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CONFESSIONS 
 
 of a 
 
 YOUNG MAN 
 
 by 
 GEORGE MOORE 
 
 Author of Esther Waters, Sister Teresa, &c, &c. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 BRENTANO'S 
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CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 MY soul, so far as 1 understand it, has very kindly 
 taken color 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 
 I have I acquire, or, to speak more exactly, chance bestows, 
 and still bestows, upon me. I came into the world appar- 
 ently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no 
 /mpress, 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 fulfilment 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 an in- 
 stinct, rather than the fervor of a reasoned conviction. 
 Sometimes, it is true, there came moments of weariness, 
 of despondency, but they were not enduring : a word 
 spoken, a book read, or yielding to the attraction of en- 
 vironment, J was soon off in another direction, forgetful 
 
2 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 of past failures. Intricate, indeed was the labyrinth of 
 my desires ; all lights were followed with the same ar- 
 dor, 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 vigor, 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 are smart with new jackets and 
 neckties ; their faces are pale with sleep, and the roll- 
 ing 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 flashed through the boy's mind ; his imag- 
 ination is stirred and quickened, and he begs for an ex- 
 planation. 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 opportu- 
 nity of stealing the novel in question. I 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 3 
 
 Shelley became my soul's divinity. Why did I love 
 Shelley ? Why was I not attracted to Byron ? I cannot 
 say. Shelley ! Oh, that crystal name, and his poetry 
 also crystalline. I must see it, I must know him. 
 
 Escaping from the schoolroom, I ransacked the library, 
 and at last my ardor was rewarded. The book — a 
 small pocket edition in red boards, no doubt long out of 
 print — opened at the " Sensitive Plant." Was I disap- 
 pointed? I think I had expected to understand better ; 
 but I had no difficultly in assuming that I was satisfied 
 and delighted. 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," amidst the priests 
 and ignorance of a hateful Roman Catholic college. 
 And there my poets saved me from intellectual savagery ; 
 for I was incapable at that time of learning anything. 
 What determined and incorrigible 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 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 enough so long as passion 
 was in me ; but as it died so the mind clouded, and re- 
 coiled to its original obtuseness. Couldn't, with wouldn't, 
 
4 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 was in my case curiously involved ; nor have I in this 
 respect ever been able to correct my natural tempera- 
 ment. I have always remained powerless to do anything 
 unless moved by a powerful desire. 
 
 The natural end to such school-days as mine was 
 expulsion. I was expelled when I was sixteen, for 
 idleness and general worthlessness. I returned to 
 a wild country home, where I found my father 
 engaged in training race-horses. For a nature of 
 such intense vitality as mine, an ambition, an 
 aspiration 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 steeple- 
 chase rider. To ride the winner of the Liverpool seemed 
 to me a final achievement and glory ; and had not acci- 
 dent intervened, it is very possible that I might have 
 succeeded in carrying off, if not the meditated honor, 
 something scarcely inferior, such as — alas, eheu fugaces ! 
 I cannot now recall the name of a race of the necessary 
 value and importance. 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 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 5 
 
 his evening away against the counter, and was supposed 
 
 to know some one 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 de- 
 mand 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 talked 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, of artistic perception, save a certain senti- 
 ment for the grand and noble — filled me with wonder- 
 ment and awe. " How jolly it would be to be a pain- 
 ter," 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 
 
6 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 a merely Art point 
 of view, I had much better have continued my sketches 
 in the streets ; but the museum was a beautiful and 
 beneficent 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 some- 
 thing 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 an appeal to our reason, impel belief. 
 France ! The word rang in my ears and gleamed in my 
 eyes. France ! All my senses sprang from sleep like 
 a crew when the man on the look-out cries, " Land 
 ahead ! " Instantly I knew 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. . . . 
 
 Then my father died, and I suddenly found myself 
 heir to considerable property — some three or four thou- 
 sands a^year : and then I knew that I was free to enjoy 
 life as I pleased ; no further trammels, no further need of 
 being a soldier, of being anything but myself : eighteen, 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 7 
 
 with life and France before me ! But the spirit did not 
 move me yet to leave home. I would feel the pulse of 
 life at home before I felt it abroad. I would hire a 
 studio. A studio — tapestries, smoke, models, conversa- 
 tions. But here it is difficult not to convey a false 
 impression. I fain would show my soul in these pages, 
 like a face in a pool of clear water ; and although my 
 studio was in truth no more than an amusement, and a 
 means of effectually throwing over all restraint, I did not 
 view it at all in this light. My love of Art was very 
 genuine and deep-rooted ; the tobacconist's betting-book 
 was now as nothing, and a certain Botticelli in the 
 National Gallery held me in tether. And when I look 
 back and consider the 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 
 contra-distinction to the University man, who is fed upon 
 the dust of ages, and after a formula which has been 
 composed to suit the requirements 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 pretty nearly all the English 
 lyric poets ; Shelley's atheism had led me to read Kant, 
 Spinoza, Godwin, Darwin, and Mill ; and these, again, 
 in their turn, introduced me to many writers and various 
 literature. I do not think that at this time I cared much 
 for novel reading. 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 
 
8 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 " 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 I was at that time curiously eager for 
 some adequate philosophy of life, and his social satire 
 seemed very small beer indeed. I was really young. I 
 hungered after great truths : " Middlemarch," " Adam 
 Bede," " The Rise and Fall of Rationalism," " The His- 
 tory of Civilization," were momentous events in my life. 
 But I loved life better than books, and I cultivated with 
 care the acquaintance of a neighbor who had taken the 
 Globe Theatre for the purpose of producing Offenbach's 
 operas. Bouquets, stalls, rings, delighted me. I was 
 not dissipated, but I loved the abnormal. I loved to 
 spend as much on scent and toilet knick-knacks as 
 would keep a poor man's family in affluence for ten 
 months ; and I smiled at the fashionable sunlight in the 
 Park, the dusty cavalcades ; and I loved to shock my 
 friends by bowing to those whom I should not bow to ; 
 above all, the life of the theatres, that life of raw 
 gas-light, whitewashed wails, of light, doggerel verse, 
 slangy polkas and waltzes, interested me beyond legiti- 
 mate measure, so curious and unreal did it seem. I 
 lived at home, but dined daily at a fashionable restaur- 
 ant ; at half -past eight I was at the theatre. Nodding 
 familiarly to the doorkeeper, I passed up the long 
 passage to the stage. Afterwards supper. Cremorne 
 and the Argyle Rooms were my favorite haunts. My 
 mother suffered, and expected ruin, for I took no trouble 
 to conceal anything ; I boasted of dissipations. But 
 there was no need for fear ; I was naturally endowed 
 with a very clear sense indeed of self-preservation ; I 
 neither betted nor drank, nor contracted debts, nor a 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 9 
 
 secret marriage ; from a worldly point of view, I was a 
 moaei 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. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 AT last the day came, and with several trunks and 
 boxes full of clothes, books, and pictures, I 
 started, accompanied by an English valet, for Paris and 
 Art. 
 
 We all know the great gray 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 color ; a pecu- 
 liar bleakness in the streets. The mfnagere hurries 
 down the asphalte to market ; a dreadful gar$on de caff, 
 with a napkin tied around his throat, moves about some 
 chairs, so decrepit and so solitary that it seems impos- 
 sible to imagine a human being sitting there. Where 
 are the Boulevards ? Where are the Champs Elys£es ? 
 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 returned to 
 the study of a French vocabulary. Nevertheless, 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 enter the beaux 
 arts — Cabanel's studio for preference ; for I had then 
 an intense and profound admiration for that painter's 
 work. I did not think much of the application I was 
 told I should have to make at the Embassy ; my thoughts 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. n 
 
 were fixed on the master, and my one desire was to see 
 him. To see him was easy, to speak to him was another 
 matter, and I had to wait three weeks, until I could hold 
 a conversation in French. How I achieved this feat I 
 cannot say. I never opened a book, I know, nor is it 
 agreeable to think what my language must have been 
 like — like nothing ever heard under God's sky before, 
 probably. It was, however, sufficient to waste a good 
 hour of the painter's time. I told him of my artistic 
 sympathies, what pictures I had seen of his in London, 
 and how much pleased I was with those then in his 
 studio. He went through the ordeal without flinching. 
 He said he would be glad to have me as a pupil. 
 
 But life in the beaux arts is rough, course, and rowdy. 
 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 required so painful an 
 effort of will, that I glanced in terror down the dim and 
 gray 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. I felt humiliated at 
 my own weakness, for much hope had been centred in 
 that academy ; and I knew no other. Day after day I 
 walked up and down the Boulevards, studying the pho- 
 tographs of the salon pictures, and was stricken by the 
 art of Jules Lefevre. True it is that I saw it was want- 
 ing in that tender grace which I am forced to admit 
 even now, saturated though I now am with the aesthet- 
 ics 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 attractive- 
 ness of nude figures, indolent attitudes, long hair, slen- 
 
12 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 der hips and hands, and I accepted Jules Lefevre wholly 
 and unconditionally. 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. This was even more to my taste, for 
 I had an instinctive liking for Frenchmen, and was 
 anxious to see as much of them as possible. 
 
 The studio was perched high up in the Passage des 
 Panoramas. There I found M. Julien, a typical meridi- 
 onal — the large stomach, the dark eyes, crafty and 
 watchful ; the seductively mendacious manner, the sen* 
 sual mind. We made friends at once — he consciously 
 making use of me, I unconsciously 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. I was curious, odd, quaint. 
 To be sure it was a little tiresome to have to put up with 
 a talkative person, whose knowledge of the French lan- 
 guage had been acquired in three months, but the din- 
 ners were good. No doubt Julien reasoned so ; I did 
 not reason at all. 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 inci- 
 dents in his own life ; and the moral reflections with 
 which he sprinkled his conversation I thought very strik- 
 ing. Like every young man of twenty, I was on the 
 lookout for something to set up that would do duty for 
 an ideal. The 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. But Julien kept 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. I3 
 
 me at a distance, and the rare occasions when he favored 
 me with his society only served to prepare my mind for 
 the friendship which awaited me, and was destined to 
 absorb some years of my life. 
 
 In the studio there was some eighteen or twenty 
 young men, and among these there were some four or 
 five from whom I could learn ; and there were also there 
 some eight or nine young English girls. We sft 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 exceptionalness of our life in this studio conveyed. 
 Besides, the women themselves were young and inter- 
 esting, and were, therefore, 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 domin- 
 ion generally comes under the sway of some friend who 
 ever uses 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 per- 
 meated and added to my life — I am nevertheless forced 
 to recognize that, 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 will- 
 
14 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 ing 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 there was a new- 
 comer in the studio ; and, to my surprise, for he was 
 fashionably dressed, and my experience had not led me 
 to believe in the marriage of genius and well-cut cloth, 
 he was painting very well indeed. His shoulders were 
 beautiful and broad ; a long neck, a tiny head, a nar- 
 row, thin face, and large eyes, full of intelligence and 
 fascination. And although he could not have been 
 working more than an hour, he had already sketched in 
 his figure, and with all the surroundings — screens, lamps, 
 stoves, etc. I was deeply interested. I asked the young 
 lady next me if she knew who he was. She could give 
 me no information. But at four o'clock there was a 
 general exodus from the studio, and we adjourned to a 
 neighboring cafe to drink beer. The way through a 
 narrow passage, and as we stooped under an archway, 
 the young man (Marshall was his name) spoke to me in 
 English. Yes, we had met before ; we had exchanged 
 a few words in So-and-So's studio — 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 " Will you 
 dine with me to-night ? " Marshall thought the follow- 
 ing 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, and 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 new-found friend. Not only 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 15 
 
 was he tall, strong, handsome, and beautifully dressed, 
 infinitely better dressed than I, but he could talk French 
 like a native. It was only natural that he should, for he 
 was born and had lived in Brussels all his life, but the 
 accident of birth rather stimulated trren calmed my 
 erubescent admiration. He spoke of, and he was clearly 
 on familiar terms with, the fashionable restaurants and 
 actresses ; he stopped at a hairdresser's to have his hair 
 curled. All this was very exciting, and a little bewilder- 
 ing. I was on the tiptoe of expectation to see his apart- 
 ments ; and, not to be utterly outdone, I alluded to my 
 valet. 
 
 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 contemplated beginning at once, 
 my admiration increased to wonder, and I examined with 
 awe the great fireplace 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 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. 
 
l6 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 " What waltz is that ! " I asked. 
 
 " Oh, nothing ; something I composed the other even- 
 ing. 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 a 
 beautiful English girl entered. Marshall introduced 
 me. 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, that she was dining out. 
 She 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 and attentively 
 at the studio, but now Marshall's society was an attrac- 
 tion I could not resist. For the sake of his talent, which 
 I religiously believed in, I regretted he was so idle ; but 
 his dissipation was winning, and his delight was thorough, 
 and his gay, dashing manner made me feel happy, and 
 his experience opened to me new avenues for enjoy- 
 ment and knowledge of life. On my arrival in Paris I 
 had visited, in the company of my taciturn valet, the 
 Mabille and the Valentino, and I had dined at the Mai- 
 son d'Or by myself ; but now I was taken 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 ; and afterwards we went in 
 great crowds to Bullier, Chateau Rouge, or the Elyse'e 
 Montmartre. The clangor of the band, the unreal 
 greenness of the foliage, the thronging of the dancers 
 and the chattering of women, whose Christian names we 
 only knew. And then the returning in open carriages 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 17 
 
 rolling through the white dust beneath the immense 
 heavy dome of the summer night, when the dusty dark- 
 ness of the street is chequered by a passing glimpse of 
 light skirts or flying feather, and the moon looms like a 
 magic lantern out of the sky. 
 
 Now we seemed to live in fiacres and restaurants, and 
 the afternoons were filled with febrile impressions. Mar- 
 shall had a friend in this street, and another in that. It 
 was only necessary for him to cry " Stop ! " to the coach- 
 men, and to run up two or three flights of stairs 
 
 " Madame , est-elle chez elle ? " 
 
 " Out, Monsieur j si Monsieur veut se donner la peine 
 d'entrer." And we were shown into a handsomely fur- 
 nished apartment. A lady would enter hurriedly, and 
 an animated discussion was begun. I did not know 
 French sufficiently well to follow the conversation, 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 Constanti- 
 nople or Japan, and they were generally involved in 
 mysterious lawsuits, or were busily engaged in prosecut- 
 ing claims for several millions of francs against different 
 foreign governments. 
 
 And just as I had watched the chorus girls and mum- 
 mers, three years ago, at the Globe Theatre, now, existed 
 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 nota- 
 tion 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 so dear to me. With the 
 
l8 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 patience of a cat before a mouse-hole, I watched and 
 listened, picked one characteristic phrase out of hours 
 of vain chatter, interested and amused by an angry or 
 loving glance. Like the midges that fret the surface of 
 a shadowy stream these men and women seemed to me ; 
 and though I laughed, danced, and made merry with 
 them, I was not of them. But with Marshall it was dif- 
 ferent : they were my amusement, they were his neces- 
 sary pleasure. And I knew of this distinction that made 
 twain our lives ; and I reflected deeply upon it. Why 
 could I not live without an ever-present and acute con- 
 sciousness of life ? Why could I not love, forgetful of 
 the harsh 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 confi- 
 dences, because to obtain confidence 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 color and a bit of perspective awakens, 
 the blue tints that the sunsetting 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 ; // avait ] se grand air ; 
 there was fascination in his very bearing, in his large, 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 19 
 
 soft, colorful eyes, and a go and dash in his dissipations 
 that carried you away. 
 
 To any one 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 ot 
 speech and his general bearing ; and yet I knew very 
 well indeed that mine was a rarer and more original 
 nature. I was willing to learn, that was all. There was 
 much that Marshall could teach me, and I used him 
 without shame, without stint. I used him as I have used 
 all those with whom I have been brought into close con- 
 tact. Search my memory as I will, I cannot recall a 
 case of man or woman who ever occupied any consider- 
 able part of my thoughts and did not contribute largely 
 towards my moral or physical welfare. In other words, 
 and in very colloquial language, I never had useless 
 friends hanging about me. From this crude statement 
 of a signal fact, the thoughtless reader will at once judge 
 me rapacious, egotistical, 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. Never have I given 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 whom you 
 did not make a profit out of ? 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 
 
20 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 
 ever been adjuvant to the other. "Pooh, pooh ! " again 
 exclaims the reader ; " I for one will not believe that 
 chance has only sent across your way 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 psychi- 
 cal 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 question, by replying to your 
 taunt : Chance, on the conditions 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 conscious, withdrew me from them, and I was 
 attracted to others. Have you not seen a horse sud- 
 denly 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 con- 
 sciousness, 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 per- 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 21 
 
 sonally have drawn all the sustenance I may draw from 
 him ; and, therefore, it (that part which I did not absorb) 
 concerns me no more. And the same with Gautier. 
 Mile, de Maupin, that godhead of flowing line, that 
 desire not " of the moth for the star," but for such per- 
 fection of hanging arm and leaned 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 use the word " use " in its fullest, not in its lim- 
 ited and twenty-shilling sense. This reduction 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 
 scaie 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 work- 
 ing 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 
 
22 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 we are on the verge of a new thought, we slip into the 
 enunciation of some time-worn truth. But I say again, 
 let general principle be waived ; it will suffice for the 
 interest of these pages if it be understood that brain in- 
 stincts have always been, and still are, the initial and the 
 determining powers of my being. 
 
 ******* 
 
 But the studio, where I had been working for the last 
 three or four months so diligently, became wearisome to 
 me, and for two reasons. First, because it deprived me 
 ol many hours of Marshall's company. Secondly — and 
 the second reason was the graver — because I was begin- 
 ning to regard the delineation of a nymph, or youth 
 bathing, etc., as a very narrow channel to carry off the 
 the strong, full tide of a man's thought. For now 
 thoughts of love and death, and the hopelessness of life, 
 were in active fermentation within me and sought for 
 utterance with a strange unintermittingness of appeal. 
 I yearned merely to give direct expression to my pain. 
 Life was then in its springtide ; every thought was new 
 to me, and it would have seemed a pity to disguise even 
 the simplest emotion in any garment when it was so 
 beautiful in its Eden-like nakedness. 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 des- 
 pised, 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 sug- 
 gestion to do so not come direct to me from the out- 
 side. 
 
 At the time I am writing I lived in an old-fashioned 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 23 
 
 hotel on the Boulevard, which an enterprising Belgian 
 had lately bought and was endeavoring to modernize ; 
 an old-fashioned hotel, that still clung to its ancient 
 character in the presence of half a dozen old people, 
 who, for antediluvian reasons, continue to dine on cer- 
 tain well-specified days at the table d'hdte. Fifteen 
 years have passed away, and these old people, no doubt, 
 have joined their ancestors ; but I can see them still 
 sitting in that salle a manger; the buffets en vieux chine ; 
 the opulent candelabra en style d empire ; the waiter 
 lighting the gas in the pale Parisian evening. That 
 white-haired man, that tall, thin, hatchet-faced Ameri- 
 can, has dined at this table d'hdte for the last thirty 
 years — he is talkative, vain, foolish, and authoritative. 
 The clean, neatly-dressed old gentleman 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 developments, your ac- 
 quaintance 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 gen- 
 tleman, 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 re- 
 turned 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. She terms a stranger any one whom she 
 has not seen at least once before. The little fat, neck- 
 less 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 
 intrude himself on your notice, but when you speak to 
 
24 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 him on literary matters he fixes a pair of tiny, sloe-like 
 eyes on you, and talks affably of his collaborateurs. 
 
 I was soon deeply interested in M. Duval, and I 
 invited him to come to the cafe after dinner. I paid for 
 his coffee and liqueurs, I offered him a choice cigar. 
 He did not smoke ; I did. It was, of course, inevitable 
 that I should find out that he had not had a play pro- 
 duced 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 genial subjects of conversation. He 
 had written plays with everybody ; his list of colla- 
 borateurs was longer than any list of lady patron- 
 esses 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 sur- 
 prised ; it was the mystery of the seances of colla- 
 boration, the rendezvous, the discussion, the illus- 
 trious 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 perej it had been refused at the Francais, and 
 then it had been about, here, there, and everywhere ; 
 finally the Varietes had asked for some alterations, and 
 c'etait une affair entendue. " 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 to the production of a one-act piece, signed 
 by him, at the Varie'te's, because his son was then giving 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 2$ 
 
 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 bon-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 Kauf- 
 mann, 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, /' exposi- 
 tion de la piece selon la formule de M. Scribe is still un- 
 known. 
 
