by Bart Schultz
world may be trusted to get on without philosophers does not altogether console.
(M )
Apparently, Sidgwick did write Symonds a separate letter of consola-
tion, as can be judged from Symonds’s painful response:
The pain of losing Janet was very great, and the desiderium will remain permanent.
There seems to be something pitiful in this extinction of a nature formed for really
noble life. It is extraordinary from how many unexpected quarters the echo of her
personality, the impression she made on those who knew a little of her, comes to
us. You tell me that you have “no consolation to offer.” But really I do not want
any. I know that I cannot get any. The loss is there, and may not be made up to
me. I have long since bent and schooled myself to expect no consolation of the
ordinary sort. And I do not think I feel less brightly and less resignedly than those who are basing their hopes upon unimaginable re-uniting with their loved ones,
in heaven only knows what planet. You go on to say that “despair in our ignorance
is the prompting of blind passion, not of reason.” I have no comprehension what
“despair” is. I have ceased to wish for immortality, and therefore ceased to hope
for it. If I am to have it, I have it at the hand of the same Power which gave me
mortal life. If I am not to have it, is a matter of contentment to me; for I have
found that all life is a struggle, and neither for myself nor my fellow-creatures do
I desire the prolongation of the struggle. Being what we are, it is obvious that the
continuation of consciousness in us must entail a toilsome Entwickelung.
So I am content to leave these things until the very end, until the very new
beginning if that comes, upon the knees of It, of Him, who is for me responsible.
Such a word as “despair,” the counterpart of hope in personal immortality, does
not exist in my vocabulary. This fact I have tested while sitting by my daughter’s
corpse, while consigning it to the earth. And I want to utter this now, because, as
you observe, “the perplexities of theory have strangely entwined themselves with
the inexorabilities of life in our correspondence.”
The net result of my present experience is to corroborate my previous opinions.
It has roused in me no new longing, no new regrets, laid its finger on no lurking hope and no concealed despair. Only it has confirmed my convictio
n that the main point
in the whole position is that of Euripides, # )# * . Upon this point
I have only the purest satisfaction with regard to Janet. She attained to spiritual
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perfection in her life. What troubles me about myself is the sense of shortcomings,
rendering the part I play in life less worthy of man’s station in the world.
I have proved in my own person that St. Paul was wrong when he exclaimed,
“If Christ be not risen, then are we of men most wretched.” We may be happy and
calm and submissive to the supreme order, to Zeus and +", without a
resurrection. I perceive that his argumenta ad hominem in I Cor. xv., “Else what shall they do that are baptised for the dead,” &c., “If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus,” &c., are blots upon the splendid inspiration of his rhetoric, appeals to human love of profit. Love and good, and the desire of
righteousness, do not need the bribe of immortality, and have to be reasoned now
upon quite different principles.
I would not willingly bore you with these observations, but it is incumbent
upon me to tell you how the last week of severance from my first-born has acted
like a test upon the convictions I began to express some weeks ago.
To an unknown correspondent, Symonds would explain that Janet had
told him “that she could cheerfully & contentedly give back her life to
Him who bestowed it on her, without repining even though it should be
renewed upon the same inadequate terms of happiness as she enjoyed in
this world.” This, he said, was “the perfectly religious spirit” and the one in which he tried “to take her loss.”
Sidgwick was apparently aware of the imperfect nature of his sympathy,
writing in his journal:
While at Miss Ewart’s I received J.A.S.’s answer to my letter of sympathy: –
from which it seems clear that I must have sympathized not with him but with
myself imagined in his circumstances. I suppose it is difficult to avoid this: yet I
of all people ought to be able to avoid it: – for no one can feel more strongly that
J.A.S.’s state of thought about the Universe is likely – for most people – to be
more conducive both to happiness and to virtue than mine: no one is more inclined
than I to give thanks that everybody does not think as he does. Still the only way
to truth is to follow out one’s own intellectual process: one cannot change it per saltum by jumping resolutely into another line of thought: at least I do not think I could. (CWC)
Symonds’s Whitmania, it would seem, had the same utilitarian merits as
Green’s Idealism, to Sidgwick’s mind – though the further irony is that
Symonds was, in effect, pursuing Mill’s line about the religion of the
future dispensing with the doctrine of personal immortality.
