They were still far, it will be observed, from the sane and truly revolutionary conception of life which has begun to obtain acceptance in our day—­a conception of life which traverses the old conceptions if “good” and “evil.”  Baudelaire and Gautier hardly did more than brilliantly champion the unpopular side of a foolish argument.  It may seem odd to us today that such a romantic, not to say hysterical, turning-upside-down of current British morality could so deeply impress the best minds of the younger generation in England.  Its influence, when mixed with original genius of a high quality, produced the “Poems and Ballads” of Swinburne.  It produced also The Yellow Book, a more characteristic and less happy result.  It produced a whole host of freaks and follies.  But it did contain a liberating idea—­the idea that human nature is a subject to be dealt with, not to be concealed and lied about.  And, among others, George Moore was set free—­set free to write some of the sincerest fiction in our language.

These “Confessions” reveal him in the process of revaluing the values of life and art for himself.  It was not an easy or a painless process.  Destined for the army, because he wasn’t apparently clever enough to go in for the church or the law, he managed, with a kind of instinctive self-protection, to avoid learning enough even to be an officer.  He turned first in this direction and then in that, in his efforts to escape.  The race-track furnished one diversion for his unhappy energies, books of poetry another.  Then he met a painter who painted and loved sumptuous and beautiful blondes, whereupon art and women became the new centers of his life, and Paris, where both might be indulged in, his great ambition.  Given permission and an allowance, he set off to study art in Paris—­only to find after much effort and heartache that he was a failure as an artist.  There remained, however, women—­and the cafes, with strange poets and personalities to be cultivated and explored.  Modelling himself after his newest friend, in attire, manners and morals, he lived what might have been on the whole an unprofitable and ordinary life, if he had not been able to gild it with the glamour of philosophic immoralism.  Finally, because everybody else was writing, he too wrote—­a play.  Then follows a period of discovery of the newest movement in art.  So impressionable is he that his stay of some years in Paris causes him actually to forget how to write English prose, and when he returns to London and has to earn his living at journalism he has to learn his native tongue over again.  Nevertheless he has acquired a point of view—­on women, on art, on life.  He writes—­criticism, poetry, fiction.  He is obscure, ambitious, full of self-esteem, that is beginning to be soured by failure.  He tries to get involved in a duel with a young nobleman, just to get himself before the public.  Failing in that, he lives in squalid lodgings—­or so they seem to a young man who has lived in Paris on