R.R. Oscar, you are perfectly absurd!
O.W. (with a glance of genuine affection). But I have forgiven you, Robbie.
L.H. What happened?
O.W. To the man I helped? He never told me; and I would not ask. When we met afterwards, he had so greatly changed that, though I recognized him, he failed to recognize me. He became a Roman Catholic, and died at the age of twenty-three, a great artist—with half the critics and all the moralists still hating him. A charming person!
L.H. How often one hears that said, as though it were the final summing up of a man’s life and character—covering everything.
O.W. But surely it is so. What is more fundamental, more inalienable from a man’s personality, than charm? He may lose his looks; he may lose his character; but in almost every case that I have known—in spite of adverse circumstances—the charm remains, like the gift of a fairy godmother: something which cannot be got rid of. 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?
O.W. Never! You misunderstood me. “See himself” is what I said; and, seeing himself naked but not ashamed, learn the terrible meaning of his own soul—how it exists to torment and divide him against himself, but always as a stranger within his gates, remote, inscrutable, unnatural. For this thing, which he can never understand, goes deeper than the consciousness of self—it is something primitive, atavistic, fierce, and savage with a fanatical faith in gods whom this world tries no longer to believe in, but still fears, lest they should become true. 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 in the other attempt there is a certain spiritual snobbery. It is surely quite sufficient that He should know us, without any pretended recognition on our part, which, in any case, would be futile. 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:
Yes, in this sea of life enisled,
We mortal millions live alone!