Do you know Walford Davies’ setting of that Grace, the setting he made some years ago for one of the daughters of the late Canon Gorton? If you do, if, as I do, you adore its Blake-like simplicity, its Ariel freshness, you will not mind his hatred of Wagner. Only, it is rather strange, don’t you think, that we outsiders who love Wagner (and I believe, don’t you, that all intense lovers of Wagner must be rather outsiderish?) should be able to love Walford Davies also, though he (most unhappy!) can’t or won’t love us?
But it is being borne in upon me that for the last five minutes I have been writing like the adorable Eve in The Tatler. Let me, for her sake, begin another chapter.
[32]
]CHAPTER III
FRANK HARRIS
It must have been five or six years ago that a friend came to me with the news that Frank Harris had expressed a desire to see some of my verse. Precisely what my friend had told Harris about me, I do not know; something very exaggerated, perhaps; something complimentary, doubtless; something that piqued Harris’s curiosity, it was evident. As Harris is one of the few modern writers for whom my boyish admiration has survived manhood, I felt subtly gratified that he should take even a fleeting interest in me, and I sat down at once and copied out various poems that had already appeared in The Academy, under Lord Alfred Douglas’s editorship, and in The English Review in the days of Ford Madox Hueffer, and, more recently, when edited by Austin Harrison. With my verses I sent a letter, hypocritically modest as regards myself, honestly full of admiration as regards Harris. He replied from his villa in Nice, sending me a long letter in which he did me the honour to enter fully into the supposed merits and demerits of my work. Of one poem he said that it was not sufficiently sensual, and I have never been able quite to understand what he meant, for I had, with some particularity, described seven naked ladies swimming in a pool, and I had felt that my verses had obviously enough expressed my feelings.
The correspondence continued until, one day, Harris wrote to tell me he was returning to London and to invite me to visit him there. In the event, however, my first meeting with Harris was in Manchester, whither he came [33] ]to lecture on Shakespeare to the local dramatic society. Jack Kahane (a great friend of mine) and I met him at the Midland Hotel upon his arrival, and from the very first moment he intoxicated me. Whilst he changed from his travelling clothes to evening dress he talked and ejaculated, beseeching us to remain with him as he had had “a rotten journey from London and felt unutterably bored.” I remember very little of what he said except that, with some venom, he called Browning “a not unprosperous gentleman.” He refused to eat or drink before his lecture and, presently, we went down to the large room in the hotel where he was to speak.
We found there a mixed assembly. Everybody in Manchester, it should be explained, writes plays; at least, I never yet met a man in that delectable city who does not. Moreover, they “study” them. They weigh and compare the merits of Stanley Houghton and Ibsen, Harold Brighouse and Strindberg, Allan Monkhouse and Bjornson, Arnold Bennett and Hauptmann, Laurence Housman and Brieux, and so forth. They search for “inner meanings”; the more earnest of them hunt for “messages”; the more delicate seek to perceive Fine Shades. They are veritable disciples of Miss Horniman—priggishly intellectual, self-consciously superior. And, of course, the rock of their salvation is St Bernard. Innocuous people enough, but impossible to live in the same city with.
To this assembly of earnest, pale men and spectacled women Harris was to lecture, and I looked from them to Harris and from Harris to them with joyful expectations. From the very first sentence he was fiery and provocative, throwing out daring theories, anathematising all forms of respectability, upholding with unparalleled fierceness a wonderful ideal of chivalry and nobility and condemning, en bloc, the whole human race, and particularly that portion of it seated before him. Ladies rustled; men stirred [34] ]uneasily. Then, having delivered himself of a passage of hot eloquence, he paused. A clock ticked. He looked defiantly at us and still paused. A fat lady in the front row, palpably embarrassed by the long silence and, no doubt, feeling that she had reached one of the most dramatic moments of her existence, banged her plump hands together and ejaculated: “Bravo!” A few other ladies of both sexes joined her, but Harris was not to be placated. Thrusting out his chin, he began again. And this time he attacked the Mancunian literary idol, Professor C. H. Herford, a great scholar, but a more than suitable object for Harris’s ridicule. Herford is a man who has not lived fully: a semi-invalid, asthmatic, bloodless and spectacled; a man of books and rather dusty books; in effect, a professor. He had recently reviewed Harris’s book, The Man Shakespeare, in The Manchester Guardian, and had called it “a disgrace to British scholarship.” Why this should have annoyed the author I cannot tell, but Harris is at times a little unreasonable. Indeed, “annoyance” but feebly describes the feeling that spent itself in scalding invective and the most terrible irony. Each sentence he spoke appeared to be the last word in bitterness; but each succeeding sentence leaped above and beyond its predecessor, until at length the speaker had lashed himself into a state of feeling to express which words were useless. He stopped magnificently, and this time the room rang with applause. It is probable that not half-a-dozen people present believed his attack on Professor Herford was justified; indeed, it is probable that not half-a-dozen were qualified to form any opinion of value on the matter. Nevertheless, they applauded him with enthusiasm, and they did so because they had been deeply stirred by eloquence that can only be described as superb and by anger that was lava hot in its sincerity. Briefly, the lecture was an overwhelming success.
I was soon to discover that Harris, like all the men of [35] ]genius I have met, is vain. I do not mean that he overrates his gifts: he does not; nor that his recognition of his own genius is offensively insistent: such is very far from being the case. I mean that he is inordinately proud, innocently and childlikely proud, of things that are not of the least consequence. At supper in the French Restaurant the head waiter slipped noiselessly across to the table at which Harris, Kahane and I were sitting. (Harris is the kind of man who acts as a magnet to all head waiters—a high tribute to his dominating personality.) When our orders had been given the waiter, turning to go, said: “Very good, Mr Harris.” On the instant Harris looked up. “So you know me?” he asked. “Yes, sir. I have had the pleasure of waiting on you in Monte Carlo and, if I am not mistaken, in New York as well.” It is difficult to describe the naïve pleasure Harris took in this: it stamped him at once as a man of the world—he who, of all people, required, in our opinion, no such stamp.
For six hours we talked—talked long after every other visitor in the hotel had retired, and we were left alone in the Octagon Court in a pool of dim light. Harris is the only brilliant talker I have met who has not made me feel an abject idiot. To begin with, though he has a pronounced strain of violence, almost of brutality, in his nature, he is always infinitely courteous. He will listen to your (I mean my) feeble contributions to a discussion with interest which, if feigned, is so admirably feigned that you are completely deceived. And he can keep this sort of thing up indefinitely. Moreover, though his mind is agile enough, his speech is rarely quick; it is slow and deliberate, but without hesitation, without a single word of tautology.
I cannot hope, after so long a lapse of time, to reproduce, however faintly, the true quality of Harris’s conversation, but I remember the substance of it most [36] ]vividly. In his lecture earlier in the evening he had mentioned Jesus Christ, and the reference to our Saviour had been so original in its implication, yet so reverent in its manner, that I felt he must have much that is new to say on a subject that has aroused more discussion than any other during the last two thousand years. So I broached it tentatively. He was aroused immediately, and skilfully drew me out to discover if I had anything new to say. I had not. I merely voiced what must be an age-long regret, that only one side of Christ’s nature has been presented to us in the Gospels; that the feasting, joyous Christ has been only faintly indicated; and that His tolerance towards the weaknesses of the body’s passions had always been shirked by those of the priestly craft. I thought it possible that at some future crisis in the world’s history Christ might come again and, on His second coming, present to the world a more complete embodiment of all the potentialities inherent in human nature.