[1]
] SET DOWN IN MALICE

[3]
]SET DOWN IN MALICE
A BOOK OF REMINISCENCES

BY
GERALD CUMBERLAND

❦

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.”
Walt Whitman.

BRENTANO’S
NEW YORK
MDCCCCXIX

[4]
]PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED
EDINBURGH

[5]
]UXORI HORAS AMISSAS REDDO

[7]
]PREFATORY NOTE

Very many of the following pages were written in the trenches and dug-outs of Greece and Serbia. I added a chapter or two in Port Said, Alexandria and Marseilles. That is to say, I wrote far away from books and without reference to documents, and I wrote to refresh a mind dulled by the conditions of Active Service in the Near East. A few chapters were written in London and a few in Winchester.

Here and there may be found factual inaccuracies, though if these exist I am not aware of them. But the spirit of the book is as near the truth as I can bring it.

Gerald Cumberland

Winchester
2nd June 1918

[9]
]CONTENTS

[11]
]CHAPTER I
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

It was when I was a very young man indeed that I caught and succumbed to my first attack of Shaw-fever. I do not remember how I caught it; something in the Manchester air, no doubt, was responsible for my malady, for a handful of “intellectual” Manchester people had most daringly produced a complete Shaw play, and, though I had not witnessed the play, I had read it, and it was with delight that I saw The Manchester Guardian saying about You Never Can Tell just the very things I had myself already thought. I found that in my suburban circle of friends I was regarded as harbouring “advanced” ideas. Shaw, I was told, was “dangerous.” This bucked me up enormously, and I thereupon wrote a long essay on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and, desiring further to astonish and bewilder my friends, got into communication with Bernard Shaw with a view to having the essay published in pamphlet form. When it was known in Manchester suburbia that Shaw had written to me, a boy still at school, my friends could not decide whether I was cleverer than they had hitherto supposed or Mr Bernard Shaw more foolish than seemed possible.

I have never completely recovered from that first attack of Shaw-fever; like ague, it sleeps in my bones and, from time to time, makes its presence known by little convulsions that are disturbing enough while they last, but which generally die pretty quickly.

It was in the middle of 1901 that I wrote to Mr Shaw about the particular brand of socialism from which at [12] ]that time I was suffering. It must have been a very raw and crude brand, and my letter to Bernard Shaw must have amused him considerably. Certainly his reply was most diverting. Here it is:

“By all means give ‘every penny you can spare to those who are most in need of monetary help.’ If you will be kind enough to send it to the Treasurer of the Fabian Society, 3 Clement’s Inn, London, W.C., you may depend upon its being wanted and well used. If you prefer relieving needy persons, I can give you the names and addresses of several fathers of families who can be depended on to absorb all your superfluous resources, however vast they may be. By making yourself poor for their sakes you will have the satisfaction of adding one more poor family to the existing mass of poverty and contributing your utmost to the ransom which perpetuates the existing social system. You will go through life consoled by an inexhaustible sense of moral superiority to bishops and other inconsistent Christians. And you will never be at a loss for friends. Where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered.

“A world of beggars and almsgivers—beautiful Christian ideal.

“You are not a prig—only a damned fool. A month’s experience will cure you.”

But though I think this letter amusing now, I am convinced I did not think so at the time I received it. I know not in what terms of pained surprise and hurt vanity I replied to it, but a few days later I received the following short note:—

“Yes: you are an ass; and nothing will help you until you get over that.

“‘A has money, B is without. If A doesn’t share with [13] ]B he is—well, I call him a thief.’ Just what an ass would do. Pray what do you call B if he accepts A’s bounty?

“I strongly recommend you to become a stockbroker. You believe that doing good means giving money; and you fancy yourself in the character of Lord Bountiful with a touch of St Francis.

“Yes, a hopeless ass. No matter; embrace your destiny and become a philanthropist. It is not a bad life for people who are built that way.”

That, I think, most effectively closed the correspondence, as, I have little doubt, it was intended to do.

During the next few months, having approached Messrs Greening & Co., the publishers, I was commissioned by them to write a book on Mr Hall Caine for their Eminent Writers of To-day series. The book being completed and published before the end of the year, I conceived the idea of writing another about Mr Bernard Shaw, and communicated with the dramatist, informing him of my intention and asking him if he would provide me with biographical details. This he consented to do, and on 19th December 1901 wrote to me from Piccard’s Cottage, Guildford, saying: “If you will let me know when you are coming to London, I will make an appointment with pleasure and give you what help I can.”

A few weeks later I went to Guildford, but I went there with a guilty secret hidden in my breast. The secret was this. My publishers did not care about issuing a complete book devoted to Bernard Shaw and all his works. I gathered, much to my amazement, that they did not think him of sufficient importance. The astounding idea was then suggested that half my book should be concerned with Bernard Shaw and the other half with Mr George Moore. Now, at the time of my visit to Guildford, I had not imparted this information to Mr Shaw. I did not anticipate that he would like the suggestion and I thought [14] ]it wiser to disclose it to him by word of mouth rather than by letter.

I came upon Mr Shaw taking photographs in the little front garden of Piccard’s Cottage. It was a winter’s day and an inch of snow lay upon the ground; yet he wore no overcoat. He insisted upon taking my photograph. He took me sitting. He took me standing. And when he had grown tired of playing with his new toy, he suggested that we should go into the house.

There a hideous surprise awaited me. Lying upon the sofa of the study was an open copy of the current week’s Candid Friend, a most brilliant and most ruthless paper edited by Mr Frank Harris.

“There is something there,” said Shaw, nodding in the direction of the sofa, “that should interest you, I think.”

I sat down, took up the paper and looked at the open pages. To my horror I saw a most brutal, murderously clever full-page caricature of Mr Hall Caine on one side, and on the other a long and most hostile review of my stupid little book on the famous novelist.... Shaw, tall and erect, stood looking at me a little malignantly, and, on the instant, I was on my guard.

I read the review word by word and examined the caricature very closely. The article was amazingly good, but, as I read it, I did so wish it had been written about a book by somebody else. Frank Harris himself, I think, had written the article and Frank Richardson had drawn the caricature. I looked up at Shaw and smiled.

“Awfully good, don’t you think?” I said.

He nodded, and by his manner seemed to express approval of the way in which I had come through the ordeal. He showed me some photographs he had taken—not very good photographs. One, taken by his wife, I think, showed Bernard Shaw with his arm round a female scarecrow; leaning slightly forward, he was leering at it with narrowed eyes.

[15]
]During lunch Shaw devoured a large number of vegetarian dishes and drank water, whilst Mrs Shaw and I ate meat and drank wine. It was, I think, the mellowing influence of a basin of raisins that loosed his tongue and set him talking without cessation. He spoke of Karl Marx and Granville Barker, of Mrs Annie Besant and Janet Achurch, of Mr Sidney Webb and the Fabian Society, of Morocco and Ancoats, of Shorthand and Wagner, of The Manchester Guardian and H. G. Wells ... in a word, of Shakespeare and the musical glasses.

I rather gathered that he had “got over” Karl Marx years ago, and I inferred that he considered the work of this writer indispensable for young cubs to sharpen their teeth upon, but that he was by no means the last word in socialism. I think he thought that Bernard Shaw was the last word. For Granville Barker he had even then a great regard, and, speaking of him, he offered me some cider, a bottle of which Barker had drunk some days previously; as he offered the cider he said that Barker had “ridden over”—whence, I know not—on his bicycle and that the cider had made him half tipsy.... The thought of Mrs Annie Besant appeared to afford him vast amusement, but he spoke in terms of high regard of Janet Achurch.

“But she uses her voice wrongly. It is quite the finest voice on the stage and, perhaps because she knows it is so fine, she is always trying experiments with it. For a Shakespeare passage, for example, she will plan out what I may call a scheme of sound; sound that will rise and fall with the passion and decline of the words, that will intensify and grow dim as the mood waxes and wanes. But the scheme, the design—for it is a kind of design—is nearly always too elaborate, too involved. It is full of detail, and the detail is apt to become more prominent than the general outline. She will start off most magnificently, lose herself a little, recover herself, lose herself [16] ]again, and then abruptly strike a woefully wrong note. Perhaps her ear is wrong; perhaps excitement betrays her. But, with all her faults—and even her faults are more interesting than other people’s excellencies—she remains a superb actress.”

Of Mr Sidney Webb I remember nothing that he said, nor have any of the loving words he spoke of the Fabian Society remained in my memory. He spoke of it a great deal, both at lunch and during our subsequent walk, but somehow or other the Fabian Society has always seemed to me a bloodless and dull sort of institution, and while he talked about it my thoughts wandered, and I mused rather sadly over the psychology of this man whose moral earnestness was so much greater than my own.

