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Title: Echo de Paris

Author: Laurence Housman

Release date: November 2, 2023 [eBook #72010]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: D. Appleton  and Company, 1924

Credits: Bob Taylor, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ECHO DE PARIS ***





  Transcriber’s Note
  Italic text displayed as: _italic_




Echo de Paris




  Echo de Paris

  BY

  Laurence Housman

  Author of “Angels and Ministers,” “Prunella,”
  “An Englishwoman’s Love-Letters,” Etc.


  [Illustration: Decoration]


  D. Appleton and Company
  New York   [Illustration: Decoration]   Mcmxxiv




  Copyright, 1924, by
  D. Appleton and Company

  Printed in the United States of America




Foreword


In a book of political dialogues, published a year ago, I explained
(perhaps unnecessarily) that they were entirely unauthentic—a personal
interpretation, given in dramatic form, of certain minds and events
that had gone to make history.

But the dialogue which here follows differs from those, in that it
has a solid basis in fact, and that I myself was a participant in the
conversation which, as here recorded, is but a free rendering of what
was then actually said.

And if it would interest any of my readers to know where these
paraphrases of memory stand nearest to fact, they will find them in
those passages dealing with the writings of Carlyle, the Scotsman’s
worship of success, and the theory of the complete life of the
artist. Other references by the way were the bird with the Berkeleyan
philosophy, and the novels of Mr. Benjamin Swift. The rest is my own
development of the main theme, though it may well be that, here and
there, I have remembered better than I know.

The scene, as regards its setting—the outside of a Paris restaurant—is
true to history; and if, toward the end, a touch of drama has been
introduced, the reader will understand that it is more symbolic than
actual. The non-arriving guest, with the unreal name, did not, on that
occasion, even begin to arrive. He was, nevertheless, a very real
element in the tragic situation which I have tried to depict; and it is
likely enough that there were more of his kind than one knew—that he
was generic rather than individual.

My choice of initials to represent those who appear upon the scene—a
convenient device for the better ordering of the printed page—was
not made with any intention to disguise identity where that could be
of interest; but it seemed better manners, in a scene where only one
character really counted, to adopt the unobtrusive formula, except in
speeches where the names occur naturally. The friendly “R.R.” is dead,
and will be easily identified; the rest are still living. And though,
for the most part, they were listeners not speakers, I have no reason
for leaving them out of a scene which, after nearly twenty-five years,
I remember so well.

My original intention was to include this dialogue in my book of
_Dethronements_; but I was warned by a good authority that if I did so
the interest of my commentators would be largely diverted from the
political theme to the personal; there was also a certain objection
to including in a set of purely imaginary dialogues another which was
so largely founded on fact. I decided, therefore, to let this other
“dethronement” stand alone in its first appearing, as different in kind
from the rest.

But though different, my reason for writing it was precisely the same.
It is, like those others, a record of failure; and failures interest
me more, generally, than success. If I am asked why, my answer is that
they seem to reveal human nature more truly, and, on the whole, more
encouragingly, than anything else in the world. The way a man faces
failure is the best proof of him. What he has done before matters
little, or only in a minor degree, if as the outcome of all, in the
grip of final and irretrievable ruin, he retains the stature of a man.
That places him far more truly than the verdicts of juries, or the
judgment of contemporary society. Sometimes he may prove his worth
more surely by failure than by success, sometimes may only just manage
to hold his ground; but if he is able to do that without complaint or
greedy self-justification, and without speaking bitterly of those who
have compassed his downfall, even so something stands to his credit,
and there is a balance on the right side.

And so, the longer I live, the more do failures attract me, making
me believe not less in human nature, but more. There are financial
vulgarians of our own day whom, in prison, one might find lovable—and
so be brought nearer to the great common heart which, with its large
tolerance for ill-doers in their gambling day of success, has found
them lovable even when they were at their worst. For it is not only
Art which holds up the mirror to Nature, or reflects most flatteringly
the coarsest of its features. The British public flourishes its
mirror, with all the self-satisfaction of a barber displaying his own
handicraft, before characters of a certain type; and a man may follow a
thoroughly vicious career with great success, so long as he does it in
a thoroughly British way. But what a pity that the mirror should cease
from its obsequious civility just when its hero, overwhelmed in failure
and disgrace, becomes so much more worthy of study and deserving of
sympathy than ever before.

And here, I suppose, lies the great difference between the mirror of
Art and the mirror of popular opinion: the mirror of Art is not broken
in a tantrum when the object becomes less acceptable to the public
gaze. But the public is shocked in its sense of decency when it finds
it has been looking at itself under an alias, applauding its own sorry
features in the mask of success. The mask falls away, and there,
instead, are the quite ordinary features of a poor human criminal, very
like all the rest of us, if only it could be known: no wonder, then,
that the mirror gets broken. In the mirror there is no such break: the
interest holds on.

And so, from the non-popular standpoint, I had sufficient reason for
putting on record my last meeting with so conspicuous a failure as
Oscar Wilde. Our previous acquaintance, except by correspondence, had
been very slight. Only once before had I met him at a friend’s house.
He was then at the height of his fame and success, and I an unknown
beginner, still undecided whether to be book-illustrator or author. But
I had recently published a short story, with illustrations of my own,
in the _Universal Review_; and a few minutes after our introduction Mr.
Wilde turned and, addressing me for the first time, said: “And when,
pray, are we to have another work from your pen?”

Like most of his remarks, the enquiry was phrased with a certain
decorative solemnity, in excess of what the occasion required; but
the kindness and the courtesy of it were very real, and of course it
pleased and encouraged me. I learned later that a certain descriptive
phrase, “The smoke of their wood-fires lay upon the boughs, soft as
the bloom upon a grape,” had attracted him in my story; he had quoted
it as beautiful, adding that one day he should use it himself, and,
sure enough, in _The Picture of Dorian Grey_, I came upon it not long
afterwards, slightly altered; and again I was pleased and complimented;
for it meant that he had really liked something in my story, and had
not praised merely to please.

I did not see him again to speak to, until we met in Paris some seven
years later, the year before his death.

Upon his release from prison I had sent him my recently published book,
_All-Fellows: seven legends of lower Redemption_, hoping that its title
and contents would say something on my behalf, which, in his particular
case, I very much wished to convey. A fortnight later a courteous and
appreciative letter reached me from the south of France, telling me
incidentally that by the same post had come a copy of _A Shropshire
Lad_, sent with the good wishes of the author, whom he had never met.
“Thus you and your brother,” he wrote, “have given me a few moments of
that rare thing called happiness.”

From that time on I sent him each of my books as they appeared, and
received letters of beautifully ornate criticism; and as I passed
through Paris on my way back from Italy in the autumn of 1899, we met
once more in the company of friends.