By early , Sidgwick is becoming rather jaded about his state: “For
my inner life, I have nothing new to say. I think over ‘Gordian knots’ but
come to no further solution. Silence is best.” But by April, the clouds are
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lifting, apparently. He has again been intensely, if internally, debating “the
tenability of my position here as a teacher of Ethics.” The problem, as he
sees it, is that ethics falls between science and theology, the former de-
manding doubt, the latter a creed. Which analogy is right for philosophical
ethics? But for all his doubt, he has had it: “Enough! this is longer than I
intended. What I intended to say is that I have emerged from my tunnel
by an act of will, and do not mean to let my mind turn on this hook any
more for the present.” Slightly earlier in the month, he had explained his
changing attitude in terms sounding distinctly Symondsish:
The change is great in my own mind since I left off the journal: – and, though the
loss is great, I am obliged to confess to myself that the change is not altogether for the worse. I take life more as it comes, and with more concern for small things. I aim at cheerfulness and I generally attain it. I have a stronger instinctive repugnance to cause pain or annoyance to any human being – in old times, when the old idea of a
judgment at which all would be known still hung about me, I was more concerned
about being in the right in my human relations – about having as Bp. Andrews says,
“defensionem bonam” ante tremendum tribunal. But now I have let this drop into
th
e background, and though I still feel what Carlyle calls the “Infinity of Duty,”
it is only in great matters I feel it: as regards the petty worries of life, I feel that both the Universe and Duty de minimis non curat: – or rather the one Infinite duty is to be serene. And serene I am – so far! (M –)
He and Nora are now “too much bored with the SPR: we only acquiesce
in the time and trouble required to keep it up because we feel the need
of an advertisement for scientific purposes – to hear of subjects.” In fact,
he is enjoying reading Symonds on aesthetics, an article in “Fortnightly
which I agreed with and liked very much – terse and pregnant, interesting
& suggestive.” (He differs on some points: “what Goethe creates appeals
to Thought not Fantasy.”) And he is in fact looking at the bright side of
leaving Cambridge, which “everything points to.” That is, “I do not think
I was made to be a teacher of age and dignity: I like talking to young men,
but I like talking to them as an equal – and this becomes harder as the
years go on.” If they leave, “Cambridge will miss my wife more than me,”
and this gives him pause, though Arthur has “stirred my desire to go to
Greece.” (M –)
By his birthday:
My fiftieth birthday! I find that now my whole nature is beginning to sway in the
direction of leaving Cambridge. Two old impulses raise their heads and sing in
tune within me – () the desire to travel to know the world of West-European
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civilisation thoroughly and as a whole, and () the desire of literary independence
to be able to speak when I like as a man to men, and not three times a week as a
salaried teacher to pupils. I understand the teacher who said that his classes were
his “wings”: but in my deep doubt whether what now appears to me true leads to
edification I find them rather chains than wings. (M )
All of this simply screams the example of Symonds, of course. And
Sidgwick is spending a great deal of time in Davos, eventually helping with
the book that Symonds would publish as Essays Speculative and Suggestive,
a work as representative of Sidgwick’s aesthetics as of Symonds’s. In July
of , Symonds writes Dakyns:
Henry Sidgwick is here, & is dissecting my essays under my eyes. He is doing me
the compliment of reading them & trying to get something useful out of them.
Good Lord! in what different orbits human souls can move.
He talks of sex, out of legal codes, & blue books. I talk of it, from human
documents, myself, the people I have known, the adulterers & prostitutes of both
Sexes I have dealt with over bottles of wine & confidences.
Nothing comes of discussions between a born doctrinaire & a born Bohemian.
We want you to moderate between us. And you are not enough. We want a cloud
of witnesses.
Shall we ever be able to see human nature from a really central point of view? I
doubt this now. Though we redouble our spectacles, put scores of our neighbours’
glasses on our own, in order to obtain the typical impression, shall we reach the
central standpoints?
Books are trifles in the current of life. What we write, is the smallest part of
what we are. And what we are, is an insignificant globule in the vast sea of nature.
So we must be content to remain with pores & tentacles wh. find no sympathetic
response in our deepest brethren – nay in the wife of our bosom, the comrade
who sleeps beside us & the children who grow up separately from ourselves; all
of whom, soul & body, in their several ways we passionately love.
