Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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VI. Sunspots
Your letter gave me the keenest pleasure I have felt for a long time. I had not
exactly expected to hear from you. Yet I felt that if you liked my poem you would
write. So I was beginning to dread that I had struck some quite wrong chord –
that perhaps I had seemed to you to have arrogantly confounded your own fine
thought & pure feeling with the baser metal of my own nature. What you say has
reassured me and has solaced me nearly as much as if I had seen the face and
touched the hand of you – my Master! For many years I have been attempting to
express in verse some of the forms of what in a note to Democratic Vistas (as also
in a blade of Calamus) you call “adhesiveness.” I have traced passionate friendship
through Greece, Rome, the medieval & the modern world, & I have now a large
body of poems written but not published. In these I trust the spirit of the Past is
faithfully set forth as far as my abilities allow.
It was while engaged upon this work (years ago now) that I first read Leaves of
Grass. The man who spoke to me from that Book impressed me in every way most
profoundly and unalterably; but especially did I then learn confidently to believe
that the Comradeship, which I conceived as on a par with the Sexual feeling for
depth & strength & purity & capability of all good, was real – not a delusion of distorted passions, a dream of the Past, a scholar’s fancy – but a strong & vital bond of man to man.
John Addington Symonds to Walt Whitman, February ,
Here, then, was the creation of Sidgwick’s favored candidate for the
Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Symonds sought a Platonic revival that
was, of all things, somehow eroticized and blended into the emergence
of a new democratic culture. Such later published essays as “Democratic
Art, with Special Reference to Walt Whitman” and “The Dantesque and
Platonic Ideals of Love” would play and replay the themes of Studies of
the Greek Poets, pointing to how the new democratic culture should try
to achieve some higher synthesis of the Greek and Christian – or better,
Dantesque – ideals of love:
What subsists of really vital and precious in both ideals is the emotional root from
which they severally sprang: in Greece the love of comrades, binding friends to-
gether, spurring them on to heroic action, and to intellectual pursuits in common;
in mediaeval Europe the devotion to the female sex, through manly courtesy,
which raised the crudest of male appetites to a higher value.
Even if it may be “a delusion to imagine that the human spirit is led
to discover divine truths by amorous enthusiasm for a fellow creature,”
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nevertheless, “there are delusions, wandering fires of the imaginative rea-
son, which, for a brief period of time, under special conditions, and in
peculiarly constituted natures, have become fruitful of real and excellent
results.”
But in the first half of the s, Symonds would continue to forge his
distinctive style of homoerotic verse, his “peccant pamphlets,” of which
“Eudiades” had marked a new beginning. Although his reputation as
a poet has always been weak, he did write some decidedly memorable
verse, including “A Vista,” a poem that was later set to music by John
Ireland as the famous “These Things Shall Be,” an anthem of the social-
ist movement. Whitman himself had pronounced “Love and Death”
a success: “a beautiful poem – just barely lacks real greatness – is in
places virile: a bit too decorative, here and there, maybe – on the whole
triumphantly worth while.” In the same pronouncement, to his friend
Horace Traubel, Whitman went on: “Symonds has got into our crowd in
spite of his culture: I tell you we don’t give away places in our crowd easy –
a man has to sweat to get in.”
“Love and Death” was in fact written for Whitman, was “suggested by
his teaching of Comradeship as the binding emotion of the nations; & in
particular by some poems out of Calamus.” Thus, the Master had received
and praised the tribute, and an exultant Symonds writes to Sidgwick:
“Did I tell you I had had a very kind letter from Walt Whitman to
whom I sent a copy of my poem ‘Love and Death’ – that only. He says
he thinks it ‘of the loftiest, strongest and tenderest,’ and wants to know
more of me. Consequently I have begun a correspondence.” Although
Whitman would ultimately deny – hypocritically deny – his Uranian
orientation when Symonds pressed him too explicitly, for most of the
years to come their correspondence was remarkably warm and mutually
supportive.