My memory of him upon that occasion inclines me to believe that those
are right who maintain that as a personality he was more considerable
than as a writer. The brilliancy of conversation is doubtfully
reproduced in the cold medium of print, and I may have wholly failed to
convey the peculiar and arresting quality of what, by word of mouth,
sounded so well. But the impression left upon me from that occasion
is that Oscar Wilde was incomparably the most accomplished talker I
had ever met. The smooth-flowing utterance, sedate and self-possessed,
oracular in tone, whimsical in substance, carried on without halt, or
hesitation, or change of word, with the quiet zest of a man perfect at
the game, and conscious that, for the moment at least, he was back at
his old form again: this, combined with the pleasure, infectious to his
listeners, of finding himself once more in a group of friends whose
view of his downfall was not the world’s view, made memorable to others
besides myself a reunion more happily prolonged than this selected
portion of it would indicate.

But what I admired most was the quiet, uncomplaining courage with which
he accepted an ostracism against which, in his lifetime, there could be
no appeal. To a man of his habits and temperament—conscious that the
incentive to produce was gone with the popular applause which had been
its recurrent stimulus—the outlook was utterly dark: life had already
become a tomb. And it is as a “monologue d’outre tombe” that I recall
his conversation that day; and whether it had any intrinsic value or
no, it was at least a wonderful expression of that gift which he had
for charming himself by charming others.

Among the many things he touched on that day (of which only a few
disjointed sentences now remain to me), one note of enthusiasm I have
always remembered, coming as it did so strangely from him, with his
elaborate and artificial code of values, based mainly not on the beauty
of human character, but on beauty of form—when, with a sudden warmth
of word and tone, he praised Mrs. Gladstone for her greatness and
gentleness of heart: “her beautiful and perfect charity” I think was
the phrase he used, adding: “But then, she was always like that.”

None of us knew her; but from that day on, the warmth and humility of
his praise left an impression upon my mind, which a reading of her life
only two years ago came to confirm. Perhaps—I like to think that it was
possible—an expression of her “beautiful and perfect charity” had come
to him personally, so making her stand differently in his eyes from the
rest of the world.




Echo de Paris




Echo de Paris

A Study from Life


 _The echo is from as far back as the year 1899. It is late September.
 By the entrance of a café, on a street opening into the Place de
 l’Opera, three Englishmen sit waiting at a small table, relieved for
 the moment from the solicitations of the garçon anxious to serve them
 their aperitifs. It is all very well for the café to call itself the
 “Vieille Rose”: no doubt by gaslight it lives charmingly up to its
 name; but seen in the noonday’s glare, its interior upholsterings are
 unmistakably magenta. From the warm sunshade of its awning the street
 view is charming; and while one of the trio watches it benevolently
 with an accustomed eye, the other two, encountering Paris for the
 first time, find in its brisk movement the attraction of novelty. But
 it is a reversion to English habit which makes one of them presently
 look at his watch a little anxiously._

L.H. Is he generally so late as this?

R.R. Generally never as early.

L.H. You are sure you said the Café Vieille Rose?

R.R. (_with a disarming smile_). As well as I could, my dear L.H. I
can’t say it quite like you.

L.H. I don’t pretend to talk French: hearing it spoken absorbs all my
faculties.

R.R. Oh, but you should! They are so charming about it: they pretend to
understand you.

L.H. Well, I did screw up courage to go to a French barber yesterday.

R.R. Ah! That explains it. I was wondering.

L.H. You might well. When I looked in the glass after he had finished
me I saw myself no longer English, but Parisian.

R.R. (_enjoying himself_). No, L.H., no! Not Parisian, I assure
you!—Alsatian.

L.H. No longer English was all that mattered: “tout à fait transformé,”
as I managed to say to the man. And he—magnificently: “Mais oui,
Monsieur, c’était bien necessaire!” Is that what you call French
politeness?

R.R. Rather the “amour propre” of the artist, I should say.

L.H. In this nation of artists one gets too much of it.

H.A. There isn’t such a thing as a nation of artists. The French only
appear so because they take a more transparent pride in themselves than
we do. They haven’t yet discovered that modesty is the best vanity.

R.R. Is that your own, Herbie, or did you get it from Oscar yesterday?

H.A. No. I didn’t see him. I invented it as I got up this morning,
meaning to let it occur as an impromptu. Now it’s gone.

R.R. Oh, no. Say it again, my dear boy, say it again! We shall all be
charmed: so will he.

L.H. Look; there he is! Who’s with him?

R.R. Davray. I asked Davray to go and bring him, so as to make sure.
You know him, don’t you? You like him?

L.H. A Frenchman who can talk English always goes to my heart.

R.R. Davray is Anglomaniac: he not only talks it, he thinks it: signs
himself “Henry,” like an Englishman, and has read more of your books
than I have.

L.H. One?

R.R. Don’t be bitter, L.H. I read them—in the reviews—regularly.

 (_While they talk, a fiacre, disentangling itself from the traffic of
 the main thoroughfare, draws up at the newspaper-kiosk on the further
 side of the street, and discharges its occupants: one small, alert,
 and obviously a Frenchman; the other large and sedate, moving with a
 ponderous suavity, which gives him an air of importance, almost of
 dignity. But though he has still a presence, its magnificence has
 departed. Threading his way indolently across the traffic, his eye
 adventures toward the waiting group. Met by the studied cordiality of
 their greetings, his face brightens._)

R.R. Oscar, L.H. thinks you are late.

O.W. Thought I was going to be late, you mean, my dear Robbie. If I
were, what matter? What are two minutes in three years of disintegrated
lifetime? It is almost three years, is it not, since we missed seeing
each other?

 (_This studied mention of a tragic lapse of time is not quite as happy
 as it would like to be, being too deliberate an understatement. The
 tactful “Robbie” hastens to restore the triviality suitable to the
 occasion._)

R.R. Oscar, when did you learn to cross streets? I have just seen you
do it for the first time. In London you used to take a cab.

O.W. No, Robbie, the cab used to take me. But here the French streets
are so polite; one gets to the right side of them without knowing it.
(_He turns to L.H._) How delightfully English of you to think that I
was going to be late!

L.H. I thought you might have done as I am always doing—gone to the
wrong place, or lost your way.

O.W. But that is impossible! In Paris one can lose one’s time most
delightfully; but one can never lose one’s way.

H.A. With the Eiffel Tower as a guide, you mean?

O.W. Yes. Turn your back to that—you have all Paris before you. Look
at it—Paris vanishes.

R.R. You might write a story about that, Oscar.