But I pricked up my ears when the word “Morocco” fell from his lips, though in the event he said very little about it. I found he had no great belief in the value of travel as a means of education, an expander of the mind. He himself had never travelled; places and countries so precisely fulfilled all your expectations that, really, what was the use of going to see them? Facts, people and ideas: nothing else aroused his curiosity.

Of shorthand he said ... well, you don’t particularly want to know what he said of shorthand, do you? And in The Perfect Wagnerite he has said all that it is necessary for him to say about Wagner. Last of all comes H. G. Wells.

Now, I have not the remotest idea what Shaw thinks of Wells in these days, yet I would give a good deal to know. But sixteen years ago the older man had for the younger an almost reverential admiration. At the time of my visit to Shaw one of Wells’ books was appearing serially in, I think, The Fortnightly Review. Wells was busy looking into the future, and the future that he saw seemed, in some respects, so disagreeable yet so likely that Shaw was dismayed at the prospect. [17] ]“A great man, Wells,” said Shaw; “do you know anything about him?”

I told him the little I knew and, as we had finished lunch, I asked Mrs Shaw’s permission to light a cigarette.

Almost immediately after, we started on our walk.

Never shall I forget that terrible walk. I believed then, as I believe now, that Shaw was deliberately pitting his powers of endurance against my own—the powers of endurance of a middle-aged vegetarian against those of a young meat-eater. He walked with a long, easy stride, swinging his arms, breathing deeply through his wide nostrils. His pace, which never for a moment did he attempt to accommodate to mine, was at least five miles an hour. He forgot, or he did not choose to remember, that I had that morning travelled by the slow midnight train from Manchester, that I had crossed London, that I had reached Guildford by a weary Sunday train from Waterloo, and that I had just eaten an enormous lunch. I panted and struggled half a pace behind him. I became stupendously hot. I made unexpected and unathletic sounds, like a man who is being smothered. Blissfully unconscious of all this was Shaw.... I wonder?... No; blissfully conscious of all this was Shaw.

He talked steadily the whole time, but I was suffering from an inhibition of all my mental faculties. Yet, at the back of my mind, I kept saying to myself: “You know, you have not yet told him that he is to share your book with George Moore.” And each time I told myself that, I shuddered somewhat.

It was not until we had neared Mr G. F. Watts’ house that Shaw moderated his pace a little.

“That,” said he, in a curiously low voice—the kind of voice one uses in churches—“that is where G. F. Watts lives.”

And he pointed to some high chimneys that overtopped [18]
]a belt of trees, and stopped and gazed. But I was in no mood of reverence and, though I have frequently struggled to induce a feeling of rapture when gazing upon the large canvases of Watts, I have never been able to do so. So I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped my perspiring forehead.

“Hot?” asked Shaw grimly.

“Of course I’m hot. Aren’t you?”

“Warm. Just nicely warm.”

Presently we came to a tall tower of terra-cotta bricks which, Shaw told me, had been erected by the villagers under the direction and at the instigation of Watts himself. We stopped in front of this and, as it was one of the “sights” of the district, I felt that I was expected to say something wise or, at all events, something complimentary about it. I could say neither.

“Which do people imagine it to be—useful or ornamental?” I asked.

“I wonder,” said he.

“For it is neither,” I ventured.

But his thoughts were otherwhere, for he began a long, technical exposition on the art of making bricks and tiles. His talk became art-and-crafty. I was carried back to my childhood days, my kindergarten days. I heard the name of William Morris and I sighed most profoundly.

Shaw won that walk by a neck. Having reached Piccard’s Cottage, he put me in a kind of conservatory, gave me a blanket and a deck chair and told me to go to sleep. But already I was asleep....

When I awoke it was quite dark, and, feeling rather miserable, I groped my way back to the house. There I found Mr and Mrs Shaw in the study, she frowning at her desk, he standing on the hearthrug and looking at her most quizzically.

“Well, how much is it?” she asked. “Four times into two hundred. The cheque must go by to-night’s [19]
]post. I’ve done the sum three times, and on each occasion I’ve got a different answer.”

“Is it two hundred pence or two hundred pounds?”

“Don’t be absurd, George. Even you know that you can’t get a furnished house like this for two hundred pence a year.”

“Four times into two hundred—let me see—fifty. Yes, fifty. You can safely write down fifty pounds.”

That little incident safely over, we turned to tea.

I induced Shaw to talk about his own work, and I quickly discovered that, unlike most authors, he had no feeling of bitterness that he had had to spend years in hard work before he won public recognition.

“A writer of originality must expect to have to wait. If a writer is acclaimed immediately—I mean a writer on social and artistic subjects—he may be pretty sure that he is saying things that have been said before. He may be saying them better than anybody else; nevertheless, they are the same things. My own success has been gained, and is very largely maintained, by the force of my personality and by the tradition about myself that has gradually grown up in the mind of the public. For example, if I were to write an article and give it to you to copy out and offer to editors in your own name, you being the professional author, I doubt very much if a single editor would look at it twice. A good deal, you see, is in a name.”

It was when Mrs Shaw, having sipped her tea, had left the room, that I broached the subject of my book.

“Publishers are curious people,” I remarked meditatively.

He sat silent.

“My own publishers in particular. They are now fighting shy of a book solely about you.”

I paused and glanced at him. But he was gazing at me with eyes of a mild malice and he was very silent.

[20]
]“Yes,” I continued. “To put it bluntly, they think that a book solely about you would not be a success. So that they propose the first half of the book should be concerned with you and the second half with George Moore.”

“And the title?” he asked gently.

“Why? What do you mean?”

“Well, don’t you think The Two Mad Irishmen would go rather well?”

I floundered. If he was going to be witty or sarcastic, or anything horrid of that kind, I should be nowhere at all. To cover my confusion—and, as it chanced, to make that confusion worse—I began to talk very rapidly.

“I know their suggestion is awfully stupid, but then publishers do make stupid suggestions. That, I suppose, is why they are so successful. Of course, George Moore and yourself——”

“Oh, George has worked awfully hard,” said Shaw reasonably. “I don’t suppose there is a more conscientious artist living. He has dug out of himself everything there was to be got. No one could have tried more. As a worker, George is magnificent. But, really, when you suggest a book——”

“No! No! I don’t suggest it for one moment,” I interrupted.

“Then what are we discussing?”

“Well, in the first instance, my publishers suggested——”

“Ha! ‘In the first instance!’ No; it really cannot be done. If you wish to write the book nobody, of course, can stop you, but if you do you must not expect me to countenance it. I shall wash my hands of the whole business.”

And, in spite of some further conversation, that remained his unshakable attitude.

An hour later he walked with me down to the station, [21] ]I resolving all the way that I would persuade my publisher to accept two books. Shaw droned on about Sidney Webb and the Fabian Society.... So many people have talked to me of Sidney Webb. I wonder why. I have heard Sidney Webb speak; he knows all about figures and dates and money and wages, and so on.... But of human nature he knows nothing; he knows less than a child, for a child has at least intuition. Figures don’t go very far, do they? Of course, by manipulation, you can make them go all the way....

But, as I was saying, Shaw talked about Fabianism and Webbism all the way to the station.

He was good enough to wait till the train started, and the last I saw of him as I leant through the window was a long, lean figure standing under a lamp. The figure wore no overcoat, but I noticed, even when a hundred yards separated us, a pair of thick, home-knitted woollen gloves....

. . . . . . . .

P.S.—The book was never written, for my publishers could not be persuaded to take G.B.S. at his own or my estimate.

Mr George Moore, on being approached, wrote me from Dublin, saying, inconsequently enough, that he had never asked anybody to write about him nor had he ever asked anybody to refrain from doing so. On the whole, he thought it better that if A (myself) wished to write about B (Mr George Moore), it would be an excellent arrangement, provided that:

(1) A was an intimate friend of B’s, or

(2) A was a complete stranger to B.

I was left, most courteously, to infer that I (A), being a complete stranger, had better remain so.

I did.

I have done.

[22]
]CHAPTER II
MISCELLANEOUS

Mrs Annie Besant—Marcus Stone—Lloyd George—Bishop Welldon—Dr Walford Davies

Mrs Annie Besant, like her Himalayan Mahatmas, is lofty, remote, and difficult of access. Only once was I admitted to The Presence. What drove me there was, first of all, curiosity, and, secondly, a feeling of great respect for her which I had retained from boyhood. I admired her courage, her independence, her friendship with and loyalty to Bradlaugh; moreover, I have always held in high regard those who, from temperamental or spiritual discord with their fellows, have kicked over the intellectual traces and run a race of their own. Annie Besant, whatever else she may be, is a woman of courage, of vast resource and of indomitable will.

