The question astonished me so that I could not make up my mind at once; but when he pressed me later I had to tell him that Shakespeare had reached higher heights of thought and feeling than any modern, though I was probably wrong in saying that I knew him better than I knew a living man.

I had to go back to England and some little time elapsed before I could return to Paris; but I crossed again early in the summer, and found he had written nothing.

I often talked with him about it; but now he changed his ground a little.

“I can’t write, Frank.  When I take up my pen all the past comes back:  I cannot bear the thoughts ... regret and remorse, like twin dogs, wait to seize me at any idle moment.  I must go out and watch life, amuse, interest myself, or I should go mad.  You don’t know how sore it is about my heart, as soon as I am alone.  I am face to face with my own soul; the Oscar of four years ago, with his beautiful secure life, and his glorious easy triumphs, comes up before me, and I cannot stand the contrast....  My eyes burn with tears.  If you care for me, Frank, you will not ask me to write.”

“You promised to try,” I said somewhat harshly, “and I want you to try.  You haven’t suffered more than Dante suffered in exile and poverty; yet you know if he had suffered ten times as much, he would have written it all down.  Tears, indeed! the fire in his eyes would have dried the tears.”

“True enough, Frank, but Dante was all of one piece whereas I am drawn in two different directions.  I was born to sing the joy and pride of life, the pleasure of living, the delight in everything beautiful in this most beautiful world, and they took me and tortured me till I learned pity and sorrow.  Now I cannot sing the joy, heartily, because I know the suffering, and I was never made to sing of suffering.  I hate it, and I want to sing the love songs of joy and pleasure.  It is joy alone which appeals to my soul; the joy of life and beauty and love—­I could sing the song of Apollo the Sun-God, and they try to force me to sing the song of the tortured Marsyas.”

This to me was his true and final confession.  His second fall after leaving prison had put him “at war with himself.”  This is, I think, the very heart of truth about his soul; the song of sorrow, of pity and renunciation was not his song, and the experience of suffering prevented him from singing the delight of life and the joy he took in beauty.  It never seemed to occur to him that he could reach a faith which should include both self-indulgence and renunciation in a larger acceptance of life.

In spite of his sunny nature he had a certain amount of jealousy and envy in him which was always brought to light by the popular success of those whom he had known and measured.  I remember his telling me once that he wrote his first play because he was annoyed at the way Pinero was being praised—­“Pinero, who can’t write at all:  he is a stage-carpenter and nothing else.  His characters are made of dough; and never was there such a worthless style, or rather such a complete absence of style:  he writes like a grocer’s assistant.”