O.W. In natural history, Robbie, it has already been done. Travellers
in South America tell of a bird which, if seen by you unawares, flies
to hide itself. But if it has seen you first, then—by keeping its
eye on you—it imagines that it remains invisible, and nothing will
induce it to retreat. The bird-trappers catch it quite easily merely
by advancing backwards. Now that, surely, is true philosophy. The
bird, having once made you the object of its contemplation, has every
right to think (as Bishop Berkeley did, I believe) that you have no
independent existence. You are what you are—the bird says, and the
Bishop says—merely because they have made you a subject of thought; if
they did not think of you, you would not exist. And who knows?—they may
be right. For, try as we may, we cannot get behind the appearance of
things to the reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no
reality in things apart from their appearances.

H.D. You English are always talking what you think is philosophy, when
we should only call it theology.

O.W. How typical of the French mind is that word “only”! But what else,
my dear Davray, was the thought of the eighteenth century, so far as it
went, but an attempt to bring Religion and Philosophy together in the
bonds of holy matrimony?

R.R. The misalliance which produced the French Revolution.

O.W. Robbie, you must not be so brilliant before meals! Or do you
wish to divert my appetite? May a guest who was supposed to be late
enquire—when, precisely?

R.R. The situation, my dear Oscar, is of your own making. You insisted
upon ortolans; L.H. telegraphed for them; they have only just arrived.

O.W. If they are still in their feathers, let them fly again! A flight
of ortolans across Paris: how romantic, how unexplainable!

H.A. Oh, no! Let’s wait for them, please! I want to taste one: I never
have.

O.W. So young, and already so eager for disappointment! Why give up
imagination? “Ortolan,” the word, is far more beautiful than when it is
made flesh. If you were wise you would learn life only by inexperience.
That is what makes it always unexpected and delightful. Never to
realize—that is the true ideal.

L.H. Still, one goes on liking plovers’ eggs after eating them: at
least, I do.

O.W. Ah, yes; an egg is always an adventure: it may be different.
But you are right; there are a few things—like the Nocturnes of
Chopin—which can repeat themselves without repetition. The genius of
the artist preserves them from being ever quite realized. But it has to
be done carelessly.

 (_There is a pause, while L.H., with due enquiry of each, orders the
 aperitifs._)

R.R. Oscar, why did you choose the “Vieille Rose”?

O.W. Will you believe me, Robbie, when I say—to match my complexion? I
have never before seen it by daylight. Is it not a perfect parable of
life, that such depravity by gaslight should become charming? Will our
host allow us to have white wine as a corrective? An additional red
might be dangerous.

 (_And with the colour-scheme of the approaching meal made safe, he
 continues to charm the ears of himself and of his listeners._)

I chose it also for another and a less selfish reason. It is here I
once met a woman who was as charming as she was unfortunate, or as she
would have been, but for the grace that was in her. To say that she was
entirely without beauty is to put it mildly; but she accepted that gift
of a blind God with so candid a benevolence, and cultivated it with
so delicate an art, that it became a quality of distinction, almost of
charm. She was the _belle amie_ of a friend of mine, whose pity she had
changed to love. He brought me here to meet her, telling me of the rare
reputation she had acquired in this city of beautiful misalliances, as
being a woman of whom nobody could possibly say that she was merely
plain. And here, upon this spot, in the first few moments of our
meeting, she challenged me, in the most charming manner possible, for
that which a woman so rarely seeks to know—the truth about herself.
“Tell me, Monsieur,” she said—but no: it can only be told in French:
“Dites moi, Monsieur, si je ne suis pas la femme la plus laide à
Paris?” And for once in my life I was able to please a woman merely
by telling her the truth; and I replied, “Mais, Madame, dans tout le
monde!”

R.R. A poem, in six words! What did she say?

O.W. What could she say, Robbie? She was delighted. To that impossible
question which she had the courage to ask I had given the only
impossible answer. Upon that we became friends. How much I have wished
since that we could have met again. For the unbeautiful to have so much
grace as to become charming is a secret that is worth keeping; and one
the keeping of which I should have liked to watch. I would not have
asked to know it for myself, for then it would no more be a mystery;
but—merely to see her keeping it. In Paris (where almost everything
is beautiful), they were very happy together. Now they are gone to
America; and in that country, from which all sense of beauty has flown,
perhaps she is no longer able to keep, as a secret, that which there
would be no eyes to interpret. When I was in America, I did not dare
to tell America the truth; but I saw it clearly even then—that the
discovery of America was the beginning of the death of Art. But not
yet; no, not yet! Whistler left America in order to remain an artist,
and Mr. Sargent to become one, I believe.... But now, tell me of
England: who are the new writers I ought to be reading, but have not?

L.H. Isn’t to be told what you ought to like rather irritating?

O.W. But I did not say “like”; I said “read.” There are many things one
ought to read which one is not bound to like: Byron, Wordsworth—even
Henry James, if Robbie will allow me to say so. But tell me whom you
yourself find interesting. I shall, at least, be interested to know
why. I have already had two books—from you and your brother—which have
interested me.

L.H. Like you, as regards my own, I should be interested to know why?

O.W. Yours interested me—shall I confess?—partly because a few years
ago it would have interested me so much less. For at that time,
believing that I had discovered—that, in a way, I represented the
symbol of my age, I was only interested in myself. Now, in an age to
which I do not belong, I find myself interested in others. Robbie,
who is the most sincere of flatterers, would have me believe that in
this transfer of interest I am making a poor exchange. I am not sure.
Till recently, absorbed in myself, I might have missed that new strange
writer of things impossible in life, who writes under the name of
Benjamin Swift. Ought I to have done so? His style has the gleam of a
frozen fire. He writes like a sea-pirate driven by contrary winds to a
vain search for tropical forests at the North Pole. Why does he look at
life only in profile, as though, met face to face, it might mean death
to him? Is he as mysterious, as unaccountable to himself, as he seems
to others?

L.H. I don’t know whether the fact that he is a well-to-do Scotsman,
who finished his education at a German university, can be said to
account for him. We have met, and I find him interesting. He reminds
me, somehow, of a lion turned hermit, wearing a hair-shirt, and roaring
into it to frighten out the fleas. In other words, he is full of
contradictions, and revels in them even while they torment him.

O.W. A Scotsman? That explains everything. For a man to be both a
genius and a Scotsman is the very stage for tragedy. He apparently
perceives it. Generally they are unaware of it.

R.R. My dear Oscar, why cannot a Scotsman be a genius as comfortably as
anyone else?

O.W. I ought to have said “artist”: I meant artist. It is much easier
for a Scotsman to be a genius than to be an artist. Mr. Gladstone, I
believe, claimed to be a Scotsman whenever he stood for a Scottish
constituency or spoke to a Scottish audience. The butter-Scotch flavour
of it makes me believe it was true. There was no art in that; and yet
how truly typical! It was always so successful....

