the sea in a storm, when the surface is agitated by the most
dreadfull tempest, and the billows run mountains high, the bottom
is still found undisturbed and peaceable.^49Whether this exceptionally interesting portrait of Benjamin Constant was
composed, as C.P.Courtney suggests,
50
towards the end of 1784 or later,
we can assume that it summarizes the knowledge gained by John Wilde
between 1783 and 1785. And that knowledge is of a man who is never the
same two days running, who is in perpetual contradiction with himself,
and yet in whom there is a still centre that is unchanging and that cannot
be reached or touched by all the agitation on the periphery.
51
It is odd that
Wilde, who is so acute about Constant’s desperate desire to be different
(which so often amounted to attention-seeking and exhibitionism), makes
no connection between Constant’s love of freedom in general and his
anxiety about being free as an individual. Perhaps he was too near to
Constant to be able to focus on this aspect of their relationship. ‘Feeling
the charms of friendship, yet reasoning against his feelings’: this arresting
phrase, taken together with ‘your friend, your foe...he supports you to
day, pulls you down to morrow’ suggests that Wilde was offering a closer
friendship than Constant was able or willing to commit himself to. ‘Yet
reasoning against his feelings’: what lies behind this? That Constant felt
the need of a more intimate bond with Wilde, perhaps, but drew back from
it? Certainly literary history offers examples of male friendships that were
close and yet, according to those involved, were not homosexual: the
obvious examples that spring to mind are Montaigne and Etienne de la
Boétie and, more recently, D.H.Lawrence and John Middleton Murry.
However, an eminent constantien has suggested^52 that Constant may have
had homosexual relationships, which is an inference presumably drawn
from the enigmatic interlinear addendum in Ma Vie under 1785–6
‘Amours grecs de Berne’, ‘Greek love in Berne’.
53
This is therefore,
perhaps, an appropriate moment to pause and consider the problem.
The case of Constant’s later friendship with Isabelle de Charrière seems to offer
something of a parallel with his friendship with John Wilde in that there is absolutely no
written evidence—letters or diary entries—to show that their relationship was ever a
sexual one. We are therefore thrown back on probabilities, and on the personalities of
those involved. There are, as is well known, two extreme positions it is possible to adopt
on the question of friendships between people of the same gender, male in this case: that
all have a sexual basis, or that none do. Both schools of thought seem, in the late-
twentieth century, somewhat crude and unlikely to account for the totality of human
behaviour in all its complexity. This is not, of course, to say that there cannot be
friendships that are entirely sexual or entirely non-sexual in origin. But if we adopt, for
Benjamin constant 56Benjamin constant 56