 How I used to enjoy these conversations ! I remem- 
 ber how I used to stand on the pavement after having 
 bid the old gentleman good-night, regretting I had not 
 demanded some further explanation regarding le mouve- 
 ment Romantique, or la facon de M. Scribe de manager la 
 situation. 
 
 Why not write a comedy ! So the thought came. I 
 had never written anything save a few ill-spelt letters ; 
 but no matter. To find a plot, that was the first thing 
 to do. Take Marshall for hero and Alice for heroine, 
 surround them with the old gentlemen who dined at the 
 table d'hote, flavor with the Italian countess who smoked 
 
26 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 cigars when there were not too many strangers present. 
 After three weeks of industrious stirring, the ingredients 
 did begin to simmer into something resembling a plot. 
 Put it upon paper. Ah ! there was my difficulty. I re- 
 membered suddenly that I had read "Cain," " Manfred," 
 " The Cenci," as poems, without ever thinking of how 
 the dialogue looked on paper ; besides, they were in 
 blank verse. I hadn't a notion how prose dialogue would 
 look on paper. Shakespeare I had never opened ; no in- 
 stinctive want had urged me to read him. He had re- 
 mained, therefore, unread, unlooked at. Should I buy 
 a copy ? No ; the name repelled me — as all popular 
 names repelled me. In preference I went to the Gym- 
 nase, and listened attentively to a comedy by M. Dumas 
 fils. But strain my imagination as I would, I could not 
 see the spoken words in their written form. Oh, for a 
 look at the prompter's copy, the corner of which I could 
 see when I leaned forward ! At last I discovered in 
 Galignani's library a copy of Leigh Hunt's edition of the 
 old dramatists, and, after a month's study of Congreve, 
 Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, I completed a com- 
 edy in three acts, which I entitled " Worldliness." It 
 was, of course, very bad ; but, if my memory serves me 
 well, I do not think it was nearly so bad as might be 
 imagined. 
 
 No sooner was the last scene written than I started 
 at once for London, confident I should find no difficulty 
 in getting my play produced. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 IS it necessary to say that I did not find a manager to 
 produce my play ? A printer was more attainable, 
 and the correction of proofs amused me for a while. I 
 wrote another play ; and when the hieing after theatrical 
 managers began to lose its attractiveness my thoughts 
 reverted to France, which always haunted me ; and 
 which now possessed me as if with the sweet and mag- 
 netic influence of home. 
 
 How important my absence from Paris seemed to me ; 
 and how Paris rushed into my eyes ! — Paris — public 
 ball-rooms, cafe's, the models in the studio and the young 
 girls painting, and Marshall, Alice, and Julien. Mar- 
 shall ! — my thoughts pointed at him through the inter- 
 vening streets and the endless possession of people 
 coming and going. 
 
 " 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 ob- 
 tain news of him there, — perhaps find him. But when I 
 
 27 
 
28 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 pulled aside the curtain, the accustomed 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 cafe, or perhaps he 
 is gone to the country." This was not very encourag- 
 ing, and now, my enthusiasm thoroughly damped, I 
 strolled along le Passage, looking 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 cafe'. As I came forward the waiter moved one 
 of the tin tables, and then I saw the fat Provencal. But 
 just as if he had seen me yesterday he said, " Tiens / 
 c'est vous j une deme tassel oui . . . gar f on, une deme 
 tasse." Presently the conversation turned on Marshall ; 
 they had not seen much of him lately. " 77 parait qu'il 
 est plus amoureux que jamais," Julien replied sardoni- 
 cally. 
 
 I found my friend in large furnished apartments on 
 the ground floor in the Rue Duphot. The walls were 
 stretched with blue silk, there were large mirrors and 
 great gilt cornices. Passing into the bedroom I found 
 the young god wallowing in the finest of fine linen — in a 
 great Louis XV. bed, and there were cupids above him. 
 " Holloa ! what, you back again, Dayne ? 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 exposition of the Im- 
 pressionists. We'll have a bit of breakfast round the 
 corner, at Durant's, and we'll go on there. I hear that 
 Bedlam is nothing to it ; there is a canvas there twenty 
 feet square and in three tints : pale yellow for the sun- 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 29 
 
 light, brown for the shadows, and all the rest is sky-blue. 
 There is, I am told, a lady walking in the foreground 
 with a ring-tailed monkey, and the tail is said to be three 
 yards long." 
 
 And so we went to jeer a group of enthusiasts that 
 willingly forfeit all delights of the world in the hope of 
 realizing a new sestheticism ; 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"; 
 " la nature ne se fait pas comme ga "j " o?i dessine par les 
 masses; combien de tetes ? " " Sept et deml." " SI f avals 
 un morceau de crale je mettrais celle-la dans un bocal, c'est 
 un fcetus" etc.; in a word, all that the journals of culture 
 are pleased to term an artistic education. And then the 
 boisterous laughter, exaggerated in the hope of giving as 
 much pain as possible. 
 
 The history of Impressionist art is simple. 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 Troyon, and Troyon begot Millet, Cour- 
 bet, Corot, and Rousseau, and these in turn begot Degas, 
 Pissarro, Madame Morizot, and Guillaumin. Degas is 
 a pupil of Ingres, but he applies the marvellous acute- 
 ness of drawing he learned from his master to delinea- 
 ting the humblest aspects of modern life. Degas draws 
 not by the masses, but by the character ; — his subjects 
 are shop-girls, ballet-girls, and washerwomen, but the 
 qualities that endow them with immortality are precisely 
 
30 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 furni- 
 ture 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 Fragonard's ladies are of 
 the Court of Louis XV. To the right you see a pic- 
 ture of two shop-girls with bonnets in their hands. So 
 accurately are the habitual movements 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 family 
 note, but it is not until we turn to the set of nude 
 figures that we find the great artist revealing any new 
 phrase 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 malforma- 
 tions 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 mid- 
 dle ages, 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 hum- 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 31 
 
 ble 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 grays and violets beautifully harmonized. 
 The figures seem to move as in a dream : we are on the 
 thither side of life, in a world of quiet color and happy as- 
 piration. 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 gray. 
 
 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 limitlessness, 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. There 
 life is rendered in violent and colorful 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 
 rfauvre. 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 por- 
 trait of the woman on a background of chintz flowers. 
 
 We could but utter coarse gibes and exclaim, " What 
 
32 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 could have induced him to paint such things ? Surely he 
 must have seen that it was absurd. I wonder if the Im- 
 pressionists are in earnest or if it is only une blague quon 
 nous fait? " Then we stood and screamed at Monet, that 
 most exquisite painter of blonde light. We stood before 
 the " Turkeys," and seriously we wondered if " it was 
 serious work," — that chef aVceuvre ! 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 rail- 
 way stations by the same painter, — those rapid sensa- 
 tions of steel and vapor, — 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 did we understand any more Renoir's rich 
 sensualities of tone; nor did the mastery with which he 
 achieves an absence of shadow appeal to us. You see 
 color and light in his pictures as you do in nature, and 
 the child's criticism of a portrait — " 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 inten- 
 sity ; we believed then in the grammar of art, perspective, 
 anatomy and lajambe qui porte ; and we found all this 
 in Julien's studio. 
 
 A year passed ; a year of art and dissipation — one part 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 33 
 
 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 Gaiet£, in the 
 company of thieves and housebreakers ; on the following 
 evening we were dining with a duchess or a princess in 
 the Champs Elysees. And we prided ourselves vastly 
 on our versatility in using with equal facility the lan- 
 guage of the " fence's " parlor, 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 
 whispered, " 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. And we thought there 
 was something very thrilling in leaving the Rue de la 
 Gaiete, returning home to dress, and presenting our 
 spotless selves to the Mite. And we succeeded very well, 
 as indeed all young men do who waltz perfectly and 
 avoid making love to the wrong woman. 
 
 But the excitement of climbing up and down the so- 
 cial ladder did not stave off our craving for art ; and 
 there came about this time 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 as a means of liveli- 
 hood. This decided me. I asked him to come and li^e 
 with me, and to be as near our studio as possible, I took 
 an appdrtement in the Passage des Panoramas. It was 
 not pleasant that your window should open, not to the 
 sky, but to an unclean prospect of glass roofing ; nor 
 was it agreeable to get up at seven in the morning ; and 
 ten hours of work daily are trying to the resolution even 
 of the best intended. But we had sworn to forego all 
 
34 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 pleasures for the sake of art — tables d'hote in the Rue 
 Maubeuge, French and foreign duchesses in the Champs 
 Elysees, thieves in the Rue de la Gaiete. 
 
 I was entering therefore on a duel with Marshall for 
 supremacy in an art for which, as has already been said, 
 I possessed no qualifications. It will be readily under- 
 stood how a mind like mine, so keenly alive to all im- 
 pulses, and so unsupported by any moral convictions, 
 would suffer in so keen a contest waged under such un- 
 equal and cruel conditions. 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 fatal pendulum in the pit, the agony 
 is a little out of reach of words to define. It was 
 even so. 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 were miserable. That of mine 
 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 with- 
 out which all is valueless, — I mean the talent of the boy 
 who can knock off a clever caricature of his schoolmaster 
 or make a lifelike sketch of his favorite 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 I was left toiling hope- 
 lesslv in the distance. Marshall's mind, though shallow, 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 35 
 
 was bright, and he understood with strange ease all that 
 was told him, and was able to put into immediate prac- 
 tice the methods of work inculcated by the professors. 
 In fact he showed himself singularly capable of educa- 
 tion ; 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 agi- 
 tation in praise of him and his work, and anxious specu- 
 lation arose as to the medals he would obtain. I con- 
 tinued 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 to 
 la jambe qui porte j 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 attain 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 ter- 
 rible are the languors and yearning 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 at an 
 end. I looked upon a blank space of years desolate as a 
 gray and sail-less sea. " What shall I do ? " I asked my- 
 self, and my heart was weary and hopeless. Litera- 
 
36 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 ture ? My heart did not answer the question at once. 
 I was too broken and overcome by the shock of failure ; 
 failure precise and stern, admitting of no equivocation. 
 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 clamored loudly from without ; every 
 day, almost every hour of the day, I heard of the medals 
 which he would carry off ; of what Lefevre thought of 
 his drawing this week, of Boulanger's opinion of his tal- 
 ent. I do not wish to excuse my conduct, but I cannot 
 help saying that Marshall showed me neither considera- 
 tion 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 popularity. I did not 
 know then how little these studio successes really meant. 
 Vanity ? No, it was not his vanity that maddened me ; 
 to me vanity is rarely displeasing, sometimes it is sin- 
 gularly attractive ; but by a certain insistence and aggres- 
 siveness 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 broke up my es- 
 tablishment. By so doing I involved my friend in grave 
 and cruel difficulties ; by this action I imperilled his fu- 
 ture prospects. It was a dastardly action ; but his pres- 
 ence had grown unbearable ; yes, unbearable in the full- 
 est acceptation of the word, and in ridding myself of him 
 I felt as if a world of misery were being lifted from me. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 AFTER three months spent in a sweet seaside resort, 
 where unoccupied men and ladies whose husbands 
 are abroad happily congregate, I returned to Paris re- 
 freshed. 
 
 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 remembered that if I had not broken 
 with him I should have been able to ask him some essen- 
 tial 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 
 reconciliation was effected. 
 
 Then I took an appartement in one of the old houses in 
 Rue de la Tour des Dames, for the windows there over- 
 looked a bit of tangled garden with a few dilapidated 
 statues. 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 collabora- 
 tion 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 colorful cloth, and the 
 arm-chairs and the couches were to match. The draw- 
 ing-room was in cardinal red, hung from the middle of 
 
 37 
 
38 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 
 the Apollo, and a bust of Shelley. The bedrooms were 
 made unconventional with cushioned seats and rich can- 
 opies ; 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 apartment 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 Edwin Dayne, 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. 
 
 Before leaving for the seaside I had bought some 
 volumes of Hugo and De 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 irritable, 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 
 v'oice 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. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 39 
 
 almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me. 
 Wordsworth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, 
 if that great austere mind, chill even as the Cumberland 
 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 card-board, tin daggers, and a mili- 
 tary 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 pub- 
 lic buildings to please me. Of "Les Feuillesd'Automne" 
 and " Les Chants du Crepuscule " I remember nothing. 
 Ten lines, fifty lines of " La Legende des Siecles," and 
 I always think that it is the greatest poetry I have ever 
 read, but after a few pages I invariably put the book 
 down and forget it. 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 splen- 
 dor of the imagery, by the thunder of the syllables : 
 
 " Quel dieu, quel moissonneur dans l'eternel ete 
 Avait s'en allant negligemment jete 
 Cette faucille dor dans les champs des etoiles." 
 
 But if I read an entire poem I never escape that sensa- 
 tion of the ennui which is inherent in gaud and the 
 glitter of the Italian or Spanish improvisatore. There 
 never was anything French about Hugo's genius. Hugo 
 was a cross between an Italian improvisatore and a meta- 
 physical German student. Take another verse — 
 " Le clair de lune bleu qui baigne l'horizon." 
 
40 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 Without a "like" or an "as," by a mere statement of 
 fact, the picture, nay more, the impression, is produced. 
 I confess I have a weakness for the poem which this 
 line concludes — " La fete chez Therese "; but admirable 
 as it is with its picture of mediaeval life, there is in it, 
 like in all Hugo's work, a sense of fabrication that dries 
 up emotion in my heart. He shouts and raves over 
 poor humanity, while he is gathering coppers for him- 
 self ; he goes in for an all-round patronage of the Al- 
 mighty in a last stanza ; but of the two immortalities he 
 evidently considers his own the most durable ; he does 
 not, however, become really intolerable until he gets on 
 the subject of little children ; he sings their innocence 
 in great bombast, but he is watching them ; the poetry 
 over, the crowd dispersed, he will appear a veritable 
 Mr. Hyde. 
 
 The first time I read of une bouche cC ombre I was as- 
 tonished, nor the second nor third repetition produced 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, was younger, truer, and more beautiful. 
 Homer's simile's can never grow old ; une bouche d'ombre 
 was old the first time it was said. It is the birthplace 
 and the grave of Hugo's genius. 
 
 Of Alfred de Musset I had heard a great deal. Mar- 
 shall and the Marquise were in the habit of reading him 
 in moments of relaxation, they had marked their favor- 
 ite passages, so he came to me highly recommended. 
 Nevertheless, I made but little progress in his poetry. 
 His modernisms were out of tune with the present strain 
 of my aspirations, and I did not find the unexpected 
 word and the eccentricities of expression which were, 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 41 
 
 and are still, so dear to me. I am not a purist ; an 
 error of diction is very pardonable if it does not err on 
 the side of the commonplace ; the commonplace, the nat- 
 ural, is constitutionally abhorrent to me ; and I have never 
 been able to read with any very thorough sense of pleasure 
 even the opening lines of " Rolla," that splendid lyrical out- 
 burst. What I remember of it now are those two odious 
 chevilles — marchait et respirait, and Astarti ' fille de Vonde 
 amere ; nor does the fact that amere rhymes with mere con- 
 done the offence, although it proves that even Musset felt 
 that perhaps the richness of the rhyme might render toler- 
 able the intolerable. And it is to my credit that the Span- 
 ish love-songs moved me not at all ; and it was not until I 
 read that magnificently grotesque poem " La Ballade a 
 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 soul. But this craft, fashioned of 
 mother-o'-pearl, with starlight at the helm and moon- 
 beams 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." The 
 reaction was as violent as it was sudden. I was weary 
 of spiritual passion, and this great exaltation of the body 
 above the soul at once conquered and led me captive ; 
 this plain scorn of a world as exemplified in lacerated 
 saints and a crucified Redeemer opened up to me illim- 
 itable prospects of fresh" beliefs, and therefore new joys 
 in things and new revolts against all that had come to 
 form part and parcel of the commonalty of mankind. 
 Till now I had not even remotely suspected that a deifi- 
 cation of flesh and fleshly desire was possible. Shelley's 
 teaching had been, while accepting the body, to dream 
 
42 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 of the soul as a star, and so preserve our ideal ; but now 
 suddenly I saw, with delightful clearness and with in- 
 toxicating conviction, that by looking without shame and 
 accepting with love the flesh, I might raise it to as high 
 a place and 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 infamous 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 ; the bold, fearless 
 gaze of Venus is lovelier than the lowered glance of the 
 Virgin, and I cried with my master that the blood that 
 flowed upon Mount Calvary " ne m'a jamais baignt dans 
 ses flots" 
 
 I will not turn to the book to find the exact words of 
 this sublime vindication, for ten years I have not read 
 the Word that has become so inexpressibly a part of me ; 
 and shall I not refrain as Mile, de Maupin refrained, 
 knowing well that the face of love may not be twice 
 seen ? Great was my conversion. 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 fairylike 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 were of naked youths riding 
 white horses through mountain passes ; there were no 
 clouds in my dreams, or if there were any, they were 
 clouds that had been cut out as if in cardboard with a 
 pair of scissors." 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 43 
 
 I had shaken off all belief in Christianity early in life, 
 and had suffered much. Shelley had replaced faith by 
 reason, but I still suffered : but here was a new creed 
 which proclaimed 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 whole attention. The exquisite 
 outlines of the marvellous castle, the romantic woods, 
 the horses moving, the lovers leaning to each other's 
 faces, enchanted me ; and then the indescribably beauti- 
 ful description of the performance of " As You Like 
 It," and the supreme relief and perfect assuagement it 
 brings to Rodolph, who then sees Mile, de Maupin for 
 the first time in woman's attire. If she were dangerously 
 beautiful as a man, that beauty is forgotten in the rapture 
 and praise of her unmatchable 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," " Jetta- 
 tura," " Une Nuit de Cleopatre," etc., and then the very 
 diamonds of the crown, " Les Emaux et Camees," " La 
 Symphonie en Blanc Majeure," in which the adjective 
 blanc and blanche is repeated with miraculous felicity in 
 each stanza. And then Contralto, — 
 
 " Mais seulement il se transpose 
 Et passant de la forme au son, 
 Trouvant dans la metamorphose 
 La jeune fille et le gar9on." 
 
 Transpose, — a word never before used except in musi- 
 cal appliction, and now for the first time applied to mate- 
 rial form, and with a beauty-giving touch that Phidias 
 might be proud of. I know not how I quote : such is my 
 
44 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 best memory of the stanza, and here that is more impor- 
 tant than the stanza itself. And that other stanza, " 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, 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 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 lcve, I did believe. Gautier des- 
 troyed 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 aggravated 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 sneers 
 of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may 
 better know the worthlessness of temptation. " Les Fleurs 
 du Mai ! " beautiful flowers, beautiful in sublime decay. 
 What great record is yours, and were Hell a reality how 
 many souls would we find wreathed with your poisonous 
 
CONFESSIONS OF a YOUNG MAN. 45 
 
 blossoms ! The village maiden goes to her Faust ; the 
 children of the nineteenth century go to you, O Baude- 
 laire, 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 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 moorland evokes the magical 
 verse: 
 
 " Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique 
 Nous e'changerons un eclair unique 
 Comme un long sanglot tout charge d'adieux." 
 
 For months I fed on the mad and morbid literature 
 that the enthusiasm of 1830 called into existence. The 
 gloomy and sterile little pictures of " Gaspard de la 
 Nuit," or the elaborate criminality, " Les Contes Im- 
 moraux," 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 
 passage in Paris. The money spent was considerable, 
 the waste of time enormous. One man's solitary work 
 (he died very young, but he is known to have excelled 
 all in 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 Vol- 
 taire. Trembling I asked the price. The man looked 
 at me earnestly and answered, " A hundred and fifty 
 
46 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 francs." No doubt it was a great deal of money, but I 
 paid it, and rushed home to read. Many that had gone 
 before had proved disappointing, and I was obliged to 
 admit had contributed little towards my intellectual ad- 
 vancement ; but this — this that I had heard about so 
 long — not a queer phrase, not an outrage of any sort of 
 kind, not even a new blasphemy, nothing, — that is to say, 
 nothing but a hundred and fifty francs. Having thus 
 rudely, and very pikelike, knocked my nose against the 
 bottom — this book was, most assuredly, 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. I 
 was repelled by Leconte de Lisle 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 — long, desolate boredom. 
 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. Oh, the vile old 
 professor of rhetoric ! and when I saw him the last time 
 I was in Paris, his head — a declaration of righteousness, 
 a cross between a Caesar by Gerome, and an archbishop 
 of a provincial town, set all my natural antipathy instantly 
 on edge. Hugo is often pompous, shallow, empty, un- 
 real, 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. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 4} 
 
 "Comrae un geai sur l'arbre 
 Le roi se tient fier ; 
 Son coeur est de marbre, 
 Son ventre est de chair. 
 