Because, Robbie—to return to your question—your Scotsman believes only
in success. How can a man, who regards success as the goal of life,
be a true artist? God saved the genius of Robert Burns to poetry by
driving him through drink to failure. Think what an appalling figure in
literature a successful Burns would have been! He was already trying
to write poems in polite English, which was about as ludicrous as for
a polite Englishman to try to write poetry in the dialect of Burns.
Riotous living and dying saved him from that last degradation of smug
prosperity which threatened him.

L.H. But do you mean no artists are successful?

O.W. Incidentally; never intentionally. If they are, they remain
incomplete. The artist’s mission is to live the complete life: success,
as an episode (which is all it can be); failure, as the real, the
final end. Death, analysed to its resultant atoms—what is it but the
vindication of failure: the getting rid for ever of powers, desires,
appetites, which have been a lifelong embarrassment? The poet’s noblest
verse, the dramatist’s greatest scene deal always with death; because
the highest function of the artist is to make perceived the beauty of
failure.

R.R. But have Scotsmen of genius been any more successful, in a wordly
sense, than others? I seem to remember a few who failed rather
handsomely.

O.W. Possibly. Providence is sometimes kinder to us than we are
ourselves. But never was there a Scotsman of genius who survived his
youth, who was not fatally compromised by his nationality. To fail and
to die young is the only hope for a Scotsman who wishes to remain an
artist. When, at the end of the eighteenth century, Scotland produced
her second great writer of genius, she inspired him to a terrible
betrayal (for which the tradespeople of literature still praise him)—to
break his art on the wheel of commercial rectitude, to write books
which became worse and worse, in order to satisfy his creditors! In
Dante’s _Purgatorio_ there is nothing to equal the horror of it. But
he succeeded; and Scotland, in consequence, is proud of him. I see by
your faces that you all know the man I mean: one does not have to name
him. Think of unhappy Sir Walter, writing his transcendent pot-boilers
for no other reason than to wipe out bankruptcy! Bankruptcy, that
beneficent fairy, who presents to all who trust her with their
insolvency five, ten, fifteen, sometimes even nineteen shillings in the
pound of what they owe to their creditors—to those usurious ones whose
extortionate demands, recognized in other branches of the law, here get
turned down. How much did she give me, Robbie?

R.R. An extension of time, Oscar. She hasn’t done with you yet.

O.W. No; she does not dismiss the lover from her embraces while she has
any hope of securing the restoration of his balance, or of discovering
some deeper stain in his character. What touching devotion! She is the
romantic figure of the money-market. But I believe—or at least I tell
myself—that fewer Scotsmen go bankrupt than any other nationality. It
is not, however, merely monetary success which seduces them; success,
in all its aspects, has for them a baleful attraction. They succumb to
it intellectually, morally, spiritually. On that Carlyle wrecked his
chances of producing a permanent work of art greater than his _French
Revolution_.

ALL. Carlyle?

O.W. I surprise you? Is that because we all know that Carlyle remained
poor? So do misers. Carlyle was the greatest intellectual miser of the
nineteenth century. In his prime he wrote his greatest work—the history
of a failure—the French Revolution. The time came when, with all his
powers matured, he stood equipped for the writing of his supreme
masterpiece. There was no need to look far afield for a subject: it
stood obvious awaiting him. After his French Revolution he should have
written the life of Napoleon—the greatest success, the greatest failure
that the world has ever known. He would have done it magnificently.
What a spectacle for the world: the Man of Destiny receiving from the
son of humble Scottish peasants his right measure of immortality! But
because Carlyle was a Scotsman, he would not take for his hero the man
whose life ended in failure: he could not bring himself to face the
débâcle of Waterloo, the enduring ignominy and defeat of St. Helena.
Had he been true to his art, he would have realized that St. Helena
was the greatest theme of all—for an artist, the most completely
significant in the whole of modern history. But because he had the
soul of a Scotsman, because he worshipped success, he looked for his
hero, and found him, in that most mean and despicable character,
Frederick the Great: a man to whom heaven had given the powers of a
supreme genius, and hell the soul of a commercial traveller with that
unavailing itch for cultural gentility which Voltaire has exposed for
us. On that mean theme he wrote his most voluminous work, and became,
in the process, that skeleton in Mrs. Carlyle’s cupboard which the
world now knows.

You smile at me, Robbie, but believe me, in my own ruin I have found
out this truth. The artist must live the complete life, must accept it
as it comes and stands like an angel before him, with its drawn and
two-edged sword. Great success, great failure—only so shall the artist
see himself as he is, and through himself see others; only so shall he
learn (as the artist must learn) the true meaning behind the appearance
of things material, of life in general, and—more terrible still—the
meaning of his own soul.

L.H. Why is a man’s soul more terrible than life in general? Does not
the greater include the less?

O.W. Because an epitome is always more terrible than a generalization.
We do not see life in general steadily diminishing in force and
vitality, or we do not realize it; the whole bulk is too great. But
when a man really sees into himself, the process of diminution that is
going on becomes apparent: he meets there a problem he cannot escape—a
problem to which religion, and philosophy, and history can give no
certain answer, however much they may pretend. As I sit here—with a few
friends left to me; friends who, however faithful, their number must
needs diminish—for I shall never make a new friend in my life, though
perhaps a few after I die—as I sit here and look back, I realize that
I have lived the complete life necessary to the artist: I have had
great success, I have had great failure. I have learned the value of
each; and I know now that failure means more—always must mean more than
success. Why, then, should I complain? I do not mean that a certain
infirmity of the flesh, or weakness of the will would not make me
prefer that this should have happened to one of my friends—to one of
you—rather than to myself; but admitting that, I still recognize that
I have only at last come to the complete life which every artist must
experience in order to join beauty to truth. I have come to see that
St. Helena is, for a world which follows Cæsar and not Christ, the
greatest place on earth next to Calvary. It is more neglected: men do
not fight for it, they do not go out to conquer it in weary generations
of disastrous crusades, like those which did so much to destroy for
Catholic Europe the true significance of Christianity. But it is there;
and only when men begin to fight for it, as a thing desirable and
precious to possess, only then will its spiritual significance change,
and its value diminish.

If I could write what I have been saying to you, if I could hope to
interest others, as I seem to have interested you, I would; but the
world will not listen to me—now. It is strange—I never thought it
possible before—to regret that one has too much leisure: leisure which
I used so to lack, when I myself was a creator of beautiful things.

L.H. But you told me, in your last letter, that you were writing
something?

