I’m not certain that I actually agree with all the principles G.M. Trevelyan lays forth in his “Clio: A Muse,” but I like how he expresses them:

To recover some of our ancestors’ real thoughts and feelings is the hardest, subtlest and most educative function that the historian can perform. It is much more difficult than to spin guesswork generalisations, the reflex of passing phases of thought or opinion in our own day. To give a true picture of any country, or man or group of men in the past requires industry and knowledge, for only teh documents can tell us the truth, but it requires also insight, sympathy and imagination of the finest, and last but not least the art of making our ancestors live again in modern narrative….

[H]istory cannot prophesy the future; it cannot supply a set of invariably applicable laws for the guidance of politicians; it cannot show, by the deductions of historical analogy, which side is in the right in any quarrel of our day. It an do a thing less, and yet greater than all these. It can mould the mind itself into the capability of understanding great affairs and sympathising with other men. The information given by history is valueless in itself, unless it produce a new state of mind. The value of Lecky’s Irish history did not consist in the fact that he recorded in a book the details of numerous massacres and murders, but that he produced sympathy and shame, and caused a better understanding among us all of how the sins of the fathers are often visited upon the children, unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate each other. He does not prove that Home Rule is right or wrong, but he trains the mind of Unionists and Home Rulers to think sensibly about that and other problems….

The dispassionateness of the historian is a quality which it is easy to value too highly, and it should not be confused with the really indispensable qualities of accuracy and good faith. We cannot be at too great pains to see that our passion burns pure, but we must not extinguish the flame. Dispassionateness—nil admirari—may betray the most gifted historian into missing some vital truth in his subject.

Also, Trevelyan gives Symonds a shoutout for having “carried on the tradition that history was related to literature,” which is of course excellent.

In the study of “Greek love,” one comes across many euphemisms. I like this bit of how Symonds talks around a particular issue, in an 1869 letter to A.H. Clough’s wife Blanche:

I like your MS. on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The analysis of the gradual improvement in stability and elevation of feeling is very good. You quote rather awkwardly and do not enough comment on the passage quoted. What makes you credit [Shakespeare critic Richard] Simpson with ‘authority’? He has only stated an ingenious hypothesis; and in his attempt, I fancy, to screen Sh. from a vile imputation has not noticed the palpable intensity of personal, historically biographically personal, emotion the sonnets contain. I think he has written the best book on the subject. But you have detected one point which, I think, he forgets and which rather breaks down his argument—the low opinion expressed for women. Now if Sh. had meant only to follow the Italians, he would not have addressed a man and shown coldness to women. He took their form of art and their subtleties of emotional analysis; but what he felt was radically different—a passion which, as in Greece, bred a contempt for the weaker sex. At least, I cannot help thinking this. At the same time he is not the mouthpiece of Platonism. It is all original, fresh sentiment. The great problem is: how near was he after all to his idol? Were they real companions? Or did Sh. worship at a distance? This, alas! we shall never know; and the sonnets must always be a mystery to us.

I am, as regular readers will no doubt know, continually fascinated by the language Victorians writing about sexuality use to disguise or elide the fact that they’re writing about sexuality. This is still more interesting because Symonds is writing to an older woman, and yet it is quite easy to read between the lines and see that he is being as frank as he feels he can be to Mrs Clough about the nature of the Sonnets and their mysterious dedicatee.

As the Oxford system is giving me a lot more time to sit around in reading rooms mulling over Victorians, expect more posts of this nature to come, at least until I need to start writing about the Victorians as well. I find it useful to try out brief readings and explications as I figure out what my Symonds project is actually going to pursue, and I hope this won’t prove uninteresting to the reader.

The Victorian historian William Stubbs on “History for Its Own Sake” in his Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History:

I should not like to be thought to be advocating my study on the mere grounds of utility; although I believe that utility, both as regards the training of the study and the information attained in it, to be the highest, humanly speaking, of all utilities; it helps to qualify a man to act in his character of a politician as a Christian man should. But this is not all; beyond the educational purpose, beyond the political purpose, beyond the philosophical use of history and its training, it has something of the preciousness of everything that is clearly true. In common with Natural Philosophy it has its value, I will not say as Science, for that would be to use a term which has now become equivocal, but it has a value analogous to the value of science; a value as something that is worth knowing and retaining in the knowledge for its own and for the truth’s sake. There is… in the study of living History, a gradual approximation to a consciousness that we are growing into a perception of the workings of the Almighty Ruler of the world; that we are growing able to justify the Eternal Wisdom….

