Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013526300 l/OMFEii^lONS ■i^^— WW—^ TTTIWCT OF A Yoi/HG UaH m DATE DU£ ^«/»>^i-^FW'(J^''#««34»4, AU G - g 1 107C g ■ 7/? I CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Joseph Whitmore Barry dramatic library THE GIFT or TWO FRIENDS OF Cornell University ^934 Cornell University Library PR 5042.C74 1888 Confessions of a young man, 3 1924 013 526 300 COJ^FESSIOIfS OF A YOUTO MAN. GEOEGE MOOEE. CONFESSIOlSrS OF A YOUNG MAN. BY GEORGE MOOEE, Author of"A Mummer's Wife" " Parnell and Sis Island,** etc, etc. LONDON : SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. BRENTAN08, 101, State Stkeet, 5, UsioN Square, 17, Ave. be L'OrERA, CHICAGO. NEW YORK. PARIS. F #■" ^hS! ''3< % J COJFESSIOI^S OF A YOUJl^G MAlf. CHAPTER L ~\ >!"¥ soul, so far as I uaderstand it, has very kindly taken colour and form from the many various modes of life that self--\nll 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 be- stowed, and still bestows, upon me. I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no impress, but capable of receiving any ; of being moulded into all shapes. Nor am I exaggerating when I say I think that 1 1 2 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 instinct, rather than the fervour of a reasoned conviction. Sometimes, it is true, there came moments of weariness, of despon- dency, but they were not enduring : a word spoken, a book read, or yielding to the attraction of en- vironment, I was soon oflF in another direction, forgetful of past failures. Intricate, indeed, was the labyrinth of my desires ; all lights were followed with the same ardour, all cries were eagerly re- sponded to : they came from the right, they came from the left, from every side. But one cry was more persistent, and as the years passed I learned to follow it with increasing vigour, and my stray- ings grew fewer and the way wider. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 3 I was eleven years old when I first heard and oheyed 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 rolling of the coach makes them feel a little sick. It is seven o'clock in the morning. Opposite the chil- dren are their parents, and they are talking of a novel the world is reading. Did Lady Audley murder her husband ? Lady Audley ! What a beau- tiful name ; and she, who is a slender, pale, fairy- like woman, killed her husband. Such thoughts flash through the boy's mind ; his imagination is stirred and quickened, and he begs for an explana- tion. The coach lumbers along, it arrives at its 4 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. destination, and Lady Audley is forgotten in the delight of tearing down fruit trees and killing a cat. Bat when we returned home I took the first opportunity 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 Shelley be- came 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 ardour was rewarded. The book — a small pocket edition in red boards, no doubt long out of print — opened at the "Sensitive Plant." Was I disappointed? I think I had expected to understand better ; but I had no CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 5 difficulty 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, compre- hending little, and loving a great deal. Byron, too, was often with me, and these poets were the ripening influence of years otherwise merely nervous and boisterous. And my poets were taken to school, because it pleased me to read "Queen Mab" and "Cain," amid the priests and ignorance of a hateful Eoman 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 1 I used to gaze fondly on a book, holding my head be- tween 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. b CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 recoiled to its original obtuseness. Couldn't, with wouldn't, was in my case curiously involved ; nor have I in this respect ever been able to correct my natural temperament. I have always remained powerless to do anything unless moved by a powerful desire. The natural end to such schooldays 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 racehorses. 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 7 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 for- ward with enthusiasm to the day when I should be known as a successful steeplechase rider. To ride the winner of the Liverpool seemed to me a final achievement and glory ; and had not accident intervened, it is very possible that I might have succeeded in carrying off, if not the meditated honour, something scarcely inferior, such as — alas, 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 Parliar- ment; 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 8 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. a small tobacconist's. Well do I remember tbat shop, the oily-faced, sandy-whiskered proprietor, his betting-book, the cheap cigars along the counter, the one-eyed nondescript who leaned his evening away against the counter, and was supposed to know some one who knew Lord 'b 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 Eoad ; 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 T 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 9 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 blonde 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 — Dor6-like improvisations, devoid of skill, and, in- deed, of artistic perception, save a certain sentiment for the grand and noble — filled me with wonder- ment and awe. " How jolly it would be to be a painter," I once said, quite involuntarily. "Why, would you like to be a painter ? " he asked abruptly. I laughed, not suspecting that I had the slightest gift, as indeed was the case, but the idea remained in my mind, and soon after I began to make sketches in the streets and theatres. My 10 CONFEHSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. attempts were not very successful, but they encour- aged 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 con- tinued 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 viding, who, I remember, it was clear to me then, looked to a higher ideal than mine, breathed a purer atmosphere of thought than I. And then the sweet, white peace of antiquity ! The great, calm gaze that is not sadness nor joy, but something that we know not of, which is lost to the world for ever. " But if you want to be a painter you must go to France — France is the only school of Art." I CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 11 must again call attention to the phenomenon of echo-augury, that is to say, words heard in an un- looked-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 thousands 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, with life and France before me 1 Bat 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 12 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. a studio. A studio — ^tapestries, smoke, models, con- versations. 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 a(t 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 G-allery 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 dissipa- tions — and they were many — was not unservice- able ; 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 13 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, G-od- win, 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 "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. 14 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. I hungered after great truths : " Middlemarch," "Adam Bede," "The Eise and Fall of Rational- ism," " The History of Civilisation," were mo- mentous events in my life. But I loved life better than books, and I cultivated with care the ac- quaintance of a neighbour who had taken the Globe Theatre for the purpose of producing Offenbach's operas. Bouquets, stalls, rings, de- lighted me. I was not dissipated, but I loved the abnormal. I loved to spend as much on scent and toilette 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 gaslight, whitewashed walls, of light, doggerel verse, slangy polkas and waltzes, interested me beyond legitimate measure, so curious and unreal did it seem. I lived at home, but dined CONCESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 15 daily at a fashionable restaurant ; 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 Eooms were my favourite haunts. My mother suffered, and expected ruin, for I took no trouble to conceal anything; I boasted of dissipa- tions. 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 secret marriage ; from a worldly point of view, I was a model 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 IL A T last the day came, and with several trunks and boxes full of clothes, books, and pic- tures, I started, accompanied by an English valet, for Paris and Art. We all know the great grey and melancholy Gare du Nord, at half-past six in the morning ; and the miserable carriages, and the tall, haggard city. Pale, sloppy, yellow houses ; an oppressive absence of colour; a peculiar bleakness in the streets. The menagire hurries down the asphalte to market ; a dreadful jargon de cafe, with a napkin tied round his throat, moves about some chairs, so decrepit and so solitary that it seems impossible to imagine a human being sitting CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, 17 there. Where are the Boulevards ? where are the Champs Elys^es ? I asked myself ; and . feeling V hound to apologise 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 pro- prietress 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 were fixed on the piaster, 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 18 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. achieved this feat I cannot say. I never opened a boot, 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, coarse, 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 grey perspective of early risings that awaited me ; then, demoralised by the lassitude of Sunday, I told my valet on Monday morning to leave the room, that T would CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 19 return to the beaux arts no more. I felt humi- liated 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 photographs of the salon pictures, and was stricken by the art of Jules Lefevre. True it is that I saw it was wanting in that tender grace which I am forced to admit even now, saturated though I now am with the aesthetics of different schools, is inherent in Cabanel's work ; but at the time I am writing of, my nature was too young and mobile to resist the conventional attractiveness of nude figures, indolent attitudes, long hair, slender hips and hands, and I accepted Jules 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 20 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. was anxious to see as much of them as possible. The studio was perched high np in the Passage des Panoramas. There I found M. Julian, a typical meridional — the large stomach, the dark eyes, crafty and watchful ; . the seductively mendacious manner, the sensual 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 language had been acquired in three months, but the dinners 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 litera- CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 21 ture, of the world and the flesh ; he told me of the books he had read, he narrated thrilling incidents in his own life ; and the moral reflections with which he sprinkled his conTcrsation I thought very striking. Like every young man of twenty, I was on the look-out for something to set up that would do duty for an ideal. The 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 Julian kept me at a distance, and the rare occasions when he favoured me with his society only served to pi^pare my mind for the friendship which awaited me, and which was destined to absorb some years of my life. In the studio there were some eighteen or twenty young men, and among these there were some four or five from whom I could learn ; and there were also there some eight or nine young English girls. 22 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. We sat round in a circlCj 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 onr life in this studio conveyed. Besides, the women themselves were young and interesting, and were, therefore, one of the charms of the place, giving, as they did, that sense of sex which is so suhtle a mental pleasure, and which is, in its outward aspect, so interesting to the eye — the gowns, the hair lifted, showing the neck ; the , earrings, the sleeves open at the elbow. Though all this was very dear to me I did not fall in love : but he who escapes a woman's dominion generally comes under the sway of some friend who ever 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 permeated and added to my life — CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN; 23 I am nevertheless forced to recognise that, how- ever suitable it may have been in my special case, in the majority of instances it would have proved but a shipwrecking reef, on which a young man's life would have gone to pieces. What saved me was the intensity of my passion for Art, and a moral revolt against any action that I thought could or would definitely compromise me in that direction. I was willing to stray a little from my path, but never further than a single step, which I could retrace when I pleased. One day I raised my eyes, and saw 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 narrow, thin face, and large eyes, full of intelligence and fascination. And although he could not have been working more 24 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. than an hour, lie 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 neighbouring eaf& to drink beer. The way led 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-ahd-So's studio — the great blonde man, whose Dor^-like improvisations bad 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 following day would suit him better, but I was very pressing. He offered to meet me at my hotel ; or would I come with him to his CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 25 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 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 than 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 bewildering. I was on the tiptoe of expectation to see his apartments ; 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 26 CONFBSSrONS OF A YOUNG MAN. thousand pounds in two years, and was now living on six or seven hundred francs a month, which his mother would allow him until he had painted and had sold a certain series of pictures, which he con- templated beginning at once, my admiration in- creased 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 ward- robe that had been picked up somewhere, — a ridicu- lous 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 j but he paid very little heed to my compliments ; and, sitting down at the piano, with a great deal of CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 27 splashing and dashing ahont the keys, he rattled off a waltz. "What waltz is that?" I asked. " Oh, nothing ; something I composed the other evening. I had a fit of the blues, and didn't go out. What do you think of it?" " I think it beautiful ; did you really compose that the other evening ? " At this moment a knock was heard at the door, and 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 atten- tively at the studio, but now Marshall's society was an attraction I could not resist. For the sake 28 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 Maison d'Or by myself; but now I was taken to strange students' cafis, 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, the Chdteau Rouge, or the Elysie Montmartre. The clangour 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 rolling through the white dust beneath the immense heavy dome of the CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 29 summer night, when the dusty darkness of the street is chequered by a passing glimpse of light .skirt 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 im- pressions. Marshall had a friend in this street, and another in that. It was only necessary for him to cry " Stop " to the coachmauj and to run up two or three flights of stairs. . . . ^^ Madame , est-elle chez ellef" " Out, Monsieur; si Monsieur veut se donner la peine d^entrer." And we were shown into a hand- somely furbished apartment. A lady would enter ^urriedly, and an animated discussion was begun. I did not know French sufficiently well to follow .the conversation, but I remember it always com- menced mon cher ami, and was plentifully sprinkled with the phrase vous avez tort. The ladies them- 30 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. selves had only just returned from Constantinople or Japan, and they were generally involved in mysterious lawsuits, or were busily engaged in prosecuting claims for several millions of francs against different foreign governments. And just as I had watched the chorus girls and mummers, three years ago, at the Globe Theatre, now, excited by a nervous curiosity, I watched this world of Parisian adventurers and lights o' love. And this craving for observation of manners, this instinct for the rapid notation of gestures and words that epitomise a state of feeling, of attitudes that mirror forth the soul, declared itself a main passion; and it grew and strengthened, to the detriment of the other Art still so dear to me. With the patience of a cat before a mouse-hole, I watched and listened, picking one characteristic phrase out of hours of vain chatter, interested and amused by an angry or loving glance. Like the midges that fret the surface of a shadowy stream, CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 31 these men and women seemed to me; and thougli I langted, danced, and made merry with them, I was not of them. But with Marshall it was different: they were my amusement, they were his necessary pleasure. And I knew of this distinction that made twain our lives j and I reflected deeply upon it. Why could I not live without an ever- present and acute consciousness of life ? Why could I not love, forgetful of the 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 con- tradictions, and how they could be explained, classified, and reduced to one primary law, were to me a constant source of thought. Our confi- dences knew no reserve. I say our confidences, because to obtain confidences it is often necessary to confide. All we saw, heard, read, or felt was the subject of mutual confidences: the ti-ansitory 32 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. emotion that a flush of colour and a bit of per- spective 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 analysed 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 ap- preciations, superficial in his judgments, that his talents did not pierce below the surface ; il avait se grand air ; there was fascination in his very bearing, in his large, soft, colourful 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 taUor's, and he advised me on the cut of my coats ; he showed me how to arrange my rooms, and I strove to copy his manner of speech and his CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 33 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 contact. Search my memory as I will, I cannot recall a case of man or woman who ever occupied any considerable 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 use- less 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 iu life with less design than myself. Never have I given a 3 34 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MANs thought to the advantage that might accrue from heing 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 some- thing 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, 35 it may ? Chance I What a field for psychical in- vestigation 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 re- plying to your taunt : Chance, or the conditions of life under which we live, sent, of course thousands of creatures across my way who were powerless to benefit me j 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 suddenly leave a corner of a field to seek pasturage further away? Never could I interest myself in a book if it were not the exact diet my mind required at the time, or in the very immediate future. The mind asked, received, and digested. So much was assimilated, so much expelled ; then, after a season, similar demands were made, the same pro-^ 36 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, oesses were repeated out of sight, below conscious- ness, as is the case in a well-ordered stomach. Shelley, who fired my youth with passion, and purified and upbore it for so long, is now to me as nothing : not a dead or faded thing, but a thing out of which I personally have drawn all the sustenance I may draw from him ; and, therefore, it (that part which I did not absorb) concerns me no more. And the same with Gautier. Mdlle. de Maupin, that godhead of flowing line, that desire not "of the moth for the star," but for such perfection 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 for- gotten 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. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 37 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 limited and twenty-shilling sense. This reduction of the .in- tellect to the blind unconsciousness of the lower organs will strike some as a violation of man's best beliefs, and as saying very little for the particular intellect that can be so reduced. But I am not sure these people are right. I am inclined to think that as you ascend the scale of thought to the great minds, these unaccountable impulses, mysterious resolutions, sudden, but certain know- ings, falling whence, or how it is impossible to say, but falling somehow into the brain, instead of growing rarer, become more and more frequent; indeed, I think that if the really great man were to confess to the working of his mind, we should 38 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. see him constautly besieged by inspirations • • . inspirations I Ah ! how hnman thought only turns in a circle, and how, when we think we are on the verge of a new thought, we slip into the enunciation of some time-worn truth. But I say again, let general principles be waived ; it will suffice for the interest of these pages if it be understood that brain instincts have always been, and still are, the initial and the determining powers of my being. Tf y^ TP tF v 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 of many hours of Marshall's company. Secondly — and the second reason was the graver — because I was beginning to regard the dielineation of a nymph, or youth bathing, etc., as a very narrow channel to carry off the strong, full tide of a man's thought. For now thoughts of love and death, and the hopelessness of life, were CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 3J) in active fermentatioii 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 irre- sponsible curiosity, but that was all, — I despised, I hated them, thought them contemptible, and to select them as subjects of artistic treatment, could not then, might never, have occurred to me, had the suggestion to do so not come direct to me from the outside. At the time I am writing I lived in an old-fashioned hotel on the Boulevard, which an enterprising Belgian bad lately bought and was 40 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. endeavouring to modernise ; an old-fashioned hotel, that still clung to its ancient character in the presence of half a dozen old people, who, for ante- diluvian reasons, continue to dine on certain vrell- specified days at the table cfhSte. Fifteen years have passed away, and these old people, no douht, have joined their ancestors ; but I can see them still sitting in that salle d, manger ; the buffets en vieux cMne ; 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 American, has dined at this table d'ASte for the last thirty years — he is talka- tive, 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 develop- ments, your acquaintance with him begins and ends ; the eyes, the fan, the mantilla, how it began. