DEAREST FANNY,--Your beautiful roses and your card arrived duly--the roses were not deserved, not at least by W. J. I have about given up all visits to Boston this winter, and the racket has been so incessant in the house, owing to foreigners of late, that we haven't had the strength to send for you. I sail on the 29th in the Megantic, first to see Henry, who has been ill, not dangerously, but very miserably. Our Harry is with him now. I shall then go to Paris for a certain medical experiment, and after that report at Nauheim, where they probably will keep me for some weeks. I hope that I may get home again next fall with my organism in better shape, and be able to see more of my friends. After Thursday, when the good Boutrouxs go, I shall try to arrange a meeting with you, dear Fanny. At present we are "contemporaries," that is all, and the one of us who becomes survivor will have regrets that we were no more! What a lugubrious ending! With love to your mother, and love from Alice, believe me, dearest Fanny, most affectionately yours, W. J. _To T, S. Perry._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 22, 1910_. BELOVED THOS.,--I have two letters from you--one about ... Harris on Shakespeare. _Re_ Harris, I did think you were a bit supercilious _a priori_, but I thought of your youth and excused you. Harris himself is horrid, young and crude. Much of his talk seems to me absurd, but nevertheless _that's the way to write about Shakespeare_, and I am sure that, if Shakespeare were a Piper-control, he would say that he relished Harris far more than the pack of reverent commentators who treat him as a classic moralist. He seems to me to have been a professional _amuser_, in the first instance, with a productivity like that of a Dumas, or a Scribe; but possessing what no other amuser has possessed, a lyric splendor added to his rhetorical fluency, which has made people take him for a more essentially serious human being than he was. Neurotically and erotically, he was hyperæsthetic, with a playful graciousness of character never surpassed. He could be profoundly melancholy; but even then was controlled by the audience's needs. A cork in the rapids, with no ballast of his own, without religious or ethical ideals, accepting uncritically every theatrical and social convention, he was simply an æolian harp passively resounding to the stage's call. Was there ever an author of such emotional importance whose reaction against false conventions of life was such an absolute zero as his? I know nothing of the other Elizabethans, but could they have been as soulless in this respect?--But _halte-la_! or I shall become a Harris myself!... With love to you all, believe me ever thine, W. J. Read Daniel Halévy's exquisitely discreet "Vie de Nietzsche," if you haven't already done so. Do you know G. Courtelines' "Les Marionettes de la Vie" (Flammarion)? It beats Labiche. _To François Pillon._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 25, 1910_.