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