10 September 1900

 

In the few years before I went to prison, I became a symbol of that Society which sent me there in scorn.  From my Oxford days I had been accepted everywhere, but as an ornament merely.  It was not until after I had left the Woman's World and begun my brilliant series of books and plays that I became the leading figure in the pageant which the really powerful people in England wished to create.  For all my drama was, to those who had eyes but not ears, a social event.  In my earlier years, my mission had been to bring art into life and in drama I discovered that the two become perfect in combination.  I should have made the audience perfect also, as I realise now to my cost.

      I was never performed at the advanced theatres, at the Independent or the New Century - that would have been sheer indulgence on my part - for I was as much a landmark of the West End as the Savoy Hotel.  Of course I knew that my plays were potboilers - exquisite potboilers - and I discovered each one as soon as it was successful: if one had failed, I would have hugged it to myself and proclaimed it the true voice of my art.

      My first nights were as carefully planned as my productions: in the little theatre in King Street, the young men wore green carnations, that sweet arsenic flower which is the emblem of a doomed life, and the women wore lilies which perfumed the whole of London.  The Prince would come, and with him the whole of the fashionable world.  Only the critics felt out of place.

      I was extravagant: I used to say that the only way to waste money was to save it and it was only when I entered the Bankruptcy Court in convict dress that I had to count the true cost of my profligacy - a cost which was not to be reckoned in coin alone.  I dressed like a Celt rather than an Englishman.  My buttonhole cost me 10/6, and like an expensive things, it expired at once; it became my fancy to purchase a new article of clothing each day - I was a saint collecting my own relics.  Dress is the most complete representation of modern civilisation, after all, and I sailed through life on cloth like Faust upon his mantle.

      Like a Celt, also, I built castles of gold which I would then enter.  I hired a hansom which followed me on a retainer and, in flight from domestic life, I lived in restaurants, hotels and private rooms.  I would sit in the Café Royal and discuss improbable things, and dine at Willis's with impossible people.  I was vain and the world loved my vanity.  If the English can be said to admire anything, they admire success, and I became the object of imitation upon the stage and in the popular press.  I had in those brilliant years the over-brightness of Pico della Mirandola and I thought that I, like him, lived in a time of hyacinths.

      I spoke on equal terms with princes and with duchesses.  I paid visits to them in the country and dined with them in London.  I was the distinguished equivalent of a Saturday Popular Concert and I suppose that, in the modern phrase, I 'sang for my supper'.  They permitted me into their drawing rooms because I brought their own illusions to brilliant life.  At dinner parties and at receptions, in salons and in cafés, I was surrounded by those who dominated life: I did not flatter them, but I understood them for I, too, believed in the value of appearances.  I sustained the over-dressed with my wit and the under-educated by my paradoxes.  I held their own fantasies to the light of my conversation and they shone.  But they did so only because they were quite transparent.  Only when I was put on trial for immorality did the English recognise this, and then they stamped upon me with all the fury of those who have betrayed themselves.

      My conversation was immaculate - I turned it into an art in which the most important things were left unsaid.  But I did not disillusion those who listened to me, and there lay the most serious flaw in my character.  I enjoyed praise, I admit it.  I like to be liked.  And my true fault was not that I succumbed to strange sins or mingled in worthless company, but that I craved fame and success even when I knew them to be fraudulent.  And so I made a philosophy out of insincerity which was universally admired.  I proclaimed that insincerity represented the multiplicity of the personality.

      But I do not miss the company of those who glittered with jewels and with the colours of the mockingbird.  I feel utterly alone now because of the absence of those real friends whom I possessed during that period.  With the rich and the powerful I never felt wholly at ease - my performances for them sometimes wearied me and left me terribly empty.  It was the same with other writers: I was too much ahead of them to be comfortable in their company.  It was only with those who accepted me entirely that I could take off the mask of the carnival and enjoy the sweet comfort of conversation shared.

