Confessions of a Young Man  

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Confessions of a Young Man (1886) is a memoir by Irish novelist George Moore who spent about 15 years in his teens and 20s in Paris and later London as a struggling artist. The book is notable as being one of the first English writings which named important emerging French Impressionists; for its literary criticism; and depictions of bohemian life in Paris during the 1870s and 80s.

Summary

In writing style The Confessions of a Young Man is presented as a novel, with a hero named Dayne, but the reader assumes in essence it is an autobiography, a true "confession". Dayne (ie. Moore) went to Paris as a teenager, and almost becomes a full Parisian nearly forgetting the English language after 15 years. He sketches, with a frankness now jubilant, now cynical, the luscious "vie de Boheme" that Paris alone could offer the young man of health and wealth who loved art. Amid scenes splendid, squalid, or bizarre, move students, cabotins, painters, poets, pale enthusiasts starving for the sake of an idea, actresses, women of fashion, courtesans, clubmen, and spectators. Artistic endeavour and perfumed vice mingle in fraternity; everything is unusual, irregular, fantastic. Dayne emerges from the ordeal of this environment but little changed. For him the enticements of the flesh are not more powerful than those of art. One week he is beguiling the hours in some salon or alcove, the next he is incandescent with aspiration. So the years pass; and at last, having saturated himself with the French theories of literary and graphic art which are bound up with the names of Flaubert, Goncourts, Zola, Degas, and Manet, he one day learns with tragic certainty that he is not destined to be a painter, and he courageously admits that all this periodic, frenzied effort has been misdirected. Then we have interludes of philosophy and literary criticism; the philosophy perhaps not of much account; the criticism often original, epigrammatic, sometimes of an astounding penetration, and always literary. Later, Dayne is driven by adverse circumstances to London and to a lodging in the Strand, where the book ends. Dayne's ideas about art and his temperament can be seen in characteristic passages like the following: "For art was not for us then as it is now—a mere emotion, right or wrong only in proportion to its intensity; we believed then in the grammar of art, perspective, anatomy, and la jambe qui forte."

Significance

Confessions of a Young Man was widely read for its energy and youthful outrage at hypocritical Victorian morality. The Modern Library picked this book as one of its early re-prints in 1917. It is significant in part because Moore was one of the first to write about the emerging impressionist art scene in Paris. As Moore says in a later Preface: "The first eulogies written in England, I might also say in almost any language, of Manet, Degas, Whistler, Monet, Pissaro, are in this book of Confessions, and whoever reads will find himself unable to deny that time has vindicated them all splendidly." Finally, Moore wrote insightful literary criticism of major authors of the 19th century the general sentiment of which concurred with the following generation of Modernists in the early 20th century.

Full text

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

WORKS BY GEORGE MOORE

LEWIS SEYMOUR AND SOME WOMEN

A MUMMER'S WIFE.

A DRAMA IN MUSLIN.

SPRING DAYS.

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN.

ESTHER WATERS.

ESTHER WATERS (PLAY).

CELIBATES.

EVELYN INNES.

SISTER TERESA.

MODERN PAINTING.

IMPRESSIONS AND OPINIONS.

THE LAKE.

THE STRIKE AT ARLINGFORD. MEMOIRS OF MY DEAD LIFE. HAIL AND FAREWELL.

I II III

AVE. SALVE. VALE.

MUSLIN. THE BROOK KERITH.

56818

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

BY

GEORGE MOORE. 1886 EDITED AND ANNOTATED BY GEORGE MOORE, 1904

AND AGAIN IN 191 6

56818

LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN

LIBRARY

^

LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN

A JACQUES BLANCHE

L'AME de 1'ancieu Egyptian s'eveillait en moi quaud mourut ma jeunesse, et j'ai eu 1'id^e de conserver mon passe, son esprit et sa forme, dans Tart.

Alors trempant le pinceau dans ma memoire, j'ai peint ses joues pour qu'elles prissent 1'exacte ressemblance de la vie, et j'ai enveloppe le mort dans les plus fins linceuls. Rhameses le second n'a pas reu des soins plus pieux ! Que ce livre soit aussi durable que sa pyramide !

Votre nom, cher ami, je voudrais 1'inscrire ici comme epitaphe, car vous etes mon plus jeune et mon plus cher ami ; et il se trouve en vous tout ce qui est gracieux et subtil dans ces mornes anne'es qui s'e"gouttent dans le vase du vingtieme siecle.

G. M.

PREFACE

IF I say that the end of the Nineteenth Century cannot brag of a more original book than The Con- fessions of a Young Man, I shall be deemed boastful and arrogant, but if the reader does not lay the book aside, he will probably discover me to be a man who would speak truthfully on all occasions, even about his own writings, a subject which lends itself to the exposition of a great deal of hypocrisy and insin- cerity, vices peculiarly disagreeable to me, and which I would avoid in the preface as I have avoided them in the book. Therefore, I relate, that the adjectives that came up in my mind on looking through these Confessions were * original ' and c incomplete.' No one will object to my applying the word ' incomplete ' to my own book, but the word ' original,' how is that to be justified ? By a simple statement that the book owes its originality to the circumstances out of which it came rather than to any special talent in the writer. Gaiety, liveliness in plenty . . . talent ? I am not sure that the word ' talent ' is applicable to these Confessions.

At the time of writing them I knew nothing of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It is barely credible that I could have lived into early manhood without having

viii PREFACE

heard of him, but The Confessions of a Young Man testifies that I never read him; a page of Jean Jacques would have made the book I am prefacing an impossibility ; another book more complete but less original might have been written. I wrote without a model, Jean Jacques, too, wrote without a model, but he wrote at the end of his life, between sixty and sixty-five. His book is life seen in long mysterious perspectives, whereas mine is merely the evanescent haze by the edge of the wood, the enchantment of a May morning. Youth goes forth singing ; the song is often crude and superficial ; youth cannot be else than superficial ; but the book babbles spontaneously and truthfully, and this is why Pater liked it, and why it drew from him the letter that I print.

' BRASENOSE COLLEGE. ' March 4

' MY DEAR, AUDACIOUS MoORE ,

' Many thanks for the ' ' Confessions," which I have read with great interest, and admiration for your originality your delightful criticisms your Aristophanic joy, or at least enjoyment, in life your unfailing liveliness. Of course, there are many things in the book I don't agree with. But then, in the case of so satiric a book, I suppose one is hardly expected to agree or disagree. What I cannot doubt is the literary faculty displayed. "Thou com'st in such a questionable shape !" I feel inclined to say, on finishing your book ; " shape," morally I mean, not in reference to style.

' You speak of my own work very pleasantly ; but

PREFACE ix

my enjoyment has been independent of that. And still I wonder how much you may be losing, both for yourself and for your writings, by what, in spite of its gaiety and good-nature and genuine sense of the beauty of many things, I must still call a cynical, and therefore exclusive, way of looking at the world. You call it only "realistic." Still !

'With sincere wishes for the future success of your most entertaining pen,

' Very sincerely yours,

' WALTER PATER.'

A delightful letter, but Pater could not do else than write ^almost' delightfully. Delightful is his word, perhaps, more than any other. It reveals him, and I would continue the revelation with other letters if I had managed to preserve them. His invitations to dinner, had I kept them, would have enabled me to reveal him still more plainly, and in the light in which it pleases me to place him before the reader as one that held himself forbidden to put pen to paper without getting some of his art on to the paper though the subject matter was merely : ' Will you dine with me on Thursday?' We have lost a great artist in Pater, for he could do this without suspicion of that priggishness which begins as soon as the artist lays his mind to the consideration of means rather than of ends ; Pater always held the end in view ; and his rule of life never to separate himself wholly from his art came out of an instinct ; his art was to him what the nest is to the sitting bird; were he to remain away for long, he might find the nest disarrayed or himself might be changed.

x PREFACE

The sights and sounds of the outer world might have rendered his own original aim less desirable to raise literature to the condition of music. To do other things and not to have achieved this would have been, in his view, to have done nothing, and to do this, I repeat, he felt that he must never separate himself wholly from his art. He was, therefore, always at composition ; comma, semi-colon, colon, dash, note of exclamation and interrogation always before his eyes. But Pater was also the most courteous of men, and as he would not have us think that he was composing whilst in our midst, he trained his face to wear a formal impassive expression behind which he could pursue his rhythms undisturbed. Pater's mask was the subject of many a debate as we turned out of Earl's Terrace into the High Street, but I doubt if anybody ever avouched the true reason for Pater's reservations of himself. We noticed, however, that he did not care for his disciples to accost him when he was out walking ; a rapid sign of recognition was enough, and he hastened away composing his slowly moving rhythms. We guessed that he was composing, but the natural conclusion that his rule of life was never to separate himself wholly from his art escaped us. ... Now it all comes back to me. I can see Pater at Andre Raffalowich's dinner-table, two very full-blown roses on either side of him, composing always. I doubt if he ever ceased composing except when he was asleep.

From talk of Pater I drag myself with almost the same difficulty as I drag myself from talk of Manet, both having such deep roots in my mind, but perforce

PREFACE xi

I must abandon Pater now for the Confessions of a Young Man. The book is a sort of genesis ; the seed of everything I have written since will be found herein. A friend once said to me, ' you always had Esther Waters in your mind/ and when I asked him what he meant he said, ' well she is in the Confes- sions of a Young Man, and for some time his mean- ing eluded me ; then I understood that the servant girl, Emma, must have given rise to the story. It is also a book that may be described as a declaration of ideas and tastes, my love of the best things in modern literature and my love of the best things in modern painting, and my whilom weakness for subtle, passionate women. The one that writes a letter describing the sale of my furniture in the Rue de la Tour des Dames is an example. She, a ray of eroticism, falls across the pages but to disappear a moment afterwards, the book being more concerned with art than with the relaxations of the artist ; and I am pleased to find that my tastes are to-day what they were in the early eighties.

The first eulogies written in England, I might almost say in any language, of Manet, Degas, Whistler, Monet, Pissaro, are in this book of Confessions, and whosoever reads will find himself unable to deny that time has vindicated all of them splendidly.

To the present edition I have added some French poems, but the reader will not think because I have done this that I attach any literary importance to these trifles ; I know that any writing done in a foreign language is worthless, but the poems were written in or about the time of the Confessions, they belong to that period. The sonnet in which I

xii PREFACE

dedicate Martin Luther, a drama, to Swinburne, is remarkable for a mistake in French that Mallarme detected at once but which no one else has been able to discover, though it has been submitted to many poets. I have also added a third translation from Mallarm6, the original edition containing translations of two prose poems, but there are three, the third was omitted from laziness I suppose, or it may be it did not please me as much as the first two. It seems to me now singularly beautiful even in the transla- tion, and I think readers will probably thank me for having included it.

A third addition is some verses inspired by Rubens' picture of his second wife, Helen Fromont, and the fourth is a ballade in the manner of Master Fran9ois Villon, somewhat weak in versification and containing, I think, a fault in prosody the counting of ' louts ' as one syllable, it surely should have been counted as two. . . . This mistake in versification has been corrected on the proof, and the ballade is now free from false prosody unless it be deemed false prosody to neglect the hemistich in verses often syllables ; in verses of twelve (the real French line) the hemistich has been abolished as antiquated ever since Banville wrote the famous line, ' Elle Jilait pen- sivement la blanche laine,' a line that Richepin imitated, f Elle tirait nonchalamment les bas de sole.' It is, how- ever, for the subject rather than for the versification that I print this ballade of old time ; for I would tell how at the end of the seventies we who spent our evenings in the Nouvelle Athenes used to look to the brothel for our literary inspirations. Every age has its favourite subject. Byron and Shelley looked to

PREFACE xiii

incest for theirs, and the brothel that had been neglected by poets since Villon wrote his celebrated ballade La Grosse Mar got began to show aloft again, on the lower slopes, perhaps, but still it was on the slopes of Parnassus that Richepin wrote Les Chansons des Gueux ; Maupassant came later with his Maison Tellier. My old friend, Paul Alexis, con- tributed something, and my ballade is the last example of a literature about which professors of literature like to write, or rather to which they like to allude, never failing to add, ' now happily extinct.'

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG

ERRATA

Page 15, last line.)

Page 1 6, line 23. For 'Engin' read 'Enghien.'

Page 17, line 16. }

Pale It line W.} F r 'DurantV read 'Durand's. Page 53, line n. For 'Majeure ' read ' Majeur.' Page 57, line 9. For 'une ' read Ma.'

Page 65, line 2. For 'speciaux' read 'specieux.' Page 93, line 14. For ' releve' read ' relcve.' Page 130, line 25. For 'le' read 'la.' Page 130, line 29. For 'la* read 'le.' Page 152, line 31. For t a t read 'All /'

fervour of a reasoned conviction. Sometimes, it is true, there came moments of weariness, of despon- dency, but they were not enduring : a word spoken, a book read, or yielding to the attraction of environ- A

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG

MAN

MY soul, so far as I understand it, has very kindly taken colour and form from the many various modes of life that self-will and an impetuous temperament have forced me to indulge in. Therefore I may say that I am free from original qualities, defects, tastes, etc. What is mine I have acquired, or, to speak more exactly, chance bestowed, and still bestows, upon me. I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no im- press, but capable of receiving any ; of being moulded into all shapes. Nor am I exaggerating when I say I think that I might equally have been a Pharaoh, an ostler, a pimp, an archbishop, and that in the fulfil- ment of the duties of each a certain measure of success would have been mine. I have felt the goad of many impulses, I have hunted many a trail ; when one scent failed another was taken up, and pursued with the pertinacity of instinct, rather than the fervour of a reasoned conviction. Sometimes, it is true, there came moments of weariness, of despon- dency, but they were not enduring : a word spoken, a book read, or yielding to the attraction of environ- A

2 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

merit, I was soon off in another direction, forgetful of past failures. Intricate, indeed, was the labyrinth of my desires ; all lights were followed with the same ardour, all cries were eagerly responded to : they came from the right, they came from the left, from every side. But one cry was more persistent, and as the years passed I learned to follow it with increasing vigour, and my strayings grew fewer and the way wider.

I was eleven years old when I first heard and obeyed this cry, or, shall I say, echo-augury ?

Scene : A great family coach, drawn by two powerful country horses, lumbers along a narrow Irish road. The ever-recurrent signs long ranges of blue mountains, the streak of bog, the rotting cabin, the flock of plover rising from the desolate water. Inside the coach there are two children. They wear new jackets and neckties ; their faces are pale with sleep, and the rolling of the coach makes them feel a little sick. It is seven o'clock in the morning. Opposite the children are their parents, and they are talking of a novel the world is reading. Did Lady Audley murder her husband ? Lady Audley ! What a beautiful name ! and she, who is a slender, pale, fairy-like woman, killed her husband. Such thoughts flash through the boy's mind ; his imagination is stirred and quickened, and he begs for an explanation. The coach lumbers along, it arrives at its destination, and Lady Audley is forgotten in the delight of tearing down fruit trees and killing a cat.

But when we returned home I took the first opportunity of stealing the novel in question. I

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 3

read it eagerly, passionately, vehemently. I read its successor and its successor. I read until I came to a book called The Doctor s Wife a lady who loved Shelley and Byron. There was magic, there was revelation in the name, and Shelley became my soul's divinity. Why did I love Shelley ? Why not attracted to Byron ? Shelley ! That crystal name, and his poetry also crystalline. I must see it, I must know him. Escaping from the schoolroom, I ran- sacked the library, and at last my ardour was re- warded. The book a small pocket edition in red boards, no doubt long out of print opened at the ' Sensitive Plant. ' Was I disappointed ? I think I had expected to understand better ; but I had no difficulty in assuming that I was satisfied and de- lighted. And henceforth the little volume never left 'my pocket, and I read the dazzling stanzas by the shores of a pale green Irish lake, comprehending little, and loving a great deal. Byron, too, was often with me, and these poets were the ripening influence of years otherwise merely nervous and boisterous.

And my poets were taken to school, because it pleased me to read ' Queen Mab ' and ' Cain/ amid the priests and ignorance of a hateful Roman Catholic college. And there my poets saved me from in- tellectual savagery ; for I was incapable at that time of learning anything. What determined and in- corrigible idleness ! I used to gaze fondly on a book, holding my head between my hands, and allow my thoughts to wander far into dreams and thin imaginings. Neither Latin, nor Greek, nor French, nor History, nor English composition could I learn, unless, indeed, my curiosity or personal

4 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

interest was excited then I made rapid strides in that branch of knowledge to which my attention was directed. A mind hitherto dark seemed suddenly to grow clear, and it remained clear and bright as long as passion was in me ; but as soon as passion died the mind began to cloud, and it remained fixed in an almost immovable obtuseness till roused again by the goad of some new impulse.

I was a boy that no schoolmaster wants, and the natural end to so wayward a temperament as mine was expulsion. I was expelled when I was sixteen, for idleness and general worthlessness, and returned to a wild country home, where I found my father engaged in training racehorses. For a nature of such intense vitality as mine, an ambition, an aspira- tion of some sort was necessary ; and I now, as I have often done since, accepted the first ideal to hand. In this instance it was the stable. I was given a hunter, I rode to hounds every week, I rode gallops every morning, I read the racing calendar, stud-book, latest betting, and looked forward with enthusiasm to the day when I should be known as a successful steeplechase rider. To ride the winner of the Liverpool seemed to me a final achievement and glory ; and had not accident intervened, it is very possible that I might have succeeded in carrying off, if not the meditated honour, something scarcely

inferior, such as Alas ! I cannot now recall the

name of a race of the necessary value and import- ance. About this time my father was elected Member of Parliament ; our home was broken up, and we went to London. But an ideal set up on its pedestal is not easily displaced, and I persevered in

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 5

my love, despite the poor promises London life held out for its ultimate attainment ; and surreptitiously I continued to nourish it with small bets made in a small tobacconist's. Well do I remember that shop, the oily-faced, sandy-whiskered proprietor, his betting- book, the cheap cigars along the counter, the one- eyed nondescript who leaned his evening away against the counter, and was supposed to know someone

who knew Lord 's footman, and the great man

often spoken of, but rarely seen he who made ' a two-'undred pound book on the Derby ' ; and the constant coming and going of the cabmen ' Half an ounce of shag, sir.' I was then at a military tutor's in the Euston Road ; for, in answer to my father's question as to what occupation I intended to pursue, I had consented to enter the army. In my heart I knew that when it came to the point I should refuse the idea of military discipline was very repugnant, and the possibility of an anonymous death on a battle-field could not be accepted by so self-conscious a youth, by one so full of his own personality. I said Yes to my father, because the moral courage to say No was lacking, and I put my trust in the future, as well I might, for a fair prospect of idleness lay before me, and the chance of my passing any examination was, indeed, remote.

In London I made the acquaintance of a great blond man, who talke^ incessantly about beautiful women, and painted them sometimes larger than life, in somnolent attitudes, and luxurious tints. His studio was a welcome contrast to the spitting and betting of the tobacco shop. His pictures Dore-like improvisations, devoid of skill, and, indeed,

6 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

of artistic perception, save a certain sentiment for the grand and noble filled me with wonderment and awe. ' How jolly it would be to be a painter !' I once said, quite involuntarily. 'Why, would you like to be a painter ?' he asked abruptly. I laughed, not suspecting that I had the slightest gift, as indeed was the case, but the idea remained in my mind, and soon after I began to make sketches in the streets and theatres. My attempts were not very successful, but they encouraged me to tell my father that I would go to the military tutor no more, and he allowed me to enter the Kensington Museum as an Art student. There, of course, I learned nothing, and, from the point of view of art merely, I had much better have continued my sketches in the streets ; but the museum was a beautiful and benefi- cent influence, and one that applied marvellously well to the besetting danger of the moment ; for in the galleries I met young men who spoke of other things than betting and steeplechase riding, who, I remember, it was clear to me then, looked to a higher ideal than mine, breathed a purer atmosphere of thought than I. And then the sweet, white peace of antiquity ! The great, calm gaze that is not sadness nor joy, but something that we know not of which is lost to the world for ever.

' But if you want to be a painter you must go to France France is the only school of Art.' I must again call attention to the phenomenon of echo- augury, that is to say, words heard in an unlooked- for quarter, that, without any appeal to our reason, impel belief. France ! The word rang in my ears and gleamed in my eyes. France ! All my senses

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 7

sprang from sleep like a crew when the man on the look-out cries, ' Land ahead !' Instantly I knew that I should, that I must, go to France, that I would live there, that I would become as a Frenchman. I knew not when nor how, but I knew I should go to France. . . .

So my youth ran into manhood, finding its way from rock to rock like a rivulet, gathering strength at each leap. One day my father was suddenly called to Ireland. A few days after a telegram came, and my mother read that we were required at his bedside. We journeyed over land and sea ; and on a bleak country road, one winter's evening, a man approached us, and I heard him say that all was over, that my father was dead. I loved my father ; and yet my soul said, ' I am glad.' The thought came unbidden, undesired, and I turned aside, shocked at the sight it afforded of my soul.

O my father, I, who love and reverence nothing else, love and reverence thee ; thou art the one pure image in my mind, the one true affection that life has not broken or soiled ; I remember thy voice and thy kind, happy ways. All I have of worldly goods and native wit I received from thee and was it I who was glad ? No, it was not I ; I had no concern in the thought that then fell upon me unbidden and undesired ; my individual voice can give you but praise and loving words ; and the voice that said ' I am glad ' was not my voice, but that of the will to live which we inherit from elemental dust through countless generations. Terrible and imperative is the voice of the will to live : let him who is innocent cast the first stone.

i -i : ,,

8 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

Terrible is the day when each sees his soul naked . stripped of all veil ; that dear soul which he cannot change or discard, and which is so irreparably his.

My father's death freed me, and I sprang like a loosened bough up to the light. His death gave me power to create myself that is to say, to create a complete and absolute self out of the partial self which was all that the restraint of home had per- mitted ; this future self, this ideal George Moore, beckoned me, lured like a ghost ; and as I followed the funeral the question, Would I sacrifice this ghostly self, if by so doing I should bring my father back ? presented itself without intermission, and I shrank horrified at the answer which I could not crush out of mind.

Now my life was like a garden in the emotive torpor of spring ; now my life was like a flower conscious of the light. Money was placed in my hands, and I divined all it represented. Before me the crystal lake, the distant mountains, the swaying woods, said but one word, and that word was self; not the self that was then mine, but the self on whose creation I was enthusiastically determined. But I felt like a murderer when I turned to leave the place which I had so suddenly, and I could not but think unjustly, become possessed of. As I probe this poignant psychological moment, I find that, although I perfectly well realized that all pleasures were then in my reach women, elegant dress, theatres, and supper-rooms I hardly thought at all of them, but much more of certain drawings from the plaster cast. I would be an artist. More than ever I was determined to be an artist, and my

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 9

brain was made of this desire as I journeyed as fast as railway and steamboat could take me to London. No further trammels, no further need of being a soldier, of being anything but eighteen, with life and France before me ! I would feel the pulse of life at home before I felt it abroad, and a studio rose up in my imagination tapestries, models, and preparations for France.

It is difficult to tell the whole truth, and to avoid conveying a false impression ; and I fain would show my soul in these pages, like a face in a pool of clear water. Looked at from one side my studio was in truth no more than an amusement, a means of effectually throwing over all restraint; but I did not view it from this side. My studio was my adventure; a certain Botticelli in the National Gallery held me ; and when I look back and consider this past, I am forced to admit that I might have grown up in less fortunate circumstances, for even the studio, with its dissipations and they were many was not unserviceable ; it developed the natural man, who educates himself, who allows his mind to grow and ripen under the sun and wind of modern life, in contradistinction to the University man, who is fed upon the dust of ages, and after a formula which has been composed to suit the require- ments of the average human being.

Nor was my reading at this time so limited as might be expected from the foregoing. The study of Shelley's poetry had led me to read very nearly all the English lyric poets; Shelley's atheism had led me to read Kant, Spinoza, Godwin, Darwin, and Mill. So it will be understood that Shelley not only

10 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

gave me my first soul, but led all its first flights. But I do not think that if Shelley had been no more than a poet, notwithstanding my very genuine love of verse, he would have gained such influence in my youthful sympathies ; but Shelley dreamed in meta- physics very thin dreaming if you will ; but just such thin dreaming as I could follow. Was there or was there not a God? And for many years I could not dismiss as parcel of the world's folly this question, and sought a solution, inclining towards atheism, for it was natural in me to oppose the routine of daily thought. I think it was in my early teens, soon after my expulsion from Oscott for refusing to confess, that I resolved to tell my mother that I believed no longer in a God. She was leaning against the chimney-piece in the drawing-room ; but although a religious woman, my mother did not seem in the least frightened, she only said, ' I am very sorry, George, it is so/ and I was deeply shocked at her indifference.

Finding music and atheism in poetry, I cared little for novels. Scott seemed to me on a par with Burke's speeches ; that is to say, too impersonal for my very personal taste. Dickens I knew by heart, and Bleak House I thought his greatest achievement. Thackeray left no deep impression on my mind ; in no way did he hold my thoughts. He was not picturesque, like Dickens, and his social satire seemed very small beer to me eager for some adequate philosophy of life. Adequate ! a word of my youth when I hungered after great truths : Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Rise and Influence of Rationalism, The History of Civilization, were momentous events

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 11

in my life. But life was loved better than books, and very curiously my studies and my pleasures kept pace, stepping together like a pair of well-trained carriage horses : while waiting for my coach to take a party of tarts and mashers to the Derby, I would read a chapter of Kant, and put the book into my pocket in the hope of finding a few spare moments to devote to it on the race- course. I liked to spend on scent and toilette knick-knacks as much as would keep a poor man's family in affluence for ten months ; I liked the fashionable sunlight in the Park, the dusty cavalcades and to shock my friends by bowing to those to whom I should not bow. I cultivated with care the acquaintance of a neighbour who had taken the Globe Theatre for the purpose of producing Offenbach's operas. Bouquets, stalls, rings, delighted me ; and of all, the life of the theatre that life of raw gaslight, whitewashed walls, of doggerel verse, slangy polkas and waltzes interested me beyond legitimate measure, so curious and unreal did it seem. I lived at home, but dined daily at a fashionable restaurant : at half-past eight I was at the theatre. Nodding familiarly to the door-keeper, I passed up the long passage to the stage. Afterwards supper. Cremorne and the Argyle Rooms were my favourite haunts. My mother suffered, and expected ruin, for I took no trouble to conceal anything ; I boasted of dissipations. But there was no need to fear, for I was naturally endowed with a very clear sense of self-preservation ; I neither betted nor drank, nor contracted debts, nor a secret marriage ; from a worldly point of view, I was a model

12 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

young man indeed ; and when I returned home about four in the morning, I watched the pale moon setting, and, repeating some verses of Shelley, I thought how I should go to Paris when I was of age and study painting.

II

AT last the day came, and with several trunks and boxes full of clothes, books, and pictures, I started, accompanied by an Irish valet, for Paris and Art.

We all know the great grey and melancholy Gare du Nord at half-past six in the morning ; and the miserable carriages, and the tall, haggard city. Pale, sloppy, yellow houses; an oppressive absence of colour ; a peculiar bleakness in the streets. The mdnagere hurries down the asphalte to market ; a dreadful gar$on de caft, with a napkin tied round his throat, moves about some chairs, so decrepit and so solitary that it seems impossible to imagine a human being sitting there. Where are the Boule- vards? where are the Champs Elysees? I asked myself; and feeling bound to apologize for the appearance of the city, I explained to my valet that we were passing through some by-streets, and re- turned to the study of a French vocabulary. Never- theless, when the time came to formulate a demand for rooms, hot water, and a fire, I broke down, and the proprietress of the hotel, who spoke English, had to be sent for. My plans, so far as I had any, were to study painting in Cabanel's studio. A satyr breaking through some branches carrying a woman in his arms had inspired an endless admir-

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 13

ation, and his picture of Dante sitting on a bench under a wall reading to a frightened audience, increased my desire to identify myself with his vision ; to feel the thrill of the girl's shoulder, as no doubt he had when she shrank back into her lover's protection, frightened by the poet's relation of what he had seen in hell. But to go to Cabanel before I could speak French were useless, and at the end of three weeks my patience was exhausted ; and three weeks are a short time to master a sufficient number of French phrases to explain my mission.

The man that received me with unaffected courtesy was of medium height, with square and rather high shoulders, and his square-cut beard and a certain nobility of countenance, like that of a lion, are among my remembrances of the great painter who listened in March, 1873, with patience to my praise of The Florentine Poet. He gave attentive ear to my jargon, and discovering in it a very genuine admira- tion of his beautiful decoration for the Louvre hanging on the end wall of his studio, he looked at my draw- ings, and tried to make plain that he could not take me as a private pupil, having no studio except the one we stood in. It seemed to me that a distant corner would suit me very well, but feeling that I should be in the way of his models and his patrons, I was about to retire apologetically. He stopped me, however, and once more I applied myself to the task of under- standing the instruction he seemed bent upon giving : he was one of the professors of the Beaux Arts, and the best thing for me to do would be to make application at the Embassy ; no doubt my Ambassador would be able to obtain for me the right of entrance without

14 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

examination. ' He thinks that my drawings are not good enough to get me through/ I said to myself as I hastened away in a cab to tell my story to Lord Lyons, an elegant old gentleman, who promised to intercede on my behalf with Le Ministre des Beaux Arts. A few days later an official letter was handed to me, and the morning after I introduced myself to many turbulent fellows whose aspects and manners soon convinced me that I would not be able to endure the life of the Beaux Arts, and that the facilities the schools afforded were not those that I sought for.

The model sits only three times a week: the other days we worked from the plaster cast ; and to be there by seven o'clock in the morning re- quired so painful an effort of will, that I glanced in terror down the dim and grey perspective of early risings that awaited me ; then, demoralized by the lassitude of Sunday, I told my valet on Monday morning to leave the room, that I would return to the Beaux Arts no more. He tried to persuade me to rise, and on my refusal to do so, his orders being explicit, he snatched the bedclothes from me and ran away with them and locked them up in another room, leaving me naked and humiliated at my own weakness, for much hope had been centred in Cabanel's influence and example. To abandon the Beaux Arts was to abandon Cabanel, and day after day I walked up and down the Boulevards studying the photographs of the salon pictures, trying to find a painter to whom I might address myself with con- fidence. I had never forgotten my father showing me, one day when he was shaving, three photographs

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 15

from pictures. They were by an artist called Sevres. My father liked the slenderer figure, but I liked the corpulent the Venus standing at the corner of a wood, pouring wine into a goblet, while Cupid, from behind her satin-enveloped knees, drew his bow and shot the doves that flew from glistening poplar- trees. The beauty of this woman, and what her beauty must be in the life of the painter, had inspired many a reverie, and I had concluded this conclusion being of all others most sympathetic to me that she was his very beautiful mistress, that they lived in a picturesque happiness in the midst of a shady garden full of birds and tall flowers. She had haunted my imagination in white muslin with wide sleeves open to the elbow, scattering grain from a silver plate to the proud pigeons that strutted about her slippered feet and fluttered to her dove-like hand ; and these dreams of her had accompanied me in my rides over the plains of Mayo, and in London I conceived a project of becoming Sevres's pupil and being loved by her !

What coming and going, what inquiries, what difficulties, arose ! At last I was advised to go to the Exposition aux Champs Elysees and seek his ajddress in the catalogue ; and while the concierge copied out the address for me, I chased his tame magpie that hopped about one of the angles of the great building, for I was a childish boy of one-and- twenty who knew nothing, and to whom the world was astonishingly new. I have often thought that before my soul was given to me it had been plunged deep in Lethe, and as an almost virgin man I stood in front of Engin a suburb not far from Paris, the

16 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

pretty French country seeming to me like a fairy- book. There were tall green poplars, and a little lake reflected the foliage and the stems of sapling oak and pine, just as in the pictures. The driver pointed with his whip, and I saw a high garden wall shadowed with young trees, and a loose iron gate, and passing through the gate I walked up the gravelled path, looking around for the beautiful mistress who I felt should feed pigeons from a silver plate, asking myself if Monsieur Sevres would invite me to breakfast. A maid-servant opened the door. She showed me into the studio, and before I had time to make examination of the few sketches on the walls Monsieur Sevres came in, a tall, reedy- looking man, who did not wear the appearance ot genius like Cabanel. But as the object of my visit was his mistress as much as himself, I prolonged the conversation as far as my knowledge of the French language allowed me. His pictures were all in the Salon, he said, but he drew forth a few sketches, and told me, as Cabanel had done, that he had no room for a pupil in his house. Whereupon I proposed to him that I should take a house in Engin. ' Were there houses to let ?' He said there were many, and that if I took one he would have much pleasure in walking over and instructing me. But being by no means sure that Monsieur Sevres had a mistress, I avoided a direct answer, saying that 1 would write and let him know as soon as I had found a house ; and answering that he hoped that I would find one that suited me, he conducted me down the green garden. ' I've seen these trees before in your pictures/ I said, scanning every nook, hoping that I

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 17

should see her reading, and that she would raise her eyes as I passed.

It seems to me that I did catch sight of a white dress behind a trellis, but the dress that I saw or imagined may have been worn by his daughter or by his wife. However this may be, Sevres's mistress, if he had one, was not discovered by me that day nor any other day. I never saw him again. He had proven somewhat of a disappointment, and the woman, I reflected, who had sat for the pictures that had stirred my childish imaginations in Mayo may have been painted long ago. ' The woman is perhaps an old woman now,' I said to myself as the train entered Paris. 'But even so, I shall have to learn painting from somebody ;' and next day I returned to Engin with my taciturn valet, who showed no enthusiasm on the subject of Engin, and was at no pains to disguise from me the fact that he was but little disposed to settle in this French suburb.

We were both very much alone in Paris. In the evenings I allowed him to smoke his clay in my room, and in an astounding brogue he counselled me to return to my mother. But I would not listen, and one day on the Boulevards I was stricken with the art of Jules Lefebvre. True it is that I saw it was wanting in that tender grace which I am forced to admit even now, saturated though I now am with the aesthetics of different schools, is inherent in Cabanel's work ; but at the time I am writing of my nature was too young and mobile to resist the conventional attractiveness of nude figures, indolent attitudes, long hair, slender hips and hands, and I accepted Jules Lefebvre wholly and unconditionally.

18 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

He hesitated, however, when I asked to be taken as a private pupil ; but he wrote out the address of a studio where he gave instruction every Tuesday morning, and as no one seemed anxious to have me in his studio I fell to thinking that perhaps a public studio would suit me better, for in it I would meet all kinds and conditions of Frenchmen, and in their society I would have a better chance of learning the language and assimilating the spirit of France.

The studio to which I had been recommended was perched high up in the Passage des Panormas, and in it I found M. Julien, a typical meridional : dark eyes, crafty and watchful, a seductively mendacious manner, and a sensual mind. We made friends at once he consciously making use of me, I uncon- sciously making use of him. To him my forty francs, a month's subscription, were a godsend, nor were my invitations to dinner and to the theatre to be disdained, though to be sure it was a little tiresome to have to put up with a talkative person, whose knowledge of the French language had been acquired in three months ; but the dinners were good, and I was quaint. No doubt Julien reasoned so ; I did not reason at all, but I felt this crafty, clever man of the world was necessary to me. I had never met such a man before, and all my curiosity was awake. He spoke of art and literature, of the world and the flesh ; he told me of the books he had read, he narrated thrilling incidents in his own life ; and the moral reflections with which he sprinkled his con- versation I thought very striking. Like every young man of twenty, I was on the look-out for something to set up that would do duty for an ideal. The

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 19

world was to me, at this time, what a toy-shop had been fifteen years before : everything was spick and span, and every illusion was set out straight and smart in new paint and gilding. Julien threw open a door of Parisian life to me ; all open doors were welcome to me at that time, and his society served to prepare my mind for the friendship which awaited me, and which was destined to absorb some years of my life.

In the studio there were some eighteen or twenty young men, and among these there were some four or five from whom I could learn ; there were also some eight or nine young English girls. We sat round in a circle and drew from the model. And this reversal of all the world's opinions and prejudices was to me singularly delightful ; I loved the sense of unreality that the exceptional nature of our life in this studio conveyed. Besides, the women them- selves were young and interesting, and were, there- fore, one of the charms of the place, giving, as they did, that sense of sex which is so subtle a mental pleasure, and which is, in its outward aspect, so interesting to the eye the gowns, the hair lifted, showing the neck ; the earrings, the sleeves open at the elbow. Though all this was very dear to me, I did not fall in love : but he who escapes a woman's dominion generally comes under the sway of some friend who ever exerts a strange attractiveness, and fosters a sort of dependency that is not healthful or valid : and although I look back with undiminished delight on the friendship I contracted about this time a friendship which permeated and added to my life I am nevertheless forced to recognize that,

so CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

however suitable it may have been in my special case, in the majority of instances it would have proved but a shipwrecking reef, on which a young man's life would have gone to pieces. What saved me was the intensity of my passion for Art, and a moral revolt against any action that I thought could or would definitely compromise me in that direction. I was willing to stray a little from my path, but never further than a single step, which I could retrace when I pleased.

