Oscar Wilde

De Profundis
Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis



Dear Bosie,
After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your
sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of
imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message
even, except such as gave me pain.
Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me, yet
the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness
and contempt should for ever take that place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me:
and you yourself will, I think, feel in your heart that to write to me as I lie in the loneliness of
prison-life is better than to publish my letters without my permission or to dedicate poems to
me unasked, though the world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or passion, of
remorse or indifference you may choose to send as your answer or your appeal.
I have no doubt that in this letter in which I have to write of your life and of mine, of the past
and of the future, of sweet things changed to bitterness and of bitter things that may be turned
into joy, there will be much that will wound your vanity to the quick. If it prove so, read the
letter over and over again till it kills your vanity. If you find in it something of which you feel
that you are unjustly accused, remember that one should be thankful that there is any fault of
which one can be unjustly accused. If there be in it one single passage that brings tears to
your eyes, weep as we weep in prison where the day no less than the night is set apart for
tears. It is the only thing that can save you. If you go complaining to your mother, as you did
with reference to the scorn of you I displayed in my letter to Robbie, so that she may flatter
and soothe you back into self-complacency or conceit, you will be completely lost. If you
find one false excuse for yourself, you will soon find a hundred, and be just what you were
before. Do you still say, as you said to Robbie in your answer, that I attribute unworthy
motives to you? Ah! you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely. A motive is an
intellectual aim. That you were very young when our friendship began? Your defect was
not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew so much. The morning dawn of
boyhood with its delicate bloom, its clear pure light, its joy of innocence and expectation you
had left far behind. With very swift and running feet you had passed from Romance to
Realism. The gutter and the things that live in it had begun to fascinate you. That was the
origin of the trouble in which you sought my aid, and I, so unwisely according to the wisdom
of this world, out of pity and kindness gave it to you. You must read this letter right through,
though each word may become to you as the fire or knife of the surgeon that makes the
delicate flesh burn or bleed. Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the
eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant of the modes of Art in its
revolution or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer
music of the vowelled Greek, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song may yet be full of the
very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know
himself. I was such a one too long. You have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do
not be afraid. The supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right. Remember
also that whatever is misery to you to read, is still greater misery to me to set down. To you
the Unseen Powers have been very good. They have permitted you to see the strange and
tragic shapes of Life as one sees shadows in a crystal. The head of Medusa that turns living
men to stone, you have been allowed to look at in a mirror merely. You yourself have walked
free among the flowers. From me the beautiful world of colour and motion has been taken
away.
I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. As I sit here in this dark cell in
convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame myself. In the perturbed and fitful nights
of anguish, in the long monotonous days of pain, it is myself I blame. I blame myself for
allowing an unintellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was not the creation
and contemplation of beautiful things, to entirely dominate my life. From the very first there
was too wide a gap between us. You had been idle at your school, worse than idle at your
university. You did not realise that an artist, and especially such an artist as I am, one, that is
to say, the quality of whose work depends on the intensification of personality, requires for
the development of his art the companionship of ideas, and intellectual atmosphere, quiet,
peace, and solitude. You admired my work when it was finished: you enjoyed the brilliant
successes of my first nights, and the brilliant banquets that followed them: you were proud,
and quite naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so distinguished: but you could
not understand the conditions requisite for the production of artistic work. I am not speaking
in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact when I
remind you that during the whole time we were together I never wrote one single line.
Whether at Torquay, Goring, London, Florence, or elsewhere, my life, as long as you were by
my side, was entirely sterile and uncreative. And with but few intervals you were, I regret to
say, by my side always.
I remember, for instance, in September '93, to select merely one instance out of many, taking
a set of chambers, purely in order to work undisturbed, as I had broken my contract with John
Hare for whom I had promised to write a play, and who was pressing me on the subject.
During the first week you kept away. We had, not unnaturally indeed, differed on the
question of the artistic value of your translation of Salome, so you contented yourself with
sending me foolish letters on the subject. In that week I wrote and completed in every detail,
as it was ultimately performed, the first act of An Ideal Husband. The second week you
returned and my work practically had to be given up. I arrived at St James's Place every
morning at 11.30, in order to have the opportunity of thinking and writing without the
interruptions inseparable from my own household, quiet and peaceful as that household was.
But the attempt was vain. At twelve o'clock you drove up, and stayed smoking cigarettes and
chattering till 1.30, when I had to take you out to luncheon at the Caf Royal or the Berkeley.
Luncheon with its liqueurs lasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired to White's. At tea-
time you appeared again, and stayed till it was time to dress for dinner. You dined with me
either at the Savoy or at Tite Street. We did not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper
at Willis's had to wind up the entrancing day. That was my life for those three months, every
single day, except during the four days when you went abroad. I then, of course, had to go
over to Calais to fetch you back. For one of my nature and temperament it was a position at
once grotesque and tragic.
You surely must realise that now? You must see now that your incapacity of being alone:
your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the attention and time of others: your lack of
any power of sustained intellectual concentration: the unfortunate accident for I like to
think it was no more that you had not yet been able to acquire the Oxford temper in
intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play gracefully with ideas but had
arrived at violence of opinion merely that all these things, combined with the fact that your
desires and interests were in Life not in Art, were as destructive to your own progress in
culture as they were to my work as an artist? When I compare my friendship with you to my
friendship with such still younger men as John Gray and Pierre Lous I feel ashamed. My
real life, my higher life was with them and such as they.
Of the appalling results of my friendship with you I don't speak at present. I am thinking
merely of its quality while it lasted. It was intellectually degrading to me. You had the
rudiments of an artistic temperament in its germ. But I met you either too late or too soon, I
don't know which. When you were away I was all right. The moment, in the early December
of the year to which I have been alluding, I had succeeded in inducing your mother to send
you out of England, I collected again the torn and ravelled web of my imagination, got my
life back into my own hands, and not merely finished the three remaining acts of An Ideal
Husband, but conceived and had almost completed two other plays of a completely different
type, the Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane, when suddenly, unbidden,
unwelcome, and under circumstances fatal to my happiness you returned. The two works left
then imperfect I was unable to take up again. The mood that created them I could never
recover. You now, having yourself published a volume of verse, will be able to recognise the
truth of everything I have said here. Whether you can or not it remains as a hideous truth in
the very heart of our friendship. While you were with me you were the absolute ruin of my
Art, and in allowing you to stand persistently between Art and myself I give to myself shame
and blame in the fullest degree. You couldn't know, you couldn't understand, you couldn't
appreciate. I had no right to expect it of you at all. Your interests were merely in your meals
and moods. Your desires were simply for amusements, for ordinary or less ordinary
pleasures. They were what your temperament needed, or thought it needed for the moment. I
should have forbidden you my house and my chambers except when I specially invited you. I
blame myself without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour with
Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was
ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist,
weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.
I blame myself again for having allowed you to bring me to utter and discreditable financial
ruin. I remember one morning in the early October of '92 sitting in the yellowing woods at
Bracknell with your mother. At that time I knew very little of your real nature. I had stayed
from a Saturday to Monday with you at Oxford. You had stayed with me at Cromer for ten
days and played golf. The conversation turned on you, and your mother began to speak to me
about your character. She told me of your two chief faults, your vanity, and your being, as
she termed it, all wrong about money. I have a distinct recollection of how I laughed. I
had no idea that the first would bring me to prison, and the second to bankruptcy. I thought
vanity a sort of graceful flower for a young man to wear; as for extravagance for I thought
she meant no more than extravagance the virtues of prudence and thrift were not in my own
nature or my own race. But before our friendship was one month older I began to see what
your mother really meant. Your insistence on a life of reckless profusion: your incessant
demands for money: your claim that all your pleasures should be paid for by me whether I
was with you or not: brought me after some time into serious monetary difficulties, and what
made the extravagances to me at any rate so monotonously uninteresting, as your persistent
grasp on my life grew stronger and stronger, was that the money was really spent on little
more than the pleasures of eating, drinking, and the like. Now and then it is a joy to have
one's table red with wine and roses, but you outstripped all taste and temperance. You
demanded without grace and received without thanks. You grew to think that you had a sort
of right to live at my expense and in a profuse luxury to which you had never been
accustomed, and which for that reason made your appetites all the more keen, and at the end
if you lost money gambling in some Algiers Casino you simply telegraphed next morning to
me in London to lodge the amount of your losses to your account at your bank, and gave the
matter no further thought of any kind.
When I tell you that between the autumn of 1892 and the date of my imprisonment I spent
with you and on you more than 5000 in actual money, irrespective of the bills I incurred,
you will have some idea of the sort of life on which you insisted. Do you think I exaggerate?
My ordinary expenses with you for an ordinary day in London for luncheon, dinner, supper,
amusements, hansoms and the rest of it ranged from 12 to 20, and the week's expenses
were naturally in proportion and ranged from 80 to 130. For our three months at Goring
my expenses (rent of course included) were 1340. Step by step with the Bankruptcy
Receiver I had to go over every item of my life. It was horrible. Plain living and high
thinking was, of course, an ideal you could not at that time have appreciated, but such
extravagance was a disgrace to both of us. One of the most delightful dinners I remember
ever having had is one Robbie and I had together in a little Soho caf, which cost about as
many shillings as my dinners to you used to cost pounds. Out of my dinner with Robbie came
the first and best of all my dialogues. Idea, title, treatment, mode, everything was struck out
at a 3 franc 50 c. table-d'hte. Out of the reckless dinners with you nothing remains but the
memory that too much was eaten and too much was drunk. And my yielding to your demands
was bad for you. You know that now. It made you grasping often: at times not a little
unscrupulous: ungracious always. There was on far too many occasions too little joy or
privilege in being your host. You forgot I will not say the formal courtesy of thanks, for
formal courtesies will strain a close friendship but simply the grace of sweet
companionship, the charm of pleasant conversation, that terpnon kakon as the Greeks called
it, and all those gentle humanities that make life lovely, and are an accompaniment to life as
music might be, keeping things in tune and filling with melody the harsh or silent places. And
though it may seem strange to you that one in the terrible position in which I am situated
should find a difference between one disgrace and another, still I frankly admit that the folly
of throwing away all this money on you, and letting you squander my fortune to your own
hurt as well as to mine, gives to me and in my eyes a note of common profligacy to my
Bankruptcy that makes me doubly ashamed of it. I was made for other things.
But most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to bring on
me. The basis of character is will-power, and my will-power became absolutely subject to
yours. It sounds a grotesque thing to say, but it is none the less true. Those incessant scenes
that seemed to be almost physically necessary to you, and in which your mind and body grew
distorted and you became a thing as terrible to look at as to listen to: that dreadful mania you
inherit from your father, the mania for writing revolting and loathsome letters: your entire
lack of any control over your emotions as displayed in your long resentful moods of sullen
silence, no less than in the sudden fits of almost epileptic rage: all these things in reference to
which one of my letters to you, left by you lying about at the Savoy or some other hotel and
so produced in Court by your father's Counsel, contained an entreaty not devoid of pathos,
had you at that time been able to recognise pathos either in its elements or its expression:
these, I say, were the origin and causes of my fatal yielding to you in your daily increasing
demands. You wore one out. It was the triumph of the smaller over the bigger nature. It was
the case of that tyranny of the weak over the strong which somewhere in one of my plays I
describe as being the only tyranny that lasts.
And it was inevitable. In every relation of life with others one has to find some moyen de
vivre. In your case, one had either to give up to you or to give you up. There was no other
alternative. Through deep if misplaced affection for you: through great pity for your defects
of temper and temperament: through my own proverbial good-nature and Celtic laziness:
through an artistic aversion to coarse scenes and ugly words: through that incapacity to bear
resentment of any kind which at that time characterised me: through my dislike of seeing life
made bitter and uncomely by what to me, with my eyes really fixed on other things, seemed
to be mere trifles too petty for more than a moment's thought or interest through these
reasons, simple as they may sound, I gave up to you always. As a natural result, your claims,
your efforts at domination, your exactions grew more and more unreasonable. Your meanest
motive, your lowest appetite, your most common passion, became to you laws by which the
lives of others were to be guided always, and to which, if necessary, they were to be without
scruple sacrificed. Knowing that by making a scene you could always have your way, it was
but natural that you should proceed, almost unconsciously I have no doubt, to every excess of
vulgar violence. At the end you did not know to what goal you were hurrying, or with what
aim in view. Having made your own of my genius, my will-power, and my fortune, you
required, in the blindness of an inexhaustible greed, my entire existence. You took it. At the
one supremely and tragically critical moment of all my life, just before my lamentable step of
beginning my absurd action, on the one side there was your father attacking me with hideous
cards left at my club, on the other side there was you attacking me with no less loathsome
letters. The letter I received from you on the morning of the day I let you take me down to the
Police Court to apply for the ridiculous warrant for your father's arrest was one of the worst
you ever wrote, and for the most shameful reason. Between you both I lost my head. My
judgment forsook me. Terror took its place. I saw no possible escape, I may say frankly, from
either of you. Blindly I staggered as an ox into the shambles. I had made a gigantic
psychological error. I had always thought that my giving up to you in small things meant
nothing: that when a great moment arrived I could reassert my will-power in its natural
superiority. It was not so. At the great moment my will-power completely failed me. In life
there is really no small or great thing. All things are of equal value and of equal size. My
habit due to indifference chiefly at first of giving up to you in everything had become
insensibly a real part of my nature. Without my knowing it, it had stereotyped my
temperament to one permanent and fatal mood. That is why, in the subtle epilogue to the first
edition of his essays, Pater says that Failure is to form habits. When he said it the dull
Oxford people thought the phrase a mere wilful inversion of the somewhat wearisome text of
Aristotelian Ethics, but there is a wonderful, a terrible truth hidden in it. I had allowed you to
sap my strength of character, and to me the formation of a habit had proved to be not Failure
merely but Ruin. Ethically you had been even still more destructive to me than you had been
artistically.
The warrant once granted, your will of course directed everything. At a time when I should
have been in London taking wise counsel, and calmly considering the hideous trap in which I
had allowed myself to be caught the booby trap as your father calls it to the present day
you insisted on my taking you to Monte Carlo, of all revolting places on God's earth, that all
day, and all night as well, you might gamble as long as the Casino remained open. As for me
baccarat having no charms for me I was left alone outside to myself. You refused to
discuss even for five minutes the position to which you and your father had brought me. My
business was merely to pay your hotel expenses and your losses. The slightest allusion to the
ordeal awaiting me was regarded as a bore. A new brand of champagne that was
recommended to us had more interest for you.
On our return to London those of my friends who really desired my welfare implored me to
retire abroad, and not to face an impossible trial. You imputed mean motives to them for
giving such advice, and cowardice to me for listening to it. You forced me to stay to brazen it
out, if possible, in the box by absurd and silly perjuries. At the end, I was of course arrested
and your father became the hero of the hour: more indeed than the hero of the hour merely:
your family now ranks, strangely enough, with the Immortals: for with that grotesqueness of
effect that is as it were a Gothic element in history, and makes Clio the least serious of all the
Muses, your father will always live among the kind pure-minded parents of Sunday-school
literature, your place is with the Infant Samuel, and in the lowest mire of Malebolge I sit
between Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade. Of course I should have got rid of you, I
should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has
stung him. In the most wonderful of all his plays schylus tells us of the great Lord who
brings up in his house the lion-cub, the leontos inin, and loves it because it comes bright-eyed
to his call and fawns on him for its food: Paidropos poti xeira, sainon te gastros anagkais.
And the thing grows up and shows the nature of its race, htos to proste tokhon, and destroys
the lord and his house and all that he possesses. I feel that I was such a one as he. But my
fault was, not that I did not part from you, but that I parted from you far too often. As far as I
can make out I ended my friendship with you every three months regularly, and each time
that I did so you managed by means of entreaties, telegrams, letters, the interposition of your
friends, the interposition of mine, and the like to induce me to allow you back. When at the
end of March '93 you left my house at Torquay I had determined never to speak to you again,
or to allow you under any circumstances to be with me, so revolting had been the scene you
had made the night before your departure. You wrote and telegraphed from Bristol to beg me
to forgive you and meet you. Your tutor, who had stayed behind, told me that he thought that
at times you were quite irresponsible for what you said and did, and that most, if not all, of
the men at Magdalen were of the same opinion. I consented to meet you, and of course I
forgave you. On the way up to town you begged me to take you to the Savoy. That was
indeed a visit fatal to me.
Three months later, in June, we are at Goring. Some of your Oxford friends come to stay
from a Saturday to Monday. The morning of the day they went away you made a scene so
dreadful, so distressing that I told you that we must part. I remember quite well, as we stood
on the level croquet-ground with the pretty lawn all round us, pointing out to you that we
were spoiling each other's lives, that you were absolutely ruining mine and that I evidently
was not making you really happy, and that an irrevocable parting, a complete separation was
the one wise philosophic thing to do. You went sullenly after luncheon, leaving one of your
most offensive letters behind with the butler to be handed to me after your departure. Before
three days had elapsed you were telegraphing from London to beg to be forgiven and allowed
to return. I had taken the place to please you. I had engaged your own servants at your
request. I was always terribly sorry for the hideous temper to which you were really a prey. I
was fond of you. So I let you come back and forgave you. Three months later still, in
September, new scenes occurred, the occasion of them being my pointing out to you the
schoolboy faults of your attempted translation of Salome. You must by this time be a fair
enough French scholar to know that the translation was as unworthy of you, as an ordinary
Oxonian, as it was of the work it sought to render. You did not of course know it then, and in
one of the violent letters you wrote to me on the point you said that you were under no
intellectual obligation of any kind to me. I remember that when I read that statement, I felt
that it was the one really true thing you had written to me in the whole course of our
friendship. I saw that a less cultivated nature would really have suited you much better. I am
not saying this in bitterness at all, but simply as a fact of companionship. Ultimately the bond
of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation
must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only
common basis possible is the lowest level. The trivial in thought and action is charming. I had
made it the keystone of a very brilliant philosophy expressed in plays and paradoxes. But the
froth and folly of our life grew often very wearisome to me: it was only in the mire that we
met: and fascinating, terribly fascinating though the one topic round which your talk
invariably centred was, still at the end it became quite monotonous to me. I was often bored
to death by it, and accepted it as I accepted your passion for going to music-halls, or your
mania for absurd extravagances in eating and drinking, or any other of your to me less
attractive characteristics, as a thing, that is to say, that one simply had to put up with, a part of
the high price one paid for knowing you. When after leaving Goring I went to Dinard for a
fortnight you were extremely angry with me for not taking you with me, and, before my
departure there, made some very unpleasant scenes on the subject at the Albemarle Hotel, and
sent me some equally unpleasant telegrams to a country house I was staying at for a few days.
I told you, I remember, that I thought it was your duty to be with your own people for a little,
as you had passed the whole season away from them. But in reality, to be perfectly frank with
you, I could not under any circumstances have let you be with me. We had been together for
nearly twelve weeks. I required rest and freedom from the terrible strain of your
companionship. It was necessary for me to be a little by myself. It was intellectually
necessary. And so I confess I saw in your letter, from which I have quoted, a very good
opportunity for ending the fatal friendship that had sprung up between us, and ending it
without bitterness, as I had indeed tried to do on that bright June morning at Goring, three
months before. It was however represented to me I am bound to say candidly by one
of my own friends to whom you had gone in your difficulty that you would
be much hurt, perhaps almost humiliated at having your work sent back to you
like a schoolboy's exercise; that I was expecting far too much intellectually
from you; and that, no matter what you wrote or did, you were absolutely and
entirely devoted to me. I did not want to be the first to check or discourage you
in your beginnings in literature: I knew quite well that no translation, unless
one done by a poet, could render the colour and cadence of my work in any
adequate measure: devotion seemed to me, seems to me still, a wonderful
thing, not to be lightly thrown away: so I took the translation and you back.
Exactly three months later, after a series of scenes culminating in one more
than usually revolting, when you came one Monday evening to my rooms
accompanied by two of your friends, I found myself actually flying abroad
next morning to escape from you, giving my family some absurd reason for
my sudden departure, and leaving a false address with my servant for fear you
might follow me by the next train. And I remember that afternoon, as I was in
the railway-carriage whirling up to Paris, thinking what an impossible, terrible,
utterly wrong state my life had got into, when I, a man of world-wide
reputation, was actually forced to run away from England, in order to try and
get rid of a friendship that was entirely destructive of everything fine in me
either from the intellectual or ethical point of view: the person from whom I
was flying being no terrible creature sprung from sewer or mire into modern
life with whom I had entangled my days, but you yourself, a young man of my
own social rank and position, who had been at my own College at Oxford, and
was an incessant guest at my house. The usual telegrams of entreaty and
remorse followed: I disregarded them. Finally you threatened that unless I
consented to meet you, you would under no circumstances consent to proceed
to Egypt. I had myself, with your knowledge and concurrence, begged your
mother to send you to Egypt away from England, as you were wrecking your
life in London. I knew that if you did not go it would be a terrible
disappointment to her, and for her sake I did meet you, and under the influence
of great emotion, which even you cannot have forgotten, I forgave the past;
though I said nothing at all about the future.
On my return to London next day I remember sitting in my room and sadly
and seriously trying to make up my mind whether or not you really were what
you seemed to me to be, so full of terrible defects, so utterly ruinous both to
yourself and to others, so fatal a one to know even or to be with. For a whole
week I thought about it, and wondered if after all I was not unjust and
mistaken in my estimate of you. At the end of the week a letter from your
mother is handed in. It expressed to the full every feeling I myself had about
you. In it she spoke of your blind exaggerated vanity which made you despise
your home, and treat your elder brother that candidissima anima as a
Philistine: of your temper which made her afraid to speak to you about your
life, the life she felt, she knew, you were leading: about your conduct in money
matters, so distressing to her in more ways than one: of the degeneration and
change that had taken place in you. She saw, of course, that heredity had
burdened you with a terrible legacy, and frankly admitted it, admitted it with
terror: he is the one of my children who has inherited the fatal Douglas
temperament, she wrote of you. At the end she stated that she felt bound to
declare that your friendship with me, in her opinion, had so intensified your
vanity that it had become the source of all your faults, and earnestly begged me
not to meet you abroad. I wrote to her at once, in reply, and told her that I
agreed entirely with every word she had said. I added much more. I went as far
as I could possibly go. I told her that the origin of our friendship was you in
your undergraduate days at Oxford coming to beg me to help you in very
serious trouble of a very particular character. I told her that your life had been
continually in the same manner troubled. The reason of your going to Belgium
you had placed to the fault of your companion in that journey, and your mother
had reproached me with having introduced you to him. I replaced the fault on
the right shoulders, on yours. I assured her at the end that I had not the smallest
intention of meeting you abroad, and begged her to try to keep you there,
either as an honorary attach, if that were possible, or to learn modern
languages, if it were not; or for any reason she chose, at least during two or
three years, and for your sake as well as for mine. In the meantime you are
writing to me by every post from Egypt.
