Daughters of Eve: Including Frank Harris Set Down in Malice (Classic Reprint)

Set Down in Malice 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 unprospexous 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 meta man in that delectable city who does not. Moreover, they study them. They weigh and compare the merits of Stanley Houghton and I bsen, 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. A nd, of course, the rock of their salvation is St. Bernard. Innocuous people enough, but impossible to live with in the same city. To this assembly of earnest, pale men and spectacled women Harris was to lecture, and I looked from them to Harris and from Harris to them with joyful expectations. From the very first sentence he was fiery and provocative, throwing out daring theories, anathematising all forms of respectability, upholding with unparalleled fierceness a wonderful ideal of chivalry and nobility and condemning, en bloc, the whole human race, and particularly that portion of it seated before him. Ladies rustled; men stirred uneasily.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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