Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/25

 There followed two years (1910-12) in New York—probably the least satisfactory years of his life. The quest of beauty is scarcely a profession, and it caused his parents some concern to find him pausing irresolute on the threshold of manhood, instead of setting himself a goal and bracing his energies for its achievement. In 1911 his mother and sister left Mexico, a week or two before Porfirio Diaz made his exit, and the Maderists entered the capital. They returned to New York, to find Alan still unsettled, and possessed with the thought, or perhaps rather the instinct, that the life he craved for was not to be found in America, but awaited him in Europe. In the following year he carried his point, and set off for Paris—a departure which may fairly be called his Hegira, the turning-point of his history. That it shortened his span there can be little doubt. Had he settled down to literary work, in his native city, he might have lived to old age. But it secured him four years of the tense and poignant joy of living on which his heart was set; and during two of these years the joy was of a kind which absolved him for ever from the reproach of mere hedonism and self-indulgence. He would certainly have said—or rather he was continually saying, in words full of passionate conviction—

It was in the spirit of a romanticist of the eighteen-forties that he plunged into the life of Paris. He had a room near the Musée de Cluny, and he found himself thoroughly at home among the artists and students of the Latin Quarter, though he occasionally varied the Vie de Bohème by excursions into "society" of a more xxi