I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. 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.
Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged.
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