18 August 1900

 

I was speaking of my childhood, was I not?  I believe it was even then that my fate was measured out, although only by chance was this revealed to me.  Frank Houlihan, who worked for my father at Moytura, took me, on one holiday from school, to an old peasant woman who had a reputation in the neighbourhood for the telling of men's fortunes.  He had told me of her often, and I felt a strange desire to see her.  I hoped, I think, that she would recognise in me what I had already discovered in myself.

      She was a withered thing, wearing the red dress common to the women of that region.  She took my hand - large, even then, and grey - and surveyed it in a somewhat scornful manner.  But then she stroked my arm, and told me that my fate was to be both magnificent and terrible, that my name, Oscar, famous in the annals of Irish history, would sit upon me - she said - as a dream of far-off things continues into the day.

      Frank and I travelled back in the cart in silence.  I received then a sense of fate which has never left me.  I knew, from my reading at Portora, that the point of all tragedy is the heedlessness of the tragic hero: even when he has seen the curse, he runs towards it willingly.  Of course I had no-one to weave beautiful songs out of my destiny - but, then, I have always been my own chorus.

      I have never spoken about my childhood before, even to those who have known me and shared my sorrows, because it bears witness to a shame not my own.  When I lay like a wounded animal in my mother's house, on bail between my trials, she came to me weeping and told me that she held herself responsible for my fate, and that the punishment I was suffering was for her own sin: that I was not Sir William's child.  I am illegitimate.  I do not wonder why I could not speak Sir William's name without sighing, and why I do not in the least resemble him.  I see now why in Merrion Square I seemed always to be the one set apart, and why my mother did her best to shield me from the world, in case I had inherited the sensual disposition with which she had conceived me.

      My mother, on that fateful evening, told me that my father was an Irish poet and patriot who had died many years before; his name was Smith O'Brien.  She told me that he used to visit us when she took me to the little farmhouse which we owned in the vale of Glencree - I had quite forgotten that farmhouse.  But I can recall dimly a quiet man who would come and play with me, let me win at childish games and press a coin into my hand.  His name is not unknown to me - he was one of those who suffered terribly for Ireland's sake and, when I recall the dignity he seemed to possess when I knew him as a child, I know also that it is the dignity of one who has failed.

      As my mother told me of those days, she wept; and, indeed, I pitied her rather than myself.  She had hidden her sorrow and, when we conceal the past, like a fox beneath a cloak, it injures us.  Only in my own tragedy had she the strength to come to me and, in short, quiet words, tell me of her dishonour that bound her to my own.  In her guilt, she had shut out the sun all those years; she had sat in darkness.

      And although I felt nothing then - so many blows had been rained upon me that I was numb to further suffering - now it helped me to understand.  The workings of the personality are mysterious to me and yet the dark thread which runs through my life can, I think, be detected in my strange beginning.  The illegitimate are forced to create themselves, to stand upright even when the whirlwind engulfs them.  I know now, also, why I longed for praise and for recognition even as I knew that fame and applause were empty things.  I have come to understand why I found myself employing conventional values only to mock at them or turn them into parody; why I took refuge in hard, nerve-destroying work, and in that mist of words which clings about me always.  My mother's confession confirmed that I, too, ranked among the outcasts - but I am not sure that murmurings of my lot had not always reached me in my private ear.