 On a pour sa nuque 
 
 Et son front vermeil 
 Fait une perruque 
 
 Avec le soleil. 
 
 : i II regne, il vegete 
 Effroyable zero ; 
 Sur lui se projette 
 L'ombre du bourreau. 
 
 ' ' Son trone est une tombe, 
 Et sur le pave 
 Quelque chose en tombe 
 Qu'on 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 syllables managed it. But stay, son trdne est la tombe ; 
 that makes the verse, 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, however, be the concluding words : he thought 
 that by saying everything, and saying everything twenty 
 times over, he would for ever render impossible the ad- 
 vent of another great poet. But a work of art is valu- 
 able and pleasurable in proportion to its rarity ; one 
 beautiful book of verses is better than twenty books of 
 beautiful verses. This is an absolute and incontestable 
 truth ; a child can burlesque this truth — one verse is 
 better than the whole poem ; a word is better than the 
 line : a letter is better than the word ; but the truth is 
 
4$ CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 not thereby affected. Hugo never had the good fortune 
 to write a bad book, nor even a single bad line, so not 
 having time to read all, the future will read none. What 
 immortality would be gained by the destruction of one 
 half of his magnificent works ! what oblivion is secured 
 by the publication of these posthumous volumes ! 
 
 To return to the Leconte de Lisle. See his " Discours 
 de Reception." Is it possible to imagine anything more 
 absurdly arid ? Rhetoric of this sort, " des vers dor sur 
 une e'cume d'airain" and such sententious platitudes 
 (speaking of the realists), " Les epid/mies de cette nature 
 passent, et le genie demeure." 
 
 Theodore de Banville. At first I thought him cold, 
 tinged with the rhetorical ice of the Leconte de Lisle. 
 He had no new creed to proclaim nor old creed to de- 
 noounce, the inherent miseries of human life did not 
 seem to touch him, and of the languors and ardors of 
 animal or spiritual passion there are none. What is 
 there ? A pure, clear song, an instinctive, incurable and 
 lark-like love of the song. The lily is white, and the 
 rose is red, — such knowledge of, such observation of 
 nature is enough for the poet, and he sings and he trills, 
 there is silver magic in every note, and the song as it 
 ascends rings, and all the air quivers with the everwiden- 
 ing circle of the echoes, sighing and dying out of the 
 ear until the last faintness is reached, and the glad 
 rhymes clash and dash forth again on their aerial way. 
 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 only perceives as stalks 
 whereon he may weave his glittering web of living words. 
 Whatever his moods may be, he is lyrical. His wit flies 
 out on clear-cut, swallow-like wings as when he said, in 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 49 
 
 speaking of Paul Alexis' book " Le Besoin d'Aimer," 
 " Vous avez trouvez un titre assez laid pour f aire reader 
 les divines /toiles." I know not what instrument to com- 
 pare with his verse. I suppose I should say a flute ; but 
 it seems to me more like a marvellously toned piano. 
 His hands pass over the keys, and he produces Chopin- 
 like music. 
 
 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 pause between the adjec- 
 tive and its noun, but it was not until Banville wrote the 
 line, " Elle filait pensivement la blanche laine" that the 
 caesura received its final coup de grace. 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 
 bas de sole, etc. It was the beginning of the end. 
 
 I read the French poets of the modern school — Cop- 
 pee, Mendes, Leon Diex, Verlaine, Jose Maria Here- 
 dia, Mallarme, Rechepin, Villiers de l'lsle Adam. Cop- 
 pee, as may be imagined, I only was capable of appre- 
 ciating 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, armor, 
 jewelry, 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 introduced. But the exquisite poetic 
 perceptivity Copp£e showed in his modern poems, the 
 certainty with which he raised the commonest subject, 
 investing it with sufficient dignity for his purpose, es- 
 caped me wholly, and I could not but turn with horror 
 from such poems as " La Nourrice " and " Le Petit Epi- 
 
50 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 cier." How any one could bring himself to acknowledge 
 the vulgar details of our vulgar age I could not under- 
 stand. The fiery glory of Jose Maria de Heredia, on 
 the contrary, filled me with enthusiasm — ruins and sand, 
 shadow and silhouette of palms and pillars, negroes, 
 crimson, swords, silence, and arabesques. As great 
 copper pans go the clangor of the rhymes : 
 
 ' ' Entre le ciel qui brule et la mer qui moutonne, 
 Au somnolent soleil d'un midi monotone, 
 Tu songes, O guerriere, aux vieux conquistadors ; 
 Et dans l'enervement des nuits chaudes et calmes, 
 Bergant ta gloire eteinte, O cite, tu t'endors 
 Sous les palmiers, au long fremissement des palmes." 
 
 Catulle Mendes, a perfect realization of his name, of 
 his pale hair, of 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 fervor is delightful, and listening to him 
 is as sweet as drinking a fair perfumed white 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 exquisite 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 voluptu- 
 ousness. 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 contem- 
 poraries might not have written. He has produced 
 good work of all kinds, " et voila tout." Every genera- 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 5 1 
 
 tion, every country, has its Catulle Mendes. Robert 
 Buchanan is ours, only in the adaptation Scotch gruel 
 has been substituted for perfumed white wine. No more 
 delightful talker than Mendes, no more accomplished 
 litterateur, no more fluent and translucid critic. I re- 
 member the great moonlights of the Place Pigale, when, 
 on 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 contrast 
 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 with the ex- 
 ception of his early verses I cannot say I ever frankly 
 enjoyed his poetry. When I knew him he had pub- 
 lished the celebrated " L'Apres Midi d'un Faun " : the 
 first poem written in accordance with the theory of 
 symbolism. But when it was given to me (this mar- 
 vellous brochure furnished with strange illustrations and 
 wonderful tassels), I thought it absurdly obscure. Since 
 then, however, it has been rendered, by force of contrast 
 with the brain-curdling enigmas the author has since 
 published, a marvel of lucidity ; and were I 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 : " notre 
 vieux grimoire*' grimoire is the parchment, parch- 
 ment is used for writing, therefore, grimoire is the 
 
52 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 symbol for literature, " tfou s'exaltent les milliers" thou- 
 sands of what ? of letters of course. We have heard a 
 great deal in England of Browning's obscurity. The 
 " Red Cotton Nightcap Country " is child's play com- 
 pared to a sonnet by a determined symbolist such as 
 Mallarme, or better still his disciple Ghil, who has added 
 to the difficulties of symbolism those of poetic instru- 
 mentation. For according to M. Ghil and his organ 
 Les Ecrits pour l'Art, it would appear that the syllables 
 of the French language evoke in us the sensations of 
 different colors ; consequently the timbre of different 
 instruments. The vowel u corresponds to the color 
 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, particu- 
 larly in coupling the sound of the vowel u with the color 
 green instead of with the color yellow. M. Ghil has 
 corrected this very stupid blunder and many others : 
 and his instrumentation 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 poissons," and other works 
 are to follow : the six tomes of " Legendes de Reves et 
 de Sangs," the innumerable tomes of " Legendes de 
 Sangs, 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, un- 
 premeditated harmonies comparable "to nothing that I 
 know of but some Hungarian rapsody ; verses of seven- 
 teen syllables interwoven with verses of eight, and even 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 53 
 
 nine, masculine rhymes, seeking strange union with 
 feminine rhymes in the middle of the line— a music 
 sweet, subtle, and epicene ; the half-note, the inflection, 
 but not the full tone, as " se fondre, o souvenir •, des lys 
 acres delices" 
 
 Se penchant vers les dahlias, 
 Des paons cabrient des rosace lunaire 
 L'assoupissement des branches venere 
 Son pale visage aux mourants dahlias. 
 
 Elle ecoute au lion les breves musiques 
 Nuit claire aux ramures d'accords, 
 Et la lassitude a berce son corps 
 Au rhythme 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 l'horizon, parure vemiculee 
 
 De son corps alangui 
 
 En ame 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 effect was a demoral- 
 izing one ; for in me they aggravated the fever of the 
 unknown, and whetted my appetite for the strange, ab- 
 normal and unhealthy in art. Hence all pallidities of 
 thought and desire were eagerly welcomed, and Ver- 
 laine became my poet. Never shall I forget the first en- 
 chantment of " Les Fetes Galantes." Here all is twi- 
 light. 
 
 The royal magnificences of the sunset have passed, the 
 solemn beatitude of the night is at hand but not yet 
 here ; the ways are veiled with shadow, and lit with 
 dresses, white, that the hour has touched with blue, 
 
54 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 yellow, green, mauve, and undecided purple ; the voices ? 
 strange contraltos ; the forms ? not those of men or 
 women, but mystic, hybrid creatures, with hands nerv- 
 ous and pale, and eyes charged with eager and fitful 
 light . . . " un soir equivoque d'automne" . . . "les 
 belles pendent reveuses a nos bras . . . and they whisper 
 " les mots spe'ciaux et tout bas." 
 
 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 a modern ball dress, 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 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 odor 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 arch- 
 bishop of Persepolis. 
 
 Parsifal a vaincu les filles, leur gentil 
 Babil et la luxure amusante et sa pente 
 Vers la chair de ce garcon vierge que cela tente 
 D'aimer des seins legers et ce gentil babil. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 55 
 
 II a vaincu la femme belle au cceur subtil 
 Etalant ces bras frais et sa gorge excitante ; 
 II a vaincu l'enfer, il rentre dans sa tente 
 Avec un lourd trophee a son bras pueril. 
 
 Avec la lance qui perca 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, o ces voix d'enfants chantent dans la coupole. 
 
 I know of no more perfect thing than this sonnet. 
 The hiatus in the last line was at first a little trying, but 
 I have learned 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 tapestry and 
 palms ; Swinburne and Rossetti were the English poets 
 I read there ; and in a golden bondage, I, a unit in the 
 generation they have enslaved, clanked my fetters and 
 trailed my golden chain. I had begun a set of stories in 
 many various metres, to be called " Roses of Midnight." 
 One of the characteristics of the volume was that daylight 
 was banished from its pages. In the sensual lamplight 
 of yellow boudoirs, or the wild moonlight of centenarian 
 forests, my fantastic loves lived out their lives, died with 
 the dawn which was supposed to be an awakening to 
 consciousness of reality. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 A LAST hour of vivid blue and gold glare ; but now 
 the twilight sheds softly upon the darting rays, and 
 only the little oval frames catch the fleeting beams. I 
 go to the miniatures. Amid the parliamentary faces, all 
 strictly garrotted with many-folded handerchiefs, there 
 is a metal frame enchased with rubies and a few emer- 
 alds. And this chef cCceuvre of antique workmanship 
 surrounds a sharp, shrewdish, modern face, withal pretty. 
 Fair she is and thin. 
 
 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 uncer- 
 tain, 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 
 pleasures, and in whose library are found some few vol- 
 umes 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 
 
 56 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 57 
 
 home is in his eyes the antithesis of freedom, desire, as- 
 piration. He longs for mystery, deep and endless, and 
 he is tempted with a foolish little illusion — white dresses, 
 water-color 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. 
 
 He has sat in the stalls, opera-glass in hand ; he has 
 met women of thirty at balls, and has sat with them be- 
 neath 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 color. How many 
 may love him ? The loveliest may one day smile upon 
 his knee ! and shall he renounce all for that little crea- 
 ture 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 admi- 
 ration, 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 hidQen in those 
 translucid eyes, no story of hate, disappointment, 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 strug- 
 
58 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 gle ? 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 out- 
 set all that is necessary to ensnare the heart of a young 
 man. I see her sitting in her beautiful drawing-room, 
 all composed by, and all belonging to her. Her chair is 
 placed beneath an evergreen plant, and the long leaves 
 lean out as if to touch her neck. The great white and 
 red rose of the d'aubusson carpet are spread enigmati- 
 cally about her feline feet ; a grand piano leans its me- 
 lodious 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 gray eyes, mysteriously still,. and mysteriously re- 
 vealed. 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 drop upon the keys she talks 
 sadly, maybe affectionately ; she speaks of the tedium 
 of life, 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 dis- 
 solve into a dream, all limitations would open in bound- 
 less 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 expression- 
 less ; there is about him the loud swagger of the caserne j 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 59 
 
 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. 
 
 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 ; riddle that no GEdipus will ever come to 
 unravel ; this sphinx will never throw herself from the 
 rock into the clangor 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 indiffer- 
 ent 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 cer- 
 tain 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. . . . 
 
 See the young man of refined mind in a ball room ! 
 He is leaning against the woodwork in a distant door- 
 way, he scarcely knows what to do with himself ; and 
 he is now striving 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 
 
60 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 looking 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 hesitates and goes to some one 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 circu- 
 lar glance — and calm with possession she passes to a 
 seat. She dances the eighth, twelfth, and fifteenth waltz 
 with him. 
 
 Will he induce her to visit his rooms ? Will they be 
 like mine — strange debauches of color and Turkish 
 lamps, Marshall's taste, an old cabinet, a faded pastel 
 which embalms the memory of a pastoral century, my 
 taste ; or will it be a library — two leather library chairs, 
 a large escritoire, etc. ? Be this as it may, whether the 
 apartments be the ruthless extravagance of artistic 
 impulse, or the subdued taste of the student, she, the 
 woman of thirty, shall be there by night and day : her 
 statue 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 complex 
 and various accidents of existence should have ruled out 
 her life virtuously ; if the many inflections of sentiment 
 have decided against this last consummation, 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 single golden 
 hair." She shall haunt his wife's face and words 
 (should he seek to rid himself of her by marriage), a 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 6l 
 
 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 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, " 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 unattainable ; and the prosy bachelors 
 who trail their ill-fated lives from their chambers to their 
 clubs know of, and they call their malady— the woman 
 of thirty. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 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 
 partaken of this odorous refreshment, I call to Jack my 
 great python, that is crawling about after a two months' 
 fast. I 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 slowly and with what 
 exquisite 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 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 the 
 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, and the arms stiffening by some miracle to iron- 
 like rigidity, she was unable to free herself, and died of 
 starvation, as her bondage loosened in decay. And I 
 had increased my difficulties by adopting as part of my 
 task the introduction of all sorts of elaborate, and in 
 
 62 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 63 
 
 many cases extravagantly composed, metres, and I had 
 begun to feel that I was working in sand, I could make 
 no progress, the house I was raising crumbled and fefl 
 away on every side. These stories had one merit : they 
 were all, so far as I can remember, perfectly constructed. 
 Far the art of telling a story clearly and dramatically, 
 selon les procedes de M. Scribe, I had thoroughly learned 
 from old M. Duval, the author of a hundred and sixty 
 plays, written in collaboration with more than a hundred 
 of the best writers of his day, including the master him- 
 self, Gautier. I frequently met M. Duval at breakfast 
 at a neighboring cafe, and our conversation turned on 
 I" exposition de la piece, preparer 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 ve'rite', la science, were repeated 
 some half-a-dozen times. Hardly able to believe my 
 eyes, I read that you should write with as little imagina- 
 tion 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 break- 
 fast, 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 quar- 
 ter, 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 
 
64 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 certain moment, of the word " France " awoke a vitai 
 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," im- 
 pressed 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 semblance of life, pas- 
 sionless in all their passion. 
 
 I had read a few chapters of the " Assommoir," as it 
 appeared in La Republique 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 looked forward to the 
 weekly exposition of the new faith with febrile eager- 
 ness. The great zeal with which the new master con- 
 tinued his propaganda, and the marvellous way in which 
 subjects the most diverse, passing events, political, 
 social, religious, were caught up and turned into argu- 
 ments 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 rami- 
 fications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civiliza- 
 tion, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before 
 the vastness of the conception, 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 65 
 
 would continue to a more glorious and legitimate con- 
 clusion 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 explanation 
 of this wild ecstacy, they 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 list- 
 lessly I say, " Only the simple, crude statements 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 nov- 
 elist, nor yet a dramatic author, and the possibility of a 
 naturalistic poet seemed to me a little doubtful. I had 
 clearly understood that the lyrical quality was to be 
 forever banished ; there were no harps and lutes in our 
 heaven, only drums ; and the preservation of all the es- 
 sentials of poetry, by the simple enumeration of the 
 utensils to be found in a back kitchen, did, I could not 
 help thinking (here it becomes necessary to whisper), 
 sound 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 important 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 spoiled by the romantic 
 
66 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 influence of his generation. Cependant there were indi- 
 cations 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 versi- 
 sified the street cries, Achetezla France, le Soir, le Rappel ; 
 he had sought to give utterance to humble sentiments 
 as in " Le Petit Epicier de Montrouge," the little grocer 
 qui cassait le sucre avec itiilancolie ; 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 dustmen 
 and the comestible glories of the market-places. The 
 subjects are to hand, the formula alone is wanting. 
 
 The prospect was a dazzling one ; I tried to calm my- 
 self. 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 
 mean time 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 Eng- 
 lish, the coloring is Baudelaire, but the rude industry of 
 the dustmen and the comestible glories of the market- 
 place shall be mine. A bas " Les Roses de Minuit ! " 
 
 I felt the " naturalization " of " Roses of Midnight " 
 would prove a difficult task. I soon found it an impos- 
 sible one, and I laid the poems aside and commenced a 
 volume redolent of the delights of Bougival and Ville 
 d'Avray. This book was to be entitled " Poems of 
 ' Flesh and Blood."' 
 
 " Elle mit son plus beau chapeau. son chapeau bleu" . . . 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 67 
 
 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 
 cinqieme" and then ? Why, the door opens, and she 
 cries, " Je faime." 
 
 But it was the idea of the new aestheticism — 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 im- 
 mense harmonic development of the idea ; and thefugal 
 treatment of the different scenes had seemed to me as- 
 tonishingly 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 cresce?i- 
 do, 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, sometimes 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 sus- 
 pect 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 
 
68 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 approve- 
 ment j in a word, by a substitution of Paris for the dis- 
 tant 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 tal- 
 ent. 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 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 at the cost of that of other days, I did not 
 fall into the fatal mistake of placing the realistic writers 
 of 1877 side by side with and on the same plane of in- 
 tellectual vision as the great Balzac ; I felt that the 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 : Sera- 
 phita, 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 moun- 
 tains, great gulfs of sea-water flowing up and reflecting 
 as in a mirror the steep cliff's side ; the straight white 
 feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is torn, 
 and the pure, strange soul continues its mystical exhor- 
 tations. Then the radiant vision, a white glory, the 
 last outburst and manifestation, the trumpets of the 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 69 
 
 apocalypse, the color of heaven ; the closing of the stu- 
 pendous allegory when Seraphita lies 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 nicances of soul are charac- 
 teristic of certain latitudes, and what subtle instinct led 
 him to Norway in quest of this fervent soul ? The in- 
 stinct of genius are unfathomable ; but he who has 
 known the white northern women with their pure spirit- 
 ual 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 blond 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 re- 
 turned to her native northern solitudes, great gulfs of 
 sea-water, mountain rocks, and pine ? 
 
 Balzac's genius is in his titles as heaven is in its stars : 
 " Melmoth Reconcilie," " 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 Pas- 
 cal. 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 logical proofs of the exist- 
 ence of God strikes us in just the same light as the 
 logical proof of the existence of Jupiter Ammon. " Les 
 Pensees " could appear to me only as infinitely childish ; 
 
70 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 per- 
 sonally he seems to me to have shown greater wings of 
 mind than any artist that ever lived. I am aware that 
 this last statement will make many cry " fool " and hiss 
 " Shakespeare ! " But I am not putting 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 developments 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 interest- 
 ing in proportion to the amount of truth it contains, and 
 I will, therefore, state frankly I never derived any profit 
 whatever, and very little pleasure, from the reading of 
 the great plays. The beauty of the verse ! Yes ; he 
 who loved Shelley so 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 forget 
 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 ? 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 7 1 
 
 Now we enter on very subtle distinctions. No doubt 
 that there is the brain-judgment and the sense-judgment 
 of a work of art. And it will be noticed that these two 
 forces of discrimination exist sometimes almost inde- 
 pendently 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 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 Shake- 
 speare 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, sex- 
 ual affinities — the same unreasoned 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 capricious woman is con- 
 stant, if not faithful, to her amant de coeur. And 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 des- 
 truction, 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 
 
72 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 thought that shall make speech beautiful and remember- 
 able. 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 
 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 are capable of understanding 
 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 in- 
 herent 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 
 novelist'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 impressions are governed by the same laws of 
 gravitation as atoms, our realization of Falstaff must of 
 necessity be more vivid than any character in contem- 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 73 
 
 porary literature, although it were equally great. And 
 so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and hear 
 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 of the 
 poor life-weary orphan in the boarding-house ? Speak- 
 ing 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 inven- 
 tion." 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 
 morts." 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 Humain." 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 lasting 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 
 ball-rooms, 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 ambition, and my utter inability to study 
 has always been to me a subject of grave inquietude, — 
 study as constrasted with a general and haphazard 
 gathering of ideas taken in flight. But in me the 
 
74 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 from 
 it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with 
 the world is in me the generating force ; without it 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 Mid- 
 night." 
 
