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Before leaving for the seaside I had bought some volumes of Hugo and De Musset; but in pleasant, sunny Boulogne poetry went flat, and it was not until I got into my new rooms that I began to read seriously. Books are like individuals; you know at once if they are going to create a sense within the sense, to fever, to madden you in blood and brain, or if they will merely leave you indifferent, or irritable, having unpleasantly disturbed sweet intimate musings as might a draught from an open window. Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me. Wordsworth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, if that great austere mind, chill even as the Cumberland year, can be called simple. But Hugo is not perverse, nor even personal. Reading him was like being in church with a strident-voiced preacher shouting from out of a terribly sonorous pulpit. "Les Orientales." An East of painted card-board, tin daggers, and a military band playing the Turkish patrol in the Palais Royal ... The verse is grand, noble, tremendous; I liked it, I admired it, but it did not--I repeat the phrase--awake a voice of conscience within me; and even the structure of the verse was too much in the style of public buildings to please me. Of "Les Feuilles d'Automne" and "Les Chants du Cr?puscule" I remember nothing. Ten lines, fifty lines of "La L?gende des Si?cles," and I always think that it is the greatest poetry I have ever read, but after a few pages I invariably put the book down and forget it. Having composed more verses than any man that ever lived, Hugo can only be taken in the smallest doses; if you repeat any passage to a friend across a caf? table, you are both appalled by the splendour of the imagery, by the thunder of the syllables.

"Quel dieu, quel moissonneur dans l'?ternel ?t? Avait s'en allant n?gligemment jet? Cette faucille d'or dans les champs des ?toiles."

But if I read an entire poem I never escape that sensation of the ennui which is inherent in the gaud and the glitter of the Italian or Spanish improvisatore. There never was anything French about Hugo's genius. Hugo was a cross between an Italian improvisatore and a metaphysical German student. Take another verse--

"Le clair de lune bleu qui baigne l'horizon."

Without a "like" or an "as," by a mere statement of fact, the picture, nay more, the impression, is produced. I confess I have a weakness for the poem which this line concludes--"La f?te chez Th?r?se;" but admirable as it is with its picture of mediaeval life, there is in it, like in all Hugo's work, a sense of fabrication that dries up emotion in my heart. He shouts and raves over poor humanity, while he is gathering coppers for himself; he goes in for an all-round patronage of the Almighty in a last stanza; but of the two immortalities he evidently considers his own the most durable; he does not, however, become really intolerable until he gets on the subject of little children; he sings their innocence in great bombast, but he is watching them; the poetry over, the crowd dispersed, he will appear a veritable Mr. Hyde.

I will not turn to the book to find the exact words of this sublime vindication, for ten years I have not read the Word that has become so inexpressibly a part of me; and shall I not refrain as Mdlle. de Maupin refrained, knowing well that the face of love may not be twice seen? Great was my conversion. None more than I had cherished mystery and dream: my life until now had been but a mist which revealed as each cloud wreathed and went out, the red of some strange flower or some tall peak, blue and snowy and fairylike in lonely moonlight; and now so great was my conversion that the more brutal the outrage offered to my ancient ideal, the rarer and keener was my delight. I read almost without fear: "My dreams were of naked youths riding white horses through mountain passes, there were no clouds in my dreams, or if there were any, they were clouds that had been cut out as if in cardboard with a pair of scissors."

"Mais seulement il se transpose Et passant de la forme au son, Trouvant dans la m?tamorphose La jeune fille et le gar?on."

The study of Baudelaire aggravated the course of the disease. No longer is it the grand barbaric face of Gautier; now it is the clean shaven face of the mock priest, the slow, cold eyes and the sharp, cunning sneer of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may better know the worthlessness of temptation. "Les Fleurs du Mal!" beautiful flowers, beautiful in sublime decay. What great record is yours, and were Hell a reality how many souls would we find wreathed with your poisonous blossoms. The village maiden goes to her Faust; the children of the nineteenth century go to you, O Baudelaire, and having tasted of your deadly delight all hope of repentance is vain. Flowers, beautiful in your sublime decay, I press you to my lips; these northern solitudes, far from the rank Parisian garden where I gathered you, are full of you, even as the sea-shell of the sea, and the sun that sets on this wild moorland evokes the magical verse:--

"Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique Nous ?changerons un ?clair unique Comme un long sanglot tout charg? d'adieux."

