我还怪自己让你给带到了经济上穷困潦倒、信誉扫地的穷途末路。我还记得1 8 9 2年1 0月初的一个上午，同你母亲一道坐在布莱克奈尔秋风渐黄的树林里。那时我对你真正的性格知道得很少，有一次在牛津同你从星期六呆到星期一，而你来过克莱默同我呆了十天打高尔夫球[8a]。我们的话题转到了你身上，你母亲开始跟我说起你的性格。她说了你的两大缺点：你虚荣，还有，用她的话说，“对钱财的看法大错特错”。我清楚记得当时我笑了，根本没想到第一点将让我进监狱，第二点将让我破产[8b]。我以为虚荣是一种给年轻人佩戴的雅致的花朵；至于说铺张浪费嘛——我以为她指的不过是铺张浪费——在我自己的性格中，在我自己的阶层里，并不见勤俭节约的美德。可是不等我们的交情再长一个月，我便开始明白你母亲指的到底是什么。你孜孜以求的是一种挥霍无度的生活[8c]，无休无止的要钱；说是你所有的寻欢作乐都得由我付账，不管我是否同你在一起。过些时候这就使我的经济陷入了严重的困难。你抓住我的生活不放，越抓越紧。总而言之，你的铺张挥霍对我来说是乏味透顶，因为钱说真的无非是花在口腹宴饮，以及诸如此类的行乐上。不时的让餐桌花红酒绿一下，可说是件赏心乐事，但你的无度却败坏了所有的品味和雅趣[8d]。你索取而无风度，接受而不道谢[8e]。你养成了一种心态，认为似乎有权让我供养，过着一种你从未习惯过的奢侈生活，而因为这一点，如此的奢侈又让你胃口更大。到后来要是在阿尔及尔的哪家赌场输了钱，第二天早上就干脆拍个电报到伦敦，要我把你输的钱如数存到你银行的户头上，事后便再也不见你提起。
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When I tell you that between the autumn of 1892 and the date of my imprisonment I spent with you and on you more than ￡5000 in actual money[9a], irrespective of the bills I incurred, you will have some idea of the sort of life on which you insisted [9b]. Do you think I exaggerate? My ordinary expenses with you for an ordinary day in London — for luncheon, dinner, supper, amusements, hansoms and the rest of it — ranged from ￡12 to ￡20, and the week’s expenses were naturally in proportion and ranged from ￡80 to ￡130. For our three months at Goring my expenses (rent of course included) were ￡1340. Step by step with the Bankruptcy Receiver I had to go over every item of my life. It was horrible. “Plain living and high thinking”[9.1] was, of course, an ideal you could not at that time have appreciated [9c], but such extravagance was a disgrace to both of us. One of the most delightful dinners I remember ever having had is one Robbie and I had together in a little Soho cafe, which cost about as many shillings as my dinners to you used to cost pounds. Out of my dinner with Robbie came the first and best of all my dialogues[9d].[9.2] Idea, title, treatment, mode, everything was struck out at a 3 franc 50 c. table-d’h?te[9e]. Out of the reckless dinners with you nothing remains but the memory that too much was eaten and too much was drunk. And my yielding to your demands was bad for you. You know that now. It made you grasping often: at times not a little unscrupulous: ungracious always. There was on far too many occasions too little joy or privilege in being your host. You forgot — I will not say the formal courtesy of thanks, for formal courtesies will strain a close friendship — but simply the grace of sweet companionship, the charm of pleasant conversation, that τερπυòυ κακ?υ as the Greeks called it, and all those gentle humanities that make life lovely, and are an accompaniment to life as music might be, keeping things in tune and filling with melody the harsh or silent places[9f]. And though it may seem strange to you that one in the terrible position in which I am situated should find a difference between one disgrace and another, still I frankly admit that the folly of throwing away all this money on you, and letting you squander my fortune to your own hurt as well as to mine, gives to me and in my eyes a note of common profligacy to my Bankruptcy that makes me doubly ashamed of it[9g]. I was made for other things[9h].