One day I raised my eyes, and saw a new-comer in the studio; and painting very well indeed, to my surprise, my experience not having led me to believe in the marriage of genius and well-cut clothes. His shoulders showed beautiful and broad ; and above them were a long neck, a tiny head, a narrow, thin face, and large eyes, full of intelligence and fascina- tion. Although he could not have been working more than an hour, he had already sketched in his figure, with all the surroundings screens, lamps, stoves, his facility interesting me deeply. I asked the young lady next me if she knew who he was. She could not tell me. At four o'clock there was a general exodus from the studio ; we adjourned to a neighbouring cafe to drink beer ; and as we stooped under an archway, the young man (Marshall was his name) spoke to me in English. Was my name Moore, and had we not exchanged a few words in So-and-So's studio So-and-So was the great blond man whose Dore-like improvisations had awakened aspiration in me.

The usual reflections on the chances of life were of course made, and then followed the inevitable

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 21

Will you dine with me to-night ?' Marshall thought the following day would suit him better, but I was very pressing. He offered to meet me at my hotel ; or would I come with him to his rooms ; he would show me some pictures some trifles he had brought up from the country? Nothing would please me better. We got into a cab. Then every moment revealed new qualities, new superiorities, in my friend. Tall, strong, handsome, beautifully dressed, and talking French like a native, he continued to invade and capture my imagination. He said it was only natural that he should speak French, for he was born in Brussels and had lived there all his life, but the accident of birth rather stimulated than calmed my pride in being seen in his company. He spoke of the fashionable restaurants and actresses ; he stopped at a hairdresser's to have his hair curled, and I was on the tiptoe of expectation to see his apartments.

His apartments were not so grand as I expected ; but when he explained that he had just spent ten thousand pounds in two years, and was now living on six or seven hundred francs a month, which his mother would allow him until he had painted and had sold a certain series of pictures, which he con- templated beginning at once, my admiration increased to wonder, and I examined with awe the great fire- place which had been constructed at his orders, and admired the iron pot which hung by a chain above an artificial bivouac fire. This detail will suggest the rest of the studio the Turkey carpet, the brass harem lamps, the Japanese screen, the pieces of drapery, the oak chairs covered with red Utrecht velvet, the oak wardrobe that had been picked up

22 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

somewhere a ridiculous bargain and the inevitable bed with spiral columns. There were vases filled with foreign grasses, and palms stood in the corners of the rooms. Marshall pulled out a few pictures ; but he paid very little heed to my compliments ; and sitting down at the piano, with a great deal of splashing and dashing about the keys, he rattled off a waltz.

' What waltz is that ?' I asked.

' Oh, nothing ; something I composed the other evening. I had a fit of the blues, and didn't go out. What do you think of it ?'

' I think it beautiful ; did you really compose that the other evening ?'

At this moment a knock was heard at the door, and Marshall introduced me to a beautiful English girl. With looks that see nothing, and words that mean nothing, an amorous woman receives the man she finds with her sweetheart. But it subsequently transpired that Alice had an appointment ; she was dining out ; but would, however, call in the morning and give him a sitting for the portrait he was painting of her.

I had hitherto worked very regularly at the studio, but Marshall's society was an attraction that could not be resisted. A long truancy began, and while re- gretting my own inconstancy, I deplored my friend's idleness, and besought him to return to work for the sake of his talent, which I believed in. But Alice's beauty held him ; a winning dissipation it was, and his delight in her was thorough, and his gay, dashing manner made me feel happy, and his experience opened to me new avenues for enjoyment and know- ledge of life.

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 23

On my arrival in Paris I had visited, in the com- pany of my taciturn valet, the Mabille and the Valentino, and had dined at the Maison d'Or by my- self ; but Marshall took me to strange students' cafes, where dinners were paid for in pictures ; to a mysterious place, where a table d'hote was held under a tent in a back garden, frequented by the lights of love of Montmartre, with whom we went to walk in the gardens of Bullier, the Chateau Rottge, or the Ely see Montmartre.

It often seemed to me that Marshall was not conscious of the fantastic greenness of the foliage under the gas-lights, or of the unreality of the life we were leading in the company of women, known only to us by their Christian names. He took it all for granted, whereas I lived it in my imagination, exalted by the clangour of the band, the thronging of the dancers, and of all by the returning home in open carriages through the close, warm night, the darkness chequered by an ostrich-feather hanging over the hood of the carriage in front of us, an edge of skirt passing beyond the foot-board. c She is in his arms,' I said. ' Does she love him ?' I asked, and watched the moon and compared it to a magic-lantern hanging out of the sky.

Now we seemed to live in fiacres and restaurants, and the afternoons were filled with febrile im- pressions. Marshall had a friend in this street, and another in that. It was only necessary for him to cry ' Stop ' to the coachman, and to run up two or three flights of stairs. . . .

' Madame , est-elle chez elle f

24 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

c Oui, Monsieur ; si Monsieur veut se donner la peint d'entrer.' And we were shown into a handsomely furnished apartment. A lady would enter hurriedly, and an animated discussion was begun. I did not know French sufficiently well to follow the conversa- tion, but I remember it always commenced mon cher ami, and was plentifully sprinkled with the phrase vous avez tort. The ladies themselves had only just returned from Constantinople or Japan, and they were generally involved in mysterious lawsuits, or were busily engaged in prosecuting claims for several millions of francs against different foreign Governments.

And just as I had watched the chorus girls and mummers, three years ago, at the Globe Theatre, now, excited by a nervous curiosity, I watched this world of Parisian adventurers and lights -o'- love. And this craving for observation of manners, this instinct for the rapid notation of gestures and words that epitomize a state of feeling, of attitudes that mirror forth the soul, declared itself a main passion ; and it grew and strengthened, to the detriment of the other Art still so dear to me. With the patience of a cat before a mouse-hole, I watched and listened, picking one characteristic phrase out of hours of vain chatter, interested and amused by an angry or loving glance. These men and women seemed to me like the midges that fret the surface of a shadowy stream, and though I laughed and danced, and made merry with them, I was not of them. But with Marshall it was different : they were my amusement, they were his necessary pleasure. And I knew of this dis- tinction that made twain our lives ; and I reflected

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 25

deeply upon it. Why could I not live without an ever-present and acute consciousness of life ? Why could I not love, forgetful of the ticking of the clock in the perfumed silence of the chamber ?

And so my friend became to me a study, a subject for dissection. The general attitude of his mind and its various turns, all the apparent contradictions, and how they could be explained, classified, and reduced to one primary law, were to me a constant source of thought. Our confidences knew no reserve. I say our confidences, because to obtain confidences it is often necessary to confide. All we saw, heard, read or felt was the subject of mutual confidences : the transitory emotion that a flush of colour and a bit of perspective awakens, the blue tints that the summer sunset lends to a white dress, or the eternal verities, death and love. But, although I tested every fibre of thought and analyzed every motive, I was very sincere in my friendship and very loyal in my admiration. Nor did my admiration wane when I discovered that Marshall was shallow in his apprecia- tions, superficial in his judgments, that his talents did not pierce below the surface ; il avail si grand air, there was fascination in his very bearing, in his large, soft, colourful eyes, and a go and dash in his dis- sipations that carried me away.

To anyone observing us at this time it would have seemed that I was but a hanger-on, and a feeble imitator of Marshall. I took him to my tailor's, and he advised me on the cut of my coats ; he showed me how to arrange my rooms, and I strove to copy his manner of speech and his general bearing ; and yet I think that I always suspected

26 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

that Marshall's brilliancy was owing to the super- ficiality of his talent, and that my nature was a deeper one than his, and would become deeper as the years went by. I think I was conscious that I was growing, and that Marshall, already arrived at maturity, could teach me. And I used him without shame or stint, as I have used all those with whom I have been brought into close contact. I cannot recall a case of man or woman who ever occupied any considerable part of my thoughts that did not contribute towards my moral or physical welfare. In other words, and in very colloquial language, I never had useless friends hanging about me. I am afraid the thought- less reader will at once judge me rapacious, egoistical, false, fawning, mendacious. Well, I may be all this and more, but not because all who have known me have rendered me eminent services. I can say that no one ever formed relationships in life with less design than myself. I never gave a thought to the advantage that might accrue from being on terms of friendship with this man and avoiding that one. 'Then how do you explain,' cries the angry reader, ' that you have never had a friend by whom you did not profit ? You must have had very few friends.' On the contrary, I have had many friends, and of all sorts and kinds men and women : and, I repeat, none took part in my life who did not contribute something towards my well- being. It must, of course, be understood that I make no distinction between mental and material help ; and in my case the one has at all times been adjuvant to the other. ' Pooh, pooh !' again exclaims the reader : ' I for one will not believe that chance

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 27

has sent across your way only the people who were required to assist you.' Chance ! Dear reader, is there such a thing as chance ? Do you believe in chance ? Do you attach any precise meaning to the word ? Do you employ it at haphazard, allowing it to mean what it may ? Chance ! What a field for psychical investigation is at once opened up ; how we may tear to shreds our past lives in search of what ? Of the Chance that made us. I think, reader, I can throw some light on the general ques- tion, by replying to your taunt : Chance, or the con- ditions of life under which we live, sent, of course, thousands of creatures across my way who were powerless to benefit me ; but then an instinct of which I knew nothing, of which I was not even con- scious, withdrew me from them, and I was attracted to others. Have you not seen a horse suddenly leave a corner of a field to seek pasturage further away ?

Never could I interest myself in a book if it were not the exact diet my mind required at the time, or in the very immediate future. The mind asked, received, and digested. So much was assimilated, so much expelled ; then, after a season, similar demands were made, the same processes were repeated out of sight, below consciousness, as is the case in a well-ordered stomach. Shelley, who fired my youth with passion, and purified and upbore it for so long, is now to me as nothing : not a dead or faded thing, but a thing out of which I personally have drawn all the sustenance I can draw from him ; and, therefore, it (that part which I did not absorb) concerns me no more. And the same with Gautier.

28 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

Mile, de Maupin, that desire not 'of the moth for the star/ but for such perfection of arm and thigh as leaves passion breathless and fain of tears, is now, if I take up the book and read, weary and ragged as a spider's web, that has hung the winter through in the dusty, forgotten corner of a forgotten room. My old rapture and my youth's delight I can regain only when I think of that part of Gautier which is now incarnate in me.

As I picked up books, so I picked up my friends. I read friends and books with the same passion, with the same avidity ; and as I discarded my books when I had assimilated as much of them as my system required, so I discarded my friends when they ceased to be of use to me. I employ the word 'use' in its fullest, not in its limited and twenty - shilling sense. This parallel of the intellect to the blind unconsciousness of the lower organs will strike some as a violation of man's best beliefs, and as saying very little for the particular intellect that can be so reduced. But I am not sure these people are right. I am inclined to think that as you ascend the scale of thought to the great minds, these unaccountable impulses, mysterious resolutions, sudden, but certain knowings, falling whence or how it is impossible to say, but falling somehow into the brain, instead of growing rarer, become more and more frequent ; indeed, I think that if the really great man were to confess to the working of his mind, we should see him constantly besieged by inspirations . . . inspirations ! Ah ! how human thought only turns in a circle, and how, when we think we are on the verge of a new thought, we slip into the enunciation of some time-worn truth. But

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 29

let general principles be waived ; for it will suffice for the interest of these pages if it be understood that brain instincts have always been, and still are, the initial and the determining powers of my being.

Ill

BUT the studio, to which I had returned and where I had been working for the last three or four months so diligently, became wearisome to me, for two reasons. It deprived me of many hours of Marshall's company. The second reason is the graver, because I was beginning to regard the delineation of a nymph, or youth bathing, as a very narrow channel to carry off the strong, full tide of a man's thought. Thoughts of love and death, and the hopelessness of life, were active within me, and I yearned to give direct expression to my pain. In youth all thoughts seem new, and we are ridiculously subjective ; our eyes are always turned inwards ; and the creatures whom I met in the ways and by-ways of Parisian life, whose gestures and attitudes I devoured with my eyes, and whose souls I hungered to know, awoke in me a tense, irresponsible curiosity, but that was all ; I despised, I hated them, thought them contemptible, and to select them as subjects of artistic treatment could not then, might never, have occurred to me had the suggestion to do so not come direct to me from the outside.

At the time of which I am writing I lived in an old-fashioned hotel on the Boulevard, which an enterprising Belgian had lately bought and was endeavouring to modernize ; an old-fashioned hotel, that still clung to its ancient character in the presence

30 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

of half a dozen old people, who, from habit, con- tinued to dine on certain well-specified days at the table (Thdte. Fifteen years have passed away, and these old people, no doubt, are among the gone ; but I can see them still sitting in that salle a manger, the buffets en meux ckcne, the opulent candelabra en style d'empire, the waiter lighting the gas in the pale Parisian evening. The tall, thin, hatchet - faced American has dined at this table d'hdte for the last thirty years, and he is talkative, vain, foolish, and authoritative. The clean, neatly dressed old gentle- man who sits by him, looking so much like a French gentleman, has spent a great part of his life in Spain. With that piece of news, and its subsequent develop- ments, our acquaintance with him begins and ends ; the eyes, the fan, the mantilla, how it began, how it was broken off, and how it began again. Opposite sits another French gentleman, with beard and bristly hair. He spent twenty years of his life in India, and he talks of his son who has been out there for the last ten, and who has just returned home. There is the Italian comtesse of sixty summers, who dresses like a girl of sixteen and smokes a cigar after dinner if there are not too many strangers in the room. A stranger she calls anyone whom she has not seen at least once before. The little fat, neckless man, with the great bald head, fringed below the ears with hair, is M. Duval. He is a dramatic author, the author of a hundred and sixty plays. He does not obtrude himself on your notice, but when you speak to him on literary matters he fixes a pair of tiny, sloe-like eyes on you, and talks affably of his collaborate urs.

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 31

1 was soon deeply interested in M. Duval, and one day ventured to invite him to come to the caft after dinner, where after paying for his coffee and liqueurs I offered him a choice cigar. He did not smoke ; I did, and we fell to talking of the drama. It was, of course, inevitable that I should find out in this or some subsequent conversation that he had not had a play produced for the last twenty years, but then the aureole of the hundred and sixty was about his poor bald head. I thought of the chances of life, he alluded to the war ; and so this unpleasantness was passed over, and we entered on more pleasing subjects of conversa- tion. He had written plays with everybody ; his list of collaborateurs was longer than any list of lady patronesses for an English county ball ; there was no literary kitchen in which he had not helped to dish up. I was at once amazed and delighted. Had M. Duval written his hundred and sixty plays in the seclusion of his own rooms, I should have been less surprised ; it was the mystery of the seances of collaboration, the trysts, the discussion, the illustrious company, that overwhelmed me in a rapture of wonder and respectful admiration. Then came the anecdotes. They were of all sorts. Here are a few specimens : He, Duval, had written a one-act piece with Dumas pere ; it had been refused at the Fran9ais, and then it had been about, here, there, and everywhere ; finally the Vari&tts had asked for some alterations, and cetait une affaire entendne. ' I made the alterations one afternoon, and wrote to Dumas, and what do you think by return of post I had a letter from him saying he could not consent

32 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

to the production of a one-act piece, signed by him, at the Vari6tts, because his son was then giving a five-act piece at the Gymnase.' Then came a string of indecent witticisms by Suzanne Lagier and Dejazet. They were as old as the world, but they were new to me, and I was amused and astonished. These bons-mots were followed by an account of how Gautier wrote his Sunday feuilleton, and how he and Balzac had once nearly come to blows. They had agreed to collaborate. Balzac was to contribute the scenario, Gautier the dialogue. One morning Balzac came with the scenario of the first act. 'Here it is, Gautier ! I suppose you can let me have it back finished by to-morrow afternoon ?' And the old gentleman would chirp along in this fashion till midnight. I would then accompany him to his rooms in the Quartier Montmartre rooms high up on the fifth floor where, between two pictures, supposed to be by Angelica Kauffmann, M. Duval had written unactable plays for the last twenty years, and where he would continue to write un- actable plays until God called him to a world, perhaps, of eternal cantatas, but where, by all accounts, I 'exposition de la pikce selon la formule de M. Scribe is still unknown.

How I used to enjoy these conversations ! I remember how I used to stand on the pavement after having bidden the old gentleman good-night, regretting I had not asked for some further explana- tion regarding le mouvement romantique, or la faqon de M. Scribe de manager la situation.

Why not write a comedy? For the plot take Marshall for hero and Alice for heroine, and

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 33

surround them with the old gentlemen who dine at the table d'hote, and the Italian countess who smokes cigars when there are not too many strangers present ; they will supply the needed satiric or comic element. After some stirring, these ingredients began to sim- mer into something resembling a plot. But to put it upon paper was the rub. ' Cain,' ' Manfred/ and ' The Cenci,' had been read as poems without think- ing how the dialogue looked upon paper ; besides, they were in blank verse, and prose dialogue would look quite different. As no instinctive want had urged me to read Shakespeare, he remained unread, and 1 did not turn to him now because of the excessive popularity of his name, but went instead to the Gym- nase, and gave an attentive hearing to the play, which, however, did not enable me to see the dialogue upon paper. A corner of the prompter's copy was visible from the stall I sat in ; a peep into it would reveal the secret of play- writing to me, but to seek out the prompter's acquaintance would mean a long delay, and being in a hurry, I betook myself to Galignani's library in quest of a book that would assist me, and after a month's study of Congreve, Wycherley, Van- borough, and Farquhar, Marshall's attempt to marry his mistress to one of his friends was related in three acts. The title given to the comedy was ( Worldliness.' My valet liked it, seeing in it the means whereby he might get back to London; and we returned to London, my valet thinking of the happy evenings that awaited him in the Sun Music Hall at Knights- bridge, myself of the rehearsals at the Olympic, the Globe, or the Gaiety. It did not matter which ; my comedy would suit any West End theatre.

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IV

IT is always difficult to get past a stage-door keeper, and it is disappointing to find in him a rival dramatist, which I did at the Olympic. A copyist of plays, mine was, as well as a writer, and while waiting I learnt among other things that it would be well to have my play copied and the stage directions in- scribed in red ink. These things he undertook to do for the play that I hoped Mr. Nevill would read ; and he performed the same good offices for another play which my friend, Dick Mansell, would have produced if he had not just taken the St. James's for the production of Offenbach's ' Bridge of Sighs.'

We had good times behind the scenes of the St. James's, and it was not till the backers refused to supply any more money and the theatre had to be closed that I was seized with a longing for Paris, and returned there hurriedly, hardly able to bear with the hours that separated me from Marshall.

<M. Marshall, is he at home ?' ' M. Marshall left here some months ago.' 'Do you know his address?' ' I'll ask my husband.' ' Do you know M. Marshall's address ?' ' Yes, he's gone to live in the Rue de Douai.' 'What number?' 'I think it is fifty-four.' ' Thanks.' ' Coachman, wake up ; drive me to the Rue de Douai.'

But Marshall was not to be found at the Rue de Douai; and he had left no address. There was nothing for it but to go to the studio ; I should be able to obtain news of him there perhaps find him. But when I pulled aside the curtain, the accustomed

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piece of slim nakedness did not greet my eyes, only the blue apron of an old woman enveloped in a cloud of dust. ' The gentlemen are not here to-day, the studio is closed, I am sweeping up/ 'Oh, and where is M. Julien ?' ' I cannot say, sir : perhaps at the cfl/V, or perhaps he is gone to the country.' This was not very encouraging, and now, my enthusiasm thoroughly damped, I strolled along le Passage, look- ing at the fans, the bangles and the litter of cheap trinkets that each window was filled with. On the left at the corner of the Boulevard was our cafl. As I came forward the waiter moved one of the tin tables, and then I saw the fat Proven9al. But just as if he had seen me yesterday he said, ' Tiens ! cest vous; une demi-tasse? out . . . gar gon, une demi-tasse.' Presently the conversation turned on Marshall ; they had not seen much of him lately. ' II parait qu'il est plus amoureux quejamais,' Julien replied sardonically. And I learnt from him that Alice Howard had become one of the celebrated lights of love in Paris, Cora Pearl's rival, and was now living in the Rue Duphot.

'Number 14-,' Julien cried after me; and a few minutes after I found Marshall in a vast apartment, cumbered with sofas, armchairs, mirrors, and great gilt cornices, wallowing in the finest of fine linen in a great Louis XV. bed, and there were cupids above him. ' Holloa ! what, you back again, George Moore ? we thought we weren't going to see you again.'

' It's nearly one o'clock ; get up. What's the news ?'

'To-day is the opening of the exhibition of the Impressionists. We'll breakfast round the corner, at

36 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

/ fa, Durant's, and go on there. I hear that Bedlam is nothing to it ; at one end of the room there is a canvas twenty feet square and in three tints : pale yellow for the sunlight, brown for the shadows, and all the rest is sky-blue. A lady walks, I'm told, in the foreground with a ring-tailed monkey, and the tail is said to be three yards long.'

We went to jeer a group of enthusiasts that willingly forfeit all delights of the world in the hope of realizing a new aestheticism ; we went insolent with patent leather shoes and bright kid gloves and armed with all the jargon of the school. < Cette jambe ne porte pas ' ; l la nature ne se fait pas comme $a ' ; 1 on dessine par les masses; combien de teles?' 'Sept et demi.' ' Si j' avals un morceau de craie je mettrais celle-la dans un bocal; c'est un Jbetus' ; in a word, all that the journals of culture are pleased to term an artistic education. We indulged in boisterous laughter, exaggerated in the hope of giving as much pain as possible, and deep down in our souls we knew that we were lying at least I did.

In the beginning of this century the tradition of French art the tradition of Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau had been completely lost; having produced genius, their art died. Ingres is the sublime flower of the classic art which succeeded the art of the palace and the boudoir : further than Ingres it was impossible to go, and his art died. Then the Turners and Constables came to France, and they begot Troy on, and Troy on begot Millet, Courbet, Corot, and Rousseau, and these in turn begot Degas, Pissarro, Madame Morizot and Guil- laumin. Degas is a pupil of Ingres, but he applies

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the marvellous acuteness of drawing he learned from his master to delineating the humblest aspects of modern life. Degas draws not by the masses, but by the character ; his subjects are shop-girls, ballet- girls, and washer- women, but the qualities that endow them with immortality are precisely those which eternalize the virgins and saints of Leonardo da Vinci in the minds of men. You see the fat, vulgar woman in the long cloak trying on a hat in front of the pier-glass. So marvellously well are the lines of her face observed and rendered that you can tell exactly what her position in life is ; you know what the furniture of her rooms is like ; you know what she would say to you if she were to speak. She is as typical of the nineteenth century as Fragoiiard's ladies are of the Court of Louis XV. To the right you see a picture of two shop-girls with bonnets in their hands. So accurately are the habitual move- ments of the heads and the hands observed that you at once realize the years of bonnet-showing and servile words that these women have lived through. We have seen Degas do this before it is a welcome repetition of a familiar note, but it is not until we turn to the set of nude figures that we find the great artist revealing any new phase of his talent. The first, in an attitude which suggests the kneeling Venus, washes her thighs in a tin bath. The second, a back view, full of the malformations of forty years, of children, of hard work, stands gripping her flanks with both hands. The naked woman has become impossible in modern art ; it required Degas' genius to infuse new life into the worn-out theme. Cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the middle ages ,

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and with cynicism Degas has rendered the nude again an artistic possibility. What Mr. Horsley or the British matron would say it is difficult to guess. Perhaps the hideousness depicted by M. Degas would frighten them more than the sensuality which they condemn in Sir Frederick Leighton. But, be this as it may, it is certain that the great, fat, short- legged creature, who in her humble and touching ugliness passes a chemise over her lumpy shoulders, is a triumph of art. Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible ; Velasquez knew this when he painted his dwarfs.

Pissarro exhibited a group of girls gathering apples in a garden sad greys and violets harmonized. The figures seem to move as in a dream : we are on the thither side of life, in a world of quiet colour and happy aspiration. Those apples will never fall from the branches, those baskets that the stooping girls are filling will never be filled : that garden is the garden of the peace that life has not for giving, but which the painter has set in an eternal dream of violet and grey.

Madame Morizot exhibited a series of delicate fancies. Here are two young girls, the sweet atmosphere folds them as with a veil, they are all summer, their dreams are limitless, their days are fading, and their ideas follow the flight of the' white butterflies through the standard roses. Take note, too, of the stand of fans : what delicious fancies are there willows, balconies, gardens, and terraces.

Then, contrasting with these distant tendernesses, there was the vigorous painting of Guillaumin.

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There life is rendered in violent and colourful brutality. The ladies fishing in the park, with the violet of the skies and the green of the trees descending upon them, is a chef d'ceuvre. Nature seems to be closing about them like a tomb ; and that hillside sunset flooding the skies with yellow and the earth with blue shadow is another piece of painting that will one day find a place in one of the public galleries ; and the same can be said of the portrait of the woman on a background of chintz flowers.

We could but utter coarse gibes and exclaim, ' What could have induced him to paint such things ? surely he must have seen that it was absurd. I wonder if the Impressionists are in earnest or if it is only une blague qu'on nous fait ?' Then we stood and screamed at Monet, that most exquisite painter of blonde light. We stood before the 'Turkeys/ and fell to wondering seriously if * it were serious work,' that chef d'ceuvre ! the high grass that the turkeys are gobbling is flooded with sunlight so swift and intense that for a moment the illusion is complete. ' Just look at the house ! why, the turkeys couldn't walk in at the door. The perspective is all wrong.' Then followed other remarks of an educational kind ; and when we came to those piercingly personal visions of railway-stations by the same painter those rapid sensations of steel and vapour our laughter knew no bounds. ' I say, Marshall, just look at this wheel ; he dipped his brush into cadmium yellow and whisked it round, that's all.' Nor had we any more understanding for Renoir's rich sensu- alities of tone ; nor did the mastery with which he

40 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

achieves an absence of shadow appeal to us. You see colour and light in his pictures as you do in nature, and the child's criticism of a portrait s Why is one side of the face black ?' is answered. There was a half-length nude figure of a girl. How the round fresh breasts palpitate in the light ! such a glorious glow of whiteness was attained never before. But we saw nothing except that the eyes were out of drawing.

For art was not for us then as it is now a mere emotion, right or wrong only in proportion to its intensity : we believed then in the grammar of art, perspective, anatomy, and la jambe qui porte ; and we found all this in Julien's studio.

A year passed ; a year of art and dissipation one part art, two parts dissipation. We mounted and descended at pleasure the rounds of society's ladder. One evening we would spend at Constant's, Rue de la Gaiete", in the company of thieves and house- breakers ; on the following evening we were dining with a duchess or a princess in the Champs Elysees. We prided ourselves vastly on our versatility in using with equal facility the language of the 'fence's' parlour, and that of the literary salon ; on being able to appear as much at home in one as in the other. Delighted at our prowess, we often whis- pered, ' The princess, I swear, would not believe her eyes if she saw us now ;' and then in terrible slang we shouted a benediction on some ' crib ' that was going to be broken into that evening. We thought there was something very thrilling in leaving the Rue de la Gaiete, returning home to dress, and pre- senting our spotless selves to the tlite, in being at

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home in all company, in being able to waltz perfectly in different styles, and to avoid making love to the wrong woman.

But the excitement of climbing up and down the social ladder did not stave off our craving for art : and about this time there came a very decisive event in our lives. Marshall's last and really grande passion had come to a violent termination, and monetary difficulties forced him to turn his thoughts to painting on china as a means of livelihood. And as this young man always sought extremes, he went to Belleville, donned a blouse, ate garlic with his food, and settled down to live there as a workman. I had been to see him, and had found him building a wall. And with sorrow I related his state that even- ing to Julien in the Cafe Veron. He said, after a pause :

' Since you profess so much friendship for him, why do you not do him a service that cannot be forgotten since the result will always continue ? Why don't you save him from the life you describe ? If you are not actually rich you are at least in easy circumstances, and can afford to give him a pension of three hundred francs a month. I will give him the use of my studio, which means, as you know, models and teaching ; Marshall has plenty of talent, all he wants is a year's education : in a year or a year-and-a-half, certainly at the end of two years, he will begin to make money.'

It is rather a shock to one who is at all concerned with his own genius to be asked to act as foster- mother to another's. Then three hundred francs meant a great deal, plainly it meant deprivation of

42 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

those superfluities which are so intensely necessary to the delicate and refined. Julien watched me. This large crafty Southerner knew what was passing in me; he knew I was realizing all the manifold inconveniences the duty of looking after Marshall's wants for two years, and to make the pill easier he said :

' If three hundred francs a month are too heavy for your purse, you might take an apartment and ask Marshall to come and live with you. You told me the other day you were tired of hotel life. It would be an advantage to you to live with him. You want to do something yourself; and the fact of his being obliged to attend the studio (for I should advise you to have a strict agreement with him re- garding the work he is to do) would be an extra inducement to you to work hard/

I always decide at once, reflection does not help me, and a moment after I said, ' Very well, Julien, I will.'

And next day I went with the news to Belleville. Marshall protested he had no real talent. I protested he had, and amid our different protests an agree- ment was drawn up and signed. He was to work in the studio eight hours a day ; he was to draw until such time as M. Lefebvre set him to paint ; and in proof of his industry he was to bring me at the end of each week a study from life and a composition, the subject of which the master gave at the beginning of each week ; in return I was to take an apartment near the studio, give him an abode, food, blanckissage. As if to convince himself of his earnestness, he began to manifest prodigious energy, telling me

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three days after that he had found an apartment in Le Passage des Panoramas which would suit us perfectly. The news was not altogether pleasant, but the plunge had been taken. I paid my hotel bill, and sent my taciturn valet to happy evenings in the Sun Music Hall.

It was disagreeable to have a window opening not to the sky, but to an unclean prospect of glass roofing ; and it was not agreeable to get up at seven in the morning ; and ten hours of work daily are trying to the resolution even of the best intentioned. But we had sworn to forgo all pleasures for the sake of art table d'hotes in the Rue Maubeuge, French and foreign duchesses in the Champs Elysees, thieves in the Rue de la Gaiete.

I was entering on a duel with Marshall for supremacy in an art for which, as has already been said, I possessed few qualifications, certainly no facilities. It will be understood how a mind like mine, intensely alive to all impulses, and unsup- ported by any moral convictions, would suffer in a contest waged under such unequal and cruel con- ditions. It was in truth a year of great passion and great despair. Defeat is bitter when it comes swiftly and conclusively, but when defeat falls by inches like the pendulum in the pit, the agony is a little beyond verbal expression. I remember the first day of my martyrdom. The clocks were striking eight ; we chose our places, got into position. After the first hour, I compared my drawing with Marshall's. He had, it is true, caught the movement of the figure better than I, but the character and the quality of his work was miserable. That of mine

44 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

was not. I have said I possessed no artistic facility, but I did not say faculty ; my drawing was never common ; it was individual in feeling, it was refined. I possessed all the rarer qualities, but not that primary power without which all is valueless 1 mean the talent of the boy who can knock off a clever caricature of his schoolmaster or make a life- like sketch of his favourite horse on the barn-door with a piece of chalk.

The following week Marshall made a great deal of progress; I thought the model did not suit me, and hoped for better luck next time. That time never came, and at the end of the first month 1 was left toiling hopelessly in the distance. Marshall's mind, though shallow, was bright, and he understood with strange ease all that was told him, and was able to put into immediate practice the methods of work inculcated by the professors. In fact, he showed himself singularly capable of education ; little could be drawn out, but a great deal could be put in (using the word in its modern, not in its original sense). He showed himself intensely anxious to learn and to accept all that was said : the ideas and feelings of others ran into him like water into a bottle whose neck is suddenly stooped below the surface of the stream. He was an ideal pupil. It was Marshall here, it was Marshall there, and soon the studio was little but an agitation in praise of him and his work, and anxious speculation arose as to the medals he would obtain. I continued the struggle for nine months. I was in the studio at eight in the morning, I measured my drawing, I plumbed it throughout, I sketched in, having regard

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 45

to la jambe qui porte, I modelled par les masses. During breakfast I considered how I should work during the afternoon, at night I lay awake thinking of what I might do to obtain a better result. But my efforts availed me nothing, it was like one who, falling, stretches his arms for help and grasps the yielding air. How terrible are the languors and yearnings of impotence ! how wearing ! what an aching void they leave in the heart ! And all this I suffered until the burden of unachieved desire grew intolerable.

I laid down my charcoal and said, ' I will never draw or paint again.' That vow I have kept.

Surrender brought relief, but my life seemed like a sea without a sail upon it, and as desolate. ( To what shall I turn ?' I asked myself, and my heart did not answer the question at once. I strove to read : but it was impossible to sit at home almost within earshot of the studio, and with all the memories of defeat still ringing their knells in my heart. Marshall's success clamoured loudly from without ; every day, almost every hour of the day, I heard of the medals which he would carry off, of what Lefebvre thought of his drawing this week, of Boulanger's opinion of his talent. I do not wish to excuse my conduct, but I cannot help say- ing that Marshall showed me neither consideration nor pity, he did not even seem to understand that I was suffering, that my nerves had been terribly shaken, and he flaunted his superiority relentlessly in my face his good looks, his talents, his popu- larity. I did not know then how little these studio successes really meant.

46 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

Vanity ? no, it was not his vanity that maddened me ; to me vanity is rarely displeasing, sometimes it is singularly attractive ; but by a certain insistence and aggressiveness in the details of life he allowed me to feel that I was only a means for the moment, a serviceable thing enough, but one that would be very soon discarded and passed over. This was intolerable. I packed up my portmanteau and left, after having kept my promise for only ten months. By so doing I involved my friend in grave and cruel difficulties ; by this action I imperilled his future prospects. It was a dastardly action, but his presence had grown unbearable ; yes, unbearable in the fullest acceptation of the word, and in ridding myself of him I felt as if a world of misery were being lifted from me.

AFTER three months spent in a sweet seaside resort, where unoccupied men and ladies whose husbands are abroad happily congregate, I returned to Paris refreshed.

Marshall and I were no longer on speaking terms, but I saw him daily, in a new overcoat, of a cut admirably adapted to his figure, sweeping past the fans and the jet ornaments of the Passage des Panoramas. The coat interested me, and I remem- bered that if I had not broken with him I should have been able to ask him some essential questions concerning it. Of such trifles as this the sincerest friendships are made ; he was as necessary to me as I to him, and after some demur on his part a recon- ciliation was effected.

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Then I took an appartement in one of the old houses in Rue de la Tour des Dames, for windows there overlooked a bit of tangled garden with a dilapidated statue. It was Marshall, of course, who undertook the task of furnishing, and he lavished on the rooms the fancies of an imagination that suggested the collaboration of a courtesan of high degree and a fifth-rate artist. Nevertheless, our salon was a pretty resort English cretonne of a very happy design vine leaves, dark green and golden, broken up by many fluttering jays. The walls were stretched with this colourful cloth, and the arm-chairs and the couches were to match. The drawing-room was in cardinal red, hung from the middle of the ceiling and looped up to give the appearance of a tent ; a faun, in terra- cotta, laughed in the red gloom, and there were Turkish couches and lamps. In another room you faced an altar, a Buddhist temple, a statue of Apollo, and a bust of Shelley. The bedrooms were made unconventional with cushioned seats and rich canopies ; and in picturesque corners there were censers, great church candlesticks, and palms ; then think of the smell of burning incense and wax and you will have imagined the sentiment of our apart- ment in Rue de la Tour des Dames. I bought a Persian cat, and a python that made a monthly meal off guinea-pigs ; Marshall, who did not care for pets, filled his rooms with flowers he used to sleep beneath a tree of gardenias in full bloom. We were so, Henry Marshall and George Moore, when we went to live in 76, Rue de la Tour des Dames, we hoped for the rest of our lives. He was to paint, I was to write.

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Before leaving for the seaside I had bought some volumes of Hugo and Musset ; but in pleasant, sunny Boulogne poetry went flat, and it was not until I got into my new rooms that I began to read seriously. Books are like individuals ; you know at once if they are going to create a sense within the sense, to fever, to madden you in blood and brain, or if they will merely leave you indifferent, or irrit- able, having unpleasantly disturbed sweet intimate musings as might a draught from an open window. Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse ; almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me. Words- worth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, if that great austere mind, chill even as the. Cumber- land year, can be called simple. But Hugo is not perverse, nor even personal. Reading him was like being in church with a strident -voiced preacher shouting from out of a terribly sonorous pulpit. ' Les Orientales . . .' An East of painted cardboard, tin daggers, and a military band playing the Turkish patrol in the Palais Royal. . . . The verse is grand, noble, tremendous ; I liked it, I admired it, but it did not I repeat the phrase awake a voice of conscience within me ; and even the structure of the verse was too much in the style of public buildings to please me. Of 'Les Feuilles d'Automne' and 'Les Chants du Crepuscule' I remember nothing. Ten lines, fifty lines of 'La Legende des Siecles,'

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and I always think that it is the greatest poetry I have ever read, but after a few pages the book is laid down and forgotten. Having composed more verses than any man that ever lived, Hugo can only be taken in the smallest doses ; if you repeat any passage to a friend across a cafe table, you are both appalled by the splendour of the imagery, by the thunder of the syllables.