      Ada Leverson was my dearest friend in London.  I called her 'the Sphinx' because of the indecipherable messages she left for me and often, at a very late hour, I would visit her little house near Gloucester Road.  She had a habit of being discovered doing something useful, like reading German aloud.  But I would always ignore it.

      'Ah, Sphinx, I see this is your leisure hour.  I am delighted to catch you at home.'

      'I rarely go out after midnight, Oscar.'

      'That is so sensible of you, Sphinx.  You should only be seen in the tawny-faced sunlight, when men will stop and wonder at your beauty.'

      'I am afraid they will only wonder where it has gone.  Do have a drink, Oscar.'

      'Where is your husband?  Have you hidden him?'

      'Ernest is asleep.'

      'Asleep?  After midnight?  I am surprised at you, Sphinx, for indulging him.'

      'You must have been with very dull people tonight, Oscar.  You are talking nonsense.'

      'I have been dining with Lord Stanhope.  Really, he is nothing more than an exaggerated farmer.  He insisted that I discuss Tennyson with him while we were going in to dinner.'

      'You know you adore Tennyson, Oscar, although I have always thought of him as the Sidney Colvin of literature.'

      'Never speak disrespectfully of Sidney Colvin.  It shows a maturity in excess of your years.'

      'I am always excessive.  Did Constance tell you that I went shopping with her this afternoon?'

      'With my money and your taste, she must have worked miracles.'

      'She seemed rather distracted.  I had to warn her twice against buying corded silk.'

      'Yes, I have often mentioned corded silk to her myself.  But you said she was distracted.  About what?'

      'You know perfectly well.  She says she hardly sees you.  And she found Arthur removing three empty bottles of champagne from your bedroom -'

      'What else does one do with empty bottles?'

      'And she says your mother complains that you never visit her.  I am sorry to talk to you like this, Oscar, but really I am the only one who will.'

      'I know, dear Sphinx, and I sit here contrite.  Where is that drink you foolishly promised me?  I suppose I will have to fetch it myself.'

      'Tread quietly, Oscar.  The servants are below you.'

      'I was amusing about servants tonight.  I said I have always been found of them: without them, no dinner party is complete.  Do you like that?'

      'It is a little below your best, but it will serve.'

      'That is very amusing.  Did I tell you about my new story?  I have called it "The Double Beheading".  I have no theme as yet, but the title is delightful don't you think?'

      And so we would talk together, until one or both of us had tired.  'Already, Sphinx,' I would say then, 'I can hear the horses of Apollo pawing impatiently at the gates.  I must leave you and dear, sleeping Ernest.'

      'Ah yes, the importance of being Ernest.'

      'It is a little below your best, Sphinx, but it will serve.'  And then I would return to Tite Street, and lie awake upon my bed until dawn.

      And yet now, when I look back upon those evenings and search my past for traces of that love and humility which must now be my guides, I do not find it there, in the companionship of those I loved and who loved me.  I am not sure that even with them I was not playing a part.  I was so much the master of my period that I knew how to adopt effortlessly all its disguises.  But I think also that I was - or thought myself to be - so much the lord of life that I was able to take on whatever character that was required and remain apart.  I took off one mask only to reveal another.  I imagined that the world was mine; that there was nothing which I could not do.  A fierce joy consumed me.  I was free.

      But in truth there was no real liberty for me.  I was imprisoned by my success just as if I had been caught in a house of mirrors where, turning quickly about myself, I saw only my own image.  For I had become a spectacle merely and often, at night, I would sit alone in Tite Street trying to see things coldly and calmly.  I knew then, in the dead hours, what I had become.

      But if I found my own Gethsemane in the dark night of London, I was in other ways quite the opposite of Christ.  The thorns tore at the divine temples, but eternal flowers blossomed in His heart because it was full of love.  My own head was crowned with myrtles and with vine-leaves, but my heart expired beneath the poisoned dart of the world.  In my plays I had made light of all the things that were dearest to me; in my life I had betrayed all those who were closest to me.  I was the Juggernaut, heaped with flowers, which crushes all those who come near to it.

