always at his best. His week's task was done, he was not due at his
house in Addiscombe until the next day, for he always stayed in his
Great College Street rooms from Monday to Friday--and the night was
before him. At first I trembled a little at the smell of powder under my
own roof, at turning our chambers into the firing line when friends came
to them to pass a peaceful friendly evening--the Roman and Venetian
_cafés_ and restaurants of my earlier experience had been common ground
on which combatants shared equal rights or, better, no rights at all. It
was probably my old Philadelphia bringing up that made me question the
propriety of the same freedom at home, that made me doubt its being
quite "the thing" when J., who is an excellent fighter though a
Philadelphian, met Henley in a clash of words. But I quickly got
accustomed to the fight and enjoyed it and would not have had it
otherwise.
Some friends who came, I must confess, enjoyed it less, especially if
they were still smarting from a recent attack in the _National
Observer_. There were evenings when it took a good deal of skilful
manoeuvring on everybody's part to keep Henley and his victims at a
safe distance from each other. More than once in later days Walter Crane
laughed with us at the memory of a Thursday night, just after he had
been torn to pieces in the best _National Observer_ style, when he
gradually realized that he was being kept a prisoner in the corner into
which he had been driven on his arrival, and he could not understand why
until, breaking loose, he discovered Henley in the next room. Our alarm
was not surprising, knowing as we did what a valiant fighter Crane was
himself: as a socialist waving the red flag in the face of the world, as
an artist forever rushing into the papers to defend his theories of art,
as a man refusing to see his glory in passing by an offence. Not very
long before, J. had exasperated him in print, by the honest expression
of an opinion he did not happen to like, into threats of a big stick
ready for attack the next time J. ventured upon his walks abroad. I need
not add that J. did not bother to stay at home, that the big stick never
materialized, that, though this was only the first of many fights
between the two, Walter Crane was our friend to the end. But the little
episode gives the true spirit of the Nineties.
I can still see Beardsley dodging from group to group to escape Henley,
for he never recovered from the fright of the first encounter. He told
me the story at the time. He had gone, by special appointment, to call
on Henley, under his arm the little portfolio he was rarely without in
those early days, ready and enchanted as he always was to show his
drawings to anybody willing to look at them. As he went up the two
flights of stairs to Henley's Great College Street rooms, he heard a
voice, loud, angry, terrifying; at the top, through an open door, he saw
a youth standing in the middle of the room listening in abject terror to
a large red man at a desk whom he knew instinctively to be Henley;--one
glance, and he turned and fled, down the stairs, into the street, the
little portfolio under his arm, his pace never slackening until he got
well beyond the Houses of Parliament, through the Horse Guards into the
Park.
Other friends would not come at all on Thursday because of Henley, just
as later more than one stayed away altogether because of Whistler. I was
wretchedly nervous when they did come and brave a face-to-face meeting.
Henley was not the sort of man to shirk a fight in the open. The
principal reason for his unpopularity was just that habit of his of
saying what he thought no matter where or when or to whom. He did not
spare his friends, for he would not have kept them as friends had they
not held some opinions worth his attacking, and they understood and
respected him for it. Moreover, he said what he had to say in the
plainest language. He roared his adversary down in good, strong,
picturesque English, if that was any consolation, and with a splendidly
rugged eloquence.
I wish I could remember the words as well as the roar. Henley's
eloquence cannot be forgotten by those who ever once listened to him,
but his wit was not, like Whistler's, so keen nor his thrust so direct
that the phrase, the one word of the retort or the attack, was
unforgettable. He had his little affectations of speech as of style, and
they added to its picturesqueness. But it was what he said that counted,
the talk itself that probably inspired more sound thought and sound
writing than most talk heard in the England of the Nineties. But it fell
unrecorded on paper and memory could not be trusted after all these
years.
It is the greater pity because his books are few. He was poor when he
started in life; almost at once he married; he was generous to a fault,
and the generous man never yet lived who was not pursued by parasites;
and as he was obliged to earn money and as his books were not of the
stuff that makes the "best sellers," his criticism of life and art was
expressed mainly in journalism.
