The essential interest of the ‘Experiment in Biography’ by means of which Mr. A. J. A. Symons tells us’ what his ingenious patience has pieced together about Frederic William Rolfe, the ‘spoilt priest’ who has definitely taken his place in Victorian letters, depends on the fact—presented by Mr. Symons with a mass of accumulated evidence—that he was a congenital Invert. Once this has been realized the course of his wasted life is comprehensible. Without this clue we might well ask ourselves what all the fuss was about.

Born in Victorian London, and received into the Catholic Church at twenty—six years of age, Rolfe presents all the ear—marks of his kind. ‘Bright, attractive, a natural Catholic . . . interested in drawing, music, and the arts, not over given to sport,’ as Mr. Symons says, he might have sublimated his Inversion under the spur and curb of Catholic asceticism to become a useful priest. Yet ‘somehow’ he met ‘squalls’ at Oscott, ‘somehow’ he was expelled from the Scots College, ‘somehow’ he lapsed into vicissitudes at Christchurch and Aberdeen, ‘somehow’ he failed to convince either Franciscans or Jesuits, until ‘somehow’ he became the man of’ many queer friendships ‘who never made a friend, and finished up by purchasing the favours of venal youths in the back alleys of Venice. The ‘somehow’ is not difficult to deduce.