John Addington Symonds; A Biographical Study

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in itself which postponed and permanently warped his proper self-development. As we shall see, he fell out of the hands of his father only to fall into the hands of Jowett, with like results. Through all these years his fancy ran one course, undirected, uneducated, chaotic, helpless, while his outward life followed the usual rut: and all the powers that be restrained him, levelled him, coerced him, appealed to all that was dutiful in him, to produce one more English gentleman. Wanting in the sense of a distinct personal purpose which might have controlled his private activities, he merely retreated into a dim world of his own where he felt growing somehow a kind of defiant passion to become something, to be his own man, illustrious in some fashion; and he describes himself in a phrase whose aptness we shall come to see, as impenetrably reserved in .the depth of myself, rhetorically candid on the surface. That rhetorical candor, forced upon him thus early as the only means of externalizing himself in a social world so essentially unreal to him, became at last a permanent literary habit, which destroyed the value of hiswritings from the point of view of enduring art. Before Symonds was fourteen his outward life and his inward life had each defined itself so sharply, with such mutual antagonism, as to destroy forever the possibility of that final coalescence between purpose and result, between content and form, between thought and style, from which true literature, true art ensues. He was a ready writer, a clever penman, a charming personality?but he remained impenetrably reserved. There was a profound Symonds which never got itself on paper: and it may be the shame of art or the glory of life that Symonds was thus unable to attain artistic sincerity as distinguished from personal ...