My life and loves Vol. 3 by Frank Harris

Author:Frank Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub

CHAPTER IX

Friends

London in the nineties! How far away and long ago it all seems, and how shall I describe it? London, to me, is like a woman with wet, draggled dirty skirts (it's always raining in London), and at first you turn from her in disgust, but soon you discover that she has glorious eyes lighting up her pale, wet face. The historic houses, such as Marlborough House, Landsdowne House, Devonshire House and Cadogan House, and a hundred others, are her eyes; and they are simply wonderful treasure-houses of past centuries, with records of each age in gorgeous pictures and books, in tapestries and table silver-all the accessories of good taste and comfortable living. And if you admire her eyes and tell her so passionately one mid-summer evening, when the sunshine is a golden mist, she will give you her lips and take you to her heart; and you will find in her spirit depths undreamed of, passionate devotions, smiling self-sacrifice and loving, gentle attendance till your eyes dim at the sweet memory of her. And ever afterwards you, the alien and outcast and pariah of this all-hating world, will have a soft heart for London.

You will find magic and mystery in her fogs, as Whistler did; and in her gardens some June morning you will wake and find her temperate warmth of desire more enchanting than any tropic heat. London draws me more than any capital, and I have been in most of them, but the sameness of her squares, the destitution of her docks, and, above all, her wretched climate, appall me; and as I grow older I prefer Paris, Berlin or Vienna, where life's contrasts are not so hideous.

Marriage did not mean as much to me as other happenings in my life, and my wife was not, by any means, so important to me or to my mental growth as some of my friends, notably John Addington Symonds, Francis Adams, Grant Allen, and Harold Frederic. In the first ten years of my London life, friends meant more to me than any other influence, and notably such companions as these, who excited me intellectually.

I never could understand why these men did not do some great and evermemorable work. Symonds was a classic of the best, and master of an excellent prose; knew Italian and French, too, rarely well, and was a student born. He had no hindering English prejudices, regarded sex as lightly as Anatole France himself, and yet he did not write a single masterpiece. Why?

He was well-off, too, and gave himself to literature with single-hearted devotion, and yet never reached even Tennyson's place, or Swinburne's.

Grant Allen was in even closer sympathy with his age; learned, too, in science as in literature, and freer in mind than Symonds himself because born in Canada; and yet he could not get beyond The Woman Who Did. Why?

Again one asks, for it was a ridiculous book as a life's message. And Francis Adams was a larger man, perhaps, than either, though not so well equipped with learning; yet he, too, did nothing of enduring worth.

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