Dear Jack,—Wonderful! wonderful! Shallow, incoherent, obnoxious to its own criticism of Chesterton and Shaw, off its balance, accidental, whimsical, false; but with central fires of truth "blazing fuliginous mid murkiest confusion," telling the reader nothing of the Comic except that it's smaller than the Tragic, but readable and splendid, showing that the man who wrote it is more than anything he can write!
Pray patch some kind of a finale to it and send it to the "Atlantic"! Yours ever fondly,
W. J.
(Membre de I'Institut!)
The "specimen" which was enclosed with the following note has been lost. It was perhaps a bit of adulatory verse. What is said about "Harris and Shakespeare," as also in a later letter to Mr. T. S. Perry on the same subject, was written apropos of a book entitled "The Man Shakespeare, His Tragic Life-Story."[87]
To John Jay Chapman.
CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 15, 1910.
Dear Jack,—Just a word to say that it pleases me to hear you write this about Harris and Shakespeare. H. is surely false in much that he claims; yet 'tis the only way in which Shakespeare ought to be handled, so his is the best book. The trouble with S. was his intolerable fluency. He improvised so easily that it kept down his level. It is hard to see how the man that wrote his best things could possibly have let himself do ranting bombast and complication on such a large scale elsewhere. 'T is mighty fun to read him through in order.
I send you a specimen of the kind of thing that tends to hang upon me as the ivy on the oak. When will the day come? Never till, like me, you give yourself out as a poetry-hater. Thine ever,
To Dickinson S. Miller.
CAMBRIDGE, Mar. 26, 1910.