Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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changed his stripes. This new parental intimacy led to more filial pain,
and more betrayal, what with Symonds being pressured to give up his
precious Willie Dyer: “The back of my life was broken when I yielded to
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convention, and became untrue in soul to Willie.” The cathartic poetry
flowed.
This was only the beginning. Another chorister, Alfred Brooke, would
follow in Willie’s place, with similar results. Worse still, Symonds himself
was very nearly brought into scandal by one of his Oxford friends. His aca-
demic career had been turned around, thanks to the stimulus of Conington
and Jowett, the latter having entered the scene during Symonds’s last two
years at Balliol. He had also been spurred by a conversation between
Conington and Green that he had accidentally overheard, in which his se-
niors had worried that “Barnes” (their nickname for him) would not “get
his First.” The “sting” of this assessment “remained in me; and though I
cared little enough for first-classes, in comparison with lads’ love, I then
and there resolved that I would win the best first of my year.” He
did – “a first-class in Litterae Humaniores – the best first of my year” –
along with a Magdalen Fellowship. And it was while at Magdalen that
he was nearly ruined by C. G. H. Shorting, whom he had befriended
in . Shorting’s “conduct with regard to boys, especially the choris-
ters at Magdalen, brought him into serious trouble,” and Symonds in
retrospect found “that my whole nature was harassed by the quarrels,
reconcilements, jealousies, suspicions, which diversified our singular sort
of comradeship.” Shorting “the troublous friend, who had chosen the
broad way of self-indulgence, plagued me by his influence – by the sym-
pathy I felt for him, my horror of his course, the love I nourished in my
bosom for a man I could not respect.”
Annoyed by Symonds’s efforts to restrain him, Shorting, in Novem-
ber of , “had sent a document defamatory of myself, and containing
extracts from my private correspondence and my poems, to six of the
Magdalen fellows. His object was to prove that I had supported him in his
pursuit of the chorister Goolden, that I shared his habits and was bent on
the same path.”
Symonds’s conscience may have been “clear,” but the nastiness of the
whole matter was considerable. Magdalen was largely hostile to the Balliol
liberalism that Symonds practically embodied, and to the system of open
fellowships that had brought him in, which factors made him suspect that
his trial would be something of a show. In the event, he did go down in
November to prepare his defense and “received letters of support from
some of the most distinguished men in Oxford and in England – numbers of
them – which were placed in the President of Magdalen’s hands, together
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with my own statement. . . . After some time, on December, a general
meeting of the College of Magdalen acquitted me of the charges brought
by Shorting.”
Symonds was acquitted, and Shorting left Oxford in disgrace, but once
again the vague sense of betraying a friend and denying his true self insured
that the psychic cost would be considerable. Besides, the whole atmosphere
of Oxford was now poisoned. Suspicion clung to him, and although he
continued in residence at Magdalen for the rest of the year, it was a painful
time. He was determined, however, to do some good work as a partial
redemption of himself in his father’s eyes. Despite collapsing health, in
part brought on by his continuing psychic agonies and pining for Brooke,
he completed his pathbreaking study of the Renaissance, which won the
Chancellor’s Essay Prize. This was to be the capstone of his official Oxford
career – a celebration of Platonism in the Renaissance.
To be sure, the Shorting affair had also strengthened his father’s hand
in counselling about the dangers to health and reputation that could be
found in Arcadia. The crushing, undeniable power of paternal guidance,
combined with the ineradicable quality of his own feelings and tenden-
cies, ensured that the s would be years of “storm and stress” for
Symonds as well as for Sidgwick. Shorting’s malicious gambit had brought
home to him how vulnerable he really was. More infatuations and more
unstable friends only worked to keep the influence of Dr. Symonds in
the ascendant. Whitney Davis has suggested that during this crucial pe-
riod, Dr. Symonds was applying the ideas of James Cowles Prichard,
whose delineation of “‘moral insanity’ extended Philippe Pinel’s iden-
tification, in , of a mania ‘confined to the moral feelings and the
emotions, just as in other cases the perceptive and reasoning powers are
the sole subjects of disorder.’” Thus, for both Prichard and Dr. Symonds,
“the ‘perversions’ of ‘moral insanity’ included inexplicable marital jeal-
ousy, uncontrolled temper, financial recklessness, and excessive fascina-
tion with sexual matters. They recommended that the affected person
separate himself totally – or be forcibly separated – from the objects to-
wards which the disordered feelings were directed.” Even if the elder
Symonds would not have pronounced either his son or Vaughan alto-
gether “morally insane,” he did prescribe, in both cases, something very
much like this form of treatment. This “liberalized approach,” Davis ob-
serves, “stood midway between the long-established canonical and juridi-
cal condemnation of sodomy and other heteroclite affections, and the later
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medical-psychiatric therapy of ‘homosexuality’ and other supposed sexual
anomalies.”