 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 " Nou- 
 velle Athenes" ? He who would know anything 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 cafe on the Place Pigale. Ah ! the morn- 
 ing idlenesses and the long evenings when life was but 
 a summer illusion, the gray moonlights on the Place 
 where we used to stand on the pavements, the shutters 
 clanging up behind us, loth to separate, thinking of 
 what we had left said, 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 75 
 
 pictures and a few pages of prose. The same old story, 
 the vanquished only are victorious ; and though unac- 
 knowledged, 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 unnatural clear- 
 ness do I see and hear, — see the white face of that caf6, 
 the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up to 
 the Place, between two streets. I can see down the in- 
 cline 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 pun- 
 gent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac ; at five o'clock the 
 fragrant odor 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 morn- 
 ing. But who is that man ? he whose prominent eyes 
 flash with excitement. That is Villiers de l'lsle-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. Now 
 and then the silence is broken by the sentries challeng- 
 ing — that is all. But not in Spanish but in French are 
 
76 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 Spaniard 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 falls 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), " man 
 of iron ; not only he declares that the spy must be be- 
 headed, 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 forget- 
 ting — 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 
 1 Nouvelle Athenes ' — ha, ha, one must belong to a great 
 family to understand, ha, ha. 
 
 " 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 77 
 
 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 
 color, 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 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, ' Remember your promise to your father, to 
 your dead father.' The mother laid her head on the 
 blook, but he could not strike. ' Be not the first coward 
 
78 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 whom 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 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, sometimes, 
 as they flowed away, bitter, but at the fountain-head 
 sweet and full of light. He sits next 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 ' Semi- 
 ramis ' when I was painting ' Modern Paris,' " says Manet. 
 " Manet is in despair because he cannot paint atrocious 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 79 
 
 pictures like Durant, 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 uncon- 
 sciously 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 extraordin- 
 ary oneness 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 
 cafe 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 my arm, speak- 
 ing in that high febrile voice of his, every phrase lumin- 
 ous, aerial, even as the soaring moon and the fitful clouds. 
 Duranty, an unknown Stendal, 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 frequently seen 
 in the " Nouvelle Athenes." 
 
80 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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, till the end of time there shall be Cab- 
 aners ; 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 aspira- 
 tion, which in each generation incarnates itself in one 
 heroic soul. Better than those who stepped to opulence 
 and fame upon thee fallen thou wert ; better, loftier- 
 minded, purer ; thy destiny was to fall that others might 
 rise upon thee ; thou wert one of the noble legion of the 
 conquered ; let praise be given to the conquered, for the 
 brunt of victory lies with the conquered. Child of the 
 pavement, of strange sonnets and stranger music, I re- 
 member 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 five francs 
 were earned by playing the accompaniments of comic 
 songs. And the wonderful room on the fifth floor, which 
 was furnished when that celebrated heritage of two thou- 
 sand francs was paid. I remember the fountain that was 
 bought for a wardrobe, and the American organ with all 
 the instruments 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." Some- 
 thing extraordinary would be done with it, I knew, but 
 the result exceeded my wildest expectation. The head 
 must needs be struck off, so that the rapture of thy ad- 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 8l 
 
 miration 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 ddbut at the Theatre 
 Lyrique, thou wert in the last stage of consumption and 
 too ill to go to hear thy pupil's success. He was im- 
 mediately engaged by Mapleson 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 humor that was 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 
 music il 77ie faudrait trois orchestres niilitaires." And 
 when I did show thee some poor verses of mine, French 
 verses, for at this time I hated and had partly forgotten 
 my native language— 
 
 " My dear Dayne, 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 — " 
 
 " Cest vrdi, mais il s'agissait d'une charogne et cela releve 
 beaucoup la chose." 
 
 I remember, too, a few stray snatches of thy extraor- 
 
82 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 dinary music, " music that might be considered by Wag- 
 ner as a little too advanced, but which Liszt would not 
 fail to understand "; also thy settings of sonnets where 
 the melody was continued uninterruptedly from the first 
 line to the last ; and that still more marvellous feat, thy 
 setting, likewise with unbroken melody, of Villon's bal- 
 lade " 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 lit- 
 tle ? 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 labor in vain ; thy des- 
 tiny, though obscure, was a valiant and fruitful one ; 
 and, as in life, thou didst live for others, so now in 
 death thou dost live in others. Thou wert in an hour 
 of wonder and strange splendor 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 color and lawless light Realism ; when 
 showing aloft in the dead pallor of the zenith, like 
 a white flag fluttering faintly, Symbolists and Deca- 
 dents 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 83 
 
 artistic convulsion and renewal of thought thou wert, 
 and thou wert a magnificent rallying-point for all 
 coiners ; it was thou who didst theorize our confused 
 aspirations, and by thy holy example didst save us from 
 all base commercialism, from alb hateful prostitution ; 
 thou wert ever our high priest, and from thy high altar 
 turned to us the white host, the ideal, the true and liv- 
 ing 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 American organ, the fountain, and 
 the decapitated Venus, and you 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. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 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 without a sen- 
 sation akin to nausea. These feelings are inherent and 
 inveterate in me. I am instinctively averse to my own 
 countrymen ; they are at once remote and repulsive ; 
 but with Frenchmen I am conscious of a sense of near- 
 ness ; I am with them in their ideas and aspirations, and 
 when I am with them, I am alive with a keen and pene- 
 trating 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, limitless ; I love them better than the 
 French, but I am not so near to them. Dear, sweet 
 Protestant England, the red tiles of the farmhouse, the 
 elms, the great hedgerows, and all the rich fields adorned 
 with spreading trees, and the weald and the wold, the 
 very words are passionately beautiful . . . southern 
 England, not the north — there is something Celtic in the 
 north, — southern England, with its quiet, steadfast faces ; 
 — a smock frock is to me one of the most delightful things 
 in the world ; it is so absolutely English. The villages 
 
 84 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 85 
 
 clustered round the greens, the spires of the churches 
 pointing between the elm-trees. . . . This is congenial 
 to me ; and this is Protestantism. England is Protest- 
 antism, Protestantism is England. Protestantism is 
 strong, clean, and westernly, Catholicism is eunuch-like, 
 dirty, and Oriental. . . . Yes, Oriental ; there is some- 
 thing even Chinese about it. What made England great 
 was Protestantism, and when she ceases to be Protest- 
 ant she will fall. . . . Look at the nations that have 
 clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starv- 
 ing brigands. The Protestant flag floats on every ocean 
 breeze, the Catholic banner hangs limp in the incense 
 silence of the Vatican. Let us be Protestant, and revere 
 Cromwell. 
 
 Garfon, 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. 
 
 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 lin- 
 endraper'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 " l'CEuvre," how terribly 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." 
 
86 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 imagining them as 
 Venuses. 
 
 Fancy, a banquet was given to Julien by his pupils ! 
 He made a speech in favor of Lefevre, and hoped that 
 every one there would vote for Lefevre. Julien was 
 very eloquent. He spoke of Le grand art, le nu, and 
 Lefevre's unswerving fidelity to le nu ... elegance, re- 
 finement, an echo of ancient Greece : and then, — what 
 do you think ? When he had exhausted all the reasons 
 why the medal of honor should be accorded to Lefevre, 
 he said, " I ask you to remember, gentlemen, that he has 
 a wife and eight children." Is it not monstrous ? 
 
 But it is you who are monstrous, you who expect to 
 fashion the whole world in conformity with your aesthet- 
 icisms ... a vain dream, and if realized it would result 
 in an impossible world. A wife and children are the 
 basis of existence, and it is folly to cry out because 
 an appeal to such interests as these meet with re- 
 sponse ... 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 87 
 
 not praised in the Figaro as much as you thought they 
 should be. 
 
 Marriage — what an abomination ! Love — yes, but 
 not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, because 
 love is an ideal ; that is to say, something not quite 
 understood — transparencies, color, 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 neighbors over 
 the way. Where then, is the dream, the au dela ? 
 There is none. I say in marriage an au dela is impos- 
 sible. . . . the endless duet of the marble and the 
 water, the enervation of burning odors, the baptismal 
 whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely 
 dark with kohl, names that evoke palm-trees and ruins, 
 Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis. The monosyl- 
 lable which epitomizes the ennui and the prose of our 
 lives is heard not, thought not there — only the nightin- 
 gale harmony of an eternal yes. Freedom limitless ; the 
 Mahometan stands on the verge of the abyss, and the 
 spaces of perfume and color extend and invite him with 
 the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the 
 unreal. . . . Thus love is possible, there is a delu- 
 sion, an au dela. 
 
 Good heavens ! and the world still believes in educa- 
 tion, in teaching people the " grammar of art." Educa- 
 tion is fatal to any one with a spark of artistic feeling. 
 Education should be confined to clerks, and even them 
 it drives to drink. Will the world learn that we never 
 learn anything that we did not know before ? The artist, 
 
88 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 the poet, painter, musician, and novelist go straight to the 
 food they want, guided by an unerring and ineffable in- 
 stinct ; to teach them is to destroy the nerve of the artis- 
 tic instinct, it is fatal. But above all in painting ..." cor- 
 rect 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 cor- 
 rect 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 mathe- 
 matics, 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 
 execution, — they call it execution, — la pdet, 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 paint- 
 ing. 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 per- 
 sonal 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 in- 
 tention. I liked his little landscapes better . . . simpli- 
 fied into nothing, into a couple of primitive tints, wonder- 
 ful clearness, light. But I doubt if he will find a public 
 to understand all that. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 89 
 
 Democratic art ! Art is the direct antithesis to 
 democracy .... Athens ! a few thousand citizens 
 who owned many thousand slaves, call that democ- 
 racy ! No ! what I am speaking of is modern 
 democracy — the mass. The mass can only appre- 
 ciate simple and naive emotions, puerile prettiness, 
 above ah 1 conventionalities. See the Americans that 
 come over here ; what do they admire ? Is it Degas or 
 Manet they admire ? No, Bouguereau and Lefevre. 
 What was most admired at the International Exhibition ? 
 — The Dirty Boy. And if the medal of honor 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 Shakespeare, 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 handi- 
 crafts. 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 collabora- 
 tion, 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 hor- 
 
90 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 rible ; every one knows it is horrible. Well, I asked 
 who had given the order for this mosaic, and I could not 
 rind 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 labor, wage-slaves, 
 and all the rest — stuff. . . . Look at these plates ; they 
 were painted by machinery ; they are abominable. 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, mil- 
 lions 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 man- 
 kind 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. 77 me fait 
 Veffet of an old woman shrieking after immortality 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 j they painted in water-colors, 
 they etched — they wrote about their water-colors and 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 91 
 
 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 him- 
 self about immortality, about everything 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, Goncourt'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 absolutely classical ; he thinks 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. 
 Oh, he knows it well enough ! Any one who knows him 
 must have heard him say, " Painting is absolutely scien- 
 tific ; 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, — a well-determined 
 
92 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 mental conception. I admire his work ; I am merely 
 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 mat- 
 tered nothing to Whistler as they matter to Degas, 
 or to Manet. Whistler took Duret out of his environ- 
 ment, 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 synthesis 
 of things more uncompromisingly than Whistler. And 
 he is right. Art is not nature. Art is nature digested. 
 Art is a sublime excrement. 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 neces- 
 sary, 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 ele- 
 gant rhythm of the synthesis. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 93 
 
 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 
 bein,g 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 color, breadth, simplicity, and direct- 
 ness 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 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 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 readable ? Not 
 
94 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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." Vil- 
 lon could not have done this unless he had read Swin- 
 burne. " 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 sen- 
 sation of something foreign. There is no translation ex- 
 cept a word-for-word translation. Baudelaire's transla- 
 tion of Poe, and Hugo's translation of Shakespeare, are 
 marvellous in this respect ; a pun or joke that is untrans- 
 latable is explained in a note. 
 
 But that is the way young ladies translate — word for 
 word ! 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 95 
 
 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 liter- 
 ally, 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 tire' ilfaut le boire" Well, 
 a translator who would translate quand I e cheval, etc., by 
 quand le vin, etc., is an ass, and does not know his busi- 
 ness. In translation only a strictly classical language 
 should be used ; no word of slang, or even word of mod- 
 ern 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 colorless lan- 
 guage, something — what shall I say ? — a sort of a mod- 
 ern Addison. 
 
 What, don't you know the story about Mendes ? — when 
 Chose wanted to marry his sister ? Chose 's mother, it ap- 
 pears, 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 apolo- 
 gizing, he got it out. You know Mendes, you can see 
 him smiling a little ; and looking at Chose with that white 
 
y 
 
 96 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 cameo face of his he said, " Avec quel meilleur homme 
 voulez-vous que voire mere se Jit ? vous riavez 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 Ver- 
 laine, not to enter the " Nouvelle Athenes," unless per- 
 haps to play dominoes like the bourgeois over there, not 
 to do anything that would awake a too intense conscious- 
 ness 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 o f 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 people out of 
 the calm satisfaction of their instincts, and give them 
 passions ! The philanthropist is the Nero of modern 
 times. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 EXTRACT FROM A LETTER. 
 
 W T^Y did you not send a letter ? We have all been 
 VV 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 proprittaire would wait if you had only said when 
 you were coming back, or if you only had 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 color 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 wide- 
 spread 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 intru- 
 sion. 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 the 
 snow lay high about the legs of the poor faun in terre 
 
 97 
 
98 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 cuite y 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 con- 
 cierge 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 the stroke of the hammer. And then the men, 
 all the marchands de meubles in the quartier, came up- 
 stairs, 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 have bought 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 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 99 
 
 desire to steal them. I don't know why, un caprice 
 de fcmme. 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 all right), 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 darknesses 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 dn balcon i-essemblent a des d/sirs mour ants' 
 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 ser- 
 vants set the other out with little tables ? That supper 
 was fascinating! I suppose it was these pleasant re- 
 membrances 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 I 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 think- 
 ing of going to see him the other day, but the 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- 
 
IOO CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 sighted as I am, picking my way from the tramcar down 
 to that out-of-the-way little street ! Men never appre- 
 ciate 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 vapor. 
 
 " We have already begun to think of where we shall 
 go to this year. Last year we went to P , an enchant- 
 ing 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 Mar- 
 quis 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 has appeared for years, c'est surtout trh Parisien. 
 He paid me great attentions, and made my husband 
 wildly jealous. I used to go out and sit with him 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. IOI 
 
 going to be spent upon the cotillion. I have just got 
 home a fascinating toilette. I am going as a Pierroitej 
 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 via 
 
 fait la cour, but it is of course no use, you know that 
 
 " The other night we went to see the Maitre- 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 stu- 
 pid. 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 de'collete'. She is 
 une femme aV esprit, but the way she affiche's herself is 
 too much for any one. She never goes 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 Duch- 
 esse'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 
 
102 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 commonplace, and gave her an 
 inexpressible charm. Yes, she is a woman who can feel, 
 and she has lived her life and felt it very acutely, 
 very sincerely — sincerely ? . . . like a moth caught in a 
 gauze curtain ! Well, would that preclude sincerity ? 
 Sincerity seems to convey an idea of depth, and 
 she was not very deep, that is quite certain. I never 
 could understand her ; — 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 intensity of feeling — ner- 
 vous feeling. I don't know . . . perhaps. . . . She 
 has lived her life . . . yes, 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 changeable 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 signt of 
 me, but no intrusion ; far too clever for that. I never 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 107 
 
 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 mill- 
 ions of Israelites died in torments, that a girl, or a thou- 
 sand 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 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 tres-chere, a la tres-belle, qui remplit 
 mon coeur de clartc" let the first-born in every house in 
 Europe be slain ; and in all sincerity I profess my readi- 
 ness to decapitate all the Japanese in Japan and else- 
 where, to save from destruction one drawing by Hokee. 
 Again I say that all we deem sublime in the world's his- 
 tory are acts of injustice ; and it is certain that if man- 
 kind 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 
 
108 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 us — we, the great ship that has floated up from the an- 
 tique world. Oh, for the antique world, its plain passion, 
 its plain joys in the sea, where the Triton blew a plain- 
 tive 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 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 ! 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 BUT neither Apollo nor Buddha could help or save 
 me. One in his exquisite balance of body, a sky- 
 lark-like song of eternal beauty, stood lightly advancing ; 
 the other sat sombrously contemplating, calm as a beauti- 
 ful 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 some- 
 thing, not more real than a summer meditation. So be 
 it, and, as was characteristic of me, I broke with Paris 
 suddenly, without warning any one. 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 that 
 Paris would pass out of my life, that it would henceforth 
 be with me a beautiful memory, but never more a prac- 
 tical delight. He and I were no longer living together ; 
 we had parted a second time, but this time without bit- 
 terness of any kind; he had learned to feel that I wanted 
 
 iog 
 
IIO CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 Lefevre and Bouguereau, and generally 
 shown himself incapable of any higher education ; he 
 could not enter where I had entered, and this was alien- 
 ation. 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 say 
 good-bye to him and to my past life. Rap — rap—rap ! 
 
 " Who's there ? " 
 
 " I — Dayne." 
 
 " I've got a model." 
 
 " 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. Ill 
 
 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-etre pour longtemps ;je 
 voudrais passer ma derniere 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 agreeable ? 
 
 " Je veux bien, monsieur." 
 
 Poor Marie ! Marshall and I were absorbed in each 
 other and art. It was always so. We dined in a gar- 
 gotte, 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 beau- 
 tiful, slim, manly figure, and Marie's exquisite graceful- 
 ness. She was Lefevre'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 
 
112 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 ; and I looked, 
 I believe, as unlike an Englishman as a drawing by 
 Gr6vin. 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 immediate future was concerned. The 
 years the 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 ; I, not an in- 
 different spectator, but an enthusiast, striving heart and 
 soul to identify himself with his environment, to shake 
 himself free from race and language and to recreate 
 himself as it were in the womb of a new nationality, 
 assuming its ideals, its morals, and its modes of thought, 
 and I had succeeded strangely well, and when I returned 
 home England was a new country to me ; I had, as it 
 were, forgotten everything. Every aspect of street and 
 suburban garden was new to me ; of the manner of 
 life of Londoners I knew nothing. This sounds incred- 
 ible, but it is so ; I saw, but I could realize 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 113 
 
 those I met I could understand nothing, nor could I 
 sympathize with them : an Englishman was at that time 
 as much out of my mental reach as an Esquimau 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 differ- 
 ence between the two races is found in the men, not in 
 the women. French and English women are psycho- 
 logically 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 
 absolutely opposed to that of an Englishman ; they 
 stand on either side of a vast abyss, two animals different 
 in color, form, and temperament ; — two ideas destined 
 to remain irrevocably separate and distinct. 
 
 I have heard of writing and speaking two languages 
 equally well : this was impossible to me, and I am con- 
 vinced that 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. As it was I only just escaped 
 this detestable fate. And it was in the last two years, 
 when I began to write French verse and occasional 
 chroniques in the papers, that the great damage was done. 
 I remember very well indeed one day, while arranging 
 an act of a play I was writing with a friend, finding sud- 
 denly 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 chattered, and I felt intensely 
 at home in it ; yes, I could write a sonnet or a ballade 
 almost without a slip, but my prose required a good deal 
 of alteration, for a greater command of language is 
 required to write in prose than in verse. I found this in 
 
114 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 French and also in English. For when I returned from 
 Paris, my English terribly corrupt with French ideas and 
 forms of thought, I could write acceptable English verse, 
 but even ordinary newspaper prose was beyond my reach, 
 and an attempt I made to write a novel drifted into a 
 miserable failure ; but the following poems opened to 
 me the doors of a first-class London newspaper, and I 
 was at once entrusted with some important critical work : 
 
 THE SWEETNESS OF THE PAST. 
 
 As sailors watch from their prison 
 For the faint gray 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. 
 
