man.  He is at his worst and weakest in the suppressed[12] part of ’De Profundis’; but in my opinion it had better be published, for several reasons.  It explains some of his personal weakness by the stifling narrowness of his daily round, ruinous to a man whose proper place was in a large public life.  And its concealment is mischievous because, first, it leads people to imagine all sorts of horrors in a document which contains nothing worse than any record of the squabbles of two touchy idlers; and, second, it is clearly a monstrous thing that Douglas should have a torpedo launched at him and timed to explode after his death.  The torpedo is a very harmless squib; for there is nothing in it that cannot be guessed from Douglas’s own book; but the public does not know that.  By the way, it is rather a humorous stroke of Fate’s irony that the son of the Marquis of Queensberry should be forced to expiate his sins by suffering a succession of blows beneath the belt.

[Footnote 11:  Superb criticism.]

[Footnote 12:  I have said this in my way.]

“Now that you have written the best life of Oscar Wilde, let us have the best life of Frank Harris.  Otherwise the man behind your works will go down to posterity[13] as the hero of my very inadequate preface to ‘The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.’”

G. BERNARD SHAW.

[Footnote 13:  A characteristic flirt of Shaw’s humor.  He is a great caricaturist and not a portrait-painter.

When he thinks of my Celtic face and aggressive American frankness he talks of me as pugnacious and a pirate:  “a Captain Kidd”:  in his preface to “The Fair Lady of the Sonnets” he praises my “idiosyncratic gift of pity”; says that I am “wise through pity”; then he extols me as a prophet, not seeing that a pitying sage, prophet and pirate constitute an inhuman superman.

I shall do more for Shaw than he has been able to do for me; he is the first figure in my new volume of “Contemporary Portraits.”  I have portrayed him there at his best, as I love to think of him, and henceforth he’ll have to try to live up to my conception and that will keep him, I’m afraid, on strain.

God help me!—­G.B.S.]