But alas! my hour’s interview with her did much to sap and destroy my devotion. First of all, I must say that, previous to meeting her, I had been for a short time an Associate of the Theosophical Society. I was never admitted to membership of that body because I never claimed the privilege; my associateship originated in my desire to hear Orage lecture and in my anxiety to study some curious and not unintelligent people at first hand. Nothing is at once more distressing and more repellent to me than affectation, and the affectation of most members of the Theosophical Society whom I met was really appalling. The people were also grotesque. The men had dyspepsia

and bald heads, and the women wore djibbahs [23] ]and a look of condescending benevolence. They read Madame Blavatsky assiduously and gabbled nonsense to each other.

Mrs Besant made an appointment for me one Saturday afternoon at the Midland Hotel, Manchester. I was shown into a private sitting-room which, upon entering, I took to be empty. But, after a few moments had passed, I observed a snake-like movement in a corner of the room, and a thin, pale lady advanced languidly towards me, holding out a lifeless hand which hung nervelessly at her wrist. I glanced at her in surprise and noticed that she wore a djibbah, a long necklace of yellow stones, a most insincere smile, and vegetarian boots.

“Mrs Besant will be with you shortly,” she said, scrutinising me carefully. Having, as it appeared to me, taken a mental inventory of my clothing, she glided to the door and, smiling at me once more, disappeared. I took her to be a sort of bodyguard.

The entrance of Mrs Besant was brisk and businesslike. She had a firm handshake; she looked a capable business woman—a woman accustomed to issuing commands and having them implicitly obeyed. Of medium height, she was plump and heavily built; her pale face, surmounted by perfectly white hair, was of an intensely serious cast, and I saw no humour in her eye.

Our conversation, a little halting at first, began to flow quite easily when I mentioned her Autobiography and asked her why she had not issued a second volume.

“You see,” I said, “it stops just at the most interesting period of your life. You have never stated fully how you became convinced of the truth of theosophical doctrines. I, for one, cannot understand your position.”

“It isn’t very necessary that you should,” she observed calmly.

“Who am I, you mean, that I should presume to understand you?”

[24]
]“Yes; perhaps I meant something like that. People who are intended to understand me will understand me. The rest don’t matter. In any case, this is not a subject that has much interest for me.”

“But, surely, if you think you have discovered the truth, you are anxious to spread it? As a matter of fact, I know, of course, that you are anxious on this point, or you would not lecture and write.”

“You are quite right,” she said, leaning forward a little. “I spread the truth, but, then, the truth is not for everybody. Much of it falls on stony ground.”

“And it will continue to do so,” I half interrupted, “until you have proved that the alleged miracles of Madame Blavatsky are really true. Was Madame Blavatsky a charlatan or was she not?—on the answer to that question all modern theosophy stands or falls.”

She smiled at this attack of mine and at the violence of it.

“It is proved,” she answered; “it is proved up to the hilt. I and thousands of others are entirely satisfied.”

“And Madame Coulomb?—was she a mountebank? And were the mysteries of Adyar frauds?”

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion about those matters. I have my own view; you, no doubt, have yours. And now,” she added, a little wearily, “let us have tea and talk about the weather.”

Such was the substance of our talk. I gathered the impression, right or wrong, that Mrs Besant had brought herself to a state of mind when no evidence, however strong, that was opposed to her beliefs would shake her faith for a moment. She desired most fervently to believe in the bona fides of Madame Blavatsky, and believe she did. The Theosophical Society does not—or it did not in those days—demand from its members the acceptance of any particular doctrine; you could accept as [25] ]little or as much as you wanted and still remain one of the faithful. But Mrs Besant went the whole hog.

Bernard Shaw once told me that, meeting Mrs Besant years after the Bradlaugh days, he said to her, half jokingly:

“You surely don’t believe one quarter of the rubbish you write and talk, do you?”

Her answer was to look at him coldly and turn on her heel. Which, after all, was perhaps the wisest answer she could give.

. . . . . . . .

A kindly old man took me to his studio and began to talk of Dickens. He spoke of those Victorian days as though they were the greatest that have ever been. He knew Anthony Trollope and all his works and looked askance at me because Barchester Towers was the only Trollope book I had read.

And then he took me to an easel and showed me his latest work—a “pretty-pretty” picture of a girl in a garden; the sort of picture that, according to my mood, either excites my laughter or throws me into a fury of rage.

But Marcus Stone was very old, and his ideals, being those of yesteryear, left me untouched. The young can never understand the old and, as I listened to him talking of art and literature and life, I told myself that we to-day are centuries away from the mid-Victorian days. If he had not been so old and kindly I should have wished to say:

“Do you want to know what all you people were like fifty years ago?—well, read Punch for, say, the year 1870.”

But though my friends tell me that I am brutal, and I know I am ill-mannered, I could not find it in my heart to speak those words.

. . . . . . . .

The amiable but rather weak Mr P. W. Wilson, who used to do “Lobby” work for The Daily News, having [26] ]declined a whisky, entered into conversation with me at the hotel at Criccieth. He told me that till that morning he had been staying with Mr Lloyd George, but that, Mr Masterman, Sir Rufus Isaacs and other people of importance having turned up, he himself had had to seek refuge in the hotel.

The occasion of the assembly of these wits was the opening of an institute at Llanystumdwy, the little village near Criccieth, where the Prime Minister spent his childhood days. Mr Lloyd George had given the institute to the inhabitants of the village and was himself to open it publicly the following day.

Mr Wilson’s amiability and his self-satisfaction at enjoying the friendship of Mr Lloyd George rather put me out, and I felt a strong desire to disturb his sleek smoothness.

“I hope,” said I, “that the suffragettes will not be brutally treated to-morrow, but I am very much afraid they will.”

“Of course,” observed P. W. W., between draws at his pipe, “if they create a disturbance here, in the very midst of Lloyd George’s worshippers, they must expect a stiff time of it.”

“Yes, and they will get it. The organised gang of roughs from Portmadoc who are coming here to-morrow armed with clubs will see to that. The uneducated Welsh, their passions once aroused, are little better than savages....” I hesitated a moment. Then, as impressively as I could, I added: “We must prepare ourselves for dreadful sights to-morrow. I should not be very surprised if one or two women are not torn limb from limb. And if they are, the responsibility will, in my opinion, rest mainly with Mr Lloyd George himself.”

P. W. Wilson took his pipe from his mouth and looked at me with some concern.

“How do you make that out?” he asked.

[27]
]“Well, hitherto he has not done very much to soothe the irritation of meetings he has addressed which have been interrupted by suffragettes. Lloyd George has not very much magnanimity. Moreover, in this particular matter, he evinces but a shallow knowledge of human nature. He would win the approval of all men of generous and chivalrous natures if——”

I allowed my voice to die away to nothing.

Wilson, really disturbed, moved a little uneasily on his chair, rose, scratched his head, sat down again and sighed.

“I must tell him,” said he. “I must warn him that, at the very beginning of his speech, he must appeal to the audience to deal gently with any interrupters.... Torn limb from limb.... You really think that?”

I felt a little sorry to have disturbed him so much, and yet I knew that I very much preferred an anxious, harassed Wilson to a Wilson who was smooth and sleek.

Next morning at breakfast he was again smooth and self-satisfied.

“I have seen him,” he whispered, like a conspirator; “I have seen him. It is arranged. Everything is all right.”

Later on that morning I was myself received by Mr Lloyd George in his house. I went prejudiced against him and determined at all hazards not to allow myself to be won over by that charm of manner of which I had heard so much.

But in five minutes I had succumbed. He has a wonderful gift of making you feel that he thinks you are the most interesting and most intelligent person he has ever met. What he really does think, I suppose, is that you (of course, I don’t mean you; I mean myself) are an unmitigated bore, and while his eyes are smiling at you he is really saying to himself: “Why doesn’t the fellow go?...” Yes, he has charm. He does not fuss and he is not over-emphatic in his manner. And he is a most [28] ]deferential listener. He will even ask you your opinion about matters of which he knows ten times more than yourself, and he will do you the honour of arguing with you.

That afternoon, at the formal ceremony of “opening” the institute, my warning concerning the suffragettes was nearly prophetic. Mr Lloyd George, of course, did all in his power to quell the mob’s anger, but the women were violently assaulted, their breasts beaten, their clothes ripped from their backs, their hair torn by the roots from their heads.... On the edge of the mêlée I saw P. W. Wilson standing deploring it.

. . . . . . . .

It has always seemed to me an extraordinary thing that, in company with Dr Walford Davies, I should have been asked some years ago to be a guest at the annual dinner of the Church Diocesan Music Society. I am always ready for adventure, of however hazardous a nature, so I accepted the invitation even after I had been told that a speech was expected from me.