' Quel dieu, quel moissonneur de 1'eternel etc Avait en s'en allant riegligemment jete Cette faucille d'or dans les champs des etoiles.'

But I never read through a volume without feeling that Hugo's genius is more German than French ; and perhaps that is why the poem is better than the volume, the stanza better than the poem, and the single line best of all :

' Le clair de lune bleu qui baigne 1'horizou.'

Without a ' like or an ' as/ by a mere statement of fact, the picture, nay more, the impression, is pro- duced. The poem which this line concludes 'La fete chez Therese ' is an admirable picture of mediaeval life, but we never really enjoy it except when the newspapers quote it. His humanitarianism is especially German, and of all his treatment of God ; arm in arm he romps Him round the universe two immortalities, it is true, but of the twain Hugo prefers his own. His delight in little children is perhaps still more unbearable, for while telling their innocence, he watches them curiously ; and as soon as the song is over and the crowd disperses, he entices them down a by-way.

50 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

The first time I read ot une bouche d'ombre I was astonished, nor did the second or third repetition produce a change in my mood of mind ; but sooner or later it was impossible to avoid conviction, that of the two 'the rosy fingers of the dawn/ although some three thousand years older, is younger, truer, and more beautiful. Homer's similes can never grow old ; une bouche d'ombre was old the first time it was said, and may be looked upon as the birthplace and the grave of Hugo's genius.

About this time I used to hear of Musset from Marshall and the Marquise, who were in the habit of reading him ; and in moments of relaxation, they marked their favourite passages, so he came to me highly recommended. But little progress was made in his poetry. His modernisms were out of tune with the spring of my aspirations, and instead of the unexpected word and the eccentricities of expression which were, and are still, so dear to me, I discovered only the clumsy versification of the man that nature designed for a prose-writer. An error of diction is pardonable if it does not err on the side of the commonplace; but the commonplace, the natural, is constitutionally abhorrent ; and I have never been able to read with any very unashamed sense of pleasure even the opening lines of ' Rolla,' a splendid lyrical outburst in a way. What I re- member of it now are those two odious chevilles marckait et respirait, and Astarte fille de Vonde amere ; nor does the fact that amkre rhymes with mere con- done the offence, although it proves that even Musset felt that perhaps the richness of the rhyme might render tolerable the intolerable. It is, how- ever, to my credit that the Spanish love songs moved

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 5i

me not at all ; and it was not until I read that magnificently grotesque poem ' La Ballade & la Lune,' that I could be induced to bend the knee and acknowledge Musset a poet.

I still read and spoke of Shelley with a rapture of joy he was still my 'pinnace.' But this craft, fashioned of mother-o'-pearl, with starlight at the helm and moonbeams for sails, suddenly ran on a reef and went down, not out of sight, but out of the agitation of actual life. The reef was Gautier ; I read ' Mile, de Maupin ' at a moment when I was weary of spiritual passion, and this great exaltation of the visible above the invisible at once conquered and led me captive. This plain scorn of a world exempli- fied in lacerated saints and a crucified Redeemer opened up a prospect of new beliefs and new joys in things and new revolts against all that had come to form part and parcel of the commonalty of mankind. Shelley's teaching had been, while accepting the body, to dream of the soul as a star, and so preserve our ideal ; but now I saw suddenly, with delightful clearness and with intoxicating conviction, that bj looking without shame and accepting with love the flesh, I might raise it to as high a place within as divine a light as even the soul had been set in. The ages were as an aureole, and I stood as if enchanted before the noble nakedness of the elder gods : not the middle nudity that sex has preserved in this modern world, but the clean pagan nude a love of life and beauty, the broad fair breast of a boy, the long flanks, the head thrown back. I cried out with my master : the bold fearless gaze of Venus is lovelier than the lowered glance of the Virgin, and the blood that flowed upon Mount Calvary ' ne rria

52 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

jamais baignd dans ses fots. 1 A sublime vindication of one born into a world that was not his.

I will not turn to the book to find the exact words for ten years I have not read the Word that has become so inexpressibly a part of me but will refrain, as Mile, de Maupin refrained, knowing well that the face of love may not be seen twice.

None more than I had cherished mystery and dream : my life until now had been but a mist which revealed, as each cloud wreathed and went out, the red of some strange flower or some tall peak, blue and snowy and fairy like in lonely moonlight ; and now so great was my conversion that the more brutal the outrage offered to my ancient ideal, the rarer and keener was my delight. I read almost without fear :

• My dreams are of naked youths riding white horses

through mountain passes; there are no clouds in my dreams, or if there are any, they are cut with the chisel from blocks fallen from the statue of Jupiter/

J had shaken off all belief in Christianity early in life with Shelley's help. He had replaced faith by reason ; I still suffered, but need suffer no more. Here was a new creed proclaiming the divinity of the body ; and for a long time the reconstruction of all my theories of life on a purely pagan basis occupied my attention. The outlines of the castle showing through the romantic woods, and the lovers leaning over the horses' necks to each other's faces, enchanted me ; and equally the description of the performance of As You Like It; in it Rodolph sees Mile, de Maupin for the first time in woman's attire, and if she were dangerously beautiful as a man, that beauty

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 53

is forgotten in the rapture and praise of her un- matchable woman's loveliness.

But if ' Mile, de Maupin ' was the highest peak, it was not the entire mountain. The range was long, and each summit offered to the eye a new and delightful prospect. There were the numerous tales tales as perfect as the world has ever seen ; 'La Morte Amoureuse,' 'Jettatura,' 'Une Nuit de Cleop&tre,' etc., and then the very diamonds of the crown, ' Les Emaux et Camees,' ' La Symphonic en Blanc Majeur^,' in which the adjective blanc and blanche is repeated with miraculous felicity in each stanza. And then Contralto

4 Mais seulement il se transpose,

Et, passant de la forme au son, Trouve dans sa metamorphose La jeurie fille et le garcon.'

Transpose a word never before used except in musical application, and now for the first time applied to material form, and with a beauty-giving touch that Phidias might be proud of. It may be that I do not quote correctly ; such is my best memory of the stanza, and here, that is more important than the stanza itself. That other, ' The Chatelaine and the Page ' ; and that other, < The Doves ' ; and that other, * Romeo and Juliet,' and the exquisite cadence of the line ending ' balcon.' Novelists have often shown how a love passion brings misery, despair, death and ruin upon a life, but I know of no story of the good or evil influence awakened by the chance reading of a book, the chain of consequences so far-reaching, so intensely dramatic. Never shall

54, CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

I open these books again, but were I to live for a thousand years, their power in my soul would remain unshaken. I am what they made me. Belief in humanity, pity for the poor, hatred of injustice, all that Shelley gave may never have been very deep or earnest ; but I did love, I did believe. Gautier destroyed these illusions. He taught me that our boasted progress is but a pitfall into which the race is falling, and I learned that the correction of form is the highest ideal, and I accepted the plain, simple conscience of the pagan world as the perfect solution of the problem that had vexed me so long! I cried, ' ave ' to it all : lust, cruelty, slavery, and I would have held down my thumbs in the Colosseum that a hundred gladiators might die and wash me free of my Christian soul with their blood.

The study of Baudelaire hurried the course of the disease.* No longer is it the grand barbaric face of Gautier ; now it is the clean-shaven face of the mock priest, the slow, cold eyes and the sharp, cunning sneer of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may better know the worthlessness of temp- tation. ' Les Fleurs du Mai !' beautiful flowers, beautiful in sublime decay. What a great record is yours, and were Hell a reality how many souls would we find wreathed with your poisonous blossoms ! The village maiden goes to her Faust ; the children of the nineteenth century go to you, O Baudelaire, and having tasted of your deadly delight all hope of repentance is vain. Flowers, beautiful in your sublime decay, I press you to my lips ; these northern

• Surely the phrase is ill considered, hurried e my con-

valescence ' would express the author's meaning better.

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 55

solitudes, far from the rank Parisian garden where I gathered you, are full of you, even as the sea- shell of the sea, and the sun that sets on this wild moor- land evokes the magical verse :

' Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique Nous echangerons un eclair unique Comme un long sanglot tout charge d'adieux.'

For months I fed on the mad and morbid litera- ture that the enthusiasm of 1830 called into existence. The gloomy and sterile little pictures of ' Gaspard de la Nuit/ or the elaborate criminality of ' Les Contes Immoraux,' laboriously invented lifeless things with creaky joints, pitiful lay figures that fall to dust as soon as the book is closed, and in the dust only the figures of the terrible ferryman and the unfortunate Dora remain. ' Madame Potiphar ' cost me forty francs, and I never read more than a few pages.

Like a pike after minnows I pursued the works of Les Jeune France along the quays and through every arcade in Paris. One man's solitary work (he died very young, but he is known to have excelled all in the length of his hair and the redness of his waist- coats) resisted my efforts to capture it. At last I caught sight of the precious volume in a shop on the Quai Voltaire, and trembling, asked the price. The man fixed his eyes on me and answered :

' A hundred and fifty francs.'

A great sum, no doubt, but I paid it and hurried home to read, hoping it would not prove as disap- pointing as many that had gone before : I had read many books without profit, but this one (of which I had heard so much) was empty. * Not a queer

56 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

phrase, not an outrage of any sort or kind, not even a new blasphemy ; ' it means nothing to me/ I said, 'nothing but a hundred and fifty francs.'

Having thus rudely, and very pikelike, knocked my nose against the bottom this book was, most certainly, the bottom of the literature of 1830 I came up to the surface and began to look around my contemporaries for something to read.

I have remarked before on the instinctiveness of my likes and dislikes, on my susceptibility to the sound of and even to the appearance of a name upon paper. His name, Leconte de Lisle, repelled me from the first, and it was only by a very deliberate outrage to my feelings that I bought and read ' Les Poemes Antiques/ and ' Les Poemes Barbares ' ; I was deceived in nothing, all I had anticipated I found antiquated nothingness. Leconte de Lisle produces on me the effect of a walk through the new Law Courts, with a steady but not violent draught sweeping from end to end. And when I saw him the last time I was in Paris, his head a declaration of righteous- ness, a cross between a Caesar by Gerome, and an archbishop of a provincial town, set all my natural antipathy on edge instantly. Hugo is often pompous, shallow, empty, unreal, but he is at least an artist, and when he thinks of the artist and forgets the prophet, as in ' Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois/ his juggling with the verse is magnificent, superb. Hallo, listen to this :

( Comme un geai sur 1'arbre

Le roi se tient fier ; Son cceur est de marbre, Son ventre est de chair.

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 57

' On a pour sa nuque

Et son front vermeil Fait une perruque Avec le soleil.

f II regne, il vegete Effrayant zero ; Sur lui se projette L' ombre du bourreau.

( Sou tr6ne est m*e tombe,

Et sur le pave Quelque chose en tombe Qu'oii n'a point lave/

But how to get the first line of the last stanza into five syllables I cannot think. If ever I meet with the volume again I will look it out and see how that rude dompteur de syllabes managed it. But stay, son trone est la tombe brings the line right, and the generalization would be in the ' line ' of Hugo. Hugo how impossible it is to speak of French literature without referring to him ! Let these, how- ever, be concluding words, that he thought he could by saying everything, and, saying everything twenty times over, for ever render impossible the rehearsal of another great poet. And the iiett result of Hugo's ambition is that nobody reads him except when the journalists quote him in the newspapers, which is more reasonable than appears at first sight, for an essential condition of a work of art is that it should be rare ; another condition is that it should be brief. Of an entire poem, as has been said, it is seldom that we remember more than a stanza, and very often of the stanza only a single line remains in the memory :

' Le clair de lune bleu qui baigne Phorizon '

58 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

is all that I remember of < La fete chez Therese.' Villiers always used to contend that no poem should be extended beyond a single line :

' O pasteur, Hesperus al'occident s'allume.'

The sweet, sad serenity of the evening air is con- tained in this verse. The star shines in the west, the lambs run to the ewes, and the shepherd leads the flock foldwards. Why add to the line ?

I remember Villiers one morning, not long before Venus kindles in the east, telling a group that had been following him from cafi to cafe listening to his stories that he had composed a drama on the subject of the Cenci, and that according to his poetic principle, he had suppressed the entire drama into one line. Throwing back his hair, he said ; ' Beatrice, not con- tent with merely murdering her father, has had him made into soup.' The soup is served and is handed round to the guests at a great banquet given in honour of the assassination. It is at this point of the tragedy que je place mon ver :

c Et les yeux du bouillon etaient ceux de son pere.'

Sometimes Villiers would add a morality to his single-line poems. Here is an example :

( Pepin le bref est mort depuis onze cents ans.' Morality :

' Quand on est mort c'est pour longtemps. '

But to return to Leconte de Lisle. See his ' Dis- cours de Reception.' Is it possible to imagine any- thing more arid ? Rhetoric of this sort, ' des vers

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 59

d'or sur unc tclume d'airain,' and such sententious platitudes as this (speaking of the realists), ' Les tpidtmies de cette nature passent, et le gfnie demeure.'

Theodore de Banville seemed to me to freeze into icicles,, a beautiful cold glitter. He had no new creed to proclaim nor old creed to denounce ; the inherent miseries of human life did not seem to touch him, nor did he sing the languors and ardours of animal or spiritual passion. And it was a long time before I began to understand that it is enough if the poet sings like the lark for love of the song. Banville sings of the white lily and the red rose ; such knowledge of, such observation of nature is enough for the poet, and he sings and he trills ; there is magic trilling in every song, and the song as it ascends rings, and all the air quivers with the ever- widening circle of the echoes, sighing and dying out of the ear until the last faintness is reached. Out of the sky the poet descends singing, and the glad rhymes clash and dash forth again. Banville is not the poet, he is the bard. The great questions that agitate the mind of man have not troubled him : life, death, and love he perceives only as pretexts. Only the song is real, and he is lyrical always ; even in conversation his wit flies out on clear-cut, swallow-like wings. In speaking to Paul Alexis of his book ' Le Besoin d'aimer/ he said : f Vous avez trouvd un litre asses laid pour faire reculer les divines Hoiles'

It is now well known that French verse is not seventy years old. If it was Hugo who invented French rhyme, it was Banville who broke up the couplet. Hugo had perhaps ventured to place the

60 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

pause between the adjective and its noun, but it was not until Banville wrote the line, ' Elle Jllait pensive- ment la blanche laine,' that the caesura received its final coup de grdce. This verse has been probably more imitated than any other verse in the French language. Pensivement was replaced by some similar four- syllable adverb, Elle tirait nonchalamment les has de soi, etc.

I read the French poets of the modern school Coppee, Mendes, Leon Diex, Verlaine, Jose Maria Heredia, Mallarme, Richepin, Villiers de 1' Isle Adam. Coppee, as may be imagined, I was only capable of appreciating in his first manner, when he wrote those exquisite but purely artistic sonnets 'La Tulipe,' and ' Le Lys.' In the latter a room decorated with daggers, armour, jewellery, and china, is beautifully described, and it is only in the last line that the lily, which animates and gives life to the whole, is intro- duced. Noble et pur un grand lys se meurt dans une coupe. But the exquisite poetic perceptivity Coppee showed in his modern poems, the certainty with which he raised the commonest subject, investing it with sufficient dignity for his purpose, escaped me wholly, and I could not but turn with horror from such poems as ' La Nourrice ' and ' Le Petit Epi- cier.' I could not understand how anybody could bring himself to acknowledge the vulgar details of our vulgar age. The fiery glory of Jose Maria de Heredia, on the contrary, filled me with enthusicasm ruins and sand, shadow and silhouette of palms and pillars, negroes, crimson, swords, silence, and arabesques. Like great copper pans goes the clangour of the rhymes.

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 61

• Entre le ciel qui brule et la mer qui moutonne,

An somnolent soleil d'uu midi monotone, Tu songes, O guerriere, aux vieux conquistadors ; Et dans Penerveinent des nuits chaudes et calmes, Ber^ant ta gloire eteinte, O cite, tu t'endors Sous les palmier?, au long fremissement des palmes. 3

Catulle Mendes, a perfect realization of his name, with his pale hair, and his fragile face illuminated with the idealism of a depraved woman. He takes you by the arm, by the hand, he leans towards you, his words are caresses, his fervour is delightful, and to hear him is as sweet as drinking a smooth per- fumed yellow wine. All he says is false the book he has just read, the play he is writing, the woman who loves him. . . . He buys a packet of bonbons in the streets and eats them, and it is false. An ex- quisite artist ; physically and spiritually he is art ; he is the muse herself, or rather, he is one of the minions of the muse. Passing from flower to flower he goes, his whole nature pulsing with butterfly voluptuousness. He has written poems as good as Hugo, as good as Leconte de Lisle, as good as Banville, as good as Baudelaire, as good as Gautier, as good as Coppee ; he never wrote an ugly line in his life, but he never wrote a line that some one of his brilliant contemporaries might not have written. He has produced good work of all kinds 'et voila tout.' Every generation, every country, has its Catulle Mendes. Robert Buchanan is ours, only in the adaptation Scotch gruel has been substi- tuted for perfumed yellow wine. No more delightful talker than Mendes, no more accomplished litterateur, no more fluent and translucid critic. I remember the great moonlights of the Place Pigale, when, on

62 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

leaving the cafe, he would take me by the arm, and expound Hugo's or Zola's last book, thinking as he spoke of the Greek sophists. There were for con- trast Mallarme's Tuesday evenings, a few friends sitting round the hearth, the lamp on the table. I have met none whose conversation was more fruitful, but I never enjoyed his poetry, his early verses of course excepted. When I knew him he had pub- lished the celebrated ' L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune ' : the first poem written in accordance with the theory of symbolism. But when it was given to me (this marvellous brochure furnished with strange illustra- tions and wonderful tassels), I thought it absurdly obscure. Since then, however, it has been rendered by force of contrast with the enigmas the author has since published a marvel of lucidity ; I am sure if I were to read it now I should appreciate its many beauties. It bears the same relation to the author's later work as Rienzi to The Walkyrie. But what is symbolism ? Vulgarly speaking, saying the opposite to what you mean. For example, you want to say that music, which is the new art, is replacing the old art, which is poetry. First symbol : a house in which there is a funeral, the pall extends over the furniture. The house is poetry, poetry is dead. Second symbol : f noire meux grimoire,' grimoire is the parchment, parchment is used for writing, therefore grimoire is the symbol for literature, ' d'ou s'exaltent les milliers,' thousands of what ? of letters of course. We have heard a great deal in England of Browning obscurity. The ' Red Cotton Nightcap Country ' is a child at play compared to a sonnet by such a determined symbolist as Mallarme, or better still his disciple

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 63

Ghil who has added to the infirmities of symbolism those of poetic instrumentation. For according to M. Ghil and his organ Les Ecrits pour I' Art, it would appear that the syllables of the French language evoke in us the sensations of different colours ; con- sequently the timbre of the different instruments. The vowel u corresponds to the colour yellow, and therefore to the sound of flutes.

Arthur Rimbaud was, it is true, first in the field with these pleasant and genial theories ; but M. Ghil informs us that Rimbaud was mistaken in many things, particularly in coupling the sound of the vowel u with the colour green instead of with the colour yellow. M. Ghil has corrected this very stupid blunder and many others ; and his instrumen- tation in his last volume, ' Le Geste Ingenu,' may be considered as complete and definitive. The work is dedicated to Mallarme, ' Pere et seigneur des ors, des pierreries, et des poisons/ and other works are to follow : the six tomes of ' Legendes de Reves et de Sang,' the innumerable tomes of ' La Glose,' and the single tome of ' La Loi.'

And that man Gustave Kahn, who takes the French language as a violin and lets the bow of his emotion run at wild will upon it, producing strange acute strains, unpremeditated harmonies comparable to nothing that I know of but some Hungarian rhap- sody ; verses of seventeen syllables interwoven with verses of eight, and even nine masculine rhymes, seeking strange union with feminine rhymes in the middle of the line a music sweet, subtil, and epicene ; the half-note, the inflexion, but not the full tone as ( se fondre, 6 souvenir, des lys acres ddlices.'

64 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

Se penchant vers les dahlias, Des paons cabrient des rosaces lunaires L'assoupissement des branches venerey Son pale visage aux mourants dahlias.

Elle ecoute au loin les breves musiques Nui claire aux ramures d'accords, Et la lassitude a berce son corps Au rythme odorant des pures musiques.

Les paons ont dresse la rampe occellee Pour la descente de ses yeux vers le tapis

De choses et de sens Qui va vers 1'horizon, parure vermiculee

De son corps alangui

En Fame se tapit Le flou desir molli de recits et d'encens.

I laughed at these verbal eccentricities, but they were not without their effect, and that a demoralizing one ; for in me they aggravated the fever of the unknown, and whetted my appetite for the strange, abnormal and unhealthy in art. Hence all pallidi- ties of thought and desire were eagerly welcomed ; Verlaine became my poet, and the terraces and colonnades of ' Les Fetes Galantes ' became the chapel of my meditations, with the lady there who descends her castle stairs unmindful that her page, a little nigger, is lifting her train higher than is necessary, sharing thereby with her monkey a view of her thighs. ' Les Fetes Galantes ' is lit with dresses, white, blue, yellow, green, mauve, and undecided purple ; the voices ? strange contraltos ; the forms ? not those of men or women, but mystic, hybrid creatures, with hands nervous and pale, and eyes charged with eager and fitful light . . . * un soir Equivoque d'automne,' . . . 'les belles pendent

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 65

reveuses a nos bras ' and they whisper ( les

mots specfyux et tout has.'

Gautier sang to his antique lyre praise of the flesh and contempt of the soul ; Baudelaire on a mediaeval organ chanted his unbelief in goodness and truth and his hatred of life. But Verlaine advances one step further : hate is to him as commonplace as love, unfaith as vulgar as faith. The world is merely a doll to be attired to-day in eighteenth-century hoops, to- morrow in aureoles and stars. The Virgin is a pretty thing, worth a poem, but it would be quite too silly to talk about belief or unbelief; Christ in wood or plaster we have heard too much of, but Christ in painted glass amid crosiers and Latin terminations, is an amusing subject for poetry. And strangely enough, a withdrawing from all commerce with virtue and vice is, it would seem, a licentiousness more curiously subtle and penetrating than any other; and the licentiousness of the verse is equal to that of the emotion ; every natural instinct of the language is violated, and the simple music native in French metre is replaced by falsetto notes sharp and intense. The charm is that of an odour of iris exhaled by some ideal tissues, or of a missal in a gold case, a precious relic of the pomp and ritual of an archbishop of Persepolis.

Parsifal a vaincu les filles, leur gentil Babil et la luxure amusaute et sa pente Vers la chair de gar^on vierge que cela tente D'aimer des seins legers et ce gentil babil.

II a vaincu la femme belle au coeur subtil Etalant ces bras frais et sa gorge excitante ; 11 a vaincu 1'enfer, il rentre sous la tente Avec un lourd trophee a son bras pueril. E

66 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

Avec la lance qui per^a le flanc supreme II a gueri le roi, le voici roi lui-meme. Et pretre du tres-saint tresor essentiel ;

En robe d'or il adore, gloire et symbole,

Le vase pur ou resplendit le sang reel,

Et, 6 ces voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole.

No English sonnet lingers in the ear like this one, and its beauty is as inexhaustible as a Greek marble. The hiatus in the last line was at first a little trying, but I have learnt to love it. Not in Baudelaire nor even in Poe is there more beautiful poetry to be found. Poe, unread and ill- understood in America and England, here, thou art an integral part of our artistic life.

The Island o' Fay, Silence, Eleonore, were the familiar spirits of an apartment beautiful with Manets and tapestry ; Swinburne and Rossetti were the English poets I read there ; and I, a unit in the generation they have enslaved, clanked fetters and trailed a golden chain, in a set of stories in many various metres, to be called ' Roses of Midnight.' One of the characteristics of the volume was banishment of daylight: from its pages terraces, gardens and orchards were held forbidden ; and my fantastics lived out their loves in the lamplight of yellow boudoirs, and died with the dawn which was supposed to be an awakening to consciousness of reality.

VI

A LAST hour of vivid blue and gold glare ; but now the twilight sheds softly upon the darting jays, and only the little oval frames catch the fleeting beams.

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 67

I go to the miniatures. Amid the parliamentary faces, all strictly garrotted with many-folded hand- kerchiefs, there is a metal frame enchased with rubies and a few emeralds. And this chef d'osuvre of an- tique workmanship surrounds a sharp, shrewdish, modern face, withal pretty.

She is a woman of thirty no, she is the woman of thirty. Balzac has written some admirable pages on this subject ; my memory of them is vague and un- certain, although durable, as all memories of him must be. But that marvellous story, or rather study, has been blunted in my knowledge of this tiny face with the fine masses of hair drawn up from the neck and arranged elaborately on the crown. There is no fear of plagiary ; he cannot have said all ; he cannot have said what I want to say.

Looking at this face so mundane, so intellectually mundane, I see why a young man of refined mind a bachelor who spends at least a pound a day on his plea- sures, and in whose library are found some few volumes of modern poetry seeks his ideal in a woman of thirty.

It is clear that, by the very essence of her being, the young girl may evoke no ideal but that of home ; and home is in his eyes the antithesis of freedom, de- sire, aspiration. He longs for mystery, deep and end- less, and he is tempted with a foolish little illusion white dresses, water-colour drawings and popular music. He dreams of Pleasure, and he is offered Duty ; for do not think that that sylph-like waist does not suggest to him a yard of apron string, cries of children, and that most odious word 'Papa.' A young man of refined mind can look through the glass of the years.

68 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

He has sat in the stalls, opera-glass in hand ; he has met women of thirty at balls, and has sat with them beneath shadowy curtains ; he knows that the world is full of beautiful women, all waiting to be loved and amused, the circles of his immediate years are filled with feminine faces, they cluster like flowers on this side and that, and they fade into garden-like spaces of colour. How many may love him ? The loveliest may one day smile upon his knee ! and shall he renounce all for that little creature who has just finished singing and is handing round cups of tea ? Every bachelor contemplating marriage says, ' I shall have to give up all for one, one.'

The young girl is often pretty, but her prettiness is vague and uncertain, it inspires a sort of pitying admiration, but it suggests nothing ; the very essence of the young girl's being is that she should have nothing to suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to touch the imagination. No past lies hidden in those translucent eyes, no story of hate, dis- appointment, or sin. Nor is there in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases in a thousand any doubt that the hand, that spends at least a pound a day in restaurants and cabs, will succeed in gathering the muslin flower if he so wills it, and by doing so he will delight every- one. Where, then, is the struggle ? where, then, is the triumph ? Therefore, I say that if a young man's heart is not set on children, and tiresome dinner- parties, the young girl presents to him no possible ideal. But the woman of thirty presents from the outset all that is necessary to ensnare the heart of a young man. I see her sitting in her beautiful drawing- room, all designed by, and all belonging to her. Her

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN b'9

chair is placed beneath an evergreen plant, and the long leaves lean out as if to touch her neck. The great white and red roses of the Aubusson carpet are spread enigmatically about her feline feet ; a grand piano leans its melodious mouth to her ; and there she sits when her visitors have left her, playing Beethoven's sonatas in the dreamy firelight. The spring-tide shows but a bloom of unvarying freshness ; August has languished and loved in the strength of the sun. She is stately, she is tall. What sins, what disappointments, what aspirations lie in those grey eyes, mysteriously still, and mysteriously revealed. These a young man longs to know of, they are his life. He imagines himself sitting by her, when the others have gone, holding her hand, calling on her name ; sometimes she moves away and plays the Moonlight Sonata. Letting her hands droop upon the keys she talks sadly, maybe affectionately ; she speaks of the tedium of life, of its disenchantments. He knows well what she means, he has suffered as she has ; but could he tell her, could she understand, that in his love reality would dissolve into a dream, all limitations would open into boundless infinity.

The husband he rarely sees. Sometimes a latch-key is heard about half past six. The man is thick, strong, common, his jaws are heavy, his eyes are expressionless, there is about him the loud swagger of the caserne, and he suggests the inevitable question, Why did she marry him ? a question that every young man of refined mind asks a thousand times by day and ten thousand times by night, asks till he is five-and- thirty, and sees that his generation has passed into middle age.

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Why did she marry him ? Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great mysterious midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry space will give him answer ; no CEdipus will ever come to unravel this riddle ; this sphinx will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the sea-gulls and waves ; she will never divulge her secret ; and if she is the woman and not a woman of thirty, she has forgotten.

The young man shakes hands with the husband ; he strives not to look embarrassed, and he talks of indifferent things of how well he (the husband) is looking, of his amusements, his projects ; and then he (the young man of refined mind) tastes of that keen and highly seasoned delight happiness in crime. He knows not the details of her home life, the husband is merely a dark cloud that fills one side of the picture, sometimes obliterating the sunlight ; a shadowy shape that in certain moments solidifies and assumes the likeness of a rock-sculptured, imminent monster, but the shadow and the shape and the threat are magnetic, and in a sense of danger the fascination is sealed.

The young man of refined mind is in a ballroom ! He leans against the woodwork in a distant doorway ; hardly knowing what to do with himself, he strives to interest himself in the conversation of a group of men twice his age. I will not say he is shunned ; but neither the matrons nor the young girls make any advances towards him. The young girls so sweet in the oneness of their fresh hair, flowers, dresses, and glances are being introduced, are getting up to dance, and the hostess is looking round for partners. She sees the young man in the doorway, but she

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hesitates and goes to someone else, and if you asked her why, she could not tell you why she avoided him. Presently the woman of thirty enters. She is in white satin and diamonds. She looks for him a circular glance. Calm with possession she passes to a seat, extending her hand here and there. She dances the eighth, twelfth and fifteenth waltz with him.

Will he induce her to visit his rooms ? Will they be like Marshall's strange debauches of colour and Turkish lamps or mine, an old cabinet, a faded pastel which embalms the memory of a pastoral cen- tury, my taste ; or will it be a library, two leather library chairs, a large escritoire, and a bust of Homer ? Be this as it may, whether the apartments be the ruth- less extravagance of artistic impulse, or the subdued taste of the student, she, the woman of thirty, shall be there by night and day : her altar is there, and even when she is sleeping safe in her husband's arms, with fevered brow, he, the young man of refined mind, alone and lonely shall kneel and adore her.

And should she not visit his rooms ? If the com- plex and various accidents of existence should have ruled out her life virtuously ; if the many inflections of sentiment have decided against this last consum- mation, then she will wax to the complete, the unfathomable temptress the Lilith of old she will never set him free, and in the end will be found about his heart ( one strangling golden hair.' She shall haunt his wife's face and words (should he seek to rid himself of her by marriage), a bitter sweet, a half-welcome enchantment ; she shall consume and destroy the strength and spirit of his life, leaving it desolation, a barren landscape, burnt and faintly

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scented with the sea. Fame and wealth shall slip like sand from him. She may be set aside for the cadence of a rhyme, for the flowing line of a limb, but when the passion of art has raged itself out, she shall return to blight the peace of the worker.

A terrible malady is she, a malady the ancients knew of and called nympholepsy a beautiful name evocative and symbolic of its ideal aspect, f the breast of the nymph in the brake.' And the disease is not extinct in these modern days, nor will it ever be so long as men shall yearn for the unattain- able ; and the prosy bachelors who trail their ill-fated lives from their chambers to their clubs know their malady, and they call it the woman of thirty.

VII

A JAPANESE dressing-gown, the ideality of whose tissue delights me, some fresh honey and milk set by this couch hung with royal fringes ; and having par- taken of this odorous refreshment, I call to Jack, my great python crawling about after a two months' fast. 1 tie up a guinea-pig to the tabouret, pure Louis XV., the little beast struggles and squeaks, the snake, his black, bead-like eyes are fixed, how superb are the oscillations . . . now he strikes : and with what ex- quisite gourmandise he lubricates and swallows !

Marshall is at the organ in the hall, he is playing a Gregorian chant, that beautiful hymn, the ' Vexilla Regis/ by Saint Fortunatus, the great poet of the Middle Ages. And, having turned over the leaves of ' Les Fetes Galantes/ I sit down to write.

My original intention was to write some thirty or

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forty stories varying from thirty to three hundred lines in length. The nature of these stories is easy to imagine : there was the youth who wandered by night into a witches' sabbath, and was disputed for by the witches, young and old. There was the light o' love who went into the desert to tempt the holy man ; but he died as he yielded, his arms stiffening by some miracle about her, and she, unable to free her- self, died while her bondage was loosening in decay. My difficulties were increased by adopting as part of my task the introduction of all sorts of elaborate, and in many cases extravagantly composed metres, and I began to feel that I was working in sand ; the house I was raising crumbled and fell away on every side. My stories had one merit : they were all, as far as I can remember, perfectly constructed. The art of telling a story clearly and dramatically, selon les precedes de M. Scribe, had been learnt from M. Duval, the author of a hundred and sixty plays, written in collaboration with more than a hun- dred of the best writers of his day, including the master himself, Gautier. We used to meet at breakfast at a neighbouring cafe, and our conver- sation turned on I' exposition de la pi&oe, prdparer la situation, nous aurons des larmes, etc. One day, as I sat waiting for him, I took up the Voltaire. It contained an article by M. Zola. Naturalisme, la v6rite, la science, were repeated some half-a-dozen times. Hardly able to believe my eyes, I read that one should write with as little imagination as possible, that plot in a novel or in a play was illiterate and puerile, and that the art of M. Scribe was an art of strings and wires, etc. I rose up from breakfast

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ordered my coffee, and stirred the sugar, a little dizzy, like one who has received a violent blow on the head.

Echo-augury ! Words heard in an unexpected quarter, but applying marvellously well to the besetting difficulty of the moment. The reader who has followed me so far will remember the instant effect the word ' Shelley ' had upon me in childhood, and how it called into existence a train of feeling that illuminated the vicissitudes and passions of many years, until it was finally assimilated and became part of my being; the reader will also remember how the mere mention, at a certain moment, of the word ' France ' awoke a vital impulse, even a sense of final ordination, and how the irrevocable message was obeyed, and how it led to the creation of a mental existence.

And now for a third time I experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and inward light. Naturalism, truth, the new art, above all the phrase, ' The new art,' impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was dazzled, and I vaguely understood that my ' Roses of Midnight ' were sterile eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanized into any sem- blance of life, passionless in all their passion.

I had read a few chapters of the ' Assommoir/ as it appeared in La lUpublique des Lettres ; I had cried, ' ridiculous, abominable/ only because it is character- istic of me to instantly form an opinion and assume at once a violent attitude. But now I bought up the back numbers of the Voltaire, and I look forward to the weekly exposition of the new faith with febrile eagerness. The great zeal with which the new

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master continued his propaganda, and the marvellous way in which subjects the most diverse, passing events, political, social, religious, were caught up and turned into arguments for, or proof of the truth of naturalism astonished me wholly. The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilization, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the concep- tion, and the towering height of the ambition. In my fevered fancy I saw a new race of writers that would arise, and with the aid of the novel would continue to a more glorious and legitimate conclusion the work that the prophets had begun ; and at each development of the theory of the new art and its universal applicability, my wonder increased and my admiration choked me. If any one should be tempted to turn to the books themselves to seek an explana- tion of this wild ecstasy, he would find nothing as well drink the dregs of yesterday's champagne. One is lying before me now, and as I glance through the pages listlessly I say, ' Only the simple crude state- ments of a man of powerful mind, but singularly narrow vision.'

