Four Years | Page 3

often passed with pleasure from Todhunter's
company to that of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace. He
cared nothing for philosophy, nothing for economics, nothing for the
policy of nations, for history, as he saw it, was a memory of men who

were amusing or exciting to think about. He impressed all who met him
& seemed to some a man of genius, but he had not enough ambition to
shape his thought, or conviction to give rhythm to his style, and
remained always a poor writer. I was too full of unfinished speculations
and premature convictions to value rightly his conversation, in-formed
by a vast erudition, which would give itself to every casual association
of speech and company precisely because he had neither cause nor
design. My father, however, found Powell's concrete narrative manner
a necessary completion of his own; and when I asked him, in a letter
many years later, where he got his philosophy, replied 'From York
Powell' and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell was
without ideas, 'By looking at him.' Then there was a good listener, a
painter in whose hall hung a big picture, painted in his student days, of
Ulysses sailing home from the Phaeacian court, an orange and a skin of
wine at his side, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by
drawing domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly magazine
that had an immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To
escape the boredom of work, which he never turned to but under
pressure of necessity, and usually late at night with the publisher's
messenger in the hall, he had half filled his studio with mechanical toys
of his own invention, and perpetually increased their number. A model
railway train at intervals puffed its way along the walls, passing several
railway stations and signal boxes; and on the floor lay a camp with
attacking and defending soldiers and a fortification that blew up when
the attackers fired a pea through a certain window; while a large model
of a Thames barge hung from the ceiling. Opposite our house lived an
old artist who worked also for the illustrated papers for a living, but
painted landscapes for his pleasure, and of him I remember nothing
except that he had outlived ambition, was a good listener, and that my
father explained his gaunt appearance by his descent from Pocahontas.
If all these men were a little like becalmed ships, there was certainly
one man whose sails were full. Three or four doors off, on our side of
the road, lived a decorative artist in all the naive confidence of popular
ideals and the public approval. He was our daily comedy. 'I myself and
Sir Frederick Leighton are the greatest decorative artists of the age,'
was among his sayings, & a great lych-gate, bought from some country
church-yard, reared its thatched roof, meant to shelter bearers and

coffin, above the entrance to his front garden, to show that he at any
rate knew nothing of discouragement. In this fairly numerous
company--there were others though no other face rises before me--my
father and York Powell found listeners for a conversation that had no
special loyalties, or antagonisms; while I could only talk upon set
topics, being in the heat of my youth, and the topics that filled me with
excitement were never spoken of.

IV
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