Copyright, 1924, byD. Appleton and CompanyPrinted in the United States of America
Copyright, 1924, byD. Appleton and CompanyPrinted in the United States of America
Foreword
Ina 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 certainminds and events that had gone to makehistory.
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 outsideof 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 ofDethronements; but I was warned by a good authority that if I did so the interest of my commentators would be largelydiverted 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 sorryfeatures 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 theUniversal 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 smokeof 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, inThe 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 ofA 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 onmy 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 andtemperament—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.