Confessions of a Young Man


By George Moore

Introduction by Floyd Dell




INTRODUCTION


These "Confessions of a Young Man" constitute one of the most significant
documents of the passionate revolt of English literature against the
Victorian tradition. It is significant because it reveals so clearly the
sources of that revolt. It is in a sense the history of an epoch--an epoch
that is just closing. It represents one of the great discoveries of English
literature: a discovery that had been made from time to time before, and
that is now being made anew in our own generation--the discovery of human
nature.

The reason why this discovery has had to be made so often is that it shocks
people. They try to hush it up; and they do succeed in forgetting about it
for long periods of time, and pretending that it doesn't exist. They are
shocked because human nature is not at all like the pretty pictures we like
to draw of ourselves. It is not so sweet, amiable and gentlemanly or
ladylike as we wish to believe it. It is much more selfish, brutal and
lascivious than we care to admit, and as such, both too terrible and too
ridiculous to please us. The Elizabethans understood human nature, and made