Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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Sidgwick keeps invoking the image of the egoist: “But you being in love do
you believe in it or not? If you do you must push on to the crisis now just as
a rational Egoist does.” The dualism of practical reason is implicated, as
Noel so cogently observed, in cultivating in the particular the very thing
that is demanded from the moral point of view – namely, love – at least if
the moral point of view is to be rendered effectual.
Thus, in his years of storm and stress, Sidgwick simply could not make
up his mind about the nature and general consequences of marriage – he
went from chiding Noel for “consecrating selfishness” by getting mar-
ried to encouraging Dakyns to be an egoist and pursue his love in good
conscience. Still, if he was at this time rather far from the Millian per-
spective on friendship in marriage as a school of sympathy, his views were
obviously in flux, and he treated the institution of marriage to a critical
consequentialist scrutiny that hardly suggests any undue reverence for it.
Intriguingly, he never seemed to doubt that his male friends would serve
as a school of sympathy, albeit of the Hellenizing type.
In a sense, Dakyns was revenged, since his effervescent happiness with
Cecil Boyle was one of the things that, earlier in , drove home to
Symonds how hollow his own marriage was, how much he relished his
male companions. When Dakyns did ultimately marry, in , this did
not dim his enthusiasm for homogenic love, any more than it did with
Symonds or Noel.
Elaborating on these matters, concerning how Sidgwick and his friends
hashed out the issues of sex and marriage, ought to suggest just how stormy
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and stressful the sixties were, as well as fixing the context for discussing
Sidgwick, Symonds, and the “crisis in Cannes.” There has been much mis-
understanding surrounding this affair, and about Sidgwick’s sympathies
in general. Indeed, he has been cast as reprising the role of Dr. Symonds,
when it came to urging “Johnnie” to stifle his impulses and any poetic
expression of them. Or worse, as a prime example of “homosocial panic,”
someone who reacted badly to the sexual suggestiveness of the danger-
ously close bondings with his male friends. Any such portrait, however,
simply fails to do justice to the facts, encoded as they may have been. If
Sidgwick’s vision of sympathetic unity seemed strange in its absorption in
parapsychology, how much stranger that it was also linked to Symonds’s
vision of the special sensitivity of Uranian love, of being attuned to the
aura of sympathetic fellows, alert to the clues that bespoke a comrade.
This was the sympathetic unity that required no words, that was some-
how conveyed, that simply vibrated the special sensitivity of the evolved
soul. Esotericism and dipsychia, joined to Apostolic-style inquiry into
the deepest problems, were never so perfectly realized as in Symonds’s
alternative to the Idealistic and Theosophical visions of the New Age.
V. Crisis Redux
Since your visit nothing very remarkable has happened except a visit from Jowett
and one from Norman – both memorable. Were there a school of sculptors in
bronze, he (Norman) might make a fortune as a model; or were I a painter, I might
even in that inferior art of colour give the world a new, true, original transcript of Hellenic life. . . .
Jowett has much to say, chiefly about my work on Elizabethan literature which
he wishes me to undertake in a severely historical spirit – also about more grave
matters, especially the future of religious feeling and opinion in England. He com-
plains bitterly of the ‘flabbiness’ of our present religious consciousness and rejects my facile belief that the civilized world must, in its present highly intellectualized scientific condition, advance after a needful period of putrid softening, towards a
new synthesis. His firm conviction of the possibility of continuing for centuries
in a slough of lightly worn and morally obstructive dogmas, prejudices, perma-
nent attitudes of traditional acceptance, startled and appalled me. I have grown
to believe myself in the centre of a transformation scene, and to expect that ere
long (I do not much care if I reckon by decades or by centuries) the scenary and
figures will be fixed for a new action. . . . It provokes me to think of your enormous fertility of ideas and power of elaborating thought.
