24 August 1900

 

When I arrived in London from Oxford, it seemed to me that I was leaving Athens in order to find Rome.  And just as Ceasar Augustus celebrated a new century some years in advance of its proper date, so in London the gods of a new age had already arrived on swift feet.  The city then was in a ferment.  Ugly buildings were torn down and uglier ones raised in their place, and the rookeries which are London's only contribution to the Romantic movement were demolished for the sake of a few unnecessary roads.  It was said that an old man had been buried in the foundations of New Oxford Street - one can only hope it was the architect.

      From the first faint stirrings of dawn, when the carts clattered towards Covent Garden with their jade-coloured vegetables, to the shouts and catcalls at the dead of night, the city did not rest.  And when by the Thames, in the early evening, the rows of electric lights stood out against the sky, I believed that I had never seen anything so beautiful.  It was, like Seager's Gin, the spirit of today and of tomorrow.

      But I tired easily of the brightness and sought instead the shadows which surround it.  I took a nervous delight in walking through narrow courts and alleys, among men and women of evil aspect.  In these ancient streets off the main thoroughfares, I saw squalor and shame but to me they were picturesque only: I was not to discover their real secrets until later.  Here ragged boys, without shoes or stockings, sold newspapers or turned cartwheels for a penny; here also young children would stand in silence around Italian organs, and then be called by strange voices into the public houses where I dared not follow.

      But, if I shrank back from a life I could not understand, I could at least experience it in my imagination.  The world of the theatres and the music halls was my principal delight.  I would go alone and sit - not with the inhabitants of the Hackney villas in the stalls but with the common people in the pit.  I would visit the Alhambra and watch with fascination Arthur Roberts, who could transform London life into a fantasy worthy of Otway's harsh laughter or Goya's grotesques.  When the dusty orchestra struck up a tune and Roberts began to sing, in his odd, cracked voice, 'Will you stand me a cab fare, ducky, I'm feeling so awfully queer,' the pit roared with laughter.  How I envied him his position on that stage.  At the end of each performance I would feel a strange elation, and I would wander out with the crowd whose faces seemed bright and powerful under the glare of the gas lamps.

      In my youthful imagination I saw London as a vast furnace which might maim or destroy all those that it touched, but which also created light and heat.  It was as if all the powers of the earth had been concentrated on this spot, and my personality was immeasurably enriched by it.  Since those days, I have always been an inhabitant of cities: I could not have known then that I was one day to become a monument to the diseases of urban civilisation.  In London I thought to understand every form of human activity but, instead, I tasted every aspect of human corruption.

      If I sought anonymity in my wanderings, I also feared it.  Frank Miles and I took rooms together near the river, behind the Strand where the noise of the cabs and the omnibuses was positively Wagnerian.  But nothing could then have discouraged us, for we had come to London in the belief that it would be a continuation of the painted elegance of our days at Oxford.  We sought fame and, in our innocence, found notoriety instead.

      Charmed by Frank's skills as a painter almost as much as they were impressed by his social connections, and amused by my ability to flatter without being indiscreet, a succession of beautiful women would come to take tea with us at Thames House.  In those days women controlled society, as they have done in all the really civilised periods.  The men were too busy, or too dull, to play a major part in the social life which we entered then for the first time.  We conquered by day and celebrated our triumphs at night - rather cheaply, I think, in the Florence.

      I knew in those days more women than I was ever to know again.  The Duchess of Westminster and the Duchess of Beaufort came, followed almost too quickly by Lily Langtry and Ellen Terry.  Frank painted them and I amused them.  I have always, in the modern phrase, 'got on' with women: I understand them.  But in those days I worshipped them also because, with the subtle arts of their sex, they had learned how to dominate life.  I can remember walking down the Strand with Lily one evening, when the cab-drivers hailed her, and the people turned around to look back at her.  I basked in her glory but even then I considered how much more interesting it would be if it were happening to me.

      I knew from the beginning, of course, that I would never possess the absurd gravitas of the English gentleman, who employs scorn when he has nothing to say and adopts an air of preoccupation when he has nothing whatever to think about.  And so I accompanied those women who had conquered society with their wonderful personalities, and I learned from them.  They were the great artists of my period and, in my dramas, I paid them the compliment of making them far more intelligent and terrible than the men - like all artists, after all, they are far less rational.

      And so I became the confident of those women who were interested in their husbands, whom they rarely saw, and bored by their lovers, who always saw them.  I would go with Lady Dudley to her dressmaker, and discovered from her the secret of speaking to a tailor: always lower one's voice.  As a result I became something of an expert on women's fashions - these were the days when I favoured green and yellow rather than purple and gold.  I would go to Lady Sebright's wonderful house in Lowndes Square where we would discuss the promise, if any, of that evening's dinner party.  We would devise the seating plan together as if it were another Peninsular War.  I had learned by now how to amuse her - I would make fun of those whom she professed to like, and talk extremely seriously about those whom she found ridiculous.

