by Bart Schultz
toward such critics as Tyrwhitt. Indeed, his celebration of the Greeks
was remarkably consistent over his mature career; their ethics
do not place between us and the world in which we have to live and die the will
of a hypothetical ruler, to whom we may ascribe our passions and our fancies,
enslaving ourselves to the delusions of our own soul. Nor, again, do they involve
the monstrous paradox of all ascetic systems, which assert that human nature
is radically evil, and that only that is good in us which contradicts our natural
appetites and instincts.
For Symonds, “the truest instinct of the Greeks” involved eliminating “the
mysterious and the terrible, to accentuate the joyous and the profitable for
humane uses.” After a brief review of Marcus Aurelius and Goethe,
whose Stoic–Epicurean search for well-ordered conduct without either
asceticism or licence he would emulate, the moral and the mission come
out:
Thus the Greek conception of life was posed; the Christian conception was
counterposed; the synthesis, crudely attempted in the age of the Renaissance,
awaits mature accomplishment in the immediate future. The very ground-thought
of Science is to treat man as part of the natural order – not, assuredly, on that
account excluding from its calculation the most eminent portion of man, his rea-
son and his moral being – and to return from the study of nature with profit
to the study of man. It does not annihilate or neutralise what man has gained
from Christianity; on the contrary, the new points of morality developed by the
Christian discipline are of necessity accepted as data by the scientific mind. Our
object is to combine both the Hellenic and the Christian conceptions in a third,
which shall be more solid and more rational than any previous manifestation of
either, superior to the Hellenic as it is no longer a mere intuition, superior to
the ecclesiastical inasmuch as it relies on no mythology, but seeks to ascertain the
law.
But there is all the difference in the world between the Greek and
the Christian: “the whole bearing of a man who feels that his highest
duty consists in conforming himself to laws he may gradually but surely
ascertain, is certainly different from that of one who obeys the formulae
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invented by dead or living priests and prophets to describe the nature
of a God whom no man had either seen or heard.” Fortified by the
example of science, in a Whitmanesque sense, Symonds asks if it is really
impossible to “dream that morality will be one branch of the study of the
world as a whole, a department of , when regarded as a
total unity, that suffers no crude radical distinction of Mind and Body, has
absorbed our scientific attention?” What is needed is chiefly suspension
of judgment, and the recognition that “we have no reason to apprehend
that personal licence should result from a system of purely positive ethics
based upon that conception of our relation to the universe which Science
is revealing.” The Greek Pantheon might be viewed as “an exhaustive
psychological analysis. Nothing in human nature is omitted: but each
function and each quality of man is deified.” And just as “the unity of
the Greek religion was not the unity of the One but of the Many blent
and harmonised in the variety that we observe in Nature, so the ideal of
Greek life imposed no commonplace conformity to one fixed standard on
individuals, but each man was encouraged to complete and realise the type
of himself to the utmost.” This was an ancient Greece that had a good
deal of J. S. Mill in it.
Needless to say, the difficulty of the task ahead is also brought out, and
much of this difficulty does seem to involve shaking off “the Hebraistic
culture we receive in childhood.” This is evident even in the first edition of
the two Studies. The Greeks, in contrast to moderns in a world grown old,
“had no Past.” To find anything resembling the vital Greek spirit, some
“living echo of this melody of curving lines,” modern Englanders “must
visit the fields where boys bathe in early morning, or the playgrounds of
our public schools in summer, or the banks of the Isis when the eights
are on the water, or the riding-schools of young soldiers.” After all, the
Genius of the Greeks was mostly stimulated by male beauty, was indeed
personified in the
young man newly come from the wrestling-ground, anointed, chapleted, and
very calm. . . . Upon his soul there is no burden of the world’s pain; the whole creation that groaneth and travaileth together, has touched him with no sense of
anguish; nor has he yet felt sin. The pride and the strength of adolescence are his –
audacity and endurance, swift passions and exquisite sensibilites, the alternations
of sublime repose and boyish noise, grace, pliancy, and stubbornness and power,
love of all things and splendours of the world, the frank enjoyment of the open
air, free merriment, and melancholy well beloved.
