by Frank Harris
Frank Harris
My life and loves Vol. 4
CHAPTER I
HOW I BEGAN TO WRITE
It was the conflict with my committee in Hackney over Parnell and his treatment by Gladstone that brought me to the parting of the ways. The Venezuela affair, the Damien incident, and my dislike of a lazy, aimless life, however luxurious, helped to decide me. Was I to continue to fool about London and waste myself on little committees, or should I give up my candidature for the House of Commons in Hackney and go abroad and try to become a writer? A long spell of bad weather in November, unceasing fog and rain, determined me. I packed up and went off to the Riviera. In a week I was installed at the Hotel of Cap d'Antibes with Mr. Sella as host, who gave me two excellent rooms on the first floor. I found that Grant Allen and his wife were staying in the hotel. I had known him for some time, but now I met him more intimately and soon confided to him that I had made a new start and was going to try to write some short stories.
Every night he and his wife came up to my sitting-room after dinner and I told them the stories before I wrote them. I told them the story of The Sheriff and His Partner, of Monies, the Matador and A Modern Idyll on three successive nights. They praised them all enthusiastically, and when they went away I sat down to write out the stories, one story each night. When I had finished all three I sent them off to the Fortnightly Review to be set up, and asked for proofs to be returned to me at once. I remember I spent two nights on the Modern Idyll, and afterwards worked on the proofs, while Mantes came perfectly on the first attempt. I was so excited with hope and fear that I went to Monte Carlo to while away the time till I could hope to get my stories back in print.
In a week or so I returned and went to my room and read the three stories. I saw that the story of The Sheriff and His Partner was spoilt by letting the facts dominate; real life is seldom artistic; I thought Monies, the Matador very much the better. I remember saying to myself that I had done what I intended, given the Spaniard his real place as an heroic man of action. I confess I thought it was better than the Carmen of Prosper Merimee, which, up to that time, I had regarded as the best Spanish story. But I preferred A Modem Idyll to either of the other two. There was in it a Sophoclean irony that appealed to me intensely. When the Deacon insisted on paying in order to keep the clergyman who was his wife's lover in the same town, I was hugely delighted: I felt sure it was good work.
I gave the three stories to Grant Allen and he agreed with me that Monies, the Matador and A Modern Idyll were much better than The Sheriff and His Partner. I began to work on other short stories. A fortnight later Grant Allen came and told me that he had a letter from Meredith about my stories. He had sent Monies and A Modern Idyll to him and asked his opinion on them.
We both regarded Meredith as the highest literary judge in England at that time. Meredith did not care so much for A Modern Idyll: "The story was too subacid," he thought, but he praised Mantes to the skies. To my delight, he said it was better than Carmen in every way; I had given even the bulls individuality, he said, whereas Merimee had dismissed them as brutes and had been content to give life to the one woman. Meredith ended his criticism with the words, "If there is any hand in England can do better than Mantes, I don't know it."
I have always thought of that letter as my knighting. And I really cared nothing afterwards for anyone's opinion of my work. Curiously enough, when I sat down to write a longer story, Elder Conklin, I found it very difficult, and the worst of it was that I didn't seem able to judge it properly. I suddenly remembered that Horace tells us that he couldn't judge his poetry for nine years-novem annas, and I found later, when a book of my stories was printed, that I could not judge them even to my own satisfaction till five or six years had elapsed after they were written. Really, an author is like a mother: her latest baby seems to her the most perfect, just as his latest story or play seems to the author the best he has done.
I sent out my first stories to three or four English magazines; although I was the editor of the Fortnightly Review, they were every one returned to me with thanks: only one editor even asked me to send him some other work, telling me that he didn't think that the English public cared for stories about bull-fighting. This amused me, so I turned A Modern Idyll and Monies, the Matador into my best French and sent them off to the Revue des Deux Mondes in Paris. Ferdinand Brunetiere, at that time editor of the Revue, was called "The Door of the French Academy." He wrote me immediately a charming letter, saying that it was the first time that he had ever received two masterpieces in one letter, but he went on to tell me that my French was faulty and that he hoped I would let him correct the worst passages. I was only too delighted. As soon as the stories appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, they were praised in the English press, and at once the same editors who had rejected them wrote, asking me for some more stories. In this way I was brought to realize how low is the standard of criticism in England. The English editors always regarded me as an American, and had pleasure in trying to put me in what they thought was my place.
Talking one day to Meredith of the low standard of English literary criticism, he turned on me and said, "It is so true: I have never once been criticized in England at all fairly."
"Good God," I cried, "not even your poetry?"
"Well," he said, "my poetry has been treated a little better than my prose.
Your ordinary editor feels that he knows nothing about poetry because he doesn't care for it, so he leaves it for an expert to judge; but he thinks he can judge a story as well as any one living, and so he has no hesitancy in telling me that my forte is not story-writing, and that Richard Fever el is not to his taste."
