QOTD (2011-05-10), part deux

Because Symonds is just that good. Here are some passages from his essay “Culture: Its Meaning and Its Uses,” which appears in In the Key of Blue and Other Essays (1893) and is one of my favorite things in the Symonds corpus.

I have no wish to enter here into the controversy which has been carried on between scientific men and humanists as to the relative educational value of their methods. Nor do I want to touch upon the burning question as to whether the classics will have to be abandoned in our schools…. Ideal culture involves both factors; and this ideal was to some extent realised in Goethe. Few men—none, indeed—can hope now to exercise themselves completely in both branches. We have to choose between the alternatives of a literary or a scientific training. Still, the points of contact between humanism and science are so numerous that thorough study compels us to approach literature scientifically and also to pursue science in a humane spirit. The humanist remembers that his department is capable of being treated with something like the exactitude which physical research demands. The man of science bears in mind that he cannot afford to despise imagination and philosophy. Both poetry and metaphysic, upon the one hand, contributed to the formation of the evolutionary hypothesis. Without habits of strict investigation, on the other hand, we should not possess the great historical works of the nineteenth century, its discoveries in comparative philology, its ethnological theories and inquiries into primitive conditions of society.

I must repeat that culture is not an end in itself. It prepares a man for life, for work, for action, for the reception and emission of ideas. Life itself is larger than literature, than art, than science. Life does not exist for them, but they for life.

True culture is never in a condescending attitude. It knows that no kind of work, however trivial, ought to be regarded with contempt. People who carve cherry-stones, dance ballets, turn rondeaux, are as much needed as those who till the soil, construct Cabinets, or fabricate new theories of the universe. True culture respects hand-labour upon equal terms with brain-labour, the mechanic with the inventor of machinery, the critic of poetry with the singer of poems, the actor with the playwright. The world wants all sorts, and wants each sort to be of the best quality.

QOTD (2011-05-10)

This letter, which Symonds wrote to his sister on New Year’s Eve, 1882, is worth quoting in full. Charlotte Symonds was far more religious than her brother, and his letters to her often make use of a religious language that he doesn’t use with any of his other correspondents. I like that he takes this language—which he is certainly using not for himself, but to try to help out a sister mourning the recent death of her husband—and does something beautiful with it all the same:

Am Hof Davos Platz Dec. 31 1882

My dearest Charlotte

On this last day of the year, which has been so bitterly full of sorrow to you, and to myself has brought many sad things, I write to wish you the greater happiness which will assuredly come with time. I am not an orthodox Christian, as the word is understood. That is, I cannot cling to the historical interpretation of the Christian dogmas. But I try to cling to their spirit. And when St. Paul says that our life must be built upon faith hope & love, I cordially accept that definition. We must have faith that the world is ordered by a beneficent intelligence, a Father. We must have hope that we shall comprehend its scheme & our own trials better. We must have love for all that is so beautiful & vigorous in the world without & the human lives around us.

This creed appears to me the creed on which the earlier Church based its regeneration of society. A passionate belief in Christ was the coping-stone of their endeavour. We have lost something, possibly, of that passion. But we have lost nothing of the truth wh it contained & consecrated. The conditions of our existence are less dreadful. There is no tyrannous Roman Empire, no universal penetrating corruption of society. We understand the physical world better, & read the history of man upon this planet more precisely. And yet abide these three; by which yet let us live; & hoping believing loving wait the revelation of God’s greatness.

I am not sure; but I rather think that what I have here sketched would be in accord with what Tom [her late husband, TH Green] much more deeply felt & thought.

It has come to me from life. It came to him from life & from reflection upon life & from a far nobler experience of life than mine—less mixed with sordid passions.

But let us all arrive at it upon the paths appointed for us severally.

The end of the doctrine, the practical application of the creed, is that we should live triumphantly in faith, hope, love.

