Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (291 page)

“You must not say that,” I replied; “you are going too far; the Venus of Milo is as fine as any Apollo, in sheer beauty; the flowing curves appeal to me more than your weedy lines.”

“Perhaps they do, Frank,” he retorted, “but you must see that the boy is far more beautiful. It is your sex-instinct, your sinful sex-instinct which prevents you worshipping the higher form of beauty. Height and length of limb give distinction; slightness gives grace; women are squat! You must admit that the boy’s figure is more beautiful; the appeal it makes far higher, more spiritual.”

“Six of one and half-a-dozen of the other,” I barked. “Your sculptor knows it is just as hard to find an ideal boy’s figure as an ideal girl’s; and if he has to modify the most perfect girl’s figure, he has to modify the most perfect boy’s figure as well. If he refines the girl’s breasts and hips he has to pad the boy’s ribs and tone down the great staring knee-bones and the unlovely large ankles; but please go on, I enjoy your special pleading and your romantic passion in
terests me; though you have not yet come to the romance, let alone the passion.”

“Oh, Frank,” he cried, “the story is full of romance; every meeting was an event in my life. You have no idea how intelligent he is; every evening we spent together he was different; he had grown, developed. I lent him books and he read them, and his mind opened from week to week like a flower, till in a short time, a few months, he became an exquisite companion and disciple. Frank, no girl grows like that; they have no minds, and what intelligence they have is all given to wretched vanities, and personal jealousies. There is no intellectual companionship possible with them. They want to talk of dress, and not of ideas, and how persons look and not of what they are. How can you have the flower of romance without a brotherhood of soul?”

“Sisterhood of soul seems to me infinitely finer,” I said, “but go on.”

“I shall convince you,” he declared; “I must be able to, because all reason is on my side. Let me give you one instance. Of course my boy had his bicycle; he used to come to me on it and go to and fro from the barracks on it. When you came to Paris in September, you invited me to dine one night, one Thursday night, when he was to come to me. I told him I had
to go and dine with you. He didn’t mind; but was glad when I said I had an English editor for a friend, glad that I should have someone to talk to about London and the people I used to know. If it had been a woman I loved, I should have been forced to tell lies: she would have been jealous of my past. I told him the truth, and when I spoke about you he grew interested and excited, and at last he put a wish before me. He wanted to know if he might come and leave his bicycle outside and look through the window of the restaurant, just to see us at dinner. I told him there might possibly be women-guests. He replied that he would be delighted to see me in dress-clothes talking to gentlemen and ladies.

“Might he come?” he persisted.

“Of course I said he could come, and he came, but I never saw him.

“The next time we met he told me all about it; how he had picked you out from my description of you, and how he knew Baüer from his likeness to Dumas
père
, and he was delightful about it all.

“Now, Frank, would any girl have come to see you enjoying yourself with other people? Would any girl have stared through the window and been glad to see you inside amusing yourself with other men and women? You know
there’s not a girl on earth with such unselfish devotion. There is no comparison, I tell you, between the boy and the girl; I say again deliberately, you don’t know what a great romantic passion is or the high unselfishness of true love.”

“You have put it with extraordinary ability,” I said, “as of course I knew you would. I think I can understand the charm of such companionship; but only from the young boy’s point of view, not from yours. I can understand how you have opened to him a new heaven and a new earth, but what has he given you? Nothing. On the other hand any finely gifted girl would have given you something. If you had really touched her heart, you would have found in her some instinctive tenderness, some proof of unselfish, exquisite devotion that would have made your eyes prickle with a sense of inferiority.

“After all, the essence of love, the finest spirit of that companionship you speak about, of the sisterhood of soul, is that the other person should quicken you, too; open to you new horizons, discover new possibilities; and how could your soldier boy help you in any way? He brought you no new ideas, no new feelings, could reveal no new thoughts to you. I can see no romance, no growth of soul in such a connection. But the girl is different from the man in all ways. You have as much to learn from her as she has
from you, and neither of you can come to ideal growth in any other way: you are both half-parts of humanity — complements, and in need of each other.”