我告诉你，从1 8 9 2年秋到我入狱那一天，看得见的我就同你以及为你花了不止5000英镑的现金[9a]，还不算付的账单呢。这样你对自己所坚持的是什么样的生活，就会明白一二了[9b]。你认为我是夸大其词吗？我与你一起在伦敦普普通通的一天的普普通通的花销——午餐、正餐、夜宵、玩乐、马车及其他——大概在12至20英镑之间，每周的花销相应的自然也就在80到130英镑之间。我们在戈灵的三个月，我的花费（当然包括房租）是1340英镑。一步一步的，我不得不同破产案的财产管理人回顾我生活中的每一个细节。太吓人了。“平实的生活，高远的理念”这一理想，当然了，你那时还无法体味[9c]，但如此的铺张奢侈却是令你我都丢脸的一件事。我记得平生最愉快的一顿饭是同罗比在索赫的一家咖啡馆吃的，所花的钱按先令算，数目同你我用餐时花的英镑差不多。同罗比的那顿饭使我写出了第一则也是最精彩的对话[9d]。意念、标题、处理方式、表达手法，一切全在一顿三法郎半的套餐上敲定[9e]。而同你的那些挥霍无度的餐宴之后，什么也没留下，只记得吃得太多、喝得太多了。你的要求我频频迁就，这对你很不好。你现在明白了。我的迁就使你更经常地伸手索要，有时很不择手段，每次都显得粗鄙低下。太多太多次了，宴请你而不觉得有多少欢乐或荣幸。你忘了——我不说礼貌上的道谢，因为表面的礼貌会令亲密的友情显得局促——我说的不过是好朋友相聚的雅趣、愉快交谈的兴致，那种希腊人称之为τερπυòυ κακ?υ的东西；还有一切使生活变得可爱的人性的温馨，像音乐一样伴随人生的温馨，使万物和谐、使艰涩沉寂之处充满乐音的温馨[9f]。虽然你也许觉得奇怪，一个像我这样潦倒的人还会去分辨这样丢人和那样丢人的不同，但我还是要老实地承认，这么一掷千金地在你身上花钱，让你挥霍我的钱财，害你也害我；做这等蠢事对我来讲、在我看来，使我的破产带上了那种庸俗的由穷奢极欲而倾家荡产的意味，从而令我倍加愧怍[9g]。天生我材，另有他用[9h]。
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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 to yours[10a]. It sounds a grotesque thing to say, but it is none the less true[10b]. 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[10c] in reference to which one of my letters to you, left by you lying about at 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 one 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.”[10.1]
但是我最怪自己的，是让你使我的道德完全堕落。性格的根基在于意志力，而我的意志力却变得完全臣服于你[10a]。听起来不可思议，但却是千真万确[10b]。那些接二连三的吵闹折腾，在你几乎是出于肉体的需要，可同时又使你的心灵和肉体扭曲，让你变成一个别人不敢听不敢看的怪物；你从你父亲那儿继承的那种可怕的狂躁，使你写出令人恶心的书信；你对自己的感情完全失去控制，要么郁郁寡欢长久的不言不语，要么如癫痫发作似的突然怒发冲冠。凡此种种性格扭曲、狂躁和情感失控[10c]，我在给你的一封信中都已提及——这信你把它随便丢在萨瓦伊或哪家旅馆，而让你父亲的辩护律师得以出示给法庭——那信中不无悲怆地恳求过你，假如你那时能认识什么是悲怆的心情和言辞的话——我说，这些就是我为什么会对你与日俱增的索求作出致命让步的根源所在。你会把人磨垮的。这是小的胜过大的。这是弱者的暴政压过了强者，在一出剧本的什么地方我说过这是 “唯一历久不衰的暴政”。
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And it was inevitable. In every relation of life with others one has to find some moyen de vivre.[11.1] In your case, one had either to give up to you or to give you up[11a]. There was no other alternative. Through deep if misplaced affection for you: through great pity for your defects of temper and temperament: through my own proverbial good-nature and Celtic laziness: through an artistic aversion to coarse scenes and ugly words: through that incapacity to bear resentment of any kind which at that time characterised me[11b]: through my dislike of seeing life made bitter and uncomely by what to me, with my eyes really fixed on other things, seemed to be mere trifles too petty for more than a moment’s thought or interest — through these reasons, simple as they may sound, I gave up to you always. As a natural result, your claims, your efforts at domination, your exactions grew more and more unreasonable. Your meanest motive, your lowest appetite, your