t 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 a liberal allowance--and writes,
writes, writes, writes ... talking to his fellow lodgers, to the stupid
servant who brings him his meals, and getting the materials for future
books out of them. A candid record of these incidents, interwoven with
eloquent self-analysis, keen and valid criticism of books and pictures,
delightful reminiscences and furious dissertations upon morality, the whole
story is given a special and, for its time, a rare interest by its utter
lack of conventional reticence. He never spares himself. He has undertaken
quite honestly to tell the truth. He has learne