My life and loves Vol. 3

by Frank Harris

  "You talk persuasively," said Lord Salisbury. "Your view is quite original, but I see your reasons."

  The talk went on for a little while, and he asked me when I could come down to Hatfield and have a longer conversation. The end of it was that I went to Hatfield and spoke with great frankness. I told him what I hoped for England was a close Union with her colonies, in order to pave the way for a confederation of all the English-speaking peoples, which might in the future, with the immense power of the United States, put an end to war. It seemed to me as easy to end war as to end dueling.

  "A quarrel between England and America," I added, "is to me the worst thing that could be imagined, altogether horrible."

  Suddenly I remembered that I had heard Lord Salisbury described as an earnest Christian, so I went on:

  "How any Christian could think of the possibility of war between these two peoples is beyond my comprehension. It would be a sin against humanity, for which there would be no forgiveness."

  Lord Salisbury suddenly turned away from me, put his hand under his desk, and drew out a sort of shelf, on which there was a glass, I think, of whiskey and soda, and took a drink. "Please forgive me!" he then exclaimed. "Would you like anything to drink?"

  I laughed. "No, thank you!"

  He looked at me and answered gravely:

  "I think in the main you are right: it would be a crime against humanity, against our hopes for man. It is a little difficult," he added, after a pause, "to let Mr. Olney have it all his own way; he is somewhat peremptory and unreasonable."

  "As the bigger man," I said, "I hope you will find reason enough in yourself far both." He smiled at me, nodding his head the while.

  The whole talk made me realize, as nothing had made me realize before, that my sympathies were with America, even against reason. Lord Salisbury's argument was reasonable; Dick Olney was in the wrong, and yet I was on the side of Dick Olney. I could not make out why till I got Harold Frederic down to stay with me and confided to him one evening, under pledge of secrecy, all that had taken place with Lord Salisbury, and found that we agreed on every point.

  From thirty to forty or so Frederic grew as I grew, but owed even less than I did to extraneous influences, for at first I had been greatly influenced by reading foreign languages and so-called scholarship. It was Frederic, indeed, who first showed me how little books and book-learning can add to one's stature, and though George Moore was always there to enforce the lesson, I couldn't honestly say I would willingly divest myself of any fragment of knowledge: Moore's familiarity with modern French literature helped him to a saner view of literary art than he would otherwise have possessed. Moore was always a pleasant acquaintance and interesting companion, rather than friend: I hardly know why.

  Early in the nineties, too, I came to know Lionel Johnson and young Crackanthorpe. I was drawn to them both from the outset: to Crackanthorpe for his gift of story-writing, and especially to Johnson, whose scholarship was worthy of his poetic endowment. Very early in our acquaintance Lionel won my heart by showing that he knew James Thomson and his poetry and was able to appreciate that rare genius. He said to me one day that Thomson's poem on Shelley was the purest piece of Shelleyism in the language.

  Thomson's prose work had escaped him, but he knew every line of his poetry and treasured it in his heart of hearts. Poor, dear Lionel Johnson, whose whole literary life was even shorter than Thomson's, for he had not long passed thirty when the end came. As in the case of Thomson, they talked of drink; but I have an idea that whenever a ship is highly powered, it should have a strong hull to boot or it cannot last long. Like Thomson, poor Lionel Johnson had a big heart, as well as a first-rate brain, and the little body was not strong enough to house such forces for many years.

  Lonely unto the Lone I go

  Divine to the Divinity.

  Whenever I think of Lionel Johnson and Crackanthorpe, I am constrained to think of all the poets and men of genius I knew in my London life and the miserable fate of many of them. I have told of Burton, Thomson, Dowson, Davidson, and Middleton; but there were many others like Henry Harland, some deservedly famous, some inheritors of unfulfilled renown.

  But the most startling appearance in these early nineties was certainly Aubrey Beardsley. I know no one in the whole history of art who made such an impression, took up such an independent and peculiar place so early in life.