Here it is well worth bearing in mind that, despite the cogency of various
broadly Foucauldian claims about the webs of power and domination built
into psychiatric discourse, Dr. Symonds’s tactics compared somewhat
favorably to the use of the gallows and the pillory, the corrective measures
that a rabidly homophobic England had employed for most of the nine-
teenth century. Louis Crompton, in his classic study, Byron and Greek
Love: Homophobia in th-Century England, has extensively documented
the singularly brutal way in which England
dealt with male love, which
stands in marked contrast to the liberalizing tendencies of the Continent:
It was totally out of keeping that England, under the circumstances, should have
invoked its parliamentary statute to hang sixty men in the first three decades of
the ninetenth century and have hanged another score under its naval regulations.
When we consider that England’s gay male minority at this time must have
numbered several hundred thousand (if we use modern statistics as a guide), it is
obvious that only a tiny proportion were touched by the law in its severest form.
Yet the threat of the gallows was always present to darken these men’s perception
of themselves as outcasts and to justify a multitude of lesser, but still onerous,
forms of persecution. As one of Byron’s closest friends at Cambridge put it in a
letter to the poet about their shared inclinations: ‘We risque our necks.’ At the
time this letter was written, Byron was on his way back from his first journey
to Greece. Charles Skinner Matthews’s remark was inspired by a visit he had
made with their common friend Scrope Davies to see two convicted men, an army
lieutenant and a sixteen-year-old drummer, in Newgate. The man and boy were
hanged shortly after before a huge crowd, which included a royal duke, who had
himself recently figured in a scandal that had encouraged alarming rumors.
As Crompton insightfully observes, Georgian England was simply in
love with the death penalty, and thus Bentham’s remarkable work on
pederasty stands out as all the more remarkable – as an utterly pathbreak-
ing analysis that would not find its emancipatory equal until the work
of Symonds. For Bentham, the pointless, obfuscatory, pleasure-hating
nature of the law on this subject was an illustrative, extreme example of
all that needed reforming. But most of those who would have agreed with
him in the following decades – Byron and his Cambridge set, Shelley in
some humors, Clough, Tennyson, and so many of the Apostles, including
Lord Houghton, the “greatest living Angel” in Sidgwick’s day – had noth-
ing like his courage, not to mention his legal expertise. And of course, even
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Bentham had kept this side of his legal reformism underground. Both
old Benthamite and young Apostle knew why Plato had been pushed
out of English education to begin with, and needed reviving. The Byronic
hero – all “the gloom, alienation, wounded pride, and guilt embodied in the
literary archetype that in many ways reflected Byron’s own personality” –
was to be replayed in William Johnson’s sadness, Sidgwick’s gloom, and
Symonds’s “self-loathing.”
At any rate, the younger Symonds had come to appreciate just how
dangerous a business his sexuality was, how class and connection had
their protective limits, and how much his father wanted him to marry. A
trip to Europe with Green in late spring of – a trip at the behest of
Dr. Symonds, who thought it would prove restorative – led to Symonds’s
two most important relationships with women, and to much else as well. It
was on this trip that he first met Catherine North. She was a “dreamer and
thinker,” in love with sketching, and Symonds felt he “could soon have
fallen in love with her” had she not had to depart with her family after a
week at Mürren, where they met. And after Catherine departed, Symonds
developed a rather wild crush on the fifteen-year-old Rosa Engel, the niece
of the innkeeper. She had come from Thun to help out her uncle over the
summer, little knowing that she was going to inspire thoughts of Faust’s
Margaret in the strange English gentleman. Unfortunately, Symonds had
to go off to meet Green in Zurich, as they had planned. Green, who
was busy thinking great German thoughts, was none too pleased about
Symonds’s insisting that they return – through a blizzard – to Mürren
to meet his potentially normalizing love. All for nought, as it turned out,
since Rosa had wisely decided that little good was likely to come of his
attentions.
