Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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a famous story about Sidgwick’s attitude toward Symonds’s poetry. As
Grosskurth describes it:
Late in December [of ] Symonds wrote a poem entitled ‘Eudiades’ on the
theme of a Greek boy and his older lover. When Henry Sidgwick arrived for a
fortnight’s visit in the middle of January, Symonds showed him ‘Eudiades’ and
a number of other poems of the same nature. Sidgwick read them with horror
and warned him of the dangers he invited by pursuing his erotic interests. He
persuaded him to lock up all his poetry in a black tin box (except the MS. of
‘Eudiades’ which Symonds had given to Dakyns and which Dakyns loyally refused
to surrender) and on January, Sidgwick stood on the bank of the Avon and
dramatically flung the key into the water.
On the th, Norman came to dine alone with Symonds for the first time.
Despite Sidgwick’s warnings, Symonds deliberately set about winning Norman’s
affection and from the outset he did not deceive himself about the possible con-
sequences of such a course. All his previous warnings to Arthur Sidgwick, all
his exhortations to Graham Dakyns and his fear of his father’s reaction were
completely disregarded as he eagerly succumbed to the excitement of this new
attraction.
As should by now be obvious, any such description hardly captures
the tenor of Symonds’s relationships with Sidgwick and Dakyns, both
of whom shared his poetic enthusiasms at some level. Grosskurth was so
keen on making Sidgwick out to be an echo of Symonds’s father that she
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even mistakenly claimed that he was the one who alarmed Symonds about
the danger of “John Morden,” his paean to a London newsboy. It was
of course not Henry but Arthur Sidgwick who moved Symonds to write
to Dakyns, in November of : “A letter from Arthur has stung me to
this recoil upon myself. It is all really well with him, but wild fire is abroad
in the world & who am I that I should offend against God’s elect?”
Symonds’s description of Henry’s reaction strikes a different chord:
Early in January Jowett paid us a visit; and on January my daughter
Margaret was born. Next day Henry Sidgwick came to stay, and we thoroughly
investigated the subject of my poems on Erôs. His conclusion was that I ought to
abandon them, as unhealthy and disturbing to my moral equilibrium. I assented.
We locked them all up in a black tin box, with the exception of ‘Eudiades’. . . .
Having done this, Henry threw the key into the river Avon on the rd.
There was something absurd in all this, because I felt myself half-consciously
upon the point of translating my dreams and fancies about love into fact. And on
January occurs the entry, ‘Norman dined with me alone: %#, &#,
. I was launched upon a new career, with the overpowering sweetness
of the vision of Eudiades pervading my soul.
And in fact, once again it is Arthur rather than Henry who sounds “hor-
rified” about Symonds’s verse. When Dakyns showed it to him, he pro-
nounced it “degrading to whoever wrote and whoever reads,” and his “high
and mighty ways” nettled Symonds to no end, making him write in turn:
What matters it if ephemerals like ‘Eudiades’ perish? This brain holds a dozen
Eudiadeses. And you were quite at liberty, so far as I am concerned, to burn it.
But about ‘Eudiades’ I have still something to say. This poem was written with
an attempt to realize a historical situation. You asked me what I meant by the
temptation of the lovers. I chose to depict one of those young men of Plato’s
Phaedrus, who recoil from acts which were permissible in Hellas. But I admit
there is an element of pathos in the poem, which makes it what you called ‘orectic’
and therefore inartistic.
Symonds was of course lecturing at Clifton during this period, which
inspired Arthur to lecture him on how he should enter into his teaching in
a “philanthropic” spirit, rather than as a hunt for “emotional excitement.”
Still, there “was no rift in the lute” of their friendship.
When Symonds visited him later in April, Henry’s reaction, was slightly
different:
I showed my diary to Henry, who said, ‘It fills me with terror and pain. I ad-
mire your spiritual gifts so much, the versatility of your intellectual interests,
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your power of poetizing life. But this thread of etherealized sensuality.’ In spite
of the uneasiness which I too felt, and which these remarks accentuated, I
was pledged to meet Norman in London. My foot was in, and could not be
drawn out.
But this too is easily misinterpreted. Of Sidgwick’s January visit, so
different from the one the year before, Symonds wrote to Mrs. Clough:
“Sidgwick has been here nearly a fortnight – is just gone. I have enjoyed his
visit much, but I am overdone.” Of their encounter in April, Symonds
wrote to Dakyns: “Henry read my ' !(! & lectured me as severely
as he can. It did clearly not agree with him or please him. I confess that
what he said pricked my conscience & I was made very sick & sorrowful.”
