by Bart Schultz
sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), especially pp. –. It should be noted in this connection that Symonds did not like the term “homosexual,” with its bastardized etymology, much as his work with Ellis helped to pop-
ularize it. He preferred a richer language for male love – Uranian, Urningthum,
comradeship, adhesion, homogenic love, Calamite, Arcadian, etc. etc. Moreover,
as ought to be clear from the text, it is hardly fair to describe his work in stock
Foucauldian terms of “reverse discourse,” such that “homosexuality began to
speak on its own behalf . . . often in the same vocabulary, using the same cate-
gories by which it was medically disqualified” (Bristow, Effeminate England [New York: Columbia University Press, ], pp. –). Nor is it quite right to claim
reductively that his “strategy was not subversion, but conversion – and this can
look like complicity in the light of Foucauldian theories about homosexuality as a
‘construction’ that legitimizes the power of the medico-legal authority to ‘cure’,
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to punish, and to silence” (“Preface” to Pemble, ed., John Addington Symonds, p. xi). Symonds’s “science” was more Greek and more attuned to cultural history
and anthropology.
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Indeed, Sidgwick’s published review of Noel’s volume Poems, which appeared in The Spectator (February , ), was fairly harsh: “being easily moved to strong feeling, he writes down whatever affects him strongly in the first language that
occurs to him, and then takes it for poetry if it will only rhyme and scan. There
are poets, no doubt, so instinctively melodious that their thoughts appear to run
spontaneously into exquisite tunes; but Mr. Noel is hardly one of these.” Noel’s
letters in the following years are heatedly defensive of his “poetic genius,” and
reveal, among other things, just how galled he was by Sidgwick’s more favorable
critical assessment of Swinburne as a poetic “Master”: “I believe that the school
of poetry (art pour art) you patronize will soon become as vapid and absurd
(and that as a direct and necessary consequence of the teaching of your school of
criticism) as Messrs. Moore Armitage etc. have already become in painting.” Noel
does, however, take some inspiration from Sidgwick’s resignation, when it comes
to giving up his “Court place”: “But do you consider that I am by profession and
necessity a writer, and that radical sentiments conflicting with a position of this
kind, either shackle and make a writer dishonest or feeble – or seem inconsistent
with such a position and unwarrantable? I take the pay and the old coat and that
more or less muzzles my mouth. That is the chief difficulty, and it is one, even
though I do not think that monarchy and court ceremonial . . . should be at once
abolished. But I do think the public mind ought to be gradually prepared for the
abolition of this and of hereditary aristocracy. So you see I am quite as radical as
you. And what makes me feel the chains especially just now is that my essay on
Whitman is of course redolent with democratic sentiment.” Noel to Sidgwick,
July , , and October , , Noel Papers, Archives and Special Collections,
Brynmoor Jones Library, University of Hull, DNO//.
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. The Greek word is “eros.” This letter is reproduced in my “Eye of the Universe:
Henry Sidgwick and the Problem Public,” Utilitas (July ), pp. –.
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , p. .
. J. A. Symonds, Many Moods (London: Smith, Elder, ), pp. v–vi.
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , p. .
. This correspondence between Symonds and Noel is in the Bodleian Library,
Oxford University, MS.Eng.Litt.c; it is not reproduced in The Letters of John
Addington Symonds.
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , p. . Interestingly, the term dipsychic, which literally means “double–minded,” comes not from classical
Greek, but from the Epistle of St. James, which is where Clough discovered it.
See McCue’s notes in Arthur Hugh Clough, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
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. Ibid., p. . The suggestion that Sidgwick was “[a]s splendid as on the first day of Creation,” even if too analytical of “trifles,” again points up just how far he
was from Symonds’s invalid condition.
. Noel to Sidgwick, Noel Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Brynmoor
Jones Library, University of Hull, DNO//.
. Symonds to Noel, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, MS.Eng.Litt.c.
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. .
. Brown, Biography, vol. , pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. A fairly hilarious reminiscence by Symonds’s friend Arthur Symons recalls a
pleasant afternoon they had together smoking hashish and entertaining a troop
of young female dancers. See his “John Addington Symonds,” in Studies in Two
Literatures (London: Leonard Smithers, ). But references to hashish occur much earlier in Symonds’s correspondence, and one cannot help wondering if
this was another thing that Noel introduced him to.
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , p. .
. The Memoir excises the line about how Dakyns “might have been more.”
. The influence obviously went both ways. Consider, for example, Animi Figura
(London: Smith, Elder, ), with the poem “Gordian Knot,” p. . The title of
this collection was suggested to Symonds by his friend (and critic) Robert Louis
Stevenson. It is one of his better collections, unusual in winning the praise of
both Stevenson and Catherine.
. Including honorary degrees from the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh,
St. Andrews, and Leipzig; in due course he would also recieve degrees from
Oxford and Budapest, and be awarded memberships in the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Danish Academy of Science (the Athenaeum
had elected him in ). He had also at last won the Knightbridge Professorship,
in , and thus finally overcome the slight that he suffered during his first run for it, in , when
he lost out to the relatively undistinguished but more orthodox
T. R. Birks (who had succeeded Maurice).
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , pp. –.
. Ibid., pp. –. The allusion is to one of Sidgwick’s favorite authors, Horace, and it is intriguing. The final stanza of the ode “Herculis ritu” reads: “Greying hair mellows the spirit / that once relished disputes and violent quarrels; / I wouldn’t
have stood for this in the heat of my youth / when Plancus was consul.” As David
West notes, “In BC, when Plancus was consul and Horace fought against
Octavian at Philippi, Horace’s disputes and quarrels were not all amorous.” See
Horace: The Complete Odes and Epodes, trans. D. West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. and p. .
