Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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and/or hallucinatory experience for much of his life, and his unique on-
tological insecurity was part of what made him so attractive to Sidgwick
and to James.
Certainly, he had a rough childhood, being plagued by everything
from bed-wetting to “night terrors” to sleepwalking. His education was
painful even in its more conventional aspects, especially when he got to
Harrow, which he thought of as “the camp, where I had to brace myself
to discipline,” compared to the Capua of Clifton Hill House, the fam-
ily home in Bristol. Particularly disturbing, however, was the “low moral
tone” – like the other public schools, Harrow was a remarkably licentious
environment:
Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognized either as a public
prostitute or as some bigger fellow’s ‘bitch’. Bitch was the word in common usage
to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover. The talk in the dormitories
and the studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there one could not avoid seeing
acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together.
There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in
these occurrences. They filled me with disgust and loathing. My school-fellows
realized what I had read in Swift about the Yahoos.
Symonds managed to remain “free in fact and act from this contam-
ination.” Although the “beasts” tried to seduce him, they apparently
ultimately decided that he was “not game.” He acquired his own set of
friends – Gustavus Bosanquet, Randall Vickers, and Alfred Pretor among
them – and survived mainly by managing to separate his “inner and real
self ” from the “outer and artificial self.” In fact, so “separate were the
two selves, so deep was my dipsychia, that my most intimate friends
there . . . have each and all emphatically told me that they thought I had
passed through school without being affected by, almost without being
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aware of, its peculiar vices. And yet those vices furnished a perpetual
subject for contemplation and casuistical reflection to my inner self.”
Symonds had long been aware of his own tendencies towards male
love. Although he was often enough – not always – disgusted with such
actual sexual encounters as he had in his youth, his “earliest recollections”
included “certain visions, half-dream, half-reverie, which were certainly
erotic in their nature.” Thus, often before falling asleep, he would fancy
himself “crouched upon the floor amid a company of naked adult men:
sailors, such as I had seen about the streets of Bristol. The contact of their
bodies afforded me a vivid and mysterious pleasure.” This fantasy is
explained more graphically in his “case history”: “he imagined himself the
servant of several adult naked sailors; he crouched between their thighs and
called himself their dirty pig, and by their orders he performed services
for their genitals and buttocks which he contemplated and handled with
relish.” Upon exposure to Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” before
he was ten, the “shaggy and brawny sailors, without entirely disappearing,
began to be superseded in my fancy by an adolescent Adonis.” He also
loved the Hermes of Homer and “was very curious to know why the
Emperors kept boys as well as girls in their seraglios, and what the male
gods did with the youths they loved.”
Dr. Symonds was apparently rather clueless about his son’s inclinations,
which were indeed kept from him. He later told him that “he sent me with
undoubting confidence to Harrow, because he had no conception that I
was either emotional or passionate.”
If Harrow would teach him to detest what he had so fantasized, he
held himself to have “transcended crude sensuality through the aesthetic
idealization of erotic instincts.” His imagination steeped in the “filth” of
his schoolmates, Symonds was “only saved from cynicism” by the “gradual
unfolding” of “an ideal passion which corresponded to Platonic love. This
idea was not derived from Greek literature; for I had not yet read the works
of Plato and Theocritus. It sprang up spontaneously, proving that my
thought was lodged in ancient Hellas.” Thus, while his fellows deemed
him passionless, he was busily “theorizing, testing and sublimating the
appetites which they unthinkingly indulged.” He would later come to
regard this as a big part of his problem, but this was not until the “crisis
in Cannes.”
Of course, Plato was soon to make a grand appearance. Symonds, age
seventeen and in the sixth form, was supposed to be studying the Apology,
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and for the purpose had bought “Cary’s crib.” During a visit to London, he
went to bed with his crib and, stumbling on the Phaedrus, read it straight
through, following it up with the Symposium, which made for a sleepless
night but “one of the most important nights of my life.” For
Here in the Phaedrus and the Symposium – in the myth of the Soul and the speeches of Pausanias, Agathon and Diotima – I discovered the true liber amoris at last, the revelation I had been waiting for, the consecration of a long-cherished idealism. It
was just as though the voice of my own soul spoke to me through Plato, as though
in some antenatal experience I had lived the life of philosophical Greek lover.