Consequently, when he gets together with Norman, he has “been able to
readjust my view of the life wh I had designed for us two. Henry has mod-
ified it permanently & in the right direction. But Norman’s presence has
restored its transcendentalism. And Catherine understands.” Sidgwick
was, after all, addressing Symonds in his own idiom, and with an effort to
sympathize.
Thus, during this interval from December through spring of ,
Symonds is busily composing the lectures that would go into Studies of
the Greek Poets, and he is pursuing Norman with some ardor, clear in
his mind that “the fruition of my moderate desires brought peace and
sanity and gladness.” Sidgwick, who had deeply sympathized with him
ever since the summer of , and who had been counted as an in-
timate friend to share his sexual writings with, has been gently chal-
lenged in his cautiousness and not so gently challenged in his philoso-
phizing, and decides that, as with religion, silence may be his best course,
explaining to Dakyns: “I have stayed with Symonds. What shall I say
of Symonds? I will keep silence even from good words. Some day I
will tell you, if you care.” (CWC) Symonds also writes to Dakyns to
say that he and Sidgwick “are to have now ‘a long silence’ about his
concerns.”
Only two weeks would pass before Symonds would write to Dakyns
fellowship:
Here is Henry’s letter wh I hardly like to return, it is so good. Your own is a proper pendant to it. But he has the clear advantage of a crisis. I have always said that
the real tragedy of a life is when its crisis is no crisis – a prolonged struggle & protracted anéantissement. Coleridge says somewhere it is a duty to hope. Then
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let us do our duty. But I know not if the voice of that stern mother is ever more
maddening than when she bids us be of a hopeful spirit & of a cheerful heart in
the midst of the Valley of the Shadow – the Valley is so long, about as long as the
Rhone Valley.
No doubt Symonds had helped Sidgwick avoid the tragedy of a life
with a crisis that is no crisis. But so had Dakyns, who in May had written
Sidgwick a strange letter complaining about the silence of his friends:
Their names are (besides J.A.S.) H.S: A.S: J.R.M: and many others H.W.E: W.C.S:
and many more. But they have come now to regard him as dead, who long played
the part of corpse. The only resource left is to read over old letters, & think
what each of them wd. be likely to say if the channel of communication cd.
suddenly again burst open. Yours are full of very plain prophecy – & strong tender expostulation & it is marvellous that the adder in me was so deaf. Verily I say unto you I have my reward. But will you not do violence to natural psychological
laws – & forgetting the hideous hiatus – speak? I believe I shall understand.
There are moreover on a lower level far a thousand things I want to hear you say
which may be said – without galvanising forfeited friendship: amicus olim amico
loquitur.
v. My opinion is that the th public are about ripe for his poems – at any rate an
excerpt. It amuses me to see the gigantic gudgeon swallowing certain passages in
“sketches” most complacently – On the other hand I ask myself more now, whether
it would not have been better long ago like Shelley or even like Swinburne to have
put the poems forth at once in toto regardless of consequences. But I can’t explain
my point of view except viva voce. I dare say festina lente was Shakespeare’s motto.
The sonnets weren’t allowed to damage him. But what nonsense was there any
need for caution or thought of it in those days? (CWC)
However demented, this letter nonetheless makes the case for
Symonds’s coming out in print, the consistent Dakynsean line. After all,
in January, before the celebrated tossing of the key into the Avon, Dakyns
had written to Sidgwick in a pitch of enthusiasm: “I have not solved the
mystery of the universe. I have the finest poem of all in my portmanteau.
It is called Eudiades.” This was the very same letter that had gone on
about having tasted “uranian food.” Again, Sidgwick had been counted as
an insider, one who knew everything there was to know about the veiled
homoerotic meanings of Symonds’s work, not to mention the work of
Swinburne, Shelley, and Shakespeare. The problem was the public, that
“gigantic gudgeon.”
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Soon the friendships are all back on course. Symonds produces his
collection of Clough’s works, which inspires Sidgwick to write his essay
on Clough, which in turn inspires Symonds to write that Sidgwick’s essay
“is really the best thing I have ever seen of yours and a celestial luminary
among Reviews. . . . You have, I think, said the dernier mot about Clough on a great many points.”
