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BOOKS of the DAY
A FALSE BIOGRAPHY.
MR. ROBERT
HARBOROUGH
SHERARD, the
author of "Ber-
nard Shaw,
Frank Harris and
Oscar Wilde" (T.
Werner- Laurie
Ltd., London),
who is now in his
76th year, has been nursing a grievance
for twenty years. In 1916 the late
Frank Harris published in the United
States a book entitled "The Life and
Confessions of Oscar Wilde," of which
Harris subsequently claimed to have
sold 40,000 copies. Mr. Sherard's griev
ance is that in writing this biography
Harris borrowed extensively, and of
course without any acknowledgment,
from his (Sherard's) biography of
Wilde, which was first published in
1906. Moreover, Mr. Sherard contends
that the conversations with Wilde re-
corded in Harris's biography never took
place, and the confessions which Har-
ris said Wilde made to him are purely
invention. But, says Mr. Sherard, Har-
ris's biography of Wilde is accepted
everywhere as authentic, mainly be-
cause Mr. Bernard Shaw, who knew
both Harris and Wilde, has endorsed
it with his approval as "much the best
intimate portrait of Wilde that is likely
to be drawn." Although Harris's lies
about Wilde in his biography have been
pointed out to Mr. Shaw in the inte-
rests of truth, and of Mr. Sherard, Mr.
Shaw refuses to retract and to declare
that Harris's biography of Wilde is a
fake, and Mr. Sherard's is the only
true and genuine one.
Mr. Sherard has no difficulty in
proving in this latest book that Frank
Harris was an unscrupulous liar, and
inferntially that he was incapable of
being honest in any of his dealings
with man or woman. Mr. H. G. Wells,
who, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, was as-
sociated with Harris as a contributor
to the "Saturday Review" when that
paper was under the control of Harris,
gave in his "Autobiography" a very
entertaining account of Harris, and of
the part lie played in the literary life
of London. Mr. Hugh Kingsmill, one
of a band of young literary aspirants
who clustered round Harris in the days
of his decline, and regarded him as
a great literary genius who had been
shamefully neglected, gave expression
to his subsequent disillusionment in a
critical biography of Harris published
in 1932. Harris was an unmitigated
blackguard in his relations with women,
and a lying, blustering bully in his re-
lations with men; but he had the art
of attracting clever young people to
him, and he possessed considerable lite-
rary ability. When he wrote "The Life
and Confessions of Oscar Wilde" his
star had almost set, and as he was
badly in need of money there is no
reason to doubt that he spiced it with
imaginary conversations with Wilde,
and invented confessions, in order to
sell it. But Mr. Sherard's exposure of
Harris is long and tedious, and the
reader will have no difficulty in under-
standing why Mr. Bernard Shaw con-
tinues to prefer Harris's biography of
Wilde to Mr. Sherard's work published
in 1906. "My verdict on Frank's me-
moir stands until I read a better one,"
Mr. Shaw wrote to Mr. Hugh Kings-
mill when the latter communicated
with him recently after reading the
manuscript of Mr. Sherard's exposure
of Harris. In fact the best thing in
Mr. Sherard's book is the final chap-
ter, written by Mr. Hugh Kingsmill and
explaining how he failed to induce Mr.
Shaw to withdraw his endorsement of
Harris's biography of Wilde. "You
know, Harris's 'Wilde' is far more in
teresting than the real 'Wilde,' " said
Mr. Shaw to Mr. Kingsmill, when the
latter called on him for the purpose
of inducing Mr. Shaw to recant. Mr.
Kingsmill appeals to the reader to con-
,demn Mr. Shaw for his obstinate re-
fusal to admit that he has no right to
prefer Harris's falsified biography of
Wilde to Mr. Sherard's genuine one.
But probably the reader will find that
Mr. Shaw summed up the situation wise-
ly and wittily when he suggested to
Mr. Kingsmill that he "should per
suade Sherard to let poor Oscar alone,
and not wake up his vaguely remem-
bered disgraces for the sake of throw-
ing another handful of soot at Harris,
which wouldn't whitewash Oscar."
Down and Out.
Stories of the lives of bad men are
usually interesting to upright citizens,
and an attempt has been made to ex
ploit this' interest in "The Other Half"
(J. M. Dent and Sons, London). The
author, John Worby, tells the story of
his life "among gangsters and mugs,
tramps, hoboes, buskers, molls, broads,
swag women, spivs and bums," but he
has not sufficient literary skill to make
his experiences interesting. Indeed,
some of his adventures are so uncon-
vincingly recorded that the reader gets
the impression they are fictitious.