The genesis of “Love and Death” was explained in the letter to Sidgwick
from September , :
It was very jolly being with Graham in Switzerland. He became better and stronger
in soul and body than I have ever known him. I, too, shook off there for the time
my physical disabilities – could walk, endure cold and heat, sleep, eat, etc., like
an ordinary healthy man. I also wrote – Poems in Terza Rima, notably one called
‘Love and Death,’ another called ‘With Caligula in Rome,’ a third ‘The Eiger and
the Monk,’ together with less aspiring works. I used to write them in my head
when walking over the glaciers or along the slopes and valleys of Mürren and the
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Scheinige Platte (a very fine place for poet or painter or for nature worshipper). I
will send you these in print.
It is in this letter that Symonds talks about believing in his own poetic
vocation, how he stands “utterly aloof from all discussions of who is first
and who is last and who is above whom. To believe in one’s Poesy or
Prophecy, to believe in oneself is the great point. Then to sing and preach.
The rest the world must do and the man must leave unnoticed.” Still,
he does want Sidgwick’s criticism; Sidgwick, he holds, is “the almost
absolute lumen siccum” and he is “most grateful” to him for everything he
says: “When you praise, I feel it is such praise as the strong will give; when
you blame, I know I am inadequate.” As for Sidgwick’s book:
I hope to be one of the readers of your book – for this reason; my meditations
of late, carried on mostly between sea and skies after reading bits of Helmholtz’
lectures, which I have with me, make me believe that on the method of Ethics
will depend the future of the human race. One such discovery as Newton’s l
aw
of gravitation in the field of morals would advance us aeons forward in all that
concerns spiritual life. We beat about the bush so long because we have not found
the scientific starting-point of ethics. This is what I meant when I said in my
Greek book that science was to be our Deliverer.
Both Symonds and Sidgwick were at this point especially taken up
with critically assessing Noel’s poetry, with all its nature worship – a
task that Noel did not always appreciate – and for all of Sidgwick’s
sophistication about the irreducibility of the normative, he too was out to
discover psychological laws bearing on moral development.
In November of , Symonds had written to assure him, “You will
find my black box and all my poems gone, evanished quite, not merely
keyless but buried. I want to be the historian of Italian Literature and so I
trundled away my stumbling-blocks.” And he had prematurely exclaimed
that the “incurable itch” to poeticize was nearly dead in him. Far from
it. Symonds was about to enter some of the most literarily productive
years of his life, of course, and in the next cycle of production, he would
be working ever more closely with Sidgwick to ensure the viability of his
scholarly reputation. Dr. Symonds had died early in , on February .
Symonds writes to Sidgwick that he “had hardly expected to feel the blow
of his loss so crushing,” but it has come and “it cannot be surpassed in
heaviness.” Shortly before his death, Dr. Symonds had explained to his
son that all his thoughts upon “the great questions” had been “resolved
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into the one thought of God as good, and of trust in Him.” Interestingly,
Symonds undertakes the assemblage of Miscellanies for both his father and
Conington, who had died shortly before.
Back in Clifton Hill House as its master, however, Symonds is clearer in
his mind than ever about taking on a literary career, and his work positively
flourishes – including his poetry. And some remarkable letters from early
summer of suggest just how much interest Sidgwick took in this
work, giving much shrewd, cautious advice to someone who harbored
ambitions to public literary fame:
Your last letter has perplexed me a little: you put so lucidly the different points
of view that you leave a judicial but indecisive mind little to do. It is vexatious that what are certainly your best things cannot be published: but it seems to me
clear that they cannot, at present certainly, so that it is useless to contemplate this source of vexation. My view of what is possible – my choice between admissible
alternatives is somewhat as follows:
. I think you ought to publish for the reasons you give yourself, and because
I think that any poems of yours are sure to have at least a success d’estime, and certainly to do no harm to your growing literary reputation.
. I do not think you can include any poems of which Hellenic sentiment is the subject without a certain risk of disagreeable things being said. If you wish to be
quite on the safe side, I advise you only to print the David and Jonathan, which is under the aegis of the Bible. But I think that the risk of printing ‘Love and Death’
and ‘Callicrates’ might be run without real imprudence, if you carefully exclude
every phrase that passes the line which separates passionate friendship from .
. I think that, as far as the poems themselves are concerned you might also
include ‘In the Stone Quarries’ and one or two more. But here comes in another
consideration. I do not think you ought to have enough of these poems in the
book to give it a distinct character: and that is why I proposed to limit you to the
above-mentioned, which seem to me on the whole the most striking.