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 41 how it was broken off, and how it hegan again. Opposite sits another French gentleman, with beard and bristly hair. He spent twenty years of his life in India, and he talks of his son who has been out there for the last ten, and who has just returned home. There is the Italian comtesse of sixty summers, who dresses like a girl of sixteen and smokes a cigar after dinner, — if there are not too many strangers in the room. She terms a stranger any one whom she has not seen at least once before. The little fat, neckless man, with the great bald head, fringed below the ears with hair, is M. Duval. He is a dramatic author — the author of a hundred and sixty plays. He does not intrude himself on your notice, but when you speak to him on literary matters he fixes a pair of tiny, sloe-like eyes on you, and talks affably of his collabora- teurs. I was soon deeply interested in M. Duval, and I invited him to come to the cafe after dinner. I 42 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 produced for the last twenty years, but then the aureole of the hundred and sixty was about his poor bald head. I thought of the chances of life, he alluded to the war ; and so this unpleasantness was passed over, and we entered on more genial subjects of conversation. He had written plays with everybody ; his list of colla- borateurs was longer than any list of lady patronesses for an English county ball ; there was no literary kitchen in which he had not helped to dish up. I was at once amazed and delighted. Had M. Duval written his hundred and sixty plays in the seclusion of his own rooms, I should have been less 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 43 the anecdotes. They were of all sorts. Here are a few specimens : He, Duval, had written a one-act piece with Damas pere ; it had heen refused at the Frangais, and then it had been ahout, here, there, and everywhere ; finally the Varietes had asked for some alterations, and c'etait une affaire entendue. "I made the alterations one afternoon, and wrote to Domas, and what do you think, — by return of post I had a letter from him saying he conld not consent to the production of a one-act piece, signed by him, at the Varietes, because his son was then giving a five-act piece at the Gymnase." Then came a string of indecent witticisms by Suzanne Lagier and Dejazet. They were as old as the world, but they were new to me, and I was amused and astonished. These 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, Gantier the dialogue. One morning 44 CONFESSIONS OP A YOUNG MAN. 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 Qnartier Montmartre — rooms high up on the fifth floor — where, between two pictures, supposed to be by Angelica Kaufmann, M. Duval had written unactable plays for the last twenty years, and where he would continue to write unactable plays until God called him to a world, perhaps, of eternal cantatas, but where, by all accounts, Vexposition de la pidce selon la formule de M. Scribe is still unknown. How I used to enjoy these conversations ! I remember how I used to stand on the pavement after having bid the old gentleman good-night, regretting I had not demanded some further ex- planation regarding le mouvement Romantique, or la fagon de M. Scribe de menager la sitication. CONFESSIONS OF A TOUKG MAN. 45 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 (Thdte, flavour with the Italian countess who smoked 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 remembered suddenly that I had read "Cain," "Manfred," "The Cenci," as poems, without ever thinking of how the dialogue looked upon paper ; besides, they were in blank verse. I hadn't a notion how prose dialogue would look upon paper. Shakespeare I had never opened ; no instinctive want had urged me to read him. He had remained, therefore, unread, unlooked at. Should I buy a copy ? No ; the name repelled me 46 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. — as all popular names repelled me. In preference I went to the Grymnase, and listened attentively to a comedy by M. Damas fils. But strain my im- agination 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 I 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 rar(juhar, I completed a comedy in three acts, which I entitled " Worldliness." It was, of coarse, 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. CHAPTEE III. TS 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 magnetic influence of home. How important my absence from Paris seemed to me ; and how Paris rushed into my eyes I — Paris — public ball-rooms, cafes, the models in the studio and the young girls painting, and Marshall, Alice, and Julien. Marshall! — my thoughts pointed 48 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. at him through the intervening streets and the endless procession 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 numher?" "I think it is fifty-four." "Thanks," "Coachman, wake up ; drive me to the Rue de Douai." But Marshall was not to he found at the Rue de Douai ; and he had left no address. There was nothing for it but to go to the studio; I should be able to obtain news of him there, — perhaps find him. But when I pulled aside the curtain, the accustomed 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 cqf^, or perhaps CONFESSIONS OP A YOUNG MAN. 49 he is gone to the country." This was not very encouraging, and now, my enthusiasm thoroughly damped, I strolled along le Passage, looking at the fans, the hangles 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 Provengal, But just as if he had seen me yesterday he said, " Tiens ! c'est vous ; une deme tasse ? oui . . . gargon, une deme tasse." Presently the conversation turned on Marshall ; they had not seen much of him lately. " II parait qiCil est plus amoureux que jamais," Julien replied sardonically. 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 50 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. there were capids above him. " Holloa ! what, you back again, Dayne ? we thoiaght 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 Impressionists. "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 sunlight, 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 realising a new aestheticism ; we went insolent with patent leather shoes and bright kid gloves and armed with all the jargon of the CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 51 school. " Cette jamhe ne porte pas ; " " la nature ne se fait pas comme qa ; " " on dessine par les masses ; comhien de tites ? " " Sept et demiP " Si f avals un morceau de crate je mettrais celle-ld dans un hocal^.c'est un foetus^' 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 pro- duced 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, Courbet, Corot, and Rousseau, and these in turn begot Degas, 52 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. PissaiTO, Madame Morizot, and Guillaumm, Degas is a pupil of Ingres, but he applies the marvellous acuteness of drawing he learned from his master to delineating the humblest aspects of modern life. Degas draws not by the masses, but by the character; — his subjects are shop-girls, ballet-girls, and washerwomen, but the qualities that endow them with immortality are precisely those which eternalise the virgins and saints of Leonardo da Vinci in the minds of men. You see the fat, vulgar woman in the long cloak trying on a hat in front of the pier-glass. So marvellously well are the lines of her face observed and rendered that you can tell exactly what her position in life is ; you know what the furniture of her rooms is like ; you know what she would say to you if she were to speak. She is as typical of the nineteenth century as Fragonard's ladies are of the Court of Louis XV. To the right you see a picture of two shop-girls with bonnets in their hands. So CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 53 accurately are the habitual movements of the heads and the hands observed that you at once realise the years of bonnet-showing and servile words that these women have lived through. We have seen Degas do this before — it is a welcome repetition of a familiar note, but it is not until we turn to the set of nude figures that we find the great artist revealing any new phase of his talent. The first, in an attitude which suggests the kneeling Venus, washes her thighs in a tin bath. The second, a back view, full of the malfor- mations of forty years, of children, of hard work, stands gripping her flanks with both hands. The naked woman has become impossible in modern art ; it required Degas' genius to infuse new life into the worn-out theme. Cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the middle ages, and with cynicism Degas has rendered the nude again an artistic possibility. What Mr. Horsley or the British matron would say it is difl&cult to guess. 54 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. Perhaps the hideousness depicted by M. Degas ■should frighten them more than the sensuality which they condemn in Sir Frederick Leighton. But, be this as it may, it is certain that the great, fat, short-legged creature, who in her humble and touching ugliness passes a chemise over her lumpy shoulders, is a triumph of art. Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible ; Velasquez knew this when he painted his dwarfs. Pissarro exhibited a group of girls gathering apples in a garden — sad greys and violets beauti- fully harmonised. The figures seem to move as in a dream : we are on the thither side of life, in a world of quiet colour and happy aspiration. Those apples will never fall from the branches, those baskets that the stooping girls are filling will never be filled : that garden is the garden of the peace that life has not for giving, but which the painter has set in an eternal dream of violet and grey. Madame Morizot exhibited a series of delicate CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 55 fancies. Here are two young girls ; the sweet atmosphere folds them as with a veil ; they are all summer ; their dreams are limitless, their days are fading, and their ideas follow the flight of the white butterflies through the standard roses. Take note, too, of the stand of fans ; what delicious fancies are there — willows, balconies, gardens, and terraces. Then, contrasting with these distant tendernesses, there was the vigorous painting of Guillaumin. There life is rendered in violent and colourful brutality. The ladies fishing in the part, with the violet of the skies and the green of the trees descending upon them, is a chef d'csuvre. 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 fn one of the public galleries ; and the same can be said of the portrait of the woman on a background of chintz flowers. 56 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. We could but utter coaise gibes and exclaim, " What could have induced him to paint such things ? surely he must have seen that it was absurd. I wonder if the Impressionists are in earnest or if it is only une blague qu'on nous fait ? " Then we stood and screamed at Monet, that most exquisite painter of blonde light. We stood before the " Turkeys," and seriously we wondered if "it was serious work," — that chef cTaiuvre! the high grass that the turkeys are gobbling is flooded with sunlight so swift and intense that for a moment the illusion is complete. "Just look at the house ! why, the turkeys couldn't walk in at the door. The perspective is all wrong." Then followed other remarks of an educational kind ; and when we came to those piercingly personal visions of railway stations by the same painter, — those rapid sensations of steel and vapour, — our laughter knew no bounds. "I say, Marshall, just look at this wheel j he dipped his brush into CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 57 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. Yon see colour 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 I such a glorious glow of whiteness was attained never before. But we saw nothing except that the eyes were out of drawing. For art was not for us then as it is now, — a mere emotion, right or wrong only in proportion to its intensity ; we believed then in the grammar of art, perspective, anatomy, and la jambe qui parte ; and we found all this in Julien's studio. A year passed ; a year of art and dissipation — one part art, two parts dissipation. We mounted and descended at pleasure the rounds of society's 58 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. ladder. One evening we would spend at Constant's, Eue de la Gaiety, in the company of thieves and housebreakers ; on the following evening we were dining with a duchess or a princess in the Champs Elys6es. And we prided ourselves vastly on our versatility in using with equal facility the language of the '' fence's " parlour, and that of the literary salon ; on being able to appear as much at home in one as in the other. Delighted at our prowess, we often 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 some- thing very thrilling in leaving the Rue de la Gaiety, returning home to dress, and presenting our spotless selves to the elite. And we suc- ceeded very well, as indeed all young men do who waltz perfectly and avoid making love to the wrong woman. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 59 Bat the excitement of climbing np and down the social ladder did not stave off onr 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 livelihood. This decided me. I asked him to come and live with me, and to be as near our studio as possible, I took an appartement 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 intentioned. But we had sworn to forego all pleasures for the sake of art — table d'h6tes in the Rue Maubeuge, French and foreign duchesses in the Champs Elysees, thieves in the Rue de la Gaiety. 60 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN". 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 readily be understood how a mind like mine, so keenly alive to all impulses, and so unsupported by any moral convictions, would sufi"er in so keen a contest waged under such unequal 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 v/as miserable. That of mine was not. I have said I possessed no artistic CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. CI facility, but I did not say faculty j my drawing was never common ; it was individual in feeling , it was refined. I possessed all the rarer qualities, but not that primary power without which all is valueless ; — I mean the talent of the boy who can knock off ■ a clever caricature of his schoolmaster or make a lifelike sketch of his favourite horse on the barn door with a piece of chalk. The following week Marshall made a great deal of progress ; I thought the model did not suit me, and hoped for better luck next time. That time never came, and at the end of the first month I was left toiling hopelessly in the distance. Marshall's mind, though shallow, was bright, and he understood with strange ease all that was told him, and was able to put into immediate practice the methods of work inculcated by the professors. In fact, he showed himself singularly capable of education; little could be drawn but^ but a great deal could be put in (using the word in its modern. 62 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. not in its original sense). He showed himself intensely anxious to learn and to accept all that was said : the ideas and feelings of others ran into him like water into a bottle whose neck is suddenly stooped below the surface of the stream. He was an ideal pupil. It was Marshall here, it was Marshall there, and soon the studio was little but an agitation in praise of him, and his work, and anxious ' speculation arose as to the medals he would obtain. I continued the struggle for nine months. I was in the studio at eight in the morning ; I measured my drawing ; I plumbed it throughout; I sketched in, having regard to la jambe qui ports; 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 terrible CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 63 are the languors and yearnings of impotence ! how wearing ! what an aching void they leave in the heart ! And all this I suffered until the burden of unachieved desire grew intolerable. I laid down my charcoal and said, "I will never draw or paint again." That vow I have kept. Surrender brought relief, but my life seemed at an end. 1 looked upon a blank space of years desolate as a grey and sailless sea. "What shall I do ? " I asked myself, and my heart was weary and hopeless. Literature ? my heart did not answer the question at once. I was too broken and over- come 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 clamoured loudly from without ; every day, almost every hour of tlie day, I heard of the medals which he would 64 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. carry off; of what Lefevre thought of his drawing this week, of Boulanger's opinion of his talent. I do not wish to excuse my conduct, but I cannot help saying that Marshall showed me neither consideration nor pity ; he did not even seem to understand that I was suffering, that my nerves had heen terribly shaken, and he flaunted his superiotity relentlessly in my face — his good looks, Ilia 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, some- times it is singularly attractive ; but by a certain insistence and aggressiveness in the details of life he allowed me to feel that I was only a means for the moment, a serviceable thing enough, but one that would be very soon discarded and passed over. This was intolerable. I broke up my establishment. By so doing I involved my friend in grave and cruel difficulties j by this action I CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, 65 imperilled his future prospects. It was a dastardly action ; but his presence had grown unbearable ; yes, unbearable in the fullest acceptation of the word, and in ridding myself of him I felt as if a world of misery were being lifted from me. CHAPTER IV. AFTER three montlis spent ia a sweet seaside resort, where unoccupied men and ladies whose husbands are abroad happily congregate, I returned to Paris refreshed. Marshall and I were no longer on speaking terms, but I saw him daily, in a new overcoat, of a cut admirably adapted to his figure, sweeping past the fans and the jet ornaments of the Passage des Panoramas. The coat interested me, and I remembered that if I had not broken with him I should have been able to ask him some essential questions concerning it. Of such trifles as this the sincerest friendships are made ; he was as necessary to me as I to him, and after some demur on his part a reconciliation was efiected. CONFESSIONS OF A Y0UN(3 MAN. 67 Then I took an appartement in one of the old houses in Eue de la Tour des Dames, for the windows there overlooked a bit of tangled garden with a few dilapidated statues. It was Marshall of course who undertook the task of fui-nishing, and he lavished on the rooms the fancies of an imagination that suggested the collaboration of a courtesan of high degree and a fifth-rate artist. Nevertheless, our salon was a pretty resort — English cretonne of a very happy design — ^vine leaves, dark green and golden, broken up by many fluttering jays. The walls were stretched with this colourful cloth, and the arm-chairs and the couches were to match. The drawing-room was in cardinal red, hung from the middle of the ceiling and looped up to give the appearance of a tent; a faun, in terra' cotta, laughed in the red gloom, and there were Turkish couches and lamps. In another room you faced an altar, a Buddhist temple, a statue of the Apollo, and a bust of Shelley. The bedrooms were 68 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN, made nnconventual with cushioned seats and rich canopies ; and in picturesque corners there were censers, great church candlesticks, and palms ; then think of the smell of burning incense and wax and you will have imagined the sentiment of our 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 aind 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 indi- viduals 5 you know at once if they are going to CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 69 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 voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am femi- nine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse, 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. Beading 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 military 70 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. band playing the Turkish patrol in the Palais Eoyal . . . The verse is grand, noble, tremendous ; I liked it, I admired it, but it did not — I repeat the phrase — awake a voice of conscience within me ; and even the structure of the verse was too much in the style of public buildings to please me. Of " Les Feuilles d'Automne " and " Les Chants du Cr^puscule" I remember nothing. Ten lines, fifty lines of "La Ldgende des Sifecles," 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 caf^ table, you are both appalled by the splendour of the imagery, by the thunder of the syllables. " Quel dieu, quel moissonneur dans I'Stemel iti Avait s'en allant ndgligemmeut jet^ Cette fauciUe d'or dans les champs des ^toiles." But if I read an entire poem I never escape that CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 71 sensation of the ennui which is inherent in the gaud and the glitter of the Italian or Spanish improvisatore. There never was anything^ French ahout Hugo's genius. Hugo was a cross between an Italian improvisatore and a metaphysical German student. Take another verse — " Le clair de lune bleu qui baigne rhorizon." 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 fSte chez Th^r^se ; " 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 himself; he goes in for an all-round patronage of the Almighty in a last stanza ; but of the two immortalities he evidently considers his own the most durable ; he does not, however, become .7^ CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 (Sombre I was astonished, nor the second nor third repetition produced a change in my mood of mind ; but sooner or later it was impossible to avoid con- viction, that of the two " the rosy fingers of the dawn," although some three thousand years older was younger, truer, and more beautiful. Homer's similes can never grow old ; une bouche (T 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. Marshall and the Marquise were in the habit of .reading him in moments of relaxation, they had marked their favourite passages, so he came to me highly recommended. Nevertheless, I made CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 73 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, 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 natural, 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 " Holla," that splendid lyrical outburst. What I remember of it now are those two odious cJievilles — marchait et respirait, and Astarte file de Vonde amdre ; nor does the fact that amere rhymes with mere condone the offence, although it proves that even Musset felt that perhaps the richness of the rhyme might render tolerable the intolerable. And it is to my credit that the Spanish love songs moved me not at all ; and it was not until I read that magnifi- 74 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. cently grotesque poem " La Ballade ^ la Lune," that I could be induced to bend the knee and acknowledge Musset a poet. I still read and spoke of Shelley with a rapture of joy, — he was still my soul. But this craft, fashioned of mother o' pearl, with starlight at the helm and moonbeams for sails, suddenly ran on a reef and went down, not out of sight, but out of the agitation of actual life. The reef was Gautierj I read " Mdlle. 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 illimitable 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 75 a deification of flesh and fleshly desire was possible, Shelley's teaching had been, while accepting the body, to dream of the soul as a star, and so preserve our ideal ; but now suddenly I sa.w, with delightful clearness and with intoxicating 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 haigne dans ses Jlots." I will not turn to the book to find the exact 76 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 Mdlle. 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," I had shaken off all belief in Christianity early CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 77 ia 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 j and then the indescribably beautiful description of the perfor- mance of As you like it, and the supreme relief and perfect assuagement it brings to Kodolph, who then sees Mdlle. 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 Mdlle. 