Confessions of a Young Man | Page 7

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 very nearly all the English lyric poets; Shelley's atheism had led me to read Kant, Spinoza, Godwin, Darwin, and Mill. So it will be understood that Shelley not only gave me my first soul, but led all its first flights. But I do not think that if Shelley had been no more than a poet, notwithstanding my very genuine love of verse, he would have gained such influence in my youthful sympathies; but Shelley dreamed in metaphysics--very thin dreaming if you will; but just such thin dreaming as I could follow. Was there or was there not a God? And for many years I could not dismiss as parcel of the world's folly this question, and I sought a solution, inclining towards atheism, for it was natural in me to revere nothing, and to oppose the routine of daily thought. And I was but sixteen when I resolved to tell my mother that I must decline to believe any longer in a God. She was leaning against the chimney-piece in the drawing-room. I expected to paralyse the household with the news; but although a religious woman, my mother did not seem in the least frightened, she only said, "I am very sorry, George, it is so." I was deeply shocked at her indifference.
Finding music and atheism in poetry I cared little for novels. 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. I hungered after great truths: Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Rise and Influence of Rationalism, The History of Civilisation, were momentous events in my life. But I loved life better than books, and very curiously my studies and my pleasures kept pace, stepping together like a pair of well-trained carriage horses. While I was waiting for my coach to take a party of tarts and mashers to the Derby, I would read a chapter of Kant, and I often took the book away with me in my pocket. And I cultivated with care the acquaintance of a neighbour who had taken the Globe Theatre for the purpose of producing Offenbach's operas. Bouquets, stalls, rings, delighted me. I was not dissipated, but I loved the abnormal. I loved to spend on scent and toilette knick-knacks as much 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 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 Rooms were my favourite haunts. My mother suffered, and expected ruin, for I took no trouble to conceal anything; I boasted of dissipations. But there was no need to fear; for I was naturally endowed with a very clear sense 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.

II
At last the day came, and with several trunks and boxes full of clothes, books, and pictures, I started, accompanied by an English valet, for Paris and Art.
We all know the great 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 m??nag?¨re hurries down the asphalte to market; a dreadful gar?§on de caf??, 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 there. Where are