Frank Harris - Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2)

F >> Frank Harris >> Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2)

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"Frank, they roared with laughter, and, to do Curzon justice, at the end
he came up to me and apologised, and was charming. Indeed, they all made
much of me and we had a great night.

"I remember we talked all the night through, or rather I talked and
everyone else listened, for the great principle of the division of
labour is beginning to be understood in English Society. The host gives
excellent food, excellent wine, excellent cigarettes, and
super-excellent coffee, that's his part, and all the men listen, that's
theirs: while I talk and the stars twinkle their delight.

"Wyndham was there, too; you know George Wyndham, with his beautiful
face and fine figure: he is infinitely cleverer than Curzon but he has
not Curzon's push and force, or perhaps, as you say, he is not in such
close touch with the average man as Curzon; he was charming to me.

"In the morning we all trooped out to see the dawn, and some of the
young ones, wild with youth and high spirits, Curzon of course among the
number, stripped off their clothes and rushed down to the lake and began
swimming and diving about like a lot of schoolboys. There is a great
deal of the schoolboy in all Englishmen, that is what makes them so
lovable. When they came out they ran over the grass to dry themselves,
and then began playing lawn tennis, just as they were, stark naked, the
future rulers of England. I shall never forget the scene. Wilfred Blunt
had gone up to his wife's apartments and had changed into some fantastic
pyjamas; suddenly he opened an upper window and came out and perched
himself, cross-legged, on the balcony, looking down at the mad game of
lawn tennis, for all the world like a sort of pink and green Buddha,
while I strolled about with someone, and ordered fresh coffee and talked
till the dawn came with silent silver feet lighting up the beautiful
greenery of the park....

"Now George Curzon plays king in India: Wyndham is on the way to power,
and I'm hiding in shame and poverty here in Paris, an exile and outcast.
Do you wonder that I cannot write, Frank? The awful injustice of life
maddens me. After all, what have they done in comparison with what I
have done?

"Close the eyes of all of us now and fifty years hence, or a hundred
years hence, no one will know anything about Curzon or Wyndham or Blunt:
whether they lived or died will be a matter of indifference to everyone;
but my comedies and my stories and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' will be
known and read by millions, and even my unhappy fate will call forth
world-wide sympathy."

It was all true enough, and good to keep in mind; but even when Oscar
spoke of greater men than himself, he took the same attitude: his
self-esteem was extraordinary. He did not compare his work with that of
others; was not anxious to find his true place, as even Shakespeare was.
From the beginning, from youth on, he was convinced that he was a great
man and going to do great things. Many of us have the same belief and
are just as persuaded, but the belief is not ever present with us as it
was with Oscar, moulding all his actions. For instance, I remarked once
that his handwriting was unforgettable and characteristic. "I worked at
it," he said, "as a boy; I wanted a distinctive handwriting; it had to
be clear and beautiful and peculiar to me. At length I got it but it
took time and patience. I always wanted everything about me to be
distinctive," he added, smiling.

He was proud of his physical appearance, inordinately pleased with his
great height, vain of it even. "Height gives distinction," he declared,
and once even went so far as to say, "One can't picture Napoleon as
small; one thinks only of his magnificent head and forgets the little
podgy figure; it must have been a great nuisance to him: small men have
no dignity."

All this utterly unconscious of the fact that most tall men have no ever
present-sense of their height as an advantage. Yet on the whole one
agrees with Montaigne that height is the chief beauty of a man: it gives
presence.

Oscar never learned anything from criticism; he had a good deal of
personal dignity in spite of his amiability, and when one found fault
with his work, he would smile vaguely or change the subject as if it
didn't interest him.

Again and again I played on his self-esteem to get him to write; but
always met the same answer.

"Oh, Frank, it's impossible, impossible for me to work under these
disgraceful conditions."

"But you can have better conditions now and lots of money if you'll
begin to work."

He shook his head despairingly. Again and again I tried, but failed to
move him, even when I dangled money before him. I didn't then know that
he was receiving regularly more than L300 a year. I thought he was
completely destitute, dependent on such casual help as friends could
give him. I have a letter from him about this time asking me for even
L5[25] as if he were in extremest need.

On one of my visits to Paris after discussing his position, I could not
help saying to him:

"The only thing that will make you write, Oscar, is absolute, blank
poverty. That's the sharpest spur after all--necessity."

"You don't know me," he replied sharply. "I would kill myself. I can
endure to the end; but to be absolutely destitute would show me suicide
as the open door."

Suddenly his depressed manner changed and his whole face lighted up.

"Isn't it comic, Frank, the way the English talk of the 'open door,'
while their doors are always locked, and barred, and bolted, even their
church doors? Yet it is not hypocrisy in them; they simply cannot see
themselves as they are; they have no imagination."

