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.
In my memory, every Thursday night stands for a battle. Henley was then 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 manœuvring 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.