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

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With much of this Harris agreed, though I soon perceived that his mind had for long been intuitively building up, and giving true proportion to, those elements in Christ’s nature that are only hinted at in the Gospels. He was all for a full-blooded, passionate Jesus, for a Jesus who had tested the body’s powers, for a Jesus who was crucified by passion before He was crucified by Pilate. In a word, he applied to Jesus the same intuitive method that he had already applied to Shakespeare. The danger of this method, of course, is that one is tempted (and it is almost impossible not to succumb to the temptation) to project one’s own personality into that of the man one is studying.

“My next book shall be about Jesus Christ,” said Harris. “No man in these days has written honestly about Him.”

“Shall you write as a believer?” I asked.

“Most assuredly,” he replied.

ssss1Then Harris told us some stories—stories he had written, stories he had yet to write. I remember Austin Harrison once saying to me: “Frank Harris is the most astounding creature! He will tell you a story and tell it so marvellously that, when he has finished, you say to yourself: ‘That is the most wonderful thing I have ever heard.’ And you say to him: ‘Why, in God’s name, don’t you write that?’ Well, he does write it, and when you read it you see that, after all, it is by no means so wonderful a thing as you had thought it.” But this is only half true. The story that is told is a very different thing from the story that is written: so different, indeed, that one cannot find any basis for comparison. In telling a story Harris is elliptical; a faint gesture serves for a sentence; a momentary silence is an innuendo; a lifting of the eyebrows, a look, a dropping of the voice, a slowness in his speech—all these take the place of words. He is an exquisite actor and he is at his best when he is sinister and menacing. One need scarcely say that the effect of one of Harris’s stories, told in private, with only one or two listeners, is extremely powerful, for his personality, so quick to melt and suffuse his speech—colouring it and vitalising it—is strong and strange and full of tropical richness....