by Frank Harris
Of course I kissed her, smiling, and she said: "Promise you'll only go with me for this next week, and I'll give my very soul to you; promise! You'll see how sweet I can be-promise! I'll say all the naughty words and do all the naughty things: I want to! There! Do you hear that; I'll do more than you imagine, you dear, you!"
I promised and kept my word, but after that week Adriana never came back again, and so we lost the loveliest figure of all. In her, jealousy was stronger than passion, as it is in many, many women.
Clara
It was the gardener again who brought me to the chief discovery. He told me that Clara had no reticences and would tell me anything, so one day I got him to bring her and questioned her. She said:
"What is there to tell? It's the same thing over and over again, only it gets better and better all the time, different to (sic) most things in life. I don't know when I began. I don't think I was more than seven, but almost immediately I noticed that I didn't care for girls touching me; I only wanted boys, and I was very curious about them, though I pretended not to be.
"One boy, five or six years older than I was, when I was about ten, told me all about it and suited the action to the word. He hurt me a little, but the pleasure, even at the beginning, was greater than the pain, and so I went on with anyone I liked; and I liked a good many.
"I got very careful about thirteen because I knew what the consequences might be, and I made up my mind only to go with a man I really cared for. I don't know why I fell in love, but I did when I was about fifteen, with a gentleman who was good-looking and had charming manners. He spoke to me in the street, took me for a drive, kissed me and put his hand all over me. I didn't mind. He really was charming but when he took me up to his bedroom in his hotel, I told him I was frightened; but he assured me that I'd run no risk with him, and he kept his word. Yet, that sort of half-pleasure didn't content me, so I was very glad, indeed, when your gardener came; and since then I have been as happy as a bird!
"You want to know whether I have touched myself. Sure; all girls have. If they say they haven't, they lie; the silly fools. Why shouldn't we have pleasure when it's so easy?
"I remember my father took me once to the picture gallery in Genoa. I loved the pictures; but one had a young man in it who looked right at me. I got off next morning and went back to the gallery to my pictured lover. I could not help it; I sat down on the bench opposite to him and crossed my legs and squeezed my sex till I was wet. And when I went to bed that night I thought of him, and his lovely limbs and his great eyes, and I touched myself with my hand pretending it was him till I came again and again, and at last got so wild I just had to stop or I'd have screamed-but lots of girls are like that.
"I think I was one of the few who let a boy have me time and again. I could not resist: the truth is, I wanted him as much as he wanted me, and when an older man came after me, it was worse: I could not refuse him, and I felt more with him than with any boy, till I came here, and the great games began. Oh, I love them all; and I've always been taken with you since you gave me the first prize when I had only won the second. You great sweet!"
Naturally, after this we had a long kissing match that ended in a new rendezvous, which was repeated frequently, for I found Clara in many respects the most delightful of all the girls. She had really no reticences, and loved to show her sex and to talk about her intense sensations in the crudest terms; but she never invented or beautified anything, and this simplicity of truth in her was most attractive. When, for example, she said, "When you have me I feel the thrills running all down my thighs to the knees," she was plainly describing an immediate personal experience, and when she told me that merely hearing my voice in the villa made her sex open and shut, I could be sure it was the truth. And bit by bit this truth of reciprocated sensation grew on me, till I, too, was won by the novelty of the emotion. Clara was the most wonderful mistress of them all; though the youngest.
I have spoken here only of pleasant occurrences; and it is interesting or amusing incidents that I remember best in my past life; but towards the end of the summer there was a good deal of trouble with some of the girls. It began with the defection of Adriana; as if encouraged by her jealousy, others felt inclined to follow her example and make conditions.
The three queens, and Clara in especial, remained fairly constant to the end, but Jean and his girls were a constant source of trouble. He would change in the same day, and that always led to remonstrances or angry scenes. Finally, both Ernest and George had to go back to England, and I was ashamed of having let the summer pass without completing my work.