I took not the smallest notice of any of your communications. I read them,
and tore them up. I had quite settled to have no more to do with you. My mind
was made up, and I gladly devoted myself to the Art whose progress I had
allowed you to interrupt. At the end of three months, your mother, with that
unfortunate weakness of will that characterises her, and that in the tragedy of
my life has been an element no less fatal than your father's violence, actually
writes to me herself I have no doubt, of course, at your instigation tells me
that you are extremely anxious to hear from me, and in order that I should have
no excuse for not communicating with you, sends me your address in Athens,
which, of course, I knew perfectly well. I confess I was absolutely astounded
at her letter. I could not understand how, after what she had written to me in
December, and what I in answer had written to her, she could in any way try to
repair or to renew my unfortunate friendship with you. I acknowledged her
letter, of course, and again urged her to try and get you connected with some
Embassy abroad, so as to prevent your returning to England, but I did not write
to you, or take any more notice of your telegrams than I did before your
mother had written to me. Finally, you actually telegraphed to my wife
begging her to use her influence with me to get me to write to you. Our
friendship had always been a source of distress to her: not merely because she
had never liked you personally, but because she saw how your continual
companionship altered me, and not for the better: still, just as she had always
been most gracious and hospitable to you, so she could not bear the idea of my
being in any way unkind for so it seemed to her to any of my friends. She
thought, knew indeed, that it was a thing alien to my character. At her request I
did communicate with you. I remember the wording of my telegram quite well.
I said that time healed every wound but that for many months to come I would
neither write to you nor see you. You started without delay for Paris, sending
me passionate telegrams on the road to beg me to see you once, at any rate. I
declined. You arrived in Paris late on a Saturday night, and found a brief letter
from me waiting for you at your hotel stating that I would not see you. Next
morning I received in Tite Street a telegram of some ten or eleven pages in
length from you. You stated in it that no matter what you had done to me you
could not believe that I would absolutely decline to see you: you reminded me
that for the sake of seeing me even for one hour you had travelled six days and
nights across Europe without stopping once on the way: you made what I must
admit was a most pathetic appeal, and ended with what seemed to me a threat
of suicide, and one not thinly veiled. You had yourself often told me how
many of your race there had been who had stained their hands in their own
blood; your uncle certainly, your grandfather possibly; many others in the mad,
bad line from which you come. Pity, my old affection for you, regard for your
mother to whom your death under such dreadful circumstances would have
been a blow almost too great for her to bear, the horror of the idea that so
young a life, and one that amidst all its ugly faults had still promise of beauty
in it, should come to so revolting an end, mere humanity itself all these, if
excuses be necessary, must serve as my excuse for consenting to accord you
one last interview. When I arrived in Paris, your tears, breaking out again and
again all through the evening, and falling over your cheeks like rain as we sat,
at dinner first at Voisin's, at supper at Paillard's afterwards: the unfeigned joy
you evinced at seeing me, holding my hand whenever you could, as though
you were a gentle and penitent child: your contrition, so simple and sincere, at
the moment: made me consent to renew our friendship. Two days after we had
returned to London, your father saw you having luncheon with me at the Caf
Royal, joined my table, drank of my wine, and that afternoon, through a letter
addressed to you, began his first attack on me.
It may be strange, but I had once again, I will not say the chance, but the
duty of separating from you forced on me. I need hardly remind you that I
refer to your conduct to me at Brighton from October 10th to 13th, 1894.
Three years ago is a long time for you to go back. But we who live in prison,
and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by
throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think
of. Suffering curious as it may sound to you is the means by which we
exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing;
and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant,
the evidence, of our continued identity. Between myself and the memory of
joy lies a gulf no less deep than that between myself and joy in its actuality.
Had our life together been as the world fancied it to be, one simply of pleasure,
profligacy and laughter, I would not be able to recall a single passage in it. It is
because it was full of moments and days tragic, bitter, sinister in their
warnings, dull or dreadful in their monotonous scenes and unseemly violences,
that I can see or hear each separate incident in its detail, can indeed see or hear
little else. So much in this place do men live by pain that my friendship with
you, in the way through which I am forced to remember it, appears to me
always as a prelude consonant with those varying modes of anguish which
each day I have to realise; nay more, to necessitate them even; as though my
life, whatever it had seemed to myself and others, had all the while been a real
Symphony of Sorrow, passing through its rhythmically-linked movements to
its certain resolution, with that inevitableness that in Art characterises the
treatment of every great theme.
I spoke of your conduct to me on three successive days, three years ago, did
I not? I was trying to finish my last play at Worthing by myself. The two visits
you had paid to me had ended. You suddenly appeared a third time bringing
with you a companion whom you actually proposed should stay in my house. I
(you must admit now quite properly) absolutely declined. I entertained you, of
course; I had no option in the matter: but elsewhere, and not in my own home.
The next day, a Monday, your companion returned to the duties of his
profession, and you stayed with me. Bored with Worthing, and still more, I
have no doubt, with my fruitless efforts to concentrate my attention on my
play, the only thing that really interested me at the moment, you insist on being
taken to the Grand Hotel at Brighton. The night we arrive you fall ill with that
dreadful low fever that is foolishly called the influenza, your second, if not
third attack. I need not remind you how I waited on you, and tended you, not
merely with every luxury of fruit, flowers, presents, books, and the like that
money can procure, but with that affection, tenderness and love that, whatever
you may think, is not to be procured for money. Except for an hour's walk in
the morning, an hour's drive in the afternoon, I never left the hotel. I got
special grapes from London for you, as you did not care for those the hotel
supplied, invented things to please you, remained either with you or in the
room next to yours, sat with you every evening to quiet or amuse you. After
four or five days you recover, and I take lodgings in order to try and finish my
play. You, of course, accompany me. The morning after the day on which we
were installed I feel extremely ill. You have to go to London on business, but
promise to return in the afternoon. In London you meet a friend, and do not
come back to Brighton till late the next day, by which time I am in a terrible
fever, and the doctor finds I have caught the influenza from you. Nothing
could have been more uncomfortable for anyone ill than the lodgings turn out
to be. My sitting-room is on the first floor, my bedroom on the third. There is
no manservant to wait on one, not even anyone to send out on a message, or to
get what the doctor orders. But you are there. I feel no alarm. The next two
days you leave me entirely alone without care, without attendance, without
anything. It was not a question of grapes, flowers, and charming gifts: it was a
question of mere necessaries: I could not even get the milk the doctor had
ordered for me: lemonade was pronounced an impossibility: and when I
begged you to procure me a book at the bookseller's, or if they had not got
whatever I had fixed on to choose something else, you never even take the
trouble to go there. And when I was left all day without anything to read in
consequence, you calmly tell me that you bought me the book and that they
promised to send it down, a statement which I found out by chance afterwards
to have been entirely untrue from beginning to end. All the while you are of
course living at my expense, driving about, dining at the Grand Hotel, and
indeed only appearing in my room for money. On Saturday night, you having
left me completely unattended and alone since the morning, I asked you to
come back after dinner, and sit with me for a little. With irritable voice and
ungracious manner you promise to do so. I wait till eleven o'clock and you
never appear. I then left a note for you in your room just reminding you of the
promise you had made me, and how you had kept it. At three in the morning,
unable to sleep, and tortured with thirst, I made my way, in the dark and cold,
down to the sitting-room in the hopes of finding some water there. I found you.
You fell on me with every hideous word an intemperate mood, an
undisciplined and untutored nature could suggest. By the terrible alchemy of
egotism you converted your remorse into rage. You accused me of selfishness
in expecting you to be with me when I was ill; of standing between you and
your amusements; of trying to deprive you of your pleasures. You told me, and
I know it was quite true, that you had come back at midnight simply in order to
change your dress-clothes, and go out again to where you hoped new pleasures
were waiting for you, but that by leaving for you a letter in which I had
reminded you that you had neglected me the whole day and the whole evening,
I had really robbed you of your desire for more enjoyments, and diminished
your actual capacity for fresh delights. I went back upstairs in disgust, and
remained sleepless till dawn, nor till long after dawn was I able to get anything
to quench the thirst of the fever that was on me. At eleven o'clock you came
into my room. In the previous scene I could not help observing that by my
letter I had, at any rate, checked you in a night of more than usual excess. In
the morning you were quite yourself. I waited naturally to hear what excuses
you had to make, and in what way you were going to ask for the forgiveness
that you knew in your heart was invariably waiting for you, no matter what
you did; your absolute trust that I would always forgive you being the thing in
you that I always really liked the best, perhaps the best thing in you to like. So
far from doing that, you began to repeat the same scene with renewed
emphasis and more violent assertion. I told you at length to leave the room:
you pretended to do so, but when I lifted up my head from the pillow in which
I had buried it, you were still there, and with brutality of laughter and hysteria
of rage you moved suddenly towards me. A sense of horror came over me, for
what exact reason I could not make out; but I got out of my bed at once, and
bare-footed and just as I was, made my way down the two flights of stairs to
the sitting-room, which I did not leave till the owner of the lodgings whom I
had rung for had assured me that you had left my bedroom, and promised to
remain within call, in case of necessity. After an interval of an hour, during
which time the doctor had come and found me, of course, in a state of absolute
nervous prostration, as well as in a worse condition of fever than I had been at
the outset, you returned silently, for money: took what you could find on the
dressing-table and mantelpiece, and left the house with your luggage. Need I
tell you what I thought of you during the two wretched lonely days of illness
that followed? Is it necessary for me to state that I saw clearly that it would be
a dishonour to myself to continue even an acquaintance with such a one as you
had showed yourself to be? That I recognised that the ultimate moment had
come, and recognised it as being really a great relief? And that I knew that for
the future my Art and Life would be freer and better and more beautiful in
every possible way? Ill as I was, I felt at ease. The fact that the separation was
irrevocable gave me peace. By Tuesday the fever had left me, and for the first
time I dined downstairs. Wednesday was my birthday. Amongst the telegrams
and communications on my table was a letter in your handwriting. I opened it
with a sense of sadness over me. I knew that the time had gone by when a
pretty phrase, an expression of affection, a word of sorrow would make me
take you back. But I was entirely deceived. I had underrated you. The letter
you sent to me on my birthday was an elaborate repetition of the two scenes,
set cunningly and carefully down in black and white! You mocked me with
common jests. Your one satisfaction in the whole affair was, you said, that you
retired to the Grand Hotel, and entered your luncheon to my account before
you left for town. You congratulated me on my prudence in leaving my
sickbed, on my sudden flight downstairs. It was an ugly moment for you,
you said, uglier than you imagine. Ah! I felt it but too well. What it had
really meant I did not know: whether you had with you the pistol you had
bought to try and frighten your father with, and that, thinking it to be unloaded,
you had once fired off in a public restaurant in my company: whether your
hand was moving towards a common dinner-knife that by chance was lying on
the table between us: whether, forgetting in your rage your low stature and
inferior strength, you had thought of some specially personal insult, or attack
even, as I lay ill there: I could not tell. I do not know to the present moment.
All I know is that a feeling of utter horror had come over me, and that I had
felt that unless I left the room at once, and got away, you would have done, or
tried to do, something that would have been, even to you, a source of lifelong
shame. Only once before in my life had I experienced such a feeling of horror
at any human being. It was when in my library at Tite Street, waving his small
hands in the air in epileptic fury, your father, with his bully, or his friend,
between us, had stood uttering every foul word his foul mind could think of,
and screaming the loathsome threats he afterwards with such cunning carried
out. In the latter case he, of course, was the one who had to leave the room
first. I drove him out. In your case I went. It was not the first time I had been
obliged to save you from yourself.
You concluded your letter by saying: When you are not on your pedestal
you are not interesting. The next time you are ill I will go away at once. Ah!
what coarseness of fibre does that reveal! What an entire lack of imagination!
How callous, how common had the temperament by that time become! When
you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. The next time you are ill I
will go away at once. How often have those words come back to me in the
wretched solitary cell of the various prisons I have been sent to. I have said
them to myself over and over again, and seen in them, I hope unjustly, some of
the secret of your strange silence. For you to write thus to me, when the very
illness and fever from which I was suffering I had caught from tending you,
was of course revolting in its coarseness and crudity; but for any human being
in the whole world to write thus to another would be a sin for which there is no
pardon, were there any sin for which there is none.
I confess that when I had finished your letter I felt almost polluted, as if by
associating with one of such a nature I had soiled and shamed my life
irretrievably. I had, it is true, done so, but I was not to learn how fully till just
six months later on in life. I settled with myself to go back to London on the
Friday, and see Sir George Lewis personally and request him to write to your
father to state that I had determined never under any circumstances to allow
you to enter my house, to sit at my board, to talk to me, walk with me, or
anywhere and at any time to be my companion at all. This done I would have
written to you just to inform you of the course of action I had adopted; the
reasons you would inevitably have realised for yourself. I had everything
arranged on Thursday night, when on Friday morning, as I was sitting at
breakfast before starting, I happened to open the newspaper and saw in it a
telegram stating that your elder brother, the real head of the family, the heir to
the title, the pillar of the house, had been found dead in a ditch with his gun
lying discharged beside him. The horror of the circumstances of the tragedy,
now known to have been an accident, but then stained with a darker
suggestion; the pathos of the sudden death of one so loved by all who knew
him, and almost on the eve, as it were, of his marriage; my idea of what your
own sorrow would, or should be; my consciousness of the misery awaiting
your mother at the loss of the one to whom she clung for comfort and joy in
life, and who, as she told me once herself, had from the very day of his birth
never caused her to shed a single tear; my consciousness of your own isolation,
both your other brothers being out of Europe, and you consequently the only
one to whom your mother and sister could look, not merely for companionship
in their sorrow, but also for those dreary responsibilities of dreadful detail that
Death always brings with it; the mere sense of the lacrimae rerum, of the tears
of which the world is made, and of the sadness of all human things out of the
confluence of these thoughts and emotions crowding into my brain came
infinite pity for you and your family. My own griefs and bitternesses against
you I forgot. What you had been to me in my sickness, I could not be to you in
your bereavement. I telegraphed at once to you my deepest sympathy, and in
the letter that followed invited you to come to my house as soon as you were
able. I felt that to abandon you at that particular moment, and formally through
a solicitor, would have been too terrible for you.
On your return to town from the actual scene of the tragedy to which you
had been summoned, you came at once to me very sweetly and very simply, in
your suit of woe, and with your eyes dim with tears. You sought consolation
and help, as a child might seek it. I opened to you my house, my home, my
heart. I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.
Never, even by one word, did I allude to your conduct towards me, to the
revolting scenes, and the revolting letter. Your grief, which was real, seemed
to me to bring you nearer to me than you had ever been. The flowers you took
from me to put on your brother's grave were to be a symbol not merely of the
beauty of his life, but of the beauty that in all lives lies dormant and may be
brought to light.
The gods are strange. It is not of our vices only they make instruments to
scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane,
loving. But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be
weeping in this terrible place.
Of course I discern in all our relations, not Destiny merely, but Doom:
Doom that walks always swiftly, because she goes to the shedding of blood.
Through your father you come of a race, marriage with whom is horrible,
friendship fatal, and that lays violent hands either on its own life or on the lives
of others. In every little circumstance in which the ways of our lives met; in
every point of great, or seemingly trivial import in which you came to me for
pleasure or for help; in the small chances, the slight accidents that look, in their
relation to life, to be no more than the dust that dances in a beam, or the leaf
that flutters from a tree, Ruin followed, like the echo of a bitter cry, or the
shadow that hunts with the beast of prey. Our friendship really begins with
your begging me in a most pathetic and charming letter to assist you in a
position appalling to anyone, doubly so to a young man at Oxford: I do so, and
ultimately through your using my name as your friend with Sir George Lewis,
I begin to lose his esteem and friendship, a friendship of fifteen years'
standing. When I was deprived of his advice and help and regard I was
deprived of the one great safeguard of my life.
You send me a very nice poem, of the undergraduate school of verse, for
my approval: I reply by a letter of fantastic literary conceits: I compare you to
Hylas, or Hyacinth, Jonquil or Narcisse, or someone whom the great god of
Poetry favoured, and honoured with his love. The letter is like a passage from
one of Shakespeare's sonnets, transposed to a minor key. It can only be
understood by those who have read the Symposium of Plato, or caught the
spirit of a certain grave mood made beautiful for us in Greek marbles. It was,
let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy if wilful moment, have
written to any graceful young man of either University who had sent me a
poem of his own making, certain that he would have sufficient wit or culture to
interpret rightly its fantastic phrases. Look at the history of that letter! It passes
from you into the hands of a loathsome companion: from him to a gang of
blackmailers: copies of it are sent about London to my friends, and to the
manager of the theatre where my work is being performed: every construction
but the right one is put on it: Society is thrilled with the absurd rumours that I
have had to pay a huge sum of money for having written an infamous letter to
you: this forms the basis of your father's worst attack: I produce the original
letter myself in Court to show what it really is: it is denounced by your father's
Counsel as a revolting and insidious attempt to corrupt Innocence: ultimately it
forms part of a criminal charge: the Crown takes it up: The Judge sums up on
it with little learning and much morality: I go to prison for it at last. That is the
result of writing you a charming letter.
While I am staying with you at Salisbury you are terribly alarmed at a
threatening communication from a former companion of yours: you beg me to
see the writer and help you: I do so: the result is Ruin to me. I am forced to
take everything you have done on my own shoulders and answer for it. When,
having failed to take your degree, you have to go down from Oxford, you
telegraph to me in London to beg me to come to you. I do so at once: you ask
me to take you to Goring, as you did not like, under the circumstances, to go
home: at Goring you see a house that charms you: I take it for you: the result
from every point of view is Ruin to me. One day you come to me and ask me,
as a personal favour to you, to write something for an Oxford undergraduate
magazine, about to be started by some friend of yours, whom I had never heard
of in all my life, and knew nothing at all about. To please you what did I not
do always to please you? I sent him a page of paradoxes destined originally
for the Saturday Review. A few months later I find myself standing in the dock
of the Old Bailey on account of the character of the magazine. It forms part of
the Crown charge against me. I am called upon to defend your friend's prose
and your own verse. The former I cannot palliate; the latter I, loyal to the bitter
extreme, to your youthful literature as to your youthful life, do very strongly
defend, and will not hear of your being a writer of indecencies. But I go to
prison, all the same, for your friend's undergraduate magazine, and the Love
that dares not tell its name. At Christmas I give you a very pretty present, as
you described it in your letter of thanks, on which I knew you had set your
heart, worth some 40 or 50 at most. When the crash of my life comes, and I
am ruined, the bailiff who seizes my library, and has it sold, does so to pay for
the very pretty present. It was for that the execution was put into my house.
At the ultimate and terrible moment when I am taunted, and spurred-on by
your taunts, to take an action against your father and have him arrested, the last
straw to which I clutch in my wretched efforts to escape is the terrible expense.
I tell the solicitor in your presence that I have no funds, that I cannot possibly
afford the appalling costs, that I have no money at my disposal. What I said
was, as you know, perfectly true. On that fatal Friday instead of being in
Humphreys's office weakly consenting to my own ruin, I would have been
happy and free in France, away from you and your father, unconscious of his
loathsome card, and indifferent to your letters, if I had been able to leave the
Avondale Hotel. But the hotel people absolutely refused to allow me to go.
You had been staying with me for ten days: indeed you had ultimately, to my
great and, you will admit, rightful indignation, brought a companion of yours
to stay with me also: my bill for the ten days was nearly 140. The proprietor
said he could not allow my luggage to be removed from the hotel till I had paid
the account in full. That is what kept me in London. Had it not been for the
hotel bill I would have gone to Paris on Thursday morning.
When I told the solicitor I had no money to face the gigantic expense, you
interposed at once. You said that your own family would be only too delighted
to pay all the necessary costs: that your father had been an incubus to them all:
that they had often discussed the possibility of getting him put into a lunatic
asylum so as to keep him out of the way: that he was a daily source of
annoyance and distress to your mother and to everyone else: that if I would
only come forward to have him shut up I would be regarded by the family as
their champion and their benefactor: and that your mother's rich relations
themselves would look on it as a real delight to be allowed to pay all costs and
expenses that might be incurred in any such effort. The solicitor closed at once,
and I was hurried to the Police Court. I had no excuse left for not going. I was
forced into it. Of course your family don't pay the costs, and, when I am made
bankrupt, it is by your father, and for the costs the meagre balance of them
some 700. At the present moment my wife, estranged from me over the
important question of whether I should have 3 or 3. 10 a week to live on, is
preparing a divorce suit, for which, of course, entirely new evidence and an
entirely new trial, to be followed perhaps by more serious proceedings, will be
necessary. I, naturally, know nothing of the details. I merely know the name of
the witness on whose evidence my wife's solicitors rely. It is your own Oxford
servant, whom at your special request I took into my service for our summer at
Goring.
But, indeed, I need not go on further with more instances of the strange
Doom you seem to have brought on me in all things big or little. It makes me
feel sometimes as if you yourself had been merely a puppet worked by some
secret and unseen hand to bring terrible events to a terrible issue. But puppets
themselves have passions. They will bring a new plot into what they are
presenting, and twist the ordered issue of vicissitude to suit some whim or
appetite of their own. To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely
dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every
moment; and this, I often think, is the only explanation possible of your nature,
if indeed for the profound and terrible mysteries of a human soul there is any
explanation at all, except one that makes the mystery more marvellous still.
Of course you had your illusions, lived in them indeed, and through their
shifting mists and coloured veils saw all things changed. You thought, I
remember quite well, that your devoting yourself to me, to the entire exclusion
of your family and family life, was a proof of your wonderful appreciation of
me, and your great affection. No doubt to you it seemed so. But recollect that
with me was luxury, high living, unlimited pleasure, money without stint. Your
family life bored you. The cold cheap wine of Salisbury, to use a phrase of
your own making, was distasteful to you. On my side, and along with my
intellectual attractions, were the fleshpots of Egypt. When you could not find
me to be with, the companions whom you chose as substitutes were not
flattering.
You thought again that in sending a lawyer's letter to your father to say that,
rather than sever your eternal friendship with me, you would give up the
allowance of 250 a year which, with I believe deductions for your Oxford
debts, he was then making you, you were realising the very chivalry of
friendship, touching the noblest note of self-denial. But your surrender of your
little allowance did not mean that you were ready to give up even one of your
most superfluous luxuries, or most unnecessary extravagances. On the
contrary. Your appetite for luxurious living was never so keen. My expenses
for eight days in Paris for myself, you, and your Italian servant were nearly
150: Paillard alone absorbing 85. At the rate at which you wished to live,
your entire income for a whole year, if you had taken your meals alone, and
had been especially economical in your selection of the cheaper form of
pleasures, would hardly have lasted you for three weeks. The fact that in what
was merely a pretence of bravado you had surrendered your allowance, such as
it was, gave you at last a plausible reason for your claim to live at my expense,
or what you thought a plausible reason: and on many occasions you seriously
availed yourself of it, and gave the very fullest expression to it: and the
continued drain, principally of course on me, but also to a certain extent, I
know, on your mother, was never so distressing, because in my case at any
rate, never so completely unaccompanied by the smallest word of thanks, or
sense of limit.
You thought again that in attacking your own father with dreadful letters,
abusive telegrams, and insulting postcards you were really fighting your
mother's battles, coming forward as her champion, and avenging the no doubt
terrible wrongs and sufferings of her married life. It was quite an illusion on
your part; one of your worst indeed. The way for you to have avenged your
mother's wrongs on your father, if you considered it part of a son's duty to do
so, was by being a better son to your mother than you had been: by not making
her afraid to speak to you on serious things: by not signing bills the payment of
which devolved on her: by being gentler to her, and not bringing sorrow into
her days. Your brother Francis made great amends to her for what she had
suffered, by his sweetness and goodness to her through the brief years of his
flower-like life. You should have taken him as your model. You were wrong
even in fancying that it would have been an absolute delight and joy to your
mother if you had managed through me to get your father put into prison. I feel
sure you were wrong. And if you want to know what a woman really feels
when her husband, and the father of her children, is in prison dress, in a prison
cell, write to my wife and ask her. She will tell you.
