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Memoirs
Selection copyright © 1997 by Rictor Norton. All
rights reserved. This edition may not be reproduced or
redistributed to third parties without permission of the
editor.
[Symonds began his autobiography in 1889 and spent much time on
it for the next two years. On his death in 1893 it was given into
the care of his friend and executor Horatio Forbes Brown, with
instructions "to save it from destruction after my death,
and yet to reserve its publication for a period when it will not
be injurious to my family". Upon Brown's death in 1926, the
manuscript was given by Edmund Gosse to the London Library, on
whose committee he served, with instructions that they could not
be published for fifty years. The green cloth box containing them
was sealed until 1949, when Symonds's daughter Dame Katharine
Furse was allowed to read them; in 1954 the Library granted
easier access to scholars, while not allowing direct quotation;
in 1976 the embargo was lifted, in accordance with the original
injunction; and in 1984 they were finally published, in an
edition of about four-fifths of the full text, by Phyllis
Grosskurth. She omitted many poems upon youths such as Alfred
Brooke, early descriptive writings, transcripts of letters sent
to him, letters sent by him to his wife, testimonials upon
several of his academic friends, and much material about
Christian Buol. The excerpt on "Passing Strangers" is
from a letter to Catherine dated 3 June 1867, which was copied
into the manuscript. The remaining excerpts illustrate the major
phases of Symonds's growing self-realization and self-acceptance
as a homosexual.]
Harrow
One thing at Harrow very soon arrested my attention. It was the
moral state of the school. Every boy of good looks had a female
name, and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some
bigger fellow's "bitch". Bitch was the word in common
usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover. The
talk in the dormitories and the studies was incredibly obscene.
Here and there one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual
masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together. There was
no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust
in these occurrences. They filled me with disgust and loathing.
My school-fellows realised what I had read in Swift about the
Yahoos.
I particularly disliked two boys: a clever Irish lad called
W. J. Currey and a brutal clown called Clayton. Of Clayton I need
speak no more. He was too stupid and perverse and clumsy to
deserve description. Currey, on the other hand, was a better
scholar than myself, and possessed a variety of facile talents.
He spent much of his time on music and drawing, played games, and
loafed. Yet though he never seemed to work, he always took a good
place in his form. Unfortunately he was dirty in his dress and
person, filthy in his talk, and shamelessly priapic in his
conduct. We went through the school side by side. At the end of
our time together, I discovered really fine intellectual and
emotional qualities beneath his Satyric exterior. I imagine that
he may have permanently injured his constitution by his youthful
vagaries; for Currey's career in afterlife has not been as
distinguished as might have been expected.
A third boy, named Barber, annoyed and amused me. He was
like a good-nature longimanous ape, gibbering on his perch and
playing ostentatiously with a prodigiously developed phallus. A
fourth, Cookson, was a red-faced strumpet, with flabby cheeks and
sensual mouth — the notissima fossa [the most
infamous trench] of our house.
I have seen nothing more repulsive in my life — except
once at the Alhambra in Leicester Square, when I saw a jealous
man tear the earrings out of the ruptured lobes of a prostitute's
ears, and all the men in the saloon rose raging at him for his
brutality I have seen nothing more disgusting in my life, I
say, than the inhuman manner in which this poor creature Cookson
came afterwards to be treated by his former lovers. What he did
to deserve his punishment I never heard, not being initiated into
their mysteries. But, after a certain period — after they
had rolled upon the floor with him and had exposed his person in
public they took to trampling on him. Whenever he appeared in
that mean dining room, about those dirty passages, upon the
sordid court through which we entered from the road into our
barracks, Currey and Clayton and Barber and the rest of the brood
squirted saliva and what they called gobs upon their bitch,
cuffed and kicked him at their mercy, shied books at him, and
drove him with obscene curses whimpering to his den.
These four were all at Rendall's. A fifth fellow, E. Dering,
in Steele's house, both fascinated and repelled me. He resembled
a handsome Greek brigand in face. I remember noticing a likeness
to his features in the photograph of one of the decapitated
Marathon cut-throats. His body was powerful, muscular, lissom as
a tiger. The fierce and cruel lust of this magnificent animal
excited my imagination. Dering used to come into our house after
a plum fair-haired boy, called Ainslie, whom we dubbed Bum
Bathsheba because of his opulent posterior parts.