For months I fed on the mad and morbid literature that the enthusiasm of 1830 called into existence. The gloomy and sterile little pictures of "Gaspard de la Nuit," or the elaborate criminality, "Les Contes Immoraux," laboriously invented lifeless things with creaky joints, pitiful lay figures that fall to dust as soon as the book is closed, and in the dust only the figures of the terrible ferryman and the unfortunate Dora remain. "Madame Potiphar" cost me forty francs, and I never read more than a few pages.

I have remarked before on the instinctiveness of my likes and dislikes, on my susceptibility to the sound of and even to the appearance of a name upon paper. I was repelled by Leconte de Lisle from the first, and it was only by a very deliberate outrage to my feelings that I bought and read "Les Po?mes Antiques," and "Les Po?mes Barbares;" I was deceived in nothing, all I had anticipated I found--long, desolate boredom. Leconte de Lisle produces on me the effect of a walk through the new Law Courts, with a steady but not violent draught sweeping from end to end. Oh, the vile old professor of rhetoric! and when I saw him the last time I was in Paris, his head--a declaration of righteousness, a cross between a Caesar by Gerome, and an archbishop of a provincial town, set all my natural antipathy instantly on edge. Hugo is often pompous, shallow, empty, unreal, but he is at least an artist, and when he thinks of the artist and forgets the prophet, as in "Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois," his juggling with the verse is magnificent, superb.

"Comme un geai sur l'arbre Le roi se tient fier; Son coeur est de marbre, Son ventre est de chair.

"On a pour sa nuque Et son front vermeil Fait une perruque Avec le soleil.

"Il r?gne, il v?g?te Effroyable z?ro; Sur lui se projette L'ombre du bourreau.

"Son tr?ne est une tombe, Et sur le pav? Quelque chose en tombe Qu'on n'a point lav?."

I read the French poets of the modern school--Copp?e, Mend?s, L?on Diex, Verlaine, Jos? Maria Heredia, Mallarm?, Rechepin, Villiers de l'Isle Adam. Copp?e, as may be imagined, I only was capable of appreciating in his first manner, when he wrote those exquisite but purely artistic sonnets "La Tulipe" and "Le Lys." In the latter a room decorated with daggers, armour, jewellery and china is beautifully described, and it is only in the last line that the lily which animates and gives life to the whole is introduced. But the exquisite poetic perceptivity Copp?e showed in his modern poems, the certainty with which he raised the commonest subject, investing it with sufficient dignity for his purpose, escaped me wholly, and I could not but turn with horror from such poems as "La Nourrice" and "Le Petit Epicier." How anyone could bring himself to acknowledge the vulgar details of our vulgar age I could not understand. The fiery glory of Jos? Maria de Heredia, on the contrary, filled me with enthusiasm--ruins and sand, shadow and silhouette of palms and pillars, negroes, crimson, swords, silence, and arabesques. As great copper pans go the clangour of the rhymes.

"Entre le ciel qui br?le et la mer qui moutonne, Au somnolent soleil d'un midi monotone, Tu songes, O guerri?re, aux vieux conquistadors; Et dans l'?nervement des nuits chaudes et calmes, Ber?ant ta gloire ?teinte, O cit?, tu t'endors Sous les palmiers, au long fr?missement des palmes."

Se penchant vers les dahlias, Des paons cabrient d?s rosace lunaire L'assoupissement des branches v?n?re Son pale visage aux mourants dahlias.

Elle ?coute au loin les br?ves musiques Nuit claire aux ramures d'accords, Et la lassitude a berc? son corps Au rhythme odorant des pures musiques.

Les paons out dress? la rampe occell?e Pour la descente de ses yeux vers le tapis De choses et de sens Qui va vers l'horizon, parure vemicul?e De son corps alangui En ?me se tapit Le flou d?sir molli de r?cits et d'encens.

I laughed at these verbal eccentricities, but they were not without their effect, and that effect was a demoralising one; for in me they aggravated the fever of the unknown, and whetted my appetite for the strange, abnormal and unhealthy in art. Hence all pallidities of thought and desire were eagerly welcomed, and Verlaine became my poet. Never shall I forget the first enchantment of "Les F?tes Galantes." Here all is twilight.

