ices and crannies where it cannot very well feel at home. Certainly, it is true that any artist creates his characters out of his own virtues and weaknesses; all of a novelists' characters, to a certain extent, reflect phases of himself. The mistake Harris has made lies in identifying Shakespeare only with his weak, unsuccessful, sentimental, disappointed, unhappy characters, such as Hamlet, Macbeth, Orsino, Antonio, and Romeo. Shakespeare probably was just as much Sir Toby Belch and Falstaff. Curiously, this theory of identification fits the critic himself, the intellectual creator, more snugly than it does the romancer, the emotional creator. Remy de Gourmont has pointed this out. He says, Criticism is perhaps the most suggestive of literary forms; it is a perpetual confession; believing to analyze the works of others, the critic unveils and exposes himself to the public. So from these books we may learn more about Frank Harris than we do about Shakespeare.[1] This, of course, has its value.
But that is why Shakespeare is greater than his critics, that is greater than the critics who cling to one theory. Shakespeare speaks only through his characters and he can say, or make some one say,
but on the next page another character may deny
- ↑ In a later book, his biography of Oscar Wilde, Frank Harris tells us more about himself than he does about Wilde. C. V. V.
