13 October 1900

 

I have been confined to bed: my doctor tells me that I am 'under observation'.  I have explained to him that it is a position I am accustomed to.

      Maurice arrived yesterday with Rowland Strong, a journalist for whom I have now become an object of curiosity.  It is strange how people with the best of intentions always say the worst possible things.  Strong seriously suggested that, to 'occupy yourself', in his immortal phrase, I should write a literary history of my age.  I told him the age was immaterial.  But surely I could write about my contemporaries?  I have no contemporaries, I told him, I have only predecessors.  He left in some dismay: I had not fulfilled the first duty of a sick man, which is to enliven one's visitors.  His suggestion was ridiculous, however: if I look back upon those years in which I have lived and worked, I can see no history but only a series of accidents - some of them fatal.

      As an age it was torn between Mrs Browning and Mrs Grundy, a desert in which only strange relics are found.  I have never been interested in the work of my contemporaries, and I detest the critical mannerism that professes to find good in everything.  Of the artists of my time, I admired Beardsley the most, although he never understood me.  He was an enfant terrible playing monstrous games with adult passions, a mixture of innocence and lust, Sporus with a breviary in his hand.  Dowson, too, I respected.  Poor Dowson.  He is dead now.  He was born with an affliction, a sort of tenderness of the heart.  It ruined his life and his poetry.

      No, the only true artists of the period are now misty figures of the past.  Pater and Ruskin are dead; Tennyson and Browning also, and I do not know if they will be able to survive their imitators.  Swinburne and Meredith linger on, but in a half-light.  No-one has come to take their place, and it is most unlikely that anyone will.  I might have done so but I betrayed my own gifts and, in the weakness of my character, I found no great subject to redeem me.

      Like everything else in the modern period, the decline has come too swiftly to be noticed or understood.  In Latin there is a pause of some four hundred years from the magnificent prose of Claudian or Rufilius to the faded dialect of St Boniface or St Aldhelm.  But the English, when engaged in destruction, work on the principles of speed and stealth: the means of proper expression have crumbled in a generation.  We have gone from Tennyson to Kipling, from Meredith to Wells, so rapidly that even those trained to discern the difference have been able to perceive none.

      But, like a dying star, English prose rose up in one last effort of glory before its fall - in myself, in Lionel Johnson and in Pater.  But we were the individualists of art, and that was our weakness.  Like Huysmans and Maeterlinck, we saw the ghosts of things, the pale chimeras, the shadow of the rose upon the water.  The pain is returning.