  I came to know him in the late eighties through his sister Mabel, a very charming and pretty girl. She told me that he had been a sort of childprodigy and had played Bach and Beethoven in public on the piano at ten or twelve.

  Beardsley was of pleasant manners and intercourse: his appearance, too, was interesting; a little above average height, but very slight; perfectly selfpossessed, though strangely youthful; quite unaffected, but curiously derisive of affectation in others. While still in his teens he used to sneer at Oscar Wilde's poses to his face, though believing to a certain extent in his genius.

  Of course Oscar was fifteen years his senior and was better read and had already won a high place.

  After his success Oscar tried to patronize him, but Beardsley wouldn't have it.

  "At noontide," he said contemptuously, "Oscar will know that the sun has risen!" Had Oscar's appreciation taken place a year or two earlier it would have made all the difference in their relation, for in a year or less Beardsley passed from pupildom to rare mastery. Today he was imitating Mantegna; six months later he was Beardsley-one of the great modern masters of design.

  I introduced him to Whistler. At first Whistler seemed bored and turned over Beardsley's drawings carelessly. Suddenly he stopped and began to study them. A few moments later he looked up. "Wonderful," he said. "You are already a master."

  Beardsley burst into tears: poor boy, even then he had hardly reached manhood.

  But what is the word of his mystery, the "open sesame" to his heart? More than anyone I have ever known, Beardsley desired immediate fame, recognition of his genius, now, as if pricked on with the instinct that he had not long to live. And that demoniac, dominant desire made him sacrifice to sensation, force the note, so to speak, confident always that when he wished he could do great work as it ought to be done-soberly and with reverence.

  Beardsley was a little lacking in reverence, that "angel of the world," as Shakespeare calls it in Cymbeline; but the explanation of his faults to me is always the intense desire of immediate recognition, of fame in the day and hour. I have told elsewhere how he came to mastery in writing in a month or so: it really seemed as if every mode of self-expression was easy to him. His sister Mabel always contended that he was more gifted as a musician than as a draughtsman, and it may well have been true. It was Beardsley's mastery of all forms of art that explained to me the extraordinary achievement of the Keatses and Rimbauds.

  There are certain pictures of his that remain as part of my intellectual consciousness. Who can ever forget his Hamlet-the slight, boyish figure with the peering, eager, frightened eyes, trying to grope his way through the depths of a pathless wood; yet this was done in 1892. I can never think of Rejane save as she appeared to Beardsley, and his Tannhauser hastening eagerly, breathlessly back to the Venusberg-and these were the conceptions of an unlettered boy of twenty or so, resolved to read all life for himself. Only four years later, he gave us the Fruit Bearers, the ponderous satyr leading with his appalling female companion. And finally the Volpone series of his ripe maturity-unforgettable. Never was there a more astonishing growth or individuality of talent.

  And Beardsley, wonderful as he was, was only one of a dozen. Think of Charles Conder as a colorist, or of Augustus John, that master draughtsman, or Walter Sickert, the painter, or Phil May as a caricaturist; to say nothing of Davidson and William Watson-both master-singers, and a dozen other writers. All these men of genius seemed to group themselves naturally round Oscar Wilde as a sort of standard-bearer: he stood for years as the representative of art in life which has now become to the intellectuals more imp
ortant than religion: for no one can deny that the artist and man of letters in the new time has taken the place of the preacher and prophet.

  I must confess that the chief influence in my life, in the first years of the nineties, was Oscar Wilde, and in the second rank, Whistler.

  Whistler had come to grief before this. Ruskin had talked of one of his paintings as an impudent attempt to throw his paint-box in the face of the English public, and Whistler had brought an action against him, claiming heavy damages. He got one farthing, and the costs practically ruined him.

  Bravely, cheerfully, he went abroad to Venice, paint-box in hand, to redeem his fallen fortunes, and did it after middle age with consummate brio.