“You have put it very cunningly, Frank, as I expected you would, to return your compliment, but you must admit that with the boy, at any rate, you have no jealousy, no mean envyings, no silly inanities. There it is, Frank, some of us hate ‘cats.’ I can give reasons for my dislike, which to me are conclusive.”

“The boy who would beg for a bicycle is not likely to be without mean envyings,” I replied. “Now you have talked about romance and companionship,” I went on, “but can you really feel passion?”

“Frank, what a silly question! Do you remember how Socrates says he felt when the chlamys blew aside and showed him the limbs of Charmides? Don’t you remember how the blood throbbed in his veins and how he grew blind with desire, a scene more magical than the passionate love-lines of Sappho?

“There is no other passion to be compared with it. A woman’s passion is degrading. She is continually tempting you. She wants your desire as a satisfaction for her vanity more than anything else, and her vanity is insatiable if her desire is weak, and so she continually
tempts you to excess, and then blames you for the physical satiety and disgust which she herself has created. With a boy there is no vanity in the matter, no jealousy, and therefore none of the tempting, not a tenth part of the coarseness; and consequently desire is always fresh and keen. Oh, Frank, believe me, you don’t know what a great romantic passion is.”

“What you say only shows how little you know women,” I replied. “If you explained all this to the girl who loves you, she would see it at once, and her tenderness would grow with her self-abnegation; we all grow by giving. If the woman cares more than the man for caresses and kindness, it is because she feels more tenderness, and is capable of intenser devotion.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about, Frank,” he retorted. “You repeat the old accepted commonplaces. The boy came to the station with me to-night. He knew I was going away for six months. His heart was like lead, tears gathered in his eyes again and again in spite of himself, and yet he tried to be gay and bright for my sake; he wanted to show me how glad he was that I should be happy, how thankful he was for all I had done for him, and the new mental life I had created in him. He did his best to keep my courage up. I cried, but he shook his tears away. ‘Six
months will soon be over,’ he said, ‘and perhaps you will come back to me, and I shall be glad again.’ Meantime he will write charming letters to me, I’m sure.

“Would any girl take a parting like that? No; she would be jealous and envious, and wonder why you were enjoying yourself in the South while she was condemned to live in the rainy, cold North. Would she ask you to tell her of all the beautiful girls you met, and whether they were charming and bright, as the boy asked me to tell him of all the interesting people I should meet, so that he, too, might take an interest in them? A girl in his place would have been ill with envy and malice and jealousy. Again I repeat, you don’t know what a high romantic passion is.”

“Your argument is illogical,” I cried, “if the girl is jealous, it is because she has given herself more completely: her exclusiveness is the other side of her devotion and tenderness; she wants to do everything for you, to be with you and help you in every way, and in case of illness or poverty or danger, you would find how much more she had to give than your red-breeched soldier.”

“That’s merely a rude gibe and not an argument, Frank.”

“As good an argument as your ‘cats,’” I
replied; “your little soldier boy with his nickel-plated bicycle only makes me grin,” and I grinned.

“You are unpardonable,” he cried, “unpardonable, and in your soul you know that all the weight of argument is on my side. In your soul you must know it. What is the food of passion, Frank, but beauty, beauty alone, beauty always, and in beauty of form and vigour of life there is no comparison. If you loved beauty as intensely as I do, you would feel as I feel. It is beauty which gives me joy, makes me drunk as with wine, blind with insatiable desire....”

CHAPTER XXII
I

He was an incomparable companion, perfectly amiable, yet vivid, and eager as a child, always interested and interesting. We awoke at Avignon and went out in pyjamas and overcoats to stretch our legs and get a bowl of coffee on the platform in the pearly grey light of early morning. After coffee and cigarettes he led the way to the other end of the platform, that we might catch a glimpse of the town wall which, though terribly restored, yet, when seen from a distance, transports one back five hundred years to the age of chivalry.

