The Project Gutenberg EBook of Confessions of a Young Man, by George Moore

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Title: Confessions of a Young Man

Author: George Moore

Release Date: March 22, 2004 [EBook #11654]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Confessions of a Young Man

By George Moore

Introduction by Floyd Dell

INTRODUCTION

These "Confessions of a Young Man" constitute one of the most significant
documents of the passionate revolt of English literature against the
Victorian tradition. It is significant because it reveals so clearly the
sources of that revolt. It is in a sense the history of an epoch--an epoch
that is just closing. It represents one of the great discoveries of English
literature: a discovery that had been made from time to time before, and
that is now being made anew in our own generation--the discovery of human
nature.

The reason why this discovery has had to be made so often is that it shocks
people. They try to hush it up; and they do succeed in forgetting about it
for long periods of time, and pretending that it doesn't exist. They are
shocked because human nature is not at all like the pretty pictures we like
to draw of ourselves. It is not so sweet, amiable and gentlemanly or
ladylike as we wish to believe it. It is much more selfish, brutal and
lascivious than we care to admit, and as such, both too terrible and too
ridiculous to please us. The Elizabethans understood human nature, and made
glorious comedies and tragedies out of its inordinate crimes and cruelties,
and its pathetic follies and fatuities. But people didn't like it, and they
turned Puritan and closed the theaters. It is true, they repented, and
opened them again; but the theater had got a bad name from which it is only
now beginning to recover.

In the fields of poetry and fiction a more long-drawn-out contest ensued
between, those who wanted to tell the truth and those who wanted to listen
to pleasant fibs, the latter generally having the best of it. The contest
finally settled down into the Victorian compromise, whic