Harrow vanished into unreality. I had touched solid ground. I had obtained
the sanction of the love which had been ruling me from childhood. Here was the
poetry, the philosophy of my own enthusiasm for male beauty, expressed with all
the magic of unrivalled style. And, what was more, I now became aware that the
Greek race – the actual historical Greeks of antiquity – treated this love seriously, invested it with moral charm, endowed it with sublimity.
For the first time I saw the possibility of resolving in a practical harmony the
discords of my instincts. I perceived that masculine love had its virtue as well as its vice, and stood in this respect upon the same ground as normal sexual appetite. I
understood, or thought I understood, the relation which those dreams of childhood
and the brutalities of vulgar lust at Harrow bore to my higher aspiration after noble passion.
This was, as Symonds allowed, a most timely revelation, one proving
“decisive” for his future. It confirmed “my congenital inclination toward
persons of the male sex, and filled my head with an impossible dream,
which controlled my thoughts for many years.” After all, Symonds had
his youthful self in mind when he penned that lette
r to Jowett about
the effects of Plato. Remarkably, however, he could not really, with justice,
blame Jowett for having exposed him to Platonic love, given the way he
had come upon it quite on his own initiative. In a sense, it was Symonds
himself who brought the Hellenic eros to Oxford.
Shocked by his friend Pretor’s revelation that he was having a love af-
fair with none other than their headmaster, C. J. Vaughan, Symonds was
thrown into a good deal of casuistical turmoil and cynical reflection about
hypocrisy in high places. Plato helped, as did Aristophanes, the erotic
dialogues of Lucian and Plutarch, Theognis, Theocritus, and the Greek
Anthology. He threw himself ever more passionately into things Greek.
Now, the “lord” of his life “was love,” and his “mental and moral evolu-
tion proceeded now upon a path which had no contact with the prescribed
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systems of education.” A visit home to Clifton for the Easter holi-
days, with his “soul lodged in Hellas” while his body was in the Bristol
Cathedral, led to his infatuation with the chorister Willie Dyer, “the
only beautiful, the only flawless being I had ever seen.” He arranged
a meeting, “on the morning of April ,” and it was from “that
morning I date the birth of my real self. Thirty-two years have elapsed
since then; and still I can hardly hold the pen when I attempt to write
about it.”
Of course, not much had happened between them, by Harrow stan-
dards. Symonds had taken “Willie’s slender hand into my own and gazed
into his large brown eyes fringed with heavy lashes.” Many meaningful
walks together in Leigh Woods would follow, culminating in a couple of
kisses. Symonds plucked a white anemone on the spot of the first kiss,
a treasure that he would still possess decades later, keeping it pressed in
his Theocritus beside the phrase “Men were of the Golden Age long ago,
when the beloved boy returned one’s love.” It was all so ethereal, so
high-minded, so Platonic in the idealization of beauty.
Still, Symonds knew well enough “that if I avowed my emotion to
my father or his friends, I should meet – not merely with no sympathy
or understanding or credence – but that I should arouse horror, pain,
aversion.” And the casuistical intricacies of his situation were soon to
grow even more complex. Happily transported to Oxford, he was taking
up with a new and infinitely more agreeable set of people, one of the
more important being John Conington. Although Symonds had presented
himself to Jowett, armed with a letter of introduction from his father,
Jowett had unexpectedly rebuffed him, and would only warm to him
during his later undergraduate years. His Apostolic-style awakening was
mainly courtesy of Conington:
The association with Conington was almost wholly good. It is true that I sat up
till midnight with him nearly every evening, drinking cup after cup of strong tea
in his private lodgings above Cooper’s shop near University. This excited and
fatigued my nerves. But the conversation was in itself a liberal education for a
youth of pronounced literary tastes. Now and again it turned on matters of the
affections. Conington was scrupulously moral and cautious. Yet he sympathized
with romantic attachments for boys. In this winter he gave me Jonica; and I learned the love story of its author William Johnson (now Cory) the Eton master, and the
pretty faced Charlie Wood (now Lord Halifax) of Ch.Ch. who had been his pupil.
