13 August 1900

 

I woke this morning just before dawn, and the pain in my head was so intense that it seemed to me then that it might be my last morning on earth.  At first I felt afraid, but then I was filled with a strange joy.  What wonderful things I might say!  But, when I made the slow descent into my personality, it was as if I had been struck dumb.  I could hear the sound of the vegetable carts driving over the cobbles on their way to Les Halles, and the sound was as deadly to me as the executioner's cart which Villon heard in the dungeon of Meury.  But pain has not provoked in me the fiery life which Villon found.  I have nothing to say: if this were indeed my last mourning, I could declare only that I heard the vegetable carts of Paris arriving at such-and-such an hour.  That is all.  It is scarcely enough to appear in volume form.

      All powers of imagination have deserted me now.  When I wrote in my glorious days, it was joy which led me forward and joy which revealed the world to me; even in prison, joy returned when I wrote my long letter to Bosie.  Now it has gone - in that terrible phrase, 'the waters have flowed over my head' - and I don't care to struggle in order to regain it.  When I left prison, I wrote my Ballad to demonstrate to the world that my suffering had served only to improve me as an artist.  I planned then, after the Ballad, to return to the Bible and find there the great dramatic themes which contemporary Europe has quite forgotten: I wished to turn the history of Jezebel and Jehu into a work of art as suggestive as my Salomé.  But my plans decayed as soon as they were conceived.  My will faltered, and was gone.  I shall not accomplish the work I want to do, and I never will.  And how useless regret is - my life cannot be patched up, that is all.  At least I have the consolation that I shall not appear in Mr Walter Scott's 'Great Writers' series.

      Yet the death of an artist such as I am is a fearful thing.  Death itself holds no terror for those who have known and understood life, but to lose one's powers as an artist - that is the unendurable punishment.  On me has been visited the doom of the Phrygian Tantalos, to see the fruit and be unable to taste it, to have wonderful visions and then be forced continually to forsake them.

      Of course my friends do no realise this: they believe that literature resembles an unfinished letter, which can be taken up at any point.  Robbie Ross writes to me as if he were Miss Marbury, the American 'agent', and sometimes I suspect that he is.  He orders me to begin a new play but I have explained to him that I cannot do proper work outside England.  Now I write only for the more advanced schoolboys; they send me their photographs, and ask advice about the production of my plays.  I reply in scarlet form.  I am a Silenus to whose feet the cherubs come.  Perhaps I might begin a new career touring the schools of England and lecturing the young on the influence of architecture upon manners - prison taught me a great deal on that particular subject.  I would create more sensation in the classrooms than Matthew Arnold.  He was impossible.  I am rather better, I am merely improbable.  The boys understand that, and no doubt it is right that they should be interested in my work - I have always been interested in them.  But the relationship has altered somewhat: they are now my peers.  Society passed sentence on the artist; the coming generation will pass its own sentence on the society which did so.  In them my work may live.

      As it is, the modern world has no use for me.  When I walk into places of public entertainment where English tourists gather, I am often asked to leave and, when in hot confusion I retreat, the curious crane their heads to look at me.  If I wish to enter a restaurant, I am careful that I go only to one where the patron knows me and I eat - at table d'hôte prices - at a separate, alien table somewhere near the kitchen.  Then one knows what it is to be alone.  The English have always objected to my presence but now, in crowds, they have the cowardice visibly to show it.  If I go to the theatre, even among the French, I am forced to sit in the cheapest seats.  I go to fashionable places only when accompanied by rich friends - the English will always bow to wealth.

      I am used to such behaviour from them now.  Shaw has given the best definition of an Englishman.  It occurs in one of his plays - I forget which, but I remember that we travelled to the suburbs in order to see it, just a few friends gathered together.  'The Englishman,' he said, 'will do anything whatever in the name of principle.'  It is a perfect remark, and Shaw forgot only to add that the name of that principle is self-interest.

      Once, when I was in the Café L'Egyptien, smoking what I believed foolishly to be an Egyptian cigarette, an Englishman spat at me.  It was as if I had been shot.  I started back, and lost all powers of speech and thought - but not, alas, of feeling.  When one is the object of general obliquy, the constant fear is not when such attacks might occur, but how they will manifest themselves.  I used to think that self-consciousness was a wonderful thing: I raised a philosophy upon it which turned the world into a multi-coloured cloak which the true individual places around his shoulders.  But the cloak became a net as fatal as that which Clytemnestra held out in front of her.  Half the power of my thought came from my vanity - when the vanity goes, to be noticed or marked out is to become lesser rather than greater.

