16 November 1900

 

Did I tell you that I have visited the Exhibition?  It was in the spring.  I was recognised in the American section - I thought that there at least I might pass, like everything else, as a curiosity - and a young man stopped me.  He asked me to say something into Edison's speaking machine.  Well, it did not speak to me, but then so few people do nowadays.  I recited some lines from the Ballad and, as I did so, I felt chilled.  I think that even then I had a premonition of my death.  That place, and that machine, were not of my time.

      I do not mind.  I have seen too much already.  The newspapers tell me that we are living in a period of 'transition' and for once they may well be right.  The old is shivered to fragments and no-one, not even the journalists, knows what is taking its place.  I could have been the voice of the coming age, for I proclaimed that which my age did not know - that every man should make himself perfect.  But I was not understood: they perfected the bicycle instead.  This is truly an age of iron.

      It is too late now.  If I am anything, I am a warning.  I discovered, in my own tragedy, that artifice crumbles - an artificial world will dissolve also, and will have to face its own vacancy, as I did in a prison cell.  And although my own century may have crushed me I am still nobler than my destroyer because I, at least, know that I must die.

      The proprietor of the hotel, I cannot remember his name, asked me if this was the first year of the twentieth century or the last year of the nineteenth: I advised him to ask his children.  Only they know.