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because ejaculation was not the set aim.
Admittedly, this affair was after the “crisis in Cannes,” and by contrast,
in , Symonds could write disapprovingly to Dakyns about the reckless
behavior of Arthur Sidgwick with a boy:
I do not intend to discuss his conduct much more. I shall long to hear of him,
every new thing; & I believe in his goodness. But that he is in a dangerous position cannot be denied; when I think of him I range the matter somehow in question &
answers like the following–
Is this Greek? No.
If it were Greek, is it what Plato wd allow? No.
Is it what the world at large wd call romantic, sentimental, effeminate, on the verge of vice? Yes.
Supposing the world wrong in a special instance, may not its general verdict be
right? I think so.
What is the source of Arthur’s love? Is it intellectual sympathy? No.
Is it moral good? No.
Is it consentaneity of tastes? No.
Is it chiefly aesthetical enjoyment & pleasure of highly refined sensuousness? Yes.
Are these likely to produce moral & intellectual strengths? No.
Are they capable of producing moral or intellectual debility? Yes, capable.
What has yr experience been of this ? That if uncontrolled it is evil.
In all cases of possible harm, what does Duty say? Avoid all appearance of
evil.
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In case moral injury were to accrue, where wd the evil fall most heavily? On the
boy, & if on him then through him on his fellow boys.
Does Arthur expose himself to external danger? Yes, to a very gt extent.
These questions by no means settle or exhaust the matter. It is a case of absolutely
new casuistry. There is no rule by wh to measure it as yet.
Here in fine is the Platonic conscience of Symonds (and his friends)
in his first phase. Still, as the line about believing in Arthur’s goodness
suggests, the Platonic conscience could be pleasantly lenient about sensual
lapses. And it was certainly fascinated by them.
In fact, Symonds had been introduced to Norman in December of
by Dakyns, who long had had a similar infatuation with the young
Cecil Boyle. In another long letter from , Symonds bemoans at length
the fact that he could not accompany Dakyns and Boyle on a trip to the
Riviera: “it is exceedingly bitter that you should be there & not I, you &
your Myrtilus, & that Theocritus should be once more alive.” Their
correspondence from this time is largely devoted to boy love. Dakyns
even helped bring Symonds to Clifton as a lecturer – the better to pur-
sue Norman at close quarters – and their correspondence simply exudes
exuberant hyperbole about their boys.
Hence, it is in this context that one has to read Sidgwick’s involve-
ment with Symonds, particularly during its formative moment, in the
decade of storm and stress. Nearly all of Sidgwick’s closest, most enduring
male friends were homosexual or bisexual: Symonds, Dakyns, his brother
Arthur, Myers, Browning, Noel. And these men were not simply prone
to the standard passing phase of schoolboyish same-sex behavior. Quite
the contrary, they were – with the exception of Myers – devoted to a life
of Uranian activity and philosophizing. That is, they were all more or less
like Symonds in finding a larger political – even cosmic – meaning in their
“inversion,” one that shaped their understandings of culture and educa-
tion. And this could take a remarkably flamboyant form. Oscar Browning,
for example, has grown into an extraordinary (if dubious) Cambridge leg-
end, and his story shares many of the telltale marks. Annan describes
Browning’s personal touch when it came to being an educational inspirer
for boys who were not part of the smart set:
He opened their minds by making them mix with the elegant sprigs. He edu-
cated the sprigs, too, by puncturing their ideas of good form. Class differences
evaporated in his rooms, where at his parties one would find foreign professors,
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diplomats, apprentice teachers, merchant seamen and soldiers in full regimentals.
He would strum Wagner on the piano and Desmond MacCarthy remembered
how after he had sung ‘Voi che sapete’ a Tommy in scarlet uniform picked him up and spanked him for singing false notes. He was senior treasurer to dozens
of undergraduate societies, including the Union. It was he rather than Seeley
who got the history school in the university afloat and it was he who first set
up a teacher training college and became its principal. . . . Browning left behind him , letters, of which , were from soldiers or sailors and some from
a few shady characters. He never concealed his interest in young men and wrote
an ode in alcaics to the penis (‘Partner of our days, King potent over men,
Troublesome author of anxieties you are . . . ’). Some Victorians were privately less shocked by demonstrations of homosexual affection than their successors and
were even indulgent towards spooning and swooning over choristers. As a boy
Browning had been revolted by the scenes of animal lust in college at Eton and
there was never any evidence that he stole even a kiss from the undergraduates he
befriended.
