My Protestant sympathies go back very far, further back than these
Confessions; I find them in a French sonnet, crude and diffuse in
versification, of the kind which finds favour with the very young, a
sonnet which I should not publish did it not remind me of two things
especially dear to me, my love of France and Protestantism.
Je t'apporte mon drame, o poète sublime,
Ainsi qu'un écolier au maître sa leçon:
Ce livre avec fierté porte comme écusson
Le sceau qu'en nos esprits ta jeune gloire imprime.
Accepte, tu verras la foi mêlée au crime,
Se souiller dans le sang sacré de la raison,
Quand surgit, rédempteur du vieux peuple saxon,
Luther à Wittemberg comme Christ à Solime.
Jamais de la cité le mal entier ne fuit,
Hélas! et son autel y fume dans la nuit;
Mais notre âge a ceci de pareil à l'aurore.
Que c'est un divin cri du chanteur éternal,
Le tien, qui pour forcer le jour tardif d'éclore
Déchire avec splendeur le voile épars du ciel.
I find not only my Protestant sympathies in the "Confessions" but a
proud agnosticism, and an exalted individualism which in certain
passages leads the reader to the sundered rocks about the cave of
Zarathoustra. My book was written before I heard that splendid name,
before Zarathoustra was written; and the doctrine, though hardly
formulated, is in the "Confessions," as Darwin is in Wallace. Here ye
shall find me, the germs of all I have written are in the "Confessions,"
"Esther Waters" and "Modern Painting," my love of France--the country as
Pater would say of my instinctive election--and all my prophecies.
Manet, Degas, Whistler, Monet, Pissaro, all these have come into their
inheritance. Those whom I brushed aside, where are they? Stevenson, so
well described as the best-dressed young man that ever walked in the
Burlington Arcade, has slipped into nothingness despite the journalists
and Mr Sidney Colvin's batch of letters. Poor Colvin, he made a mistake,
he should have hopped on to Pater.
Were it not for a silly phrase about George Eliot, who surely was no
more than one of those dull clever people, unlit by any ray of genius, I
might say with Swinburne I have nothing to regret, nothing to withdraw.
Maybe a few flippant remarks about my private friends; but to withdraw
them would be unmanly, unintellectual, and no one may re-write his
confessions.
A moment ago I wrote I have nothing to regret except a silly phrase
about George Eliot. I was mistaken, there is this preface. If one has
succeeded in explaining oneself in a book a preface is unnecessary, and
if one has failed to explain oneself in the book, it is still more
unnecessary to explain oneself in a preface.