O.W. I told you that I was going to write something: I tell everybody
that. It is a thing one can repeat each day, meaning to do it the next.
But in my heart—that chamber of leaden echoes—I know that I never
shall. It is enough that the stories have been invented, that they
actually exist; that I have been able, in my own mind, to give them the
form which they demand.

R.R. If you won’t write them, Oscar, you might at least tell them.

O.W. You have heard them all, Robbie.

R.R. The others have not.

O.W. My dear Robbie, you are not nearly artful enough; but you are very
kind. I will tell you one of my stories presently. Let us go on talking
till the appropriate moment makes it more possible.... Is it I, or is
it the ortolans that are still keeping us here? I do not mind; I would
only like to know.

R.R. To tell you the truth, Oscar, the ortolans were merely a delicate
excuse. We are now waiting for the most perfectly forgetful, and the
most regularly unpunctual person that any of us know. Do you mind if I
cling for five minutes more to my belief that he really intends to meet
us?

O.W. Not at all; a charming experiment. Forgetfulness is a great gift.
While he exercises it, we have more time for being happy where we are
than we should otherwise have allowed ourselves. Who is our benefactor?

R.R. I thought you might like to meet Harvey Jerrold again. I was
keeping it behind the ortolans as a surprise for you.

 (_The name has evoked a look of eager, almost of startled, pleasure;
 and response comes with animation._)

O.W. My dear Robbie; but how inventive of you! What a finishing touch
to a circle which already seemed complete! I did not know that he was
here.

R.R. He only arrived last night. I ’phoned to his hotel and left a
message for him asking him to join us. This morning he sent word that
he would come.

O.W. (_with just a shade of doubt in his tone_). Did you tell him who
we all were?

R.R. I only said “friends.” He knows all of us.

O.W. If he has not, in the exercise of his gift, forgotten some of us.
That—as I remember him—is possible.

R.R. He can’t have forgotten you, at any rate, considering it was you
who published his first plays for him. Or did you only write them?

O.W. Ah! but he has done so much better since. Suppose he were
now ashamed of them. He was one of those—true artists—who make a
reputation before they do anything. That is the right way to begin;
but few have the courage to persevere. It is so difficult. Yet he, of
course, is the most complete artist who is able to remain perfect—doing
nothing.

R.R. I have heard you say that before. But for the sake of the others
won’t you explain it? Your explanations are so much more illuminating
than your statements, you know.

O.W. I may have said the same thing before, Robbie. (It requires a
friend to tell one so!) But my explanation, I am sure, will always be
different. And yet the one which comes at this moment seems only too
obvious. The greatest work of the imagination, for an artist, is to
create first himself, then his public. The writing of my plays and
my poems was never difficult: because they belonged to me, they came
at call. But to make my own public was a labour of Hercules. That is
what I did first. The effort lay in the fact that while one appeared
to be doing nothing, one was actually prostrated by the exertion.
I have known what it is to come back from a week-end—one of those
ordeals by tattle which the stately homes of England provide for the
passing guest—almost literally at death’s door, from which nothing but
hermetic seclusion, until the week-end following, enabled me to escape.
One of my doctors called it “heart-strain,” the other “brain-fag.”
It was really both. I remember once, on a Monday morning, missing an
unreasonably early train, and having to return for four hours to the
bosom of a ducal family, when its exhibition hours were over. It was a
charnel house: the bones of its skeleton rattled: the ghosts gibbered
and moaned. Time remained motionless. I was haunted. I could never go
there again. I had seen what man is never meant to see—the sweeping
up of the dust on which the footfall of departing pleasure has left
its print. There for two days I had been creating my public: the two
days given by God to the Jewish and the Christian world for rest; and
from that breaking of the sabbath, creator and created were equally
exhausted. The breath of life I had so laboriously breathed into their
nostrils they were getting rid of again, returning to native clay. And
yet how few understand what a life of heroism is that of an artist when
he is producing—not his art, but the receptacle which is to contain it.
That, dear friends, is why the world is to the artist so tragic. It is
always a struggle. The artist may possibly for a while mould the world;
but if the world moulds him, he has failed to become an artist, though
he may have succeeded in acquiring the Scotch accent.

L.H. You spoke just now of the artist creating a public for the
appreciation of his work; can he not also create other artists? Would
not that be the ideal aim?

O.W. Ideal, but impossible. You cannot create an artist; you can
only invent one—and it always remains a fiction. Artists—God’s last
creation, secret recipients of the Word of Life—continue to create
themselves. But invention is often tried as a substitute. I remember,
years ago, Hermann Vezin inventing an actress who was to be a second
Rachel. For years and years he continued to invent her, telling us what
to expect. Then one day he produced her....

R.R. (_after allowing the rhetorical pause its due weight_). What
happened? I don’t remember.

O.W. On the day he produced her, she ceased to exist.

R.R. You mean she didn’t arrive?

O.W. Her arrival was a departure: the stage was her terminus. Engines
whistled; the uproar became frightful. She ran to Brighton without
stopping; and, I believe, still dies there.

L.H. Was she so bad, then, after all?

O.W. She may have been almost a genius; who can tell? The fatal mistake
was when Hermann Vezin began inventing her. What would happen to an
actress, however great, who came upon the stage bejewelled with the
names of Sarah, Rachel, Ristori, Siddons? Probability becomes violated;
the sense of the theatre is destroyed. When that happens all is over.
Hermann Vezin should have held his tongue till the gods themselves
applauded. But he lacked faith. The worst thing you can do for a person
of genius is to help him: that way lies destruction. I have had many
devoted helpers—and you see the result. Only once did I help a man who
was also a genius. I have never forgiven myself.

R.R. Oscar, you are perfectly absurd!

O.W. (_with a glance of genuine affection_). But I have forgiven _you_,
Robbie.

L.H. What happened?

O.W. To the man I helped? He never told me; and I would not ask. When
we met afterwards, he had so greatly changed that, though I recognized
him, he failed to recognize me. He became a Roman Catholic, and died at
the age of twenty-three, a great artist—with half the critics and all
the moralists still hating him. A charming person!

L.H. How often one hears that said, as though it were the final summing
up of a man’s life and character—covering everything.

O.W. But surely it is so. What is more fundamental, more inalienable
from a man’s personality, than charm? He may lose his looks; he may
lose his character; but in almost every case that I have known—in spite
of adverse circumstances—the charm remains, like the gift of a fairy
godmother: something which cannot be got rid of. A person who has charm
has the secret of life; but does not know what the secret is—he himself
being the secret. For in this wonderful turning world we can know other
people by their differences—as I know all of you; but we can never know
ourselves. Matthew Arnold, a fine but a very mistaken poet, was always
trying to do the most impossible thing of all—to know himself. And that
is why sometimes, in the middle of his most beautiful poems, he left
off being the poet and became the school inspector.

