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changes with Sidgwick, back in in the long hot summer of , when
Symonds was longing to be “knocked flat” and was unimpressed with his
friend’s theistic faith. This was the stance that Brown would maintain
throughout, even in defending the work to the much admired (though
puzzled) Carpenter:
About the Biography, though well aware how large a part of Symonds’ later life
was occupied by this question [Inversion], I have always felt & still feel convinced that it was not the main thread in his psychology. I have by no means omitted
the topic altogether; there are passages on the theory of fellow service, on the
theory of class distinctions, etc. which contain some of the most important of
Symonds’ views on this subject – and which will be understood by those who can
understand the matter at all; but of course I was bound to consider the whole life
and to observe proportion.
Fine, Mauricean Apostolic evasion and myth making is about the most
generous construction that one can put on this, with truth being left
between the lines for the knowing eye. Sidgwick’s hand, so practiced from
his exercises in literary criticism and censorship, was obviously the one
guiding the entire effort. In another letter to Carpenter, Brown somewhat
heatedly explained:
You probably do not know that the very last words he wrote, when he was past
speech, and within a few hours of death, were a strong injunction to me to regard his family in all matters of publication. An appeal from one of his family; the strongly
expressed opinion of his oldest and most intimate friends when I got to London;
the best legal & medical opinion I could obtain; all combined to make me take the steps I did: although I may not have done quite what he would have liked (but did
not do), I think I have done what he would have done in the circumstances.
Of course, the biography, supposedly grounded on Symonds’s very
frank memoirs, was only one part of the effort to “keep things secret.”
There was, after all, Symonds’s work with Ellis on Sexual Inversion, which
was in a fairly advanced state. This was apt to blow everything. Grosskurth
describes how Brown handled Ellis:
At first Symonds’s literary executor, Horatio Brown, from Venice gave every
encouragement possible. On August th, , he wrote, after reading the
manuscript: ‘I think that it is admirable in its calmness, its judicial unbiased
tone. And if anything can persuade people to look the question in the face this
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should.’ But Mrs. Symonds – who apparently never saw the manuscript – felt
nervous and wanted her husband’s old friend, the philosopher Henry Sidgwick,
to look it over carefully. Sidgwick insisted on some omissions, and Brown, now
in London, was obviously beginning to waver and told Ellis that he fully agreed
with Sidgwick. Suddenly, in July , Ellis received word from Brown that he
had consulated both Herbert Asquith and a Professor George Poore (an authority
on sanitation), who advised that the publication ‘will do more harm to Symonds’s
name than good to the cause’. The matter, be believed, should be left entirely to
medical men. As for Asquith, he believed the treatment was far too ‘literary’. Pres-
sure was being put on Brown from all sides, and while he personally might have
liked to have seen the publication of the book as it was (as well as the publication
of Symonds’s autobiography), he felt obliged to ask Ellis to remove Symonds’s
name from the title page as well as all material attributed to Symonds. He would
not allow further distribution of the book and, after buying up the entire edition
from de Villiers, had it destroyed.
That Sidgwick orchestrated all this is highly likely – “Henry’s wisdom”
was the “final” reference in all such matters. And thus it was that “Soldier
Love” and much else that Symonds had written went underground until
late in the twentieth century. Sidgwick may have had a reputation, during
his lifetime and since, for saintly honesty and candor. But he did not
deserve it. This massive falsification was not merely one of his golden
silences: it was an extended campaign to create and control Symonds’s
posthumous public reputation. The new casuistry apparently had room
for pious fraud after all.
But if this was a very big lie, it was at least not a betrayal. Sidgwick,
Dakyns, and Brown were too much in accord about matters, and their
efforts quite possibly did reflect Symonds’s final thoughts about how wise
it would be to take the public into one’s intimate confidence. Wilde was
a martyr and Carpenter a hero, in the eyes of the later gay liberation
movement. Sidgwick must go down as someone who was politically astute,
loyal to friends, and very, very good at keeping a secret. He never did come
out, with sexual or psychical research, but had he done so, the reaction
would probably have been even more depressing than it was in the case
of women’s higher education. From Sidgwick’s perspective, the “yellow
nineties” must have been rather blue, personally and politically, with the
problem of hypocrisy weighing on him more heavily than ever. One can well
imagine what spectres kept him awake at night – visions of blazing forth
on psychical research or women’s higher education only to be attacked by
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his old religious antagonists, newly armed with a sex scandal and coverup,
courtesy of his old friend Symonds.
