not “of the moth for the star,” but for such perfection of hanging arm and leaned thigh as leaves passion breathless and fain of tears, is now, if I take up the book and read, weary and ragged as a spider’s web, that has hung the winter through in the dusty, forgotten corner of a forgotten room.  My old rapture and my youth’s delight I can regain only when I think of that part of Gautier which is now incarnate in me.

As I picked up books, so I picked up my friends.  I read friends and books with the same passion, with the same avidity; and as I discarded my books when I had assimilated as much of them as my system required, so I discarded my friends when they ceased to be of use to me.  I use the word “use” in its fullest, not in its limited and twenty-shilling sense.  This reduction of the intellect to the blind unconsciousness of the lower organs will strike some as a violation of man’s best beliefs, and as saying very little for the particular intellect that can be so reduced.  But I am not sure these people are right.  I am inclined to think that as you ascend the scale of thought to the great minds, these unaccountable impulses, mysterious resolutions, sudden, but certain knowings, falling whence, or how it is impossible to say, but falling somehow into the brain, instead of growing rarer, become more and more frequent; indeed, I think that if the really great man were to confess to the working of his mind, we should see him constantly besieged by inspirations ... inspirations!  Ah! how human thought only turns in a circle, and how, when we think we are on the verge of a new thought, we slip into the enunciation of some time-worn truth.  But I say again, let general principles be waived; it will suffice for the interest of these pages if it be understood that brain instincts have always been, and still are, the initial and the determining powers of my being.

* * * * *

But the studio, where I had been working for the last three or four months so diligently, became wearisome to me, and for two reasons.  First, because it deprived me of many hours of Marshall’s company.  Secondly—­and the second reason was the graver—­because I was beginning to regard the delineation of a nymph, or youth bathing, etc., as a very narrow channel to carry off the strong, full tide of a man’s thought.  For now thoughts of love and death, and the hopelessness of life, were in active fermentation within me and sought for utterance with a strange unintermittingness of appeal.  I yearned merely to give direct expression to my pain.  Life was then in its springtide; every thought was new to me, and it would have seemed a pity to disguise even the simplest emotion in any garment when it was so beautiful in its Eden-like nakedness.  The creatures whom I met in the ways and by ways of Parisian life, whose gestures and attitudes I devoured with my eyes, and whose souls I hungered to know, awoke in me a tense irresponsible curiosity, but that was all,—­I despised, I hated them, thought them contemptible, and to select them as subjects of artistic treatment, could not then, might never, have occurred to me, had the suggestion to do so not come direct to me from the outside.