Dark Lady of the Sonnets | Page 5

about
something or other, no doubt finding that people who were keen on this
sort of conversation were rather scarce. He remains a vivid spot of
memory in the void of my forgetfulness, a quite considerable and
dignified soul in a grotesquely disfigured body.

Frank Harris
To the review in the Pall Mall Gazette I attribute, rightly or wrongly,
the introduction of Mary Fitton to Mr Frank Harris. My reason for this
is that Mr Harris wrote a play about Shakespear and Mary Fitton; and
when I, as a pious duty to Tyler's ghost, reminded the world that it was
to Tyler we owed the Fitton theory, Frank Harris, who clearly had not a
notion of what had first put Mary into his head, believed, I think, that I
had invented Tyler expressly for his discomfiture; for the stress I laid
on Tyler's claims must have seemed unaccountable and perhaps
malicious on the assumption that he was to me a mere name among the
thousands of names in the British Museum catalogue. Therefore I make
it clear that I had and have personal reasons for remembering Tyler,
and for regarding myself as in some sort charged with the duty of
reminding the world of his work. I am sorry for his sake that Mary's
portrait is fair, and that Mr W. H. has veered round again from
Pembroke to Southampton; but even so his work was not wasted: it is
by exhausting all the hypotheses that we reach the verifiable one; and
after all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.
Frank Harris's play was written long before mine. I read it in
manuscript before the Shakespear Memorial National Theatre was
mooted; and if there is anything except the Fitton theory (which is
Tyler's property) in my play which is also in Mr Harris's it was I who
annexed it from him and not he from me. It does not matter anyhow,
because this play of mine is a brief trifle, and full of manifest
impossibilities at that; whilst Mr Harris's play is serious both in size,
intention, and quality. But there could not in the nature of things be
much resemblance, because Frank conceives Shakespear to have been a
broken-hearted, melancholy, enormously sentimental person, whereas I
am convinced that he was very like myself: in fact, if I had been born in

1556 instead of in 1856, I should have taken to blank verse and given
Shakespear a harder run for his money than all the other Elizabethans
put together. Yet the success of Frank Harris's book on Shakespear
gave me great delight.
To those who know the literary world of London there was a sharp
stroke of ironic comedy in the irresistible verdict in its favor. In critical
literature there is one prize that is always open to competition, one blue
ribbon that always carries the highest critical rank with it. To win, you
must write the best book of your generation on Shakespear. It is felt on
all sides that to do this a certain fastidious refinement, a delicacy of
taste, a correctness of manner and tone, and high academic distinction
in addition to the indispensable scholarship and literary reputation, are
needed; and men who pretend to these qualifications are constantly
looked to with a gentle expectation that presently they will achieve the
great feat. Now if there is a man on earth who is the utter contrary of
everything that this description implies; whose very existence is an
insult to the ideal it realizes; whose eye disparages, whose resonant
voice denounces, whose cold shoulder jostles every decency, every
delicacy, every amenity, every dignity, every sweet usage of that quiet
life of mutual admiration in which perfect Shakespearian appreciation
is expected to arise, that man is Frank Harris. Here is one who is
extraordinarily qualified, by a range of sympathy and understanding
that extends from the ribaldry of a buccaneer to the shyest tendernesses
of the most sensitive poetry, to be all things to all men, yet whose
proud humor it is to be to every man, provided the man is eminent and
pretentious, the champion of his enemies. To the Archbishop he is an
atheist, to the atheist a Catholic mystic, to the Bismarckian Imperialist
an Anacharsis Klootz, to Anacharsis Klootz a Washington, to Mrs
Proudie a Don Juan, to Aspasia a John Knox: in short, to everyone his
complement rather than his counterpart, his antagonist rather than his
fellow-creature. Always provided, however, that the persons thus
confronted are respectable persons. Sophie Perovskaia, who perished
on the scaffold for blowing Alexander II to fragments, may perhaps
have echoed Hamlet's
Oh God, Horatio, what a wounded name-- Things standing thus
unknown--I leave behind! but Frank Harris, in his Sonia, has rescued
her from that injustice, and enshrined her