Still, although eager and anxious for the fray, I did not see how I was to participate in it. I was not a novelist, not yet a dramatic author, and the possibility of a naturalistic poet seemed to me not a little doubtful. I had clearly understood that the lyrical quality was to be for ever banished ; there were to be no harps and lutes in our heaven, only

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drums ; and the preservation of all the essentials of poetry, by the simple enumeration of the utensils to be found in a back kitchen, sounded, I could not help thinking (here it becomes necessary to whisper), not unlike rigmarole. I waited for the master to speak. He had declared that the Republic would fall if it did not become instantly naturalistic ; he would not, he could not pass over in silence so impor- tant a branch of literature as poetry, no matter how contemptible he might think it. If he could find nothing to praise, he must at least condemn. At last the expected article came. It was all that could be desired by one in my fever of mind. Hugo's claims had been previously disproven, but now Banville and Gautier were declared to be warmed-up dishes of the ancient world ; Baudelaire was a naturalist, but he had been spoilt by the romantic influence of his generation. Cependant there were indications of the naturalistic movement even in poetry. I trembled with excitement, I could not read fast enough. Coppee had striven to simplify language, he had versified the street cries, Achetez la France, le Soir, le Rappel ; he had sought to give utterence to humble sentiments as in ' Le Petit Epicier de Montrouge,' the little grocer qui cassait le sucre avec melancolie ; Richepin had boldly and frankly adopted the language of the people in all its superb crudity. All this was, however, preparatory and tentative. We are waiting for our poet, he who will sing to us fearlessly of the rude industry of dust- men and the comestible glories of the market-places. The subjects are to hand, the formula alone is wanting. The prospect dazzled me ; I tried to calm myself

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Had I the stuff in me to win and to wear these bays, this stupendous laurel crown ? bays, laurel crown, a distinct souvenir of Parnassus, but there is no modern equivalent, I must strive to invent a new one, in the meantime let me think. True it is that Swinburne was before me with the ' Romantiques.' The ' Hymn to Proserpine ' and ' Dolores ' are wonderful lyrical versions of Mile, de Maupin. In form ' The Leper ' is old English, the colouring is Baudelaire, but the rude industry of the dustmen and the comestible glories of the market-place shall be mine. A bos 1 Les Roses de Minuit ' /

But I felt the ' naturalization ' of the ' Roses of Midnight' would prove a difficult task, and soon found it an impossible one ; the poems were laid aside and a volume begun steeped in the delights of Bougival and Ville d'Avray. And this book was to be entitled ' Poems of " Flesh and Blood !" '

' Elle mit son phis beau chapeau, son chapeau bleu' . . . and then ? Why, then picking up her skirt, she threads her way through the crowded streets, reads the advertisements on the walls, hails the omnibus, inquires at the concierge's loge, murmurs as she goes upstairs, ' Que c'est haul le cinquiemej and then ? Why, the door opens, and she cries, ' Je t'aime.'

But it was the idea of the new sestheticism the new art corresponding to modern, as ancient art corresponded to ancient life that captivated me, that led me away, and not a substantial knowledge of the work done by the naturalists. I had read the ' Assommoir,' and had been much impressed by its pyramid size, strength, height, and decorative grandeur, and also by the immense harmonic develop-

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ment of the idea; and the fugal treatment of the different scenes had seemed to me astonishingly new the washhouse, for example : the fight motive is indicated, then follows the development of side issues, then comes the fight motive explained ; it is broken off short, it flutters through a web of progressive detail, the fight motive is again taken up, and now it is worked out in all its fulness ; it is worked up to crescendo, another side issue is introduced, and again the theme is given forth. And I marvelled greatly at the lordly, river-like roll of the narrative, some- times widening out into lakes and shallowing meres, but never stagnating in fen or marshlands. The language, too, which I did not then recognize as the weak point, being little more than a boiling down of Chateaubriand and Flaubert, spiced with Goncourt, delighted me with its novelty, its richness, its force. Nor did I then even roughly suspect that the very qualities which set my admiration in a blaze wilder than wildfire, being precisely those that had won the victory for the romantic school forty years before, were very antagonistic to those claimed for the new art. I was deceived, as was all my generation, by a certain externality, an outer skin, a nearness, un approchement ; in a word, by a substitution of Paris for the distant and exotic backgrounds so beloved of the romantic school. I did not know then, as I do now, that art is eternal, that it is only the artist that changes, and that the two great divisions the only possible divisions are : those who have talent, and those who have no talent. But I do not regret my errors, my follies ; it is not well to know at once of the limitations of life and things. I should be less

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than nothing had it not been for my enthusiasms ; they were the saving clause in my life.

But although I am apt to love too dearly the art of my day, and to the disparagement of that of other days, I did not fall into the stupid mistake of placing the realistic writers of 1877 side by side with and on the same plane of intellectual vision as the great Balzac ; I felt that that vast immemorial mind rose above them all, like a mountain above the highest tower.

And, strange to say, it was Gautier that introduced me to Balzac ; for mention is made in the wonderful preface to ' Les Fleurs du Mai ' of Seraphita : Seraphita, Seraphitus ; which is it ? woman or man ? Should Wilfred or Mona be the possessor ? A new Mile, de Maupin, with royal lily and aureole, cloud- capped mountains, great gulfs of sea- water flowing up and reflecting as in a mirror the steep cliffs' side ; the straight white feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is torn, and the pure, strange soul con- tinues its mystical exhortations. Then the radiant vision, a white glory, the last outburst and manifesta- tion/ the trumpets of the apocalypse, the colour of heaven, the closing of this stupendous allegory Seraphita lying dead in the rays of the first sun of the nineteenth century.

I, therefore, had begun, as it were, to read Balzac backwards ; instead of beginning with the plain, simple, earthly tragedy of the Pere Goriot, I first knelt in a beautiful but distant coigne of the great world of his genius Seraphita. Certain nuances of soul are characteristic of certain latitudes, and what subtle instinct led him to Norway in quest of this fervent

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soul ? The instincts of genius are unfathomable ? but he who has known the white northern women with their pure spiritual eyes, will aver that instinct led him aright. I have known one, one whom I used to call Seraphita ; Coppee knew her too, and that exquisite volume, ( L' Exile,' so Seraphita-like in the keen blonde passion of its verse, was written to her, and each poem was sent to her as it was written. Where is she now, that flower of northern snow, once seen for a season in Paris ? Has she returned to her native northern solitudes, great gulfs of sea-water, mountain rock, and pine ?

Balzac's genius is in his titles as heaven is in its stars : ' Melmoth Reconcili6,' 'Jesus-Christ en Flandres,' ' Le Revers d'un Grand Homme/ ' La Cousine Bette.' I read somewhere not very long ago, that Balzac was the greatest thinker that had appeared in France since Pascal. Of Pascal's claim to be a great thinker I confess I cannot judge. No man is greater than the age he lives in, and, therefore, to talk to us, the legitimate children of the nineteenth century, of proofs that we ought to believe in the Catholic God strikes us in just the same light as a proof that we ought to believe in Jupiter Ammon. { Les Pensees ' could appear to me only as childish ; the form is no doubt superb, but tiresome and sterile to one of such modern and exotic taste as myself. Still, I accept thankfully, in its sense of two hundred years, the compliment paid to Balzac ; but I would add that he seems to me to have shown greater wings of mind than any writer that ever lived. I am aware that this last statement will make many cry

• fool ' and hiss ' Shakespeare* ! But I am not putting

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forward these criticisms axiomatically, but only as the expressions of an individual taste, and interesting so far as they reveal to the reader the different develop- ments and the progress of my mind. It might prove a little tiresome, but it would no doubt ' look well/ in the sense that going to church * looks well/ if I were to write in here ten pages of praise of our national bard. I must, however, resist the temptation to { look well ' ; a confession is interesting in proportion to the amount of truth it contains, and I will, therefore, state that I never derived any profit whatsoever, and very little pleasure from the reading of the great plays. The beauty of the verse ! Yes ; he who loved Shelley as well as I could not fail to hear the melody of

( Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly ? Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.'

Is not such music as this enough ? Of course, but I am a sensualist in literature. I may see perfectly well that this or that book is a work of genius, but if it doesn't ' fetch me/ it doesn't concern me, and I for- get its very existence. What leaves me cold to-day will madden me to-morrow. With me literature is a question of sense, intellectual sense if you will, but sense all the same, and ruled by the same caprices those of the flesh ? Now we enter on very subtle distinctions. No doubt that there is the brain-judg- ment and the sense-judgment of a work of art. And it will be noticed that these two forces of discrimi- nation exist sometimes almost independently of each other, in rare and radiant instances confounded and blended in one immense and unique love. Who has not been, unless perhaps some dusty old pedant, thrilled and driven to pleasure by the action of a

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book that penetrates to and speaks to you of your most present and most intimate emotions. This is of course pure sensualism ; but to take a less marked stage. Why should Marlowe enchant me ? why should he delight and awake enthusiasm in me, while Shakespeare leaves me cold ? The mind that can understand one can understand the other, but there are affinities in literature corresponding to, and very analogous to, sexual affinities the same un- reasoned attractions, the same pleasures, the same lassitudes. Those we have loved most we are most indifferent to. Shelley, Gautier, Zola, Flaubert, Goncourt ! how I have loved you all ; and now I could not, would not, read you again. How womanly, how capricious ; but even a light of love is con- stant, if not faithful, to her amant de cceur. So with me ; of those I have loved deeply there is but one that still may thrill me with the old passion, with the first ecstacy it is Balzac. Upon that rock I built my church, and his great and valid talent saved me often from destruction, saved me from the shoaling waters of new aestheticisms, the putrid mud of naturalism, and the faint and sickly surf of the symbolists. Thinking of him, I could not forget that it is the spirit and not the flesh that is eternal ; that, as it was thought that in the first instance gave man speech, so to the end it shall still be thought that shall make speech beautiful and rememberable. The grandeur and sublimity of Balzac's thoughts seem to me to rise to the loftiest heights, and his range is limitless ; there is no passion he has not touched, and what is more marvellous, he has given to each in art a place equivalent to the place it occupies in

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nature ; his intense and penetrating sympathy for human life and all that concerns it enabled him to surround the humblest subjects with awe and crown them with the light of tragedy. There are some, particularly those who can understand neither and can read but one, who will object to any comparison being drawn between the Dramatist and the Novelist ; but I confess that I if the inherent superiority of verse over prose, which I admit unhesitatingly, be waived that I fail, utterly fail, to see in what Shakespeare is greater than Balzac. The range of the poet's thought is of necessity not so wide, and his concessions must needs be greater than the novel- ist's. On these points we will cry quits, and come at once to the vital question the creation. Is Lucien inferior to Hamlet ? Is Eugenie Grandet inferior to Desdemona ? Is her father inferior to Shylock ? Is Macbeth inferior to Vautrin ? Can it be said that the apothecary in the ' Cousine Bette,' or the Baron Hulot, or the Cousine Bette herself is inferior to anything the brain of man has ever conceived ? And it must not be forgotten that Shakespeare has had three hundred years and the advantage of stage representation to impress his characters on the sluggish mind of the world ; and as mental impres- sions are governed by the same laws of gravitation as atoms, our realization of Falstaff must of necessity be more vivid than of any character in contemporary literature, although it were equally great. And so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I speak with absolute sincerity and conviction, the work of the novelist seems to me richer than that of the dramatist. Who shall forget those terrible words

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of the poor life -weary orphan in the boarding-house ? Speaking of Vautrin she says, ' His look frightens me as if he put his hand on my dress ' ; and another epigram from the same book, ' Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention.' Find me anything in La Rochefoucauld that goes more incisively to the truth of things. One more ; here I can give the exact words : ' La gloire est le soleil des worts.' It would be easy to compile a book of sayings from Balzac that would make all ' Maximes' and ' Pensees,' even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, seem trivial and shallow.

Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated in the ' Comedie Humaine/ I no doubt fluttered through some scores of other books, of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but he alone left any important or last- ing impression upon my mind. The rest was like walnuts and wine, an agreeable after-taste.

But notwithstanding all this reading I can lay no claim to scholarship of any kind ; for save life I could never learn anything correctly. I am a student only of ballrooms, bar-rooms, streets, and alcoves. I have read very little ; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambi- tion, and my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave inquietude study as con- trasted with a general and haphazard gathering of ideas taken in flight. But in me the impulse is so original to frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring

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from it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is in me the generating force ; with- out this what invention I have is thin and sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it did in the composition of my unfortunate ' Roses of Midnight.'

Men and women, oh the strength of the living faces ! conversation, oh the magic of it ! It is a fabulous river of gold where the precious metal is washed up without stint for all to take, to take as much as he can carry. Two old ladies discussing the peerage? Much may be learned, it is gold; poets and wits, then it is fountains whose spray solidifies into jewels, and every herb and plant is begemmed with the sparkle of the diamond and the glow of the ruby.

I did not go to either Oxford or Cambridge, but I went to the Nouvelle Athenes.' What is the Nouvelle Athenes ' ? He who would know any- thing of my life must know something of the academy of the fine arts. Not the official stupidity you read of in the daily papers, but the real French academy, the cafe. The 'Nouvelle Athenes' is a caft on the Place Pigale. Ah ! the morning idle- nesses and the long evenings when life was but a summer illusion, the grey moonlights on the Place where we used to stand on the pavements, the shutters clanging up behind us, loath to separate, thinking of what we had left unsaid, and how much better we might have enforced our arguments. Dead and scattered are all those who used to assemble there, and those years and our home, for it was our home, live only in a few pictures and a few pages of

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prose. The same old story, the vanquished only are victorious; and though unacknowledged, though unknown, the influence of the * Nouvelle Athenes ' is inveterate in the artistic thought of the nineteenth century.

How magnetic, intense, and vivid are these memories of youth ! With what strange, almost un- natural clearness do I see and hear see the white face of that cafo, the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up to the Place, between two streets. I can see down the incline of those two streets, and I know what shops are there ; I can hear the glass door of the cafe grate on the sand as I open it. I can recall the smell of every hour. In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pungent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac ; at five o'clock the fragrant odour of absinthe ; and soon after the steaming soup ascends from the kitchen ; and as the evening advances, the mingled smells of cigarettes, coffee, and weak beer. A partition, rising a few feet or more over the hats, separates the glass front from the main body of the cafe. The usual marble tables are there, and it is there we sat and aestheticized till two o'clock in the morning. But who is that man ? he whose prominent eyes flash with excitement. That is Villiers de 1'Isle Adam. The 'last or the supposed last of the great family. He is telling that girl a story that fair girl with heavy eyelids, stupid and sensual. She is, however, genuinely astonished and interested, and he is striving to play upon her ignorance. Listen to him. ' Spain the night is fragrant with the sea and the perfume of the orange trees, you know a midnight of stars and dreams.

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Now and then the silence is broken by the sentries challenging that is all. But not in Spanish, but in French are the challenges given ; the town is in the hands of the French ; it is under martial law. But now an officer passes down a certain garden, a Span- iard disguised as a French officer ; from the balcony the family one of the most noble and oldest families Spain can boast of, a thousand years, long before the conquest of the Moors watches him. Well then ' Villiers sweeps with a white feminine hand the long hair that is falling over his face he has half forgotten, he is a little mixed in the opening of the story, and he is striving in English to ' scamp,' in French to escamoter. ( The family are watching, death if he is caught, if he fails to kill the French sentry. The cry of a bird, some vague sound attracts the sentry, he turns ; all is lost. The Spaniard is seized. Martial law, Spanish conspiracy must be put down. The French General is a man of iron' (Villiers laughs, a short, hesitating laugh that is characteristic of him, and continues in his abrupt, uncertain way), c man of iron ; not only he declares that the spy must be beheaded, but also the entire family a man of iron that, ha, ha ! and then, no you cannot, it is impossible for you to understand the enormity of the calamity a thousand years before the conquest by the Moors, a Spaniard alone could there is no one here, ha, ha ! I was forgetting the utter extinction of a great family of the name, the oldest and noblest of all the families in Spain, it is not easy to understand that, no, not easy here in the " Nouvelle Athenes" ha, ha, one must belong to a great family to understand, ha, ha !

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' The father beseeches, he begs that one member may be spared to continue the name the youngest son that is all ; if he could be saved, the rest what matter ? death is nothing to a Spaniard ; the family, the name, a thousand years of name is everything, The General is, you know, a " man of iron." " Yes, one member of your family shall be respited, but on one condition." To the agonized family conditions are as nothing. But they don't know the man of iron is determined to make a terrible example, and they cry, " Any conditions." " He who is respited must serve as executioner to the others." Great is the doom : you understand ; but after all the name must be saved. Then in the family council the father goes to his youngest son and says, " I have been a good father to you, my son ; I have always been a kind father, have I not ? answer me ; I have never refused you anything. Now you will not fail us, you will prove yourself worthy of the great name you bear. Remember your great ancestor who defeated the Moors, remember." ' (Villiers strives to get in a little local colour, but his knowledge of Spanish names and history is limited, and he in a certain sense fails.) ' Then the mother comes to her son and says, " My son, I have been a good mother, I have always loved you ; say you will not desert us in this hour of our great need." Then the little sister comes, and the whole family kneels down and appeals to the horror-stricken boy. . . .

' " He will not prove himself unworthy of our name," cries the father. " Now, my son, courage, take the axe firmly, do what I ask you, courage, strike straight." The father's head falls into the

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sawdust, the blood all over the white beard ; then comes the elder brother, and then another brother ; and then, oh, the little sister was almost more than he could bear, and the mother had to whisper, u Remember your promise to your father, to your dead father." The mother laid her head on the block, but he could not strike. " Be not the first coward of our name, strike ; remember your promise to us all," and her head was struck off.'

( And the son/ the girl asks, { what became of him ?'

' He never was seen, save at night, walking, a solitary man, beneath the walls of his castle in Granada.'

• And who did he marry ?'

' He never married.'

Then after a long silence some one said

' Whose story is that ?'

'Balzac's.'

At that moment the glass door of the cafe grated upon the sanded floor, and Manet entered. Although by birth and by art essentially a Parisian, there was something in his appearance and manner of speaking that often suggested an Englishman. Perhaps it was his dress his clean-cut clothes and figure. That figure ! those square shoulders that swaggered as he went across a room, and the thin waist ; and that face, the beard and nose, satyr-like shall I say ? No, for I would evoke an idea of beauty of line united to that of intellectual expression frank words, frank passion in his convictions, loyal and simple phrases, clear as well-water, sometimes a little hard, some- times, as they flowed away, bitter, but at the fountain-head sweet and full of light. He sits next

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to Degas, that round-shouldered man in suit of pepper-and-salt. There is nothing very trenchantly French about him either, except the large necktie ; his eyes are small, and his words are sharp, ironical, cynical. These two men are the leaders of the impressionist school. Their friendship has been jarred by inevitable rivalry. ' Degas was painting " Semiramis when I was painting " Modern Paris," ' says Manet. ' Manet is in despair because he cannot paint atrocious pictures like Duran^, and be feted and decorated ; he is an artist, not by inclination, but by force. He is as a galley slave chained to the oar,' says Degas. Different, too, are their methods of work. Manet paints his whole picture from nature, trusting his instinct to lead him aright through the devious labyrinth of selection. Nor does his instinct ever fail him, there is a vision in his eyes which he calls nature, and which he paints unconsciously as he digests his food, thinking and declaring vehemently that the artist should not seek a synthesis, but should paint merely what he sees. This extraordinary one- ness of nature and artistic vision does not exist in Degas, and even his portraits are composed from drawings and notes. About midnight Catulle Mendes will drop in, when he has corrected his proofs. He will come with his fine paradoxes and his strained eloquence. He will lean towards you, he will take you by the arm, and his presence is a nervous pleasure. And when the cafd is closed, when the last bock has been drunk, we shall walk about the great moonlight of the Place Pigale, and through the dark shadows of the streets, talking of the last book published, he hanging on to my arm, speaking in that high febrile voice of his,

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every phrase luminous, aerial, even as the soaring moon and the fitful clouds. Duranty, an unknown Stendhal, will come in for an hour or so ; he will talk little and go away quietly ; he knows, and his whole manner shows that he knows, that he is a defeated man ; and if you ask him why he does not write another novel, he will say, ' What's the good ? it would not be read ; no one read the others, and I mightn't do even as well if I tried again.' Paul Alexis, Leon Diex, Pissarro, Cabaner, are also fre- quently seen in the ' Nouvelle Athenes.'

Cabaner ! the world knows not the names of those who scorn the world : somewhere in one of the great populous churchyards of Paris there is a forgotten grave, and there lies Cabaner. Cabaner ! since the beginning there have been, to the end of time there shall be, Cabaners ; and they shall live miserably, and they shall die miserable, and shall be forgotten ; and there shall never arise a novelist great enough to make live in art that eternal spirit of devotion, disinterestedness, and aspiration, which in each gener- ation incarnates itself in one heroic soul. Better wast thou than those who stepped to opulence and fame upon thee fallen ; better, loftier-minded, purer ; thy destiny was to fall that others might rise upon thee, thou wert one of the noble legion of the con- quered ; let praise be given to the conquered, for with them lies the brunt of victory. Child of the pavement, of strange sonnets and stranger music, I remember thee ; I remember the silk shirts, the four sous of Italian cheese, the roll of bread, and the glass of milk, the streets were thy dining room. And the five-mile walk daily to the suburban music hall where

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five francs were earned by playing the accompani- ments of comic songs. And the wonderful room on the fifth floor, which was furnished when that cele- brated heritage of two thousand francs was paid. I remember the fountain that was bought for a ward- robe, and the American organ with all the instru- ments of the orchestra, and the plaster casts under which the homeless ones that were never denied a refuge and a crust by thee slept. I remember all, and the buying of the life-size ' Venus de Milo.' Something extraordinary would be done with it, I knew, but the result exceeded my wildest expecta- tion. The head must needs be struck off, so that the rapture of thy admiration should be secure from all jarring reminiscence of the streets.

Then the wonderful story of the tenor, the pork butcher, who was heard giving out such a volume of sound that the sausages were set in motion above him ; he was fed, clothed and educated on the five francs a day earned in the music hall in the Avenue de la Motte Piquet ; and when he made his debut at the Theatre Lyrique, thou wast in the last stage of consumption and too ill to go to hear thy pupil's success. He was immediately engaged by Maple- son and taken to America.

I remember thy face, Cabaner ; I can see it now that long, sallow face ending in a brown beard, and the hollow eyes, the meagre arms covered with a silk shirt, contrasting strangely with the rest of the dress. In all thy privation and poverty, thou didst never forego thy silk shirt. I remember the paradoxes and the aphorisms, if not the exact words, the glamour and the sentiment of a humour that was

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all thy own. Never didst thou laugh ; no, not even when in discussing how silence might be rendered in music, thou didst say, with thy extraordinary Pyrenean accent, ' Pour rendre le silence en musique il me faudrait trois orchestres militaires.' And when I did show thee some poor verses of mine, French verses, for at this time I hated and had partly for- gotten my native language

f My dear George Moore, you always write about love, the subject is nauseating.'

' So it is, so it is ; but after all Baudelaire wrote about love and lovers ; his best poem. . . .'

f C'est vrai, metis il s'agissait d'une charogne et cela relive beaucoup la chose S

I remember, too, a few stray snatches of thy extraordinary music, r music that might be considered by Wagner as a little too advanced, but which Liszt would not fail to understand ;' also thy settings of sonnets where the melody was continued uninter- ruptedly from the first line to the last ; and that still more marvellous feat, thy setting, likewise with unbroken melody, of Villon's ballade ' Les Dames du Temps Jadis ;' and that out-Cabanering of Cabaner, the putting to music of Cros's ' Hareng Saur/

And why didst thou remain ever poor and unknown ? Because of something too much, or something too little ? Because of something too much ! so I think, at least ; thy heart was too full of too pure an ideal, too far removed from all possible contagion with the base crowd.

But, Cabaner, thou didst not labour in vain ; thy destiny, though obscure, was a valiant and fruitful one ; and, as in life thou didst live for others, so now

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in death thou dost live in others. Thou wast in an hour of wonder and strange splendour when the last tints and lovelinesses of romance lingered in the deepening west ; when out of the clear east rose with a mighty effulgence of colour and lawless light Realism ; when showing aloft in the dead pallor of the zenith, like a white flag fluttering faintly, Symbolists and Decadents appeared. Never before was there so sudden a flux and conflux of artistic desire, such aspiration in the soul of man, such rage of passion, such fainting fever, such cerebral erethism. The roar and dust of the daily battle of the Realists was continued under the flush of the sunset, the arms of the Romantics glittered, the pale spiritual Symbolists watched and waited, none knowing yet of their presence. In such an hour of artistic convulsion and renewal of thought thou wast, and thou wast a magnificent rallying point for all comers ; it was thou who didst theorize our confused aspirations, and by thy holy example didst save us from all base commercialism, from all hateful prostitution; thou wast ever our high priest, and from thy high altar turned to us the white host, the ideal, the true and living God of all men.

Cabaner, I see you now entering the ' Nouvelle Athenes ;' you are a little tired after your long weary walk, but you lament not and you never cry out against the public that will accept neither your music nor your poetry. But though you are tired and footsore, you are ready to aestheticize till the cafe closes ; for you the homeless ones are waiting : there they are, some three or four, and you will take them to your strange room, furnished with the

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American organ, the fountain, and the decapitated Venus, and you will give them a crust each and cover them with what clothes you have ; and, when clothes are lacking, with plaster casts, and though you will take but a glass of milk yourself, you will find a few sous to give them lager to cool their thirsty throats. So you have ever lived a blameless life is yours, no base thought has ever entered there, not even a woman's love ; art and friends, that is all.

Reader, do you know of anything more angelic ? If you do you are more fortunate than I have been.

VIII

. THE SYNTHESIS OF THE NOUVELLE ATHENES

Two dominant notes in my character an original hatred of my native country, and a brutal loathing of the religion I was brought up in. All the aspects of my native country are violently disagreeable to me, and I cannot think of the place I was born in with- out a sensation akin to nausea. These feelings are inherent and inveterate in me. I am instinctively averse from my own countrymen ; they are at once remote and repulsive ; but with Frenchmen I am conscious of a sense of nearness ; I am one with them in their ideas and aspirations, and when I am with them, I am alive with a keen and penetrating sense of intimacy. Shall I explain this by atavism ? Was there a French man or woman in my family some half-dozen generations ago? I have not inquired. The English I love, and with a love that is foolish mad, for it is limitless ; I love them better than the

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French, but I am not so near to them. Dear, sweet, Protestant England claims me. Every aspect of it raises me above myself, and there is perhaps no moment in my life more intense than when I stand and gaze admiring the red tiles of the farmhouse, the elms, the great hedgerows and all the rich fields adorned with spreading trees and smock frocks. My soul is cheered by the sight of a windmill or a smock, we find neither in the north the north is Celtic and I am by ancestry a South Saxon. The county of my instinctive aspiration would be Sussex, the most Saxon of all. Its every aspect awakens antenatal sympathies in me. The villages clustered round the greens with spires of the churches point- ing between the elms were never new to me. When I saw them for the first time they were familiar; and the church bells calling the folk to prayer, to sweet-smelling churches, without candles, without incense, drew my feet instinctively. I followed, and learnt to love God in Protestantism and to under- stand that when England ceases to be Protestant she will decline into the equivalent of the poor Celt who worships his priest and shoots his landlord. France never was Catholic, no nation is, and nowhere in France does the Catholic banner hang so limp as in the Nouvelle Athenes.

Gar$on, un bock ! I write to please myself, just as I order my dinner ; if my books sell I cannot help it it is an accident.

But you live by writing.

Yes, but life is only an accident art is eternal.

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What I reproach Zola with is that he has no style ; there is nothing you won't find in Zola from Chateau- briand to the reporting in the Figaro.

He seeks immortality in an exact description of a linendraper's shop ; if the shop conferred immortality it should be upon the linendraper who created the shop, and not on the novelist who described it.

And his last novel ' 1'GEuvre/ how spun out, and for a franc a line in the * Gil Bias/ Not a single new or even exact observation. And that terrible phrase repeated over and over again ' La Conquete de Paris.' What does it mean ? I never knew any- one who thought of conquering Paris : no one ever spoke of conquering Paris except, perhaps, two or three provincials.

You must have rules in poetry, if it is only for the pleasure of breaking them, just as you must have women dressed, if it is only [for the pleasure of undressing them.

Fancy, a banquet was given to Julien by his pupils ! He made a speech in favour of Lefebvre, and hoped that every one there would vote for Lefebvre. Julien was very eloquent. He spoke of Le grand art, le nu, and Lefebvre's unswerving fidelity to le nu . . . elegance, refinement, an echo of ancient Greece: and then what do you think ? when he had exhausted all the reasons why the medal of honour should be given to Lefebvre, he said, ' I ask you to remember, gentlemen, that he has a wife and eight children.' Is it not monstrous ?

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But it is you who are monstrous, you who expect to fashion the whole world in conformity with your aestheticisms ... a vain dream, and if realized it would result in an impossible world. A wife and children are the bases of existence, and it is folly to cry out because an appeal to such interests as these meets with response ... it will be so till the end of time.

And these great interests that are to continue to the end of time began two years ago, when your pictures were not praised in the Figaro as much as you thought they should be.

Love but not marriage. Marriage means a four- post bed and papa and mamma between eleven and twelve. Love is aspiration : transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife you know all about her who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream, the au delh ? But the women one has never seen before, that one will never see again ! The choice ! the enervation of burning odours, the baptismal whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely dark with kohl, names that evoke palm treeg and ruins, Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis ! The nightingale-harmony of an eternal yes the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the unreal. This is love. There is delusion, an au dela.

Good heavens ! and the world still believes in education, in teaching people the ' grammar of art.' Education should be confined to clerks, and it drives

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even them to drink. Will the world learn that we never learn anything that we did not know before ? The artist, the poet, painter, musician, and novelist go straight to the food they want, guided by an unerring and ineffable instinct ; to teach them is to destroy the nerve of the artistic instinct. Art flees before the art school . . . 'correct drawing/ 'solid painting.' Is it impossible to teach people, to force it into their heads that there is no such thing as correct drawing, and that if drawing were correct it would be wrong ? Solid painting ; good heavens ! Do they suppose that there is one sort of painting that is better than all others, and that there is a receipt for making it as for making chocolate ? Art is not mathematics, it is individuality. It does not matter how badly you paint, so long as you don't paint badly like other people. Education destroys individuality. That great studio of Julien's is a sphinx, and all the poor folk that go there for artistic education are devoured. After two years they all paint and draw alike, every one ; that vile execu- tion they call it execution la pate, la peinture au premier coup. I was over in England last year, and I saw some portraits by a man called Richmond. They were horrible, but I liked them because they weren't like painting. Stott and Sargent are clever fellows enough ; I like Stott the best. If they had remained at home and hadn't been taught, they might have developed a personal art, but the trail of the serpent is over all they do that vile French painting, le morceau, etc. Stott is getting over it by degrees. He exhibited a nymph this year. I know what he meant ; it was an interesting intention. I

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liked his little landscapes better . . . simplified into nothing, into a couple of primitive tints, wonderful clearness, light. But I doubt if he will find a public to understand all that.

Democratic art ! Art is the direct antithesis to democracy. . . . Athens ! a few thousand citizens who owned many thousand slaves, call that demo- cracy ! No ! what I am speaking of is modern democracy the mass. The mass can only appreciate simple and naive emotions, puerile prettiness, above all conventionalities. See the Americans that come over here ; what do they admire ? Is it Degas or Manet they admire ? No, Bouguereau and Lefebvre. What was most admired at the International Exhibition ? The Dirty Boy. And if the medal of honour had been decided by a plebiscite, The Dirty Boy would have had an overwhelming majority. What is the literature of the people ? The idiotic stories of the Petit Journal. Don't talk of Shakes- peare, Moliere and the masters ; they are accepted on the authority of the centuries. If the people could understand Hamlet, the people would not read the Petit Journal; if the people could understand Michel Angelo, they would not look at our Bouguereau or your Bouguereau, Sir F. Leighton. For the last hundred years we have been going rapidly towards democracy, and what is the result ? The destruction of the handicrafts. That there are still good pictures painted and good poems written proves nothing, there will always be found men to sacrifice their lives for a picture or a poem. But the decorative arts which are executed in collaboration,

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and depend for support on the general taste of a large number, have ceased to exist. Explain that if you can. I'll give you five thousand, ten thousand francs to buy a beautiful clock that is not a copy and is not ancient, and you can't do it. Such a thing does not exist. Look here, I was going up the staircase of the Louvre the other day. They were putting up a mosaic ; it was horrible ; every one knows it is horrible. Well, I asked who had given the order for this mosaic, and I could not find out ; no one knew. An order is passed from bureau to bureau, and no one is responsible ; and it will be always so in a republic, and the more republican you are the worse it will be.

The world is dying of machinery ; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization ; man will have to rise against it sooner or later. . . . Capital, unpaid labour, wage- slaves, and all the rest stuff. . . . Look at these plates; they were painted by machinery ; they are abomin- able. Look at them. In old times plates were painted by the hand, and the supply was necessarily limited to the demand, and a china in which there was always something more or less pretty, was turned out ; but now thousands, millions of plates are made more than we want, and there is a commercial crisis ; the thing is inevitable. I say the great and the reasonable revolution will be when mankind rises in revolt, and smashes the machinery and restores the handicrafts.

Goncourt is not an artist, notwithstanding all his affectation and outcries ; he is not an artist. // me

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fait Veffet of an old woman shrieking after immor- tality and striving to beat down some fragment of it with a broom. Once it was a duet, now it is a solo. They wrote novels, history, plays, they collected bric- a-brac they wrote about their bric-a-brac; they painted in water-colours, they etched they wrote about their water-colours and etchings ; they have made a will settling that the bric-a-brac is to be sold at their death, and the proceeds applied to founding a prize for the best essay or novel, I forget which it is. They wrote about the prize they are going to found ; they kept a diary, they wrote down every- thing they heard, felt, or saw, radotage de vieille femme ; nothing must escape, not the slightest word ; it might be that very word that might confer on them immortality ; everything they heard, or said, must be of value, of inestimable value. A real artist does not trouble himself about immortality, about every- thing he hears, feels and says ; he treats ideas and sensations as so much clay wherewith to create.

And then the famous collaboration ; how it was talked about, written about, prayed about ; and when Jules died, what a subject for talk for articles : it all went into pot. Hugo's vanity was titanic, Gon- eourt's is puerile.

And Daudet ?

Oh, Daudet, c'est de la bouillabaisse.

Whistler, of all artists, is the least impressionist ; the idea people have of his being an impressionist only proves once again the absolute inability of the public to understand the merits or the demerits of artistic work. Whistler's art is classical ; he thinks

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of nature, but he does not see nature ; he is guided by his mind, and not by his eyes ; and the best of it is he says so. He knows it well enough ! Any one who knows him must have heard him say, ' Painting is absolutely scientific ; it is an exact science.' And his work is in accord with his theory ; he risks nothing, all is brought down, arranged, balanced, and made one ; his pictures are thought out beforehand, they are mental conceptions. I admire his work ; I am showing how he is misunderstood, even by those who think they understand. Does he ever seek a pose that is characteristic of the model, a pose that the model repeats oftener than any other ? Never. He advances the foot, puts the hand on the hip, etc., with a view to rendering his idea. Take his portrait of Duret. Did he ever see Duret in dress clothes ? Probably not. Did he ever see Duret with a lady's opera cloak ? I am sure he never did. Is Duret in the habit of going to the theatre with ladies ? No, he is a litterateur who is always in men's society, rarely in ladies'. But these facts mattered nothing to Whistler as they matter to Degas, or to Manet. Whistler took Duret out of his environment, dressed him up, thought out a scheme in a word, painted his idea without concerning himself in the least with the model. Mark you, I deny that I am urging any fault or flaw ; I am merely contending that Whistler's art is not modern art, but classic art yes, and severely classical, far more classical than Titian's or Velasquez' ; from an opposite pole as classical as Ingres'. No Greek dramatist ever sought the syn- thesis of things more uncompromisingly than Whistler. And he is right. Art is not nature. Art is nature

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digested. Zola and Goncourt cannot, or will not, understand that the artistic stomach must be allowed to do its work in its own mysterious fashion. If a man is really an artist he will remember what is necessary, forget what is useless ; but if he takes notes he will interrupt his artistic digestion, and the result will be a lot of little touches, inchoate and wanting in the elegant rhythm of the synthesis.

I am sick of synthetical art ; we want observation direct and unreasoned. What I reproach Millet with is that it is always the same thing, the same peasant, the same sabot, the same sentiment. You must admit that it is somewhat stereotyped.

What does that matter ; what is more stereotyped than Japanese art? But that does not prevent it from being always beautiful.

People talk of Manet's originality; that is just what I can't see. What he has got, and what you can't take away from him, is a magnificent execution. A piece of still life by Manet is the most wonderful thing in the world; vividness of colour, breadth, simplicity, and directness of touch marvellous !