L.H. I thought you said that the artist must know himself in order to
know others?

O.W. Never! You misunderstood me. “See himself” is what I said; and,
seeing himself naked but not ashamed, learn the terrible meaning of his
own soul—how it exists to torment and divide him against himself, but
always as a stranger within his gates, remote, inscrutable, unnatural.
For this thing, which he can never understand, goes deeper than the
consciousness of self—it is something primitive, atavistic, fierce,
and savage with a fanatical faith in gods whom this world tries no
longer to believe in, but still fears, lest they should become true.
When news of Matthew Arnold’s death came to Robert Louis Stevenson in
Samoa, he said (for he was a Scotsman with a fine sense of humour):
“How dreadful! He won’t like God.” You smile; and yet there was a
very real truth in it. The theology of Matthew Arnold was a terrible
mistake; it arose out of that insistence on trying to know himself: he
wanted also to know God. And just as trying to know yourself savours of
social snobbery—being an attempt to know the person you think the most
important in the world, so in the other attempt there is a certain
spiritual snobbery. It is surely quite sufficient that He should know
us, without any pretended recognition on our part, which, in any case,
would be futile. For if a man cannot know his own soul with real
understanding, still less can he know with real understanding that
which directs its ministry of pain—that constant intolerable reminder
that we can never, unless we would choose only to be dust, belong
separately and entirely to ourselves. Man’s destiny is to be haunted;
however deserted of his fellows, he is never for a moment alone.
Matthew Arnold, in one of his poems, made that beautiful but ridiculous
statement which appeals to us, perhaps, as true because we would so
much like it to be true:

    Yes, in this sea of life enisled,
    We mortal millions live alone!

We don’t: we live with a familiar who is a stranger, always eating out
of our hand, always defrauding us of the joys of life while denying us
the reason. And we never know from day to day whether that stranger is
going to murder us in cold blood, or make us become saints.

R.R. Why not both? To me they sound almost synonymous.

O.W. Robbie, you must not interrupt me, saying clever, sensible things
like that: you put me out. People who want to say merely what is
sensible should say it to themselves before they come down to breakfast
in the morning, never after.

L.H. That was when Lewis Carroll’s “White Queen” used to practise
telling herself all the things she knew to be impossible.

R.R. I always thought that meant saying her prayers.

O.W. But saying prayers, Robbie, is always possible. It is only the
answer to prayer that is impossible. Prayer must never be answered:
if it is, it ceases to be prayer, and becomes a correspondence. If we
ask for our daily bread and it is given us as manna was given to the
Israelites in the wilderness, it is merely an invitation to dinner
reversed. How much more devotional the exercise becomes when we know
that our food comes to us from quite mundane sources, irrespective of
prayer.

H.D. But your prayer then becomes merely a superstition.

O.W. Not at all: a compliment—a spiritual courtesy which one may surely
hope is appreciated in the proper place. I do not say it derisively.
There is a proper place for the appreciation of everything. And perhaps
it is only in heaven—and in hell—that art, now so generally despised,
will receive the appreciation that is due to it.

H.A. In heaven, yes; but why in hell?

O.W. Why in hell? I must tell you one of my stories.

 (_A grave smile passes from face to face, as the friends lean forward
 attentively to listen; for they know that this born story-teller only
 tells them when, for the moment, life contents him._)

In hell, among all the brave company that is ever to be found there
of lovers, and fair ladies, and men of learning, and poets, and
astrologers, amid all the ceaseless movement of doomed bodies, tossing
and turning to be rid of the torment of their souls, one woman sat
alone and smiled. She had the air of a listener, ever with lifted head
and eyes raised, as though some voice from above were attracting her.

“Who is that woman?” enquired a new-comer, struck by the strange
loveliness of her face, with its look the meaning of which he could not
read, “the one with the smooth, ivory limbs, and the long hair falling
down over her arms to the hands resting upon her lap. She is the only
soul whose eyes are ever looking aloft. What skeleton does she keep in
the cupboard of God up yonder?”

He had not finished speaking before one made haste to answer, a man who
carried in his hand a wreath of withered leaves. “They say,” he said,
“that once on earth she was a great singer, with a voice like stars
falling from a clear sky. So when doom came for her, God took her voice
and cast it forth to the eternal echoes of the spheres, finding it too
beautiful a thing to let die. Now she hears it with recognition, and
remembering how once it was her own, shares still the pleasure which
God takes in it. Do not speak to her, for she believes that she is in
heaven.”

And when the man, bearing the wreath of withered leaves, had finished,
“No,” said another, “that is not her story.”

“What then?”

“It is this,” he said, as the man with the withered wreath turned
away: “On earth a poet made his song of her, so that her name became
eternally wedded to his verse, which still rings on the lips of men.
Now she lifts her head and can hear his praise of her sounded wherever
language is spoken. That is her true story.”

“And the poet?” asked the new-comer. “Did she love him well?”

“So little,” replied the other, “that here and now she passes him daily
and does not recognize his face.”

“And he?”

The other laughed, and answered: “It is he who just now told you that
tale concerning her voice, continuing here the lies which he used to
make about her when they two were together on earth.”

But the new-comer said, “If he is able to give happiness in hell, how
can what he says be a lie?”

 (_There is an appreciative pause: no one speaks: from those listening
 faces no word of praise is necessary. Once more the speaker has
 secured the homage of his fellow men; and so, forgetting for a while
 the pit that life has digged for him, continues to narrate to his
 friends the stories which he will never write._)

Since that has appealed to you, I will tell you another.... Once there
was a young man, so beautiful of mind that all who heard him wished to
be of his company; so beautiful of form——

 (_In the middle of a sentence he pauses, as he sees advancing—though
 the others, intent only on him, do not—a young man, graceful in
 person, indolent in motion, who, with a light nonchalant air, meets
 and lets go the glances of strangers as they pass. From these, as he
 draws near, his eye turns toward the group seated at the out-door
 table under the sun-bright awning, and becomes fixed and attentive.
 Glance meets glance, holds for a moment, till that of the younger man
 is withdrawn. Without any change of countenance he slightly deflects
 his course and passes on. In the face they are watching, the friends
 see a quick change: the colour goes, the look of quiet expectation
 ends abruptly, as though sight had stopped dead. But it is with his
 accustomed deliberation of tone that at last he resumes speaking._)

Ah, no; that is a story of which I have forgotten the end: or else it
has forgotten me. No matter; I will tell you another. This is one that
has only just occurred to me; and I am not quite sure yet what the end
of it will be. But it is there waiting. You and I will listen to this
story together, as I tell it for the first time.