Feeling the pinch of skepticism, of hypocrisy, and something more,
Sidgwick had finally managed a real crisis. And he was becoming rather
famous for his studied silences.
What, precisely, was the faith that had seemed so inadequate in the face
of Symonds’s crisis and Sidgwick’s casuistry? A letter to Noel from January
of , a letter that beautifully captures the quality of the metaphysical
thinking refracted in the Methods (and this with reference to a discussion
society), is illuminating on a number of counts:
Are you going to the Metaphysical on the th? If so will you take me in at Kew
that night, and then we can discuss Palingenesis & the Immortality of the Soul.
I should have written but have been busy in various ways finishing up odds &
ends of work here. I send back your papers. As to Green I do not know whether I
advise sending it to him. He is in the state of mind in which he does not care about
other people’s opinions, & rather shuns them – a state of mind not unnatural in an original, rather lethargic intellect, conscious of thoughts unworked out. At least
he does not care a bit about my opinions: he might care more about yours. Only my vanity you see, will not allow me exactly to promise you that he will.
If you like I will ask him. I think he would quite allow that he had made
Aristotle Hegelianize and would maintain that A. can only so be made
profitable.
Your arguments on the [Imm.?] seem to me very able and closely put. In fact
I have rather delayed to answer from a wish to answer them more satisfactorily:
I can only make one or two remarks () as to the Unity of consciousness I see
you revive what is ordinarily regarded as Locke’s paradox on Personal Identity. I
admit that personal identity as a doctrine of consciousness, ascertained by Empirical Psychology, is only coextensive with memory, or if not with actual memory at any
rate with possible memory. But one may fairly ask, how can you limit possible
memory? How can you be sure that all our past consciousnesses are not potentially reversible, as we know some to have been actually recovered when they were to all
appearances irretrievably lost.
At any rate as a Belief of Common Sense, personal identity is held to extend
through the whole of a stream of consciousness where there has been no break of
continuity, (as in the life of a normal man).
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However this [is] all beside the mark to my mind: as I have never based my
belief in immortality on our consciousness of the oneness of Self. I have always
considered Kant’s ‘Paralogisms’ conclusive as against that.
What I really base it on (apart from the evidence supplied by Spiritualism, and
apart from religious grounds) is on Ethics, as Kant, supported by Common Sense.
But I do not state the argument quite as you answer it: but thus.
In face of the conflict between Virtue & Happiness, my own voluntary life, and
that of every
other man constituted like me, i.e. I believe, of every normal man is
reduced to hopeless anarchy.
Two authorities roughly speaking Butler’s ‘self-love’ and ‘Conscience’ claim to
rule, and neither will yield to the other.
The only way of avoiding this intolerable anarchy is by the Postulate of Immor-
tality. But you may say – ‘you cannot believe it because you want to’.
I reply; I find
) in me an inherited predisposition to this faith.
) In human history the belief is that of the best part of mankind: it has nearly,
though not quite, the authority of a belief of Common Sense.
Not only is the dualism of practical reason presented here in unvar-
nished form, but also the various possible resolutions of it – theistic (or
spiritualistic), epistemological, and ethical. But perhaps most noteworthy
is Sidgwick’s simple confession that he has “an inherited predisposition
to this faith,” in the Postulate of Immortality, a faith that he thinks so
widespread as to nearly have the authority of common sense. This is
nearly to say that his belief in the harmony of the Universe was on a par
with Symonds’s sexual inversion – he was simply born that way. Hence,
their inner voyaging after the “true self” was a remarkable case of elec-
tive affinities, twinning the religious and the sexual. And doubtless this
deep conviction of his own immortality goes far to explain how he could
have been so persuaded of the rationality and logical priority of egoism,
just as much as it was a reflection of the grip egoism had on him. For on
Sidgwick’s rendering, is not the appeal to one’s immortal soul typically
egoistic? Whether in Plato or in Christianity, is it not the final strategy for
marrying self-interest and justice? What point would there be in depicting
an eternity of self-sacrifice? Would one wish that on one’s loved ones?
But what was at the bottom of this? Thought? Feeling? Knowledge?
Hope? Evolutionarily useful dispositions? Small wonder that Symonds
found this philosophy unsatisfactory. So did Sidgwick, and the decades to
come would only play out their struggles with their “abnormality.”
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