      When Helen Modjeska was rehearsing La Dame aux Camélias at the little Court theatre in Sloane Square, she asked me to visit her there.  Frank had just completed a peculiarly flattering portrait of her, and I believe she wanted to be near anyone who had seen it.  When I arrived, the theatre was empty and, in semi-darkness, the flats were drawn into position and the stage hands shouted to each other above the hammering and the sawing.  Then there was silence.  La Modjeska came onto the stage.  In that fiery moment, which has always been a source of wonder to me, she ceased to be the person whom I knew; when she walked from the dusky recesses of the wings and moved in to the glare of the electric lamps, she was transformed.  I had a vision then which I scarcely understood, for it was a vision of the world.

      It seemed natural in those days that everyone should be in London and so, at dinners or at large gatherings, one met the people who either controlled or entertained society - although it was sometimes difficult to distinguish between them.  I did not view such proceedings with complete seriousness, and I cannot say that I was impressed, personally, even by those whose work I admired.  I adored Meredith as a novelist, for example - he is one of the few cases in recent literature of a writer whose poetry is more comprehensible than his prose, so of course I preferred his prose - but as a man he was a severe disappointment.  He had the melancholy expression of a verger who has been told that there will be no more services today.  I met Swinbourne - once only, but I believe that was the common experience.  He seemed to me a shy, awkward fellow.  Often he drew his hand across his face, as if trying to shield his eyes from the world.  Frank and I would imitate him, when we returned laughing to Thames House, but now I look upon him with great pity.  I remember remarking, at the time, that he was forced to live in Putney, and was as a consequence contributing to the Nineteenth Century.  But I see now that his tragedy was similar to my own: he suddenly lost his genius, and with it his ability to dominate his own life.  I should have seen that, and loved him for it.

      I had a great aversion to Matthew Arnold.  I sat opposite to him, dining at Lord Wharncliffe's, I think, and he had the satisfied countenance of a man who has never succeeded in boring himself.  He was a vain, elongated creature who would have bent forward to see his own reflection in a puddle.  We were discussing the new French dramatists: he sounded like a Methodist preacher advising against the use of crematoria.  I believe that he wanted to fill the theatres of the West End with the middle-classes, and so set an example to the world.  I disagreed, naturally, but of course he paid no attention to me.

      And indeed it is possible that I was not impressed by the great and the distinguished simply because they were not impressed by me.  I was about to publish a volume of poems and I was completing my first play, Vera, but my literary work was considered to be of no importance.  Even after we had moved to Chelsea, our callers were women principally - and they were interested only in those poems which were addressed to themselves.  My reputation, such as it was, had nothing whatever to do with my serious work and so, out of the bitter gaiety which springs from the consciousness of failure, I made fun of myself as well as of others.  I became an aesthete, but neither Gilbert nor Sullivan could have mocked me as much as I mocked myself.

      Once I read an extract from Vera to Lily, but she was not a success as an audience.  She asked for more tea in the middle of a beautiful speech, and walked distractedly around the room, fingering the photographs of herself, while I wept over a passage of more than usual beauty.  When Lily was not the centre of attention, she had no sense of occasion.  She once brought to my rooms an enormous stuffed peacock, popularly assumed to have been shot by the Earl of Warwick.  The death of such a bird, she declared, was supposed to bring misfortune.  'But then,' she said, 'some people believe anything at all.'  I looked at her with horror, and threw the peacock out of the window, much to the surprise of passing pedestrians.  It was probably the only time in our friendship that Lily and I quite understood each other.  But she was right, I now believe, to ignore Vera: it was suitable only for the ears of the deaf.  I cannot think of that play without embarrassment.  There was poetry in it, but unfortunately none of it was my own.  One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

      But nevertheless it was a source of bitter disappointment to me, in those first years in London, that other artists had no confidence in my own talent.  I had thought to come to London and announce myself, but I could find no-one to listen.  If I had shown them holes in my hands, and a wound in my side, they would have paid just as little attention.  I had imagined, also, that there was a camaraderie among artists which transcended the trivial obligations of social life - of course, none whatever existed.  Whistler lived opposite us in Chelsea; he was a frequent visitor, but he came only so that he could talk about himself in different company.  The only way to silence him was to be more extravagant than he was - when he had paused for breath.  I think I succeeded too well; he never forgave me the fact that, while people smiled at his remarks, they laughed at my own.  His was a failure of the American temperament: he took himself too seriously, and as a result no-one else took her seriously at all.  There was a terrible rage beneath even the most extravagant flourishes of his temperament: as an Irishman, I understand that.  Poor Jimmy - and now he is about to be enshrined among the Immortals.  He will never leave them in peace.