me, for, to my knowledge, J. has never known the time that was anything
else. After our years of wandering, years of hotels and rooms and
lodgings, we had just settled in London in the first place we had ever
called our own--the old chambers in the old Buckingham Street house
overlooking the river; I was doing more regular newspaper work than I
had ever done before or ever hope to do again; we were in the
Eighteen-Nineties, and I need neither the magnifying glasses through
which age has the reputation of looking backward, nor the clever young
men of to-day who write about that delectable decade and no doubt
deplore my indiscretion in being alive to write about it myself, to show
me how very much more amusing and interesting life was then than now.
There is no question that people, especially people doing our sort of
work, were much more awake in the Nineties, much more alive, much more
keen about everything, even a fight, or above all a fight, if they
thought a fight would clear the air. Those clever young men,
self-appointed historians of a period they know only by hearsay, may
deplore or envy its decadence. But because a small clique wrote anæmic
verse and bragged of the vices for which they had not the strength,
because a few youthful artists invented new methods of expression the
outsider did not understand, that does not mean decadence. A period of
revolt against decadence, of insurrection, of vigorous warfare it seemed
to me who lived and worked through it. The Yellow Nineties, the Glorious
Nineties, the Naughty Nineties, the Rococo Nineties, are descriptions I
have seen, but the Fighting Nineties would be mine. As I recall those
stimulating days, the prevailing attitude of the artist in his studio,
the author at his desk, the critic at his task, was that of Henley's Man
in the Street:
Hands in your pockets, eyes on the pavement,
Where in the world is the fun of it all?
But a row--but a rush--but a face for your fist.
Then a crash through the dark--and a fall.
Scarcely an important picture was painted, an important illustration
published, an important book written, an important criticism made, that
it did not lead to battle. Few of the Young Men of the Nineties
accomplished all the triumphant things they thought they could, but the
one thing they never failed to do and to let the world know they were
doing was to fight, and they loved nothing better--coats off, sleeves
rolled up, arms squared. Whatever happened was to them a challenge.
Whistler began the Nineties with his Exhibition at the Groupil Gallery
and it was a rout for the enemy. The harmless portrait of Desboutin by
Degas was hung at the New English Art Club and straightaway artists and
critics were bludgeoning each other in the press. Men were elected to
the Royal Academy, pictures were bought by the Chantrey Bequest; new
papers and magazines were started by young enthusiasts with something to
say and no place to say it in; new poets, yearning for degeneracy, read
their poems to each other in a public house they preferred to
re-christen a tavern; new printing presses were founded to prove the
superiority of the esoteric few; new criticism--new because honest and
intelligent--was launched; everything suddenly became _fin-de-siècle_
in the passing catchword of the day borrowed from Paris; every fad of
the Continent was adopted; but no matter what it might be, the incident,
or work, or publication that roused any interest at all was the signal
for the clash of arms, for the row and the rush. Everybody had to be in
revolt, though it might not always have been easy to say against just
what. I remember once, at the show of a group of young painters who
fancied themselves fiery Independents, running across Felix Buhot, the
most inflammable man in the world, and his telling me, with his wild
eyes more aflame than usual, that he could smell the powder. He was not
far wrong, if his metaphor was a trifle out of proportion to those very
self-conscious young rebels. A good deal of powder was flying about in
the Nineties, and when powder flies, whatever else may come of it, one
thing sure is that nobody can sleep and most people want to talk.
I had not been in London a year before I knew that there the _café_ was
not the place to talk in. I have dreary memories of the first efforts J.
and I, fresh from Italy, made to go on leading the easy, free-from-care
life in restaurants and _cafés_ we had led in Rome and Venice. But it
was not to be done. The distances were too great, the weather too
atrocious, the little restaurants too impossible, the big restaurants
too beyond our purse, and the only real _café_ was the _Café Royal_. At
an earlier date Whistler had drawn his followers to it. In the Nineties
Frederick Sandys was one of its most familiar figures. Even now,
especially on Saturday nights, young men, in long hair and strange hats
and laboriously unconventional clothes, are to be met there, looking a
trifle solemnized by their share in so un-English an entertainment. For
this is the trouble: The _café_ is not an English institution and
something in the atmosphere tells you right away that it isn't. It
might, it may still, serve us for an occasion, its mirrors and gilding
and red velvet pleasantly reminiscent, but for night after night it
would not answer at all as the _Nazionale_ had answered in Rome, the
_Orientale_ in Venice.
