31 August 1900

 

I have a copy of Les Misérables here in my room.  Since, like the urchin, I have been thrown upon the streets, it has become my Baedeker for the really interesting aspects of French society.  The book is now quite as battered as its owner; I bought it when I first came to Paris, and it has a signature as large and as florid as some monstrous orchid: Oscar Wilde, March 1883.

      I had returned from America, determined that I was to begin a new life, the life of an artist.  But when I arrived in London I found only the old personality which I had thought to transcend.  It would have been impossible for me to do serious work in an atmosphere which I had left charged with the temperature of the blagueur.  I went to live with my mother, but the shades of infancy hovered over my head and would have crushed the laurels which I wished to place there.  When I was with her, it was as if any achievement of mine would count for nothing.

      And so I fled my mother's house, and travelled to Paris.  This city seemed to me then to be the centre of European literary civilisation.  Of course I had read the French poets of the modern school - Coppée, Rechepin and Mallarmé were interesting in the days before they were understood - but it was the masters of French prose to whom I owed the greatest debt.  When I was an undergraduate I had discovered Victor Hugo: here was a writer who knew pity and understood, also, the awful solitude of suffering, the solitude of the human soul which does not know itself.  I was too young to learn from the mystery of that suffering, but I understood perfectly the miraculous prose of the poet.

      I had read Baudelaire and was entranced by his prose, just as later I was to be captivated by the poetry of À Rebours, with its strange scents and colours.  Huysmans is, in the modern period, the great prophet of artifice - of that coming age in which nature will have exhausted all of her powers, and the artist paints her most vivid effects for her.  In the dimly lit pages of that book I first saw Salomé rise up, covered in opals and in hydrophanes.

      I loved Gautier's work also.  He once wrote a play in which Elogabolus throws himself into a water closet: an effect I have always wanted to use upon the stage.  His novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, awoke wonderful dreams in me for I, too, had experienced the sensations of its hero when, trembling upon the abyss of a fiery-coloured passion, he is no longer certain who he is or who others are.  I wished, in those days, to write a novel of the heart in Gautier's manner, a book of strange sins whose father would be Werther and whose mother Manon Lescaut.  And indeed I have always attempted to express in my own tongue the languor and the eroticism of French writers.  Their sentences are like flowers pressed tightly together: no light can pass through them which is not dazed by colour and infected by scent.  And there were others: I worshipped Flaubert with my head, Stendhal with my heart, and Balzac by my manner of dress.  When I moved into the Hôtel Voltaire I adopted a white dressing-gown, in which I would sit up through the night to continue my writing.

      Of course Balzac sees life as it is, fashioning it into shape as a sculptor will fashion stone into a beautiful form.  I saw life then as a parade of shadows intoning strange syllables.  The fact is that I did not know life at all.

      I remember a story.  There was once a poet who sang of the secret things of the world.  The music of his verses was forever chanted in the city, and those whom he met stepped back to let him pass.  Each morning, at dawn, he would rise up from his solitary bed - for poets, in their imagination at least, always sleep alone - and walk into the desert beyond the city.  It was a trackless waste but the poet recognised his way and he walked on until he came to one rock and a tree which shaded it.  Here he would sit and, stooping down towards the sand, he would let the grains sift through his fingers.  Then he would lift up his head and gaze at the tawny horizon of the desert, at the great wilderness which has no shade and no movement.  When he grew tired of staring, he would raise his eyes to the sky which shone like beaten copper over the desert.  No birds flew here, and no cloud distracted his gaze.

      So he would pass the day and, when the shadow of the tree told him that evening approached, he would rise from his rock and return to the city.  As always, at the end of the day, when the people saw him walking with firm step towards the great gate of the city, they would come out to greet him and, after words of salutation, they would question him eagerly.  'Tell us, what have you seen today?  What visions of terror and of beauty?'  And then he would reply, and tell them what he had seen.  'I have seen the scarlet Ibis carry a star in her beak, and I have seen the giant Lizard expire and turn into bronze.  A young Nereid rose from the sand; when I embraced her, she turned into a wave of the sea.  All these, and other things, have I seen.'  And they marvelled at what the poet had told them; the common people wondered where they might find the giant Lizard of bronze, while the priests of the city saw in the poet's words a shadowy image of spiritual things.  But the poet was greatly feared, and no-one questioned him about the interpretation of such matters.

      Another dawn came, and the poet walked across the desert to his usual rock, and under the shade of the same tree he bent down and gazed upon the sand.  But as he did so remorse stepped over his heart as if it were a lizard of bronze.  'I have destroyed all those who loved me,' he said, 'I rose from their beds at dawn and never turned my head.  I have heard them weeping, and I have walked away into this desert place.'  And then the poet turned his eyes towards the horizon, and saw the shadows of his own life.  'I have lied to all those who listen to me.  I have given them tawdry images for the sake of gold.  In order to find praise, I have invented the secrets of the world.'  And then he turned his face towards the blank sky, and saw only the emptiness of his own life.  'I see my life now as a vacant listening to the wind, a hollow straw which falls slowly to the ground.'

      And the poet gathered up his cloak and returned to the city, for it was evening now.  'What have you seen today?  What have you seen today?' they asked him, and he would not answer.  But they kept up their clamouring until at last he spoke to them.  'I have seen nothing,' he told them, 'I have seen nothing today.'  For the first time, the poet had seen reality and he could not speak of it.  And then they jeered at him, and some of them picked up stones to hurl at his back as he returned slowly to his own dwelling.

      When I told Robbie this story, he asked me to write it down.  He promised me an American newspaper.  Of course he had not understood.