"But when did you actually begin writing verses?" he asked. "When I was ten, as I remember," I said, "the first was a rhymed acrostic for our school gala."
After a while I made a gesture of going, for I was apprehensive of trespassing upon the man's time and kindness. I felt it to be such a genuine human kindness. That loud roar rising out of him seemed to proclaim: My body may be little and insignificant, but my heart is great and sincere.
Frank Harris laughed at my worrying about his time. He said that since there had been so much difficulty about our getting together, we should make the most of it now. He had a lot to say yet, he said. But first he wanted to know how I got beyond the jingle-rhyme stage of verse-making. He remarked upon the fact that though I began verse-writing early, I had not been attracted by poetry in my early reading. It was the story in the plays that had carried me through Shakespeare.
And I related to him the story of my adolescence: my meeting with one Mr. Jekyll, an English gentleman who became my intellectual and literary mentor and encouraged me to continue writing verses in the Negro dialect. I told him something of this man who had gone among the peasants and collected their field-and-yard songs (words and music) and African folk tales and published them in a book called Jamaica Song and Story; of how he became interested when he first saw my verses—enthusiastic really—and said that they sounded like the articulate consciousness of the peasants. I had corresponded with and visited him over a period of five years and written many songs. His interest in me was general at first. I was merely a literate phenomenon among the illiterate peasants whose songs and tales he was writing. Then in time there was a subtle change from a general to an individual interest and he became keen about my intellectual development and also in my verse as real poetry.
I told Harris how, with this man's excellent library at my disposal, I read poetry: Childe Harold, The Dunciad, Essay on Man, Paradise Lost, the Elizabethan lyrics, Leaves of Grass, the lyrics of Shelley and Keats and of the late Victorian poets, and how he translated and we read together pieces out of Dante, Leopardi, and Goethe, Villon and Baudelaire. During those years also Mr. Jekyll was translating Schopenhauer and I read a lot from his translation. Then he suggested Spinoza's Ethics, which I read, skipping the mathematical hypotheses, and for a time considered myself a pantheist. Also at that time the Rationalist Press of London was publishing six-penny reprints of Herbert Spencer's works, which I devoured greedily as they appeared.
I related to Frank Harris how I experienced a specially piquant human interest in reading Herbert Spencer and also George Eliot, because Mr. Jekyll had told me that he had seen them both, and that George Eliot lived near the Jekyll country place. He or his people (I am not sure which) made overtures to get acquainted with her. But she rejected them, saying she preferred not to make any new friends.
Mr. Jekyll had also shown me a letter from Herbert Spencer, which he regarded as a rare treasure. He (Mr. Jekyll) had discovered a mistake in computation, which he considered important, in one of Spencer's books and had written to him pointing it out. Herbert Spencer, replying, acknowledged the mistake, but said that, since it was already published, he did not think it was important enough to change. I am not even sure if that was the exact nature of the reply. I was so immature that I did not even grasp the significance of the matter, nor what exactly it was about. What amazed me then was that a great philosopher had permitted an error, which had been brought to his notice, to remain—that he had not corrected it. For in those burgeoning days I was a zealot for the truth as something absolute. But Mr. Jekyll had smiled at my reaction. He was satisfied that Herbert Spencer had sent him a private and courteous acknowledgment.
At this point Frank Harris exploded so hard that he frightened me. "Exactly like Herbert Spencer," he cried. "I knew him well. You may not know it, but the letter you mention is a key to his character. I wish I had it in my hands. He was a narrow, bigoted, self-opinionated and typical John-Bullish unscientific Englishman. Fancy his acknowledging an error in his book and yet refusing to correct it! Putting his personal vanity above scientific fact. A purely Anglo-Saxon disregard for logic. No French intellectual would be capable of such a thing!"
Frank Harris said that he had written, or was writing, a portrait of Herbert Spencer. "And I wish I had that letter," he cried. "It would illuminate my portrait and prove my point that he was an old humbug. He was the philosopher of British Philistinism—self-righteous and smug. I told him once that I thought that certain of his deductions were untenable and he said he could not stand contradiction. Think of that! He refused to listen. He did not want to be contradicted, not even by the truth."
I mentioned Mr. Jekyll's joking about the matter and remarking that it was better that the mistakes of the great should remain, so that the world could see and know that the great are not infallible and are subject to error like anybody else. How also he had pointed out Byron's famous grammatical error in Childe Harold as an example. Frank Harris said the comparison was far-fetched, but he could not forbear to seize the moment to make his own: "Byron was a great poet and a rebel to boot, like myself, and he was hated and hunted by English society. But they accepted a little man like Herbert Spencer as a great philosopher, because he made a virtue of their lowest predatory instincts. The survival of the fittest: a smug, mediocre, comfortable, middle-class interpretation of Darwin's great theory, making it pleasant for the Imperialist grabbers and the conscienceless British shopkeepers. Survival of the fittest indeed! What would become of the better-class litter if they were not sheltered and protected from birth? What if they had to fend for themselves like the children of the have-nots?"