Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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What you have done has been to give a thoroughly personal, a specifically
English, & if I may so put it, a feminine (as implying other strains of sensitiveness, humour, ways of regarding particular modes of (social life), interpretation upon
the leading ideas).
Insofar, then, as “Towards Democracy” is read & appreciated, it will do more
than any amount of analysis or criticism to diffuse the teaching wh inspires you.
You know how deeply I sympathize with all that is involved in the new religion.
The circumstances of my own existence & having been early married, & then
reduced to a state of comparative physical inefficiency, have rendered it not only
a necessity, but a duty also, & what is more, the best practical form left for me of service – to carry on my own work as a scholar, a writer, a student of history, an
analyst. I have been unable to do what I should have preferred, had I been vigorous
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& unentangled, namely to join the people in their lives. Still I have endeavoured more & more to approach them, & learned more & more from them. A large
portion of my happiness in later years has come to me from frank companionship,
wholesome comradeship, & mutual fellow-service with these Swiss mountaineers
among whom my lot has been cast.
John Addington Symonds to Edward Carpenter, March ,
Given the controversial, radical nature of the manner in which Symonds
had found relief from the hypocrisy of his own English milieu and of
England generally, it is very curious that Sidgwick would say of him the
same thing he had said of Green – namely, that people would be better
off believing something like that, rather than accepting the views of the
author of the Methods. Ironic, too, since in the end what Symonds mostly
had to offer was also a simple felt faith in “Things in General.” Of course,
it was Whitman, not Socrates, who kept Symonds from becoming “a
mere English gentleman” and made him instead an aspirant to symmetry,
or rather, made him someone who could defy Sidgwick’s claims about
even the symmetrical people needing the comforts of belief in personal
immortality when confronting old age and death. In this, Symonds was
also the better Millian, consistently resisting the bribes of orthodox or
even theistic belief in framing the “new religion.”
Yet however serene these two – Symonds and Sidgwick – were trying
to become in middle age, neither was really inclined to let ethics look after
themselves. Work for the new religion took many forms, of course, but
one of the most important involved appeal to the authority of science in
the cause of legal reform. This was a most interesting denouement for
Sidgwick’s early positivistic phases, and for his cultural and educational
ideal, with its consistent incorporation of the scientific attitude along with
that of culture and many-sidedness. As another battle line in the academic
liberal war against the influence of orthodox religion, it made tremendous
good sense.
Certainly, legal reform was needed. As Symonds summarized the state
of things, following the Labouchère Amendment of : “Any act of
‘gross indecency’ between males, in private or public, is a Misdemeanour
punishable with two years imprisonment and hard labour. Connection
per anum, with or without consent, is a penal servitude for life.” This,
of course, was the law used against Wilde, the law that was supposed to
be something of an advance over the previous use of capital punishment.
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But as Symonds wrote a friend: “Whatever view the psychologist may
take of homosexual passions, every citizen of a free country must feel
that Labouchere’s Clause is a disgrace to legislation, because of its vague
terminology & plain incitement to false accusations.” His course was clear,
as he wrote to Ellis:
I am glad to hear that Arthur Symons told you what I wrote to him about a book
on “Sexual Inversion,” and that you are disposed to consider it.
This, I feel, is one of the psychological and physiological questions which
demand an open treatment at last. The legal and social persecution of abnormal
natures requires revision. And enquiry may lead to some light being thrown upon
that terra incognita, the causes of sexual differentiation.
I have written and privately printed two treatises on this subject. One deals with
the phenomenon as recognised and utilized in Ancient Greece; the other with the
same phenomenon, under adverse conditions, in the modern world.
It is absolutely necessary to connect those two investigations in any philosophi-
cal handling of the problem. The so-called scientific “psychiatrists” are ludicrously in error, by diagnosing as necessarily morbid what was the leading emotion of the
best and noblest men in Hellas. The ignorance of men like Casper-Liman, Tardieu,
Carlier, Taxil, Moreau, Tarnowsky, Kraft-Ebing, Richard Burton is incalculable,
and is only equalled to their presumption. They not only do not know Ancient
Greece, but they do not know their own cousins and club-mates. The theory of
morbidity is more humane, but it is not less false, than that of sin or vice.