      Now, when those who have loved or admired me have left my side, I do not truly know who I am.  I have survived the disaster, but I have emerged from the wreckage as dazzled and as bereft of thought as a child emerging from the womb.  I catch myself now, in my loneliness, empty of action and of imagination.  I can spend minutes, hours even, staring out of the small window which looks upon the courtyard, staring at nothing, thinking of nothing.

      Could it be that I, who have written so much about the powers of the personality, do not - after everything which has happened to me - know what my own personality is?  That would be the tragedy of my life, if tragedy were to be found anywhere within it.  I can say only one thing truly: in that strange complicity between the world and the individual character, I was one in which the world played the largest part.  My greatest efforts can be traced to the love of praise, my greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.

      Of course that is why I have always been enchanted by the lives of anchorites, for the true artist is always looking for that hooded figure who is 'the opposite of himself'.  I consulted the authorities on the lives of the saints - Flaubert and Villiers de L'Isle Adam - and I even began a story of my own upon that theme.  There are fragments of it among the notes I made in prison, but they were stolen at Dieppe.  I believe the princess Myrrhina approaches the cave of the hermit, Honorius, to tempt him with her silks and perfumes.  She tells him of sins and palaces, and he tells her of the love of God.  She mocks him at his rags, and he implores her to leave him.  She murmurs to him of subtle foods and sweet drinks which, once taken, grant you the memories of the world and then in scorn she scatters his coarse bread and his cup of brackish water.  And he is tempted.  I have done no further work upon it, but I had an ending in mind which I have yet to write down.

      Myrrhina, in her arrogance, tempts Honorius to such effect that he embraces her and puts his mouth to her mouth - I want the music of cymbals here - but the punishment of God is a mysterious thing.  In that act of surrender Honorius expires, and his embrace is so passionate that Myrrhina cannot free herself.  As he grows cold in death, his arms tighten around her like the root of an ancient tree.   And she looks with horror upon that body which in her pride she lured into sin: she sees that body decay even as it imprisons her in the fatal embrace.  And Myrrhina, too, dies.  Is that not a charming ending?

      There is, after all, a strange justice in the workings of fate: we cry out against it at first but then it whispers to us the secrets of our soul and we bow our head in silence.  I realise now that my social and financial success would have destroyed me, more completely and terribly, than my disaster if they had continued.  The artist within me was dying, and had to enter a prison before he could be reborn.  In the days of triumph I was like a large goldfish which has choked from devouring too much bread.  The meal did not nourish me: it simply distended my stomach.

      And in truth I became fat - bloated almost.  I drank too much, far too much, so that I might retain the intoxication of spirit which propelled me forward.  My wife was dismayed - and even my little sons turned away from me.  My family said nothing but, just as I saw little of them, they were in turn pleased to see little of me.  My friends - my real friends, not those who surrounded me and held me up for others to gape at - tried to warn me that I was losing myself in a mist of excess.  I remember one conversation with Shaw, in the Café Royal, where he took me to one side and spoke quietly and seriously to me of the way my life was going.  I remember him saying to me, 'You are betraying us, us Irishmen.'  And I laughed in his face.  I could not take him seriously.  And then he told me to read again one of my own stories, 'The Fisherman and His Soul', and how I had written that no life can bloom if there is no love to nourish it.  Naturally, I paid no attention.

      There were other intimations, also.  At the time of my greatest success, I was suspected of the greatest infamies.  My own writings - and my plays especially - contained evidence of those disclosures which I most feared.  But England is the home of Tartuffe and, as long as I amused the English, they chose to ignore the whisperings which were then circulating about my private life.  But I, too, had been infected by the same hypocrisy - my work will show what my secret voice continually murmured to me, that my life was hollow and my triumphs fraudulent.