by Bart Schultz
about his filiations that such a record is scarcely needed. There is little
ambiguity about his longing wondering, in his diary, if Oscar Browning
might be “the friend I seek.” Perhaps E. E. Constance Jones realized,
when she described Sidgwick’s “Horatian” wit, that “Horatian” was a
well-known code word for bisexual. As one of Sidgwick’s literary execu-
tors, she may well have known what Eleanor and Arthur so clearly knew
about Henry’s deeper self. No doubt Myers, at any rate, knew exactly
what he was suggesting when he recalled Sidgwick’s habit of nervously
munching on his beard while sitting in chapel staring at the choristers.
And among the various fragmented jottings contained in the Sidgwick
Papers, one finds such Symondsish thoughts as the following, entitled
“My Friends”:
. These are my friends – beautiful, plain-featured, tender-hearted, hard headed.
. Pure, spiritual, sympathetic, debauched, worldly, violent in conflict.
. Their virtue and vice are mine and not mine: they were made my friends
before they were made virtuous and vicious.
. Because I know them, the Universe knows them and you shall know them:
they exist and will exist, because I love them.
. This one is great and forgets me: I weep, but I care not, because I love him.
. This one is afar off, and his life lies a ruin: I weep but I care not because I love him.
. We meet, and their eyes sparkle and then are calm.
. Their eyes are calm and they smile: their hands are quick and their fingers
tremble.
. The light of heaven enwraps them: their faces and their forms become har-
monious to me with the harmony of the Universe.
. The air of heaven is spread around them; their houses and books,
their pictures and carpets make music to me as all things make music to God.
* * *
. Some are women to me, and to some I am a woman.
. Each day anew we are born, we meet and love, we embrace and are united for
ever: with passion that wakes no longing, with fruition that brings no satiety
T.O.
. We pour the Cana-wine of converse: the first poured is good, and the last
poured is better, and what is not poured is best.
This is marked “(May to JAS),” suggesting that Sidgwick and
Symonds were growing close even before their summer visit.
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Admittedly, Sidgwick was conflicted, perhaps more conflicted than
Symonds and certainly more consistently repressed. He was less pas-
sionate by far, and for Symonds, comparable to rhubarb in his sobriety. In
an exchange concerning a sex scandel, in , Noel wrote to him: “nor by
the way did I accuse you of ‘sympathy with Immorality!’ (I know you a lit-
tle better, au contraire you are the Ascetic and I the Libertine!)” Sidgwick, as noted, had a reputation for health-imparing asceticism, being at war
with his “clay.” But what Noel goes on to say is suggestive. He admits
that “There is also some truth in what you say, I fear, about the low tone
of morals prevailing in society, and the hypocritical cant that conceals its
own vileness, and perchance even lays a salve to its own conscience (a poor
crippled thing easily gagged) by raising a virtuous howl when somebody
is found out.” But what, Noel asks, is the inference? “Not ‘Yelverton is to
be let off with a shrug of the shoulders,’ but that of W. M. Thackeray, ‘We
are surrounded by infernal scoundrels more than we think for.’ And then,
probably you will say, after all this, let us look within! Well, if you say that, you will be right. But are we hypocrites? I hope not.”
At any rate, the upshot here is that, whatever his ascetic tendencies –
so odd for a professed Benthamite – it is simply incredible to suppose that
all of Sidgwick’s profoundly intimate friendships were somehow sexually
veiled or repulsive to him. The Apostolic worship of “In Memoriam,” the
adoration of Clough and Shelley, the orientalist studies (emerging at the
very time of Noel’s travels), a taste for de Musset, Swinburne, Whitman,
and Pater, not to mention an astounding knowledge of Plato – all these
things, and much else besides, put him in a very precisely delimited circle of
comrades. And of course, beyond the (for Sidgwick) passionate exchanges
with Symonds, there are the passionate exchanges with Dakyns, with the
language of Greek love plastered all over them. For example, Dakyns wrote
to him, in January of :
This is perhaps the only news I have to give you: except, (unless you have divined
it) that I am grown & growing cynical. It is not a pretty ending I am going to
have I believe. It is also a little curious; to be so much begotten of your own age
that when you are most exalted, & believe yourself on the “verge of something
real” old ante philistering period slang you remember – “heaven’s gate opening,
to have tasted the uranian food” then you find yourself anatomically becoming
one of Balzac’s heroes; and struggle & writhe under the reproach as you may, seek to cloak yourself with a vesture of original sanctity as you will, for don’t we all
live from the beginning the first-born of the Father? is not original righteousness
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imputed to us who believed? struggle writhe seek – but find not unless it be more
spiders web and serpent coil, and hollow-heaven which is bottomless hell I think
it wd. make a capital nightmare for an archangel with an attack of indigestion to
fall asleep one with christ by doubleconsciousness a dream a godly dream awake
find himself a witless apollyon: hearing also some ape repeating “we told you so.”
