Henley repudiated this languid aestheticism; he scorned a negative art
which was out of touch with the world. His was a large and sweeping
affirmation. He felt that mere existence was glorious; life was
coarse, difficult, often dangerous and dirty, but splendid at the
heart. Art, he knew, could not be separated from the dreams and
hungers of man; it could not flourish only on its own essences or
technical accomplishments. To live, poetry would have to share the
fears, angers, hopes and struggles of the prosaic world. And so Henley
came like a swift salt breeze blowing through a perfumed and
heavily-screened studio. He sang loudly (sometimes even too loudly) of
the joy of living and the courage of the "unconquerable soul." He was
a powerful influence not only as a poet but as a critic and editor. In
the latter capacity he gathered about him such men as Robert Louis
Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, T.
E. Brown, J. M. Barrie. None of these men were his disciples, but none
of them came into contact with him without being influenced in some
way by his sharp and positive personality. A pioneer and something of
a prophet, he was one of the first to champion the paintings of
Whistler and to proclaim the genius of the sculptor Rodin.
If at times Henley's verse is imperialistic, over-muscular and
strident, his noisy moments are redeemed not only by his delicate
lyrics but by his passionate enthusiasm for nobility in whatever cause
it was joined. He never disdained the actual world in any of its
moods--bus-drivers, hospital interiors, scrubwomen, a panting train,
the squalor of London's alleys, all found a voice in his lines--and
his later work contains more than a hint of the delight in science and
machinery which was later to be sounded more fully in the work of
Rudyard Kipling.