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downward, particularly when it came to the larger world. After all, they
did help pave the way for better strategies, such as those of Jane Addams
and the settlement movement.
Moreover, the foregoing remarks ought also to help us appreciate just
what Sidgwick’s assessment of the importance of traditional Christianity
amounted to, and why he was so nervous about advancing the new ratio-
nalism, always hoping for a minimum of disruption to the old orthodoxy.
Perhaps they also shed some further light on his complex attitude toward
the Platonic revival and the uses to which it could be put. Sidgwick shared
much with Mill, but he had his own worries as well, and the central one
was that audacious egoism, that selfishness, that he so feared in both self
and society, even as he found its high-minded Goethean version diffi-
cult to resist. His was a most difficult balancing act: without wanting to
cause pain by disrupting the old, he nevertheless realized that the cul-
ture, morals, and education appropriate to the democratic society of the
future would be in many respects new. He wanted to preserve, even foster
respect for, quasi-religious fire and strength, while reviving the study of
Plato, adding Bentham and Mill to the curriculum along with modern
science in general and much modern literature, and inviting women and
workers to join him in Apostolic-style classroom discussions as well as in
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the larger world of the educated public. In the end, his lessons, like Mill’s,
were directed at all classes and all peoples, however arrogantly. Rich as
well as poor were expected to attend the school of sympathy and doubt,
and they were even expected to learn from each other. Rather amazingly,
they were apparently also expected, in due course, to learn from the “other
world.”
But at this point, in the late sixties, Sidgwick was led into some of his
most productive doubting of all. To call for fire and strength, self-sacrifice,
was all very well, but given his doubts about the larger fabric of the cosmos,
it was often unclear, to say the least, just what duty actually demanded,
beyond the familiar demand for “more research.” Worse, it was unclear
what duty demanded of him. Even Mill had come around to thinking that
the universities might be made to harbor genuine thought after all, and
the struggle was on. But the reformers, as much as those they planned on
reforming, found it very hard to escape the atmosphere of hypocrisy that
they so bitterly condemned.
VI. The Poetry of Hypocrisy
The intellectual function, then, which Clough naturally assumed was scepticism
of the Socratic sort – scepticism occupied about problems on which grave practical
issues depended. The fundamental assumptions involved in men’s habitual lines
of endeavour, which determined their ends and guided the formation of their rules,
he was continually endeavouring to clear from error, and fix upon a sound basis. He
would not accept either false solutions or no solutions, nor, unless very relectantly, provisional solutions. At the same time, he saw just as clearly as other men that
the continued contemplation of insoluble problems is not merely unpractical, but
anti-practical; and that a healthy and natural instinct forces most men, after a
few years of feverish youthful agitation, resolutely to turn away from it. But with
this instinct Clough’s fine passion for absolute truth conflicted; if he saw two
sides of a question, he must keep seeking a point of view from which they might
be harmonised. In one of the most impressive of the poems . . . he describes his disposition
To finger idly some old Gordian knot,
Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave;
but the reluctance to cleave knots, in the speculative sphere, does not proceed
from weakness.
Sidgwick, “The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough”
(MEA –)
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Oddly enough, just as Sidgwick’s position at Cambridge seemed more con-
ducive than ever to his inquiries into the “deepest problems,” an old guilt
that had been kept in partial abeyance by his linguistic studies returned to
haunt him with renewed force. In a recollection of singular significance,
he explained:
Meanwhile I had been led back to philosophy by a quite different line of thought
from a practical point of view – that is, by the question that seemed to continually
to press with more urgency for a definite answer – whether I had a right to keep
my Fellowship. I did my very best to decide the question methodically on general
principles, but I found it very difficult, and I may say that it was while struggling with the difficulty thence arising that I went through a good deal of the thought
that was ultimately systematised in the Methods of Ethics. (M )
This was a practical problem of the first importance, and one that in
many ways encapsulated a good many of the larger practical political prob-
lems that engaged Sidgwick during the sixties. Conscientious objection to
subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England was for
Sidgwick and his time what conscientious objection to the draft was to the
students in the s who opposed the war in Vietnam, or what objection
to loyalty oaths was in the s. The Methods was a work loaded with po-
litical relevance, in much the same way that Rawls’s A Theory of Justice was when it appeared in . And rightly so. How many capable persons were
lost to the English academic world, and to the social world it underwrote,
because of the demand that one swear such allegiance? Agnostics, Jews,
Unitarians, Catholics, Methodists, and countless others were all beyond
the pale of officially sanctioned higher education until the educational
tests were abolished in . Small wonder that the youthful Mill and the
earlier utilitarians should have had such withering contempt for Oxford
and Cambridge, regarding them as imposter universities, ecclesiastical
institutions all.
