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

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Subsequently he wrote bitterly about England in an American paper. I never had an opportunity of reading his articles, but I read various extracts from them in British newspapers, and was astounded both by the views they contained and by the manner in which those views were expressed.

Years ago Ruskin wrote Rossetti a curious letter: he said he could regard no man as friend who did not value his (Ruskin’s) gifts as highly as he (Ruskin) did. Harris, no doubt, adopted the same kind of attitude towards England. England refused to accept him at his own estimate and, at length, in fierce disgust, Harris turned his back on a country which he deemed unworthy of him.

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Madame Yvette Guilbert—Sir Victor Horsley—MrsPankhurst—Jacob Epstein—Madame Aïno Ackté

Yvette Guilbert!... Yvette Guilbert! I suppose that only a writer who really can write can say anything useful or dignified about this most wonderful woman.... And yet I must try. Do you remember that extraordinary breath-catching passage in Villette where Charlotte Brontë describes the acting of Vashti—Vashti who was Rachel—Vashti who went to London when Charlotte loved Héger?... That, I always think, was a great event. Little Currer Bell, with her most modest mind and her most proud heart, sitting, so breathlessly, on one side of the footlights, and Rachel walking from the wings, beyond the footlights, and, like an empress, speaking, thinking like an empress, and, like a veritable woman, loving and hating.... Do you remember that passage? If you do, perhaps you will think, as I do, that, after all, only women can write of women. Did not Jane Austen create Elizabeth Bennet? And who was it who wrote the Sonnets from the Portuguese? And even, after all, Aphra Behn ... well, she knew something about women, didn’t she?