I also had my illusions. I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy,
and that you were to be one of many graceful figures in it. I found it to be a
revolting and repellent tragedy, and that the sinister occasion of the great
catastrophe, sinister in its concentration of aim and intensity of narrowed
will-power, was yourself, stripped of that mask of joy and pleasure by which
you, no less than I, had been deceived and led astray.
You can now understand can you not? a little of what I am suffering.
Some paper, the Pall Mall Gazette I think, describing the dress-rehearsal of
one of my plays, spoke of you as following me about like my shadow: the
memory of our friendship is the shadow that walks with me here: that seems
never to leave me: that wakes me up at night to tell me the same story over and
over till its wearisome iteration makes all sleep abandon me till dawn: at dawn
it begins again: it follows me into the prison-yard and makes me talk to myself
as I tramp round: each detail that accompanied each dreadful moment I am
forced to recall: there is nothing that happened in those ill-starred years that I
cannot recreate in that chamber of the brain which is set apart for grief or for
despair: every strained note of your voice, every twitch and gesture of your
nervous hands, every bitter word, every poisonous phrase comes back to me: I
remember the street or river down which we passed, the wall or woodland that
surrounded us, at what figure on the dial stood the hands of the clock, which
way went the wings of the wind, the shape and colour of the moon.
There is, I know, one answer to all that I have said to you, and that is that
you loved me: that all through those two and a half years during which the
Fates were weaving into one scarlet pattern the threads of our divided lives you
really loved me. Yes: I know you did. No matter what your conduct to me was
I always felt that at heart you really did love me. Though I saw quite clearly
that my position in the world of Art, the interest my personality had always
excited, my money, the luxury in which I lived, the thousand and one things
that went to make up a life so charmingly, and so wonderfully improbable as
mine was, were, each and all of them, elements that fascinated you and made
you cling to me: yet besides all this there was something more, some strange
attraction for you: you loved me far better than you loved anybody else. But
you, like myself, have had a terrible tragedy in your life, though one of an
entirely opposite character to mine. Do you want to learn what it was? It was
this. In you Hate was always stronger than Love. Your hatred of your father
was of such stature that it entirely outstripped, o'erthrew, and overshadowed
your love of me. There was no struggle between them at all, or but little; of
such dimensions was your Hatred and of such monstrous growth. You did not
realise that there is no room for both passions in the same soul. They cannot
live together in that fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by
which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are:
by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can
understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and
finely conceived, can feed Love. But anything will feed Hate. There was not a
glass of champagne you drank, not a rich dish you ate of in all those years, that
did not feed your Hate and make it fat. So to gratify it, you gambled with my
life, as you gambled with my money, carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the
consequence. If you lost, the loss would not, you fancied, be yours. If you
won, yours, you knew, would be the exultation, and the advantages of victory.
Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that. Love can read the writing
on the remotest star, but Hate so blinded you that you could see no further than
the narrow, walled-in, and already lust-withered garden of your common
desires. Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your
character, was entirely the result of the Hate that lived in you. Subtly, silently,
and in secret, Hate gnawed at your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of
some sallow plant, till you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests
and the most petty aims. That faculty in you which Love would have fostered,
Hate poisoned and paralysed. When your father first began to attack me it was
as your private friend, and in a private letter to you. As soon as I had read the
letter, with its obscene threats and coarse violences, I saw at once that a
terrible danger was looming on the horizon of my troubled days: I told you I
would not be the catspaw between you both in your ancient hatred of each
other: that I in London was naturally much bigger game for him than a
Secretary for Foreign Affairs at Homburg: that it would be unfair to me to
place me even for a moment in such a position: and that I had something better
to do with my life than to have scenes with a man drunken, dclass, and
half-witted as he was. You could not be made to see this. Hate blinded you.
You insisted that the quarrel had really nothing to do with me: that you would
not allow your father to dictate to you in your private friendships: that it would
be most unfair of me to interfere. You had already, before you saw me on the
subject, sent your father a foolish and vulgar telegram, as your answer. That of
course committed you to a foolish and vulgar course of action to follow. The
fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable
moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical.
There is a wide difference. That telegram conditioned the whole of your
subsequent relations with your father, and consequently the whole of my life.
And the grotesque thing about it is that it was a telegram of which the
commonest street-boy would have been ashamed. From pert telegrams to
priggish lawyers' letters was a natural progress, and the result of your lawyer's
letters to your father was, of course, to urge him on still further. You left him
no option but to go on. You forced it on him as a point of honour, or of
dishonour rather, that your appeal should have the more effect. So the next
time he attacks me, no longer in a private letter and as your private friend, but
in public and as a public man. I have to expel him from my house. He goes
from restaurant to restaurant looking for me, in order to insult me before the
whole world, and in such a manner that if I retaliated I would be ruined, and if
I did not retaliate I would be ruined also. Then surely was the time when you
should have come forward, and said that you would not expose me to such
hideous attacks, such infamous persecution, on your account, but would,
readily and at once, resign any claim you had to my friendship? You feel that
now, I suppose. But it never even occurred to you then. Hate blinded you. All
you could think of (besides of course writing to him insulting letters and
telegrams) was to buy a ridiculous pistol that goes off in the Berkeley, under
circumstances that create a worse scandal than ever came to your ears. Indeed
the idea of your being the object of a terrible quarrel between your father and a
man of my position seemed to delight you. It, I suppose very naturally, pleased
your vanity, and flattered your self-importance. That your father might have
had your body, which did not interest me, and left me your soul, which did not
interest him, would have been to you a distressing solution of the question.
You scented the chance of a public scandal and flew to it. The prospect of a
battle in which you would be safe delighted you. I never remember you in
higher spirits than you were for the rest of that season. Your only
disappointment seemed to be that nothing actually happened, and that no
further meeting or fracas had taken place between us. You consoled yourself
by sending him telegrams of such a character that at last the wretched man
wrote to you and said that he had given orders to his servants that no telegram
was to be brought to him under any pretence whatsoever. That did not daunt
you. You saw the immense opportunities afforded by the open postcard, and
availed yourself of them to the full. You hounded him on in the chase still
more. I do not suppose he would ever really have given it up. Family instincts
were strong in him. His hatred of you was just as persistent as your hatred of
him, and I was the stalking-horse for both of you, and a mode of attack as well
as a mode of shelter. His very passion for notoriety was not merely individual
but racial. Still, if his interest had flagged for a moment your letters and
postcards would soon have quickened it to its ancient flame. They did so. And
he naturally went on further still. Having assailed me as a private gentleman
and in private, as a public man and in public, he ultimately determines to make
his final and great attack on me as an artist, and in the place where my Art is
being represented. He secures by fraud a seat for the first night of one of my
plays, and contrives a plot to interrupt the performance, to make a foul speech
about me to the audience, to insult my actors, to throw offensive or indecent
missiles at me when I am called before the curtain at the close, utterly in some
hideous way to ruin me through my work. By the merest chance, in the brief
and accidental sincerity of a more than usually intoxicated mood, he boasts of
his intention before others. Information is given to the police, and he is kept
out of the theatre. You had your chance then. Then was your opportunity.
Don't you realise now that you should have seen it, and come forward and said
that you would not have my Art, at any rate, ruined for your sake? You knew
what my Art was to me, the great primal note by which I had revealed, first
myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the
love to which all other loves were as marsh-water to red wine, or the
glow-worm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the moon. Don't you
understand now that your lack of imagination was the one really fatal defect of
your character? What you had to do was quite simple, and quite clear before
you, but Hate blinded you, and you could see nothing. I could not apologise to
your father for his having insulted me and persecuted me in the most
loathsome manner for nearly nine months. I could not get rid of you out of my
life. I had tried it again and again. I had gone so far as actually leaving
England and going abroad in the hope of escaping from you. It had all been of
no use. You were the only person who could have done anything.
The key of the situation rested entirely with yourself. It was the one great
opportunity you had of making some slight return to me for all the love and
affection and kindness and generosity and care I had shown you. Had you
appreciated me even at a tenth of my value as an artist you would have done
so. But Hate blinded you. The faculty by which, and by which alone, we can
understand others in their real as in their ideal relations was dead in you. You
thought simply of how to get your father into prison. To see him in the dock,
as you used to say: that was your one idea. The phrase became one of the many
scies of your daily conversation. One heard it at every meal. Well, you had
your desire gratified. Hate granted you every single thing you wished for. It
was an indulgent Master to you. It is so, indeed, to all who serve it. For two
days you sat on a high seat with the Sheriffs, and feasted your eyes with the
spectacle of your father standing in the dock of the Central Criminal Court.
And on the third day I took his place. What had occurred? In your hideous
game of hate together, you had both thrown dice for my soul, and you
happened to have lost. That was all.
You see that I have to write your life to you, and you have to realise it. We
have known each other now for more than four years. Half of the time we have
been together: the other half I have had to spend in prison as the result of our
friendship. Where you will receive this letter, if indeed it ever reaches you, I
don't know. Rome, Naples, Paris, Venice, some beautiful city on sea or river, I
have no doubt, holds you. You are surrounded, if not with all the useless
luxury you had with me, at any rate with everything that is pleasurable to eye,
ear, and taste. Life is quite lovely to you. And yet, if you are wise, and wish to
find Life much lovelier still, and in a different manner, you will let the reading
of this terrible letter for such I know it is prove to you as important a crisis
and turning-point of your life as the writing of it is to me. Your pale face used
to flush easily with wine or pleasure. If, as you read what is here written, it
from time to time becomes scorched, as though by a furnace-blast, with shame,
it will be all the better for you. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is
realised is right.
I have now got as far as the House of Detention, have I not? After a night
passed in the Police Cells I am sent there in the van. You were most attentive
and kind. Almost every afternoon, if not actually every afternoon till you go
abroad, you took the trouble to drive up to Holloway to see me. You also wrote
very sweet and nice letters. But that it was not your father but you who had put
me into prison, that from beginning to end you were the responsible person,
that it was through you, for you, and by you that I was there, never for one
instant dawned upon you. Even the spectacle of me behind the bars of a
wooden cage could not quicken that dead unimaginative nature. You had the
sympathy and the sentimentality of the spectator of a rather pathetic play. That
you were the true author of the hideous tragedy did not occur to you. I saw that
you realised nothing of what you had done. I did not desire to be the one to tell
you what your own heart should have told you, what it indeed would have told
you if you had not let Hate harden it and make it insensate. Everything must
come to one out of one's own nature. There is no use in telling a person a thing
that they don't feel and can't understand. If I write to you now as I do it is
because your own silence and conduct during my long imprisonment have
made it necessary. Besides, as things had turned out, the blow had fallen upon
me alone. That was a source of pleasure to me. I was content for many reasons
to suffer, though there was always to my eyes, as I watched you, something not
a little contemptible in your complete and wilful blindness. I remember your
producing with absolute pride a letter you had published in one of the
halfpenny newspapers about me. It was a very prudent, temperate, indeed
commonplace production. You appealed to the English sense of fair play,
or something very dreary of that kind, on behalf of a man who was down. It
was the sort of letter you might have written had a painful charge been brought
against some respectable person with whom personally you had been quite
unacquainted. But you thought it a wonderful letter. You looked on it as a
proof of almost quixotic chivalry. I am aware that you wrote other letters to
other newspapers that they did not publish. But then they were simply to say
that you hated your father. Nobody cared if you did or not. Hate, you have yet
to learn, is, intellectually considered, the Eternal Negation. Considered from
the point of view of the emotions it is a form of Atrophy, and kills everything
but itself. To write to the papers to say that one hates someone else is as if one
were to write to the papers to say that one had some secret and shameful
malady: the fact that the man you hated was your own father, and that the
feeling was thoroughly reciprocated, did not make your Hate noble or fine in
any way. If it showed anything it was simply that it was an hereditary disease.
I remember again, when an execution was put into my house, and my books
and furniture were seized and advertised to be sold, and Bankruptcy was
impending, I naturally wrote to tell you about it. I did not mention that it was
to pay for some gifts of mine to you that the bailiffs had entered the home
where you had so often dined. I thought, rightly or wrongly, that such news
might pain you a little. I merely told you the bare facts. I thought it proper that
you should know them. You wrote back from Boulogne in a strain of almost
lyrical exultation. You said that you knew your father was hard up for
money, and had been obliged to raise 1500 for the expenses of the trial, and
that my going bankrupt was really a splendid score off him as he would not
then be able to get any of his costs out of me! Do you realise now what Hate
blinding a person is? Do you recognise now that when I described it as an
Atrophy destructive of everything but itself, I was scientifically describing a
real psychological fact? That all my charming things were to be sold: my
Burne-Jones drawings: my Whistler drawings: my Monticelli: my Simeon
Solomons: my china: my Library with its collection of presentation volumes
from almost every poet of my time, from Hugo to Whitman, from Swinburne
to Mallarm, from Morris to Verlaine; with its beautifully bound editions of
my father's and mother's works; its wonderful array of college and school
prizes, its ditions de luxe, and the like; was absolutely nothing to you. You
said it was a great bore: that was all. What you really saw in it was the
possibility that your father might ultimately lose a few hundred pounds, and
that paltry consideration filled you with ecstatic joy. As for the costs of the
trial, you may be interested to know that your father openly said in the Orleans
Club that if it had cost him 20,000 he would have considered the money
thoroughly well spent, he had extracted such enjoyment, and delight, and
triumph out of it all. The fact that he was able not merely to put me into prison
for two years, but to take me out for an afternoon and make me a public
bankrupt was an extra-refinement of pleasure that he had not expected. It was
the crowning-point of my humiliation, and of his complete and perfect victory.
Had your father had no claim for his costs on me, you, I know perfectly well,
would, as far as words go, at any rate have been most sympathetic about the
entire loss of my library, a loss irreparable to a man of letters, the one of all my
material losses the most distressing to me. You might even, remembering the
sums of money I had lavishly spent on you and how you had lived on me for
years, have taken the trouble to buy in some of my books for me. The best all
went for less than 150: about as much as I would spend on you in an ordinary
week. But the mean small pleasure of thinking that your father was going to be
a few pence out of pocket made you forget all about trying to make me a little
return, so slight, so easy, so inexpensive, so obvious, and so enormously
welcome to me, had you brought it about. Am I right in saying that Hate blinds
people? Do you see it now? If you don't, try to see it.
How clearly I saw it then, as now, I need not tell you. But I said to myself:
At all costs I must keep Love in my heart. If I go into prison without Love
what will become of my Soul? The letters I wrote to you at that time from
Holloway were my efforts to keep Love as the dominant note of my own
nature. I could if I had chosen have torn you to pieces with bitter reproaches. I
could have rent you with maledictions. I could have held up a mirror to you,
and shown you such an image of yourself that you would not have recognised
it as your own till you found it mimicking back your gestures of horror, and
then you would have known whose shape it was, and hated it and yourself for
ever. More than that indeed. The sins of another were being placed to my
account. Had I so chosen, I could on either trial have saved myself at his
expense, not from shame indeed but from imprisonment. Had I cared to show
that the Crown witnesses the three most important had been carefully
coached by your father and his solicitors, not in reticences merely, but in
assertions, in the absolute transference, deliberate, plotted, and rehearsed, of
the actions and doings of someone else on to me, I could have had each one of
them dismissed from the box by the Judge, more summarily than even
wretched perjured Atkins was. I could have walked out of Court with my
tongue in my cheek, and my hands in my pockets, a free man. The strongest
pressure was put upon me to do so. I was earnestly advised, begged, entreated
to do so by people whose sole interest was my welfare, and the welfare of my
house. But I refused. I did not choose to do so. I have never regretted my
decision for a single moment, even in the most bitter periods of my
imprisonment. Such a course of action would have been beneath me. Sins of
the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should
be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful. To have secured my acquittal by
such means would have been a life long torture to me. But do you really
think that you were worthy of the love I was showing you then, or that for a
single moment I thought you were? Do you really think that at any period in
our friendship you were worthy of the love I showed you, or that for a single
moment I thought you were? I knew you were not. But Love does not traffic in
a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect,
is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You
were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you my life,
and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, Hatred
and Vanity and Greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you
had entirely ruined me from every point of view. For my own sake there was
nothing for me to do but to love you. I knew, if I allowed myself to hate you,
that in the dry desert of existence over which I had to travel, and am travelling
still, every rock would lose its shadow, every palm tree be withered, every well
of water prove poisoned at its source. Are you beginning now to understand a
little? Is your imagination wakening from the long lethargy in which it has
lain? You know already what Hate is. Is it beginning to dawn on you what
Love is, and what is the nature of Love? It is not too late for you to learn,
though to teach it to you I may have had to go to a convict's cell.
After my terrible sentence, when the prison-dress was on me, and the
prison-house closed, I sat amidst the ruins of my wonderful life, crushed by
anguish, bewildered with terror, dazed through pain. But I would not hate you.
Every day I said to myself, I must keep Love in my heart today, else how
shall I live through the day. I reminded myself that you meant no evil, to me
at any rate: I set myself to think that you had but drawn a bow at a venture, and
that the arrow had pierced a King between the joints of the harness. To have
weighed you against the smallest of my sorrows, the meanest of my losses,
would have been, I felt, unfair. I determined I would regard you as one
suffering too. I forced myself to believe that at last the scales had fallen from
your long-blinded eyes. I used to fancy, and with pain, what your horror must
have been when you contemplated your terrible handiwork. There were times,
even in those dark days, the darkest of all my life, when I actually longed to
console you. So sure was I that at last you had realised what you had done.
It did not occur to me then that you could have the supreme vice,
shallowness. Indeed, it was a real grief to me when I had to let you know that I
was obliged to reserve for family business my first opportunity of receiving a
letter: but my brother-in-law had written to me to say that if I would only write
once to my wife she would, for my own sake and for our children's sake, take
no action for divorce. I felt my duty was to do so. Setting aside other reasons, I
could not bear the idea of being separated from Cyril, that beautiful, loving,
loveable child of mine, my friend of all friends, my companion beyond all
companions, one single hair of whose little golden head should have been
dearer and of more value to me than, I will not merely say you from top to toe,
but the entire chrysolite of the whole world: was so indeed to me always,
though I failed to understand it till too late.
Two weeks after your application, I get news of you. Robert Sherard, that
bravest and most chivalrous of all brilliant beings, comes to see me, and
among other things tells me that in that ridiculous Mercure de France, with its
absurd affectation of being the true centre of literary corruption, you are about
to publish an article on me with specimens of my letters. He asks me if it really
was by my wish. I was greatly taken aback, and much annoyed, and gave
orders that the thing was to be stopped at once. You had left my letters lying
about for blackmailing companions to steal, for hotel servants to pilfer, for
housemaids to sell. That was simply your careless want of appreciation of what
I had written to you. But that you should seriously propose to publish
selections from the balance was almost incredible to me. And which of my
letters were they? I could get no information. That was my first news of you. It
displeased me.
The second piece of news followed shortly afterwards. Your father's
solicitors had appeared in the prison, and served me personally with a
Bankruptcy notice, for a paltry 700, the amount of their taxed costs. I was
adjudged a public insolvent, and ordered to be produced in Court. I felt most
strongly, and feel still, and will revert to the subject again, that these costs
should have been paid by your family. You had taken personally on yourself
the responsibility of stating that your family would do so. It was that which
had made the solicitor take up the case in the way he did. You were absolutely
responsible. Even irrespective of your engagement on your family's behalf you
should have felt that as you had brought the whole ruin on me, the least that
could have been done was to spare me the additional ignominy of bankruptcy
for an absolutely contemptible sum of money, less than half of what I spent on
you in three brief summer months at Goring. Of that, however, no more here. I
did through the solicitor's clerk, I fully admit, receive a message from you on
the subject, or at any rate in connection with the occasion. The day he came to
receive my depositions and statements, he leant across the table the prison
warder being present and having consulted a piece of paper which he pulled
from his pocket, said to me in a low voice: Prince Fleur-de-Lys wishes to be
remembered to you. I stared at him. He repeated the message again. I did not
know what he meant. The gentleman is abroad at present, he added
mysteriously. It all flashed across me, and I remember that, for the first and
last time in my entire prison-life, I laughed. In that laugh was all the scorn of
all the world. Prince Fleur-de-Lys! I saw and subsequent events showed me
that I rightly saw that nothing that had happened had made you realise a
single thing. You were in your own eyes still the graceful prince of a trivial
comedy, not the sombre figure of a tragic show. All that had occurred was but
as a feather for the cap that gilds a narrow head, a flower to pink the doublet
that hides a heart that Hate, and Hate alone, can warm, that Love, and Love
alone, finds cold. Prince Fleur-de-Lys! You were, no doubt, quite right to
communicate with me under an assumed name. I myself, at that time, had no
name at all. In the great prison where I was then incarcerated I was merely the
figure and letter of a little cell in a long gallery, one of a thousand lifeless
numbers, as of a thousand lifeless lives. But surely there were many real names
in real history which would have suited you much better, and by which I would
have had no difficulty at all in recognising you at once? I did not look for you
behind the spangles of a tinsel vizard only suitable for an amusing masquerade.
Ah! had your soul been, as for its own perfection even it should have been,
wounded with sorrow, bowed with remorse, and humble with grief, such was
not the disguise it would have chosen beneath whose shadow to seek entrance
to the House of Pain! The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for
that reason, strange as it may sound to you, are often difficult to interpret. But
the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily
through them. Your seemingly casual choice of a feigned name was, and will
remain, symbolic. It reveals you.
Six weeks later a third piece of news arrives. I am called out of the Hospital
Ward, where I was lying wretchedly ill, to receive a special message from you
through the Governor of the Prison. He reads me out a letter you had addressed
to him in which you stated that you proposed to publish an article on the case
of Mr Oscar Wilde, in the Mercure de France (a magazine, you added for
some extraordinary reason, corresponding to our English Fortnightly Review
) and were anxious to obtain my permission to publish extracts and selections
from what letters? The letters I had written you from Holloway Prison! The
letters that should have been to you things sacred and secret beyond anything
in the whole world! These actually were the letters you proposed to publish for
the jaded dcadent to wonder at, for the greedy feuilletoniste to chronicle, for
the little lions of the Quartier Latin to gape and mouth at! Had there been
nothing in your own heart to cry out against so vulgar a sacrilege you might at
least have remembered the sonnet he wrote who saw with such sorrow and
scorn the letters of John Keats sold by public auction in London and have
understood at last the real meaning of my lines
I think they love not Art
Who break the crystal of a poet's heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare or gloat.
For what was your article to show? That I had been too fond of you? The Paris
gamin was quite aware of the fact. They all read the newspapers, and most of
them write for them. That I was a man of genius? The French understood that,
and the peculiar quality of my genius, much better than you did, or could have
been expected to do. That along with genius goes often a curious perversity of
passion and desire? Admirable: but the subject belongs to Lombroso rather
than to you. Besides, the pathological phenomenon in question is also found
amongst those who have not genius. That in your war of hate with your father I
was at once shield and weapon to each of you? Nay more, that in that hideous
hunt for my life, that took place when the war was over, he never could have
reached me had not your nets been already about my feet? Quite true: but I am
told that Henri Baur had already done it extremely well. Besides, to
corroborate his view, had such been your intention, you did not require to
publish my letters; at any rate those written from Holloway Prison.