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Of this “clear and stainless personality, this conscience whole and pure
and reconciled to nature, what survives among us now?” After all, the
“blear-eyed mechanic, stifled in a hovel of our sombre northern towns”
was hardly even in a position “to envy the pure clear life of Art made
perfect in Humanity, which was the pride of Hellas.” How can such a one
“comprehend a mode of existence in which the world itself was adequate
to all the wants of the soul, and when to yearn for more than life affords
was reckoned a disease”?
When it came to the celebration of Greek boy love – or more accurately,
young man love – Symonds made Pater seem like a model of circumspec-
tion and understatement. Indeed, Pater would grow more conciliatory
toward Christianity, albeit a Christianity that valorized the body and de-
moted St. Paul. Symonds’s higher synthesis was hardly such as to fool
anyone with even a trace of religious orthodoxy in his or her soul.
But of course, this was the danger. The conservative critics of Jowett’s
religious heresies and Platonist pedagogy were all too ready to urge that
these had spawned the sexual heresies of Pater and Symonds. Recall that
Jowett had been one of the contributors to the Essays and Reviews, and
early on had been known for his unorthodox views, shaped in part by the
German critics. Among other things, he found conventional explanations
of the Atonement to have an offensively “commercial” tone. If he became
a giant figure in the Balliol of Symonds’s day, this was after years of nast
y
academic battling and public controversy. He was pressured to sign the
Thirty-nine Articles again when he was appointed Regius Professor, and
was no doubt another prime example of what Sidgwick deemed high-
minded laxness, though Leslie Stephen observed that Jowett was, after
all, following Mill’s advice about reforming the church from within. At
least, many of the academic liberals took him to be on their side, and he
joined with Sidgwick in contributing a piece to Essays on Liberal Education.
For Jowett, the emphasis on Plato was pretty clearly an alternative to an
emphasis on religion.
To be sure, Jowett was a very strange man – at once shy and sarcastic,
apparently opposed to academic research in favor of “usefulness in life,”
he hated to see his students become antipractical, even while he was in
subtle ways bringing them to a lifelong interest in the Plato that he was
busy translating. He was not exactly the ideal of the aggressive reformer,
though in some respects he was a model for Sidgwick. As Annan notes,
after Pusey had (unsuccessfully) launched proceedings against Jowett for
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publishing heretical doctrines (in the Essays and Reviews), “never again
was Jowett to express his theological opinions in public.” And if he was not
quite what one would call a “friend” to the undergraduates, nonetheless:
Jowett was not the first don to institute reading parties in the vacation, but he
was the first head of house to know something about all his men, and a great deal
about some of them. The list of Balliol graduates in – included Asquith,
Curzon, Gell, Milner, Baden-Powell, Leveson-Gower and W. P. Kerr. As un-
dergraduates they would have been invited to meet the Master’s guests – among
them Turgenev, George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, Bishop Colenso, Archbishop Tait,
Lord Sherbrooke and Tyndall. He made a point of mixing the different types of
undergraduates at his parties – ‘Jowett’s Jumbles’, they were called – yet Balliol
was judged to be the most cliquey of all colleges.
And certainly when it came to Green and Symonds, it was Jowett’s
personal touch that had turned them into educated men – indeed, into
educators themselves, who appreciated the sheer labor involved in cultural
understanding. But this was just the point. As Dowling has argued:
[T]he darker, subversive dimension to Jowett’s and, more generally, to all tutorial
Socraticism would always be the fatal character of Socrates as a ‘corrupter of
youth.’ In the aftermath of the conservative clerical challenge to Jowett’s religious orthodoxy which made him such a hero to undergraduates during –, this
darker Socratic character was never to be far from the foreboding imaginations
of many at Oxford. Even Brodrick himself, a political ally of Jowett’s, did not
absolutely reject the notion that Jowett may have deliberately instilled theologi-
cal doubt into his pupils, while the judgement of Richard St. John Tyrwhitt, as
voiced by a character in his novelistic memoir Hugh Heron, Christ Church (), would express a deep mistrust of all such tutors who ‘take pleasure in unsettling lads’ minds, and think they were like Socrates whenever they succeeded in
that’ ().
Amazingly, however, given Jowett’s distance from utilitarianism, his
Plato was in many respects the fearless and sexless Socratic doubter of Mill.
