Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
One reason why I disliked this kind of trance was that I could not describe it
to myself. I cannot even now find words to render it intelligible, though it is
probable that many readers of these pages will recognize the state in question. It
consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation and the multitudinous factors of experience which seemed to qualify what we are
pleased to call ourself. In proportion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness
were subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired
intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract self. The universe became without form and void of content. But self persisted, formidable in its
vivid keenness, asking or rather feeling the most poignant doubt about reality,
ready as it seemed to find existence break as breaks a bubble round about it. And
what then? The apprehension of a coming dissolution, the grim conviction that
this state was the last state of the conscious self, the sense that I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of the abyss and had arrived at demonstration
of eternal maya or illusion, stirred or seemed to stir me up again. The return of ordinary conditions of sentient existence began by my first recovering the power
of touch, and then by the gradual though rapid influx of familiar impressions and
diurnal interests. At last I felt myself once more a human being; and though the
riddle of what is meant by life remained unsolved, I was thankful for this return
from the abyss – this deliverance from so awful an initiation into the mysteries of
scepticism.
As if Symonds’s grasp on reality were not shaky enough, he had these
mystical, dissociative states to contend with, accentuating his sense of
ontological insecurity. This was an all-too-literal Platonic sense of “the
phenomenal unreality of all the circumstances which contribute to a merely
phenomenal consciousness.” Often, upon awakening from “that formless
state of denuded keenly sentient being,” he asked himself “which is the
unreality: the trance of fiery vacant apprehensive sceptical self from which
I issue, or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner
self and build a self of flesh-and-blood conventionality?” What would
happen if “the final stage of the trance were reached. . . . Could another
garment of sensitive experience clothe again that germ of self, which
recognized the unsubstantiality of all that seem to make it human?”
Such states would return “with diminishing frequency” until Symonds
was twenty-eight – curiously, until , after the “crisis in Cannes.”
Symonds worried that he might have been a bit too intense, too over-
whelming for Sidgwick, after they had been so much together over the
long, hot summer. They planned to meet up again “in the dim distance
of the Riviera.” But Symonds wrote to explain “that much which I have
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told you about myself must seem painful. My past life has been painful
in many ways, and I bear in my body the marks of what I have suffered.”
Thus, he allows that
when my nervous light burns low in solitude, then the shadows of the past gather
round, and I feel that life itself is darkened. . . . I dread that art and poetry and nature are unable to do more for what Dante, with terrible truth, called ‘Li mal
protesi nervi’ [badly strained nerves]. These darknesses, which Arthur calls my
depression fits, assail me in splendid scenery, among pictures and statues, wher-
ever, in fact, I ought to enjoy most and be most alive. It is only the intercourse of friends which does me really any good.
This was a revealing reversal from his attitude in , when he had written
to his sister concerning Arthur Sidgwick, “it seems necessary to blunt all
my sensibilites at present, & therefore the more I like a companion the less
he is esteemed a healthy one.” And it would prove prophetic.
Needless to say, in all this Symonds had touched Sidgwick’s Apostolic
soul in just the right way, eliciting perhaps the most passionate letter that
Sidgwick ever penned:
My dearest friend I cannot tell you all I feel: I have drunk deep of happiness: I
have said to the Augenblick, ‘du bist so schön’ – I am so glad you say I have done
you good: I must have given you my best: my best never comes out except when
I am played upon & stirred by affection and subtle sympathy combined: when I
do not get this, I become lethargic. Among the ‘dim’ common populations I seem
to change and become common. I am so glad you let me stay with you so long;
I might have felt that what of strange, new, delicious, rich had come into my life
might pass out of it like a dream. I feel now that you are ‘not something to be
retracted in a certain contingency.’
And Symonds knew his power: he wrote to Dakyns that “Henry
Sidgwick has been with me a week. He is numbered among mine.”
Symonds had put the great questions to Sidgwick with unrivalled force.
