"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 pa.s.sion, no feeling, and without pa.s.sionate 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; pa.s.sion to him is a childish illness like measles--poor unhappy spirit!"
"You might be describing Mrs. Humphry Ward," I cried.
"G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion 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 cafe 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 dest.i.tution.
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 pa.s.sage 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 Theophile 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 _roue_ of forty-five who is married; incorrigible, of course, Frank, a great n.o.ble 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 pa.s.ses 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."
"It is," I said, "a great scene; why don"t you write it?"
"Perhaps I shall, Frank, one of these days, but now I am thinking of some poetry, a "Ballad of a Fisher Boy," a sort of companion to "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," in which I sing of liberty instead of prison, joy instead of sorrow, a kiss instead of an execution. I shall do this joy-song much better than I did the song of sorrow and despair."
"Like Davidson"s "Ballad of a Nun,"" I said, for the sake of saying something.
"Naturally Davidson would write the "Ballad of a Nun," Frank; his talent is Scotch and severe; but I should like to write "The Ballad of a Fisher Boy,"" and he fell to dreaming.
The thought of his punishment was oft with him. It seemed to him hideously wrong and unjust. But he never questioned the right of society to punish. He did not see that, if you once grant that, the wrong done to him could be defended.
"I used to think myself a lord of life," he said. "How dared those little wretches condemn me and punish me? Everyone of them tainted with a sensuality which I loathe."
To call him out of this bitter way of regret I quoted Shakespeare"s sonnet:
"For why should others" false adulterate eyes Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies, Which in their wills count bad what I think good?"
"His complaint is exactly yours, Oscar."
"It"s astonishing, Frank, how well you know him, and yet you deny his intimacy with Pembroke. To you he is a living man; you always talk of him as if he had just gone out of the room, and yet you persist in believing in his innocence."
"You misapprehend me," I said, "the pa.s.sion of his life was for Mary Fitton, to give her a name; I mean the "dark lady" of the sonnets, who was Beatrice, Cressida and Cleopatra, and you yourself admit that a man who has a mad pa.s.sion for a woman is immune, I think the doctors call it, to other influences."
"Oh, yes, Frank, of course; but how could Shakespeare with his beautiful nature love a woman to that mad excess?"
"Shakespeare hadn"t your overwhelming love of plastic beauty," I replied; "he fell in love with a dominant personality, the complement of his own yielding, amiable disposition."
"That"s it," he broke in, "our opposites attract us irresistibly--the charm of the unknown!"
"You often talk now," I went on, "as if you had never loved a woman; yet you must have loved--more than one."
"My salad days, Frank," he quoted, smiling, "when I was green in judgment, cold of blood."
"No, no," I persisted, "it is not a great while since you praised Lady So and So and the Terrys enthusiastically."
"Lady ----," he began gravely (and I could not but notice that the mere t.i.tle seduced him to conventional, poetic language), "moves like a lily in water; I always think of her as a lily; just as I used to think of Lily Langtry as a tulip, with a figure like a Greek vase carved in ivory. But I always adored the Terrys: Marion is a great actress with subtle charm and enigmatic fascination: she was my "Woman of no importance," artificial and enthralling; she belongs to my theatre--"
As he seemed to have lost the thread, I questioned again.
"And Ellen?"
"Oh, Ellen"s a perfect wonder," he broke out, "a great character. Do you know her history?" And then, without waiting for an answer, he continued:
"She began as a model for Watts, the painter, when she was only some fifteen or sixteen years of age. In a week she read him as easily as if he had been a printed book. He treated her with condescending courtesy, _en grand seigneur_, and, naturally, she had her revenge on him.
"One day her mother came in and asked Watts what he was going to do about Ellen. Watts said he didn"t understand. "You have made Ellen in love with you," said the mother, and it is impossible that could have happened unless you had been attentive to her."