Frank Harris - My Life And Loves, vol 5

All the months I was in Peking I used to see her nearly every day. It was she who convinced me that passion and devotion, hard as they are to find there, are not unknown in China. She was the very soul of love.

Strange to say, she wanted a child, but there I could not agree. “If you had a child,” I said, “I should be tied to Peking always and I must eventually go away.”

“Then you don't love me,” was her reply.

“Oh yes I do,” I answered.

But I felt always that she had the best of the argument.

One day she told me that her mother, discovering what we were about, had asked for money. Naturally, I gave with both hands. No price within my power would have been too high for the pure and real devotion which she had for me. She was an adorable mistress.

One evening she wanted to know if I would like her better if she took all the hairs off her pussy as many women did. I said no, that I liked her better as she was, but she went on earnestly: “I have the salve and I shall use it if you say so. You know, there is nothing I would not do to keep your lovenothing!” I kissed her tenderly. If ever I was tempted to give up my life in which the wanderlust played so great a part, I was tempted then. The girl's love was infinite. I felt suddenly almost basely materialistic in the face of such passion. What more could a man desire? But then, we must face reality. My life's work was elsewhere. This affair, almost saintly as it was, could represent to a man like me no more than a pleasurable interlude. The problems of the world recalled me, like the voice which called Moses to his task. I faced up to the real, as all really dedicated men have in the past. It was high time to shake myself out of my lethargy and give more purpose, more depth and meaning, to my intellectual life. But parting from her was the hardest task I had in all my travels. When I finally left, I did so with a heavy heart.

Fortunately, I found an old banker who gave her from me a yearly pension. Three years afterwards she married an American and I had a letter from her in due course declaring that she was very happy and about to have a child.

Before going on to Japan, I stayed for a couple of months with an English friend and his wife in Hong Kong, but the residence there made little or no impression on me. They told me I should find nothing worthwhile in Japan, but in that they were not soothsayers. Still, for the time being, they gave me rest and change and I was in need of both.

I write all of these things quite frankly because I believe that Puritanism is not only dead, but deserved to die, and I feel sure that bodily pleasures of all sorts will be more and more sought after in the future.

Looking back over my life, I realize with dismay that there are many people and places of which I have not had the opportunity to speak. In this volume therefore there was from the beginning a kind of dual purpose. In the first place, I wished to continue the true story of my life and loves and, in the second, to make up for the unfortunate omissions in the earlier volumes I'd written. Thus, formally speaking, this last, and in a sense, most final of my expressions, will doubtless lack the purposeful continuity of the earlier. In a summing up, that is only to be expected. I make no apologies for it. I should be untrue to my purpose were I to do otherwise than I am doing. For the truth is that I am not satisfied with what I have written; I might have done it better. I am obsessed by the desire to make each chapter of this volume memorable by some new thought.

The greatest omission as I see it has been amongst some of the great names with whom I was off and on acquainted throughout my colorful life. Without hesitation, therefore, and despising a mechanical chronology, I move now into the consideration of some of the men who have inspired me and whom, not seldom, I have numbered among my friends.

I was more interested in Meredith than in any other man of my time. I thought him one of the greatest of men, worthy to stand with Shakespeare and Wordsworth. He was one of the handsomest of men, just above middle height, slight and strong of figure with a superb head and face, the head all outlined in graying hair, but excellently shaped and the face noblestraight nose, incomparable blue eyes, now laughing, now pathetic, excellent mouth and chinin sum a very good-looking man, sane and strong. When Grant Allen sent him one of my earliest stories, “Montes the Matador,” he praised it as better than the “Carmen” of Merimee because, he explained, I had given even the bulls individuality. He ended his praise with the words: “If there is any hand in England that can do better, I don't know it.” As I have said somewhere, I regarded that judgment as my knighting. No contempt touched me afterwards; Meredith to me already stood among the greatest.

Born in 1828, he brought out his first book of Poems in 1851 and I think he was always more of a poet than a prose writer. But good as his best poetry iseven “Love in the Valley” has stanzas I can never forget and Modern Loves with the entrancing “Margaret's Bridal Eve” is greater still; yet neither in poetry nor in prose has Meredith reached the highest or given his full measure.

The reason always escaped me. When I knew him first about 1885 he was the reader for Chapman and Hall and made his?500 or?600 a year out of this easily enough while his books added perhaps as much more to his income. He had a house on Box Hill in Surrey, and lived like a modest country gentleman. Nothing in his circumstances hindered him from reaching Cervantes or Shakespeare.

His conversation was astonishing. He touched everything that came up from the highest standpoint; he praised the Irish as if he had been bred in Ireland and the Welsh as if from the highest of the Celtic stock. Once indeed he went so far as to suggest merrily that the English should invade France in order to get some French women to enlarge their matter of fact narrowness of mind. He was in favor of the Boers too, and a passionate advocate of women's suffrage; he wanted feminine influence in government as in the home. Once he went so far as to advocate the making of Britain into one state of the American Union, “the Eastern Star in the Banner of the Republic,” as he said, for he was profoundly convinced that the British were dropping back, were indeed no longer leaders of the world. “Their fatal lack of imagination,” he said, “dwarfs them.” In every question he was an unprejudiced and most interesting guide.

Every man he mentioned lived unforgettably in his judgment. Who can ever forget his criticism of Tennyson's “dandiacal flutingthe great length of his mild fluency, the yards of linen drapery for the delight of women.” And then “the praises of the book shut me away from my fellows,” and the superb return: “To be sure, there is the magnificent Lucretius.” Then he sees Irving as Romeo: “No loveplay but a pageant with a quaint figure ranting about.” His judgment of Gladstone: “This valiant, prodigiously gifted, in many respects admirable old man is, I fear me, very much an actor.”

And finally he touches the height in a letter to his son:

“Don't think that the obscenities mentioned in the Bible do harm to children. The Bible is outspoken upon facts, and rightly. It is because the world is pruriently and stupidly shamefaced that it cannot come in contact with the Bible without convulsions.

“Look for the truth in everything and follow it, and you will then be living justly before God. Let nothing flout your sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that your understanding wavers whenever you chance to doubt that he leads to good. We grow to good as surely as the plant grows to the light. The school has only to look through history for a scientific assurance of it. And do not lose the habit of praying to the unseen Divinity. Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless, but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks.”