by Frank Harris
Bigge thought the offense very grave. «The morals of a boy,» he declared, «were the most important part of his education. The matter must be probed to the bottom: he thought that on reflection I would not deny that I had seen a college boy that night in colors and in suspicious company.» I thereupon got up and freed my soul; the whole crew seemed to me mere hypocrites. «In the Doctor's own House,» I said, «where I take evening preparation, I could give him a list of boys who are known as lovers, notorious even, and so long as this vice is winked at throughout the school, I shall be no party to persecuting anybody for yielding to legitimate and natural passion.» I had hardly got out the last words when Cotteril, the son of the Bishop of Edinburgh, got up and called upon me to free his House from any such odious and unbearable suspicion. I retorted immediately that there was a pair in his house known as «the inseparables,» and went on to state that my quarrel was with the whole boarding-house system, and not with individual masters who, I was fain to believe, did their best. The vice-principal, Dr. Newton, was the only one who even recognized my good motives: he came away from the meeting with me and advised me to consult with his wife. After this I was practically boycotted by the masters: I had dared to say in public what Wolverton and others of them had admitted to me in private a dozen times.
Mrs. Newton, the vice-principal's wife, was one of the leaders of Brighton society: she was what the French called une maitresse femme, and a born leader in any society. She advised me to form girls' classes in literature for the half-holidays each week; was good enough to send out the circulars and lend her drawing-room for my first lectures. In a week I had fifty pupils who paid me half a crown a lesson, and I soon found myself drawing ten pounds a week in addition to my pay. I saved every penny and thus came in a year to monetary freedom. At every crisis in my life I have been helped by good friends who have aided me out of pure kindness at cost of time and trouble to themselves. Smith helped me in Lawrence and Mrs. Newton at Brighton out of bountiful human sympathy. Before this I had got to know a man named Harold Hamilton, manager of the London amp; County Bank, I think, at Brighton. It amused him to see how quickly and regularly my balance grew; soon I confided my plans to him and my purpose: he was all sympathy. I lent him books and his daughter Ada was assiduous at all my lectures. In the nick of time for me the war broke out between Chili and Peru: Chilean bonds dropped from 90 to 60. I saw Hamilton and assured him that Chili, if left alone, could beat all South America: he advised me to wait and see. A little later Bolivia threw in her lot with Peru, and Chilean bonds fell to 43 or 44. At once I went to Hamilton and asked him to buy Chileans for all I possessed on a margin of three or four. After much talk he did what I wished on a margin of ten: a fortnight later came the news of the first Chilean victory, and Chileans jumped to 60 odd and continued to climb steadily. I sold at over 80 and thus netted from my first five hundred pounds over two thousand pounds and by Christmas was free once more to study with a mind at ease. Hamilton told me that he had followed my lead a little later but had made more from a larger investment. The most important happening at Brighton I must now relate. I have already told in a pen-portrait of Carlyle, published by Austin Harrison in the English Review some twelve years ago, how I went one Sunday morning and called upon my hero, Thomas Carlyle, in Chelsea. I told there, too, how on more than one Sunday I used to meet him on his morning walk along the Chelsea embankment, and how once at least he talked to me of his wife and admitted his impotence. I only gave a summary of a few talks in my portrait of him, for the traits did not call for strengthening by repetition, but here I am inclined to add a few details, for everything about Carlyle at his best is of enduring interest! When I told him how I had been affected by reading Emerson's speech to the students of Dartmouth College and how it had in a way forced me to give up my law-practice and go to Europe to study, he broke in excitedly: «I remember well reading that very page to my wife and saying that nothing like it for pure nobility had been heard since Schiller went silent. It had a great power with it… And so that started you off and changed your way of life?… I don't wonder… It was a great call.» After that Carlyle seemed to like me. At our final parting, too, when I was going to Germany to study and he wished me «Godspeed and Good speed! on the way that lies before ye,» he spoke again of Emerson and the sorrow he had felt on parting with him; deep, deep sorrow and regret, and he added, laying his hands on my shoulders, «Sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no more forever.» I remembered the passage and cried: «Oh, Sir, I should have said that, for mine is the loss, mine the unspeakable misfortune now,» and through my tears I saw that his eyes, too, were full. He had just given me a letter to Froude, «good, kindly Froude,» who, he was sure, would help me in any way of commendation to some literary position, «if I have gone as is most likely,» and in due time Froude did help me, as I shall tell in the proper place. My pen-portrait of Carlyle was ferociously attacked by a kinsman, Alexander Carlyle, who evidently believed that I had got my knowledge of Carlyle's weakness from Froude's revelations in 1904. But luckily for me, Sir Charles Jessel remembered a dinner in the Garrick Club given by him in 1886 or 1887, at which both Sir Richard Quainft and myself were present. Jessel recalled distinctly that I had that evening told the story of Carlyle's impotence as explaining the sadness of his married life and had then asserted that the confession came to me from Carlyle himself. At that dinner Sir Richard Quain said that he had been Mrs. Carlyle's physician and that he would tell me later exactly what Mrs. Carlyle had confessed to him. Here is Quain's account as he gave it to me that night in a private room at the Garrick. He said: «I had been a friend of the Carlyles for years: he was a hero to me, one of the wisest and best of men: she was singularly witty and worldly-wise and pleased me even more than the sage. One evening I found her in great pain on the sofa: when I asked her where the pain was, she indicated her lower belly and I guessed at once that it must be some trouble connected with the change of life. «I begged her to go up to her bedroom and I would come in a quarter of an hour and examine her, assuring her the while that I was sure I could give her almost immediate relief. She went upstairs. In about ten minutes I asked her husband, would he come with me? He replied in his broadest Scotch accent, always a sign of emotion with him: «'I'll have naething to do with it. Ye must arrange it yerselves.' «Thereupon I went upstairs and knocked at Mrs.
