3 September 1900

 

Robert Sherard approached me in the Pied Noir last night and, in a state of some intoxication, announced that he wished to write my biography.

      'I will weave a crown for your head, Oscar,' he told me.

      'What is the use of a crown without royalties, Bobbie?'

      I was a little short with him but he becomes less interesting nightly.  He would write a biography, he said, which would explain my conduct to the world and reveal my true character.

      'You will defend me at the cost of my reputation,' I told him.  But, as always, he paid no attention.

      'Do you remember our early days in Paris, when we read Poe and Chatterton together?'

      'I recall nothing whatever, Robert.  There is one principle you must understand if you insist upon this absurd undertaking: an artist's life is determined by what he forgets, not by what he remembers.'

      'Why must you laugh at everything, Oscar?'

      'Well, Robert, I am told that Plato died with the farces of Sophron under his pillow.  Only I have your company instead.'

      He staggered off in the general direction of absinthe; I hope never to see him again.

      After such encounters, I feel acutely the waste of everything I might have become.  Sometimes I feel compelled to gaze upon my fate like Regulus, with his lids cut off, who was forced to look upon the sun until his eyes withered and died.  And I, who once kissed the goddess of fortune, now lie down in the stews with only the ghosts of my past for companions.  Every success has been fateful to me, so that my life has rocked continually on the knees of the gods.  In my brilliant days, my fortune was so great that it filled me with fear.  But, since I ran willingly towards my destiny, I forgot sometimes that I was the victim.  I was the ox fattened with flowers, but for the sacrifice only.

      I wrote once in Dorian Gray, 'to say a thing is to bring it to pass', and then I crossed the phrase out.  The world does not know of it because I did not want the world to understand one of the secrets of my art.  It is a strange thing, but in all my writing I anticipate my own fate.  Everything that has happened to me - even the beautiful spring day when I was released from the winter of prison - is mentioned somewhere in my work.  I saw Nemesis and I placed its nets around my shoulders.  I think I have explained how, in my earliest years, I was taken to see the Galway women who read my hand.  And, although I forgot her prophecies in the midst of boyish pleasures, I understood even then that my secret history was already written and that nothing I might do or say could alter it in the slightest particular.

      And so throughout my life I have consulted volumes of magic, chiromancy and cabbalistic lore, to see if I might pierce the heart of the mystery which surrounds me.  I read Andreae's The Chemical Wedding, that poisoned flower of German baroque literature, the Secrets of Weckerus and the Artis Cabalisticae of John Pistorius.  In that febrile air where fate reveals its mysteries, I was comforted only by Paracelsus's device: 'Be not another, if thus canst be thyself.'

      I have always also consulted the secretaries to the gods - the palmists, or psalmists as Bosie calls them, are now so important to our civilisation that one always met them at dinner parties, although on those occasions one knew one's fate in advance.  I once met Cheiro at one of his informal 'evenings' at Lady Colin Campbell's.  I put my hand through a curtain so that he could not see my face.  As always I trembled with apprehension: at these moments, I feel that my past life means nothing and that I am to be reborn.  'The left hand,' Cheiro told me, 'is the hand of a king.  The right hand is that of a king who will send himself into exile.'  I was asked by others what he had said to me, but I could not speak.  At the end of the evening, when he emerged from behind his curtain like a character in some Adelphi melodrama, I could not look at him or approach him.  But he seemed to catch my eye: I stared at him, and he gave me a most curious glance.  It was after that occasion that I wrote Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, in which the palmist sees the improbable shape of his own death in the hand of another.  It was, I suppose, my way of laughing at Fate.

      And yet I cannot escape it.  At moments of crisis in my life, I have always consulted those who know.  I used to see Mrs Robinson regularly in London, and I wrote to her just before my trial.  She prophesied success - the gods are cruel.  Only last year I tempted them again to wilder laughter.  I went, with More Adey, to a famous fortune teller here.  She looked at my hand, and then said in the most polite manner, 'I am puzzled.  By your line of life, you died two years ago.'

      I still have my scarab ring.  I had just returned from Paris and I was wandering down Holywell Lane, a narrow street full of shops which sold curiosities and the battered relics of dispersed libraries.  I was in one of these shops, glancing at some more than usually revolting glassware, when a young man entered, rather breathlessly, and asked to see its owner.  He was a working man; he was employed at Billingsgate, gutting fish, he said.  I remember the phrase caught my attention.  He had found this, he said, on the floor of the market, and was it worth anything - and then he held out the ring which now I wear.  The owner inspected it and, being a man of no particular discernment, offered him a shilling.  The young man took offence at this, and left the shop.

      I followed him outside and asked to see the ring myself, and he proffered it to me.  I could see at once the wonder of its green stone - I offered him five pounds, which of course he accepted.  'Where did you find this exactly?' I asked him.  'I told the governor, on the floor.'  And then he laughed: 'Perhaps a fish brought it.'  Since that time, the scarab has been precious to me.  I showed it to John Farrell, the expert in Egyptology at the British Museum, and he assured me that it was the ring of a high official in that empire.  I did not tell him where I had found it: it would have sounded somewhat too mythological.  But its strange origins haunted me and I felt that it might, like Edgar Poe's gold bug, lead me to great fortune - a fortune dancing attendance upon violence and mortality.  Indeed it drew me even closer to Poe's sweet sense of fate for, when I returned to London from Paris, I saw the life of the sewers with awakened eyes.  I felt myself like him drawn towards the precipice, imagining the sensations of my fall: and so, in the end, I plunged down and was destroyed.