Some quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park, out on the high
road to Richmond, lived W. E. Henley, and I, like many others,
began under him my education. His portrait, a lithograph by
Rothenstein, hangs over my mantlepiece among portraits of other
friends. He is drawn standing, but, because doubtless of his
crippled legs, he leans forward, resting his elbows upon some
slightly suggested object--a table or a window-sill. His heavy
figure and powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright,
his short irregular beard and moustache, his lined and wrinkled
face, his eyes steadily fixed upon some object, in complete
confidence and self-possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie,
all are exactly as I remember him. I have seen other portraits and
they too show him exactly as I remember him, as though he had but
one appearance and that seen fully at the first glance and by all
alike. He was most human--human, I used to say, like one of
Shakespeare's characters--and yet pressed and pummelled, as it
were, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture and a speech,
as by some overwhelming situation. I disagreed with him about
everything, but I admired him beyond words. With the exception of
some early poems founded upon old French models, I disliked his
poetry, mainly because he wrote _Vers Libre_, which I associated
with Tyndall and Huxley and Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant
staring with vacant eyes at her great boots; and filled it
with unimpassioned description of an hospital ward where his leg
had been amputated. I wanted the strongest passions, passions that
had nothing to do with observation, and metrical forms that seemed
old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey.
Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelitism affected him as some people are
affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself at
our first meeting without political interests or convictions, he
soon grew into a violent unionist and imperialist. I used to say
when I spoke of his poems: 'He is like a great actor with a bad
part; yet who would look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini
played the grave-digger?' and I might so have explained much that
he said and did. I meant that he was like a great actor of
passion--character-acting meant nothing to me for many years--and
an actor of passion will display some one quality of soul,
personified again and again, just as a great poetical painter,
Titian, Botticelli, Rossetti may depend for his greatness upon a
type of beauty which presently we call by his name. Irving, the
last of the sort on the English stage, and in modern England and
France it is the rarest sort, never moved me but in the expression
of intellectual pride; and though I saw Salvini but once, I am
convinced that his genius was a kind of animal nobility. Henley,
half inarticulate--'I am very costive,' he would say--beset with
personal quarrels, built up an image of power and magnanimity till
it became, at moments, when seen as it were by lightning, his true
self. Half his opinions were the contrivance of a sub-consciousness
that sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis, and
expression to that point of artifice where the true self could
find its tongue. Without opponents there had been no drama,
and in his youth Ruskinism and Pre-Raphaelitism, for he was
of my father's generation, were the only possible opponents. How
could one resent his prejudice when, that he himself might play a
worthy part, he must find beyond the common rout, whom he derided
and flouted daily, opponents he could imagine moulded like
himself? Once he said to me in the height of his imperial
propaganda, 'Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thing
must go on. They say Ireland is not fit for self-government but
that is nonsense. It is as fit as any other European country but
we cannot grant it.' And then he spoke of his desire to found and
edit a Dublin newspaper. It would have expounded the Gaelic
propaganda then beginning, though Dr. Hyde had as yet no league,
our old stories, our modern literature--everything that did not
demand any shred or patch of government. He dreamed of a tyranny
but it was that of Cosimo de Medici.
V
We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors
between, & hung, I think, with photographs from Dutch masters, and
in one room there was always, I think, a table with cold meat. I
can recall but one elderly man--Dunn his name was--rather silent
and full of good sense, an old friend of Henley's. We were young
men, none as yet established in his own, or in the world's
opinion, and Henley was our leader and our confidant. One evening
I found him alone amused and exasperated.
He cried: 'Young A... has just been round to ask my advice. Would
I think it a wise thing if he bolted with Mrs. B...? "Have you
quite determined to do it?" I asked him. "Quite." "Well," I said,
"in that case I refuse to give you any advice."' Mrs. B... was a
beautiful talented woman, who, as the Welsh triad said of
Guinevere, 'was much given to being carried off.' I think we
listened to him, and often obeyed him, partly because he was quite
plainly not upon the side of our parents. We might have a
different ground of quarrel, but the result seemed more important
than the ground, and his confident manner and speech made us
believe, perhaps for the first time, in victory. And besides, if
he did denounce, and in my case he certainly did, what we held in
secret reverence, he never failed to associate it with things, or
persons, that did not move us to reverence. Once I found him just
returned from some art congress in Liverpool or in Manchester.
'The Salvation Armyism of art,' he called it, & gave a grotesque
description of some city councillor he had found admiring Turner.
Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided
Turner, and finding the city councillor the next day on the other
side of the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there, derided
that Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley discovered the poor man
on a chair in the middle of the room, staring disconsolately upon
the floor. He terrified us also, and certainly I did not dare, and
I think none of us dared, to speak our admiration for book or
picture he condemned, but he made us feel always our importance,
and no man among us could do good work, or show the promise of it,
and lack his praise.
I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth
Grahame, author of 'The Golden Age,' Barry Pain, now a well known
novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker,
George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief
secretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older
than the rest. But faces and names are vague to me and, while
faces that I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met
on many a Sunday has perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I
think, but I never met him; and Stepniak, the nihilist, whom I
knew well elsewhere but not there, said 'I cannot go more than
once a year, it is too exhausting.' Henley got the best out of us
all, because he had made us accept him as our judge and we knew
that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor
changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis
that is the foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I
see his crippled legs as though he were some Vulcan perpetually
forging swords for other men to use; and certainly I always
thought of C..., a fine classical scholar, a pale and seemingly
gentle man, as our chief swordsman and bravo. When Henley founded
his weekly newspaper, first the 'Scots,' afterwards 'The National
Observer,' this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious for
savage wit; and years afterwards when 'The National Observer' was
dead, Henley dying & our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him in
Paris very sad and I think very poor. 'Nobody will employ me now,'
he said. 'Your master is gone,' I answered, 'and you are like the
spear in an old Irish story that had to be kept dipped in
poppy-juice that it might not go about killing people on its own
account.' I wrote my first good lyrics and tolerable essays for
'The National Observer' and as I always signed my work could go my
own road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics, crossing
out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I was
comforted by my belief that he also re-wrote Kipling then in the
first flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of
being re-written and thought that others were not, and only began
investigation when the editorial characteristics--epigrams,
archaisms and all--appeared in the article upon Paris fashions and
in that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I was not compelled to
full conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in prose, that
I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost or
fairy stories, picked up from my mother, or some pilot at Rosses
Point, and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my
subject matter. But if he had changed every 'has' into 'hath' I
would have let him, for had not we sunned ourselves in his
generosity? 'My young men out-dome and they write better than I,'
he wrote in some letter praising Charles Whibley's work, and to
another friend with a copy of my 'Man who dreamed of Fairyland:'
'See what a fine thing has been written by one of my lads.'