27 August 1900

 

You can do two things with the English - you can shock them, or you can amuse them.  You can never reason with them, at least if the editorial in The Times are anything to go by.  And so, where Pater had murmured and Ruskin had denounced, I would surprise.  They had in sober words argued that the values of art and the imagination were not to be divorced from the practice of life, but it was left to me to become the first convincing demonstration of that truth.  I entered my aesthetic phase.  I did not walk down Piccadilly with a lily in my hand - I tried not to walk anywhere in those days - but I fashioned a world in which such things became possible.  I dressed in either an eighteenth- or a twentieth-century fashion - the glory that had passed or the splendour yet to come, I am not sure which - but I made a definite point of having no connection with my own century.  I was astonishing: like Pears Soap, there was no substitute.  To my friends I was Stupor Mundi, to my enemies the Anti-Christ.

      And indeed I actively desired to stand apart.  If I could not yet do so in my writing, I would turn my genius to personal account.  Now, in my ruin, there seems to me to be something of melancholy about those who wish to stand above others.  It is both offensive and yet pitiable, ironic but also touching: it is the cry of the child for attention and the roar of the beast in pain.  But I possessed a sense of myself which the world did not share and so, in my vanity, I resisted the blandishments of the world's conventions.  My mother, who had moved to London after Sir William's death, wanted me to follow my brother's example and do journalistic work of a literary nature.  I shrank from the prospect: if one touches pitch, of course one is defiled.  I disliked the literary authorities and they disliked me.  I mocked their values, and they in turn laughed at me.  Indeed my personality has always been a problem to others: just as, in later years, my work was to be the object of general bewilderment.

      For in those first brilliant years in London, when I had found no genuine or permanent expression outside myself, I shrank from some earnestness in my character and took on the multicoloured garb of the clown.  It seems to me now that I took life too seriously to be able to speak of it without embarrassment.  Pliny advised his closest friend to seek in literature deliverance from mortality, advice which I understood perfectly.  I was wounded and afraid of life, and so I fled with panting breath and bleeding feet to Art and Beauty, in whose temples I might find sanctuary.  Here I concealed myself from the world in the mask of the dandy, when with fatal fluency I pronounced the doctrines of Aestheticism.

      So afraid was I of the formlessness of life - it bore the marks of the Chaos from which it sprang, like striations in a wonderful jewel - that I took it with both hands and fashioned it into stories and epigrams, just as later I was to change it into the shape of clever drama.  I turned conversation into an art, and my personality into a symbol; with these I braved the emptiness and darkness which threatened to engulf me, that emptiness and darkness which are now my constant companions: how strange it is that one should, in the end, suffer the fate which one most fears.

      Naturally, the reasons for my conduct were never understood, even by those who were closest to me; to my enemies, and even to my friends, I was an amiable fool.  They never discerned my values, and so it was assumed that I had none.  And, in truth, my ideas were often more dignified than myself.  And yet they mocked me also because my utter want of seriousness represented a terrible threat to all their values.  I was a Nihilist of the imagination, in revolt against my period - although I could hardly be accused of shedding blood, I used the weapons which were closest to hand, for they were those which my own class had fashioned for me.

      I was reading Balzac then, and I can still recall the chilling interview of the criminal Vautrin with Lucien de Rubempré, when he saves Lucien from an impulsive suicide by instructing him in the invisible laws of society; by persuading Lucien, the poor poet impelled forward by that curious mixture of anger and ambition which I knew so well, that he could work those laws to his own benefit.  'There are no longer any laws', he whispers to him with the ineffable sweetness of true evil, 'merely conventions: nothing but form.'  I was, at that moment I read those terrible sentences, like the ancient king who reads upon a wall the shining letters of his own destiny, although I hardly needed a prophet to decipher them.  What had before been an instinct with me became a principle.  It completed the first stage of my education which, like any real education, had been conducted by means of a dialogue with myself.  Everything seemed to me to be like its own parody - I do not speak of society, for that was its only truly remarkable attribute.  But I believed then that almost all the methods and conventions of art and life found their higher expression in parody.  I have made that clear in all my work, just as I announced it in my dress and in my behaviour.

      It was for this reason that it pleased me somewhat when I became an object of wonder or of ridicule.  The fact that a gilded mask was taken for the human face confirmed and strengthened the laws of my own being.  It was for that reason, also, that I agreed to go to America in order to lecture upon aesthetics.  There I could, in stern conditions resembling those of a laboratory, live up to my own drama.