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 78 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. tales, — tales as perfect as the world has ever seen ; " La Morte Amoureuse," " Jettatura," " Une Nait de C16op&tre," 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 seulemenfc il se transpose Et passant de la forme au son, Trouvant dans la metamorphose La jeune fille et le gargon." Transpose, — a word never before used except in musical application, and now for the first time applied to material form, and with a beauty-giving touch that Phidias might be proud of. I know not how I quote ; such, is my best memory of the stanza, and here, that is more important than the stanza itself. And that other stanza, "The Oh§,telaine and the Page ; " and that other, " The Doves;" and that other, "Romeo and Juliet," CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 79 and the exquisite cadence of the line ending "balcon." Novelists have often shown how a love passion brings misery, despair, death, and ruin upon a life, but I know of no story of the good or evil influence awakened by the chance reading of a book, the chain of consequences so far-reaching, so intensely dramatic. Never shall I open these books again, but were I to live for a thousand years, their power ip my soul would remain unshaken. I am what they made me. Belief in humanity, pity for the poor, hatred of injustice, all that Shelley gave may never have been very deep or earnest ; but I did love, I did believe, G-autier destroyed these illusions. He taught me that our boasted progress is but a pitfall into which the race is falling, and I learned that the correction of form is the highest ideal, and I accepted the plain, simple conscience of the pagan world as the perfect solution of the problem that had vexed me so long ; I cried, " ave " to it all : lust, cruelty, 80 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 G-autier ; now it is the clean shaven face of the mock priest, the slow, cold eyes and the sharp, cunning sneer of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may better know the worthlessness of 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 blossoms. The village maiden goes to her Faust ; the children of the nineteenth century go to you, Baudelaire, and having tasted of your deadly delight all hope of repentance is vain. Flowers, beautiful in your sublime decay, I press you to my lips j these northern solitudes, CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 81 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 6changerons uu Eclair unique Comme uu long sanglot tout charg^ d'adieus." 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 Immoraux," laboriously invented life- less 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 eveiy passage in Paris. The money spent was 6 82 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. considerable, the waste of time enorinous. 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 waistcoats) resisted my efforts to capture it. At last I caught sight of the precious volume in a shop on the Quai Voltaire. Trembling I asked the price. The man looked at me earnestly and answered, "A hundred and fifty 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 disappoint- ing, and I was obliged to admit had contributed little towards my intellectual advancement ; 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 83 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 Po^mes Antiques," and " Les Pofemes 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, 84 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. empty, unreal, but he is at least an artist, and when he thinks of the artist and forgets the prophet, as in " Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois," his juggling with the verse is magnificent, superb, " Comme un geai eur I'arbre Le roi se tient fier ; Sou coeur est de marbre, Son ventre est de chair. " On a pour sa nuque Et son front vermeil Fait une perruque Avec le soleil. Effroyable z^ro ; Sur lui se projette L'ombre du bourreau. " Son trSne est une tombe, Et sur le pav6 Quelque chose en tombe Qu'on n'a point lav& " 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. Bat stay, son tr&ne est la tombe; that makes the CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 85 verse, and the generalisation 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 advent of another great poet. But a work of art is valuable, 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 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 immor- tality would be gained by the destruction of one half of his magnificent works ; what oblivion is 86 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. secured by the publication of tbese 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, "rfes vers d'or sur une ecume d'airain" and such sententious platitudes (speaking of the realists), " Les epidemies de cette nature passent, et le genie demeurey 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 denounce, the inherent miseries of human life did not seem to touch him, and of the languors and ardours 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, CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 87 there is silver magic iu every note, and the song as it ascends rings, and all the air quivers with the everwidening 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 speaking of Paul Alexis' book " Le Besoin d'aimer," " Vous avez trouvez un titre assez laid pour faire reculer les divines Stoiles." I know not what instrument to compare 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. 88 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 adjective and its noun, but it was not until Banville wrote the line, " Elle jilait pensivement la blanche laine,^'' that the caesura received its final coup de grdce. This verse has been probably more imitated than any other verse in the French language. Pensivement was replaced by some similar four-syllable adverb, Elle tirait ■nonchalamment les has de soie, etc. It was the beginning of the end. I read the French poets of the modern school — Copp^e, Mendfes, L6on Diex, Verlaine, Jos6 Maria Heredia, Mallarm6, Rechepin, Villiers de I'lsle Adam. Copp6e, as may be imagined, I only was capable of appreciating in his first manner, when he wrote those exquisite but purely artistic sonnets "La Tulipe" and "Le Lys." In the latter a CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 89 room decorated witli daggers, armour, jewellery and china is beautifully described, and it is only in the last line that the lily which animates and gives life to the whole is introduced. But the exq[uisite 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, escaped me wholly, and I could not but turn with horror from such poems as " La Nourrice " and " Le Petit Epicier." How anyone could bring himself to acknowledge the vulgar details of our vulgar age I could not understand. The fiery glory of Jos6 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 clangour of the rhymes. " Entre le ciel qui brtile et la mer qui moutonne, Au somnolent soleil d'un midi monotone, Tu songes, guerri^re, aux vieux conquistadors ; 90 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. Et dans I'^nervement des nuits chaudes et calmea, Bergant ta gloire ^teinte, cH6, tu t'endors Sous les palmiers, an long fr^missement des palmes." Oatulle Mend^s, a perfect realisation 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 fervour 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 voluptuousness. He has written poems as good as Hugo, as good as Leconte de Lisle, as good as Banville, as good as Baudelaire, as good as Gautier, as good as CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 91 Coppde ; he never wrote an ngly line in his life, but he never wrote a line that some one of his brilliant contemporaries might not have written. He has produced good work of all kinds " et voilk tout." Every generation, every country, has its Catulle Mendfes. Robert Buchanan is ours, only in the adaptation Scotch gruel has been substituted for perfumed white wine. No more delightful talker than Mendfes, no more accom- plished litterateur, no more fluent . and translucid critic. I remember the great moonlights of the Place Pigale, when, on leaving the caf^, he would take me by the arm, and expound Hugo's or Zola's last book, thinking as he spoke of the Grreek sophists. There were for contrast Mallarm^'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 exception of his early verses I cannot say I ever frankly enjoyed his poetry. When I knew 92 WXFKSSVOSS OF A YOUXO MAN. him he had publishovl the oolebit^tod '* L'Apix'-s ilidi d*uu Fanu : '" the first poem writtou ia acconianoo with the thoory of symbolism. Hut whoLi it \ras givou to luo (this murvoUous brochure furnished with strange ilUistratioua and woudorful tassels), I thought it absurdly obsouro. iSiiu-o then, howover, it has boon ivudoivd by force of contrast with the braiu-cunlliug ouigmas tlie author has siuoc published a marvol of hioiility ; aud were I to ivad it now I should appi'eoitvto its many boautios. It beai's tlio same ivlation to the author's later work as Hietui to Tie M '(i/Xy/vV. But what is symbolism? Vulgarly sjioaking, ssiyiug the opposite to what you mean. For oxaiuplo, you want to say tlxat music which is tlio now ai't, is roplaciug the old art, which is poetry. First symbol : a house in wliieh there is a fVmeral, the pall oxteuils over tlie furniture. The house ia poetry, poetry ia dead. iSeeovul symbol : " iiotro mux grimoire," grimoire is the parchment, paroh- CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 03 tnont is used for writing, therefore, grimoire is the symbol for literature, " d'oh s^eu-altent tea milUers" thousands of what? of letters of course. Wo have hoard a groat deal in England of Ikowning obscurity. The "Red Cotton Nightcap Country" is child's play compared to a sonnet by a determined symbolist such as Malkviud, or hotter still his disciple Ghil who has added to tho difficulties of symbolism those of poetic instru- mentation. For according to M. Ghil and his organ Lea Ecrits pour I'Art, it would appear that the syllables of the Fronoh language evoke in us the sensations of dilForent colours j con- soqu(^nt.ly the timbre of the different instruments. The vowel « corresponds to the colour yellow, and therefore to the sound of flutes. Arthur Rimbaud was, it is true, first in tho Hold with tlioso pleasant and genial theories j but M. Ghil informs us that Rimbaud was mistalcon in many things, partioularly in coupling the sound 94 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. of the vowel u witli the colour green instead of with the colour yellow. M. Ghil has corrected this very stupid blunder and many others ; and his instrumentation in his last volume, "Le Geste Ing^nu," may be considered as complete and definitive. The work is dedicated to Mallarm^,- " P^re et seigneur des ors, des pierreries, et des poissons," and other works are to follow : — the six tomes of "L^gendes de R6ves et 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, unpremeditated harmonies comparable to nothing that I know of but some Hungarian rhapsody ; verses of seventeen syllables interwoven with verses of eight, and even nine, masculine rhymes, seeking strange union with feminine rhymes in the middle of the line — a CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 95 music sweet, subtil, and epicene ; the half-note, the inflexion, but not the full tone — as " se fondre, souvenir, des lys Acres delices." Se penchant vers lea daMias, Pes paons cabrient i^a rosace lunalre L'assoupissemeut des branches T^n&re Son pale visage aux mourants dahlias. Elle &oute au loin les brfeves musiquea Nuit claire aux ramures d'accords, Et la lassitude a berc^ son corps Au rhythme odorant des pures musiquea. Les paons ont dress6 la rampe occell^e Pour la desoente de ses yeux vera le tapia De choses et de sens Qui va vers rhorizon, parure vemiculfe Be son corps alangui En djne se tapit Le flou d^air molli de rdcits et d'encena. I laughed at these verbal eccentricities, but they were not without their effect, and that effect was a demoralising one ; for in me they aggravated the fever of the unknown, and whetted my appetite for the strange, abnormal and unhealthy in art. Hence all pallidities of thought and desire were eagerly welcomed, and Verlaine became my poet. 96 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, Never shall I forget the first enchantment of "Les F^tes Gralantes." Here all is twilight. 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, yellow, green, mauve, and undecided purple ; the voices ? strange contraltos ; the forms? not those of men or women, but mystic, hybrid creatures, with hands nervous and pale, and eyes charged with eager and fitful light . . . " un soir equivoque (Tautomne," ..." les belles pendent rtveuses d nos bras "... and they whisper " les mots speciaux et tout bas^ Grautier sang to his antique lyre praise of the flesh and contempt of the soul ; Baudelaire on a mediaeval organ chaunted his unbelief in goodness and truth and his hatred of life. But Yerlaine advances one step further : hate is to him as commonplace as love, unfaith as vulgar as faith. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 97 The world is merely a doll to he attired to-dary 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 the emotion ; every natural instinct of the language is violated, and the simple music native in French metre is replaced by falsetto notes sharp, and intense. The charm is that of an odour of iris exhaled by some ideal tissues, or of a missal in a gold case, a precious relic of the pomp and ritual of an archbishop of Persepolis. 98 CONFESSIOKS OF A YOUNG MAN. Parsifal a vaincu les fiUes, leur gentil Babil et la luxure amusante et sa pente Vers la chair de ee gargon -rierge que oela tente D 'aimer des seins Ifegers et ce gentil babil. II a vaincu la femme belle au coeur subtil Etalant ces bras frais et sa gorge exeitante ; II a vaincu I'enfer, il rentre dans sa tente Avec un lourd trophfe & sou bras pueriL Aveo la lanoe qui per^a le flanc supr&me II a gueri le roi, le voici roi lui-m&me, Et prltre du trfes-saint tr^sor esaentiel ; En robe d'or il adore, gloire et symbole, Le vase pur oil resplendit le sang r^el, Et, o ces yoix 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, thon art an integral part of our artistic life. The Island o' Fay, Silence, Elionore, were the familiar spirits of an apartment beautiful with tapestry and palms; Swinburne and Eossetti were the English poets 1 read therej and in a CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 99 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 wUd 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 jays, 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 handkerchiefs, there is a metal frame enchased with rubies and a few emeralds. And tliis chef dCoeuvre of antique workmanship sur- rounds 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 admir- able pages on this subject; my memory of them is vague and uncertain, although durable, as all memories of him must be. But that marvellous CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. lOl" 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 intel- lectually 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 volumes of modern poetry- seeks his ideal in a woman of thirty. It is clear that, by the very essence of her being, the young girl may evoke no ideal but that of home ; and home is in his eyes the antithesis of freedom, desire, aspiration. He longs for mystery, deep and endless, and he is tempted with a foolish little illusion — white dresses, water colour draw- ings, and popular music. He dreams of Pleasure, and he is ofi"ered Duty; for do not think that that 102 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. sylph-like waist does not suggest to him a yard of apron string, cries of children, and that most odions 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 halls, and has sat with them heneath shadowy curtains ; he knows that the world is full of beautiful women, all waiting to he loved and amused, the circles of his im- mediate years are filled with feminine faces, they cluster like flowers on this side and that, and they fade into garden-like spaces of colour. How many may love him ? The loveliest may one day smile upon his knee ! and shall he renounce all for that little creature who has just finished singing, and is handing round cups of tea ? Every bachelor contemplating marriage says, " I shall have to give up all for one, one." The young girl is often pretty but her prettiness is vague and uncertain, it inspires a sort of pitying CONFESSIONS OF A YOUKG MAN. 103 admiration, but it suggests nothing j the very essence of the young girl's being is that she should have nothing to suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to touch the imagination. No past lies hidden in those 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 struggle? where, then, is the triumph? Therefore, I say that if a young man's heart is not set on children, and tiresome dinner parties, the young girl presents to him no possible ideal. But the woman of thirty pre- sents from the outset all that is necessary to ensnare the heart of a young man. I see her sitting in her beautiful drawing-room, all com- posed by, and all belonging to her. Her chair 104 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. is placed beneath an evergreen plant, and tlie long leaves lean out as if to touch her neck. The great white and red roses of the d'auhusson carpet are spread enigmatically about her feline feet; a grand piano leans its melodious mouth to her ; and there she sits when her visitors have left her, playing Beethoven's sonatas in the dreamy firelight. The spring-tide shows but a bloom of unvarying fresh- ness ; August has languished and loved in the strength of the sun. She is stately, she is tall. What sins, what disappointments, what aspirations lie in those grey eyes, mysteriously still, and my- steriously revealed. These a young man longs to know of, they are his life. He imagines himself sitting by her, when the others have gone, holding her hand, calling on her name ; sometimes she moves away and plays the moonlight sonata. Let- ting her hands droop upon the keys . she talks sadly, maybe affectionately; she speaks of the tedium of life, of its disenchantments. He knows CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 105 well what she means, he has suffered as she has ; but could he tell her, could she understand, that in his love reality would dissolve into a dream, all limitations would open into boundless infinity. The husband he rarely sees. Sometimes a latch- key is heard about half-past six. The man is thick, strong, common ; his jaws are heavy ; his eyes are expressionless ; there is about him the loud swagger of the caserne; and he suggests the inevi- table question, Why did she marry him? — a ques- tion 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 (Edipus will ever come to unravel; this sphinx will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the sea- 106 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. gulls and waves ; she will never divulge her secret ; and if she is the woman and not a woman of thirty, she has forgotten. The young man shakes hands with the husband; he strives not to look embarrassed, and he talks of indifferent things — of how well he (the hus- band) is looking, of his amusements, his projects ; and then he (the young man of refined mind) tastes of that keen and highly-seasoned delight — happiness in crime. He knows not the details of her home life, the husband is merely a dark cloud that fills one side of the picture, sometimes obliterating the sunlight; a shadowy shape that in certain moments solidifies and assumes the likeness of a rock-sculp- tured, 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 I He is leaning against the woodwork in a distant doorway, he scarcely knows what to do CONFESSIONS OF A XOUNG MAN. 107 ■with himselfj 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 anj' advances towards him. The young girls looking so sweet — in the oneness of their fresh hair, flowers, dresses, and glances — are heing introduced, are get^ ting up to dance, and the hostess is looking round for partners. She sees the young man in the doorway ; hut 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 circular 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 he like mine — strange debauches of colour and Turkish lamps, Marshall's taste, an old cabinet, a faded pastel which embalms the memory of a 108 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 com- plex and various accidents of existence should have ruled out her life virtuously; if the many injlec- tions of sentiment have decided against this last consummation, then she will wax to the com- plete, 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), CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 109 a bitter sweet, a half-welcome enchantment ; she shall consume and destroy the strength and spirit of his life, leaving it desolation, a barren lands- cape, 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 dis- ease is not extinct in these modern days, nor will it ever be so long as men shall yearn for the un- attainable; 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 guineapig to the tabouret, pure Louis XV., the little beast struggles and sq^ueaks, the snake, his black, bead- like eyes are fixed, how superb are the oscillations . . . now he strikes, and slowly and with what ex- quisite gourmandise he lubricates and swallows. Marshall is at the organ in the hall, he is play- ing a Gregorian chant, that beautiful hymn, the " Vexilla Regis," by Saint Fortunatus, the great poet of the Middle Ages. And, having turned CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. Ill over the leaves of "Les Ffites Gallantes," 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 wan- dered by night into a witches' sahbath, 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 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 fell away on every side. These stories had one merit : they were 112 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. all, SO far as I can remember, perfectly constructed. For the art of telling a story clearly and drama- tically, selon les precedes de M. Scribe, I had thoroughly learnt 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 himself, Gautier. I fre- quently met M. Duval at breakfast at a neighbour- ing cafi, and our conversation turned on Vexposition de la pidce, 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 verite, la science, were repeated some half-a-dozen times. Hardly able^ to belie re my eyes, I read that you should write, with as little imagination as possible, that plot in a novel or in a play was illiterate and puerile, and that the art of M. Scribe was an art of strings and wires, etc. I rose up from breakfast, ordered my coffee, and stirred the sugar, a little dizzy, CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNS MAN. 113 like one who lias received a violent blow on the head. Echo-augury I Words heard in an unexpected quarter, but applying marvellously well to the besetting difiSculty of the moment. The reader who has followed me so far will remember the instant effect the word " Shelley " had upon me in child- hood, 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 certaiu moment, of the word " France " awoke a vital impulse, even a sense of final ordination, and how the irrevocable message was obeyed, and how it led to the creation of a mental existence. And now for a third time I experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and inward light. Naturalism, truth, the new art, above all the phrase, "the new art," impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. 8 114 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. 1 was dazzled, and I vaguely understood that my " Eoses of Midnight " were sterile eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanised into any semblance of life, passionless in all their passion. I had read a few chapters of the "Assommoir," as it appeared in La Repuhlique des Lettres; I had cried, "ridiculous, abominable," only because it is characteristic 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 ex- position of the new faith with febrile eagerness. 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 arguments for, or proof of the truth of natura- lism 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 115 art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifica- tions, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civili- sation, 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 would continue to a more glorious and legitimate conclusion the work that the prophets had begun; and at each deve- lopment of the theory of the new art and its uni- versal 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 weU drink the dregs of yesterday's champagne. One is lying before me now, and as I glance through the pages listlessly I say, "Only the simple crude statements of a man of powerful mind, but singularly narrow vision." 