French translation is the only translation ; in England you still continue to translate poetry into poetry, instead of into prose. We used to do the same, but we have long ago renounced such follies. Either of two things if the translator is a good poet, he substitutes his verse for that of the original I don't want his verse, I want the original if he is a

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bad poet, he gives us bad verse, which is intolerable. Where the original poet put an effect of caesura, the translator puts an effect of rhyme ; where the original poet puts an effect of rhyme, the translator puts an effect of caesura. Take Longfellow's ' Dante.' Does it give as good an idea of the original as our prose translation ? Is it as interesting reading ? Take Bayard Taylor's translation of < Goethe.' Is it read- able ? Not to any one with an ear for verse. Will any one say that Taylor's would be read if the original did not exist? The fragment translated by Shelley is beautiful, but then it is Shelley. Look at Swinburne's translations of Villon. They are beautiful poems by Swinburne, that is all ; he makes Villon speak of a ' splendid kissing mouth.' Villon could not have done this unless he had read Swinburne. * Heine/ translated by James Thomson, is not different from Thomson's original poems ; ' Heine,' translated by Sir Theodore Martin, is doggerel.

But in English blank verse you can translate quite as literally as you could into prose ?

I doubt it, but even so, the rhythm of the blank line would carry your mind away from that of the original.

But if you don't know the original ?

The rhythm of the original can be suggested in prose judiciously used ; even if it isn't, your mind is at least free, whereas the English rhythm must destroy the sensation of something foreign. There is no translation except a word-for-word translation.

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Baudelaire's translation of Poe, and Hugo's transla- tion of Shakespeare, are marvellous in this respect ; a pun or joke that is untranslatable is explained in a note.

But that is the way young ladies translate word for word !

No ; 'tis just what they don't do ; they think they are translating word for word, but they aren't. All the proper names, no matter how unpronounceable, must be rigidly adhered to ; you must never transpose versts into kilometres, or roubles into francs ; I don't know what a verst is or what a rouble is, but when I see the words I am in Russia. Every proverb must be rendered literally, even if it doesn't make very good sense : if it doesn't make sense at all, it must be explained in a note. For example, there is a proverb in German : ' Quand le cheval est selle il faut le monter ;' in French there is a proverb : ' Quand le vin est tir6 il faut le boire.' Well, a translator who would translate quand le cheval, etc., by quand le vin, etc., is an ass, and does not know his business. In translation only a strictly classical language should be used ; no word of slang, or even word of modern origin should be employed ; the translator's aim should be never to dissipate the illusion of an exotic. If I were translating the ' Assommoir' into English, I should strive after a strong, flexible, but colourless language, something what shall I say ? the style of a modern Addison.

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What, don't you know the story about Mendes ? when Chose wanted to marry his sister ? Chose s mother, it appears, went to live with a priest. The poor fellow was dreadfully cut up ; he was broken- hearted ; and he went to Mendes, his heart swollen with grief, determined to make a clean breast of it, let the worst come to the worst. After a great deal of beating about the bush, and apologizing, he got it out. You know Mendes, you can see him smiling a little ; and looking at Chose with that white cameo face of his he said, ' Avec quel meilleur homme voulez- vous que votre mere se mit ? vous n'avez done, jeune homme, aucun sentiment religieux.'

Victor Hugo, he is a painter on porcelain ; his verse is mere decoration, long tendrils and flowers ; and the same thing over and over again.

How to be happy ! not to read Baudelaire and Verlaine, not to enter the Nouvelle Athknes, unless perhaps to play dominoes like the bourgeois over there, not to do anything that would awake a too intense consciousness of life to live in a sleepy country-side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas out to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are devoured by insects ; the tame rook has flown away ; mother lost her prayer-book coming from church, she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy and to think there are people who would educate, who would draw these

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people out of the calm satisfaction of their instincts, and give them passions ! The philanthropist is the Nero of modern times.

IX

EXTRACT FROM A LETTER

1 WHY did you not send a letter? We have all been writing to you for the last six months, but no answer none. Had you written one word I would have saved all. The poor concierge was in despair ; she said the proprietaire would wait if you had only said when you were coming back, or if you had only let us know what you wished to be done. Three quarters' rent was due, and no news could be obtained of you, so an auction had to be called. It nearly broke my heart to see those horrid men tramping over the delicate carpets, their coarse faces set against the sweet colour of that beautiful English cretonne. . . . And all the while the pastel by Manet, the great hat set like an aureole about the face ' the eyes deep set in crimson shadow,' ' the fan widespread across the bosom ' (you see I am quoting your own words), looking down, the mistress of that little paradise of tapestry. She seemed to resent the intrusion. I looked once or twice half expecting those eyes ' deep set in crimson shadow ' to fill with tears. But nothing altered her great dignity ; she seemed to see all, but as a Buddha she remained impenetrable. . . .

' I was there the night before the sale. I looked through the books, taking notes of those I intended to buy those which we used to read together when

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the snow lay high about the legs of the poor faun in terre cuite, that laughed amid the frosty boulingrins. I found a large packet of letters which I instantly destroyed. You should not be so careless ; I wonder how it is that men are always careless about their letters.

' The sale was announced for one o'clock. I wore a thick veil, for I did not wish to be recognized ; the concierge of course knew me, but she can be depended upon. The poor old woman was in tears, so sorry was she to see all your pretty things sold up. You left owing her a hundred francs, but I have paid her ; and talking of you we waited till the auctioneer arrived. Everything had been pulled down ; the tapestry from the walls, the picture, the two vases I gave you were on the table waiting for the stroke of the hammer. And then the men, all the marchands de meubles in the quartier, came upstairs, spitting and talking coarsely their foul voices went through me. They stamped, spat, pulled the things about, nothing escaped them. One of them held up the Japanese dressing-gown and made some horrible jokes ; and the auctioneer, who was a humorist, answered, 'If there are any ladies' men present, we shall have some spirited bidding. ' The pastel I bought, and I shall keep it and try to find some excuse to satisfy my husband, but I send you the miniature, and I hope you will not let it be sold again. There were many other things I should have liked to buy, but I did not dare the organ that you used to play hymns on and I waltzes on, the Turkish lamp which we could never agree about . . . but when I saw the satin shoes which I gave you to carry the night of that

110 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

adorable ball, and which you would not give back, but nailed up on the wall on either side of your bed and put matches in, I was seized with an almost invincible desire to steal them. I don't know why, un caprice de femme. No one but you would have ever thought of converting satin shoes into match boxes. I wore them at that delicious ball ; we danced all night together, and you had an explanation with my husband (I was a little afraid for a moment, but it came out alright), and we went and sat on the balcony in the soft warm moonlight ; we watched the glitter of epaulets and gas, the satin of the bodices, the whiteness of passing shoulders : we dreamed the massy darkness of the park, the fairy light along the lawny spaces, the heavy perfume of the flowers, the pink of the camellias ; and you quoted something : ' les camelias du bakon ressemblent a des desirs mourants.' It was horrid of you : but you always had a knack of rubbing one up the wrong way. Then do you not remember how we danced in one room, while the servants set the other out with little tables ? That supper was fascinating ! I suppose it was these pleasant remembrances which made me wish for the shoes, but I could not summon up courage enough to buy them, and the horrid people were comparing me with the pastel ; I suppose 1 did look a little mysterious with a double veil bound across my face. The shoes went with a lot of other things and oh, to whom ?

• So now that pretty little retreat in the Rue de la

Tour des Dames is ended for ever for you and me. We shall not see the faun in terre cuite again ; I was thinking of going to see him the other day, but the

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street is so steep ; my coachman advised me to spare the horse's hind legs. I believe it is the steepest street in Paris. And your luncheon parties, how I did enjoy them, and how Fay did enjoy them too ; and what I risked, short-sighted as I am, picking my way from the tramcar down to that out-of-the-way little street ! Men never appreciate the risks women run for them. But to leave my letters lying about I cannot forgive that. When I told Fay she said, " What can you expect ? I warned you against flirting with boys." I never did before never.

' Paris is now just as it was when you used to sit on the balcony and I read you Browning. You never liked his poetry, and I cannot understand why. I have found a new poem which I am sure would convert you ; you should be here. There are lilacs in the room and the Mont Valerien is beautiful upon a great lemon sky, and the long avenue is merging into violet vapour.

'We have already begun to think of where we

shall go to this year. Last year we went to P ,

an enchanting place, quite rustic, but within easy distance of a casino. I had vowed not to dance, for I had been out every night during the season, but the temptation proved irresistible, and I gave way. There were two young men here, one the Count of

B , the other the Marquis of G , one of the

best families in France, a distant cousin of my husband. He has written a book which every one says is one of the most amusing things that have appeared for years, cest surtout trh Parisien. He paid me great attentions, and made my husband wildly jealous, I used to go out and sit with him

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amid the rocks, and it was perhaps very lucky for me that he went away. We may return there this year ; if so, I wish you would come and spend a month ; there is an excellent hotel where you would be very comfortable. We have decided nothing as yet. The

Duchesse de is giving a costume ball ; they say

it is going to be a most wonderful affair. I don't know what money is not going to be spent upon the cotillion. I have just got home a fascinating toilette. I am going as a Pierrette ; you know, a short skirt and a little cap. The Marquise gave a ball some few

days ago. I danced the cotillion with L , who,

as you know, dances divinely ; il m a fait la cour, but it is of course no use, you know that.

The other night we went to see the Mattre-de- Forges, a fascinating play, and I am reading the book ; I don't know which I like the best. I think the play, but the book is very good too. Now that is what I call a novel ; and I am a judge, for I have read all novels. But I must not talk literature, or you will say something stupid. I wish you would not make foolish remarks about men that tout-Paris considers the cleverest. It does not matter so much with me, I know you, but then people laugh at you behind your back, and that is not nice for me. The marquise was here the other day, and she said she almost wished you would not come on her "days," so extraordinary were the remarks you made. And by the way, the marquise has written a book. I have not seen it, but I hear that it is really too decollete. She is une femme d 'esprit, but the way she affiche's herself is too much for any one. She never goes

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anywhere now without le petit D . It is a great

pity.

' And now, my dear friend, write me a nice letter, and tell me when you are coming back to Paris. I am sure you cannot amuse yourself in that hateful London ; the nicest thing about you was that you were really tres Parisien. Come back and take a nice apartment on the Champs Elysees. You might come back for the Duchesse's ball. I will get an invitation for you, and will keep the cotillion for you. The idea of running away as you did, and never telling any one where you were going to. I always said you were a little cracked. And letting all your things be sold ! If you had only told me ! I should like so much to have had that Turkish lamp. Yours '

How like her that letter is egotistical, vain, foolish ; no, not foolish narrow, limited, but not foolish ; worldly, oh, how worldly ! and yet not repulsively so, for there always was in her a certain intensity of feeling that saved her from the common place, and gave her charm. She can feel, and she has lived her life and felt it acutely, and sincerely . . . like a moth caught in a gauze curtain ! Would that preclude sincerity ? Sincerity seems to convey an idea of depth, and she was not very deep, that is quite certain a little brain that span rapidly and hummed a pretty humming tune. But no, there was something more in her than that. She often said things that I thought clever, things that I did not forget, things that I should like to put into books. But it was not brain power; it was only H

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intensity of feeling nervous feeling. I don't know . . . perhaps. . . . She has lived her life ; within certain limits she has lived her life. None of us do more than that. True. I remember the first time I saw her. Sharp, little, and merry a change- able little sprite. I thought she had ugly hands ; so she has, and yet I forgot all about her hands before I had known her a month. It is now seven years ago. How time passes ! I was very young then. What battles we have had, what quarrels ! Still we had good times together. She never lost sight of me, but no intrusion; far too clever for that. I never got the better of her but once . . . once I did, enfin / She soon made up for lost ground. I wonder what the charm was. I did not think her pretty, I did not think her clever ; but I could not get her out of my head. I never knew if she cared for me, never, but there were moments when . . . Curious, febrile, subtle little creature, oh, infinitely subtle, subtle in everything, in her sensations subtle ; I suppose that was her charm, subtleness. I never knew if she cared for me, I never knew if she hated her husband one never knew her I never knew how she would receive me. The last time I saw her . . . that stupid American would take her downstairs, no getting rid of him, and I was hiding behind one of the pillars in the Rue de Rivoli, my hand on the cab door. However, she could not blame me that time and all the stories she used to invent of my indiscretions ; I believe she used to get them up for the sake of the excitement. She was awfully silly in some ways, once you got her into a certain line ; that marriage, that title, and she used

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to think of it night and day. I shall never forget when she went into mourning for the Count de Chambord. And her tastes, oh, how bourgeois they were ! That salon ; the flagrantly modern clock, brass work, eight hundred francs on the Boulevard St. Germain, the cabinets, brass work, the rich brown carpet, and the furniture set all round the room geometrically, the great gilt mirror, the ancestral portrait, the arms and crest everywhere, and the stuffy bourgeois sense of comfort; a little grotesque no doubt the mechanical admiration for all that is about her, for the general atmosphere ; the Figaro, that is to say Albert Wolf, Vhomrne le plus spirituel de Paris, cest-d-dire, dans le monde, the success of Georges Ohnet and the talent of Gustave Dore: But with all this vulgarity of taste certain apprecia- tions, certain ebullitions of sentiment, within the radius of sentiment certain elevations and de- pravities depravities in the legitimate sense of the word, that is to say, a revolt against the common- place. . . .

Ha, ha, ha ! how I have been dreaming ! I wish I had not been awoke from my reverie, it was pleasant.

The letter just read indicates, if it does not clearly tell, the changes that have taken place in my life; and it is only necessary to say that one morning, a few months ago, when my servant brought me some summer honey and a glass of milk to my bedside, she handed me an unpleasant letter. My agent's handwriting, even when I knew the envelope con- tained a cheque, has never quite failed to produce a sensation of repugnance in me so hateful is any

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sort of account, that I avoid as much as possible even knowing how I stand at my banker's. Therefore the odour of honey and milk, so evocative of fresh flowers and fields, was spoilt that morning for me ; and it was some time before I slipped on that beautiful Japanese dressing-gown, which I shall never see again, and read the odious epistle.

That some wretched farmers and miners should refuse to starve, that I may not be deprived of my demi-tasse at Tortoni's, that I may not be forced to leave this beautiful retreat, my cat and my python monstrous. And these wretched creatures will find moral support in England ; they will find pity !

Pity, that most vile of all vile virtues, has never been known to me. The great pagan world I love knew it not. Now the world proposes to interrupt the terrible austere laws of nature which ordain that the weak shall be trampled upon, shall be ground into death and dust, that the strong shall be really strong that the strong shall be glorious, sublime. A little bourgeois comfort, a little bourgeois sense of right, cry the moderns.

Hither the world has been drifting since the com- ing of the pale socialist of Galilee ; and this is why I hate Him, and deny His divinity. His divinity is falling, it is evanescent in sight of the goal He dreamed ; again He is denied by His disciples. Poor fallen God! I, who hold nought else pitiful, pity Thee, Thy bleeding face and hands and feet, Thy hanging body ; Thou at least art picturesque, and in a way beautiful in the midst of the sombre mediocrity, towards which Thou hast drifted for two thousand years, a flag; and in which Thou shalt find Thy

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doom as I mine, I, who will not adore Thee and can- not curse Thee now. For verily Thy life and Thy fate has been greater, stranger and more Divine than any man's has been. The chosen people, the garden, the betrayal, the crucifixion, and the beautiful story, not of Mary, but of Magdalen. The God descend- ing to the Magdalen ! Even the great pagan world of marble and pomp and lust and cruelty, that my soul goes out to and hails as the grandest, has not so sublime a contrast to show us as this.

Come to me, ye who are weak. The Word went forth, the terrible disastrous Word, and before it fell the ancient gods, and the vices that they represent, and which I revere, are outcast now in the world of men ; the Word went forth, and the world inter- preted the Word, blindly, ignorantly, savagely, for two thousand years, but nevertheless nearing every day the end the end that Thou in Thy divine intelligence foresaw, that finds its voice to-day (enormous though the antithesis may be, I will say it) in the Pall Mall Gazette. What fate has been like Thine? Betrayed by Judas in the garden, denied by Peter before the cock crew, crucified between thieves, and mourned for by a Magdalen, and then sent bound and bare, nothing changed, nothing altered, in Thy ignominious plight, forth- ward in the world's van the glory and symbol of man's new idea Pity. Thy day is closing in, but the heavens are now wider aflame with Thy light than ever before Thy light, which I, a pagan, standing on the last verge of the old world, declare to be darkness, the coming night of pity and justice which is imminent, which is the twentieth century,

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The bearers have relinquished Thy cross, they leave Thee in the hour of Thy universal triumph, Thy crown of thorns is falling, Thy face is buffeted with blows, and not even a reed is placed in Thy hand for sceptre ; only I and mine are by Thee, we who shall perish with Thee, in the ruin Thou hast created.

Injustice we worship ; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is the sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of fearful injustice; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of lofty aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but for injustice. Hail, therefore, to the thrice glorious virtue injustice ! What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh's lash or Egypt's sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramids to look on, or to fill a musing hour with wonderment. Is there one amongst us who would exchange them for the lives of the ignominious slaves that died ? What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old maiden was the price paid for Ingres' La Source ? That the model died of drink and disease in the hospital, is nothing when compared with the essential that I should have La Source, that exquisite dream of innocence, to think of till my soul is sick with delight of the painter's holy vision. Nay more, the knowledge that a wrong was done that millions of Israelites died in torments, that a girl, or a thousand girls, died in the hospital for that one virginal thing, is an added pleasure which I could not afford to spare. Oh, for the silence of marble courts, for the shadow of great pillars, for gold, for reticulated canopies of lilies ; to see the great gladiators pass, to hear them

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cry the famous * Ave Caesar,' to hold the thumb down, to see the blood flow, to fill the languid hours with the agonies of poisoned slaves ! Oh, for excess, for crime ! I would give many lives to save one sonnet by Baudelaire ; for the hymn, ' A la trks-chere, A la trks-belle, qui remplit mon cceur de clartt,' let the first- born in every house in Europe be slain ; and in all sincerity I profess my readiness to decapitate all the Japanese in Japan and elsewhere, to save from destruction one drawing by Hokusai. Again I say that all we deem sublime in the world's history are acts of injustice ; and it is certain that if mankind does not relinquish at once, and for ever, its vain, mad, and fatal dream of justice, the world will lapse into barbarism. England was great and glorious, because England was unjust, and England's greatest son was the personification of injustice Cromwell.

But the old world of heroes is over now. The skies above us are dark with sentimentalism, the sand beneath us is shoaling fast, we are running with streaming canvas upon ruin ; all ideals have gone ; nothing remains to us for worship but the Mass, the blind, inchoate, insatiate Mass ; fog and fen land before us, we shall founder in putrefying mud, creatures of the ooze and rushes about us we, the great ship that has floated up from the antique world. Oh, for the antique world, its plain passion, its plain joys in the sea, where the Triton blew a plaintive blast, and the forest where the whiteness of the nymph was seen escaping ! We are weary of pity, we are weary of being good ; we are weary of tears and effusion, and our refuge the British Museum is the wide sea shore and the wind of the

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ocean. There, there is real joy in the flesh ; our statues are naked, but we are ashamed, and our nakedness is indecency : a fair, frank soul is mirrored in those fauns and nymphs ; and how strangely enigmatic is the soul of the antique world, the bare, barbarous soul of beauty and of might !

BUT neither Apollo nor Buddha could help or save me. One in his exquisite balance of body, a skylark- like song of eternal beauty, stood lightly advancing ; the other sat in sombre contemplation, calm as a beautiful evening. I looked for sorrow in the eyes of the pastel the beautiful pastel that seemed to fill with a real presence the rich autumnal leaves where the jays darted and screamed. The twisted columns of the bed rose, burdened with great weight of fringes and curtains, the python devoured a guinea-pig, the last I gave him ; the great white cat came to me. I said all this must go, must henceforth be to me an abandoned dream, a something, not more real than a summer meditation. So be it, and, as was characteristic of me, I broke with Paris suddenly, without warning anyone. I knew in my heart of hearts that I should never return, but no word was spoken, and I continued a pleasant delusion with myself; I told my concierge that I would return in a month, and I left all to be sold, brutally sold by auction, as the letter I read in the last chapter charmingly and touchingly describes. Not even to Marshall did I confide my foreboding

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that Paris would pass out of my life, that it would henceforth be with me a beautiful memory, but never more a practical delight. He and I were no longer living together ; we had parted a second time, but this time without bitterness of any kind ; he had learnt to feel that I wanted to live alone, and had moved away into the Latin quarter, whither I made occasional expeditions. I accompanied him once to the old haunts, but various terms of penal servitude had scattered our friends, and I could not interest myself in the new. Nor did Marshall himself interest me as he had once done. To my eager taste, he had grown just a little trite. My affection for him was as deep and sincere as ever ; were I to meet him now I would grasp his hand and hail him with firm, loyal friendship ; but I had made friends in the Nouvelle Athenes who interested me passionately, and my thoughts were absorbed by and set on new ideals, which Marshall had failed to find sympathy for, or even to understand. I had introduced him to Degas and Manet, but he had spoken of Jules Lefebvre and Bouguereau, and generally shown himself incapable of any higher education ; he could not enter where I had entered, and this was aliena- tion. We could no longer even talk of the same people ; when I spoke of a certain marquise he answered with an indifferent ' Do you really think so ?' and proceeded to drag me away from my glitter of satin to the dinginess of print dresses. It was more than alienation, it was almost separation ; but he was still my friend, he was the man, and he always will be, to whom my youth, with all its aspirations, was most closely united. So I turned to

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say good-bye to him and to my past life. Rap rap rap!

' Who's there ?'

' I George Moore.' I've got a model.'

1 Never mind your model. Open the door. How are you ? what are you painting ?'

' This ; what do you think of it ?'

' It is prettily composed. I think it will come out all right. I am going to England ; come to say good-bye.'

' Going to England ! What will you do in England ?

' I have to go about money matters, very tiresome. I had really begun to forget there was such a place.'

' But you are not going to stay there ?'

< Oh, no !'

' You will be just in time to see the Academy.'

The conversation turned on art, and we aestheticized for an hour. At last Marshall said, ' I am really sorry, old chap, but I must send you away ; there's that model.'

The girl sat waiting, her pale hair hanging down her back, a very picture of discontent.

' Send her away/

' I asked her to come out to dinner.'

' D n her. . . . Well, never mind, I must spend this last evening with you ; you shall both dine with me. Je quitte Paris demain matin, peut-$tre pour longtemps ; je voudrais passer ma dernikre soiree avec mon ami; alors si vous voulez bien me permettre, mademoiselle, je vous invite tons les deux a diner; nous passerons la soiree ensemble si cela vous est agreable ?'

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' Je veux bien, monsieur.'

Poor Marie! Marshall and I were absorbed in each other and art. It was always so. We dined in a gargote, and afterwards we went to a students' ball ; and it seems like yesterday. I can see the moon sailing through a clear sky, and on the pavement's edge Marshall's beautiful, slim, manly figure, and Marie's exquisite gracefulness. She was Lefebvre's Chloe ; so every one sees her now. Her end was a tragic one. She invited her friends to dinner, and with the few pence that remained she bought some boxes of matches, boiled them, and drank the water. No one knew why ; some said it was love.

I went to London in an exuberant necktie, a tiny hat ; I wore large trousers and a Capoul beard ; looking, I believe, as unlike an Englishman as a drawing by Grevin. In the smoking-room of Morley's Hotel I met my agent, an immense nose, and a wisp of hair drawn over a bald skull. He explained, after some hesitation, that I owed him a few thousands, and that the accounts were in his portmanteau. I suggested taking them to a solicitor to have them examined. The solicitor advised me strongly to contest them. I did not take the advice, but raised some money instead, and so the matter ended so far as the imme- diate future was concerned. The years that are most impressionable, from twenty to thirty, when the senses and the mind are the widest awake, I, the most impressionable of human beings, had spent in France, not among English residents, but among that which is the quintessence of the nation, not an indifferent spectator, but an enthusiast, striving heart and soul to identify himself with his environment, to shake

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himself free from race and language and to recreate himself as it were in the womb of a new nationality, as- suming its ideals, its morals, and its modes of thought, and I had succeeded so well, that when I returned home every aspect of street and suburban garden was new to me ; of the manner of life of Londoners I knew nothing. I went into a drawing-room, but everything seemed far away a dream, a presentment, nothing more ; I was in touch with nothing ; of the thoughts and feelings of those I met I could under- stand nothing, nor could I sympathize with them : an Englishman was at that time as much out of my mental reach as an Esquimaux would be now. Women were nearer to me than men, and I will take this opportunity to note my observation, for I am not aware that any one else has observed that the difference between the two races is found in the men, not in the women. French and English women are psychologically very similar; the standpoint from which they see life is the same, the same thoughts interest and amuse them ; but the attitude of a Frenchman's mind is opposed to that of an English- man' ; they stand on either side of a vast abyss, two animals different in colour, form, and temperament ; two ideas destined to remain separate and distinct. I have heard of writing and speaking two languages equally well, but if I had remained two more years in France I should never have been able to identify my thoughts with the language I am now writing in, and I should have written it as an alien. It was in the last two years that I began to lose my English, and I remember very well indeed how one day, while arranging an act of a play I was writing with a friend,

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I found to my surprise that I could think more easily and rapidly in French than in English ; but with all this I did not learn French. I could write a sonnet or a ballade almost without a slip, but my prose required a good deal of alteration, and when I returned to London I could write English verse, but even ordinary newspaper prose was beyond my reach, and an attempt I made to write a novel drifted into failure.

Of my knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of the two languages I will give examples. Here is a poem that I translated aloud to Cabaner one night in the Nouvelle Athenes :

We are alone ! Listen, a little while. And hear the reason why your weary smile And lute-toned speaking is so very sweet. And how my love of you is more complete Than any love of any lover. They Have only been attracted by the grey Delicious softness of your eyes, your slim And delicate form, or some such other whim, The simple pretexts of all lovers I For other reason. Listen whilst I try To say. I joy to see the sunset slope Beyond the weak hours' hopeless horoscope, Leaving the heavens a melancholy calm Of quiet colour chanted like a psalm, In mildly modulated phrases ; thus Your life shall fade like a voluptuous yision beyond the sight, and you shall die Like some soft evening's sad serenity . . . I would possess your dying hours ; indeed My love is worthy of the gift, I plead For them. Although I never loved as yet, Methinks that I might love you ; I would get From out the knowledge that the time was brief That tenderness, whose pity grows to grief, And grief that sanctifies, a joy, a charm Beyond all other loves, for now the arm

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Of Death is stretched to you- ward, and he claims

You as his bride. Mayhe my soul misnames

Its passion ; love perhaps it is not, yet

To see you fading like a violet,

Or some sweet thought away, would he a strange

And costly pleasure, far beyond the range

Of formal man's emotion. Listen, I

Will chose a country spot where fields of rye

And wheat extend in rustling yellow plains,

Broken with wooded hills and leafy lanes,

To pass our honeymoon ; a cottage where,

The porch and windows are festooned with fair

Green wreaths of eglantine, and look upon

A shady garden where we'll walk alone

In the autumn sunny evenings ; each will see

Our walks grow shorter, till the orange tree,

The garden s length, is far, and you will rest

From time to time, leaning upon my breast

Your languid lily face. Then later still

Unto the sofa by the window-sill

Your wasted body I shall carry, so

That you may drink the last left lingering glow

Of evening, when the air is filled with scent

Of blossoms ; and my spirit shall be rent

The while with many griefs. Like some blue day

That grows more lovely as it fades away,

Gaining that calm serenity and height

Of colour wanted, as the solemn night

Steals forward you will sweetly fall asleep

For ever and for ever ; I shall weep

A day and night large tears upon your face,

Laying you then beneath a rose-red place

Where I may muse and dedicate and dream

Volumes of poesy of you ; and deem

It happiness to know that you are far

From any base desires as that fair star

Set in the evening magnitude of heaven.

Death takes but little, yea, your death has given

Me that deep peace, and that secure possession

Which man may never find in earthly passion.

The poem entitled < Une Nuit de Septembre ' tells of a very unplatonic encounter in the forests of

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Fontainebleau and, perhaps, readers will be interested to hear that the lady still retains in face and figure many pleasant remembrances of her springtime, though, alas ! her whilom lover has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf.

NUIT DE SEPTEMBRE

La nuit est pleine de silence, Et dans une etrange lueur, Et dans une douce indolence La lune dort comme une fleur

Parmi les rochers, dans le sable, Sous les grands pins d'un calme amer Surgit mon amour perissable, Faim de tes yeux, soif de ta chair.

Je suis ton amant, et ta blonde Gorge tremble sous mon baiser, Et le feu de 1'amour inonde Nos deux coaurs sans les apaiser.

Rien ne peut durer, mais ta bouche Est telle qu'un fruit fait de sang ; Tout passe, mais ta main me touche Et je me donne en fremissant.

Tes yeux verts me regardent : j'aime Le clair de lurie de tes yeux, Et je ne vois dans le ciel meme Que tori corps rare et radieux.

POUR UN TABLEAU DE LORD LEIGHTON

De quoi revent-elles ? de fleurs, D'ombres, d'etoiles ou do pleurs ? De quoi revent ces douces femmes ? De leurs amours ou de leurs ames ?

12S CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

Pareilles aux lis abattus Elles dorment les reves tus Dans la grande fentre ovale Ou s'ouvre la nuit estivale.

POUR UN TABLEAU DE RUBENS

( Dans sa gracieuse paleur Elle vit ainsi qu'une fleur, Evoquant une fraiclie odeur Par la transparente couleur.

' Loin de 1' emotion charnelle, Rubens, oubliant son modele, Pressentit la vie eternelle Qui s'incarne un moment en elle.

' Sa pense"e est dans cette main, Dans sa pose et dans son dessiu Et dans ses yeux pleins du chemin Que traverse le cceur humain.

5 Neanmoius pour toute ame en peine Que son calme altier rasserene, Elle est 1' image souveraine De la vie ephemere et vaine. '

THE SWEETNESS OF THE PAST

As sailors watch from their prison For the faint grey line of the coasts,

I look to the past re-arisen, And joys come over in hosts

Like the white sea birds from their roosts.

I love not the indelicate present, The future's unknown to our quest,

To-day is the life of the peasant, But the past is a haven of rest

The things of the past are the best.

The rose of the past is better Than the rose we ravish to-day,

'Tis holier, purer, and fitter To place on the shrine where we pray

For the secret thoughts we obey.

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 129

In the past nothing dies, nothing changes,

In the past all is sacred and still ; No grief nor fate that estranges,

Nor hope that no life can fulfil, But ethereal shelter from ill.

The coarser delights of the hour Tempt, and debauch, and deprave,

And we joy in a fugitive flower, Knowing that nothing can save

Our flesh from the fate of the grave.

But sooner or later returning

In grief to the well-loved nest, Filled with an infinite yearning,

We cry, there is rest, there is rest In the past, its joys are the best.

NOSTALGIA

Fair were the dreamful days of old,

When in the summer's sleepy shade, Beneath the beeches on the wold,

The shepherds lay and gently played Music to maidens, who, afraid,

Drew all together rapturously, Their white soft hands like white leaves laid,, 1

In the old dear days of Arcady.

Men were not then as they are now

Haunted and terrified by creeds, They sought not then, nor cared to know

The end that as a magnet leads, Nor told with austere fingers beads,

Nor reasoned with their grief and glee, But rioted in pleasant meads

In the old dear days of Arcady.

The future may be wrong or right, The present is a hopeless wrong,

For life and love have lost delight, And bitter even is our song ;

130 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

And year by year grey doubt grows strong, And death is all that seems to dree.

Wherefore with weary hearts we long For the old dear days of Arcady.

ENVOI.

Glories and triumphs ne'er shall cease, But men may sound the heavens and sea,

One thing is lost for aye the peace Of the old dear days of Arcady.

It would be easy for me to produce more poems in English and in French, for in youth I believed myself to be a poet ; my only doubt was whether my muse was French or English. But of what avail to print any more, since I have not written verse for many and many a year, and shall probably never write again in verse ? But as I write these lines a poem of old time starts up in my memory, and it is one that there is more reason for printing here than any other. I'm thinking of the sonnet in which I dedicate Luther, a five-act drama, to Swinburne.

Je t'apporte mom drame, 6 poete sublime,

Ainsi qu'un ecolier au maitre sa lecon :

Ce livre avec fiert porte comme ecusson

Le sceau 4 u'en nos esprits ta jeune gloire imprime.

j Accepte, tu verras 1^ foi melee au crime

/ \-&" Se souiller dans le sang sacre de la raison,

Quand surgit, redempteur du vieux peuple saxon, Luther & Wittemberg comme Christ a Solime.

Jamais de la cite' 1^ mal entier ne fuit, Helas ! et son autel y fume dans la nuit ; Mais iiotre age a ceci de pareil a 1'aurore,

Que c'est un divin cri du chanteur eternel, Le tien, qui pour forcer le jour tardif d'eclore Dechire avec splendeur le voile e"pars du ciel.

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

XI

AND so it was that I came to settle down in a Strand lodging-house, prepared to accept the hardships of a literary life, convinced that play -time was over, and anxious for proof (peremptory proof) of my capacity or incapacity. A book ! No. An immediate answer was required : journalism could give it ; therefore to journalism I would go. So did I try to come to terms with myself in the Strand lodging- house. But what led me to that house ? Chance, or a friend's recommendation ? It was uncomfort- able, ugly, and not very clean ; but curious, as all things are curious when examined closely. Let me tell about my rooms. The sitting-room, a good deal longer than it was wide, was panelled with deal, and the deal was painted a light brown ; behind it there was a large bedroom, and a big bed stood in the middle of the floor. Next to the sitting-room was a small bedroom which was let for ten shillings a week ; and the partition wall was so thin that I could hear every movement, and this nearness proved so intolerable that I eventually decided to add ten shillings to my rent and possess myself of the entire flat. In the room above me a pretty young woman lived, an actress at the Savoy Theatre. She had a piano, and she used to play and sing in the mornings, and in the afternoon, friends girls from the theatre used to come and see her ; and Emma, the maid- of-all-work, used to take them up their tea ; and, oh !

the chattering and the laughter. Poor Miss L ;

she had only two pounds a week to live on, but she

132 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

was always in high spirits except when she could not pay the hire of her piano ; and I am sure that she now looks back with pleasure and thinks of those days as very happy ones.

She was a tall girl, with a thin figure, and her eyes were large and brown a Jewess who liked young men, and hoped that Mr. Gilbert would give her a line or two in his next opera. On her return from the theatre we used to sit on the stairs talking, long after midnight, of what ? of our landlady, of the theatre, of the most suitable ways of enjoying ourselves in life. One night she told me she was married ; and in a sympathetic voice I asked why she was not living with her husband, and heard the reasons of the separation; valid reasons enough, forgotten, however, lost in the many similar reasons for separations and partings which have since been confided to me. The landlady resented our intimacy,

and I believe Miss L was charged indirectly for

her conversations with me in the bill.

On the first floor there was a large sitting-room and bedroom, solitary rooms nearly always unlet. The landlady's parlour was on the ground floor, with her bedroom next to it, and further on was the entrance to the kitchen stairs, whence ascended Mrs.

S 's brood of children and many various smells,

that of ham and eggs predominating.

Emma, I remember you you are not to be forgot- ten up at five o'clock every morning, scouring, washing, cooking, dressing the children ; seventeen hours at least out of the twenty-four at the beck and call of landlady and lodgers ; seventeen hours at least out of the twenty-four drudging in and out of the

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 133

kitchen, running upstairs with coals and breakfasts and cans of hot water, or down on your knees before a grate, pulling out the cinders with those hands can I call them hands? The lodgers sometimes threw you a kind word, but never one that recognized you as of our kin, only the pity that might be ex- tended to a dog.

