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There was nothing logical or scientific about his sensibility. It never
occurred to him, for example, that if his love was impossible he was
therefore chaste, a puritan. He was a dreamer, forever wandering in
Mediterranean byways. He would have found solace in Sartre's last will
and testament: "I, twenty-five volumes, eighteen thousand pages of
text, three hundred engravings, including a portrait of the author, I
sit in state through a hundred thirty pounds of paper."
Not ironically, there was a genuine warmth and sense of life be–
neath the facade, as is evident in Symonds' early letters. A fierce honesty
about his own fragmentation. "I am afraid of forming a permanent
double consciousness in my own mind," he wrote Dakyns (another dis–
enchanted soul) at 28, "of being related to this world of phantoms,
and moving meanwhile in the world of fact."
His double consciousness composed of outer pretense and inner
secret took hold of him nevertheless. He courted and married Catherine
North, who permitted with dignity his close friendships and who bore
him four daughters. Their marriage was forever a black disillusionment,
Symonds unable to consummate it on his wedding night. On the alleged
grounds of helping an impoverished Swiss family, he poured money
into their married son Christian Buol, with whom he lived in sin and
sodomy. All the time explaining his comradeship to Catherine and his
friends as part of his education as a citizen of the world. "You do not
feel the beauty of a nation till you have slept with one of its natives."
"Soddington," as Swinburne called him, was in some ways the
archetypal victim of the general malaise of his age. He was thoroughly
skeptical about religion and death. But his problems extended deeper.
Unrelenting fascination for his own sexual nature affected every area
of his life. His tastes varied, from choirboys and sixth-formers to British
grenadiers and Alpine farmers. Inwardly he knew of his doom and
sympathized with it; outwardly he was fettered. He could do nothing.
He was one of the "other" Victorians. At best he would become vin–
dictive towards female "Vrnings" like "Vernon Lee." The contradictions
of his life were never to be resolved and this he knew as clearly as he
knew that the Pope would not be excommunicated. In defeat, he poured
his energies into the writing of heavy tomes, aware that even this de–
flection would prove abortive.
A curious side of his soul went into his letters, primarily to his
loving, if somewhat sugary, sister Charlotte. This is a side not seen in
his literary works. He wrote her religiously every Sunday, offering her
few of the self-confessions he found in Cellini's autobiography, which
