Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
Page 131
are that I shall not die under it, but how long I shall live after it is uncertain. At any rate it will be only an invalid halflife.
I have hoped till today to defer telling this till after your brother’s visit. I have shrunk from grieving those who love me. But today I am telling brothers and
sisters and one or two intimate friends. Only them: please tell no one.
We may of course have to put our visitors off. If so, we shall telegraph to you
tomorrow afternoon. If not, all will go on as arranged, and in that case I shall
probably come to the Synthetic though not to the dinner.
P: IJD/GCV
c.xml
CY/Schultz
January ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
Life is very strange now: very terrible: but I try to meet it like a man, my beloved
wife aiding me. I hold on – or try to hold on – to duty and love; and through love
to touch the larger hope.
I wish now I had told you before: as this may be farewell. Your friendship has
had a great place in my life, and as I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I feel your affection. Pray for me.
Sidgwick had supposed that the operation was to take place very shortly
after this letter, but a second expert, thinking that his pulse was too weak,
ordered him to “eat, drink, and be merry for a few days first.” Sidgwick
did attend the Synthetic, and as Myers would recall:
I learnt his sentence from his own lips just before he presided at a meeting of
the Synthetic Society, at which Mr. Arthur Balfour read a paper upon Prayer.
And thus it came about that my friend’s last utterance, – not public, indeed, but
spoken intimately to a small company of like-minded men, – was an appeal for
pure spirituality in all human supplication; a gentle summons to desire only such
things as cannot pass away. I will not say how his countenance showed then to my
eyes; – eyes dimmed, perhaps, with secret knowledge of what so soon must be.
The intimate company of “like-minded men,” the companions of
Socrates – this was just the image that Myers would seek to capture.
How fitting, too, that the topic of the evening should be prayer. This had
obviously been a preoccupation of Sidgwick’s for his entire life – recall his
youthful essay for the Apostles entitled “Is Prayer a Permanent Function
of Humanity?” And his attitude at the end appears to have been much the
same as his attitude at the beginning:
Men pray not merely as a means to an end, but to indulge a profound abiding and
imperious instinct, and the function does not merely generate emotions, which
produce moral results, but is closely bound up with a whole group of thoughts
and feelings which we may call religious (in a narrow sense of the term). It is
not impossible to imagine a genuine Theism as existing and producing the best
effects on the character, without prayer: but it is not possible to conceive an
emotional relation existing between man and unknown powers, without states of
consciousness that are in substance prayer.
He was not willing to let go of some sense of reverence for the larger whole,
despite his sense that he was living on reasonableness rather than reason.
He was never one of the symmetrical people.
P: IJD/GCV
c.xml
CY/Schultz
January ,
:
Last Words?
At a luncheon party at Myers’s Leckhampton on May , Sidgwick
would be in good form, discussing Swinburne’s poetry. A friend who
attended recalled: “He taught me there how calmly and manfully death
and suffering could be faced, as he recited without a break in his voice the
lines which I could hardly bear to hear, from ‘Super Flumina Babylonis,’
ending ‘Where the light of the life of him is on all past things, / Death
only dies.’ ” (M )
Myers said his goodbye to Sidgwick shortly before his death in late
August. It had been a difficult summer, with some glimmers of hope, but
mostly a steady wasting away of life and energy. Sidgwick had not been in
pain, but the discomfort, caused chiefly by his dyspepsia, was acute, and
by mid-August even his closest friends and relatives were simply wishing
for a serene end. Dakyns had been sending him their old correspondence
to go over, which stimulated his thoughts about his past life. And with the
cumulative effect of so much reflection in his mind, his message to Myers
was a particularly significant one:
“As I look back on my life,” – almost his last words to me were these, – “I seem
to see little but wasted hours. Yet I cannot be sorry that you should idealise me,
if that shows that I have made my ideals in some degree felt. We must idealise, or
we should cease to struggle.”
Perhaps Sidgwick had in mind the many hours wasted in psychical re-
search. But if so, it would appear that Myers did not quite agree. Sidgwick
“did not indeed bequeath to us his wisdom in the shape of crisp meta-
physical bank-notes, which the Universe would ultimately decline to cash.
