4 September 1900

 

The pain in my head woke me this morning and, as I raised myself from the bed in agony, I saw on my pillow noxious substances discharged from my ear.  I am used to this now but, when I first saw the blood and the mucus, I felt the horror of one whose life is visibly ebbing away; but now I am in so continuously weak and painful a state that I do not lament the stages in my decline.  I merely watch them with interest.

      I injured my ear in Wandsworth prison.  I had been kept in my cell because of my general sickness and anguish until the prison doctor, examining me, told me that I must take some exercise in the yard.  'It will do you good,' he said.  'It will stop you thinking about yourself.'  Such is the banality of those who work in places of evil.  And so I was escorted down the metal steps, across the metal landing, and the door of the courtyard was opened for me.  I saw the light, and I watched the prisoners walking around the yard.  In my cell I could hide and weep; but I felt the daylight like a sword, and I fell.  My ear was damaged in that fall: it has become my relic from prison, a stigma which bleeds, not once a year at festivals, but every night.  I must stop now: I am in such pain that I must send again for the little Jewish doctor.

 

He has come.  He has a wonderful gift for changing his mind and, where once he diagnoses neurasthenia, now he suspects something worse.  He has told me that I must prepare myself for an operation, and has left a phial of chloral to comfort me.  Later he promises me morphia, when I cry to dream again.  I am used to narcotics.  Sometimes, when I lie in their embrace, I see my personality rising out of me and going to hide in some corner of the room until it is sure it is quite safe to return.  In these moods I resemble Mr Wells's Invisible Man - only recognisable to myself, and to others, when I am dressed.

      Recently, however, these nerve sedatives have alarmed me with their power.  I remember once, some years ago in London, being taken by an angel of the streets to Brick Lane, to one of those houses of shame where opium is bought and sold.  I was led to an upstairs room - it was large and unhealthy, a lime pit where the diseased are buried - and I saw there only grinning phantoms, men who neither woke nor slept; they lived somewhere out of the world, and the looks they cast were terrible: I had been thrown among blind men who had put out each other's eyes.  I turned away in horror - some sights of the world resemble those when we glimpse the Gorgon, but alas the world does not turn us to stone - but now I find myself being drawn ineluctably towards the same fate.  Perhaps it is not a fearful one: perhaps the gods are wise to take away our wits before they destroy us.

      After I have taken chloral, I no longer sleep even in the pit of the night.  I lie in a daze and watch absurd shapes pass in phantasmagoric array.  I know that, when I return to my bed after writing this, little lizards will chase each other through my brain.  But I also run: I am both hunter and hunted, watcher and watched.  I will take chloral now.

      I am afraid to grasp sleep even when it is offered to me: I have such bad dreams, dreams which do not leave my waking moments.  Once I dreamt that I seemed to be a mask lying on the counter of a shop in Piccadilly.  Many people came in and tried me upon their faces: I saw myself reflected in the mirrors, a strange white thing, but then they laughed and flung me back upon the counter.  I jerked awake, and I was panting for breath.

      Is it possible that in my dreams I have become the artist that I have ceased to be in my ordinary hours?  Is it possible that, now I have been torn apart, mine is the song of Marsyas rather than Apollo and that through pain I acquire prophecy?  I dreamed of two lambs, and then of a fawn with one of its legs cut off, its lifeblood dripping upon the grass.  The next morning, I received in the post a photograph of my two children - I wept when I saw in them the lineaments of my own face, as it might have been when I was a child - and in a daze of sorrow I walked out into the streets.  A young man limped along on the other side of the Rue des Beaux Arts: his leg had been sawn off at the hip.  Is it the secret of dreams that they prefigure reality and thus help us to endure it, that they turn a child into a lamb and a suffering spirit into a fawn?  It would explain, at least, the somewhat obscure origins of mythology, all those sad stories which mimic human reality and bear it aloft like a bier.

      The night before she died, my wife Constance herself appeared before me in a dream, walking towards me with her hands outstretched, and I called out, 'Go away! Go away!'; whether in pity or in anger I do not know.

      It seems to me that the pain I experience on waking is the pain of knowing one's mortality; in sleep I return to the enchanted, terrible world of childhood in which joys are more joyful, horrors more horrible, because there is no consciousness that they will end.

      In these fiery-coloured visions, my mother is the dominant note.  She flashes across the darkly: other faces, even that of Constance, become her face; other hands become her hands.  And how could it not be so?  I resemble her in so many things.  Sometimes I think that all the best in me was woven from her.  It was she who gave birth to that mysterious essence which dwells in me and from which my thoughts were born, and from those thoughts my art once sprang.  In my old days, I would find myself imitating her gestures and her manners and, when I wrote, it seems to me now that hers was the image which, like a ghost in the forest, I always glimpsed within my words.  The chloral is working within me now.  I must rest for a moment: I always enjoy familiar sensations.

      Salomé was, for me, the ideal woman: lust is terrible and, in her madness, she destroys the man who denies that lust.  My male characters belong to the sphere of fancy merely - my women belong to the sphere of art.  I have always preferred my heroines - I understand them because I was terrified of them.  Only they can afford to be serious, because they see life as a game.  If I had been a woman, there is no knowing to what heights I might have reached.  The chloral is cold, with the coldness of the polar regions which makes one drowsy.  I will sleep now.  I see monstrous butterflies coming to rest on my face.  I see the shapes of monsters everywhere - beautiful monsters, too large, too large for ourselves.