Doubtless Browning was the one manning the piano at that Dresden
pension in the summer of . At Eton, he had been a student of none
other than William Johnson Cory, and as noted, when he went up to
Cambridge he was one of Sidgwick’s Apostolic brethren – indeed, the
one who eventually donated the cedarwood chest, known as the “Ark,”
in which the Society stored its papers. And he was laughably far from
being above suspicion. Although he returned to Eton after Cambridge
and became a popular teacher, he was driven out in because of the
close relationships he established with the boys, particularly the future
Lord Curzon. Symonds and Sidgwick worked behind the scenes on his
behalf, unsuccessfully attempting to undercut Browning’s nemesis, the
headmaster Hornby. Sidgwick deemed Browning rather than Hornby
the more advanced educator, and Browning’s transition to Cambridge
was aided by his Apostolic friends. Sidgwick, like nearly everyone else,
had reservations about Browning’s scholarship. This, however, in no way
impeded their friendship or collaboration in the cause of educational
reform. Much the same assessment could be given of Sidgwick’s re-
lationship with Dakyns, who was also by all accounts a most inspiring
schoolmaster. Stimulating the intellect was their mission, not promot-
ing sports.
Consider also Noel, the aristocratic Apo
stle who identified himself as a
radical and poet, and who was, if anything, even more flagrantly sexually
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active and politicized than Symonds (and was, in all probability, the one
who persuaded Symonds to take up with his soldier). As Symonds summed
him up:
Noel was married, deeply attached to his wife, a poet of high soaring fancies, a
philosopher of burning nebulous ideas. He justified passion to his own eyes and
preached it to others in an esoteric quasi-Manichean mysticism. He was vain of
his physical beauty, which was splendid at that epoch; and his tastes tended to
voluptuousness. The attraction of the male governed him through this vanity
and this voluptuousness. He loved to be admired. He enjoyed in indolent sultana
fashion the contact of masculine desire, the attouchements of excited organisms, the luxurious embracements of nakedness. Strange to say, the indulgence of these
tastes did not disturb his mental equilibrium. Both as poet and thinker, he remained
vigorous and grew in comprehension. Finally, I think, he overlived, absorbed, and
clarified by religious mysticism the grossness of his passions. But for me the
conversation of this remarkable man was nothing less than poisonous – a pleasant
poison, it is true.
Symonds would also appreciatively suggest that the “exaltation of
enthusiasm which distinguishes Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley, appears
rarely in their contemporaries and successors. Only perhaps in Roden
Noel does the cult of Nature rise to the fervour point of philosophical and
religious inspiration.”
As remarked earlier, Noel, who would die the year after Symonds,
in , also sought a literary career (following a disastrous attempt at
business), soliciting the patronage of Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton
Milnes). This made sense, given that, as noted, Lord Houghton was the
greatest living Angel and a decided “invert.” During the sixties, Sidgwick
was extremely close to Noel, perhaps closer to him than to anyone else,
with the possible exceptions of Dakyns, Cowell, and later on, Symonds.
The Memoir includes a letter from Sidgwick to Noel’s widow, which reads:
I must write a few lines – though I feel how useless words are – to tell you how much shocked and grieved I was by the news of Roden’s death. I have been thinking
ever since of him and of your trouble; and also of the early years of our friendship, when we talked and wrote to each other, in the eagerness of youth, on all things in
heaven and earth. I have always felt that, though he was keenly disappointed by the
world’s inadequate recognition of his genius, he did his work in life none the less
resolutely, and brought out his great gifts, and remained nobly true to his ideal.
I never knew any one more free from what Goethe calls – “was uns alle bändigt,
das Gemeine.” After conversing with him I always felt that the great realities of
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Life and Thought and Art, the true concerns of the human spirit, became more
real and fresh and vivid to me.