Will you say, in answer to my questions, that in one of my Holloway letters
I had myself asked you to try, as far as you were able, to set me a little right
with some small portion of the world? Certainly, I did so. Remember how and
why I am here, at this very moment. Do you think I am here on account of my
relations with the witnesses on my trial? My relations, real or supposed, with
people of that kind were matters of no interest to either the Government or
Society. They knew nothing of them, and cared less. I am here for having tried
to put your father into prison. My attempt failed of course. My own Counsel
threw up their briefs. Your father completely turned the tables on me, and had
me in prison, has me there still. That is why there is contempt felt for me. That
is why people despise me. That is why I have to serve out every day, every
hour, ever minute of my dreadful imprisonment. That is why my petitions have
been refused.
You were the only person who, and without in any way exposing yourself
to scorn or danger or blame, could have given another colour to the whole
affair: have put the matter in a different light: have shown to a certain degree
how things really stood. I would not of course have expected, nor indeed
wished you to have stated how and for what purpose you had sought my
assistance in your trouble at Oxford: or how, and for what purpose, if you had
a purpose at all, you had practically never left my side for nearly three years.
My incessant attempts to break off a friendship that was so ruinous to me as an
artist, as a man of position, as a member of society even, need not have been
chronicled with the accuracy with which they have been set down here. Nor
would I have desired you to have described the scenes you used to make with
such almost monotonous recurrence: nor to have reprinted your wonderful
series of telegrams to me with their strange mixture of romance and finance;
nor to have quoted from your letters the more revolting or heartless passages,
as I have been forced to do. Still, I thought it would have been good, as well
for you as for me, if you had made some protest against your father's version
of our friendship, one no less grotesque than venomous, and as absurd in its
reference to you as it was dishonouring in its reference to me. That version has
now actually passed into serious history: it is quoted, believed, and chronicled:
the preacher has taken it for his text, and the moralist for his barren theme: and
I who appealed to all the ages have had to accept my verdict from one who is
an ape and a buffoon. I have said, and with some bitterness, I admit, in this
letter that such was the irony of things that your father would live to be the
hero of a Sunday-school tract: that you would rank with the infant Samuel: and
that my place would be between Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade. I
dare say it is best so. I have no desire to complain. One of the many lessons
that one learns in prison is that things are what they are, and will be what they
will be. Nor have I any doubt that the leper of medivalism, and the author of
Justine, will prove better company than Sandford and Merton.
But at the time I wrote to you I felt that for both our sakes it would be a
good thing, a proper thing, a right thing not to accept the account your father
had put forward through his Counsel for the edification of a Philistine world,
and that is why I asked you to think out and write something that would be
nearer the truth. It would at least have been better for you than scribbling to the
French papers about the domestic life of your parents. What did the French
care whether or not your parents had led a happy domestic life? One cannot
conceive a subject more entirely uninteresting to them. What did interest them
was how an artist of my distinction, one who by the school and movement of
which he was the incarnation had exercised a marked influence on the
direction of French thought, could, having led such a life, have brought such
an action. Had you proposed for your article to publish the letters, endless I
fear in number, in which I had spoken to you of the ruin you were bringing on
my life, of the madness of moods of rage that you were allowing to master you
to your own hurt as well as to mine, and of my desire, nay, my determination
to end a friendship so fatal to me in every way, I could have understood it,
though I would not have allowed such letters to be published: when your
father's Counsel desiring to catch me in a contradiction suddenly produced in
Court a letter of mine, written to you in March '93, in which I stated that,
rather than endure a repetition of the hideous scenes you seemed to take such a
terrible pleasure in making, I would readily consent to be blackmailed by
every renter in London, it was a very real grief to me that that side of my
friendship with you should incidentally be revealed to the common gaze: but
that you should have been so slow to see, so lacking in all sensitiveness, and so
dull in apprehension of what is rare, delicate and beautiful, as to propose
yourself to publish the letters in which, and through which, I was trying to
keep alive the very spirit and soul of Love, that it might dwell in my body
through the long years of that body's humiliation this was, and still is to me,
a source of the very deepest pain, the most poignant disappointment. Why you
did so, I fear I know but too well. If Hate blinded your eyes, Vanity sewed
your eyelids together with threads of iron. The faculty by which, and by
which alone, one can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations,
your narrow egotism had blunted, and long disuse had made of no avail. The
imagination was as much in prison as I was. Vanity had barred up the
windows, and the name of the warder was Hate.
All this took place in the early part of November of the year before last. A
great river of life flows between you and a date so distant. Hardly, if at all, can
you see across so wide a waste, But to me it seems to have occurred, I will not
say yesterday, but today. Suffering is one long moment. We cannot divide it by
seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us
time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of
pain. The paralysing immobility of a life, every circumstance of which is
regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and walk and
lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws
of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the
very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those
external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of
seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the
grape-gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made
white with broken blossoms, or strewn with fallen fruit, we know nothing, and
can know nothing. For us there is only one season, the season of Sorrow. The
very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and
gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the
small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is
always twilight in one's cell, as it is always midnight in one's heart. And in the
sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The
thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is
happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow. Remember
this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing to you, and
in this manner writing.
A week later, I am transferred here. Three more months go over and my
mother dies. You knew, none better, how deeply I loved and honoured her. Her
death was so terrible to me that I, once a lord of language, have no words in
which to express my anguish and my shame. Never, even in the most perfect
days of my development as an artist, could I have had words fit to bear so
august a burden, or to move with sufficient stateliness of music through the
purple pageant of my incommunicable woe. She and my father had bequeathed
me a name they had made noble and honoured not merely in Literature, Art,
Archology and Science, but in the public history of my own country in its
evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low
byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given
it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it
into a synonym for folly. What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to
write or paper to record. My wife, at that time kind and gentle to me, rather
than that I should hear the news from indifferent or alien lips, travelled, ill as
she was, all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings
of so irreparable, so irredeemable a loss. Messages of sympathy reached me
from all who had still affection for me. Even people who had not known me
personally, hearing what a new sorrow had come into my broken life, wrote to
ask that some expression of their condolence should be conveyed to me. You
alone stood aloof, sent me no message, and wrote me no letter. Of such
actions, it is best to say what Virgil says to Dante of those whose lives have
been barren in noble impulse and shallow of intention: Non ragioniam di lor,
ma guarda, e passa.
Three more months go over. The calendar of my daily conduct and labour
that hangs on the outside of my cell-door, with my name and sentence written
upon it, tells me that it is Maytime. My friends come to see me again. I
enquire, as I always do, after you. I am told that you are in your villa at Naples,
and are bringing out a volume of poems. At the close of the interview it is
mentioned casually that you are dedicating them to me. The tidings seemed to
give me a sort of nausea of life. I said nothing, but silently went back to my
cell with contempt and scorn in my heart. How could you dream of dedicating
a volume of poems to me without first asking my permission? Dream, do I
say? How could you dare to do such a thing? Will you give as your answer that
in the days of my greatness and fame I had consented to receive the dedication
of your early work? Certainly, I did so; just as I would have accepted the
homage of any other young man beginning the difficult and beautiful art of
literature. All homage is delightful to an artist, and doubly sweet when youth
brings it. Laurel and bay leaf wither when aged hands pluck them. Only youth
has a right to crown an artist. That is the real privilege of being young, if youth
only knew it. But the days of abasement and infamy are different from those of
greatness and of fame. You have yet to learn that Prosperity, Pleasure and
Success may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but that sorrow is the
most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole
world of thought or motion to which Sorrow does not vibrate in terrible if
exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles
the direction of forces that the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a
wound that bleeds when any hand but that of Love touches it and even then
must bleed again, though not for pain.
You could write to the Governor of Wandsworth Prison to ask my
permission to publish my letters in the Mercure de France, corresponding to
our English Fortnightly Review. Why not have written to the Governor of the
Prison at Reading, to ask my permission to dedicate your poems to me,
whatever fantastic description you may have chosen to give of them? Was it
because in the one case the magazine in question had been prohibited by me
from publishing the letters, the legal copyright of which, as you are of course
perfectly well aware, was and is vested entirely in me, and in the other you
thought that you could enjoy the wilfulness of your own way without my
knowing anything about it till it was too late to interfere? The mere fact that I
was a man disgraced, ruined, and in prison should have made you, if you
desired to write my name on the fore-page of your work, beg it of me as a
favour, an honour, a privilege. That is the way in which one should approach
those who are in distress and sit in shame.
Where there is Sorrow there is holy ground. Some day you will realise what
that means. You will know nothing of life till you do. Robbie, and natures like
his, can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of
Bankruptcy between two policemen, Robbie waited in the long dreary
corridor, that before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple
hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as handcuffed and
with bowed head I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things
than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love that the saints knelt
down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I
have never said one single word to him about what he did. I do not know to the
present moment whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It
is not a thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it
in the treasury-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that I am glad
to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept sweet by the
myrrh and cassia of many tears. When Wisdom has been profitless to me, and
Philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to
give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that little
lowly silent act of Love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity, made the
desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile
into harmony with the wounded, broken and great heart of the world. When
you are able to understand, not merely how beautiful Robbie's action was, but
why it meant so much to me, and always will mean so much, then, perhaps,
you will realise how and in what spirit you should have approached me for
permission to dedicate to me your verses.
It is only right to state that in any case I would not have accepted the
dedication. Though, possibly, it would under other circumstances have pleased
me to have been asked, I would have refused the request for your sake,
irrespective of any feelings of my own. The first volume of poems that in the
very springtime of his manhood a young man sends forth to the world should
be like a blossom or flower of spring, like the white thorn in the meadow at
Magdalen, or the cowslips in the Cumnor fields. It should not be burdened by
the weight of a terrible, a revolting tragedy, a terrible, a revolting scandal. If I
had allowed my name to serve as herald to the book it would have been a
grave artistic error. It would have brought a wrong atmosphere round the
whole work, and in modern art atmosphere counts for so much. Modern life is
complex and relative. Those are its two distinguishing notes. To render the
first we require atmosphere with its subtlety of nuances, of suggestion, of
strange perspectives: as for the second we require background. That is why
Sculpture has ceased to be a representative art; and why Music is a
representative art; and why Literature is, and has been, and always will remain
the supreme representative art.
Your little book should have brought with it Sicilian and Arcadian airs, not
the pestilent foulness of the criminal dock or the close breath of the convict
cell. Nor would such a dedication as you proposed have been merely an error
of taste in Art; it would from other points of view have been entirely unseemly.
It would have looked like a continuance of your conduct before and after my
arrest. It would have given people the impression of being an attempt at foolish
bravado: an example of that kind of courage that is sold cheap and bought
cheap in the streets of shame. As far as our friendship is concerned Nemesis
has crushed us both like flies. The dedication of verses to me when I was in
prison would have seemed a sort of silly effort at smart repartee, an
accomplishment on which in your old days of dreadful letter-writing days
never, I sincerely hope for your sake, to return you used openly to pride
yourself and about which it was your joy to boast. It would not have produced
the serious, the beautiful effect which I trust I believe indeed you had
intended. Had you consulted me, I would have advised you to delay the
publication of your verses for a little; or, if that proved displeasing to you, to
publish anonymously at first, and then when you had won lovers by your song
the only sort of lovers really worth the winning you might have turned
round and said to the world These flowers that you admire are of my sowing,
and now I offer them to one whom you regard as a pariah and an outcast, as
my tribute to what I love and reverence and admire in him. But you chose the
wrong method and the wrong moment. There is a tact in love, and a tact in
literature: you were not sensitive to either.
I have spoken to you at length on this point in order that you should grasp
its full bearings, and understand why I wrote at once to Robbie in terms of
such scorn and contempt of you, and absolutely prohibited the dedication, and
desired that the words I had written of you should be copied out carefully and
sent to you. I felt that at last the time had come when you should be made to
see, to recognise, to realise a little of what you had done. Blindness may be
carried so far that it becomes grotesque, and an unimaginative nature, if
something be not done to rouse it, will become petrified into absolute
insensibility, so that while the body may eat, and drink, and have its pleasures,
the soul, whose house it is, may, like the soul of Branca d'Oria in Dante, be
dead absolutely. My letter seems to have arrived not a moment too soon. It fell
on you, as far as I can judge, like a thunderbolt. You describe yourself, in your
answer to Robbie, as being deprived of all power of thought and expression.
Indeed, apparently, you can think of nothing better than to write to your
mother to complain. Of course, she, with that blindness to your real good that
has been her ill-starred fortune and yours, gives you every comfort she can
think of, and lulls you back, I suppose, into your former unhappy, unworthy
condition; while as far as I am concerned, she lets my friends know that she is
very much annoyed at the severity of my remarks about you. Indeed it is not
merely to my friends that she conveys her sentiments of annoyance, but also to
those a very much larger number, I need hardly remind you who are not
my friends: and I am informed now, and through channels very
kindly-disposed to you and yours, that in consequence of this a great deal of
the sympathy that, by reason of my distinguished genius and terrible
sufferings, had been gradually but surely growing up for me, has been entirely
taken away. People say Ah! he first tried to get the kind father put into prison
and failed: now he turns round and blames the innocent son for his failure.
How right we were to despise him! How worthy of contempt he is! It seems
to me that, when my name is mentioned in your mother's presence, if she has
no word of sorrow or regret for her share no slight one in the ruin of my
house, it would be more seemly if she remained silent. And as for you don't
you think now that, instead of writing to her to complain, it would have been
better for you, in every way, to have written to me directly, and to have had the
courage to say to me whatever you had or fancied you had to say? It is nearly a
year ago now since I wrote that letter. You cannot have remained during that
entire time deprived of all power of thought and expression. Why did you not
write to me? You saw by my letter how deeply wounded, how outraged I was
by your whole conduct. More than that; you saw your entire friendship with
me set before you, at last, in its true light, and by a mode not to be mistaken.
Often in old days I had told you that you were ruining my life. You had always
laughed. When Edwin Levy at the very beginning of our friendship, seeing
your manner of putting me forward to bear the brunt, and annoyance, and
expense even of that unfortunate Oxford mishap of yours, if we must so term
it, in reference to which his advice and help had been sought, warned me for
the space of a whole hour against knowing you, you laughed, as at Bracknell I
described to you my long and impressive interview with him. When I told you
how even that unfortunate young man who ultimately stood beside me in the
Dock had warned me more than once that you would prove far more fatal in
bringing me to utter destruction than any even of the common lads whom I
was foolish enough to know, you laughed, though not with such sense of
amusement. When my more prudent or less well-disposed friends either
warned me or left me, on account of my friendship with you, you laughed with
scorn. You laughed immoderately when, on the occasion of your father writing
his first abusive letter to you about me, I told you that I knew I would be the
mere catspaw of your dreadful quarrel and come to some evil between you.
But every single thing had happened as I had said it would happen, as far as
the result goes. You had no excuse for not seeing how all things had come to
pass. Why did you not write to me? Was it cowardice? Was it callousness?
What was it? The fact that I was outraged with you, and had expressed my
sense of outrage, was all the more reason for writing. If you thought my letter
just, you should have written. If you thought it in the smallest point unjust, you
should have written. I waited for a letter. I felt sure that at last you would see
that, if old affection, much-protested love, the thousand acts of ill-requited
kindness I had showered on you, the thousand unpaid debts of gratitude you
owed me that if all these were nothing to you, mere duty itself, most barren
of all bonds between man and man, should have made you write. You cannot
say that you seriously thought I was obliged to receive none but business
communications from members of my family. You knew perfectly well that
every twelve weeks Robbie was writing to me a little budget of literary news.
Nothing can be more charming than his letters, in their wit, their clever
concentrated criticism, their light touch: they are real letters: they are like a
person talking to one: they have the quality of a French causerie intime: and in
his delicate modes of deference to me, appealing at one time to my judgment,
at another to my sense of humour, at another to my instinct for beauty or to my
culture, and reminding me in a hundred subtle ways that once I was to many an
arbiter of style in Art, the supreme arbiter to some, he shows how he has the
tact of love as well as the tact of literature. His letters have been the little
messengers between me and that beautiful unreal world of Art where once I
was King, and would have remained King, indeed, had I not let myself be
lured into the imperfect world of coarse uncompleted passions, of appetite
without distinction, desire without limit, and formless greed. Yet, when all is
said, surely you might have been able to understand, or conceive, at any rate,
in your own mind, that, even on the ordinary grounds of mere psychological
curiosity, it would have been more interesting to me to hear from you than to
learn that Alfred Austin was trying to bring out a volume of poems, or that
Street was writing dramatic criticisms for the Daily Chronicle, or that by one
who cannot speak a panegyric without stammering Mrs Meynell had been
pronounced to be the new Sibyl of Style.
Ah! had you been in prison I will not say through any fault of mine, for
that would be a thought too terrible for me to bear but through fault of your
own, error of your own, faith in some unworthy friend, slip in sensual mire,
trust misapplied, or love ill-bestowed, or none, or all of these do you think
that I would have allowed you to eat your heart away in darkness and solitude
without trying in some way, however slight, to help you to bear the bitter
burden of your disgrace? Do you think that I would not have let you know that
if you suffered, I was suffering too: that if you wept, there were tears in my
eyes also: and that if you lay in the house of bondage and were despised of
men, I out of my griefs had built a house in which to dwell until your coming,
a treasury in which all that men had denied to you would be laid up for your
healing, one hundredfold in increase? If bitter necessity, or prudence, to me
more bitter still, had prevented my being near you, and robbed me of the joy of
your presence, though seen through prison-bars and in a shape of shame, I
would have written to you in season and out of season in the hope that some
mere phrase, some single word, some broken echo even of Love might reach
you. If you had refused to receive my letters, I would have written none the
less, so that you should have known that at any rate there were always letters
waiting for you. Many have done so to me. Every three months people write to
me, or propose to write to me. Their letters and communications are kept. They
will be handed to me when I go out of prison. I know that they are there. I
know the names of the people who have written them. I know that they are full
of sympathy, and affection, and kindness. That is sufficient for me. I need to
know no more. Your silence has been horrible. Nor has it been a silence of
weeks and months merely, but of years; of years even as they have to count
them who, like yourself, live swiftly in happiness, and can hardly catch the gilt
feet of the days as they dance by, and are out of breath in the chase after
pleasure. It is a silence without excuse; a silence without palliation. I knew you
had feet of clay. Who knew it better? When I wrote, among my aphorisms, that
it was simply the feet of clay that made the gold of the image precious, it was
of you I was thinking. But it is no gold image with clay feet that you have
made of yourself. Out of the very dust of the common highway that the hooves
of homed things pash into mire you have moulded your perfect semblance for
me to look at, so that, whatever my secret desire might have been, it would be
impossible for me now to have for you any feeling other than that of contempt
and scorn, for myself any feeling other than that of contempt and scorn either.
And setting aside all other reasons, your indifference, your worldly wisdom,
your callousness, your prudence, whatever you may choose to call it, has been
made doubly bitter to me by the peculiar circumstances that either
accompanied or followed my fall.
Other miserable men, when they are thrown into prison, if they are robbed
of the beauty of the world, are at least safe, in some measure, from the world's
most deadly slings, most awful arrows. They can hide in the darkness of their
cells, and of their very disgrace make a mode of sanctuary. The world, having
had its will, goes its way, and they are left to suffer undisturbed. With me it
has been different. Sorrow after sorrow has come beating at the prison doors in
search of me. They have opened the gates wide and let them in. Hardly, if at
all, have my friends been suffered to see me. But my enemies have had full
access to me always. Twice in my public appearances at the Bankruptcy Court,
twice again in my public transferences from one prison to another, have I been
shown under conditions of unspeakable humiliation to the gaze and mockery
of men. The messenger of Death has brought me his tidings and gone his way,
and in entire solitude, and isolated from all that could give me comfort, or
suggest relief, I have had to bear the intolerable burden of misery and remorse
that the memory of my mother placed upon me, and places on me still. Hardly
has that wound been dulled, not healed, by time, when violent and bitter and
harsh letters come to me from my wife through her solicitor. I am, at once,
taunted and threatened with poverty. That I can bear. I can school myself to
worse than that. But my two children are taken from me by legal procedure.
That is and will remain to me a source of infinite distress, of infinite pain, of
grief without end or limit. That the law should decide, and take upon itself to
decide, that I am one unfit to be with my own children is something quite
horrible to me. The disgrace of prison is as nothing compared to it. I envy the
other men who tread the yard along with me. I am sure that their children wait
for them, look for their coming, will be sweet to them.
The poor are wiser, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are.
In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casualty,
something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in
prison as of one who is in trouble simply. It is the phrase they always use,
and the expression has the perfect wisdom of Love in it. With people of our
rank it is different. With us prison makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am,
have hardly any right to air and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of
others. We are unwelcome when we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the
moon is not for us. Our very children are taken away. Those lovely links with
humanity are broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live.
We are denied the one thing that might heal us and help us, that might bring
balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain.
And to all this has been added the hard, small fact that by your actions and
by your silence, by what you have done and by what you have left undone, you
have made every day of my long imprisonment still more difficult for me to
live through. The very bread and water of prison fare you have by your
conduct changed. You have rendered the one bitter and the other brackish to
me. The sorrow you should have shared you have doubled, the pain you should
have sought to lighten you have quickened to anguish. I have no doubt that you
did not mean to do so. I know that you did not mean to do so. It was simply
that one really fatal defect of your character, your entire lack of imagination.
And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you. I must do so. I don't
write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For
my own sake I must forgive you. One cannot always keep an adder in one's
breast to feed on one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of
one's soul. It will not be difficult at all for me to do so, if you help me a little.
Whatever you did to me in old days I always readily forgave. It did you no
good then. Only one whose life is without stain of any kind can forgive sins.
But now when I sit in humiliation and disgrace it is different. My forgiveness
should mean a great deal to you now. Some day you will realise it. Whether
you do so early or late, soon or not at all, my way is clear before me. I cannot
allow you to go through life bearing in your heart the burden of having ruined
a man like me. The thought might make you callously indifferent, or morbidly
sad. I must take the burden from you and put it on my own shoulders.
I must say to myself that neither you nor your father, multiplied a thousand
times over, could possibly have ruined a man like me: that I ruined myself: and
that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite
ready to do so. I am trying to do so, though you may not think it at the present
moment. If I have brought this pitiless indictment against you, think what an
indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as what you did to me
was, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my
age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had
forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their
own lifetime and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned
at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have
passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it.
Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age
and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more
permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished
name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a
philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours
of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I
took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal
a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened
its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem
in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a
new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true
as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms
of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere
mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth
and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence
in an epigram.
Along with these things, I had things that were different. I let myself be
lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with
being a flneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the
smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own
genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on
the heights I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations.
What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me
in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or
both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me
and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or
unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber
one has some day to cry aloud on the housetops. I ceased to be Lord over
myself. I was no longer the Captain of my Soul, and did not know it. I allowed
you to dominate me, and your father to frighten me. I ended in horrible
disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute Humility: just as there
is only one thing for you, absolute Humility also. You had better come down
into the dust and learn it beside me.
I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild
despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at: terrible and
impotent rage: bitterness and scorn: anguish that wept aloud: misery that could
find no voice: sorrow that was dumb. I have passed through every possible
mood of suffering. Better than Wordsworth himself I know what Wordsworth
meant when he said:
Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark
And has the nature of Infinity.