Bishop Welldon, arriving late—in fact, I believe he had dined elsewhere—plumped himself on a chair next to me, and immediately began to dominate everything and everybody within a radius of twenty yards. He is one of those distressing people who will be jocular. And his jocularity is rather noisy. He laughed a great deal and rubbed his hands together. And he asked me a question and then asked me another before I had had time to answer the first. And, really, he did talk so awfully loudly.... I had come across him before in trams and shops and places of that kind, and it was always the same; he invariably talked at you.... Even in the Manchester Cathedral, where Dr Kendrick Pyne introduced me to him, he shouted at me and never allowed me to finish a sentence.

But I perceive that I am becoming petulant, and I [29] ]ought not to do so for, as a matter of fact, the dinner was a screamingly funny affair. I had prepared a fierce and warlike speech, a speech attacking the Society whose food I had just eaten and whose wine was still warm in my veins. I am, I suppose, quite the worst speaker in the world; so I had memorised my speech and, so good I thought it that I had vastly enjoyed doing so. But alas! when the minute drew near for me to deliver it, I found myself in an atmosphere of such conviviality, such kindness, such flattering attention, that I could not find it in my heart to deliver the words I had prepared and memorised. Yet an impromptu speech of a different tenor was impossible. I simply hadn’t the talent to do it. My name was called and I rose to my feet.

My speech was offensive: it was meant to be. But offensive though I knew it to be, I did not know how offensive it really was. I mentioned the name of Wagner and, as I did so, I saw Dr Walford Davies shudder most violently. Though I attacked the Church for her unimaginative attitude to music, though I stamped on hymns and hymn tunes, though I slanged the microscopic brains of many organists, though I said that nearly all Cathedral music was to me anathema maranatha, nobody except Bishop Welldon appeared to care in the least, and he did not care half so much as poor, virginal Walford Davies, who, at the name of Wagner, shuddered and put his glass aside.

Davies spoke: earnestly, like St Francis; frenziedly, like Savonarola; passionately, like Venus ... no! no! no! ... passionately, like St Paul. Eschew Wagner! That’s what it all came to.... “Eschew....” Hate the sin, love the sinner, but most certainly “eschew” both. His cheeks were very white, his lips pale. He trembled a little. Wagner, it appeared, was one of the devils. Ab-so-lute-ly pernicious.... Have you ever noticed how accurately you can estimate a man by his [30] ]adjectives? Dr Walford Davies used “pernicious” eleven times, “poisonous” twice, “very-much-to-be-distrusted” once, “naughty” once (“this naughty man!” was the phrase), “unlicensed” thrice, and “immoral” fifteen times.... I must say, en passant, that I am writing from memory and that my memory for figures is atrocious; still, these adjectives, collectively represent the impression his speech left on my mind.

After dinner (well, neither after nor before dinner) one does not ardently desire a speech of that kind. It fell flat. A fat organist from Bolton (or was it Bacup?) winked me a fat wink. The man on my left—a young musical doctor from Cambridge—dug his elbow into my ribs.

And then came Bishop Welldon’s speech. He was extraordinarily clever. He said some of the most cutting things imaginable. He was scathing. He hurt me. Reaching for my glass, I hastily swallowed the large brandy I had been careful to ask for beforehand. He made epigrams, epigrams adapted most skilfully from the writings of his friend, John Oliver Hobbes. And he spoke so well; he had presence; he had a manner; he, like Sir Willoughby Patterne, had a leg ... and a leg that was gaitered. Perhaps it was the gaiters that did it. One has heard a good deal lately about the Hidden Hand, but what about the influence of the Hidden Leg? The leg hidden under the table? The gaitered leg hidden under the table? Most of the diners, remembering that Bishop Welldon was indeed a bishop—though, truly, only, so to speak, an ex-bishop, and an ex-bishop only of Calcutta, and now possessing only the powers of a dean (whatever those powers may be!)—most of the diners, I say, recollecting that Bishop Welldon was indeed a bishop, looked at me with eyes of faint hostility or did not look at me at all.

I was very young, said Bishop Welldon. I was [31] ]enthusiastic; I was inexperienced; I was “artistic”; I was a jumper-at-conclusions.

When he finished and, with one of his good-natured smiles, turned and looked at me, I was crumbling bread very rapidly, rolling the bread into soiled little pills, putting the little pills all in a row.

Later on in the evening Bishop Welldon, a little group of jolly people and I myself sat and smoked and drank very inferior coffee. Dr Walford Davies did not join us. He shot little pointed darts at me from his eyes, but (as, of course, you must have anticipated) when he and I parted he was most studiously polite.

And, on my way to my tram, I hummed Davies’ Hame! Hame! Hame! to myself and pondered over the mystery that enables a man to write such a wonderful, soul-searching melody and yet possess an intellect of quality only ... well, so-so.

Here a little child I stand,

Heaving up my either hand ...

Do you know Walford Davies’ setting of that Grace, the setting he made some years ago for one of the daughters of the late Canon Gorton? If you do, if, as I do, you adore its Blake-like simplicity, its Ariel freshness, you will not mind his hatred of Wagner. Only, it is rather strange, don’t you think, that we outsiders who love Wagner (and I believe, don’t you, that all intense lovers of Wagner must be rather outsiderish?) should be able to love Walford Davies also, though he (most unhappy!) can’t or won’t love us?

But it is being borne in upon me that for the last five minutes I have been writing like the adorable Eve in The Tatler. Let me, for her sake, begin another chapter.

[32]
]CHAPTER III
FRANK HARRIS

It must have been five or six years ago that a friend came to me with the news that Frank Harris had expressed a desire to see some of my verse. Precisely what my friend had told Harris about me, I do not know; something very exaggerated, perhaps; something complimentary, doubtless; something that piqued Harris’s curiosity, it was evident. As Harris is one of the few modern writers for whom my boyish admiration has survived manhood, I felt subtly gratified that he should take even a fleeting interest in me, and I sat down at once and copied out various poems that had already appeared in The Academy, under Lord Alfred Douglas’s editorship, and in The English Review in the days of Ford Madox Hueffer, and, more recently, when edited by Austin Harrison. With my verses I sent a letter, hypocritically modest as regards myself, honestly full of admiration as regards Harris. He replied from his villa in Nice, sending me a long letter in which he did me the honour to enter fully into the supposed merits and demerits of my work. Of one poem he said that it was not sufficiently sensual, and I have never been able quite to understand what he meant, for I had, with some particularity, described seven naked ladies swimming in a pool, and I had felt that my verses had obviously enough expressed my feelings.

The correspondence continued until, one day, Harris wrote to tell me he was returning to London and to invite me to visit him there. In the event, however, my first meeting with Harris was in Manchester, whither he came [33] ]to lecture on Shakespeare to the local dramatic society. Jack Kahane (a great friend of mine) and I met him at the Midland Hotel upon his arrival, and from the very first moment he intoxicated me. Whilst he changed from his travelling clothes to evening dress he talked and ejaculated, beseeching us to remain with him as he had had “a rotten journey from London and felt unutterably bored.” I remember very little of what he said except that, with some venom, he called Browning “a not unprosperous gentleman.” He refused to eat or drink before his lecture and, presently, we went down to the large room in the hotel where he was to speak.

We found there a mixed assembly. Everybody in Manchester, it should be explained, writes plays; at least, I never yet met a man in that delectable city who does not. Moreover, they “study” them. They weigh and compare the merits of Stanley Houghton and Ibsen, Harold Brighouse and Strindberg, Allan Monkhouse and Bjornson, Arnold Bennett and Hauptmann, Laurence Housman and Brieux, and so forth. They search for “inner meanings”; the more earnest of them hunt for “messages”; the more delicate seek to perceive Fine Shades. They are veritable disciples of Miss Horniman—priggishly intellectual, self-consciously superior. And, of course, the rock of their salvation is St Bernard. Innocuous people enough, but impossible to live in the same city with.

