Laurence Housman

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 [Pg 35] 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 34] of Waterloo, the enduring ignominy and defeat of St. Helena. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, [Pg 23] 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 36] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 47] in the other attempt there is a certain spiritual snobbery. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.) ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The genius of the artist preserves them from being ever quite realized. But it has to be done carelessly.
[Pg 24]
(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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 48] know from day to day whether that stranger is going to murder us in cold blood, or make us become saints. ”

“ They succumb to it intellectually, morally, spiritually. On that Carlyle wrecked his chances of producing a permanent [Pg 33] 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. ”

“ 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. ”