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whatever way he could.” He and Sidgwick were close in many respects,
and back in the heady days of storm and stress, each had contributed an
essay to the pathbreaking Essays on a Liberal Education. Though some-
thing of a dilettante, Houghton, too, wanted reform, a “larger and wiser
instruction of our governing classes, if they are to remain our gover-
nors.” Sidgwick of course also wanted to free liberal studies from “the
clergy and persons of a literary bias,” and to advance a notion of cul-
ture that would incorporate a truer Platonic Revival, being bound up
with modern languages and modern science. The schools and the school-
masters, like Dakyns and Browning and Eleanor Sidgwick, were to be-
come the leaven in the loaf, loosening the hold of the church. This was
manifestly not the form of Platonic Revival known in more recent times,
though it certainly shared the aspiration of civilizing the rulers. Lord
Houghton also practised mesmerism, which he had learned from Harriet
Martineau.
The one club that Sidgwick apparently did not join was Cowell’s Alpine
Club, though it did represent for him a kind of premonition of Symonds
at Davos. Many Apostles were members, and as Lubenow notes, the club
was meant to foster comradeship: “it mingled life’s mental, emotional and
social properties. The life of physical exertion complemented mental ex-
ertion. Alpining allowed them to experience feelings of courage, vigour,
physical pain, and being at one with nature in an immediate way. The
struggle with and against nature gave a powerful sense of personal iden-
tity.” Cowell, according to Trevelyan, “carried camaraderie to the highest
point in our set and generation.” And even if he did not take to moun-
taineering with the same gusto, Sidgwick regarded Cowell as an intimate
friend and was distraught over his premature death in – the year he
wrote to Mill and took up with Symonds.
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But there were so many other clubs, and they all took such similar form,
sounding more or less Masonic in their organization. Consider Lubenow’s
description of the Savile club:
The Apostles also became members of less distinguished clubs which were as
notable for their fellowship as for their learning. The Savile Club had a number of
pronounced apostolic characteristics. One was the taking of common meals at a
common table as a means of fostering friendly as well as social relations. Another
was the club’s conscious policy of electing members who differed from each other
in their occupations, tastes, accomplishments, and interests. Henry and Arthur
Sidgwick, J. B. Payne, Lord Houghton, and Henry Lee Warner were founding
members of the Savile Club, and many other Apostles joined it in later years.
Or his account of the Ad Eundem:
The Ad Eundem Club, founded to encourage university reform, was another en-
terprise of the Apostles as well as another of Henry Sidgwick’s particular projects.
Henry Jackson called it ‘one of Henry’s good works.’ Composed of twenty mem-
bers, ten from Cambridge and ten from Oxford, five resident and five non-resident,
it met once a term to dine and discuss university affairs. It was strewn with Apostles on the Cambridge side: Henry and Arthur Sidgwick (though Arthur was in residence at Oxford after he left Rugby to take up his lectureship at Corpus Christi
College), Jermyn Cowell, W. H. Thompson, G. O. Trevelyan, Richard Jebb, Henry
Jackson, James Duff Duff, and G. M. Trevelyan. Cowell welcomed membership,
but feared for the rules by which members would pay for their dinners. . . . The Ad Eundem Club represented a half century’s commitment to university reform and liberal values which the Apostles shared with like-minded colleagues at
Oxford.
Or A. W. Brown’s account of the formative influences on the Metaphysical
Society:
The Apostles continued to influence the intellectual life of England throughout the
century. When the Metaphysical Society was founded in , Tennyson, Alford,
Lushington, Thirlwall, and soon Maurice, Fitzjames Stephen, W. K. Clifford, and
other Apostles were asked to join the new society. James Martineau, who although
not a Cambridge man had sometimes attended meetings of the Apostles, and
J. R. Seeley, who, Sidgwick said, should have been a member, were both among
the founders of the Metaphysical Society. The Essay Club, the Apostles’ lesser
light at Oxford, contributed Gladstone and Henry Acland. Thus more than a
sixth of the members of the Metaphysical Society were men who, at one time
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or another, had been under the influence of the Apostles. The success of the
Metaphysical Society, whose aims and procedure were in some ways so similar
to those of the older society, was perhaps in no small measure owing to the de-
manding discipline of mind and manner obtained in the weekly meetings of the
Apostles.