To this assembly of earnest, pale men and spectacled women Harris was to lecture, and I looked from them to Harris and from Harris to them with joyful expectations. From the very first sentence he was fiery and provocative, throwing out daring theories, anathematising all forms of respectability, upholding with unparalleled fierceness a wonderful ideal of chivalry and nobility and condemning, en bloc, the whole human race, and particularly that portion of it seated before him. Ladies rustled; men stirred [34] ]uneasily. Then, having delivered himself of a passage of hot eloquence, he paused. A clock ticked. He looked defiantly at us and still paused. A fat lady in the front row, palpably embarrassed by the long silence and, no doubt, feeling that she had reached one of the most dramatic moments of her existence, banged her plump hands together and ejaculated: “Bravo!” A few other ladies of both sexes joined her, but Harris was not to be placated. Thrusting out his chin, he began again. And this time he attacked the Mancunian literary idol, Professor C. H. Herford, a great scholar, but a more than suitable object for Harris’s ridicule. Herford is a man who has not lived fully: a semi-invalid, asthmatic, bloodless and spectacled; a man of books and rather dusty books; in effect, a professor. He had recently reviewed Harris’s book, The Man Shakespeare, in The Manchester Guardian, and had called it “a disgrace to British scholarship.” Why this should have annoyed the author I cannot tell, but Harris is at times a little unreasonable. Indeed, “annoyance” but feebly describes the feeling that spent itself in scalding invective and the most terrible irony. Each sentence he spoke appeared to be the last word in bitterness; but each succeeding sentence leaped above and beyond its predecessor, until at length the speaker had lashed himself into a state of feeling to express which words were useless. He stopped magnificently, and this time the room rang with applause. It is probable that not half-a-dozen people present believed his attack on Professor Herford was justified; indeed, it is probable that not half-a-dozen were qualified to form any opinion of value on the matter. Nevertheless, they applauded him with enthusiasm, and they did so because they had been deeply stirred by eloquence that can only be described as superb and by anger that was lava hot in its sincerity. Briefly, the lecture was an overwhelming success.

I was soon to discover that Harris, like all the men of [35] ]genius I have met, is vain. I do not mean that he overrates his gifts: he does not; nor that his recognition of his own genius is offensively insistent: such is very far from being the case. I mean that he is inordinately proud, innocently and childlikely proud, of things that are not of the least consequence. At supper in the French Restaurant the head waiter slipped noiselessly across to the table at which Harris, Kahane and I were sitting. (Harris is the kind of man who acts as a magnet to all head waiters—a high tribute to his dominating personality.) When our orders had been given the waiter, turning to go, said: “Very good, Mr Harris.” On the instant Harris looked up. “So you know me?” he asked. “Yes, sir. I have had the pleasure of waiting on you in Monte Carlo and, if I am not mistaken, in New York as well.” It is difficult to describe the naïve pleasure Harris took in this: it stamped him at once as a man of the world—he who, of all people, required, in our opinion, no such stamp.

For six hours we talked—talked long after every other visitor in the hotel had retired, and we were left alone in the Octagon Court in a pool of dim light. Harris is the only brilliant talker I have met who has not made me feel an abject idiot. To begin with, though he has a pronounced strain of violence, almost of brutality, in his nature, he is always infinitely courteous. He will listen to your (I mean my) feeble contributions to a discussion with interest which, if feigned, is so admirably feigned that you are completely deceived. And he can keep this sort of thing up indefinitely. Moreover, though his mind is agile enough, his speech is rarely quick; it is slow and deliberate, but without hesitation, without a single word of tautology.

I cannot hope, after so long a lapse of time, to reproduce, however faintly, the true quality of Harris’s conversation, but I remember the substance of it most [36] ]vividly. In his lecture earlier in the evening he had mentioned Jesus Christ, and the reference to our Saviour had been so original in its implication, yet so reverent in its manner, that I felt he must have much that is new to say on a subject that has aroused more discussion than any other during the last two thousand years. So I broached it tentatively. He was aroused immediately, and skilfully drew me out to discover if I had anything new to say. I had not. I merely voiced what must be an age-long regret, that only one side of Christ’s nature has been presented to us in the Gospels; that the feasting, joyous Christ has been only faintly indicated; and that His tolerance towards the weaknesses of the body’s passions had always been shirked by those of the priestly craft. I thought it possible that at some future crisis in the world’s history Christ might come again and, on His second coming, present to the world a more complete embodiment of all the potentialities inherent in human nature.

With much of this Harris agreed, though I soon perceived that his mind had for long been intuitively building up, and giving true proportion to, those elements in Christ’s nature that are only hinted at in the Gospels. He was all for a full-blooded, passionate Jesus, for a Jesus who had tested the body’s powers, for a Jesus who was crucified by passion before He was crucified by Pilate. In a word, he applied to Jesus the same intuitive method that he had already applied to Shakespeare. The danger of this method, of course, is that one is tempted (and it is almost impossible not to succumb to the temptation) to project one’s own personality into that of the man one is studying.

“My next book shall be about Jesus Christ,” said Harris. “No man in these days has written honestly about Him.”

“Shall you write as a believer?” I asked.

“Most assuredly,” he replied.

[37]
]Then Harris told us some stories—stories he had written, stories he had yet to write. I remember Austin Harrison once saying to me: “Frank Harris is the most astounding creature! He will tell you a story and tell it so marvellously that, when he has finished, you say to yourself: ‘That is the most wonderful thing I have ever heard.’ And you say to him: ‘Why, in God’s name, don’t you write that?’ Well, he does write it, and when you read it you see that, after all, it is by no means so wonderful a thing as you had thought it.” But this is only half true. The story that is told is a very different thing from the story that is written: so different, indeed, that one cannot find any basis for comparison. In telling a story Harris is elliptical; a faint gesture serves for a sentence; a momentary silence is an innuendo; a lifting of the eyebrows, a look, a dropping of the voice, a slowness in his speech—all these take the place of words. He is an exquisite actor and he is at his best when he is sinister and menacing. One need scarcely say that the effect of one of Harris’s stories, told in private, with only one or two listeners, is extremely powerful, for his personality, so quick to melt and suffuse his speech—colouring it and vitalising it—is strong and strange and full of tropical richness....

But the actor’s gift is not rare, whereas that combination of talents that makes a great short-story writer is met with only once or twice in a generation. Harris’s claims to greatness in this direction cannot justly be denied, though of late years there has been a noticeable tendency to treat his work as though it were not of first-rate importance. His choice of subject, the violence of his thought, his strict honesty of mind, his open contempt for many of his contemporaries—these have brought him enemies whose only method of retaliation is to decry work they will not understand.

But Harris could not be happy without hostility. [38] ]There is something of the jaguar in his nature; he must, for his soul’s peace, have his teeth in the flesh of an enemy. And, if he is not fighting an individual, he is offending society at large. Years ago, so Harris told me, when he was editing The Fortnightly Review with such distinction, he printed one of his own short stories in that magazine—a story that, for one reason or another, gave great offence to a large section of readers. Within twenty-four hours he had a hornet’s nest about his ears, and the directors of the firm, Messrs Chapman & Hall, who published the Fortnightly, met in solemn conclave to discuss what should be done with so injudicious and reckless an editor. Needless to say, Harris stood by his guns, and one can imagine the splendidly arrogant way in which he would uphold his right to insert anything he chose in a magazine edited by himself. But discussion made matters only more critical, and Harris told me he would have been compelled to hand in his resignation if an unforeseen event had not occurred. That event was the entrance of George Meredith, who, at that time, was a reader for Messrs Chapman & Hall. As soon as his eyes lit on Harris he held out his hand, and walked quickly up to him, saying: “My warmest congratulations! Your story in the new number is quite the finest thing you have done—an honour to yourself and the Fortnightly!” That left no further room for discussion and, needless to say, Harris retained his editorship of the great magazine.

My first meeting with Harris was of the friendliest nature, and on his return to London he wrote to me thanking me for something I had written about him in The Manchester Courier. (I noticed with amusement that The Manchester Guardian, unable, no doubt, to forgive Harris for attacking Professor Herford, had absolutely ignored the Shakespeare lecture, except to announce baldly that it had been given.)

Very soon after this meeting in Manchester I went to [39] ]live in London, and called on Harris in Chancery Lane. He was running a curious illustrated weekly, entitled Hearth and Home, and I remember sitting in a little back room in his office turning over the files

of his magazine and wondering what on earth he hoped to do with such a production. It was tame; it was watery; it was feeble. I looked at him quizzically.

“What do you think of it?” he asked.

“Well, don’t you see?...” I began hesitatingly; “don’t you see that ... well, now, look at the title!”

“Title’s good enough, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes, good enough ... good enough for Fleetway House. Why not sell it to Northcliffe? But you’ve got no Aunt Maggie’s column, and no Beauty Hints, and no Cupid’s Corner! Oh, Harris!”

He laughed, and invited me out to lunch.

I never discovered what strange circumstances had conspired to make him the possessor of this extraordinary production. No doubt he bought it for nothing, with the intention of rapidly improving it and selling it for something substantial later on. But I believe it died soon after—perhaps urged on to its grave by some verses of mine which were printed close to an advertisement of ladies’ ——.

On our way out of the office we were joined by a very beautiful lady who, it soon transpired, shared my admiration for Harris’s genius. We jumped on to a bus running at full speed and alighted, a couple of minutes later, at Simpson’s.

Harris should write a book on cookery. Perhaps he will. Harris should run a hotel. But he has already done so. Harris should be induced to print all the indiscreet things he says over coffee and liqueurs....