Nor was Mill the only one of Sidgwick’s mentors to take up the cause.
The young Maurice had also confronted the issue, and in a very personal
way, since he had, as the Cambridge system allowed, largely and success-
fully completed his course of studies, taking a first in civil law. It was a
proud Unitarian father who wrote, after his son had opted not to subscribe,
and thus not to graduate:
Fred has left Cambridge, and has preserved his principles at the sacrifice of his
interests. With this I am more satisfied than if he had taken a degree, and had<
br />
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been immediately presented with a fellowship. He was willing to state that he was
a full believer in Christianity, and would conform to all the rules of the Gospel;
but subscribe he must, if he would retain his scholarships. . . . This he could not do, and therefore was not permitted to take his degree, though he had passed all
his examinations with credit.
Eventually, Maurice would come around to the view expressed in one
of his book titles, Subscription No Bondage, but that would be after some
intellectual reconfiguration; and even then, he generally held that although
subscription could be a good thing, in practice it often was not. After all,
he knew that his own students, “if they think,”
must pass, some more, some less, consciously through phases of Arianism,
Sabellianism, Tritheism, through Pantheism in many shapes. I know that they
will be often on the borders of Atheism. I deliberately stir up the thoughts which
will be drawn in these directions; I give them the pledge and hope of a home and
resting-place after their toil; I say it is night, not afar off. You are living, mov-
ing, having your being in this God; but you may traverse many lonely deserts,
and ford many rivers, and scale many mountains before you discover how near
He is. Spinozism, Hegelism, Comtism – all may offer themselves to you on your
pilgrimage; you may turn in for a while and rest in any of them; and God, not we,
must, if our faith is true, teach you that there is any larger and freer dwelling-place than that which they afford.
‘What then is subscription? I answer, it expresses the consent of the students
to be taught according to certain conditions of thought.
But the reality, Maurice agreed, was that although “subscription might
make University teaching and learning more honest,” it in fact “does make
both less honest.” Such was the view of a great many intelligent commen-
tators, and even those sympathetic to subscription often took the more
flexible line that subscription involved only a general conformity, not be-
lief in the detailed phrases of the Articles. As Arthur Stanley nicely put
it, if the question of what was actually being subscribed to were pressed
on the details, there was not “one clergyman in the church” who could
“cast a stone at another – they must all go out, from the greatest to the
least, from the archbishop in his palace at Lambeth to the humblest curate
in the wilds of Cumberland.” Such views had led to a royal commis-
sion being appointed in to consider the terms of subscription, and
then to the Clerical Subscription Act of , officially legitimating what
was understood to be the more general form of assent: “I assent to the
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thirty-nine articles of religion, and to the Book of Common Prayer. . . . I
believe the doctrine . . . as therein set forth, to be agreeable to the word of God.”
It was on this score that Sidgwick was especially dismayed with the
state of his country’s morals. Nothing provoked him like the taint of
hypocrisy. In a heated letter of , he launched into a tirade in re-
sponse to some of Dakyns’s worries about the confidentiality of their
letters:
But I do not agree with you as to the duty of concealment: I am certain the duty is
all the other way: it is a spurious philanthropy that suppresses earnest convictions
to avoid offence: why the very antagonism deepens the spiritual life of those who
are { merely } really orthodox tho’ it makes the formalist blacker. Don’t think I want to preach to you: but your letter alarms just a little: there is just a breath
in it of the miserable semi-hypocrisy that is paralysing the intellectual religion of England. My only motive for not speaking out now is scepticism: I am not sure
I am right & so I keep silence even from good words, but it is pain & grief to me
& hence my present hunger to get to the bottom of all the detailed & technical controversy & see if a stable defence of orthodoxy is lurking under any of the dry leaves.