But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were
to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I find hidden
away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in me whole world is
meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my
nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility.
It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I
have arrived: the starting-point for a fresh development. It has come to me
right out of myself, so I know that it has come at the proper time. It could not
have come before, nor later. Had anyone told me of it, I would have rejected it.
Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I want to
keep it. I must do so. It is the one thing that has in it the elements of life, of a
new life, a Vita Nuova for me. Of all things it is the strangest. One cannot give
it away, and another may not give it to one. One cannot acquire it, except by
surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things,
that one knows that one possesses it.
Now that I realise that it is in me, I see quite clearly what I have got to do,
what, in fact, I must do. And when I use such a phrase as that, I need not tell
you that I am not alluding to any external sanction or command. I admit none.
I am far more of an individualist than I ever was. Nothing seems to me of the
smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a
fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with. And the first
thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of
feeling against you.
I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse
things in the world than that. I am quite candid when I tell you that rather than
go out from this prison with bitterness in my heart against you or against the
world I would gladly and readily beg my bread from door to door. If I got
nothing from the house of the rich, I would get something at the house of the
poor. Those who have much are often greedy. Those who have little always
share. I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when
winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the
penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart. The external things
of life seem to me now of no importance at all. You can see to what intensity
of individualism I have arrived, or am arriving rather, for the journey is long,
and where I walk there are thorns.
Of course I know that to ask for alms on the highway is not to be my lot,
and that if ever I lie in the cool grass at night-time it will be to write sonnets to
the Moon. When I go out of prison, Robbie will be waiting for me on the other
side of the big iron-studded gate, and he is the symbol not merely of his own
affection, but of the affection of many others besides. I believe I am to have
enough to live on for about eighteen months at any rate, so that, if I may not
write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books, and what joy can be
greater? After that, I hope to be able to recreate my creative faculty. But were
things different: had I not a friend left in the world: were there not a single
house open to me even in pity: had I to accept the wallet and ragged cloak of
sheer penury: still as long as I remained free from all resentment, hardness, and
scorn, I would be able to face life with much more calm and confidence than I
would were my body in purple and fine linen, and the soul within it sick with
hate. And I shall really have no difficulty in forgiving you. But to make it a
pleasure for me you must feel that you want it. When you really want it you
will find it waiting for you.
I need not say that my task does not end there. It would be comparatively
easy if it did. There is much more before me. I have hills far steeper to climb,
valleys much darker to pass through. And I have to get it all out of myself.
Neither Religion, Morality, nor Reason can help me at all.
Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who
are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing
wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one
becomes. It is well to have learned that.
Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I
give to what one can touch, and look at. My Gods dwell in temples made with
hands, and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and
complete: too complete it may be, for like many or all of those who have
placed their Heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of
Heaven, but the horror of Hell also. When I think about Religion at all, I feel
as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the
Confraternity of the Fatherless one might call it, where on an altar, on which
no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might
celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be
true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less
than faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God
daily for having hidden Himself from man. But whether it be faith or
agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own
creating. Only that is spiritual which makes its own form. If I may not find its
secret within myself, I shall never find it. If I have not got it already, it will
never come to me.
Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am
convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have
suffered a wrong and unjust system. But, somehow, I have got to make both of
these things just and right to me. And exactly as in Art one is only concerned
with what a particular thing is at a particular moment to oneself, so it is also in
the ethical evolution of one's character. I have got to make everything that has
happened to me good for me. The plank-bed, the loathsome food, the hard
ropes shredded into oakum till one's finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial
offices with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine
seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at,
the silence, the solitude, the shame each and all of these things I have to
transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single degradation of the
body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.
I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say, quite simply and
without affectation, that the two great turning-points of my life were when my
father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison. I will not say
that it is the best thing that could have happened to me, for that phrase would
savour of too great bitterness towards myself. I would sooner say, or hear it
said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age that in my perversity, and
for that perversity's sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the
evil things of my life to good. What is said, however, by myself or by others
matters little. The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I
have to do, or be for the brief remainder of my days one maimed, marred, and
incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to make it
part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear, or reluctance. The supreme
vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.
When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget
who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have
found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to
forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally
fatal. It would mean that I would be always haunted by an intolerable sense of
disgrace, and that those things that are meant as much for me as for anyone
else the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of
daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or
the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver would all be tainted for
me, and lose their healing power and their power of communicating joy. To
reject one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's
own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a
denial of the Soul. For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things
common and unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has cleansed,
and converts them into swiftness or strength, into the play of beautiful muscles
and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of the hair, the lips,
the eye: so the Soul, in its turn, has its nutritive functions also, and can
transform into noble moods of thought, and passions of high import, what in
itself is base, cruel, and degrading: nay more, may find in these its most august
modes of assertion, and can often reveal itself most perfectly through what was
intended to desecrate or destroy.
The fact of my having been the common prisoner of a common gaol I must
frankly accept, and, curious as it may seem to you, one of the things I shall
have to teach myself is not to be ashamed of it. I must accept it as a
punishment, and if one is ashamed of having been punished, one might just as
well never have been punished at all. Of course there are many things of which
I was convicted that I had not done, but then there are many things of which I
was convicted that I had done, and a still greater number of things in my life
for which I was never indicted at all. And as for what I have said in this letter,
that the gods are strange, and punish us for what is good and humane in us as
much as for what is evil and perverse, I must accept the fact that one is
punished for the good as well as for the evil that one does. I have no doubt that
it is quite right one should be. It helps one, or should help one, to realise both,
and not to be too conceited about either. And if I then am not ashamed of my
punishment, as I hope not to be, I shall be able to think, and walk, and live
with freedom.
Many men on their release carry their prison along with them into the air,
hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length like poor poisoned
things creep into some hole and die. It is wretched that they should have to do
so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of Society that it should force them to do
so. Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the
individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise
what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself:
that is to say it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty
towards him begins. It is really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those
whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay,
or one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an irredeemable wrong. I
claim on my side that if I realise what I have suffered, Society should realise
what it has inflicted on me: and that there should be no bitterness or hate on
either side.
Of course I know that from one point of view things will be made more
difficult for me than for others; must indeed, by the very nature of the case, be
made so. The poor thieves and outcasts who are imprisoned here with me are
in many respects more fortunate than I am. The little way in grey city or green
field that saw their sin is small: to find those who know nothing of what they
have done they need go no further than a bird might fly between the twilight
before dawn and dawn itself: but for me the world is shrivelled to a
hands-breadth, and everywhere I turn my name is written on the rocks in lead.
For I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of crime,
but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of infamy, and
sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it required showing, that
between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if so much as one.
Still, in the very fact that people will recognise me wherever I go, and know
all about my life, as far as its follies go, I can discern something good for me.
It will force on me the necessity of again asserting myself as an artist, and as
soon as I possibly can. If I can produce one more beautiful work of art I shall
be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out
the tongue of scorn by the roots. And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me,
I am no less a problem to Life. People must adopt some attitude towards me,
and so pass judgment both on themselves and me. I need not say I am not
talking of particular individuals. The only people I would care to be with now
are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what Beauty is, and
those who know what Sorrow is: nobody else interests me. Nor am I making
any demands on Life. In all that I have said I am simply concerned with my
own mental attitude towards life as a whole: and I feel that not to be ashamed
of having been punished is one of the first points I must attain to, for the sake
of my own perfection, and because I am so imperfect.
Then I must learn how to be happy. Once I knew it, or thought I knew it, by
instinct. It was always springtime once in my heart. My temperament was akin
to joy. I filled my life to the very brim with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to
the very brim with wine. Now I am approaching life from a completely new
standpoint, and even to conceive happiness is often extremely difficult for me.
I remember during my first term at Oxford reading in Pater's Renaissance
that book which has had such a strange influence over my life how Dante
places low in the Inferno those who wilfully live in sadness, and going to the
College Library and turning to the passage in the Divine Comedy where
beneath the dreary marsh lie those who were sullen in the sweet air, saying
for ever through their sighs:
Tristi fummo
nell'aer dolce che dal sol s'allegra.
I knew the church condemned accidia, but the whole idea seemed to me quite
fantastic, just as the sort of sin, I fancied, a priest who knew nothing about real
life would invent. Nor could I understand how Dante, who says that sorrow
remarries us to God, could have been so harsh to those who were enamoured
of melancholy, if any such there really were. I had no idea that some day this
would become to me one of the greatest temptations of my life.
While I was in Wandsworth Prison I longed to die. It was my one desire.
When after two months in the Infirmary I was transferred here, and found
myself growing gradually better in physical health, I was filled with rage. I
determined to commit suicide on the very day on which I left prison. After a
time that evil mood passed away, and I made up my mind to live, but to wear
gloom as a King wears purple: never to smile again: to turn whatever house I
entered into a house of mourning: to make my friends walk slowly in sadness
with me: to teach them that melancholy is the true secret of life: to maim them
with an alien sorrow: to mar them with my own pain. Now I feel quite
differently. I see it would be both ungrateful and unkind of me to pull so long a
face that when my friends came to see me they would have to make their faces
still longer in order to show their sympathy, or, if I desired to entertain them,
to invite them to sit down silently to bitter herbs and funeral baked meats. I
must learn how to be cheerful and happy.
The last two occasions on which I was allowed to see my friends here I
tried to be as cheerful as possible, and to show my cheerfulness in order to
make them some slight return for their trouble in coming all the way from
town to visit me. It is only a slight return, I know, but it is the one, I feel
certain, that pleases them most. I saw Robbie for an hour on Saturday week,
and I tried to give the fullest possible expression to the delight I really felt at
our meeting. And that, in the views and ideas I am here shaping for myself, I
am quite right is shown to me by the fact that now for the first time since my
imprisonment I have a real desire to live.
There is before me so much to do that I would regard it as a terrible tragedy
if I died before I was allowed to complete at any rate a little of it. I see new
developments in Art and Life, each one of which is a fresh mode of perfection.
I long to live so that I can explore what is no less than a new world to me. Do
you want to know what this new world is? I think you can guess what it is. It is
the world in which I have been living.
Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world. I used to live
entirely for pleasure. I shunned sorrow and suffering of every kind. I hated
both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible, to treat them, that is to say,
as modes of imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had
no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole, used often
to quote to me Goethe's lines written by Carlyle in a book he had given her
years ago and translated, I fancy, by him also:
Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow,
He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.
They were the lines that noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon treated with
such coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation and exile: they were
lines my mother often quoted in the troubles of her later life: I absolutely
declined to accept or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not
understand it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not want
to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a
more bitter dawn. I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the
Fates had in store for me; that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do
little else. But so has my portion been meted out to me; and during the last few
months I have, after terrible struggles and difficulties, been able to
comprehend some of the lessons hidden in the heart of pain. Clergymen, and
people who use phrases without wisdom, sometimes talk of suffering as a
mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things that one never discerned
before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What
one had felt dimly through instinct, about Art, is intellectually and emotionally
realised with perfect clearness of vision and absolute intensity of apprehension.
I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable,
is at once the type and test of all great Art. What the artist is always looking
for is that mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in
which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which Form reveals. Of such
modes of existence there are not a few: youth and the arts preoccupied with
youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at another, we may like to
think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of impression, its suggestion of a
spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of
mist and city alike, and in the morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones and
colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised
in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is
absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example,
and a flower or a child a simple example of what I mean: but Sorrow is the
ultimate type both in Life and Art.
Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and
callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure,
wears no mask. Truth in Art is not any correspondence between the essential
idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow,
or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself: it is no Echo coming
from a hollow hill, any more than it is the well of silver water in the valley that
shows the Moon to the Moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in Art is the
unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the
soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no
truth comparable to Sorrow. There are times when Sorrow seems to me to be
the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to
blind the one and cloy the other, but out of Sorrow have the worlds been built,
and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.
More than this, there is about Sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality. I
have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art
and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched
place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relations to the very
secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind
everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is
bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasure, and
seek not merely for a month or twain to feed on honeycomb, but for all our
years to taste no other food, ignorant the while that we may be really starving
the soul.
I remember talking once on this subject to one of the most beautiful
personalities I have ever known: a woman, whose sympathy and noble
kindness to me both before and since the tragedy of my imprisonment have
been beyond power and description: one who has really assisted me, though
she does not know it, to bear the burden of my troubles more than anyone else
in the whole world has: and all through the mere fact of her existence: through
her being what she is, partly an ideal and partly an influence, a suggestion of
what one might become, as well as a real help towards becoming it, a soul that
renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual seem as simple and
natural as sunlight or the sea, one for whom Beauty and Sorrow walk hand in
hand and have the same message. On the occasion of which I am thinking I
recall distinctly how I said to her that there was enough suffering in one
narrow London lane to show that God did not love man, and that wherever
there was any sorrow, though but that of a child in some little garden weeping
over a fault that it had or had not committed, the whole face of creation was
completely marred. I was entirely wrong. She told me so, but I could not
believe her. I was not in the sphere in which such belief was to be attained to.
Now it seems to me that Love of some kind is the only possible explanation of
the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot
conceive any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that
if the worlds have indeed, as I have said, been built out of Sorrow, it has been
by the hands of Love, because in no other way could the Soul of man for
whom the worlds are made reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for
the beautiful body, but Pain for the beautiful Soul.
When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride.
Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that
it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could.
But with me and such as I am it is different. One can realise a thing in a single
moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so
difficult to keep heights that the soul is competent to gain. We think in
Eternity, but we move slowly through Time: and how slowly time goes with us
who lie in prison I need not speak again, nor of the weariness and despair that
creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange
insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their
coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it
is one's chance or choice to be. And, though at present you may find it a thing
hard to believe, it is true none the less that for you, living in freedom and
idleness and comfort, it is more easy to learn the lessons of Humility than it is
for me, who begin the day by going down on my knees and washing the floor
of my cell. For prison-life, with its endless privations and restrictions, makes
one rebellious. The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart
hearts are made to be broken but that it turns one's heart to stone. One
sometimes feels that it is only with a front of brass and a lip of scorn that one
can get through the day at all. And he who is in a state of rebellion cannot
receive grace, to use the phrase of which the Church is so fond so rightly
fond, I dare say for in life, as in Art, the mood of rebellion closes up the
channels of the soul, and shuts out the airs of heaven. Yet I must learn these
lessons here, if I am to learn them anywhere, and must be filled with joy if my
feet are on the right road, and my face set towards the gate which is called
Beautiful, though I may fall many times in the mire, and often in the mist go
astray.
This new life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call it, is, of
course, no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by means of
development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember when I was at
Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen's
narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the June before I took my degree
that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and
that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so,
indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself
so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sungilt side of the garden,
and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace,
poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come
from the lips of pain, remorse that makes one walk in thorns, conscience that
condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head,
the anguish that chooses sackcloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts
gall all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to
know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each one of them in turn, to feed
on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all.
I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the
full, as one should do everything that one does to the full. There was no
pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I
went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But
to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have
been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its secrets for
me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my art. Some of
it is in The Happy Prince: some of it in The Young King, notably in the
passage where the Bishop says to the kneeling boy, Is not He who made
misery wiser than thou art? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me
little more than a phrase: a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of Doom
that like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray: in The
Critic as Artist it is set forth in many colours: in The Soul of Man it is written
down simply and in letters too easy to read: it is one of the refrains whose
recurring motifs make Salome so like a piece of music and bind it together as a
ballad: in the prose-poem of the man who from the bronze of the image of the
Pleasure that liveth for a Moment has to make the image of the Sorrow that
abideth for Ever it is incarnate. It could not have been otherwise. At every
single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what
one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.
It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the artistic life. For
the artistic life is simple self-development. Humility in the artist is his frank
acceptance of all experiences, just as Love in the artist is simply that sense of
Beauty that reveals to the world its body and its soul. In Marius the Epicurean
Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with the life of religion in the deep,
sweet and austere sense of the word. But Marius is little more than a spectator:
an ideal spectator indeed, and one to whom it is given to contemplate the
spectacle of life with appropriate emotions, which Wordsworth defines as the
poet's true aim: yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too much occupied
with the comeliness of the vessels of the Sanctuary to notice that it is the
Sanctuary of Sorrow that he is gazing at.
I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of
Christ and the true life of the artist, and I take a keen pleasure in the reflection
that long before Sorrow had made my days her own and bound me to her
wheel I had written in The Soul of Man that he who would lead a Christ-like
life must be entirely and absolutely himself, and had taken as my types not
merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell but also the
painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the world is a
song. I remember saying once to Andr Gide, as we sat together in some Paris
caf, that while Metaphysics had but little real interest for me, and Morality
absolutely none, there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that
could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art, and there find its
complete fulfilment. It was a generalisation as profound as it was novel.
Nor is it merely that we can discern in Christ that close union of personality
with perfection which forms the real distinction between classical and
romantic Art and makes Christ the true precursor of the romantic movement in
life, but the very basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the
artist, an intense and flamelike imagination. He realised in the entire sphere of
human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the
sole secret of creation. He understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of
the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty
of the rich. You can see now can you not? that when you wrote to me in
my trouble, When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. The
next time you are ill I will go away at once, you were as remote from the true
temper of the artist as you were from what Matthew Arnold calls the secret of
Jesus. Either would have taught you that whatever happens to another
happens to oneself, and if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at
night-time and for pleasure or for pain, write up on the wall of your house in
letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver Whatever happens to
another happens to oneself, and should anyone ask you what such an
inscription can possibly mean you can answer that it means Lord Christ's
heart and Shakespeare's brain.
Christ's place indeed is with the poets. His whole conception of Humanity
sprang right out of the imagination and can only be realised by it. What God
was to the Pantheist, man was to him. He was the first to conceive the divided
races as a unity. Before his time there had been gods and men. He alone saw
that on the hills of life there were but God and Man, and, feeling through the
mysticism of sympathy that in himself each had been made incarnate, he calls
himself the Son of the One or the son of the other, according to his mood.
More than anyone else in history he wakes in us that temper of wonder to
which Romance always appeals. There is still something to me almost
incredible in the idea of a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear
on his own shoulders the burden of the entire world: all that had been already
done and suffered, and all that was yet to be done and suffered: the sins of
Nero, of Csar Borgia, of Alexander VI., and of him who was Emperor of
Rome and Priest of the Sun: the sufferings of those whose name is Legion and
whose dwelling is among the tombs, oppressed nationalities, factory children,
thieves, people in prison, outcasts, those who are dumb under oppression and
whose silence is heard only of God: and not merely imagining this but actually
achieving it, so that at the present moment all who come in contact with his
personality, even though they may neither bow to his altar nor kneel before his
priest, yet somehow find that the ugliness of their sins is taken away and the
beauty of their sorrow revealed to them.
I have said of him, that he ranks with the poets. That is true. Shelley and
Sophocles are of his company. But his entire life also is the most wonderful of
poems. For pity and terror there is nothing in the entire cycle of Greek
Tragedy to touch it. The absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire
scheme to a height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and
Pelops' line are by their very horror excluded, and shows how wrong
Aristotle was when he said in his treatise on the Drama that it would be
impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain. Nor in schylus nor
Dante, those stern masters of tenderness, in Shakespeare, the most purely
human of all the great artists, in the whole of Celtic myth and legend where the
loveliness of the world is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man
is no more than the life of a flower, is there anything that for sheer simplicity
of pathos wedded and made one with sublimity of tragic effect can be said to
equal or approach even the last act of Christ's Passion. The little supper with
his companions, one of whom had already sold him for a price: the anguish in
the quiet moonlit olive-garden: the false friend coming close to him so as to
betray him with a kiss: the friend who still believed in him and on whom as on
a rock he had hoped to build a House of Refuge for Man denying him as the
bird cried to the dawn: his own utter loneliness, his submission, his acceptance
of everything: and along with it all such scenes as the high priest of Orthodoxy
rending his raiment in wrath, and the Magistrate of Civil Justice calling for
water in the vain hope of cleansing himself of that stain of innocent blood that
makes him the scarlet figure of History: the coronation-ceremony of Sorrow,
one of the most wonderful things in the whole of recorded time: the crucifixion
of the Innocent One before the eyes of his mother and of the disciple whom he
loved: the soldiers gambling and throwing dice for his clothes: the terrible
death by which he gave the world its most eternal symbol: and his final burial
in the tomb of the rich man, his body swathed in Egyptian linen with costly
spices and perfumes as though he had been a King's son when one
contemplates all this from the point of view of Art alone one cannot but be
grateful that the supreme office of the Church should be the playing of the
tragedy without the shedding of blood, the mystical presentation by means of
dialogue and costume and gesture even of the Passion of her Lord, and it is
always a source of pleasure and awe to me to remember that the ultimate
survival of the Greek Chorus, lost elsewhere to art, is to be found in the
servitor answering the priest at Mass.
Yet the whole life of Christ so entirely may Sorrow and Beauty be made
one in their meaning and manifestation is really an idyll, though it ends with
the veil of the temple being rent, and the darkness coming over the face of the
earth, and the stone rolled to the door of the sepulchre. One always thinks of
him as a young bridegroom with his companions, as indeed he somewhere
describes himself, or as a shepherd straying through a valley with his sheep in
search of green meadow or cool stream, or as a singer trying to build out of
music the walls of the city of God, or as a lover for whose love the whole
world was too small. His miracles seem to me as exquisite as the coming of
Spring, and quite as natural. I see no difficulty at all in believing that such was
the charm of his personality that his mere presence could bring peace to souls
in anguish, and that those who touched his garments or his hands forgot their
pain: or that as he passed by on the highway of life people who had seen
nothing of life's mysteries saw them clearly, and others who had been deaf to
every voice but that of Pleasure heard for the first time the voice of Love and
found it as musical as is Apollo's lute: or that evil passions fled at his
approach, and men whose dull unimaginative lives had been but a mode of
death rose as it were from the grave when he called them: or that when he
taught on the hillside the multitude forgot their hunger and thirst and the cares
of this world, and that to his friends who listened to him as he sat at meat the
coarse food seemed delicate, and the water had the taste of good wine, and the
whole house became full of the odour and sweetness of nard.
Renan in his Vie de Jsus that gracious Fifth Gospel, the Gospel
according to St Thomas one might call it says somewhere that Christ's great
achievement was that he made himself as much loved after his death as he had
been during his lifetime. And certainly, if his place is among the poets, he is
the leader of all the lovers. He saw that love was that lost secret of the world
for which the wise men had been looking, and that it was only through love
that one could approach either the heart of the leper or the Feet of God.
And, above all, Christ is the most supreme of Individualists. Humility, like
the artistic acceptance of all experiences, is merely a mode of manifestation. It
is man's soul that Christ is always looking for. He calls it God's Kingdom h
basileia toy teoy and finds it in everyone. He compares it to little things, to a
tiny seed, to a handful of leaven, to a pearl. That is because one only realises
one's soul by getting rid of all alien passions, all acquired culture, and all
external possessions be they good or evil.