To be sure, Sidgwick actually liked the book. Only ten days later,
Symonds would write to Dakyns again, this time explaining that “Henry
Sidgwick here has helped me in the same way, or a similar. These Essays
have suggested for twelve days constantly recurring conversations, and
have set speculation on the wind. They would not have done so with him,
had they not had stuff. And do you know, I was beginning to fear I had no
stuff left in me?”
The reviewers did not think that Essays Speculative and Suggestive had
the right stuff, making Symonds wonder why he supposed he “could do
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things of that sort well.” But that he had a great deal of stuff left in
him was plain. It was at this time that he began so much of the work that
would mark the final, “scientific” period of his sexual writings, including
“A Problem in Modern Ethics” and his memoirs. Among other things, he
presses Whitman on the sexual meaning of “Calamus,” visits the great sex
researcher Karl Ulrichs in Italy, sets to work on his massive biography of
Michelangelo (“if he had any sexual energy at all . . . he was a U”), starts his collaboration with Ellis (in the course of which he begins collecting stories
and “case histories” from Urnings all over the globe), becomes friendly
with the very out and politically active Whitmanian Edward Carpenter,
and appears to be circulating photographs and reproductions of beautiful
(and naked) young men among his intimate friends. Oscar Wilde is counted
as one of his admirers, but Symonds has reservations:
Oscar Wilde sent me his story. I have read it with interest. But I do not like this
touch upon moral psychological problems, wh have for myself great actuality, &
ought I think to be treated more directly. I am afraid that Wilde’s work in this
way will only solidify the prejudices of the vulgar – to wit, that aesthetics are
inseparable from unhealthiness or inhumanity, & that interest in art implies some corruption in its votaries. My Essays are meant in a large measure to remove this
error.
Wilde’s manner is “morbid & perfumed.” But if the British public will
stand The Picture of Dorian Gray, “they can stand anything.”
Through it all, Sidgwick the disenchanted is visiting Davos at every
turn, and in “excellent form.” That he was critical of Symonds’s work
signifies little, since he was critical of everyone’s work, including his own.
Indeed, Symonds had written to their friend Noel – the “Centaur” –
in that “if you had shown as much contempt for my verses as F.
Myers & H. Sidgwick do, it would not have made any difference in my
feeling for you.” Which is to say, everyone, with the possible exception
of Dakyns, criticized Symonds’s verses. Symonds even worried about
Brown’s reaction:
I do not want to send you any more of my verses. I can always tell you what I
think. But verse is form. I hope this will not prevent you from sending me what
you write. About twenty years ago I used to s
how my verse productions to Henry
Sidgwick and F. Myers. I discovered that they were curious about them on account
of what I said, but did not like the form. So I stopped doing so, and there has
been no interruption of the freest closest exchange of thought and feeling. Henry
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is only a little plaintive when “Vagabunduli Libellus” appears, and I do not send
it him, and will not discuss it with him. But he has made the situation. It is easy
enough to do without a man’s sympathy, but difficult to go on seeking it and not
getting it. . . . if I must sing, I will sing to myself and God, not to you and Henry and F. M.
If Symonds was worried that Brown and Noel would criticize his verse
after the manner of Sidgwick, the criticism at issue could not have had
much to do with male love in and of itself. Henry is only a “little plaintive”
about one of Symonds’s most graphic verse productions, and in fact wants
to bring Symonds to Cambridge to meet Arthur Balfour.
But, even if Symonds was a psychological experiment in living of the
first importance, one whose serene attitude was seeping ever more steadily
across Sidgwick’s mental landscape, he was not in the end the example
that Sidgwick chose to follow. Sidgwick remained in Cambridge, and, as
noted in the previous chapter, would be working ever more religiously for
the SPR and women’s higher education. To appreciate why he took the
road that he did, it is vital to consider how Symonds’s concerns figured
in his vision of educational reform and the relations between the sexes,
which, on the face of it, does not appear very Whitmanian.
VIII. Women
I duly received the gift of your book “Towards Democracy” in its third edition,
& have been reading it with sustained interest ever since it came into my hands.
It is certainly the most important contribution which has as yet been made to the
diffusion of Whitman’s philosophy of life, & what I think we may now call the
new religion. . . .