The Synthetic Society in its turn would be devoted to such questions as:
“The evidence for the operation, in the process of the world and especially
in human history, of a power that ‘makes for righteousness,’ in a manner or
degree not to be accounted for by naturalistic explanations of the origin and
development of morality, or, briefly the Moral Order or Moral Government
of the World.” The Society’s “concessions” included recognition of the
“general value” of religion and the “failure of attempts to find a socially
effective substitute for Christian Theism.” But the approach, what with
Sidgwick, Myers, Bryce, and Balfour attending, was very much on the old
lines.
To be sure, these other discussion societies were not wrapped in quite
the same aura of secrecy as the legendary Apostles. Still, for all prac-
tical purposes, their exclusiveness rendered them safe from any larger,
unwanted public scrutiny. Preventing victimization by the church – or
the dim masses – turned out to be a lifelong task for Sidgwick. How
deeply ironic that his worst failings came from an excess of missionary
zeal displaced, with civilization taking over for Christianity.
And as we have seen, he was, if the occasion called for it, perfectly
willing to shade privacy into secrecy into more or less overt deception. At
any rate, Apostolic inquiry required throwing a good many people off the
scent in rather aggressive ways.
How else to interpret his advice about how to handle the more negative
results of the SPR? Or about Balfour’s political machinations? Or, most
troubling, his evasions on the issue of race?
How else to regard his handling of Symonds’s public persona, both
&
nbsp; during the latter’s lifetime and posthumously? Recall the careful criti-
cism of Symonds’s poetry, the construction of biblical cover for homo-
erotic verse that he knew to be precisely that (indeed, that he admired
as such). And as we noted, Horatio Brown’s John Addington Symonds, A
Biography was very much a joint effort of Brown, Dakyns, and Sidgwick.
Sidgwick was the one who realized the degree to which public reaction
to Symonds’s erotic activities and Whitmania – particularly during the
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years of the Wilde trial – could ruin everyone involved, completely dis-
crediting him in his position at Cambridge and undermining all his ef-
forts at reform. In fact, Balfour appears to have involved himself in the
Wilde case, being somewhat sympathetic to Bosie Douglas; according
to George Ives, Balfour cautioned Rosebery against intervening to help
Wilde, Rosebery already being widely suspected of homosexuality. And
George Ives, incidentally, was the founder of the Order of Chaeronea, a so-
ciety based on the Masons but devoted to the reform of the laws concerning
homosexuality.
Like Symonds, Sidgwick in fact recognized the importance of treating
these issues with all the resources of scientific respectability. The constant
worry that Symonds’s writings on the subject were “too literary,” and that
physicians such as Ellis were the ones who had to lead the way, is revealing.
Sidgwick brought to sexual issues the same keen sense of how to reassure
the public that he brought to the SPR. And when in the s, Brown and
Dakyns were caught up both in assembling the Symonds biography and
in admiration for Edward Carpenter’s work, it was quite in the tone set by
Sidgwick. In a letter to Carpenter from February of , Brown set out
at some length the point of view:
I have just finished reading your pamphlet on Homogenic Love which Mr.
Havelock Ellis was kind enough to send me.
I should like to tell you with what admiration, sympathy & enthusiasm I have
read it. It is in this cool, quiet, convincing, scientific way that I think this difficult
&, at present, obscure problem should be brought to the notice of an ignorant and hostile society.
At present I am rather afraid of the effect upon the world if the polemic is
confined to the region of belles lettres. I ought to say it more simply; I mean that I think we want a cool, unimpassioned statement of the situation, & that Doctors & Lawyers must be induced to take off their spectacles and look. If Lord H [?] had
been alive I should certainly have sent him your admirable Essay.
“Lord H” was presumably Lord Houghton, who had died in .
In a follow-up letter, Brown adopts a very Sidgwickian tactic:
You ask my opinion about publishing: as I said in my last letter to you, I feel
that the main object just now is to get doctors & lawyers to give intelligent at-
tention to the subject; if publication will reach & touch them I should say pub-
lish by all means. It is the uninformed & prejudiced majority who require to be
instructed.