I bore up against everything with some stubbornness of will and much
rebellion of nature till I had absolutely nothing left in the world but Cyril. I had
lost my name, my position, my happiness, my freedom, my wealth. I was a
prisoner and a pauper. But I had still one beautiful thing left, my own eldest
son. Suddenly he was taken away from me by the law. It was a blow so
appalling that I did not know what to do, so I flung myself on my knees, and
bowed my head, and wept and said The body of a child is as the body of the
Lord: I am not worthy of either. That moment seemed to save me. I saw then
that the only thing for me was to accept everything. Since then curious as it
will no doubt sound to you I have been happier. It was of course my soul in
its ultimate essence that I had reached. In many ways I had been its enemy, but
I found it waiting for me as a friend. When one comes in contact with the soul
it makes one simple as a child, as Christ said one should be.
It is tragic how few people ever possess their souls before they die.
Nothing is more rare in any man, says Emerson, than an act of his own. It
is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's
opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation. Christ was not merely
the supreme Individualist, but he was the first in History. People have tried to
make him out an ordinary Philanthropist, like the dreadful philanthropists of
the nineteenth century, or ranked him as an Altruist with the unscientific and
sentimental. But he was really neither one nor the other. Pity he has, of course,
for the poor, for those who are shut up in prisons, for the lowly, for the
wretched, but he has far more pity for the rich, for the hard Hedonists, for
those who waste their freedom in becoming slaves to things, for those who
wear soft raiment and live in Kings' houses. Riches and Pleasure seemed to
him to be really greater tragedies than Poverty and Sorrow. And as for
Altruism, who knew better than he that it is vocation not volition that
determines us, and that one cannot gather grapes off thorns or figs from
thistles?
To live for others as a definite self-conscious aim was not his creed. It was
not the basis of his creed. When he says Forgive your enemies, it is not for
the sake of the enemy but for one's own sake that he says so, and because Love
is more beautiful than Hate. In his entreaty to the young man whom when he
looked on he loved, Sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor, it is not of
the state of the poor that he is thinking but of the soul of the young man, the
lovely soul that wealth was marring. In his view of life he is one with the artist
who knows that by the inevitable law of self-perfection the poet must sing, and
the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make the world a mirror for his
moods, as surely and as certainly as the hawthorn must blossom in Spring, and
the corn burn to gold at harvest-time, and the Moon in her ordered wanderings
change from shield to sickle, and from sickle to shield.
But while Christ did not say to men, Live for others, he pointed out that
there was no difference at all between the lives of others and one's own life. By
this means he gave to man an extended, a Titan personality. Since his coming
the history of each separate individual is, or can be made, the history of the
world. Of course Culture has intensified the personality of man. Art has made
us myriad-minded. Those who have the artistic temperament go into exile with
Dante and learn how salt is the bread of others and how steep their stairs: they
catch for a moment the serenity and calm of Goethe, and yet know but too well
why Baudelaire cried to God:
O Seigneur, donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon corps et mon coeur sans dgot.
Out of Shakespeare's sonnets they draw, to their own hurt it may be, the secret
of his love and make it their own: they look with new eyes on modern life
because they have listened to one of Chopin's nocturnes, or handled Greek
things, or read the story of the passion of some dead man for some dead
woman whose hair was like threads of fine gold and whose mouth was as a
pomegranate. But the sympathy of the artistic temperament is necessarily with
what has found expression. In words or in colour, in music or in marble,
behind the painted masks of an schylean play or through some Sicilian
shepherd's pierced and jointed reeds the man and his message must have been
revealed.
To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life
at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ it was not so. With a width
and wonder of imagination, that fills one almost with awe, he took the entire
world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and
made of himself its eternal mouthpiece. Those of whom I have spoken, who
are dumb under oppression and whose silence is heard only of God, he
chose as his brothers. He sought to become eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf,
and a cry on the lips of those whose tongue had been tied. His desire was to be
to the myriads who had found no utterance a very trumpet through which they
might call to Heaven. And feeling, with the artistic nature of one to whom
Sorrow and Suffering were modes through which he could realise his
conception of the Beautiful, that an idea is of no value till it becomes incarnate
and is made an image, he makes of himself the image of the Man of Sorrows,
and as such has fascinated and dominated Art as no Greek god ever succeeded
in doing.
For the Greek gods, in spite of the white and red of their fair fleet limbs,
were not really what they appeared to be. The curved brow of Apollo was like
the sun's disk crescent over a hill at dawn, and his feet were as the wings of the
morning, but he himself had been cruel to Marsyas and had made Niobe
childless: in the steel shields of the eyes of Pallas there had been no pity for
Arachne: the pomp and peacocks of Hera were all that was really noble about
her: and the Father of the Gods himself had been too fond of the daughters of
men. The two deep suggestive figures of Greek mythology were, for religion,
Demeter, an earth-goddess, not one of the Olympians, and, for art, Dionysus,
the son of a mortal woman to whom the moment of his birth had proved the
moment of her death also.
But Life itself from its lowliest and most humble sphere produced one far
more marvellous than the mother of Proserpina or the son of Semele. Out of
the carpenter's shop at Nazareth had come a personality infinitely greater than
any made by myth or legend, and one, strangely enough, destined to reveal to
the world the mystical meaning of wine and the real beauty of the lilies of the
field as none, either on Cithaeron or at Enna, had ever done it.
The song of Isaiah, He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him, had
seemed to him to be a prefiguring of himself, and in him the prophecy was
fulfilled. We must not be afraid of such a phrase. Every single work of art is
the fulfilment of a prophecy. For every work of art is the conversion of an idea
into an image. Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a
prophecy. For every human being should be the realisation of some ideal,
either in the mind of God or in the mind of man. Christ found the type, and
fixed it, and the dream of a Virgilian poet, either at Jerusalem or at Babylon,
became in the long progress of the centuries incarnate in him for whom the
world was waiting. His visage was marred more than any man's, and his
form more than the sons of men, are among the signs noted by Isaiah as
distinguishing the new ideal, and as soon as Art understood what was meant it
opened like a flower at the presence of one in whom truth in Art was set forth
as it had never been before. For is not truth in Art, as I have said, that in
which the outward is expressive of the inward; in which the soul is made flesh,
and the body instinct with spirit: in which Form reveals?
To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the
Christ's own renaissance which had produced the Cathedral of Chartres, the
Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto,
and Dante's Divine Comedy, was not allowed to develop on its own lines but
was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us
Petrarch, and Raphael's frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal French
tragedy, and St Paul's Cathedral, and Pope's poetry, and everything that is
made from without and by dead rules, and does not spring from within through
some spirit informing it. But wherever there is a romantic movement in Art,
there somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. He is in
Romeo and Juliet, in the Winter's Tale, in Provenal poetry, in The Ancient
Mariner, in La Belle Dame sans Merci, and in Chatterton's Ballad of
Charity.
We owe to him the most diverse things and people. Hugo's Les Misrables,
Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, the note of pity in Russian novels, the stained
glass and tapestries and quattrocento work of Burne-Jones and Morris,
Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, belong to him no less than the Tower of
Giotto, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tannhuser, the troubled romantic marbles of
Michael Angelo, pointed architecture, and the love of children and flowers
for both of whom, indeed, in classical art there was but little place, hardly
enough for them to grow or play in, but who from the twelfth century down to
our own day have been continually making their appearance in art, under
various modes and at various times, coming fitfully and wilfully as children
and flowers are apt to do. Spring always seeming to one as if the flowers had
been hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid that
grown-up people would grow tired of looking for them and give up the search,
and the life of a child being no more than an April day on which there is both
rain and sun for the narcissus.
And it is the imaginative quality of Christ's own nature that makes him this
palpitating centre of romance. The strange figures of poetic drama and ballad
are made by the imagination of others, but out of his own imagination entirely
did Jesus of Nazareth create himself. The cry of Isaiah had really no more to
do with his coming than the song of the nightingale has to do with the rising of
the moon no more, though perhaps no less. He was the denial as well as the
affirmation of prophecy. For every expectation that he fulfilled, there was
another that he destroyed. In all beauty, says Bacon, there is some strangeness
of proportion, and of those who are born of the spirit, of those, that is to say,
who like himself are dynamic forces, Christ says that they are like the wind
that bloweth where it listeth and no man can tell whence it cometh or whither
it goeth. That is why he is so fascinating to artists. He has all the
colour-elements of life: mystery, strangeness, pathos, suggestion, ecstasy, love.
He appeals to the temper of wonder, and creates that mood by which alone he
can be understood.
And it is to me a joy to remember that if he is of imagination all compact,
the world itself is of the same substance. I said in Dorian Gray that the great
sins of the world take place in the brain, but it is in the brain that everything
takes place. We know now that we do not see with the eye or hear with the ear.
They are merely channels for the transmission, adequate or inadequate, of
sense-impressions. It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is
odorous, that the skylark sings.
Of late I have been studying the four prose-poems about Christ with some
diligence. At Christmas I managed to get hold of a Greek Testament, and every
morning, after I have cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read a little of the
Gospels, a dozen verses taken by chance anywhere. It is a delightful way of
opening the day. To you, in your turbulent, ill-disciplined life, it would be a
capital thing if you would do the same. It would do you no end of good, and
the Greek is quite simple. Endless repetition, in and out of season, has spoiled
for us the navet, the freshness, the simple romantic charm of the Gospels. We
hear them read far too often, and far too badly, and all repetition is
anti-spiritual. When one returns to the Greek it is like going into a garden of
lilies out of some narrow and dark house.
And to me the pleasure is doubled by the reflection that it is extremely
probable that we have the actual terms, the ipsissima verba, used by Christ. It
was always supposed that Christ talked in Aramaic. Even Renan thought so.
But now we know that the Galilean peasants, like the Irish peasants of our own
day, were bilingual, and that Greek was the ordinary language of intercourse
all over Palestine, as indeed all over the Eastern world. I never liked the idea
that we only knew of Christ's own words through a translation of a translation.
It is a delight to me to think that as far as his conversation was concerned,
Charmides might have listened to him, and Socrates reasoned with him, and
Plato understood him: that he really said ego eimi o poimhn o kalos: that when
he thought of the lilies of the field, and how they neither toil nor spin, his
absolute expression was katamatete ta krina toy agroy, tos ayxanei oy kopia
oyde nntei, and that his last word when he cried out My life has been
completed, has reached its fulfilment, has been perfected, was exactly as St
John tells us it was: tetelestai: no more.
And while in reading the Gospels particularly that of St John himself, or
whatever early Gnostic took his name and mantle I see this continual
assertion of the imagination as the basis of all spiritual and material life, I see
also that to Christ imagination was simply a form of Love, and that to him
Love was Lord in the fullest meaning of the phrase. Some six weeks ago I was
allowed by the Doctor to have white bread to eat instead of the coarse black or
brown bread of ordinary prison fare. It is a great delicacy. To you it will sound
strange that dry bread could possibly be a delicacy to anyone. I assure you that
to me it is so much so that at the close of each meal I carefully eat whatever
crumbs may be left on my tin plate, or have fallen on the rough towel that one
uses as a cloth so as not to soil one's table: and do so not from hunger I get
now quite sufficient food but simply in order that nothing should be wasted
of what is given to me. So one should look on love.
Christ, like all fascinating personalities, had the power not merely of saying
beautiful things himself, but of making other people say beautiful things to
him; and I love the story St Mark tells us about the Greek woman the gynh
Ellhnis who, when as a trial of her faith he said to her that he could not give
her the bread of the children of Israel, answered him that the little dogs
kynaria, little dogs it should be rendered who are under the table eat of the
crumbs that the children let fall. Most people live for love and admiration. But
it is by love and admiration that we should live. If any love is shown us we
should recognise that we are quite unworthy of it. Nobody is worthy to be
loved. The fact that God loves man shows that in the divine order of ideal
things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally
unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to you a bitter one to hear, let us say that
everyone is worthy of love, except he who thinks that he is. Love is a
sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine, non sum dignus should
be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it. I wish you would
sometimes think of that. You need it so much.
If I ever write again, in the sense of producing artistic work, there are just
two subjects on which and through which I desire to express myself: one is
Christ, as the precursor of the Romantic movement in life: the other is the
Artistic life considered in its relation to Conduct. The first is, of course,
intensely fascinating, for I see in Christ not merely the essentials of the
supreme romantic type, but all the accidents, the wilfulnesses even, of the
romantic temperament also. He was the first person who ever said to people
that they should live flower-like lives. He fixed the phrase. He took children
as the type of what people should try to become. He held them up as examples
to their elders, which I myself have always thought the chief use of children, if
what is perfect should have a use. Dante describes the soul of a man as coming
from the hand of God weeping and laughing like a little child, and Christ
also saw that the soul of each one should be a guisa di fanciulla, che
piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia. He felt that life was changeful, fluid,
active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped into any form was death. He saw
that people should not be too serious over material, common interests: that to
be unpractical was a great thing: that one should not bother too much over
affairs. The birds didn't, why should man? He is charming when he says,
Take no thought for the morrow. Is not the soul more than meat? Is not the
body more than raiment? A Greek might have said the latter phrase. It is full
of Greek feeling. But only Christ could have said both, and so summed up life
perfectly for us.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be. If the only thing
he had ever said had been Her sins are forgiven her because she loved much,
it would have been worth while dying to have said it. His justice is all poetical
justice, exactly what justice should be. The beggar goes to heaven because he
had been unhappy. I can't conceive a better reason for his being sent there. The
people who work for an hour in the vineyard in the cool of the evening receive
just as much reward as those who had toiled there all day long in the hot sun.
Why shouldn't they? Probably no one deserved anything. Or perhaps they were
a different kind of people. Christ had no patience with the dull lifeless
mechanical systems that treat people as if they were things, and so treat
everybody alike: as if anybody, or anything for that matter, was like aught else
in the world. For him there were no laws: there were exceptions merely.
That which is the very keynote of romantic art was to him the proper basis
of actual life. He saw no other basis. And when they brought him one taken in
the very act of sin and showed him her sentence written in the law and asked
him what was to be done, he wrote with his finger on the ground as though he
did not hear them, and finally, when they pressed him again and again, looked
up and said Let him of you who has never sinned be the first to throw the
stone at her. It was worth while living to have said that.
Like all poetical natures, he loved ignorant people. He knew that in the soul
of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great idea. But he could not
stand stupid people, especially those who are made stupid by education
people who are full of opinions not one of which they can understand, a
peculiarly modern type, and one summed up by Christ when he describes it as
the type of one who has the key of knowledge, can't use it himself, and won't
allow other people to use it, though it may be made to open the gate of God's
Kingdom. His chief war was against the Philistines. That is the war every child
of light has to wage. Philistinism was the note of the age and community in
which he lived. In their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability,
their tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire
preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their ridiculous
estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jew of Jerusalem in Christ's
day was the exact counterpart of the British Philistine of our own. Christ
mocked at the whited sepulchres of respectability, and fixed that phrase for
ever. He treated worldly success as a thing to be absolutely despised. He saw
nothing in it at all. He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man. He
would not hear of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or morals. He
pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms
and ceremonies. He took Sabbatarianism as a type of the things that should be
set at nought. The cold philanthropies, the ostentatious public charities, the
tedious formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind, he exposed with utter and
relentless scorn. To us, what is termed Orthodoxy is merely a facile
unintelligent acquiescence, but to them, and in their hands, it was a terrible and
paralysing tyranny. Christ swept it aside. He showed that the spirit alone was
of value. He took a keen pleasure in pointing out to them that though they were
always reading the Law and the Prophets they had not really the smallest idea
of what either of them meant. In opposition to their tithing of each separate day
into its fixed routine of prescribed duties, as they tithed mint and rue, he
preached the enormous importance of living completely for the moment.
Those whom he saved from their sins are saved simply for beautiful
moments in their lives. Mary Magdalen, when she sees Christ, breaks the rich
vase of alabaster that one of her seven lovers had given her and spills the
odorous spices over his tired, dusty feet, and for that one moment's sake sits
for ever with Ruth and Beatrice in the tresses of the snow-white Rose of
Paradise. All that Christ says to us by way of a little warning is that every
moment should be beautiful, that the soul should always be ready for the
coming of the Bridegroom, always waiting for the voice of the Lover.
Philistinism being simply that side of man's nature that is not illumined by the
imagination, he sees all the lovely influences of life as modes of Light: the
imagination itself is the world-light, to pos toy kosmoy: the world is made by
it, and yet the world cannot understand it: that is because the imagination is
simply a manifestation of Love, and it is love, and the capacity for it, that
distinguishes one human being from another.
But it is when he deals with the Sinner that he is most romantic, in the sense
of most real. The world had always loved the Saint as being the nearest
possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some divine
instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as being the nearest
possible approach to the perfection of man. His primary desire was not to
reform people, any more than his primary desire was to relieve suffering. To
turn an interesting thief into a tedious honest man was not his aim. He would
have thought little of the Prisoners' Aid Society and other modern movements
of the kind. The conversion of a Publican into a Pharisee would not have
seemed to him a great achievement by any means. But in a manner not yet
understood of the world he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves
beautiful, holy things, and modes of perfection. It sounds a very dangerous
idea. It is so. All great ideas are dangerous. That it was Christ's creed admits of
no doubt. That it is the true creed I don't doubt myself.
Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he
would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is the
moment of initiation. More than that. It is the means by which one alters one's
past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their gnomic
aphorisms Even the Gods cannot alter the past. Christ showed that the
commonest sinner could do it. That it was the one thing he could do. Christ,
had he been asked, would have said I feel quite certain about it that the
moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept he really made his having
wasted his substance with harlots, and then kept swine and hungered for the
husks they ate, beautiful and holy incidents in his life. It is difficult for most
people to grasp the idea. I dare say one has to go to prison to understand it. If
so, it may be worth while going to prison.
There is something so unique about Christ. Of course, just as there are false
dawns before the dawn itself, and winter-days so full of sudden sunlight that
they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and
make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there
were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate
thing is that there have been none since. I make one exception, St Francis of
Assisi. But then God had given him at his birth the soul of a poet, as he himself
when quite young had in mystical marriage taken Poverty as his bride; and
with the soul of a poet and the body of a beggar he found the way to perfection
not difficult. He understood Christ, and so he became like him. We do not
require the Liber Conformitatum to teach us that the life of St Francis was the
true Imitatio Christi: a poem compared to which the book that bears that name
is merely prose. Indeed, that is the charm about Christ, when all is said. He is
just like a work of art himself. He does not really teach one anything, but by
being brought into his presence one becomes something. And everybody is
predestined to his presence. Once at least in his life each man walks with
Christ to Emmaus.
As regards the other subject, the relation of the artistic life to conduct, it
will no doubt seem strange to you that I should select it. People point to
Reading Gaol, and say There is where the artistic life leads a man. Well, it
might lead one to worse places. The more mechanical people, to whom life is a
shrewd speculation dependent on a careful calculation of ways and means,
always know where they are going, and go there. They start with the desire of
being the Parish Beadle, and, in whatever sphere they are placed, they succeed
in being the Parish Beadle and no more. A man whose desire is to be
something separate from himself, to be a Member of Parliament, or a
successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally
tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his
punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.
But with the dynamic forces of life, and those in whom those dynamic
forces become incarnate, it is different. People whose desire is solely for
self-realisation never know where they are going. They can't know. In one
sense of the word it is, of course, necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know
oneself. That is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the
soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of Wisdom. The final
mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in a balance, and measured
the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there
still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? When the
son of Kish went out to look for his father's asses, he did not know that a man
of God was waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his
own soul was already the Soul of a King.
I hope to live long enough, and to produce work of such a character, that I
shall be able at the end of my days to say, Yes: this is just where the artistic
life leads a man. Two of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own
experience are the lives of Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men
who passed years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante, the
other a man with the soul of that beautiful white Christ that seems coming out
of Russia. And for the last seven or eight months, in spite of a succession of
great troubles reaching me from the outside world almost without intermission,
I have been placed in direct contact with a new spirit working in this prison
through men and things, that has helped me beyond any possibility of
expression in words; so that while for the first year of my imprisonment I did
nothing else, and can remember doing nothing else, but wring my hands in
impotent despair, and say What an ending! what an appalling ending! now I
try to say to myself, and sometimes when I am not torturing myself do really
and sincerely say, What a beginning! what a wonderful beginning! It may
really be so. It may become so. If it does, I shall owe much to this new
personality that has altered every man's life in this place.
Things in themselves are of little importance, have indeed let us for once
thank Metaphysics for something that she has taught us no real existence.
The spirit alone is of importance. Punishment may be inflicted in such a way
that it will heal, not make a wound, just as alms may be given in such a manner
that the bread changes to a stone in the hands of the giver. What a change there
is not in the regulations, for they are fixed by iron rule, but in the spirit that
uses them as its expression you can realise when I tell you that had I been
released last May, as I tried to be, I would have left this place loathing it and
every official in it with a bitterness of hatred that would have poisoned my life.
I have had a year longer of imprisonment, but Humanity has been in the prison
along with us all, and now when I go out I shall always remember great
kindnesses that I have received here from almost everybody, and on the day of
my release will give my thanks to many people and ask to be remembered by
them in turn.
The prison-system is absolutely and entirely wrong. I would give anything
to be able to alter it when I go out. I intend to try. But there is nothing in the
world so wrong but that the spirit of Humanity, which is the spirit of Love, the
spirit of the Christ who is not in Churches, may make it, if not right, at least
possible to be borne without too much bitterness of heart.
I know also that much is waiting for me outside that is very delightful, from
what St Francis of Assisi calls my brother the wind and my sister the
rain, lovely things both of them, down to the shop-windows and sunsets of
great cities. If I made a list of all that still remains to me, I don't know where I
should stop: for, indeed, God made the world just as much for me as for
anyone else. Perhaps I may go out with something I had not got before. I need
not tell you that to me Reformations in Morals are as meaningless and vulgar
as Reformations in Theology. But while to propose to be a better man is a
piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of
those who have suffered. And such I think I have become. You can judge for
yourself.
If after I go out a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I
shouldn't mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself. With freedom, books,
flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? Besides, feasts are not for me
any more. I have given too many to care about them. That side of life is over
for me, very fortunately I dare say. But if, after I go out, a friend of mine had a
sorrow, and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he
shut the doors of the house of mourning against me I would come back again
and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled
to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it
as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace
could be inflicted on me. But that could not be. I have a right to share in
Sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world, and share its
sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact
with divine things, and has got as near to God's secret as anyone can get.
Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still
deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not
width but intensity is the true aim of modern Art. We are no longer in Art
concerned with the type. It is with the exception we have to do. I cannot put
my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins
where Imitation ends. But something must come into my work, of fuller
harmony of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious colour-effects,
of simpler architectural-order, of some sthetic quality at any rate.
When Marsyas was torn from the scabbard of his limbs dalla vagina
delle membre sue, to use one of Dante's most terrible, most Tacitean phrases
he had no more song, the Greeks said. Apollo had been victor. The lyre had
vanquished the reed. But perhaps the Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much
modern Art the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in
Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine. It is in the deferred resolutions of Chopin's
music. It is in the discontent that haunts the recurrent faces of Burne-Jones's
women. Even Matthew Arnold, whose song of Callicles tells of the triumph
of the sweet persuasive lyre, and the famous final victory, in such a clear
note of lyrical beauty even he, in the troubled undertone of doubt and distress
that haunts his verse, has not a little of it. Neither Goethe nor Wordsworth
could heal him, though he followed each in turn, and when he seeks to mourn
for Thyrsis or to sing of the Scholar Gipsy, it is the reed that he has to
take for the rendering of his strain. But whether or not the Phrygian Faun was
silent, I cannot be. Expression is as necessary to me as leaf and blossom are to
the black branches of the trees that show themselves above the prison wall and
are so restless in the wind. Between my art and the world there is now a wide
gulf, but between Art and myself there is none. I hope at least that there is
none.
