e of sympathy and understanding
that extends from the ribaldry of a buccaneer to the shyest
tendernesses of the most sensitive poetry, to be all things to all
men, yet whose proud humor it is to be to every man, provided the man
is eminent and pretentious, the champion of his enemies. To the
Archbishop he is an atheist, to the atheist a Catholic mystic, to the
Bismarckian Imperialist an Anacharsis Klootz, to Anacharsis Klootz a
Washington, to Mrs Proudie a Don Juan, to Aspasia a John Knox: in
short, to everyone his complement rather than his counterpart, his
antagonist rather than his fellow-creature. Always provided, however,
that the persons thus confronted are respectable persons. Sophie
Perovskaia, who perished on the scaffold for blowing Alexander II to
fragments, may perhaps have echoed Hamlet's

Oh God, Horatio, what a wounded name--
Things standing thus unknown--I leave behind!

but Frank Harris, in his Sonia, has rescued her from that injustice,
and enshrined her 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