This shall be called “The Story of the Man who sold his Soul.”

A certain traveller, passing through the streets of a great city, came
there upon a man whose countenance indicated a grief which he could
not fathom. The traveller, being a curious student of the human heart,
stopped him and said: “Sir, what is this grief which you carry before
the eyes of all men, so grievous that it cannot be hidden, yet so deep
that it cannot be read?”

The man answered: “It is not I who grieve so greatly; it is my soul, of
which I cannot get rid. And my soul is more sorrowful than death, for
it hates me, and I hate it.”

The traveller said: “If you will sell your soul to me, you can be well
rid of it.” The other answered: “Sir, how can I sell you my soul?”
“Surely,” replied the traveller, “you have but to agree to sell me your
soul at its full price; then, when I bid it, it comes to me. But every
soul has its true price; and only at that, neither at more nor at less,
can it be bought.”

Then said the other: “At what price shall I sell you this horrible
thing, my soul?”

The traveller answered: “When a man first sells his own soul he is like
that other betrayer; therefore its price should be thirty pieces of
silver. But after that, if it passes to other hands, its value becomes
small; for to others the souls of their fellow men are worth very
little.”

So for thirty pieces of silver the man sold his soul; and the traveller
took it and departed.

Presently the man, having no soul, found that he could do no sin.
Though he stretched out his arms to sin, sin would not come to him.
“You have no soul,” said sin, and passed him by. “Wherefore should I
come to you? I have no profit in a man that has no soul?”

Then the man without a soul became very miserable, for though his hands
touched what was foul they remained clean, and though his heart longed
for wickedness, it remained pure; and when he thirsted to dip his lips
in fire, they remained cool.

Therefore a longing to recover his soul took hold of him, and he went
through the world searching for the traveller to whom he had sold it,
that he might buy it back and again taste sin in his own body.

After a long time the traveller met him; but hearing his request he
laughed and said: “After a while your soul wearied me and I sold it to
a Jew for a smaller sum than I paid for it.”

“Ah!” cried the man, “if you had come to me I would have paid more.”
The traveller answered: “You could not have done that; a soul cannot
be bought or sold but at its just price. Your soul came to be of small
value in my keeping; so to be rid of it I sold it to the first comer
for considerably less money than I paid in the beginning.”

So parting from him the man continued his quest, wandering over the
face of the earth and seeking to recover his lost soul. And one day as
he sat in the bazaar of a certain town a woman passed him, and looking
at him said: “Sir, why are you so sad? It seems to me there can be no
reason for such sadness.” The man answered: “I am sad because I have no
soul, and am seeking to find it.”

The other said: “Only the other night I bought a soul that had passed
through so many hands that it had become dirt-cheap; but it is so poor
a thing I would gladly be rid of it. Yet I bought it for a mere song;
and a soul can only be sold at its just price; how, then, shall I be
able to sell it again—for what is worth less than a song? And it was
but a light song that I sang over the wine-cup to the man who sold it
me.”

When the other heard that, he cried: “It is my own soul! Sell it to me,
and I will give you all that I possess!”

The woman said: “Alas, I did but pay for it with a song, and I can but
sell it again at its just price. How then can I be rid of it, though
it cries and laments to be set free?”

The man without a soul laid his head to the woman’s breast, and heard
within it the captive soul whimpering to be set free, to return to the
body it had lost. “Surely,” he said, “it is my own soul! If you will
sell it to me I will give you my body, which is worth less than a song
from your lips.”

So, for his body, the other sold to him the soul that whimpered to be
set free to return to its own place. But so soon as he received it he
rose up aghast: “What have you done?” he cried, “and what is this foul
thing that has possession of me? For this soul that you have given me
is not _my_ soul!”

The woman laughed and said: “Before you sold your soul into captivity
it was a free soul in a free body; can you not recognize it now it
comes to you from the traffic of the slave-market? So, then, your soul
has the greater charity, since it recognizes and returns to you, though
you have sold your body miserably into bondage!”

And thus it was that the man had to buy back, at the cost of his body,
the soul which he let go for thirty pieces of silver.

 (_With occasional pauses imposed for effect, but without any
 hesitation or change in the choice of word, the ordered narrative
 has run its course. But in spite of the decorative form, and the
 decorative modulations of tone, there is an under-current of passion;
 and his friends, undeceived by that quiet deliberateness of speech,
 know that the speaker is greatly moved. And so, at the end, there is
 a pause while nobody speaks. At the kiosk opposite a newsboy arrives,
 and delivers a bundle of papers to the woman in charge. Over her is
 an announcement to the Englishman, in his native tongue, that his own
 papers are there on sale. From the restaurant comes a garçon charged
 with a message, and wishing to have instructions. The two, who have
 shared in the arrangement, exchange glances interrogatively; R.R.
 looks at his watch and nods. L.H. signs to the garçon who has served
 the aperitifs._)

R.R. Let us go in to lunch. Jerrold is not coming; he has forgotten us.

O.W. Not all of us, Robbie. He came, but he has gone again.

 (_They all look at him in astonishment; and, for a moment, nobody
 speaks. Then_:)

R.R. Came? _Here_, do you mean?

O.W. Looking as young and charming as ever. But, as soon as he looked
at me, I saw he had entirely forgotten me.

 (_There is nothing possible to be said. L.H. makes haste to pay for
 the aperitifs; and with the anxiety of an Englishman, unpractised in
 foreign ways, to do what is right for the reputation of his country
 in a strange land, he puts down an additional pour-boire, five bronze
 pieces in all, to correspond to the number who have been served. With
 grave apologetic politeness his guest lays an arresting hand upon
 his arm; and (while the garçon whisks away the douceur with cheerful
 alacrity) instructs him for future occasions_.)

O.W. My dear L.H., you should not do that! The Frenchman, for these
casual services, gives what you call a penny. The Englishman gives
what some of them call “tuppence”; not because he does not know that
the Frenchman’s penny is sufficient, but because he is an Englishman.
If you give more than that the waiter only thinks that you do not know
where you are.

L.H. (_who has a weakness for putting himself in the right, even in
quite small matters_.) Ah, yes, Mr. Wilde, that may be, but here, at
St. Helena, one tips the waiters differently.

 (_It is touching to see what pleasure that foolish but fortunate
 little “mot” has given to the man for whom it was designed. They have
 all now risen; and their next move will be to the tabled interior,
 where pleasant courses are awaiting them. But the forward movement is
 delayed; and it is with a curious air of finality, as though already
 taking his leave, that O.W. speaks._)

O.W. My friends, we have had a wonderful hour together. I have been
very happy. Excuse me: I am going across to get an English paper.
The woman at the kiosk, who sells them, is a charming character: she
compliments my accent by pretending to think that I am French. Go in: I
beg you not to wait for me.