A long pause, and he went on gravely:

"Suicide, Frank, is always the temptation of the unfortunate, a great
temptation."

"Suicide is the natural end of the world-weary," I replied; "but you
enjoy life intensely. For you to talk of suicide is ridiculous."

"Do you know that my wife is dead, Frank?"[26]

"I had heard it," I said.

"My way back to hope and a new life ends in her grave," he went on.
"Everything I do, Frank, is irrevocable."

He spoke with a certain grave sincerity.

"The great tragedies of the world are all final and complete; Socrates
would not escape death, though Crito opened the prison door for him. I
could not avoid prison, though you showed me the way to safety. We are
fated to suffer, don't you think? as an example to humanity--'an echo
and a light unto eternity.'"

"I think it would be finer, instead of taking the punishment lying down,
to trample it under your feet, and make it a rung of the ladder."

"Oh, Frank, you would turn all the tragedies into triumphs, you are a
fighter. My life is done."

"You love life," I cried, "as much as ever you did; more than anyone I
have ever seen."

"It is true," he cried, his face lighting up quickly, "more than anyone,
Frank. Life delights me. The people passing on the Boulevards, the play
of the sunshine in the trees; the noise, the quick movement of the cabs,
the costumes of the _cochers_ and _sergents-de-ville_; workers and
beggars, pimps and prostitutes--all please me to the soul, charm me, and
if you would only let me talk instead of bothering me to write I should
be quite happy. Why should I write any more? I have done enough for
fame.

"I will tell you a story, Frank," he broke off, and he told me a slight
thing about Judas. The little tale was told delightfully, with eloquent
inflections of voice and still more eloquent pauses....

"The end of all this is," I said before going back to London, "that you
will not write?"

"No, no, Frank," he said, "that I cannot write under these conditions.
If I had money enough; if I could shake off Paris, and forget those
awful rooms of mine and get to the Riviera for the winter and live in
some seaside village of the Latins with the blue sea at my feet, and the
blue sky above, and God's sunlight about me and no care for money, then
I would write as naturally as a bird sings, because I should be happy
and could not help it....

"You write stories taken from the fight of life; you are careless of
surroundings, I am a poet and can only sing in the sunshine when I am
happy."

"All right," I said, snatching at the half-promise. "It is just possible
that I may get hold of some money during the next few months, and, if I
do, you shall go and winter in the South, and live as you please without
care of money. If you can only sing when the cage is beautiful and
sunlight floods it, I know the very place for you."

With this sort of vague understanding we parted for some months.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] _Cfr._ Appendix.

[26] See Appendix.

CHAPTER XXII

"A GREAT ROMANTIC PASSION"

There is no more difficult problem for the writer, no harder task than
to decide how far he should allow himself to go in picturing human
weakness. We have all come from the animal and can all without any
assistance from books imagine easily enough the effects of unrestrained
self-indulgence. Yet it is instructive and pregnant with warning to
remark that, as soon as the sheet anchor of high resolve is gone, the
frailties of man tend to become master-vices. All our civilisation is
artificially built up by effort; all high humanity is the reward of
constant striving against natural desires.

In the fall of this year, 1898, I sold _The Saturday Review_ to Lord
Hardwicke and his friends, and as soon as the purchase was completed, I
think in November, I wired to Oscar that I should be in Paris in a short
time, and ready to take him to the South for his holiday. I sent him
some money to pave the way.

A few days later I crossed and wired to him from Calais to dine with me
at Durand's, and to begin dinner if I happened to be late.

While waiting for dinner, I said:

"I want to stay two or three days in Paris to see some pictures. Would
you be ready to start South on Thursday next?" It was then Monday, I
think.

"On Thursday?" he repeated. "Yes, Frank, I think so."

"There is some money for anything you may want to buy," I said and
handed him a cheque I had made payable to self and signed, for he knew
where he could cash it.

"How good of you, Frank, I cannot thank you enough. You start on
Thursday," he added, as if considering it.

"If you would rather wait a little," I said, "say so: I'm quite
willing."

"No, Frank, I think Thursday will do. We are really going to the South
for the whole winter. How wonderful; how gorgeous it will be."

We had a great dinner and talked and talked. He spoke of some of the new
Frenchmen, and at great length of Pierre Louys, whom he described as a
disciple:

"It was I, Frank, who induced him to write his 'Aphrodite' in prose." He
spoke, too, of the Grand Guignol Theatre.

"Le Grand Guignol is the first theatre in Paris. It looks like a
nonconformist chapel, a barn of a room with a gallery at the back and a
little wooden stage. There you see the primitive tragedies of real life.
They are as ugly and as fascinating as life itself. You must see it and
we will go to Antoine's as well: you must see Antoine's new piece; he is
doing great work."

