21 September 1900

 

When I first entered my 'new life', three years after my marriage, I was so immersed in my sins that I did no work of a serious kind.  But the strange ritual of my fate was already turning unholy things into sacraments, and I had begun to see artistic possibilities in the double life.  As it was for Janus, who looked both backwards and forwards, so it was for me: I could see the world more completely.  And, if I became possessed by my sins, it was with the fever that allows one to speak freely for the first time.

      My first work was primarily of a critical nature.  The dialogues in which I outlined my philosophy sprang fully armed from my conversations with Robert Ross in Tite Street: conceived in laughter, they had that joy within them which pierces all mysteries.  I formed a philosophy out of Egotism and out of the self-consciousness of Art which, like that of Rousseau, was 'de nier ce qui est, et d'expliquer ce qui n'est pas'.

      Under the guise of paradox, I exposed the illusions of my period and set forth a larger and saner reality in their place.  I do not agree with everything which I wrote then, but that is the price of perfect expression - it ceases to belong to oneself, and belongs instead to the world.

      In all my first writings, from the portrait in chiaroscuro of Thomas Wainewright, the poisoner, to the relatively straightforward manner of my Soul of Man under Socialism, I wished to express a philosophy which was complete in itself because I, too, would then be complete: I fashioned a style which perfectly expressed my attitudes and at the same time gilded my experience with shining words.  It is true that I was writing about the charms of indolence and the pleasures of the artist at a time when my health and nerves were seriously affected by the life I was then leading.  But mine was the dream of the alchemist: the transformation of the weary heart into the unwearied spirit.  The nineteenth century is a sensuous, sordid age, but I wished to subtilise the senses, to arrange them in an order higher than that which the commercial classes aspired to.  I thought I could mingle in the sensuous world without shame or loss, and come back from it with fresh perceptions - just as in my imagination I could enter the house of the poor and return with a philosophy which quite understood the nature of poverty.  And that angered my contemporaries.  They did not wish to see their sins in any light - not even one which refined them, and made them the elements of a new spirituality in which the fine instinct for beauty was the dominant characteristic.

      But one's philosophy is always less interesting than oneself and I believe that throughout my writing, even that which is concerned with beautiful, timeless things, I wished to reveal myself to the world as a man marked by fresh sensations.  In The Portrait of Mr W.H., that extraordinary essay in which I reveal the identity of the boy who haunts Shakespeare's sonnets, I limned a portrait of perfect masculine beauty, in which both sexes have left their touch.  This book was my homage to Greek love, and never had I put my learning to more artful use.  It was of no concern to me if the facts were accurate or inaccurate: I had discerned a truth which was larger than that of biography and history, a truth not merely about Shakespeare but about the nature of all creative art.  And, even though I invented the name of the boy actor, Willie Hughes, at whose shrine Shakespeare had brought such a wonderful offering, I will be quite astounded if Willie Hughes did not exist: at any moment I expect him to be discovered by an Oxford scholar.  Nature always follows Art.

      But that book was simply an entertainment.  My first really impressive work was The Picture of Dorian Gray.  It was not a début but it was the next best thing, a scandal.  It could not have been otherwise: I wanted to rub the faces of my generation in their own century, at the same time as I wished to create a novel which would defy the canons of conventional English fiction.  It might have been written in French, for it seems to me that its charm lies in the fact that it is quite without meaning of any kind, just as it is without any fashionable moral.  It is an odd book, filled with the vivacity and the strange joy with which it was written.  I fashioned it quickly and without serious preparation and, as a result, the whole of my personality dwells somewhere within it: but I do not think I know where.  I exist in every character, although I cannot pretend to comprehend the forces which impel them forward.  All I fully realised, as I wrote it, was the necessity that it should end in disaster: I could not reveal such a world without watching it collapse in shame and weariness.

      I was at first surprised by the hostile reaction which Dorian Gray provoked, and it was only when I had finished these first works that I realised what I had done: I had effectively challenged conventional society on every possible front.  I had mocked its artistic pretensions, and derided its social morality; I had shown the hovels of the poor as well as the houses of the depraved, but I had also shown that in its own homes there lurked hypocrisy and conceit.  I date my downfall from that period - it was the moment when the prison gates swung open for me, and awaited my arrival.