116 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. Slill, aJthoTigli eager and anxious for tlie fray, I did not see how I was to participate in it. 1 was not a novelist, not yet a dramatic author, and the possibility of a naturalistic poet seemed to me not a little doubtful. I had clearly understood that the lyrical quality was to be for ever banished ; there were to be no harps and lutes in our heaven, only drums ; and the preservation of all the essen- tials 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 tvas all that could be desired by one in my fever CONFESSIONS OF A XOUNG MAN. 117 of mind. Hugo's claims had been previously dis- proven, but now Banville and Gautier were declared to be warmed up dishes of the ancient world; Baudelaire was a naturalist, but he had been spoilt by the romantic influence of his generation. Cependant there were indications of the naturalistic movement even in poetry. I trembled with excite- ment, I could not read fast enough. Copp6e had striven to simplify language; he had versified the street cries, Achetez la France, le Soir, le Rappel ; he had sought to give utterance to humble senti- ments as in "Le Petit Epicier de Montrouge," the little grocer qui cassait le sucre avec melancolie ; Eichepin had boldly and frankly adopted the lan- guage 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 sub- jects are to hand, the formula alone is wanting. 118 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. The prospect was a dazzling one; I tried to calm myself. Had I the stuff in me to win and to wear these bays, this stupendous laurel crown? — bays, laurel crown, a distinct souvenir of Parnassus, but there is no modern equivalent, I must strive to invent a new one, in the meantime let me think. True it is that Swinburne was before me with the " Eomantiques." The hymn to Proserpine and Dolores are wonderful lyrical versions of Mdlle. de Maupin. In form the Leper is old English, the colouring is Baudelaire, but the rude industry of the dustmen and the comestible glories of the market-place shall be mine. A has ' Les Roses de Minuit"/ I felt the " naturalisation '' oi the " Roses of Midnight " would prove a difficult task. I soon found it an impossible 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.' " CONFESSIONS OE' A YOUNG MAN. 119 " Elle mit son plus heoiu cJiapeau, son ckapeau bleu" . . . and then? Why, then picking up her skirt she threads her way through the crowded streets, reads the advertisements on the walls, hails the omnibus, inquires at the concierge's loge, murmurs as she goes upstairs, " Que c'est haut le cinqieme," and then? Why, the door opens, and she cries, "Je faime^ But it was the idea of the new asstheticism — the new art corresponding to modern, as ancient art corresponded to ancient life — that captivated me, that led me away, and not a substantial know- ledge of the work done by the naturalists. I had read the "Assommoir," and had been much im- pressed by its pyramid size, strength, height, and decorative grandeur, and also by the immense harmonic development of the idea; and the fugal treatment of the different scenes had seemed to me astonishingly new — the washhouse, for example : the fight motive is indicated, then follows the 120 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. development of side issues, then comes the fight motive explained ; it is broken off short, it flutters through a web of progressive detail, the fight motive is again taken up, and now it is worked out in all its fulness ; it is worked up to crescendo, another side issue is introduced, and again the theme is given forth. And I marvelled greatly at the lordly, river-like roll of the narrative, some- times widening out into lakes and shallowing meres, but never stagnating in fen or marshlands. The language, too, which I did not then recognise as the weak point, being little more than a boiling down of Chateaubriand and Flaubert, spiced with Goncourt, delighted me with its novelty, its richness, its force. Nor did I then even roughly suspect that the very qualities which set my admir- ation in a blaze wilder than wildfire, being precisely those that had won the victory for the romantic school forty years before, were very antagonistic to those claimed for the new art ; I was deceived. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 121 as was all my generation, by a pertain externality, an outer skin, a nearness, un approchement ; in a word, by a substitution of Paris for the distant and exotic backgrounds so beloved- of the romantic school. I did not know then, as I do now, that art is eternal, that it is only the artist that changes, and that the two great divisions — the only possible divisions — are : those who have talent, and those who have no talent. But I do not regret my errors, my follies ; it is not well to know at once of the limitations of life and things. I should be less 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 intellectual vision as the great Balzac ; I felt that that vast immemorial mind 122 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. rose above them all, like a mountain above the highest tower. And, strange to say, it was Gautier that intro- duced me to Balzac; for mention is made in the wonderful preface to " Les Fleurs du Mai " of Seraphita : Seraphita, Seraphitus ; which is it ? — woman or man? Should Wilfred or Mona be the possessor ? A new Mdlle. de Maupin, with royal lily and aureole, cloudcapped mountains, 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 exhortations. Then the radiant vision, a white glory, the last outburst and manifestation, the trumpets of the apocalypse, the colour of heaven ; the closing of the stupendous 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 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. 123 Balzac backwards ; instead of beginning with the plain, simple, earthly tragedy of the P^re Goriot, I first knelt in a beautiful but distant coigne of the great world of his genius — Seraphita. Certain nuances of soul are characteristic of certain latitudes, and what subtle instinct led him to Norway in quest of this fervent soul ? The instincts of genius are unfathomable ; but he who has known the white northern women with their pure spiritual eyes, will aver that instinct led him aright. I have known one, one whom I used to call Seraphita; Copp^e knew her too, and that exquisite volume, "L'Bxil6," so Seraphita-like in the keen blond passion of its verse, was written to her^ and eacih poem was sent to her as it was written. Where is she now, that flower of northern snow, once seen for a season in Paris ? Has she returned to her native northern solitudes, great gulfs of sea water, mountain rock, and pine? Ba]zac'.s genius is in his titles as heaven is in 124 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. its stars: "Melmoth Eeconcilie," " J^sus-Christ en Flandres," "Le Eevers d'un Grand Homme," "La Cousine Bette." I read somewhere not very long ago, that Balzac was the greatest thinker that had appeared in France since Pascal. Of Pascal's claim to be a great thinker I confess I cannot judge. No man is greater than the age he lives in, and, therefore, to talk to us, the legitimate children of the nineteenth century, of logical proofs of the existence of God strikes us in just the same light as the logical proof of the existence of Jupiter Ammon. " Les Pens6es " could appear to me only as infinitely childish ; the form is no doubt superb, but tiresome and sterile to one of such modern and exotic taste as myself. Still, I accept thankfully, in its sense of two hundred years, the compliment paid to Balzac ; but I would add that personally he seems to me to have shown greater wings of mind than any artist that ever' lived. I am aware that this last statement CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 125 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, hut 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 tempta^ tion to "look well ; " a confession is interesting in proportion to the amount >of truth it contains, and I willj therefore, state frankly I never derived any profit whatsoever, and very little pleasure from the reading of the great plays. The beauty of the verse! Yesj he who loved Shelley so well as I could not fail to hear the melody of — "Muaic 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 126 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. feiit I am a sensualist in literature. I may see per- fectly well that this or that book is a work of genius, but if it doesn't " fetch me," it doesn't con- cern 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, intellec- tual sense if you will, but sense all the same, and ruled by the same caprices — those of the flesh ? Now we enter on very subtle distinctions. No doubt that there is the brain-judgment and the sense-judgment of a work of art. And it will be noticed that these two forces of discrimination exist sometimes almost independently of each other, in rare and radiant instances confounded and blended in one immense and unique love. Who has not been, unless perhaps some dusty old pedant, thrilled and driven to pleasure by the action of a book that penetrates to and speaks to you of your most pre- sent and most intimate emotions. This is of course pure sensualism ; but to take a less marked stage. COUrBSSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 127 Why should Marlowe enchant me? why should he delight and awake enthusiasm in me, while Shake- speare leaves me cold? The mind that can under- stand one can understand the other, but there are affinities in literature corresponding to, and very analogous to, sexual 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 ; btit even a capricious woman is con- stant, if not faithful to her amant de cmur. 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 destruction, saved me from the shoaling waters of new sestheticisms, the putrid mud of naturalism, and the faint and 128 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 he thought that shall make speech beautiful and rememberable. The grandeur and sublimity of Balzac's thoughts seem to me to rise to the loftiest heights, and his range is limitless ; there is no passion he has not touched, and what is more marvellous, he has given to each in art a place equivalent to the place it occupies in 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 flf verse over prose, which I CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 129 admit uahesitatiugly, be waived — that I fail, utterly fail to see in what Shakespeare is greater than Balzac. The range of the, poet's thoaght is of necessity not so wide, and his concessions must needs be greater than the novelists. On these points we will cry quits, and come at once to the vital question — the creation. Is Lucien inferior to Hamlet? Is Eugenie Grrandet inferior to Desde- mona? Is her father inferior to Shylock? Is Macbeth inferior to Vautrin? Can it be said that the apothecary in the " Oousine Bette," or the Baron Hulot, or the Cousine Bette herself is in- ferior 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 realisation of Falstaff must of necessity be more vivid than any 9 130 CONFESSIONS OF A TOTJNG MAN. character iu contemporary literature, although it were equally great. And so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I speak with absolute sincerity and conviction, the work of the novelist seems to me richer than that of the dramatist. Who shall forget those terrible words of the poor life-weary orphan in the boarding- house? Speaking of Vautrin she says, "His look frightens me as if he put his hand on my dress j" and another epigram from the same book, " Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention." Find me any- thing in La Rochefoucauld that goes more inci- sively 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 " Maxi- mes" and "Pens6es," even those of La Rochefou- cauld or Joubert, seem trivial and shallow. Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated in the "Oomddie CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 131 Humaine." I no doubt fluttered through some scores of other books, of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but he alone left any important or 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 j 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 contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering of ideas taken in flight. But in me the impulse is so original to frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and 132 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 com- position of my unfortunate " Roses of Midnight." Men and women, oh the strength of the living faces I 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 Athfenes." What is the " Nouvelle Athfenes " ? He who would know anything of my life must know something of the CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 133 academy of the fine arts. Not the official stupidity you read of in the daily papers, but the real French academy, the caf^. The "Nouvelle Athfenes" is a cafe on the Place Pigale. Ah ! the morning idle- nesses and the long evenings when life was but a summer illusion, the grey moonlights on the Place where we used to stand on the pavements, the shutters clanging up behind us, loath to sepa- rate, 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 as- semble there, and those years and our home, for it was our home, live only in a few pictures and a few pages of prose. The same old story, the van- quished only are victorious ; and though unac- knowledged, though unknown, the influence of the "Nouvelle Ath^nes" is inveterate in the artistic thought of the nineteenth century. How magnetic, intense, and vivid are these memories of youth. "With what strange, almost 134 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. nnnatural clearness do I see and hear, — see the jvhite face of that cafe, the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up to the Place, be- tween two streets. I can see down the incline of those two streets, and I know what shops are there; I can hear the glass-door of the cafe grate on the sand as I open it. T can recall the smell of every homv In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pungent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac; at five o'clock the fragrant odour of absinthe ; and soon after the steaming soup ascends from the kitchen ; and as the evening advances, the mingled smells of cigarettes, coffee, and weak beer. A partition, rising a few feet or more over the hats, separates the glass front from the main body of the cafe. The usual marble tables are there, and it is there we sat and Eestheticised till two o'clock in the morning. But who is that man? he whose prominent eyes flash with excitement. That is Villiers de I'lsle-Adam. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 135 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 challenging — that is all. But not in Spanish but in French are the challenges given; the town is in the hands of the French; it is under martial law. But now an ofl&cer passes down a certain garden, a Spaniard disguised as a French oflBcer; from the balcony the family— one of the most noble and oldest fami- lies 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 136 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. opening of the story, and he is striving in English to "scamp," in French to escamoter. "The family- are watching,, death if he is caught, if he fails to kill the French sentry. The cry of a bird, some vague sound attracts the sentry, he turns ; all is lost. The Spaniard is seized. Martial law, Spanish conspiracy must be put down. The French general is a man of iron." (Villiers laughs, a short hesitating laugh that is characteristic of him, and continues in his abrupt, uncertain way), "man of iron; not only he declares that the spy must be beheaded, but also the entire family-^a man of iron that, ha, ha; and then, no yon cannot, it is impos- sible for you to understand the enormity of the calamity — a thousand years before the conquest by the Moors, a Spaniard alone could — there is no one here, ha, ha, I was forgetting — the utter extinc- tion 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 'Nou- COlTfESSIONS OF A YOCNG MAN. 137 velle Athfenes ' — ha, ha, one must belong to a great family to understand, ha, ha. " The father beseeches, he begs that one mem- ber may be spared to continue the name — the youngest son — that is all ; if he could be saved, the rest what matter ; death is nothing to a Spaniard ; the family, the name, a thousand years of name is everything. The general is, you know, a ' man of iron.' ' Yes, one member of your family shall be respited, but on one condition.' To the agonised 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 condi- tions.' 'He who is respited must serve as exe- cutioner 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 yon, my son; I have always been a kind father, have I not? answer me; T haVe never refuged you 138 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. anything. Now you will not fail us, you will prove yourself worthy of the great name you hear. Ee- member your great ancestor who defeated the Moors, remember.' " (Villiers strives to get in a little local colour, but his knowledge of Spanish names and history is limited, and he in a certain sense fails.) "Then the mother comes to her son and says, ' My son, I have been a good mother, I have always loved you ; say you will not desert us in this hour of our great need.' Then the little sister comes, and the whole family kneels down and appeals to the horror stricken-boy. . . . " ' He will not prove himself unworthy of our name,' cries the father. 'Now, my son, courage, take the axe firmly, do what I ask you, courage, strike straight.' The father's head falls into the 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, CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 139 ' Remember your promise to yom- father, to your dead father.' The mother laid her head on the block, but he could not strike. 'Be not the first coward of our name, strike ; remember your promise to ns 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 aftej. 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. 140 CONTESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 ? 'So, for I would evoke an idea of beauty of line united to that of intellectual ex- pression — frank words, frank passion in his convic- tions, 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 ' Semiramis ' when I was painting ' Modern Paris,' " says Manet. " Manet is in despair because he cannot paint atrocious CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, 141 pictures like Durant, and be ffited and decorated ; lie 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 uature, trusting his instinct to lead him aright through the devious labyrinth of selection. Nor does his instinct ever fail him, there is a vision in his eyes which he calls nature, and which he paints unconsciously as he digests his food, thinking and declaring vehemently that the artist should not seek a syn- thesis, btj^t should paint merely what he sees. This extraordinary oneness of nature and artistic vision does not exist in Degas, and even his portraits are composed from drawings and notes. About midnight CatuUe Mendifes will drop in, when he has corrected his proofs. He wUl 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 142 COSFESSIOSS OF A TOrSG MAS. is dosed, when the last bock has he»i dmni^ ve shall walk about the great moonlight of the Place Figale, and thioogh the da^ shadows of di^ streets, talkmg of the last book published, he liang-ing oQ to TDj aim, speakiog in that liig li febnie Toice of his, eveiy phrase InminonB, asnai, eren as the eoanng moon and rlie fitfhl doods. Dnianty, an unknown Stemial, will oame in for an hoar or so ; he wili talk little and go awar juietif ; he knows, and Lis whole manner diows that he knows that Le is a de&ated man ; and if yoa ask him why he does not write another novel, he will saj, "Whars the good, it would not be read; no one read the others, and I mightn't do even as wdl if I tried again." Panl Alexis, Leon Dies, Pissarro, Cabaner, are also ftequentlj- sren in the - Xonrelle Athenes.-' Cabaner! the wodd knows not the names :f those who s&tuL the world : somewhere in one of the great popnloos chnrchjards of Paris there is a CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 143 forgotten grave, and there lies Cabaner. Cabaner 1 since the beginning there have been, till the end of time there shall be Cabaners; and they shall live miserably and they shall die miserable, and shall be forgotten j and there shall never arise a novelist great enough to make live in art that eternal spirit of devotion, disinterestedness, and aspiration, which in each generation incarnates itself in one heroic soul. Better than those who stepped to opulence and fame upon thee fallen thou wertj 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 remember thee ; I remember the silk shirts, the four sous of Italian cheese, the roll of bread, and the glass of milk ; — the streets were thy, dining-room. And the five-mile walk daily to the suburban music hall 144 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. where five francs were earned by playing tlie ac- companiments of comic songs. And the wonderful room on the fifth floor, which was furnished when that celebrated heritage of two thousand 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." Something extraordinary would be done with it, I knew, but the result exceeded my wildest expectation. The head must needs be struck ofi', so that the rapture of thy admiration should be secure from all jarring re- miniscence 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 CONFESSIONS OF A. YOUNG MAN. 145 the five francs a day earned in the music hall in the Avenue de la Motte Piquet; and when he made his dehut at the Thd&tre Lyrique, thou wert in the last stage of consumption and too ill to go to hear thy pupil's success. He was immediately engaged by Mapleson and taken to America. I remember thy face, Cabaner j I can see it now — that long sallow face ending in a brown beard, and the hollow eyes, the meagre arms covered with a silk shirt, contrasting strangely with the rest of the dress. In all thy privation and poverty, thou didst never forego thy silk shirt. I remember the paradoxes and the aphorisms, if not the exact words, the glamour and the sentiment of a humour that was 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 me faudrait trois orchestres militaires." And when I did show thee some poor 10 146 CONFESSIONS OF A TOX)NG MAN. verses of mine, French verses, for at this time 1 hated and had partly forgotten my native language-v- " 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 vrai, mats il s'agissait d'une charogne et cela releve beaucoup la chose" I remember, too, a few stray snatches of thy ex- traordinary music, "music that might be considered by Wagner as a little too advanced, but which Liszt would not fail to understand ; " also thy settings of sonnets where the melody was continued uninter- ruptedly from the first line to the last; and that stiU. more marvellous feat, thy setting, likewise with unbroken melody, of Villon's ballade "Les Dames du Temps Jadis;" and that Out-Cabanering of Cabaner, the putting to music of Cros's " Hareng Saur." And why didst thou remain ever poor and un- CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNS MAN. 147 known? Because of something too much, or some- thing too little ? Because of something too much ! so I think, at least; thy heart was too full of too pure an ideal, too far removed from all possible con- tagion with the base crowd. But, Cabaner, thou didst not labour in vain ; thy destiny, though obscure, was a valiant and fruitful one; and, as in lifCj thou didst live for others so now in death thou dost live in others. Thou wert in an hour of wonder and strange splendour when the last tints and lovelinesses of romance lingered in the deepening west; when out of the clear east rose with a mighty effulgence of colour and lawless light Eealism; when showing aloft in the dead pallor of the zenith, like a white flag fluttering faintly, Symbolists and Decadents appeared. Never before was there so sudden a flux and con- flux 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 148 CONFESSIONS OF A TOTING MAN. daily battle of the Realists was continued under the flash of the sunset, the arms of the Romantics glittered, the pale spiritual Symbolists watched and waited, none knowing yet of their presence. In such an hour of artistic convulsion and renewal of thought thou wert, and thou wert a magnificent rallying point for all comers; it was thou who didst theorise our confused aspirations, and by thy holy example didst save us from all base com- mercialism, from all hateful prostitution ; thou wert ever our high priest, and from thy high altar turned to us the white host, the ideal, the true and living God of all men. Cabaner, I see you now entering the "Nouvelle Athfenes ; " 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 yon are tired and footsore, you are ready to aestheticise till the caf^ closes; for you the homeless ones are CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. 