10 October 1900

 

Robert Ross has sent me a parcel.  I opened it in haste, only to discover some copies of An Ideal Husband.  I had been hoping for jars of Koko-Marikopas, which turns my hair strangely brown.  Well, I glanced at the play: I was curious to see what I had written and, with the exception of one or two of the more serious speeches, it amuses me still.  But I cannot go back to that kind of thing: unlike Sarah Bernhardt, I cannot be forever striking attitudes.  And how can a man, who simply looks at the world and wonders, produce art?  It is a thing quite impossible.

      Charles Wyndham wrote to me the other day asking me to translate Scribe for a publisher in Bond Street; fortunately, he offered money in advance.  I accepted that, of course, but I do not think I can bear to do the translation: I would rather be stitching sacks.  Scribe does not write, he tinkers.  Only Hugo and Maeterlinck were my equal as dramatists and, in any case, translation is not my forte.  Like prayer, one should do it in the privacy of one's own home, preferably not aloud.

      My career as an artist is complete, and it would be superfluous to attempt to add to it.  I went from poetry to prose, and then to drama.  After that, I went to prison.  There, in two sentences, is the secret of my extraordinary life: always do the unexpected.  People rarely forgive you for it, but they never forget you.  It was fitting, however, that my last published work should be the Ballad and that I should end, as I began, with poetry.  Like the head of Orpheus, I sang as I floated into oblivion.  I began with the song of Apollo, and ended with the cry of Marsyas.

      There have been absurd rumours that I am still writing under an assumed name.  Frank Harris told me at lunch - did I mention that lunch? - that Mr and Mrs Daventry is about to open at the Royalty: well, royalty devised it.  He told me that I am reported to be the author of the play and, although he is the author himself, he laughed at the idea.  It will bring the play publicity, he said.  But the idea fills me with horror.  I devised the scenario, and out of it I could have created a perfect example of domestic melodrama.  Frank, however, has taken the thing seriously and written a perfectly dreadful tragedy.  If my name is attached to it, it will add yet another chapter to my martyrdom.  I believe it is called a 'problem play', although the only real problem is why Frank wrote it.  He is not a dramatist: he has no interest in himself, let alone in other people.

      Actually, I do not care any more about such matters, although I pretend to do so.  Once it was quite otherwise: I laughed about my work with others, and made light of it in conversation with friends, while in reality I thought nothing else to be of the slightest importance.  I do not believe that any of my companions realised how serious an artist I then was: when my work touched upon suffering as well as joy, sin as well as love, I was reproached by some of them for being morbid.  They wanted me to be always as I seemed to be with them, and it came as a positive disappointment that I might be different out of their company.

      I was the greatest artist of my time, I do not doubt that, just as my tragedy was the greatest of my time.  I had a reputation as an artist both in Europe and in America, and in England my work was always a commercial success - I am not ashamed of that.  The cult of the artist as St Francis has never appealed to me: their virginity is the virginity of the eunuch, their isolation that of the thoroughly understood.

      I mastered each literary form.  I brought comedy back to the English stage, I created symbolic drama in our tongue, and I invented the prose poem for a modern audience.  I divorced criticism from practice, and turned it into an independent enquiry, just as I wrote the only modern novel in English.  And, although I turned my plays into an essentially private form of expression, I never swerved from my ideal which was to make drama the meeting place of life and art.  I proposed a novel theory in doing so: that Man is, or should be, what he appears to be.  The public did not understand that, but then the public never understands anything.  The problem with the modern age is that it has the merits of chiaroscuro only - with much shade and little light.  I reversed the equation and the public were dazzled.

      Of course there were great faults, but if there had been no faults there would have been no triumph.  I exaggerated wildly, and turned the things I most loved to parody.  I thought too quickly, and grew so impatient with my own sorrows that I turned them aside into laughter.  I was so great a master of language that I thought I could fashion the world into my own image.  In my days of purple and gold, I did too many things too well.  I had the openness of mind and the flexibility of intelligence which were the predominant notes of the Athenian people.  I believed I was one such as Denys L'Auxerrois in Pater's story: the Greek boy born too late, who brought with him everywhere a mad joyfulness, one for whom the honours and injustices of the world were but light and trivial things.  But, in reality, I courted success primarily.  And that was to be my ruin.  I remember reading, in my prison cell, Pascal's motto: 'Diseur de bons mots - mauvais caractère', and I bowed my head at the justice of the indictment.

      I was a vessel for the prose of the age, and in the end it flowed over my head.  I revelled in its language but not in its morality and so, when I look back over my work, it sometimes has the strangely scented doom of hot-house flowers.  Browning was not afraid to write an ugly line in order to express precisely his thought - that was his tragedy.  I found meaning in beauty only and abjured ugliness - that was mine.  I never saw reality.  I put on a mask as easily as I adopted a mood, and as a result I became a prisoner of those masks and my moods; even now I am tempted to make roulades of phrases.  Perhaps Frank was right: perhaps even in this journal I am not portraying myself as indeed I am.  I feel like Timanthes who, despairing of his ability to represent Agammemnon's head, threw a drapery over it.

      The doctor comes in half an hour: I must shave.