I feel that a reviewer may be nasty about these: but then I feel that we shall have a strong case against him. We shall say that he introduced the nastiness himself:
we shall say that as long as the attention of mankind is so much directed to the
life of Greece in its prime, it is absurd to ignore this sentiment altogether: and
that as long as Plato is put into the hands of youth etc. etc. Now I do not feel
that these arguments apply equally well to the loves of Imperial Rome: and that is
why I should exclude Antinous. I feel that I could not defend it myself if it were
attacked. (Of course you will understand that I say this not as passing a decision
on the propriety of your work, but as trying to ascertain from my own feelings
what the average more-or-less cultivated man would feel.)
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Symonds responds, “I owe you a great debt of gratitude for the trouble
you have taken about these poems.” But Sidgwick takes even more
trouble; he continues the correspondence, changing his mind about the
poetic value of “Callicrates” and recommending instead that Symonds go
with “In the Stonequarries” and “Before the Hêrôon &c.”
Although the Rev. Tyrwhitt had not mentioned Sidgwick when dis-
cussing the “polite hiss” of the devil in more recent days, he would no
doubt have found in these letters an utter vindication of his claims about
pagans cynically using the charge of “prurient” to deflect criticism from
the perspective of orthodox religion. This was the undeniably cynical
strategy that Sidgwick was proposing. He was obviously in deep sympa-
thy with Symonds’s project – which would appear in due course as the
volume Many Moods – and completely understood his Whitmanian am-
bitions. The book was to be an “experiment,” a test of what commonsense
morality – that “great gudgeon,” the public – could handle.
As suggested in previous sections, commonsense morality badly failed
the test in the mid-s, what with the abortive campaign for the profes-
sorship and Tyrwhitt’s smoking out of Symonds. All the more remarkable,
then, that during this period Sidgwick was working in an exceedingly col-
laborative humor with his more sensual friend. Indeed, in a letter from
October of , when he was hard at work on the Methods, he had even
written to Dakyns that he should tell “Johnnie I am meditating a study of
the Greek Mind with the guidance of his book. If only Time was longer!”
(CWC)
When Many Moods appeared, in , well after Tyrwhitt’s attack, it
contained not only an altered version of “The Lotus Garden of Antinous,”
but also a touching dedication to Roden Noel that suggestively explained,
“It has always seemed to me that there are some thoughts which a writer,
who dares not claim the sacred name of poet, may express better in rhyme
and metre than
in prose, and that the verses so produced have a certain
value.” The apologia for weak poetry – then as in recent decades – was
that it allowed for the special expression of special sentiments, particularly
homoerotic ones. But Symonds continued:
Condemned by ill health to long exile, and deprived of the resource of serious
study, I wish to gather up the fragments that remain from stronger and it may
be happier periods of life, in order that some moods of thought and feeling, not
elsewhere expressed by me in print, may live within the memory of men like you,
as part of me.
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The “unity of tone” of the volume is achieved by focusing mainly on “the
themes of Love, Friendship, Death, and Sleep,” and the work is offered to
Noel “in token of a friendship founded upon sympathies of no common
strength or quality.” As Symonds remarked to Gosse, who was to receive
a complimentary copy, “You may see from the dedication that I am not
unprepared for plain speech in my own critical mood.” However, to
Noel he wrote:
I am glad, very glad, that you like my Dedication. How could I but always feel what
I have said there, & for {? } for you – for a man to whom I have so unreservedly given myself once, & to such a man as you – not to be forgotten & to be loved for the very contradictions in him? No one alive has seen into me in the same way as
you; on no one have I felt that I could to the same extent depend for sympathy &
understanding of dark troublous things; no one perhaps has more influenced me;
& of no one do I so much respect & admire the warfare & ascendant aspiration; the fuliginous volcanic glow half hail with rapture & half tremble at!
I do not think I have inserted in my selection a single poem you could object to –
except “The Lotus Garland of Antinous”; and that has been so radically castrated of all that was allusive to Roman foulness that I believe nothing but a pageant & a tragic mystery is left.
This letter suggests that Noel tended to agree with Sidgwick in urging
caution.
For their part, the reviewers heartily agreed with Symonds that he was