The study of History is in this respect, as Coleridge said of Poetry, its own great reward, a thing to be loved and cultivated for its own sake…. It has not been well used of late years; it has been taught as a task to children; it has been valued only as an instrument to strengthen the memory; it has been under-valued in its true character of mental training; it has been learned to qualify men to make effective speeches to ignorant hearers, and to indite brilliant articles for people who only read periodicals; it has been begun from the standing point of popular infatuation; it has been begun from the advanced ground of ecclesiastical or political partisanship; it has been made an embellishment for wordy eloquence, a source of subjects for pictorial talent that has evolved grouping, features and circumstances, from its own consciousness; it has been written as a poem, but without the inspiration of poetry, as philosophy without the thoughtfulness or humility of the true philosophic spirit; it has been written for readers already known, counted and pandered to. What wonder that there are few who love it for its own sake, when there are so few who know it as it is!

You don’t need to be on board with Stubbs’ religious language to be on board with his larger sentiment.

From H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, 1948:

The Problem of Wilde’s Inversion

Wilde must necessarily be considered from the view point of his pathological case history…. Havelock Ellis has expressed the opinion that homosexual germs were latent in Wilde’s constitution from the first, although, as we know, they did not become active until he was in his early thirties. Certain it is that Wilde betrayed no signs of abnormality in adolescence and early manhood. On the contrary, his inclinations seemed to have been decidedly heterosexual. While an undergraduate at Oxford he contracted syphilis as the result of a casual connexion, probably with a prostitute…. Nor, it may be added, was there the slightest suggestion of effeminacy about him, either at Oxford or at any subsequent period. If somewhat ungainly in movement, he was endowed with an abundant measure of manly strength….

The precise mode in which Wilde’s peculiar inverted instincts found satisfaction is of interest from the medico-legal standpoint His conduct with the various youths whom he met or who were procured for him usually began with close physical contact and fondling. He would pretend, for instance, in the case of Charles Parker, that the youth was a woman and that he was her lover. This would be accompanied by some form of mutual masturbation and intercrural intercourse. Finally fellatio would be practised with Wilde as the active agent, though this role was occasionally reversed. [Hyde gives no citation for this set of statements.] There was no question of actual pedicatio being perpetrated. It was suggested by only one of the witnesses who gave evidence at his trial that Wilde committed sodomy. Nor indeed was he ever charged at any time with this offence….

[I]t would appear that the world has still a long distance to go before it can be said to have arrived at a complete and satisfactory understanding of the problem posed by Wilde’s sexual inversion. But to-day at least it is unusual to hear it referred to as “vice,” although it still remains a crime under English statute.

I recommend this book for even more retro discussion of the “scandal” of “inversion.” Highly entertaining. As you can see, I’m being just so attentive to my schoolwork….

From the ODNB entry on J.A. Symonds:

A Problem in Greek Ethics (written 1873, ten copies printed 1883), the first history of homosexuality in English, carefully argues that if homosexual relations were honourable in ancient Greece, they cannot be diagnosed as morbid in modern times…. A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891, 50 copies) is the first ‘scientific’ psychological–sociological analysis of homosexuality in English, exposing vulgar errors by a well-judged mixture of sarcasm, science, and common sense.

I obviously have the best thesis topic ever. Also, so much Symondsiana is in Oxford! More real thinking about research/scholarship too, but for now just enthusiasm will have to do.

Happy New Year!

From Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s essay “Solitude of Self”, a Rule to Live By:

The chief reason for opening to every soul the doors to the whole round of human duties and pleasures is the individual development thus attained, the resources thus provided under all circumstances to mitigate the solitude that at times must come to everyone. I once asked Prince Krapotkin, a Russian nihilist, how he endured his long years in prison, deprived of books, pen, ink, and paper. “Ah,” he said, “I thought out many questions in which I had a deep interest. In the pursuit of an idea I took no note of time. When tired of solving knotty problems I recited all the beautiful passages in prose or verse I had ever learned. I became acquainted with yself and my own resources. I had a world of my own, a vast empire, that no Russian jailer or Czar could invade.” Such is the value of liberal thought and broad culture when shut off from all human companionship, bringing comfort and sunshine within even the four walls of a prison cell.