. And it is certainly suggestive of how Brink’s “externalist” interpretation, ad-
dressed in Chapter , appears to fit some of what Sidgwick says, though as noted,
Sidgwick’s “internalism” allowed for motives conflicting with the moral one.
. Symonds to Noel, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, MS.Eng.Litt.c.
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. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , pp. –. The Greek expressions mean “those who are alive are well off” and “destiny,” respectively.
. Ibid., p. .
. These lines are not included in the Memoir.
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. , p. .
. Symonds to Noel, August , , Bodleian Library, Ms.Eng.Lett.c..
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , pp. –.
. Ibid., vol. , pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Experiments in ethics and intuitive theism were of course another matter.
. See his “A Problem in Gay Heroics: Symonds and l’Amour di ‘impossible,’ ” in John Addington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire, p. .
. The story is told in Lidgett’s My Own Guided Life (London: Methuen, ), pp. –. My thanks to the Rev. Dr. David Young for calling this to my attention.
. These are views expressed by Sidgwick’s old friend Henry Jackson and G. F.
Browne, the bishop of Bristol, who was the one told to watch out for the dangerous
Sidgwick. Of course, Sidgwick had long been known as someone of suspect
religious views, which means that, in a sense, the wariness of him was nothing new.
. Roden Noel, Essays on Poetry and Poets (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, ), pp. –.
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid.
. E. M. Forster, “Anonymity: An Enquiry,” in his Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt Brace, ; first edition ), p. .
. Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. –. What Sedgwick’s work mostly brings home is how little understanding there really is of Symonds’s notions of sex and gender.
For all his reservations about Pater and Wilde, his Dorian distrust of “effeminacy,”
he could still praise Carpenter for giving Whitman a more “feminine” twist.
. Rita McWilliams Tullberg. Women at Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, ); I am profoundly indebted to this excellent work, a classic
in the field.
. Ibid., p. .
. F. Hunt and C. Barker, Women at Cambridge: A Brief History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ), p. .
. “Memorandum in Answer to Questions from the Royal Commission on Sec-
ondary Education.” This memorandum also nicely illustrates Sidgwick’s abiding
concern for improving the training of teachers, especially in secondary educa-
tion. He notes that “though fifteen years ago, at the request of a committee of
headmasters, the university of Cambridge established a system of lectures and
examinations in the theory, history and practice of education, it has remained
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almost inoperative up to the present time, so far as the schoolmasters for whose
benefit it was primarily instituted are concerned; though it has been used to an
important extent by women preparing for secondary teaching. I have no doubt
that the theory of education should be taught at the universities, and that some
systematic practical training should be given to all teachers in secondary schools;
though whether the practical training should be carried on at the universities, in
conjunction with theoretical study, or afterwards in the form of apprenticeship at
the schools . . . is a question which I have no experience that would justify me in
expressing a confident opinion. I should be disposed to allow free scope for both
methods.” (CWC) See also Browning, Memories of Sixty Years, pp. –.
. Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. IV, –, pp. –.
. McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Symonds, Inside the Citadel: Men and the Emancipation of Women, –
(London: Macmillan, ), p. .
. Olive Banks, “Sidgwick, Eleanor Mildred (Nora),” in The Biographical Dictio-
nary of British Feminists, vol. (New York: New York University Press, ), p. .
. Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University,
Add.Ms.c...–.
. Ibid.
. Henry Sidgwick, “Obituary Notice of John Stuart Mill,” Academy (May ).
. Henry Sidgwick, “Review of J. F. Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,”
Academy (August ).
. Henry Sidgwick, “Review of Courthope’s Ludibria Lunae,” Spectator (August ,
).
. Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, pp. –.
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , p. .
. Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, p. .
. Sidgwick’s educational work would make a book in itself, and a most valuable
one. Here, as in so many other areas, one can only lament that so much research
remains to be done.
. Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, pp. –.
. And these could be thoroughly crushing. For a superb overview of the distinc-
tive issues surrounding domesticity and the law at this point, see Mary Lyndon
Shanley’s Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ).
. E. M. Sidgwick, Flysheet dated February , Newnham College Archives,
reproduced in Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick.
. McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, p. .
. Oppenheim, “A Mother’s Role, a Daughter’s Duty,” p. .
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. Eleanor Sidgwick, “The Place of University Education in the Life of Women:
An Address Delivered at the Women’s Institute, London, on November rd,
,” Newnham College Archives, Sidgwick Papers, Box .
. E. M. Sidgwick, “University Education for Women” (Manchester, ), p. ,
p. , and p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Oppenheim, “A Mother’s Role, a Daughter’s Duty,” p. .
. “Initial Society Papers,” Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Cambridge University,
Add.Ms.c...–.
. See the correspondence in CWC. The Sidgwicks worked to see that Eliot was
properly honored after her death, when religious conservatives pronounced her
too unorthodox to be awarded a plaque in Westminster Cathedral.
. George Eliot, quoted in F. R. Karl, George Eliot, Voice of a Century (New York: Norton, ), p. .
. Quoted in Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. IV, –.
. Karl, Eliot, p. , note.
. Yopie Prins, “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters,” in Dellamora, ed., Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. .
. For this and many other fascinating reminiscences, see the marvellous little work A Newnham Anthology, ed. Ann Phillips (Cambridge: Newnham College, ,