1 September 1900

 

I was in the Hôtel Voltaire, was I not, in a white dressing-gown?  My room looked out over the Seine and I learned at once one of the first principles of the creative imagination: an artist should never have a view.  It is so deceptive.  So I ignored the river and wrote my second play, The Duchess of Padua, a fantastic Jacobean thing.  As I wrote it, I felt the spirits of the great dead quick within me but, unfortunately, most of them died a second time.  It was not a success, and is notable now only for the number of costume changes I introduced.  But in those days I was never more serious than when I was using melodrama.  It has since become the basis of all my commercial correspondence but I realise now that it has no part in literature.  And yet I understood through the failure of that play a more significant truth: as soon as I took my own work seriously I was laughed at and my words ridiculed.  If I was to succeed as an artist, and find an audience for my art, I would have to proceed by cunning obliquity - by the guile of the creative artist who smiles where others weep and who sheds bitter tears while all those around him are lost in laughter.

      I came to Paris as that remarkable creature, a disciple.  I have always believed that it is only in association with others that one finds oneself - and, for an artist, contact with other artists is absolutely necessary for the growth of his personality.  And so I set out to meet everyone; my volume of Poems was my introduction, and, indeed, I needed no other.  If I seemed brash, it was only the brashness of high spirits: as soon as the soil of England was wiped from my feet, I walked with quicker and lighter step.

      In the cafés, in those apricot-coloured days, one met all the young poets - or at least the poets who considered themselves young.  The French writers seemed to be ahead of me, and I became involved in what I thought then to be a great movement in art and letters.  I was closest to Barbey d'Aurevilly.  He had a disagreeable room in the Rue Rousselet, close to where Maurice is now living.  The first time I called upon him, he came to the door in a suspiciously silk dressing-gown and then, waving his arm around a bare and dirty room, announced that 'I have sent my household effects into the country'.  Only a true artist can banish reality with one magnificent gesture.

      Often, at the Café Cénacle, I would see Verlaine, like a Silenus carved in butter.  On the first occasion we met, he had been granted a day's exeat from the hospital where he was being treated, I believe, for the sins of Venus.  He showed me an ulcer upon his leg, and giggled.  I felt quite faint: physical ugliness has always been abhorrent to me and I tried afterwards to avoid him, but he always assumed a jovial intimacy and sat beside me, as though we were linked by bonds invisible to our companions.

      I would sometimes meet him in Mallarmé's rooms in the Rue de Rome.  I remember quite clearly the first time I visited Mallarmé - really, it was as if one was attending a séance.  Whistler had heard that I was coming to Paris, and had tried to turn Mallarmé against me; he is too ridiculous.  When it became clear, however, that Mallarmé, a poet, a lord of language, would of course welcome me, Whistler sent him a telegram.  'Wilde viendra chez vous.  Serrez l'argenterie.'  I once painted a likeness of Whistler in one of my stories.  I told him so one evening, and he assumed at once I meant Lord Henry Wotton.  In fact, I had the Remarkable Rocket in mind.

      That first evening with Mallarmé was something of a success; my French is, I am told, somewhat florid and literary but I was understood perfectly by my peers: indeed I believe I would have been understood if I had said nothing at all.  Mallarmé was immensely courteous, and affable, slow of speech as all poets should be, but with a most remarkable purity of diction.  Contes cruels had just been published - now it is just being read - and I remember Mallarmé praising that wonderful volume to me as containing 'les tristesses, la solitude, les déboires'.  His voice was like a bell tolling in the distance.

      The quiet flow of conversation, the sombre ornate furniture, all spread a strange torpor over one's senses so that the only matters of any importance were Art and the things of Art.  Flaubert was there, with the flushed cheeks and moustache of a Viking.  It was entirely characteristic of him that he expressed an affection for Caliban.  I have often been struck by the apparent insignificance of the greatest artists, for it seems to me that they lack self-awareness.  Flaubert's writing is quite cold but with a coldness that in its ferocity burns - like the embrace of the devil which, in books of medieval magic, is so intensely cold that it is described as fiery.  But to hear him talk - well, one might have been listening to the conversation of a pork butcher.  That is nothing against his art: indeed, in my own case, if my love for art had been more intense than my love of fame and of sensation, I might have created much greater things.  I feel like Andrea del Sarto in Browning's exquisite poem,

 

Had I been two, another and myself

Our work would have o'erlooked the world.