      But the irony is that I held out my own hands to be tied.  For an artist is not a savant: the difference between his work and that of a philosopher, or even a journalist, is that his own personality enters and defines his work.  Although I was revealing the sins of the world, I was also disclosing the sins which I harboured; the vanity and hypocrisy were mine, just as the vice was mine, and the fierce joy of denunciation was mine also.

      Of course my wife knew nothing of this and, as a result, I could not be near her when she read my work; she said nothing to me which could not be construed as loyal admiration, but she was troubled - I saw that.  It was only when I wrote about marriage that she became visibly hurt.  She told me that she had wept when she read some of the things I had written on that subject - it was something to do with the 'life of deception' that a perfect marriage entails - but in my infatuation with my own genius I hardly understood what she meant.  She much preferred my stories in The House of Pomegranates which, in the expurgated form, she would read to the children.  I believe she even managed to extract a moral from them: where I had seen only the horror and the impermanence of the world, she found love and beauty.  It was like her to do so.

      Those stories were largely unremarked by the public, however.  Now that my name was attached to infamous work, they wanted only to be amused or shocked.  And I was infinitely obliging: immediately after I had completed my first comedy, Lady Windermere's Fan, I set to work on Salomé.  Although they are written in different styles - Salomé had to be composed in French as well, since my serious characters always think in that language - they are not so different in feeling.  I have always wished an audience to understand them in the same way - they are both gilded creations where, instead of the masks of classical drama, my actors are shielded by perfect sentences.  That is all.

      It was only in my drama that I saw both the horror and comedy of life, the brilliant success and the grotesque passion.  When I was being applauded for the wit of Lady Windermere's Fan, it was quite natural that in Salomé I should create a play in which the dominant moods were mystery and terror.  I wanted my entire personality to be revealed, so that I could gain the plaudits of the world equally for that which was inchoate and dark within me as for that which was smart of amusing.  I believe that if Salomé had not been banned by the Lord Chamberlain, and had been performed on the London stage, my subsequent life would have changed utterly.  I would have presented myself so fully to the world that I would not have wished to continue my double life of sin and shame.  But, as long as I was known as the author of only witty comedies, I felt incomplete and sought for expression elsewhere.

      And my comic plays are connected, I see that now, by the consciousness of sin which is struggling to come into the light - sin as doleful as that of Phèdre, as laughable as that of Falstaff.  I turned it into melodrama, and of course rendered it more serious by doing so; I thought of it as an artistic device and forgot that, as an artist, I would not therefore be able to free myself from it.  In A Woman of No Importance I played with a theme which intrigued and frightened me both at once: that of a relationship between a younger and an older man.  The boy is dazzled by the cultivation of the man, the man by the beauty of the boy.  I have the situation by heart, you might say.

      But An Ideal Husband was the play which most closely resembled the terrible drama of my life - the husband's fear is that of scandal.  A letter arrives to expose him: just such a letter came to my house, brought by two blackmailers of the lowest kind.  But in that play I made it clear that I do not give in to threats.  I wrote the passages of denunciation and pride with all the passion of a man convinced of the truth of his own narrative.  Of course I resolved all the problems in the final scene, just as I expected to do in my own life.  I believed that I was a great enough dramatist to turn life itself into a drama.

      So it was that in my final comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, I mocked life even at the time when it was showing me its most terrible aspects, when I was pursued by blackmailers no less assiduously than by the mad, pantomimic dance of Queensberry.  I wrote the play in great agony of mind, when I knew that disaster and humiliation were about to fall on me.  But it seems to me now that by the strange alchemy of the artistic life it was the threat of ruin which wounded me into life.  I have always asserted that out of joy only can creative work spring, but it is possible that out of fear and pain, also, joyous words can come.  In the chronicle of Limburg, there is a story about the lovely aubades of the fourteenth century which the young men and women of Germany then sang.  The chronicle tells us that the author of these lyrics was a clerk afflicted with leprosy, living apart from the world.  He went through the streets with an enormous rattle, giving notice of his approach.  And the people shrank from his affliction, even as they knew he was the maker of their songs.  I have proved that to be a true story, have I not?

      And so I played with life until the end, even though I knew that life was also playing with me.  We understood each other completely and, when life and imagination are so much in harmony, only comedy can properly express it.  I constructed fire, light work, as sensuous as Maeterlinck, as witty as Sheridan.  And yet I carved, also, a pillory for myself in which I would be placed for eternity.  Look, people will say, this is the kind of heartless and absurd drama which leads to a prison cell.