AFTERWORD TO THE FIRST VOLUME OF MY LIFE'S STORY.
I had hardly written "Finis" at the end of this book when the faults in it, faults both of omission and commission, rose in swarms and robbed me of my joy in the work.
It will be six or seven years at least before I shall know whether the book is good and life-worthy or not and yet need drives me to publish it at once.
Did not Horace require nine years to judge his work?
I, therefore, want the reader to know my intention; I want to give him the key, so to speak, to this chamber of my soul.
First of all I wished to destroy or, at least, to qualify the universal opinion that love in youth is all romance and idealism. The masters all paint it crowned with roses of illusion: Juliet is only fourteen: Romeo, having lost his love, refuses life: Goethe follows Shakespeare in his Mignon and Marguerite: even the great humorist Heine and the so-called realist, Balzac, adopt the same convention. Yet to me it is absolutely untrue in regard to the male in boyhood
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