You have surely come across that ubiquitous individual who immortalizes his travels abroad through innumerable “Kodaks,” to be rubbed into your eyes on every opportune and inopportune occasion. He bores you ad nauseam. Why? You are offered an opportunity to observe the majestic Mont Blanc, the smoking Vesuvius, the respectable Eiffel Tower, the San Marco, the Brandenburg Gate, the Westminster Abbey, and the rest of the hackneyed wonders. Yet you are nauseated. Your individual has caused the Kodak to utilize the magnificent views as backgrounds for his own central figure; you are compelled to seek the Schlangenberg behind the back of the complacently smiling tourist. A curious rooster strolling over a map is harmless, until he gets an inspiration to add something of his own. With what impatience I have awaited Frank Harris’s _Contemporary Portraits_! Not that the name of the “painter” appeals to me tremendously; I am rather uneasy about the cleverists and the renegades who of late have found refuge on the hospitable pages of Mr. Viereck’s monthly pamphlet. But will you consider extravagant my expectation that any portraitist would reveal exciting things about such unique sitters as Whistler, Wilde, Verlaine, Swinburne, Maupassant, Maeterlinck, Rodin, France, or about such remote, semi-legendary personages as Carlyle, Renan, Burton, Browning?—The book gave me a slap in the face. The very first chapter annoyed me. I could not make myself believe in the veracity of Mr. Harris’s conversation with Carlyle, which took place some time in 1877 during a stroll. Mr. Harris is not a bad fiction writer, but as a hero of his own fiction he appears clumsy. The interview presents a study in black and white; the black is the crude, narrow, obstinate Scotchman, while the white is, of course, the brilliant, witty, condescending Mr. Harris. This is the leitmotif of the whole book. The “Portraits” are used to emphasize and accentuate the superior features of the “painter”; the “sitters” are familiarly patted on the shoulder, pulled by a string like marionettes, and made to talk “nice” by whim of the ventriloquist. Defenceless dummies! In one place Mr. Harris spontaneously exclaims—about the only time he gives the impression of spontaneity: “What a pity St. Paul did not write a ‘Life of Jesus!’” Frank Harris would. He would surely not miss the opportunity of capitalizing such a “contemporary portrait.” What a pity Mr. Harris has not met at a dinner given by Lady-and-So Mr. Socrates, or Mr. Moses, or Mr. Adam! What a loss of a good seller.