most common passion, became to you laws by which the lives of others were to be guided always, and to which, if necessary, they were to be without scruple sacrificed[11c]. Knowing that by making a scene you could always have your way, it was but natural that you should proceed, almost unconsciously I have no doubt, to every excess of vulgar violence. At the end you did not know to what goal you were hurrying, or with what aim in view[11d]. Having made your own of my genius, my will power, and my fortune, you required, in the blindness of an inexhaustible greed, my entire existence. You took it. At the one supremely and tragically critical moment of all my life, just before my lamentable step of beginning my absurd action[11e], on the one side there was your father attacking me with hideous cards left at my club, on the other side there was you attacking me with no less loathsome letters. The letter I received from you on the morning of the day I let you take me down to the Police Court to apply for the ridiculous warrant for your father’s arrest was one of the worst you ever wrote, and for the most shameful reason. Between you both I lost my head. My judgment forsook me. Terror took its place[11f]. I saw no possible escape, I may say frankly, from either of you. Blindly I staggered as an ox into the shambles. I had made a gigantic psychological error. I had always thought that my giving up to you in small things meant nothing: that when a great moment arrived I could reassert my will-power in its natural superiority. It was not so[11g]. At the great moment my will-power completely failed me. In life there is really no small or great thing. All things are of equal value and of equal size[11h]. 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[11i]. That is why, in the subtle epilogue to the first edition of his essays, Pater says that “Failure is to form habits.”[11.2] 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 had allowed you to sap my strength of character, and to me the formation of a habit had proved to be not Failure merely but Ruin[11j]. Ethically you had been even still more destructive to me than you had been artistically. 而这又是无可避免的。生活里，每一种人际关系都要找着某种相处之道。与你的相处之道是，要么全听你的要么全不理你[11a]，毫无选择余地。出于对你深挚的如果说是错爱了的感情，出于对你禀性上的缺点深切的怜悯，出于我那有口皆碑的好心肠和凯尔特人的懒散，出于一种艺术气质上对粗鲁的言语行为的反感，出于我当时对任何事物都能逆来顺受的性格特征[11b]，出于我不喜欢看到生活因为在我看来是不屑一顾的小事（我眼里真正所看的是另外一些事）而变得苦涩不堪的脾气——出于这种种看似简单的理由，我事事全听你的。自然而然的，你的要求、你对我的操控和逼迫，就越来越蛮横了。你最卑鄙的动机、最下作的欲望、最平庸的喜怒哀乐，在你看来成了法律，别人的生活总要任其摆布，如有必要就得二话不说地作出牺牲[11c]。知道大吵大闹一番你就能得逞，那么无所不用其极地动粗撒野，就是很自然的事了；我毫不怀疑你这么做几乎是无意识的。最终你不知道自己急急所向的是什么目标，或者心目中到底有什么目的[11d]。在尽情利用了我的天赋、我的意志力、我的钱财之后，贪得无厌的心蒙住了你的眼睛，竟要占据我的整个生活。你得逞了。