I hope my dear you have , as I have not . (CWC)
Difficult as it may be to decipher Dakyns’s manic outpourings, the line
about “heaven’s gate opening, to have tasted uranian food,” coupled with
the complaint about “anatomically becoming one of Balzac’s heroes” –
corpulent, presumably – make it plain enough that this is a complaint
about growing old after a fitter Uranian youth. Dakyns was hardly writing
to an unsympathetic party. Indeed, there is a long “love poem” from
Sidgwick, seemingly dated September , , that reads in part:
My dearest,
So it’s over then, at last,
The envious days that could not let us stay
Among the fairest places of the earth,
The envious days, that as the time went on,
Grew shorter ever and shorter, and the sun
That could not hide himself and could not hide
The glory of the mountains of the Lord,
Yet quicker, qu
icker thro’ the heavens fled.–
At length their envy is accomplished
And the short hour of loveliness is past.
Yet, howsoever it be past, I know
It is but buried in the fruitful earth
Even as a root; and in the aftertime
Such evergreen of fragrant memories
Shall spring and spread luxuriant around
That these brief days, tho’ dead, yet live for ever.
Another stanza – following some lines about how he had simply set out
with his brother for a “healthy life & happy, in the hills,” which if it rained
would have them “smoke cigars / Or play picquet, écarté, or bezique– /
Or read some Positive Philosophy” – reads:
A healthy life and happy, I repeat–
Tho’ just perhaps a little superficial.
You know the truth – how different it was.
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The life I lived – the joy & happiness
That God permitted me to taste & see–
It was not on the surface, nor external–
Nay, for it entered deep into my soul.
They two, whose nerves and red ‘arterial blood’
Most closely thrill & beat in unison
With mine, These two did God vouchsafe to me.
And when the time was ripe for him to go–
That great pure tender heart & sensitive
The gift that only in the latter years
So suddenly was given to my life–
Then straightway came the other – in his eyes
And in the welcome flavour of his word
The mutual love and deep-struck sympathy
That thro’ the thirteen years of sweet & sad
Of boyhood and of manhood ever more
Has bloomed and blossomed to the perfect flower –
He came – and as it were one day had set
And one had risen, with no night between. (CWC)
This poetic effort, which few would associate with the author of the
Methods, suggests that there was no gulf of understanding between the
members of the Symonds circle. It might refer to any number of trips,
perhaps even to the voyage of the summer of . But some trip in
seems the most likely – his old Rugby friend Dakyns had known Sidgwick
“the thirteen years of sweet & sad.”
To be sure, Sidgwick did on occasion express some ardour for young
women. His years of storm and stress held even more romantic tur-
bulence than has been indicated, albeit of a curious Sidgwickian variety.
Thus, there was the frustrating experience with Meta Benfey, the daughter
of Professor Benfey, with whose family Sidgwick stayed for a time while
studying in Germany in . After a painful misunderstanding with her,
apparently involving some type of crush on Sidgwick’s part, he wrote to
Dakyns:
Friendship between the sexes is you know after all a devilish difficult thing. How
are you to prevent mistakes on the one side or the other. It is not as if the human
heart was only capable of the one or other definite emotion blue or red: then
it would be comparatively easy to distinguish which was proffered: but on the
contrary there are all sorts of purples which run into one another. (M )
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By December of , he can write of her: “Dear little girl: I know now
I should be glad to hear she was engaged to be married. which is a safe
test.” (CWC)
In fact, Sidgwick’s singularly revealing ideas about love and marriage
at this time emerge in sharp relief in Noel’s letters. In May of , Noel
had written to Sidgwick about his own good news:
As one of my best friends I must first announce to you my engagement to be married!