It was a close study of Simpson’s menu that started the cookery discussion. The Beautiful Lady and I were told what was wrong and what was right with the menu. And [40] ]then there began a discourse, profound, full of strange knowledge and recondite wisdom, a discourse that Balzac should have heard, that the de Goncourts would have envied. We listened, amazed. And a waiter, having rushed to our table in the stress of his work, stood anchored, his mouth slightly open, his whole attention riveted on the Master from whom no gastronomic secrets were hid. Truly, Harris was amazing!

After a considerable time his enthusiasm evaporated and we began to eat. And then ensued a long talk, full of indiscretions, of most enjoyable malice. Harris told us many things that, perhaps, it would have been wiser if he had kept to himself. But, in spite of his venom, his real hatred of certain individuals, he never for a moment permits himself to be blinded to the quality of a man’s work.

“So-and-so is the most detestable person,” he said, speaking of a well-known writer, “but he is one of the few real poets alive.” Again: “X is the most generous-hearted man I have ever met; it’s a pity he can’t learn to write.”

Mention of Richard Middleton, who had only recently died by his own hand in Brussels, troubled him, and it was clear that he had not yet recovered from the shock of this tragedy.

“He killed himself in a mood of sheer disgust—disgust at his lack of success. True, he was still young, and was becoming more widely known month by month; also, he had many friends. Nevertheless, life did not give him what he asked and, tired of asking, he ended life. I remember him coming to me just before he left England. He wanted to get away. Some mood of loathing had come to him; he was fretful, yet determined. I offered him my villa at Nice; it was empty, the caretaker would attend to his wants and he would have ample leisure for his work. He hesitated, stayed in London a day or two longer and then disappeared to Brussels.... I know the [41] ]poison he used, and a score of times I have gone over in my mind the tortures he must have endured.”

Harris paled; his face twitched and, involuntarily, as it seemed, his shoulders twisted themselves. Brooding, he was silent for a few minutes, and then, collecting himself with a little shudder, began to speak of other things.

A little later the Beautiful Lady departed and we were left alone.

“And now,” said Harris, “tell me about yourself. What are you doing? Why have you left Manchester?—but there is no reason to ask that. Tell me this—are you making enough money for yourself?”

“Well, I’ve lived in London just one week,” said I, “and my tastes are rather expensive. Just before I left Manchester a very experienced journalist told me I should be making a thousand pounds a year at the end of eighteen months; another, equally experienced, declared I should never make more than six pounds a week. I hope the second one won’t prove correct.”

He mused for a few moments.

“You ought to make a thousand pounds a year pretty easily, I should think,” he said at length. “Whom do you know?”

I knew nobody, and said so. He thereupon took a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote a list of names; at the top of the list stood J. L. Garvin; at the bottom, Lord Northcliffe.

“Northcliffe’s away,” he said, “buying forests in Newfoundland to make paper with. However, he’ll be back in a week or two, and in the meantime I’ll write you a letter to give to him. And now we’ll take a taxi and see people.”

Harris gave up the whole of that day to me and, largely owing to him, I had within the next few days more work offered to me than I could possibly get through. From time to time, months later, good things would come my [42] ]way, and nearly always I could trace them to something generous and fine that Harris had said of me.

It was chiefly because he was so generous with his time that I so rarely called upon him. Often I would curb a strong desire to see him, feeling that however embarrassing my visit might be, he would, out of a quixotic kindness, throw up his work and come with me to talk. For this reason I had not seen him for some little time, when, one morning, I received a letter from him reproaching me for my absence. “Why have you hidden yourself for so long?” he asked. “I go to the Café every night; come, you will find me there.”

“The Café,” of course, was the Café Royal. It so chanced that, that very afternoon, my duties took me to a symphony concert in the Queen’s Hall; the concert over, I found myself passing the Café Royal on my way from the Queen’s Hall to Piccadilly Circus, and turned in on the remote chance of finding Harris.

At the end of the passage, near the windows where French papers are displayed, I found a crowd of a dozen excited men, all talking and gesticulating. The rest of the Café was empty, as one would expect at that time of the day. In the middle of the small crowd was Harris, who caught my eye almost at once. He came to me, and I saw that he was rather agitated.

“Come and sit over here, Cumberland,” he said. “I’ve just been through a beastly quarter of an hour.”

It appeared that a well-known and very distinguished littérateur had quarrelled with him in the Café.... Blows had been exchanged....

We talked of money—an ever-absorbing topic both to Harris and to me. He told me his books had brought him practically nothing. For The Bomb, if I remember correctly, he received fifty pounds—certainly not more than one hundred pounds.

“If I had been compelled to live by what my books [43] ]have brought me,” he said, “I should have starved. Yet it is not long ago that Arnold Bennett assured me that I should be able to earn five thousand pounds a year if I gave my whole time to fiction. But Bennett is wrong. My books, ever since Elder Conklin was published, have been enthusiastically praised, but they have not had large sales. Most authors must find book-writing the most unremunerative work in the world. I put an enormous amount of labour into The Bomb, as I do into all my books, and the labour was not made any the less from the fact that much of the earliest part of the book is autobiographical. In my young manhood I worked as a labourer, deep under water, at the foundations of Brooklyn Bridge; it is all described in my book.”

Though I went to the Café Royal at frequent intervals after that I very rarely saw Harris there. He had abandoned Hearth and Home, or it had abandoned him, and he was now throwing away his brilliant gifts on Modern Society. I was elected an honorary member of the Cabaret Club, run by Madame Strindberg, the widow of the great Swedish writer, and I used to look in there occasionally in the early hours of the morning, expecting to run across Harris, who, I heard, also visited that exotic, underground and rather riotous place. But I never chanced to see him, and two or three months must have passed without my hearing of him.

In March, 1914, I went to Athens for a holiday. Something brave and wonderful in that city, some ancient Bacchic madness, some fierce exaltation of soul took hold of me, and I remember sitting down one night, after a visit to fever-stricken Eleusis, to write to Harris, feeling the necessity of expressing myself to one who would understand. The reader may be amused that I should think Harris akin to ancient Greece, but if the reader is amused he does not know Harris. Only A. R. Orage is more Greek in spirit than he is. In reply Harris wrote at great [44] ]length, full of the fervour of a young student. He told me that in his young manhood he had spent a year of study in that wonderful city, and urged me to visit him on my return to England.

But I was destined not to see him again. Very soon after my return to England he got into trouble with reference to something libellous that he had published in Modern Society. He was kept in prison, if I remember rightly, for about a month. I sought permission to visit him there, but was refused, and I was staying in Oxford when he was released.

Soon after the war broke out he wrote me the following letter from Paris:—

23, Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Paris,
29th Aug. ’14.

My dear Cumberland,—I’m just back from the frontier.... This war of nations is going to test every man as by fire before it’s over. It will be long in spite of Mr Kipps and Bernard Shaw. The Russian masses will hardly come decisively into action (they have scarcely any railways and no good roads) till next May or June, and long before then, or rather in a couple of months from now, the French will be pressed back to within twenty miles of besieged Paris, when I hope the English forces on the flank will stop the German advance. Then will begin the slow process of driving the Germans home, which will be quickened by the Russian weight behind Cossack pricks. Fancy one man having the power to set 400 millions of men fighting for their lives. And then they talk of man as a rational animal!!

Don’t say you like what I wrote in The Daily Sketch; all my best things were carefully cut out and filled up with drivel, till my cheeks burned.

Your sketch of me is very kindly; the fault you find in me is not a fault. Jesus, Shakespeare, Napoleon—all the [45] ]greatest men have known their own value and insisted on it—perhaps because they have all come to their own and their own received them not. When you have done great work you feel it is not yours, but given to you; you are only a reed shaken in the wind; you can judge it as if it had nothing to do with you. Moreover, you see that this failure to recognise greatness is the capital sin of all time, the sin against the Holy Ghost which He said could never be forgiven. Modesty is the fig-leaf of mediocrity—don’t let us talk of it. Remember how Whistler scourged it.

I’m writing now on Natural Religion—my best thing yet: I’ve done more than Nietzsche: don’t think I’m bragging. I am the Reconciler; though my cocked nose and keen eyes may make you think me a combatant. Twenty years hence, Cumberland, if your eyes keep their promise, you’ll think differently of me. I remember as a young man getting Wagner to praise himself and saying to myself that no man was ever so conceited as the little hawk-faced fellow with the ploughshare chin. Did he not say that the step from Bach to Beethoven was not so great as that from Beethoven to Wagner! And yet for these fifteen years past I have agreed with him and find nothing conceited in the declaration. Only weak men are hurt by another man’s conceit; are we not gods also to be spoken of with reverence?