Indeed, Jowett might well seem a textbook case of homosocial panic, trying
to deny that education was a sexually charged business and that Plato’s
language concerning this had been anything but figurative. Swinburne,
after his homophobic turn, would remark on “such renascent blossoms of
the Italian Renaissance as the Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondo-
liers who is now in Aretino’s bosom,” assuring his readers that the “cult
of the calamus, as expounded by Mr Addington Symonds to his fellow
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calamites, would have found no acceptance or tolerance with the trans-
lator of Plato.” And in truth, as Annan records, the “translator of Plato
did indeed on one occasion take action. A Balliol undergraduate, William
Hardinge, sent Pater sonnets praising homosexual love. Pater responded
by signing himself ‘Yours lovingly’. Jowett was told: confronted both,
expelled Hardinge from Balliol and never spoke to Pater again.” It was
apparently this event, in , that brought the proctorship to Wordsworth
rather than Pater.
In due course, Symonds was the one who would try to drive home to
Jowett how impossibly conflicted the Balliol Platonic Revival was. In a
touching letter of February , , he wrote about how glad he was that
Jowett had abandoned the “idea of an essay on Greek love.”
It surprises me to find you, with your knowledge of Greek history, speaking of
this in Plato as ‘mainly a figure of speech.’ – It surprised me as much as I seem to
surprise you when I repeat that the study of Plato is injurious to a certain number
of predisposed young men.–
Many forms of passion between males are matters of fact in English schools,
colleges, cities, rural districts. Such passion is innate in some persons no less than the ordinary sexual appetite is innate in the majority. With the nobler of such pre-determined temperaments the passion seeks a spiritual or ideal transfiguration.
When, therefore, individuals of the indicated species come into contact with the
reveries of Plato, (clothed in graceful diction, immersed in the peculiar emotion,
presented with considerable dramatic force, gilt with a mystical philosophy, throb-
bing with the realism of actual Greek life), the effect upon them has the force of a
revelation. They discover that what they had been blindly groping after was once
an admitted possibility – not in a mean hole or corner – but that the race whose
literature forms the basis of their higher culture, lived in that way, aspired in that way. For such students of Plato there is no question of ‘figures of speech,’ but of
concrete facts, facts in the social experience of Athens, from which men derived
courage, drew intellectual illumination, took their first step in the path which led
to great achievements and the arduous pursuit of truth.
Greek history confirms, by a multitude of legends and of actual episodes, what
Plato puts forth as a splendid vision, and subordinates to the higher philosophic
life.
It is futile by any evasion of the central difficulty, by any dexterity in the use of words, to escape from the stubborn fact that natures so exceptionally predisposed
find in Plato the encouragement of their furtively cherished dreams. The Lysis, the
Charmides, the Phaedrus, t
he Symposium – how many varied and unimaginative
pictures these dialogues contain of what is only a sweet poison to such minds!
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Meanwhile the temptations of the actual world surround them: friends of like
temper, boys who respond to kindness, reckless creatures abroad upon the common
ways of life. Eros Pandemos is everywhere. Plato lends the light, the gleam, that
never was on sea or shore.
Symonds continues this remarkable letter by growing even more emphatic
and more personal. He urges Jowett to
Put yourself in the place of someone to whom the aspect of Greek life which you
ignore is personally and intensely interesting, who reads his Plato as you would
wish him to read his Bible – i.e. with a vivid conviction that what he reads is the
life-record of a masterful creative man-determining race, and the monument of a
world-important epoch.
Can you pretend that a sympathetically constituted nature of the sort in question
will desire nothing from the panegyric of paederastic love in the Phaedrus, from
the personal grace of Charmides, from the mingled realism and rapture of the
Symposium? What you call a figure of speech, is heaven in hell to him – maddening,
because it is stimulating to the imagination; wholly out of accord with the world
he has to live in; too deeply in accord with his own impossible desires.
Greek love was for Plato no ‘figure of speech,’ but a present poignant reality.
Greek love is for modern students of Plato no ‘figure of speech’ and no anachro-
nism, but a present poignant reality. The facts of Greek history and the facts of
contemporary life demonstrate these propositions only too conclusively.
By the time that he penned this letter, Symonds had long been per-
suaded that he himself had been “born that way,” and moreover that there
was nothing morbid about his tendencies. But he was harking back sym-
pathetically to the tortured time of his youth, when he was much more
conflicted. Symonds may have been rather more in the grip of a repression-
versus-release view of sexual passion than Pater, who had a delicate (almost