What was the great secret? the true, enduring self ? the proof of theism?
the human cost of skepticism? the significance of altered psychological
states? And he had tied them together with a warm appreciation of how
friendship, duly aestheticized, was the sustaining and enabling element in
a life absorbed in such inquiries. Here was the friend that Sidgwick had
so long sought, with whom the soul could flow in soaring talk. No one,
in the years to come, would do so much to bring out his best. Goethean
hypocrisy had its Apostolic virtues.
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Part II
IV. The Point of View of the Universe
At about the age of , unable to endure his position any longer, he at last yielded
to his sexual inclinations. As he began to do this, he also began to regain calm and
comparative health. He formed a close alliance with a youth of . This liaison was largely sentimental, and marked by a kind of etherialised sensuality. It involved no
sexual acts beyond kissing, naked contact, and rare involuntary emissions. About
the age of he began freely to follow homosexual inclinations.
At the same time, when he had begun to indulge his inborn homosexual in-
stincts, he rapidly recovered his health. The neurotic disturbances subsided.
He has always loved men younger than himself. At about the age of he began
to admire young soldiers. Since he yielded freely to his inclinati
ons the men he
has sought are invariably persons of a lower social rank than his own. He carried
on one liaison continuously for years; it began without passion on the friend’s side, but gradually grew to nearly equal strength on both sides. He is not attracted
by uniforms but seeks some uncontaminated child of Nature. The methods of
satisfaction have varied with the phases of his passion. At first they were romantic
and Platonic, when a hand-touch, a rare kiss, mere presence, sufficed. In the
second period sleeping side by side, inspection of the naked body of the loved
man, embracements, occasional emissions after prolonged contact. In the third
period the gratification became more frankly sensual. It took every shape: mutual
masturbation, intercrural coitus, fellatio, irrumatio, occasionally paedicatio, always according to the inclination or concession of the beloved male. He himself plays
the active masculine part. He never yields himself to the other, and he asserts
that he never has the joy of finding himself desired with ardour equal to his own.
He does not shrink from passive paedicatio; but it is never demanded of him.
Coitus with males, as above described, always seems to him healthy and natural;
it leaves a deep sense of well-being, and has cemented durable friendships. He
has always sought to form permanent ties with the men whom he has adored so
excessively.
He is of medium height; not robust, but with great nervous energy, with
strong power of will and self-control, able to resist fatigue and changes of external circumstance. In boyhood he had no liking for female occupations, or for the
society of girls, preferring study and solitude. He avoided games and the noisy
occupations of boys, but was only non-masculine in his indifference to sport, was
never feminine in dress or habit. He never succeeded in his attempts to whistle. Is a great smoker, and has at times drunk much. He likes riding, skating and climbing,
but is a poor horseman, and is clumsy with his hands. He has no capacity for the
fine arts and music, though much interested in them, and is a prolific author.
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He has suffered extremely throughout life owing to his sense of the differ-
ence between himself and normal human beings. No pleasure he has enjoyed, he
declares, can equal a thousandth part of the pain caused by the internal conscious-
ness of Pariahdom. The utmost he can plead in his own defence, he admits, is
irresponsibility, for he acknowledges that his impulse may be morbid. But he feels
absolutely certain that in early life his health was ruined, and his moral repose
destroyed, owing to the perpetual conflict with his own inborn nature, and that
relief and strength came with indulgence. Although he always has before him the
terror of discovery, he is convinced that his sexual dealings with men have been
thoroughly wholesome to himself, largely increasing his physical, moral, and in-
tellectual energy, and not injurious to others. As a man of letters he regrets that
he has been shut out from that form of artistic expression which would express
his own emotions. He has no sense whatever of moral wrong in his actions, and
he regards the attitude of society towards those in his position as utterly unjust
and founded on false principles.
Case History of John Addington Symonds
As Symonds explained in the case history, there was a certain peri-
odization in his sexual maturation, such that he moved from a more subli-
mated, Platonized form of sexuality with Willie Dyer, through a somewhat
more direct middle period, when he took up with the nineteen-year-old
Clifton student Norman Moor, and on to an amazingly libidinous mid-
dle age, when he would become intimate comrades with the Swiss peas-
ant Christian Buol and the Venetian gondolier Angelo Fusato. If
marked the transition from the second to the third stage, the transition
from the first to the second came in , with the “crisis in Cannes.”