14& 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 mUk your- self, 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 lovej art and friends, that is all. Reader, do yon know of anything more angelic? If you do you are more fortunate than I have been. CHAPTER VII. THE SYNTHESIS OF THE NOUVELLE ATHBNBS. rr^WO 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 dis- agreeable to me, and I cannot think of the place I was born in without a sensation 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 nearness ; I am one with them in their ideas and aspirations, and when I am with them, I am alive with a keen and penetrating sense of intimacy. Shall I explain CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 151 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 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 Protestantism, Protestantism is England. Protest- antism is strong, clean, and westernly, Catholicism 152 CONFESSIONS OF A T0UN6 MAN. is eunnch-like, dirty, and Oriental. . . . Yes, Oriental ; there is something even Chinese about it. What made England great was Protestantism, and when she ceases to he Protestant she will fall. . . . Look at the nations that have clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starving 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. Gargon, un hock! 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 Chateaubriand to the reporting in the Figaro. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 153 He seeks immortality in an exact description of a linendraper's shop; if the shop conferred immortality it shonld be upon the linendraper who created the shop, and not on the novelist who described it. And his last novel "I'CEavre," 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 Conqnfite de Paris." What does it mean ? I never knew any one who thought of conquering Paris; — no one ever spoke of conquering Paris except, per- haps, 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 favour of Lefevre, 154 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. and hoped that every one there would vote for Lefevre. Jnlien was very eloquent. He spoke of Le grand art, le nu, and Lefevre's unswerving fidel- ity to le nu . . . elegance, refinement, an echo of ancient Greece: and then, — what do you think? when he had exhausted all the reasons why the medal of honour should be 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 Eestheticisms ... a vain dream, and if realised 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 response ... it will be so tUl the end of time. And these great interests that are to continue to CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 155 the end of time began two years ago, when your pictures were not praised in the Figaro as much as you thought they should he. Marriage — ^what an abomination ! Love — yes, but not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, be- cause love is an' ideal ; that is to say, something not quite understood — transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife — you know all about her — who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream, the au deld? There is none. I say in marriage an au deld is impossible. . • . the endless duet of the marble and the water, the enerva- tion of burning odours, the baptismal whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely dark with kohl, names that evoke palm trees and Tuinfi, Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis. The monosyllable which epitomises the ennui and the 156 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. prose of our lives is heard not, thought not there — only the nightingale-harmony of an eternal yes. Freedom limitless ; the Mahometan stands on the verge of the abyss, and the spaces of perfume and colour extend and invite him with the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the unreal. . . . Thus love is possible, there is a delusion, an au deld. Good heavens ! and the world still believes in education, in teaching people the " grammar of art." Education 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, the poet, painter, musician, and novelist go straight to the food they want, guided by an unerring and ineffable instinct ; to teach them is to destroy the nerve of the artistic instinct, it is fatal. But above all in CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 157 painting . . . "correct drawing," "solid painting." Is it impossible to teach people, to force it into their heads that there is no such thing as correct draw- ing, and that if drawing were correct it would be wrong? Solid painting ; good heavens ! Do they suppose that there is one sort of painting that is better than all others, and that there is a receipt for making it as for making chocolate I Art is not mathematics, it is individuality. It does not matter how badly you paint, so long as you don't paint badly like other people. Education destroys individuality. That great studio of Julien's is a sphinx, and all the poor folk that go there for artistic education are devoured. After two years they all paint and draw alike, every one ; that vile execution, — they call it execution, — la pdet, la peinture au premier coup. I was over in England last year, and I saw somie portraits by a man called Richmond. They were horrible, but I liked them because they weren't like painting. 158 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. Stott and Sargent are clever fellows enough; I like Stott the best. If they had remained at home and hadn't been taught, they might have developed a personal art, but the trail of the serpent is over all they do — that vile French painting, le morceau, etc. Stott is getting over it by degrees. He exhibited a nymph this year, I know what he meant ; it was an interesting intention. I liked his little landscapes better . . . simplified into nothing, into a couple of primitive tints, wonderful clearness, light. But I doubt if he will find a public to understand all that. Democratic art I Art is the direct antithesis to democracy. . . . Athens ! a few thousand citizens who owned many thousand slaves, call that democ- racy I No ! what I am speaking of is modem democracy — the mass. The mass can only appre- ciate simple and naive emotions, puerile prettiness, above all conventionalities. See the Americans that CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 159 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 honour had been decided by a plebiscite, the dirty boy would have had an over- whelming majority. What is the literature of the people ? The idiotic stories of the Fetit Journal. Don't talk of Shakespeare, Molifere, and the masters; they are accepted on the authority of the centuries. If the people could understand Hamlet, the people would not read the Petit Journal; if the people could understand Michel Angelo, they would not look at our Bouguereau or your Bouguereau, Sir F. Leighton, For the last hundred years we have been going rapidly towards democracy, and what is the result? The destruction of the handicrafts. That there are still good pictures painted and good poems written proves nothing, there will always be found men 160 COKFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. to sacrifice their lives for. a picture or a poem. But the decorative arts which are executed in collaboration, and depend for support on the general taste of a large numher, have ceased to exist. Explain that if you can. I'll give you five thousand, ten thousand francs to buy a beautiful clock that is not a copy and is not ancient, and you can't do it. Such a thing does not exist. Look here ; I was going up the staircase of the Louvre the other day. They were putting up a mosaic ; it was horrible ; every one knows it is horrible. Well, I asked who had given the order for this mosaic, and I could not find out ; no one knew. An order is passed from bureau to bureau, and no one is responsible ; and it will be always so in a republic, and the more republican you are the worse it will be. The world is dying of machinery ; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNa MAN. 16l away and destroy civilisation ; man will have to rise against It sooner or later. . . . Capital, unpaid labour, wage-slaves, and all the rest — stuff. . . . Look at these plates ; they were painted by ma- chinery j 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, millions of plates are made more than we want, and there is a commercial crisis ; the thing is inevitable. I say the great and the reasonable revolution will be when mankind rises in revolt, and smashes the machinery and restores the bandit crafts. Goncourt is not an artist, notwithstanding all his affectation and outcries; he is not an artist. II me fait Veffet of an old woman shrieking after immortality and striving to beat down some frag- 11 162 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN, ment of it witli a broom. Once it was a duet, now it is a solo. They wrote novels, history, plays, they collected bric-d-brac — they wrote about their bric-d- brac; they painted in water-colours, they etched — they wrote about their water-colours and etchings ; they have made a will settling that the bric-d-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 everything they beard, felt, or saw, radotage de vieille /emme; 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 inesti- mable value. A real artist does not trouble himself about immortality, about everything he hears, feels, ^nd says ; he treats ideas and sensations as so much clay wherewith to create. And then the famous collaboration ; how it was CONfBSSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 163 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 I Any one who knows him must have heard him say, " Painting is absolutely scientific ; it is an exact science." And his work is in accord with his theory ; he risks nothing, all is brought down, arranged, balanced, and made one, — a well- 164 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. determined 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 SBe Duret in dress clothes ? Probably not. Did he ever see Duret with a lady's opera cloak? — I am sure he never did. Is Duret in the habit of going to the theatre with ladies ? No ; he is a litterateur who is always in men's society, rarely in ladies'. But these facts mattered nothing to Whistler as they matter to Degas, or to Manet. Whistler took Duret out of his environment, dressed him up, thought out a scheme — in a word, painted his idea without concerning himself in the least with the model. Mark you, I deny that I am urging any fault or flaw ; I am merely contending CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 165 that Whistler's art is not modern art, hut 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 uncompromis- ingly than Whistler. And he is right. Art is not nature. Art is nature digested. Art is a suhlime 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 necessary, forget what is useless ; but if he takes notes he will interrupt his artistic digestion, and the result will be a lot of little touches, inchoate and wanting in the elegant rhythm of the synthesis. I am sick of synthetical art ; we want observa- tion direct and unreasoned. What I reproach Millet with is that it is always the same thing, the same 166 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. peasant, the same sabot, the same sentiment. You must admit that it is somewhat stereotyped. What does that matter ; what is more stereo- typed than Japanese art? But that does not prevent it from being always beautiful. People talk of Manet's originality ; that is just what I can't see. "What he has got, and what you can't take away from him, is a magnificent execution. A piece of still life by Manet is the most wonderful thing in the world ; vividness of colour, breadth, simplicity, and directness of touch —marvellous ! French translation is the only translation ; in England you still continue to translate poetry into poetry, instead of into prose. We used to do the same, but we have long ago renounced such follies. Either of two things— if the translator is a good CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 1G7 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 poet puts an effect of rhyme, the translator puts an effect of caesura. Take Longfellow's " Dante." Does it give as good an idea of the original as our prose translation ? Is it as interesting reading ? Take Bayard Taylor's translation of " Goethe." Is it readable 1 Not to any one with an ear for verse. Will any one say that Taylor's would be read if the original did not exist. The fragment translated by Shelley is beautiful, but then it is Shelley. Look at Swinburne's translations of Villon. They are beautiful poems by Swinburne, that is all ; he makes Villon speak of a "splendid kissing mouth." Villon could not have done this unless he had read Swinburne. " Heine," translated by James Thomson, 168 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. is not diiFerent from Thomson's original poems ; "Heine," translated by Sir Theodore Martin, is doggerel. But in English blank verse yon can translate quite as literally as you could into prose? I doubt it, but even so, the rhythm of the blank line would carry your mind away from that of the original. But if you don't know the original ? The rhythm of the original can be suggested in prose judiciously used ; even if it isn't, your mind is at least free, whereas the English rhythm must destroy the sensation of something foreign. There is no translation except a word-for-word transla- tion. Baudelaire's translation of Poe, and Hugo's translation of Shakespeare, are marvellous in this CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 169 respect ; a pun or joke that is nntranslatable is explained in a note. But that is the way young ladies translate — word for word! No ; 'tis just what they don't do ; they think they are translating word for word, but they aren't All the proper names, no matter how unpronounce- able, must be rigidly adhered to ; you must never transpose versts into kilometres, or roubles into francs ; — I don't know what a verst is or what a rouble is, but when I see the words I am in Russia. Every proverb must be rendered literally, even if it doesn't make very good sense ; if it doesn't make sense at all, it must be explained in a note. For example, there is a proverb in German : " Quand le cheval est selU il faut le monter;" in French there is a proverb : " Quand le vin est tire il faut le hoire." Well, a translator who would translate 170 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. quand le cheval, etc., by qtmnd le vin, etc., is an ass, and does not know his business. In translation, only a strictly classical language should be used ; no word of slang, or even word of modern origin should be employed ; the translator's aim should be never to dissipate the illusion of an exotic. If I were translating the "Assommoir" into English, I should strive after a strong, flexible, but colour- less language, something — what shall I say? — a sort of a modern Addison, What, don't you know the story about Mend^s ? — when Chose wanted to marry his sister ? Chose s mother, it appears, went to live with a priest. The poor fellow was dreadfully cut up ; he was broken- hearted ; and he went to Mend^s, 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 apologising, he got it out. You know Mend^s, you can see him CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 171 smiling a little; and looking at Chose with that white cameo face of his he said, " Avec quel meilleur homme voulez-vous que votre mhre se fit? vous rCavez done, jeune homme, aucun sentiment religieux." Victor Hugo, he is a painter on porcelain ; his verse is mere decoration, long tendrils and flowers ; and the same thing over and over again. How to be happy ! — not to read Baudelaire and Verlaine, not to enter the Nouvelle AtMnes, unless perhaps to play dominoes like the bourgeois over there, not to do anything that would awake a too intense consciousness of life, — to live in a sleepy country side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas out to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are devoured by insects; the tame rook has flown away; mother lost her prayer-boek 172 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. coming from church, she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must he very nearly happy; — and to think there are people who would educate, who would draw these people out of the calm satisfac- tion of their instincts, and give them passions ! The philanthropist is the Nero of modern times. CHAPTER VIII. EXTRACT FROM A LETTER. " ~V TyHY did you not send a letter ? We have all been writing to you for the last six months, but no answer — none. Had you written one word I would have saved all. The poor con- cierge was in despair ; she said the proprietaire 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 fin auction had to be called. It nearly broke my heart to see those horrid men tramping over the delicate carpets,, their coarse faces set against the sweet colour of that beautifal English cretonne. . . . And 174 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. all the while the pastel by Manet, the great hat set like an aureole about the face — 'the eyes deep set in crimson shadow,' 'the fan widespread across the bosom ' (you see I am quoting your own words), looking down, the mistress of that little paradise of tapestry. She seemed to resent the intrusion. I looked once or twice half expecting those eyes ' deep set in crimson shadow ' to fill with tears. But nothing altered her great dignity ; she seemed to see all, but as a Buddha she remained impene- trable. . . . " I was there the night before the sale. I locked 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 cuite, that laughed amid the frosty boulin- grins. I found a large packet of letters which I instantly destroyed. You should not be so care- less; I wonder how it is that men are always careless about their letters. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 175 "The sale was announced for one o'clock. I wore a thick veil, for I did not wish to be recog- nised; the concierge of course knew me, but she can be depended upon. The poor old woman was in tears, so sorry was she to see all your pretty things sold up. You left owing her a hundred francs, but I have paid her; and talking of you we waited till the auctioneer arrived. Everything had been pulled down ; the tapestry from the walls, the picture, the two vases I gave you were on the table waiting the stroke of the hammer. And then the men, all the marchands de meubles in the quartier, came upstairs, spitting and talking coarsely — their foul voices went through me. They stamped, ■ spat, pulled the things about, nothing escaped them. One of them held up the Japanese dressing-gown and made some horrible jokes; and the auctioneer, who was a humorist, answered, "If there are any ladies' men present, we shall have some spirited bidding." The pastel I bought, and I shall keep 176 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. it and try to find some excuse to satisfy my husband, but I send you tbe 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, T was seized with an almost invincible desire to steal them. I don't know why, un caprice de femme. No one but you would have ever thought of converting satin shoes into match boxes. I wore them at that delicious ball ; we danced all night together, and you had an explanation with my husband (I was a little afraid for a moment, but it came out all right), and we went and sat on the balcony in the soft warm moonlight ; we CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 177 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 eamelias du balcon ressemhlent d des desirs mourants.'' It was horrid of you : but you always had a knack of rubbing one up the wrong way. Then do you not remember how we danced in one room, while the servants set the other out with little tables? That supper was fascinating! I suppose it was these pleasant remembrances which made me wish for the shoes, but I could not summon up courage enough to buy them, and the horrid people were comparing me with the pastel ; I suppose 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 12 178 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. de la Tour des Dames is ended for ever for yea and me. We shall not see tlie faun in terre cuite again ; I was thinking 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, shortsighted as I am, picking my way from the tramcar down to that out-of-the-way little street ! Men never appreciate the risks women run for them. But to leave my letters lying about — I cannot forgive that. When I told Fay she said, 'What can you expect? I warned you against flirting with boys.' I never did before — never. "Paris is now just as it was when you used ,?to sit on the balcony and I read you Browning. Yon never liked his poetry, and I cannot under- stand why. I have found a new poem which I am sure would convert you ; you should be here. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 179 There are lilacs in the room and the Mont Valerien is beautiful upon a great lemon sky, and the long avenue is merging into violet vapour. "We have already begun to think of where we shall go to this year. Last year we went to P , an enchanting place, quite rustic, but within easy distance of a casino. I had vowed not to dance, for I had been out every night during the season, but the temptation proved irresistible, and I gave way. There were two young men here, one the Count of B , the other the Marquis of Gr , 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 tres 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 180 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. you would come and spend a month ; there is an excellent hotel where you would be very comfort- able. We have decided nothing as yet. The Duchesse de is giving a costume balls they say it is going to be a most wonderful affair. I don't know what money is not going to be spent upon the cotillion. I have just got home a fasci- nating toilette. I am going as a Pierrotte; 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 nCa 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 stunid. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 181 1 wish you would not make foolisli 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 dicollete. She is une femme d^esprit, but the way she affich^'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 trhs Parisien. Come back and take a nice apartment on the Champs ElysSes. 182 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. You might come back for the Duchesse's hall. I will get an invitation for you, and will keep the cotillion for you. The idea of running away as you did, and never telling any one where you were going to. I always said you were a little cracked. And letting all your things he 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, hut not foolish ; worldly, oh, how worldly ! and yet not repulsively so, for there always was in her a certain- intensity of feeling that saved her from the common- place, and gave her 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 183 she was not very deep, that is quite certain. 