So much had to be said in general about the moral atmosphere
into which I was plunged at the age of thirteen. It will appear
in the sequel that Harrow exercised a powerful influence over
certain phases of my development. But I must not omit to mention
that, while I was at school, I remained free in fact and act from
this contamination. During my first half year the
"beasts", as they were playfully called, tried to
seduce me. But it was soon decided that I was "not
game".
* * *
The progress of a lad of seventeen has to be reckoned not
by years but by months.
We were reading Plato's Apology
in the sixth form. I bought Cary's crib, and took it with me to
London on an exeat in March. My hostess, a Mrs Bain, who
lived in Regent's Park, treated me to a comedy one evening at the
Haymarket. I forget what the play was — except that there
was a funny character in it, who set the house in a roar by his
enunciation of this sentence: "Smythers please, not
Smithers; Smithers is a different party, and moves in quite a
different sphere". When we returned from the play, I went
to bed and began to read my Cary's Plato. It so happened that I
stumbled on this Phaedrus. I read on
and on, till I reached the end. Then I began the
Symposium; and the sun was shining on
the shrubs outside the ground-floor room in which I slept, before
I shut the book up.
I have related these insignificant details because that
night was one of the most important nights of my life; and when
anything of great gravity has happened to me, I have always
retained a firm recollection of trifling facts which formed its
context.
Here in the Phaedrus and the
Symposium — in the myth of the
Soul and the speeches of Pausanias Agathon and Diotima — I
discovered the true liber amoris at last, the revelation
I had been waiting for, the consecration of a long-cherished
idealism. It was just as though the voice of my own soul spoke
to me through Plato, as though in some antenatal experience I had
lived the life of a philosophical Greek lover.
Harrow vanished into unreality. I had touched solid ground.
I had obtained the sanction of the love which had been ruling me
from childhood. Here was the poetry, the philosophy of my own
enthusiasm for male beauty, expressed with all the magic of
unrivalled style. And, what was more, I now became aware that the
Greek race — the actual historical Greeks of antiquity
— treated this love seriously, invested it with moral charm,
endowed it with sublimity.
For the first time I saw the possibility of resolving in a
practical harmony the discords of my instincts. I perceived that
masculine love had its virtue as well as its vice, and stood in
this respect upon the same ground as normal sexual appetite. I
understood, or thought I understood, the relation which those
dreams of childhood and the brutalities of vulgar lust at Harrow
bore to my higher aspiration after noble passion. . . .
Willie Dyer
When my father learned the truth about my romantic affection for
Willie Dyer, he thought it right to recommend a cautious
withdrawal from the intimacy. The arguments he used were
conclusive. Considering the very delicate position in which I
stood with regard to Vaughan, the possibility of Vaughan's story
becoming public, and the doubtful nature of my own emotion,
prudence pointed to a gradual diminution or cooling-off of
friendship.
At that important moment of my life, I could not understand,
and I've never been able to understand, why people belonging to
different strata in society — if they love each other —
could not enter into comradeship. But my father made me see that,
under the existing conditions of English manners, an ardent
friendship between me (a young man, gently born, bred at Harrow,
advancing to the highest academical honours at Balliol) and
Willie (a Bristol chorister, the son of a Dissenting tailor),
would injure not my prospects only but his reputation. The
instincts of my blood, the conventionalities under which I had
been trained, the sympathy I felt for sisters and for brothers-
in-law, the ties which bound me to the class of gentlefolk,
brought me to look upon myself as an aberrant being, who was
being tutored by my father's higher sense of what is right in
conduct. Furthermore, I recognised that in my own affection for
Willie there was something similar to the passion which had
ruined Vaughan. I foresaw the possibility, if I persisted in my
love for him, of being brought into open rupture with my family,
and would involve my friend thereby in what would hamper his
career by casting the stigma of illicit passion on our
intercourse.