Carlyle's bedroom door: no reply; I tried to enter: the door was locked, and unable to get an answer, I went downstairs in a huff and flung out of the house. «I stayed away for a fortnight, but when I went back one evening I was horrified to see how ill Mrs. Carlyle looked, stretched out on the sofa, and as pale as death. 'You're worse?' I asked. «'Much worse and weaker!' she replied.
«'You naughty, obstinate creature!' I cried. 'I'm your friend and your doctor and anything but a fool: I'm sure I can cure you in double-quick time, and you prefer to suffer. It's stupid of you and worse.-Come up now at once and think of me only as your doctor,' and I half lifted, half helped her to the door: I supported her up the stairs and at the door of her room she said: «'Give me ten minutes, Doctor, and I'll be ready. I promise you I won't lock the door again.' «With that assurance I waited and in ten minutes knocked and went in. «Mrs. Carlyle was lying on the bed with a woolly-white shawl round her head and face. I thought it absurd affectation in an old married woman, so I resolved on drastic measures: I turned the light full on, then I put my hand under her dress and with one toss threw it right over her head. I pulled her legs apart, dragged her to the edge of the bed and began inserting the speculum in her vulva: I met an obstacle-I looked-and immediately sprang up. 'Why, you're a virgo intacta!' (an untouched virgin), I exclaimed. «She pulled the shawl from her head and said: 'What did you expect?' «'Anything but that,' I cried, 'in a woman married these five and twenty years.' «I soon found out the cause of her trouble and cured it or rather did away with it: that night she rested well and was her old gay, mutinous self when I called next day.
«A l
ittle later she told me her story. «'After the marriage,' she said, 'Carlyle was strange and out of sort, very nervous, he seemed, and irritable. When we reached the house, we had supper and about eleven o'clock I said I would go to bed, being rather tired: he nodded and grunted something. I put my hands on his shoulders as I passed him and said, «Dear, do you know that you haven't kissed me once, all day-this day of days!» and I bent down and laid my cheek against his. He kissed me, but said: «You women are always kissing-I'll be up soon!» Forced to be content with that, I went upstairs, undressed and got into bed: he hadn't even kissed me of his own accord, the whole day! «'A little later he came up, undressed and got into bed beside me. I expected him to take me in his arms and kiss and caress me. «'Nothing of the sort, he lay there, jiggling like.' («I guessed what she meant,» said Quain, «the poor devil in a blue funk was frigging himself…») 'I thought for some time,' Mrs. Carlyle went on, 'one moment I wanted to kiss and caress him; the next moment I felt indignant. Suddenly it occurred to me that in all my hopes and imaginings of a first night I had never got near the reality: silent the man lay there jiggling, jiggling. Suddenly I burst out laughing: it was too wretched! too absurd! «'At once he got out of bed with the one scornful word, «Woman!» and went into the next room: he never came back to my bed. «'Yet he's one of the best and noblest men in the world, and if he had been more expansive and told me oftener that he loved me, I could easily have forgiven him any bodily weakness; silence is love's worst enemy, and after all, he never really made me jealous, save for a short time with Lady Ashburnham. I suppose I've been as happy with him as I could have been without anyone, yet-' «That's my story,» said Quain in conclusion, «and I make you a present of it: even in the Elysian Fields I shall be content to be in the Carlyles' company. They were a great pair!» Just one more scene. When I told Carlyle how I had made some twenty-five hundred pounds in the year, and told him besides how a banker offered me almost the certainty of a great fortune if I would buy with him a certain coal-wharf at Tunbridge Wells (it was Hamilton's pet scheme), he was greatly astonished. «I want to know,» I went on, «if you think I'll be able to do good work in literature; if so, I'll do my best. Otherwise I ought to make money and not waste time in making myself another second-rate writer.» «No one can tell you that,» said Carlyle slowly. «You'll be lucky if you reach the knowledge of it yourself before ye die! I thought my Frederick was great work: yet the other day you said I had buried him under the dozen volumes, and you may be right; but have I ever done anything that will live?» «Sure,» I broke in, heartsore at my gibe, «sure.