What remains of years to us upon this earth is numbered and is short. What awaits us beyond is unknown, unguessed; possibly, nay probably, stupendous. Let us in the intermediate space of time do our duty, and resign ourselves, in no sour spirit of dejection, but in joyful, God-embracing spirit of expectancy, to what the coming days shall bring us.

You say the prosperous people are rather trying. I think they are. I am not prosperous. I feel what you feel; but I try to bless God for their prosperity. It is part of the beauty of the world. We may stand aside and rejoice with them in their happiness. If they ever need our consolation, we can give it.

The great thing for us is to remember that the human soul contains God on this planet. It becomes a duty for us to preserve the soul, which is God’s temple and God’s revelation to the world, inviolate. Later or sooner, all of us shall surely meet in God. Of this I am persuaded. This faith gives me hope for myself and love for the most prosperous, the most abject and abandoned of my fellow-men.

If you ever want a change, a rest, come to us. I see that you have been half moved to come. I am not sure that you would find a bed of roses here. There are many thorns in our lot; not the least those thorns which our own indomitable passions thrust forth. I am irritable from ill-health and constant aspiration—kicking against the pricks of physical debility. You would find here no stagnant calm, rather the surf and surge of life in its intensity of suffering and action. I have ever doubted whether our home, with its dramatic vitality, isolated, uncircumscribed by rules and precedents, would not be more painful than restful to you. And yet I think it might be good. I think you might do good here.

God bless you. God grant us all, not peace, but activity in fuller certitude of His presence.

And as for me, my task is twofold. I must first live in hope and charity/love and faith-in-humanity with no such certainty, with no such belief in an afterlife or an eternal reward. And I must then understand another time, another way of thinking, when men like Symonds or Green looked out the window of the Upper Reading Room at the Radcliffe Camera, as I do now, and professed a faith in God that was inviolable.

QOTD (2011-05-03); or, Happy Birthday, Pete!

In honor of Pete Seeger’s 92nd (!) birthday, here are some beautiful songs which I prefer to chanting “USA! USA!” as if the US armed forces have just won the World Cup instead of assassinating a bad guy.

I watched this live on TV in my dorm room on January 19, 2009 with tears streaming down my face. I’ll never forget it. I prefer this kind of flag-waving to what we saw the night bin Laden was killed:

Whatever the agnostic humanist’s expression is for “God bless Pete,” well, that.

QOTD (2011-04-22); or, The Problems in Greek Ethics Continue

The disconcerting ethical ambiguity of the moral of the story in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys did not stop me literally sobbing at the ending of the film, which I watched for the third time this evening:

Mrs Lintott: But of all Hector’s boys, there was only one who truly took everything to heart, who remembers everything he was ever told. The songs, the poems, the sayings, the endings… the words of Hector, never forgotten.
Posner: Slightly to my surprise, I’ve ended up, like you, a teacher—a bit of a stock figure. I do a wonderful school play, for instance. And though I never touch the boys, it’s always a struggle. But maybe that’s why I’m a good teacher. I’m not happy, but I’m not unhappy about it.
Irwin: He was a good man. But I don’t think there’s time for his kind of teaching anymore.
Scripps: No. Love apart, it is the only kind of education worth having.
Hector: Pass the parcel. That’s sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Pass it on, boys! That’s the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.

Hector, in his small unhistoric way, is the tragic hero of Bennett’s play (not, as some Americans apparently presume, Irwin), and in sympathizing with this poor old man who, other than touching the boys, does everything absolutely pedagogically right, we find ourselves negotiating the minefield of what the Platonic eros is, and whether “other than touching the boys” is a phrase we can allow ourselves to utter while giving Hector an otherwise good review. I, at least, want to say that Hector is wrong to make that a part of his programme; and I want to cry out to Posner and let him know, as glad as I am that the fruit of learning your lessons well, in Bennett’s mind, is becoming a teacher, you do not have to desire your students, to sublimate your sexual energy, in order to teach them well. But I also regret that this is a conversation we need to have, in order to rationalize the fact that I broke down and sobbed and sobbed in my room in the sunlit Oxford springtime evening, thankful that this character in a play learnt something from his sad and troubled teacher. I regret that this is a play that I don’t feel as if I could ever put up in front of a family audience, as ably as I think it teaches the lesson of teaching and learning for itself.

