That is all gone by. I have no longer a
spark of social enthusiasm. Art is all I now care for, and as art I
wish my work to be judged."
"One would have thought," said Julian, "that increased knowledge of
these fearful things would have had just the opposite effect."
"Yes," exclaimed the other, with the smile which always prefaced
some piece of self-dissection, "and so it would in the case of a man
born to be a radical. I often amuse myself with taking to pieces my
former self. I was not a conscious hypocrite in those days of
violent radicalism, working-man's-club lecturing, and the like; the
fault was that I understood myself as yet so imperfectly. That zeal
on behalf of the suffering masses was nothing more nor less than
disguised zeal on behalf of my own starved passions. I was poor and
desperate, life had no pleasures, the future seemed hopeless, yet I
was overflowing with vehement desires, every nerve in me was a
hunger which cried to be appeased. I identified myself with the poor
and ignorant; I did not make their cause my own, but my own cause
theirs. I raved for freedom because I was myself in the bondage of
unsatisfiable longing."
"Well," he went on, after regarding his listener with still the same
smile, "I have come out of all that, in proportion as my artistic
self-consciousness has developed.
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