To T, S. Perry

Bad-Nauheim, May 22, 1910.

Beloved Thos.,—I have two letters from you—one about ... Harris on Shakespeare. Re Harris, I did think you were a bit supercilious a priori, but I thought of your youth and excused you. Harris himself is horrid, young and crude. Much of his talk seems to me absurd, but nevertheless that's the way to write about Shakespeare, and I am sure that, if Shakespeare were a Piper-control, he would say that he relished Harris far more than the pack of reverent commentators who treat him as a classic moralist. He seems to me to have been a professional amuser, in the first instance, with a productivity like that of a Dumas, or a Scribe; but possessing what no other amuser has possessed, a lyric splendor added to his rhetorical fluency, which has made people take him for a more essentially serious human being than he was. Neurotically and erotically, he was hyperæsthetic, with a playful graciousness of character never surpassed. He could be profoundly melancholy; but even then was controlled by the audience's needs. A cork in the rapids, with no ballast of his own, without religious or ethical ideals, accepting uncritically every theatrical and social convention, he was simply an æolian harp passively resounding to the stage's call. Was there ever an author of such emotional importance whose reaction against false conventions of life was such an absolute zero as his? I know nothing of the other Elizabethans, but could they have been as soulless in this respect?—But halte-la! or I shall become a Harris myself!... With love to you all, believe me ever thine,

W. J.

Read Daniel Halévy's exquisitely discreet "Vie de Nietzsche," if you haven't already done so. Do you know G. Courtelines' "Les Marionettes de la Vie" (Flammarion)? It beats Labiche.