To see the world in a grain of sand

And Heaven in a wild flower,

To hold Infinity in your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

The question for you is, have I quickened you? Encouraged you to be a brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity? Did virtue come out of me? or discouragement? Now at nearly sixty I am about to rebuild my life: my own people have stoned and imprisoned and exiled me. Well—the world’s wide. In [46] ]October I shall be in New York, ready for another round with Fate. Meanwhile, all luck to you and all good will from your friend, Frank Harris.

Remember this word of Joubert: there is no such sure sign of mediocrity as constant moderation in praise. Ha! Ha! Ha! Yours ever, F. H.

There is not in this letter a single word to indicate that he was not, heart and soul, in sympathy with the Allied Cause. Late in September, 1914, I was myself in Paris, having visited Amiens and the Marne. I took the earliest opportunity of calling upon Harris, but discovered that he had left his rooms a few days earlier, leaving no indication of his next resting-place. On calling upon the American Consul I discovered that my friend had already sailed for the States.

Subsequently he wrote bitterly about England in an American paper. I never had an opportunity of reading his articles, but I read various extracts from them in British newspapers, and was astounded both by the views they contained and by the manner in which those views were expressed.

Years ago Ruskin wrote Rossetti a curious letter: he said he could regard no man as friend who did not value his (Ruskin’s) gifts as highly as he (Ruskin) did. Harris, no doubt, adopted the same kind of attitude towards England. England refused to accept him at his own estimate and, at length, in fierce disgust, Harris turned his back on a country which he deemed unworthy of him.

[47]
]CHAPTER IV
MISCELLANEOUS

Madame Yvette Guilbert—Sir Victor Horsley—Mrs Pankhurst—Jacob Epstein—Madame Aïno Ackté

Yvette Guilbert!... Yvette Guilbert! I suppose that only a writer who really can write can say anything useful or dignified about this most wonderful woman.... And yet I must try. Do you remember that extraordinary breath-catching passage in Villette where Charlotte Brontë describes the acting of Vashti—Vashti who was Rachel—Vashti who went to London when Charlotte loved Héger?... That, I always think, was a great event. Little Currer Bell, with her most modest mind and her most proud heart, sitting, so breathlessly, on one side of the footlights, and Rachel walking from the wings, beyond the footlights, and, like an empress, speaking, thinking like an empress, and, like a veritable woman, loving and hating.... Do you remember that passage? If you do, perhaps you will think, as I do, that, after all, only women can write of women. Did not Jane Austen create Elizabeth Bennet? And who was it who wrote the Sonnets from the Portuguese? And even, after all, Aphra Behn ... well, she knew something about women, didn’t she?

So that I feel only a woman can write at all convincingly of Yvette Guilbert. I must just gossip and prattle a little while.

I must have heard Yvette Guilbert a score of times. The first occasion was in the Midland Hall, Manchester, eight or ten years ago, when she sang to an audience of [48] ]about two hundred frigid people who, apparently, knew as much French as I know of the language of the Serbs, and as much about Art as the pencil with which I write knows about the thoughts it records. Ernest Newman was there and, that night, wrote an article for The Manchester Guardian that must have more than compensated Guilbert for the smallness of the audience. For she loves praise, even the praise she gives herself, as the following letter addressed to myself will testify:

Je reçois votre aimable lettre et votre admirable article!! Je ne peux pas vous dire toute la joie que je ressens

en lisant que vous comprenez si bien mes efforts! Je n’ai jamais su être hypocrite et j’ai toujours manqué de diplomatie dans la vie à

cause de cela; aussi, je n’hésite

pas à

vous dire que je crois sincèrement mériter vos bonnes paroles parce que je passe ma vie entière

à

me dévouer à

mon art sans jamais de vacances. Mon amour pour le travail et la Beauté et tout ce qui est pure en art est tout le “mateur” de mes forces intellectuelles. Merci d’avoir deviné

ce que

le public ne voit

pas toujours. Mes mains dans les vôtres

. Yvette Guilbert.

Guilbert has no singing voice, and yet she sings. Her singing voice is small ... ever so small. Yet clear, distinct, expressive and, in the lowest register, most deep and thrilling. How little mere “voice” matters! Only consider. Here, on one hand, we have Madame Clara Butt with, I suppose, one of the most wonderful organs that this world, or any other world, has ever listened to. But would you walk five miles to hear her sing? I wouldn’t. You, I hope and believe, wouldn’t either. Would you walk five miles to hear Blanche Marchesi sing—Blanche Marchesi, whose voice, as mere voice, is like a hundred other voices? Of course you would. Voice matters little. It is the temperament, the intellect, behind the [49] ]voice that counts. And the eternal struggle that Yvette Guilbert has had to undergo has been the struggle to make her comparatively small voice express the wonderful things of her imagination.

A gesture. A look. An inflection. Two paces on the platform. A little cry ... a little cry of dismay. A superb and beautiful signal that tells us the Mother of God is big with a Child. A tiny silence. A moment of jauntiness. Something arch and irresistible. Something tragic that makes you clench your fists....

One day Yvette Guilbert wrote to ask me to call on her. I did not go. One feels so foolish in the presence of genius. One’s vanity is hurt. One is afraid of being found out.

. . . . . . . .

In the early days of the war I visited Sir Victor Horsley several times at his home. I was interested in shell shock, in the influence that the horror of war has on certain types of human nature, and he was good enough to supply me with a great deal of information. Quiet and undemonstrative, he used always to stand, or move slowly up and down the room; in the long talks we had together, I do not remember his sitting down once.

I don’t think I ever met a man more careful to express his exact meaning; he appeared to have a horror of exaggeration and he qualified nearly every statement he made. In discussing scientific subjects such scrupulous carefulness is, of course, not only wise but necessary, and when, later on, I wrote a newspaper article on the effect that the strain and horror of war have on the human brain, Sir Victor showed himself very anxious that, in quoting his views, I should do so in language that could not possibly be interpreted in two different senses.

He told me what my own experience in France and Salonica in 1915–1917 confirmed later on, that it is frequently the neurotic, the artistic, the excitable man who most quickly adapts himself to, and is least disturbed by, [50] ]the incredible cruelties of warfare, whilst the phlegmatic type of man is more liable to be broken by those cruelties. Sir Victor Horsley suggested that this was, in some measure, due to the fact that the neurotic man has, in imagination, tasted the terror of war before he has actually experienced it; that he has, as it were, prepared his mind for the shock it is to receive. The unimaginative man cannot do this, so that when his turn comes to go to the trenches and witness stark horrors, his nervous system reacts most violently.

Sir Victor spoke a good deal to me about the evil influence of drink, and continually regretted that rum was served out to our soldiers. On this subject, of course, though I disagreed with him profoundly, I did not attempt to argue, though I pointed out that Napoleon had won many of his campaigns by almost drugging his men with spirits. To this he made no reply, though he shook his head gravely and seemed to ponder a little.

My last interview with him was in his long, bare dining-room, where, as we stood before the fire, he described to me in a low, serious voice two or three war cases of mental trouble (functional, of course, not organic), and I could see that the war was, so to speak, closing in around him and enveloping him with its violent appeals, its tragic interests.

. . . . . . . .

Mrs Pankhurst I met only once, but the impression she has left on my mind is that of a most vivid personality. I saw her in many ridiculous situations that would have made almost any other person look positively foolish; but Mrs Pankhurst’s sense of personal dignity is so strong, her personality is so imperious, and, above all, she possesses so much humour and good sense, that it is impossible to imagine any situation, however grotesque, that would render her ridiculous.

My interview with her was at the close of a day during which she had worked incessantly. She was tired, and [51] ]her face was lined and rather dim. An hour earlier I had seen her in Oxford Street, Manchester, seated in an open, horseless carriage, a dozen enthusiastic girls pulling at the shafts, a few ribald boys following and shouting small obscenities. I admired the perfect way she carried off the trying situation. She sat perfectly calmly, as though nothing in the least unusual were happening, as though, indeed, it were her daily custom, and the daily custom of all women, to be dragged through the public streets by a band of young ladies.

We sat under a lamp at a large table. The things we discussed are now of no consequence, for the need for their discussion no longer exists. I can only give my impression of her.

She struck me as being unutterably weary, weary bodily and perhaps mentally. Her personality suggested a body and a spirit being driven by an implacable will, a will that had no mercy for herself or for others, a will that no power could break. I could not help wondering, as I looked at her, whether she had not her moments of doubt, of self-distrust. She must have had, for all men and women have. But those moments would be few and short. Though she spoke to me very quietly, without a gesture, with one rather tightly clenched hand on the table, I felt the sheer power of her, the power that a quenchless spirit always gives to its owner.

Fanatic? Well, yes, if to be indifferent to the opinion of other people and to be absolutely sure of yourself is to be fanatical. Certainly, she was strange and grim and relentless. And yet one could not doubt her tenderness, her deep sympathy, her devotion to humanity. Yes, a strange woman, but perhaps not so very strange. The qualities I saw in her are common qualities; the difference between her and others was simply that she possessed those qualities in an unusual degree.

