agic.

You surely must realise that now. You must see now that your incapacity
of being alone: your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the
attention and time of others: your lack of any power of sustained
intellectual concentration: the unfortunate accident--for I like to
think it was no more--that you had not been able to acquire the "Oxford
temper" in intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play
gracefully with ideas, but had arrived at violence of opinion
merely--that all these things, combined with the fact that your desires
and your interests were in Life, not in Art, were as destructive to your
own progress in culture as they were to my work as an artist. When I
compare my friendship with you to my friendship with still younger men,
as John Gray and Pierre Louys, I feel ashamed. My real life, my higher
life, was with them and such as they.

Of the appalling results of my friendship with you I don't speak at
present. I am thinking merely of its quality while it lasted. It was
intellectually degrading to me. You had the rudiments[43] of an artistic
temperament in its germ. But I met you either too late or too soon. I
don't know which. When you were away I was all right. The moment, in the
early December of the year to which I have been alluding, I had
succeeded in inducing your mother to send you out of England, I
collected again the torn and ravelled web of my imagination, got my life
back into my own hands, and not merely finished the three remaining acts
of the _Ideal Husband_, but conceived and had almost completed two other
plays of a completely different type, the _Florentine Tragedy_ and _La
Sainte Courtesane_, when suddenly, unbidden, unwelcome, and under
circumstances fatal to my happiness, you returned. The two works left
then imperfect I was unable to take up again. The mood that created them
I could never recover. You now, having yourself published a volume of
verse, will be able to recognise the truth of everything I have said
here. Whether you can or not it remains as a hideous truth in the very
heart of our friendship. While you were with me you were the absolute
ruin of my art, and in allowing you to stand persistently between Art
and myself, I give to myself shame and blame in the fullest degree. You
couldn't appreciate, you couldn't know, you couldn't understand. I had
no right to expect it of you at all. Your interests were merely in your
meals and moods. Your desires we