Morality and Arts. A reflection by George Moore.

A 1879 portrait of George Moore by Édouard Manet. From Wikipedia.org

Confessions of a Young Man (1886) is a memoir by Irish novelist George Moore who spent about 15 years in his teens and 20s in Paris and later London as a struggling artist. The book is notable as being one of the first English writings which named important emerging French Impressionists; for its literary criticism; and depictions of bohemian life in Paris during the 1870s and 80s.

In writing style The Confessions of a Young Man is presented as a novel, with a hero named Dayne, but the reader assumes in essence it is an autobiography, a true "confession". (Wikipedia.com) From Confessions of a Young Man, pp. 144-5:

¨What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoph´s lash of Egypt´s sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramids to look on, or to fill a musing hour with wonderment. Is there one among us who would exchange them fro the lives of the ignominious slaves that died? What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old maid was the price paid fro Ingre´s La Source? That the model died of drink and disease in the hospital is nothing when compared with the essential that I should have La Source, that exquisite dream of innoncence.¨