Confessions of a Young Man

Confessions of a Young Man

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Title: Confessions of a Young Man
Author: George Moore
Release Date: March 22, 2004 [EBook #11654]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN ***

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Confessions of a Young Man
By George Moore
Introduction by Floyd Dell

INTRODUCTION
These "Confessions of a Young Man" constitute one of the most
significant documents of the passionate revolt of English literature
against the Victorian tradition. It is significant because it reveals so
clearly the sources of that revolt. It is in a sense the history of an
epoch--an epoch that is just closing. It represents one of the great
discoveries of English literature: a discovery that had been made from
time to time before, and that is now being made anew in our own
generation--the discovery of human nature.
The reason why this discovery has had to be made so often is that it
shocks people. They try to hush it up; and they do succeed in forgetting
about it for long periods of time, and pretending that it doesn't exist.
They are shocked because human nature is not at all like the pretty
pictures we like to draw of ourselves. It is not so sweet, amiable and
gentlemanly or ladylike as we wish to believe it. It is much more selfish,
brutal and lascivious than we care to admit, and as such, both too
terrible and too ridiculous to please us. The Elizabethans understood
human nature, and made glorious comedies and tragedies out of its
inordinate crimes and cruelties, and its pathetic follies and fatuities. But
people didn't like it, and they turned Puritan and closed the theaters. It
is true, they repented, and opened them again; but the theater had got a
bad name from which it is only now beginning to recover.
In the fields of poetry and fiction a more long-drawn-out contest ensued
between, those who wanted to tell the truth and those who wanted to
listen to pleasant fibs, the latter generally having the best of it. The
contest finally settled down into the Victorian compromise, which was
tacitly accepted by even the best of the imaginative writers of the
period. The understanding was that brutality, lust and selfishness were
to be represented as being qualities only of "bad" people, plainly
labelled as such. Under this compromise some magnificent works were
produced. But inasmuch as the compromise involved a suppression of a
great and all-important fact about the human soul, it could not endure
forever. The only question was, under what influences would the revolt
occur?

It occurred, as George Moore's quite typical and naïvely illuminating
confessions reveal, under French influences. Something of the same
sort had been happening in France, and the English rebels found
exemplars of revolt ready to their need. These French rebels were of all
sorts, and it was naturally the most extreme that attracted the
admiration of the English malcontents. Chief among these were Gautier
and Baudelaire.
Gautier had written in "Mademoiselle de Maupin" a lyrical exaltation
of the joys of the flesh: he had eloquently and unreservedly pronounced
the fleshly pleasures good. Baudelaire had gone farther: he had said
that Evil was beautiful, the most beautiful thing in the world--and
proved it, to those who were anxious to believe it, by writing beautiful
poems about every form of evil that he could think of.
They were still far, it will be observed, from the sane and truly
revolutionary conception of life which has begun to obtain acceptance
in our day--a conception of life which traverses the old conceptions if
"good" and "evil." Baudelaire and Gautier hardly did more than
brilliantly champion the unpopular side of a foolish argument. It may
seem odd to us today that such a romantic, not to say hysterical,
turning-upside-down of current British morality could so deeply
impress the best minds of the younger generation in England. Its
influence, when mixed with original genius of a high quality, produced
the "Poems and Ballads" of Swinburne. It produced also The Yellow
Book, a more characteristic and less happy result. It produced a whole
host of freaks and follies. But it did contain a liberating idea--the idea
that human nature is a subject to be dealt with, not to be concealed and
lied about. And, among others, George Moore was set free--set free to
write some of the sincerest