To hold Infinity in your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
The question for you is, have I quickened you? Encouraged you to be a brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity? Did virtue come out of me? or discouragement? Now at nearly sixty I am about to rebuild my life: my own people have stoned and imprisoned and exiled me. Well—the world’s wide. In [46] ]October I shall be in New York, ready for another round with Fate. Meanwhile, all luck to you and all good will from your friend, Frank Harris.
Remember this word of Joubert: there is no such sure sign of mediocrity as constant moderation in praise. Ha! Ha! Ha! Yours ever, F. H.
There is not in this letter a single word to indicate that he was not, heart and soul, in sympathy with the Allied Cause. Late in September, 1914, I was myself in Paris, having visited Amiens and the Marne. I took the earliest opportunity of calling upon Harris, but discovered that he had left his rooms a few days earlier, leaving no indication of his next resting-place. On calling upon the American Consul I discovered that my friend had already sailed for the States.
Subsequently he wrote bitterly about England in an American paper. I never had an opportunity of reading his articles, but I read various extracts from them in British newspapers, and was astounded both by the views they contained and by the manner in which those views were expressed.
Years ago Ruskin wrote Rossetti a curious letter: he said he could regard no man as friend who did not value his (Ruskin’s) gifts as highly as he (Ruskin) did. Harris, no doubt, adopted the same kind of attitude towards England. England refused to accept him at his own estimate and, at length, in fierce disgust, Harris turned his back on a country which he deemed unworthy of him.
[47]
]CHAPTER IV
MISCELLANEOUS
Madame Yvette Guilbert—Sir Victor Horsley—Mrs Pankhurst—Jacob Epstein—Madame Aïno Ackté
Yvette Guilbert!... Yvette Guilbert! I suppose that only a writer who really can write can say anything useful or dignified about this most wonderful woman.... And yet I must try. Do you remember that extraordinary breath-catching passage in Villette where Charlotte Brontë describes the acting of Vashti—Vashti who was Rachel—Vashti who went to London when Charlotte loved Héger?... That, I always think, was a great event. Little Currer Bell, with her most modest mind and her most proud heart, sitting, so breathlessly, on one side of the footlights, and Rachel walking from the wings, beyond the footlights, and, like an empress, speaking, thinking like an empress, and, like a veritable woman, loving and hating.... Do you remember that passage? If you do, perhaps you will think, as I do, that, after all, only women can write of women. Did not Jane Austen create Elizabeth Bennet? And who was it who wrote the Sonnets from the Portuguese? And even, after all, Aphra Behn ... well, she knew something about women, didn’t she?