was a most pathetic appeal, and ended with what seemed
to me a threat of suicide and one not thinly veiled.
You had yourself often told me how many of your race
there had been who had stained their hands in their
own blood: your uncle certainly, your grandfather
possibly; many others in the mad bad line from which
you come. Pity, my old affection for you, regard
for your mother, to whom your death under such dreadful
circumstances would have been a blow almost too great
for her to bear, the horror of the idea that so young
a life, and one that amidst all its ugly faults had
still promise of beauty in it, should come to so revolting
an end, mere humanity itself—all these,
if excuses be necessary, must serve as an excuse for
consenting to accord you one last interview. When
I arrived in Paris, your tears breaking out again
and again all through the evening, and falling over
your cheeks like rain as we sat at dinner first at
Voisin’s, at supper at Paillard’s afterwards,
the unfeigned joy you evinced at seeing me, holding
my hand whenever you could, as though you were a gentle
and penitent child; your contrition, so simple and
sincere at the moment made me consent to renew our
friendship. Two days after we had returned to
London, your father saw you having luncheon with me
at the Cafe Royal, joined my table, drank of my wine,
and that afternoon, through a letter addressed to
you, began his first attack on me.... It may
be strange, but I had once again, I will not say the
chance, but the duty, of separating from you forced
on me. I need hardly remind you that I refer
to your conduct to me at Brighton from October 10th
to 13th, 1894. Three years is a long time for
you to go back. But we who live in prison, and
in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have
to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of
bitter moments. We have nothing else to think
of. Suffering, curious as it may sound to you,
is the means by which we exist, because it is the only
means by which we become conscious of existing; and
the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary
to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued
identity. Between myself and the memory of joy
lies a gulf no less deep than that between myself
and joy in its actuality. Had our life together
been as the world fancied it to be, one simply of
pleasure, profligacies and laughter, I would not be
able to recall a single passage in it. It is
because it was full of moments and days tragic, bitter,
sinister in their warnings, dull or dreadful in their
monotonous scenes and unseemly violences, that I can
see or hear each separate incident in its detail,
can indeed see or hear little else. So much in
this place do men live by pain that my friendship with
you, in the way through which I am forced to remember
it, appears to me always as a prelude consonant with
those varying modes of anguish which each day I have
to realise, nay more, to necessitate them even; as
though my life, whatever it had seemed to myself and
others, had all the while been a real symphony of
sorrow, passing through its rhythmically linked movements
to its certain resolution, with that inevitableness
that in Art characterises the treatment of every great
theme.... I spoke of your conduct to me on three
successive days three years ago, did I not?