If it were possible for us to collaborate in the production of an impartial and
really scientific survey of the matter, I should be glad. I believe it might come
from two men better than from one, in the present state of public opinion. I would
contribute the historical analysis (ancient Greece), which I am sure must form
a basis for the study. You are more competent than I am to criticize the crudest
modern medical and forensico-medical theories. But I might be of use here by
placing at your disposition what I have already done in “getting up” the material,
and in collecting data of fresh cases. We should have to agree together about the
legal aspects of the subject. I should not like to promulgate any book, which did not show the absurdity and injustice of the English law. The French and Italian
Penal Codes are practically right, though their application is sometimes unfair.
(Do not imagine that I want to be aggressive or polemical.)
I am almost certain that this matter will very soon attract a great deal of attention; and that it is a field in which pioneers may not only do excellent service to humanity, but also win the laurels of investigators and truth-seekers.
If you do not feel able to collaborate with me, I shall probably proceed to some
form of solitary publication, and I should certainly give my name to anything I
produced.
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Even if the great Whitman himself was reluctant to go this far, Symonds,
as he put it to Whitman’s disciple Traubel, is confident that “in Europe”
there are “signs of an awakening of enthusiastic relations between men,
which tend to assume a passionate character.”
Symonds brought to this task both his personal commitment and the
larger perspectives of the cultural historian and proto-anthropologist, and
his sense of the grotesque na¨ıveté of the “medical men” was acute and per-
fectly justified. He seemed to be working almost in tandem with Sidgwick
and the psychical researchers, in the effort to pay science its due while
recognizing that many of the scientists were actually promoting their own
religious or nonreligious agendas. For his part, Sidgwick was continuing to
feel a very similar frustration. Elected to preside over a large London meet-
ing of professional psychologists, he exclaimed in his journal: “Behold me
then President elect of a Congress of Experimental Psychologists – most
of them stubborn materialists, interested solely in psychophysical experi-
ments on the senses; whereas I have never experimented except in telepa-
thy. Water and fire, oil and vinegar, are feeble to express our antagonism!”
(M –)
Thus, the sense that psychological science might be emancipatory, but
mostly was not, formed a common bond between Sidgwick and Symonds.
Their often overlapping visions of education recognized the limitations
of both classicist notions of culture and scientistic notions of science, and
sought to use each to correct the other. Both – Symonds with sex research,
and Sidgwick with psychical – would begin exploring a larger, more par-
ticipatory, and more depth psychological conception of scientific research.
Just as the psychical researchers had been increasingly driven to regard
their investigations as a cooperative venture between subject and object,
the investigators and the investigated, that demanded a certain intimacy,
so too would Symonds recognize that his investigations were premised on
being able to give voice to those being investigated, a politicized business
from beginning to end. As Jonathan Kemp has put it:
Unlike the Memoirs, however, Symonds’s privately printed essay, A Problem in Modern Ethics (), which both Grosskurth and Weeks see as a counterpart to the Memoirs, circulated within the homosexual underground of the early s, and it was undoubtedly a signal text in the emergence of a coherent sense of the
‘homosexual’ as a particular type of person/personality. Only copies of the
book were printed and, despite the appearance on the title page of the disclaimer
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‘Addressed especially to medical psychologists and jurists’, it appears to have been
sent out mainly to fellow-inverts.
Grosskurth testifies that Symonds received hundreds of letters from men who
identified with A Problem in Modern Ethics, who saw within its pages a mirrorimage of their own feelings; men whose lives were characterized by constant
conflict and furtiveness. For the first time, men whose sexual interest was pre-
dominantly – if not exclusively – in other men could read about themselves in a
way that did not classify their desires as the product of sin or sickness. The margins of Modern Ethics were wide open in order that recipients could return their copies with written comments, thus reversing the discourse and giving homosexuals a
vehicle to speak out via this pseudo-scientific text, or, as Koestenbaum argues,
making the readers collaborators. In this way, Symonds hoped to open up the
debate to include inverts.
