Confessions of a Young Man. by

The Confessions of a Young Man (1886 in French; 1888 in English) is a memoir by Irish novelist George Moore who spent about 15 years in his teens and 20s in Paris and later London as a struggling artist. The book is notable as being one of the first English writings which named important emerging French Impressionists; for its literary criticism; and depictions of bohemian life in Paris during the 1870s and 1880s. In writing style The Confessions of a Young Man is presented as a novel, with a hero named Dayne, but the reader assumes in essence it is an autobiography, a true "confession."Dayne (i.e. Moore) went to Paris as a teenager, and almost becomes a full Parisian nearly forgetting the English language after 15 years. He sketches, with a frankness now jubilant, now cynical, the luscious "vie de Boheme" that Paris alone could offer the young man of health and wealth who loved art. Amid scenes splendid, squalid, or bizarre, move students, cabotins, painters, poets, pale enthusiasts starving for the sake of an idea, actresses, women of fashion, courtesans, clubmen, and spectators. Artistic endeavour and perfumed vice mingle in fraternity; everything is unusual, irregular, fantastic. Dayne emerges from the ordeal of this environment but little changed. For him the enticements of the flesh are not more powerful than those of art. One week he is beguiling the hours in some salon or alcove, the next he is incandescent with aspiration. So the years pass; and at last, having saturated himself with the French theories of literary and graphic art which are bound up with the names of Flaubert, Goncourts, Zola, Degas, and Manet, he one day learns with tragic certainty that he is not destined to be a painter, and he courageously admits that all this periodic, frenzied effort has been misdirected.[1] Then we have interludes of philosophy and literary criticism; the philosophy perhaps not of much account; the criticism often original, epigrammatic, sometimes of an astounding penetration, and always literary. Later, Dayne is driven by adverse circumstances to London and to a lodging in the Strand, where the book ends. Dayne's ideas about art and his temperament can be seen in characteristic passages like the following: "For art was not for us then as it is now-a mere emotion, right or wrong only in proportion to its intensity; we believed then in the grammar of art, perspective, anatomy, and la jambe qui forte...".. George Augustus Moore (24 February 1852 - 21 January 1933) was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist. Moore came from a Roman Catholic landed family who lived at Moore Hall in Carra, County Mayo. He originally wanted to be a painter, and studied art in Paris during the 1870s. There, he befriended many of the leading French artists and writers of the day. As a naturalistic writer, he was amongst the first English-language authors to absorb the lessons of the French realists, and was particularly influenced by the works of Émile Zola. His writings influenced James Joyce, according to the literary critic and biographer Richard Ellmann, and, although Moore's work is sometimes seen as outside the mainstream of both Irish and British literature, he is as often regarded as the first great modern Irish novelist. George Moore was born in Moore Hall in 1852. As a child, Moore enjoyed the novels of Walter Scott, which his father read to him. He spent a good deal of time outdoors with his brother, Maurice George Moore, and also became friendly with the young Willie and Oscar Wilde, who spent their summer holidays at nearby Moytura. Oscar was to later quip of Moore: "He conducts his education in public." His father had again turned his attention to horse breeding and in 1861 brought his champion horse, Croagh Patrick, to England for a successful racing season, together with his wife and nine-year-old son......