Morality, as has been said, does not enter into the consideration of such a man; he was above morality, or outside it. There have been and there are others like him. They are grown-up children, utterly irresponsible; not immoral but unmoral; they “please to live and live to please” themselves. They do not realise that their actions may prove costly to others and therefore do not count the cost. They are children of impulse not of calculation. They are emotional not logical. Pleasure is their pursuit and they shun all that is unpleasing and displeasing. They are so different from us ordinary folk that we cannot appraise them or even fully understand them. Fear of consequences that would appal us have no terrors for them; they do not need to set them aside, they are not aware of them. Conventions which hamper us, for them do not exist. To fulfil the desire of to-day is their one aim and ambition and they take no heed of to-morrow.
It is as a dandy that D’Orsay must be judged, and in that rôle he achieved triumph. It was as a dandy he lived and as a dandy that he is immortal. Such men as he, if indeed there are others with his genius, should—as we have said—be pensioned by the State, should be set above the carking cares of questions of want of pounds—shillings and pence do not trouble them; they should be cherished and sustained as rarely-gifted and rare beings, to whom life presents not any serious problems, and to whom life is a space of time only too brief for all the pleasures which should be crowded into it. “Life’s fitful fever” should be kept apart from such sunny souls, and our only regret should be that there are so few of them.
There are mouldy-minded people who put out the finger of scorn at D’Orsay. Is it not the truth that they are jealous of him, and that at the bottom of their hearts there is a muttered prayer: “I would thank God if He had made me such a man”?
FOOTNOTES
[1] De Guiche. See p. 35.
[2] D’Orsay was but twenty at the time of his first appearance in London.
[3] Cf. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, ch. i. l. 1.
[4] Sir David Wilkie.
[5] His unsuccessful three-volume novel.