Mistake yesterday. "The Glimpse" was published today and not on Wednesday. I received today a highly enthusiastic letter from Waugh about it. He does not think it will sell. I have a wild idea that it will.
A wild wet morning, and it was very fine on the hill in the rain at 8.15. I came home and wrote the first of new series of articles for T.P's Weekly on English family life. rather pleased with it.
After lunch I painted. Then had tea here and went down to Godebskis for tea afterwards. Wonderful colours on the Godebskis' house and trees. Showers and wind.
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| Frank Harris |
After dinner I finished Harris's Shakespere, amid enthusiasm. I telegraphed him that it surpassed my most sanguine expectations and was glorious. It is. But I wish I hadn't got to write an article on it. The ever-increasing emotion, which I experienced as I read steadily through Harris's book I can only compare with unforgettable sensations that have perturbed me at moments when I stood between earth and sky on some high tor of Dartmoor. . . . I realised that a masterpiece on Shakspere had at length been written. The opening pages of "The Man Shakspere" at once produce certainty that the mind of its author is worldly, non-academic, and powerfully creative. I use "worldly" in a good sense. I mean that the author knows the actual world, moves about in it freely, and is versed in life itself: qualities denied to professors, or to most of them. And he writes as an artist. He does not fit words ingeniously together; he plastically moulds the whole phrase. All English literature is divided into Shakspere and the rest, and in the subconsciousness of the race is a notion that Shakspere's defects are finer than other writers' virtues. Mr. Frank Harris has a very short way with all this. His fist goes through the pane instantly, and the breezes of commonsense blow through the stuffy chambers where the commentators have been mumbling at their priest-like task. By its courage, its originality, its force, its patient ingenuity, its comprehension of art and the artist, its acquaintance with life, and its perfectly astounding acquaintance with Shakspere's plays, the ultimate destiny of the book is assured. It marks an epoch. It has destroyed nearly all previous Shaksperean criticism, and it will be the parent of nearly all the Shaksperean criticism of the future.
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