We kept dinner up to an unconscionable hour. I had much to tell of
London and much to hear of Paris, and we talked and drank coffee till
one o'clock, and when I proposed supper Oscar accepted the idea with
enthusiasm.

"I have often lunched with you from two o'clock till nine, Frank, and
now I am going to dine with you from nine o'clock till breakfast
to-morrow morning."

"What shall we drink?" I asked.

"The same champagne, Frank, don't you think?" he said, pulling his jowl;
"there is no wine so inspiring as that dry champagne with the exquisite
_bouquet_. You were the first to say my plays were the champagne of
literature."

When we came out it was three o'clock and I was tired and sleepy with my
journey, and Oscar had drunk perhaps more than was good for him. Knowing
how he hated walking I got a _voiture de cercle_ and told him to take
it, and I would walk to my hotel. He thanked me and seemed to hesitate.

"What is it now?" I asked, wanting to get to bed.

"Just a word with you," he said, and drew me away from the carriage
where the _chasseur_ was waiting with the rug. When he got me three or
four paces away he said, hesitatingly:

"Frank, could you ... can you let me have a few pounds? I'm very hard
up."

I stared at him; I had given him a cheque at the beginning of the
dinner: had he forgotten? Or did he perchance want to keep the hundred
pounds intact for some reason? Suddenly it occurred to me that he might
be without even enough for the carriage. I took out a hundred franc note
and gave it to him.

"Thank you, so much," he said, thrusting it into his waistcoat pocket,
"it's very kind of you."

"You will turn up to-morrow at lunch at one?" I said, as I put him into
the little brougham.

"Yes, of course, yes," he cried, and I turned away.

Next day at lunch he seemed to meet me with some embarrassment:

"Frank, I want to ask you something. I'm really confused about last
night; we dined most wisely, if too well. This morning I found you had
given me a cheque, and I found besides in my waistcoat pocket a note for
a hundred francs. Did I ask you for it at the end? 'Tap' you, the French
call it," he added, trying to laugh.

I nodded.

"How dreadful!" he cried. "How dreadful poverty is! I had forgotten that
you had given me a cheque, and I was so hard up, so afraid you might go
away without giving me anything, that I asked you for it. Isn't poverty
dreadful?"

I nodded; I could not say a word: the fact told so much.

The chastened mood of self-condemnation did not last long with him or go
deep; soon he was talking as merrily and gaily as ever.

Before parting I said to him:

"You won't forget that you are going on Thursday night?"

"Oh, really!" he cried, to my surprise, "Thursday is very near; I don't
know whether I shall be able to come."

"What on earth do you mean?" I asked.

"The truth is, you know, I have debts to pay, and I have not enough."

"But I will give you more," I cried, "what will clear you?"

"Fifty more I think will do. How good you are!"

"I will bring it with me to-morrow morning."

"In notes please, will you? French money. I find I shall want it to pay
some little things at once, and the time is short."

I thought nothing of the matter. The next day at lunch I gave him the
money in French notes. That night I said to him:

"You know we are going away to-morrow evening: I hope you'll be ready? I
have got the tickets for the _Train de Luxe_."

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" he cried, "I can't be ready."

"What is it now?" I asked.

"Well, it's money. Some more debts have come in."

"Why will you not be frank with me, and tell me what you owe? I will
give you a cheque for it. I don't want to drag it out of you bit by bit.
Tell me a sum that will make you free, and I will give it to you. I want
you to have a perfect six months, and how can you if you are bothered
with debts?"

"How kind you are to me! Do you really mean it?"

"Of course I do."

"Really?" he said.

"Yes," I said, "tell me what it is."

"I think, I believe ... would another fifty be too much?"

"I will give it you to-morrow. Are you sure that will be enough?"

"Oh, yes, Frank; but let's go on Sunday. Sunday is such a good day for
travelling, and it's always so dull everywhere, we might just as well
spend it on the train. Besides, no one travels on Sunday in France, so
we are sure to be able to take our ease in our train. Won't Sunday do,
Frank?"

"Of course it will," I replied laughing; but a day or two later he was
again embarrassed, and again told me it was money, and then he confessed
to me that he was afraid at first I should not have paid all his debts,
if I had known how much they were, and so he thought by telling me of
them little by little, he would make sure at least of something. This
pitiful, pitiable confession depressed me on his account. It showed
practice in such petty tricks and all too little pride. Of course it did
not alter my admiration of his qualities; nor weaken in any degree my
resolve to give him a fair chance. If he could be saved, I was
determined to save him.

We met at the Gare de Lyons on Sunday evening. I found he had dined at
the buffet: there was a surprising number of empty bottles on the table;
he seemed terribly depressed.