Unfortunately, no just idea of the amount or the quality of his
journalistic work is now to be had even from the files of the _National
Observer_. He had a way of editing every article sent in to him until it
became more than a fair imitation of his own. I can sympathize with his
object--the artist's desire for harmony, for the unity of the paper as a
whole. But if he succeeded, as he did, it was at the sacrifice of the
force, the effect, the character of individual contributions, and nobody
can now say for sure which were Henley's save those he re-published in
book form. When articles I wrote for him appeared in print, it was an
open question with me whether I had the right to call them mine and to
take any money for them. His _Views and Reviews_ gathered from the
_National Observer_ and other papers and periodicals, his three or four
small volumes of verse, the plays he wrote with Stevenson, an anthology
or two, a few books of his editing, are scarcely sufficient to explain
to the present generation his importance in his day and why his
influence made itself felt in literature as keenly as Whistler's in
art, through all the movements and excitements and enthusiasms of the
Nineties. The joyous wars that marked the beginning of my life in
London, when not led by Whistler's "Ha! Ha!" were commanded by Henley's
roar.
No man was ever more in need of a Boswell than Henley. Dr. Weir Mitchell
once complained to me that in America nobody waited upon great men to
report their sayings, while in England a young man was always somewhere
near with a clean cuff to scribble them on. The enthusiast, with his
cuff an impatient blank, never hung about Henley. Anyway, that was not
what our Thursday evenings were for. Of all his Young Men who climbed up
the Buckingham Street stairs with him on Thursday night and sat round
him, his devoted disciples, until they climbed down the Buckingham
Street stairs with him again, not one seems to have hit upon this useful
way of proving his devotion.
I do not need to be told that this was no excuse for my not having my
cuff ready. But, foolishly perhaps, I too often spent my Thursday nights
oppressed by other cares. For one thing, I could seldom keep my weekly
article on Cookery out of my mind. Without it Saturday's _Pall-Mall_, I
felt, would lose its brilliancy and my bank account, I knew, would grow
appreciably less, and Friday was my day for writing it. A serious
question therefore was, how, if I did not get to bed until two or three
or four o'clock on Friday morning, was I to sit down at my desk at nine
and be the brilliant authority on Eating that I thought I was?
Another distraction grew out of my mistaken sense of duty as hostess, my
feeling of responsibility in providing for all a share in the cheerful
smell of powder and the stimulating sound of strife.
Also, men being at best selfish animals, their wives, whose love of
battle was less, were often an anxiety.
These seemed big things at the time, though in retrospect they have
dwindled into trifles that I had no business to let come between me and
my opportunities to store up for future generations talk as brilliant as
any on record. Of course I heard a great deal of it, and what I missed
at home on our Thursday nights, I made up for at Henley's, and at
friends' houses on many other occasions, and few can answer better than
I for the quality of Henley's talk if I have forgotten the actual words.
Its strength was its simple directness,--no posing, no phrasing, no
attitudinizing for effect. This, I know, was always what most struck
people when they first met him on our Thursday nights, especially
Americans, for with us in America the man who has won the reputation of
greatness too often seems afraid he will lose it if he does not forever
advertise it by fireworks of cleverness and wit.
Henley's talk had too a strange mixture of the brutal and the tender,
the rough and the fine, a blending of the highest things with what might
seem to the ordinary man the most trivial. I asked two old friends of
his the other day what they remembered best of him and of his talk. The
answer of one was: "He was certainly the most stupendous Jove-like
creature who ever lived, and I did not in the least mind his calling me
Billy, which I have always hated from others." The second answer was:
"He talked as he wrote, and I know of nothing more characteristic of his
talking and his writing than that tragic poem in which, with his heart
crying for the child he had adored and lost, he could compare himself to
'an old black rotter of a boat' past service, and could see, when
criticised for it, nothing discordant in that slang _rotter_ dropped
into such verse!" A good deal of Henley is in both answers. This
curious blend must have especially struck everybody who saw him and
listened to him in his own home. I can recall summer Sunday afternoons
at Addiscombe, with Henley sitting on a rug spread on the lawn behind
his house, Mrs. Henley at his side, his eyes following with twinkling
tenderness his little daughter as she ran backwards and forwards busy
with the manifold cares of childhood, while all the time, to his Young
Men gathered round him, he was thundering against the last book, or the
last picture show, or the last new music, in language not unworthy of
Defoe or Smollett, for Henley could call a spade not only a spade but a
steam shovel when so minded. He could soar to the heights and dive to
the depths in the same breath.
