ABSTRACT
Sir,—I am emboldened to take the liberty of acquainting you in this letter with my past as well as actual opinion of your personality, by the certainty that in so doing I shall give expression to the ideas of a considerable number of people, and in the hope that a timely word of counsel may have some influence in persuading you to abandon some of the methods by which you have so far been content to seek the bubble reputation. You are in yourself a paradox as strange and confusing as any which has ever flowed from your pen, presenting as you do the curious spectacle of a man of genuine and brilliant talent who has made his success, not by the worthy culture and legitimate exhibition of that talent, but by the silliest kind of trick and quackery. You persistently advertised yourself for years through the length and breadth of the English speaking world as an insipid and pretentious dullard, whose motto was ‘notoriety at any price,’ You werewith a very considerable difference-like the late Laureate1 when he dreamed there would be spring no more-you plucked the thorns of public contempt and wore them like a civic crown. Such small belief in your intelligence and sanity as were abroad a year or two ago was held only by your personal acquaintances; to the world in general you were the dreariest of bores, a buffoon with one trick which had long since ceased to be amusing. That the spectacle of a man of talent posing as a zany was not an absolute novelty, is proved by the ancient proverb that it takes a clever man to play a fool, but if that saying had been lacking to our proverbial philosophy your career might well have inspired it. You would probably contend that the end has justified the means; but to my thinking that plea is only acceptable under serious protest. It is quite true that in the distressingly over-crowded condition of the brain-market a man of real power may find it a long and arduous business to ensure a hearing. It is true that an idle and not too cultured society will pay a readier attention to the man who can amuse, than to him who waits his hour to teach, and bides his time with the patient and scornful self-possession usually associated with real talent. The brassy voice that shouts-
In Folly’s horny tympanum The thing that makes the wise man dumb,
has its uses no doubt-to him who cares to use it. It must needs be listened to, applauded by the idle and foolish, and denounced as a nuisance by the thoughtful. But the vote of the first half of the communitythough it is usually the bigger half-is surely not worth having. It is always a degradation to the man who gets it, and it never remains long with him, for every day Folly is justified of some new child more attractive to her devotees than any former birth; and it disgusts the thoughtful contingent altogether. The performing dog gets a bad name, and is not easily credited with the capacity of useful work among the intellectual gorse and stubble. The sterling and legitimate success you have at last made might have come much earlier had you been content to build it on a sounder and less meretricious foundation. Your pursuit of notoriety was too successful, and held you back from the attainment of fame and all the solid comforts and advantages fame brings. How much wrong it had done to your personal nature, to your instincts and breeding as a gentleman, was abundantly shown by the famous cigarette incident on the first night of Lady Windermere’s Fan. You were, I hope, the one man alive in England capable of at once scoring so deserved a success and besmirching it by so petty an act of ill-bred braggadocio. It was not merely ill-bred, it was futile, and more than futile, as an advertisement. Had the play been a failure, the ill-considered insult to your audience might then have made a little extra talk among the silliest of their number, and so have kept about you that very dubious aureole you were so long content to wear. But it had not failed. It had posed you as one of the figures ofintelligent London. Surely at such a moment you might have risen above such a mountebank trick, and have recognised that to be a successful dramatist it is not necessary to cease to be a gentleman.
