In March, 1914, I went to Athens for a holiday. Something brave and wonderful in that city, some ancient Bacchic madness, some fierce exaltation of soul took hold of me, and I remember sitting down one night, after a visit to fever-stricken Eleusis, to write to Harris, feeling the necessity of expressing myself to one who would understand. The reader may be amused that I should think Harris akin to ancient Greece, but if the reader is amused he does not know Harris. Only A. R. Orage is more Greek in spirit than he is. In reply Harris wrote at great [44] ]length, full of the fervour of a young student. He told me that in his young manhood he had spent a year of study in that wonderful city, and urged me to visit him on my return to England.
But I was destined not to see him again. Very soon after my return to England he got into trouble with reference to something libellous that he had published in Modern Society. He was kept in prison, if I remember rightly, for about a month. I sought permission to visit him there, but was refused, and I was staying in Oxford when he was released.
Soon after the war broke out he wrote me the following letter from Paris:—
23, Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Paris,
29th Aug. ’14.
My dear Cumberland,—I’m just back from the frontier.... This war of nations is going to test every man as by fire before it’s over. It will be long in spite of Mr Kipps and Bernard Shaw. The Russian masses will hardly come decisively into action (they have scarcely any railways and no good roads) till next May or June, and long before then, or rather in a couple of months from now, the French will be pressed back to within twenty miles of besieged Paris, when I hope the English forces on the flank will stop the German advance. Then will begin the slow process of driving the Germans home, which will be quickened by the Russian weight behind Cossack pricks. Fancy one man having the power to set 400 millions of men fighting for their lives. And then they talk of man as a rational animal!!
Don’t say you like what I wrote in The Daily Sketch; all my best things were carefully cut out and filled up with drivel, till my cheeks burned.
Your sketch of me is very kindly; the fault you find in me is not a fault. Jesus, Shakespeare, Napoleon—all the [45] ]greatest men have known their own value and insisted on it—perhaps because they have all come to their own and their own received them not. When you have done great work you feel it is not yours, but given to you; you are only a reed shaken in the wind; you can judge it as if it had nothing to do with you. Moreover, you see that this failure to recognise greatness is the capital sin of all time, the sin against the Holy Ghost which He said could never be forgiven. Modesty is the fig-leaf of mediocrity—don’t let us talk of it. Remember how Whistler scourged it.
I’m writing now on Natural Religion—my best thing yet: I’ve done more than Nietzsche: don’t think I’m bragging. I am the Reconciler; though my cocked nose and keen eyes may make you think me a combatant. Twenty years hence, Cumberland, if your eyes keep their promise, you’ll think differently of me. I remember as a young man getting Wagner to praise himself and saying to myself that no man was ever so conceited as the little hawk-faced fellow with the ploughshare chin. Did he not say that the step from Bach to Beethoven was not so great as that from Beethoven to Wagner! And yet for these fifteen years past I have agreed with him and find nothing conceited in the declaration. Only weak men are hurt by another man’s conceit; are we not gods also to be spoken of with reverence?
To see the world in a grain of sand
And Heaven in a wild flower,