Nor did he, like the old man in the fable, tell us to dig everywhere for a
treasure which in reality was only to consist in the strengthening of our
own minds.” No, there was more to Sidgwick than the disciplining of the
faculties and the concentrating of fog: “he pointed to a definite spot; he
vigorously drove in the spade; he upturned a shining handful, and he left
us as his testament, Dig here.”
Sidgwick died at about .. on August , and the funeral was held
on the thirty-first, at Terling. Dakyns went down, but otherwise only
members of the family were there, in the beautiful, peaceful corner of the
old country churchyard. The Church of England funeral service was used,
it being a village churchyard, even though Eleanor knew that “not to use
it was what seemed to him most in harmony with his views and actions
in life.” He had not left specific instructions, but he had in fact composed
P: IJD/GCV
c.xml
CY/Schultz
January ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
an alternative: “Let us commend to the love of God with silent prayer the
soul of a sinful man who partly tried to do his duty. It is by his wish that I
say over his grave these words and no more.” (M ) These words were
used to conclude the Memoir.
There is a report that Sidgwick insisted on being buried in a wickerware
coffin, though his rationale for this remains unclear. At any rate, a beautiful
monument of red Whittingehame sandstone was placed on the grave,
carrying a simple inscription: “In Thy Light Shall He See Light.”
There were many obituaries, tributes, letters of condolence. Bryce,
Maitland, Balfour, Myers, and so many others saw to that. Yet as Alan
Gauld has noted, one of the most touching testimonials came in the shape
of a letter that Frank Podmore had written to Sidgwick on August ,
which he probably never saw:
You have counted for so much in my life: and I have valued so highly your friend-
ship. Apart from all that you have done for our common work, I feel that I per-
sonally owe so much of my intellectual development to you: that you have helped
me to see more clearly and to weigh more soberly and justly.
And in other ways, that I can hardly find words for, your life and character have
meant a great deal to me. I am not sure now that I very much care whether or
not there is a personal, individual immortality. But I have at bottom some kind
of inarticulate assurance that there is a unity and a purpose in the Cosmos: that
our lives, our own conscious force, have some permanent value – and persist in
some form after death. And – if you will let me say it – you and some others, just
by being what you are, constantly revive and strengthen that assurance for me. I
feel that there is a meaning in things.
This is the kind of tribute that Sidgwick would have singled out – he
had done something for someone to restore faith in “things in general.”
As he wrote to Baron von Hugel: “it is a deep satisfaction to any one who
has to look back on his life’s work as something nearly finished to think
that the incompleteness of his work and the imperfection of his manner of
performing it have not altogether obscured his ideal from the recognition of
his fellow-men” (M ). Indeed, Eleanor seems not to have been terribly
impressed with the more florid tributes. As her biography notes:
Many good and consolatory things were said of her husband, as at the Memorial
Meeting in Cambridge of November ; but from the more emotional expres-
sions her nature shrank. (“I don’t think Henry was like that,” she said once, long
afterwards, of one of these more florid tributes. She once or twice asserted that she
P: IJD/GCV
c.xml
CY/Schultz
January ,
:
Last Words?
and he were “grey,” – “grey people”). Her old students’ letter, from the Newnham
College Club, – of which Miss Clough was the Cambridge representative – she
answered at once. “We wanted you to know,” they wrote, “that we realise that we
owe to him opportunities which have altered our whole lives, that we feel it to
have been an honour and a privilege to be even indirectly under his influence, and
that we understand at least something of the value of what we have lost.”
The Sidgwick Memorial Lecture at Newnham was instituted as a fitting
remembrance – the first being given by Bryce, in – though one might
well think that the winning of Newnham’s freehold and their burgeoning
Fellowship Fund were the better memorials, especially given Balfour’s
contribution to the lecture series. Eleanor would remain at the helm of
Newnham for another ten years, as well as being a mainstay of the SPR.
She also kept up her work for women’s education and suffrage, and for
such causes as the Charity Organization Society.
But in the immediate aftermath of Henry’s death, she was tired. Friends
and family convinced her, curiously enough, to journey to Egypt, where
her niece, an Oxford student named Maggie Benson, was heading to ex-
cavate tombs. Thus it was that, ironically, Eleanor packed up various of
Henry’s literary remains and correspondence in order to sort through
them at Karnak, in a house “with a lovely view of Luxor and the east-
ern hills beyond.” The trip apparently restored her. She divided her time
between arranging The Development of European Polity and joining in the
work in the tombs, tracing the wall paintings.
