small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to
say so. I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the
present moment. This pitiless indictment I bring without pity
against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I
did to myself was far more terrible still.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture
of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my
manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men
hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so
acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the
historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have
passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made
others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations
were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine
were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue,
of larger scope.

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured
into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself
with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded
myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the
spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me
a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went
to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox
was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the
sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness,
or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure
where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little
action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that