. . . . . . . .

[52]
]Jacob Epstein, after flouting the artistic conventions for at least ten years, is being taken to the heart of the public. The impossible is happening, and it is happening because of the war. The war has forced reality upon us; it has made us love beauty rather than prettiness, truth rather than make-believe, the soul of things rather than their appearances.

Epstein, I think, could never be said to be in revolt against any of the artistic tendencies of the time. He simply did not follow those tendencies or permit them to influence him. But three or four years ago, when I first met him, he had the appearance, the manner, and even the thoughts of one who is in revolt.

I remember discussing with him some very curious and, indeed, rather alarming designs of his which were being exhibited at a little gallery whose name I have forgotten. The designs were openly and widely described as “indecent”; to me they were not indecent: they were merely meaningless. I could see no idea behind them.

“They are not designs,” said Epstein, a little petulantly, I thought.

“Then what are they?” I asked. “What do you call them?”

“I am not aware that I call them anything.”

“But what do they mean?”

He smiled curiously and (we were sitting in the Café Royal) lit a cigarette.

“Ah! That is for you to find out. Surely you don’t expect an artist to explain himself?”

Of course he was perfectly right, and I was more than foolish to ask him these questions. But I flogged at it.

“Now, your busts! Especially that wonderful head of Augustus John’s son!—beautiful, marvellous! But those extraordinary red drawings.”

“I cannot explain them,” said he, “but I would [53] ]certainly like you to understand them, for it seems to me that you are not unintelligent.”

He gave me a quick, sly look, and we began to talk of John. I am afraid that Epstein must have qualified his opinion of my intelligence, for he asserted, in contradiction to what I was saying, that John was on the wrong tack, and we failed to come to any agreement about this most wonderful of living painters.

Like most artists, Epstein is pronouncedly inarticulate. He is, I suppose, as much a mystery to himself as he is to others. But his work is, of course, a hundred times more interesting than himself.

I used to see him often, but we rarely did more than acknowledge each other’s existence, and when I saw him the other week in khaki, sitting in the Café Royal, it was clear to me that, though he said he remembered me, he had only a vague recollection of my personality and had completely forgotten my name.

. . . . . . . .

I have often thought it strange that while singers like Madame Patti and Madame Tetrazzini should conquer the world—and by the world I mean every section of the musical public, vulgar and fastidious alike—another and, to my mind, a very much finer artiste, Madame Ackté, should be regarded with delight only by those whose musical experience is wide and whose minds have been tutored by comprehensive study. Personality, after all, is almost everything in Art, and Madame Ackté has a personality that dwarfs into insignificance nearly all singers who are her equal in technical attainments and in musical subtlety.

Her great part is Salomé, in Richard Strauss’s opera of that name. With the wonderful intuition of a healthy, robust mind she has divined all the perverted wickedness of that most tortured woman. Her acting is among the finest things of our day.

[54]
]No one could guess, in talking to this quiet, almost demure woman, that she has in her such fires of passion, such powers of portraying devastating wickedness. She has charm, graciousness

, simplicity. Like Yvette Guilbert, she has worked hard almost every day of her life. Her talk is all of music and acting. She seems most unmodern. Her ingenuous love of praise is delightful, and if you notice the little subtleties in her singing and acting that most people do not notice, she is your friend for ever.

[55]
]CHAPTER V
STANLEY HOUGHTON AND HAROLD BRIGHOUSE

But perhaps you have forgotten who Stanley Houghton was? Well, not so long before the Great War he was famous, both in England and America, as the author of Hindle Wakes, he was universally alluded to as a charming personality, and he promised to become one of the most prosperous playwrights in England. Then, while still young and not yet accustomed to his fame, he died in Italy. Thereupon some thousand newspaper-writers recorded his death and wrote about him some of the most lamentable nonsense it has ever been my misfortune to read.

Let me tell you all about it.

I was introduced to Stanley Houghton in Manchester by Jack Kahane—the latter a most brilliant and engaging personality who knew everybody: or, rather, everybody knew him.

“This,” said Kahane, indicating Houghton, “is one of Miss Horniman’s pets. She is doing a play of his this week at the Gaiety. Now, let me see, Stanley, what is the name of your little play?”

Houghton laughed deprecatingly.

“Oh, I saw it last night,” said I, “and jolly good it was. But I’ve seen another play of yours besides The Younger Generation; it was founded on a story by Guy de Maupassant. That, also, was tremendously amusing.”

He frowned, and I understood from the way that he [56] ]looked over my head that I had displeased him. For a moment he was silent, then:

“I’ve just been reading some of your verses in The English Review,” said he; “quite nice, quite nice.”

So then I examined him closely and saw a tall, fair youth, with plenty of straw-coloured hair, a prominent, rather crooked nose, and a manner of painful self-consciousness. I believe that, from that moment, we distrusted each other most heartily. We parted a few minutes later and I think Houghton must have shared my suspicion and regret that we should often have to meet after that date. Kahane was and is (though he has been in France these three years and I in Macedonia) my most intimate friend, and had lately “taken up” Houghton, and whenever Kahane did a thing he did it pretty thoroughly. And friends of a friend are bound to tumble across each other continually.

Later in the day I protested to Kahane.

“What on earth has induced you to take up this man Houghton?” I asked.

“He amuses me,” said Jack. “And, really, you know, one or two of his little things are quite promising. When he bores me I rag him. And then he loses his temper. Il m’amuse, and that’s all I require from him.”

Shortly after I was elected a member of a funny little coterie in Manchester, called the Swan Club. Kahane had founded it. There were twelve of us altogether: Kahane; Stanley Houghton; Harold Brighouse (whose play, Hobson’s Choice, is making “big money” in London at the moment of writing); Charles Abercrombie (now a Lt.-Colonel and a C.B.); Walter Mudie, the best of good fellows; Ernest Marriott, artist; W. Price-Heywood, accountant and leader-writer; myself and a few hangers-on of the Arts. We used to meet for lunch at a shabby little restaurant in Peter Street, Manchester, opposite the [57] ]Theatre Royal, and we did our utmost to induce each other to talk about ourselves.

In this little coterie Houghton was a veritable whale among the minnows. He was also a fish out of water. From the very first his success spoiled him. He would take himself ponderously. Brighouse worshipped success, so he worshipped Houghton. The rest of us, if we worshipped anything at all, worshipped genius, and as Kahane was the only one among us who had a touch of that divine quality, we rather tended to worship him. But Kahane frittered away his gifts; he made a lot of money by dint of working about an hour a day and by the sheer force of his personality. For the rest he played and played hard. He talked; he ragged; he listened to music and saw plays; he fell in love; he indulged harmless vices; and he wrote two wonderful plays, full of faults, but streaked with originality, with fire and with colour. In effect, he could beat both Houghton and Brighouse at their own game, and they knew it. But, at that time, playwriting with Kahane was only a game; with the other two it was deadly earnest.

Houghton and Brighouse were something (and, I gathered, something not very brilliant) in the city. Quite what that something was I do not know, though I remember seeking out Brighouse once in a dark warehouse smelling of damp cloth. Every afternoon Houghton and Brighouse would close their ledgers, or petty-cash books, or whatever it was they did close, and rush off home—Brighouse to catch, perhaps, his six-five P.M. train to Eccles, and Houghton to jump gymnastically (he played hockey, I believe) on to a passing tram bound for Alexandra Park. After a hurried meal, out with the MSS., the notebooks, the typescript and to work! And how hard they did work!

I remember Brighouse telling me some years ago that he had written more than thirty plays, but I cannot [58] ]conceive that anybody but himself has read them all. Brighouse slogged, and he beat so long at the door of success that at last it opened to him. Houghton also slogged, but in a dandified way. He was clever, he was cute, and he played his cards well.

. . . . . . . .

Houghton was, not without full justice, called the leader of the Manchester School of dramatists. He was hard; he was unimaginative; he was unromantic. But he was extraordinarily apt, and he had a neat and tidy brain. Close must have been that union of souls that bound his soul to the soul of Miss Horniman. Miss Horniman never (well, hardly ever) produced a romantic play, and Stanley Houghton never wrote one. He was out to “make good,” and Miss Horniman helped him to go one better.

I need scarcely say that Houghton was, so far as his plays were concerned, an industrious man of business. When the real artist has finished a work, he ceases to take interest in it; but, with Houghton, when a play was completed his interest in it immediately intensified. He sent his plays everywhere: to the provinces, to London, to America, to agents. As soon as a play came back, “returned with thanks,” out it went again by the next post. And he pulled strings—oh! ever so gently, but he pulled them.