1 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 — nervous 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 h^er a month. It is now seven years ago. How time passes ! I was very young then. What battles we have had, what quarrels ! Still we had good times together. She never lost sight of me, but no intrusion; far too clever for that. I never 184 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. got the better of her but once . . . once I did, enfin ! She soon made up for lost ground. I wonder what the charm was. I did not think her pretty, I did not think her clever ; that I know. . . , I never knew if she cared for me, never. There were moments when . , . Curious, febrile, subtle little creature, oh, infinitely subtle, subtle in every- thing, in her sensations subtle ; I suppose that was her charm, subtleness. I never knew if she cared for me, I never knew if she hated her husband, — one never knew her, — I never knew how she would receive me. The last time I saw her . . . that stupid American would take her downstairs, no getting rid of him, and I was hiding behind one of the pillars in the Eue de Eivoli, my hand on the cab door. However, she could not blame me that time — and all the stories she used to invent of my indiscretions ; I believe she used to get them up for the sake of the excitement. She was awfully silly in some ways, once you got her into CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, l85 a certain line ; that marriage, that title, and she nsed to think of it night and day. I shall never forget when she went into mourning for the Connt de Ghambord. And her tastes, oh, how bourgeois they were ! That salon ; the flagrantly modern clock, brass work, eight hundred francs on the Boulevard St. Germain, the cabinets, brass work, the rich brown carpet, and the furniture set all round the room geometrically, the great gilt mirror, the ancestral portrait, the arms and crest everywhere, and the stuffy bourgeois sense of com- fort ; a little grotesque no doubt ; — the mechanical admiration for all that is about her, for the general atmosphere ; the Figaro, that is to say Albert Wolf, I'homme le plus spirituel de Paris, c'est-d-dire, dans le monde, the success of Georges Ohnet and the talent of Gustave DorL But with all this vulgarity of taste certain appreciations, certain ebnlitions of sentiment, within the radius of sentiment certain elevations and depravities, — depravities in the legi- 186 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. timate sense of the word, that is to say, a revolt against the commonplace. . . . Ha, ha, ha ! how I have been dreaming ! I wish I had not been awoke from my reverie, it was pleasant. The letter just read indicates, if it does not clearly tell, the changes that have taken place in my life; and it is only necessary to. say that one morning, a few months ago, when my servant brought me some summer honey and a glass of milk to my bedside, she handed me an unpleasant letter. My agent's handwriting, even when I knew the envelope contained a cheque, has never quite failed to produce a sensation of repugnance ia me ; — so hateful is any sort of account, that I avoid as much as possible even knowing how I stand at my banker's. Therefore the odour of honey and milk, so evocative of fresh flowers and fields, was spoilt that morning for me ; and it was some time CONFESSIOl^S OF .A YOUNG MAN. 187 before I slipped on that beautiful Japanese dressing- gown, which I shall never see again, and read the odious epistle. That some wretched farmers and miners should refuse to starve, that I may not be deprived of my demi-tasse at Tortonis; that I may not be forced to leave this beautiful retreat, my cat and my python — monstrous. And these wretched creatures will find moral support in England ; they will find pity ! Pity, that most vile of all vile virtues, has never been known to me. The great pagan world I love knew it not. Now the world proposes to interrupt the terrible austere laws of nature which ordain that the weak shall be trampled upon, shall be ground into death and dust, that the strong shall be really strong, — that the strong shall be glorious, sublime. A little bourgeois comfort, a little bourgeois sense of right, cry the moderns. Hither the world has been drifting since the coming of the pale socialist of Galilee ; and this 188 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. is why I hate Him, and deny His divinity. His divinity is falling, it is evanescent in sight of the goal He dreamed; again He is denied by His disciples. Poor fallen God ! I, who hold nought else pitiful, pity Thee, Thy bleeding face and hands and feet, Thy hanging body; Thou at least art picturesque, and in a way beautiful in the midst of the sombre mediocrity, towards which Thou hast drifted for two thousand years, a flag ; and in which Thou shalt find Thy doom as I mine, I, who will not" adore Thee and cannot curse Thee now. For verily Thy life and Thy fate has been greater, stranger and more Divine than any man's has been. The chosen people, the garden, the betrayal, the crucifixion, and the beautiful story, not of Mary, but of Magdalen. The God descending to the harlot ! Even the great pagan world of marble and pomp and lust and cruelty, that my soul goes out to and hails as the grandest, has not so sublime a contrast to show us as this. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 189 Come to me, ye who are weak. The Word went forth, the terrible disastrous Word, and before it fell the ancient gods, and the vices that they represent, and which I revere, are outcast now in the world of men ; the Word went forth, and the world interpreted the Word, blindly, ignorantly, savagely, for two thousand years, but nevertheless Hearing every day the end — the end that Thou in Thy divine intelligence foresaw, that finds its voice to-day (enormous though the antithesis may be, I will say it) in the Pall Mall Gazette. What fate has been like Thine? Betrayed by Judas in the garden, denied by Peter before the cock crew, crucified between thieves, and mourned for by a harlot, and then sent bound and bare, nothing changed, nothing altered, in Thy ignominious plight, forthward in the world's van the glory and symbol of a man's new idea — Pity. Thy day is closing in, but the heavens are now wider afiame with Thy light than ever before— Thy light, which I, a pagan, standing on 190 CONFESSIONS OF, A YOUNG MAN. the last verge of the old world, declare to he darkness, the coming night of pity and justice which is imminent, which is the twentieth century. The hearers have relinquished Thy cross, they leave Thee in the hour of Thy universal triumph. Thy crown of thorns is falling. Thy face is buffeted with blows, and not even a reed is placed in Thy hand for sceptre ; only I and mine are by Thee, we who shall perish with Thee, in the ruin Thou hast created. Injustice we worship ; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is the sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of fearful injustice ; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of lofty aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but for injustice. Hail, therefore, to the thrice glorious virtue injustice! What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died u_der Pharaoh's lash or Egypt's sun? It was well that they died that I might CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 191 have the pyramids to look on, or to fill a musing hour with wonderment. Is there one amongst us who would exchange them for the lives of the ignominious slaves that died? What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old maiden was the price paid for Ingres' La Source? That the model died of drink and disease in the hospital, is nothing when compared with the essential that I should have La Source, that exquisite dream of innocence, to think of till my soul is sick with delight of the painter's holy vision. Nay more, the knowledge that a wrong was done — that millions of Israelites died in torments, that a girl, or a thousand girls, died in the hospital for that one virginal thing, is an added pleasure which I could not afford to spare. Oh, for the silence of marble courts, for the shadow of great pillars, for gold, for reticulated canopies of lilies ; to see the great gladiators pass, to hear them cry the famous "Ave Caesar," to hold the thumb down, to see the blood flow, to fill the languid 192 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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, trls-chlre, d, la tr^s-helle, qui remplit man cmur de clart4" let the first-horn in every house in Europe he slain ; and in all sincerity I profess my readiness 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 history are acts of injustice j and it is certain that if mankind does not relinquish at once, and for ever, its vain, mad, and fatal dream of justice, the world will lapse into barbarism. Eng- land was great and glorious, because England was unjust, and England's greatest son was the per- sonification 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 CONFESSIONS OK A YOUNG MAN. 193 gone; nothing remains to ns for worship bnt the Mass, the blind, inchoate, insatiate Mass; fog and fen land before us, we shall founder in putrefying mud, creatures of the ooze and rushes about us — we, the great ship that has floated up from the antique world. Oh, for the antique world, its plain passion, its plain joys in the sea, where the Triton blew a plaintive blast, and the forest where the whiteness of the nymph was seen escaping I 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! 13 CHAPTER IX. "DUT neither Apollo nor Buddha could help or save me. One in his exquisite balance of body, a skylark-like song of eternal beauty, stood lightly advancing ; the other sat sombrously con- templating, calm as a beautiful evening. I looked for sorrow in the eyes of the pastel — the beautiful pastel that seemed to fill with a real presence the rich autumnal leaves where the jays darted and screamed. The twisted columns of the bed rose, burdened with great weight of fringes and curtains, the python devoured a guinea pig, the last I gave him ; the great white cat came to me. I said all this must go, must henceforth be to me an aban- doned dream, a something, not more real than a CONFESSIONS OF A TOtTNG MAN. 195 summer meditation. So be it, and, as was char- acteristic of me, I broke with Paris suddenly, with- out warning anyone. I knew in my heart of hearts that I should never return, but no word was spoken, and I continued a pleasant delusion with myself; I told my concierge that I would return in a month, and I left all to be sold, brutally sold by auction, as the letter I read in the last chapter charmingly and touchingly describes. Not even to Marshall did I confide my foreboding that Paris would pass out of my life, that it would henceforth be with me a beautiful memory, but never more a practical delight. He and I were no longer living together ; we had parted a second time, but this time without bitterness of any kind ; he had learnt to feel that I wanted to live alone, and had moved away into the Latin quarter, whither I made occasional expeditions. I accompanied him once to the old haunts, but various terms of penal servitude had scattered our friends, and I could 196 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. not interest myself in tlie new. Nor did Marshall himself interest me as he had once done. To my eager taste, he had grown jnst 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 Nonvelle Athtees 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 under- stand. I had introduced him to Degas and Manet, but he had spoken of Jules Leffevre and Bougue- reau, and generally shown himself incapable of any higher education ; he could not enter where I had entered, and this was alienation. 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 pro- ceeded to drag me away from my glitter of satin to the dinginess of print dresses. It was more CONFESSIONS Off A TOUNG MAN. 197 than alienation, it was almost separation; but lie 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. Eap — 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 right. I am going to England ; come to say good-bye." " Going to England 1 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?" 198 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. "Oh, no!" " You will be just in time to see tlie Academy." The conversation turned on art, and we sesthe- ticised 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 mtist spend this last evening with you ; you shall both dine with me. Je quitte Paris demain matin, peut-Hre pour longtemps ; je voudrais passer ma derniere soiree avec mon ami i alors si vous voulez Men me permettre, mademoiselle, je vous invite tous les deux a diner; nous passerons la soiree ensemble si cela vous est agreable? " Je veux hien, monsieur ^^ Poor Marie! Marshall and I were absorbed in CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 199 each other and art. It was always so. We dined in a gargotte, and afterwards we went to a students' ball J and it seems like yesterday. I can see the moon sailing through a clear sky, and on the pavement's edge Marshall's beautiful, slim, manly figure, and Marie's exquisite gracefulness. She was Lef^vre's Chloe ; so every one sees her now. Her end was a tragic one. She invited her friends to dinner, and with the few pence that remained she bought some boxes of matches, boiled them, and drank the water. No one knew why ; some said it was love. I wfent 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 G-r6vin. 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 200 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 impres- sionable 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 j I had, as it were, forgotten everything. Every aspect of street and suburban CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 201 garden was new to me ; of the manner of life of Londoners I knew nothing. This sounds incredible, but it is so; I saw, but I could realise nothing. I went into a drawing-room, but everything seemed far away — a dream, a presentment, nothing more ; I was in touch with nothing ; of the thoughts and feelings of those I met I could understand nothing, nor could I sympathise with them : an Englishman was at that time as much out of my mental reach as an Esquimaux would be now. Women were nearer to me than men, and I will take this opportunity to note my observation, for I am not aware that any one else has observed that the difference between the two races is found in the men, not in the women. French and English women are psychologically very similar ; the stand- point 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 op- posed to that of an .Englishman ; they stand on 202 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. either side of a vast abyss, two animals different in colour, form, and temperament ; — two ideas destined to remain irrevocably separate and distinct. I have heard of writing and speating two lan- guages equally well : this was impossible to me, and I am convinced 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 detest- able fate. And it was in the last two years, when 1 began to write French verse and occasional chroni- ques 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 suddenly 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 203 slip, but my prose required a good deal of alteration, for a greater command of language is required to write in prose tlian in verse. I found this in 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 news- paper prose was beyond my reach, and act 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 OP THE PAST. As sailors watch from their prison For the faint grey line of the coasts, I look to the past re-arisen, And joys come over in hosts Like the white sea birds from then- roosts. I love not the indelicate present, The future 's unknown to our quest, To-day is the life of the peasant. Bat the past is a haven of rest — The things of the past are the best. 204 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. The rose of the past is better Than the rose we. lavish 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 aU is lovely and still; No grief nor fate that estranges, Nor hope that no life can fulfil. But ethereal shelter from Ul. 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 gravei 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 shSde, 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. CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. 205 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, ITor told with austere fingers beads, ' Nor reasoned with their grief and glee, t 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 grey doubt grows strong, And death is all that seems to dree. Wherefore with weary hearts we long For the old dear days of Arcady. 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. And SO it was that I came to settle down in a Strand lodging-honse, 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, peremp- 206 CONFESSIONS OF A TOTING MAN. tory proof, of my capacity or incapacity. A book I 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 forget. 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 proximity was intolerable, and eventually I decided on adding ten shillings to my rent, and I became the possessor of the CONFESSIONS OF A TOONG MAN. 207 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 mornings, and in the afternoon, friends — girls from the theatre — nsed to come and see her ; and Emma, the maid-of-all-work, used to take them up their tea ; and, oh I 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 j and I am sure that she now looks back with pleasure and thinks of those days as very happy ones. She was a taU 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 suit- 208 CONFESSIONS OP A YOUNG MAN. able ways of enjoying ourselves in life. One night she told me she was married j it was a solemn moment. I asked in a sympathetic voice why she was not living with her husband. She told me, but the reason 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 parlour 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 for- gotten — up at five o'clock every morning, scouring. CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. 209 washing, cooking, dressing those infamous children ; seventeen hours at least out of the twenty-four at the beck and call of landlady, lodgers, and quar- relling children ; seventeen hours at least out of the twenty-four drudging in that horrible kitchen, running up stairs with coals and breakfasts and cans of hot water ; down on your knees before a grate, pulling out the cinders with those hands — can I call them hands ? The lodgers sometimes threw you a kind word, but never one that re- cognised that you were akin to us, only the pity that might be extended to a dog. And I used to ask you aU 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 yon 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 W^inced a little ; but this was rarely, for you were 14 210 CONFESSIONS (Hf A YOUNO MAN. very nearly, oh, Yory iicmly iiii aTiimiil : your t.('iiii)ciraineiit. and iiilclIi^n'ciKMi wuh JuhI, ilial. of ii (l(ij>' l.liM,|-, lias pi('l«(Hl up a luaHlor, not n> real nuiHlcr, but a Tiialvculiift iiiaH(;(ir who iniiy l.iini it onl. nl. any imoukmiI,. Dickoim would HonUm(inl,iiliHo or ln,uj;li over you ; I do noil.luir. I nuMvily nHuijj;iiiHi\ you as one oC tho IiicIh of liiviliHalioii. You loolicd — well, to bo (Muulid, you lookdil n<'il-li(>r youn^jf nor old; hard work luul oblitornXiMl tho di'liaiitd marldugs of llio ycarH, aud hl\ you in rduiid uuiiilidrH Hoiu(illiiiifjr ovur Lliirl.y, Your luiir w(in ri'ddinli brown, and your Iimhi woro tliat |iln,iu lioiK^Hfc look that iH ho cHHi'iiUally MMfj;liHh. The rost of yon wn.H a uuihh of Htully (doilios, and whou you ruHlu^l up Hin'trH i saw HoiniiUiiii^ Mud, did uol, look liko i(^^rH ; n, liorriblo hihIi Uiat was of yourn, a sort oC (!arl,-liorso liki;rily to yon ; I have heard olhiirH HpimJc aii^n-ily in you, but nov(^r did that swocil; face of yours, Cor it was u sweet face — that sweet, natural goodnosH thai; is CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 211 SO sublime — lose its expression of perfect and un- failing 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 seventeen hoars a day in a lodging- house ; to be a Londoner, but to know only the slum in which you were born and the few shops in the Strand at which the landlady dealt. To know nothing of London meant in your case not to know that it was not England; England and London! you could not distinguish between them. Was England an island or a mountain ? you had no notion. I remember when you heard that Miss L was going to America, you asked me, and the question was sublime : " Is she going to travel all night ? " You had heard people speak of travelling all night, and that was all you knew of travel or any place that was not the Strand. I asked you if you went to church, and you said "No, it makes my eyes bad."' I said, ''But you 212 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. don't read; you can't read." "No, but I have to look at the book." I asked you if you had heard of God ; you hadn't ; but -when I pressed you on the point you suspected I was laughing at you, and you would not answer, and when I tried you again on the subject I could see that the landlady had been telling you what to say. But you had not understood, and your conscious ignorance, grown conscious within the last couple of days, was even more pitiful than your unconscious ignorance when you answered that you couldn't go to church be- cause 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 CONCESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 213 work seventeen hours a day and to get cheated out of your wages; to answer, when asked, why you did not get your wages or leave if you weren't paid, that you " didn't know how Mrs. S would get on without me." This woman owed you forty pounds, I think, so I calculated it from what you told me ; and yet you did not like to leave her because you did not know how she would get on without you. Sublime 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 burden, a drudge too horrible for anything but work ; and • I suppose, 214 CONFESSIONS OF A TO0NG MAN. 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 humour; you were born beauti- fully good as a rose is born with perfect perfume ; you were as unconscious of your goodness as the rose of its perfume. And you were taken by this fat landlady as 'Arry takes a rose and sticks it in his tobacco-reeking coat ; and you will be thrown away, shut out of doors when health fails you, or when, overcome by base usage, you take to drink. There is no hope for you ; even if yon were treated better and paid your wages there would be no hope. That forty pounds even, if they were given to you, CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 215 would bring you no good fortune. They would bring the idle loafer, who scorns you now as some- thing 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. Bat what truisms are these; who believes in philan- thropy nowadays? » • « • • "Come in." "Oh, it is you, Emma!" " Are you going to dine at home to-day, sir?" "What can I have?" "Well, yer can 'ave a chop or a steak." 216 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. " Anything else ? " "Yes, yer can 'aye 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 ." "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." "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 yon go?" " We went for a walk on the Embankment." CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 217 "And when is he coming for you again?" " He said he was coming last evening, hat 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." 218 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 sympathise with on the stairs at mid- night, loved me better, and our intimacy was more strange and subtle, because 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 219 that any young man, however 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 knocking at the door, "Nine o'clock, sir; 'ot water sir ; what will you have for breakfast ? " "What can 1 have?" "Anything you like, sir. You can have bacon and eggs, or " "Any- thing 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 oc- casional 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 thinking now of intel- lectual rather than physical comforts. I could put 220 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. up with even lodging-house food, but I found it difficult to forego the glitter and artistic enthusiasm of the cafd 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 clubs have been founded, and their leather arm-chairs have begotten Mr. Gosse ; but the tavern gave the world Villon and Marlowe. Nor is this to be wondered at. What is wanted is enthusiasm and devil-may-careism ; and the very aspect of a tavern is a snort of defiance at the hearth, 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 — LongmarCs, with a serial by Rider Haggard, the Nineteenth Century, with an article, " The Rehabilitation of the Pimp in Modern Society," by W. E. Gladstone — a dulness that's a CONCESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 221 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; everyone can go to the tavern, and no place in England where every- one can go is considered respectable. This is the genesis of the Club — out of the Housewife by Eespectability. 