But most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to bring on me.  The basis of character is will power, and my will power became absolutely subject[45] to yours.  It sounds a grotesque thing to say, but it is none the less true.  Those incessant scenes that seemed to be almost physically necessary to you, and in which your mind and body grew distorted, and you became a thing as terrible to look at as to listen to:  that dreadful mania you inherit from your father, the mania for writing revolting and loathsome letters:  your entire lack of any control over your emotions as displayed in your long resentful moods of sullen silence, no less than in the sudden fits of almost epileptic rage:  all these things in reference to which one of my letters to you, left by you lying about in the Savoy or some other hotel, and so produced in court by your father’s counsel, contained an entreaty not devoid of pathos, had you at that time been able to recognise pathos either in its elements or its expression—­these, I say, were the origin and causes of my fatal yielding to you in your daily increasing demands.  You wore me out.  It was the triumph of the smaller over the bigger nature.  It was the case of that tyranny of the weak over the strong which somewhere in one of my plays I describe as being “the only tyranny that lasts.”  And it was inevitable.  In every relation of life with others one has to find some moyen de vivre.

I had always thought that my giving up to you in small things meant nothing:  that when a great moment arrived I could myself re-assert my will power in its natural superiority.  It was not so.  At the great moment my will power completely failed me.  In life there is really no great or small thing.  All things are of equal value and of equal size.  My habit—­due to indifference chiefly at first—­of giving up to you in everything had become insensibly a real part of my nature.  Without my knowing it, it had stereotyped my temperament to one permanent and fatal mood.  That is why, in the subtle epilogue to the first edition of his essays, Pater says that “Failure is to form habits.”  When he said it the dull Oxford people thought the phrase a mere wilful inversion of the somewhat wearisome text of Aristotelian Ethics, but there is a wonderful, a terrible truth hidden in it.  I had allowed you to sap my strength of character, and to me the formation of a habit had proved to be not failure merely, but ruin.  Ethically you had been even still more destructive to me than you had been artistically.

The warrant once granted, your will, of course, directed everything.  At a time when I should have been in London taking wise counsel and calmly considering the hideous trap in which I had allowed myself to be caught—­the booby trap, as your father calls it to the present day—­you insisted on my taking you to Monte Carlo, of all revolting places on God’s earth, that all day and all night as