I used to ask you all sorts of cruel questions; I was curious to know the depth of animalism you had sunk to, or rather out of which you had never been raised. And generally you answered innocently and naively enough. But sometimes my words were too crude, and they struck through the thick hide into the quick, into the human, and you winced a little ; but this was rarely, for you were very nearly, oh, very nearly an animal, your temperament and intelligence were just those of a dog that has picked up a master, not a real master, but a makeshift master who may turn it out at any moment. Dickens would sentimentalize or laugh over you ; I do neither, but recognize you as one of the facts of civilization. You looked well, to be candid, you looked neither young nor Id ; hard work had obliterated the delicate markings of the years,and left you in round numbers something over thirty. Your hair was reddish-brown, and your face wore that plain honest look that is so essentially English. The rest of you was a mass of stuffy clothes, and when you rushed upstairs I saw something that did not look like legs ; a horrible rush that was of yours, a sort of carthorse-like bound. I have spoken angrily to you ; I have heard others speak angrily to you, but aever did that sweet face of yours, for it was a sweet face that sweet, natural goodness that is so sublime

134 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

lose its expression of perfect and unfailing kindness. Words convey little sense of the real horrors of the reality. Life in your case meant this : to be born in a slum, and to leave it to work seven- teen hours a day in a lodging-house ; to be a Londoner, but to know only the slum in which you were born and the few shops in the Strand at which the landlady dealt. To know nothing of London meant in your case not to know that it was not England ; England and London ! you could not distinguish between them. Was England an island or a mountain ? you had no notion. I remember

when you heard that Miss L was going to

America, you asked me, and the question was sublime : ' Is she going to travel all night ? ' You had heard people speak of travelling all night, and that was all you knew of travel or any place that was not the Strand. I asked you if you went to church, and you said ' No, it makes my eyes bad.' I said, ' But you don't read; you can't read.' ' No, but I have to look at the book.' I asked you if you had heard of God you hadn't, but when I pressed you on the point you suspected I was laughing at you, and you would not answer, and when I tried you again on the subject I could see that the landlady had been telling you what to say. But you had not understood, and your conscious ignorance, grown conscious within the last couple of days, was even more pitiful than your unconscious ignorance when you answered that you couldn't go to church because it made your eyes bad. It is a strange thing to know nothing ; for instance, to live in London and to have no notion of the House of Commons, nor indeed of the Queen, except

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 135

perhaps that she is a rich lady ; the police yes, you knew what a policeman was because you used to be sent to fetch one to make an organ-man or a Christy minstrel move on. To know of nothing but a dark kitchen, grates, eggs and bacon, dirty children ; to work seventeen hours a day and to get cheated out of your wages ; to answer, when asked, why you did not get your wages or leave if you weren't paid, that

you ' didn't know how Mrs. S would get on

without me '

This woman owed you forty pounds, 1 think, so I calculated it from what you told me ; and yet you did not like to leave her because you did not know how she would get on without you. Sublime stupid- ity ! At this point your intelligence stopped. I remember you once spoke of a half-holiday ; I ques- tioned you, and I found your idea of a half-holiday was to take the children for a walk and buy them some sweets. I told my brother of this and he said Emma out for a half-holiday ! why you might as well give a mule a holiday. The phrase was brutal, but it was admirably descriptive of you. Yes, you are a mule, there is no sense in you ; you are a beast of burden, a drudge too horrible for anything but work ; and I suppose, all things considered, that the fat landlady with a dozen children did well to work you seventeen hours a day, and cheat you out of your miserable wages. You had no friends ; you could not have a friend unless it were some forlorn cat or dog ; but you once spoke to me of your brother, who worked in a potato store, and I was astonished, and I wondered if he were as awful as you. Poor Emma ! I shall never forget your kind heart and your unfailing

136 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

good humour ; you were born beautifully good as a rose is born with perfect perfume ; you were as unconscious of your goodness as the rose of its perfume. And you were taken by this fat landlady as 'Arry takes a rose and sticks it in his tobacco- reeking coat ; and you will be thrown away, shut out of doors when health fails you, or when, overcome by base usage, you take to drink. There is no hope for you ; even if you were treated better and paid your wages there would be no hope. Those forty pounds even, if they were given to you, would bring you no good fortune. They would bring the idle loafer, who scorns you now as something too low for even his kisses, hanging about your heels and whispering in your ears. And his whispering would drive you mad, for your kind heart longs for kind words ; and then when he had spent your money and cast you off in despair, the gin shop and the river would do the rest. Providence is very wise after all, and your best destiny is your present one. We can- not add a pain, nor can we take away a pain ; we may alter, but we cannot subtract nor even alleviate. But what truisms are these ; who believes in philan- thropy nowadays ?

'Come in.'

' Oh, it is you, Emma ! '

' Are you going to dine at home to-day, sir ? '

' What can I have ?'

'Well, yer can 'ave a chop or a steak.'

' Anything else ? '

' Yes, yer can 'ave a steak, or a chop, or '

' Oh, yes, I know ; well then, I'll hare a chop.

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 137

And now tell me, Emma, how is your young man ? I hear you have got one, you went out with him the other night.'

< Who told yer that ?'

' Ah, never mind ; I hear everything/

' I know, from Miss L '

'Well, tell me, how did you meet him, who intro- duced him ?'

' I met 'im as I was a-coming from the public 'ouse with the beer for missus' dinner.'

' And what did he say ?'

' He asked me if I was engaged ; I said no. And he come round down the lane that evening.'

• And he took you out ?'

'Yes.'

' And where did you go?'

' We went for a walk on the Embankment.'

' And when is he coming for you again ?'

' He said he was coming last evening, but he didn't.'

'Why didn't he?'

' I dunno ; I suppose because I haven't time to go

out with him. So it was Miss L that told you ;

well, you do 'ave chats on the stairs. I suppose you likes talking to 'er/

' I like talking to everybody, Emma ; I like talk- ing to you.'

1 Yes, but not as you talks to 'er ; I 'ears you jes do 'ave fine times. She said this morning that she had not seen you for this last two nights that you had forgotten 'er, and I was to tell yer.'

' Very well, I'll come out to-night and speak to her.'

188 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

' And missus is so wild about it, and she daren't say nothing 'cause she thinks yer might go.'

A young man in a house full of women must be almost supernatu rally unpleasant if he does not occupy a great deal of their attention. Certain at least it is that I was the point of interest in that house ; and J found there that the practice of virtue is not so disagreeable as many young men think it. The fat landlady hovered round my doors, and I obtained perfectly fresh eggs by merely keeping her at a distance ; the pretty actress, with whom I used to sympathize on the stairs at midnight, loved me better, and our intimacy was more strange and subtle, because it was pure, and it was not very unpleasant to know that the servant dreamed of me as she might of a star, or something equally unattainable ; the landlady's daughter, a nasty girl of fifteen, annoyed me with her ogling : the house was not aristocratic, it is true, but, I repeat, it was not unpleasant, nor do I believe that any young man, however refined, would have found it unpleasant.

My days in Cecil Street are only a few years behind me, and already I have begun to regret them, or, to speak more exactly, to regret that chance mis- fortune did not plunge me deeper into what is known as low life, but which is really the only life. Cecil Street is remembered with a certain pride, for I went there to live on two pounds a week, de- termined to make my way in literature, for my Irish properties seemed at that time to be vanishing away, and to make one's bread at literature requires

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 159

hard training, especially in my case, for I could not write printable English at that time only a jargon that was neither French nor English. It was in that house in Cecil Street that I began 'The Modern Lover/ and wrote it out in copybooks from daylight till dark, and then went out to learn London, to assimilate, to become part of the vast incoherent mass which is London. To write about London I should have to begin by forgetting Paris, blotting out of my mind the Boulevards with their trees and the kiosque. Ah ! the kiosque ! Nothing is so evocative of Paris as the kiosque. The old women sitting before their trestles covered with newspapers ; the men buying and turning into their cafe or sitting down in the chairs under the awning, an absinthe or vermuth in front of them.

These were the scenes that I saw in my mind's eye when I walked out of grubby Cecil Street into the Strand, and turned eastward and mooched about in many various purlieus, wondering at the sordid public-house at the corner. It reminded me how far I was from the Nouvelle Athenes and the Boule Noire. It was the cafe that I missed, the brilliant life of the caf&, the casual life of the cafe, so different from the life of the bars into which I turned in search of a companion and the eating-houses where I fed between seven and eight on roast saddle of mutton, wheeled round the different pens and cut to the liking of the customer, with potatoes and vegetables. ' Potatoes and vegetables ' was the cry of the second waiter, and often I pondered the phrase. Why ' potatoes ' and vegetables ? Are potatoes not vegetables? Strictly, I suppose they

140 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

are tubers. These eating-houses were well enough from seven till eight ; one met somebody connected with a newspaper or some shadowy rhymer willing to talk; but after nine o'clock London was a desolate place for me, and I walked thinking of the cafes that I had abandoned, and thinking, too, of the Mermaid Tavern in which the Elizabethan poets used to foregather very much as we did in Paris in the Nouvelle Athenes. But London has lost her taverns.

Some seventy years ago the Club superseded the Tavern, and since then all literary intercourse has ceased in London. Literary clubs have been founded, and their leather arm-chairs have begotten Mr. Gosse ; but the tavern gave the world Villon and Marlowe. Nor is this to be wondered at. What is wanted is enthusiasm and devil- may-careism ; and the very aspect of a tavern is a snort of defiance at the hearth, but the leather arm-chairs are so many salaams to it. I ask, Did anyone ever see a gay club-room ? Can anyone imagine such a thing ? You can't have a club-room without mahogany tables, you can't have mahogany tables without magazines Longman s y with a serial by Rider Haggard, the Nineteenth Century, with an article, ' The Rehabilitation of the Pimp in Modern Society,' by W. E. Gladstone a dulness that's a purge to good spirits, an aperient to enthus- iasm ; in a word, a dulness that's worth a thousand a year. You can't have a club without a waiter in red plush arid silver salver in his hand ; then you can't bring a lady to a club, and you have to get into a corner to talk about them. Therefore I say a club is dull

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 141

As the hearth and home grew all-powerful it became impossible for the husband to tell his wife that he was going to the tavern ; everyone can go to the tavern, and no place is considered respectable where everyone can go.

The genesis of the Club is out of the Housewife by Respectability.

Nowadays everyone is respectable jockeys, bet- ting men, actors, and even actresses. Mrs. Kendal takes her children to visit a duchess, and has naughty chorus girls to tea, and tells them of the joy of respectability. Only one class left unrespectable, and that one will succumb before long; how the transformation will be effected I can't say, but I know an editor or two who would be glad of an article on the subject.

Respectability ! a suburban villa, a piano in the drawing-room, and going home to dinner. Such things are no doubt very excellent, but they do not promote intensity of feeling, fervour of mind ; and as art is in itself an outcry against the animality of human existence, it would be well that the life of the artist should be a practical protest against the so- called decencies of life ; and he can best protest by frequenting a tavern and cutting his club. In the past the artist has always been an outcast ; it is only latterly he has become domesticated, and judging by results, it is clear that if Bohemianism is not a necessity it is at least an adjuvant. For if long locks and general dissoluteness were not an aid and a way to pure thought, why have they been so long his characteristics ? If lovers were not necessary for the development of poet, novelist, and actress, why have

142 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

they always had lovers Sappho, George Eliot, George Sand, Rachel, Sara ? But good Mrs. Kendal suckles her child by day and plays Rosalind at night. Truly a ridiculous endeavour ! for to realize the transformation, a woman must have sinned ; only through sin may we learn the charm of innocence. A woman must have had more than one lover to play Rosalind, and if she has been made to wait in the rain and been beaten she will have suffered enough, and through suffering qualified herself for the part, Sara makes no pretence to virtue, but she introduces her son to an English duchess, and throws over a nation for the love of Richepin. She can, therefore, say as none other

' Ce n'est plus qu'une ardeur dans mes reines cachee, C'est Venus tout entiere a sa proie attachee.'

Swinburne, when he dodged about London, a lively young dog, wrote ' Poems and Ballads ' and ' Chastelard '; since he has gone to live at Putney, he has contributed to the Nineteenth Century, and published an interesting little volume entitled, ' A Century of Rondels/ in which he continued his plaint about his mother the sea.

Respectability is sweeping the picturesque out of life ; national costumes are disappearing. The kilt is going or gone in the highlands, and the smock in the southlands, even the Japanese are becoming Christian and respectable ; in another quarter of a century silk hats and pianos will be found in every house in Yeddo. Too true that universal uniformity is the future of the world ; and when Mr. Morris speaks of the democratic art to be when the world

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 143

is socialistic, I ask, whence will the unfortunates draw their inspiration ? To-day our plight is pitiable enough the duke, the jockey-boy, and the artist are exactly alike; they are dressed by the same tailor, they dine at the same clubs, they swear the same oaths, they speak equally bad English, they love the same women. Such a state of things is dreary enough, but what unimaginable dreariness there will be when there are neither rich nor poor, when all have been educated, when self-education has ceased. A terrible world to dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and hopelessness than Dante's lowest circle of hell. The spectres of famine, of the plague, of war, etc., are mild and gracious symbols compared with that menacing figure, Universal Education, with which we are threatened, which has already eunuched the genius of the last five-and- twenty years of the nineteenth century, and produced a limitless abortion in that of future time. Education, I tremble before thy dreaded name. The cruelties of Nero, of Caligula, what were they ? a few crunched limbs in the amphitheatre ; but thine, O Education, are the yearning of souls sick of life, maddening discontent, all the fearsome and fathomless sufferings of the mind. When Goethe said * More light,' he said the wickedest and most infamous words that human lips ever spoke. In old days, when a people became too highly civilized the barbarians came down from the north and regenerated that nation with darkness ; but now there are no more barbarians, and sooner or later I am convinced that we shall have to end the evil by summary edicts the obstruction no doubt will be severe, the

144 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

equivalents of Gladstone and Morley will stop at nothing to defeat the Bill ; but it will nevertheless be carried by patriotic Conservative and Unionist majorities, and it will be written in the Statute Book that not more than one child in a hundred shall be taught to read, and no more than one in ten thousand shall learn the piano.

Such will be the end of Respectability, but the end is still far distant. We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute. The old gods are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things only a snobbery is left to us, thank heaven, deeply graven in the English heart ; the snob is now the ark that floats triumphant over the democratic wave ; the faith of the old world reposes in his breast, and he shall proclaim it when the waters have subsided.

In the meanwhile Respectability, having destroyed the Tavern, and created the Club, continues to exercise a meretricious and enervating influence on literature. All audacity of thought and expression has been stamped out, and the conventionalities are rigorously respected. It has been said a thousand times that an art is only a reflection of a certain age ; quite so, only certain ages are more interesting than others, and consequently produce better art, just as certain seasons produce better crops. We heard in the Nouvelle Athenes how the Democratic move- ment, in other words, Respectability, in other words, Education, has extinguished the handicrafts ; it was admitted that in the more individua arts painting and poetry men would be always found to sacrifice

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 145'

their lives for a picture or a poem : but no man is, after all, so immeasurably superior to the age he lives in as to be able to resist it wholly ; he must draw sustenance from some quarter, and the con- templation of the past will not suffice. The pressure on him from without is as water upon the diver ; and sooner or later he grows fatigued and comes to the surface to breathe ; he is as a flying-fish pursued by sharks below and birds above ; and he neither dives as deep nor flies as high as his freer and stronger ancestry. A daring spirit in the nineteenth century would have been but a timid nursery soul indeed in the sixteenth. We want tumult and war to give us forgetfulness, sublime moments of peace to enjoy a kiss in ; but we are expected to be home to dinner at seven, and to say and do nothing that might shock the neighbours. Respectability has wound itself about society, a sort of octopus, and nowhere are you quite free from one of its suckers. The power of the villa residence is great : art, science, politics, religion, it has transformed to suit its requirements. The villa goes to the Academy, the villa goes to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly realistic; not the great realism of idea, but the puny reality of materialism ; not the deep poetry of a Pieter de Hooch, but the meanness of a Frith not the winged realism of Balzac, but the degrading naturalism of a coloured photograph.

There is no sadder spectacle of artistic decadence than a London theatre ; the overfed inhabitants of the villa in the stalls hoping for gross excitement to assist them through their hesitating digestions ; an ignorant mob in the pit and gallery forgetting the

146 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

miseries of life in imbecile stories reeking of the sentimentality of the back stairs. Were other ages as coarse and common as ours ? It is difficult to imagine Elizabethan audiences as not more intelligent than those that applaud Mr. Pettit's plays ; and we find it hard indeed to believe that an audience that could sit out Edward II. could find any pleasure in such literary infamy as In the Ranks and Harbour Lights. Artistic atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the*briar. I will not speak of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled the miser in the old castle count- ing his gold by night, the dishevelled woman whom he keeps for ambiguous reasons confined in a cellar. Let all this be waived. We must not quarrel with the ingredients. The miser and the old castle are as true, and not one jot more true, than the million events which go to make up the spectacle of human existence. Not at these things considered separately do I take umbrage, but at the miserable use that is made of them, the vulgarity of the complications evolved from them, and the poverty of beauty in the dialogue.

Not the thing itself, but the idea of the thing evokes the idea. Schopenhauer was right; we do not want the thing, but the idea of the thing. The thing itself is worthless ; and the moral writers who embellish it with pious ornamentation are just as reprehensible as Zola, who embellishes it with erotic arabesques. We want the idea drawn out of obscuring matter, and this can best be done by the symbol

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The symbol, or the thing itself, that is the great artistic question. In earlier ages it was the symbol ; a name, a plume, sufficed to evoke the idea ; now we evoke nothing, for we give everything, the imagina- tion of the spectator is no longer called into play. In Shakespeare's days to create wealth in a theatre it was only necessary to write upon a board, 'A magnificent apartment in a palace.' This was no doubt primitive and not a little barbarous, but it was better by far than by dint of anxious archaeology to construct the Doge's palace upon the stage. By one rich pillar, by some projecting balustrade taken in conjunction with a moored gondola, we should strive to evoke the soul of the city of Veronese : by the magical and unequalled selection of a subtle and unexpected feature of a thought or aspect of a land- scape, and not by the up-piling of extraneous detail, are all great poetic effects achieved.

f By the tideless dolorous midland sea, In a land of sand and ruin and gold. '

And, better example still,

c Dieu que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois/

that impeccable, that only line of real poetry Alfred de Vigny ever wrote. Being a great poet Shake- speare consciously or unconsciously observed more faithfully than any other poet these principles of art ; and, as is characteristic of the present day, no- where do we find these principles so grossly violated as in the representation of his plays. I had proof ot this some few nights after my arrival in London. I had never seen Shakespeare acted, and I went to the Lyceum and there I saw that exquisite love-song

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for Romeo and Juliet is no more than a love-song in dialogue tricked out in silks and carpets and illuminated buildings, a vulgar bawd suited to the gross passion of an ignorant public ; and hating it all, I longed for a few scenical indications, and the reci- tation of the two white souls sacrificed for the reconciliation of two great families. My hatred did not reach to the age of the man who played the boy- lover, but was concerned only with the offensiveness with which he thrust his individuality upon me, prone to realize the poet's divine imagination. The woman, too, I wished with my whole soul away, subtle and strange though she was ; and I yearned for the youth as of old time in the part : a youth cunningly disguised, I said, would be a symbol ; and my mind would be free to imagine the divine Juliet of the poet, whereas I can but dream of the bright eyes and delicate mien and motion of the woman who had thrust herself between me and it.

But not witn symbol and subtle suggestion has the villa to do, but with such stolid intellectual fare as corresponds to its material wants. The villa has not time to think, the villa is the working bee. The tavern is the drone. It has no boys to put to school, no neighbours to study, and is therefore a little more refined or, should I say depraved? in its taste. The villa in one form or other has always existed, and always will exist so long as our present social system holds together. It is the basis of life, and more important than the tavern. Agreed : but does that mean that the tavern should be abolished ? The tavern is an excellent corrective influence to the villa, and its disappearance has had a vulgarizing

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effect on artistic work of all kinds ; the club cannot replace the tavern : the club is no more than the correlative of the villa ; and that much being granted to me, I will pass on to the circulating library, at once the symbol and glory of villaism.

The subject is not unfamiliar to me ; I come to it like the son to his father, like the bird to its nest. (Singularly inappropriate comparison, but I am in such excellent humour to-day ; a man's humour is half the game. It is said that the tiger will some- times play with the lamb ! Let us play.) We have the villa well in our mind. The father who goes to the city in the morning, the grown-up girls waiting to be married, the big drawing-room where they play waltz music, and talk of dancing parties. But waltzes will not entirely suffice, nor even tennis ; the girls must read. Mother cannot keep a censor (it is as much as she can do to keep a cook, housemaid and page-boy), besides the expense would be enormous, even if nothing but shilling and two-shilling novels were purchased. Out of such circumstances the cir- culating library was hatched.

The villa made known its want, and art fell on its knees. Pressure was put on the publishers ; books were published at 31s. 6d. ; the villa paid its yearly subscription, and had nice large handsome books that none but the elite could obtain, and with them a sense of being put on a footing of equality with my Lady This and Lady That, and certainty that nothing would come into the hands of dear Kate and Mary and Maggie that they might not read, and all for two guineas a year. English fiction became pure, and the garlic and assafoetida with which Byron,

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Fielding and Ben Jonson so liberally seasoned their works, and in spite of which, as critics say, they were geniuses, have disappeared from our literature. English fiction became pure, smutty stories were % be heard no more, were no longer procurable. But at this point human nature intervened ; poor human nature ! when you pinch it in one place it bulges out in another, after the fashion of a lady's figure. Human nature has from the earliest time shown a liking for smutty stories ; smutty stories have formed a substantial part of every literature. Call it a disease if you will an incurable disease which, if it is driven inwards, will break out in an unexpected quarter in a new form and with redoubled virulence. This is exactly what has happened. Actuated by the most laudable motives, Mudie cut off our rations of stories, and for forty years we were ap- parently the most moral people on the face of the earth. It was confidently asserted that an English woman of sixty would not read what would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of a maiden of any other nation. But humiliation and sorrow were awaiting Mudie. True it is that we still continued to subscribe to his library, true it is that we still con- tinued to go to church, true it is that we turned our faces away when Mile, de Maupin or the Assommair was spoken of ; to all appearance we were as good and chaste as even Mudie might wish us ; and no doubt he looked back upon his forty years of effort with pride ; no doubt he beat his manly breast and said, ' I have scorched the evil one out of the villa ; the head of the serpent is crushed for evermore ;' but lo ! suddenly, with all the horror of an earthquake, the

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slumbrous Jaw courts awoke, and the burning cinders of fornication and the blinding and suffocating smoke of adultery were poured upon and hung over the land. Through the mighty columns of our news- papers the terrible lava rolled unceasing, and in the black stream the villa, with all its beautiful illusions, tumbled and disappeared.

It is strange that it should have come into any- body's head to think that our morality is dependent upon the books we read, and we begin to wonder how it is that Nature should have implanted so strange an idea into our minds rather than in the mind of some other race. But there it is, a perennial in the Anglo-Saxon mind, bursting into bloom at un- expected intervals, out of sheer lightheartedness, it would seem, for even the little children in the streets must know by this time that the morality of the world will always be the same, despite good and bad books. A strange belief it is, truly, that our morality depends upon the books we read, especially modern books, and harmful in more ways than one ; for without it the three- volume system would secure a certain market to the writer for his first work and give him valuable leisure to consider and revise his subsequent works. But all the advantages that literature might have derived from the circulating libraries have been frittered away by a vain and vexatious censorship.

There is one thing in England that reminds me of the blithe humanities of the Continent, yet it is wholly and essentially English ; its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity sets us thinking of

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Elizabethan England I mean the music-hall ; the French music-hall lacks the vulgarity of the English hall not the Pavillion, that is too cosmopolitan (dreary French comics are heard there) let us say the Royal. I shall not easily forget my first evening at the Royal, when I saw for the time a living house the dissolute paragraphists, the elegant mashers (mark the imaginativeness of the slang), the stolid, good-humoured costers, the cheerful lights o' love, the extraordinary comics. What delightful unison of enjoyment, what unanimity of soul, what com- munality of wit ; all knew each other, all enjoyed each other's presence ; in a word, there was life. Then there were no cascades of real water, nor London docks, nor offensively rich furniture, with hotel lifts down which somebody will certainly be thrown, but one scene representing a street ; a man comes on not, mind you, in a real smock-frock, but in something that suggests one and sings of how he came up to London, and was ' cleaned out ' by thieves. Simple, you will say ; yes, but better than a fricassee of Faust, garnished with hags, imps, and blue flame ; better, far better than a drawing-room set at the St. James's, with an exhibition of passion by Mrs. and Mr. Kendal ; better, a million times better than the cheap popularity of Wilson Barrett an elderly man posturing in a low-necked dress to some poor trull in the gallery ; nor is there in the hall any affectation of language, nor that worn-out rhetoric which reminds us of a broken-winded barrel-organ playing ^ che la morte, bad enough in prose, but when set up in blank verse shocking in its more than natural deformity but bright quips and

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cranks fresh from the back-yard of the slum where the linen is drying, or the 'pub ' where the unfortunate wife has just received a black eye that will last her a week. That inimitable artist, Bessie Bellwood, whose native wit is so curiously accentuated that it is no longer repellent vulgarity but art, choice and rare see, here she comes with 'What cheer, Rea ! Rea's on the job.' The sketch is slight, but is welcome and refreshing after the eternal drawing-room and Mrs. Kendal's cumbrous domesticity; it is curious, quaint, perverted, and are not these the aions and the attributes of art ? Now see that perfect comedian, Arthur Roberts, superior to Irving because he is working with living material ; how trim and saucy he is ! and how he evokes the soul, the brandy-and- soda soul, of the young men, delightful and elegant in black and white, who are so vociferously cheering him, ' Will you stand me a cab-fare, ducky, I am feel- ing so awfully queer ?' The soul, the spirit, the entity of Piccadilly Circus is in the words, and the scene the comedian's eyes each look is full of suggestion ; it is irritating, it is magnetic, it is symbolic, it is art.

Not art, but a sign, a presentiment of an art, that may grow from the present seeds, that may rise into some stately and unpremeditated efflorescence, as the rhapsodist rose to Sophocles, as the miracle play rose through Peele and Nash to Marlowe, hence to the wondrous summer of Shakespeare, to die later on in the mist and yellow and brown of the autumn of Crowes and Davenants. I have seen music-hall sketches, comic interludes that in their unexpected- ness and naive naturalness remind me of the comic

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passages in Marlowe's Faustus, 1 waited (I admit in vain) for some beautiful phantom to appear, and te hear an enthusiastic worshipper cry out in his agony :

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And hurnt the topless towers of Ilium ? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul ; see where it flies ! Come, Helen, come ; give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena.'

And then the astonishing change of key :

' I will he Paris, and for love of thee, Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked,' etc.

The hall is at least a protest against the wearisome stories concerning wills, misers in old castles, lost heirs, and the woeful solutions of such things she who has been kept in the castle cellar for twenty years restored to the delights of hair-pins and a mauve dress, the ingenue to the protecting arm, etc. The music-hall is a protest against Mrs. Kendal's marital tenderness and the abortive platitudes of Messrs. Pettit and Sims ; the music-hall is a protest against Sardou and the immense drawing-room sets, rich hangings, velvet sofas, etc., so different from the movement of the English comedy with its constant change of scene. The music-hall is a protest against the villa, the circulating library, the club, and for this the ' 'all ' is inexpressibly dear to me.

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XII

THE actress, when she returned home from the theatre, suggested I had an enemy, a vindictive enemy, who dogged my steps ; but her stage experience led her astray. I had no enemy except myself; or to put it scientifically, no enemy except the logical conse- quences of my past life and education, and these caused me a great and real inconvenience. French wit was in my brain, French sentiment was in my heart ; of the English soul I knew nothing, and I could not remember old sympathies, it was like seeking forgotten words, and if I were writing a short story, I had to return in thought to Montmartre or the Champs Elysees for my characters. Some will not be able to believe this because few are aware of how little they know of the details of life, even of their own, and are incapable of appreciating the influence of their past upon their present. The visible world is visible only to a few, the moral world is a closed book to nearly all. I was full of France, and France had to be got rid of, or pushed out of sight, before I could understand England ; I was handi- capped with dangerous ideas, and an impossible style^ and before long the leading journal that had printed two poems and some seven or eight critical articles, ceased to send me books for review. I fell back upon obscure society papers. But it was not incum- bent on me to live by my pen ; so I talked, and watched, and waited till I grew akin to those around

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me, and my thoughts blended with, and took root in my environment.

I wrote a play or two, I translated a French opera, which had a run of six nights, I dramatized a novel, I wrote short stories, and I read a good deal of contemporary fiction.

The first book that came under my hand was ' A Portrait of a Lady,' by Henry James. I will admit that an artist may be great and limited ; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul ; but there must be this one magical and unique word. Shake- speare gives us the word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it always ; but Henry James only flutters about it ; his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken ; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of nebulae. We are on a bowing acquaintance with them ; they pass us in the street, they stop and speak ; we know how they are dressed, and we watch the colour of their eyes. The crowd of well-dressed people, in ' A Portrait of a Lady,' comes back to me precisely as an accurate memory of a fashionable soiree the staircase with its ascending figures, the hostess smiling, the host at a little distance with his back turned ; some one calls him. He wheels round, and I see his white kid gloves. The air is sugar-sweet with the odour of the gardenias; there is brilliant light here, there is shadow in the further rooms, the women's feet pass to and fro beneath the stiff skirts, I call for my hat and coat, I light a cigar, I stroll up Piccadilly . . . saying to myself, ' a very pleasant evening, I have seen a

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good many people I knew, I have observed an atti- tude, and an earnestness of manner that proved that a heart was beating . . . somewhere.'

Mr. James might say, c If I have done this, I have done a great deal/ and I would answer, ' No doubt you're a man of talent, cultivation, and not at all of the common herd, and to please you I'll place you in the very front rank, not only of novelists but of men of letters.' But a man of genius, Oh, no !

I've read nothing of Henry James's that didn't suggest a scholar ; so there shall be none of the old taunts why does he not write complicated stories ? Why does he always avoid decisive action ? In his stories a woman never leaves the house with her lover, nor does a man ever kill another man or him- self. Why is nothing ever accomplished ? In real life murder, adultery, and suicide are of common occurrence ; but Mr. James's people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition. Suicide or adultery has happened before the story begins, suicide or adultery happens some years after the characters have left the stage, but in front of the reader nothing happens. The suppression or maintenance of story in a novel is a matter of personal taste; some prefer character-drawing to adventures, some adventures to character-drawing ; that we cannot have both at once I take to be a self-evident proposition ; so when Mr. Lang says, ' I like adventures,' I say, ' Oh, do you ? ' as I might to a man who says ' I like sherry,' and no doubt when I say I like character-drawing, Mr. Lang says, ' Oh, do you ? ' as he might to a man who says, ' I like port/ But Mr. James and I are agreed on essentials ; we

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are more interested in human portraiture than with searches made for buried treasure according to scripts left behind by ancient mariners. But for human portraiture models are necessary, and the drawing- room presents few accents and angles, conformity to its prejudices and conventions having worn all away. Ladies and gentlemen are as round as the pebbles on the beach, presenting only smooth surfaces. Is there really much to say about people who live in stately houses and eat and drink their fill every day of the year ? The lady, it is true, may have a lover, but the pen finds scanty pasturage in the fact ; and in James's novels the lady only considers the question on the last page, and the gentleman looks at her questioningly.

In connection with Henry James the name of W. D. Ho wells is often mentioned, and I bought some three or four of his novels and finding them overflowing with girls in white dresses, languid mammas, mild witticisms, and young men, some cynical, some a little over-shadowed by love (in a word, a Tom Robertson comedy faintly spiced with American), I said : ' Henry James went to France and read TourgueneiF. W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James."

Henry James's mind is of a higher cast and temper; I have no doubt at one time of his life Henry James said, I will write the moral history of America, as Tourgueneff wrote the moral history of Russia he borrowed at first hand, understanding what he was borrowing. W. D. Howells borrowed at second hand, and without understanding what he was borrowing. Altogether Mr. James's instincts

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are more scholarly, and I often regret his concessions to the prudery of the age, and cannot but feel that his concessions, for I suppose I must call them concessions, are to a certain extent self-imposed. He would answer me somewhat in this fashion regretfully, perhaps : ' It is true that I live in an age not very favourable to artistic production, but the art f an age is the spirit of that age ; if I violate the prejudices of the age I shall miss its spirit, and an art that is not redolent of the spirit of its age is an artificial flower, perfumeless, or perfumed with the scent of flowers that bloomed three hundred years ago.' To carry the analysis one step further, we will answer the apology that we conceive Mr. James would make to us were we to address him in a question of this sort : ' Why don't you turn your hand to a girl who gets thirty shillings a week and thinks she would be very happy if she could get thirty-five/ ' The woman of leisure/ he would answer, ' lives in a deeper intellectual mood than the work-girl whose ambition is an extra five shillings a week.' The inter- viewer in us would like to ask Henry James why he never married ; but it would be vain to ask, so much does he write like a man to whom all action is repugnant. He confesses himself on every page, as we all do. On every page James is a prude and Howells is the happy father of a numerous family ; the sun is shining, the girls and boys are playing on the lawn, they come trooping in to high tea, and there is dancing in the evening.

It was about this time that my landlady lent me George Meredith's 'Tragic Comedians/ and after reading a few pages I fell to wondering how she had become possessed of the volume, and if it were true

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that she had enjoyed reading it ; a sufficient matter for my wonderment surely, for myself, who I supposed to be more literary than the landlady, was not able to come to any sort of terms with the book : or could it be that she had been told that George Meredith was ' the thing ' to admire by some lodger that had taken her fancy ? Her admiration of the book I felt to be derivative, and this opinion was enforced by the discovery that she had not read any other book by George Meredith, and did not know that he was primarily a poet. She had never heard of ' Love in a Valley ' nor the ' Nuptials of Attila/ and I men- tioned to her the lordly refrain ' Make the bed for Attila/ forgetful for the moment that she sometimes made my bed.

In Balzac, that I know by heart, in Shakespeare, that I have just begun to love, there are phrases deeply impregnated with the savour of life ; but in George Meredith only sterile nuts, phrases that people call epigrams, and it is impossible for me to call to mind a book more like a cockatoo than ' The Tragic Comedians '; it struts and screams just like one ; but in ' Rhoda Flemming ' there is some wit. One, Antony by name, describes how he is interrupted at his tea in a paragraph of seven or ten lines with ' I am having my tea, I am at my tea/ running through it for refrain. Then a description of a lodging-house dinner : ' a block of bread on a lonely place, and potatoes that looked as if they had committed suicide in their own steam.' A little ponderous and stilted, but withal good, and I read on until I came to a young man who fell from his horse, or had been thrown from

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN l6l

his horse, I never knew which, nor did I feel enough interest in the matter to make research ; the young man was put to bed by his mother, and once in bed he began to talk ! . . . four, five, six, ten pages of talk, arid and useless, surprisingly commonplace.

' Diana of the Crossways ' I liked better, and were there nothing to do I might have crawled through it. A scene with a rustic amused me a rustic who could eat 'og a solid hour and there is an excellent sloppy road with vague outlines of the South Downs seen in starlight and mist. But when we look round for a human being we see and hear none : Diana has faded into starlight and mist, and it is by the power to call souls out of the abyss into life that time judges us. If this page comes under the eyes of a reader of Tourgueneff, he will remember the un- veiling of the woman's affections for Bazaroff, and the relation at the same time of the reasons why she will never marry him. ... I wish I had the book by me ; I have not seen it for ten years.

My memory of Balzac must help me now. After striving through many pages to describe Lucien, he allows Lucien to create himself. In answer to an impatient question by Vautrin, who asks him what he wants, what he is sighing for, Lucien answers, ' D'etre celkbre et d'etre aime' On these words, and not before, he starts into being. The tale-teller creates easily, if he create. Tourgueneff is never at pains to tell us that this woman is good and that woman bad ; his women are good or bad ; but Meredith insists insistence conveys no idea of his style ; he puts a trumpet to his lips and yells that

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Diana is beautiful, divine ; that she is brilliant, that her conversation is like a display of fireworks, and that the company is dazzled and overcome.

' When we have translated half of Mr. Meredith's utterances into possible human speech, then we can enjoy him/ says the Pall Mall Gazette. We take eur pleasures differently ; mine are spontaneous, and I know nothing about translating the rank smell of a nettle into the fragrance of a rose, and then enjoying it.

He puts on his style so thickly that we can barely see his people, and have to peer through the dazzling page to catch sight of them. They seem to be doing a great deal, but in truth the most that can be said is that they are dancing to literary rhythms a thing which, however, cannot be said of any other novelist. His habit is not slattern ; there is no trace of the crowd about him ; he is one whose love of art is pure and untainted with commercialism, and if I may praise it for nought else, I can praise it for this.

I have noticed that if I buy a book because I am advised, or because I think I ought, my reading is sure to prove sterile. A quotation, a chance word heard in an unexpected quarter, puts me on the trail of the book destined to achieve some intellectual advancement in me, and I read Mr. Hardy despite his name. It prejudiced me against him from the first ; a name so trivial as Thomas Hardy cannot, I said, foreshadow a great talent ; and * Far from the Madding Crowd ' discovered the fact to me that Mr. Hardy was but one of George Eliot's miscarriages.

The critic is no doubt right when he insists on the difficulty of telling a story. A sequence of events

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it does not matter how simple or how complicated working up to a logical close, or shall I say, a close in which there is a sense of rhythm and in- evitableness is always indicative of genius. Shake- speare affords some fine examples, likewise Balzac, likewise Tourgueneff ; the s (Edipus ' is, of course, the crowning and final achievement in the music f sequence and the massy harmonies of fate. But in contemporary English fiction I am often struck by the inability of writers, even of the first class, to make an organic whole of their stories. Here, I say, the course is clear, the way is obvious, but no sooner do we enter on the last chapters than the story begins to show incipient shiftiness, and soon it doubles back and turns, growing with every turn weaker like a hare before the hounds. The opening chapters of ' Far from the Madding Crowd ' promised well, and there was no reason to suspect that the story would run hare-hearted in its close, but the moment Troy told his wife that he never cared for her, I knew something was wrong ; when he went down to bathe and was carried out by the current I said ' the game was up,' and was prepared for any- thing, even for the final shooting by the rich farmer, and the marriage with Oak, a conclusion which of course does not come within the range of literary criticism.