Gautier sang to his antique lyre praise of the flesh and contempt of the soul; Baudelaire on a mediaeval organ chaunted his unbelief in goodness and truth and his hatred of life. But Verlaine advances one step further: hate is to him as commonplace as love, unfaith as vulgar as faith. The world is merely a doll to be attired to-day in a modern ball dress, to-morrow in aureoles and stars. The Virgin is a pretty thing, worth a poem, but it would be quite too silly to talk about belief or unbelief; Christ in wood or plaster we have heard too much of, but Christ in painted glass amid crosiers and Latin terminations, is an amusing subject for poetry. And strangely enough, a withdrawing from all commerce with virtue and vice is, it would seem, a licentiousness more curiously subtle and penetrating than any other; and the licentiousness of the verse is equal to that of the emotion; every natural instinct of the language is violated, and the simple music native in French metre is replaced by falsetto notes sharp and intense. The charm is that of an odour of iris exhaled by some ideal tissues, or of a missal in a gold case, a precious relic of the pomp and ritual of an archbishop of Persepolis.

Parsifal a vaincu les filles, leur gentil Babil et la luxure amusante et sa pente Vers la chair de ce gar?on vierge que cela tente D'aimer des seins l?gers et ce gentil babil.

Il a vaincu la femme belle au coeur subtil Etalant ces bras frais et sa gorge excitante; Il a vaincu l'enfer, il rentre dans sa tente Avec un lourd troph?e ? son bras pueril.

Avec la lance qui per?a le flanc supr?me Il a gu?ri le roi, le voici roi lui-m?me, Et pr?tre du tr?s-saint tr?sor essentiel;

En robe d'or il adore, gloire et symbole, Le vase pur o? resplendit le sang r?el, Et, o ces voix d'enfants chantent dans la coupole.

I know of no more perfect thing than this sonnet. The hiatus in the last line was at first a little trying, but I have learned to love it; not in Baudelaire nor even in Poe is there more beautiful poetry to be found. Poe, unread and ill-understood in America and England, here, thou art an integral part of our artistic life.

The Island o' Fay, Silence, Elionore, were the familiar spirits of an apartment beautiful with tapestry and palms; Swinburne and Rossetti were the English poets I read there; and in a golden bondage, I, a unit in the generation they have enslaved, clanked my fetters and trailed my golden chain. I had begun a set of stories in many various metres, to be called "Roses of Midnight." One of the characteristics of the volume was that daylight was banished from its pages. In the sensual lamplight of yellow boudoirs, or the wild moonlight of centenarian forests, my fantastic loves lived out their lives, died with the dawn which was supposed to be an awakening to consciousness of reality.

She is a woman of thirty,--no,--she is the woman of thirty. Balzac has written some admirable pages on this subject; my memory of them is vague and uncertain, although durable, as all memories of him must be. But that marvellous story, or rather study, has been blunted in my knowledge of this tiny face with the fine masses of hair drawn up from the neck and arranged elaborately on the crown. There is no fear of plagiary; he cannot have said all; he cannot have said what I want to say.

Looking at this face so mundane, so intellectually mundane, I see why a young man of refined mind--a bachelor who spends at least a pound a day on his pleasures, and in whose library are found some few volumes of modern poetry--seeks his ideal in a woman of thirty.

It is clear that, by the very essence of her being, the young girl may evoke no ideal but that of home; and home is in his eyes the antithesis of freedom, desire, aspiration. He longs for mystery, deep and endless, and he is tempted with a foolish little illusion--white dresses, water colour drawings, and popular music. He dreams of Pleasure, and he is offered Duty; for do not think that that sylph-like waist does not suggest to him a yard of apron string, cries of children, and that most odious word, "Papa." A young man of refined mind can look through the glass of the years.

He has sat in the stalls, opera-glass in hand; he has met women of thirty at balls, and has sat with them beneath shadowy curtains; he knows that the world is full of beautiful women, all waiting to be loved and amused, the circles of his immediate years are filled with feminine faces, they cluster like flowers on this side and that, and they fade into garden-like spaces of colour. How many may love him? The loveliest may one day smile upon his knee! and shall he renounce all for that little creature who has just finished singing, and is handing round cups of tea? Every bachelor contemplating marriage says, "I shall have to give up all for one, one."

Why did she marry him? Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great mysterious midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry space will give him answer; riddle that no Oedipus will ever come to unravel; this sphinx will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the seagulls and waves; she will never divulge her secret; and if she is the woman and not a woman of thirty, she has forgotten.