 There are there no deceptions or changes, 
 
 And there all is lovely 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 poisonous flower, 
 
 Knowing that nothing can save 
 Our flesh from the fate of the grave. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 115 
 
 But sooner or later returning 
 
 In grief to the well-loved nest, 
 Our souls filled with infinite yearning, 
 
 We cry, in the past there is rest, 
 There is peace, 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, 
 
 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 distinctly wrong, 
 For life and love have lost delight, 
 
 And bitter even is our song ; 
 And year by year gray 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. 
 
Il6 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 And so it was that I came to settle down in a Strand 
 lodging-house, determined to devote myself to literature, 
 and to accept the hardships of a literary life. I had 
 been playing long enough, and now I was resolved to see 
 what I could do in the world of work. I was anxious 
 for proof, peremptory proof, of my capacity or incapac- 
 ity. A book ! No. I required an immediate answer, 
 and journalism alone could give me that. So I reasoned 
 in the Strand lodging-house. And what led me to that 
 house ? Chance, or a friend's recommendation ? I for- 
 get. It was uncomfortable, hideous, and not very clean : 
 but curious, as all things are curious when examined 
 closely. Let me tell you about my rooms. The sitting- 
 room was a good deal longer than it was wide ; it was 
 panelled with deal, and the deal was painted a light 
 brown ; behind it there was a large bedroom : the floor 
 was covered with a ragged carpet, and a big bed stood 
 in the middle of the floor. But 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 the occupant made. This proxim- 
 ity was intolerable, and eventually I decided on adding 
 ten shillings to my rent, and I became the possessor of 
 the entire flat. In the room above me lived a pretty 
 young woman, an actress at the Savoy Theatre. She 
 had a piano, and she used to play and sing in the morn- 
 ings, 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 was 
 always in high spirits except when she could not pay the 
 hire of her piano ; and I am sure that she now looks 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 117 
 
 back with pleasure and thinks of those days as very 
 happy ones. 
 
 She was a tall girl, a thin figure, and she had large 
 brown eyes ; she liked young men, and she hoped that 
 Mr. Gilbert would give her a line or two in his next 
 opera. Often have I come out on the landing to meet 
 her ; we used to sit on those 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 ; it was a solemn 
 moment. I asked in a sympathetic voice why she was 
 not living with her husband. She told me, but the rea- 
 son of the separation I have forgotten in the many 
 similar reasons for separations and partings which have 
 since been confided to me. The landlady bitterly 
 
 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 that were nearly always 
 unlet. The landlady's parlor was on the ground floor, 
 her bedroom was next to it, and further on was the 
 entrance to the kitchen stairs, whence ascended Mrs. 
 
 S 's brood of children, and Emma, the awful servant, 
 
 with tea things, many various smells, that of ham and 
 eggs predominating. 
 
 Emma, I remember you — you are not to be forgotten — 
 up at five o'clock every morning, scouring, washing, 
 cooking, dressing those infamous children ; seventeen 
 hours at least out of the twenty-four at the beck and call 
 of landlady, lodgers, and quarrelling children ; seventeen 
 hours at least out of the twenty-four drudging in that 
 horrible kitchen, running up stairs with coals and break- 
 fasts and cans of hot water ; down on your knees before 
 
Il8 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 that you were 
 akin to us, only the pity that might be extended to a 
 dog. And 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 you generally 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 was just 
 that 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. I merely recognize you as one 
 of the facts of civilization. You looked — well, to be 
 candid, — you looked neither young nor old ; 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 cart-horse-like 
 bound. I have spoken angrily to you ; I have heard 
 others speak angrily to you, but never did that sweet face 
 of yours, for it was a sweet face — that sweet, natural 
 goodness that is so sublime — lose its expression of per- 
 fect 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 119 
 
 seventeen hours a day in a lodging-house ; to be a Lon- 
 doner, 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 igno- 
 rance 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 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 
 
120 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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, I think, so I cal- 
 culated 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 stupidity ! At this point your 
 intelligence stopped. I remember you once spoke of a 
 half-holiday : I questioned 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 bur- 
 den, 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 good-humor ; 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 per- 
 fume. 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 121 
 
 were treated better and paid your wages there would be 
 no hope. That 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 cannot 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 philanthropy 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 have a chop. 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 — -." 
 
 11 Well, tell me, how did you meet him ; who introduced 
 him ? " 
 
 " I met 'im as I was a-coming from the public 'ouse 
 with the beer for missus' dinner." 
 
122 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 " 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 talking to 
 you." 
 
 " 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." 
 
 " 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 
 supernaturally 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 I 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 her distance; the pretty actress, with whom 
 I used to sympathize on the stairs at midnight, loved me 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 23 
 
 better, and our intimacy was more strange and subtle, be- 
 cause it was pure, and it was not quite unpleasant to know 
 that the awful servant dreamed of me as she might 
 of a star, or something equally unattainable ; but the 
 landlady's daughter, a nasty girl of fifteen, annoyed me 
 with her ogling, which was a little revolting, but the rest 
 was, and I speak quite candidly, not wholly unpleasant. 
 It was not aristocratic, it is true, but, I repeat, it was not 
 unpleasant, nor do I believe that any young man, how- 
 ever refined, would have found it unpleasant. 
 
 But if I was offered a choice between a chop and 
 steak in the evening, in the morning I had to decide 
 between eggs and bacon and bacon and eggs. A knock- 
 ing at the door, " Nine o'clock, sir ; 'ot water, sir ; what 
 will you have for breakfast ? " " What can I have ? " 
 " Anything you like, sir. You can have bacon and eggs, 
 or — " " Anything else ? " — Pause. — " Well, sir, you 
 can have eggs and bacon, or—" " Well, I'll have eggs 
 and bacon." 
 
 The streets seemed to me like rat-holes, dark and 
 wandering as chance directed, with just an occasional 
 rift of sky, seen as if through an occasional crevice, so 
 different from the boulevards widening out into bright 
 space with fountains and clouds of green foliage. The 
 modes of life were so essentially opposed. I am think- 
 ing now of intellectual rather than physical comforts. I 
 could put up with even lodging-house food, but I found 
 it difficult to forego the glitter and artistic enthusiasm 
 of the cafe. The tavern, I had heard of the tavern. 
 
 Some seventy years ago the Club superseded the 
 Tavern, and since then all literary intercourse has 
 ceased in London. Literary dabs have been founded, 
 and their leather arm-chairs have begotten Mr. Gosse ; 
 
124 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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, the 
 leather arm-chairs are so many salaams to it. I ask, 
 Did any one ever see a gay club room ! Can any one 
 imagine such a thing ? You can't have a club room 
 without mahogany tables, you can't have mahogany 
 tables without magazines — Longman's, with a serial by 
 Rider Haggard, the Nineteenth Ce?itury i 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 enthusiasm ; in a word, a dulness 
 that's worth a thousand a year. You can't have a club 
 without a waiter in red plush and 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. 
 
 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 ; every one can go to the tavern, and 
 no place in England where every one can go is con- 
 sidered respectable. This is the genesis of the Club — 
 out of the Housewife by Respectability. Nowadays 
 every one is respectable — jockeys, betting-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. There is 
 only one class left that is not respectable, and that will 
 succumb before long ; how the transformation will be 
 effected I can't say, but I know an editor or two who 
 wouid be glad of an article on the subject. 
 
 Respectability ! — a suburban villa, a piano in the 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 25 
 
 drawing-room, and going home to dinner. Such things 
 are no doubt very excellent, but they do not promote 
 intensity of feeling, fervor of mind ; and as art is in 
 itself an outcry against the animality of human exis- 
 tence, 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 they always had lovers — Sappho, George Eliot, 
 George Sand, Rachel, Sara ? Mrs. Kendal nurses 
 children all day and strives to play Rosalind at night. 
 What infatuation, what ridiculous endeavor ! To realize 
 the beautiful woodland passion and the idea of the 
 transformation, a woman must have sinned, for only 
 through sin may we learn the charm of innocence. To 
 play Rosalind a woman must have had more than one 
 lover, and if she has been made to wait in the rain and 
 has been beaten she will have done a great deal to 
 qualify herself for the part. The ecstatic Sara makes 
 no pretence to virtue, she introduces her son to an 
 English duchess, and throws over a nation for the love 
 of Richepein ; she can, therefore, say as none other : 
 
 "Ce n'est plusqu'une ardeur dans mes veines cachee, 
 C'est Venus tout entiere a sa proie attachee." 
 
 Swinburne, when he dodged about London, a lively 
 
V- 
 
 126 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 young dog, wrote " Poems and Ballads," and " Chaste- 
 lard "; since he has gone to live at Putney, he has con- 
 tributed to the Nineteenth Century, and published an 
 interesting little volume entitled, " A Century of Ron- 
 dels," in which he continues 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 South- 
 lands, — 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 Jeddo. 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 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 beeu 
 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 
 spectre of famine, of the plague, of war, etc., are mild 
 and gracious symbols compared with that menacing- 
 figure, Universal Education, with which we are threat- 
 ened, 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. 
 Edcation, I tremble before thy dreaded name. The 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 127 
 
 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, of 
 maddening discontent, or all the fearsome and fathom- 
 less sufferings of the mind. When Geothe 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 dark- 
 ness ; 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 equivalents of Gladstone and Morley will 
 stop at nothing to defeat the Bill ; but it will neverthe- 
 less 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 mean while 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 
 
128 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 pro- 
 duce better art, jnst as certain seasons produce better 
 crops. We heard in the Nouvelle Athenes how the Demo- 
 cratic movement, in other words Respectability, in other 
 words, Education, has extinguished the handicrafts ; 
 it was admitted that in the more individual arts — paint- 
 ing and poetry — men would be always found to sacrifice 
 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 contemplation of the past 
 will not suffice. Then the pressure on him from with- 
 out 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 cruel 
 birds above ; and he neither dives as deeply 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 neighbors. Respectability has wound 
 itself about society, a sort of octopus, and nowhere are 
 you quite free from one of its horrible suckers. The 
 power of the villa residence is supreme : art, science, 
 politics, religion, it has transformed to suit its require- 
 ments. 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 29 
 
 reality of materialism ; not the deep poetry of a Peter de 
 Hogue, but the meanness of a Frith — not the winged 
 realism of Balzac, but the degrading naturalism of a 
 colored photograph. 
 
 To my mind there is no sadder spectacle of artistic 
 debauchery than a London theatre ; the overfed in- 
 habitants of the villa in the stalls hoping for gross ex- 
 citement to assist them through their hesitating diges- 
 tions ; an ignorant mob in the pit and gallery forgetting 
 the miseries of life in imbecile stories reeking of the sen- 
 timentality of the back-stairs. Were other ages as 
 coarse and as common as ours ? It is difficult to im- 
 agine Elizabethan audiences as not more intelligent than 
 those that applaud Mr. Pettit's plays. Impossible that 
 an audience that could sit out Edward II. could find 
 any pleasure in such sinks of literary infamies as In the 
 Ranks and Harbor Lights. Artistic atrophy is benumb- 
 ing 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 
 counting 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 phenomena 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 
 
130 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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. You want 
 the idea drawn out of obscuring matter ; this can best be 
 done by the symbol. 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 imagination 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 con- 
 struct the Doge's palace upon the stage. By one rich 
 pillar, by some projecting balustrade taken in conjunc- 
 tion 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 landscape, and not by the 
 up-piling of an extraneous detail, are all great poetic 
 effects achieved. 
 
 " By the tideless dolorous inland sea, 
 In a land of sand, of ruin, and gold." 
 
 And, better example still, 
 
 " 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 ; and being a great poet Shakespeare 
 consciously or unconsciously observed more faithfully 
 than any other poet these principles of art ; and, as is 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 131 
 
 characteristic of the present day, nowhere do we find 
 these principles so grossly violated as in the representa- 
 tion of his plays. I had painful proof of 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 — for Romeo and Juliet is 
 no more than a love-song in dialogue — tricked out in 
 silks and carpets and illuminated building, a vulgar 
 bawd suited to the gross passion of an ignorant public. 
 I hated all that with the hatred of a passionate heart, 
 and I longed for a simple stage, a few simple indi- 
 cations, and the simple recitation of that story of the 
 sacrifice of the two white souls for the reconciliation of 
 two great families. My hatred did not reach to the age 
 of the man who played the boy-lover, but to the offen- 
 siveness with which he thrust his individuality upon me, 
 longing to realize the poet's divine imagination : and 
 the woman, too, I wished with my whole soul away, 
 subtle and strange though she was, and I yearned for 
 her part to be played by a youth as in old time : a youth 
 cunningly disguised, would be a symbol ; and my mind 
 would be free to imagine the divine Juliet of the poet, 
 whereas I could but dream of the bright eyes and deli- 
 cate mien and motion of the woman who had thrust her- 
 self between me and it. 
 
 But not with symbol and subtle suggestion has the 
 villa to do, but with such stolid, intellectual fare as cor- 
 responds 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 neighbors 
 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 
 
132 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 as our present social system holds together. It is the 
 basis of life, and more important than the tavern. 
 Agreed ; but that does not say that the tavern was not 
 an excellent corrective influence to the villa, and that its 
 disappearance has not had a vulgarizing effect on artis- 
 tic work of all kinds, and the club has been proved im- 
 potent to replace it, the club being no more than the 
 correlative of the villa. Let the reader trace villa 
 through each modern feature. I will pass on at once 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. (Singular- 
 ly inappropriate comparison, but I am in such excellent 
 humor to-day ; humor is everything. It is said that 
 the tiger will sometimes 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 waltz- 
 es 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 expenses would be enormous, even if nothing 
 but shilling and two-shilling novels were purchased. 
 Out of such circumstances the circulating library was 
 hatched. The villa made known its want, and art fell on 
 its knees. Pressure was put on the publishers, and books 
 were published at 31J. 6d. ; the dirty outside public was 
 got rid of, and the villa paid its yearly subscription, and 
 had nice, large, handsome books that none but the Mite 
 could obtain, and with them a sense of being put on a 
 footing of equality with my Lady This and Lady That, 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 133 
 
 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 be- 
 came pure, and the garlic and assafcetida with which 
 Byron, 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, dirty stories were to 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 dirty stories ; 
 dirty stories have formed a substantial part of every liter- 
 ature (I employ the words " dirty stories " in the circu- 
 lating library sense) ; therefore a taste for dirty stories 
 may be said to be inherent in the human animal. Call 
 it a disease if you will — an incurable disease — which, if 
 it is driven jnwards, 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 
 dirty stories, and for forty years we were apparently the 
 most moral people on the face of the earth. It was con- 
 fidently 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 continued to go to church, true it is that we 
 turned our faces away when Mile, de Maupin or the Assom- 
 moir was spoken of ; to"* all appearance we were as good 
 and chaste as even Mudie might wish us ; and no doubt 
 
134 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 slumbrous law 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 col- 
 umns of our newspapers the terrible lava rolled unceas- 
 ing, and in the black stream the villa, with all its beauti- 
 ful illusions, tumbled and disappeared. 
 
 An awful and terrifying proof of the futility of human 
 effort, that there is neither bad work nor good work to 
 do, nothing but to await the coming of the Nirvana. 
 
 I have written much against the circulating library, 
 and I have read a feeble defence or two ; but I have not 
 seen the argument that might be legitimately put for- 
 ward in its favor. It seems to me this : the circulating 
 library is conservatism, art is always conservative ; the 
 circulating library lifts the writer out of the precarious- 
 ness and noise of the wild street of popular fancy into a 
 quiet place where passion is more restrained and there 
 is more reflection. The young and unknown writer is 
 placed at once in a place of comparative security, and 
 he is not forced to employ vile and degrading methods 
 of attracting attention ; the known writer, having a cer- 
 tain market for his work, is enabled to think more of it 
 and less of the immediate acclamation of the crowd ; but 
 all these possible advantages are destroyed and rendered 
 nil by the veracious censorship exercised by the librarian. 
 ****** 
 
 There is one thing in England that is free, that is 
 spontaneous, that reminds me of the blitheness and 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 135 
 
 nationalness of the Continent ; — but there is nothing 
 French about it, it is wholly and essentially English, and 
 in its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity it is a 
 survival of Elizabethan England — I mean the music-hall; 
 the French music-hall seems to me silly, effete, sophis- 
 ticated, and lacking, not in the popularity, but in the 
 vulgarity of an English hall — I will not say the Pavilion, 
 which is too cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are 
 heard there — for preference let us say the Royal. I shall 
 not easily forget my first evening there, when I saw for 
 the time a living house — the dissolute paragraphists, the 
 elegant mashers (mark the imaginativeness of the slang), 
 the stolid, good-humored costers, the cheerful lights o' 
 love, the extraordinary comics. What delightful unison 
 of enjoyment, what unanimity of soul, what communality 
 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 offen- 
 sively rich furniture, with hotel lifts down which some 
 one 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 slut in the 
 gallery ; nor is there in the hall any affectation of lan- 
 guage, nor that worn-out rhetoric which reminds you of a 
 broken-winded barrel-organ playing Ah, che la morte, bad 
 
136 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 enough in prose, but when set up in blank verse awful 
 and shocking in its more than natural deformity — but 
 bright quips and cracks 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 awns 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 feeling 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 rhapsod- 
 ist 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 Dave- 
 nants. I have seen music-hall sketches, comic interludes 
 that in their unexpectedness and naive naturalness re- 
 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. I37 
 
 mind me of the comic passages in Marlowe's Faustus j I 
 waited (I admit in vain) for some beautiful phantom to 
 appear, and to hear an enthusiastic worshipper cry out 
 in his agony : 
 
 ' ' Was this the face that launched a thousand ships 
 And burnt the topless towers of Illium ? 
 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 be Paris, and for love of thee, 
 
 Instead of Troy shall Wurtemberg be sacked," etc. 
 
 The hall is at least a protest against the wearisome 
 stories concerning wills, misers in old castles, lost heirs, 
 and the woful 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 in- 
 genue to the protecting arm, etc. The music-hall is a 
 protest against Mrs. Kendal's marital tendernesses 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. 
 
 But in the interests of those illiterate institutions 
 called theatres it is not permissible for several characters 
 to narrate events in which there is a sequel, by means of 
 dialogue, in a music-hall. If this vexatious restriction 
 
138 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 were removed it is possible, if it is not certain, that while 
 some halls remained faithful to comic songs and jugglers 
 others would gradually learn to cater for more intellect- 
 ual and subtle audiences, and that out of obscurity and 
 disorder new dramatic forms, colored and permeated by 
 the thought and feeling of to-day, might be definitely 
 evolved. It is our only chance of again possessing a 
 dramatic literature. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 IT is said that young men of genius come to London 
 with great poems and dramas in their pockets and 
 find every door closed against them. Chatterton s s 
 death perpetuated this legend. But when I, Edward 
 Dayne, came to London in search of literary adventure, 
 I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have 
 been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an 
 ordinary person. Let this be waived. I was as covered 
 with " fads " as a distinguished foreigner with stars. 
 Naturalism I wore around my neck, Romanticism was 
 pinned over the heart, Symbolism I carried like a 
 toy revolver in my waistcoat pocket, to be used on 
 an emergency. I do not judge whether I was 
 charlatan or genius, I merely state that I found all — 
 actors, managers, editors, publishers, docile and ready to 
 listen to me. The world may be wicked, cruel, and 
 stupid, but it is patient ; on this point I will not be gain- 
 said, it is patient ; I know what I am talking about ; I 
 maintain that the world is patient. If it were not, what 
 would have happened ? I should have been murdered 
 by the editors of (I will suppress names), torn in pieces 
 by the sub-editors, and devoured by the office boys. 
 There was no wild theory which I did not assail them 
 with, there was no strange plan for the instant extermi- 
 nation of the Philistine, which I did not press upon them, 
 and (here I must whisper), with a fair amount of suc- 
 cess; not complete success I am glad to say — that would 
 
 139 
 
I40 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 have meant for the editors a change from their arm- 
 chairs to the benches of the Union and the plank beds 
 of Holloway. 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 nryself ; 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. That I should have forgotten so much in 
 ten years seems incredible, and it will be deemed impos- 
 sible by many, but that is 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 like a snake striving to slough its skin. 
 
 Handicapped as I was with dangerous ideas, and an 
 impossible style, defeat was inevitable. My English was 
 rotten with French idiom ; it was like an ill-built wall 
 overpowered by huge masses of ivy; the weak foundations 
 had given way beneath the weight of the parasite ; and 
 the ideas I sought to give expression to were green, sour, 
 and immature as apples in August. 
 
