Book Discussion

Egomania

Contemporary Portraits, by Frank Harris. New York: Mitchell Kennerley.

You have surely come across that ubiquitous individual who immortalizes his travels abroad through innumerable “Kodaks,” to be rubbed into your eyes on every opportune and inopportune occasion. He bores you ad nauseam. Why? You are offered an opportunity to observe the majestic Mont Blanc, the smoking Vesuvius, the respectable Eiffel Tower, the San Marco, the Brandenburg Gate, the Westminster Abbey, and the rest of the hackneyed wonders. Yet you are nauseated. Your individual has caused the Kodak to utilize the magnificent views as backgrounds for his own central figure; you are compelled to seek the Schlangenberg behind the back of the complacently smiling tourist. A curious rooster strolling over a map is harmless, until he gets an inspiration to add something of his own.

With what impatience I have awaited Frank Harris’s Contemporary Portraits! Not that the name of the “painter” appeals to me tremendously; I am rather uneasy about the cleverists and the renegades who of late have found refuge on the hospitable pages of Mr. Viereck’s monthly pamphlet. But will you consider extravagant my expectation that any portraitist would reveal exciting things about such unique sitters as Whistler, Wilde, Verlaine, Swinburne, Maupassant, Maeterlinck, Rodin, France, or about such remote, semi-legendary personages as Carlyle, Renan, Burton, Browning?—The book gave me a slap in the face.

The very first chapter annoyed me. I could not make myself believe in the veracity of Mr. Harris’s conversation with Carlyle, which took place some time in 1877 during a stroll. Mr. Harris is not a bad fiction writer, but as a hero of his own fiction he appears clumsy. The interview presents a study in black and white; the black is the crude, narrow, obstinate Scotchman, while the white is, of course, the brilliant, witty, condescending Mr. Harris. This is the leitmotif of the whole book. The “Portraits” are used to emphasize and accentuate the superior features of the “painter”; the “sitters” are familiarly patted on the shoulder, pulled by a string like marionettes, and made to talk “nice” by whim of the ventriloquist. Defenceless dummies!

In one place Mr. Harris spontaneously exclaims—about the only time he gives the impression of spontaneity: “What a pity St. Paul did not write a ‘Life of Jesus!’” Frank Harris would. He would surely not miss the opportunity of capitalizing such a “contemporary portrait.” What a pity Mr. Harris has not met at a dinner given by Lady-and-So Mr. Socrates, or Mr. Moses, or Mr. Adam! What a loss of a good seller.

An editor of a brave magazine, which allows its contributors the free use of the first personal pronoun, has rebuked me for my too-subjective animosity towards Mr. Harris’s book and for my failure to see its other, better, side. I find my justification in Mr. Harris’s own words: “I put these portraits forth as works of art.” In the same measure as the artist is allowed—or rather, expected—to present that which seems to him most intrinsic and striking in his subject, so am I, the appreciator, to have the liberty of criticising in a work of art those features that appear to me most salient and conspicuous. As a matter of fact I enjoyed reading Mr. Harris’s characteristics of the persons he has met; he doubtless has an artistic touch in his pen-and-ink portraits; his criticisms on Mathew Arnold, John Davidson, Richard Middleton, are interesting. But it is the leitmotif of the book that gives you a general impression. The impression it made on me I have told in the preceding paragraphs. The pages on Whistler, Wilde, Verlaine, Renan, and others, are malodorous; the persons whom you admire or love appear blurred and maimed, for in front of them spins the annoying little figure of the portraitist, who preaches good behavior to Oscar, who is charitable to Jimmy, who tells silly anecdotes about Paul, who condescendingly smiles at old Renan, and journalistically interviews Anatole France and Maeterlinck.

K.

Pot-Boilers

The Sorrows of Belgium, by Leonid Andreyev. New York: The Macmillan Company.

It does make you feel sorry. Sorry for a big talent corrupted by the omnipotent Huhn-Public. During the Russo-Japanese war Andreyev wrote his Red Laughter, a rough affair, yet powerful in its horror. This pamphlet is nothing but an editorial from an anti-German newspaper.

A test of man’s well-being and consciousness of power is the extent to which he can acknowledge the terrible and questionable character of things, and whether he is in any need of a faith at the end.—Nietzsche.

The Poets’ Translation Series

The object of the editors of this series is to present a number of translations of Greek and Latin poetry and prose, especially of those authors who are less frequently given in English.

This literature has too long been the property of pedagogues, philologists and professors. Its human qualities have been obscured by the wranglings of grammarians, who love it principally because to them it is so safe and so dead.

But to many of us it is not dead. It is more alive, more essential, more human than anything we can find in contemporary English literature. The publication of such classics, in the way we propose, may help to create a higher standard for poetry than that which prevails, and a higher standard of appreciation of the writers of antiquity, who have suffered too long at the hands of clumsy metrists. We do not deny that there are many good translations in English of classical writers—Lang’s Homer and Theokritos, Mackail’s Anthology or Aldington’s Apuleius, for instance; but too often such works are lonely and austerely expensive.

THE POET’S TRANSLATION SERIES will appear first in The Egoist (starting September 1st) and will then be reprinted and issued as small pamphlets, simple and inexpensive, so that none will buy except to read. The translations will be done by poets whose interest in their authors will be neither conventional nor frigid. The translators will take no concern with glosses, notes, or any of the apparatus with which learning smothers beauty. They will endeavor to give the words of these Greek and Latin authors as simply and as clearly as may be. Where the text is confused, they will use the most characteristic version; where obscure, they will interpret.

The first six pamphlets, when bound together, will form a small collection of unhackneyed poetry, too long buried under the dust of pedantic scholarship. They range over a period of two thousand years of literature—a proof of the amazing vitality of the Hellenic tradition.

If this venture has the success its promoters look for, other similar and possibly larger pamphlets will be issued.

1. (Ready September) The complete poems (25) of Anyte of Tegea, now brought together in English for the first time: translated by Richard Aldington. (8 pages) 2d. (2½d. post free).

2. (Ready October) An entirely new version of the poems and new fragments, together with the more important of the old fragments, of Sappho: translated by Edward Storer. (12 pages) 4d (4½d. post free).

3. Choruses from the Rhesos of Euripides: translated by H. D.

4. A choice of the Latin poetry of the Italian Renaissance, many now translated for the first time, by Richard Aldington.

5. The Poems of Leonidas of Tarentum, now collected—and many translated for the first time in English: by James Whitall.

6. The Mosella of Ausonius, translated by F. S. Flint. All the pamphlets—except the first—will be twelve pages long and cost four pence; 4½d. post free. The series of six 2s. post free. The pamphlets will be issued monthly.

To be obtained from: The Egoist, Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, W. C., or from Richard Aldington, 7 Christ Church Place, Hampstead, N. W.

Subscriptions will be taken through The Little Review.

Wanted: A “Spoon River Anthology.”

A first edition of The Spoon River Anthology has been borrowed or filched from our office. First editions are scarce, and we prize ours beyond words. Will the guilty person please return it; or will any one wishing to dispose of his at a reasonable price let us know about it?