I am afraid that in later years I often vexed him somewhat by unsympathetic
criticism of his poetic work: but I am glad to think that this never made any
division between us, – he knew that I recognised in him the “deep poetic heart”
and the rare constructive force and vividness of poetic imagination in which he
was second to none among his contemporaries. (M )
Noel, as Desmond Heath has observed, called himself “an Advanced
Liberal with Democratic Leanings,” though he was one who also wor-
ried, like Mill, about socialism’s possible antagonism to individuality and
eccentricity. Unlike “Blake, Roden was a nature worshipper, but unlike
Wordsworth, he faced her ‘disinterest’ quite squarely, declaring that ‘Truth
must embrace both horns of the dilemma’.” All this perforce made him
exceptionally congenial to Sidgwick and Symonds, however critical they
both were of many (not all) of his poetic productions. Sidgwick judged
his friend a “poetical man,” if not exactly a poet, and he criticized Noel’s
willingness “to take a poet as a philosopher” as opposed to an artist pro-
viding the matter for philosophy, “special” by virtue of emotional fine
tuning. Still, he admitted that A Modern Faust, Noel’s most autobiograph-
ical poem, was a very special appreciation of the difficulties confronting
“the most sympathetic, thoughtful and sensitive amongst ourselves.” The
tenor of their Apostolic friendship is suggested by some lines from the
letter, cited in Chapter , that Sidgwick wrote to Noel when the latter was
traveling in Syria, in :
If you throw any light on Platonic mysticism, bring out any esoteric doctrines that
our uninitiated eyes are now blind to, why, we shall be proud of you as a man and
a brother. Our [Apostolic] discussions have of late taken a slightly political and
social turn – for instance, I am now engaged on an essay on the “Over-population”
theory – but every now and then we have a good speculation, than which nothing
has a more rousing and quickening effect. I wish you could have discussed with
us last term “Whether Life Culminated,” viz. Whether the noblest view of man’s
course inter utramque facem was not that of continued progress instead of first ascent and then descent. (M )
It was also in a letter to Noel that Sidgwick wrote about taking the
lines from Shelley’s “Hymn to Apollo” as the motto of a true metaphysic.
Shelley was another special bond between Sidgwick, Noel, and Symonds,
and it is illuminating that, as Crompton shows, “Shelley was unique in
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challenging accepted sex mores in his prose as well as in his verse. Both
his Godwinism and his deep immersion in Greek literature gave him a
point of view remote from his countrymen.” Shelley would virtually
rank with Goethe as a sort of poetic encoding of the great questions, the
deepest problems.
Noel was also dear friends with Cowell and a member of the Alpine
Club, and thus his links to Sidgwick were singularly close. Symonds met
Noel through Sidgwick. And happily, Noel also contributed an anonymous
case history to Symonds, for inclusion in Sexual Inversion:
He dreams indifferently about men and women, and has strong sexual feeling for
women. Can copulate, but does not insist on this act; there is a tendency to refined, voluptuous pl
easure. He has been married for many years, and there are several
children of the marriage.
He is not particular about the class or age of the men he loves. He feels with
regard to older men as a woman does, and likes to be caressed by them. He is
immensely vain of his physical beauty; he shuns paedicatio and does not much care for the sexual act, but likes long hours of voluptuous communion during which his
lover admires him. He feels the beauty of boyhood. At the same time he is much
attracted by young girls. He is decidedly feminine in his dress, manner of walking,
love of scents, ornaments and fine things. His body is excessively smooth and
white, the hips and buttocks rounded. Genital organs normal. His temperament
is feminine, especially in vanity, irritability and petty preoccupations. He is much
preoccupied with his personal appearance and fond of admiration; on one occasion
he was photographed naked as Bacchus. He is physically and morally courageous.
He has a genius for poetry and speculation, with a tendency to mysticism.
He feels the discord between his love for men and society, also between it and
his love for his wife. He regards it as in part, at least, hereditary and inborn in
him.
Noel’s case falls under the classification “Psychosexual Herma-
phroditism,” which is probably where Sidgwick’s case history would have
been placed had he only contributed one – though of course, Sidgwick
was by all accounts impotent with women. Noel apparently believed
his bisexuality inborn in part because his great uncle was none other than
Percy Jocelyn, the bishop of Clogher, who in “was apprehended with
a guardsman of the First Regiment in the White Lion Tavern near the
Haymarket, a well-known place of assignation.” His gender bending
and decadence complicate any straightforward identification of him with
the Whitmanians, though he too professed to worship at that shrine.
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Lamentably or not, there is no such frank record of the particulars of
Sidgwick’s sexual tendencies, though there is such a mountain of evidence