Under this pressure of arguments from without, of sense of
weakness within, and of conventional traditions which had made
me what I was, I yielded. I gave up Willie Dyer as my avowed
heart's friend and comrade. I submitted to the desirability of
not acknowledging the boy I loved in public. But I was not strong
enough to break the bonds which linked us or to extirpate the
living love I felt for him. I carried on our intimacy in
clandestine ways and fed my temperament on sweet emotion in
secret. This deceit, and the encouragement of what I then
recognised as an immoral impulse, brought me cruel wrong.
Here I feel inclined to lay my pen down in weariness. Why
should I go on to tell the story of my life? The back of my life
was broken when I yielded to convention, and became untrue in
soul to Willie.
But what is human life other than successive states of
untruth and conforming to custom? We are, all of us, composite
beings, made up, heaven knows how, out of the compromises we have
effected between our impulses and instincts and the social laws
which gird us round.
Had Willie been a boy of my own rank, our friendship need
not have been broken; or had English institutions favoured
equality like those I admire in Switzerland, he might have been
admitted to my father's home. As it was, I continued for some
years to keep up an awkward and uncomfortable intercourse with
him, corresponding by letters, meeting him in churches where he
played the organ and going with him now and then to concerts. I
paid the organist of Bristol Cathedral fifty guineas as premium
for Willie's musical education, and thus was responsible for
starting him in a career he wished to follow. . . .
Passing Strangers
A citizen of Coutances gave a large garden on the hill-slope to
his townsfolk. It is laid out in terraces and walks. Before we
found it out, we met two old women sitting on the steps of a
church & gazing across the house-roofs to the lands below. They
had a young man with them, slender & graceful, with a wistful
look in his grey eyes, as though they were sweeping the horizon
in search of something sweet and far away he had not yet
discovered. Charlotte asked them where the public garden was.
They rose at once to show us the way; & the young man sauntered
at their side, half bold, half shy, darting his love-laden soul
out in furtive glances from heavy silky eye lashes. A singularly
magnetic youth, with a force in him "eligible to burst
forth", & only too ready to do so. The simplicity of the two
old dames in their prim white caps & blue check gowns formed a
curious contrast to the passionate suppression of the boy, alert
for adventures and eager to taste of love's forbidden fruit. I
hummed to myself "Non so più coso son, cosa faccio"
["I no longer know what I am, what I am doing" —
Cherubino's aria in Le Nozze di
Figaro]. They grinned from ear to ear, going off
into ecstasies of admiration over the Cathedral & the beauties
of the garden which they promised us. He, their son & nephew
[François], as it turned out, kept appealing to me with his eyes,
& asking mutely whether I too did not want something more than
this. It was pleasant to see so much enjoyment of the simplest
things in the old women, such gaiety & good-humour, such kindly
artless manners. . . . And all the while his languid eloquent
eyes were asking me: "Do you want nothing? Is there nothing
to give, nothing to get?" In a sort of way I corresponded;
for these meetings with passing strangers, these magnetisms of
one indifferent person by another, are among the strangest things
in life. I remember, for example, today, as though it had been
yesterday, how several years ago a young man in a shirt &
trousers, stretched upon a parapet below the Ponte di Paradiso
at Venice, gazed into my eyes as I rowed past him, lifted his
head, then rose upon his elbows, & followed me till I was out of
sight with a fixed look which I shall remember if we meet in the
next world. . . . Charlotte delighted in the kindly, hale,
hearty, sweet-tempered, plain-featured, innocent, hospitable
elderly ladies. They liked the amusement of walking with two
English tourists. But the young man & I, we wanted to be
comrades, if only for a day or two in passing; he to hear of my
life, I of his; to embrace & exchange experiences; to leave a
mark upon each other's memory; to part at last as friends with
something added, each by each to each. And things are so arranged
that this may not be, perhaps ought not to be, though I cannot,
for the soul of me, see why they should not be. . . .
The "Wolf"
It was my primary object when I began these autobiographical
notes to describe as accurately and candidly as I was able a type
of character, which I do not at all believe to be exceptional,
but which for various intelligible reasons has never yet been
properly analyzed. I wanted to supply material for the ethical
psychologist and the student of mental pathology, by portraying
a man of no mean talents, of no abnormal depravity, whose life
has been perplexed from first to last by passion — natural,
instinctive, healthy in his own particular case — but morbid
and abominable from the point of view of the society in which he
lives — persistent passion for the male sex.