That volume of verse, trifling as it may appear to casual readers, went straight to
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my heart and inflamed my imagination. It joined on in a singular manner to
my recent experiences at Harrow, and helped to form a dream world of un-
healthy fancies about love. I went so far as to write a letter to William Johnson,
exposing the state of my own feelings and asking his advice. The answer, ad-
dressed to O.D.Y. at the Union, duly came. It was a long epistle on paiderastia
in modern times, defending it and laying down the principle that affection be-
tween people of the same sex is no less natural and rational than the ordinary
passionate relations. Underneath Johnson’s frank exposition of this unconven-
tional morality there lay a wistful yearning sadness – a note of disappointment
for forced abstention. I have never found this note absent in lovers of my sort and
Johnson’s, unless the men have cast prudence to the winds and staked their all on
cynicism.
Avoiding such cynicism, while rediscovering something of the joy of
the ancients in male love, would become his guiding task.
Although his normal studies were suffering (Symonds was “ploughed in
Smalls for Greek Grammar”), he was educating himself after his fashion.
He kept before his mind, as a sort of maxim, an oracle from Herodotus:
“You ask me for Arkadia; a great request you make of me. I will not
grant it.” Be that as it may, he avidly discussed the subject of Arcadian
love with Conington, and in the course of some of these discussions,
during a reading party at Whitby that also included Green, Albert Rutson,
and Cholmeley Puller, he informed his tutor about Vaughan’s affair with
Pretor. Conington insisted that Symonds should go to Clifton to inform
his father about these goings-on.
This Symonds did, with the result that his father now became rather
more aware of his son’s inner workings. But Symonds was terribly con-
flicted about the intricacies of this “new casuistry”:
I had become the accuser of my old headmaster, a man for whom I felt no love, and
who had shown me no special kindness, but who was after all the awe-inspiring
ruler of the petty state of Harrow. My accusation rested solely upon the private
testimony of an intimate friend, whose confidence I violated by the communication
of his letter to a third party. To complicate matters, I felt a deeply rooted sympathy with Vaughan. If he had sinned, it had been by yielding to passions which already
mastered me. But this fact instead of making me indulgent, determined me to tell
the bitter truth. At that period I was not cynical. I desired to overcome the malady
of my own nature. My blood boiled and my nerves stiffened when I thought what
mischief life at Harrow was doing daily to young lads under the autocracy of a
hypocrite.
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verse
Dr. Symonds was not so conflicted, and with the guidance of Con-
ington successfully pressured Vaughan to resign from Harrow. But the
young Symonds was troubled by the “sense that I appeared disloyal to my
friends.” Pretor and some other old schoolmates let him know that they
did not agree that this was the action of Conscience. Symonds’s “brain
and moral consciousness – the one worn with worrying thought, the other
racked by casuistical doubts – never quite recovered from the weariness
of those unprofitable weeks.” Loyalty to friends would remain for him
a burning issue, calling for the best of one’s soul searching. Among his
manuscript remains is a little piece entitled simply “Loyalty to Friends,”
which reads:
The truly loyal friend, is not merely staunch in his adherence – for this he might
be from a sense of duty – nor devoted in his love – for this he might be through
passion: he is both staunch & devoted; but he is also true in every corner of his soul to his friend, honouring & respecting him, incapable of believing evil in him, betraying his secrets to none, criticizing him to none, never complaining of him,
waiting if wronged by him in the hope of explanation; & if such a friend has to
break from his friend at last he still honours the past & is silent preferring to suffer before the world rather than to throw blame on one whom he once greatly
loved.
Quite possibly this was penned with Pretor in mind. In any case, such
meditations were classic Symonds: he would develop a “genius” for male
friendship.
The curious casuistical web spun round this affair – the betrayal of
a friend’s confidence, the partial ruin of a friend’s uncle (Green was
Vaughan’s nephew), the hypocritical condemnation of hypocritical boy
love by appeal to a father (whom he had consistently deceived) at the behest
of a decidedly Arcadian tutor – surely did help to determine Symonds’s
ethical course in profound ways. He would forever be engaged in strug-
gling to work out the new casuistry that so troubled him, enlisting the aid
of such philosophical friends as Sidgwick, who, needless to say, shared his
absorbing interest in the issue of hypocrisy.
But the more immediate effect of the Vaughan matter was to bring his
father into his confidence in an altogether new way. Dr. Symonds had not