Confessions of a Young Man | Page 6

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....
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