Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

In this sense I used to feel that there was a striking contrast between the man and his writing. Personally, and as a talker, it was the carelessness of his attack of any subject that first impressed me. His interest seemed wholly centred and absorbed by the incident, the character, or the episode under discussion, and the means by which his thought and feeling concerning it might be expressed, were by contrast almost negligently employed. As a writer, great as is the rank he deservedly holds in the region of romance, his work yields to me exactly the opposite impression. His own faith in the story he has to tell is never, to my thinking, entirely convincing. Something too much of the conscious artist intrudes itself between the narrator and the reader, something that robs the result of the sense that the recorded fact is a fact indeed. It is impossible to forget, I think, even in Stevenson’s happiest work that he is an accomplished man of letters; and although there is no great writer who is not, the greatest and ablest allow us to forget it.

Certainly in contact with Stevenson the man, one had no temptation to remember it. One was never haunted in those delightful hours of social intercourse by the suspicion that he was searching for a phrase, and yet often enough our conversation turned upon points of style; and I remember once in a selected line of a poet, where the fitness of a single word was under discussion, Stevenson swiftly checked our condemnation by a remark that seemed all the more apt because it came from his lips:

“My dear Carr, every word looks guilty when it is put into the dock.”

I suppose no one ever had a juster or more generous appreciation of the great leisurely genius of Sir Walter Scott than was possessed by Stevenson. No one by intention or design was more desirous to exclude from his own work the sense of modishness in style, and yet it remains with me as a final impression of Stevenson as a writer, that he occasionally laid himself open to the reproach that he would, as a critic, have been the first to detect in the work of another.

But I can think of him now only as I knew him then, an unconquerable boy with his heart set for adventure, lending to our talk as often as he came into it something of that daring outlook into worlds as yet undiscovered which characterised the adventurers of the seventeenth century.

It may have been something of this fighting quality in himself that attracted Stevenson to the combative spirit of Henley. Their first association, of course, bore an early date, and it may have been again something in poor Henley’s physical disability which provoked and sustained Stevenson’s affectionate regard. It is not altogether pleasant to reflect that such affection loyally rendered on Stevenson’s part was not at the close so loyally recognised by his comrade. Henley’s vehement personality rendered his presence on those particular afternoons at the Savile Club a constant factor of vitality. It was impossible for thought to slumber while Henley was awake. There was no opinion he would not question, no proposition, however confidently or however modestly put forward, he would not immediately set upon its trial. Those were his days of battle, and it was not easy then to guess that a few years later he would win to his standard quite a troop of young men eager to enforce the gospel he had to preach.

At the time of which I am thinking he was fighting for his own hand, and he fought strenuously; the mere love of the conflict was a dominating passion, and if there was, as I think sometimes there was, an underlying note of personal bitterness, may it not be set down in the hearts of those who knew him, and who survive him, as the inevitable price humanity has to pay for the long martyrdom of pain to which nature had doomed him?

And yet Henley, for all the valorous spirit that was in him, was not always proof against sudden attack. One night when we were gathered at the Savile after some public dinner where we had all been present, Irving was of the party. Irving had a trick of waiting for his foe, and on this particular occasion, as I recall it, he was chafing under a criticism which had been delivered by Henley upon his impersonation of Macbeth. Henley appeared to be well aware that the matter in difference between them would come under discussion before the evening was ended, and was obviously ready with all the destructive weapons that were arrayed in his critical armoury. But quick and vigilant as he was as a fighting force, he nevertheless proved himself unready for the kind of attack which Irving had designed. Very quietly and almost deferentially the actor came to his point. After much genial interchange of cordial sentiment on one side and the other, Irving suddenly pounced upon his man.

“I notice,” he said, speaking to Henley in that tone of reverie which with him always concealed an imminent blow, “that you do not approve of my conception of Macbeth. Tell me now, for I should be interested to hear it, how would you play Macbeth if you were called upon to present the character on the stage? What is your conception?”

Henley was hardly prepared for such an invitation, and as we sat in expectation of what he would have to say, it was easy to perceive that the critic’s destructive method, which at that time was uppermost in him, could not suddenly readjust itself to the task of offering any coherent appreciation of the character which Irving, according to his allegation, had misinterpreted.