 

      As it is, my personality has destroyed my work: that is the one unforgivable sin of my life.  Even in those first months in Paris, my affection for luxury and for fame beguiled me from the company of those artists at whose feet I should have sat.  Instead, I lived in fiacres and restaurants; I was fêted in the salons of the Baronne Deslandes and the Princess do Monaco, that strange Siren without a voice and, indeed, hardly a country.  I accompanied Sarah Bernhardt from her dressing room to the edge of the stage - and always the heady, sweet smell of triumph, the spectacle of purple and of gold, led me fatally forward.  With poets and artists I felt that only part of my temperament was truly engaged: in some ways I stood apart from them for I felt even then that my destiny was to be greater than theirs.  With Sarah I felt that I, like her, could triumph over the world: the brilliant receptions, the dinners, the life of a great personality, these were the things I most desired.

      I shared my enthusiasm in those early days with Robert Sherard, a young Englishman whom I had met at dinner.  He had the looks of a fallen angel: now, of course, he has quite completed the process and insists that his friends descend with him.  But then he was full of impossible dreams and, since he had impossible youthfulness also, I had great affection for him.

      I once explained to him that my three favourite characters in fiction were Julien Sorel, Lucien de Rubempré and myself.  Like de Rubempré, I told him, I wanted 'd'être celébré et d'être aimé', and like Sorel, I would sometimes cry out in anguish, 'Pourquoi suis-je moi?'  I can recall quite clearly walking along the Seine with Robert one evening and recounting in inordinate detail the last hours of Sorel in a prison cell; how lost he was in a mist of words and how, in the last extreme moments before his death, all he heard within himself were broken sentences from the books he had loved, the books upon which he had modelled his character.  Lucien hanged himself, and Julien died on the scaffold.  'But then, Robert,' I warned him, 'these were the lives of the saints.'

      I was fascinated in those days also by Chatterton, Poe, Baudelaire and by the horror of their fate - when you are young, you play with the fire which you do not understand.  The death of Chatterton still brings tears to my eyes - with scarcely bread to feed himself but charged with the knowledge of fame to come, a strange, slight boy who was so prodigal of his genius that he attached the names of others to it.  It is the great tragedy of the eighteenth century, with the possible exception of Pope's verses.

      But, if in Chatterton I heard the sad music of human hopefulness, in the fate of Poe I heard the strange laughter of the gods who give men the instruments of torture with which they tear themselves to pieces.  I peered into the abyss and looked down upon those whose personalities had been destroyed or quite twisted out of shape, and I felt a strange elation.  With Sherard I visited the Rue de la Vieille Lanterne where de Nerval hanged himself: for me, each cobble seemed enchanted.  It was as if we had come to an archaic place where blood had been spilt in sacrifice.  Sherard did not understand such things - he was too romantic to have a proper sense of fate.  Once, I remember, we went to the rooms of Maurice Rollinat; Rollinat began reciting to us his soliloquy of Troppman, a grotesque, dark piece of writing.  He screamed and cursed, beating the ground with his feet.  Sherard looked at me appalled.  But I thought it wonderful - it was the mad dance of the artist in his own wound, a scream of rage and defiance in which I wished to add my own voice.

      I am surprised that no-one has yet written a shilling treatise on the effect of poetry upon conduct - although I suppose that Matthew Arnold is presumed to have the last word on such subjects.  Of course, when one reads him, one always hopes that every word will be his last.  I could write such a treatise with some conviction, for it seems to me that only when I read French poetry did I begin to seek eagerly for those sensations that might provoke in me that despair which I cherished in the writings of others.  In Huysman's book, Des Esseintes keeps three of Baudelaire's poems under glass - 'La Mort des Amants', 'Anywhere Out of the World' and 'L'Ennemi'.  In those three is contained the entire history of modern feeling and it was under the spell of Baudelaire's sonorous anguish that I set out, for the first time, to explore the dark quarters of the world.

      With Sherard, and the young French poets, I would haunt the most disreputable taverns and associate with the common people of the streets.  In London and in America that world had been unknown to me, and the first experience of it in Paris awakened in me the taste for more and wilder delights.  I was like Pasiphae who had seen the monster and cries to see it again.  In my imagination this city was both Babylon and Parnassus; it was a sea from which some god might rise to claim me but, for a time, I was content to drown in its waters.

      And so we would travel to distant places where Sapphists lurked, where girls or boys could be bought and enjoyed.  Of course I did nothing then; I was, I think, too frightened.  Indeed so strongly did I feel within myself the terrible fascination of such things that in the end I fled from those strange passions stalking in the chambers of my heart.  I determined to leave Paris.  I had seen too many of those who, having tasted the Lotus, fall into lethargy and despair.  With the self-confidence of youth I was determined to preserve myself but I knew also that, having acquired the knowledge of forbidden things, I could go back to England and become great.