Conrad in Quest of His Youth: An Extravagance of Temperament

IN QUEST OF HIS YOUTH
AN EXTRAVAGANCE OF TEMPERAMENT
LEONARD MERRICK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXI
COPYRIGHT, 1911 BY MITCHELL KENNERLY

How we laughed as we laboured together! How well I remember, to-day, Our 'outings' in midsummer weather, Our winter delights at the play! We were not over-nice in our dinners; Our 'rooms' were up rickety stairs; But if hope be the wealth of beginners, By Jove, we were all millionaires! Our incomes were very uncertain, Our prospects were equally vague; Yet the persons I pity who know not the city, The beautiful city of Prague!
If you can imagine the lonely shade of the man who wrote that verse returning to Literary London—where there is no longer a young man who could write it, and merely a few greybeards are left still to understand what it means—I say, if you can imagine this, you may appreciate the condition of Conrad when he went back to the Quartier Latin.
Conrad was no less sad, his disappointment was no less bitter, the society that he had sought so eagerly was no less alien to him. But while he commanded bocks for all, and mourned the change that left him desolate, the melancholy of his mood was a subtler thing—for he realised that the profoundest change was in himself.
Something should be said of the longings that had brought him back to the Quarter—longings in one hour tender, and in the next tempestuous—something hinted of the regretful years during which his limbs reposed in an official chair while his mind flew out of the official window to places across the sea where he had been young, and sanguine, and infinitely glad. To a score of places it flew, but to none perhaps so often as Paris, where he had studied art in the days when he meant to move the world.
Of course the trouble with the man was that he wanted to be nineteen again, and didn't recognise it. We do not immediately recognise that our youth is going from us; it recedes stealthily, like our hair. For a long time he had missed the zest, the sparkle, the buoyancy from life, but for the flatness that distressed him he blamed the Colony instead of his age. He confused the emotions of his youth with the scenes where he had felt them, and yearned to make sentimental journeys, fancying that to revisit the scenes would be to recover the emotions.