Apparently, the plan for the Memoir emerged fairly early on, when
Eleanor realized how much material was available for the purpose. At any
rate, she almost immediately set about rounding up as much of Henry’s cor-
respondence as possible. Doubtless it was with thoughts of the Symonds
biography in mind that she wrote to Horatio Brown in September, who
responded on October :
I am sure you will not have attributed to want of sympathy the fact that I have not
written to say how deeply I feel for you in this great loss. For Henry, who only
longed to go, to rest at the close of a noble life, & for him there can be no sorrow, no fears. But for you, for us, who have to go on without him, how bitter is the
loss. I do not think a day has passed without my recalling him, his sympathy, his
understanding, his support so generously given; and if I feel it so what must it be
for you? He said to me in a letter “I think you will not forget me.” That I never
shall.
P: IJD/GCV
c.xml
CY/Schultz
January ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
The great packet of Henry’s letter-journals to Mr. Symonds was returned to
him long ago & must either be among his papers or have been destroyed by him.
But I will look out whatever other letters I have from him to Mr. Symonds; not
many; as the journal formed the real correspondence.
Brown’s sympathy was clearly sincere. And surely Eleanor’s concern
was not unlike that of Symonds’s widow. After all, if one counts the stu-
dents of Newnham, Henry had left far more than three surviving daughters
whose reputations might suffer, should the founding father be disgraced.
And of course, there were the Balfour political careers, and so on and on.
Is it in the least bit shocking that the Memoir, like John Addington
Symonds, A Biography, decorously leaves out all reference to sexual
matters? The Symonds poetry, Arthur’s doings, the Brown biography –
all these the Memoir enfolds in silence. It was a silence that continued for a very long time indeed. Quite possibly the Valley of the King’s witnessed
some fresh burials, during Eleanor’s time there.
But there was a yet stranger aftermath to Sidgwick’s death. One would
expect the leading psychical researchers to seek to devise new, more inven-
tive tests for communicating with the other world, and this they did. Both
Sidgwick and Myers, who died on January , , left sealed envelopes
with messages inside, the hope being that some medium would be able to
divine the contents. The researchers gave the test over eight years, and
Eleanor reported the results to James in a letter dated February , :
We opened the Myers envelope which you sent over and the envelope my husband
left, on Tuesday last, in the presence of Sir Archibald Geikie (President of the
Royal Society), my brother Gerald Balfour, Mr Walter Leaf, Mr Piddington,
Mr Fielding, Miss Johnson and m
yself. The result was a blank. So far as we can at
the moment remember the scripts of the different automatists, there is no evidence
of any attempt to communicate the contents of either envelope.
Mr Myers’, dated July , contained two lines from Wordsworth’s
Laodama:
The invisible world with thee hath
sympathised;
Be thy affections raised and
illuminised
My husband’s, dated May , , contained two texts
I keep under my body and
bring it into subjection.
Shall we receive good at the
P: IJD/GCV
c.xml
CY/Schultz
January ,
:
Last Words?
hands of the Lord and shall
we not receive evil.
These were headed “To be remembered” and below them was written
“For remembrance H Sidgwick”
But the failure of the experiment did not much move Eleanor: “I have
always doubted whether posthumous envelopes were likely to give us good
results, because I am so certain I should forget anything I put in one
myself.”
It was of course just like Sidgwick to leave a couple of biblical texts, par-
ticularly one about bringing his body into subjection. Noteworthy, in this
connection, is the date of the Sidgwick letter, suggesting that it was penned
shortly after the tragic diagnosis by Dr. Allingham. But Eleanor was to
come to a more optimistic conclusion as a result of other developments –
the cross-correspondence cases mentioned earlier. As Broad has described
the fresh evidence:
Certain parts of what follows [a discussion of Mrs. Willett’s mediumship] would
not be intelligible unless it were prefaced by a few words about the so-called
‘cross-correspondences’, which were in and for many years afterwards being
reported, analysed, and commented upon in the S.P.R. Proceedings. These scripts came through the hands of a number of non-professional automatists, several
of whom were personally strangers to each other and living in various parts of
the world. They purported to come from the surviving spirits of F.W.H. Myers,
Edmund Gurney, Henry Sidgwick, and certain of their friends. It was claimed
in the scripts themselves, that these persons, after their deaths, had devised and