Green at length insisted that Symonds continue with their planned
journey together, and although the latter insisted on a side trip to Thun so
that he could search (unsuccessfully) for a picture of Rosa, in due course
they made it to Dresden, where they shared a pension with none other
than Henry and Arthur Sidgwick, along with J. R. Mozley and Oscar
Browning. As for the Cambridge men, he had a supremely disengaged
perspective:
The Pension we are in is comfortable. . . . There are numbers of young Cambridge men in the house, who, one & all, play the piano & spend their time in nothing but learning German & talking about music. This is somewhat of an infliction.
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Arthur Sidgwick is among them. Altogether, I feel as if I should be well off here;
very well, if my eyes wd let me read; but there is something sad in coming back to
old ways of going on, old gossip, old College talk, old associations of foregone life, much of wh I wd be glad to spurn for good, after the fresh divine existence wh I
led among the mountains. There I did nothing common or mean, but everything
was new & had a definite import. Here there are the thousand indifferences &
little interests that vulgar life brings with it.
This must have been an inauspicious meeting with Henry, who was
always decidedly unmusical, but Symonds did find himself traveling part
of the way home with Arthur, whom he found a most attractive compan-
ion. In October, he would apparently try to induce Arthur to travel to
Italy with him, explaining, “I have to-day a desire to embrace at once all
that is beautiful and deeply thought in Art, Philosophy, and Nature.” In
December, he would instruct Dakyns, “If you see Arthur please tell him
of me & make him feel me the never forgetting never to be forgotten but of
speech and sight much thirsting wh things for reasons are not easily ob-
tained.” Dakyns was another friend from this period. Over the course
of a pretty miserable fall back in Clifton, the only bright spot had been
Dakyns, a new master at Clifton College:
He was a Rugby-Cambridge man, the friend of Arthur Sidgwick whom I knew,
and of Henry Sidgwick, whom I was destined to know. All these names will recur
frequently in my memoirs. Of Graham, I need only say here that his perfervid tem-
per of emotion, his unselfishness, his capacity for idealizing things and people, the shrewdness of his intellectual sense, and the humour of his utterance (style almost
of Jean-Paul Richter), made their immediate impression on me. In philosophy he
inclined to Comtism, chiefly because of its alt
ruistic theories. He was physically
robust, athletic at football, courageous and spirited, but withal very nervously
excitable and irritable. Gentle exceedingly and sweet in converse –
. Masculine to the back-bone.
Dr. Symonds was apparently less enthusiastic, and vetoed his son’s plan
to invite Dakyns along on an Italian trip.
Thus, at the precise time when Symonds was placing himself so thor-
oughly in his father’s care and keeping, and even feeling affectionate toward
certain select women, his most intimate circle of male friends had started
to take shape. The preceding lines in the letter to Dakyns were:
I cannot tell you exactly as I wish how deeply I feel the more than kindness of your
words, & yet how much I fear them. I know I am not worthy of them. I dread lest
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they should make me selfish, & lest a time should come when I might have to cry
in vain for them & be alone. – Still they are gifts wh I take as I sh take any great gift of God wh came to me & made me live.
He sends his new friend a book as a gift, in all likelihood his old copy of
Shelley.
Needless to say, there was much felt conflict in all this – more guilt,
more health problems, more drift. And there was much else going on with
his life beyond his new – and hardly unsuspicious – friends. Symonds was,
after all, casting about for a career. This took him to London, later in the
spring of , where he went “to eat dinners at Lincoln’s Inn, and to
make a pretence of studying law.”
In London, Symonds socialized, he poeticized, he philosophized. He
did not in any serious way study law, instead preferring to read and think
“at random in the club.” Meditations on Goethe’s Proemium to “Gott
und Welt,” a favorite of his, took up more of his time than studying
Blackstone. And of course, “I rode in the park, rowed on the Serpentine,
and went sculling up the river with a waterman of Surbiton. Character-
istically enough, I began to fall in love with this young fellow.” His
father again intervened, and with the additional support of the eminent