"Someone was dining with me, Frank, a friend," he offered by way of
explanation.

"Why did he not wait? I should like to have seen him."

"Oh, he was no one you would have cared about, Frank," he replied.

I sat with him and took a cup of coffee, whilst waiting for the train.
He was wretchedly gloomy; scarcely spoke indeed; I could not make it
out. From time to time he sighed heavily, and I noticed that his eyes
were red, as if he had been crying.

"What is the matter?" I asked.

"I will tell you later, perhaps. It is very hard; parting is like
dying," and his eyes filled with tears.

We were soon in the train running out into the night. I was as
light-hearted as could be. At length I was free of journalism, I
thought, and I was going to the South to write my Shakespeare book, and
Oscar would work, too, when the conditions were pleasant. But I could
not win a single smile from him; he sat downcast, sighing hopelessly
from time to time.

"What on earth's the matter?" I cried. "Here you are going to the
sunshine, to blue skies, and the wine-tinted Mediterranean, and you're
not content. We shall stop in a hotel near a little sun-baked valley
running down to the sea. You walk from the hotel over a carpet of pine
needles, and when you get into the open, violets and anemones bloom
about your feet, and the scent of rosemary and myrtle will be in your
nostrils; yet instead of singing for joy the bird droops his feathers
and hangs his head as if he had the 'pip.'"

"Oh, don't," he cried, "don't," and he looked at me with tears filling
his eyes; "you don't know, Frank, what a great romantic passion is."

"Is that what you are suffering from?"

"Yes, a great romantic passion."

"Good God!" I laughed; "who has inspired this new devotion?"

"Don't make fun of me, Frank, or I will not tell you; but if you will
listen I will try to tell you all about it, for I think you should know,
besides, I think telling it may ease my pain, so come into the cabin and
listen.

"Do you remember once in the summer you wired me from Calais to meet you
at Maire's restaurant, meaning to go afterwards to Antoine's Theatre,
and I was very late? You remember, the evening Rostand was dining at the
next table. Well, it was that evening. I drove up to Maire's in time,
and I was just getting out of the victoria when a little soldier passed,
and our eyes met. My heart stood still; he had great dark eyes and an
exquisite olive-dark face--a Florentine bronze, Frank, by a great
master. He looked like Napoleon when he was first Consul, only--less
imperious, more beautiful....

"I got out hypnotised, and followed him down the Boulevard as in a
dream; the _cocher_ came running after me, I remember, and I gave him a
five franc piece, and waved him off; I had no idea what I owed him; I
did not want to hear his voice; it might break the spell; mutely I
followed my fate. I overtook the boy in a short time and asked him to
come and have a drink, and he said to me in his quaint French way:

"'_Ce n'est pas de refus!_' (Too good to refuse.)

"We went into a cafe, and I ordered something, I forget what, and we
began to talk. I told him I liked his face; I had had a friend once like
him; and I wanted to know all about him. I was in a hurry to meet you,
but I had to make friends with him first. He began by telling me all
about his mother, Frank, yes, his mother." Oscar smiled here in spite of
himself.

"But at last I got from him that he was always free on Thursdays, and he
would be very glad to see me then, though he did not know what I could
see in him to like. I found out that the thing he desired most in the
world was a bicycle; he talked of nickel-plated handle bars, and
chains--and finally I told him it might be arranged. He was very
grateful and so we made a rendezvous for the next Thursday, and I came
on at once to dine with you."

"Goodness!" I cried laughing. "A soldier, a nickel-plated bicycle and a
great romantic passion!"

"If I had said a brooch, or a necklace, some trinket which would have
cost ten times as much, you would have found it quite natural."

"Yes," I admitted, "but I don't think I'd have introduced the necklace
the first evening if there had been any romance in the affair, and the
nickel-plated bicycle to me seems irresistibly comic."

"Frank," he cried reprovingly, "I cannot talk to you if you laugh; I am
quite serious. I don't believe you know what a great romantic passion
is; I am going to convince you that you don't know the meaning of it."

"Fire away," I replied, "I am here to be convinced. But I don't think
you will teach me that there is any romance except where there is
another sex."

"Don't talk to me of the other sex," he cried with distaste in voice and
manner. "First of all in beauty there is no comparison between a boy and
a girl. Think of the enormous, fat hips which every sculptor has to tone
down, and make lighter, and the great udder breasts which the artist
has to make small and round and firm, and then picture the exquisite
slim lines of a boy's figure. No one who loves beauty can hesitate for a
moment. The Greeks knew that; they had the sense of plastic beauty, and
they understood that there is no comparison."

"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 interests
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 Baueer from his likeness to
Dumas _pere_, 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."

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