QOTD (2011-04-21)

Not a great deal has changed in sex education since Symonds wrote his Memoirs:

Truly we civilized people of the nineteenth century are more backward than the African savages in all that concerns this most important fact of human life. We allow young men and women to contract permanent relations involving sex, designed for procreation, without instructing them in the elementary science of sexual physiology. We do all that lies in us to keep them chaste, to develop and refine their sense of shame, while we leave them to imagine what they like about the nuptial connection. Then we fling them naked into bed together, modest, alike ignorant, mutually embarrassed by the awkward situation, trusting that they will blunder upon the truth by instinct…. I have known cases of marriage spoiled form the commencement by this idiotic system of let-alone education.

QOTD (2011-04-16)

Symonds, “The Genius of Greek Art” in Studies of the Greek Poets:

Guided by no supernatural revelation, with no Mosaic law for conduct, they trusted their αἴσθησις (percipient reason), delicately trained and preserved in a condition of the utmost purity. This tact is the ultimate criterion in all matters of art—a truth which we recognize in our use of the word aesthetic, though we too often attempt to impart the alien elements of metaphysical dogmatism and moral prejudice into the sphere of beauty. This tact was also for the Greeks the ultimate criterion of ethics…. [W]e ought still to emulate their spirit by cheerfully accepting the world as we find it, acknowledging the value of each human impulse, and aiming after virtues that depend on self-regulation rather than on total abstinence and mortification.

He was no aesthete, that man—problems in Greek ethics, indeed.

Happy Poem in Your Pocket Day!

Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day. My pockets are digital, and this, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, is one of my favorite poems.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

QOTD (2011-04-06); or, Why I Will Not Be Using the Word “Hermeneutic” in My Thesis

Twenty years before Freud published his famous analysis of the Schreber case, arguing that Schreber’s extraordinary fantasies were a result of paranoia stemming from repressed homosexuality, John Addington Symonds published his A Problem in Modern Ethics. Therein, he highlights these lines from a case study of an anonymous “Urning” in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis:

… when he first becomes aware of the sexual stirrings in his nature, and innocently speaks about them to his comrades, soon finds that he is unintelligible. So he wraps himself within his own thoughts…. He imagines that he alone of all the people in the world is the subject of emotions so eccentric…. How many unexplained cases of suicide in young men ought to be ascribed to this cause!

Those who have studied Freud in his historical context will be aware that, although his role in the formation of modern psychoanalysis was pivotal, he wasn’t the only person at the turn of the twentieth century thinking about the mind and mental health in relation to desire. Scientists like Krafft-Ebing who collected and edited personal narratives about individuals’ sexual histories (something which Symonds was himself very actively involved in in later life, though thanks to Edmund Gosse none of his research has survived) no doubt had specific pathological narratives in mind which they sought to highlight through their selection and organization of the case studies. The case study Symonds presents us with in Modern Ethics is no exception, but what’s striking is how this narrative maps onto the model of homosexual desire that Freud (in)famously gives us in Schreber. In the Krafft-Ebing case study, a severe mental-health risk (suicide) is instigated by the idea that someone would “wrap himself within his own thoughts”—in modern psychoanalytic terms, repress his sexual identification, covering it over with conscious thoughts—and that this coping mechanism would cause him to believe—as the paranoiac does—that he is the only person who feels as he does, and that therefore he is at risk of persecution from everyone. It’s the link between repression and paranoia that emerges in the Krafft-Ebing case study (and, in particular, in the bits Symonds highlights from it, performing his own editorial work!) that seems so strikingly to prefigure Freud. For we historians, this is an interesting muddling of the timeline: we whose scholarly duty seems to be to warn other critics against applying critical frameworks to historical moments prior to their invention need to keep in mind that critical frameworks do not suddenly come into being with the jolt of electric current that accompanies the flipping of an “on/off” switch. Rather, they develop—as all ideas and paradigms do—gradually over time, thanks to the contributions of many individuals. Freud may loom large in the history of psychoanalysis and indeed of sexology, but to a certain extent he is also affected by the way that people think and express their thoughts in the period at which he starts to think and write about the mechanisms of sexual desire. I haven’t done the reading to be able to do more than speculate, but I wonder in what ways Freud’s immersion in the genre of the case study, which has its narrative conventions just like any other genre, affected the nature of the frameworks he extrapolated from his own case studies!