This was my primary object. It seemed to me, being a man of
letters, possessing the pen of a ready writer and the practised
impartiality of a critic accustomed to weigh evidence, that it
was my duty to put on record the facts and phases of this
aberrant inclination in myself — so that fellow-sufferers
from the like malady, men innocent as I have been, yet haunted
as I have been by a sense of guilt and dread of punishment, men
injured in their character and health by the debasing influences
of a furtive and lawless love, men deprived of the best pleasures
which reciprocated passion yields to mortals, men drive in upon
ungratified desires and degraded by humiliating outbursts of
ungovernable appetite, should feel that they are not alone, and
should discover at the same time how a career of some
distinction, of considerable energy and perseverance, may be
pursued by one who bends and sweats beneath a burden heavy enough
to drag him down to pariahdom. Nor this only. I hoped that the
unflinching revelation of my moral nature, connected with the
history of my intellectual development and the details of my
physical disorders, might render the scientific handling of
similar cases more enlightened than it is at present, and might
arouse some sympathy even in the breast of Themis for not ignoble
victims of a natural instinct reputed vicious in the modern age.
No one who shall have read these memoirs, and shall possess even
a remote conception of my literary labour, will be able to assert
that the author was a vulgar and depraved sensuality. He may be
revolted; he may turn with loathing from the spectacle. But he
must acknowledge that it possesses the dignity of tragic
suffering. . . .
In the spring of 1865 we were living in lodgings in Albion
Street, Hyde Park. I had been one evening to the Century Club,
which then met near St Martin le Grand in rooms, I think, of the
Alpine Club. Walking home before midnight, I took a little
passage which led from Trafalgar into Leicester Square, passing
some barracks. This passage has since then been suppressed. I was
in evening dress. At the entrance of the alley a young grenadier
came up and spoke to me. I was too innocent, strange as this may
seem, to guess what he meant. But I liked the man's looks, felt
drawn toward him, and did not refuse his company. So there I was,
the slight nervous man of fashion in my dress clothes, walking
side by side with a strapping fellow in scarlet uniform, strongly
attracted by his physical magnetism. From a few commonplace
remarks he broke abruptly into proposals, mentioned a house we
could go to, and made it quite plain for what purpose. I
quickened my pace, and hurrying through the passage broke away
from him with a passionate mixture of repulsion and fascination.
What he offered was not what I wanted at the moment, but the
thought of it stirred me deeply. The thrill of contact with the
man taught me something new about myself. I can well recall the
lingering regret, and the quick sense of deliverance from danger,
with which I saw him fall back, after following and pleading with
me for about a hundred yards. The longing left was partly a fresh
seeking after comradeship and partly an animal desire the like
of which I had not before experienced.
The memory of this incident abode with me, and often rose
to haunt my fancy. Yet it did not disturb my tranquillity during
the ensuing summer, which we spent at Clifton and Sutton Court.
Toward autumn we settled into our London house, 47 Norfolk
Square, Hyde Park. Here it happened that a second seemingly
fortuitous occurrence intensified the recrudescence of my
trouble. I went out for a solitary walk on one of those warm
moist unhealthy afternoons when the weather oppresses and yet
irritates our nervous sensibilities. Since the date of my
marriage I had ceased to be assailed by what I called "the
wolf" — that undefined craving coloured with a vague
but poignant hankering after males. I lulled myself with the
belief that it would not leap on me again to wreck my happiness
and disturb my studious habits. However, wandering that day for
exercise through the sordid streets between my home and Regent's
Park, I felt the burden of a ponderous malaise. To shake it off
was impossible. I did not recognise it as a symptom of the moral
malady from which I had resolutely striven to free myself. Was
I not protected by my troth-pledge to a noble woman, by my recent
entrance upon the natural career of married life? While returning
from this fateful constitutional, at a certain corner, which I
well remember, my eyes were caught by a rude graffito
scrawled with slate-pencil upon slate. It was of so concentrated,
so stimulative, so penetrative a character — so thoroughly
the voice of vice and passion in the proletariat — that it
pierced the very marrow of my soul. "Prick to prick, so
sweet"; with an emphatic diagram of phallic meeting, glued
together, gushing. I must have seen a score such
graffiti in my time. But they had not hitherto appealed
to me. Now the wolf leapt out: my malaise of the moment was
converted into a clairvoyant and tyrannical appetite for the
thing which I had rejected five months earlier in the alley by
the barracks. The vague and morbid craving of the previous years
defined itself as a precise hunger after sensual pleasure,
whereof I had not dreamed before save in repulsive visions of the
night.