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If you publish I should venture to suggest the omission of the word “delights”
in the first line. I may be wrong, but I have an idea that the sympathetic colour of
the word might prejudice the already prejudiced against the argument; the whole
tone of which strikes me as cool, grave, admirable except for “delights.” . . . Did it ever strike you how young both spiritually & physically the homosexuals remain!
The lines in question read: “Of all the many forms that Love delights
to take, perhaps none is more interesting (for the very reason that it has
been so inadequately considered) than that special attachment which is
sometimes denoted by the word Comradeship.” Brown, by his own ac-
count, was altogether a literary person, but the matter of comradeship was
something that he, like Symonds and Sidgwick, wanted to see treated with
all the authority of the scientific establishment, even if he thought it clear
enough what science would prove.
In due course, when he assembled his sole volume of (somewhat) homo-
erotic poetry, Drift, in the spring of , Brown too sought and followed
Sidgwick’s “wisdom.” Sidgwick, even on his deathbed, urged caution; ac-
cording to Brown, Sidgwick was afraid that “the enemy” might use Drift
for purposes of an “attack” on both Brown and Symonds. Brown came to
feel very close to Sidgwick, toward the end of the latter’s life, finding him
a uniquely sympathetic friend. Sidgwick, like Symonds and like Dakyns,
was on his side, against “the enemy.”
It is scarcely surprising that “Henry’s wisdom” in these matters should
have been so insightful and so effective, given how he had so long honed his
skills at leading a double life in order to pursue the “deepest problems” in
sympathetic fellowship while avoiding “victimisation by the Church.” In
this, at least, his efforts were a success. And he clearly did keep Symonds
from becoming a public scandal. He was intensely engaged with Brown and
Dakyns in the assembly of the Symonds biography, candidly describing
their “care” to “keep things secret.” The flavor of their lengthy and detailed
exchanges – puzzling, for example, over whether they dare mention the
name of the sex researcher Ulrichs – may be gleaned from one of Brown’s
letters to Sidgwick, from November of :
I have to thank you very much for two long letters of most valuable criticism;
one I ought to have answered sooner, the other has just arrived. Of course they
both raise a most important point in the construction of the book. The variance
between us is, as it always has been, upon the question of how much. There are
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two reasons why I should hesitate to hold by my own selection, as against your
excisions;
() I have excised so much already that, to me, what I have left in seems harmless;
but it is possible that I have ‘poisoned my eye’ as painters say.
() You are so much more experienced than I am; & you are in England; in
touch with the best of it.
On the other hand I sometimes fancy that there must be another public – not
a vicious one necesarily, but perhaps less influenced by traditions of cultivated
society, to whom these things would not appear shocking.
I also feel that this book, if it is going to live at all, wil
l probably be appealing to people long after all who are immediately concerned with it are gone, and it is a
pity that its readers should not get some idea of the emotional side of the life that is portrayed.
I notice that you take it for granted that wherever passion, emotion, affection,
for other is mentioned the public will take it for that kind of passion, emotion,
affection which we are not to introduce. I do not think there is anything in the
pages of the book itself to warrant that conclusion.
But then, as you say, there is that wretched Key of Blue, (I think there is nothing I regret so much as the existence of that book). Personally I feel that where emotion,
passion, affection, play a large part in a man’s life, it does not matter much what
the precise complexion of that passion etc. was; and the student of a man’s life
need not enquire too closely. . . . But I suppose we should not agree here; and I am very far from asserting that I am right.
I do not think I am incautious, & I feel the weight of your wisdom; and yet I
think if I came to this book as an outsider I should only gather from the Davos
pages indications of a man who made warm friendships with many people not of
his own class. However there are one or two considerations in myself, which make
me doubtful whether I am a competent judge; and I daresay I shall excise again
as I have done before almost all that you query.
The letter would go on to explain that “in the end I shall be governed
by the consensus of yourself & H.G.D.” and to ask Sidgwick to indicate
the degree of his alarm at various passages. In fact, as all concerned recog-
nized, Sidgwick was also working at the request of the Symonds family –
Catherine had written to Dakyns, in November of , about how glad
she was “to have Henry’s wisdom for final reference.”
Although some have suggested that Sidgwick effectively spoiled
Brown’s work, it should be stressed that they were actually very much
in accord and for the most part happily collaborative. The book cast all
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of Symonds’s agonizing purely in the religious terms of those intense ex-