Читать книгу Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences онлайн

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But it is being borne in upon me that for the last five minutes I have been writing like the adorable Eve in The Tatler. Let me, for her sake, begin another chapter.

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It must have been five or six years ago that a friend came to me with the news that Frank Harris had expressed a desire to see some of my verse. Precisely what my friend had told Harris about me, I do not know; something very exaggerated, perhaps; something complimentary, doubtless; something that piqued Harris’s curiosity, it was evident. As Harris is one of the few modern writers for whom my boyish admiration has survived manhood, I felt subtly gratified that he should take even a fleeting interest in me, and I sat down at once and copied out various poems that had already appeared in The Academy, under Lord Alfred Douglas’s editorship, and in The English Review in the days of Ford Madox Hueffer, and, more recently, when edited by Austin Harrison. With my verses I sent a letter, hypocritically modest as regards myself, honestly full of admiration as regards Harris. He replied from his villa in Nice, sending me a long letter in which he did me the honour to enter fully into the supposed merits and demerits of my work. Of one poem he said that it was not sufficiently sensual, and I have never been able quite to understand what he meant, for I had, with some particularity, described seven naked ladies swimming in a pool, and I had felt that my verses had obviously enough expressed my feelings.