When I returned later to San Remo to see Flora, I found that Clara, too, had got well married. She explained it by saying that widows always found husbands easier than girls, knowing more of what men wanted.
A word here about the difference between the jealousy of man and that of woman.
The jealousy of woman: If the man went with another woman because he loved her, the woman would weep, but forgive him. Love is all powerful to her. But if the man went with another girl out of mere passion, even if he didn't care for her, the woman would be furious: she sees the act-it is an unpardonable traitorism.
The jealousy of man is just the contrary: If the woman went with another man, and gave herself to a passing fancy, the man would be hurt, but would forgive her easily. But if the woman gave herself to some one out of love, the man would be furious and too angry to forgive.
CHAPTER X
Celebrities of the nineties
I want to give as fair and large a picture as I can of this third period of my life-the last decade of the nineteenth century. Casanova is often praised for having given a good picture of his age, yet he has painted no great man of his time, no writer of the first rank, no artist, no statesman, with the solitary exception of Frederick the Great, whom he hardly does more than mention.
In this Life of mine I have tried to picture my growth of character and mind and soul as faithfully as I can, and to complete this history by putting in the foreground, so to speak, the great men and deeds which characterized the age. In my first volume I tried to paint Whitman, Emerson, Carlyle, and others; and in my second volume Skobelef, Ruskin, Randolph Churchill and Maupassant. In this volume I have given sketches of many artists and writers, and I wish to complete the picture with further memories of my contemporaries.
I met Zola and talked with him a dozen times before I ventured to differ with him on any subject. He thought his later books, Lourdes and Rome, his best books, whereas I felt that L'Assommoir, La Terre, Germinal and Nona were far better, to say nothing of Page d'Amour, Le Reve and La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret, which I thought at least as good. Lourdes and Paris and the rest were all to me lifeless, machine-made things that had never grown.
I tried to make him see that Balzac's latest tales, La Cousine Bette and Cousin Pans, seemed to me manufactured and mechanical in comparison with Pere Goriot or La Recherche de l'Absolu, or Eugenie Grandet, and in truth many of the earlier works, such as Le Cure de Tours.
Zola would not agree with me. He regarded Cousine Bette and Cousin Pans as the best things Balzac had ever written.
I remember when he came over to London once, he could talk of nothing but the quiet of the place, the strange peace that reigned in the streets. "What a great city," he said, "here, there is no noise." He wanted to know why La Terre was regarded as pornographic, which incensed him very much. "If they knew, how much worse life is," he cried, "they would stop talking such nonsense."
And with that sentiment I was in complete agreement.
I got more pleasure from a side of Zola that is almost unknown. I knew that as a young man he had been an art critic of a Paris paper; I think it was Le Figaro; and he interested me enormously when he talked about the modern schools of painting. He was the first person I ever heard say that Cezanne was one of the greatest masters that ever lived. George Moore praised Manet, Monet, and Degas, but said little or nothing about Cezanne, though he was the g
reatest of the lot, the true head of the school. Zola let out the secret one day when he told me that he had been at school with Cezanne and that when Cezanne came to Paris, he, Zola, was almost the first person whom Cezanne called upon and interested in his work.
It is strange that Zola never wrote any book about painting, and when I asked him why he did not, he told me that it was not his art, that he felt as an outsider to it. But his love of painting and of artistic things generally was seen in his house, which was filled with old furniture and quaint decorations.
I cannot help thinking that Zola might have given us as good a book on modern French art, as Fromentin gave us on the art of Holland, and such a volume would be, as Thucydides called his book, "a possession forever."
Zola, though one of the heads of the time, had a peculiarly uninteresting outward. He was a little below ordinary height, but strongly built and rather stout. His hair and beard and walk showed strength, but there was nothing distinctive about his face: an ordinary round face with thick nose and ordinary lips that might have passed in any crowd. He had not even the distinction of ugliness; his pale face, coarse lips and brown beard were merely commonplace.
