You know this one. Wilfred Owen.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

So many boys, sent to their deaths for so little. And what’s more, we learned nothing from it—not in 1919, not in 1939 or 1945, not now. Certainly not now, in the last decadent days of the withering western empire.

While in fact the real, very best quote of the day so far is that Whitman, apparently, called Symonds “wonderfully cute” (or so Eve Sedgwick says in Between Men), I do have another lengthier one that’s worth sharing. I was rereading Joan Scott’s classic AHR review essay from 1986, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” and found this paragraph worth quoting:

The subject of war, diplomacy, and high politics frequently comes up when traditional political historians question the utility of gender in their work. But here, too, we need to look beyond the actors and the literal import of their words. Power relations among nations and the status of colonial subjects have been made comprehensible (and thus legitimate) in terms of relations between male and female. The legitimizing of war—of expending young lives to protect the state—has variously taken the forms of explicit appeals to manhood (to the need to defend otherwise vulnerable women and children), of implicit reliance on belief in the duty of sons to serve their leaders or their (father the) king, and of associations between masculinity and national strength. High politics itself is a gendered concept, for it establishes its crucial importance and public power, the reasons for and the fact of its highest authority, precisely in its exclusion of women from its work. Gender is one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimated, and criticized. It refers to but also establishes the meaning of the male/female opposition. To vindicate political power, the reference must seem sure and fixed, outside human construction, part of the natural or divine order. In that way, the binary opposition and the social process of gender relationships both become part of the meaning of power itself; to question or alter any aspect threatens the entire system.

In Oxford, where I’m in with a much more random sample of history students than I generally am when I choose my classes more freely at Princeton, I’ve been encountering for the first time in years intelligent people who nevertheless are skeptical about the utility of gender as an analytical paradigm in the study of history. I can talk all I want from my fairly narrow area of expertise about how the history of Oxford itself can only be understood through its centuries of homosociality, and that today’s Oxford owes itself in large part to the university reform of the masculinized, Hellenist-in-all-kinds-of-ways Victorian intellectual age. But that hasn’t been sticking among those who do really largely understand history in terms of kings and emperors, wars and revolutions. I hope Scott’s words, then, can speak to the inextricability of not just gender, but society and culture, from the histories of even the most canonical dead-white-men history. And I hope that I, in turn, can learn to be a better teacher, to improve my ability to interact intellectually with those who come from different backgrounds to mine, with different assumptions about the meaning and practice of history. If the theories and methods I use and concepts I explore in my research don’t seem important, that’s because I’m not teaching them well enough.

From John Tyndall’s Address Delivered Before the British Association [for the Advancement of Science] at Belfast, 1874:

The world embraces not only a Newton, but a Shakespeare—not only a Boyle, but a Raphael—not only a Kant, but a Beethoven—not only a Darwin, but a Carlyle. Not in each of these, but in all, is human nature whole. They are not opposed, but supplementary—not naturally exclusive, but reconcilable. And if, unsatisfied with them all, the human mind, with the yearning of a pilgrim for his distant home, will still turn to the Mystery from which it has emerged, seeking so to fashion it as to give unity to thought and faith; so long as this is done, not only without intolerance or bigotry of any kind, but with the enlightened recognition that ultimate fixity of conception is here unattainable, and that each succeeding age must be held free to fashion the Mystery in accordance with its own needs—then, casting aside all the restrictions of Materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the knowing faculties, may be called the creative faculties of man.

William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children”:

I.
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way–the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II.
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy–
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III.
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age–
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler’s heritage–
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV.
Her present image floats into the mind–
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once–enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V.
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI.
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII.
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts–O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise–
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

VIII.
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Matthew Arnold, Preface to Essays in Criticism:

And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us near to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

When, back in September, my exchange partner asked me why I’d wanted to come to Oxford, I struggled to find an answer more credible than simple Anglophilia. But now I understand that I am here because, if there is anything I live for, it is lost causes, truth, and beauty.

I have always considered myself somewhat conservative or old-fashioned when it comes to embracing a highly prescriptive moralist approach to grounding and guiding my life, and how much I appreciate this passage from T.H. Green’s lecture “On the different senses of ‘Freedom’ as applied to will and to the moral progress of man” reminds me of this:

The self-realising principle… must overcome the ‘natural impulses’, not in the sense of either extinguishing them or denying them an object, but in the sense of fusing them with those of higher interests, which have human perfection in some of its forms for their object. Some approach to this fusion we may notice in all good men; not merely in those in whom all natural passions, love, anger, pride, ambition, are enlisted in the service of great public cause, but in those with whom such passions are all governed by some such commonplace idea as that of educating a family.