 Therefore before long the leading journal that had 
 printed two poems and some seven or eight critical arti- 
 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 141 
 
 cles, ceased to send me books for review, and I fell back 
 upon obscure society papers. Fortunately it was not 
 incumbent on me to live by my pen ; so I talked, and 
 watched, and waited till I grew akin to those around me, 
 and my thoughts blended with, and took root in my en- 
 vironment. 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 Por- 
 trait of a Lady," by Henry James. Each scene is devel- 
 oped with complete foresight and certainty of touch. 
 What Mr. James wants to do he does. 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. Shakespeare gives us the 
 word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, 
 gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous 
 certainty ; but Henry James, no ; a hundred times he 
 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. You are on 
 a bowing acquaintance with them ; they pass you in the 
 street, they stop and speak to you, you know how they 
 are dressed, you watch the color of their eyes. When I 
 think of " A Portrait of a Lady," with its marvellous 
 crowd of well-dressed people, it comes back to me pre- 
 cisely as an accurate memory of a fashionable soiree — 
 the staircase with its ascending figures, the hostess smil- 
 ing, the host at a little distance with his back turned ; 
 some one calls him. He turns ; I can see his white kid 
 gloves ; the air is as sugar with the odor of the gardenias; 
 
142 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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. . . a very pleasant evening ; 
 I have seen a good many people I knew ; I have observed 
 an attitude, and an earnestness of manner that proved 
 that a heart was beating. 
 
 Mr. James might say, " If I have done this, I have 
 done a great deal," and I would answer, " No doubt you 
 are a man of great talent, great cultivation and not at all 
 of the common herd ; I place you in the very front rank, 
 not only of novelists but of men of letters." 
 
 I have read nothing of Henry James's that did suggest 
 the manner of a scholar ; but why should a scholar limit 
 himself to empty and endless sentimentalities ? I will 
 not taunt him with any of the old taunts — why does 
 he not write complicated stories ? Why does he not 
 complete his stories ? Let all this be waived. I 
 will ask him only why he always avoids decisive 
 action ? Why does a woman never say " I will " ? 
 Why does a woman never leave the house with her 
 lover ? Why does a man never kill a man ? Why 
 does a man never kill himself ? 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 be- 
 gins, suicide or adultery happens some years hence, 
 when the characters have left the stage, but bang in 
 front of the reader nothing happens. The suppression 
 or maintenance of story in a novel is a matter of per- 
 sonal taste ; some prefer character-drawing to adven- 
 tures, some adventures to character- drawing ; that you 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 143 
 
 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 prefer character-drawing 
 to adventures. One, two, or even three determining 
 actions are not antagonistic to character-drawing ; the 
 practice of Balzac, and Flaubert, and Thackeray prove 
 that. Is Mr. James of the same mind as the poet Ver- 
 laine — 
 
 " La nuance, pas la couleur, 
 Seulement la nuance, 
 * * * * 
 
 Tout le reste est litterature." 
 
 In connection with Henry James I had often heard 
 the name of W. D. Howells. I bought some three or 
 four of his novels. I found them pretty, very pretty, 
 but nothing more, — a sort of Ashby Sterry done into 
 very neat prose. He is vulgar, is refined as Henry 
 James ; he is more domestic ; girls with white dresses 
 and virginal looks, languid mammas, mild witticisms, 
 here, there, and everywhere ; a couple of young men, 
 one a little cynical, the other a little overshadowed by 
 his love ; a strong, bearded man of fifty in the back- 
 ground ; in a word, a Tom Robertson comedy faintly 
 spiced with American. Henry James went to France 
 and read Tourgueneff. 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 
 
144 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 Russia — he borrowed at first hand, understanding what 
 he was borrowing. W. D. Howells borrowed at second 
 hand, and without understanding what he was borrow- 
 ing. Altogether Mr. James's instincts are more schol- 
 arly. Although his reserve irritates me, and I often re- 
 gret his concessions to the prudery of the age, — no, not 
 of the age but of librarians, — I cannot but feel that his 
 concessions, for I suppose I must call them concessions, 
 are to a certain extent self-imposed ; regretfully, perhaps, 
 . . . somewhat in this fashion — '-' True, that I live in an 
 age not very favorable to artistic production, but the art 
 of an age is the spirit of that age ; if I violate the preju- 
 dices 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." Plausible, in- 
 genious, quite in the spirit of Mr. James's mind ; I can 
 almost hear him reason so ; nor does the argument dis- 
 please me, for it is conceived in a scholarly spirit. Now 
 my conception of W. D. Howells is quite different — I see 
 him the happy father of a numerous family ; the sun is 
 shining, the girls and boys are playing on the lawn, they 
 jome trooping in to a high tea, and there is dancing in 
 the evening. 
 
 My fat landlady lent me a novel by George Meredith,- — 
 " Tragic Comedians"; I was glad to receive it, for my 
 admiration of his poetry, with which I was slightly ac- 
 quainted, was very genuine indeed. " Love in a Valley " 
 is a beautiful poem, and the " Nuptials of Attila," — I 
 read it in the New Quarterly Review years ago — is very 
 present in my mind, and it is a pleasure to recall its 
 chanting rhythm, and lordly and sombre refrain — " Make 
 the bed for Attila." I expected, therefore, one of my 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 145 
 
 old passionate delights from his novels. I was disap- 
 pointed, painfully disappointed. But before I say more 
 concerning Mr. Meredith, I will admit at once frankly 
 and fearlessly, that I am not a competent critic, because 
 emotionally I do not understand him, and all except an 
 emotional understanding is worthless in art. I do not 
 make this admission because I am intimidated by the 
 weight and height of the critical authority with which I 
 am overshadowed, but from a certain sense, of which I 
 am as distinctly conscious, viz., that the author is, how 
 shall I put it? the French would say "quelqu'un"; that 
 expresses what I would say in English. I remember, 
 too, that although a man may be able to understand 
 anything, that there must be some modes of thoughts 
 and attitudes of mind which we are so naturally an- 
 tagonistic to, so entirely out of sympathy with, that we 
 are in no true sense critics of them. Such are the 
 thoughts that come to me when I read Mr. George 
 Meredith. I try to console myself with such reflections, 
 and then I break forth, and crying passionately : — jerks, 
 wire, splintered wood. In Balzac, which I know by 
 heart ; in Shakespeare, which I have just begun to love, 
 I find words deeply impregnated with the savor of 
 life ; but in George Meredith there is nothing but crack- 
 jaw sentences, empty and unpleasant in the mouth as 
 sterile nuts. I could select hundreds of phrases which 
 Mr. Meredith would probably call epigrams, and I would 
 defy any one to say they were wise, graceful or witty. I 
 do not know any book more tedious than " Tragic 
 Comedians," more pretentious, more blatant ; it struts 
 and screams, stupid in all its gaud and absurdity as a 
 cockatoo. More than fifty pages I could not read. 
 How, I asked myself, could the man who wrote the 
 
146 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 " Nuptials of Attila " write this ? but my soul returned 
 no answer, and I listened as one in a hollow mountain 
 side. My opinion of George Meredith never ceases to 
 puzzle me. He is of the north, I am of the south. 
 Carlyle, Mr. Robert Browning, and George Meredith 
 are the three essentially northern writers ; in them there 
 is nothing of Latin sensuality and subtlety. 
 
 I took up " Rhoda Fleming." I found some exquisite 
 bits of description in it, but I heartily wished them in 
 verse, they were motives for poems ; and there was some 
 wit. I remember a passage very racy indeed, of middle- 
 class England. Antony, I think is the man's name, 
 describes how he is interrupted at his tea ; a paragraph 
 of seven or ten lines with " I am having my tea, I am at 
 my tea," running through it for a refrain. Then a des- 
 cription of a lodging-house dinner : " a block of bread 
 on a lonely plate, and potatoes that looked as if they 
 had committed suicide in their own steam." A little 
 ponderous and stilted, but undoubtedly witty. I read 
 on until I came to a young man who fell from his horse, 
 or had been thrown from his horse, I never knew which, 
 nor do I feel enough interest in the matter to make a 
 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, and such talk ! I can offer no opinion why 
 Mr. George Meredith committed them to paper ; it is 
 not narrative, it is not witty, nor is it sentimental, nor is 
 it profound. I read it once ; my mind astonished at re- 
 ceiving no sensation cried out like a child at a milkless 
 breast. I read the pages again . . . did I understand ? 
 Yes, I understood every sentence, but they conveyed no 
 idea, they awoke no emotion in me ; it was like sand, 
 arid and uncomfortable. The story is surprisingly com- 
 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 147 
 
 monplace — the people in it are as lacking in subtlety as 
 those of a Drury Lane melodrama. 
 
 " Diana of the Crossways" I liked better, and had I* 
 had absolutely nothing to do I might have read it to the 
 end. I remember a scene with a rustic — a rustic who 
 could eat hog a solid hour — that amused me. I re- 
 member the sloppy road in the Weald, and the vague 
 outlines of the South Downs seen in starlight and mist. 
 But to come to the great question, the test by which 
 Time will judge us all — the creation of a human being, 
 of a live thing that we have met with in life before, and 
 meet for the first time in print, and who abides with us 
 ever after. Into what shadow has not Diana floated ? 
 Where are the magical glimpses of the soul ? Do you 
 remember in "Peres et Enfants," when Tourgueneff is 
 unveiling the woman's, shall I say, affection, for Baza- 
 roff, or the interest she feels in him ? and exposing at 
 the same time the reasons why she will never marry him. 
 ... I wish I had the book by me, I have not seen it 
 for ten years. 
 
 After striving through many pages to put Lucien, 
 whom you would have loved, whom I would have loved, 
 that divine representation of all that is young and desir- 
 ble in man, before the reader, Balzac puts these words in 
 his mouth in reply to an impatient question by Vautrin, 
 who asks him what he wants, what he is sighing for ; 
 " L'etre ceVebre et d'etre aitne'" — these are soul-waking 
 words, these are Shakespeare words. 
 
 Where in " Diana of the Crossways " do we find soul- 
 evoking words like these ? With tiresome repetition we 
 are told that she is beautiful, divine ; but I see her not 
 at all, I don't know if she is dark, tall, or fair ; with 
 tiresome reiteration we are told that she is brilliant, that 
 
148 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 her conversation is like a display of fireworks, that the 
 company is dazzled and overcome : but when she speaks 
 the utterances are grotesque, and I say that if any one 
 spoke to me in real life as she does in the novel, I should 
 not doubt for an instant that I was in the company of a 
 lunatic. The epigrams are never good, they never come 
 within measurable distance of La Rochefoucauld, Balzac, 
 or even Goncourt. The admirers of Mr. Meredith con- 
 stantly deplore their existence, admitting that they des- 
 troy all illusion of life. " 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 our pleasures differently ; mine are spontane- 
 ous, and I know nothing about translating the rank smell 
 of a nettle into the fragrance of a rose, and then enjoy- 
 ing it. 
 
 Mr. Meredith's conception of life is crooked, ill-bal- 
 anced, and out of tune. What remains ? — a certain 
 lustiness. You have seen a big man with square shoul- 
 ders and a small head, pushing about in a crowd ; he 
 shouts and works his arms, he seems to be doing a great 
 deal, — in reality he is doing nothing ; so Mr. Meredith 
 appears to me, and yet I can only think of him as an 
 artist ; his habit is not slatternly, like those of such 
 literary hodmen as Mr. David Christie Murray, Mr. 
 Besant, Mr. Buchanan. There is no trace of the crowd 
 about him. I do not question his right of place, I am 
 out of sympathy with him, that is all ; and I regret that 
 it should be so, for 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 ad- 
 vised, or because I think I ought, my reading is sure to 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 149 
 
 prove sterile. II faut que cela vient de moi } as a woman 
 once said to me, speaking of her caprices ; a quotation, 
 a chance word heard in an unexpected quarter. Mr. 
 Hardy and Mr. Blackmore I read because I had heard 
 that they were distinguished novelists ; neither touched 
 me, I might just as well have bought a daily paper ; 
 neither like nor dislike, a shrug of the shoulders — that 
 is all. Hardy seems to me to bear about the same re- 
 lation to George Eliot as Jules Breton does to Millet — 
 a vulgarization never offensive, and executed with abil- 
 ity. The story of an art is always the same, ... a suc- 
 cession of abortive but ever strengthening efforts, a 
 moment of supreme concentration, a succession of efforts 
 weakening the final extinction. George Eliot gathered 
 up all previous attempts, and created the English 
 peasant ; and following her peasants there came an 
 endless crowd from Devon, Yorkshire, and the Mid- 
 land Counties, and, as they came, they faded into 
 the palest shadows until at last they appeared in 
 red stockings, high heels, and were lost in the chorus 
 of opera. Mr. Hardy was the first step down. His 
 work is what dramatic critics would call good, honest, 
 straightforward work. It is unillumined by a ray of 
 genius ; it is slow and somewhat sodden. It reminds me 
 of an excellent family coach — one of the old sort hung 
 on C springs — a fat coachman on the box and a footman 
 whose livery was made for his predecessor. In criti- 
 cising Mr. Meredith I was out of sympathy with my 
 author, ill at ease, angry, puzzled ; but with Mr. Hardy 
 I am on quite different terms, I am as familiar with him 
 as with the old pair of trousers I put on when I sit down 
 to write ; I know all about his aims, his methods ; I know 
 what has been done in that line, and what can be done. 
 
I50 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 I have heard that Mr. Hardy is country bred, but I 
 should not have discovered this from his writings. 
 They read to me more like a report, yes, a report, — a 
 conscientious, well-done report, executed by a thoroughly 
 efficient writer sent down by one of the daily papers. 
 Nowhere do I find selection, everything is reported, dia- 
 logues and descriptions. Take for instance the long 
 evening talk between the farm people when Oak is seek- 
 ing employment. It is not the absolute and literal 
 transcript from nature after the manner of Henri Mon- 
 ier ; for that it is a little too diluted with Mr. Hardy's 
 brains, the edges are a little sharpened and pointed ; I 
 can see where the author has been at work filing ; on 
 the other hand, it is not synthesized — the magical word 
 which reveals the past, and through which we divine 
 the future — is not seized and set triumphantly as it is 
 in " Silas Marner." The descriptions do not 'flow out 
 of and form part of the narrative, but are wedged in, 
 and often awkwardly. We are invited to assist at a 
 sheep-shearing scene, or at a harvest supper, because 
 these scenes are not to be found in the works of George 
 Eliot, because the reader is supposed to be interested in 
 such things, because Mr. Hardy is anxious to show how 
 jolly country he is. 
 
 Collegians, when they attempt character-drawing, 
 create monstrosities, but a practised writer should be 
 able to create men and women capable of moving through 
 a certain series of situations without shocking in any 
 violent way the most generally applicable principles of 
 common sense. I say that a practised writer should be 
 able to do this ; that they sometimes do not is a matter 
 which I will not now go into ; suffice it for my purpose 
 if I admit that Mr. Hardy can do this. In Farmer Oak 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 15I 
 
 there is nothing to object to ; the conception is logical, 
 the execution is trustworthy ; he has legs, arms, and a 
 heart ; but the vital spark that should make him of our 
 flesh and of our soul is wanting ; it is dead water that 
 the sunlight never touches. The heroine is still more 
 dim ; she is stuffy, she is like tow ; the rich farmer is a 
 figure out of any melodrama ; Sergeant Troy nearly 
 quickens to life ; now and then the clouds are liques- 
 cent, but a real ray of light never falls. 
 
 The story-tellers are no doubt right when they insist 
 on the difficulty of telling a story. A sequence of events 
 —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 inevitableness, is 
 always indicative of genius. Shakespeare affords some 
 magnificent examples, likewise Balzac, likewise George 
 Eliot, likewise Tourgueneff ; the " OEdipus " is, of course, 
 the crowning and final achievement in the music of se- 
 quence and the massy harmonies of fate. But in con- 
 temporary English fiction I marvel, and I am repeatedly 
 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. From a certain directness of construction, 
 from the simple means by which Oak's ruin is accom- 
 plished in the opening chapters, I did not expect that 
 the story would run hare-hearted in its close, but the 
 moment Troy told his wife that he never cared for her, 
 I suspected something was wrong ; when he went down 
 to bathe and was carried out by the current I knew the 
 
I52 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 game was up, and was prepared for anything, 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 interesting in 
 themselves and leading to nothing. Mr. Hardy pos- 
 sesses the power of being able to shape events ; he can 
 mould them to a certain form ; that he cannot breathe 
 into them the spirit of life I have already said, " but 
 " Lorna Doone " reminds me of a third-rate Italian 
 opera, La Fille du Regiment or Ernani ; it is corrupt 
 with all the vices of the school, and it does not contain a 
 single passage of real fervor or force to make us forget 
 the inherent defects of the art of which it is a poor 
 specimen. Wagner made the discovery, not a very 
 wonderful one after all when we think, that an opera 
 had much better be melody from end to end. The 
 realistic school following on Wagner's footsteps dis- 
 covered that a novel had much better be all narrative — 
 an uninterrupted flow of narrative. Description is nar- 
 rative, analysis of character is narrative, dialogue is 
 narrative ; the form is ceaselessly changing, but the 
 melody of narration is never interrupted. 
 
 But 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 dramatis 
 persona and the deeds in which they are involved must 
 correspond, and their relationship should remain unim- 
 paired. Turner's " Carthage " is nature transposed and 
 wonderfully modified. Some of the passages of light 
 and shade there — those of the balustrade — are fugues, 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 153 
 
 and there his art is allied to Bach in sonority and beauti- 
 ful combination. Turner knew that a branch hung 
 across the sun looked at separately 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 without question allows them to achieve 
 deeds ; nor does he hesitate to pass them into the realms 
 of the supernatural. Such violation of the first princi- 
 ples of narration is never to be met with in the elder 
 writers. Achilles stands as tall as Troy, Merlin is as 
 old and as wise as the world. Rhythm and poetical 
 expression are essential attributes of dramatic genius, 
 but the original sign of race and mission is an instinc- 
 tive modulation of man with the deeds he attempts or 
 achieves. The man and the deed must be cognate and 
 equal, and the melodic balance and blending are what 
 first separate Homer and Hugo from the fabricators of 
 singular adventures. In Scott leather jerkins, swords, 
 horses, mountains, and castles harmonize completely and 
 fully with food, fighting, words, and vision of life ; the 
 chords are simple as Handel's, but they are as perfect. 
 Lytton's work, although as vulgar as Verdi's, is, in much 
 the same fashion, sustained by a natural sense of formal 
 harmony ; but all that follows is decadent, — an admix- 
 ture 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 the triumphant 
 imagination of Shakespeare, and 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, the result is in- 
 
154 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 choate and rhythmless folly: I mean the regular and in- 
 evitable alternation and combination of pa and ma, and 
 dear Annie who lives at Clapham, with the Mountains of 
 the Moon, and the secret of eternal life ; this violation 
 of the first principles of art — that is to say, of the rhythm 
 of feeling and proportion, is not possible in France. I 
 ask the reader to recall what was said on the subject of 
 the Club, Tavern, and Villa. We have a surplus popu- 
 lation of more than two million women ; the tradition 
 that chastity is woman's only virtue still survives the 
 Tavern and its adjunct Bohemianism have been sup- 
 pressed, and the Villa is omnipotent and omnipresent ; 
 tennis-playing, church on Sundays, and suburban hops 
 engender a craving for excitement, for the far away, for 
 the unknown ; but the Villa with its tennis-playing, 
 church on Sundays, and suburban hops will not surren- 
 der its own existence, it must take a part in the heroic 
 deeds that happen in the Mountains of the Moon ; it 
 will have heroism in its own pint pot. Achilles and 
 Merlin must be replaced by Uncle Jim and an under- 
 graduate ; and so the Villa is the author of " Rider Hag- 
 gard," " Hugh Conway," " Robert Buchanan," and the 
 author of " The House on the Marsh." 
 
 I read two books by Mr. Christie Murray, " Joseph's 
 Coat " and " Rainbow Gold," and one by Messrs. Besant 
 and Rice, — " The Seamy Side." It is difficult to criti- 
 cise such work ; there is absolutely nothing to say but 
 that it is as suited to the mental needs of the Villa as the 
 baker's loaves and the butcher's rounds of beef are to the 
 physical. I do not think that any such literature is 
 found in any other country. In France some three or 
 four men produce works of art ; the rest of the fiction of 
 the country is unknown to men of letters. But " Rain- 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 155 
 
 bow Gold " — I take the best of the three — is not bad as a 
 second-rate French novel is bad ; it is excellent as all 
 that is straightforward is excellent ; and it is surprising 
 to find that work can be so good, and at the same time so 
 devoid of artistic charm. That such a thing should be 
 is one of the miracles of the Villa. 
 