“How I should have loved to be a troubadour, or a
trouvère
, Frank; that was my true
métier
, to travel from castle to castle singing love songs and telling romantic stories to while away the tedium of the lives of the great. Fancy the reception they would have given me for bringing a new joy into their castled isolation, new ideas, new passions — a breath of gossip and scandal from the outside world to relieve the intolerable boredom of the middle ages. I should have been kept at the Court of Aix: I think they would have bound me with flower-chains, and
my fame would have spread all through the sunny vineyards and grey olive-clad hills of Provence.”

When we got into the train again he began:

“We stop next at Marseilles, don’t we, Frank? A great historic town for nearly three thousand years. One really feels a barbarian in comparison, and yet all I know of Marseilles is that it is famous for
bouillabaisse
. Suppose we stop and get some?”

“
Bouillabaisse
,” I replied, “is not peculiar to Marseilles or the
Rue Cannebière
. You can get it all along this coast. There is only one thing necessary to it and that is
rascasse
, a fish caught only among the rocks: you will get excellent
bouillabaisse
at lunch where we are going.”

“Where are we going? You have not told me yet.”

“It is for you to decide,” I answered. “If you want perfect quiet there are two places in the Esterel mountains, Agay and La Napoule. Agay is in the middle of the Esterel. You would be absolutely alone there except for the visit of an occasional French painter. La Napoule is eight or ten miles from Cannes, so that you are within reach of a town and its amusements. There is still another place I had thought of, quieter than either, in the mountains behind Nice.”

“Nice sounds wonderful, Frank, but I should meet too many English people there who would know me, and they are horribly rude. I think we will choose La Napoule.”

About ten o’clock we got out at La Napoule and installed ourselves in the little hotel, taking up three of the best rooms on the second or top floor, much to the delight of the landlord. At twelve we had breakfast under a big umbrella in the open air, looking over the sea. I had put the landlord on his mettle, and he gave us a fry of little red mullet, which made us understand how tasteless whitebait are: then a plain beefsteak
aux pommes
, a morsel of cheese, and a sweet omelette. We both agreed that we had had a most excellent breakfast. The coffee left a good deal to be desired, and there was no champagne on the list fit to drink; but both these faults could be remedied by the morrow, and were remedied.

We spent the rest of the day wandering between the seashore and the pine-clad hills. The next morning I put in some work, but in the afternoon I was free to walk and explore. On one of my first tramps I discovered a monastery among the hills hundreds of feet above the sea, built and governed by an Italian monk. I got to know the Père Vergile
and had a great talk
with him. He was both wise and strong, with ingratiating, gentle manners. Had he gone as a boy from his little Italian fishing village to New York or Paris, he would have certainly come to greatness and honour. One afternoon I took Oscar to see him: the monastery was not more than three-quarters of an hour’s stroll from our hotel; but Oscar grumbled at the walk as a nuisance, said it was miles and miles; the road, too, was rough, and the sun hot. The truth was, he was abnormally lazy. But he fascinated the Italian with his courteous manner and vivid speech, and as soon as we were alone the Abbé asked me who he was.

“He must be a great man,” he said, “he has the stamp of a great man, and he must have lived in courts: he has the charming, graceful, smiling courtesy of the great.”

“Yes,” I nodded mysteriously, “a great man — incognito.”

The Abbé kept us to dinner, made us taste of his oldest wines, and a special liqueur of his own distilling; told us how he had built the monastery with no money, and when we exclaimed with wonder, reproved us gently:

“All great things are built with faith, and not with money; why wonder that this little building stands firmly on that everlasting foundation?”

When we came out of the monastery it was already night, and the moonlight was throwing fantastic leafy shadows on the path, as we walked down through the avenue of forest to the sea shore.