To each of us different fates have been meted out. Freedom, pleasure,
amusements, a life of ease have been your lot, and you are not worthy of it. My
lot has been one of public infamy, of long imprisonment, of misery, of ruin, of
disgrace, and I am not worthy of it either not yet, at any rate. I remember I
used to say that I thought I could bear a real tragedy if it came to me with
purple pall and a mask of noble sorrow, but that the dreadful thing about
modernity was that it put Tragedy into the raiment of Comedy, so that the great
realities seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking in style. It is quite true
about modernity. It has probably always been true about actual life. It is said
that all martyrdoms seemed mean to the looker-on. The nineteenth century is
no exception to the general rule.
Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in
style. Our very dress makes us grotesques. We are the zanies of sorrow. We
are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are specially designed to appeal to the
sense of humour. On November 13th 1895 I was brought down here from
London. From two o'clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the
centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, for the
world to look at. I had been taken out of the Hospital Ward without a moment's
notice being given to me. Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque.
When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the
audience. Nothing could exceed their amusement. That was of course before
they knew who I was. As soon as they had been informed, they laughed still
more. For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by
a jeering mob.
For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and
for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds
to you. To those who are in prison, tears are a part of every day's experience. A
day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is
hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.
Well, now I am really beginning to feel more regret for the people who
laughed than for myself. Of course when they saw me I was not on my
pedestal. I was in the pillory. But it is a very unimaginative nature that only
cares for people on their pedestals. A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A
pillory is a terrific reality. They should have known also how to interpret
sorrow better. I have said that behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. It were
still wiser to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul. And to mock at a
soul in pain is a dreadful thing. Unbeautiful are their lives who do it. In the
strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to
those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of
things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?
I have told you this account of the mode of my being conveyed here simply
that you should realise how hard it has been for me to get anything out of my
punishment but bitterness and despair. I have however to do it, and now and
then I have moments of submission and acceptance. All the spring may be
hidden in a single bud, and the low groundnest of the lark may hold the joy
that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns, and so perhaps whatever
beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some moment of surrender,
abasement and humiliation. I can, at any rate, merely proceed on the lines of
my own development, and by accepting all that has happened to me make
myself worthy of it.
People used to say of me that I was too individualistic. I must be far more
of an individualist than I ever was. I must get far more out of myself than I
ever got, and ask far less of the world than I ever asked. Indeed my ruin came,
not from too great individualism of life, but from too little. The one
disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life was
my allowing myself to be forced into appealing to Society for help and
protection against your father. To have made such an appeal against anyone
would have been from the individualistic point of view bad enough, but what
excuse can there ever be put forward for having made it against one of such
nature and aspect?
Of course once I had put into motion the forces of Society, Society turned
on me and said, Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws,
and do you now appeal to those laws for protection? You shall have those laws
exercised to the full. You shall abide by what you have appealed to. The
result is I am in gaol. And I used to feel bitterly the irony and ignominy of my
position when in the course of my three trials, beginning at the Police Court, I
used to see your father bustling in and out in the hopes of attracting public
attention, as if anyone could fail to note or remember the stableman's gait and
dress, the bowed legs, the twitching hands, the hanging lower lip, the bestial
and half-witted grin. Even when he was not there, or was out of sight, I used to
feel conscious of his presence, and the blank dreary walls of the great
Court-room, the very air itself, seemed to me at times to be hung with
multitudinous masks of that apelike face. Certainly no man ever fell so
ignobly, and by such ignoble instruments, as I did. I say, in Dorian Gray
somewhere, that a man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I
little thought that it was by a pariah that I was to be made a pariah myself.
This urging me, forcing me to appeal to Society for help, is one of the
things that makes me despise you so much, that makes me despise myself so
much for having yielded to you. Your not appreciating me as an artist was
quite excusable. It was temperamental. You couldn't help it. But you might
have appreciated me as an Individualist. For that no culture was required. But
you didn't, and so you brought the element of Philistinism into a life that had
been a complete protest against it, and from some points of view a complete
annihilation of it. The Philistine element in life is not the failure to understand
Art. Charming people such as fishermen, shepherds, ploughboys, peasants and
the like know nothing about Art, and are the very salt of the earth. He is the
Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind mechanical forces
of Society, and who does not recognise the dynamic force when he meets it
either in a man or a movement.
People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil
things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But they, from the
point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approached them, were
delightfully suggestive and stimulating. It was like feasting with panthers. The
danger was half the excitement. I used to feel as the snake-charmer must feel
when he lures the cobra to stir from the painted cloth or reed-basket that holds
it, and makes it spread its hood at his bidding, and sway to and fro in the air as
a plant sways restfully in a stream. They were to me the brightest of gilded
snakes. Their poison was part of their perfection. I did not know that when
they were to strike at me it was to be at your piping and for your father's pay. I
don't feel at all ashamed of having known them. They were intensely
interesting. What I do feel ashamed of is the horrible Philistine atmosphere
into which you brought me. My business as an artist was with Ariel. You set
me to wrestle with Caliban. Instead of making beautiful coloured, musical
things such as Salome, and the Florentine Tragedy, and La Sainte Courtisane,
I found myself forced to send long lawyer's letters to your father and
constrained to appeal to the very wings against which I had always protested.
Clibborn and Atkins were wonderful in their infamous war against life. To
entertain them was an astounding adventure. Dumas pre, Cellini, Goya, Edgar
Allan Poe, or Baudelaire, would have done just the same. What is loathsome to
me is the memory of interminable visits paid by me to the solicitor Humphreys
in your company, when in the ghastly glare of a bleak room you and I would
sit with serious faces telling serious lies to a bald man, till I really groaned and
yawned with ennui. There is where I found myself after two years' friendship
with you, right in the centre of Philistia, away from everything that was
beautiful, or brilliant, or wonderful, or daring. At the end I had to come
forward, on your behalf, as the champion of Respectability in conduct, of
Puritanism, in life, and of Morality in Art. Voil o mnent les mauvais
chemins!
And the curious thing to me is that you should have tried to imitate your
father in his chief characteristics. I cannot understand why he was to you an
exemplar, where he should have been a warning, except that whenever there is
hatred between two people there is bond or brotherhood of some kind. I
suppose that, by some strange law of the antipathy of similars, you loathed
each other, not because in so many points you were so different, but because in
some you were so like. In June 1893 when you left Oxford, without a degree
and with debts, petty in themselves, but considerable to a man of your father's
income, your father wrote you a very vulgar, violent and abusive letter. The
letter you sent him in reply was in every way worse, and of course far less
excusable, and consequently you were extremely proud of it. I remember quite
well your saying to me with your most conceited air that you could beat your
father at his own trade. Quite true. But what a trade! What a competition!
You used to laugh and sneer at your father for retiring from your cousin's
house where he was living in order to write filthy letters to him from a
neighbouring hotel. You used to do just the same to me. You constantly
lunched with me at some public restaurant, sulked or made a scene during
luncheon, and then retired to White's Club and wrote me a letter of the very
foulest character. The only difference between you and your father was that
after you had dispatched your letter to me by special messenger, you would
arrive yourself at my rooms some hours later, not to apologise, but to know if I
had ordered dinner at the Savoy, and if not, why not. Sometimes you would
actually arrive before the offensive letter had been read. I remember on one
occasion you had asked me to invite to luncheon at the Caf Royal two of your
friends, one of whom I had never seen in my life. I did so, and at your special
request ordered beforehand a specially luxurious luncheon to be prepared. The
chef, I remember, was sent for, and particular instructions given about the
wines. Instead of coming to luncheon you sent me at the Caf an abusive letter,
timed so as to reach me after we had been waiting half an hour for you. I read
the first line, and saw what it was, and putting the letter in my pocket,
explained to your friends that you were suddenly taken ill, and that the rest of
the letter referred to your symptoms. In point of fact I did not read the letter till
I was dressing for dinner at Tite Street that evening. As I was in the middle of
its mire, wondering with infinite sadness how you could write letters that were
really like the froth and foam on the lips of an epileptic, my servant came in to
tell me that you were in the hall and were very anxious to see me for five
minutes. I at once sent down and asked you to come up. You arrived, looking I
admit very frightened and pale, to beg my advice and assistance, as you had
been told that a man from Lumley, the solicitor, had been enquiring for you at
Cadogan Place, and you were afraid that your Oxford trouble or some new
danger was threatening you. I consoled you, and told you, what proved to be
the case, that it was merely a tradesman's bill probably, and let you stay to
dinner, and pass your evening with me. You never mentioned a single word
about your hideous letter, nor did I. I treated it as simply an unhappy symptom
of an unhappy temperament. The subject was never alluded to. To write to me
a loathsome letter at 2.30, and fly to me for help and sympathy at 7.15 the
same afternoon, was a perfectly ordinary occurrence in your life. You went
quite beyond your father in such habits, as you did in others. When his
revolting letters to you were read in open Court he naturally felt ashamed and
pretended to weep. Had your letters to him been read by his own Counsel still
more horror and repugnance would have been felt by everyone. Nor was it
merely in style that you beat him at his own trade, but in mode of attack you
distanced him completely. You availed yourself of the public telegram, and the
open postcard. I think you might have left such modes of annoyance to people
like Alfred Wood whose sole source of income it is. Don't you? What was a
profession to him and his class was a pleasure to you, and a very evil one. Nor
have you given up your horrible habit of writing offensive letters, after all that
has happened to me through them and for them. You still regard it as one of
your accomplishments, and you exercise it on my friends, on those who have
been kind to me in prison like Robert Sherard and others. That is disgraceful of
you. When Robert Sherard heard from me that I did not wish you to publish
any article on me in the Mercure de France, with or without letters, you should
have been grateful to him for having ascertained my wishes on the point, and
for having saved you from, without intending it, inflicting more pain on me
than you had done already. You must remember that a patronising and
Philistine letter about fair play for a man who is down is all right for an
English newspaper. It carries on the old traditions of English journalism in
regard to their attitude towards artists. But in France such a tone would have
exposed me to ridicule and you to contempt. I could not have allowed any
article till I had known its aim, temper, mode of approach and the like. In art
good intentions are not of the smallest value. All bad art is the result of good
intentions.
Nor is Robert Sherard the only one of my friends to whom you have
addressed acrimonious and bitter letters because they sought that my wishes
and my feelings should be consulted in matters concerning myself, the
publication of articles on me, the dedication of your verses, the surrender of
my letters and presents, and such like. You have annoyed or sought to annoy
others also.
Does it ever occur to you what an awful position I would have been in if for
the last two years, during my appalling sentence, I had been dependent on you
as a friend? Do you ever think of that? Do you ever feel any gratitude to those
who by kindness without stint, devotion without limit, cheerfulness and joy in
giving, have lightened my black burden for me, have visited me again and
again, have written to me beautiful and sympathetic letters, have managed my
affairs for me, have arranged my future life for me, have stood by me in the
teeth of obloquy, taunt, open sneer or insult even? I thank God every day that
he gave me friends other than you. I owe everything to them. The very books
in my cell are paid for by Robbie out of his pocket-money. From the same
source are to come clothes for me, when I am released. I am not ashamed of
taking a thing that is given by love and affection. I am proud of it. But do you
ever think of what my friends such as More Adey, Robbie, Robert Sherard,
Frank Harris, and Arthur Clifton, have been to me in giving me comfort, help,
affection, sympathy and the like? I suppose that has never dawned on you. And
yet if you had any imagination in you you would know that there is not a
single person who has been kind to me in my prison-life, down to the warder
who may give me a good-morning or a good-night that is not one of his
prescribed duties down to the common policemen who in their homely rough
way strove to comfort me on my journeys to and fro from the Bankruptcy
Court under conditions of terrible mental distress down to the poor thief
who, recognising me as we tramped round the yard at Wandsworth, whispered
to me in the hoarse prison-voice men get from long and compulsory silence:
I am sorry for you: it is harder for the likes of you than it is for the likes of us
not one of them all, I say, the very mire from whose shoes you should not be
proud to be allowed to kneel down and clean.
Have you imagination enough to see what a fearful tragedy it was for me to
have come across your family? What a tragedy it would have been for anyone
at all, who had a great position, and great name, anything of importance to
lose? There is hardly one of the elders of your family with the exception of
Percy, who is really a good fellow who did not in some way contribute to my
ruin.
I have spoken of your mother to you with some bitterness, and I strongly
advise you to let her see this letter, for your own sake chiefly. If it is painful to
her to read such an indictment against one of her sons, let her remember that
my mother, who intellectually ranks with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and
historically with Madame Roland, died broken-hearted because the son of
whose genius and art she had been so proud, and whom she had regarded
always as a worthy continuer of a distinguished name, had been condemned to
the treadmill for two years. You will ask me in what way your mother
contributed to my destruction. I will tell you. Just as you strove to shift on to
me all your immoral responsibilities, so your mother strove to shift on to me
all her moral responsibilities with regard to you. Instead of speaking directly to
you about your life, as a mother should, she always wrote privately to me with
earnest, frightened entreaties not to let you know that she was writing to me.
You see the position in which I was placed between you and your mother. It
was one as false, as absurd, and as tragic as the one in which I was placed
between you and your father. In August 1892, and on the 8th of November in
the same year, I had two long interviews with your mother about you. On both
occasions I asked her why she did not speak directly to you herself. On both
occasions she gave me the same answer: I am afraid to: he gets so angry
when he is spoken to. The first time, I knew you so slightly that I did not
understand what she meant. The second time, I knew you so well that I
understood perfectly. (During the interval you had had an attack of jaundice
and been ordered by the doctor to go for a week to Bournemouth, and had
induced me to accompany you as you hated being alone.) But the first duty of
a mother is not to be afraid of speaking seriously to her son. Had your mother
spoken seriously to you about the trouble she saw you were in in July 1892 and
made you confide in her it would have been much better, and much happier
ultimately for both of you. All the underhand and secret communications with
me were wrong. What was the use of your mother sending me endless little
notes, marked Private on the envelope, begging me not to ask you so often
to dinner, and not to give you any money, each note ending with an earnest
postscript On no account let Alfred know that I have written to you ? What
good could come of such a correspondence? Did you ever wait to be asked to
dinner? Never. You took all your meals as a matter of course with me. If I
remonstrated, you always had one observation: If I don't dine with you,
where am I to dine? You don't suppose that I am going to dine at home. It
was unanswerable. And if I absolutely refused to let you dine with me, you
always threatened that you would do something foolish, and always did it.
What possible result could there be from letters such as your mother used to
send me, except that which did occur, a foolish and fatal shifting of the moral
responsibility on to my shoulders? Of the various details in which your
mother's weakness and lack of courage proved so ruinous to herself, to you,
and to me, I don't want to speak any more, but surely, when she heard of your
father coming down to my house to make a loathsome scene and create a
serious scandal, she might then have seen that a serious crisis was impending,
and taken some serious steps to try and avoid it? But all she could think of
doing was to send down plausible George Wyndham with his pliant tongue to
propose to me what? That I should gradually drop you!
As if it had been possible for me to gradually drop you! I had tried to end
our friendship in every possible way, going so far as actually to leave England
and give a false address abroad in the hopes of breaking at one blow a bond
that had become irksome, hateful, and ruinous to me. Do you think that I could
have gradually dropped you? Do you think that would have satisfied your
father? You know it would not. What your father wanted, indeed, was not the
cessation of our friendship, but a public scandal. That is what he was striving
for. His name had not been in the papers for years. He saw the opportunity of
appearing before the British public in an entirely new character, that of the
affectionate father. His sense of humour was roused. Had I severed my
friendship with you it would have been a terrible disappointment to him, and
the small notoriety of a second divorce suit, however revolting its details and
origin, would have proved but little consolation to him. For what he was
aiming at was popularity, and to pose as a champion of purity, as it is termed,
is, in the present condition of the British public, the surest mode of becoming
for the nonce a heroic figure. Of this public I have said in one of my plays that
if it is Caliban for one half of the year, it is Tartuffe for the other, and your
father, in whom both characters may be said to have become incarnate, was in
this way marked out as the proper representative of Puritanism in its
aggressive and most characteristic form. No gradual dropping of you would
have been of any avail, even had it been practicable. Don't you feel now that
the only thing for your mother to have done was to have asked me to come to
see her, and had you and your brother present, and said definitely that the
friendship must absolutely cease? She would have found in me her warmest
seconder, and with Drumlanrig and myself in the room she need not have been
afraid of speaking to you. She did not do so. She was afraid of her
responsibilities, and tried to shift them on to me. One letter she did certainly
write to me. It was a brief one, to ask me not to send the lawyer's letter to your
father warning him to desist. She was quite right. It was ridiculous my
consulting lawyers and seeking their protection. But she nullified any effect
her letter might have produced by her usual postscript: On no account let
Alfred know that I have written to you. You were entranced at the idea of my
sending lawyers' letters to your father, as well as yourself. It was your
suggestion. I could not tell you that your mother was strongly against the idea,
for she had bound me with the most solemn promises never to tell you about
her letters to me, and I foolishly kept my promise to her. Don't you see that it
was wrong of her not to speak directly to you? That all the
backstairs-interviews with me, and the area-gate correspondence were wrong?
Nobody can shift their responsibilities on anyone else. They always return
ultimately to the proper owner. Your one idea of life, your one philosophy, if
you are to be credited with a philosophy, was that whatever you did was to be
paid for by someone else: I don't mean merely in the financial sense that was
simply the practical application of your philosophy to everyday life but in the
broadest, fullest sense of transferred responsibility. You made that your creed.
It was very successful as far as it went. You forced me into taking the action
because you knew that your father would not attack your life or yourself in any
way, and that I would defend both to the utmost, and take on my own
shoulders whatever would be thrust on me. You were quite right. Your father
and I, each from different motives of course, did exactly as you counted on our
doing. But somehow, in spite of everything, you have not really escaped. The
infant Samuel theory, as for brevity's sake one may term it, is all very well
as far as the general world goes. It may be a good deal scorned in London, and
a little sneered at in Oxford, but that is merely because there are a few people
who know you in each place, and because in each place you left traces of your
passage. Outside of a small set in those two cities, the world looks on you as
the good young man who was very nearly tempted into wrong-doing by the
wicked and immoral artist, but was rescued just in time by his kind and loving
father. It sounds all right. And yet, you know you have not escaped. I am not
referring to a silly question asked by a silly juryman, which was of course
treated with contempt by the Crown and by the Judge. No one cared about that.
I am referring perhaps principally to yourself. In your own eyes, and some day
you will have to think of your conduct, you are not, cannot be quite satisfied at
the way in which things have turned out. Secretly you must think of yourself
with a good deal of shame. A brazen face is a capital thing to show the world,
but now and then when you are alone, and have no audience, you have, I
suppose, to take the mask off for mere breathing purposes. Else, indeed, you
would be stifled.
And in the same manner your mother must at times regret that she tried to
shift her grave responsibilities on someone else, who already had enough of a
burden to carry. She occupied the position of both parents to you. Did she
really fulfil the duties of either? If I bore with your bad temper and your
rudeness and your scenes, she might have borne with them too. When last I
saw my wife fourteen months ago now I told her that she would have to be
to Cyril a father as well as a mother. I told her everything about your mother's
mode of dealing with you in every detail as I have set it down in this letter,
only of course far more fully. I told her the reason of the endless notes with
Private on the envelope that used to come to Tite Street from your mother,
so constantly that my wife used to laugh and say that we must be collaborating
in a society novel or something of that kind. I implored her not to be to Cyril
what your mother was to you. I told her that she should bring him up so that if
he shed innocent blood he would come and tell her, that she might cleanse his
hands for him first, and then teach him how by penance or expiation to cleanse
his soul afterwards. I told her that if she was frightened of facing the
responsibility of the life of another, though her own child, she should get a
guardian to help her. That she has, I am glad to say, done. She has chosen
Adrian Hope, a man of high birth and culture and fine character, her own
cousin, whom you met once at Tite Street, and with him Cyril and Vyvyan
have a good chance of a beautiful future. Your mother, if she was afraid of
talking seriously to you, should have chosen someone amongst her own
relatives to whom you might have listened. But she should not have been
afraid. She should have had it out with you and faced it. At any rate, look at
the result. Is she satisfied and pleased?
I know she puts the blame on me. I hear of it, not from people who know
you, but from people who do not know you, and do not desire to know you. I
hear of it often. She talks of the influence of an elder over a younger man, for
instance. It is one of her favourite attitudes towards the question, and it is
always a successful appeal to popular prejudice and ignorance. I need not ask
you what influence I had over you. You know I had none. It was one of your
frequent boasts that I had none, and the only one indeed that was well-founded.
What was there, as a mere matter of fact, in you that I could influence? Your
brain? It was undeveloped. Your imagination? It was dead. Your heart? It was
not yet born. Of all the people who have ever crossed my life you were the
one, and the only one, I was unable in any way to influence in any direction.
When I lay ill and helpless in a fever caught from tending on you, I had not
sufficient influence over you to induce you to get me even a cup of milk to
drink, or to see that I had the ordinary necessaries of a sickroom, or to take the
trouble to drive a couple of hundred yards to a bookseller's to get me a book at
my own expense. When I was actually engaged in writing, and penning
comedies that were to beat Congreve for brilliancy, and Dumas fils for
philosophy, and I suppose everybody else for every other quality, I had not
sufficient influence with you to get you to leave me undisturbed as an artist
should be left. Wherever my writing room was, it was to you an ordinary
lounge, a place to smoke and drink hock-and-seltzer in, and chatter about
absurdities. The influence of an elder over a younger man is an excellent
theory till it comes to my ears. Then it becomes grotesque. When it comes to
your ears, I suppose you smile to yourself. You are certainly entitled to do
so. I hear also much of what she says about money. She states, and with
perfect justice, that she was ceaseless in her entreaties to me not to supply you
with money. I admit it. Her letters were endless, and the postscript Pray do
not let Alfred know that I have written to you appears in them all. But it was
no pleasure to me to have to pay every single thing for you from your morning
shave to your midnight hansom. It was a horrible bore. I used to complain to
you again and again about it. I used to tell you you remember, don't you?
how I loathed your regarding me as a useful person, how no artist wishes to
be so regarded or so treated; artists, like art itself, being of their very essence
quite useless. You used to get very angry when I said it to you. The truth
always made you angry. Truth, indeed, is a thing that is most painful to listen
to and most painful to utter. But it did not make you alter your views or your
mode of life. Every day I had to pay for every single thing you did all day
long. Only a person of absurd good nature or of indescribable folly would have
done so. I unfortunately was a complete combination of both. When I used to
suggest that your mother should supply you with the money you wanted, you
always had a very pretty and graceful answer. You said that the income
allowed her by your father some 1500 a year I believe was quite
inadequate to the wants of a lady of her position, and that you could not go to
her for more money than you were getting already. You were quite right about
her income being one absolutely unsuitable to a lady of her position and tastes,
but you should not have made that an excuse for living in luxury on me: it
should on the contrary have been a suggestion to you for economy in your own
life. The fact is that you were, and are I suppose still, a typical sentimentalist.
For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an
emotion without paying for it. To propose to spare your mother's pocket was
beautiful. To do so at my expense was ugly. You think that one can have one's
emotions for nothing. One cannot. Even the finest and the most self-sacrificing
emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.