 I have heard that Mr. Besant is an artist in the " Chap- 
 lain of the Fleet " and other novels, but this is not possi- 
 ble. The artist shows what he is going to do the moment 
 he puts pen to paper, or brush to canvas ; he improves 
 on his first attempts, that is all ; and I found " The Seamy 
 Side " so very common, that I cannot believe for a mo- 
 ment that its author or authors could write a line that 
 would interest me. 
 
 Mr. Robert Buchanan is a type of artist that every age 
 produces unfailingly : Catulle Mendes is his counterpart 
 in France, — but the pallid Portuguese Jew with his Christ- 
 like face, and his fascinating fervor, is more interesting 
 than the spectacled Scotchman. Both began with vol- 
 umes of excellent but characterless verse, and loud out- 
 cries about the dignity of art, and both have — well. 
 . . . Mr. Robert Buchanan has collaborated with Gus 
 Harris, and written the programme poetry for the Vaude- 
 ville Theatre ; he has written a novel, the less said about 
 which the better — he has attacked men whose shoe-strings 
 he is not fit to tie, and having failed to injure them, he 
 retracted all he said, and launched forth into slimy 
 benedictions. He took Fielding's masterpiece, degraded 
 it, and debased it ; he wrote to the papers the Fielding 
 was a genius in spite of his coarseness, thereby inferring 
 that he was a much greater genius since he had so- 
 journed in this Scotch house of literary ill-fame. Clar- 
 ville, the author of " Madame Angot," transformed 
 
156 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 Madame Marneff into a virtuous woman ; but he did 
 not write to the papers to say that Balzac owed him a 
 debt of gratitude on that account. 
 
 The star of Miss Braddon has finally set in the obscure 
 regions of servantgalism ; Ouida and Rhoda Broughton 
 continue to rewrite the books they wrote ten years ago ; 
 Mrs. Lynn Linton I have not read. The " Story of an 
 African Farm " was pressed upon me. I found it sincere 
 and youthful, disjointed but well-written ; descriptions of 
 sand-hills and ostriches sandwiched with doubts con- 
 cerning a future state, and convictions regarding the 
 moral and physical superiority of women : but of art 
 nothing ; that is to say, art as I understand it, — rhyth- 
 mical sequence of events described with rhythmical se- 
 quence of phrase. 
 
 I read the " Story of Elizabeth " by Miss Thackeray. 
 It came upon me with all the fresh and fair naturalness 
 of a garden full of lilacs and blue sky, and I thought 
 of Hardy, Blackmore, Murray, and Besant as of great 
 warehouses where everything might be had, and even 
 if the article required were not in stock it could be sup- 
 plied in a few days at latest. The exquisite little de- 
 scriptions, full of air, color, lightness, grace ; the French 
 life seen with such sweet English eyes ; the sweet little 
 descriptions all so 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, without affecting the beauty of 
 the original. " Will Dampier turned his broad back and 
 looked out of the window. There was a moment's 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNo MAN. 157 
 
 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 near may not come 
 the ugliness of positivism, nor the horror of pessimism, 
 nor the profound grayness of Hegelism, but merely the 
 genial love and reverence of a beautiful-minded woman. 
 Such charms as these necessitate certain defects, I 
 should say limitations. Vital creation,, of character is 
 not possible to Miss Thackeray, but I do not rail against 
 beautiful water-color indications of balconies, vases, 
 gardens, fields, and harvesters because they have not the 
 fervid glow and passionate force of Titian's Ariadne ; 
 Miss Thackeray cannot give us a Maggie Tulliver, and 
 all the many profound modulations of that Beethoven-like 
 country-side : 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 it for a while, and bearing 
 it on at last to final and magnificent extinction. That 
 sense of the inevitable which had the Greek dramatists 
 wholly, which had George Eliot sufficiently, the rhyth- 
 mical progression of events, rhythm and inevitableness 
 (two words for one and the same thing), is not there. 
 Elly's golden head, the background of austere French 
 Protestants, is sketched with a flowing water-color brush, 
 I do not know if it is true, but, true or false in reality, it 
 is true in art. But the jarring dissonance of her mar- 
 riage is inadmissible ; it cannot be led up to by chords 
 
158 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 no matter how ingenious ; the passage, the attempts from 
 one key to the other, is impossible ; the true end is the 
 ruin, by death or lingering life, of Elly, and the remorse 
 of the mother. 
 
 One of the few writers of fiction who seems to me to 
 possess an ear for the- music of events is Miss Margaret 
 Veley. Her first novel, " For Percival," although 
 diffuse, although it occasionally flowed into by-channels 
 and lingered in stagnating pools, was informed and held 
 together, even at ends the most twisted and broken, by 
 that sense of rhythmic progression which is so dear to 
 me, and which was afterwards so splendidly developed 
 in " Damocles." Pale, painted with gray and opaline 
 tints of morning passes the grand figure of Rachel Con- 
 way, a victim chosen for her beauty, and crowned with 
 flowers of sacrifice. She has not forgotten the face of 
 the maniac, and it comes back to her in its awful lines 
 and lights 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 to 
 trample out her love. Unborn generations cry to her. 
 The wrath and the lamentation of the chorus of the 
 Greek singer, the intoning voices of the next-of-kin, the 
 pathetic responses of voices far in the depths of ante- 
 natal night, these the modern novelist, playing on an 
 inferior instrument, may suggest, but cannot give ; but 
 here the suggestion is so perfect that we cease to yearn 
 for the real music, as, readiug from a score, we are 
 satisfied with the flute and bassoons that play so fault- 
 lessly in soundless dots. 
 
 There is neither hesitation nor doubt. Rachel Conway 
 puts her dreams away, she will henceforth walk in a sad 
 and shady path ; her interests are centered in the child 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 159 
 
 of the man she loves, and as she looks for the last time 
 on the cloud of trees, glorious and waving green in the 
 sunset that encircles her home, her sorrow swells once 
 again to passion, and, we know, for the last time. 
 
 The mechanical construction of M. Scribe I had learnt 
 from M. Duval ; the naturalistic school had taught me 
 to scorn tricks, and to rely on the action of the senti- 
 ments rather than on extraneous aid for the bringing 
 about of a denouement; and I thought of all this as I 
 read " Disenchantment " by Miss Mabel Robinson, and 
 it occurred to me that my knowledge would prove 
 valuable when my turn came to write a novel, for the 
 mise en place, the setting forth of this story, seemed to 
 me so loose, that much of its strength had dribbled 
 away before it had rightly begun. But the figure of the 
 Irish politician I accept without reserve. It seems to 
 me grand and mighty in its sorrowfulness. The tall, 
 dark-eyed, beautiful Celt, attainted in blood and brain 
 by generations of famine and drink, alternating with the 
 fervid sensuousness of the girl, her Saxon sense of right 
 alternating with the Celt's hereditary sense of revenge, 
 his dreamy patriotism, his facile platitudes, his accept- 
 ance of literature as a sort of bread-basket, his knowl- 
 edge that he Is not great nor strong, and can do noth- 
 ing in the world but love his country ; and as he passes 
 his thirtieth year the waxing strong of the disease, 
 nervous disease complex and torturous ; to him drink 
 is at once life and death ; an article is bread, and to 
 calm him and collect what remains of weak, scattered 
 thought, he must drink. The woman cannot under- 
 stand that caste and race, separate them ; and the damp 
 air of spent desire, and the gray and failing leaves of 
 her illusions fill her life's sky. Nor is there any hope 
 
l6o CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 for her until the husband unties the awful knot by 
 suicide. 
 
 I will state frankly that Mr. R. L. Stevenson never 
 wrote a line that failed to delight me ; but he never 
 wrote a book. You 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 other, 
 and, in popular imagination, epitomizes his talent and 
 position. What is Shakespeare the author of ? What is 
 Milton the author of? What is Fielding the author of? 
 What is Byron the author of ? What is Carlyle the au- 
 thor of ? What is Thackeray the author of ? What is 
 Zola the author of ? What is Mr. Swinburne the author 
 of? Mr. Stevenson is the author of, shall I say, " Treas- 
 ure Island," or what? 
 
 I think of Mr. Stevenson as a consumptive youth 
 weaving 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. 
 
 I do not care to speak of great ideas, for I am unable 
 to see how an idea can exist, at all events can be great 
 out of language ; an allusion to Mr. Stevenson's verbal 
 expression will perhaps make my meaning clear. His 
 periods are fresh and bright, rhythmical in sound, and 
 perfect realizations of their sense ; in reading you often 
 think that never before was such definiteness united to 
 such poetry of expression ; every page and every sen- 
 tence rings of its individuality. 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. l6l 
 
 ever walked on the Burlington. Mr. Stevenson is com- 
 petent to understand any thought that might be pre- 
 sented 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 Steven- 
 son (I pass over his direct indebtedness to Edgar Poe, 
 and his constant appropriation of his methods) is the 
 unsuitableness of the special characteristics of his talent 
 to the age he lives in. He wastes in his limitations, and 
 his talent is vented in prettiness of style. In speaking 
 of Mr. Henry James, I said that, although he had con- 
 ceded 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 liv- 
 ing in this end of the century needed freedom of ex- 
 pression for the distinct development of his genius, that 
 man is R. L. 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 rea- 
 sod except that the public likes to read filth ; the poet 
 and novelist must emasculate and destroy their work 
 because. . . . Who shall come forward and make an- 
 
l62 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 swer ? Oh, vile, filthy, and hypocritical century, I at 
 least scorn you ! 
 
 But this is not a course of literature but the story of 
 the artistic development of me, Edward Dayne ; so I will 
 tarry no longer with mere criticism, but go direct to the 
 book to which I owe the last temple in my soul — " Ma- 
 rius 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 I was 
 awakened a fourth time, that a fourth vision of life was 
 to be given to me. Shelley had revealed to me the un- 
 imagined skies 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 color 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 of life, and how by a certain avoid- 
 ance 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 163 
 
 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. 
 
 Certainly, in my mind, these books will be always inti- 
 mately associated ; and when a few adventitious points 
 of difference be 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 same glad wor- 
 ship 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—/^ trouve la terre aussi belle vue le ciel, et je pense 
 que la correction de la forme est la vertu. And I too join 
 issue ; 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 odor 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 steppbsg-stone 
 
164 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 colors, 
 which although new was a sort of sequel to the educa- 
 tion I had chosen, and a continuance of it in 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 litera- 
 ture of my race, and washed myself clean. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THOUGHTS IN A STRAND LODGING. 
 
 AWFUL Emma has undressed and put the last child 
 away — stowed the last child away in some myster- 
 ious and unapproachable corner that none knows of but 
 she ; the fat landlady has ceased to loiter about my 
 door, has ceased to pester me with offers of brandy and 
 water, tea and toast, the inducements that occur to her 
 landlady's mind ; the actress from the Savoy has ceased 
 to walk up and down the street with the young man who 
 accompanied 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, and of the 
 husband whom she was obliged to leave ; we have bid 
 each other good-night ; she has gone up the creaky stair- 
 case. I have returned to my room, littered with MS. 
 and queer publications ; the night is hot and heavy, but 
 now a wind is blowing from the river. I am 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 com- 
 mercialism, the four pens the most entirely devoted to art y 
 that were arraigned before the public prosecutor : Bauds* 
 laire y Flaubert^ and ourselves." 
 
 165 
 
l66 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 Yes, it is indeed curious, and I will not spoil the 
 piquancy of the moral by a comment. No comment 
 would help those to see who have eyes to see ; no 
 comment would give sight to the hopelessly blind. 
 Goncourt's statement is eloquent and suggestive 
 enough ; I leave it a naked, simple truth ; but I 
 would put by its side another naked, simple truth. 
 This : 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 Eng- 
 land as in France those who loved literature the most 
 purely, who were the least mercenary in their love, 
 were marked out for prosecution, and all three were 
 driven into exile. Byron, Shelley, and George Moore ; 
 and Swinburne, he, too, who loved literature for its own 
 sake, was forced, amid cries of indignation and horror, 
 to withdraw his book from the reach of the public that 
 was rooting then amid the garbage of the Yelverton 
 divorce case. I think of these facts and think of Baude- 
 laire's prose poem — that poem in which he 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. Baude- 
 laire was wrong : that dog was a — . 
 
 When I read Balzac's stories of Vautrin and Lucien 
 de Rubempr£, I often think of Hadrian and the Anti- 
 nous. I wonder if Balzac did dream of transposing the 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 167 
 
 Roman Emperor and his favorite 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 is the present to the 
 past ! I hate with my whole soul this London lodging, 
 and all that concerns it — Emma, and eggs and bacon, 
 the fat lascivious landlady and her lascivious daughter ; 
 I am sick 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 weak leaf ; it 
 will flutter out of sight presently. I am sick of everything ; 
 I wish I were back in Paris ; I am sick of reading ; I 
 have nothing to read. Flaubert bores me. What non- 
 sense has been talked about him ! Impersonal ! Non- 
 sense, he is the most personal writer I know. That 
 odious pessimism ! How sick I am of it ! It never ceases, 
 it is lugged in a tout dropos, and the little lyrical phrase 
 with which he winds up every paragraph, how boring it 
 is. Happily, I have " A Rebours" to read, that prodig- 
 ious book, that beautiful mosaic. Huysmans is quite 
 right, ideas are well enough until you are twenty, after- 
 wards only words are bearable ... a new idea, what 
 can be more insipid — fit for members of parliament. . . . 
 Shall I go to bed ? No. ... I wish I had a volume of 
 Verlaine, or something of Mallarme's to read — Mal- 
 larme" for preference. I remember Huysmans speaks of 
 Mallarme in " A Rebours. " In hours like these a page 
 
l68 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of some ex- 
 quisite and powerful liqueur. 
 
 " The decadence of a literature irreparably attacked 
 in its organism, weakened by the age of ideas, overworn 
 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 souvenirs of its suffering on its deathbed, is in- 
 carnate in Mallarme 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 
 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, reconstruct 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 of 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 accessible only to them." 
 
 Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of 
 Byzantine workmanship ; there is in his style the yearn- 
 ing charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the 
 mural, of the window. Ah ! in this hour of weariness 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 169 
 
 for one of Mallarme'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: 
 
 FORGOTTEN PAGES. 
 
 " Since Maria left me to go to another star — which ? 
 Orion, Altair, or thou, green Venus? I have always cher- 
 ished 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 
 singularly I have loved all that the word fall expresses. 
 In such wise that my favorite 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 gray 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 rejuvenat- 
 ing approach of the barbarians, or has begun to stam- 
 mer 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 pure 
 animal, when a barrel organ sang languidly and melan- 
 choly 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 
 
170 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 
 remembrance, 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 com- 
 monplace. Why do its flourishes 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. 
 
 II. 
 
 " 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. 
 
 " (I see the spiders' 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, and the old 
 engravings, and all these old things. Does it not seem 
 to thee that even these bluebirds are discolored by time ? 
 
 " (Dream not of the spiders' webs that tremble above 
 the lofty windows.) 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 171 
 
 " 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 shouldest use them — a difficult 
 thing indeed to do, for thou hast no taste for action. 
 
 "Come, close thy old German almanac 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.)" 
 
 To argue about these forgotten pages would be futile. 
 We, the " ten superior persons scattered through the 
 universe," think these prose poems the concrete essence, 
 the osmazomeof 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 common- 
 place ; the pit will immediately declare them to be non- 
 sense, and will return with satisfaction to the last leading 
 article in the daily paper. 
 
 " J* at fait mes adieux a ma mere et je viens pour vous 
 faire les miens" and other absurdities by Ponson du Ter- 
 rail amused us many a year in France, and in later days 
 
172 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 sen- 
 tence, 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 filled 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. 
 
 One thing that cannot be denied to the realists : a con- 
 stant 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 our failures are 
 more interesting than the vulgar successes of our oppo- 
 nents ; for when we fall into the sterile and distorted, it 
 is through our noble and incurable hatred of the com- 
 monplace, of all that is popular. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 73 
 
 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 ; what can be more pud- 
 ding than the language of Mr. Hardy, and he is typical 
 of a dozen other writers, Mr. Besant, Mr. Murray, Mr. 
 Crawford ? The reason of this heaviness of thought 
 and expression is that the avenues are closed, no new 
 subject-matter is introduced ; the language of English 
 fiction has therefore run stagnant. But if the realists 
 should catch favor in England the English tongue may 
 be saved from dissolution, for with the new subjects 
 they would introduce, new forms of language would 
 arise. 
 
 I wonder why murder is considered less immoral than 
 fornication in literature ? 
 
 I feel that it is almost impossible for the same ear to 
 seize music so widely differing as Milton's blank verse 
 and Hugo's alexandrines, and it seems to me especially 
 strange that critics varying in degree from Matthew 
 Arnold to the obscure paragraphist, never seem even 
 remotely to suspect, when they passionately declare that 
 English blank verse is a more perfect and complete 
 poetic instrument than French alexandrines, that the 
 imperfections which they aver are inherent in the latter 
 exist only in their British ears, impervious to a thousand 
 subtleties. Mr. Matthew Arnold does not hesitate to 
 say that the regular rhyming of the lines is monotonous. 
 To my ear every line is different ; there is as much vari- 
 ation in Charles V.'s soliloquy as in Hamlet's ; but be 
 
174 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 this as it may, it is not unworthy of the inmates of Han- 
 well for critics to inveigh against la rimepleine, that 
 which is instinctive in the language as accent in ours, 
 that which is the very genius of the language. 
 
 But the principle has been exaggerated, deformed, 
 caricatured until some of the most modern verse is little 
 more than a series of puns — in art as in life the charm 
 lies in the unexpected, and it is annoying to know that 
 the only thought of every poet is to couple les murs with 
 des fruits trop mdrs, and that no break in the absolute 
 richness of sound is to be hoped for. Gustave Kahn, 
 whose beautiful volume " Les Palais Nomades " I have 
 read with the keenest delight, was the first to recognize 
 that an unfailing use of la rime pleine might become 
 cloying and sat ating, and that, by avoiding it some- 
 times and markedly and maliciously choosing in prefer- 
 ence a simple assonance, new and subtle music might 
 be produced. 
 
 " Les Palais Nomades " is a really beautiful book, 
 and it is free from all the faults that make an absolute 
 and supreme enjoyment of great poetry an impossibil- 
 ity. 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 a common property, 
 it is dragged through newspaper articles, magazine ar- 
 ticles, through books, it is repeated in clubs, drawing- 
 rooms ; it is bandied about the corners of streets ; in a 
 week it is wearisome ; 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, 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 75 
 
 that is the question " ? Shakespeare was really great 
 when he wrote " Music to hear, why nearest 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 intolerable leisure to 
 preparing an edition from which everything resembling 
 an idea shall be firmly excluded. We might then shut 
 up our Marlowes and our Beaumonts and resume our 
 reading of the bard, and these witless beings would con- 
 fer happiness on many, and crown themselves with truly 
 immortal bays. See the fellows ! their fingers catch at 
 scanty wisps of hair ; the lamps are burning ; the long 
 pens are poised, and idea after idea is hurled out of 
 existence. 
 
 Gustave Kahn took counsel of the past, and he has 
 successfully avoided everything that even a hostile critic 
 might be tempted to term an idea ; for this I am grate- 
 ful to him. Nor is his volume a collection of miscella- 
 neous 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 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 con- 
 forming 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 giving expression to, 
 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. 
 
176 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 "Chere apparence viens aux cou chants 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 l'air evoque de calmes musique de patres. 
 
 Viens sous des tendelets aux fleuves souriants 
 Aux lilas palis des nuits d'Orient 
 
 Aux glauques etendues a falbalas d'argent 
 A l'oasis des baisers urgents 
 
 Seulement 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'oublie du lointain des jours chatouille et serre, 
 Le lotos de l'oubli s'est fane dans mes serres, 
 Cependant tu m'aimais a jamais ? 
 Adieu pour jamais." 
 
 The repetitions of Edgar Poe seem hard and mechi- 
 cal 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 orches- 
 tra, flute and violin disappearing in a silver mist ; but 
 the clouds break, and all the enchantment of a spring 
 garden appears in a shaft of sudden sunlight. 
 
 ' ' L'ephemere idole, au frisson du printemps, 
 Sentant des renouveaux eclore, 
 Le guepa de satins si lointains et d'antan ; 
 Rose exiles 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 ; 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 177 
 
 " Des rires ailes peuplerent le jardin ; 
 Souriants des caresses breves, 
 Des oiseaux joyeux, jaunes, incarnadins 
 Vibrerent aux ciels de reve." 
 
