women who have written, thanking me for my outspokenness. They have all told me what I knew, that frank expression made my life story more interesting and more valuable; for without knowledge of the sexual life of man or woman, one can know little or nothing of the character. And so I begin this third volume of my autobiography, comprising the ten years between 1890 and 1900, with these words of Heinrich Heine, the first of all the moderns.
Ever the eunuchs whimpered
When I sang out with force,
They whimpered and they simpered:
My singing was much too coarse.
This decade of my life was memorable to me for the discovery of a side of life which I had hitherto almost ignored. I had found out early, at fifteen or sixteen, that if you worked as hard as you could, you came to success everywhere very quickly. So few people do their best that the one who does becomes a marked man almost at once; and thus success leads immediately to large influence. If you choose to save, you can become rich in a few years. But till this later period I had no idea of the speculative part of city life, where fortunes are made in a day by an idea. This knowledge in its complete form came to me through association with Terah Hooley — the great speculator of that mid-period in London. As Maupassant and Randolph Churchill were the heroes of my second volume, so Terah Hooley, Cecil Rhodes, Oscar Wilde, and a host of writers and artists were the dominant personalities of this period.
It was asserted by the official receiver in Hooley's bankruptcy that he had made over six million pounds in two years in London; that is why I call him one of the most successful speculators of that time. Rhodes's fortune was even larger and better based and led to all sorts of political influence which I wish to trace as fairly as I can, for I liked both these men and had good reason to like them.
In my first volume travel and study had the chief place and, in my second volume, love and politics; but in this third volume I propose to deal with literature and art and describe my own beginnings as a writer and artist; and when passing thus from things of the will to things of the intellect, I feel that I am rising into serener and purer air, and hope, therefore, to make this third volume more interesting than the earlier ones.
I have always wanted to build Romance in the heart of Reality, making the incidents of my life an Earthly Pilgrimage: of my youth a great adventure; of my manhood a lyric of love; of my maturity the successful quest of El Dorado; and finally, of my old age, a prophetic vision.
And here in this book I wish to admit the reader more closely than ever to the subtle intimacies of my spirit. I want him to realize my tremulous-vague hopes of immortal life; the evidences of my mortality, and the effect of sadeyed doublings; the fitful joys of life and love, and the growing spirit of things called inanimate. I want him to meet a thousand instincts and confused desires, and gradually come to know me better than he knows anyone else who has given a record of himself in any literature.
As one gets toward life's term, one is apt to dwell more and more on the supreme value of goodness and loving-kindness. It comes to me often, as if the only things of moment in my life were the kindly things I've done, and the consistent advocacy of forgiveness in my works was the prophylactic against decay-as if goodness were in a very real sense the goal of human life.
It is not altogether then by chance that this third volume should be devoted to some of the best and sweetest souls I have met in this strange crusade of life-Thomson, Meredith, and Burton; I must tell, too, what I owe to Heine, whom I love more even than any of these, though I never met him in the flesh, for Heine left this world in the same month I entered it. All through these years from thirty-five to forty-five the spirit of Jesus came to have ever more and greater influence, not only upon my mind, but also on all my actions.
CHAPTER I
What can we call our own in this world, but our energy, strength and will power? If I could count up all I owe to my great predecessors and contemporaries, there would not be much over.
Strictly speaking, one should tell only of one's life that which is symbolic and therefore of universal interest; but it is extremely difficult to draw the line with any precision, and now and then the seemingly trivial accidents of life have a certain deeper meaning of their own; for instance, adventures come to the adventurous, riches to the greedy. I am treating the happenings of my existence as freely as Rousseau treated his: taking memory, for the most part, as artist-but the first pages of his Confessions startle me with the extraordinary difference of character between us.
He is full of affection and sentiment even in childhood. As a boy, I certainly loved no one. I liked my eldest brother because when I was about thirteen he began to treat me as an equal and showed me kindness. But the first person I really cared for was Professor Smith of Lawrence, Kansas.
How he managed to discover that there was something more than the ordinary in me the very first time we met, I am at a loss to imagine; it may have been a certain fluency of speech, or an uncommon choice of words.
I remember, on my way up from Texas once, the malarial fever having left me, I was hungry and glad to get down from the stage-coach. Dinner had been laid in a little roadside inn for half a dozen people-but I was the only passenger, and I practically ate the half-dozen dinners!
The motherly woman of the place came in and held up her hands in astonishment. I said, 'Of course I will pay you for the six dinners.'
'Indeed you won't!' she cried. 'You have a right to eat all you can; won't you have another pie?'
I could not help accepting, and took another apple pie. When I was pulling out six dollars to pay, 'No, no,' she exclaimed, 'it is a dollar a head — I know'd at once you was a foreigner!'
'Why do you think I'm a foreigner?' I asked.
'You speak such broken United States!' she replied. I gasped, for already I prided myself on my English speech. Professor Smith was the first to praise me for it.
All my boyhood was informed with a consuming passion to win in life, and to enjoy as much as possible. By living for three years beside Professor Smith, there came to me a passionate desire for growth, a view of the possibility, not of perfection, but of trained and lofty intelligence. From that time on, I read and thought and lived with a purpose, to develop every faculty I had to the uttermost.
A gifted woman writes to me that my first love must have modified my character profoundly. It did nothing of the sort. I never felt what is called love, that is, sexual desire and admiration plus affection, until I was nearly thirty, though desire possessed me incessantly from fourteen on.
In some respects Rousseau was very like me and again very unlike. For instance, he tells us that the true meaning of a scene did not come to him at the time, but hours afterwards he recalled each intonation, each look, each gesture, and realized exactly what each person had thought and felt in his heart. This has been true to me all my life, and I attribute its magic to my excellent memory. How one with a bad memory can reproduce a scene, I am at a loss to imagine. But always, thanks to my exact remembrance, friends and enemies and the indifferent reveal themselves to me in their true colors when I recall their words and looks afterwards.
On another occasion, Rousseau tells us how girls appeal to him according to their fine dress and manners; chambermaids, he says, and shop-girls never attracted him at all: he wanted ladies-cared-for hands, exquisitely dressed hair, pretty shoes, ribbons and laces always won him more than beauty. He knew this preference to be ridiculous, but he could not help feeling it. In my case, the exact reverse was true: it was beauty and youth that attracted me and the dress had absolutely nothing to do with it; even the beauty of face did not affect me as much as a beautiful figure, and while still a youth, I was as conscious as a Frenchman of the charm of small wrists and