"I'll repair the omission," I said, "for I look upon you as only second to the very greatest, to my heroes: Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cervantes."
"Strange," he said, turning away, perhaps to hide his emotion, "that is what I have sometimes thought of myself, but I never hoped to hear it said."
"I shall say it and loudly," I declared. And so I tried my best to get Matthew Arnold and Browning to write the truth about Meredith, but they both made excuses. Browning told me that "praise of the living always seems tainted."
Why, I couldn't imagine, but my scheme fell through. Yet, think of what Meredith did in superb poetry, and of Richard Feverel, that great love idyll in prose; and how difficult it is to win mastery in both arts, or, indeed, in either.
I often think of William Watson's noble epigram:
Forget not, brother singer, that though Prose Can never be too truthful nor too wise, Song is not Truth-not Wisdom-but the Rose Upon Truth's lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes!
Here I cannot but recall a funny incident which occurred a little earlier. I had gone up to Paris and had my usual sitting-room in the Hotel Meurice; one day when I came in I found George Moore waiting for me. He naturally had picked up the little stories which were lying in print on the table and had read them.
"Where did you get these stories, Harris?" he asked. "I don't care for the Mantes; it is too romantic; I hate bulls and bullfighting; but The Sheriff and His Partner is very good, and A Modern Idyll is a masterpiece. I might have done it myself. Who is the writer? Whoever he is, he ought to be proud of himself."
"I wrote 'em all, Moore," I said.
"You!" he cried in astonishment. "Where did you learn to write stories?"
"They are my first fruits," I replied, laughingly.
"Good God!" he cried. "It must make you feel very conceited."
"On the contrary," I said, "it has made me feel very humble. I am not sure that A Modern Idyll is better than Balzac's Chef d'Oeuvre Inconnu or his Autre Etude de Femme."
"Good gracious!" cried Moore. "You surely didn't think
you could write better than Balzac straight off, did you?"
"Certainly I did," I replied, "or I'd never have begun."
A little later Moore wrote to me, asking for permission to turn the Modern Idyll into a play, and I believe he did it with Arthur Symons, under the title of The Curate's Call or something of that sort. It had little interest for me.
I wanted to know whether I could do a long novel. Above all, I wanted to know how I was to render the portrait of Shakespeare and his life that was in my mind. But the joy in me already was rampant. I knew that, like Saul, I had gone out to find my father's asses and had found a kingdom. I was drunk with the hope that I might really be a great writer, as Carlyle said, "One of that strange race called Immortal."
Immediately I took the matter seriously to heart. I returned to London and sought counsel from the wisest, but got little or nothing for my pains, till it suddenly came to me that I ought to increase my vocabulary as much as possible; and when I told this to my friend, Verschoyle, he agreed with me and sent me an early edition of Johnson's great dictionary. I put in two years' work at it, as I have already related in detail.
The worst of it was that at first I had no guide as to how I should use the larger vocabulary which I had acquired, till one day I came across the words of Julius Caesar, who, according to Aulus Gellius, advised all writers "to avoid, as the seaman avoids a rock, any word that isn't well known and commonly used" (ut tamquam scopolum sic vitas inauditum et insolens verbum).
The simplest speech is the best in prose. It was Joubert, I think, who called simplicity "the varnish of the great masters."
Meredith advised me to read English prose exclusively for some tune, till I got free of the obsession of German, and accordingly I read Gulliver's Travels, Donne's Sermons, and Dryden's Prefaces, and soaked myself in their rhythms and cadences. I read, too, Froude's Short Stories on Great Subjects, and learnt pages of Pater and of the Bible. Above all, while writing a good deal of journalism, I forced myself every day to write one or two sentences as carefully as possible: now I chopped them up into short sentences and then wrote them all as one long phrase, studying the different effects; now I began with the logical beginning and afterwards began at the end; in short, I studied day by day for some years the structure of our English speech.
I don't think I got much from it all; still, reading the masters taught me their peculiarities, and was in itself good discipline; and thus in time I learned that the half is greater than the whole. As Goethe said: "In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister."
I am not inclined to lay much stress on style or mere verbal excellence: a conception may be as great in sandstone as in marble, in putty as in bronze.
Of course, I prefer the marble and bronze to sand and putty, but the conception is, after all, the chief thing.
I came to love English words, too, for their bold, naked exposures, for the pulsing, painting heat in them, and their shrill shrieks of pain; for the hot rhetoric, too, drawn from the childhood of the race, and the high poetry embalming man's dreams of the future and the ultimate triumph of beauty and goodness and truth.
Words to me often possess individual life and the evocative magic of personality:
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy is to me a revelation of Shakespeare's soul; and when I read All the soft luxury That nestled in his arms, I see Fanny Brawne atoning to Keats for her brainlessness by her soft, luxuriant nestling.