However, Buckingham Street made a good substitute as an extremely
convenient centre for talk, and its convenience was so well taken
advantage of that, at this distance of time, I am puzzled to see how we
ever got any work done. J. and I have never been given to inhospitality,
and we both liked the talk. But the day of reckoning came when, sitting
down to lunch one morning, we realized that it was the first time we
had eaten that simple meal alone for we could not remember how long.
The lunch for which no preparation is made and at which the company is
uninvited but amusing may be one of the most agreeable of feasts, but we
knew too well that if we went on cutting short our days of work to enjoy
it, we ran the risk of no lunch ever again for ourselves, let alone for
anybody else.
To be interrupted in the evening did not matter so much, though our
evenings were not altogether free of work--nor are J.'s even yet, the
years proving less kind in moulding him to the indolence to which, with
age, I often find myself pleasantly yielding. Our friends, when we
stopped them dropping in by day, began dropping in by night instead, and
one group of friends to whom Thursday night was particularly well
adapted for the purpose gradually turned their dropping in from a chance
into a habit until, before we knew it, we were regularly at home every
Thursday after dinner.
[Illustration: Mezzotint by Joseph Pennell
OUT OF OUR LONDON WINDOWS]
The entertainment, if it can be called by so fine a name, always
retained something of the character of chance with which it began. We
sent out no invitations, we attempted no formality. Nobody was asked to
play at anything or to listen to anything. Nobody was expected to
dress, though anybody who wanted to could--everybody was welcome in the
clothes they wore, whether they came straight from the studio or a
dinner. If eventually I provided sandwiches--in addition to the tobacco
always at hand in the home of the man who smokes and the
whiskey-and-soda without which an Englishman cannot exist through an
evening--it was because I got too hungry not to need something to eat
before the last of the company had said good-night. We did not offer
even the comfort of space. Once the small dining-room that had been
Etty's studio, and the not over-large room that was J.'s, and the
nondescript room that was drawing-room and my workroom combined, were
packed solid, there was no place to overflow into except the short,
narrow entrance hall, and I still grow hot at the thought of what became
of hats and coats if it also was filled. I can never forget the
distressing evening when in the bathroom--which, with the ingenuity of
the designer of flats, had been fitted in at the end of the narrow hall
and was the reason of its shortness--I caught William Penn devouring the
gloves of an artist's wife who I do not believe has forgiven him to this
day; nor the still more distressing occasion when I discovered Bobbie,
William's poor timid successor, curled up on a brand-new bonnet of
feathers and lace.
But it was the very informality, so long as it led to no crimes on the
part of our badly brought-up cats, that attracted the friends who were
as busy and hard-working as ourselves,--this, and the freedom to talk
without being silenced for the music that no talker wants to hear when
he can listen to his own voice, or for the dances that nobody wants to
watch if he can follow his own argument, or for the introductions that
invariably interrupt at the wrong moment, or for the games and
innumerable devices without which intelligent human beings are not
supposed to be able to survive an evening in each other's company. The
idle who play golf all day and bridge all night, who cannot eat in the
short intervals between without music, believe that talk has gone out of
fashion. My experience had been in Rome and Venice, was then in London,
and is now, that men and women who have something to talk about are
always anxious to talk about it, if only the opportunity is given to
them, and the one attraction we offered was just this opportunity for
people who had been doing more or less the same sort of work all day to
meet and talk about it all night--the reason why, despite heat and
discomfort, despite meagre fare and the risk to hats and coats, Thursday
after Thursday crowded our rooms to suffocation as soon as evening came.
