and in my eyes a note of common profligacy to my bankruptcy
that makes me doubly ashamed of it. I was made for other things.

But most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I
allowed you to bring on me. The basis of character is will power, and my
will power became absolutely subject[45] to yours. It sounds a grotesque
thing to say, but it is none the less true. Those incessant scenes that
seemed to be almost physically necessary to you, and in which your mind
and body grew distorted, and you became a thing as terrible to look at
as to listen to: that dreadful mania you inherit from your father, the
mania for writing revolting and loathsome letters: your entire lack of
any control over your emotions as displayed in your long resentful
moods of sullen silence, no less than in the sudden fits of almost
epileptic rage: all these things in reference to which one of my letters
to you, left by you lying about in the Savoy or some other hotel, and so
produced in court by your father's counsel, contained an entreaty not
devoid of pathos, had you at that time been able to recognise pathos
either in its elements or its expression--these, I say, were the origin
and causes of my fatal yielding to you in your daily increasing demands.
You wore me out. It was the triumph of the smaller over the bigger
nature. It was the case of that tyranny of the weak over the strong
which somewhere in one of my plays I describe as being "the only tyranny
that lasts." And it was inevitable. In every relation of life with
others one has to find some _moyen de vivre_.

I had always thought that my giving up to you in small things meant
nothing: that when a great moment arrived I could myself re-assert my
will power in its natural superiority. It was not so. At the great
moment my will power completely failed me. In life there is really no
great or small thing. All things are of equal value and of equal size.
My habit--due to indifference chiefly at first--of giving up to you in
everything had become insensibly a real part of my nature. Without my
knowing it, it had stereotyped my temperament to one permanent and fatal
mood. That is why, in the subtle epilogue to the first edition of his
essays, Pater says that "Failure is to form habits." When he said it the
dull Oxford people thought the phrase a mere wilful inversion of the
somewhat wearisome text of Aristotelian Ethics, but there is a
wonderful, a terrible truth hidden in it. I h