The young man shakes hands with the husband; he strives not to look embarrassed, and he talks of indifferent things--of how well he is looking, of his amusements, his projects; and then he tastes of that keen and highly-seasoned delight--happiness in crime. He knows not the details of her home life, the husband is merely a dark cloud that fills one side of the picture, sometimes obliterating the sunlight; a shadowy shape that in certain moments solidifies and assumes the likeness of a rock-sculptured, imminent monster; but the shadow and the shape and the threat are magnetic, and in a sense of danger the fascination is sealed....

See the young man of refined mind in a ball room! He is leaning against the woodwork in a distant doorway, he scarcely knows what to do with himself; and he is now striving to interest himself in the conversation of a group of men twice his age. I will not say he is shunned; but neither the matrons nor the young girls make any advances towards him. The young girls looking so sweet--in the oneness of their fresh hair, flowers, dresses, and glances--are being introduced, are getting up to dance, and the hostess is looking round for partners. She sees the young man in the doorway; but she hesitates and goes to some one else; and if you asked her why, she could not tell you why she avoided him. Presently the woman of thirty enters. She is in white satin and diamonds. She looks for him,--a circular glance,--and calm with possession she passes to a seat. She dances the eighth, twelfth, and fifteenth waltz with him.

Will he induce her to visit his rooms? Will they be like mine--strange debauches of colour and Turkish lamps, Marshall's taste, an old cabinet, a faded pastel which embalms the memory of a pastoral century, my taste; or will it be a library,--two leather library chairs, a large escritoire, etc.? Be this as it may, whether the apartments be the ruthless extravagance of artistic impulse, or the subdued taste of the student, she, the woman of thirty, shall be there by night and day: her statue is there, and even when she is sleeping safe in her husband's arms with fevered brow, he, the young man of refined mind, alone and lonely shall kneel and adore her.

A terrible malady is she, a malady the ancients knew of and called nympholepsy--a beautiful name evocative and symbolic of its ideal aspect, "the breast of the nymph in the brake." And the disease is not extinct in these modern days, nor will it ever be so long as men shall yearn for the unattainable; and the prosy bachelors who trail their ill-fated lives from their chambers to their clubs know of, and they call their malady--the woman of thirty.

Marshall is at the organ in the hall, he is playing a Gregorian chant, that beautiful hymn, the "Vexilla Regis," by Saint Fortunatus, the great poet of the Middle Ages. And, having turned over the leaves of "Les F?tes Gallantes," I sit down to write.

Echo-augury! Words heard in an unexpected quarter, but applying marvellously well to the besetting difficulty of the moment. The reader who has followed me so far will remember the instant effect the word "Shelley" had upon me in childhood, and how it called into existence a train of feeling that illuminated the vicissitudes and passions of many years, until it was finally assimilated and became part of my being; the reader will also remember how the mere mention, at a certain moment, of the word "France" awoke a vital impulse, even a sense of final ordination, and how the irrevocable message was obeyed, and how it led to the creation of a mental existence.

And now for a third time I experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and inward light. Naturalism, truth, the new art, above all the phrase, "the new art," impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was dazzled, and I vaguely understood that my "Roses of Midnight" were sterile eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanised into any semblance of life, passionless in all their passion.

I felt the "naturalisation" of the "Roses of Midnight" would prove a difficult task. I soon found it an impossible one, and I laid the poems aside and commenced a volume redolent of the delights of Bougival and Ville d'Avray. This book was to be entitled "Poems of 'Flesh and Blood.'"

But although I am apt to love too dearly the art of my day, and at the cost of that of other days, I did not fall into the fatal mistake of placing the realistic writers of 1877 side by side with and on the same plane of intellectual vision as the great Balzac; I felt that that vast immemorial mind rose above them all, like a mountain above the highest tower.

And, strange to say, it was Gautier that introduced me to Balzac; for mention is made in the wonderful preface to "Les Fleurs du Mal" of Seraphita: Seraphita, Seraphitus; which is it?--woman or man? Should Wilfred or Mona be the possessor? A new Mdlle. de Maupin, with royal lily and aureole, cloud-capped mountains, great gulfs of sea-water flowing up and reflecting as in a mirror the steep cliff's side; the straight white feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is torn, and the pure, strange soul continues its mystical exhortations. Then the radiant vision, a white glory, the last outburst and manifestation, the trumpets of the apocalypse, the colour of heaven; the closing of the stupendous allegory when Seraphita lies dead in the rays of the first sun of the nineteenth century.

