14 September 1900

 

Maurice is going to Switzerland with More Adey: I have warned him in the past about the unpredictability of the northern races, but he pretends not to understand me.  I shall miss him.  I tire easily now.  I find it difficult to write for long periods and Maurice has a charming hand.  When he returns I shall ask him to take dictation.  If he can survive Switzerland, he can survive anything.

      I was speaking, was I not, of the days of my great success?  The voice of fatality was there always, even though I took care not to listen to it.  But the presence of doom colours with a darker shade even one's most fiery moments, and I saw through my own attitudes as if they were shadows thrown upon a screen.  Modern aesthetics, after all, is only an extension of modern morality - both of them conceal the truth and the shame that comes from knowledge of the truth.  When I was a boy I was always angered by the hypocrisy of my elders - but could I not be accused of that sin?  Does one come to be the thing one most despises?

      For what did I, who should have been a great poet, what did I become?  I became a symbol of modern society, both in its rise and in its fall.  Yet in order to become a symbol, one must know thoroughly what one represents: self-consciousness is the essence of success.  And here lay the hypocrisy for I knew very well, as Pater did, that I lived in a worn-out society, theatrical in its art, theatrical in its life, theatrical even in its piety.  But I could no more escape from my period than a bird can fly without wings.  I sought for visible rather than intellectual success; I wrote quickly and without thought; I mimicked the pleasures of the age and made light of its pains.  Like Augustine, in that terrible phrase, 'factus sum mihi regio egestatis'.

      I knew also, even when expounding my philosophy in a phrase, even when I stood in the drawing rooms of London, that I was of an alien race.  And those who invited me knew it, too.  They laughed at me behind my back, and I became more iridescent.  They were baffled by me, and so I made my paradoxes more brilliant still.  I did not talk to them: I addressed them.  It is possible, I suppose, that I was a little frightened of them.

      For I was always, essentially, a foreigner among them, a civilised man trying to break down the walls of the barbarians.  I was Irish, and therefore in permanent exile.  As a Celt, I was part of a proud race with a native quickness and imagination which the English have never possessed.  I spring from the race of Swift and Sheridan.  O'Connell and Parnell came before me, Irishmen destroyed by scandal - it is the one revenge which the English have fashioned into an art.  I was a devotee of Greek love, which marked me out more brutally than I then knew.  And, through it all, the scarlet thread of illegitimacy runs: but it was not Ariadne's thread, for it led me only further into the labyrinth.

      Outcasts, since they dwell in the shadows, learn to recognise each other by small signs and movements.  I had always, for example, been interested in the criminal classes even before I became a member of them.  In prison, I came to enjoy their company: they sought fresh sensations, as I did.  And I was fascinated by them also because they were ahead of me and could teach me.  They had found a delightful combination: they possessed the easy manner of the rich and the vices of the poor.

      Naturally I understood the anarchists - like John Barlas.  I admired him: he was a foolish man, but a necessary one.  Power seems to me so fearful a thing that my instincts were entirely with those who wished to subvert it, who tore off the gaudy raiment and pointed to the skeleton beneath.  Of course Nihilists have monstrously flawed characters, but just as imaginative fire can visit the disturbed mind and bruised soul of a poet such as Dowson, so the rage against the established order is beautiful in itself, whatever form it chooses to take.

      But the poor are truly the outcasts of the world.  One has only to walk down a London street to see the suffering.  It is one long chaplet of sorrowful mysteries.  The unseen host of the poor bear the marks of our civilisation like scars; that is why the middle class never look at them.  It would be to examine the wounds which they themselves have inflicted.  The deed is done, but the consequences must be shunned.  I believe I explained in The Soul of Man under Socialism that my interest in poverty was aesthetic primarily - I desired only that ugliness and squalor should be removed.  I am what is known as a speculative radical, and I have a positive distaste for Fabianism and philanthropy - they are cures for civilisation far more deadly than its diseases.  But now I believe that we are creating, in the poor, a society which will wreak a terrible vengeance on our own.  I have always been convinced that our civilisation has the transparency and evanescence of a bubble floating, in the charming manner which bubbles have, before being blown away in the wind.

      In one of my stories the young king thought only of his magnificent robes, until he saw the small children who wove the silk for them; he marvelled at its magnificent jewels, until he saw those who died in order to find them.  It is a mysterious truth, but sorrow is always mysterious; the paper which I write on now, the clothes I am wearing, the bed upon which I sleep: they have all been made by the toil of others, created out of the indigence and the suffering of the poor.  I am lying on the poor.  I am writing with them.  They are my food and my drink.  I see their pain everywhere, like paint.

      It is my privilege - I understand this now - to have become like them, to have become a byword for infamy, an indigent wanderer who must beg for his bread.  And yet I believe my destiny to be more terrible than theirs.  Yeats has called one of his stories 'The Crucifixion of an Outcast', and in that story he writes of me.  He writes of one who, on the road to his crucifixion, sang and told wonderful stories; yet his accusers showed him no mercy because of that, but hated him all the more fiercely for awakening forgotten longings in their breasts.  Even under the shadow of the cross, they despised him for showing to them the beauty and the mystery of the world.  And, in the end, even the beggars left him, crucified, to the mercy of wild beasts.  Even the outcasts turned against the outcast.

      And now I must write to Maurice, warning him against the views.