. . . Inborn instincts, warped by my will and forced to take
a bias contrary to my peculiar nature, reasserted themselves with
violence. I did not recognise the phenomenon as a temptation. It
appeared to me, just what it was, the resurrection of a chronic
torment which had been some months in abeyance. Looking back upon
the incident now, I know that obscene graffito was the
sign and symbol of a paramount and permanent craving of my
physical and psychical nature. It connected my childish reveries
with the mixed passions and audacious comradeship of my maturity.
Not only my flesh, but my heart also, was involved in the emotion
which it stirred.
* * *
In February 1877, I think, I gave three lectures on
"Florence and the Medici" at the Royal Institution.
This took me of course to London; and, as it happened, an
acquaintance of old standing asked me one day to go with him to
a male brothel near the Regent's Park Barracks. I consented out
of curiosity. Moved by something stronger than curiosity, I made
an assignation with a brawny young soldier for an afternoon to
be passed in a private room at the same house. Naturally, I chose
a day on which I was not wanted at the Royal Institution. We came
together at the time appointed; the strapping young soldier with
his frank eyes and pleasant smile, and I, the victim of
sophisticated passions. For the first time in my experience I
shared a bed with one so different from myself, so ardently
desired by me, so supremely beautiful in my eyes, so attractive
to my senses. He was a very nice fellow, as it turned out:
comradely and natural, regarding the affair which had brought us
together in that place from a business-like and reasonable point
of view. For him at all events it involved nothing unusual,
nothing shameful; and his simple attitude, the not displeasing
vanity with which he viewed his own physical attractions, and the
genial sympathy with which he met the passion they aroused,
taught me something I had never before conceived about illicit
sexual relations. Instead of yielding to any brutal impulse, I
thoroughly enjoyed the close vicinity of that splendid naked
piece of manhood; then I made him clothe himself, sat and smoked
and talked with him, and felt, at the end of the whole
transaction, that some at least of the deepest moral problems
might be solved by fraternity. He made no exorbitant demands upon
my purse, and seemed to appreciate the way in which I had
accepted him — adding an agreeable intimation of his own
satisfaction at the delight I took in his delightfulness, and all
this was expressed by him in a wholly manly way, although I could
not help imagining what he might have undergone on previous
occasions within the walls of that chamber, and thinking how mean
and base any comradeship must be, built upon such foundations.
We parted the best of friends, exchanging addresses; and while
I was in London, I met him several times again, in public places,
without a thought of vice.
This experience exercised a powerful effect upon my life.
I learned from it — or I deluded myself into thinking I had
learned — that the physical appetite of one male for another
may be made the foundation of a solid friendship, when the man
drawn by passion exhibits a proper respect for the man who draws.
I also seemed to perceive that, within the sphere of the male
brothel, even in that lawless godless place, permanent human
relations — affections, reciprocal toleration, decencies of
conduct, asking and yielding, concession and abstention —
find their natural sphere: perhaps more than in the sexual
relations consecrated by middle-class matrimony. So at least the
manly and comradely attitude of the young soldier, who had sold
his body to a stranger, and with whom I as a stranger
fraternised, indicated. Was this a delusion? To this hour I do
not know, though I have extended the same experience, with
similar results, a hundredfold, never seeming to outrage any
purely natural sentiments, but only colliding with the sense of
law and the instincts of convention. I came away from the male
brothel with a strong conviction that, although it was a far more
decent place than I expected, this was not the proper
ground in which to plant the seeds of irresistible emotion. It
offered an initial difficulty — a false position —
which had to be overcome. It raised disgust, and I left it
shaking the dust and degradation of the locality off my feet.