“You remember those words of Vergil, Frank —
per amica silentia lunæ
— they always seem to me indescribably beautiful; the most magic line about the moon ever written, except Browning’s in the poem in which he mentioned Keats— ‘him even.’ I love that ‘amica silentia.’ What a beautiful nature the man had who could feel ‘the
friendly
silences of the moon.’”

When we got down the hill he declared himself tired.

“Tired after a mile?” I asked.

“Tired to death, worn out,” he said, laughing at his own laziness.

“Shall we get a boat and row across the bay?”

“How splendid! of course, let’s do it,” and we went down to the landing stage. I had never seen the water so calm; half the bay was veiled by the mountain, and opaque like unpolished steel; a little further out, the water was a purple shield, emblazoned with shimmering silver. We called a fisherman and explained what we wanted. When we got into the boat, to my astonishment, Oscar began calling the fisher boy
by his name; evidently he knew him quite well. When we landed I went up from the boat to the hotel, leaving Oscar and the boy together....

A fortnight taught me a good deal about Oscar at this time; he was intensely indolent: quite content to kill time by the hour talking to the fisher lads, or he would take a little carriage and drive to Cannes and amuse himself at some wayside café.

He never cared to walk and I walked for miles daily, so that we spent only one or at most two afternoons a week together, meeting so seldom that nearly all our talks were significant. Several times contemporary names came up and I was compelled to notice for the first time that really he was contemptuous of almost everyone, and had a sharp word to say about many who were supposed to be his friends. One day we spoke of Ricketts and Shannon; I was saying that had Ricketts lived in Paris he would have had a great reputation: many of his designs I thought extraordinary, and his intellect was peculiarly French —
mordant
even. Oscar did not like to hear praise of anyone.

“Do you know my word for them, Frank? I like it. I call them ‘Temper and Temperament.’”

Was his punishment making him a little spiteful or was it the temptation of the witty phrase?

“What do you think of Arthur Symons?” I asked.

“Oh, Frank, I said of him long ago that he was a sad example of an Egoist who had no Ego.”

“And what of your compatriot, George Moore? He’s popular enough,” I continued.

“Popular, Frank, as if that counted. George Moore has conducted his whole education in public. He had written two or three books before he found out there was such a thing as English grammar. He at once announced his discovery and so won the admiration of the illiterate. A few years later he discovered that there was something architectural in style, that sentences had to be built up into a paragraph, and paragraphs into chapters and so on. Naturally he cried this revelation, too, from the housetops, and thus won the admiration of the journalists who had been making rubble-heaps all their lives without knowing it. I’m much afraid, Frank, in spite of all his efforts, he will die before he reaches the level from which writers start. It’s a pity because he has certainly a little real talent. He differs from Symons in that he has an Ego, but his Ego has five senses and no soul.”

“What about Bernard Shaw?” I probed further, “after all he’s going to count.”

“Yes, Frank, a man of real ability but with a bleak mind. Humorous gleams as of wintry sunlight on a bare, harsh landscape. He has no passion, no feeling, and without passionate feeling how can one be an artist? He believes in nothing, loves nothing, not even Bernard Shaw, and really, on the whole, I don’t wonder at his indifference,” and he laughed mischievously.

“And Wells?” I asked.

“A scientific Jules Verne,” he replied with a shrug.

“Did you ever care for Hardy?” I continued.

“Not greatly. He has just found out that women have legs underneath their dresses, and this discovery has almost wrecked his life. He writes poetry, I believe, in his leisure moments, and I am afraid it will be very hard reading. He knows nothing of love; passion to him is a childish illness like measles — poor unhappy spirit!”

“You might be describing Mrs. Humphry Ward,” I cried.

“God forbid, Frank,” he exclaimed with such mock horror I had to laugh. “After all, Hardy is a writer and a great landscape painter.”

