I
My soul, so far as I understand it, has very kindly taken colour and
form from the many various modes of life that self-will and an impetuous
temperament have forced me to indulge in. Therefore I may say that I am
free from original qualities, defects, tastes, etc. What is mine I have
acquired, or, to speak more exactly, chance bestowed, and still bestows,
upon me. I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth
sheet of wax, bearing no impress, but capable of receiving any; of being
moulded into all shapes. Nor am I exaggerating when I say I think that I
might equally have been a Pharaoh, an ostler, a pimp, an archbishop, and
that in the fulfilment of the duties of each a certain measure of
success would have been mine. I have felt the goad of many impulses, I
have hunted many a trail; when one scent failed another was taken up,
and pursued with the pertinacity of instinct, rather than the fervour of
a reasoned conviction. Sometimes, it is true, there came moments of
weariness, of despondency, but they were not enduring: a word spoken, a
book read, or yielding to the attraction of environment, I was soon off
in another direction, forgetful of past failures. Intricate, indeed, was
the labyrinth of my desires; all lights were followed with the same
ardour, all cries were eagerly responded to: they came from the right,
they came from the left, from every side. But one cry was more
persistent, and as the years passed I learned to follow it with
increasing vigour, and my strayings grew fewer and the way wider.
I was eleven years old when I first heard and obeyed this cry, or, shall
I say, echo-augury?
Scene: A great family coach, drawn by two powerful country horses,
lumbers along a narrow Irish road. The ever-recurrent signs--long ranges
of blue mountains, the streak of bog, the rotting cabin, the flock of
plover rising from the desolate water. Inside the coach there are two
children. They are smart, with new jackets and neckties; their faces
are pale with sleep, and the rolling of the coach makes them feel a
little sick. It is seven o'clock in the morning. Opposite the children
are their parents, and they are talking of a novel the world is reading.
Did Lady Audley murder her husband? Lady Audley! What a beautiful name!
and she, who is a slender, pale, fairy-like woman, killed her husband.
Such thoughts flash through the boy's mind; his imagination is stirred
and quickened, and he begs for an explanation. The coach lumbers along,
it arrives at its destination, and Lady Audley is forgotten in the
delight of tearing down fruit trees and killing a cat.
But when we returned home I took the first opportunity of stealing the
novel in question. I read it eagerly, passionately, vehemently. I read
its successor and its successor. I read until I came to a book called
_The Doctors Wife_--a lady who loved Shelley and Byron. There was magic,
there was revelation in the name, and Shelley became my soul's divinity.
Why did I love Shelley? Why was I not attracted to Byron? I cannot say.
Shelley! Oh, that crystal name, and his poetry also crystalline. I must
see it, I must know him. Escaping from the schoolroom, I ransacked the
library, and at last my ardour was rewarded. The book--a small pocket
edition in red boards, no doubt long out of print--opened at the
"Sensitive Plant." Was I disappointed? I think I had expected to
understand better; but I had no difficulty in assuming that I was
satisfied and delighted. And henceforth the little volume never left my
pocket, and I read the dazzling stanzas by the shores of a pale green
Irish lake, comprehending little, and loving a great deal. Byron, too,
was often with me, and these poets were the ripening influence of years
otherwise merely nervous and boisterous.
And my poets were taken to school, because it pleased me to read "Queen
Mab" and "Cain," amid the priests and ignorance of a hateful Roman
Catholic college. And there my poets saved me from intellectual
savagery; for I was incapable at that time of learning anything. What
determined and incorrigible idleness! I used to gaze fondly on a book,
holding my head between my hands, and allow my thoughts to wander far
into dreams and thin imaginings. Neither Latin, nor Greek, nor French,
nor History, nor English composition could I learn, unless, indeed, my
curiosity or personal interest was excited,--then I made rapid strides
in that branch of knowledge to which my attention was directed. A mind
hitherto dark seemed suddenly to grow clear, and it remained clear and
bright enough so long as passion was in me; but as it died, so the mind
clouded, and recoiled to its original obtuseness. Couldn't and wouldn't
were in my case curiously involved; nor have I in this respect ever been
able to correct my natural temperament. I have always remained powerless
to do anything unless moved by a powerful desire.