Moreover as a real bad man John
Worby is a washout. He was an
habitual tramp who preferred to be
dirty, unkempt, ragged and verminous,
rather than work. As a boy brought
up in an orphanage in England he
was sent to Canada to work on a
farm, but he soon tired of work and
lived on his wits. For years he tra-
velled over the United States, stealing
rides on freight trains, mixing with
other hoboes, and living by begging and
petty thieving. He was deported to
England, and continued the same sort
of life in his native country. But
dirty, unkempt, ragged and verminous,
his sex appeal was irresistible, if his
account of his experiences is to be be-
lieved. In fashionable Park-lane in the
West End of London he was stopped
in the street by a well-dressed young
woman named Avril, who insisted on
taking him home to her luxurious flat
and installing him (after a bath and
a complete new rigout at the hands of
an outfitter) as her lover. Mr. Worby
had spent most of his life in the open,
cooking his meals in rusty tins picked
up anywhere, but he soon adapted him-
self to expensive restaurants in the
company of Avril. She had plenty of
money and wanted to marry him, but
Mr. Worby, after curing her of the
drug habit, took his leave and once
more became a tramp. He had several
other experiences of a somewhat simi-
lar kind. All of them may be true,
but he hasn't sufficient skill as a nar-
rator to make them seem probable.
History of Governments.
"A Hundred Years of English Go-
vernment" is the latest addition to the
series of books dealing with progress
during the past hundred years, which
is being published by Duckworth and
Co.. London. Mr. K. B. Smellie, the
author of this new volume, begins his
survey from 1832, the year of the first
Reform Bill, which marks the first at-
tempt by the old governing order in
England to adapt itself to the new
conditions. He traces the growth of
the work of the State, and the conse-
quent development of administrative
machinery, the relation of the State to
society, and the relation of political
parlies to the constitution. His rapid
survey of the great changes in the
English governmental system and in
administration during the war years
is particularly well done.
He expresses the view that in the
post-war world the English system of
government no longer serves as a
model for other countries. Up to 1914
it still seemed to be a model, in spite
of its many parochial and insular
peculiarities. It was not formally
as complete a democracy as the sys-
tems in Scandinavia, Switzerland,
Prance and the United States, and its
machinery of administration and
justice was hampered by a long
and tenacious past. "But it had
secured a harmony of order with
liberty, which promised much for a
world on the eve of revolutions in in-
dustrial organisation, such as those
which had made England what she
was." In a changed world it remains
to be seen how far the English con-
stitution can be adjusted to meet
changes. "The mark of the machine
is now on every human activity."
writes Mr. Smellie, "Government will
have to achieve something of the speed
and the precision of the factory. How
far this can be done, and at the same
time secure a way of life worth living
is not yet known. But many political
and social forms cherished by the nine-
teenth century, including the minimis-
ing of bureaucracy, will have to be
abandoned. It may be that a Conti-
nental, or even a world order may
emerge, leaving to national Govern-
ments only a parochial significance. It
is possible that Imperialism will have
its way, and that the only form of
Government open to England will be
to become part of a British Common-
wealth of Nations. It is possible also
that the English people may not find
impossible to keep their imperial heri-
tage. Finally, it may be that with the
break up of the economic order of the
nineteenth century the Soviet or the
Fascist form of Government will be-
come common. Even if that were so,
it is still to be expected that the spirit
or the English constitution, the tech
nique, the style of our political artists
would survive."
Evolution of Art.
To Mr. Herbert Read, the author of
"Art and Society" (William Heine-
mann, London), "art is the most cer-
tain mode of expression that mankind
has achieved." He protests against the
ignorance which exists in regard to
the place of art in the history of man-
kind, and quotes Mr. H. G. Wells as a
distinguished example of such ignor-
ance. "In every age man has made
things for his use and followed thou-
sands of occupations made necessary
by his struggle for existence," writes
Mr. Read. "He has fought endlessly
for power and leisure and for material
happiness. He has created languages
and symbols, and built up an impres-
sive fund of learning; his resource and
invention have never been exhausted.
And yet all the time, in every phase
of civilisation, he has felt that what
we call the scientific attitude is inade-
quate. The mind he has developed
from his deliberate cunning can only
cope with objective facts; beyond these
objective facts is a whole aspect of the
world which is only accessible to in-
stinct and intuition. The development
of these obscurer modes of apprehen-
sion has been the purpose of art; and
we are nowhere near an understanding
of mankind and of the history of man-
kind until we admit the significance
and, indeed, the superiority of such
knowledge embodied in art. We may
venture to claim superiority for such
knowledge because whilst nothing has
proved so impermanent and provisional
as that which we are pleased to call
scientific fact and philosophy built on
it, art, on the contrary, os everywhere,
in its highest manifestations, universal
and eternal."
Mr. Read begins by examining the
function of art in primitive society.
He surveys the position which art has
occupied in relation to the religions
of later civilisations, particularly Chris-
tianity. Then follow an examination
of the status of the artist during and
since the Renaissance, and an analysis
of the frustration of the artist under
modern economic conditions. The
author predicts the doom of modern
academic art, i.e., "the kind of art that
every year covers the walls of the Royal
Academy in England and of similar
institutions in other countries." He
describes it as "occasionally competent
in a technical sense, generally senti-
mental, and always utterly insignifi-
cant. neither aware of its fatuity nor
yet ignorant of its fate." To Mr. Read
the hope of the future lies in revolu-
tionary art, and more particularly in
surrealism. "The notion of an art
divorced from the general process of
social development is an illusion." He
states, "and since the artist cannot
escape the transformation of life which
is always in progress, he had better
take stock of his position and play
his part in the process." And Mr.
Read is convinced that the liberation
of mind which surrealism requires can
come only through the liberation of
man by the proletarian revolution.
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