Some impressive talking-around-the-homosexuality-issue from Melvin Richter’s 1964 biography of T.H. Green, The Politics of Conscience: T.H. Green and His Age:

In more than one sense a deviant from Balliol morality, Symonds in time rebelled, abandoned Zeller to two more obedient disciples of Jowett, and made his own mark by a prodigious number of literary and historical works, including the first extended treatment in English of the Italian Renaissance. Symonds married and lived in Switzerland with his wife and four daughters, but had another aspect to his character which led him to keep a Venetian gondolier as his personal servant. Yet Jowett never repudiated him; indeed Jowett came often to stay with the SYmonds at their villa, Am Hof, at Davos. Campbell, Jowett’s biographer commented on this. For the Master ‘had a “horror naturalis” of sentimental feelings between men (“diabolical” I have heard him call them)….’

I really like how in the course of these sentences the nature of Symonds’ moral deviance gets progressively clearer: first you have “a deviant from Balliol morality,” then “another aspect to his character,” then finally outright “sentimental feelings between men,” though that itself still a euphemism. I’m also interested by the class assumptions going on here; my understanding has always been that Angelo Fusato was Symonds’ lover on what Symonds, at least, thought were relatively equal terms. Like Edward Carpenter and other British Whitmaniacs, Symonds took seriously the notion that homosexual relationships could bridge class divides (though of course whenever he put it into practice he made himself look ridiculous, as he did when he lent Fusato and his family money and basically acted the part of the elite romantically struck by but not taking at all seriously the impoverished circumstances in which Fusato and his family lived). You could say that Symonds was unconsciously implicated in the bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat, but you certainly couldn’t say that Fusato was his servant—that speaks more to how Richter understands the nature of Symonds’ particular brand of homosexuality in the context of both Symonds’ and Richter’s historical moments.

It’s also worth noting that Richter gives a fairly broad attention to Symonds (at least inasmuch as his life was connected to Green’s, which it very much was) a year before the publication of Grosskurth’s biography. Grosskurth’s biography is thought to be the first modern treatment of Symonds (and one of the few to date), but Richter in some ways does a much better job than Grosskurth of placing Symonds in the context of the Balliol world he inhabited, involved in many of the intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual questions dogging Oxford in the mid-to-late-19th century.

This passage is from the middle of the third chapter of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty:

It will not be denied by anybody that originality is a valuable element in human affairs. There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices and set the example of more enlightened conduct and better taste and sense in human life. This cannot well be gainsaid by anybody who does not believe that the world has already attained perfection in all its ways and practices. It is true that this benefit is not capable of being rendered by everybody alike; there are but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement on established practice. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already existed. If there were nothing new to be done, would human intellect cease to be necessary? Would it be a reason why those who do the old things should forget why they are done, and do them like cattle, not like human beings? There is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical; and unless there were a succession of persons whose ever-recurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional, such dead matter would not resist the smallest shock from anything really alive, and there would be no reason why civilization should not die out, as in the Byzantine Empire. Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.

Thus both a suspicion of elitism and dedication to ferreting it out and critiquing it where it lies, and a suspicion of the analytical systems which assume that human history is a trajectory of self- and society-improvement, come into conflict with the principles which underpin a belief in Teaching as Vocation, and the reasons for which one answers the call. But we can solve this problem. The thing is, if we’re to believe in teaching as something we do to make our world better, and to inculcate in the next generation a desire to do the same (Mill is as emphatic as I about the power of education to instill these kinds of vague moral principles), we need to place ourself on some kind of teleological timeline that suggests the future can be better than the present and the past. But we must also in so doing refuse to allow ourselves to believe that we are in any way exceptional; that our age, our civilization, our people, our culture, our system of government, is so much nearer perfectibility than others that we close ourselves off to the possibility of further bettering. This, Mill might say (and I, though cautious with regard to his classical liberalism and its relevance to the modern nation-state in an era of late-stage capitalism, am inclined to agree), would be why we need to ensure the freedom of thought and action of dissenters—but I’m interested by the fact that he doesn’t also discuss how the dissenters (even the dissenting geniuses) and their morals and ideals might play a role in what we teach our children.

It is nevertheless true, though, that the greatest good for the greatest number comes when the greatest number of children feel called to better the world their children will inherit.

(my gratitude to JN for providing some of the framework for this post)