rhaps, or poet or
writer. I listened to any quantity of gossip in regard to new movements
that were ready to burst upon the world, in sculpture, painting, the
scriptic art. About the whole group there was much that was exceedingly
warm, youthful, full of dreams. They were intensely informative and full
of hope, and I used to look at them and wonder which one, if any, was
destined to have his dreams realized.

Of L---- however I never had the least doubt. He began, it is true, to
adopt rather more liberal tendencies, to wish always to be part and
parcel of this gayety, this rushing here and there; and he drank at
times--due principally, as I thought, to my wildling art-director, who
had no sense or reserve in matters material or artistic and who was all
for a bacchanalian career, cost what it might. On more than one occasion
I heard L---- declaring roundly, apropos of some group scheme of
pilgrimage, "No, no! I will not. I am going _home_ now!" He had a story
he wanted to work on, an article to finish. At the same time he would
often agree that if by a certain time, when he was through, they were
still at a certain place, or a second or third, he would look them up.
Never, apparently, did his work suffer in the least.

And it was about this time that I began to gather the true source and
import of his literary predisposition. He was literally obsessed, as I
now discovered, with Continental and more especially the French
conception of art in writing. He had studied the works as well as the
temperaments and experiences (more especially the latter, I fear) of
such writers as de Maupassant, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Balzac, de Musset,
Sand, Daudet, Dumas junior, and Zola, as well as a number of the more
recent writers: Hervieu, Bourget, Louys and their contemporaries. Most
of all, though, he was impressed, and deeply, by the life and art of de
Maupassant, his method of approach, his unbiased outlook on life, his
freedom from moral and religious and even sentimental predisposition. In
the beginning of his literary career I really believe he slaved to
imitate him exactly, although he could not very well escape the American
temperament and rearing by which he was hopelessly conditioned. A
certain Western critic and editor, to whom he had first addressed his
hopes and scribblings before coming to me, writing me after L----'s
death in reference to a period antedating that in which I had known him,
observed, "He was crazy about the _