________________________________________________
_ To the review in the Pall Mall Gazette I attribute, rightly or
wrongly, the introduction of Mary Fitton to Mr Frank Harris. My
reason for this is that Mr Harris wrote a play about Shakespear and
Mary Fitton; and when I, as a pious duty to Tyler's ghost, reminded
the world that it was to Tyler we owed the Fitton theory, Frank
Harris, who clearly had not a notion of what had first put Mary into
his head, believed, I think, that I had invented Tyler expressly for
his discomfiture; for the stress I laid on Tyler's claims must have
seemed unaccountable and perhaps malicious on the assumption that he
was to me a mere name among the thousands of names in the British
Museum catalogue. Therefore I make it clear that I had and have
personal reasons for remembering Tyler, and for regarding myself as in
some sort charged with the duty of reminding the world of his work. I
am sorry for his sake that Mary's portrait is fair, and that Mr W. H.
has veered round again from Pembroke to Southampton; but even so his
work was not wasted: it is by exhausting all the hypotheses that we
reach the verifiable one; and after all, the wrong road always leads
somewhere.
Frank Harris's play was written long before mine. I read it in
manuscript before the Shakespear Memorial National Theatre was mooted;
and if there is anything except the Fitton theory (which is Tyler's
property) in my play which is also in Mr Harris's it was I who annexed
it from him and not he from me. It does not matter anyhow, because
this play of mine is a brief trifle, and full of manifest
impossibilities at that; whilst Mr Harris's play is serious both in
size, intention, and quality. But there could not in the nature of
things be much resemblance, because Frank conceives Shakespear to have
been a broken-hearted, melancholy, enormously sentimental person,
whereas I am convinced that he was very like myself: in fact, if I
had been born in 1556 instead of in 1856, I should have taken to blank
verse and given Shakespear a harder run for his money than all the
other Elizabethans put together. Yet the success of Frank Harris's
book on Shakespear gave me great delight.
To those who know the literary world of London there was a sharp
stroke of ironic comedy in the irresistible verdict in its favor. In
critical literature there is one prize that is always open to
competition, one blue ribbon that always carries the highest critical
rank with it. To win, you must write the best book of your generation
on Shakespear. It is felt on all sides that to do this a certain
fastidious refinement, a delicacy of taste, a correctness of manner
and tone, and high academic distinction in addition to the
indispensable scholarship and literary reputation, are needed; and men
who pretend to these qualifications are constantly looked to with a
gentle expectation that presently they will achieve the great feat.
Now if there is a man on earth who is the utter contrary of everything
that this description implies; whose very existence is an insult to
the ideal it realizes; whose eye disparages, whose resonant voice
denounces, whose cold shoulder jostles every decency, every delicacy,
every amenity, every dignity, every sweet usage of that quiet life of
mutual admiration in which perfect Shakespearian appreciation is
expected to arise, that man is Frank Harris. Here is one who is
extraordinarily qualified, by a range of sympathy and understanding
that extends from the ribaldry of a buccaneer to the shyest
tendernesses of the most sensitive poetry, to be all things to all
men, yet whose proud humor it is to be to every man, provided the man
is eminent and pretentious, the champion of his enemies. To the
Archbishop he is an atheist, to the atheist a Catholic mystic, to the
Bismarckian Imperialist an Anacharsis Klootz, to Anacharsis Klootz a
Washington, to Mrs Proudie a Don Juan, to Aspasia a John Knox: in
short, to everyone his complement rather than his counterpart, his
antagonist rather than his fellow-creature. Always provided, however,
that the persons thus confronted are respectable persons. Sophie
Perovskaia, who perished on the scaffold for blowing Alexander II to
fragments, may perhaps have echoed Hamlet's
Oh God, Horatio, what a wounded name--
Things standing thus unknown--I leave behind!
but Frank Harris, in his Sonia, has rescued her from that injustice,
and enshrined her among the saints. He has lifted the Chicago
anarchists out of their infamy, and shewn that, compared with the
Capitalism that killed them, they were heroes and martyrs. He has
done this with the most unusual power of conviction. The story, as he
tells it, inevitably and irresistibly displaces all the vulgar, mean,
purblind, spiteful versions. There is a precise realism and an
unsmiling, measured, determined sincerity which gives a strange
dignity to the work of one whose fixed practice and ungovernable
impulse it is to kick conventional dignity whenever he sees it. _
Read next: PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS: Harris "durch Mitleid wissend"
Read previous: PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS: Thomas Tyler
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