"Scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men"
W.B.Yeats
"Bizarre, fantastic, feverish, eccentric, extravagant, morbid and perverse"
Arthur Symons
A contemporary critic sarcastically supposed his work must be "an elaborate and screaming parody of . . . the youthful decadent, . . the affected preciousness, the sham mysticism and sham aestheticism, the ridiculous medley of Neo-Paganism and Neo-Catholicism . . ."
In 1885 Stenbock inherited his ancestral domain and seems to have spent most of the next two years there, a period splendidly evoked by Mary Smith, wife of an old college friend when the couple visited him one Christmas: "Count Stenbock has his own rooms furnished in the most aesthetic style, with a lamp burning before a Buddha & an Eros and his other gods disposed in various places. When he was at Oxford, he said, he & one of his friends (who is now insane) used to try a fresh religion every week. . . He has also a number of pet snakes & lizards & toads & salamanders in his room, and - worse still - a collection of Simeon Solomon's morbid & pessimistic pictures of the Rossetti school. In the garden . . . he has a 'zoo' containing three reindeer, a bear and a fox. . . "
On his travels he had been escorted, and with him went a dog, a monkey and a life-size doll. He was convinced that the doll was his son and referred to it as 'le Petit comte'. Every day it had to be brought to him, and when it was not there he would ask for news of its health. The Stenbocks believed that a dishonest monk - or perhaps a Jesuit - had extorted large sums of money from him under the pretence of paying for the education of 'le Petit Comte'.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario