re simply for amusements, for ordinary
or less ordinary pleasures. They were what your temperament needed, or
thought it needed for the moment. I should have forbidden you my house
and my chambers except when I specially invited you. I blame myself
without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour
with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at
any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance[44] to me
compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing
less than a crime when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.

I blame myself for having allowed you to bring me to utter and
discreditable financial ruin. I remember one morning in the early
October of '92, sitting in the yellowing woods at Bracknell with your
mother. At that time I knew very little of your real nature. I had
stayed from a Saturday to Monday with you at Oxford. You had stayed with
me at Cromer for ten days and played golf. The conversation turned on
you, and your mother began to speak to me about your character. She told
me of your two chief faults, your vanity, and your being, as she termed
it, "all wrong about money." I have a distinct recollection of how I
laughed. I had no idea that the first would bring me to prison and the
second to bankruptcy. I thought vanity a sort of graceful flower for a
young man to wear, as for extravagance--the virtues of prudence and
thrift were not in my own nature or my own race. But before our
friendship was one month older I began to see what your mother really
meant. Your insistence on a life of reckless profusion: your incessant
demands for money: your claim that all your pleasures should be paid for
by me, whether I was with you or not, brought me, after some time, into
serious monetary difficulties, and what made the extravagance to me, at
any rate, so monotonously uninteresting, as your persistent grasp on my
life grew stronger and stronger, was that the money was spent on little
more than the pleasures of eating, drinking and the like. Now and then
it is a joy to have one's table red with wine and roses, but you
outstripped all taste and temperance. You demanded without grace and
received without thanks. You grew to think that you had a sort of right
to live at my expense, and in a profuse luxury to which you had never
been accustomed, and which, for that reason, made your appetites all the
more keen, and at the end, if you lost mone