With just the same feeling of disgust, not more, not less, have
I quitted female brothels. But there I never found the
satisfaction which the soldier gave me. From him I learned that
natural male beings in the world at large were capable of
corresponding to my appreciation of them. A dangerous lesson,
perhaps.
Meanwhile I was giving my lectures on Florence to the Royal
Institution. Very dull lectures they were, for my soul was not
in them; my soul throbbed for the soldier; and I had composed the
lectures specially for what I most abhor, an audience of
cultivated people. This is a paradoxical confession. I am nothing
if not cultivated; or, at least, the world only expects culture
from me. But, in my heart of hearts, I do not believe in culture
except as an adjunct to life. Life is more than literature, I
say. So I cannot, although I devote my time and energy to culture
(even as a carpenter makes doors, or a carver carves edelweiss
on walnut wood), regard it otherwise than in the light of
pastime, decoration, service. Passion, nerve and sinew, eating
and drinking, the stomach and the bowels, sex, action, even
money-getting — the coarsest forms of activity — come,
in my reckoning, before culture. The man, the man's the thing.
. . .
In the spring of 1881 I was staying for a few days at Venice. I
had rooms in the Casa Alberti on the Fondamenta Venier, S. Vio,
and it was late in the month of May.
One afternoon I chanced to be sitting with my friend Horatio
Brown in a little backyard to the wineshop of Fighetti at S.
Elisabetta on the Lido. Gondoliers patronise this place, because
Fighetti, a muscular giant, is a hero among them. He has won I
do not know how many flags in their regattas. While we were
drinking our wine Brown pointed out to me two men in white
gondolier uniform, with the enormously broad black hat which was
then fashionable. They were servants of a General de Horsey; and
one of them was strikingly handsome. The following description
of him, written a few days after our first meeting, represents
with fidelity the impression he made on my imagination.
He was tall and sinewy, but very slender — for these
Venetian gondoliers are rarely massive in their strength.
Each part of the man is equally developed by the exercise
of rowing; and their bodies are elastically supple, with
free sway from the hips and a Mercurial poise upon the
ankle. Angelo showed these qualities almost in
exaggeration. Moreover, he was rarely in repose, but moved
with a singular brusque grace. — Black broad-brimmed
hat thrown back upon his matted zazzera of dark
hair. — Great fiery grey eyes, gazing intensely, with
compulsive effluence of electricity — the wild glance
of a Triton. — Short blond moustache; dazzling teeth;
skin bronzed, but showing white and delicate through open
front and sleeves of lilac shirt. — The dashing
sparkle of this splendour, who looked to me as though the
sea waves and the sun had made him in some hour of secret
and unquiet rapture, was somehow emphasised by a curious
dint dividing his square chin — a cleft that
harmonised with smile on lips and steady fire in eyes.
— By the way, I do not know what effect it would have
upon a reader to compare eyes to opals. Yet Angelo's eyes,
as I met them, had the flame and vitreous intensity of
opals, as though the quintessential colour of Venetian
waters were vitalised in them and fed from inner founts of
passion. — This marvellous being had a rough hoarse
voice which, to develop the simile of a sea-god, might have
screamed in storm or whispered raucous messages from crests
of tossing waves. He fixed and fascinated me.
Angelo Fusato at that date was hardly twenty-four years of age.
He had just served his three years in the Genio, and returned to
Venice.
This love at first sight for Angelo Fusato was an affair not
merely of desire and instinct but also of imagination. He took
hold of me by a hundred subtle threads of feeling, in which the
powerful and radiant manhood of the splendid animal was
intertwined with sentiment for Venice, a keen delight in the
landscape of the lagoons, and something penetrative and pathetic
in the man.
How sharp this mixed fascination was at the moment when I
first saw Angelo, and how durable it afterwards beame through the
moral struggles of our earlier intimacy, will be understood by
anyone who reads the sonnets written about him in my published
volumes. [Here he lists nearly 60 poems from Vagabunduli Libellus and
Animi Figura.] . . . Many of these
sonnets were mutilated in order to adapt them to the female sex.