But this pragmatizing of sex research was, like Sidgwick’s psychical
research, as much a challenge to medical discourse in the name of cul-
tural history as a ratification of its terms. The “vulgar,” it seems, were
to be found across all classes and professions. And the “better vulgar” of
science needed more poetry and personal experience, as well as greater
historical understanding. The sympathy of Apostolic-style friendship was
indeed crucial to inquiry after all. Intimacy and growth, education in the
larger transfigurative mode – this was the common currency of Symonds’s
Oxford and Sidgwick’s Cambridge, at least in their visions.
Still, as always, Sidgwick was given to fits of depression over just what
his own personal touch might produce. As we have seen, time and again
he found himself concluding that he left a great deal to be desired as an
inspirer – he would speak candidly if doubting students came to him,
but otherwise he would train their faculties and leave their faith alone.
He was no Green, nor did he have Symonds’s talents for raising the
dead or Cowell’s for communicating with them. He was, quite simply, too
conscientious, too careful, and too skeptical, more Cloughian than Whit-
manian. John Scott Lidgett, one of Maurice’s most distinguished disciples,
noted how Sidgwick’s intellect acted as cold water on reforming zeal:
Dr. Paton, Dr. Percival – then Bishop of Hereford – and others were seeking
to constrain the Government to revise the restrictive conditions which at that
time made the establishment of Evening Continuation Schools difficult, if not
altogether impossible. I was requested to approach Professor Sidgwick on their
behalf, in order to secure his signature to the Memorial they had prepared for
submission to the Minister of Education. Unfortunately, however, for this purpose,
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the Memorial spoke of this object as “the most important educational reform” then
urgent. But Professor Sidgwick wrote to tell me that he was unable to sign because,
though in full sympathy with the Memorialists, he could not conscientiously
say that the proposed reform, though very important, was “the most important”
education improvement that was then called for! It is to be feared that such
meticulous exactitude and sense of proportion, while no doubt desirable, would,
as things go, chill and check the endeavours of many enthusiastic reformers, who
can only secure the necessary momentum for their efforts by seeing them as, for
the time being, the one and only end of social improvement.
Just as he worried about his effect on Myers, so he worried about his
effect on so many others, including Symonds. Surely this made for some
painful dilemmas, especially when following out his own “intellectual pro-
cess” seemed to drive away the “phenomena” he was seeking to explore,
whether spirits or Symonds’s homoerotic feelings. Too often, he seemed
ucator and a reformer. He did not leave Cambridge. He remained in his
post, and it is interesting that in the section of the Memoir following the
bit to Symonds about the “Infinite duty” to be serene, Eleanor and Arthur
comment:
Sidgwick was liable to periods of depression all his life after his illness as an
undergraduate, generally accompanied – perhaps caused – by a tendency to lie
awake at night. During the latter part of his life he used, as indicated in the passage just quoted, to make a great effort to conceal depression from those he was with.
To a great extent he succeeded, and he found the effort beneficial to himself. He
never took drugs to relieve sleeplessness. He had been warned against this by a
doctor early in life, and never wavered from the principle he had adopted. Nor
did he read in bed; he generally found it best to lie still, and get rest if he could not get sleep. He used to find making plans for the future a soothing occupation
under these circumstances. (M )
Who was the crisis-driven dipsychic now? Perhaps, like Plato, Sidgwick
feared the lower self that came out in dreams. Intriguing it is that he was
fantasizing an independent literary life with plenty of European travel –
Symonds’s life, to be sure. Intriguing as well that he may have been mask-
ing his depression from his friend, sensing a want of sympathy there or
perhaps, once again, a potentially deleterious impact on his part – or both.
Symonds may have cast doubt on his convictions about normality and
sought to dethrone Philosophy, but to Sidgwick’s mind, his friend had not
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grasped the horror of an unfriendly universe in which death is the end
and reason is powerless, much less the pain of the age of transition.
Clearly, Sidgwick had a lot to be depressed about. The work of reform
went on, but he was not as serene about how the future was shaping up
as Symonds or his other friends were. Why did he stay in Cambridge?
There was no one reason; duty beckoned from many different sides. With