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

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The correspondence continued until, one day, Harris wrote to tell me he was returning to London and to invite me to visit him there. In the event, however, my first meeting with Harris was in Manchester, whither he came ssss1 to lecture on Shakespeare to the local dramatic society. Jack Kahane (a great friend of mine) and I met him at the Midland Hotel upon his arrival, and from the very first moment he intoxicated me. Whilst he changed from his travelling clothes to evening dress he talked and ejaculated, beseeching us to remain with him as he had had “a rotten journey from London and felt unutterably bored.” I remember very little of what he said except that, with some venom, he called Browning “a not unprosperous gentleman.” He refused to eat or drink before his lecture and, presently, we went down to the large room in the hotel where he was to speak.

We found there a mixed assembly. Everybody in Manchester, it should be explained, writes plays; at least, I never yet met a man in that delectable city who does not. Moreover, they “study” them. They weigh and compare the merits of Stanley Houghton and Ibsen, Harold Brighouse and Strindberg, Allan Monkhouse and Bjornson, Arnold Bennett and Hauptmann, Laurence Housman and Brieux, and so forth. They search for “inner meanings”; the more earnest of them hunt for “messages”; the more delicate seek to perceive Fine Shades. They are veritable disciples of Miss Horniman—priggishly intellectual, self-consciously superior. And, of course, the rock of their salvation is StBernard. Innocuous people enough, but impossible to live in the same city with.