But Henley's talk was animated above all by the intense and virile love
of life that I was so conscious of in him personally, that reveals
itself in every line he wrote, and that is what I liked best about him.
He was so alive, so exhilarated with the sense of being alive. The
tremendous vitality of the man, that should have found its legitimate
outlet in physical activity, seemed to have gone instead into his
thought and his expression of it--as if the very fact that fate forced
him to remain a looker-on had made him the more sensitive to the
beauty, the joy, the challenge in everything life gave him to look at.
He could wrest romance even out of the drear, drab hospital--there is
another characteristic glimpse in one of Stevenson's letters, a picture
of Henley sitting up in his hospital bed, his hair and beard all
tangled, "talking as cheerfully as if he had been in a King's palace, or
the great King's palace of the blue air."
His interest in life was far too large and all-embracing for him to be
indifferent to the smallest or most insignificant part of it. He had
none of the disdain for everyday details, none of the fear of the
commonplace that oppresses many men who think themselves great. Nothing
that lived came amiss to his philosophy or his pleasure. He could talk
as brilliantly upon the affairs of the kitchen as upon those of state,
he could appreciate gossip as well as verse, he could laugh over an
absurdity as easily as he could extol the masterpiece. Romance for him
was everywhere--in the slang of the cockney of the Strand as in a
symphony by Berlioz, in 'Arriet's feathers as in the "Don Diegos" of the
Prado--the mere sound of the title in his mouth became a tribute to the
master he honoured above most--in the patter of the latest Lion-comique
of the Halls as in the prose of Meredith or Borrow, in the disreputable
cat stealing home through the dull London dawn as in the Romanticists
emerging from the chill of Classicism--in everything, big and little, in
which he felt the life so dear to him throbbing.
And he loved always the visible sign through which the appeal came. I
have seen him lean, spell-bound, from our windows on a blue summer
night, thrilled by the presence out there of Cleopatra's Needle, the
pagan symbol flaunting its slenderness against river and sky, while in
the distance the dome of St. Paul's, the Christian symbol, hung a
phantom upon the heavens. His pleasure in the friendship of men of rank
and family might have savoured of snobbishness had not one understood
how much they stood for to him as symbols. I am sure he could fancy
himself with these friends that same King of Babylon who thrills in the
lover of his poem. I used to think that for him all the drama of
_Admiral Guinea_, one of the plays he wrote with Stevenson, was
concentrated in the tap-tap of the blind man's stick. In his _Hospital
Verses_, his _London Voluntaries_, his every _Rhyme_ and _Rhythm_, the
outward sign is the expression of the emotion, the thought that is in
him. And coming down to more ordinary matters--ordinary, that is, to
most people--I shall never forget, once when I was in Spain and he wrote
to me there, his decoration of my name on the envelope with the finest
ceremonial prefix of the ceremonious Spanish code which to him
represented the splendour of the land of Don Diego and Don Quixote.
