r hansoms, then a genius or two
would arrive, and supper and singing went merrily until the chimney sweeps
began to go by, and we took chairs and bottles into the street and entered
into discussion with the policeman. Twelve hours later we struggled out of
our beds, and to the sound of church bells we commenced writing. The paper
appeared on Tuesday. Our host sat in a small room off the dining-room from
which he occasionally emerged to stimulate our lagging pens.

But I could not learn to see life paragraphically. I longed to give a
personal shape to something, and personal shape could not be achieved in a
paragraph nor in an article. True it is that I longed for art, but I longed
also for fame, or was it notoriety? Both. I longed for fame, fame, brutal
and glaring, fame that leans to notoriety. Out with you, liars that you
are, tell the truth, say you would sell the souls you don't believe in, or
do believe in, for notoriety. I have known you attend funerals for the sake
of seeing your miserable names in the paper. You, hypocritical reader, who
are now turning up your eyes and murmuring "horrid young man"--examine your
weakly heart, and see what divides us; I am not ashamed of my appetites, I
proclaim them, what is more I gratify them; you're silent, you refrain, and
you dress up natural sins in hideous garments of shame, you would sell your
wretched soul for what I would not give the parings of my finger-nails
for--paragraphs in a society paper. I am ashamed of nothing I have done,
especially my sins, and I boldly confess that I then desired notoriety. I
walked along the streets mad; I turned upon myself like a tiger. "Am I
going to fail again as I have failed before?" I asked myself. "Will my
novel prove as abortive as my paintings, my poetry, my journalism?" I
looked back upon my life,--mediocrity was branded about my life. "Would it
be the same to the end?" I asked myself a thousand times by day, and a
thousand times by night. We all want notoriety, our desire for notoriety is
hideous if you will, but it is less hideous when it is proclaimed from a
brazen tongue than when it hides its head in the cant of human
humanitarianism. Humanity be hanged! Self, and after self a friend; the
rest may go to the devil; and be sure that when any man is more stupidly
vain and outrageously egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his
hideousness in humanitarianism. Victor Hugo was hideous with self, and the
innermost stench of the h