  Personally, I always rank Whistler with Rodin and Degas among the greatest artists of my time. I always coupled Degas in my mind with Whistler. Though no two talents could be more different, yet the likeness in some ways between them was most extraordinary. Both were witty and bitter-tongued, sparing neither friend nor foe; both made more money than they needed when money could no longer bring them happiness.

  I have given in my sketch of him twenty instances of Whistler's poisonous tongue. Oscar spoke of him as a wasp with a sting in his tail, and Swinburne's verse lays emphasis on the same quality:

  Fly away, butterfly, back to Japan,

  Tempt not a pinch at the hand of a man,

  And strive not to sting ere you die away.

  So pert and so painted, so proud and so pretty, To brush the bright down from your wings were a pity- Fly away, butterfly, fly away!

  Let me recall one or two stories of Degas. I was praising Puvis de Chavannest one day. I had just seen three or four of his great cartoons for some public building and was struck by the suave, idyllic beauty of the landscapes and the Arcadian innocence of the men and women, clothed only in grace.

  "He's really another Rafael," I said, "born out of due time."

  "There's some truth in that," replied Degas, with curling lip, "un Rafael du village" (a village Rafael). I could not help smiling, for the scalpel had touched the weakest spot. There is something provincial in Arcady-it is too far from the center of our struggle today, and our struggle is of intense interest. Degas with his racehorses and jockeys, ballet girls and opera singers, came nearer to us, being of our tune and hour.

  I recall another story of Degas. He had gone to an exhibition of paintings and suddenly picked out one. "A poor Rembrandt!" he cried, and went over to examine it more nearly because of shortsightedness. "I'm mistaken," he said on getting nearer; "it's a first-rate Forain." Yet Forain the caricaturist had always been an admirer and even a disciple of his.

  Toward the end of his life Degas was nearly blind and hardly worked at all.

  He was a solitary and when he accepted an invitation it was always hedged about with conditions, one of which was that there must be no scent, for he hated odors of all kinds. He often said that "love was not a question of skin," as the French proverb has it, "but of smell."

  Degas was a relentless skeptic. "I believe in that," he said one day, pointing to a painting on his easel, "and in nothing else"-a weird, unhappy temperament. He carried his bitterness into his work, whereas Whistler's work is always dedicated to pure beauty. Degas was a realist and supreme draughtsman; Whistler hated reality and was a master colorist. Oddly enough, one would have guessed that Degas, with his sense of line, would have been the great etcher; but it was Whistler who reigned here beyond comparison, save with Rembrandt.

  From 1885 on to the catastrophe in 1895, I met Oscar Wilde pretty constantly. He used to lunch with me a couple of tunes every month, and whenever he brought out a new book, or when some article in the Fortnightly attracted him, we would dine together as well and talk half the night. He was, as I have said already, far and away the best talker I have ever met, with the most astounding gift of humor that irradiated all his other qualities. First of all, he was a born story-teller, a better story-teller, by word of mouth, even than Kipling, and with far higher themes, more suggestive, more poetic and symbolical. Often, after telling an exquisite little story, he would drift into portraiture of this or that man he had met: while giving a kindly picture of his subject, he would suddenly illumine it with some humorous, unforgettable word.

  The defeat of Oscar Wilde came as a sort of result of the height to which he had climbed. He tasted real success for the first time when his first play was performed, Lady Windermere's Fan. It was admirably constructed, and it was just this quality that excited my curiosity. I asked him how he had won to such stagecraft, and he confessed to me quite frankly that he had gone away by himself for a fortnight and studied the construction of half a dozen of the best French and English plays, and from that study had gained the craft. But the parts of his play that won the public were the admirable aphorisms and witty sayings which he strewed about in every scene. I had heard them all before; they had come to him from time to time in conversation, but the effect on the stage to those who had never heard them was really overpowering.

  I have pictured him so often, and with such particularity, that I could leave him now to the readers of my Life of him, but one is tempted again and again to recall the laughing eyes, the eloquent tenor voice, and the charming phrases.

  Speaking of young Raffalovich, I said that he had come to London apparently to found a salon.

