LITMIR.BIZ

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      From the time when 'Don Quixote' first opened my eyes to an imaginative world outside myself, I had read hungrily; but another world was also opened to me when I was about sixteen. I had been taught scales and exercises on the piano; I had tried to learn music, with very little success, when one day the head-master of the school asked me to go into his drawing-room and copy out something for him. As I sat there copying, the music-master, a German, came in and sat down at the piano. He played something which I had never heard before, something which seemed to me the most wonderful thing I had ever heard. I tried to go on copying, but I did not know what I was writing down; I was caught into an ecstasy, the sound seemed to envelop me like a storm, and then to trickle through me like raindrops shaken from wet leaves, and then to wrap me again in a tempest which was like a tempest of grief. When he had finished I said, 'Will you play that over again?' As he played it again I began to distinguish it more clearly; I heard a slow, heavy trampling of feet, marching in order, then what might have been the firing of cannon over a grave, and the trampling again. When he told me that it was Chopin's Funeral March, I understood why it was that the feet had moved so slowly, and why the cannon had been fired; and I saw that the melody which had soothed me was the timid, insinuating consolation which love or hope sometimes brings to the mourner. I asked him if he would teach me music and if he would teach me that piece. He promised to teach me that piece, and I learned it. I learned no more scales and exercises; I learned a few more pieces; but in a little while I could read at sight; and when I was not reading a book I was reading a piece of music at the piano. I never acquired the technique to play a single piece correctly, but I learned to touch the piano as if one were caressing a living being, and it answered me in an intimate and affectionate voice.

      Books and music, then, together with my solitary walks, were the only means of escape which I was able to find from the tedium of things as they were. I was passionately in love with life, but the life I lived was not the life I wanted. I did not know quite what I wanted, but I knew that what I wanted was something very different from what I endured. We were very poor, and I hated the constraints of poverty. We were surrounded by commonplace, middle-class people, and I hated commonplace and the middle classes. Sometimes we were too poor even to have a servant, and I was expected to clean my own boots. I could not endure getting my hands or my shirt-cuffs dirty; the thought of having to do it disgusted me every day. Sometimes my mother, without saying anything to me, had cleaned my boots for me. I was scarcely conscious of the sacrifices which she and the others were continually making. I made none, of my own accord, and I felt aggrieved if I had to share the smallest of their privations.

      From as early a time as I can remember, I had no very clear consciousness of anything external to myself; I never realised that others had the right to expect from me any return for the kindness which they might show me or refuse to me, at their choice. I existed, others also existed; but between us there was an impassable gulf, and I had rarely any desire to cross it. I was very fond of my mother, but I felt no affection towards any one else, nor any desire for the affection of others. To be let alone, and to live my own life for ever, that was what I wanted; and I raged because I could never entirely escape from the contact of people who bored me and things which depressed me. If people called, I went out of the room before they were shown in; if I had not time to get away, I shook hands hurriedly, and slipped out as soon as I could. I remember a cousin who used to come to tea every Sunday for two or three years. My aversion to her was so great that I could hardly answer her if she spoke to me, and I used to think of Shelley, and how he too, like me, would 'lie back and languish into hate.' The woman was quite inoffensive, but I am still unable to see her or hear her speak without that sickness of aversion which used to make the painfulness of Sunday more painful.

      People in general left me no more than indifferent; they could be quietly avoided. They meant no more to me than the chairs on which they sat; I was untouched by their fortunes; I was unconscious of my human relationship to them. To my mother every person in the world became, for the moment of contact, the only person in the world; if she merely talked with any one for five minutes she was absorbed to the exclusion of every other thought; she saw no one else, she heard nothing else. I watched her, with astonishment, with admiration; I felt that she was in the right and I in the wrong; that she gained a pleasure and conferred a benefit, while I only wearied myself and offended others; but I could not help it. I felt nothing, I saw nothing, outside myself.

      I always had a room upstairs, which I called my study, where I could sit alone, reading or thinking. No one was allowed to enter the room; only, in winter, as I always let the fire go out, my mother would now and then steal in gently without speaking, and put more coals on the fire. I used to look up from my books furiously, and ask why I could not be left alone; my mother would smile, say nothing, and go out as quietly as she had come in. I was only happy when I was in my study, but, when I had shut the door behind me, I forgot all about the tedious people who were calling downstairs, the covers of the book I was reading seemed to broaden out into an enclosing rampart, and I was alone with myself.

      At my last school there was one master, a young man, who wrote for a provincial newspaper, of which he afterwards became the editor, with whom I made friends. He had read a great deal, and he knew a few literary people; he was equally fond of literature and of music. Some school composition of mine had interested him in me, and he began to lend me books, and to encourage me in trying to express myself in writing. I had already run through Scott and Byron, with a very little Shelley, and had come to Browning, whom he detested. When I was laid up with scarlatina he sent me over a packet of books to read; one of them was Swinburne's 'Poems and Ballads,' which seemed to give voice to all the fever that I felt just then in my blood. I read 'Wuthering Heights' at the same time and Rabelais a little time afterwards. I read all the bound volumes of the 'Cornhill Magazine' from the beginning right through, stories, essays, and poems, and I remember my delight in 'Harry Richmond,' at a time when I had never heard the name of George Meredith. I read essays signed 'R. L. S.', from which I got my first taste of a sort of gipsy element in literature which was to become a passion when, later on, 'Lavengro' fell into my hands. The reading of 'Lavengro' did many things for me. It absorbed me from the first page, with a curiously personal appeal, as of some one akin to me, and when I came to the place where Lavengro learns Welsh in a fortnight, I laid down the book with a feeling of fierce emulation. I had often thought of learning Italian: I immediately bought an Italian Bible, and a grammar; I worked all day long, not taking up 'Lavengro' again, until, at the end of the fortnight which I had given myself, I could read Italian. Then I finished 'Lavengro.'

      'Lavengro' took my thoughts into the open air, and gave me my first conscious desire to wander. I learned a little Romany, and was always on the lookout for gipsies. I realised that there were other people in the world besides the conventional people I knew, who wore prim and shabby clothes, and went to church twice on Sundays, and worked at business and professions, and sat down to the meal of tea at five o'clock in the afternoon. And I realised that there was another escape from these people besides a solitary flight in books; that if a book could be so like a man, there were men and women, after all, who had the interest of a book as well as the warm advantage of being alive. Humanity began to exist for me.

      But with this discovery of a possible interest in real people, there came a deeper loathing of the people by whom I was surrounded. I had for the most part been able to ignore them; now I wanted to get away, so that I could live my own life, and choose my own companions. My vague notions of sex became precise, became a torture.

      When I first read Rabelais and the 'Poems and Ballads,' I was ignorant of my own body; I looked upon the relationship of man and woman as something essentially wicked; my imagination took fire, but I was hardly conscious of any physical reality connected with it. I was irrepressibly timid in the presence of a woman; I hardly ever met young people of my own age; and I had a feeling of the deepest reverence for women, from which I endeavoured to banish the slightest consciousness of sex. I thought it an inexcusable disrespect; and in my feeling towards the one or two much older women who at one time or another had a certain attraction for me, there was nothing, conscious at least, but a purely romantic admiration. At the same time I had a guilty delight in reading books which told me about the sensations of physical love, and I trembled with ecstasy as I read them. Thoughts of them haunted me; I put them

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