The natural end to such schooldays as mine was expulsion. I was expelled
when I was sixteen, for idleness and general worthlessness. I returned
to a wild country home, where I found my father engaged in training
racehorses. For a nature of such intense vitality as mine, an ambition,
an aspiration of some sort was necessary; and I now, as I have often
done since, accepted the first ideal to hand. In this instance it was
the _stable_. I was given a hunter, I rode to hounds every week, I rode
gallops every morning, I read the racing calendar, stud-book, latest
betting, and looked forward with enthusiasm to the day when I should be
known as a successful steeplechase rider. To ride the winner of the
Liverpool seemed to me a final achievement and glory; and had not
accident intervened, it is very possible that I might have succeeded in
carrying off, if not the meditated honour, something scarcely inferior,
such as--alas! I cannot now recall the name of a race of the necessary
value and importance. About this time my father was elected Member of
Parliament; our home was broken up, and we went to London. But an ideal
set up on its pedestal is not easily displaced, and I persevered in my
love, despite the poor promises London life held out for its ultimate
attainment; and surreptitiously I continued to nourish it with small
bets made in a small tobacconist's. Well do I remember that shop, the
oily-faced, sandy-whiskered proprietor, his betting-book, the cheap
cigars along the counter, the one-eyed nondescript who leaned his
evening away against the counter, and was supposed to know some one who
knew Lord ----'s footman, and the great man often spoken of, but rarely
seen--he who made "a two-'undred pound book on the Derby"; and the
constant coming and going of the cabmen--"Half an ounce of shag, sir." I
was then at a military tutor's in the Euston Road; for, in answer to my
father's question as to what occupation I intended to pursue, I had
consented to enter the army. In my heart I knew that when it came to the
point I should refuse--the idea of military discipline was very
repugnant, and the possibility of an anonymous death on a battle-field
could not be accepted by so self-conscious a youth, by one so full of
his own personality. I said Yes to my father, because the moral courage
to say No was lacking, and I put my trust in the future, as well I
might, for a fair prospect of idleness lay before me, and the chance of
my passing any examination was, indeed, remote.
In London I made the acquaintance of a great blonde man, who talked
incessantly about beautiful women, and painted them sometimes larger
than life, in somnolent attitudes, and luxurious tints. His studio was a
welcome contrast to the spitting and betting of the tobacco shop. His
pictures--Doré-like improvisations, devoid of skill, and, indeed, of
artistic perception, save a certain sentiment for the grand and
noble--filled me with wonderment and awe. "How jolly it would be to be a
painter," I once said, quite involuntarily. "Why, would you like to be a
painter?" he asked abruptly. I laughed, not suspecting that I had the
slightest gift, as indeed was the case, but the idea remained in my
mind, and soon after I began to make sketches in the streets and
theatres. My attempts were not very successful, but they encouraged me
to tell my father that I would go to the military tutor no more, and he
allowed me to enter the Kensington Museum as an Art student. There, of
course, I learned nothing, and, from the point of view of art merely, I
had much better have continued my sketches in the streets; but the
museum was a beautiful and beneficent influence, and one that applied
marvellously well to the besetting danger of the moment; for in the
galleries I met young men who spoke of other things than betting and
steeplechase riding, who, I remember, it was clear to me then, looked to
a higher ideal than mine, breathed a purer atmosphere of thought than I.
And then the sweet, white peace of antiquity! The great, calm gaze that
is not sadness nor joy, but something that we know not of--which is lost
to the world for ever.
"But if you want to be a painter you must go to France--France is the
only school of Art." I must again call attention to the phenomenon of
echo-augury, that is to say, words heard in an unlooked-for quarter,
that, without any appeal to our reason, impel belief. France! The word
rang in my ears 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
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 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.