I was astonished to find that Alphonse Daudet had a very high opinion of Zola. "Have you ever seen his notes," he said, "on any book he is going to write? It is extraordinary, the way he gets up his subject, studies every part of it. I suppose he knew more about Lourdes when he wrote about it than any one living. He went down and spent a month in the place."
Yet Zola used to interest me by saying that too much knowledge is as dangerous as too little. You had to know enough to see all the peculiarities of a place or a theme, but the moment you knew so much about it, that its resemblance to other places struck you rather than its differences, you had done too much work. "For my part," Daudet added, "I write without any notes, trusting to the idiosyncracy of the characters to develop the plot and, in fact, I trust to what people call inspiration, which is probably another name for laziness, rather than to study."
In striking contrast to Zola, Daudet was picturesque, very good-looking indeed: he wore his hair long, but his nose was well-cut, his eyes large, the shape of his face excellent. I happened to see Daudet again after Turgenev's letters had been published, and I found him strangely angry. He resented Turgenev's criticism as if it had been a personal offence. "We all treated him as one of ourselves," he kept repeating, "and here he talks of us as if Zola and Flaubert and the rest of us were pigmies and he alone was the great writer and artist."
I wanted to see whether I could get a new word out of him, so I said: "Well, you know, some of us think that in Bazarof, Turgenev has depicted the one new character added to European literature since the Mephistopheles of Goethe."
"Good God," cried Daudet, "but is not Madame Bovary a character, and Zola's Lantier? I cannot understand such criticism."
To insist would have been surely rude, yet to some of us Madame Bovary is poor stuff and Lantier poorer still in comparison with Bazarof. Bazarof is the model of the realist for all time, deeper than Tartuffe or Le Misanthrope, and they are both greater creations than Madame Bovary or Lantier.
Daudet's novels were better than his criticism.
I don't know why, but Daudet often reminded me of W. E. Henley. I met Henley first at dinner at Sidney Low's house, who had followed Greenwood as editor of the St. James Gazette. Henley was then editing the Scots Observer, which he later removed to London as the National Observer.
Seated at the table, Henley was a great big man with broad shoulders, looking at least six feet in height, with an immense leonine head, full golden beard, large blue eyes and good features, a handsome and striking personality.
Almost immediately we came to some difference about the relative value of the play and the novel. I spoke of the novel as the most complex and therefore the highest form of art, and he replied: "That's nonsense," so rudely that I retorted: "Let us wait until the ladies go and then we'll continue the argument." Too surprised to find words, Henley grunted "Hmph!" But after the ladies had left the table, he turned on me and said: "Now I would like to know why you think the novel a higher form of art than a play, or for that matter, a poem?"
"It can include poems," I retorted, "as Goethe showed, and it has all the powers of a play and many that the play lacks."
Henley grunted again: "I don't see that mere assertion proves anything!"
"The dramatic presentation of character," I went on, "is, of course, the best for simple characters, but suppose you want to make a complex character.
Suppose, for instance, you want to show your readers a man of great courage, who for some reason or other, (a weakness of heredity, drink, let us say, or some hereditary murder) is a coward at night: the spectators would not understand what you meant. You have to put in the finer qualifying shades of character by explanations. This you can do in the novel, (1849–1903); he was a considerable critic and editor, as well as a writer, and that's why I said that the novel was the largest form of art, a more complex form even than the play."
To my astonishment, Henley replied quite frankly: "I never thought of it, but I believe you are right"; and we became, to a certain extent, friends.
When he afterwards laid down the law about poetry, I did not contradict him, and when he asked me whether I agreed with him or not, I told him I only believed in criticizing the art that I myself practiced, and not being a poet, I never disputed with poets about their mystery.
When we got up to join the ladies, I was horrified. Henley's legs were all twisted, and instead of being a man of six feet and over, he was only middle height. My host told me that from his poems in hospital, it was pretty clear that syphilis had turned him from a giant into a cripple.