' Lorna Doone ' struck me as childishly garrulous, stupidly prolix, swollen with comments not interest- ing in themselves and leading to nothing. Mr. Hardy starts out with an idea, and it is a pity that ke cannot mould his idea, shape it, breathe into it the breath of life ; but he is better than Mr. Black-

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more, who seems just to have happened once on a subject that interested people at the time ; and if I speak of these writers, who certainly are inferior, it is because they are links in the chain whereby I returned from French into English literature, and having to speak of them, I relate jny impressions.

The reading of ' Lorna Doone ' calls to my mind, and very vividly, an original artistic principle of which English romance writers are either strangely ignorant or neglectful, viz., that the sublimation of the drfrmatis personce and the deeds in which they are involved must correspond, and their relationship should remain unimpaired. Turner's ' Carthage ' is Nature transposed and modified. Some of the passages of light and shade those of the balustrade are fugues, and there his art is allied to Bach in sonority and beautiful combination. Turner knew that a branch hung across the sun looked at separ- ately was black, but he painted it light to maintain the equipoise of atmosphere. In the novel the characters are the voice, the deeds are the orchestra. But the English novelist takes 'Arry and 'Arriet, and allows them to achieve deeds manifestly above their statue, thereby violating first principles. The deed should always be a symbol of the man, and in the elder writers the man and the deed are cognate and co-equal. Achilles stands as tall as Troy. Helen represents every man's desire, old or young, and it is this sense, shall I say, of the chord, that separates Homer from the fabricators of singular adventures. And it is this sense of harmony that separates us from circulating literature ; our melody may lay itself open to criticism, but the chord is beautiful

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always. Even poor old Scott was not without some sense of ' Without some sense of what ?' I asked myself, rousing suddenly from my meditation. Who was talking of Scott ? I answer myself that Scott was succeeded by Lytton, and that a professor of literature would know enough about Landor to enable him to speak of stiff brocades, woven in Athens, somebody has written that, somebody must have written that, and I fall to dreaming of the great and beautiful men and women (exalted melodies) that rise out of Lander's pages a writer as great as Shake- speare, surely ? The last heir of a noble family. All that follows Landor is decadent an admixture of romance and realism, the exaggerations of Hugo and the homeliness of Trollope ; a litter of ancient elements in a state of decomposition.

The spiritual analysis of Balzac equals Shake- speare's evocations ; by different roads they reach the same height of tragic awe, but when improba- bility, which in these days does duty for imagination, is mixed with the familiar aspects of life I mean the combination of Ma and Pa and dear Annie who live in Clapham with the mountains of the moon and the secret of eternal life, the result is art for the villa. The villa must take part in the heroic deeds that fall out in the mountains of the moon ; it will have heroism in its own teapot, and Achilles and Merlin must be replaced by Uncle Jim and an under- graduate. The Villa is the only begotten of Rider Haggard, Hugh Con way, Robert Buchanan, and the author of ' The House on the Marsh.'

In this wise I used to talk in the Gaiety bar to the great amazement of its litterati, always con-

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scious that David Christie Murray, Byron Webber, and Richard Dowling were poor substitutes for Manet, Degas, Pissaro, Renoir, Cabaner, Villiers de PIsle Adam, Catulle Mendez, and Duranty. But so long as men talked about art, I did not mind very much how they talked. That they were willing U listen was enough, and in pursuit of English literature I read what they wrote ' Joseph's Coat,' by David Christie Murray ; ' In Luck's Way/ by Byron Webber ; and a Celtic romance, the name of which I hare for- gotten, by Richard Dowling.

These men used to arrive at the Gaiety bar about four o'clock, and at five the bar was in session, deference being paid to David Christie Murray, a clear-eyed, tall, blunt Northerner whose resonant voice bespoke his success with publishers. Byron Webber, the editor of a ' weekly/ a thick-set maa, waddled into the bar with a black bag in his hand, and a red flush in the small portion of his face that was not covered with a black beard. His first question was, if Murray had concluded the arrangements with Chatto and Windus to write the serial for Belgravi*. Murray answered that he had. Soon after Richard Dowling entered, a tall Irishman of flabby face and hands, without distinctive feature except, perhaps, weak eyes. His voice, too, was weak and pathetic from disappointment ; for he had once imagined himself on the threshold of success, and now he spoke only of having been quill-driving all day, trying to earn food for the little family he had brought over from Waterford.

At half-past five we were all sitting in the semi- circular nooks under the cathedral windows, and at

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six, Tinsley, the publisher from Catherine Street, would come in, room being made for him in- stantly. He used to carry a bag containing fish for the family and a manuscript novel ; and until seven whisky was drunk, and before dinner-time somebody was gleefully drunk, and a scowl began to appear on my face, for I was always annoyed by drunkenness. But there was nowhere else I could talk literature, and it was essential to drive the French language and French ideas out of my mind ; till that was done a novel of English life could not be written. The Gaiety bar could do this, and I was impatient to be an Englishman again, and persevered day after day, month after month, till at the end of a couple of years I began to weary of the English language, an awkward, blunt instrument, unfitted for delicate work it seemed to me to be in the works of David Christie Murray and Robert Buchanan. And one night in Cecil Street, I threw ' The Seamy Side ' across the room with a cry of despair. 'All this is pure commerce/ I groaned, and fell to thinking of Miss Braddon, remembering her with kindliness, for it was she who had put Shelley into my hand long ago, when I lived by the side of an Irish lake, and thought it would be a good thing to ride in the Liverpool Steeplechase. Ouida had inflamed me in my teens. At last I met Mrs. Lynn Linton, and liked her ; but she was elderly, her style vehement and arid ; and every night I went up to the Cafe Monico to buy a French paper which was publishing Goncourt's ' La Fille Eliza,' a story that enchanted me in my lonely lodging and awakened new dreams of the conquest of London. I read with disappro-

168 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

bation the ' Story of an African Farm ' : descriptions of sandhills and ostriches sandwiched with doubts concerning a future state, and convictions regarding the moral and physical superiority of women in plenty, but of art nothing ; that is to say, art as I understand it rhythmical sequence of events de- scribed with rhythmical sequence of phrase. After the ' African Farm,' the ' Story of Elizabeth/ by Miss Thackeray, came upon me with all the fresh and fair naturalness of a garden full of lilacs and blue sky. ' Only a water-colour,' I said, ' but what a beautiful water-colour !' and I continued her exquisite little descriptions, full of air, colour, lightness, grace, the French life seen with sweet English eyes, the dear little descriptions gently evocative. * What a tranquil little kitchen it was, with a glimpse of the courtyard outside, and the cocks and hens, and the poplar trees waving in the sunshine, and the old woman sitting in her white cap busy at her homely work !' Into many wearisome pages these simple lines have since been expanded, but without affect- ing the beauty of the original. 'Will Dampier turned his broad back and looked out of the window. There was a moment's silence. They could hear the tinkling of bells, the whistling of the sea, the voices of the men calling to each other in the port. The sunshine streamed in ; Elly was standing in it, and seemed gilt with a golden background. She ought to have held a palm in her hand, poor little martyr !' There is sweet wisdom in this book, wisdom that is eternal, being simple ; and I do not rail against dainty water-colour indications of balconies, vases, gardens, fields, and harvesters because they have not

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the fervid glow and passionate force of Titian's Ariadne. Miss Thackeray knew the limits of her talent, which is more than can be said for George Eliot, despite the many profound modulations of that Beethoven-like countryside : the pine wood and the cripple ; this aunt's linen presses, and that one's economies ; the boy going forth to conquer the world, the girl remaining at home to conquer herself; the mighty river holding the fate of all, playing and dallying with its people for a while, and bearing them on at last to extinction. She had the sense of rhythmical progression : but a woman cannot become a man, and it is not certain that, if pleasure be a condition of artistic performance, we do not get more from contemplating Elly than Maggie. Her golden head is sketched with a flowing water-colour brush on a background of austere French Protestants. We do not know whether the picture is true to nature; but we know that it is true to art; our objections do not begin till her marriage, which seems to us a jarring dissonance, the true end being the ruin of Elly and the remorse of her mother.

It was Margaret Veley who spoke to me first about

• The Story of Elizabeth/ when I was introduced to

her in a Kensington drawing-room, a tall, shy woman, declining wittily, without regret, into middle age, and who I preferred to the showy women scattered about the sofas and chairs on the look out for a young man. In a few minutes she admitted to me that what I had heard was true ; she had published a novel in the Cornhill Magazine. Such a success as that was the blue ribbon of literature in those days, and for it she became admirable in my

170 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

eyes, and I took pleasure in her intelligence whick I learnt in many visits. On her side she was beguiled by a certain alertness of mind, a curious absence of education, and it became her pleasure to correct my proofs, and with erery correction she helped me out of the French into the English language.

All the world over there are women willing to sacrifice themselves, and Margaret Veley would have come into great literary honours, I am convinced, if she had not laid down her life for her sister, a woman stricken with consumption. One day I called to ask for some proofs, and received this note : ' I am too ill to correct them ; you know I would if I were able/ And next day a soul passed out of life always associated in my memory with her beautiful novel 'Damocles.' Rachel Conway is to me none other than Margaret Veley herself, a victim chosen for her beauty and crowned with the flowers of sacrifice. She has not forgotten the face of the maniac, and it comes back to her when she finds herself rich and loved by the man whom she loves. The catastrophe is a double one. Now she knows she is accursed, and that her duty is te trample out her love, unborn generations cry to her ; but Rachel Conway puts her dreams away, and will henceforth walk in a sad path, her interests centred in the child of the man she loves, and as she looks for a last time on the cloud of trees, glorious and waving green in the sunset, her sorrow swells once again to passion, and, we know, for the last time.

I aver that Mr. R. L. Stevenson never wrote a line that failed to delight me ; but he never wrote a book.

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We arrive at a strangely just estimate of a writer's worth by the mere question : ' What is he the author of? ' for every writer whose work is destined to live is the author of one book that outshines the others, and, in popular imagination, epitomizes his talent and position. Ask the same question about Milton, Fielding, Byron, Carlyle, Thackeray, Zola, Mr. Swin- burne.

I think of Mr. Stevenson as a consumptive youth wearing garlands of sad flowers with pale, weak hands, or leaning to a large plate-glass window, and scratching thereon exquisite profiles with a diamond pencil. His periods are fresh and bright, rhythmical in sound, and perfect realizations of their sense ; in reading him one often thinks that never before was such definite- hess united to such poetry of expression ; every page and every sentence rings of its individuality. But Mr. Stevenson's style is over-smart, well-dressed, shall I say, like a young man walking in the Burlington Arcade ? Yes, I will say so, but I will add, the most gentlemanly young man that ever walked in the Burlington. Mr. Stevenson is competent to under- stand any thought that might be presented to him, but if he were to use it, it would instantly become neat, sharp, ornamental, light, and graceful, and it would lose all its original richness and harmony. It is not Mr. Stevenson's brain that prevents him from being a thinker, but his style.

Another thing that strikes me in thinking of Stevenson (I pass over his direct indebtedness to Edgar Poe, and his constant appropriation of his methods) is the unsuitableness of the special character- sties of his talent to the age he lives in. He wastes

172 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

in his limitations, and his talent is vented in pretti- ness of style. In speaking of Mr. Henry James, I said that, although he had conceded much to the foolish, false, and hypocritical taste of the time, the concessions he made had in little or nothing impaired his talent. The very opposite seems to me the case with Mr. Stevenson. For if any man living in this end of the century needed freedom of expression for the distinct development of his genius, that man is R. I/. Stevenson. He who runs may read, and he with any knowledge of literature will, before I have written the words, have imagined Mr. Stevenson writing in the age of Elizabeth or Anne.

Turn your platitudes prettily, but write no word that could offend the chaste mind of the young girl who has spent her morning reading the Colin Campbell divorce case ; so says the age we live in. The penny paper that may be bought everywhere, that is allowed to lie on every table, prints seven or eight columns of filth, for no reason except that the public likes to read filth ; the poet and novelist must emas- culate and destroy their work because. . . . Who shall come forward and make answer? Oh, vile, filthy, and hypocritical century, I at least scorn you.

But this book is not a course of literature, and I will tarry no longer with mere criticism, but go direct to the book to which I owe the last temple in my soul ' Marius the Epicurean.' Well I remember when I read the opening lines, and how they came upon me sweetly as the flowing breath of a bright spring. I knew that I was awakened a fourth time, that a fourth vision of life was to be given to me. Shelley had revealed to me the unimagined skies

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where the spirit sings of light and grace ; Gautier had shown me how extravagantly beautiful is the visible world and how divine is the rage of the flesh ; and with Balzac I had descended circle by circle into the nether world of the soul, and watched its afflictions. Then there were minor awakenings. Zola had en- chanted me with decoration and inebriated me with theory ; Flaubert had astonished with the wonderful delicacy and subtlety of his workmanship ; Goncourt's brilliant adjectival effects had captivated me for a time, but all these impulses were crumbling into dust, these aspirations were etiolated, sickly as faces grown old in gaslight.

I had not thought of the simple and unaffected joy of the heart of natural things ; the colour of the open air, the many forms of the country, the birds flying that one making for the sea ; the abandoned boat, the dwarf roses and the wild lavender ; nor had I thought of the beauty of mildness in life, and how by a certain avoidance of the wilfully passionate, and the surely ugly,we may secure an aspect of temporal life which is abiding and soul-sufficing. A new dawn was in my brain, fresh and fair, full of wide temples and studious hours, and the lurking fragrance of incense ; that such a vision of life was possible I had no suspicion, and it came upon me almost with the same strength, almost as intensely, as that divine song of the flesh, Mademoiselle de Maupin.

In my mind, these books will be always inti- mately associated ; and when a few adventitious points of difference are forgotten, it is interesting to note how firm is the alliance, and how cognate and co-equal the sympathies on which it is based ; the

174 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

same glad worship of the visible world, and the same incurable belief that the beauty of material things is sufficient for all the needs of life. Mr. Pater can join hands with Gautier in saying -je trouve la terre aussi belle que le del, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la vertu. And I too am of their company in this at least I too love the great pagan world, its bloodshed, its slaves, its injustice, its loathing of all that is feeble.

But ' Marius the Epicurean ' was more to me than a mere emotional influence, precious and rare though that may be, for this book was the first in English prose I had come across that procured for me any genuine pleasure in the language itself, in the combination of words for silver or gold chime, and unconventional cadence, and for all those lurking half-meanings, and that evanescent suggestion, like the odour of dead roses, that words retain to the last of other times and elder usage. Until I read ' Marius ' the English language (English prose) was to me what French must be to the majority of English readers. I read for the sense and that was all ; the language itself seemed to me coarse and plain, and awoke in me neither aesthetic emotion nor even interest. ' Marius ' was the stepping-stone that carried me across the channel into the genius of my own tongue. The translation was not too abrupt; I found a constant and careful invocation of meaning that was a little aside of the common comprehension, and also a sweet depravity of ear for unexpected falls of phrase, and of eye for the less observed depths of colours, which although new was a sort of sequel to the education I had chosen, and a continuance of it

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in a foreign, but not wholly unfamiliar medium ; and having saturated myself with Pater, the passage to De Quincey was easy. He, too, was a Latin in manner and in temper of mind ; but he was truly English, and through him I passed to the study of the Elizabethan dramatists, the real literature of my race, and washed myself clean of France.

XIII

THOUGHTS IN A STRAND LODGING

EMMA has undressed and put the last child away stowed the last child away in some mysterious and unapproachable corner that none knows of but she ; the fat landlady has ceased to loiter about my door, has ceased to tempt me with offers of brandy and water, tea and toast, the inducements that occur to ker landlady's mind ; the actress from the Savoy has ceased to walk up and down the street with the young man who accompanies her home from the theatre; she has ceased to linger on the doorstep talking to him, her key has grated in the lock, she has come upstairs, we have had our usual midnight conversation on the landing, she has told me her latest hopes of obtaining a part, she has told me of the husband whom she was obliged to leave; we have bidden each other good-night ; she has gone up the creaky staircase, and I have returned to my room, littered with MSS. and queer publications ! . .. . the night is hot and heavy, but now a wind is blowing from the river, and listless and lonely I open a book, the first book that comes to hand. It is Le Journal des Goncourts, p. 358, the end of a chapter :

'It is really curious that it should be the four men the most free from all taint of handicraft and all base commercialism, the four pens the most entirely devoted to art, that were arraigned before the public prosecutor : Baudelaire, Flaubert, and ourselves?

Goncourt's statement is suggestive, and I leave it uncommented on ; but I would put by its side another naked simple truth. That if in England the public prosecutor does not seek to over-ride literature the means of tyranny are not wanting, whether they be the tittle-tattle of the nursery or the lady's drawing-room, or the shameless combinations entered into by librarians. ... In England as in France those who loved literature the most purely, who were the least mercenary in their love, were marked out for persecution, and all three were driven into exile. Byron and Shelley, and Swinburne, he, too, who loved literature for its own sake, was forced, amid cries of indgination and horror, to withdraw his book from the reach of a public that was rooting then amid the garbage of the Yelverton divorce case. I think of these facts and turn to the prose poem, in which Baudelaire tells how a dog will run away howling if you hold to him a bottle of choice scent, but if you offer him some putrid morsel picked out of some gutter hole, he will sniff round it joyfully, and will seek to lick your hand for gratitude. Baudelaire compared that dog to the public.

When I read Balzac's stories of Vautrin and Lucien de Rubempre, I often think of Hadrian and Antinous.

I wonder if Balzac thought of transposing the Roman Emperor and his favourite into modern life. It is the kind of thing that Balzac would think of. No critic has ever noticed this.

Sometimes, at night, when all is still, and I look out on that desolate river, I think I shall go mad with grief, with wild regret for my beautiful appartement in Rue de la Tour des Dames. How different the present from the past ! I hate with my whole soul this London lodging, ancl all that concerns it Emma, and eggs and bacon, the lascivious land- lady and her smutty daughter ; I am weary of the sentimental actress who lives upstairs, I swear I will never go out to talk to her on the landing again. Then there is failure I can do nothing, nothing ; my novel I know is worthless ; my life is a leaf, it will flutter out of sight. I am weary of everything, and wish I were back in Paris. I am weary of reading, there is nothing to read, Flaubert bores me. What nonsense has been talked about him ! Impersonal ! He is the most personal writer. But his odious pessi- mism ! How weary I am of it, it never ceases, it is lugged in a tout propos and the little lyrical phrase with which he winds up every paragraph, how boring it is ! Happily, I have ' A Rebours ' to read, that pro- digious book, that beautiful mosaic. Huysmans is quite right, ideas are well enough until you are twenty, afterwards only words are bearable ... a new idea, what can be more insipid fit for Members of Parlia- ment. Shall I go to bed ? No. I would that I had a volume of Verlaine, or something of Mallarme's to read Mallarme for preference. Huysmans speaks of Mallarme in * A Rebours,' and in hours like

M

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these a page of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of something exquisite and spirituous.

' The decadence of a literature irreparably attacked in its organism, weakened by the age of ideas, over- worn by the excess of syntax, sensible only of the curiosity which fevers sick people, but nevertheless hastening to explain everything in its decline, desirous of repairing all the omissions of its youth, to bequeath all the most subtle memories of its suffer- ing on its deathbed, is incarnate in Mallarm in most consummate and absolute fashion. . . .

' The poem in prose is the form, above all others they prefer ; handled by an alchemist of genius, it should contain in a state of meat the entire strength of the novel, the long analysis and the superfluous description of which it suppresses . . . the adjective placed in such an ingenious and definite way, that it could not be legally dispossessed of its place, would open up such perspectives, that the reader would dream for whole weeks together on its meaning at once precise and multiple, affirm the present, recon- struct the past, divine the future of the souls of the characters revealed by the light of the unique epithet. The novel thus understood, thus condensed into one or two pages, would be a communion ot thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration by consent between ten superior persons scattered through the universe, a delectation offered to the most refined, and acces- sible only to them.'

Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of Byzantine workmanship : there is in his style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the Gothic, of the window. Ah ! in this

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hour of weariness for one of Mallarrae's prose poems ! Stay, I remember I have some numbers of La Vogue. One of the numbers contains, I know, ' Forgotten Pages ; ' I will translate word for word, preserving the very rhythm, one or two of these miniature marvels of diction :

i FORGOTTEN PAGES.

' Since Maria left me to go to another star which ? Orion, Altair, or thou, green Venus ? I have always cherished solitude. What long days I have passed alone with my cat. By alone, I mean without a material being, and my cat is a mystical companion a spirit. I can, therefore, say that I have passed whole days alone with my cat, and alone with one of the last authors of the Latin decadence ; for since that white creature is no more, strangely and singu- larly I have loved all that the word fall expresses. In such wise that my favourite season of the year is the last weary days of summer, which immediately precede autumn, and the hour I choose to walk in is when the sun rests before disappearing, with rays of yellow copper on the grey walls and red copper on the tiles. In the same way the literature that my soul demands a sad voluptuousness is the dying poetry of the last moments of Rome, but before it has breathed at all the rejuvenating approach of the barbarians, or has begun to stammer the infantile Latin of the first Christian poetry.

' I was reading, therefore, one of those dear poems (whose paint has more charm for me than the blush of youth), had plunged one hand into the fur of the

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pure animal, when a barrel organ sang languidly and melancholy beneath my window. It played in the great alley of poplars, whose leaves appear to me yellow, even in the spring-tide, since Maria passed there with the tall candles for the last time. The instrument is the saddest, yes, truly; the piano scintillates, the violin opens the torn soul to the light, but the barrel-organ, in the twilight of remem- brance, made me dream despairingly. Now it murmurs an air joyously vulgar which awakens joy in the heart of the suburbs, an air old-fashioned and commonplace. Why do its nourishes go to my soul, and make me weep like a romantic ballad ? I listen, imbibing it slowly, and I do not throw a penny out of the window for fear of moving from my place, and seeing that the instrument is not singing itself.

'The old Saxony clock, which is slow, and which strikes thirteen amid its flowers and gods, to whom did it belong ? Thinkest that it came from Saxony by the mail coaches of old time ?

' (Singular shadows hang about the worn-out panes.)

' And thy Venetian mirror, deep as a cold fountain in its banks of gilt work ; what is reflected there ? Ah ! I am sure that more than one woman bathed there in her beauty's sin ; and, perhaps, if I looked long enough, I should see a naked phantom.

' Wicked one, thou often sayest wicked things.

4 (I see the spider's webs above the lofty windows.)

'Our wardrobe is very old; see how the fire reddens its sad panels ! the weary curtains are as old, and the tapestry on the arm-chairs stripped of paint,

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and the old engravings, and all these old things. Does it not seem to thee that even these blue birds are discoloured by time ?

'(Dream not of the spiders' webs that tremble above the lofty windows.)

'Thou lovest all that, and that is why I live by thee. When one of my poems appeared, didst thou not desire, my sister, whose looks are full of yesterdays, the words, the grace of faded things? New objects displease thee; thee also do they frighten with their loud boldness, and thou feelest as if thou shouldst use them a difficult thing indeed to do, for thou hast no taste for action.

' Come, close thy old German almanack that thou readest with attention, though it appeared more than a hundred years ago, and the Kings it announces are all dead, and, lying on this antique carpet, my head leaned upon thy charitable knees, on the pale robe, oh ! calm child, I will speak with thee for hours ; there are no fields, and the streets are empty, I will speak to thee of our furniture.

' Thou art abstracted ?

' (The spiders' webs are shivering above the lofty windows.)'

We, the 'ten superior persons scattered through the universe ' think these prose poems the concrete essence, the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art, others, those in the stalls, will judge them to be the aberrations of a refined mind, distorted with hatred of the commonplace ; the pit will immediately declare them to be nonsense, and will return with satisfaction to the last leading article in the daily paper.

1812 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

HI

The pale sky that lies above a world ending in decrepitude will perhaps pass away with the clouds : the tattered purple of the sunset is fading in a river sleeping on the horizon submerged in sunlight and in water. The trees are tired ; and beneath their whitened leaves (whitened by the dust of time rather than by that of the roads) rises the canvas house of the Interpreter of Past Things : many a lamp awaits the twilight and lightens the faces of an unhappy crowd, conquered by the immortal malady and the sin of the centuries, of men standing by their wretched accomplices quick with the miserable fruit with which the world shall perish. In the unquiet silence of every eye supplicating yonder sun, which, beneath the water, sinks with the despair of a cry, listen to the simple patter of the showman : c No sign regales you of the spectacle within, for there is not now a painter capable of presenting any sad shadow of it. I bring alive (and preserved through the years by sovereign science) a woman of old time. Some folly, original and simple, an ecstasy of gold, I know not what she names it, her hair falls with the grace of rich stuffs about her face, and contrasts with the bloodlike nudity of her lips. In place of the vain gown, she has a body ; and the eyes, though like rare stones, are not worth the look that leaps from the happy flash : the breasts, raised as if filled with an eternal milk, are pointed to the sky, and the smooth limbs still keep the salt of the primal sea.' Remembering their poor wives, bald, morbid, and

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full of horror, the husbands press forward : and the wives, too, impelled by melancholy curiosity, wish to see.

When all have looked upon the noble creature, vestige of an epoch already accursed, some, in- different, have not the power to comprehend, but others, whelmed in grief and their eyelids wet with tears of resignation, gaze at each other ; whilst the poets of these times, feeling their dead eyes brighten, drag themselves to their lamps, their brains drunk for a moment with a vague glory, haunted with Rhythm, and forgetful that they live in an age that has outlived beauty.

1 J'ai fait mes adieux a ma mkre etje viens pour vous faire les miens, and other absurdities by Ponson du Terrail amused us many a year in France, and in later days similar bad grammar by Georges Ohnet has not been lost upon us, but neither Ponson du Terrail nor Georges Ohnet sought literary suffrage ; such a thing could not be in France, but in England, Rider Haggard, whose literary atrocities are more atrocious than his accounts of slaughter, receives the attention of leading journals and writes about the revival of Romance. As it is as difficult to write the worst as the best conceivable sentence, I take this one and place it for its greater glory in my less remarkable prose :

' As we gazed on the beauties thus revealed by Good, a spirit of emulation Jilled our breasts, and we set to work to get ourselves up as well as we could.'

A return to romance ! a return to the animal, say I.

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One thing that cannot be denied to the realists : a constant and intense desire to write well, to write artistically. When I think of what they have done in the matter of the use of words, of the myriad verbal effects they have discovered, of the thousand forms of composition they have created, how they have remodelled and refashioned the language in their untiring striving for intensity of expression, for the very osmazome of art, I am lost in ultimate wonder and admiration. What Hugo did for French verse, Flaubert, Goncourt, Zola, and Huysmans have done for French prose. No more literary school than the realists has ever existed, and I do not except even the Elizabethans. And for this reason our failures are more interesting than the vulgar successes of our opponents ; for when we fall into the sterile and distorted, it is through our noble and incur- able hatred of the common-place, of all that is popular.

The healthy school is played out in England ; all that could be said has been said. The successors of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot have no ideal, and consequently no language, nothing new to say, and the reason of this heaviness of expression is that the avenues are closed, no new subject-matter is introduced, the language of English fiction is stagnant. But if the realists should catch favour in England the English tongue may be saved, for with the new subjects they would introduce new forms of language would arise.

' Carmen Sylva ! ' How easy it is to divine the aestheticism of any one signing, ' Carmen Sylva. '

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In youth the genius of Shelley astonished me ; but now I find the stupidity of the ordinary person infinitely more surprising.

That I may die childless that when my hour comes I may turn my face to the wall saying, I have not increased the great evil of human life then, though I were a murderer, fornicator, thief, and liar, my sins shall melt even as a cloud. But he who dies with children about him, though his life were in all else an excellent deed, shall be held accursed by the truly wise, and the stain upon him shall endure for ever.

I realize that this is truth, the one truth, and the whole truth ; and yet the vainest woman that ever looked in a glass never regretted her youth more than I, or felt the disgrace of middle-age more keenly. She has her portrait painted, I write these confessions ; each hopes to save something of the past, and escape somehow the ravening waves of time and float into some haven of remembrance. St. Augustine's Confes- sions are the story of a God-tortured, mine of an art- tortured, soul. Which subject is the most living ? The first ! for man is stupid and still loves his con- science as a child loves a toy. Now the world plays with ' Robert Elsmere.' This book seems to me like a suite of spacious, well distributed, and well proportioned rooms. Looking round, I say, 'tis a pity these rooms are only in plaster of Paris.

• Les Palais Nomades ' is a really beautiful book,

and it is free from all the faults that make an abso- lute and supreme enjoyment of great poetry an

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impossibility. For it is in the first place free from those pests and parasites of artistic work ideas. Of all literary qualities the creation of ideas is the most fugitive. Think of the fate of an author who puts forward a new idea to-morrow in a book, in a play, in a poem. The new idea is seized upon, it becomes common property, it is dragged through newspaper articles, magazine articles, through books, it is repeated in clubs, drawing-rooms ; it is bandied about the corners of streets ; in a week it is weari- some, in a month it is an abomination. Who has not felt a sickening feeling come over him when he hears such phrases as ' To be or not to be, that is the ques- tion ' ? Shakespeare was really great when he wrote

• Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly ? ' not

when he wrote, ' The apparel oft proclaims the man.' Could he be freed from his ideas, what a poet we should have ! Therefore, let those who have taken firsts at Oxford devote their trite souls 'to preparing an edition from which everything resembling an idea shall be excluded. We might then shut up our Marlowes and our Beaumonts and resume our reading of the bard, and the witless foists would confer happi- ness on many, and crown themselves with truly immortal bays.

Gustave Kahntook counsel of the past, and he has successfully avoided everything that even a hostile critic might be tempted to term an idea ; and for this I am grateful. Nor is his volume a collection of miscellaneous verses bound together. He has chosen a certain sequence of emotions ; the circumstances out of which these emotions have sprung are given in a short prose note. Les Palais Nomades ' is

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therefore a novel in essence ; description and analysis are eliminated, and only the moments when life grows lyrical with suffering are recorded ; recorded in many varying metres conforming only to the play of the emotion, for, unlike many who, having once discovered a tune, apply it promiscuously to every subject they treat, Kahn adapts his melody to the emotion he is expressing, with the same propriety and grace as Nature distributes perfume to her flowers. For an example of magical transition of tone I turn to Intermede.

' Chere apparence, viens aux couchants illumines.

Veux-tu mieux des matins albes et calmes ? Les soirs et les matins ont des calmes rosatres, Les eaux ont des manteaux de cristal irise

Et des rythmes de calmes palmes Et Fair eVoque de calmes musiques de patres.

Viens sous des tendelets aux fleuves souriants Aux lilas palis des nuits d'Orient

Aux glauques e'tendues a falbalas d'argent A 1' oasis des baisers urgents

Settlement vit le voile aux seuls Orients.

Quel que soit le spectacle et quelle que soit la rame Et quelle que soit la voix qui s'affame et brame, L'oubli du lointain des jours chatouille et serre, Le lotos de 1'oubli s'est fane dans mes serres, Cependaut tu m'aimais a jamais ? Adieu pour jamais.'

The repetitions of Edgar Poe seem hard and mechanical after this, so exquisite and evanescent is the rhythm, and the intonations come as sweetly and suddenly as a gust of perfume ; it is as the vibration of a fairy orchestra, flute and violin disappearing in a

188 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

silver mist ; but the clouds break, and all the enchantment of a spring garden appears in a shaft of sudden sunlight.

( L'^phemere idole, au frisson du printemps,

Sentant des renouveaux clorent, Se guepa de satins si lointains et d'antan : Rose exile des flores !

Le jardin rima ses branches de lilas ;

Aux murs, les roses tremieres ; La terre etala, pour feter les las,

Des divans vert lumiere ;

Des rires ailes peuplerent le jardin ;

Souriants des caresses breves, Des oiseaux joyaux, jaunes, incarnadine

Vibrerent aux ciels de reve.'

But to the devil with literature ! Who cares if Gustave Kahn writes well or badly ? I met a chappie yesterday whose views of life coincide with mine. 1 A ripping good dinner,' he says ; c get a skinful of champagne inside you, go to bed when it is light, and get up when you are rested.'

Each century has its special ideal, the ideal of the nineteenth is the young man. The eighteenth century is only woman see the tapestries, the delightful goddesses who have discarded their hoops and heels to appear in still more delightful nakedness, the noble woods, the tall castles, with the hunters looking round ; no servile archaeology chills the fancy ; and this treatment of antiquity is the highest proof of the genius of the eighteenth century. See the Fragonards the ladies in high-peaked bodices, their little ankles showing amid the snow of the petticoats. Up they go ; you can hear their light false voices amid the summer of the leaves, where

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Loves are garlanded even as roses. Masks and arrows are everywhere, all the machinery of light and gracious days. In the Watteaus the note is more pensive ; there is satin and sunset, plausive gestures and reluctance false reluctance ; the guitar is tinkling, and exquisite are the notes in the languid evening ; and there is the Pierrot, that marvellous white animal, sensual and witty and glad, the soul of the century ankles and epigrams everywhere, for love was not then sentimental, it was false and a little cruel ; see the furniture and the polished floor, and the tapestries with whose delicate tints and decorations the high hair blends, the foot-stool and the heel and the calf of the leg that is withdrawn, showing in the shadows of the lace ; see the satin of the bodices, the fan outspread, the wigs so adorably false, the knee-breeches, the buckles on the shoes, how false ; adorable little comedy, adorably men- dacious ; and how winsome it is to feast on these sweet lies, it is indeed delight to us, wearied with the bland sincerity of newspapers. In the eighteenth century it was the man who knelt at the woman's feet, it was the man who pleaded and the woman who acceded ; but in our century the place of the man is changed, it is he who holds the fan, it is he who is besought ; and if one were to dream of continuing the tradition of Watteau and Fragonard in the nineteenth century, he would have to take note of and meditate deeply and profoundly on this, as he sought to formulate and synthesize the erotic spirit of our age.

The position of a young man in the nineteenth century is the most enviable that has ever fallen to

>

I

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the lot of any human creature. He is the rare bird, and is fted, flattered, adored. The sweetest words are addressed to him, the most loving looks are poured upon him. T]he young man can do no wrong. Every house is open to him, and the best of every- thing is laid before him ; girls dispute ther right to serve him ; they come to him with cake and wine, they sit circlewise and listen to him, and when one is fortunate to get him alone she will hang upon his neck, she will propose to him, and will take his refusal kindly and without resentment. They will not let him stoop to tie up his shoe-lace, but will rush and simultaneously claim the right to attend on him. To represent in a novel a girl proposing marriage to a man would be deemed unnatural, but nothing is more common ; there are few young men who have not received at least a dozen offers, nay, more ; it is characteristic, it has become instinctive for girls to choose, and they prefer men not to make love to them ; and every young man who knows his business avoids making advances, knowing well that it will only put the girl off.

In a society so constituted, what a delightful open- ing there is for a young man. He would have to waltz perfectly, play tennis fairly, the latest novel would suffice for literary attainments ; billiards, shooting, and hunting, would not come in amiss, for he must not be considered a useless being by men ; not that women are much influenced by the opinion of men in their choice of favourites, but the reflex action of the heart, although not so marked as that of the stomach, exists and must be kept in view ; besides a man who would succeed with women, must

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 191

succeed with men ; the real Lovelace is loved by all. Like gravitation, love draws all things. Our young man would have to be five feet eleven, or six feet, broad shoulders, light brown hair, deep eyes, soft and suggestive, a thin neck, long delicate hands, a high instep. His nose should be straight, his face oval and small, he must be clean' about the hips, and his movements must be naturally caressing. He comes into the ballroom, his shoulders well back, he stretches his hand to the hostess, he looks at her earnestly (it is characteristic of him to think of the hostess first, he is in her house, the house is well furnished, and is suggestive of excellent meats and wines). He can read through the slim woman whose black hair, a-glitter with diamonds, contrasts with her white satin ; an old man is talking to her, she dances with him, and she refused a young man a moment before. This is a bad sign ; our Lovelace knows it ; there is a stout woman of thirty- five, who is looking at him, red satin bodice, doubtful taste. He looks away ; a little blonde woman fixes her eyes on him, she looks as innocent as a child ; instinctively our Lovelace turns to his host. ' Who is that little blonde woman over there, the right

hand corner ?' he asks. ' Ah, that is Lady .'