The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible
affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of
thought the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul and send them back soiled
at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and
refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception
of life. As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality,
and be the better for such knowledge. And remember that the sentimentalist is
always a cynic at heart. Indeed sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of
cynicism. And delightful as cynicism is from its intellectual side, now that it
has left the Tub for the Club, it never can be more than the perfect philosophy
for a man who has no soul. It has its social value, and to an artist all modes of
expression are interesting, but in itself it is a poor affair, for to the true cynic
nothing is ever revealed.
I think that if you look back now to your mother's income, and your attitude
towards my income, you will not feel proud of yourself, and perhaps you may
some day, if you don't show your mother this letter, explain to her that your
living on me was a matter in which my wishes were not consulted for a
moment. It was simply a peculiar, and to me personally most distressing, form
that your devotion to me took. To make yourself dependent on me for the
smallest as well as the largest sums lent you in your own eyes all the charm of
childhood, and in the insisting on my paying for every one of your pleasures
you thought that you had found the secret of eternal youth. I confess that it
pains me when I hear of your mother's remarks about me, and I am sure that on
reflection you will agree with me that if she has no word of regret or sorrow
for the ruin your race has brought on mine it would be better if she remained
silent. Of course there is no reason she should see any portion of this letter that
refers to any mental development I have been going through, or to any point of
departure I hope to attain to. It would not be interesting to her. But the parts
concerned purely with your life I should show her if I were you.
If I were you, in fact, I would not care about being loved on false pretences.
There is no reason why a man should show his life to the world. The world
does not understand things. But with people whose affection one desires to
have it is different. A great friend of mine a friend of ten years' standing
came to see me some time ago and told me that he did not believe a single
word of what was said against me, and wished me to know that he considered
me quite innocent, and the victim of a hideous plot concocted by your father. I
burst into tears at what he said, and told him that while there was much
amongst your father's definite charges that was quite untrue and transferred to
me by revolting malice, still that my life had been full of perverse pleasures
and strange passions, and that unless he accepted that fact as a fact about me
and realised it to the full, I could not possibly be friends with him any more, or
ever be in his company. It was a terrible shock to him, but we are friends, and I
have not got his friendship on false pretences. I have said to you that to speak
the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.
I remember as I was sitting in the dock on the occasion of my last trial
listening to Lockwood's appalling denunciation of me like a thing out of
Tacitus, like a passage in Dante, like one of Savonarola's indictments of the
Popes at Rome and being sickened with horror at what I heard. Suddenly it
occurred to me, How splendid it would be, if I was saying all this about
myself! I saw then at once that what is said of a man is nothing. The point is,
who says it. A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he
kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life. So with
you. You would be much happier if you let your mother know a little at any
rate of your life from yourself. I told her a good deal about it in December
1893, but of course I was forced into reticences and generalities. It did not
seem to give her any more courage in her relations with you. On the contrary.
She avoided looking at the truth more persistently than ever. If you told her
yourself it would be different. My words may perhaps be often too bitter to
you. But the facts you cannot deny. Things were as I have said they were, and
if you have read this letter as carefully as you should have done you have met
yourself face to face.
I have now written, and at great length, to you in order that you should
realise what you were to me before my imprisonment, during those three years'
fatal friendship: what you have been to me during my imprisonment, already
within two moons of its completion almost: and what I hope to be to myself
and to others when my imprisonment is over. I cannot reconstruct my letter, or
rewrite it. You must take it as it stands, blotted in many places with tears, in
some with the signs of passion or pain, and make it out as best you can, blots,
corrections and all. As for the corrections and errata, I have made them in
order that my words should be an absolute expression of my thoughts, and err
neither through surplusage nor through being inadequate. Language requires to
be tuned, like a violin: and just as too many or too few vibrations in the voice
of the singer or the trembling of the string will make the note false, so too
much or too little in words will spoil the message. As it stands, at any rate, my
letter has its definite meaning behind every phrase. There is in it nothing of
rhetoric. Wherever there is erasion or substitution, however slight, however
elaborate, it is because I am seeking to render my real impression, to find for
my mood its exact equivalent. Whatever is first in feeling comes always last in
form.
I will admit that it is a severe letter. I have not spared you. Indeed you may
say that, after admitting that to weigh you against the smallest of my sorrows,
the meanest of my losses, would be really unfair to you, I have actually done
so, and made scruple by scruple the most careful assay of your nature. That is
true. But you must remember that you put yourself into the scales.
You must remember that, if when matched with one mere moment of my
imprisonment the balance in which you lie kicks the beam, Vanity made you
choose the balance, and Vanity made you cling to it. There was the one great
psychological error of our friendship, its entire want of proportion. You forced
your way into a life too large for you, one whose orbit transcended your power
of vision no less than your power of cyclic motion, one whose thoughts,
passions and actions were of intense import, of wide interest, and fraught, too
heavily indeed, with wonderful or awful consequence. Your little life of little
whims and moods was admirable in its own little sphere. It was admirable at
Oxford, where the worst that could happen to you was a reprimand from the
Dean or a lecture from the President, and where the highest excitement was
Magdalen becoming head of the river, and the lighting of a bonfire in the quad
as a celebration of the august event. It should have continued in its own sphere
after you left Oxford. In yourself, you were all right. You were a very
complete specimen of a very modern type. It was simply in reference to me
that you were wrong. Your reckless extravagance was not a crime. Youth is
always extravagant. It was your forcing me to pay for your extravagances that
was disgraceful. Your desire to have a friend with whom you could pass your
time from morning to night was charming. It was almost idyllic. But the friend
you fastened on should not have been a man of letters, an artist, one to whom
your continual presence was as utterly destructive of all beautiful work as it
was actually paralysing to the creative faculty. There was no harm in your
seriously considering that the most perfect way of passing an evening was to
have a champagne dinner at the Savoy, a box at a Music-Hall to follow, and a
champagne supper at Willis's as a bonne-bouche for the end. Heaps of
delightful young men in London are of the same opinion. It is not even an
eccentricity. It is the qualification for becoming a member of White's. But you
had no right to require of me that I should become the purveyor of such
pleasures for you. It showed your lack of any real appreciation of my genius.
Your quarrel with your father, again, whatever one may think about its
character, should obviously have remained a question entirely between the two
of you. It should have been carried on in a back yard. Such quarrels, I believe,
usually are. Your mistake was in insisting on its being played as a
tragi-comedy on a high stage in History, with the whole world as the audience,
and myself as the prize for the victor in the contemptible contest. The fact that
your father loathed you, and that you loathed your father, was not a matter of
any interest to the English public. Such feelings are very common in English
domestic life, and should be confined to the place they characterise: the home.
Away from the home-circle they are quite out of place. To translate them is an
offence. Family-life is not to be treated as a red flag to be flaunted in the
streets, or a horn to be blown hoarsely on the housetops. You took Domesticity
out of its proper sphere, just as you took yourself out of your proper sphere.
And those who quit their proper sphere change their surroundings merely,
not their natures. They do not acquire the thoughts or passions appropriate to
the sphere they enter. It is not in their power to do so. Emotional forces, as I
say somewhere in Intentions, are as limited in extent and duration as the forces
of physical energy. The little cup that is made to hold so much can hold so
much and no more, though all the purple vats of Burgundy be filled with wine
to the brim, and the treaders stand knee-deep in the gathered grapes of the
stony vineyards of Spain. There is no error more common than that of thinking
that those who are the causes or occasions of great tragedies share in the
feelings suitable to the tragic mood: no error more fatal than expecting it of
them. The martyr in his shirt of flame may be looking on the face of God, but
to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole
scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or the felling of a
tree to the charcoal-burner in the forest, or the fall of a flower to one who is
mowing down the grass with a scythe. Great passions are for the great of soul,
and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them.
I know of nothing in all Drama more incomparable from the point of view
of Art, or more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than Shakespeare's
drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's college friends.
They have been his companions. They bring with them memories of pleasant
days together. At the moment when they come across him in the play he is
staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of his temperament.
The dead have come armed out of the grave to impose on him a mission at
once too great and too mean for him. He is a dreamer, and he is called upon to
act. He has the nature of the poet and he is asked to grapple with the common
complexities of cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which
he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows much.
He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly. Brutus used
madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will,
but to Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness. In the
making of mows and jests he sees a chance of delay. He keeps playing with
action, as an artist plays with a theory. He makes himself the spy of his proper
actions, and listening to his own words knows them to be but words, words,
words. Instead of trying to be the hero of his own history, he seeks to be the
spectator of his own tragedy. He disbelieves in everything, including himself,
and yet his doubt helps him not, as it comes not from scepticism but from a
divided will.
Of all this, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz realise nothing. They bow and
smirk and smile, and what the one says the other echoes with sicklier iteration.
When at last, by means of the play within the play and the puppets in their
dalliance, Hamlet catches the conscience of the King, and drives the
wretched man in terror from his throne, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz see no
more in his conduct than a rather painful breach of court-etiquette. That is as
far as they can attain to in the contemplation of the spectacle of life with
appropriate emotions. They are close to his very secret and know nothing of
it. Nor would there be any use in telling them. They are the little cups that can
hold so much and no more. Towards the close it is suggested that, caught in a
cunning springe set for another, they have met, or may meet with a violent and
sudden death. But a tragic ending of this kind, though touched by Hamlet's
humour with something of the surprise and justice of comedy, is really not for
such as they. They never die. Horatio, who in order to report Hamlet and his
cause aright to the unsatisfied,
Absents him from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draws his breath in pain,
dies, though not before an audience, and leaves no brother. But Guildenstern
and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo and Tartuffe, and should rank with
them. They are what modern life has contributed to the antique ideal of
friendship. He who writes a new De Amicitia must find a niche for them and
praise them in Tusculan prose. They are types fixed for all time. To censure
them would show a lack of appreciation. They are merely out of their sphere:
that is all. In sublimity of soul there is no contagion. High thoughts and high
emotions are by their very existence isolated. What Ophelia herself could not
understand was not to be realised by Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz,
by Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern. Of course I do not propose to
compare you. There is a wide difference between you. What with them was
chance, with you was choice. Deliberately and by me uninvited you thrust
yourself into my sphere, usurped there a place for which you had neither right
nor qualifications, and having by curious persistence, and by the rendering of
your very presence a part of each separate day, succeeded in absorbing my
entire life, could do no better with that life than break it in pieces. Strange as it
may sound to you, it was but natural that you should do so. If one gives to a
child a toy too wonderful for its little mind, or too beautiful for its but
half-awakened eyes, it breaks the toy, if it is wilful; if it is listless it lets it fall
and goes its way to its own companions. So it was with you. Having got hold
of my life, you did not know what to do with it. You couldn't have known. It
was too wonderful a thing to be in your grasp. You should have let it slip from
your hands and gone back to your own companions at their play. But
unfortunately you were wilful, and so you broke it. That, when everything is
said, is perhaps the ultimate secret of all that has happened. For secrets are
always smaller than their manifestations. By the displacement of an atom a
world may be shaken. And that I may not spare myself any more than you I
will add this: that dangerous to me as my meeting with you was, it was
rendered fatal to me by the particular moment in which we met. For you were
at that time of life when all that one does is no more than the sowing of the
seed, and I was at that time of life when all that one does is no less than the
reaping of the harvest.
There are some few things more about which I must write to you. The first
is about my Bankruptcy. I heard some days ago, with great disappointment I
admit, that it is too late now for your family to pay your father off, that it
would be illegal, and that I must remain in my present painful position for
some considerable time to come. It is bitter to me because I am assured on
legal authority that I cannot even publish a book without the permission of the
Receiver to whom all the accounts must be submitted. I cannot enter into a
contract with the manager of a theatre, or produce a play without the receipts
passing to your father and my few other creditors. I think that even you will
admit now that the scheme of scoring off your father by allowing him to
make me a bankrupt has not really been the brilliant all-round success you
imagined it was going to turn out. It has not been so to me at any rate, and my
feelings of pain and humiliation at my pauperism should have been consulted
rather than your own sense of humour, however caustic or unexpected. In point
of actual fact, in permitting my Bankruptcy, as in urging me on to the original
trial, you really were playing right into your father's hands, and doing just what
he wanted. Alone, and unassisted, he would from the very outset have been
powerless. In you though you did not mean to hold such a horrible office
he has always found his chief ally.
I am told by More Adey in his letter that last summer you really did express
on more than one occasion your desire to repay me a little of what I spent on
you. As I said to him in my answer, unfortunately I spent on you my art, my
life, my name, my place in history, and if your family had all the marvellous
things in the world at their command, of what the world holds as marvellous,
genius, beauty, wealth, high position and the like, and laid them all at my feet,
it would not repay me for one tithe of the smallest things that have been taken
from me, or one tear of the least tears that I have shed. However, of course
everything one does has to be paid for. Even to the Bankrupt it is so. You seem
to be under the impression that Bankruptcy is a convenient means by which a
man can avoid paying his debts, a score off his creditors in fact. It is quite the
other way. It is the method by which a man's creditors score off him, if we
are to continue your favourite phrase, and by which the Law by the
confiscation of all his property forces him to pay every one of his debts, and if
he fails to do so leaves him as penniless as the commonest mendicant who
stands in an archway, or creeps down a road, holding out his hand for the alms
for which, in England at any rate, he is afraid to ask. The Law has taken from
me not merely all that I have, my books, furniture, pictures, my copyright in
my published works, my copyright in my plays, everything in fact from The
Happy Prince and Lady Windermere's Fan down to the stair-carpets and
door-scraper of my house, but also all that I am ever going to have. My interest
in my marriage-settlement, for instance, was sold. Fortunately I was able to
buy it in through my friends. Otherwise, in case my wife died, my two children
during my lifetime would be as penniless as myself. My interest in our Irish
estate, entailed on me by my own father, will I suppose have to go next. I feel
very bitterly about its being sold, but I must submit.
Your father's seven hundred pence or pounds is it? stand in the way, and
must be refunded. Even when I am stripped of all I have, and am ever to have,
and am granted a discharge as a hopeless Insolvent, I have still got to pay my
debts. The Savoy dinners the clear turtle soup, the luscious ortolans wrapped
in their crinkled Sicilian vine-leaves, the heavy amber-coloured, indeed almost
amber-scented champagne Dagonet 1880, I think, was your favourite wine?
all have still to be paid for. The suppers at Willis's, the special cuve of
Perrier-Jouet reserved always for us, the wonderful pts procured directly
from Strasburg, the marvellous fine champagne served always at the bottom of
great bell-shaped glasses that its bouquet might be the better savoured by the
true epicures of what was really exquisite in life these cannot be left unpaid,
as bad debts of a dishonest client. Even the dainty sleeve-links four
heart-shaped moonstones of silver mist, girdled by alternate ruby and diamond
for their setting that I designed, and had made at Henry Lewis's as a special
little present to you, to celebrate the success of my second comedy these
even though I believe you sold them for a song a few months afterwards
have to be paid for. I cannot leave the jeweller out of pocket for the presents I
gave you, no matter what you did with them. So, even if I get my discharge,
you see I have still my debts to pay.
And what is true of a bankrupt is true of everyone else in life. For every
single thing that is done someone has to pay. Even you yourself with all your
desire for absolute freedom from all duties, your insistence on having
everything supplied to you by others, your attempts to reject any claim on your
affection, or regard, or gratitude even you will have some day to reflect
seriously on what you have done, and try, however unavailingly, to make some
attempt at atonement. The fact that you will not be able to do so will be part of
your punishment. You can't wash your hands of all responsibility, and propose
with a shrug or a smile to pass on to a new friend and a freshly spread feast.
You can't treat all that you have brought upon me as a sentimental
reminiscence to be served up occasionally with the cigarettes and liqueurs, a
picturesque background to a modern life of pleasure like an old tapestry hung
in a common inn. It may for the moment have the charm of a new sauce or a
fresh vintage, but the scraps of a banquet grow stale, and the dregs of a bottle
are bitter. Either today, or to-morrow, or some day you have got to realise it.
Otherwise you may die without having done so, and then what a mean,
starved, unimaginative life you would have had. In my letter to More I have
suggested one point of view from which you had better approach the subject as
soon as possible. He will tell you what it is. To understand it you will have to
cultivate your imagination. Remember that imagination is the quality that
enables one to see things and people in their real as in their ideal relations. If
you cannot realise it by yourself, talk to others on the subject. I have had to
look at my past face to face. Look at your past face to face. Sit down quietly
and consider it. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.
Talk to your brother about it. Indeed the proper person to talk to is Percy. Let
him read this letter, and know all the circumstances of our friendship. When
things are clearly put before him, no judgment is better. Had we told him the
truth, what a lot would have been saved to me of suffering and disgrace! You
remember I proposed to do so, the night you arrived in London from Algiers.
You absolutely refused. So when he came in after dinner we had to play the
comedy of your father being an insane man subject to absurd and
unaccountable delusions. It was a capital comedy while it lasted, none the less
so because Percy took it all quite seriously. Unfortunately it ended in a very
revolting manner. The subject on which I write now is one of its results, and if
it be a trouble to you, pray do not forget that it is the deepest of my
humiliations, and one I must go through. I have no option. You have none
either.
The second thing about which I have to speak to you is with regard to the
conditions, circumstances, and the place of our meeting when my term of
imprisonment is over. From extracts from your letter to Robbie written in the
early summer of last year I understand that you have sealed up in two packages
my letters and my presents to you such at least as remain of either and are
anxious to hand them personally to me. It is, of course, necessary that they
should be given up. You did not understand why I wrote beautiful letters to
you, any more than you understood why I gave you beautiful presents. You
failed to see that the former were not meant to be published, any more than the
latter were meant to be pawned. Besides, they belong to a side of life that is
long over, to a friendship that somehow you were unable to appreciate at its
proper value. You must look back with wonder now to the days when you had
my entire life in your hands. I too look back to them with wonder, and with
other, far different, emotions.
I am to be released, if all goes well with me, towards the end of May, and
hope to go at once to some little seaside village abroad with Robbie and More
Adey. The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigenia, washes
away the stains and wounds of the world. Talassa klyzei panta t' antropon
kaka.
I hope to be at least a month with my friends, and to gain, in their healthful
and affectionate company, peace, and balance, and a less troubled heart, and a
sweeter mood. I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things,
such as the Sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that
we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great
sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed
whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that
the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They
loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at
noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy that he might keep off
the rays of the sun as he stooped over the young shoots, and for the artist and
the athlete, the two types that Greece gave us, they plaited into garlands the
leaves of the bitter laurel and of the wild parsley which else had been of no
service to man.
We call ourselves a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any
single thing. We have forgotten that Water can cleanse, and Fire purify, and
that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our Art is of the Moon and
plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the Sun and deals directly with
things. I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go
back to them and live in their presence. Of course, to one so modern as I am,
enfant de mon sicle, merely to look at the world will be always lovely. I
tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison
both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I
shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and
make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes so that all the air shall be
Arabia for me. Linnus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the
first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny
aromatic blossoms of the common furze, and I know that for me, to whom
flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose. It
has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not a single colour
hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which by
some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer.
Like Gautier I have always been one of those pour qui le monde visible existe.
Still, I am conscious now that behind all this Beauty, satisfying though it
be, there is some Spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but
modes of manifestation, and it is with this Spirit that I desire to become in
harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The
Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am
looking for and in the great symphonies of Music, in the initiation of Sorrow,
in the depths of the Sea I may find it. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it
somewhere.
All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death,
and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the
second time to be led back to the House of Detention, the third time to pass
into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no
place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust
and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys
in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so
that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind
over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me
in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
At the end of a month, when the June roses are in all their wanton opulence,
I will, if I feel able, arrange through Robbie to meet you in some quiet foreign
town like Bruges, whose grey houses and green canals and cool still ways had
a charm for me, years ago. For the moment you will have to change your
name. The little title of which you were so vain and indeed it made your
name sound like the name of a flower you will have to surrender, if you wish
to see me; just as my name, once so musical in the mouth of Fame, will have to
be abandoned by me, in turn. How narrow, and mean, and inadequate to its
burdens is this century of ours! It can give to Success its palace of porphyry,
but for Sorrow and Shame it does not keep even a wattled house in which they
may dwell: all it can do for me is to bid me alter my name into some other
name, where even medivalism would have given me the cowl of the monk or
the face-cloth of the leper behind which I might be at peace.
I hope that our meeting will be what a meeting between you and me should
be, after everything that has occurred. In old days there was always a wide
chasm between us, the chasm of achieved Art and acquired culture: there is a
still wider chasm between us now, the chasm of Sorrow: but to Humility there
is nothing that is impossible, and to Love all things are easy.
As regards your letter to me in answer to this, it may be as long or as short
as you choose. Address the envelope to The Governor, H.M. Prison,
Reading. Inside, in another, and an open envelope, place your own letter to
me: if your paper is very thin do not write on both sides, as it makes it hard for
others to read. I have written to you with perfect freedom. You can write to me
with the same. What I must know from you is why you have never made any
attempt to write to me, since the August of the year before last, more
especially after, in the May of last year, eleven months ago now, you knew,
and admitted to others that you knew, how you made me suffer, and how I
realised it. I waited month after month to hear from you. Even if I had not been
waiting but had shut the doors against you, you should have remembered that
no one can possibly shut the doors against Love for ever. The unjust judge in
the Gospels rises up at length to give a just decision because Justice comes
knocking daily at his door; and at night-time the friend, in whose heart there is
no real friendship, yields at length to his friend because of his importunity.
There is no prison in any world into which Love cannot force an entrance. If
you did not understand that, you did not understand anything about Love at all.
Then, let me know all about your article on me for the Mercure de France. I
know something of it. You had better quote from it. It is set up in type. Also,
let me know the exact terms of your Dedication of your poems. If it is in prose,
quote the prose; if in verse, quote the verse. I have no doubt that there will be
beauty in it. Write to me with full frankness about yourself: about your life:
your friends: your occupations: your books. Tell me about your volume and its
reception. Whatever you have to say for yourself, say it without fear. Don't
write what you don't mean: that is all. If anything in your letter is false or
counterfeit I shall detect it by the ring at once.
It is not for nothing, or to no purpose, that in my lifelong cult of literature I
have made myself
Miser of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage.
Remember also that I have yet to know you. Perhaps we have yet to know each
other.
For yourself, I have but this last thing to say. Do not be afraid of the past. If
people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present
and the future are but one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight we
should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely
accidental conditions of Thought. The Imagination can transcend them, and
move in a free sphere of ideal existences. Things, also, are in their essence
what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one
looks at it. Where others, says Blake, see but the Dawn coming over the
hill, I see the sons of God shouting for joy. What seemed to the world and to
myself my future I lost irretrievably when I let myself be taunted into taking
the action against your father: had, I dare say, lost it really long before that.
What lies before me is my past. I have got to make myself look on that with
different eyes, to make the world look on it with different eyes, to make God
look on it with different eyes. This I cannot do by ignoring it, or slighting it, or
praising it, or denying it. It is only to be done fully by accepting it as an
inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character: by bowing my head to
everything that I have suffered. How far I am away from the true temper of
soul, this letter in its changing, uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its
aspirations and its failure to realise those aspirations, shows you quite clearly.
But do not forget in what a terrible school I am sitting at my task. And
incomplete, imperfect, as I am, yet from me you may have still much to gain.
You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I
am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of
Sorrow, and its beauty. Your affectionate friend
OSCAR WILDE