Your French Revolution must live and the Heroes and Hero Worship, and Latter Day Pamphlets and-and-» «Enough,» he cried; «you're sure?»
«Quite, quite sure,» I repeated. Then he said, «You can be equally sure of your own place; for we can all reach the heights we are able to oversee.»
Afterword.
To the Story of My Life's Story
I had hardly written «Finis» at the end of this book when the faults in it, faults both of omission and commission, rose in swarms and robbed me of my joy in the work.
It will be six or seven years at least before I shall know whether the book is good and life-worthy or not, and yet need drives me to publish it at once. Did not Horace require nine years to judge his work? I, therefore, want the reader to know my intention; I want to give him the key, so to speak, to this chamber of my soul. First of all I wished to destroy, or at least to qualify, the universal opinion that love in youth is all romance and idealism. The masters all paint it crowded with roses of illusion:
Juliet is only fourteen; Romeo, having lost his love, refuses life;
Goethe follows Shakespeare in his Mignon and Marguerite; even the great humorist Heine and the so-called realist Balzac adopt the same convention. Yet to me it is absolutely untrue in regard to the male in boyhood and early youth, say from thirteen to twenty: the sex urge, the lust of the flesh, was so overwhelming in me that I was conscious only of desire. When the rattlesnake's poison bag is full, he strikes at everything that moves, even the blades of grass; the poor brute is blinded and in pain with the overplus. In my youth I was blind, too, through excess of semen. I often say that I was thirty-five years of age before I saw an ugly woman, that is, a woman whom I didn't desire. In early puberty, all women tempted me; and all girls still more poignantly. From twenty to twenty-three, I began to distinguish qualities of the mind and heart and soul; to my amazement, I preferred Kate to Lily, though Lily gave me keener sensations; Rose excited me very little, yet I knew she was of rarer, finer quality than even Sophy, who seemed to me an unequalled bedfellow. From that time on the charm of spirit, heart and soul, drew me with ever-increasing magnetism, overpowering the pleasures of the senses, though plastic beauty exercises as much fascination over me today as it did fifty years ago. I never knew the illusion of love, the rose-mist of passion, till I was twenty-seven, and I was intoxicated with it for years; but that story will be for my second volume.
Now strange to say, my loves till I left America just taught me as much of the refinements of passion as is commonly known in these States. France and Greece made me wise to all that Europe has to teach; that deeper knowledge, too, is for the second volume, in which I shall relate how a French girl surpassed Sophy's art, as far as Sophy surpassed Rose's ingenuous yielding. But it was not till I was over forty and had made my second journey round the world that I learned in India and Burma all the high mysteries of sense and the profounder artistry of the immemorial East. I hope to tell it all in a third volume, together with my vision of European and world politics.
Then I may tell in a fourth volume of my breakdown in health and how I won it back again and how I found a pearl of woman and learned from her what affection really means, the treasures of tenderness, sweet-thoughted wisdom and self-abnegation that constitute the woman's soul. Vergil may lead Dante through Hell and Purgatory: it is Beatrice alone who can show him Paradise and guide him to the Divine. Having learned the wisdom of women-to absorb and not to reason-having experienced the irresistible might of gentleness and soul-subduing pity, I may tell of my beginnings in literature and art, and how I won to the front and worked with my peers and joyed in their achievements, always believing my own to be better. Without this blessed conviction, how could I ever have undergone the labor or endured the shame or faced the loneliness of the Garden, or carried the cross of my own Crucifixion; for every artist's life begins in joy and hope and ends in the shrouding shadows of doubt and defeat and the chill of everlasting night. In these books, as in my life, there should be a crescendo of interest and understanding. I shall win the ears of men first and then" senses, and later their minds and hearts and finally their souls; for I shall show them all the beautiful things I have discovered in Life's pilgrimage, all the sweet and loveable things, too, and so encourage and cheer them and those after-comers, my peers, whose sounding footsteps already I seem to hear; and I shall say as little as may be of defeats and downfalls and disgraces save by way of warning, for it is courage men need most in life, courage and loving-kindness. It is not written in the Book of Fate that he who gives most receives most, and do we not all, if we would tell the truth, win more love than we give. Are we not all debtors to the overflowing bounty of God? FRANK HARRIS. The Catskill Mts., this 25th day of August, 1922.