It was this faculty of entering into the heart, the spirit of life and
all things in it that made him the inspiring companion and friend he
was, that widened his sympathies until he, whose intolerance was a
byword with his contemporaries, showed himself tolerant of everything
save sham and incompetence. The men who would tell you in their day, who
will tell you now, of the great debt they owe to Henley, are men of the
most varied interests, whose style and subject both might have been
expected to prove a great gulf to separate them. Ask Arthur Morrison
straight from the East End, or FitzMaurice Kelly fresh from Spain; ask
W.B. Blakie preoccupied with the modern development of the printed book,
or Wells adrift in a world of his own invention; ask Kipling steeped in
the real, or Barrie lost in the Kail-Yard; ask Kenneth Grahame on his
Olympian heights or George S. Street deep in his study of the prig--ask
any one of these men and a score besides what Henley's sympathy,
Henley's outstretched hand, meant to him, and some idea of the breadth
of his judgment and taste and helpfulness may be had. Why he could
condescend even to me when, in my brave ignorance, I undertook to write
that weekly column on Cookery for the _Pall-Mall_. He it was who gave me
Dumas's _Dictionnaire de la Cuisine_, the corner-stone of my collection
of cookery books--a fact in which I see so much of Henley that I feel as
if the stranger to him who to-day takes the volume down from my shelves
and reads on the fly-leaf the simple inscription, "To E.R.P. d.d.
W.E.H.," in his little crooked and crabbed writing, must see in it the
eloquent clue to his personality that it is to me.
III
I have said that Henley seldom came to us--as indeed he seldom went
anywhere or, for that matter, seldom stayed at home--without a
contingent of his Young Men in attendance. I do not believe I could ever
have gone to his rooms in Great College Street, or to his house at
Addiscombe, or in later, sadder days to the other, rather gloomy, house
on the riverside at Barnes,--turned into some sort of college the last
time I passed, with a long bare students' table in the downstairs
dining-room where I had been warmed and thrilled by so much exhilarating
talk,--that some of his Young Men were not there before me or did not
come in before I left. In London, on his journeys to and fro, they
surrounded him as a bodyguard. If on those old Thursday nights, his was
the loudest voice, theirs played up to it untiringly. There were no half
measures about them. As warriors in the cause of art and literature,
they reserved nothing from their devotion to their leader, they
exhausted every possibility of that form of flattery usually considered
the greatest. They fought Henley's battles with hardly less valour,
hardly milder roaring. On Thursday, they had been working with him all
day and all evening, they probably had lunched together, and dined
together, and yet so far from showing any desire to separate on their
arrival in our rooms, they immediately grouped themselves again round
Henley.
It was curious, anyway, how strong the tendency was with all the company
to break up into groups. Work was the common bond, but there was also a
special bond in each different kind of work. On my round as hostess I
was sure to find the writers in one corner, the artists in another, the
architects in a third--though to this day it is a question with me why
we should have had enough architects to make a group and, more puzzling,
why, having them, they should have been so unpopular, unless it was
because of their air of prosperity and respectability, always as correct
in appearance as if there was a possible client at the door. I can still
recall the triumphant glee, out of all proportion to the cause, of one
of Henley's Young Men the Thursday night he came to tell me that all the
architects were safe out of the way in the studio, and "I have shut both
doors," he added, "and now that we are rid of them we can talk." As if
any of Henley's Young Men under any circumstances ever did anything
else.
Some of Henley's staff, if I remember, never came to us, others came
only occasionally, but a few failed us as rarely as Henley himself. The
Thursday night was the exception that did not see Charles Whibley at
Henley's right hand even as he was in the pages of the _National
Observer_, not merely ready for the fight but provoking it, insisting
upon it, forcing it, boisterous in battle, looking like an
undergraduate, talking like a pastmaster of the art of invective, with a
little stammer that gave point to his lightest commonplace. Rarely
lagging very far behind came Marriott Watson, young, tall, blonde,
good-looking--a something exotic, foreign in the good looks that I put
down to New Zealand, for I suppose New Zealand as well as America has
produced a type--not quite so truculent in talk as in print, more
inclined to fight with a smile. A third was Wilfred Pollock, forgotten
save by his friends I am afraid; and a fourth, Vernon Blackburn, who
began life as a monk at Fort Augustus and finished it as a musical
critic, he too I fear scarcely more than a name; and a fifth, Jack
Stuart, and a sixth, Harold Parsons, and a seventh, and an eighth, and I
can hardly now say how many more long since dead, now for me vague
ghosts from out that old past so overflowing with life.