V. The Voyage
My religion if I were dying is this verse of Whitman’s. It is not poetry, few hymns (but Clough’s) are
“Unchanged through our changes of spirit and frame
Past, now and henceforward the Lord is the same
Though we sink in the darkness, his arms break our fall,
and in death as in life he is Father of all.”
Simple words for a dying man. I do not wish to die but I think of it – the “word
proceeding out of the mouth of God” is often bitter food.
Sidgwick to H. G. Dakyns, spring (CWC)
Early in the month of May Sidgwick, by his Cambridge physician’s advice,
consulted an eminent surgeon in London, and learnt the serious nature of the
illness which had recently affected him. He was suffering from an internal cancer,
which must ultimately prove fatal, and which within a very short time would
necessitate an operation of a grave character. For nearly a fortnight he told no
one but his wife. It was easier to carry on life in a normal manner when no one
knew. But he began to set his affairs in order. He felt full of vigour and vitality,
and minded very much leaving this life and all the work he was doing and was
/> interested in; and he was especially troubled because he was leaving so much
literary work unfinished. There was the book on the Development of European
Polity, already in an advanced state, but which he had had to lay aside, feeling that he could not give to it the time and labour required to make it as scholarly
a work as he desired while giving courses of lectures on metaphysics; there was
an Introduction to Philosophy which he was gradually evolving into a book. And
in a more fragmentary state there were other metaphysical lectures which in his
own mind were books in embryo. He did what he could to arrange these and his
other papers, fearing, what proved to be the case, that after the operation he might
not be able to do any more work; but he had promised to give an address on the
Philosophy of T. H. Green to the Oxford Philosophical Society on May , the
preparation of which required time, and prevented his spending as much time in
putting his papers into order as he would have liked.
Henry Sidgwick, A Memoir
It was characteristic of Sidgwick to carry out his commitments in this
way. He and Eleanor went to Oxford on May , staying with the Diceys.
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He had a last Ad Eundem dinner that evening, and gave his final philo-
sophical lecture the next night, also working in a meeting “to establish
the Mind Association, which was to take over from him and carry on the
philosophical journal Mind.” No one at the meetings knew what had be-
fallen him, and he did not tell, though he did take the occasion of being in
Oxford to explain to his brother Arthur how matters stood. Arthur later
recalled Henry’s visit in a letter to his half-brother-in-law, James Maurice
Wilson, who had written him a letter of condolence:
On the Sunday in May – the most sorrowful day I have known, for my mother
died in ripe old age after we had been long prepared for it, and my father I do
not remember – that Sunday when he came over to tell us what was impending –
there will always abide with me the memory how he calmly told me, that when the
blow fell and he heard that he was doomed, he reviewed his whole life, considering
whether under the new solemn certainty (as he then thought) of imminent death
his thoughts and beliefs stood fast, and whether, or how far, he could feel he had
done his work and lived his life as he had meant;
and how he did not see, after fullest reflection, that the coming death
brought any new light on his intellectual beliefs or shifted or modified in any way
the grounds on which the truths (as he had long held them) had commanded his
assent:
how as to his work, he felt that [he] had in the main and to the best of his
power carried out what he had meant to do, – whatever the worth of it;
but in regard to the daily life and conduct he saw many points of shortcom-
ing in spite of effort, and faults of character too indulgently treated, and practices which would have been salutary not adopted, from insufficient consideration –
here he gave examples, some of which he thought might be useful to others, and
to me.
The whole left a deep impression of mixed sincerity, and humility, and high moral aims, and genuine devotion to truth, and anxious effort to avoid all forms of self
deception, and complete detachment from any personal motive – a deep sense of
responsibility and the truest and rarest disinterestedness.