Once Henry Sidgwick came on the scene, Symonds was to become a less
divided self. Strange as it surely must seem to readers of The Methods of
Ethics, Sidgwick’s vision of education and culture was worked out in his
intense interplay with Symonds, who in turn was a vivid, forceful presence
at nearly every major crisis point in Sidgwick’s life.
Now, this account of the concrete sexual practices underlying
Symonds’s sometimes more lyrical or etherealized public presentations
of them is of considerable value for interpreting his relationship with
Sidgwick, who, needless to say, was never quite as forthcoming about the
particulars of his sexual existence. Or rather, insofar as he was, the record
has in large part been either destroyed or protected from public exposure.
This, naturally enough, has made the so-called “friendship problem” more
of an issue in his case. As Louis Crompton has eloquently framed it: “the
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central issue confronting gay studies may be called ‘the friendship prob-
lem.’ If a novel, poem, or essay describes or expresses ardent feelings for a
member of the same sex, when are we to regard them merely as reflections
of what is usually called romantic friendship?”
If this is no longer quite the problem that it was when Crompton wrote, it
is thanks in part to work on Symonds, who provided a very accurate means
for decoding just how sexualized his more elusive pronouncements really
were. Admittedly, much has been written to show how a proper contex-
tual, historical understanding of Victorian friendship precludes any ready
translation of it into the sexual and gender categories of more recent times.
Thus, it has variously been claimed, passionate, emotional expressions of
brotherly love were not necessarily sexual, and effeminate behavior was
not necessarily sexual, and many forms of same-sex behavior were not
necessarily construed as any indication of a deeper underlying identity
or character. And no doubt considerable caution is needed in trying to
understand the complex web of acts and identities of the Victorian period.
Still, the case of Symonds does rather put the lie to any attempt to
interpret in a desexualized manner the notions of comradeship at play in
the English Whitmanians and others of a Hellenistic bent. The record of
his inclinations and activities leaves no doubt whatsoever about precisely
what was figurative and what literal. What seems clear, from his case,
is that even his more etherealized periods often involved a good deal of
body contact, foreplay, and physical arousal, even if he did swear that he
was being “chaste.” Thus, he could spend a long evening with the young
Norman M
oor during which, as his diary of January , , so zealously
explains:
I stripped him naked, and fed sight, touch and mouth on these things. Will my
lips ever forget their place upon his breast, or on the tender satin of his flank, or on the snowy whiteness of his belly? Will they lose the nectar of his mouth – those
opened lips like flower petals, expanding neath their touch and fluttering? Will
my arms forget the strain of his small fragile waist, my thighs the pressure of his
yielding thighs, my ears the murmur of his drowsy voice, my brain the scent of
his sweet flesh and breathing mouth? Shall I ever cease to hear the metallic throb
of his mysterious heart – calm and true – ringing little bells beneath my ear?
I do not know whether, after all, the mere touch of his fingers as they met and
clasped and put aside my hand, was not of all the best. For there is the soul in the
fingers. They speak. The body is but silent, a dumb eloquent animated work of
art made by the divine artificer.
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Beneath his armpits he has no hair. The flesh of his throat and breast is white as
ivory. The nipples of his breats are hardly to be seen, they are so lost in whiteness and so soft. Between them, on the breastbone, is a spot of dazzling brightness, like
snow or marble that has felt the kisses of the sun. His hips are narrow, hardened
where the muscles brace the bone, but soft as down and sleek as satin in the hollows
of the groin. Shy and modest, tender in the beauty-bloom of ladhood, is his part
of sex – fragrant to the searching touch, yet shrinking: for
when the wandering hand rests there, the lad turns pleadingly into my arms as
though he sought to be relieved of some delicious pang. . . . Ah, but the fragrance of his body! Who hath spoken of that scent undefinable, which only love can seize,
and which makes love wild mad and suicidal.
Symonds could actually go on to say that “neither then, nor afterwards,
nor before, did any one of those things take place between us which people
think inseparable from love of this sort,” seemingly implying, in some
oblique way, that what he was doing was somehow not really licentious