My life and loves Vol. 4

by Frank Harris

  And thereafter, when the Jewish leaders got to know of it, they assembled themselves with the high priests and said: "We are powerless and weak to stand against the Romans. But as also the bow is bent, we will go and tell Pilate what we have heard, and we will be untroubled; lest if he hear it from others, we be robbed of our goods and ourselves cut down and our children scattered." And they went and told Pilate. And he sent and had many of the people struck down.

  And as for the wonder-worker, he had him brought before him. And when he had tried him, he perceived that he was a doer of good and not of wrong; neither a rebel, nor a striver after political power, and he set him free. He had given heed to his perturbed wife.

  And he went again to his accustomed place and did his customary works.

  And at once again more people gathered to him, so that his works were more celebrated than ever; the Scribes became filled with envy and gave thirty talents to Pilate that he should kill him. And after he had taken, he consented that they should themselves carry out their purpose. And they took him and crucified him according to Imperial Law.

  It was only natural that Josephus, when he turned his story written in Aramaic into Greek, should omit this bribing of Pilate, which would surely have offended the Romans. After most careful consideration, I regard this account as a wonderful addition to the Gospel story as we have it. It does not represent Jesus as divine; in fact it gives an almost modern view of the rarest spirit that has ever steered humanity.

  CHAPTER XII

  The end of the century

  THE LAST YEARS of this century were dignified by an extraordinary proposal, which has been allowed to fall into complete oblivion: the Tsar Nicolas II sent in August, 1898, to all European rulers and to the United States, a proposal to bring about a great conference in order to ensure peace among the nations and put an end to the constantly increasing armaments that were impoverishing Europe. The Tsar's words were:

  "The maintenance of general peace and a possible reduction of the excessive armaments which weigh upon all nations, present themselves, in the existing conditions of the whole world, as the ideal towards which the endeavors of all governments should be directed."

  The difficulties in reaching any agreement were of necessity great, but did not appear at first to be insurmountable. The conference met: all the nations sent of their wisest. The president was M. de Staal, Germany sent Count Munster, England Sir Julian Pauncefote, America the Hon. Andrew D.

  White, Italy Count Nigra, France Leon Bourgeois, Spain the Duke of Tetuan, China sent Yang Yu, Persia her poet, Riza Khan, Servia the celebrated writer, Miyatovich. The young Queen of Holland put the great palace of the Hague at the disposition of the delegates. Alas! Even before the Congress met, signs of disagreement arose.

  A little dispute between Lord Salisbury and Dick Olney of the United States put the chief difficulty in a nutshell. Suppose the conference condemned a war and a certain nation or nations began hostilities. How could the conference get power to enforce its decision? Plainly, the difficulty had to be met in some way or other, yet, though the talk went on for months, it all came to nothing. But the peace proposal and the conference cast a certain grim light upon the murder later in Siberia of the Tsar and his whole family by his unruly subjects.

  The year 1899 was to me extraordinarily painful. I have already told how my work in South Africa had taken away my attention from investments in Monte Carlo and Nice, which I had neglected and which therefore turned out very badly. I lost thirty or forty thousand pounds and had to find some new way of making money. Suddenly in this mood I went back from the Riviera and stayed a short time in Paris.

  On one of my earlier hurried visits to Paris I met Whistler, who took me to lunch at his house in the Rue du Bac. He talked to me passionately of his quarrel with Sir William Eden, which arose about the price to be paid for the portrait he had done of Lady Eden. He read to me his newest pamphlet: "The Baronet and the Butterfly."

  I had already written in the Saturday Review in Whistler's favor in the dispute with Sir William Eden because I thought it petty of a man as rich as Eden to quarrel over a hundred pounds with a great artist; but now I noticed a malevolence in Whistler that amazed me.

  I have told in my Life of Wilde how I had dined with Whistler in London and told him that Oscar was engaged in prison in writing a new work, a very important drama; and I simply recorded the fact that my story called forth "a stinging gibe at Oscar's expense."

  I may now recount Whistler's word. "Oscar writing a new work," he said, "a great romantic drama; we must find a name for it. I have it" he cried; "it must be known as The Bugger's Opera."

  If Whistler had been more kindly, he would have been a greater man. In full maturity of talent he dissipated himself in squabbles and quarrels which had really no meaning or importance.

  Of course, I always took care to meet Oscar whenever I was in Paris; at this time he was hard up and I had to promise him money.

  I must now tell perhaps the most characteristic piece of humor that I ever heard from him. He called on me one morning and found me reading the Bible.

  "Wonderful book, Frank," he said.

  "A fairy tale of religion," I said, "the development of a national conscience."

  "Not quite that, Frank," he said gravely, "it's its truth that impresses me."

  "Truth?" I questioned.

  "Yes, Frank," and the fine eyes laughed. "It begins, you know, with a man and a woman in a garden and naturally it ends with Revelations."

  I was delighted with the word; and of course had to try to equal it, so I told him the story of my old friend Marix. I was astonished one day at meeting him coming out of a private room of the Cafe Royal, for at that time, even, he was quite grey and must have been seventy years of age.