  "And he very nearly succeeded," replied Oscar smiling, "he established a saloon."

  On another occasion, apropos of some notice in a paper, I remarked, "It is curious to see how thinkers like Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer love to call on titled people, princesses and duchesses; how inappropriate it all is!"

  "Inappropriate, Frank?" cried Oscar. "Surely it is to be expected: doctors must visit the dying."

  No afterthought, no art can give any idea of the astounding richness of his verbal humor. One day, walking down by the Houses of Parliament, we came on a meeting of the unemployed who were reinforced by some bands of suffragettes. "Characteristic," I said, in my usual serious way, "one of these days the unemployed will make themselves heard here in Westminster. We are witnessing the beginnings of a social revolution."

  "You call it 'characteristic'," said Oscar. "I think it characteristic, too, my dear Frank, to find the unenjoyed united in protest with the unemployed."

  No one else ever possessed such humor, both of words and of thoughts. His magnificent gift had conquered even English dullness and he was becoming a social favorite when Nemesis overtook him. One day I heard that the Marquis of Queensbury had insulted him, and then Oscar called on me, as I have narrated in my Life of him, and the tragedy began.

  CHAPTER X

  Grace

  Since maturity I have always thought of women in three categories: those who love with the head, those who love with the heart, and those who are ruled in love, as in life, by the senses. Fortunately for us men, most women love with all three: head, heart and body, but still an acute student can usually see which of the three powers is in the ascendant.

  Those who love with the head are the most dangerous and least attractive: as soon as they find out that their lover or husband has failings or infidelities, they cast about how best to avenge themselves and so punish him. Usually their invention is not long at fault, and woe betide the poor wretch who has to suffer their vindictiveness. The worst tragedies in life come from their malevolence.

  The women who love with the heart, on the other hand, are like pearls of great price, and happily they are the most numerous class. Nearly every woman has something of the mother in her, and pity for weakness and lovingkindness beyond reason are always innate in her.

  Lastly come those who love by the senses; but men can estimate this category perfectly: the senses are always selfish and seek selfish gratification, and so the sensuous sometimes when piqued or disappointed come to be as harsh and unamiable as those women who have brains and no heart. But, as I have said, most women have all three powers, and we can develop in them the affections we most
need by judicious flattery.

  My experience has been that girls as a rule never yield willingly to sensual desire, unless it is accompanied with some appeal to the heart or emotion; even some who turn out to be very passionate later do not give themselves readily to the sex-urge.

  I want to tell here some experiences at this time which show how all sorts of motive enter into the matter with the girl, whereas the one motive is strong enough as a rule in the man. All through the years from 1890 to 1895,1 thought chiefly of Laura and of arranging meetings with her almost exclusively, but in the sex-way I was always inconstant.

  I don't know why it was, but from my first months in Paris I had always the feeling that French girls gave themselves more easily to passion than any others. They seemed to know more about it and to give more place to it in their lives than girls of other races; and above all, they were as outspoken about it as English boys, and as a Welsh-Celt I felt a peculiar kinship with the French on that account. When American or English girls are brought up in France, they, too show more understanding of sensuality than those brought up in England or America; the contagion is catching.

  All these years I went over to France irregularly every winter: my health was better in Nice than it was anywhere else: I never suffered from my bronchitis there; and of course I stayed in Paris on the way to the Riviera. One day when I was crossing the Channel, it was very rough, indeed, and there was an American lady and a girl on deck together who were very ill- at least the older lady was. I brought the stewardess and tipped her well to take care of the patient; in a few moments the lady said that she would like to go downstairs to the cabin, but the girl preferred to remain on deck. The stewardess and I took Mrs. Sterling down to the ladies' cabin, and I came back to the girl. She seemed about fifteen or sixteen years of age. She had run to the side and been ill once and was still very white. I got her a glass of port wine which brought the color to her cheeks, and with the color all her native courage. "Would you like to walk," I asked, "or would you prefer to lie in the chair?"