When William Waldorf Astor bought the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and started
the weekly _Pall Mall Budget_ and the monthly _Pall Mall Magazine_, he
presented Henley with two or three new Young Men and added to our
company on Thursday nights, little as he had either of these
achievements in view. His plunge into newspaper proprietorship was one
of the newspaper ventures that counted for most in the Nineties. It was
a venture inclining to amateurism in detail, but run on business, not
romantic, lines and therefore it was less talked about than those
purely amateur plunges into journalism which gave the Nineties so much
of their picturesqueness. But all the same, we saw revolution in it, the
possibility of wholesale regeneration, the inauguration of a new era,
when "sham" would be exposed, and "Bleat" silenced, and art grow "Human"
once more. In the _Budget_ and the _Magazine_ it was likewise to be
proved that America and France were not alone in understanding and
valuing the art of illustration:--vain hopes!
Henley and his Young Men rejoiced in a new sphere for fighting, certain
of a brilliant victory, since they were to have a share in the command.
Astor, with a fine fling for independence--his only one in public--or
else with that old gentlemanly dream of a newspaper "written by
gentlemen for gentlemen," had captured his editors in regions where
editors are not usually hunted--Henry Cust, heir to a title, for the
_Gazette_, Lord Frederick Hamilton, his title already inherited, for the
_Magazine_. Fleet Street shrugged its shoulders, laughed a little, not
believing title and rank to have the same value in journalism as in
society. Cust, to do him justice, agreed with Fleet Street, and, knowing
that he was without experience, had the sense to appeal for help to
those with it. By good luck he went to Henley, who was not free to do
much for the paper save give it his advice, offer it those of his Young
Men whom he could spare, and take under his wing the new Young Men it
invented for itself. When new enthusiasts fell into Henley's train, it
was never long before they followed him to Buckingham Street on Thursday
nights.
I could scarcely label as anybody's Young Man Iwan-Müller, huge, half
Russian, half English, all good comrade, who had come up from Manchester
and the editorship of a leading paper there to be Cust's Assistant
Editor. He was nearly Henley's contemporary, but he did not, for such a
trifle as age, let any one of Henley's Young Men exceed him in devotion,
and his laugh became the unfailing accompaniment of Henley's talk, so
much so that I am convinced if Henley still leads the talk in the land
beyond the grave, Iwan-Müller still punctuates it with the big bracing
laugh that was as big as himself.
[Illustration: Photograph by Frederick Hollyer
IWAN-MÜLLER AND GEORGE W. STEEVENS]
At the other extreme, younger than the youngest of the Young Men he
joined, came George W. Steevens, fresh from Oxford, Balliol Prize
Scholar, shy and carrying it off, in the Briton's way, with appalling
rudeness and more appalling silence. I remember J., upon whose nerves as
well as mine this silence got, taking me apart one Thursday evening
to tell me that if that young Oxford prig was too superior to talk to
anybody, why then he was too superior to come to us at all, and he must
be made to understand it. Eventually he learned to talk, with us
anyway--he was always a silent man with most people. And I got to know
him well, to like him, to admire him,--to respect him too through the
long summer when his friends were doing their best to dissuade him from
his proposed marriage with a woman many years older than he. The men of
the _National Observer_ and the _Pall Mall_ were such keen fighters that
they could not be kind or sentimental--and they grew maudlinly
sentimental over Steevens's engagement--without a fight for it. They
thought he was making a mistake, forgetting that it was his business,
not theirs, if he was. He fought alone against them, but he held his
place like a man and won. Our Thursday nights had come to an end before
he went to America, to Germany, to Khartoum with Kitchener, to South
Africa, where he passed into the great silence that no protest of ours,
or any man's can break. If his work was overrated, he himself as I knew
him was as kind and brave as in Henley's verse to his memory.