by Bart Schultz
surgeon Sir Spencer Wells, encouraged his son to get married. “Then,
by inspiration, the memory of Catherine North returned to me. She was
connected with the best and happiest period of my past confused exis-
tence.” Symonds set out in pursuit of her, receiving, later in the summer,
after some initial overtures, her parents’ permission to follow the fam-
ily to Pontresina, which proved a fateful turn. Thus, hanging about the
entrance at the Hotel Krone, he “met Catherine; and our life together
began.”
As the Memoirs continue, the “best would have been to have died there
on the top of the Pitz Languard,” where they had had “a day of days” and
exchanged rings. Symonds was plagued by doubts straight off: “I loved
her ardently. . . . But was it not too pure, too spiritual, too etherialized, this exquisite emotion?” He “missed something in the music – the coarse
and hard vibrations of sex” and wondered whether his love was really
“perfect for her, such a holocaust of self as she had a right to expect?” But
he managed to compare this love to that of “Dante and his Beatrice,” and
told his “heart it did not signify,” this want of passion.
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The marriage duly took place, at Hastings on November , , and
the honeymoon almost immediately confirmed Symonds’s fears. He “felt
no repugnance at first, but no magnetic thrill of attraction,” no magic, no
cure. It was all so awkward:
The organ of sex was vigorous enough and ready to perform its work. My own
ineptitude prevented me for several nights from completing the marital function;
and at last I found the way by accident – after having teased and hurt both my
wife and myself, besides suffering dismally from the humiliating absurdity of the
situation. She afterwards told me that such manifest proofs of my virginity were
agreeable to her. But all the romance and rapture of sexual intercourse, on which
I had so fondly counted, were destroyed by this sordid experience.
Symonds would come to admit that this marriage was a colossal mistake.
Catherine was a very sophisticated and intelligent women, who preferred
the socializing of Clifton to the beauties of remote Davos, and her pain
and isolation were often palpable during their years together.
Symonds did try, in at least some limited ways, to protect Catherine.
It is curious that even the quite candid case history was slightly censored
in the first English edition, which reads: “He found that he was potent,
and he begot several children, but he also found, to his disappointment,
that the tyranny of the male genital organs on his fancy increased.” The
German text reads a touch differently: “He found that he was potent, and
he begot several children. But he also found, to his disappointment, that
he only slept with his wife faute de mieux. The dependence on picturing
male genitals was so great that visions of men pursued him even in the
very act of marital copulation.”
Just how well Catherine understood her husband’s inner life is not easy
to determine. Naturally, he supposed that they would be in a deep sense
friends, a school of sympathy for their children. Symonds was, after all, a
liberal who had read his Mill and his Maurice and was determined to do
his bit for women’s higher education. And in fact, his children – ironically,
all girls – profited from his ambitions for them. But of course, his sexual
interests were so thoroughly intwined with an aesthetic celebrating the
superiority of male beauty that there was a pervasive, often unconscious,
masculinism that hung about his life and work. Like the Greeks, he held
male beauty to be paramount.
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Needless to say, Symonds’s “health gave way.” If he did at this time do
much to hone the literary style that would figure in his future works, it
was always in a haze of pain and discomfort. Troubled by the failure of the
“marriage cure,” he would recognize in retrospect that “[w]hat was really
happening was that I was pining away through the forcible repression
of my natural inclination for the male sex. I could not keep my thoughts
from running on this subject; I could not prevent myself from dreaming at
night about it; I could not refrain from poetizing the passion in a hundred
forms.” When introduced to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in , by
Myers, he had been immediately struck by the moving celebration of
male comradeship. But explicit graffiti and a proposition from a soldier in
Leicester Square only served to drive home how fragile his equilibrium
really was. Still, things were coming to a head, and the year would
prove as fateful for Symonds as it had been for Sidgwick.
Just what a state he was in became evident during the hot summer of that
year, after their return to London. Symonds was in “a perpetual fever” and
would later describe his own writings from that period as “hysterical.” As
the Memoirs recount, he would rise early in the morning “from a sleepless
bed, walk across the park, and feed my eyes upon the naked men and boys
bathing in the Serpentine.” It was a cosmic experience:
I was Hypnos gazing on Endymion in the cave of Latmos. Golden hair, and white
neck, and breasts brighter than twin stars, and belly softer than the down of doves,
and dewy thighs, and awful beauty of love’s minister beneath the tuft of crispy
curls, and slender swelling legs, and rosy feet, and long lithe languid arms. I had
them all pressed to my body there, flank to flank – kissed every part and member
of the lad – with wandering hand tasted them one by one, and felt the fervous of
smooth buttocks glowing and divine. In a day dream: O Jupiter!