“I don’t know why it is,” he went on, “but I am always match-making when I think of English celebrities. I should so much like to have introduced Mrs. Humphry Ward blushing at eighteen or twenty to Swinburne, who
would of course have bitten her neck in a furious kiss, and she would have run away and exposed him in court, or else have suffered agonies of mingled delight and shame in silence.

“And if one could only marry Thomas Hardy to Victoria Cross he might have gained some inkling of real passion with which to animate his little keepsake pictures of starched ladies. A great many writers, I think, might be saved in this way, but there would still be left the Corellis and Hall Caines that one could do nothing with except bind them back to back, which would not even tantalise them, and throw them into the river, a new
noyade
: the Thames at Barking, I think, would be about the place for them....”

“Where do you go every afternoon?” I asked him once casually.

“I go to Cannes, Frank, and sit in a café and look across the sea to Capri, where Tiberius used to sit like a spider watching, and I think of myself as an exile, the victim of one of his inscrutable suspicions, or else I am in Rome looking at the people dancing naked, but with gilded lips, through the streets at the
Floralia
. I sup with the
arbiter elegantiarum
and come back to La Napoule, Frank,” and he pulled his jowl, “to the simple life and the charm of restful friendship.”

More and more clearly I saw that the effort, the hard work, of writing was altogether beyond
him: he was now one of those men of genius, talkers merely, half artists, half dreamers, whom Balzac describes contemptuously as wasting their lives, “talking to hear themselves talk”; capable indeed of fine conceptions and of occasional fine phrases, but incapable of the punishing toil of execution; charming companions, fated in the long run to fall to misery and destitution.

Constant creation is the first condition of art as it is the first condition of life.

I asked him one day if he remembered the terrible passage about those “eunuchs of art” in “La Cousine Bette.”

“Yes, Frank,” he replied; “but Balzac was probably envious of the artist-talker; at any rate, we who talk should not be condemned by those to whom we dedicate our talents. It is for posterity to blame us; but after all I have written a good deal. Do you remember how Browning’s Sarto defends himself?

“Some good son Paint my two hundred pictures — let him try.”

He did not see that Balzac, one of the greatest talkers that ever lived according to Théophile Gautier, was condemning the temptation to which he himself had no doubt yielded too often. To my surprise, Oscar did not even read much now. He was not eager to hear new thoughts, a little rebellious to any new mental influence.
He had reached his zenith, I suppose: had begun to fossilise, as men do when they cease to grow.

One day at lunch I questioned him:

“You told me once that you always imagined yourself in the place of every historic personage. Suppose you had been Jesus, what religion would you have preached?”

“What a wonderful question!” he cried. “What religion is mine? What belief have I?

“I believe most of all in personal liberty for every human soul. Each man ought to do what he likes, to develop as he will. England, or rather London, for I know little of England outside London, was an ideal place to me, till they punished me because I did not share their tastes. What an absurdity it all was, Frank: how dared they punish me for what is good in my eyes? How dared they?” and he fell into moody thought.... The idea of a new gospel did not really interest him.

It was about this time he first told me of a new play he had in mind.

“It has a great scene, Frank,” he said. “Imagine a
roué
of forty-five who is married; incorrigible, of course, Frank, a great noble who gets the person he is in love with to come and stay with him in the country. One evening his wife, who has gone upstairs to lie down
with a headache, is behind a screen in a room half asleep; she is awakened by her husband’s courting. She cannot move, she is bound breathless to her couch; she hears everything. Then, Frank, the husband comes to the door and finds it locked, and knowing that his wife is inside with the host, beats upon the door and will have entrance, and while the guilty ones whisper together — the woman blaming the man, the man trying to think of some excuse, some way out of the net — the wife gets up very quietly and turns on the lights while the two cowards stare at her with wild surmise. She passes to the door and opens it and the husband rushes in to find his hostess as well as the host and his wife. I think it is a great scene, Frank, a great stage picture.”