[Illustration: Bust by Rodin
W.E. HENLEY]
II
As, in memory, I listen to the endless talk of our Thursday nights, the
leading voice, when not J.'s, is Henley's, which is natural since it was
Henley, followed by his Young Men,--our name for his devoted staff
always in attendance at his office and out of it,--who got so into the
habit of dropping in to see us on Thursday night that we got into the
habit of staying at home to see him. For Thursday was the night when the
_National Observer_, which he was editing at the time, went to press and
Ballantynes, the printers, were not more than five minutes away in
Covent Garden. At about ten his work was over and he and his Young Men
were free to do nothing save talk for the rest of the week if they
chose--and they usually did choose--and Buckingham Street was a handy
place to begin it in. Our rooms were already fairly well packed,
pleasantly smoky, and echoing with the agreeable roar of battle when
they arrived.
I like to remember Henley as I saw him then, especially if my quite
superfluous feeling of responsibility as hostess had brought me on some
equally superfluous mission into the little hall at the moment of his
arrival. As the door opened he would stand there at the threshold, his
tall soft black hat still crowning his massive head, leaning on his
crutch and stick as he waited to take breath after his climb up our
three flights of stone stairs--"Did I really ever climb those stairs at
Buckingham Street?"--he asked me the last time I saw him, some years
later, at Worthing when he was ill and broken, and I have often
marvelled myself how he managed it. But breathless as he might be, he
always laughed his greeting. I cannot think of Henley as he was in his
prime, to borrow a word that was a favourite with him, without hearing
his laugh and seeing his face illuminated by it. Rarely has a man so
hampered by his body kept his spirit so gay. He was meant to be a
splendid creature physically and fate made of him a helpless
cripple--who was it once described him as "the wounded Titan"? Everybody
knows the story: he made sure that everybody should by telling it in his
_Hospital Verses_. But everybody cannot know who did not know him how
bravely he accepted his disaster. It seemed to me characteristic once
when a young cousin of mine, a girl at the most susceptible age of
hero-worship, meeting him for the first time in our chambers and
volunteering, in the absence of anybody else available, to fetch the cab
he needed, thought his allowing her to go on such an errand for him the
eccentricity of genius and never suspected his lameness until he stood
up and took his crutch from the corner. There was nothing about him to
suggest the cripple.
[Illustration: Painting by William Nicholson
W.E. HENLEY]
He was a remarkably handsome man, despite his disability, tall and large
and fair, a noble head and profile, a shock of red hair, short red
beard, keen pale blue eyes, his indomitable gaiety filling his face with
life and animation, smoothing out the lines of pain and care. He was so
striking in every way, his individuality so strangely marked that the
wonder is the good portrait of him should be the exception. Nicholson,
when painting him, was a good deal preoccupied with the big soft hat and
blue shirt and flowing tie, feeling their picturesque value, and turned
him into a brigand, a land pirate, to the joy of Henley, whom I always
suspected of feeling this value himself and dressing as he did for the
sake of picturesqueness. Simon Bussy seemed to see, not Henley, but
Stevenson's caricature--the John Silver of _Treasure Island_, the
cripple with the face as big as a ham. Even Whistler failed and never
printed more than one or two proofs of the lithograph for which Henley
sat. Rodin came nearest success, his bust giving the dignity and
ruggedness and character of head and profile both. He and Nicholson
together go far to explain the man.
Unfortunately there is no biography at all. Charles Whibley was to have
written the authorized life, but the world still waits. Cope Cornford
attempted a sketch, but scarcely the shadow of Henley emerges from its
pages. Because he thundered and denounced and condemned and slashed to
pieces in the _National Observer_, his contemporaries imagined that
Henley did nothing anywhere at any time save thunder and denounce and
condemn and slash to pieces and that he was altogether a fierce,
choleric, intolerant, impossible sort of a person. The chances are few
now realize that Henley was enough of an influence in his generation for
it to have mattered to anybody what manner of man he was. A glimpse of
him remains here and there. Stevenson has left the description of his
personality, so strong that he was felt in a room before he was seen.