Four young men are bathing in the pond by the embankment. I pass; the engine
screams and hurries me away. But the engine has no power to take my soul. That
stays, and is the pond in which the bathers swim, the air in which they shout, the
grass on which they run and dress themselves, the hand that touches them unfelt,
the lips that kiss them and they know it not.
Not surprisingly, Symonds “began writing poetry again during the
hot summer weather,” and all of his poems “were composed upon the
subject of masculine love. The second half of ‘John Mordan’, ‘Diego’,
‘Love and Music’, ‘The Headmaster’, together with a great number
of dithyrambic pieces in the style of Walt Whitman, belong to those
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months.” However uncertain he was of his own talents, he simply could
not stop.
And of course, it was at precisely this moment that the ascetic, tor-
mented, and poeticizing Henry Sidgwick was to enter his life in an intimate
and permanent way. As the Memoirs explain:
Henry Sidgwick, whose acquaintance I had recently made, was also staying in
London – philosophizing, going to spiritualistic seances, and trying to support
himself (for an experiment) on the minimum of daily outlay. Our acquaintance
ripened rapidly into a deep and close friendship, which has been of inestimable
value during the last twenty-two years. It would be difficult to say how much I owe
to the rarely noble character, the wisdom, the extraordinary mental originality, the
inexhaustible sympathy and kindness of this most remarkable man.
For its part, the dryly evasive Henry Sidgwick, A Memoir, actually quotes
Symonds on the “inestimable value” of this friendship, noting that for
“Sidgwick, too, this friendship was one of the things he most valued in
life” (M ).
Apparently, each found the confessions of the other profoundly inter-
esting right from the start. A long letter to Sidgwick, dated June , ,
spells out how much talk was being devoted to the “deepest problems”:
I wonder what I have done to deserve being classed among the infidels, who
imagine human delusion to be the origin of all religions. I am far too sceptical
for that. The explanation of Comte seems to me more puerile and less consonant
with the laws of our nature than Theism. But yet I am not a Theist. I should like
to know very much what made you one, or whether you never ceased to be one.
I would give a great deal to regain the Christian point of view, or rather, since
all modern people are ethically Christian, to regain the sentiment of belief in the
Deity – the personal, creative, conscious Deity. But I nowhere find Him. I see that
this age has no definition of Him. I cannot construct one. Theists, each and all in
different ways, continue the old anthropomorphism and self-worship. They derive
the Deity from man, refining their conceptions proportionately to the advancing
refinement of the world. It is possible that this may be good evidence of the Deity:
an innate impulse to worship God in our own image may have been implanted in us
by Him. But scepticism requires evidence from the other side. In a word, nothing
appears to me satisfactory by way of proof but revelation; and I do not feel myself
forced at present to credit any revelation. All the revelations, like the Theistic
ideals, seem products of the human soil; good, bad, or indifferent, according as
clay, sand, peat, and the like are mixed. I wonder whether you think you may lay
your finger in spiritualism on some point affecting revelation. If you do, you have
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the secret. I could believe anything if somebody first knocked me flat with a club – if all the conceit were taken out of me by the proof of agencies beyond our experience
revealing God, I could prepare myself for mysticism. Here says the teleologist, are
not thought, conception of seed, the growth of plants, miracles enough for you?