  "My boy," he said, "I have just been with the prettiest girl in London, and had a great time."

  "Come, come, Marix," I said, "you are too old to brag."

  "Oh, you unbeliever," he said, "don't you know the English proverb: 'Many a good tune comes from an old fiddle?' "

  "That's true," I said, "but even the English have never been foolish enough to say that the good tune comes from an old bow (beau)."

  In one of these talks, Oscar told me a scene from a play he had thought of writing, in which the wife, who was also the mistress of the house, has gone up to her private sitting-room to rest: she is lying down behind the screen with a "migraine," when her husband comes in with the woman he is in love with at the moment. In the middle of their love-making, which the wife can't help overhearing, a knock comes at the door and they hear outside the voice of the husband of the lady, who demands admission. The scene is resolved by the lady of the house getting up from behind the screen and opening the door, and thus saving the guilty couple.

  It occurred to me that I had a story about a Mr. and Mrs. Daventry in my head, which would suit this scene. I finally bought the right to use it for a hundred pounds from Oscar. He asked me fifty pounds for the scene and I gave it to him, and I told him I would give him fifty pounds more if he would write the first act. He promised, but did not keep his word. I went back to London and wrote the play, Mr. and Mrs. Daventry, in four or five days, and took it to Mrs.

  Patrick Campbell, who accepted it at once. I only made one condition-that Mr. Daventry should be played by Fred Kerr, whom I regarded as one of the best character actors on the English stage.

  As Oscar would not write the first act, I wrote it and did it badly, and I rewrote it for the fiftieth night when I had had a little stage experience.

  Afterwards Oscar twitted me about my purchase, saying I had bought the great scene from the Lady Teazle of Sheridan without recognizing it.

  When the play was put on at first, it had a very bad press: the London papers all told me that I had written a French play better suited for Paris than for London; and I found Mrs. Campbell, the next day, in despair because of the unfavorable notices. I cheered her up by telling her that I would pay all the
expenses of the play for a half-share in it.

  "If you can afford to do that," she said, "I can afford to risk it."

  "This bad press," I said, "will make the play."

  Clement Scott, the most influential critic of the tune, tried to damn the play out of personal dislike for me and gave one phrase in the play astonishing notoriety. People talked in the play of the "English vice" till at length the protagonist, Mr. Daventry, turns round and asks: "Is there such a thing, Lady Hillington, as an English vice? What is the peculiarly English vice?"

  "Oh," retorted the clever woman, "I thought every one knew that, Mr.

  Daventry; the English vice is adultery with home comforts."

  That brought all the best class of London society in streams to the theatre, and created such an excitement that about the fiftieth night the censor interfered and cut the phrase out. I went to see him. "Why do this?" I asked.

  "Surely the phrase is harmless enough, and true to boot."

  "Oh, I am delighted with it" he replied, "I tell it every night. I wish you could tell me as good a one about the French. Couldn't you tell me what the French vice is?"

  "Quite easily," I replied. "You know that in all the apartment houses in Paris they have a notice 'eau et gaz a tous les Stages' (water and gas on every floor).

  Well, you know the word garce, meaning a naughty flapper, is pronounced very much like gaz, so I say 'eau et garces a tous les etages' that is the French vice."

  He roared with laughter and thanked me, and this word of mine had almost as great a success, told by him in private, as anything in the play: but in the middle of the success, when I was receiving some hundreds of pounds a week from the play, Queen Victoria died, and the period of mourning stopped all plays in London for a fortnight; but after the period of mourning had passed my play was the only play, I believe, revived in that season, and it ran for fifty or sixty more nights-until Mrs. Patrick Campbell got rid of Fred Kerr, whom I had picked to play the protagonist, Mr. Daventry, and so spoilt the whole cast.

  The success emboldened me to write other plays and I wrote three or four, notably one Shakespeare and His Love, and one entitled The Bucket Shop.

  The one on Shakespeare was immediately taken by Beerbohm Tree, who gave me five hundred pounds in advance for it and promised to open his season with it; but in the meantime he found that his daughter Viola had some talent and wished to go on the stage; and he therefore rejected my play for another because, as he said, he couldn't make love to his own daughter on the stage, whereas Shakespeare in my play was the lover personified. So I withdrew the play and it was never given in London. A year or so later I wrote The Bucket Shop and the Stage Society asked me to allow them to give a representation of it. The success was so great that the society, with my consent, put it on for a second performance, when again the house was crowded.

  I found such difficulty, however, with actors and actresses that I resolved to return to writing stories: each actor and actress seems to be firmly convinced that his or her part is greater than the whole, and they will deform the whole at any moment for a personal success in the part. Besides, I made more money on the stock exchange than I could make at either play-writing or bookwriting, and so I resolved to write merely the books that pleased me, careless of what the monetary outcome might be.

