Frank Harris 
Contemporary Portraits (Third Series) [PDF ebook] 

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. What a gorgeous undertaking it is to try to depict the soul of a man. A god-like hardship to render in words the utmost reach of thought and spiritual endeavor and the abyss of feelings, instincts, fears — the ghostly echoes in us of forgotten dangers or long disused power. Of necessity the enterprise is a failure.<br><br>You might as well try to paint a wave and at the same time, its chemical constituents and its myriad animalculae.<br><br>You think of your friend’s chief characteristic, the most prominent and peculiar trait of his nature and before you have got it on the paper, you recognize that he might correct you and declare that the opposite and antagonistic quality had guided him again and again and in fact finally determined his life’s course.<br><br>Each one of us is made up of a myriad contradictories and no man has been able as yet to paint his own spirit in its entirety, let alone a stranger’s, for we are all strangers one to another and lonely from the cradle to the grave, alone and forlorn.<br><br>Yet when we look at this impossible task in another light, it comes within our compass.