking, or were about to
think, in order that he might bring his mind near to theirs, learn from
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