 (_They see him cross the street, with his accustomed air of leisurely
 deliberation—a little amused to notice how the vehement traffic has to
 pause and make way for him. At the kiosk he and the woman exchange
 words and smiles. He lifts his hat and turns away._)

L.H. (_startled_). He’s not coming back?

R.R. Harvey Jerrold wants kicking. Poor Oscar!

H.A. Shall I go after him?

R.R. No, no! Let him go. We understand.

 (_And they all stand and watch, as he passes slowly down the street,
 till he disappears in the crowd._)




Footnote


Twenty years after a man’s death is usually a sufficient time to
compose, in their proper unimportance, the prejudices and enmities
which have surrounded his career. But in this particular case, I
suppose, it has hardly done so; and the man who was so greatly
over-rated by his own following, during those ten years of literary and
social triumph which made him the vogue, was, in the ten years after,
as carefully under-rated, not because the quality of his work had
proved itself poor and ephemeral, but because of something that he had
done.

The blight which fell on his literary reputation was about as sensible
in its application as it would have been for historians to deny that
Marlborough was a great general because he peculated and took bribes,
or that Mahomet was a great religious leader because he had a number of
wives, or that David was a great poet because he preferred the love
of Jonathan to the love of women. In which last-named absurdity of
critical inconsequence we have something very much to the point; and it
is upon that point, and because the world has been so unintelligently
slow in seizing it, that I am moved to write this footnote to my
dialogue, with which, in subject, it has so little to do.

Always, so long as it stays remembered, the name of Oscar Wilde
is likely to carry with it a shadowy implication of that strange
pathological trouble which caused his downfall. And whatever else may
be said for or against the life of promiscuous indulgence he appears
to have led, his downfall did at least this great service to humanity,
that—by the sheer force of notoriety—it made the “unmentionable”
mentionable; and marks the dividing of the ways between the cowardice
and superstitious ignorance with which the problem had been treated
even by sociologists and men of science, and the fearless analysis
of origins and causes which has now become their more reputable
substitute.

Obscurantists may still insist on treating as an acquired depravity
what medical research has now proved to be an involuntary or congenital
deflection from a “normality” which exact science finds it harder and
harder to define. But in spite of these surviving resistances to the
formation of a new social conscience, intelligence is at work, and
to-day it is no longer eccentric or disreputable to insist that the
whole problem shall henceforth be studied and treated from the medical,
rather than from the criminal standpoint; so that in future, whatever
limitation of reticence or segregation society decides to impose on
men whose tendencies are ineradicably homo-sexual, the treatment shall
be health-giving in character and purpose, carrying with it no social
or moral damnation of those who, in the vast majority of cases, have
been made what they are by forces outside their own volition, either at
their birth or in early infancy.

The comical ignorance and ineptitude of which quite brilliant minds
are capable in regard to a matter that they wish to relegate to mental
obscurity, was well exemplified in the remarks made to me on this
subject, only ten years ago, by one who ranked then as now among the
most eminent of British bacteriologists. He had been told, he said,
that homo-sexuality came from meat-eating; and his solution of the
problem was to have all homo-sexuals put to death. But the subject,
he went on to say, did not interest him; nor did he propose to give
the meat-eaters (of whom he himself was one) any warning of their
pathological danger, or of his proposed remedy for the pathological
condition to which their meat-eating habits might bring them. Having
escaped the infection himself, he was quite willing, apparently, to
leave the rest to chance. It was, he had been told, very prevalent, but
personally he had not come across it. And so he continued to interest
himself in bacteriology, through which fame, wealth, and title had come
to him.

As I left his consulting-room I felt as though I had just emerged from
the Middle Ages, and from listening to the discourse of some learned
theologian—a marvellous expert in the doctrine of the Incarnation
and the Procession of the Holy Spirit, but still believing that the
sun went round the earth, and that the earth was flat; and though—God
aiding him—he would put to death any who thought otherwise, the subject
did not interest him!

He remains to me a portentous example of how a really brilliant mind
can totter into second infancy when called upon to dig for the roots of
knowledge outside his own cabbage-patch in hitherto uncultivated ground.

What led me to this strange scientific experience was very much to
the point. For it was just then, ten years ago, that I had been asked
to join a society having for its object the formation of a more
intelligent and less servile public opinion on this and various other
difficult sex problems which are a part of human nature. I agreed to do
so upon one condition—that membership should be open to men and women
on equal terms, and that women should be upon the executive committee.
Even in that comparatively enlightened group the proposal seemed
revolutionary; and I was asked whether I realized that such things
as homo-sexuality would have to be openly discussed. My answer was:
“That is why we must include women.” I contended that where a problem
concerns both sexes alike, only by the full co-operation of both sexes
can it be rightly solved.

My contention was admitted to be sound, and the society was formed
on the equal basis I had advocated; and perhaps one of its best
discoveries is that, in a body of social goodwill, there is no such
thing as “the unmentionable.” Since then, women have been called to
juries, and it has become a duty of good citizenship for them to share
with men the knowledge of things which the obscurantists, in order to
keep them as a male perquisite, chose to describe as “unmentionable.”

“E pur se muove”: that wise old saying continues to have its
application in every age. Always, at some contentious point in the
affairs of men, belief in knowledge and belief in ignorance stand as
antagonists. The nineteenth century had its superstitions, quite as
much as the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, when loyalty to
the Mosaic law made the persecution of witchcraft a religious duty.
And a surviving superstition of our own time has been that false and
foolish moral insistence on regarding certain maladjustments of nature
as something too horrible to be mentioned, and of putting the victims
thereof in a class apart, rather lower than the ordinary criminal.
The old theological idea that the world was flat reproduced itself in
another form; and so, in spite of the advance of science, the moral
world had to remain flat and simple, unencumbered by nature-problems,
for fear of the terrible things it might have to contain and account
for if once admitted to be round.

Twentieth-century science is busy proving to us that the moral world is
dangerously round; and it is no use trying to fall off it by walking
about it with shut eyes. From a flat world that method of escape might
be conceivably possible, but not from a round. A round world has us in
its grip; and it is our duty as intelligent human beings to face the
danger and get used to it.

What a strange irony of life that the man who tried most to detach
himself from the unlovely complications of modern civilization should
have become the symbol, or the byword, of one of its least solved
problems; and that society’s blind resentment toward a phenomenon it
had not the patience or the charity to trace to its origin, should have
supplied him so savagely with that “complete life of the artist” which
success could never have given him.




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 44 Changed: Oscar, you are perfectly asburd!
             to: Oscar, you are perfectly absurd!





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