John Addington Symonds to Henry Sidgwick, January ,
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The “crisis in Cannes” took place in January of . Symonds had
been in London until late August, and had continued to write Sidgwick
passionate letters. In one from the fourteenth, he allows that he has been
“reading Noel’s poems all this morning” and found “in them a singular
earnestness and purity of feeling. There are passages of real pathos, and
a few of liquid beauty,” even if the form is much too “rough hewn,”
an ore in need of much “smelting.” As always, he worries about his own
capacities as well as Noel’s. “But no sooner is this written than I remember
the things I have to say, the poem of life which I should not like to die
without expressing somehow, the excellences in another line which I can
claim.” On the twenty-second, he writes, apparently in answer to a
letter from Sidgwick discussing the trials of being in advance of his age,
that to “be a Moses upon Pisgah is not a ‘feeble failure,’ ” but is rather “the
best thing which one who believes in progress can at this moment hope
for.” This was a decidedly Sidgwickian sentiment, as was the following
Goethean aspiration: “At all events, I feel, let us not acquiesce in anything
but Wholes; let us feebly grasp, or powerfully bear, displaying strength
in our weakness; until the Whole is made clear to us.” The next line
was the slightly glum Sidgwickian: if “it is never in this life revealed,
n’importe. There are plenty of men to come, and nature is prodigal of her
dear ones.” For his part, Sidgwick was also busily pondering the utility
of truth, having written to Mill on the subject in late July, just after his
stay with Symonds.
After a quick trip to Clifton, the Symonds family is off on the planned
European trip, eventually to take them to the Riviera. But all the while
Symonds is boiling and brooding. On September , he writes to Sidgwick
that “[y]our squirrel moods gratify me immensely, for then, like Jacque [in
As You Like It] you are full of matter. My obliteration is proceeding quickly.
There are four from which I habitually suffer in the flesh –
the digestive organs, which affects more subtle parts of the economy.”
Unfortunately, all of these “are in a bunch upon me now, so that rest and
beauty have but little meaning, and like the happy man in Aristotle, my
chance of noble action consists in maintaining serenity amid a crowd of
evils.” Still, he a confesses that he feels his “own to be one definite human
situation, and am satisfied.” But in a prophetic afterthought, he admits, “I
have seen so little into the nature of anything here – I am so utterly blind
to everything hereafter – love and life have so many flowers for me that
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I have not yet mortified myself into recognising a possible early death as
part of this human situation, which I would not exchange. I hate diffusing
the scent of the charnel.” It is amazing, he adds, “what calm there is in
suffering.”
But he is terribly vexed. Conington has criticized his “shady fluency”
and touched a nerve. He needs “guidance,” feeling that he “might work,
if well counselled, to better purpose,” and asks Sidgwick for criticism.
Catherine is depressed and sick, and, having reached Cannes, he writes to
Dakyns that he wishes he “could go to sleep at night without chloral” and
that “I could say what is in me like a cloud, & I wish I had got something
to say.” By Christmas, things are apparently a little better. He writes to
Charlotte:
It is sad. I think over & over again of my literary impuissance, & have a fellow feeling for Sir Egerton Brydges who, when he was past , still eagerly thirsted for the
assurance of poetical genius, trying to prove to himself he had it by writing lines a night, yet confessing that the assurance never came. Sidgwick is magnanimous
on similar occasions of self bewailment: he satisfies himself with remembering that
Nature works on a large scale. For one being that she succeeds with, she produces
many apparent failures; yet these very failures are of value – they go, as it were,
to make up the perfect being, or at least to prove his sovereignty & completeness.
men e.g. with only the embryos of eyes or nose or arms & the desire to having
these useful members complete, should be glad to testify by their abortiveness to
the law that has been thwarted in them. Positivism is a serene philosophy if it so
annihilates self. – I am getting better in health & spirits though I have not quite lost the pain in my chest.
But events then take a nasty turn. Out walking with his new friend
Edward Lear, the celebrated writer of nonsense verse, he sprains his ankle
and has to walk nearly two miles in pain in order to return home. Thus,
just before Sidgwick is set to arrive for a visit, Symonds is completely
bedridden. The visit is a disaster, as he explains to Mrs. Clough in a letter
of January :
Three weeks ago I sprained my ankle very badly & I have been on the sofa ever
since – partly owing, I think, to the awkwardness of the doctor who attended to
it. . . . Unfortunately the confinement, together with other reasons, brought on a violent attack of brain weakness, wh is still oppressing me. I cannot read or write or think or speak, but I lie for hours together in mere nervous prostration & misery.
I do not know how it is to end. Work will be impossible for many weeks if not
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months. Unluckily, Henry Sidgwick arrived just at the beginning of my troubles.
He had come out on purpose to see & cheer me; & when he came I cd do nothing.