These all may seem like very elementary points to be making, and I don’t need to do the JSTOR search to make an educated guess that they’ve been made before by readers of Freud more sophisticated than I. But the bottom line that any given intellectual figure is both shaped by his or her historical context and yet exists as an individual apart from it seems too often forgotten by scholars of all stripes. Every day I read secondary literature about Symonds and his circle which believes it appropriate to refer to Symonds as a gay liberationist (in the framing of one ’90s queer theorist I was reading yesterday, a sort of Foucault avant-la-personne) or for that matter to dismiss him as a “minor man of letters” whose form somehow camouflages into the prized Morris wallpaper of his drawing-room. For scholars whose discipline is all about questioning categories, I find that queer theorists aren’t always as perfect as they might be at distancing themselves for the categories they in turn have created, and the world-historical figures—the Freuds and the Foucaults—they have elevated. Of course, no one is perfect, nor should they be. It is rather the lack of interest in trying to see the world from their subjects’ point of view that irritates me.

But then, I suppose, that’s why I’m a historian, not a queer theorist. From each according to her abilities, to each according to her needs.

QOTD (2011-04-03)

Some Symonds well-suited to the fourth Sunday in Lent, from Walt Whitman: A Study:

Nor does the supreme doctrine of redemption and self-sacrifice lose in significance if we extend it from the One, imagined a pitiful and condescending God, to all who for a worthy cause have endured humiliation, pain, an agonizing death. Not to make Christ less, but to make him the chief of a multitude, the type and symbol of a triumphant heroism, do we think of the thousands who have died on battlefields, in torture chambers, at the stake, from lingering misery, as expiators and redeemers, in whom the lamp of the divine spirit shines clearly for those who have eyes to see.

In Oxford I see cross-topped spires from my bedroom window, I hear chapel bells sound the hour, and I could, if I wished, go to choral Evensong every day of the week. I do go once a week, though, and I go because it helps me to understand how Symonds could write sentences like these, how the straight and unyielding spires of Oxford could and can be bent to the needs of those who think better in layers of metaphor than they do in the uncompromising and unambiguous recitation of Anglican doctrine.

I have been thinking about it, and I don’t think I will go to Christian services when I’m back in the States. I’ve realized that to me Evensong is about the same things that my Symonds project is about: about the romance of Oxford’s “forsaken beliefs” and “impossible loyalties,” and about having it both ways, being simultaneously faithful and apostate, cheerfully Hellbound and yet making a slow Pilgrim’s Progress toward the Celestial City all the same.

QOTD (2011-03-29)

Symonds to A.R. Cluer, 1873:

Thus property and Communism are both logical, both intelligible and capable of yielding perfect deductive results, but quite irreconcilable in their integrity. The problem is how to be illogical and human in conduct, to effect that for-ever-fluctuating compromise which is life…. And I firmly believe that the world will be best served by each man discovering what his natural ἐργον [work] is, and doing that as well as he can. The world is a symphony in which flutes and horns have places as well as violins. But a certain set of politico-economic prigs would fain have all men be fiddles—and themselves first fiddles.