His vigour and his manliness, survive in his work, but cannot quite
explain the commanding power he was in his generation, while neither he
nor his friends have shewn, as it should be shewn, the other side to his
character, the gay, the kindly side, so that I feel almost as if I owed
it to his memory to put on record my impressions of my first meeting
with him, since it was only this side he then gave me the chance to see.
I wonder sometimes why I had never met Henley before. When J. and I came
to London he was editing the _Magazine of Art_, a little later he
managed the _Art Journal_, and in both he published a number of J.'s
drawings, and we had letters from him. We went to houses where he often
visited. I remember hearing him announced once at the Robinsons' in
Earl's Terrace, but Miss Mary Robinson, as she was then--Madame Duclaux
as she is now--left everybody in the drawing-room while she went to see
him downstairs, because of his lameness she said, but partly, I
fancied, because she wanted to keep him to herself to discuss a new
series of articles. She had just "come out" in literature and was as
fluttered by her every new appearance in print as most girls are by
theirs in a ball-room. In other houses, more than once I just missed
him, I had never got nearer than business correspondence when he left
London to edit the _Scots Observer_ in Edinburgh, and he stayed there
until the _Scots_ became the _National Observer_ with its offices in
London.
I had heard more than enough about him in the meanwhile. The man who
says what he believes to be the truth--the man who sits in, and talks
from, the chair of the scorners--is bound to get himself hated, and
Henley came in for his fair share of abuse. As somebody says, truth
never goes without a scratched face.
But, like all men hated by the many, Henley inspired devotion in the few
who, in his case, were not only devoted themselves but eager to make
their friends devoted too. When he got back to London one of his Young
Men, whom I do not see why I should not call Charles Whibley, insisted
that J. and I must meet Henley first in the right way, that all our
future relations with him depended upon it, and that this right way
would be for him to ask Henley and ourselves, and nobody else, to dinner
in his rooms.
When the evening came J. was off on a journey for work and I went alone
to Fig-Tree House--the little old house, with a poor shabby London
apology of a fig-tree in front, on Milbank Street by the riverside,
which, with Henley's near Great College Street office round the corner,
has disappeared in the fury of municipal town-disfigurement. A popular
young man, in making his plans, cannot afford to reckon without his
friends. Four uninvited guests, all men, had arrived before me, a fifth
appeared as I did, and he was about the last man any of the party could
have wanted at that particular moment--a good and old and intimate
friend of Stevenson's, whose own name I am too discreet to mention but
to whom, for reasons I am also too discreet to explain, I may give that
of Michael Finsbury instead. Whoever has read _The Wrong Box_ knows that
Michael Finsbury enjoyed intervals of relaxation from work, knows also
the nature of the relaxation. I had struck him at the high tide of one
of these intervals. It was terribly awkward for everybody, especially
for me. I have got now to an age when I could face that sort of
awkwardness with equanimity, even with amusement. But I was young then,
I had not lived down my foolish shyness, and I would have run if, in my
embarrassment, I had had the courage,--would have run anyhow, I do
believe, if it had not been for Henley. He seized the situation and
mastered it. He had the reputation of being the most brutal of men, but
he showed a delicacy that few could have surpassed or equalled under
the circumstances. He simply forced me to forget the presence of the
objectionable Michael Finsbury, who at the other end of the table, I
learned afterwards, was overwhelming his neighbours with a worse
embarrassment than mine by finding me every bit as objectionable as I
found him, and saying so with a frankness it was not in me to emulate.
The force Henley used with such success was simply his talk. He did not
let my attention wander for one minute, so full of interest was all he
had to say, while the enthusiasm with which he said it became
contagious. I can remember to this day how he made me see a miracle in
the mere number of the Velasquezes in the Prado, an adventure in every
hansom drive through the London streets, an event in the dressing of the
salad for dinner--how he transformed life into one long Arabian Nights'
Entertainment, which is why I suppose it has always been my pride that
his poem called by that name he dedicated to me. And so the evening that
began as one of the most embarrassing in my experience ended as one of
the most delightful, and the man whom I had trembled to meet because of
his reputation with those who did not know him or understand intolerance
in a just cause, won me over completely by his kindness, his
consideration, his charm.
