by Bart Schultz
of his, ‘Long I thought that knowledge alone would content me.’ This fine poem,
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omitted from later editions of Leaves of Grass, formed part of ‘Calamus’. The book became for me a sort of Bible. Inspired by ‘Calamus’ I adopted another
method of palliative treatment, and tried to invigorate the emotion I could not
shake off by absorbing Whitman’s conception of comradeship. The process of
assimilation was not without its bracing benefit. My desires grew manlier, more
defined, more direct, more daring by contact with Calamus. I imbibed a strong
democratic enthusiasm, a sense of the dignity and beauty and glory of simple
healthy men. This has been of great service to me during the eleven years I have
passed at Davos. I can now declare with sincerity that my abnormal inclinations,
modified by Whitman’s idealism and penetrated with his democratic enthusiasm,
have brought me into close and profitable sympathy with human beings even while
I sinned against law and conventional morality.
The immediate result of this study of Walt Whitman was the determination to
write the history of paiderastia in Greece and to attempt a theoretical demonstra-
tion of the chivalrous enthusiasm which seemed to me implicit in comradeship.
Both these literary tasks I accomplished.
Thus, it would appear that work on this remarkable piece – the world
would not see its like until Sir Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality
appeared in – was part of what precipitated Symonds’s crisis. It
was, as much as his poetry, a frank endorsement of the healthiness of Greek
love – popular more than Platonic – albeit one cast in a remarkably erudite
and anthropologically astute manner. Interestingly, in the very same letter
to Mrs. Clough in which Symonds complained of how difficult the visit
with Sidgwick had been, he also explained:
Since this illness began I have read & of course have written nothing. Yet I have so much both to read & write. One little piece of satisfaction I got from Sidgwick who read an essay of mine written this winter on ‘Platonic Love’ among the Greeks,
& who told me it ought to create a change in the opinion of scholars respecting
some social questions of Gk history. I cannot publish it, & I do not wish any one to know that I have written it except my most intimate friends. But it is gratifying,
when so helpless & lamed in the race, to find that I can still contribute my share to the thoughts of stronger men & more assiduous students. Sidgwick works
hours a day. I at my best work or . With respect to Zeller I am in great difficulty.
Sidgwick read some of the translation & pointed out a few linguistic errors wh
make me feel my grasp of German to be too feeble & uncertain. I cannot give the
whole thing up. . . . I do not know what I wd not give for a little more horse power of work. As soon as I feel the collar, crack I go & all study is impossible. Problems wh I want to work out in verse fare just in the same way.
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He goes on to say that there is one “book I have tried to see through
the haze of my vapours,” and it is none other than Essays on a Liberal
Education, which holds much “to interest anyone who cares for education,
for the intellectual prospects of the English upper classes, & for the kind
of thought prevalent in our great schools – especially if such an one has
a boy to be taught.” Sidgwick’s contribution is singled out as one of the
best.
What is singularly instructive about all this is how it indicates both the
respect that Symonds had for Sidgwick as a scholar and educator, and the
way in which he counted him as one of his “most intimate friends,” one
who could be trusted with “A Problem in Greek Ethics.” And Sidgwick
in turn was obviously impressed.
It is also noteworthy that Catherine, as her daughter Margaret would
later recall,
had the greatest affection and trust for Mr Henry Sidgwick. There is a note in one
of her letters about all he was prepared to do for her husband at that period: ‘Henry Sidgwick is wonderfully nice and gentle and good, but he is so strong bodily and
intellectually, that it is almost impossible for him to bring himself down to the
level of an invalid, and I think the contrast makes J. feel his own weakness more
painfully. Think of Henry’s gravely proposing, after finding a few small faults in
the translation of J.’s German, to go through the whole, line by line, with the
original, in the Easter Vacation, and correct it. Few friends would undertake such
a work, I think.’
This admiration and trust on Catherine’s part would prove enduring.
What also seems so striking, however, is the way in which Symonds’s
thoughts of death and suicide hit Sidgwick hard. As he wrote to Dakyns,
shortly after his return to Cambridge:
I left the Garden on Monday week. When I say the garden, I speak chiefly ob-
jectively and only partly subjectively. I thought as I was on my way that it would
be odd if something did not happen – something to make this mixed like the rest
of life. When I got to Cannes I found it had happened. Johnnie had sprained his
ankle a day or two before. The confinement to the house brought on a return of a
cerebral complaint from which he suffers. It became doubtful whether I ought to
stay, and indeed, on looking back, I am afraid I feel sure I ought not: but I sophis-
ticated myself into staying, and made a permanent effort (with what doubtful and
varying success you know me well enough to imagine) to avoid fatiguing topics.
