Produced by David Newman and PG Distributed Proofreaders
Confessions of a Young Man
By George Moore
Introduction by Floyd Dell
These "Confessions of a Young Man" constitute one of the most significantdocuments of the passionate revolt of English literature against theVictorian tradition. It is significant because it reveals so clearly thesources of that revolt. It is in a sense the history of an epoch—an epochthat is just closing. It represents one of the great discoveries of Englishliterature: a discovery that had been made from time to time before, andthat is now being made anew in our own generation—the discovery of humannature.
The reason why this discovery has had to be made so often is that it shockspeople. They try to hush it up; and they do succeed in forgetting about itfor long periods of time, and pretending that it doesn't exist. They areshocked because human nature is not at all like the pretty pictures we liketo draw of ourselves. It is not so sweet, amiable and gentlemanly orladylike as we wish to believe it. It is much more selfish, brutal andlascivious than we care to admit, and as such, both too terrible and tooridiculous to please us. The Elizabethans understood human nature, and madeglorious comedies and tragedies out of its inordinate crimes and cruelties,and its pathetic follies and fatuities. But people didn't like it, and theyturned Puritan and closed the theaters. It is true, they repented, andopened them again; but the theater had got a bad name from which it is onlynow beginning to recover.
In the fields of poetry and fiction a more long-drawn-out contest ensuedbetween, those who wanted to tell the truth and those who wanted to listento pleasant fibs, the latter generally having the best of it. The contestfinally settled down into the Victorian compromise, which was tacitlyaccepted by even the best of the imaginative writers of the period. Theunderstanding was that brutality, lust and selfishness were to berepresented as being qualities only of "bad" people, plainly labelled assuch. Under this compromise some magnificent works were produced. Butinasmuch as the compromise involved a suppression of a great andall-important fact about the human soul, it could not endure forever. Theonly question was, under what influences would the revolt occur?
It occurred, as George Moore's quite typical and naïvely illuminatingconfessions reveal, under French influences. Something of the same sort hadbeen happening in France, and the English rebels found exemplars of revoltready to their need. These French rebels were of all sorts, and it wasnaturally the most extreme that attracted the admiration of the Englishmalcontents. Chief among these were Gautier and Baudelaire.
Gautier had written in "Mademoiselle de Maupin" a lyrical exaltation of thejoys of the flesh: he had eloquently and unreservedly pronounced thefleshly pleasures good. Baudelaire had gone farther: he had saidthat Evil was beautiful, the most beautiful thing in the world—and provedit, to those who were anxious to believe it, by writing beautiful poemsabout every form of evil that he could think of.
They were still far, it will be observed, from the sane and trulyrevolutionary conception of life which has begun to obtain acceptance inour day—a conception of life which traverses the old conceptions if "good"and "evil." Baudelaire and Gautier hardly did more than brilliantlychampion the unpopular side of a foolish argument. It may seem odd to ustoday that such a romantic, not to say hysterical, turning-upside-dow