What a beautiful word "mouth" is! and what a dreadful, ill-sounding brute is "logic"; how stiff is "right," and how stupid "honest"; one word always amuses me-the word "wanton"; English lexicographers can find no derivation for it, and so they have suggested that it means "want one," as if any loose woman ever would want only one! The idiocy of the professors could scarcely find a more perfect illustration. I could go on forever; think of the beauty of Keats's:
There is a budding morrow in midnight, or of Shakespeare's supreme verse:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
One should remember, too, that Hamlet exclaims: "Oh my prophetic soul!"
I think I was the first to point out that even Shakespeare had favorite words, such as "gild," that he used in and out of season; even the greatest of men have a peculiar vocabulary, and the limitations of speech mark limitations of memory and of mind. The style changes with the growth of the man.
Shakespeare sloughs off his early euphemism, becomes in middle life very fluid, intensely articulate, reaching even to simplicity, and then in age packed sentences into words, deep thoughts into an epithet-a most remarkable growth.
I am not likely to underrate the magic of words, and English writers are apt to be more articulate than Americans of the same mental caliber. Lowell noticed this, but found no explanation for it, whereas I believe the reason is that all English writers love poetry more than Americans do and start their literary career by trying to write verse. This practice soon gives a large vocabulary and a keen sense of the value of the painting epithet and of rhythm.
Some of my correspondents have asked me to tell them what in my judgment are the best pages in English prose: I think Swift perhaps the best model of all; but there is hardly a finer passage in English literature than Pater's page on the Mona Lisa:
The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how they would be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.
And Ruskin's page on Calais Church is almost as fine. I thrill when he speaks of the large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it; the record of its years written so visibly, yet without sign of weakness or decay; its stern wasteness and gloom eaten away by the Channel winds, and overgrown with the bitter sea grasses… as some old fisherman beaten grey by storm, yet drawing his daily nets.
The last chapter of Ecclesiastes and Paul's words on Faith, Hope, and Charity are even higher.
There are prose writers like Carlyle and Heine of an incomparable splendor of achievement. No one surely has ever read the first page or the last volume of Carlyle's French Revolution and come away without being deeply affected by the experience. Yet Carlyle was not as great as Cervantes.
The greatest page in Cervantes, however, as I often say, I have never seen quoted: it is near the end of the second part of Don Quixote, written shortly before his death, when he was well over three score years of age.
There comes a cloud upon the plain, and the Don immediately takes it for the paynim host who have come out to fight him. Sancho Panza, the squire, says it smells badly and may well be the pagans, so skins up a tree to be safe. Don Quixote lays his lance in rest and spurs out to combat. A little while later he is flung to the ground and trampled on; and when the wild mob has passed, Sancho comes down the tree, goes over to the knight and is rejoiced to find that he is not killed, not even wounded seriously; only bruised and cut and dirtied.
"What was it?" asked the Knight. "What a terrible charge!"
"It was indeed," said Sancho, "a crowd of swine were being driven to market; but as you are not wounded seriously, it doesn't matter."
"I am wounded to the soul," cried the Don; "to go out to do noble deeds and be trampled on by the swine;-that's the last insult, the final disaster. Take me home; my fighting is over and done."
With the exception of some sayings of Jesus, and especially the story of "The Woman Taken in Adultery," there is nothing greater in prose than this page of Cervantes.
My experiences of poetry, too, perhaps deserve to be recalled. I have already described in the preceding volume how I gave up writing poetry, but with the years my love for poetry has grown if possible more intense.
In London it used to amuse Colonel John Hay, when he was American ambassador there, to hear me recite his Jim Bludso:
He weren't no saint, — but at jedgment I'd run my chance with Jim, 'Longside of some pious gentlemen That wouldn't shake hands with him. He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing, — And went for it thar and then; And Christ ain't agoing to be too hard On a man that died for men.
But I always preferred even to that fine poem the Prayer of the Romans:
We lift our souls to Thee, O Lord
Of Liberty and of Light!
Let not earth's kings pollute the work
That was done in their despite.
Let not Thy light be darkened
In the shade of a sordid crown,
Nor Piedmont swine devour the fruit
Thou shook'st with an earthquake down…
Let the People come to their birthright, And crosier and crown pass away, Like phantasms that flit o'er the marshes At the glance of the clean white day.
This work of Hay, with some of Emerson and The Prayer of Columbus of Whitman constitute, I think, the greatest American poetry; but the best English poetry of the nineteenth century is finer still.
I sometimes wonder whether accidents are not providential. We have almost driven God out of the universe and installed law in his stead; but curious chances and coincidences often remind us that there are more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
In the first volume I declared that any originality of thought I may possess is due in the first case to the fact that, when a cowboy on the trail some fifty years ago, I had no books and by the camp fire at night had to answer the obstinate questionings of sense and outward things without any help from the choice and master spirits of my time. I was forced to think because I could not read.