My Life And Loves, vol 5 by Frank Harris

Author:Frank Harris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub

CHAPTER VI

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.

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