It was sad and painful, though I myself was so happy as to feel unsympathetic.
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But some life has the Divine in it as a felt element, and everything else seems to
vanish in comparison – just as it does from the point of view of mysticism. Why
cannot we all have it always?
For should I prize thee, could’st thou last,
At half thy real worth
I wonder. It is only my belief in Providence, my optimism, that makes me even
disposed to entertain a doubt.
But this is about myself. I am – now that I am gone – unhappy and anxious
about them. Catherine looks worn and jaded rather: has a cold that she is unable
to throw off, which is a sign of lowered vitality. She refuses to believe that there is any reason to take care of herself – a state of mind which is good on one side and
bad on the other. Johnnie is often very depressed. I felt terribly that I had
. . . Neither faith no
r light,
Nor certitude, nor any help in pain, . . .
as Matthew Arnold says. My religion, which I believe is sincere, seemed such a
weak and feeble thing when I endeavoured to communicate it in need. What can I
do? I cannot, as Clough says, ‘be profane with yes and no’ – subjectively it would
be profanity. Oh, how I sympathise with Kant! with his passionate yearning for
synthesis and condemned by his reason to criticism.
Forgive me, dearest, I am going to say something which may annoy you and
which offends my own taste – but I wish you would write to Johnnie. He keeps
thinking that there must be a barrier of his raising. I endeavoured to make him
understand my understanding of you: but when one is ill subtle calculations have
to be simplified both to the brain and to the heart.
I had written so far when a letter came from Johnnie. I copy out part. It is partly
discrepant with what I have just written – but that is all the more reason (The
‘letter’ is your last to me). Do not tell him I showed it you. You feel that I would not have written these words but for my strong feeling that he needs shewn sympathy
just now. I would send you the whole letter but it is too painful. (CWC)
And Sidgwick was probably not feeling as robust as he seemed. He
had in fact arrived in Cannes straight from the funeral, in December, of
his dear friend Cowell, whose death had been a source of intense pain to
him. Evidently, he was looking forward to this visit with Symonds as an
opportunity for intimate soul-knitting thoughts at a time when he, too,
was in need. Cowell, it should be recalled, was the intimate with whom
Sidgwick had engaged in experiments in automatic writing.
Thus, having watched one intimate friend die a wretched, tubercular
death, Sidgwick was now struggling with a “great invalid” who could
mount a penetrating challenge to many of his cherished notions. In fact,
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as the months wear on, Symonds starts gaining in horsepower, agreeing
with Sidgwick that “when people talk of ‘Hell’ they often mean a state
of their nerves” and allowing how he has learned “that for Life a square
is needed: Health, Home, Occupation, Faith or Philosophy,” though it is
health that is the “matter” of happiness. And he is meditating away,
on Clough, Goethe, Whitman and the rest, despite Sidgwick’s apparent
suggestion that what he needs “is healthily animalizing.” As in the golden
moments of their earlier conversations, he is pondering Goethe’s maxim
“Resolve to live in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful.” But Sidgwick
appears to be growing gloomier over the spring, even eliciting Symonds’s
sympathy, mixed with remonstrance:
You do not write in the best spirits, and you say you have never felt scepticism
really till now. I do not believe that any man who is healthy and active can know
the pinch of scepticism – what there is wretched and weak and morbid in it. Life
is so good a thing to the strong, that no despair about the essence underlying its
pleasing shows can make them valueless. It is only when the phantasmagoria of
the world becomes sickly or menacing that the intolerable burden of not knowing
whence, where, whither, how, etc., makes itself oppressive. . . . As for the garbage of the world, and the really good things in it, I cannot weigh them against each
other. In the infinity of the universe they seem to merge and become as one. At all
events for me, who am a grain of clay upon this tiniest of little worlds, and who live for less than a moment in the short minute of its terraqueous aeons, when I think
of the chaos of greater universes and the irrevocable circles of eternity, and when
I remember it was but yesterday that the like of me imagined sun, moon, and stars
made to give them light – I fold the wings of aspiration and of discontent, and
wait in patience till the chemistry of the years resolves me into my elements. I do
not wish for death, since life has many beautiful things in it. But I am incapable
of living for any purpose, or of raising my soul to the altitude of a delusion. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Let us weep and pray, for tomorrow we die.