The whole essay, in fact, is required reading, for it offers some guidelines as to how to survive the seemingly soul-destroying pressures and anxieties of Living in Society. I take particular heart from it now as I sit here at my co-op’s kitchen table on the first weekend of fall break, trying desperately to piece together my life out of the shards of self-doubt to which it had been reduced after six weeks of term. I mean in the next few days to find a way to more eloquently and constructively write about the hard parts of academic life, why my day-to-day existence has seemed so difficult recently, and how best to deal with it and move forward into Making a Difference—but until I can find my own voice again, I’ll let Stanton’s message of self-reliance and inner resources speak for me.

Oh, that, and Joni Mitchell, and the flaringly bright and beautiful crisp sidewalk-littering leaves of autumn:

Joseph Litvak, as quoted by Eve Sedgwick in her Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity:

It seems to me that the importance of “mistakes” in queer reading and writing… has a lot to do with loosening the traumatic, inevitable-seeming connection between mistakes and humiliation. What I mean is that, if a lot of queer energy, say around adolescence, goes into what Barthes calls “le vouloir-être-intelligent” (as in “If I have to be miserable, at least let me be brainier than everybody else”), accounting in large part for paranoia’s enormous prestige as the very signature of smartness (a smartness that smarts), a lot of queer energy, later on, goes into… practices aimed at taking the terror out of error, at making the making of mistakes sexy, creative, even cognitively powerful. Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?

Now, I almost had a temper tantrum late last night because I struggle so much with understanding theory, and with understanding why I need to understand theory, so I am not one to tell you what this blockquote is doing in the chapter of Sedgwick in which it appears. But I am one to tell you that, “say around adolescence,” and even as early as my preschool days, I was convinced, as I still am convinced now, that somehow knowing a shit-ton would give me a sense of belonging that I could not find by actually belonging. Knowing that if I was doing your Latin translations for you, you had to let me sit at your lunch table, helped me through middle school. And difference, in more ways than simple queerness (if queerness can be simple, of course), which I suppose some might call a “mistake” of my birth and my early childhood development, became for me a métier and a route to self-understanding. And instead of letting the kids whose Latin translations I was doing tell me what I was, I took my cues from the books whose authors were able to write those books because they had taken their cues from books, and we all fit ourselves into a genealogy of queer reading, generations of around-adolescents who had been saved by the promise of another world, whether that world was one of Socrates’ dinner-parties or one of an alternate European history where the girls could be Cyrano de Bergerac too.

The problem comes, however, when you find yourself reacting this way to a paragraph dropped into the middle of Sedgwick, and knowing full well that your personal experience is leading you to draw something very different from it than what Sedgwick means to draw, and vaguely sensing that if you were a little smarter, or a little better socialized, or a full member of the club, you wouldn’t be drawn to so desperately misread one of the giants of queer theory. You find yourself remembering—as I did last night, when I stared at the pages of this chapter and panicked—that even queer reading can keep fellow queer readers out; can set up new systems of exclusion and oppression even as it dismantles and deconstructs others. When I turn the language of theory back upon itself it becomes harder to hope that I can be “brainier than everybody else” while still being “miserable”: the language of theory remains unchangingly determined to tell me, “ur doin it rong.”

From K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, in which he’s explaining the character of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, etc.:

Plato’s Socrates believes that particular persons, animals, things, artefacts, acts and events which constitute our sensory experience, all possessing definable duration and location in space and all subject to change and decay, give us faint and fitful glimpses of a different world, a world of everlasting, unchanging entities, ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’, accessible to systematic reasoning…. The ultimate cause, towards which all rational explanation progresses, is Good itself; qua form, it is the goal of reason, and qua Good it is the goal of desire. Hence to perceive it is to love and desire it, and error blinds us to it; reason and desire converge upon Good, and in its vicinity fuse together.

This passage leaps off the page for me in a way in which, as good as Dover is, no other passage in this book does, and I think it’s because in its prose I hear echoes of the last few sentences of Pater’s Renaissance:

Well, we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: les hommes sont tous comdamnés a morte avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the ‘enthusiasm of humanity.’ Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

It’s not just the content of the Platonic Socrates’ views: it’s striking, I think, that Dover chose to encapsulate those views through language like “faint and fitful glimpses of a different world,” not so very different perhaps from Pater’s “pulsations,” which yield not necessarily the Good, but at least a better thing: “fruit,” “wisdom.” I’m ignorant of what there is to connect the two other than the obvious Greek-loving (in several senses) cultural context of Pater’s milieu, but I wonder if Dover was thinking along those lines at all when he wrote that paragraph. I wonder, after all, if I’m completely misguided to leap to Pater. What do you think?