. . .
Eight years have elapsed since that first meeting at the
Lido. A steady friendship has grown up between the two men
brought by accident together under conditions so unpromising. But
before I speak of this — the happy product of a fine and
manly nature on his side and of fidelity and constant effort on
my own — I must revert to those May days in 1881.
The image of the marvellous being I had seen for those few
minutes on the Lido burned itself into my brain and kept me
waking all the next night. I did not even know his name; but I
knew where his master lived. In the morning I rose from my bed
unrefreshed, haunted by the vision which seemed to grow in
definiteness and to coruscate with phosphorescent fire. A trifle
which occurred that day made me feel that my fate could not be
resisted, and also allowed me to suspect that the man himself was
not unapproachable. Another night of storm and longing followed.
I kept wrestling with the anguish of unutterable things, in the
deep darkness of the valley of vain desire — soothing my
smarting sense of the impossible with idle pictures of what it
would be to share the life of this superb being in some lawful
and simple fashion.
In these waking dreams I was at one time a woman whom he
loved, at another a companion in his trade — always somebody
and something utterly different from myself; and as each
distracting fancy faded in the void of fact and desert of
reality, I writhed in the clutches of chimaera, thirsted before
the tempting phantasmagoria of Maya. My good sense rebelled, and
told me that I was morally a fool and legally a criminal. But the
love of the impossible rises victorious after each fall given it
by sober sense. Man must be a demigod of volition, a very
Hercules, to crush the life out of that Antaeus, lifting it aloft
from the soil of instinct and of appetite which eternally creates
it new in his primeval nature.
Next morning I went to seek out Angelo, learned his name,
and made an appointment with him for that evening on the Zattere.
We were to meet at nine by the Church of the Gesuati. True to
time he came, swinging along with military step, head erect and
eager, broad chest thrown out, the tall strong form and pliant
limbs in action like a creature of the young world's prime. All
day I had been wondering how it was that a man of this sort could
yield himself so lightly to the solicitation of a stranger. And
that is a puzzle which still remains unsolved. I had been told
that he was called il matto, or the madcap, by his
friends; and I gathered that he was both poor and extravagant.
But this did not appear sufficient to explain his recklessness
— the stooping to what seemed so vile an act. I am now
inclined, however, to imagine that the key to the riddle lay in
a few simple facts. He was careless by nature, poor by
circumstance, determined to have money, indifferent to how he got
it. Besides, I know from what he has since told me that the
gondoliers of Venice are so accustomed to these demands that they
think little of gratifying the caprice of ephemeral lovers —
within certain limits, accurately fixed according to a
conventional but rigid code of honour in such matters. There are
certain things to which a self-respecting man will not
condescend, and any attempt to overstep the line is met by firm
resistance.
Well: I took him back to Casa Alberti; and what followed
shall be told in the ensuing sonnet, which is strictly accurate
— for it was written with the first impression of the
meeting strong upon me.
-
I am not dreaming. He was surely here
- And sat beside me on this hard low bed;
For we had wine before us, and I said —
"Take gold: 'twill furnish forth some better
cheer".
- He was all clothed in white; a gondolier;
- White trousers, white straw hat upon his head,
A cream-white shirt loose-buttoned, a silk thread
Slung with a charm about his throat so clear.
- Yes, he was here. Our four hands, laughing, made
- Brief havoc of his belt, shirt, trousers, shoes:
Till, mother-naked, white as lilies, laid
- There on the counterpane, he bade me use
- Even as I willed his body. But Love forbade —
Love cried, "Less than Love's best thou shalt
refuse!"
Next morning, feeling that I could not stand the strain of
this attraction and repulsion — the intolerable desire and
the repudiation of mere fleshly satisfaction — I left Venice
for Monte Generoso. There, and afterwards at Davos through the
summer, I thought and wrote incessantly about Angelo. The series
of sonnets entitled "The Sea Calls", and a great many
of those indicated above were produced at this time.