Henley delighted in talk, that was why he talked so well. On Thursday
night his crutch would be left with his big hat at the front door; then,
one hand leaning on his cane, the other against the wall for support, he
would hobble over to the chair waiting for him, usually by the window
for he loved to look out on the river, and there, seldom moving except
to stand bending over with both arms on the back of the chair, which was
his way of resting, and always with his Young Men round him, the talk
would begin and the talk would last until only my foolish ideas of
civility kept me up to listen. As a woman, I had not then, nor have I
yet, ceased to be astonished by man's passion for talking shop and his
power of going on with it forever. My explanation of this special power
used to be that the occupation supplied him by the necessity of keeping
his pipe or his cigarette or his cigar going, with the inevitable
interruptions and pauses and movement, and the excitement of the eternal
hunt for the matches, made the difference and helped to keep him
awake--there is nothing more difficult for me personally than to sit
still long when my hands are idle, unless I am reading. But the women I
know who smoke are not men's equals in the capacity for endless talk and
the reason must be to seek elsewhere. He who divines it will have gone
far to solving the tedious problem of sex.
Of Henley the talker, at least, one portrait remains. He was the
original of Stevenson's Burly--the talker who would roar you down, bury
his face in his hands, undergo passions of revolt and agony, letting
loose a spring torrent of words. There was always a wild flood and storm
of talk wherever Henley might be. He and his Young Men were the most
clamorous group of the clamorous Nineties, though curiously their
clamour seems faint in the ears of the present authorities on that noisy
period. I have read one of these authorities' description of the London
of the Nineties dressed in a powder puff, dancing beneath Chinese
lanterns, being as wicked as could be in artificial rose-gardens. But
had Henley and his Young Men suspected the existence of a London like
that, they would have overthrown it with their voices, as Joshua
overthrew the walls of Jericho with his trumpets. To other authorities
the Nineties represent an endless orgy of societies--Independent Theatre
Societies, Fabian Societies, Browning Societies, every possible kind of
societies--but the _National Observer_, with its keen scent for shams,
was as ready to pounce upon any and all of them for the good of their
health, and to upbraid their members as cranks. It was a paper that
existed to protest against just this sort of thing, as against most
other things in a sentimental and artificial and reforming and ignorant
world. It made as much noise in print as its editorial staff made in
talk. The main function of criticism, according to Henley, was to
increase the powers of depreciation rather than of appreciation, and
what a healthy doctrine it is! As editor, he roared down his opponents
no less lustily than he roared them down as talkers, and he had the
strong wit and the strong heart that a man must have, or so it is said,
to know when to tell the truth, which, with him, was always. He could
not stand anything like affectation, or what people were calling
æstheticism and decadence. To him, literature was literature and art was
art, and not puling sentiment, affected posturing, lilies and
sunflowers. The _National Observer_ was the housetop from which he
shouted for all who passed to hear that it did not matter twopence what
the dabbler wanted to express if he could not express it, if he had not
the technique of his medium at his fingers' ends and under his perfect
control. A man might indulge in noble and beautiful ideas, and if he did
not know how to put them in beautiful words or in beautiful paint or in
beautiful sound, he was anathema, to be cast into outer darkness where
there is gnashing of teeth--the doctrine of art for art's sake which the
advanced young leaders of the new generation assure me is hopelessly out
of date. Pretence of any kind was as the red rag; "bleat" was the
unpardonable sin; the man who was "human" was the man to be praised. I
would not pretend to say who invented this meaning for the word "human."
Perhaps Louis Stevenson. As far back as 1880, in a letter from Davos
describing the people "in a kind of damned hotel" where he had put up, I
find him using it as Henley and his Young Men used it later:
Eleven English Parsons, all
Entirely inoffensive; four
True human beings--what I call
Human--the deuce a cipher more.
Stevenson may even then have learned it from Henley. But however that
may have been, "bleat" and "human" were the two words ever recurring
like a refrain in the columns of the _National Observer_, ever the
beginning and end of argument in the heated atmosphere of Buckingham
Street.