I remember some later meetings with Henley; once when he sent me his Song of the Sword for the Fortnightly Review, which I should have liked to publish, but Chapman, the managing director, would not hear of it. "Free verse," he said, "is neither poetry nor prose," and he begged me not to have anything to do with it.
Henley was not a great man, but a very interesting one. He thought it his duty to edit every contribution sent him, and he did edit every word, every phrase, weighed every comma and colon, until the whole of his paper was steeped in his own style, so that it often seemed as if it were all written by one man.
My chief object, when I got a paper of my own, the Saturday Review, was the antipodes of his. I encouraged everybody to express himself as personally as possible, and the more he differed with me, as a rule, the more I liked his work. I do not see how one could have got Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, McColl, Chalmers Mitchell and Cunninghame Graham to do their best on any other terms.
What then was Henley's success? He got together a band of youthful admirers who wrote for him and afterwards became known as journalists. I don't remember one man of real ability in Henley's crowd; not one, so far as I recollect, made a great name for himself in the future. But success in the day and hour he had in abundance and admirers, such as the Right Hon. George Wyndham, who always called Henley a remarkable poet, mainly I used to think, because Henley's poetry, second rate as it was, was better than his own.
There was another figure whom I got to know very well in the nineties, an infinitely more gifted man than Henley in another art: Auguste Rodin. I have done a portrait of him, but here I wish to add a few more words.
At our very first meeting I noticed that he had no venom in him and no exclusions. He was of the race of the great masters, easily moved to enthusiasm, without a particle of envy in his composition. He accepted life as it was, lived it to the fullest, and had few regrets. The only trace of bitterness I ever saw in him came to the surface when an American millionaire offered him ten thousand dollars for a portrait-head, provided he would finish it in a week.
"I explained to him," said Rodin, relating the incident, "that in such a short time I could do nothing more than a likeness. I should not be able to understand the soul of him, much less find out ho
w best to suggest it through his features; but he declared that a likeness was all he wanted, and so"-and he threw up his hand-"ma foi, I said, 'Yes.'" He swung round a moment later as if the thought had stung him: "Fifty thousand francs in a week. Ah, had I had those fifty thousand in a year when I did my 'man with the broken nose,'
I'd have done a dozen types that now-"
There was an inexpressible sadness in his voice, and well there might be. "A dozen types," I said to myself, "all swallowed up and lost 'in the vague womb of uncreated night.' "
Rodin died during the World War, leaving twenty or thirty great portraits of his contemporaries, from Henley and Shaw to Rochefort, Hugo and Balzac, to say nothing of a dozen groups and figures that can never be forgotten. His Thinker is finer than the Medician figure of Michelangelo; his Baiser, his Nymph and Satyr, his Succube, are all examples of bronze turned into flesh by virtue of an incomparable craftsmanship and the urge of an astonishing sensuality that could lend even to marble the pulsing thrills of life.
I can still see a little female figure, perhaps half-life size, that stood for some years in the center of the salon in his little villa at Meudon. I christened it La Parisienne, and he adopted the name at once joyfully, and indeed it might have stood as a personification of the gay capital-the only city in the world where artists feel at home. There was a certain perversity in its frank beauty that was exquisitely characteristic. The hips were slight, the limbs slight, too, with something of the divine awkwardness of girlhood; but the breasts stood out round and firm, defiantly provocative; the nose, too, was tip-tilted, cheeky; the face, one would swear, smiling with a gay challenge.
Madame Rodin, I remember, regaled us with some petits fours that were very good, and some desperate coffee which made me wonder why it was not called chicory honestly, as it should have been. The little old woman served the Master like a servant at once and mother for half a century; then, conscious of his immense debt to her loving care, and anxious to make tardy amends, Rodin married her. I think so much of her humble devotion that I do not believe the new dignity affected her much: yet I may be mistaken m this, for she died a month or so afterwards, and a little later Rodin, as if unable to bear the separation after so many years of companionship, followed her into the silent land.