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 ti-ansformation will 222 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, be effected I can't say, but I know an editor or two who would be glad of an article on the subject. Respectability ! — a suburban villa, a piano in the drawing-room, and going home to dinner. Such things are no doubt very excellent, but they do not promote intensity of feeling, fervour of mind; and as art is in itself an outcry against the ani- mality of human existence, it would be well that the life of the artist should be a practical protest against the so-called decencies of life; and he can best protest by frequenting a tavern and cutting his club. In the past the artist has always been an outcast; it is only latterly he has become domes- ticated, 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 disso- luteness 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 223 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, wliat ridiculous endeavour! To realise 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 plus qu'uiae ardeur dans mes veines cach^, Ceat Veuus tout enti^re k sa proie attachfe." Swinburne, when he dodged about London, a lively young dog, wrote " Poems and Ballads," and " Chaste- 224 CONFESSIOKS OF A YOUNG MAN. lard," since he has gone to live at Putney, he has contributed to the Nineteenth Century, and pub- lished an interesting little volume entitled, "A Century of Eondels," in which he continues his plaint about his mother the sea. Eespectability is sweeping the picturesque out of life; national costumes are disappearing. The kilt is going or gone in the highlands, and the smock in the southlands, even the Japanese are becoming christian and respectable; in another quarter of a century silk hats and pianos will be found in every house in 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 ftlike; they are dressed by the same tailor, they dine at the same clubs, they swear the same oaths, they CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNU ilAN. 225 speak eq[ually bad English, they love the same women. Such a state of things is dreary enough, but what unimaginable dreariness there will be when there are neither rich nor poor, when all have been educated, when self-education has ceased. A terrible world to dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and hopelessness than Dante's lowest circle of hell. The spectre of famine, of the plague, of war, etc., are mild and gracious symbols com- pared with that menacing figure. Universal Educa- tion, with which we are threatened, which has al- ready eunuched the genius of the last five-and- twenty years of the nineteenth century, and pro- duced a limitless abortion in that of future time. Education, I tremble before thy dreaded name. The cruelties of Nero, of Caligula, what Were they? — a few crunched limbs in the amphitheatre ; but thine, Education, are the yearning of souls sick of life, of maddening discontent, of all the fearsome and fathomless sufferings of the mind. When Goethe 15 226 CONFESSIONS or A YOUNG MAN. 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 civilised the barbarians came down from the north and re- generated that nation with darkness ; but now there are no more barbarians, and sooner or later I am convinced that we shall have to end the evil by summary edicts — the obstruction no doubt will be. severe, the equivalents of Gladstone and Morley will stop at nothing to defeat the Bill; but it will nevertheless be carried by patriotic Conservative and Unionist majorities, and it will be written in the Statute Book that not more than one child in a hundred shall be taught to read, and no more than one in ten thousand shall learn the piano. Such will be the end of Eespectability, 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 227 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 trium- phant over the democratic wave ; the faith of the old world reposes in his breast, and he shall proclaim it when the waters have subsided. In the meanwhile Respectability, having destroyed the Tavern, and created the Club, continues to exercise a meretricious and enervating influence on literatm-e. All audacity of thought and expression has been stamped out, and the conventionalities are rigorously respected. It has been said a thou- sand times that an art is only a reflection of a certain age; quite so, only certain ages are more interesting than others, and consequently produce better art, just as certain seasons produce better crops. We heard in the Nouvelle Ath^nes how the Democratic movement, in other words. Respecta- bility, in other words, Education, has extinguished the handicrafts; it was admitted that in the more 228 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. individual arts — painting and poetry — men would be always found to sacriiice their lives for a picture or a poem : but no man is, after all, so immea- surably 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 suiHce. Then the pressure on him from without is as water upon the diver ; and sooner or later he grows fatigued and comes to the sur- face 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 neighbours. Re- spectability has wound itself about society, a sort CONTESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 229 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 requirements. The villa goes to the Academy, the villa goes to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly realistic ; not the great realism of idea, but the puny reality of materialism ; not the deep poetry of a Peter de Hogue, but the meanness of a Frith — not the winged realism of Balzac, but the degrading naturalism of a coloured photograph. To my mind there is no sadder spectacle of artistic debauchery than a London theatre ; the overfed inhabitants of the villa in the stalls hoping for gross excitement to assist them through their hesitating digestions ; an ignorant mob in the pit and gallery forgetting the miseries of life in im- becile stories reeking of the sentimentality of the back stairs. Were other ages as coarse and as common as ours ? It is^ difficult to imagine 230 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 Harbour Lights. Artistic atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled — the miser in the old castle 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 231 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 fivokes 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, snfi&ced 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 232 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. dint of anxious archaeology to construct the Doge's palace upon the stage. By one rich pillar, by some projecting balustrade taken in conjunction with a moored gondola, we should strive to evoke the soul of the city of Veronese: by the magical and un- equalled selection of a subtle and unexpected feature of a thought or aspect of a landscape, and not by the up-piling of 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 dea 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 characteristic of the present day, nowhere do we find these principles so grossly violated as in the representation of his plays. I CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, 233 had painfol 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 indications, 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 offensiveness 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, 234 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. would be a symbol ; and my mind would be free to imagine tbe divine Juliet of the poet, whereas I could but dream of the bright eyes and delicate mien and motion of the woman who had thrast herself between me and it. But not with symbol and subtle suggestion has the villa to do, but with such stolid, intellectual fare as corresponds to its material wants. The villa has not time to think, the villa is the working bee. The tavern is the drone. It has no boys to put to school, no neighbours to study, and is therefore a little more refined, or, should I say ? depraved, in its taste. The villa in one form or other has always existed, and always will exist so long as our pre- sent 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 inflaence to the villa, and that its disappearance has not had a vulgarising eifect on artistic work of all kinds, and CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 235 the club has been proved impotent 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. (Singularly inappropriate comparison, but I am in such excellent humour to-day ; humour 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 waltzes will not entirely suffice, nor even tennis ; the girls must read. Mother cannot keep a censor it is as much as she can do to keep a cook, housemaid, and page-boy), besides the expense would 236 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG HAS. 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 31s. 6a?. ; 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 ilite could obtain, and with them a sense of being put on a footing of equality with my Lady This and Lady That, and certainty that nothing would come into the hands of dear Kate and Mary ind Maggie that they might not read, and all for two guineas a year. English fic- tion became pure, and the garlic and assafoetida 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 CONFESSIOKS OF A YOUNG MAN. 237 longer procurable. But at this point human nature intervened ; poor human nature ! when you pinch it in 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 literature (I employ the words "dirty stories" in the circulating 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 in- wards, 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 confidently asserted that an English woman of sixty would not read what would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of a maiden of any other 2;1S CKJNFESSIOKS OF A YOU NO MAN. nation. But hnmilintiou aud sorrow were awaiting Mndio. Trno it is that wo still oontiniunl to sub- scribe to his library, trne it is that wo still oou- tiunod to yo to ohuroli, ti'uo it is that we tnrnod our laws away whea Mdllt\ de Muu/hh or tho A/igot/imoir was s}ioken of; to all appoai'anoo \\'o wore as gooil aud ohasto as ovon Mudio niig'lit wish ns ; and no donbt lu' lookinl Imok upon his forty yi'ars of olfurt witli prido ; no doubt ho beat his manly broast and said, " I havo soorolunl the evil one out of the villa; tho bead of the sorpont is erusbed for (n'enuore ; " but lo, suddenly, with all tho liorror of an oarth(pialve, tho shnubrous law courts awoke, and tho burning eiiulers of fornication and tho blinding and snlfocatiug sniohe of adultery were poured upon and hung over tlie land. Through tho niiglity columns of our newspapers the torriblo lava rolled unceasing, and in the black stream tlu* villa, with all its beautiful illuHJons, tumbled and disajipearod. CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNU MAN. 239 An awfal and terrifying proof of the futility of hcinian effort, that there is neither bad work nor good work to do, nothing but to await the ooming 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 forward in its favour. It seems to me this : the circulating library is conservatism, art is always conservative j the circulating library lifts the writer out of the precariousness 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 degrad- ing methods of attracting attention ; the known writer, having a certain market for his work, is enabled to think more of it and loss of the im- mediate acclamation of the crowd ; but all 240 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. 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 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, sophisticated, and lactiag, 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- CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 241 humoured costers, the cheerful lights o' love, the extraordinary comics. What delightful unison of enjoyment, what unanimity of soul, what com-. munality of wit; all knew each other, all enjoyed each other's presence ; in a word, there was life. Then there were no cascades of real water, nor London docks, nor offensively rich furniture, with hotel lifts down which 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 16 242 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. in the gallery ; nor is there in the hall any affect- ation of language, nor that worn-out rhetoric which reminds you of a broken- winded barrel-organ playing a eke la morte, bad 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 sublimated, that it is no longer repellent vulgarity but art, choice and rare — see, here she comes with " What cheer, Eea ; Eea'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, per- verted, and are not these the aions and the attributes of art? Now see that perfect comedian, Arthur Koberts, superior to Irving because he is CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 243 working with living material ; how trim and saucy he is! and how he erokes 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 fall 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 eflflores- cence, as the rhapsodist rose to Sophocles, as the miracle play rose through Peele and Nash to Marlowe, hence to the wondrous summer of Shake- speare, to die later on in the mist and yellow and brown of the autumn of Crowes and Davenants. I have seen music-hall sketches, comic interludes that in their unexpectedness and naive naturalness re- 244 COKFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. mind me of the comic passages in Marlowe's Faustus, I waited (I admit in vain) for some beantiful phantom to appear, and to hear an en- thusiastic worshipper cry out in his agony : — "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium ? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul ; see where it flies ! Come, Helen, come ; give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena." And then the astonishing change of key : — "I will be Paris, and for love of thee, Instead of Troy shall Wurtemberg be sacked," etc. The hall is at least a protest against the weari- some stories concerning wills, misers in old castles, lost heirs, and the woeful solutions of such things — she who has been kept in the castle cellar for twenty years restored to the delights of hair-pins and a mauve dress, the ingenue to the protecting arm, etc. The music-hall is a protest against Mrs. Kendal's marital tendernesses and the abortive platitudes of Messrs. Pettit and Sims j the music- CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAIv^ 245 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 cir- culating library, the club, and for this the "'all" is inexpressibly dear to me. But in the interests of those illiterate institu- tions 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 were removed it is pos- sible, if it is not certain, that while some halls remained faithful to comic songs and jugglers others would gradually learn to cater for more intellectual and subtle audiences, and that out of obscurity and disorder new dramatic forms, coloured 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 TT 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 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 wel- come 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 round 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 247 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 gainsaid, 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 mur- dered by the editors of (I will suppress names), torn in pieces by the sub-editors, and devoured by the ofiBlce boys. There was no wild theory which I did not assail them with, there was no strange plan for the instant extermination of the Philistine, which I did not press upon them, and (here I must whisper), with a fair amount of success, not complete success I am glad to say — that would have meant for the editors a change from their arm-chairs to the benches of the Union and the plank beds of HoUoway. The actress when she returned home from the theatre, 248 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. saggested I had an enemy, a vindictive enemy, who dogged my steps ; but her stage experience led her astray. I had no enemy except myself; or to put it scientifically, no enemy except the logical consequences of my past life and educa- tion, and these caused me a great and real inconvenience. French wit was in my hrain, 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 ElysSes for my characters. That I should have forgotten so much in ten years seems incredible, and it will be deemed impossible 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 249 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 articles, 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 250 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. waited till I grew akin to those around me, and my thoughts blended with, and took root in my environment. I wrote a play or two, I translated a French opera, which had a run of six nights, I dramatized a novel, I wrote short stories, and I read a good deal of contemporary fiction. The first book that came under my hand was " A Portrait of a Lady," by Henry James. Each scene is developed 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 CONCESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 251 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 colour 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 precisely as an accurate memory of a fashionable soiree — the staircase with its ascend- ing figures, the hostess smiling, 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 odour of the gardenias ; there is brilliant light here ; there is shadow in the further rooms ; the women's feet pass to and fro beneath the stiff skirts ; I call for my hat and coat ; I light a cigar ; I stroll np Piccadilly ... a very pleasant evening; I have seen a good many people I knew; I have observed 252 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 253 accomplislied ? In real life marder, adultery, and Buicide are of common occurrence ; but Mr. James's people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition. Suicide or adultery has hap- pened before the story begins, 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 personal taste ; some prefer character-drawing to adventures, some adventures to character-drawing ; that you cannot have both at once I take to be a self-evident pro- position ; so when Mr. Lang says, " I like adven- tures," 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 yon?" 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 ad- ventures. One, two, or even three determining 254 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. actions are not antagonistic to cliaracter-drawiag, tlie practice of Balzac, and Flaubert, and Thackeray prove that. Is Mr. James of the same mind as the poet Verlaine — " La nuance, pas la couleur, Seulement la nuance, Tout le rests est litt&ature.' 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 every- where ; a couple of young men, one a little cynical, the other a little over-shadowed by his love, a strong, bearded man of fifty in the background ; in a word, a Tom Eobertson comedy faintly spiced with American. Henry James went to France and CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 255 read Tonrgueneff. 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 Tonrgueneff wrote the moral history of Russia — he borrowed at first hand, understanding what he was borrowing. W. D. Howells borrowed at second hand, and without understanding what he was borrowing. Altogether Mr. James's instincts are more scholarly. Although his reserve irritates me, and I often regret 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 favourable to artistic production, but the art of an age is the spirit of that age ; if I violate the prejudices of the age I shall miss its spirit, and an art that is 256 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. not redolent of the spirit of its age is an arti- ficial flower, perfameless, or perfumed with the scent of flowers that bloomed three hundred years ago." Plausible, ingenious, quite in the spirit of Mr. James's mind ; I can almost hear him reason so; nor does the argument displease me, for it is conceived in a scholarly spirit. 'Sow my conception of W. D. Howells is quite difierent — I see him the happy father of a numerous family ; the sun is shining, the girls and boys are playing on the lawn, they come trooping in to 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 acquainted, was very genuine indeed, "Love in a Valley" is a beautiful poem, and the "Nuptials of Attila," I read it in the Mw Quarterly/ Review years ago, is very present in my mind, and it is a pleasure to recall its chanting CONTESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 257 rhytlim, and lordly and sombre refrain — "Make the bed for Attila." I expected, therefore, one of my old passionate delights from his novels. I was disappointed, painfully disappointed. But before I say more concerning Mr. Meredith, I will admit at once frankly and fearlessly, that I am not a com- petent 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 over- shadowed, 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 antagonistic to, so entirely out of sympathy with, that we are in no true sense 17 258 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 savour of life ; but in George Meredith there is nothing but crackjaw sentences, empty and unplea- sant in the mouth as sterile nuts. I could select hundreds of phrases which Mr. Meredith would pro- bably call epigrams, and I would defy anyone 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, 1 asked myself, could the man who wrote the " Nuptials of Attila " write this ? but my soul returned no answer, and I listened as one in a CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 259 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. Eohert 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 theni in verse, they were motives tor 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 refrain. Then a description 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. 260 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. I read on until I came to a yonng man who fell from his horse, or had been thrown from his horse, I never knew which, nor did I feel enough in- terest in the matter to make research ; the young man was put to bed by his mother, and once in bed he began to talk ! . . . four, five, six, ten pages of talk, and such talk I I can offer no opinion why Mr. G-eorge 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 j my mind astonished at receiving 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 common- place — the people in it are as lacking in subtlety as those of a Drury Lane melodrama. "Diana of the Orossways " I liked better, and had I had absolutely nothing to do I might have read CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 2G1 it to the end. I remember a scene with a rustic — a rustic who could eat hog a solid hour — that amused me. I remember 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 "P^res et Enfants," when Tourgueneff is unveiling the woman's, shall I say, affection, for Bazaroff, 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 262 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. loved, that divine representation of all that is young and desirable 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, '^ Vetre ceUbre et d'etre aime," — 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 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 measur- CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MANi 263 able distance of La Eochefoucauldj Balzac, or even Goncourt. The admirers of Mr. Meredith coa- stantly deplore their existence, admitting that they destroy 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 plea- sures differently ; mine are spontaneous, and I know nothing about translating the rank smell of a nettle into the fragrance of a rose, and then enjoying it. Mr. Meredith's conception of life is crooked, ill-balanced, and out of tune. What remains? — a certain lustiness. You have seen a big man with square shoulders 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 264 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 1 may praise it for nought else, I can praise it for this. I have noticed that if I buy a book because I am advised, or because I think I ought, my reading is sure to prove sterile. 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. Black- more 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 relation to George Eliot as Jules Breton does to Millet — CONFKSSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 265 a vulgarisation never offensive, and executed with ability. The story' of an art is always the same, ... a succession of abortive but ever strengthen- ing 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 Midland 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, straight- forward work. It is nnillumined 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 springs^a fat coachman on the box and a footman whose livery was made for his pre- decessor. In criticising Mr. Meredith I was out 266 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. of sympathy with my author, ill at ease, angry, puzzled J 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. I have heard that Mr. Hardy is country bred, but I should not have discovered this from his writ- ings. 