Sidgwick was precisely the type to review his life in this way, and al-
though there do seem to be conflicting impressions of just how content he
was with the state of his work, there is greater consensus on the matter of
his refusal to let death alter his philosophical convictions. This was plainly
something that he, more than anyone, regarded as a vital test of one’s true
self, a crucial part of the experiment to determine the religious leanings
of individual psychology, the universality of some form of theistic belief.
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It would of course have been most helpful if Arthur had elaborated on
just which practices “would have been salutary not adopted,” but that
was not something he was likely to do at that point, when he was in fact
being highly protective of his reputation. But Sidgwick must not have
been too censorious with his younger brother, though he still wanted him
to take on an ambitious piece of work, and willed him some money for
that purpose. Arthur had always felt his “function to be to distribute, not
produce, knowledge.”At any rate, the younger brother was deeply moved;
he wrote to George Trevelyan, on August , that Henry’s “quiet review
of his own life” was “what we can none of us forget. It was the last and best
example of what he was and is – as I have known since I knew anything,
and you have known for over forty years.” (M )
What was uppermost in Sidgwick’s mind may in fact have been better
expressed to Dakyns. He had written to Dakyns on May – just two
days before the operation, which took place on his sixty-second birthday –
telling him of the “incurable complaint of the bowels” and how he would
“try to bear it as a man should”:
I think much of old times and old friends and especially of your unfailing love and
sympathy. It is through human love that I try to touch the Divine and “faintly
trust the larger hope.”
If I have given a hint, I shall be happy. (M )
After the operation and a brief convalescence at the Cliftonville Hotel
in Margate, when there were still hopeful signs, Sidgwick was taken to
Terling Place, the Rayleigh estate in Essex. Dakyns was a frequent visitor,
extremely concerned about his old friend. Like Arthur, he was also priv-
ileged to hear Sidgwick’s review of his life, though he also heard much
about beauty and love; about the continuing need humanity had for prayer,
or at least self-examination; and about the much-too-ready acceptance of
agnosticism, as simply a foregone conclusion, on the part of the younger
Cambridge men (this last matter being aimed at Graham’s son, who was
at Cambridge and a friend of Bertrand Russell’s).
Thus, Sidgwick at the end was very far from worrying about his overly
introspective self, and was very well aware of and unimpressed by the
insouciance of the younger Apostles on religious issues. They had, to his
mind, a tendency to miss the deeper side of human existence, the emo-
tional unsatisfactoriness of the universe being constructed by modernity.
Crude atheism, crude materialism, crude conversation – he had always
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rejected these for the finer ambivalences of human existence. It is singu-
larly interesting that when Arthur and Eleanor assembled Henry Sidgwick,
A Memoir, they provided so much detail about the Apostles – something
that caused the younger Brethren much consternation, and of course
discussion. It was a curious exposure, coming from the “Pope’s” widow
and an old Apostle and brother of the “Pope.”
At any rate, when it came to possessing a sense of the gravity of the issue,
he was closer to Nietzsche’s grasp of the world-shattering importance of
the death of God, or at least to James on the variety of religious experience
and Dewey on a common faith, than to Keynes and Russell.
Prayer was a prominent theme throughout Sidgwick’s last months.
Father Tyrrell had written to him a “very kind and sympathetic letter,”
and Sidgwick felt it necessary to respond that he valued “sincerely the
prayers of all whose kindness prompts them to pray for me, and especially
of those who devote themselves to the betterment of man’s spiritual life.”
But this value, he emphasized, was “entirely independent of agreement
in theological beliefs,” and he was quite well aware “of the different atti-
tudes towards the endurance of pain and sorrow in which our respective
intellectual conclusions place us.” Sidgwick had recognized “that truth
long ago in days of health and happiness,” and it is a subject on which he
may, if he has any future capacity for work, try to put his thoughts “into
an orderly form for the help of others.” (M )
Moreover, there was the farewell to Myers, in some ways the most
revealing of all. Sidgwick had written to Myers on May :
I went to Leckhampton this afternoon to tell you face to face our trouble. But you
were away and I must write.
I have an organic disorder (bowels) which – the expert said more than a fortnight
ago – must soon render an operation necessary. I am, by my Cambridge physician’s
advice, going to see him again tomorrow. He may say ‘at once.’ I believe that the
chances of the operation are on the whole favourable: I mean that the probabilities