在我整个生命最为关键也最具悲剧性的那个时刻，正是我要采取那可悲的步骤开始那可笑的行动之前[11e]，一边有你父亲在我俱乐部留下一些明信片恶语中伤我，另一边有你用同样令人恶心的信攻击我。在让你带着到警察局，可笑地去申请拘捕令将你父亲逮捕的那天早晨，我收到的那封信，是你所写的最恶毒的一封，而且是出于最可耻的理由。对你们两人，我不知如何是好。判断力不见了，代之而来的是恐惧[11f]。老实说，在你们的夹攻下，我欲逃无路，盲目地跌跌撞撞，如一条牛被拉向屠宰场。我对自己心理的估计大错特错了。我总以为小事上对你迁就没什么，大事临头时我会重拾意志力，理所当然地重归主宰地位。情形并非这样[11g]。大事临头时我的意志力全垮了。生活中说真的是分不出大事小事的。凡事大小轻重都一样[11h]。主要是由于最初的无动于衷，让那凡事听你的习惯很没有理性地成了我性格的一部分。不知不觉地，这成了我禀性的模式，成了一种永久的、致命的心态[11i]。这就是为什么佩特会在他的散文集第一版那言辞微妙的跋中说道：“失败就在于形成习惯。”当他说这话时，牛津的那些死脑筋们还以为，这话不过是故意将亚里士多德有些乏味的《伦理学》文字颠倒过来说罢了。可是话中隐含了一条绝妙的、可怕的真理。我允许你榨取我的性格力量，而对我来说，习惯的形成到头来不止是失败，而是身败名裂[11j]。你在道德伦理上对我的破坏更甚于在艺术上。
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The warrant once granted, your will of course directed everything. At a time when I should have been in London taking wise counsel, and calmly considering the hideous trap in which I had allowed myself to be caught — the booby-trap as your father calls it to the present day—you insisted on my taking you to Monte Carlo, of all revolting places on God’s earth, that all day, and all night as well, you might gamble as long as the Casino remained open[12a]. As for me—baccarat having no charms for me—I was left alone outside to myself. You refused to discuss even for five minutes the position to which you and your father had brought me. My business was merely to pay your hotel expenses and your losses. The slightest allusion to the ordeal awaiting me was regarded as a bore. A new brand of champagne that was recommended to us had more interest for you[12b].
逮捕令一旦批了下来，你的意志当然就主宰一切了。当我本应在伦敦听取律师的高见，冷静地考虑一下我让自己一头钻进去的这个令人发指的圈套——你父亲至今一直称它为陷阱——你却硬要我带你去蒙特卡罗。在这天下首屈一指的肮脏地方，你好没日没夜地赌，只要赌场不关门[12a]。至于我呢，赌纸牌没兴致，就一个人留在门外头了。你不肯花哪怕五分钟时间同我讨论你和你父亲使我面临的处境。我的事不过是为你付旅馆的费用和赌债而已。只要稍稍提及我面临的严峻处境你就心烦，还不如人家向我们推荐的新牌香槟更让你感兴趣[12b]。
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On our return to London those of my friends who really desired my welfare implored me to retire abroad, and not to face an impossible trial. You imputed mean motives to them for giving such advice, and cowardice to me for listening to it[13a]. You forced me to stay to brazen it out, if possible, in the box by absurd and silly perjuries. At the end, I was of course arrested and your father became the hero of the hour: more indeed than the hero of the hour merely: your family now ranks, strangely enough, with the Immortals: for with that grotesqueness of effect that is as it were a Gothic element in history, and makes Clio the least serious of all the Muses, your father will always live among the kind pure-minded parents of Sunday school literature[13b], your place is with the Infant Samuel, and in the lowest mire of Malebolge[13.1] I sit between Gilles de Retz[13.2] and the Marquis de Sade[13.3][13c].
