I should have thanked you long ago for sending me your charming
Fairy Tale, but the season with its red roses of pleasure has
absorbed me quite and I have almost forgotten how to write a
letter. However, I know you will forgive me, and I must tell you
how graceful and artistic I think your story is--full of delicate
imagination, and a symbolism suggestive of many meanings, not
narrowed down to one moral, but many-sided, as I think symbolism
should be.
But your strength lies not in such graceful winsome work. You
must deal directly with Life--modern terrible Life--wrestle with
it, and force it to yield you its secret. You have the power and
the pen. You know what passion is, what passions are. You can
give them their red raiment and make them move before us. You can
fashion puppets with bodies of flesh and souls of turmoil, and so
you must sit down and do a great thing.
It is all in you.
Your sincere friend,
OSCAR WILDE.
That Wilde was an artist in flattery as well as an egotist, is not
to be denied, but when quite early in our friendship I was shown by
a certain woman poet a presentation copy of Wilde’s book of poems
inscribed “To a poet and a poem,” and within the next few weeks saw
upon a table in the drawing-room of a very beautiful and singularly
accomplished woman, the late Rosamund Marriott-Watson (“Graham
Tomson”), who was a friend of Wilde’s and mine, a fine portrait of
himself also inscribed “To a poet and a poem,” I was not so foolish
as to take too seriously the flattering things he said.
Egotist as Wilde was, his was not the expansive egotism which, in
spreading its wings to invite admiration, seeks to eclipse and to
shut out its fellow egotists from their own little place in the
sun. Most egotists are eager only for flattery and applause. Wilde
was equally eager, but he was ready for the time being to forget
himself and his eagerness in applauding and flattering others. Not
many egotists of my acquaintance, especially literary egotists,
write letters like that I have quoted, in which there is no word of
himself, or of his own work, but only of his friend.
The last letter I ever received from Wilde is in the same vein. It
is as usual undated, but as the play to which it refers was his
first, _Lady Windermere’s Fan_, I am, by the assistance of Mr. Stuart
Mason’s admirably compiled _Oscar Wilde Calendar_, enabled to fix the
date as the middle of February, 1892.
HOTEL ALBEMARLE,
PICCADILLY, LONDON.