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, dialogues and descriptions. Take for instance the long evening talk between the farm people when Oak is seeking employ- ment. It is not the absolute and literal transcript from nature after the manner of Henri Monierj for that it is a little too diluted with Mr. Hardy's brains, the edges are a little sharpened and COKFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 267 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 with- out 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 ; 268 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 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 tben the clouds are liquescent, 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 rbythm and inevitableness is always indicative of genius. Shakespeare affords some magnificent CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 269 examples, likewise Balzac, likewise George Eliot, likewise Tourgueneff; the "OEdipus" is, of coarse, the crowning and final achievement in the music of sequence and the massy harmonies of fate. But in contemporary 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 accomplished 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 Ify 270 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNGt MAN. the current I knew the 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 gar- rulous, stupidly prolix, swollen with comments not interesting in themselves and leading to nothing. Mr. Hardy possesses 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 Rdgiment, or Ernani ; it is corrupt with all the vices of the school, and it does not contain a single passage of real fervour 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. ^71 end to end. The realistic school following on Wagner's footsteps discovered that a novel had much better be all narrative — an uninterrupted flow of narrative. Description is narrative, 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 personce and the deeds in which they are involved must correspond, and their relationship should remain unimpaired. Turner's " Carthage " is nature transposed and wonderfully modified. Some of the passages of light and shade there — those of the balustrade — are fugues, and there his art is allied to Bach in sonority and beautiful combination. Turner knew that a branch hung across the sun looked at separately was black, 272 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. but he painted it light to maintaia the equipoise of atmosphere. In the novel the chai'acters are the voice, the deeds are the orchestra. But the English novelist takes 'Arry and 'Arriet, and without question allows them to achieve deeds ; lior does he hesitate to pass them into the realms of the supernatural. Such violation of the first principles 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 instinctive 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 fabri- cators of singular adventures. In Scott leather jerkins, swords, horses, mountains, and castles harmonise completely and fully with food, fighting, CONFESSIONS OF A Y.OUNG MAN, 273 words, and vision of life ; the chords are simple as Handel's, but they are as perfect. Lytton's work, although as valgar as Verdi's is, in much the same fashion, sustained by a natural sense of formal harmony ; but all that follows is decadent, — an ad- mixture of romance and realism, the exaggerations of Hugo and the homeliness of TroUope ; 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 improbability, which in these days does duty for imagination, is mixed with the familiar aspects of life, the result is inchoate 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 18 274 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 population 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 suppressed, 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 surrender 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 undergraduate ; and so the Villa is the author of "Eider Haggard," "Hugh Conway," "Eobert Buchanan," and the author of "The House on the Marsh." I read two books by Mr, Christip Murray, CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 275 "Joseph's Coat" and "Rainbow Gold," and one by Messrs. Besant and Rice, — "The Seamy Side^" It is difficult to criticise such work, there is abso- lutely nothing to say but that it is as suited to the mental needs of the Villa as the baker's loares 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 -jvorks of art, the rest of the fiction of the country is unknown to men of letters. But "Rainbow Gold," I take the best of the three, is not bad as a second-rate French norel 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 "Chaplain of the Fleet" and other novels, but 276 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, this is not possible. 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 moment 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 : CatuUe Mendfes is his counterpart in France, — ^but the pallid Portuguese Jew with his Christ-like face, and his fascinating fervour is more interesting than the spectacled Scotchman. Both began with volumes of excellent but characterless verse, and loud outcries about the dignity of art, and both have well , . . Mr. Robert Buchanan has collaborated vrith Gus Harris, and written the programme poetry for the Vaudeville Theatre ; he has written a novel, the less said about which the better — he has attacked men whose CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAif. 277 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 that Fielding was a genius in spite of his coarseness, thereby infer- ring that he was a much greater genius since he had sojourned in this Scotch house of literary ill-fame. Clarville, the author of " Madame Angot," transformed Madame Marneff into a vir- tuous 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- 278 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. hills and ostriclies 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, — rhythmical sequence of events described with rhythmical sequence of phrase. I read the "Story of Elizabeth" by Miss Thackeray. It came upon me with all the fresh and fair natural- ness of a garden full of lilacs and blue sky, and I thought of Hardy, Blackmore, Mun-ay, and Besant as of great warehouses where everything might be had, and even if the article required were not in stock it could be supplied in a few days at latest. The exquisite little descriptions, fall of air, colour, 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 270 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 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; EUy 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 greyness 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 280 CONFESSIONS OF A TOBNG MAN. rail against beautiful •water-colour indications of balconies, vases, gardens, fields, and harvesters because they have not the fervid glow and passion* ate force of Titian's Ariadne; Miss Thackeray cannot give us a Maggie Tulliver, and all the many profound modulations of that Beethoven-lite 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, that rhythmical progression of events, rhythm and inevitableness (two words for one and the same thing) is not there. Elly's golden head, the back-ground of austere French Protestants, is sketched with a flowing water-colour brush, I do not knov; if it is CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 281 true, but true or false in reality, it is true in art. But the jarring dissonance of her marriage is inadmissible ; it cannot be led up to by chords 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 EUy 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 difi'use, 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 grey and opaline tints of morning passes the grand figure of Eachel Conway, a victim chosen for her beauty, and 282 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. crowned with flowers of sacrifice. Slie 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, reading from a score, we .are satisfied with the flute and bassoons that play so faultlessly in soundless dots. There is neither hesitation nor doubt. Kachel Conway puts her dreams away, she wiU henc^ forth walk in a sad and sbady path ; her interests CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 283 are centred in the child of the man she loves, and as she loolis for a last time on the cload 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 sentiments 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 Eobinson, 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 284 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. Celt, attainted ia blood and brain by generations of famine and drinbj alternating with the fervid sensu- ousness of the girl, her Saxon sense of right alternating with the Celt's hereditary sense of revenge, his dreamy patriotism, his facile platitudes, his acceptance of literature as a sort of bread basket, his knowledge that he is not great nor strong, and can do nothing 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 understand that caste and race separate them ; and the damp air of spent desire, and the grey and falling leaves of her illusions fill her life's sky. Nor is there any hope for her until the husband unties the awful knot by suicide. I will state frankly that Mr. E. L. Stevenson CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, 285 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, epitomises 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 author 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, "Treasure 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. 286 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 wUl 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 sentence rings of its individaality. 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 wiU add, the most gentlemanly young man that ever walked in the Burlington. Mr. Stevenson is competent to understand any thought that might be presented to him, but if he were to use it, it would instantly become neat, sharp, ornamental, light, and graceful ; and it would lose all its original richness and harmony. It is not Mr. Stevenson's brain CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 287 that prevents him from being a thinker, but his style. Another thing that strikes me in thinking of Stevenson (I pass over his direct indebtedness to Edgar Poe, and his constant appropriation of his methods), is the unsuitableness of the special characteristics of his talent to the age he lives in. He wastes in his limitations, and his talent is vented in prettinesses of style. In speaking of Mr. Henry James, I said that, although he had conceded much to the foolish, false, and hypocritical taste of the time, the concessions he made had in little or nothing impaired his talent. The very opposite seems to me the case with Mr. Stevenson. For if any man living in this end of the century needed freedom of expression for the distinct development of his genius, that man is K. 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, 288 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN, Turn your platitudes prettily, but write no word that could offend the chaste mind of the young girl who has spent her morning reading the Colin Campbell divorce case ; so says the age we live in. The penny paper that may be bought everywhere, that is allowed to lie on every table, prints seven or eight columns of filth, for no reason except that the public likes to read filth ; the poet and novelist must epiasculate and destroy their work because. . . . Who shall come forward and make answer? Oh, vile, filthy, and hypocritical century, I at least scorn you. But this 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 — "Marius the Epicurean." Well I remember when I read the opening lines, and how they came upon me sweetly as the flowing breath of a bright spring. I knew CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 28^ that I was awakened a fourth time, that a fourth vision of life was to be given to me. Shelley had revealed to me the unimagined skies 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 workman- ship ; Goncourt's brilliant adjectival effects bad captivated me for a time, but. all these impulses were crumbling into dust, these aspirations were etiolated, sickly as faces grown old in gaslight. I had not thought of the simple and unaffected joy of the heart of natural things ; the colour of the open air, the many forms of the country, the birds flying, — that one making for the sea ; the 19 290 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. abandoned boat, the dwarf roses and the wild lavender; nor had I thought of the beauty of mildness in life, and how by a certain avoidance of the wilfully passionate, and the surely ugly, we may secure an aspect of temporal life which is abiding and soul-sufficing. A new dawn was in my brain, fresh and fair, full of wide temples and studious hours, and the lurking fragrance of incense ; that such a vision of life was possible I had no suspicion, and it came upon me almost with the same strength, almost as intensely, as that divine song of the flesh, — Mademoiselle de Maupin. Certainly, in my mind, these books will be always intimately 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 worship of the visible world, and the same incurable belief that the beauty of material things is sufficient for all the CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 291 needs of life. Mr. Pater can join hands with Gautier in saying— ;;e trouve la terre aussi belle que le del, 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 "Marias 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 com- bination of words for silver or gold chime, and unconventional cadence, and for all those lurking half-meanings, and that evanescent suggestion, like the odour of dead roses, that words retain to the last of other times and elder usage. Until I read "Marius" the English language (English prose) was to me what French must be to the majority of English readers. I read for the sense 292 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. and that was all ; the language itself seemed to me coarse and plain, and awoke in me neither 83sthetic emotion nor even interest, "Marius" wa? the stepping-stone that carried me across the channel into the genius of my own tongue. The translation was not too abrupt ; I found a constant and careful invocation of meaning that was a little aside of the common comprehension, and also a sweet depravity of ear for unexpected falls of phrase, and of eye for the less observed depths of colours, which although new was a sort of sequel to the educa- tion I had chosen, and a continuance of it in oreign, but not wholly unfamiliar medium, and having saturated myself with Pater, the passage to De Quincey was easy. He, too, was a Latin in manner and in temper of mind ; but he was truly English, and through him I passed to the study of the Elizabethan dramatists, the real literature of my race, and washed myself clean. CHAPTER XI. THOUGHTS IN A STRAND LODGING. A WFUL Emma has undressed and put the last child away^stowed the last child away in some mysterious and unapproachable corner that none knows of but she ; the fat landlady has ceased to loiter about my door, has ceased to 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 conversa- tion on the landing, she has told me her latest 294 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 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 staircase. 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 ie Journal des Goncourts, p. 358, the end of a chapter : — "It is really curious that it should he the four men the most free from all taint of handicraft and all base commercialism, the four pens the most entirely devoted to art, that were arraigned before the public prosecutor: Baudelaire, Flaubert, and ourselves.^'' 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 hope- lessly blind. Goncourt's statement is eloquent and CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAU. SOS 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 England as in France those who loved literature the most purely, who were the least mercenary in their love, were marked out for persecution, and all three were driven into exile. Byron, Shelley, and George Moore 5 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 a public that was rooting then amid the garbage of the Yelverton divorce case. I think of these facts and think of Baudelaire'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 296 CONFESSIONS OF A TOTTNG MAN. 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. Baude- laire compared that dog to the public. Baudelaire was wrong : that dog was a . When I read Balzac's stories of Vautrin and Lucien de Eubempr^, I often think of Hadrian and the Antinous. I wonder if Balzac did dream of transposing the Eoman Emperor and his favourite into modern life. It is the kind of thing that Balzac would think of. No critic has ever noticed this. Sometimes, at night, when all is still, and I look out on that desolate river, I think I shall go mad with grief, with wild regret for my beautiful appartement in Eue 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 297 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 read- ing ; I have nothing to read. Flaubert bores me. What nonsense has been talked about him I Im- personal! Nonsense, he is the most personal writer I know. That odious pessimism ! How sick I am of it, it never ceases, it is lugged in d 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, afterwards only words are bearable ... a new 298 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNS MAN, idea, -what can be more insipid — fit for members of parliament. . . . Shall I go to bti? No. . . . I wish I had a volume of Verlaine, or something of Mallarm^'s to read — Mallarm^ for preference. I remember Huysmans speaks of Mallarm^ in " A Kebours." In hours like these a page of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of some exquisite and powerful liqueur. " The decadence of a literature irreparably at- tacked 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 Mallarm6 in most consummate and absolute fashion. . . . "The poem in prose is the form, above all others, they prefer ; handled by an alchemist of CONFESSION'S OF A TOUNG MAN. 299 genius, it should contain in a state of meat the entire strength of the novel, the long analysis and the superfluous description of which it sup- presses . • . 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 pre- cise 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 con- densed 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 orna- ment of Byzantine workmanship j there is in his 300 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the mural, of the window. Ah ! in this hour of weariness for one of Mallarm6's prose poems ! Stay, I remember I have some numbers of La Vogue. One of the numbers con- tains, 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 cherished solitude. What long days I have passed alone with my cat. By alone, I mean without a material being, and my cat is a mystical companion — a spirit. I can, therefore, say that I have passed whole days alone with my cat, and, alone with one of the last authors of the Latin decadence ; for since that white creature is no more, strangely and singularly I CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 301 have loved all that the word fall expresses. In such wise that my favourite season of the year is the last weary days of summer, which immediately precede autumn, and the hour I choose to walk in is when the sun rests before disappearing, with rays of yellow copper on the grey walls and red copper on the tiles. In the same way the litera- ture that my soul demands — ^a sad voluptuousness — is the dying poetry of the last moments of Rome, hut before it has breathed at all the rejuvenating approach of the barbarians, or has begun to stammer the infantile Latin of the first Christian poetry. "I was reading, therefore, one of those dear poems (whose paint has more charm for me than the blush of youth), had plunged one hand into the fur of the pure animal, when a barrel organ sang languidly and melancholy beneath my window. It played in the great alley of poplars, whose leaves appear to me yellow, even in the 302 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUNG MAN. spring-tide, since Maria passed there with the tall candles for the last time. The instrument is the saddest, yes, truly ; the piano scintillates, the violin opens the torn soul to the light, but the barrel- organ, in the twilight of 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 common- place. 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 sing- ing 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.) CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 303 "And thy Venetian mirror, deep as a cold fonntain 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 say est wicked things. " (I see the spiders' webs above the lofty windows.) " Our wardrobe is very old ; see how the fire reddens its sad panels I 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 blue birds are discoloured by time ? " (Dream not of the spiders' webs that tremble above the lofty windows.) " Thou lovest all that, and that is why I live by thee. When one of my poems appeared, didst thou not desire, my sister, whose looks are full 304 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. of yesterdays, the words, the grace of faded things ? New objects displease thee j thee also do they frighten with their loud boldness, and thou feelest as if thou shonldest use them — a difficult thing indeed to do, for thou hast no taste for action. " Come, close thy old German almanack that thou readest with attention, though it appeared more than a hundred years ago, and the Kings it announces are all dead, and, lying on this antique carpet, my head leaned upon thy charitable knees, on the pale robe, oh ! calm child, I wiU 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 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 305 futile. "We, the " ten superior persons scattered through the universe " think these prose poems the concrete essence, the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art, others, those in the ptalls, will judge them to be the aberrations of a refined mind, distorted with hatred of the commonplace ; the pit will immediately declare them to be nonsense, and will return with satisfaction to the last leading article in the daily paper. " Tai fait mes adieux d ma mire et je viens pour vous /aire les miens and other absurdities by Ponson du Terrail amused us many a year in France, and in later days similar bad gram- mar 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, Eider Haggard, whose literary atrocities 20 306 CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. are more atrocious than his accounts of slaughter, receives the attention of leading journals and writes about the revival of Eomance. As it is as difficult to write the worst as the best conceivable sentence, I take this one and place it for its greater glory in my less remarkable prose : — " As we gazed on the beauties thus revealed by Good, a spirit of emulation filled our breasts, and we set to work to get ourselves up as well as roe could." A return to romance ! a return to the animal, say I. One thing that cannot be denied to the realists : a constant and intense desire to write well, to write artistically. When I think of what they have done in the matter of the use of words, of the myriad verbal eflects they have discovered, of the thousand forms of composi- tion they have created, how they have remodelled CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN. 307 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, Gonconrt, 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 Elizabethaps. And for this our failures are more interesting than the vulgar successes of our opponents ; for when we fall into the sterile and distorted, it is through our noble and incurable hatred of the common- place of all that is popular. The healthy school is played out in England ; all that could be said has been said ; the successors of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot have no ideal, and consequently no language ; what can be more pudding than the language of Mr. Hardy, and he is typical of a dozen other writers, Mr. Besant, Mr. Murray, Mr. Crawford? The 308 CONFESSIONS OF A TOUKG MAN. reason of this heaviness of thought and ex- pression 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 favour 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 vFonder why murder is considered less immoral than forni