我们一回到伦敦，那些真正关心我安危的朋友恳求我避到国外，别去打一场无望的官司。你说他们这是居心不良，我要听他们的话便是胆小鬼[13a]。你逼我留下来，可能的话在审判席上靠荒唐愚蠢的谎言伪证顶住。最终当然是我被捕入狱，而你父亲则成了一时英雄。何止是一时英雄，你们家莫名其妙地跻身于神仙圣人之列。好像历史也带上了一点哥特式的离奇古怪，从而使历史和史诗之神克里奥成了众缪斯中最不正经的一位。靠着这份离奇古怪，结果是你父亲在主日学校的文学里将永远活在那些个心地和善纯良的父母之中[13b]，你将与少年塞缪尔并列，而在地狱最底层的污渎中，我将与崇拜撒旦的雷斯和性变态的萨德侯爵为伍[13c]。
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Of course I should have got rid of you. I should have shaken you out of my life[14a] as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him. In the most wonderful of all his plays[14.1] ?schylus[14b] tells us of the great Lord who brings up in his house the lion-cub, the λ?οντο? ?vιν, and loves it because it comes bright-eyed to his call and fawns on him for its food φαιδρωπò? ποτì χε?ρα, σαíνων τε γαστρò? ?νáγκαι?. And the thing grows up and shows the nature of its race, ?θο? τò πρóσθε τοκ?ων, and destroys the lord and his house and all that he possesses. I feel that I was such a one as he. But my fault was, not that I did not part from you, but that I parted from you far too often. As far as I can make out I ended my friendship with you every three months regularly, and each time that I did so you managed by means of entreaties, telegrams, letters, the interposition of your friends, the interposition of mine, and the like to induce me to allow you back. When at the end of March ’93 you left my house at Torquay I had determined never to speak to you again, or to allow you under any circumstances to be with me, so revolting had been the scene you had made the night before your departure[14c]. You wrote and telegraphed from Bristol to beg me to forgive you and meet you. Your tutor, who had stayed behind, told me that he thought that at times you were quite irresponsible for what you said and did, and that most, if not all, of the men at Magdalen were of the same opinion. I consented to meet you, and of course I forgave you. On the way up to town you begged me to take you to the Savoy. That was indeed a visit fatal to me. 当然了，我本该把你甩掉的。本该把你从我的生活中甩掉[14a]，就像从衣服上抖掉一根扎人的刺。古希腊的大剧作家埃斯库罗斯[14b]在他的一出最好的戏剧中给我们讲了一个大公的故事。他在自己家里养了一头小狮子，对它疼爱有加，因为那小家伙大公一叫就眼睛亮闪闪地跑过来，要东西吃时就朝他摇尾巴。等这家伙长大了，本相毕露，把大公本人、他的房子和财产全毁了。我觉得自己就跟那大公一样。但我的错不是没离开你，而是太经常离开你了。照我算来，每三个月我就想把同你的友谊断掉。而每次要同你一刀两断时，你总是通过哀求、电报、书信、你的或我的朋友来说情等诸如此类的手段，要我让你回来。在1 8 9 3年3月底你离开我在托基的家时，我下过决心从此不再和你说话，无论如何不让你跟我在一起，因为你离开前那天晚上大吵大闹了一通，实在叫人受不了[14c]。于是你就从布里斯托尔又是写信又是拍电报，求我原谅，同你再见面。你的导师没走，他告诉我说他觉得有时你无法对自己的说话做事负责，在莫德林学院的人，如果不是全部也大部分持有这种看法。我答应了见你，当然也原谅了你。在去城里的路上，你求我带你去萨瓦伊酒店。那一趟对我的确是致命的。
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Three months later, in June, we are at Goring. Some of your Oxford friends come to stay from a Saturday to Monday. The morning of the day they went away you made a scene so dreadful, so distressing that I told you that we must part. I remember quite well, as we stood on the level croquet-ground with the pretty lawn all round us, pointing out to you that we were spoiling each other’s lives, that you were absolutely ruining mine and that I evidently was not making you really happy, and that an irrevocable parting, a complete separation was the one wise philosophic thing to do[15a]. You went sullenly after luncheon, leaving one of your most offensive letters behind with the butler to be handed to me after your departure. Before three days had elapsed you were telegraphing from London to beg to be forgiven and allowed to return. I had taken the place to please you. I had engaged your own servants at your request. I was always terribly sorry for the hideous temper to which you were really a prey[15b]. I was fond of you. So I let you come back and forgave you. Three months later still, in September, new scenes occurred, the occasion of them being my pointing out the schoolboy faults of your attempted translation of Salome.[15.1] You must by this time be a fair enough French scholar to know that the translation was as unworthy of you, as an ordinary Oxonian, as it was of the work it sought to render. You did not of course know it then, and in one of the violent letters you wrote to me on the point you said that you were under “no intellectual obligation of any kind” to me. I remember that when I read that statement, I felt that it was the one really true thing you had written to me in the whole course of our friendship. I saw that a less cultivated nature would really have suited you much better. I am not saying this in bitterness at all, but simply as a fact of companionship. Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level. The trivial in thought and action is charming. I had made it the keystone of a very brilliant philosophy expressed in plays and paradoxes[15c]. But the froth and folly[15d] of our life grew often very wearisome to me: it was only in the mire that we met: and fascinating, terribly fascinating though the one topic[15.2] round which your talk invariably centred was, still at the end it became quite monotonous to me[15e]. I was often bored to death by it, and accepted it as I accepted your passion for going to music-halls[15f], or your mania for absurd extravagances in eating and drinking, or any other of your to me less attractive characteristics, as a thing, that is to say, that one simply had to put up with, a part of the high price one paid for knowing you. When after leaving Goring I went to Dinard for a fortnight you were extremely angry with me for not taking you with me, and, before my departure there, made some very unpleasant scenes on the subject at the Albemarle Hotel, and sent me some equally unpleasant telegrams to a country house I was staying at for a few days. I told you, I remember, that I thought it was your duty to be with your own people for a little, as you had passed the whole season away from them. But in reality, to be perfectly frank with you, I could not under any circumstances have let you be with me. We had been together for nearly twelve weeks. I required rest and freedom from the terrible strain of your companionship. It was necessary for me to be a little by myself; It was intellectually necessary. And so I confess I saw in your letter, from which I have quoted, a very good opportunity for ending the fatal friendship that had sprung up between us, and ending it without bitterness, as I had indeed tried to do on that bright June morning at Goring, three months before. It was however represented to me — I am bound to say candidly by one of my own friends to whom you had gone in you difficulty — that you would be much hurt, perhaps almost humiliated at having your work sent back to you like a schoolboy’s exercise; that I was expecting far too much intellectually from you; and that, no matter what you wrote or did, you were absolutely and entirely devoted to me. I did not want to be the first to check or discourage you[15g] in your beginnings in literature: I knew quite well that no translation, unless one done by a poet, could render the colour and cadence of my work in any adequate measure: devotion seemed to me, seems to me still, a wonderful thing, not to be lightly thrown away: so I took the translation and you back. Exactly three months later, after a series of scenes culminating in one more than usually revolting, when you came one Monday evening to my rooms accompanied by two of your friends, I found myself actually flying abroad next morning to escape from you, giving my family some absurd reason for my sudden departure, and leaving a false address with my servant for fear you might follow me by the next train. And I remember that afternoon, as I was in the railway-carriage whirling up to Paris, thinking what an impossible, terrible, utterly wrong state my life had got into, when I, a man of world-wide reputation, was actually forced to run away from England, in order to try and get rid of a friendship that was entirely destructive of everything fine in me either from the intellectual or ethical point of view[15h]: the person from whom I was flying being no terrible creature sprung from sewer or mire into modern life with whom I had entangled my days, but you yourself, a young man of my own social rank and position, who had been at my own college at Oxford, and was an incessant guest at my house[15i]. The usual telegrams of entreaty and remorse followed: I disregarded them. Finally you threatened that unless I consented to meet you, you would under no circumstances consent to proceed to Egypt. I had myself, with your knowledge and concurrence, begged your mother to send you to Egypt away from England, as you were wrecking your life in London. I knew that if you did not go it would be a terrible disappointment to her, and for her sake[15j] I did meet you, and under the influence of great emotion[15k], which even you cannot have forgotten, I forgave the past; though I said nothing at all about the future.
