Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties

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 h

ek if they chose-and they usually did choose-and Buckingham Street was a handy place to begin it in. Our rooms w

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

by Willia

. H

f 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

ndemn 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

arl'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 fl

uth-the man who sits in, and talks from, the chair of the scorners-is bound to get himself hated, and H

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 wa

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 i

n 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 ev

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 in

f 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 ?stheticism and decadence. To him, literature was literature and art was art, and not puling sentiment, affected posturing, lilies and sunflower

glish Par

inoffen

n beings-

deuce a ci

and "human" were the two words ever recurring like a refrain in the columns of the National O

mell 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 o

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 offenc

y 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

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 wort

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

s 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

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 wi

th 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 S

ekly 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 seri

ess, my feeling of responsibility in providing for all a share in

mals, their wives, whose love of ba

ur 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. Thi

aracteristic 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 sp

t 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 cou

n 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

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

ison 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. Wh