 But to the devil with literature, I am sick of it ; who 
 the deuce cares if Gustave Kahn writes well or badly. 
 Yesterday I met a chappie whose views of life coincide 
 with mine. " A ripping good dinner," he says ; " get a 
 skinful of champagne inside you, go to bed when it is 
 light, and get up when you are rested." This seems to 
 me as concise as it is admirable ; indeed there is little 
 to add to it ... a note or two concerning women might 
 come in — but I don't know, " a skinful of champagne " 
 implies everything. 
 
 Each century has its special ideal ; the ideal of the 
 nineteenth is a young man. The seventeenth 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 around ; no servile 
 archaeology chills the fancy, it is but a delightful whim ; 
 and this treatment of antiquity is the highest proof of 
 the genius of the seventeenth century. See the Frago- 
 nards — the ladies in high-peaked bodices, their little 
 ankles showing amid the snow of the petticoats. Up 
 they go ; you can almost hear their light false voices 
 into the summer of the leaves, where Loves are garlanded 
 even as of roses. Masks and arrows are everywhere, all 
 the machinery of light and gracious days. In the Wat- 
 teaus the note is more pensive ; there is satin and sun- 
 set, 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 marvel- 
 
I78 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 lous 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 footstool and the heel and the calf 
 of the leg that is withdrawn, showing in the shadows of 
 the lace ; look at the satin of the bodices, the fan out- 
 spread, the wigs so adorably false, the knee-breeches, 
 the buckles on the shoes, how false ; adorable little 
 comedy, adorably mendacious ; and how sweet it is to 
 feast on these sweet lies, it is a divine delight to us, 
 wearied with the hideous sincerity of newspapers. Then 
 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 
 hold 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 cen- 
 tury is the most enviable that has ever fallen to the lot 
 of any human creature. He is the rare bird, and is 
 feted, flattered, adored. The sweetest words are ad- 
 dressed to him, the most loving looks are poured upon 
 him. The young man can do no wrong. Every house 
 is open to him ; girls dispute the 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 round his neck, she will propose to 
 him, and will take his refusal kindly and without resent- 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 79 
 
 ment. 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 opening 
 there is for a young man! He would have to waltz per- 
 fectly, play tennis fairly, the latest novel would suffice 
 for literary attainments ; billiards, shooting, and hunt- 
 ing, 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 favorites, 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 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, broad shoulders, 
 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 ball-room, 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 
 
l8o CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 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 inno- 
 cent 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 into 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 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 some one 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. Lovelace 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 you. Is love, then, a magnetism which we 
 sometimes possess and exercise unconsciously, and some- 
 times do not possess ? 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 AND now, hypocritical reader, I will answer the ques- 
 tions which have been agitating you this long while, 
 which you have asked at every stage of this long narra- 
 tive of a sinful life. Shake not your head, lift not your 
 finger, exquisitely hypocritical reader ; you can deceive 
 me in nothing. I know the baseness and nnworthiness 
 of your soul as I know the baseness and unworthiness of 
 my own. This is a magical tete-ti-tete, such a one as will 
 never happen in your life again ; therefore 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 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 yourself, 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 
 
 181 
 
182 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 fit for nothing but the grave. Look back upon your life, 
 examine it, probe it, weigh it, philosophize on it, and then 
 say, if you dare, that it has not been a very 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 immut- 
 able delight of life is to think, for one reason or another, 
 that we are better than our neighbors. 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 fifteen 
 years of systematic enjoyment. Nature provided me 
 with as perfect a digestive apparatus, mental and physi- 
 cal, as she ever turned out of her workshop ; my stomach 
 and brain are set in the most perfect equipoise possible 
 to conceive, 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. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 183 
 
 This book is a record of my 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, pat£-de-foie-gras, 
 heaps of truffles, salad, and then a walk home in the 
 early morning, a few philosophical reflections sug- 
 gested by the appearance of a belated street-sweeper, 
 then sleep, quiet and gentle sleep. 
 
 I have had the rarest and most delightful friends. 
 Ah, how I have loved my friends ; the rarest wits of my 
 generation were my boon companions ; everything con- 
 spired 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 intentions 
 and bald greed go to the wall, but subtle selfishness with 
 a dash of unscrupulousness pulls more plums out of life's 
 pie than the seven deadly virtues. 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 magi- 
 cal Ute-ct-tite which will happen never again in your life, 
 admit that you feel just a little interested in my wicked- 
 ness, admit that if you ever thought you would like to' 
 know me it is because I know a great 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, delightful 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 I had done, 
 that you would not have bought it or borrowed it. Hypo- 
 critical reader, think, had you had courage, health, and 
 money to lead a fast life, would you not have done so ? 
 
184 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAJXT, 
 
 You don't know, no more do I ; I have done so, and I 
 regret nothing except that some infernal 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 apartment in 
 Rue de la Tour des Dames, with all its charming ad- 
 juncts, palms and pastels, my cat, my python, my friends, 
 blond hair and dark. 
 
 It was not long before I wearied of journalism ; 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. I wrote a dozen with a view to preparing 
 myself for a long novel. Some were printed in weekly 
 newspapers, others were returned to me from the maga- 
 zines. But there was a publisher in the neighbourhood 
 the Strand, who used to frequent a certain bar. I saw 
 the chance, and I seized it. This worthy man conducted 
 his business as he dressed himself, sloppily ; a dear kind 
 soul, quite witless and quite ^-less. From long habit he 
 would make a feeble attempt to drive a bargain, but he 
 generally let himself in : he was, in a word, a literary 
 stepping-stone. Hundreds had made use of him. If a 
 fashionable author asked for two hundred 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 after having refused a dozen times 
 the work of a Strand loafer whom he was in the habit of 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 85 
 
 " 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. B. 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 MS., 
 looked after the printer and binder, kept the accounts 
 when he had a spare moment, and entertained the visi- 
 tors. I did not trouble Messrs. Macmillan and Messrs. 
 Longman with polite requests to look at my MS., but 
 straddled on the counter, played with the cat, joked with 
 the Irishman, was treated by Mr. B., 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 
 previously straddled. For those who were in the swim 
 this was a matter of 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 un- 
 fortunate Mr. Sedley, Mr. B. used to slouch along, and 
 he would 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, alas ! in the hands of the 
 brokers. 
 
 But conservative though we were in matters concern- 
 ing "copy," though all means were taken to protect our- 
 selves against interlopers, one who had not passed the 
 
l86 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 preliminary stage of straddling would occasionally slip 
 through our defences. I remember one especially. It 
 was a 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. B.'s room, he asked him to read a MS., 
 and he fled, looking very frightened. " Waste-paper 
 basket, waste-paper basket," we shouted when Mr. B. 
 handed us the roll of paper. " What an odd-looking fish 
 he is !" said O'Flanagan; " I wonder what his MS. is 
 like." We remonstrated in vain, O'Flanagan took the 
 MS. home to read, and returned next morning convinced 
 that he had discovered an embryo Dickens. The young 
 men was asked to call, his book was accepted, and we 
 adjourned to the bar. 
 
 A few weeks afterwards this young man took rooms in 
 the house next to me on the ground floor. He was ter- 
 ribly inflated with his success, and was clearly determined 
 to take London by storm. He had been to Oxford, and 
 to Heidelberg, he drank beer and smoked long pipes, he 
 talked of nothing else. Soon, very soon, I grew consci- 
 ous 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." There were 
 generally tea-things and jam-pots on the table. In a 
 little while he brought a little creature about five feet 
 three to live with with him. and when the little creature 
 and the long creature went out together, it was like Don 
 Quixote and Sancho Panza setting forth in quest of 
 adventuries in the land of Strand. The little creature 
 indulged in none of the loud, rasping affectation of 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 187 
 
 humor that was so maddening in the long creature ; the 
 little creature was dry, hard, and sterile, and when he did 
 join in the conversation it was like an empty nut between 
 the teeth — dusty and bitter. He was supposed to be 
 going in for the law, but the part of him to which he 
 drew our attention was his knowledge of the Elizabethan 
 dramatists. 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 anony- 
 mous plays, — fifty-four in all." He neither praised nor 
 blamed, he neither extolled nor criticised ; he told you 
 what he had read, and left you to draw your own con- 
 clusions. 
 
 What the little creature thought of the long creature I 
 never discovered, but with every new hour I became 
 freshly sensible that they held me in still decreasing 
 estimation. This, I remember, was wildly irritating to 
 me. I knew myself infinitely superior to them ; I knew 
 the long creature's novel was worthless ; I knew that I 
 had fifty books in me immeasurably better than it, and 
 savagely and sullenly I desired to trample upon them, to 
 rub their noses in their feebleness ; but oh, it was I who 
 was feeble ! and full of visions of a wider world I raged 
 up and down the cold walls of impassable mental limita- 
 tions. Above me there was a barred window, and, but 
 for my manacles, I would have sprung at it with my teeth. 
 Then passion was so strong in me that I could scarce 
 refrain from jumping off the counter, stamping my feet, 
 and slapping my friends in the face, so tepid were their 
 enthusiasms, so thin did their understanding appear to 
 me. The Straddlers seemed inclined for a moment to 
 
 
1 88 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 take the long creature very seriously, and in the office 
 which I had marked down for my own I saw him installed 
 as a genius. 
 
 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 odor of cigarette and brandy and soda, 
 I was introduced to a Jew of whom I had heard much, 
 a man who had newspapers and race-horses. The bright 
 witty glances of his brown eyes at once prejudiced me in 
 his favor, 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 to 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 cosmopoli- 
 tanism 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 sover- 
 eigns always jingling 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 hard-upishness and eternal 
 squandering of money, — money that rose at no discover- 
 able well-head and flowed into a sea of boudoirs and 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 189 
 
 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 direc- 
 tion 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 mer- 
 rily until the chimney-sweeps began to go by, and 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. 
 
 But I could not learn to see life paragraphically. I 
 longed to give a personal shape to something, and per- 
 sonal 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, fame, brutal and glaring, fame that leads to noto- 
 riety. 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 turn- 
 ing up your eyes and murmuring " horrid young man " — 
 examine your weakly heart, and see what divides us ; I 
 
190 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 am not ashamed of my appetites, I proclaim them ; what 
 is more I gratify them ; you're silent, you refrain, and 
 you dress up natural sins in hideous garments of shame ; 
 you would sell your wretched soul 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 I boldly confess that I then de- 
 sired notoriety. I walked along the streets mad ; I 
 turned upon myself like a tiger. " 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 ? " I looked back upon my life — medi- 
 ocrity was branded about my life. " Would it be the 
 same to the end ? " I asked myself a thousand times 
 by day, and a thousand times by night. We all want 
 notoriety ; your desire for notoriety is hideous if you 
 will, but it is less hideous when it is proclaimed from a 
 brazen tongue than when it hides its head in the cant of 
 human humanitarianism. Humanity be hanged ! Self, 
 and after self a friend ; the rest may go to the devil ; 
 and be sure that when any man is more stupidly vain 
 and outrageously egotistic than his fellows, he will hide 
 his hideousness in humanitarianism. Victor Hugo was 
 hideous with self, and the innermost stench of the 
 humanitarianism he vented about him is unbearable to 
 any stomach, not excepting even Mr. Swinburne's, who 
 occasionally holds his nose with one hand while he 
 waves the censer with the other. Humanity be hanged ! 
 Men of inferior genius, Victor Hugo and Mr. Glad- 
 stone, take refuge in it. Humanity 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 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 191 
 
 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 illustra- 
 tion 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, ex- 
 quisitely 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 horribly 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 ; shouts and oaths ; 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- 
 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 chappie who 
 seemed inclined to empty the mustard-pot down my 
 neck ; him I could keep in order, but the beautiful lord 
 I saw 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. About three or half- 
 
192 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 past the ladies retired, and the festivities continued with 
 unabated vigor. We had passed through various stages, 
 not of intoxication, no one was drunk, but of jubilation ; 
 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 some one proposed to drink to the downfall of 
 Gladstone. The beautiful lord got on his legs and be- 
 gan a speech. Politically it was sound enough, but 
 much of it was 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." 
 
 " Any one 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 any one 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 
 meant politically." 
 
 " And I only meant socially." 
 
 He advanced a step or two and struck me across the 
 face with his finger-tips ; I took up a champagne bottle, 
 and struck him across the head and shoulders. Differ- 
 ent 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 wrath, 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, 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 193 
 
 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 
 in it would be carrion for the society papers. But the 
 danger ? To the fear of death I do not think I was ever 
 susceptible. I should have been afraid of a row with a 
 music-hall singer, because I should have had much to 
 lose by rowing with him, but as matters stood I had too 
 much to gain to consider the possibilities of danger. 
 Besides there was no need to consider. I knew very 
 well there was no reality in it. I had broken sixteen 
 plates consecutively at the order to fire dozens of times ; 
 and yet it was three to one against my shooting a man 
 at twenty paces ; so was it ten thousand to one against a 
 man, who had probably only fired off a revolver half a 
 dozen times in a back yard, hitting me. In the gallery you 
 are firing at white or black, on the ground you are firing 
 at black upon a neutral tint, a very different matter. In 
 the gallery there is nothing to disturb you ; there is not 
 a man opposite you with a pistol in his hand. In the 
 gallery you are calm and collected ; you have risen at 
 your ordinary hour, you are returning from a stroll 
 through the sunlight ; on the ground your nerves are 
 altered by unusual rising, by cold air, by long expecta- 
 tion. It was three to one against my killing him, it was 
 a hundred to one against his killing me. So I calculated 
 the chances, so much as I took the trouble to calculate 
 the chances, but in truth I thought very little of them ; 
 when I want to do anything I do not fear anything, and 
 I sincerely wanted to shoot this young man. I did not 
 go to bed at once, but sat in the armchair thinking. 
 Presently a cab came rattling up to the door, and one of 
 
194 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 the revellers came upstairs. He told me that every- 
 thing had been arranged ; I told him I was not in the 
 habit of allowing others to arrange my affairs for me, 
 and went to bed. One thing, and only one thing puzzled 
 me: who was I to ask to be my second ? My old friends 
 were scattered, they had disappeared ; and among my 
 new acquaintances I could not think of one that would 
 do. None of the Straddlers would do, that was certain ; 
 I wanted some one that could be depended upon, and 
 whose social position was above question. 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. 
 At last my thoughts fixed themselves on one man. I 
 took a hansom and drove to his house. I found him 
 packing up, preparing to go abroad. This was not for- 
 tunate. I took a seat on the edge of the dining-room 
 table, and told him I wanted him to act for me in an 
 affair of honor. I told him the story in outline. " I 
 suppose," he said, " it was about one or two in the 
 morning ? " 
 
 " Later that that," I said : " it was about seven." 
 " My dear fellow, 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. I don't mind acting as 
 intermediary, and settling the affair for you ; he will no 
 doubt regret he struck you, and you will regret you 
 struck him ; but really I cannot act for you, that is to 
 say, if you are determined to force on a meeting. Just 
 think ; supposing you were to shoot him, a man who has 
 really done you no wrong." 
 
 " My dear , I did not come here to listen to 
 
 moral reflections ; if you don't like to act for me, say so." 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 195 
 
 I telegraphed to Warwickshire to an old friend : 
 " Can I count on you to act for me in an affair of 
 honor ? " Two or three hours after the reply came. 
 " Come down here and stay with me for a few days ; we'll 
 talk it over." I ground my teeth ? what was to be done ? 
 I must wire to Marshall and ask him to come over ; 
 English people evidently will have nothing to do with 
 serious duelling. " Of alt importance. Come over at 
 once and act for me in an affair of honor. 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 ; so soon as he is 
 underground will come." Was there ever such luck ? 
 .... He won't be here before the end of the week. 
 These things demand the utmost promptitude. Three 
 or four days afterwards dreadful Emma told me a 
 gentleman was upstairs taking a bath. " Holloa, Mar- 
 shall, how are you ? Had a good crossing ? Awful 
 good of you to come. . . 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 f assure, jefais 
 Vecole . . . 
 
 " Tu crois fa ... on fait Ve'cole aprls vingt ans de 
 travail" 
 
 " Mon ami, je f assure, fai un public qui me suit" 
 
 " Mon ami, veux-tu que je te dis ce que tu a fait ; tu a 
 
196 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 fait encore une vulgarization, une jolie vulgarization, je 
 veux Men, de la note invents par Millet j tu a ajoute' la 
 note claire invente'e par Manet, enfin tu suis avec talent le 
 mouvement moderne, voilh tout." 
 
 " Par Ions oV autre chose : sur la question d'art on ne 
 s'entend jamais. " 
 
 When we were excited, Marshall and I always 
 dropped into French. 
 
 " And now tell me," he said, " about this duel." 
 
 I could not bring myself to admit, even to Marshall, 
 that I was willing to shoot a man for the sake of the 
 notoriety it would bring me, not because I feared in him 
 any revolt of conscience, but because I dreaded his 
 sneers ; he was known to all Paris, I was an obscure 
 something, living in an obscure lodging in London. 
 Had Marshall suspected the truth he would have said 
 pityingly, " My dear Dayne, how can you be so foolish ? 
 why will you not be contented to live ? " etc. . . . Such 
 homilies would have been maddening ; he was success- 
 ful, I was not ; I knew there was not much in him, un 
 feu de paille, no more, but what would I not have done 
 and given for that feu de paille ? So I was obliged to 
 conceal my real motives for desiring a duel, and I spoke 
 strenuously of the gravity of the insult and the neces- 
 sity of retribution. But Marshall was obdurate. 
 " Insult ? " he said. " He hit you with his hand, you 
 hit him with the champagne bottle ; you can't have him 
 out after that ; there is nothing to avenge, you wiped out 
 the insult yourself ; if you had not struck him with the 
 champagne bottle the case would be different." 
 
 We went out to dine, we went to the theatre, and after 
 the theatre we went home and aestheticized till three in 
 the morning. I spoke no more of the duel, I was sick 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1 97 
 
 of it ; luck, I saw, was against me, and I let Marshall 
 have his way. He showed his usual tact, a letter was 
 drawn up in which my friend withdrew the blow of his 
 hand, I withdrew the blow of the bottle, and the letter 
 was signed by Marshall and two other gentlemen. 
 
 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 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 hypocritical reader, you are my brother, I 
 salute you. 
 
 Day passed over day : I lived in that horrible lodging ; 
 I continued to labor at my novel ; it seemed an impossi- 
 ble task — defeat glared at me from every corner of that 
 frouzy 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. Noth- 
 ing 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 and lodgings for three 
 pounds a week, and henceforth resisting all Curzon Street 
 temptations, I trudge home through November fogs, to 
 
198 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 
 
 eat a chop in a frouzy lodging-house. I studied the 
 horrible servant as one might an insect under a micro- 
 scope. " What an admirable book she would make, but 
 what will the end be ? if I only knew the end ! " I had 
 more and more difficulty in keeping the fat landlady at 
 arm's length, and the nasty child was well beaten one 
 day for lingering about my door. I saw poor Miss L. 
 nightly, on the stairs of this infamous house, and I 
 never wearied of talking to her of her hopes and ambi- 
 tions, of the young man she admired. She used to ask 
 me about my novel. 
 
 Poor Miss L. ! Where is she ? I do not know, but I 
 shall not forget the time when I used to listen for her 
 footstep on the midnight stairs. Often I was too despond- 
 ent ; when my troubles lay too heavily and darkly upon 
 me, I let her go up to her garret without a word. Des- 
 pondent days and nights when I cried, Shall I never pass 
 from this lodging ? shall I never be a light in that Lon- 
 don, long, low, misshapen, that dark monumental stream 
 flowing through the lean bridges ; and what if I were a 
 light in this umber-colored mass, — shadows falling, barges 
 moored midway in a monumental stream ? Happiness 
 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 ? . . . 
 
 " 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 
 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. I99 
 
 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 world is not 
 worth erasure ; if it is not true to-day it will be in two 
 years hence ; farewell ! I yield my place, do you be 
 young as I was, do you love youth as I did ; remember 
 you are the most interesting beings under heaven, for 
 you all sacrifices will be made, you will be feted and 
 adored upon the condition 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 bitterly 
 against education, I will not strive to educate you, you 
 will educate yourselves. Dear ones, dear ones, the 
 world is your pleasure, you can 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." 
 
 I shivered ; the cold air of morning blew in my face ; 
 I closed the window, and sitting at the table, haggard 
 and overworn, I continued my novel. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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