' Will you introduce me ?' ' Certainly.' Lovelace has made up his mind. Then there is a young oldish girl, richly dressed ; ' I hear her people have a nice house in a hunting country, I will dance with her, and take the mother in to supper, and, if I can get a moment, will have a pleasant talk with the father in the evening.'

In manner Lovelace is facile and easy ; he never

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says no, it is always yes, ask him what you will ; but he only does what he has made up his mind it is his advantage to do. Apparently he is an embodiment of all that is unselfish, for he knows that after he has helped himself, it is advisable to help someone else, and thereby make a friend who, on a future occasion, will be useful to him. Put a violinist into a room filled with violins, and he will try every one. Love- lace will put each woman aside so quietly that she is often only half aware that she has been put aside. Her life is broken ; she is content that it should be broken. The real genius for love lies not in getting into, but getting out of love.

I have noticed that there are times when every second woman likes us. Is love, then, a magnetism which we sometimes possess and exercise uncon- sciously, and sometimes do not possess ?

XIV

Now I am full of eager impulses that mourn and howl by turns, striving for utterance like wind in turret chambers. I hate this infernal lodging. I feel like a fowl in a coop that landlady, those children, Emma. . . . The actress will be coming upstairs presently ; shall I ask her into my room ? Better let things remain as they are.

Conscience.

Why intrude a new vexation on her already vexed life?

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7.

Hallo, you startled me ! Well, I am surprised. We have not talked together for a long time. Since when ?

Conscience.

I will spare your feelings. I merely thought I would remind you that you have passed the Rubicon your thirtieth year.

It is terrible to think of. My youth gone !

Conscience. Then you are ashamed you repent ?

I am ashamed of nothing I am a writer ; 'tis my profession to be ashamed of nothing but to be ashamed.

Conscience. I had forgotten.

1.

But I will chat with you when you please ; even now, at this hour, about all things about any of my sins.

Conscience.

Since we lost sight of each other you have devoted your time to the gratification of your senses,

N

194 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

Pardon me, I have devoted quite as much of my time to art.

Conscience.

You were glad, I remember, when your father died, because his death gave you unlimited facilities for moulding the partial self which the restraining influence of home had only permitted, into that complete and ideal George Moore which you had in mind. I think I quote you correctly.

You don't ; but never mind. Proceed.

Conscience.

Then, if you have no objection, we will examine how far you have turned your opportunities to account.

You will not deny that I have educated myself and made many friends.

Conscience.

Friends ! your nature is very adaptable you interest yourself in their pursuits, and so deceive them into a false estimate of your worth. Your education speak not of it ; it is but flimsy stuff.

7.

There I join issue with you. Have I not drawn the intense ego out of the clouds of semi-conscious-

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ness, and realized it ? And surely, the rescue and the individualization ot the ego is the first step.

Conscience,

To what end ? You have nothing to teach, nothing to reveal. I have often thought of asking you this : since death is the only good, why do you not embrace death ? Of all the world's goods it is the cheapest, and the most easily obtained.

7.

We must live since nature has willed it so. My poor conscience, are you still struggling in the fallacy of free will ?

For at least a hundred thousand years man has rendered this planet abominable and ridiculous with what he is pleased to call his intelligence, without, however, having learned that his life is merely the breaking of the peace of unconsciousness, the drowsy uplifting of tired eyelids of somnolent nature. How glibly this loquacious ape chatters of his religion and his moral sense, always failing to see that both are but allurements and inveiglements ! With religion he is induced to bear his misery, and his sexual appetite is preserved, ignorant, and vigorous, by means of morals. A scorpion, surrounded by a ring of fire, will sting itself to death, and man would turn upon life and deny it, if his reason were complete. Religion and morals are the poker and tongs with which nature intervenes and scatters the ring of reason.

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X

Conscience (after a long pause).

I believe forgive my ignorance, but I have seen so little of you this long while that your boast is that no woman influenced, changed, or modified your views of life.

None j my mind is a blank on the subject. Stay ! my mother said once, when I was a boy, ' You must not believe them ; all their smiles and pretty ways are only put on. Women like men only for what they can get out of them.' And to these simple words I attribute all the suspicion of woman's truth which hung over my youth. For years it seemed to me impossible that women could love men. Women seemed to me so beautiful and desirable men so ugly, almost revolting. Could they touch us without revulsion of feeling, could they really desire us? I was absorbed in the life of woman the mystery of petticoats, so different from the staidness of trousers ! the rolls of hair entwined with so much art, and suggesting so much colour and perfume, so different from the bare crop ; the unnaturalness of the waist in stays ! plenitude and slenderness of silk, so different from the stupidity of a black tail-coat ; rose feet passing under the triple ruches of rose, so different from the broad foot of the male. My love for the life of women was a life within my life ; and oh, how strangely secluded and veiled ! A world of calm colour with phantoms moving, floating past and changing in dim light an averted face with abundant hair, the gleam of a perfect bust or the poise of a

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 197

neck turning slowly round, the gaze of deep translucid eyes. I loved women too much to give myself wholly to one.

Conscience.

Yes, yes ; but what real success have you had with women ?

/.

Damn it ! you would not seek to draw me into long-winded stories about women how it began, how it was broken off, how it began again? I'm not Casanova. I love women as I love champagne I drink it and enjoy it ; but an exact account of every bottle drunk would prove flat narrative.

Conscience.

You have never consulted me about your cham- pagne loves : but you have asked me if you have ever inspired a real affection, and I told you that we can- not inspire in others what does not exist in ourselves. You have never known a nice woman who would have married you ?

Why should I undertake to keep a woman by me for the entire space of her life, watching her grow fat, grey, wrinkled, and foolish? Think of the annoyance of perpetually looking after any one, especially a woman ! Besides, marriage is antago- nistic to my ideal. You say that no ideal illumines the pessimist's life, that if you ask him why he exists, he cannot answer, and that Schopenhauer's arguments against suicide are not even plausible casuistry. True, on this point his reasoning is feeble and ineffective.

19 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

But we may easily confute our sensual opponents. We must say that we do not commit suicide, although we admit it is a certain anodyne to the poison of life, an absolute erasure of the wrong inflicted on us by our parents because we hope by noble example and precept to induce others to refrain from love. We are the saviours of souls. Other crimes are finite ; love alone is infinite. We punish a man with death for killing his fellow ; but a little reflection should make the dullest understand that the crime of bring- ing a being into the world exceeds by a thousand, a millionfold that of putting one out of it.

Men are to-day as thick as flies in a confectioner's shop; in fifty years there will be less to eat, but certainly some millions more mouths. I laugh, I rub my hands ! I shall be dead before the red time comes. I laugh at the religionists who say that God provides for those He brings into the world. The French Revolution will compare with the revolution that is to come, that must come, that is inevitable, as a puddle on the road-side compares with the sea. Men will hang like pears on every lamp-post, in every great quarter of London, there will be an electric guillotine that will decapitate the rich like hogs in Chicago. Christ, who with his white feet trod out the blood of the ancient world, and promised Universal Peace, shall go out in a cataclysm of blood. The neck of mankind shall be opened, and blood shall cover the face of the earth.

Conscience.

Your philosophy is on a par with your painting and your poetry ; but, then, I am a conscience, and

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conscience is never philosophic you go in for ' The Philosophy of the Unconscious '?

No, no, 'tis but a silly vulgarization. But Schopen- hauer, oh, my Schopenhauer ! Say, shall I go about preaching hatred of women ? Were I to call them a short-legged race that was admitted into society only a hundred and fifty years ago ?

Conscience.

You cannot speak the truth even to me ; no, not even at half-past twelve at night.

Surely of all hours this is the one in which it is advisable to play you false ?

Conscience. You are getting humorous.

7.

I am getting sleepy. You are a tiresome old thing, a relic of the ancient world I mean the mediaeval world. You know that I now affect

antiquity ?

Conscience.

You wander helplessly in the road of life until you stumble against a battery; nerved with the shock you are frantic, and rush along wildly until the current received is exhausted, and you lapse into disorganization.

200 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

If I am sensitive to and absorb the various potenti- alities of my age, am I not of necessity a power ?

Conscience.

To be the receptacle of and the medium through which unexplained forces work, is a very petty office to fulfil. Can you think of nothing higher ? Can you feel nothing original in you, a something that is cognizant of the end ?

You are surely not going to drop into talking to me of God ?

Conscience.

You will not deny that I at least exist ? I am

with you now, and intensely, far more than the dear

, friend with whom you love to walk in the quiet

evening; the women you have held to your bosom

in the perfumed darkness of the chamber

Pray don't. 'The perfumed darkness of the chamber' is very common. I was suckled on that kind of literature.

Conscience.

You are rotten to the root. Nothing but a very severe attack of indigestion would bring you to your senses or a long lingering illness.

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7.

'Pon my faith, you are growing melodramatic. Neither indigestion nor illness long drawn out can change me. I have torn you all to pieces long ago, and you have not now sufficient rags on your back to scare the rooks in seed-time.

Conscience. In destroying me you have destroyed yourself.

Edgar Poe, pure and simple. Don't pick holes in my originality until you have mended those in your own.

Conscience.

1 was Poe's inspiration ; he is eternal, being of me But your inspiration springs from the flesh, and therefore ephemeral even as the flesh.

If you had read Schopenhauer you would know that the flesh is not ephemeral, but the eternal objectification of the will to live. Siva is represented, not only with the necklace of skulls, but with the lingam.

Conscience.

You have failed in all you have attempted, and the figure you have raised on your father's tomb is merely a sensitive and sensuous art-cultured being who lives in a dirty lodging and plays in desperate desperation his last card. You are now writing a

202 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

novel. The hero is a wretched creature, something like yourself. Do you think there is a public in England for that kind of thing ?

1.

Just the great Philistine that you always were ! What do you mean by a ' public ' ?

Conscience.

I have not a word to say on that account, your one virtue is sobriety.

/.

A wretched pun. . . . The mass of mankind run much after the fashion of the sheep of Panurge, but there are always a few that

Conscience. A fw that are like the Gadarene swine.

1.

Ah ... were I the precipice, were I the sea in which the pigs might drown !

Conscience.

The same old desire of admiration, admiration in its original sense of wonderment (miratio) ; you are a true child of the century ; you do not desire admiration, you would avoid it, fearing it might lessen that sense which only you care to stimulate wonderment. And persecuted by the desire to astonish, you are now exhibiting yourself in the most

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 203

hideous light you can devise. The man whose biography you are writing is no better than a pimp.

Then he is not like me ; I have never been a pimp, and I don't think I would be if I could.

Conscience.

The whole of your moral nature is reflected in Lewis Seymour, even to the ' And I don't think I would be if I could.' You would put me behind you if you could and return to the mending of the shameful little ballade, ' La Ballade d' Alfred, Alfred aux Belles Dents/ whose light of love you enticed down here out of vanity, it being your vanity to destroy what remained in her of morality: it was her morality to give herself to no man but one except for money, and now she is really among the fallen. . . . What are you laughing at ?

I am thinking of her trouble of conscience, of the qualms she must suffer, for she is a Fleming to whose bedside a priest would be called if she were dying ; and the poor man, how would he shrive her, so strange would her point of view seem to him to be ; so different from his other penitents.

Conscience.

A shameful play of fancy. Let us be serious together; you surely can be serious, if only for a moment. Try to recall to your mind the disgraceful scene that occurred a few months ago in your bd-

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room, the landlady at the foot of the bed ordering the woman whose conscience affords you so much amusement out of the house. But no, it will be better to avoid recollections of that scene, forget it, and tell me if you do not think that you did Alfred an injustice by writing the ballade.

But he is represented as ruling the roost !

Conscience.

The distribution of that shameful ballade in manuscript has caused great inconvenience to Anatole Pellissier, the painter, whose safest way home now is the longest way round. You have heard that he doesn't dare to enter his street before three in the morning lest he receive an ill blow.

And all because he is suspected of having written my little ballade.

Conscietice.

Your wretched little ballade, wretched verses, if they are verses ; the opening lines of your second stanza zigzags out of all possible prosody. Moreover, the ballade-maker who respects his art chooses a difficult rhyming word, and the choice of a word like ' verre/ to which a hundred rhymes might easily be found, is in itself a condemnation. Art is difficulty overcome.

Banville's poetic principle, I know it, but in the most famous ballade of all, the ballade that made

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the ballade itself famous, the rhyming is not more complex than mine.

' La belle romaine Qui fut sa cousine germaine. . . .'

' Ou sont ils vierge souveraine ?' Why ( ils ' ? Were ' ils ' and ' elles ' interchangeable in the fifteenth century ? I can't see that ' peine ' is a more difficult word to rhyme to than 'verre.' My ballade goes very smoothly. Listen :

LA BALLADE D' ALFRED, ALFRED AUX BELLES DENTS

Je suis Alfred, 1' Alfred aux belles dents, Un tres grand macq'illustre dans le square. J'ai du poignon et de beaux vetements, Fins escarpins, gants, bague a grosse pierre, Car, sur le true ma femme est la plus chere. Toujours de Tor trois guineas, au moins deux, Pour le plaisir d'un petit ordinaire . . . II en faut bien des messieurs serieux.

Je m'absente du billard par moments

Pour voir si la putain travaille. . . . Un verre !

Bah la tournee et plus d'enmerdements.

Copains, trinquons a la sante d'un pere

Qui vient chez nous dans la nuit solitaire.

II fait 1'amour, il n'est pas de ces gueux

Qui casquent mal et sont si durs a plaire . . .

II en faut bien des messieurs serieux.

Le maquereau seul parmi les amante Plane au-dessus de tout amour vulgaire. 11 met la main sur les petits romans Qui troublent Tame et font manquer 1'affaire. Les temps sont durs sans le miche que faire ? Et nom de dieu pourquoi se ficher d'eux ? Je gueule au nez du roussin, ce faux frere : II en faut bien des messieurs serieux.

206 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

ENVOI

Roi du trottoir je le suis, et tres fiere Elle m'attend la voix pleine d'aveux. Je prends la braise et je la fous par terre. II en faut bien des messieurs serieux.

Conscience.

Your ballade does not appear to me on second hearing any better than it did on the first. I cannot abide your ballade, so there's an end of it.

1. Now you're talking just like Gosse.

Conscience.

One word more. You have failed in everything you have attempted, and you will continue to fail until you consider those moral principles those rules of conduct which the race has built up, guided by an unerring instinct of self-preservation. Humanity defends herself against those who attempt to subvert her ; and none, neither Napoleon nor the wretched scribbler such as you are, has escaped her vengeance.

1.

You would have me pull down the black flag and turn myself into an honest merchantman, with children in the hold and a wife at the helm. You would remind me that grey hairs begin to show, that health falls into rags, that high spirits split like canvas, and that in the end the bright buccaneer drifts, an old derelict, tossed by the waves of ill fortune, and buffeted by the winds into those dismal bays and dangerous offings housekeepers,

CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN 207

nurses, and uncomfortable chambers. Such will be my fate ; and since none may avert his fate, none can do better than to run pluckily the course which he must pursue.

Conscience.

You might devise a moral ending ; one that would conciliate all classes.

It is easy to see that you are a nineteenth-century conscience.

Conscience.

I do not hope to find a Saint Augustine in you.

An idea ; one of these days I will write my con- fessions ! Again I tell you that nothing really matters to me but art. And, knowing this, you chatter of the unwisdom of my not concluding my novel with some foolish moral. . . . Nothing matters to me but art.

Conscience.

Would you seduce the wretched servant girl if by so doing you could pluck out the mystery of her being and set it down on paper !

XV

AND now, hypocritical reader, I will answer the questions which have been agitating you this long

208 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

while, which you have asked at every stage of this long narrative of a sinful life. 1 Shake not your head, lift not your finger, exquisitely hypocritical reader : you can deceive me in nothing. I know the base and unworthy soul. This is a magical tete-d-tete, such a one as will never happen in your life again ; there- fore I say let us put off all customary disguise, let us be frank : you have been angrily asking, exquisitely hypocritical reader, why you have been forced to read this record of sinful life ; in your exquisite hypocrisy, you have said over and over again, what good purpose can it serve for a man to tell us of his unworthiness unless, indeed, it is to show us how he may rise, as if on stepping stones of his dead self, to higher things, etc. ? You sighed, O hypocritical friend, and you threw the magazine on the wicker table, where such things lie, and you murmured something about leaving the world a little better than you found it, and you went down to dinner and lost consciousness of the world 2 in the animal enjoyment of your stomach. I hold out my hand to you, I embrace you, you are my brother, and I say, undeceive your- self, you will leave the world no better than you found it. The pig that is being slaughtered as I write this line will leave the world better than it found it, but you will leave only a putrid carcase fit for nothing but worms. Look back upon your life, examine it, probe it, weigh it, philosophize on it, aud then say, if you dare, that it has not been a very

lr The use of the word sinful here seems liable to mis- interpretation. The phrase should run : ' Of a virtuous life, for remember that my virtues are your vices. '

2 This should run : ' Forgot your hypocrisy.'

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futile and foolish affair. Soldier, robber, priest, atheist, courtesan, virgin, I care not what you are, if you have not brought children into the world to suffer your life has been as vain and as harmless as mine has been. I hold out my hand to you, we are brothers ; but in my heart of hearts I think myself a cut above you, because I do not believe in leaving the world better than I found it ; and you, exquisitely hypocritical reader, think that you are a cut above me because you say you would leave the world better than you found it. The one eternal and immutable delight of life is to think, for one reason or another, that we are better than our neighbours. This is why I wrote this book, and this is why it is affording you so much pleasure, O exquisitely hypocritical reader, my friend, my brother, because it helps you to the belief that you are not so bad after all. Now to resume.

The knell of my thirtieth year has sounded, in three or four years my youth will be as a faint haze on the sea, an illusive recollection ; so now while standing on the last verge of the hill, I will look back on the valley I lingered in. Do I regret ? I neither repent nor do I regret; and a fool and a weakling I should be if I did. I know the worth and the rarity of more than ten years of systematic enjoyment. Nature provided me with as perfect a digestive apparatus, mental and physical, as she ever turned out of her workshop ; my stomach and brain are set in the most perfect equipoise possible to con- ceive, and up and down they went and still go with measured movement, absorbing and assimilating all that is poured into them without friction or stoppage.

210 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

This book is a record of ray mental digestions ; but it would take another series of confessions to tell of the dinners I have eaten, the champagne I have drunk ! and the suppers ! seven dozen of oysters, pate-de-foie-gras, heaps of truffles, salad, and then a walk home in the early morning, a few philosophical reflections suggested by the appearance of a belated street-sweeper, then sleep, quiet and gentle sleep.

I have had the rarest, the finest friends. I have loved my friends ; the rarest wits of my generation were my boon companions ; everything conspired to enable me to gratify my body and my brain ; and do you think this would have been so if I had been a good man ? If you do you are a fool, good inten- tions and bald greed go to the wall, but subtle selfishness with a dash of unscrupuloumess pulls more plums out of life's pie than the seven deadly virtues. 1 If you are a good man you want a bad one to convert ; if you are a bad man you want a bad one to go out on the spree with. And you, my dear, my exquisite reader, place your hand upon your heart, tell the truth, remember this is a magical tete-a-tete which will happen never again in your life, admit that you feel just a little interested in my wicked- ness, 2 admit that if you ever thought you would like to know me it is because I know a good deal that you probably don't; admit that your mouth waters when you think of rich and various pleasures that fell to my share in happy Paris ; admit that if this book had been an account of the pious books I had read, the churches I had been to, and the good works 1 had done, you would not have bought 1 Vices, surely. See note, p, 205. * Virtue?

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it or borrowed it. Hypocritical reader, think, had you had courage, health, and money, to lead a fast life, would you not have done so ? You don't know, no more do I ; I have done so, and I regret nothing except that some farmers and miners will not pay me what they owe me and enable me to continue the life that was once mine, and of which I was so bright an ornament. How I hate this atrocious Strand lodging-house, how I long for my apart- ment in Rue de la Tour des Dames, with all its charming adjuncts, palms and pastels, my cat, my python, my friends, blond hair and dark.

The daily article soon grows monotonous, even when you know it will be printed, and this I did not know ; my prose was very faulty, and my ideas were unsettled, I could not go to the tap and draw them off, the liquor was still fermenting ; and partly because my articles were not very easily disposed of, and partly because I was weary of writing on different subjects, I turned my attention to short stories. But short stories did not represent my ambition.

There was the publisher in Catherine Street, who used to frequent a certain bar, and this worthy man conducted his business as he dressed himself, sloppily ; a dear kind soul, quite witless and quite A-less. From long habit he would make a feeble attempt to drive a bargain, but he was duped generally. If a fashionable author asked two hun- dred pounds for a book out of which he would be certain to make three, it was ten to one that he would allow the chance to drift away from him ; but

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after having refused a dozen times the work of a Strand loafer whom he was in the habit of ' treating/ he would say, ' Send it in, my boy, send it in, I'll see what can be done with it.' There was a long counter, and the way to be published by Mr. Tinsley was to straddle on the counter and play with a black cat. There was an Irishman behind this counter who, for three pounds a week, edited the magazine, read the MSS., looked after the printer and binder, kept the accounts and entertained the visitors ; and instead of troubling Messrs. Macmillan and Messrs. Longman with polite requests to look at my MS., I straddled, played with the cat, joked with the Irishman, drank with Mr. Tinsley, and in the natural order of things my stories went into the magazine and were paid for. Strange were the ways of this office ; Shakespeare might have sent in prose and poetry, but he would have gone into the waste-paper basket had he not straddled. For those who were in the 'know ' this was a matter for congratulation ; straddling we would cry, ' We want no blooming outsiders coming along interfering with our magazine. And you, Smith, you devil, you had a twenty-page story in last month and cut me out. O' Flanagan, do you mind if I send you in a couple of poems as well as my regular stuff, that will make it all square ?' ' I'll try to manage it ; here's the governor.' And looking exactly like the unfortunate Mr. Sedley, Mr. Tinsley used to slouch in and fall into his leather armchair, the one in which he wrote the cheques the last time I saw that chair it was standing in the street in the hands of the brokers.

But conservative though we were in matters concerning ' copy,' though all means were taken to

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protect ourselves against interlopers, one who had not passed the preliminary stage of straddling would occasionally slip through our defences. One hot summer's day, we were all on the counter, our legs swinging, when an enormous young man entered. He must have been six feet three in height. He was shown into Mr. Tinsley's room, he asked him to read a MS., and he fled, looking very frightened. 'Waste- paper basket, wastepaper basket/ we shouted. ' What an odd-looking fish he is like a pike !' said O'Flanagan ; 'I wonder what his MSS. is like.' ' Very like a pike/ we cried. But O'Flanagan took the MS. home to read, and returned next morning convinced he had discovered an embryo Dickens. The young man was asked to call, his book was accepted, and we adjourned to the bar.

This young man took rooms in the house next to me on the ground floor. He had been to Oxford, and to Heidelberg, he drank beer and smoked long pipes, he talked of nothing but tobacco. Soon, very soon, I began to see that he thought me a simpleton ; he pooh-poohed my belief in Naturalism and declined to discuss the symbolist question. He curled his long legs upon the rickety sofa and spoke of the British public as the ' B. P./ and of the magazine as the ' mag/ and in the office which I had marked down as my own I saw him installed as a genius. He brought a little man about five feet three to live with him, and when the two, the long and the short, went out together, it was like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza setting forth in quest of adventures in the land of Strand. The short man indulged in none of the loud, rasping affectation of humour that

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was so maddening in the long; he was dry, hard, and sterile, and when he did join in the conversation it was like a rotten nut between the teeth dusty and bitter. He kept a pocket-book, in which he held an account of his reading. Holding the pocket- book between finger and thumb, he would say, ' Last year I read ten plays by Nash, twelve by Peele, six by Greene, fifteen by Beaumont and Fletcher, and eleven anonymous plays fifty- four in all.'

XVI

FORTUNATELY for my life and my sanity, my interests were, about this time, attracted into other ways ways that led into London life, and were suitable for me to tread. In a restaurant where low-necked dresses and evening clothes crushed with loud exclamations, where there was ever an odour of cigarette and brandy and soda, I was introduced to a Jew of whom I had heard much, a man who had newspapers and racehorses. The bright witty glances of his brown eyes at once prejudiced me in his favour, and it was not long before I knew that I had found another friend. His house was what was wanted, for it was so trenchant in character, so different from all I knew of, that I was forced to accept it, without likening it to any French memory and thereby weakening the impression. It was a house of champagne, late hours, and evening clothes, of literature and art, of passionate discussions. So this house was not so alien to me as all else I had seen in London ; and perhaps the cosmopolitanism

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of this charming Jew, his Hellenism, in fact, was a sort of plank whereon I might pass and enter again into English life. I found in Curzon Street another ' Nouvelle Athenes/ a Bohemianism of titles that went back to the Conquest, a Bohemianism of the ten sovereigns always a-jingle in the trousers pocket, of scrupulous cleanliness, of hansom cabs, of ladies' pet names ; of triumphant champagne, of debts, gaslight, supper-parties, morning light, coaching : a fabulous Bohemianism ; a Bohemianism of eternal hardupishness and eternal squandering of money money that rose at no discoverable well-head and flowed into a sea of boudoirs and restaurants, a sort of whirlpool of sovereigns in which we were caught, and sent eddying through music-halls, bright shoulders, tresses of hair, and slang ; and I joined in the adorable game of Bohemianism that was played round and about Piccadilly Circus, with Curzon Street for a magnificent rallying point.

After dinner a general ( clear' was made in the directions of halls and theatres, a few friends would drop in about twelve, and continue their drinking till three or four; but Saturday night was gala night at half-past eleven the lords drove up in their hansoms, then a genius or two would arrive, and supper and singing went merrily until the chimney sweeps began to go by. Then we took chairs and bottles into the street and entered into discussion with the policeman. Twelve hours later we struggled out of our beds, and to the sound of church bells we commenced writing. The paper appeared on Tuesday. Our host sat in a small room off the dining-room from which he occasionally emerged to stimulate our lagging pens.

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But I could not learn to see life paragraphically. I longed to give a personal shape to something, and personal shape could not be achieved in a paragraph nor in an article. True it is that I longed for art, but I longed also for fame, or was it notoriety ? Both. I longed for fame, brutal and glaring.

Out with you, liars that you are, tell the truth, say you would sell the souls you don't believe in, or do believe in, for notoriety. I have known you attend funerals for the sake of seeing your miserable names in the paper ! You, hypocritical reader, who are now turning up your eyes and murmuring ' dreadful young man' examine your weakly heart, and see what divides us ; I am not ashamed of my appetites, I pro- claim them, what is more I gratify them ; you're silent, you refrain, and you dress up natural sins in garments of shame, you would sell your wretched souls for what I would not give the parings of my finger-nails for paragraphs in a society paper. I am ashamed of nothing I have done, especially my sins, and always boldly confess that I desired to make a noise in the world.

1 Am I going to fail again as I have failed before ?' I asked myself. ' Will my novel prove as abortive as my paintings, my poetry, my journalism ? ' We all want notoriety, our desire for notoriety is ugly, but it is less hideous when it is proclaimed from a brazen trumpet than when it lisps the cant of humani- tarianism. Self, and after self a friend ; the rest may go to the devil ; and be sure that when any man is more vain and egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his head in humanitarianism. Victor Hugo was the stench and worms of humanitarianism :

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Mr. Swinburne holds his nose with one hand while he waves the censer with the other. All men of inferior genius, Victor Hugo and Mr. Gladstone, take refuge in humanitarianism. Humanitarianism is a pigsty, where liars, hypocrites, and the obscene in spirit congregate ; it has been so since the great Jew conceived it, and it will be so till the end. Far better the blithe modern pagan in his white tie and evening clothes, and his facile philosophy. He says, ' I don't care how the poor live ; my only regret is that they live at all ;' and he gives the beggar a shilling.

We all want notoriety ; our desires on this point, as upon others, are not noble, but the human is very despicable vermin and only tolerable when it tends to the brute, and away from the evangelical. I will tell you an anecdote which is in itself an admirable illustration of my craving for notoriety ; and my anecdote will serve a double purpose it will bring me some of the notoriety of which I am so desirous, for you, dear, exquisitely hypocritical reader, will at once cry, ' Shame ! Could a man be so wicked as to attempt to force on a duel, so that he might make himself known through the medium of a legal murder ? ' You will tell your friends of this horrible unprincipled young man, and they will, of course, instantly want to know more about him.

It was a gala night in Curzon Street, the lords were driving up in hansoms ; some seated on the roofs with their legs swinging inside ; the comics had arrived from the halls ; there were ladies, many ladies ; choruses were going merrily in the drawing-

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room ; one man was attempting to kick the chandelier, another stood on his head on the sofa. There was a beautiful young lord there, that sort of figure that no woman can resist. There was a delightful youth who seemed inclined to empty the mustard-pot down my neck ; him I could keep in order, but the beauti- ful lord was attempting to make a butt of me. With his impertinences I did not for a moment intend to put up ; I did not know him, he was not then, as he is now, if he will allow me to say so, a friend. The ladies retired about then; and the festivities continued. We had passed through various stages of jubilation, no one was drunk, but we had been jocose and rowdy, we had told stories of all kinds. The young lord and I did not ' pull well together,' but nothing decidedly unpleasant occurred until someone proposed to drink to the downfall of Gladstone. The beautiful lord got on his legs and began a speech. Politically it was sound enough, but much of it was plainly intended to turn me into ridicule. I answered sharply, working gradually up crescendo, until at last, to bring matters to a head, I said,

' I don't agree with you ; the Land Act of '81 was a necessity.'

' Anyone who thinks so must be a fool.'

' Very possibly, but I don't allow people to address such language to me, and you must be aware that to call anyone a fool, sitting with you at table in the house of a friend, is the act of a cad.'

There was a lull, then a moment after he said,

' I only meant politically/

' And I only meant socially.'

He advanced a step or two and struck me across

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the face with his finger tips ; I took up a champagne bottle, and struck him across the head and shoulders. Different parties of revellers kept us apart, and we walked up and down on either side of the table swearing at each other. Although I was very wroth, I had had a certain consciousness from the first that if I played my cards well I might come very well out of the quarrel ; and as I walked down the street I determined to make every effort to force on a meeting. If the quarrel had been with one of the music-hall singers I should have backed out of it, but I had everything to gain by pressing it. I grasped the situation at once. All the Liberal Press would be on my side, the Conservative Press would have nothing to say against me, no woman in it and a duel with a lord would be nuts and apples for the journalists.

I did not go to bed at once, but sat in the arm- chair thinking, calculating my chances. A cab came rattling up to the door, and one of the revellers came upstairs. He told me that everything had been arranged ; I told him that I was not in the habit of allowing others to arrange my affairs for me, and went to bed.

Among my old friends I could think of some half- dozen that would suit me perfectly, but where were they ? Ten years' absence scatters friends as October scatters swallows.

The first one said, ' it was about one or two in the morning ?'

' Later than that, it was about seven.'

' He struck you, and not very hard, I should imagine ; you hit him with a champagne bottle, and now you want to have him out.'

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' I did not come here to listen to moral reflections ; if you don't like to act for me, say so/

I telegraphed to Warwickshire to an old friend : ' Can I count on you to act for me in an affair of honour ?' Two or three hours after the reply came : ' Come down here and stay with me for a few days, we'll talk it over.' English people, I said, will have nothing to do with serious duelling ^ I must tele- graph to Marshall. ' Of all importance. Come over at once and act for me in an affair of honour. Bring the Count with you ; leave him at Boulogne ; he

knows the colonel of the .' The next day I

received the following. ' Am burying my father ; as soon as he is underground will come/ Was there ever such ill-luck? . . . He won't be here before the end of the week. These things demand the utmost promptitude. Three or four days afterwards Emma told me a gentleman was upstairs taking a bath. * Hollo, Marshall, how are you ? Had a good crossing ? The poor old gentleman went off quite suddenly, I suppose ?'

'Yes; found dead in his bed. He must have known he was dying, for he lay quite straight as the dead lie, his hands by his side . . . wonderful presence of mind/

' He left no money ?'

' Not a penny ; but I could manage it all right. Since my success at the Salon, I have been able to sell my things. I am only beginning to find out now what a success that picture was. Je t' assure, je fais dcole ' . . .

• Tu crois fa ... on fait faole aprts vingt ans de

travail '

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When we were excited Marshall and I always dropped into French.

' And now tell me/ he said, ' about this duel.' No sooner had I begun to tell the story than it dawned upon me that it was impossible to tell it seriously ; it was fundamentally an absurd story ; and I lacked courage to tell Marshall that I looked upon the duel as a way to notoriety. The most courageous will shrink from admitting such a weakness, and, moreover, if it were admitted, Marshall might refuse to act for me ; nor were my fears altogether ground- less, for I had not related the whole story when Marshall interrupted me with the suggestion that he did not think the matter serious enough to neces- sitate a journey to Flanders. On seeing my face change expression, he added, to propitiate me, that

if he saw any reluctance on the part of Lord 's

seconds to apologize he would, of course, insist that reparation was due to me. He had no sooner spoken than I began to doubt the possibility of a bloody issue to my quarrel, and somewhat helplessly asked Marshall if he would care to go to the theatre. After the theatre we went home and aestheticized till the duel became the least important event and Marshall's new picture the greatest At break- fast next day the duel seemed more tiresome than ever, but the gentlemen were coming to meet Marshall. He showed his usual tact in arranging my affair of honour ; a letter was drawn up in which my friend withdrew the blow of his hand, I withdrew the blow of the bottle, etc. really now I lack energy to explain it any further.

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XVII

HYPOCRITICAL reader, you draw your purity garments round you, you say, ' How very base ' ; but I say unto you, remember how often you have longed, if you are a soldier in Her Majesty's army, for war war that would bring every form of sorrow to a million fellow- creatures, and you longed for all this to happen, because it might bring your name into the Gazette. Hypocritical reader, think not too hardly of me ; hypocritical reader, think what you like of me, your hypocrisy will alter nothing; in telling you of my vices I am only telling you of your own ; hypocritical reader, in showing you my soul I am showing you your own ; hypocritical reader, exquisitely hypo- critical reader, you are my brother, I salute you.

Day passed over day, and my novel seemed an impossible task defeat glared at me from every corner of the room. My English was so bad, so thin stupid colloquialisms out of joint with French idiom. I learnt unusual words and stuck them up here and there ; they did not mend the style. Self- reliance had been lost in past failures ; I was weighed down on every side, but I struggled to bring the book somehow to a close. Nothing mattered to me, but this one thing. To put an end to the landlady's cheating, and to bind myself to remain at home, I entered into an arrangement with her that she was to supply me with board arid lodgings for three pounds a week, and henceforth resisting all Curzon Street temptations, I trudged home to oat a chop. I studied tht servant as out

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might an insect under a microscope. ' What an admirable book she would make, but what will the end be ? if I only knew the end !'

I saw poor Miss L. nightly on the stairs, and I never wearied of talking to her of her hopes and ambitions, of the young man she admired, and she used to ask me about my novel.

When my troubles lay too heavily upon me, I let her go up to her garret without a word, and remained at the window wondering if I should ever escape from Cecil Street, if I should ever be a light in that London, long, low, misshapen, that dark monumented stream flowing through the lean bridges. What if I were a light in this umber-coloured mass ? Happi- ness abides only in the natural affections in a home and a sweet wife. Would she whom I saw to-night marry me? How sweet she was in her simple naturalness, the joys she has known have been slight and pure, not violent and complex as mine. Ah, she is not for me, I am not fit for her, I am too sullied for her lips. Were I to win her could I be dutiful, true? . . .

XVIII

' YOUNG men, young men whom I love, dear ones who have rejoiced with me, not the least of our pleasures is the virtuous woman ; after excesses there is reaction, all things are good in nature, and they are foolish young men who think that sin alone should be sought for. The feast is over for me, I have eaten and drunk : I yield my place, do you eat and drink as I have ; do you be young as I was. I have written it ! The word is not worth erasure, if it is not

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true to-day it will be two years ; hence farewell ! I yield my place, do you be young as I was, do you love youth as I did ; you are the most interest- ing beings under heaven, for you all sacrifices will be made, you will be feted and adored upon the condi- tion of remaining young men. The feast is over for me, I yield my place, but I will not make this leave- taking more sorrowful than it is already by afflicting you with advice and instruction how to obtain what I have obtained. I have spoken against education, and will not strive to educate you, you will educate yourselves. Dear ones, dear ones, the world is your pleasure ; use it at your will. Dear ones, I see you all about me still, I yield my place ; but one more glass I will drink with you ; and while drinking I would say my last word were it possible I would be remembered by you as a young man : but I know too well that the young never realize that the old were not born old. Farewell.'

The cold air of morning blew in my face, forcing me to close the window ; and sitting at the table, overworn and not a little haggard, I continued my novel.

THE END

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1917

Moore , George

Confessions of a young man