I told J. B. Mayor last term my perplexity about holding Fellowship and he
anwered wisely I think that ‘when the views that were at present negative became
positive in me I ought to resign not till then.’ (CWC)
This last bit of advice comported well with the guidelines of the Initial
Society – in effect, the motto of Davy Crockett, “Always be sure you’re
right, then go ahead.” Yet Sidgwick was bridling at the very constraints
that largely defined his life, whether it be with the Initial Society, the
Apostles, the Grote Club, the psychical researchers, or, as we shall see,
Symonds and his circle. Neither Mill nor Maurice was quite the ideal
that the young Sidgwick most admired when it came to this burning
issue. Mill was too much the hostile critic from outside, Maurice too
much the friendly conciliator from within (after all, Sidgwick was hardly
being drawn through doubt to belief). Rather, Sidgwick looked to another
source for guidance, one that would prove to be as influential as any: the
poet Arthur Hugh Clough.
Clough, who died prematurely in , was one of the most popular
poets of the later Victorian period, and the struggles of his life served
Sidgwick as a veritable mirror of his own trials. He had been a star pupil
of Thomas Arnold’s at Rugby, after which he had gone to Balliol College,
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Oxford, where he also attended Newman’s services and lectures, making
such friends as W. G. “Ideal” Ward, and joined the progressive Oxford
debating society. Although he achieved only a second-class degree – and
walked back to Rugby to announce to Arnold, “I have failed” – he nonethe-
less became a Fellow of Oriel College and eventually Subdean there. Dur-
ing that time, he brought Emerson to Oxford, and then traveled with
him in revolutionary France. He resigned his Fellowship at Oriel in ,
and a number of his most highly regarded poems were composed around
the period of his resignation crisis: “The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich,”
“Ambarvalia,” and “Amours De Voyage.” Not surprisingly, these were
the pieces that Sidgwick liked best, and his essay on “The Poems
and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough” perhaps affords, all in all,
the single best window onto Sidgwick’s
soul of any of his publications.
Ironically, Clough was a friend of Matthew Arnold’s, though there was
considerable critical distance between them.
During the s, especially, Clough was of unsurpassed emotional
importance to Sidgwick – he was the “wine of life” (M –). Thus it
was that in he could write to Clough’s widow to thank her for sending
him a copy of her edition of the poet’s works:
I ventured to ask Lushington’s advocacy to procure me the book, because I felt
that to no one, out of the range of his personal friendships, could Clough be an
object of more intense individual interest than to myself. I suppose every one has
some one book of poems to which he turns in any solitary mood that demands
special sympathy: such a book, in these latter years I have had in Clough’s poems.
They are so dear to me in this peculiar way, that I should find it difficult to judge impartially their literary merit: yet I cannot but think that there are few poets –
only two, it seems to me – of the present age whom the world would less willingly
let die. He was the one true disciple of Wordsworth, with a far deeper interest than
Wordsworth in the fundamental problems of human life, and a more subtle, more
cultivated intellect. But – as with Wordsworth – every ornament, every melody
in his poems seems the natural spontaneous utterance of his thought and feeling:
with him thought seems always to glow with feeling and the two to run into simple
music.
His rarest excellence seems to me his singular comprehensive complex sym-
pathy. Many poets have treated the problems of life sometimes with bitter
irony, sometimes with vehement oscillation of passion: but with him irony and
sympathy – for all that is not base – seem indissolubly blended, and he never loses that judicial fairness in balancing conflicting influences, which we demand of a
philosopher, but hardly expect from a poet. (CWC)
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Here, then, was the poet who could serve Sidgwick in his time of crisis,
in much the same way that Wordsworth had served Mill during his mental