Confessions of a Young Man | Page 2

fiction in our language.
These "Confessions" reveal him in the process of revaluing the values
of life and art for himself. It was not an easy or a painless process.
Destined for the army, because he wasn't apparently clever enough to
go in for the church or the law, he managed, with a kind of instinctive
self-protection, to avoid learning enough even to be an officer. He
turned first in this direction and then in that, in his efforts to escape.

The race-track furnished one diversion for his unhappy energies, books
of poetry another. Then he met a painter who painted and loved
sumptuous and beautiful blondes, whereupon art and women became
the new centers of his life, and Paris, where both might be indulged in,
his great ambition. Given permission and an allowance, he set off to
study art in Paris--only to find after much effort and heartache that he
was a failure as an artist. There remained, however, women--and the
cafés, with strange poets and personalities to be cultivated and explored.
Modelling himself after his newest friend, in attire, manners and morals,
he lived what might have been on the whole an unprofitable and
ordinary life, if he had not been able to gild it with the glamour of
philosophic immoralism. Finally, because everybody else was writing,
he too wrote--a play. Then follows a period of discovery of the newest
movement in art. So impressionable is he that his stay of some years in
Paris causes him actually to forget how to write English prose, and
when he returns to London and has to earn his living at journalism he
has to learn his native tongue over again. Nevertheless he has acquired
a point of view--on women, on art, on life. He writes--criticism, poetry,
fiction. He is obscure, ambitious, full of self-esteem, that is beginning
to be soured by failure. He tries to get involved in a duel with a young
nobleman, just to get himself before the public. Failing in that, he lives
in squalid lodgings--or so they seem to a young man who has lived in
Paris on a liberal allowance--and writes, writes, writes, writes ... talking
to his fellow lodgers, to the stupid servant who brings him his meals,
and getting the materials for future books out of them. A candid record
of these incidents, interwoven with eloquent self-analysis, keen and
valid criticism of books and pictures, delightful reminiscences and
furious dissertations upon morality, the whole story is given a special
and, for its time, a rare interest by its utter lack of conventional
reticence. He never spares himself. He has undertaken quite honestly to
tell the truth. He has learned from Paris not to be ashamed of himself.
And this, though he had not realized it, was what he had gone to Paris
to learn.
He had put himself instinctively in the way of receiving liberalizing
influences. But it was, after all, an accident that he received those
influences from France. He might conceivably have stayed at home and

read Tolstoi or Walt Whitman! So indeed might the whole English
literary revolt have taken its rise under different and perhaps happier
influences. But it happened as it happened. And accidents are important.
The accident of having to turn to France for moral support colored the
whole English literary revolt. And the accident of going to Paris
colored vividly the superficial layers of George Moore's soul. This
book partly represents a flaunting of such borrowed colors. It was the
fashion of the Parisian diabolists to gloat over cruelty, by way of
showing their superiority to Christian morality. The enjoyment of
others' suffering was a splendid pagan virtue. So George Moore kept a
pet python, and cultivated paganness by watching it devour rabbits
alive.
It was the result of the same accident which caused him to
conclude--and to preach at some length in this book--that art is
aristocratic. It was the proper pagan thing to say, as he does
here--"What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under
Pharaoh's lash? They died that I might have the Pyramids to look
on"--and other remarks even more shocking and jejune. It was this
accident which made him write ineffable silliness in this and other
early volumes about "virtue" and "vice," assume a man-about-town's
attitude toward women, and fill pages with maudlin phrases about
marble, perfumes, palm-trees, blood, lingerie, and moonlight. These
were the follies of his teachers, to be faithfully imitated. If he had first
heard the news that the body is good from Walt Whitman, or that the
human soul contains lust and cruelty from Tolstoi, what canticles we
should have had from George Moore on the subject of democracy in
life and art!
Deeper down, George Moore was already wiser than his masters. He
was to