  When I had done a number of short stories, some which later appeared in my book The Veils of Isis, I began to see that the art of narration was still in its infancy. I saw that though the French were masters of the art of story-writing, there wasn't a single story in French, long or short, which I considered at all perfectly designed.

  My practice taught me that the most important thing in a story is the speed of narration; no one wants his reader to skip passages or to feel that this or that part is too long. Most writers think that they can avoid being tedious by jumping from one part of the story to another; but this habit is apt to distract attention. The true art consists in so graduating the speed of the narration that the reader feels that he is being carried along faster and faster to an inevitable conclusion, much as if he were caught in the rapids of Niagara above the falls. And in order to be able to graduate the speed, the introduction of the characters should be deliberate and slow in exact proportion to the length of the story. For as soon as the characters are all known to the readers and the trend of the story is indicated, then the pace should begin to quicken, and chapter by chapter the speed should increase and should be felt to be increasing, so that skipping or tedium should be absolutely impossible. I can understand using telegraphese at the end of a story to prevent any suspicion of dragging.

  In time, with a great deal of practice, I learned many things about the art of story-writing, which I shall perhaps tell about in a future volume.

  In the meantime, I had no journal; the South African war was going on, English defeats growing more and more frequent, every one disappointed and dejected. A sad close to a wonderful period! My old enemy, bronchitis, had seized me in October and I couldn't shake it off. I was in bed with it in a little country house I had outside London when I read of Oscar Wilde's death.

  The world went greyer to me.

  The news from the front continued to get worse and worse. It seemed to me that the South African war marked the decadence of England. I thought and said it showed a lack of understanding, a lack of all high qualities of heart as well as of head, so grave that I couldn't see any possibility of England standing in the future side by side with the United States. The English had spent a thousand millions of money on that unspeakably silly South African war, whereas, if they had spent half that sum in settling up the central plateau of Africa, even from the north of the Transvaal to the Zambesi with their own unemployed, they might have laid the foundations of a greater empire than even the one they had lost in North America.

  Now, after many years, I wonder still whether it is too late for them to recover, but their policy since the Great War is exactly the same as it was in the South African War-a policy of petty grocers much more intent on getting than on giving-and greedy of small immediate gains. Fancy disputing with the miners about an eight hours' day. The miner has to go to his work and return and wash from head to foot in warm water, and on the average this costs him, at least, two hours more; ten hours a day of meanest labor for eight hours pay is bad enough for anyone. The workers in England are always vilely treated.

  Another evil is that the aristocrat always supports the employers and exploiters of labor as against the workingmen, although his conduct to his own servants and dependents is usually excellent; consequently, the strife in England between the employer and the workman becomes keener and keener: the employer wishes to pay as little as he can, and naturally under these circumstances, the workman tries to do as little as he can. The chief result is that though the mining conditions in England are more favorable than they are anywhere else in the world, for in South Wales and elsewhere they have coal quite close to the sea, yet coal can be produced in America and shipped from Virginia, four hundred miles to the sea, and sold to compete with English prices in the London markets. The English employers continually seek to make their money by grinding the workmen, instead of using their own brains in new labor saving appliances and inventions-and now in this year, 1927, they are bringing in a law to make a general strike criminal and so reduce the workmen to practical slavery. Nothing has been done in twenty years to develop the central plateau of Africa-the noblest field for colonization in the world! I harp on this because of its extraordinary importance: I wish all good things for England, for I know well her chivalrous and honorable side, enskied by beauty and sainted by noble deeds, a side realized in her poetry, the finest in the world's literature. But if she ever wins again to financial power it will be through her colonies, and she possesses no colony that can compare with that Central African plateau.

  But if England doesn't care to use her power wisely, what must be said of America? The United States Government has never even shown an inkli
ng of its highest function. Already she is by far the strongest power in the world, strong enough to disband her army and navy and make the chief navies of the world a mere police force and insurance against piracy and privateering; and the money she now spends on armaments could be used to spiritualize her people. By putting an end to war, she may inaugurate that reign of peace upon earth and universal good will to men which is, so to speak, the first recognition by the soul of the new commandment given to us by Christ.

  The money rewards of work are far larger in America than anywhere else in the world, and so artists and thinkers and writers of all sorts are swept into the struggle for money and carried away by success. Of course, this fact should have led the governors to increase at any cost the spiritualization of the people. Conservatories of music and opera houses should have been founded by the state in every city of fifty-thousand inhabitants. Long ago America should have had municipal theatres, too, as well as municipal opera houses, and even municipal schools of chemistry and physics for original research, after the German fashion, but nothing of this sort has been done.

  America, I am afraid, is becoming more and more a mere weapon of the rich to plunder the poor. Yet something great in America drew me always; my love of Professor Smith, who had been my earliest teacher in Kansas, taught me that there was an ideal there higher than anywhere else on earth, because kinder. Every revelation of English snobbishness led me back to the democratic feeling in America with intense pleasure. I always knew that all snobbishness was a love of unreal superiorities, and always loathed the vice; as Emerson said, it dwarfs the dignity of manhood, and prevents one feeling at home with the best in every country.