I think you know the lady. She is (without any humbug!) the best, purest and most
loving of her sex. To enable me to marry consistently with the duties one owes to
a wife and family I am obliged to look out for some occupation more remunerative
than Literature and though I believe in the right of every man to follow his own
line and believe in a purely intellectual life (if study of men and experience of life be made the basis of it) which I myself always meant to follow till I found my ideal
woman, yet I do believe that to live is above writing about it and that, at least for most natures, to rough it in the world, to marry the woman of one’s choice, is the
primary duty, even as a question of self-culture. I agree with a remark I saw the
other day that the greatest thinkers and writers have been practical active men
like others, not dreamers. The mind needs such food, needs to be strengthened
for its work by the Heart and Will, disciplined and fully exercised in active life.
But this is not to be laid down as a rule for all, as no rule is.
Such thoughts were evidently right up Sidgwick’s critical line, for a hot
correspondence ensues, and it is in this connection that Noel is pushed to
explain defensively to Sidgwick that we must “let the eye of Conscience
be well open,” seeing that it sometimes may be our duty to take “our
largest cut” of pleasure. This letter ranks as a singularly fine flowing of
soul, much of it swirling around the lower Goethean ideal. Apparently,
whatever congratulations he may have offered, Sidgwick also managed
to convey that Noel was falling off the Apostolic pedestal, opting for the
lower rather than the higher, the partial over the universal. With this, Noel
took issue:
Then again there are men, fully men, (but these are a select few indeed, and
perhaps can be developed only at certain great crises) who are penetrated with the feeling and passion of the universal heart without yielding more particularly
to any special individual affection – there may be crises in which such men, who
will give up all special binding ties of affection, are needed. But in them there
is no lack of Humanity. Yet again, there may be circumstances which preclude a
man from forming marriage ties with real advantage to himself and others. This
may be the case with anyone of us, either always, or at a given time of our lives.
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Or suppose, still more simply, that he had not fallen in love: well then your ideal
is doubtless the right one for him, if he is intellectual. Only should circumstances
change, and his feelings change, you see I would not lay this down as the grand
and binding ideal for myself for ever, unless I know and feel sure I am not a man
but a student, or that I am one of the great prophets, or at least specially called to a great special
work whose due performance involves giving up near social ties. I
would be pretty sure of this latter before I did so. I am far from saying that the life of a professional man is a better thing than the life of an intellectual man, far from that. I like your life at Cambridge for instance. But as much as you can be in contact with the younger men, so as to draw them out and be yourself refreshed body and
soul by them the better. Then you don’t want to marry just now, but if you ever do, then I mean that I don’t know that it would be the grand thing to resist and
refuse to adopt some mode of life which would enable you to do so, seeing that you
would be brought into contact with another phase of social national life; certainly
would double your individual life, your being – and acquire a much deeper wider
sympathy with the universal heart. Here I come to my favourite theme. You send
a shudder through me with your blasphemy (excuse the word) about “marriage
consecrating selfishness.” Hear a beautiful sentence from Maurice’s kind letter to
me when I told him of my marriage– “you will be always encouraged to be your
very best without any temptation to be proud of it, for it is Love that prompts you.”
I am sure that common men like me most fully acquire the universal sympathy
you speak of in marriage. There is apt to be something vague, sentimental, unreal,
fitful in it. The more we come in contact with life and reality the better. Else
we may get simply dreamy, at last selfish. Marriage does not necessarily involve
giving up one’s intellectual life. My ideal would be – Love – the throng and busy
life of men – and contemplation – combined. And then “give me neither poverty
nor riches” – Yet we cannot always have all we like – and no doubt, our business
is to carve the best ideal we can see out of the materials we have got and not be
craving too much for others. This was my idea in the latter part of the poem you
allude to. I am glad and I may say proud to know that anything I have felt and
striven to express has gone home to you. Again, how much danger is there lest
“the native hue of resolution be sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” What
a fine poem is Browning’s “Statue and Bust.” It strikes me that that man is the
great poet of the age. We must not strive too much after more perfection of theory
than is attainable, we shall have constantly to modify it. Only let us act up to our
light. The value of will and action are intense, and in so far as thought paralyses