Balzac's genius is in his titles as heaven is in its stars: "Melmoth Reconcili?," "J?sus-Christ en Flandres," "Le Revers d'un Grand Homme," "La Cousine Bette." I read somewhere not very long ago, that Balzac was the greatest thinker that had appeared in France since Pascal. Of Pascal's claim to be a great thinker I confess I cannot judge. No man is greater than the age he lives in, and, therefore, to talk to us, the legitimate children of the nineteenth century, of logical proofs of the existence of God strikes us in just the same light as the logical proof of the existence of Jupiter Ammon. "Les Pens?es" could appear to me only as infinitely childish; the form is no doubt superb, but tiresome and sterile to one of such modern and exotic taste as myself. Still, I accept thankfully, in its sense of two hundred years, the compliment paid to Balzac; but I would add that personally he seems to me to have shown greater wings of mind than any artist that ever lived. I am aware that this last statement will make many cry "fool" and hiss "Shakespeare!" But I am not putting forward these criticisms axiomatically, but only as the expressions of an individual taste, and interesting so far as they reveal to the reader the different developments and the progress of my mind. It might prove a little tiresome, but it would no doubt "look well," in the sense that going to church "looks well," if I were to write in here ten pages of praise of our national bard. I must, however, resist the temptation to "look well;" a confession is interesting in proportion to the amount of truth it contains, and I will, therefore, state frankly I never derived any profit whatsoever, and very little pleasure from the reading of the great plays. The beauty of the verse! Yes; he who loved Shelley so well as I could not fail to hear the melody of--

"Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy."

Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated in the "Com?die Humaine." I no doubt fluttered through some scores of other books, of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but he alone left any important or lasting impression upon my mind. The rest was like walnuts and wine, an agreeable aftertaste.

But notwithstanding all this reading I can lay no claim to scholarship of any kind; for save life I could never learn anything correctly. I am a student only of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets, and alcoves. I have read very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave inquietude,--study as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering of ideas taken in flight. But in me the impulse is so original to frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring from it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is in me the generating force; without it what invention I have is thin and sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it did in the composition of my unfortunate "Roses of Midnight."

Men and women, oh the strength of the living faces! conversation, oh the magic of it! It is a fabulous river of gold where the precious metal is washed up without stint for all to take, to take as much as he can carry. Two old ladies discussing the peerage? Much may be learned, it is gold; poets and wits, then it is fountains whose spray solidifies into jewels, and every herb and plant is begemmed with the sparkle of the diamond and the glow of the ruby.

"The father beseeches; he begs that one member may be spared to continue the name--the youngest son--that is all; if he could be saved, the rest what matter; death is nothing to a Spaniard; the family, the name, a thousand years of name is everything. The general is, you know, a 'man of iron.' 'Yes, one member of your family shall be respited, but on one condition.' To the agonised family conditions are as nothing. But they don't know the man of iron is determined to make a terrible example, and they cry, 'Any conditions.' 'He who is respited must serve as executioner to the others.' Great is the doom; you understand; but after all the name must be saved. Then in the family council the father goes to his youngest son and says, 'I have been a good father to you, my son; I have always been a kind father, have I not? answer me; I have never refused you anything. Now you will not fail us, you will prove yourself worthy of the great name you bear. Remember your great ancestor who defeated the Moors, remember.'" "Then the mother comes to her son and says, 'My son, I have been a good mother, I have always loved you; say you will not desert us in this hour of our great need.' Then the little sister comes, and the whole family kneels down and appeals to the horror-stricken boy....

"'He will not prove himself unworthy of our name,' cries the father. 'Now, my son, courage, take the axe firmly, do what I ask you, courage, strike straight.' The father's head falls into the sawdust, the blood all over the white beard; then comes the elder brother, and then another brother; and then, oh, the little sister was almost more than he could bear, and the mother had to whisper, 'Remember your promise to your father, to your dead father.' The mother laid her head on the block, but he could not strike. 'Be not the first coward of our name, strike; remember your promise to us all,' and her head was struck off."

"And the son," the girl asks, "what became of him?"

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