Dark Lady of the Sonnets | Page 6

among the saints. He has

lifted the Chicago anarchists out of their infamy, and shewn that,
compared with the Capitalism that killed them, they were heroes and
martyrs. He has done this with the most unusual power of conviction.
The story, as he tells it, inevitably and irresistibly displaces all the
vulgar, mean, purblind, spiteful versions. There is a precise realism and
an unsmiling, measured, determined sincerity which gives a strange
dignity to the work of one whose fixed practice and ungovernable
impulse it is to kick conventional dignity whenever he sees it.

Harris "durch Mitleid wissend"
Frank Harris is everything except a humorist, not, apparently, from
stupidity, but because scorn overcomes humor in him. Nobody ever
dreamt of reproaching Milton's Lucifer for not seeing the comic side of
his fall; and nobody who has read Mr Harris's stories desires to have
them lightened by chapters from the hand of Artemus Ward. Yet he
knows the taste and the value of humor. He was one of the few men of
letters who really appreciated Oscar Wilde, though he did not rally
fiercely to Wilde's side until the world deserted Oscar in his ruin. I
myself was present at a curious meeting between the two, when Harris,
on the eve of the Queensberry trial, prophesied to Wilde with
miraculous precision exactly what immediately afterwards happened to
him, and warned him to leave the country. It was the first time within
my knowledge that such a forecast proved true. Wilde, though under no
illusion as to the folly of the quite unselfish suit-at-law he had been
persuaded to begin, nevertheless so miscalculated the force of the social
vengeance he was unloosing on himself that he fancied it could be
stayed by putting up the editor of The Saturday Review (as Mr Harris
then was) to declare that he considered Dorian Grey a highly moral
book, which it certainly is. When Harris foretold him the truth, Wilde
denounced him as a fainthearted friend who was failing him in his hour
of need, and left the room in anger. Harris's idiosyncratic power of pity
saved him from feeling or shewing the smallest resentment; and events
presently proved to Wilde how insanely he had been advised in taking
the action, and how accurately Harris had gauged the situation.
The same capacity for pity governs Harris's study of Shakespear, whom,
as I have said, he pities too much; but that he is not insensible to humor
is shewn not only by his appreciation of Wilde, but by the fact that the

group of contributors who made his editorship of The Saturday Review
so remarkable, and of whom I speak none the less highly because I
happened to be one of them myself, were all, in their various ways,
humorists.

"Sidney's Sister: Pembroke's Mother"
And now to return to Shakespear. Though Mr Harris followed Tyler in
identifying Mary Fitton as the Dark Lady, and the Earl of Pembroke as
the addressee of the other sonnets and the man who made love
successfully to Shakespear's mistress, he very characteristically refuses
to follow Tyler on one point, though for the life of me I cannot
remember whether it was one of the surmises which Tyler published, or
only one which he submitted to me to see what I would say about it,
just as he used to submit difficult lines from the sonnets.
This surmise was that "Sidney's sister: Pembroke's mother" set
Shakespear on to persuade Pembroke to marry, and that this was the
explanation of those earlier sonnets which so persistently and
unnaturally urged matrimony on Mr W. H. I take this to be one of the
brightest of Tyler's ideas, because the persuasions in the sonnets are
unaccountable and out of character unless they were offered to please
somebody whom Shakespear desired to please, and who took a
motherly interest in Pembroke. There is a further temptation in the
theory for me. The most charming of all Shakespear's old women,
indeed the most charming of all his women, young or old, is the
Countess of Rousillon in All's Well That Ends Well. It has a certain
individuality among them which suggests a portrait. Mr Harris will
have it that all Shakespear's nice old women are drawn from his
beloved mother; but I see no evidence whatever that Shakespear's
mother was a particularly nice woman or that he was particularly fond
of her. That she was a simple incarnation of extravagant maternal pride
like the mother of Coriolanus in Plutarch, as Mr Harris asserts, I cannot
believe: she is quite as likely to have borne her son a grudge for
becoming "one of these harlotry players" and disgracing the Ardens.
Anyhow, as a conjectural model for the Countess of Rousillon, I prefer
that one of whom Jonson wrote