Let us laugh and sing, let us paint pictures and write poems, let us love and kill,
let us improve our species and disseminate disease, let us parade the destinies of
man and draw our lineage from the ape, for tomorrow we die. ‘One is prone,’ you
say, ‘in scepticism to make semi-practical the idea that nothing matters.’ Yes; and
then you proceed: ‘it is so easy to show the absurdity of this semi-practicality.’ If it is so easy, show it me; tell me what is practical, if anything is practical, or if any sect except the peisithanatoi were final and irrefutable.
Evidently, Symonds is feeling strong enough to set Sidgwick all the
old challenges to his faith and then some. And Sidgwick feels the pinch
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in the worst way. As Symonds carries on, in a letter from June :
Perhaps by this time you are out of scepticism and in McCosh. So I will not discuss
that part of your letter – except to say that I think you hit the most intolerable
part of the world’s riddle in the eternity a parte ante. But it oppresses me just as much if I try to imagine no God as if I try to state the absurdity of a God emerging
from somnolence into world-creative activity. I wish I could, like you, embrace
Positivism as !"#, it is just what I could not do. I feel that the instant I endeavour to take the and not the $ point of view I resent the attempt to
impose upon myself. No healthy reaction takes place, but I am thrown back upon
a moral helplessness inclining to materialism, and to the feeble hope (yearly more
vain) of perhaps living so as to enjoy myself without doing any positive harm.
Then again, as to wickedness; your inclined plane is a just statement; but
what is to arrest one on this plane, and (from another point of view) why should
I seek to be arrested? . . . I am here in the same see-saw as about Scepticism, and end in the same temporizing, modified by an agonizing sense of there being
somewhere a clear truth – a something $ and not or even , but
plain and unmistakable when once perceived.
Clearly, as all these intimations of Moore intimate, Symonds is not being
“knocked flat” by any of Sidgwick’s arguments or evidence. Still, Symonds
wants to see Sidgwick as soon as he returns to England, “if only to remove
the nightmare recollection of those Cannes days when I could not talk
to you.” There is much exchange about poetry, with both Sidgwick and
Dakyns, that finds Symonds urging, for example, that much as he would
have liked to have written Clough’s “Dipsychus,” “even this poem is now
behind the age. Its handling of religious and sex
ual matters is quite timid.”
Revealingly, he is at work studying the life of Byron, being persuaded that
the “time is come for a return to Byronism in literature,” the better to
“free ourselves of the nightmare of Tennyson.” The latter plays “into the
hands of conceited Academical pedantic priggish verbal supersubtilizing
critics of the Cambridge-Coningtonian sort.” But he is genuinely torn
about his dipsychical self and about the creative, sublimative potential of
it, writing to Dakyns:
I am afraid of forming a permanent double consciousness in my own mind, of
being related to this world of phantoms, & moving meanwhile in the world of fact.
But the phantoms are so beautiful to me & so real. Last night we had a dinner party,
& over our wine I was listening to a certain Dr Marshall droning in a saccharine
medical medicinal voice about local politics, when suddenly Myronides appeared
before me, as he fell on Theron’s neck & the dawn overspread the hills of Attica.
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It was too good. I enjoyed my double consciousness; for I talked to Dr Marshall
about Lewis Fry & John Miles, & all the while I heard Athenian night breezes
shuddering in the myrtle groves of Harmodius.
He continues by explaining “what are the chief things written for this
‘Doric Muse’ & what, if it were not for the trouble & the ostracism, I wd
write into the big fair book you gave me yesterday for a monument of Love
Heroic.” This concerns a sketch of how he would assemble his homoerotic
verse, including his tribute to “John Morden” and “Lelio, the Florentine
Platonist, a subject suggested by Henry.” But as he explains, all these and
the essay on “A Problem in Greek Ethics” “will be consigned to Coutts
erelong; & you & Henry & Catherine are to have them to do what you think
fit with if you survive me – that is, unless I make some other disposition
regarding them.”
This last refers to the way Symonds was going to lock up his homoerotic
verse in storage with his banker, Coutts. In fact, what transpired made for