I had not time to stop him by telegram before he left England; & I had not heart to send him back as soon as he came, wh I ought to have done. So his visit of nearly
weeks proved a great source of disappointment to both of us & tended to prolong
& aggravate my weakness.
This was putting it mildly. The Memoirs provide a rather vivider descrip-
tion of his state:
All the evil humours which were fermenting in my petty state of man – poignant
and depressing memories of past troubles, physical maladies of nerve substance
and of lung tissue, decompositions of habitual creeds, sentimental vapours, the
disappointment of the sexual sense in matrimony, doubts about the existence
of a moral basis to human life, thwarted intellectual activity, ambitions rudely
checked by impotence – all the miserable factors of a wretched inner life, masked
by appearances, the worse for me for being treated by the outside world as mere
accidents of illness in a well-to-do and idle citizen, boiled up in a kind of devil’s cauldron during those last weeks at Cannes, and made existence hell. The crisis
I passed through then was decisive for my future career. But I did not foresee
the point to which it was about to lead me. I only knew for certain that I must
change my course, and that I would never repeat, come what might, that infernal
experience of the Riviera.
Among his papers from that time, he found an “incoherent document”
testifying to just how bad things had been. He contemplated suicide, but
“death is not acceptable; it offers no solution. I loathe myself, and turn in
every direction to find strength. What I want is life; the source of life fails
me.”
In my present state of entire negation I cannot get the faith without the strength,
or the strength without the faith. . . . The last night I spent in Cannes was the worst of my whole life. I lay awake motionless, my soul stagnant, feeling what is
meant by spiritual blackness and darkness. If it should last for ever! As I lay, a
tightening approached my heart. It came nearer, the grasp grew firmer, I was cold
and lifeless in the clutch of a great agony. If this were death? Catherine who kept
hold of me, seemed far away. I was alone, so utterly desolate that I drank the very
cup of the terror of the grave. The Valley of the Shadow was opened, and the
shadow lies still upon my soul.
As Symonds explained, he was undergoing what in “another nature”
might have been a “conversion experience.” But with him it “was different.
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I emerged at last into Stoical acceptance of my place in the world, combined
with Epicurean indulgence of my ruling passion for the male. Together,
these two motives restored me to comparative health, gave me religion,
and enabled me, in spite of broken nerves and diseased lungs, to do what
I have done in literature.” It was, in this sense, a conversion ex
perience of
a certain sort. He found “indifference very shortly in the study of Marcus
Aurelius, the Imitatio Christi, and Walt Whitman. Later on, I found the
affirmation of religion and contentment in love – not the human kindly
friendly love which I had given liberally to my beloved wife and children,
my father and my sister and my companions, but in the passionate sexual
love of comrades.” Now he was beyond the sense that his view of love was
a sin; “when, in the stage of indifference, I became careless about sinning,
then, and not until then, I discovered love, the keystone of all the rest of
my less tortured life.”
As noted, it is from this period that his renewed enthusiasm for homo-
erotic versifying dates. Clearly, this form of cathartic expression was part
of his cure. And there was still more such literary expression. Despite his
claims about literary impotence, it is evident that during the autumn and
early winter of he completed a draft of one of his most enduring
works, “A Problem in Greek Ethics.” As the Memoirs explain:
I have been busy, and have greatly tired myself by writing an essay on Platonic love.
To do so has been often in my mind, and some time ago I collected the materials
for it, but had to lay the work aside. My object is to explain the feelings of the
Greeks about passion, to show how paiderastia was connected with their sense of
beauty, and how it affected their institutions. It is not by any means finished. I
am once again compelled to lay my pen down breathless. The subject appeals too
deeply to my sympathies, while its more repulsive aspects are painful. I stumbled
on till I came to grief in my brain.
Part of the work went into Studies of the Greek Poets, though the original
was rewritten “at Clifton in , and privately printed under the title of
‘A Problem in Greek Ethics.’ ” This would be revised again for inclusion
in Sexual Inversion, and would in general serve as a crucial source of many
other of his works. It was, as much as the Memoirs, Symonds’s signature
work, the fruition of his exposure to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:
I was sitting with F. M. Myers in his rooms at Trinity, Cambridge, when he stood
up, seized a book and shouted out in his nasal intonation with those brazen lungs