Undoubtedly they are miracles. But, in order to make me a Theist, connect them
with God, prove their inevitable emanation from Paternal Intelligence – I am not
Atheistic, or scoffing; I am merely helpless, painfully surrounded by miracles. My
pen upon this paper, these letters, and what they mean, assuredly these things
are miracles; it is this very thing that distracts me; miracles are so plentiful. I
turn aside and think of the past myriads of centuries; I look across the stars and
see billions flying into sight suddenly down the tubes of the telescopes; are there
not more miracles than blackberries? But not one teaches me God. Or if I talk
of God, worn out with these inexplicable wonders, I feel this to be cowardice;
God, so spoken of, is a merely otiose summum genus, a general term to include everything, the O which ends an infinite series. In other words, again, if God is
everywhere He is as good as nowhere. I have forgotten His definition. The world
cannot supply me with one. I sprawl simply. Then what makes you a Theist? Is
it the moral world? Is it your intellect? In the moral and intellectual miracles I do not find more than in those of the material world, except that, because my whole
being depends on them essentially, they seem to me more marvellous and more
inexplicable. Yet when I try to abstract them, and when I throw myself into a state
of trance, proceeding in my ascent from infimae species to the summum genus, I eventually eliminate everything but naked consciousness, which tells absolutely
no tale. It is an appalling solitude. My head reels, my heart seems ceasing, I catch
myself upon the verge of madness, and roll down the mountain of meditation
again, only too glad to be among the infimae species at the bottom. Long ago, even as a child, I had the morbid faculty of such self-abstraction, and when doubt
first insinuated itself into my mind this spiritual nakedness made itself horribly
remembered. I thought, will death be like that, and when our eyes are closed for
ever, will even that last sense of existence, naked, solitary, formless, unimpressed, which I so much hate, be also lost? I can imagine annihilation thus. What I call
my soul is simply the embroidery of sense upon this blankness. I can reduce it
to its primal blankness by abstracting sense; and when sense is finally abstracted
from me, what, to call ‘Myself,’ will be left? With the conception of the soul
disappears that of God. Then both irresistibly rush back and assert themselves.
Then comes the problem of human history. The philosophy of religion says its say.
Physical science perplexes more than it illuminates. Its new horizons are merely
great in bewilderment. The struggle of the soul begins to wax faint. It ceases and
atomic scepticism gets in. Therewith there is nothing left to live for. Every faculty droops; the whole man becomes etiolated; death intervenes, and at last – the great
secret.
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But such a helpless condition is awful – ò . Four words rarely
meant more than these. Objectively they contradict themselves, for “quis Deus
incertum est, habitat Deus”; subjectively, in relation to the aching brain and
unsatisfied heart, and incomplete intelligence and weak moral nature, they contain
a volume of sad significance. “Malgré moi l’infini me tourmente.” The whole
question revolves on the quis, quis Deus. If there be no other God, what Is is a
God – not Jah, but – yet who, having heard of Moses and of Christ, can be<
br />
satisfied with Parmenides? Even Spinoza will not do for me. I would sooner have
Comte than the worshippers of Ens. My human weakness clamours for a personal
God, and – let not Congreve hear me – for some assurance of either immortality or
annihilation. It is the indefinite which is so cruel, the perpetual “perhaps,” which
will not be dismissed.
The only thing I know which will restore my physical tone and give me health is
living in the Alps. The only prospect of obtaining spiritual tone and health seems
to be the discovery of some immaterial altitudes, some mountains and temples
of God. As I am prostrated and rendered vacant by scepticism, the Alps are my
religion. I can rest there and feel, if not God, at least greatness – greatness prior, and posterior to man in time, beyond his thoughts, not of his creation, independent,
palpable, immovable, proved. The sense of the Alps was a long time coming to
me. Perhaps even now that grander sentiment is on its way. [incomplete]
The significance of this letter cannot be overestimated. Brown’s biog-
raphy of Symonds, effectively coauthored by Sidgwick and Dakyns, was
a thematization of the line about being knocked flat as a prerequisite for
mysticism. Clearly, this seminal letter struck right at the very heart of
Sidgwick’s deepest concerns, and he would use it when thinking about
how to construct his departed friend’s biographical treatment. There was
something extremely judicious about this, a subtle recognition of a mo-
ment in their lives that had been a defining one, however painful. Indeed,
the letter brings out the curious religious interest of Symonds’s various
dissociative states, how his dipsychia often took quite literal forms. He
had often, when growing up, been strangely affected by light in certain
natural settings and had “passed from the sense of a tangible presence into
a dream,” a “very definite phase of experience, approaching hypnotism in
its character.” Moreover, he was also subject to “a kind of trance.”
Suddenly, at church, or in company, or when I was reading, and always when my
muscles were at rest, I felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of my mind and will, lasted what seemed like an eternity and disappeared in a series
of rapid sensations which resembled the awakening from anaesthetic influence.
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