      And so now customarily I dine alone, or with those gamins who are entirely the creation of Victor Hugo.  Their company entrances me because they see the world as it really is: as a result they understand me perfectly.  I think that, to them, I have told my most perfect stories; sine most of them can neither read nor write, I become positively Homeric.  They bay for stories of love, and then they weep for me; they ask for stories of wealth and palaces, and I weep for them.  We have a most satisfactory relationship.  There is one café where I sit with the public executioner.  Of course he does not know who I am - executioners are never interested in police records - but we play cards together.  My most poetic moments come when he exclaims, 'Je coupe!'

      But if it still offends me that I am snubbed by members of the English public, what is harder to endure is the sensation of being cut by other artists.  I was sitting outside the Grand Café some weeks ago, when William Rothenstein passed my table - he stays in Paris when London grows tired of him.  He saw me, but he looked through me: it was absurd of him, a young man, to snub the poet who created him, who showed him how to attain the personality of an artist where before there had only been certain raw - very raw - materials.  But I once said that the art of life was the art of defiance: I took off my hat to him, and wished him good morning.  There must have been serpents beneath the hat, since Rothenstein turned to stone.

      There have been others, also.  I came face to face with Whistler as he was leaving Poussin's one evening, and he ignored me.  He looked old and tired, exactly like one of Cranach's Virgins.  Even Beardsley avoided me in Dieppe.  I am told that he blames me for the entire collapse of his career.  It is unworthy of him: an artist always suffers in one way or another, and it is absurd of him to heap his own pain upon my shoulders.

      I understand the English, however - they are an open secret - and it pains me more when I think of my French friends who have abandoned me in their own city.  Pierre Louys, Marcel Schwob, Mallarmé - none of them cares to visit me now.  Even Gide crosses the street when he sees me approaching.  He sent me a letter, just after I had returned to Paris from my wanderings in Dieppe, saying that he had decided to burn the pages of his journal for that one fiery-coloured month we spent together, some eight or nine years ago.  I repaid the compliment by burning his letter.  I believe Gide tells all his acquaintances that I was, in those triumphant years, positively Satanic - well, if I was, I found in him a willing disciple.  Poor Gide, he has the face of a seducer and the manner of a virgin perpetually being defiled.

      Of course I can accept the verdict of my equals such as Whistler; I have followed a life which is unworthy of an artist, and those who love the things of art and the imagination can never forgive me for what I have done.  But to be cut by those like Gide who, artistically, are beneath me - well, there is no parallel in history.

      Yet to be turned on by those who knew me teaches a bitter lesson in understanding.  To a large extent, I realise now, my power - and the power of my personality - depended upon my position in society.  As soon as that position was taken away, my personality counted for nothing whatever.  In similar fashion, I once saw reality from a great height since it was from the pinnacle of my individualism; now I have fallen so low that reality rises above me, and I see its shadows and its secret crevices.  The fact that I discovered within myself the strength to continue my life, that I have raised myself from humiliation in order to face the world, is a standing reproach to the modern age.

      And so now my presence makes people uneasy: I am Lazarus come from the dead to mock those who buried me.  Yet in my darkest hours it seems to me proper that I should be shunned, like an unclean thing.  More wrote recently to tell me that Arthur, my manservant, had killed himself.  Against him, too, the world turned - he was too close to me, and he suffered for it.  For the curse I carry within me is greater than any which my century has conferred upon me.  I have destroyed every life that I have touched - my wife, Constance, lies dead in a small grave near Genoa beneath a stone which bears no trace of my name; the lives of my two sons have been blasted, my name taken from them also.  And my mother - I killed her as surely as if I had stabbed a knife in her back.  I killed her and, like Orestes, I have been pursued by the Fates.  I carry a strange doom with me everywhere: those whom I have touched have borne the scars of that touch, those whom I kissed have been scalded.  Even Bosie, who in his poetry might have touched the heavens, has been worn to a disastrous shadow: I see nothing ahead of him but pain and weariness.  And, if anyone were foolish enough to write my biography, then the fatefulness of my life would touch him, also.  There will, in any event, be no royalties.

      It is no comfort to me that the man who sought to encompass my ruin has himself been destroyed - Queensberry died earlier this year, and I am told that on his deathbed he spat at his own son and then called out my name in his final agony.  I truly live in the tears and pain of others.  And yet I shall not kill myself.  Although the second Mrs Tanqueray has made suicide respectable, I shall not follow her example.  I shrink from pain; and to die at my own hand is a homage to my enemies which I shall never make.

      I am what I am: there is nothing more to be said.  I believe there is a line to this effect in Dorian Gray.  That odd little story was meant to be taken quite literally: it is about the corruptibility of art, not the corruptibility of the artist.  It was a stroke of genius to place the canvas in the schoolroom; that is where all our troubles start.