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 pretty nearly all the English lyric poets; Shelley’s atheism had led me to read Kant, Spinoza, Godwin, Darwin and Mill; and these, again, in their turn, introduced me to many writers and various literature.  I do not think that at this time I cared much for novel reading.  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:  “Middle-march,” “Adam Bede,” “The Rise and Fall of Rationalism,” “The History of Civilisation,” were momentous events in my life.  But I loved life better than books, 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 as much on scent and toilette knick-knacks 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 for fear; I was naturally endowed with a very clear sense indeed 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.

CHAPTER II

At last the day came, and with several trunks and boxes full of clothes, books, and pictures, I started, accompanied by an English valet, for Paris and Art.