In the autumn I returned alone to Venice having resolved to
establish this now firmly rooted passion upon some solid basis.
I lived in the Casa Barbier. Angelo was still in the service of
General de Horsey. But we often met at night in my rooms; and I
gradually strove to persuade him that I was no mere light-o-love,
but a man on whom he could rely — whose honour, though
rooted in dishonour, might be trusted. I gave him a gondola and
a good deal of money. He seemed to be greedy, and I was mortified
by noticing that he spent his cash in what I thought a foolish
way — on dress and trinkets and so forth. He told me
something about his history: how he had served three years in the
Genio at Venice, Ferrara and Verona. Released from the army, he
came home to find his mother dead in the madhouse at S. Clemente,
his elder brother Carlo dead of sorrow and a fever after three
weeks' illness, his father prostrated with grief and ruined, and
his only remaining brother Vittorio doing the work of a baker's
boy. The more I got to know the man, the more I liked him.
Yet there were almost insurmountable obstacles to be
overcome. These arose mainly from the false position in which we
found ourselves from the beginning. He not unnaturally classed
me with those other men to whose caprices he had sold his beauty.
He could not comprehend that I meant to be his friend, to serve
and help him in all reasonable ways according to my power. Seeing
me come and go on short flights, he felt convinced that one day
or other my will would change and I should abandon him. A just
instinct led him to calculate that our friendship, originating
in my illicit appetite and his compliance, could not be expected
to develop a sound and vigorous growth. The time must come, he
reasoned, when this sickly plant would die and be forgotten. And
then there was always between us the liaison of shame; for it is
not to be supposed that I confined myself to sitting opposite the
man and gazing into his fierce eyes of fiery opal. At the back
of his mind the predominant thought, I fancy, was to this effect:
"Had I not better get what I can out of the strange
Englishman, who talks so much about his intentions and his
friendship, but whose actual grasp upon my life is so
uncertain?" I really do not think that he was wrong. But it
made my task very difficult.
I discovered that he was living with a girl by whom he had
two boys. They were too poor to marry. I told him that it was his
duty to make her an honest woman, not being at that time fully
aware how frequent and how binding such connections are in
Venice. However, the pecuniary assistance I gave him enabled the
couple to set up house; and little by little I had the
satisfaction of perceiving that he was not only gaining
confidence in me but also beginning to love me as an honest well-
wisher.
I need not describe in detail the several stages by which
this liaison between myself and Angelo assumed its present form.
At last he entered my service as gondolier at fixed wages, with
a certain allowance of food and fuel. He took many journeys with
me, and visited me at Davos. We grew to understand each other and
to conceal nothing. Everything I learned about him made me forget
the suspicions which had clouded the beginning of our
acquaintance, and closed my eyes to the anomaly of a comradeship
which retained so much of passion on my part and of indulgence
on his. I found him manly in the truest sense, with the manliness
of a soldier and warm soft heart of an exceptionally kindly
nature — proud and sensitive, wayward as a child, ungrudging
in his service, willing and good-tempered, though somewhat
indolent at the same time and subject to explosions of passion.
He is truthful and sincere, frank in telling me what he thinks
wrong about my conduct, attentive to my wants, perfect in his
manners and behaviour — due allowance made for his madcap
temperament, hoarse voice and wild impulsive freedom.
I can now look back with satisfaction on this intimacy.
Though it began in folly and crime, according to the constitution
of society, it has benefited him and proved a source of comfort
and instruction to myself. Had it not been for my abnormal
desire, I could never have learned to know and appreciate a human
being so far removed from me in position, education, national
quality and physique. I long thought it hopeless to lift him into
something like prosperity — really because it took both of
us so long to gain confidence in the stability of our respective
intentions and to understand each other's character. At last, by
constant regard on my side to his interests, by loyalty and
growing affection on his side for me, the end has been attained.
His father and brother have profited; for the one now plies his
trade in greater comfort, and the other has a situation in the
P & O service, which I got for him, and which enables him to
marry. And all this good, good for both Angelo and myself, has
its taproot in what at first was nothing better than a
misdemeanour, punishable by the law and revolting to the majority
of human beings.
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