Confessions of a Young Man | Page 6

France....
So my youth ran into manhood, finding its way from rock to rock like a rivulet, gathering strength at each leap. One day my father was suddenly called to Ireland. A few days after, a telegram came, and my mother read that we were required at his bedside. We journeyed over land and sea, and on a bleak country road, one winter's evening, a man approached us and I heard him say that all was over, that my father was dead. I loved my father; I burst into tears; and yet my soul said, "I am glad." The thought came unbidden, undesired, and I turned aside, shocked at the sight it afforded of my soul.
O, my father, I, who love and reverence nothing else, love and reverence thee; thou art the one pure image in my mind, the one true affection that life has not broken or soiled; I remember thy voice and thy kind, happy ways. All I have of worldly goods and native wit I received from thee--and was it I who was glad? No, it was not I; I had no concern in the thought that then fell upon me unbidden and undesired; my individual voice can give you but praise and loving words; and the voice that said "I am glad" was not my voice, but that of the will to live which we inherit from elemental dust through countless generations. Terrible and imperative is the voice of the will to live: let him who is innocent cast the first stone.
Terrible is the day when each sees his soul naked, stripped of all veil; that dear soul which he cannot change or discard, and which is so irreparably his.
My father's death freed me, and I sprang like a loosened bough up to the light. His death gave me power to create myself, that is to say, to create a complete and absolute self out of the partial self which was all that the restraint of home had permitted; this future self, this ideal George Moore, beckoned me, lured like a ghost; and as I followed the funeral the question, Would I sacrifice this ghostly self, if by so doing I should bring my father back? presented itself without intermission, and I shrank horrified at the answer which I could not crush out of mind.
Now my life was like a garden in the emotive torpor of spring; now my life was like a flower conscious of the light. Money was placed in my hands, and I divined all it represented. Before me the crystal lake, the distant mountains, the swaying woods, said but one word, and that word was--self; not the self that was then mine, but the self on whose creation I was enthusiastically determined. But I felt like a murderer when I turned to leave the place which I had so suddenly, and I could not but think unjustly, become possessed of. And now, as I probe this poignant psychological moment, I find that, although I perfectly well realised that all pleasures were then in my reach--women, elegant dress, theatres, and supper-rooms, I hardly thought at all of them, and much more of certain drawings from the plaster cast. I would be an artist. More than ever I was determined to be an artist, and my brain was made of this desire as I journeyed as fast as railway and steamboat could take me to London. No further trammels, no further need of being a soldier, of being anything but myself; eighteen, with life and France before me! But the spirit did not move me yet to leave home. I would feel the pulse of life at home before I felt it abroad. I would hire a studio. A studio--tapestries, smoke, models, conversations. But here it is difficult not to convey a false impression. I fain would show my soul in these pages, like a face in a pool of clear water; and although my studio was in truth no more than an amusement, and a means of effectually throwing over all restraint, I did not view it at all in this light. My love of Art was very genuine and deep-rooted; the tobacconist's betting-book was now as nothing, and a certain Botticelli in the National Gallery held me in tether. And when I look back and consider the past, I am forced to admit that I might have grown up in less fortunate circumstances, for even the studio, with its dissipations--and they were many--was not unserviceable; it developed the natural man, who educates himself, who allows his mind to grow and ripen under the sun and wind of modern life, in contradistinction to the University man, who is fed upon the dust of ages, and after a formula which has been composed to suit