Four Years | Page 4

her great
boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an hospital ward
where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the strongest passions,
passions that had nothing to do with observation, and metrical forms
that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a
journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelitism affected him as some people

are affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself at
our first meeting without political interests or convictions, he soon
grew into a violent unionist and imperialist. I used to say when I spoke
of his poems: 'He is like a great actor with a bad part; yet who would
look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini played the grave-digger?'
and I might so have explained much that he said and did. I meant that
he was like a great actor of passion--character-acting meant nothing to
me for many years--and an actor of passion will display some one
quality of soul, personified again and again, just as a great poetical
painter, Titian, Botticelli, Rossetti may depend for his greatness upon a
type of beauty which presently we call by his name. Irving, the last of
the sort on the English stage, and in modern England and France it is
the rarest sort, never moved me but in the expression of intellectual
pride; and though I saw Salvini but once, I am convinced that his
genius was a kind of animal nobility. Henley, half inarticulate--'I am
very costive,' he would say--beset with personal quarrels, built up an
image of power and magnanimity till it became, at moments, when
seen as it were by lightning, his true self. Half his opinions were the
contrivance of a sub-consciousness that sought always to bring life to
the dramatic crisis, and expression to that point of artifice where the
true self could find its tongue. Without opponents there had been no
drama, and in his youth Ruskinism and Pre-Raphaelitism, for he was of
my father's generation, were the only possible opponents. How could
one resent his prejudice when, that he himself might play a worthy part,
he must find beyond the common rout, whom he derided and flouted
daily, opponents he could imagine moulded like himself? Once he said
to me in the height of his imperial propaganda, 'Tell those young men
in Ireland that this great thing must go on. They say Ireland is not fit for
self-government but that is nonsense. It is as fit as any other European
country but we cannot grant it.' And then he spoke of his desire to
found and edit a Dublin newspaper. It would have expounded the
Gaelic propaganda then beginning, though Dr. Hyde had as yet no
league, our old stories, our modern literature--everything that did not
demand any shred or patch of government. He dreamed of a tyranny
but it was that of Cosimo de Medici.

V
We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors
between, & hung, I think, with photographs from Dutch masters, and in
one room there was always, I think, a table with cold meat. I can recall
but one elderly man--Dunn his name was--rather silent and full of good
sense, an old friend of Henley's. We were young men, none as yet
established in his own, or in the world's opinion, and Henley was our
leader and our confidant. One evening I found him alone amused and
exasperated.
He cried: 'Young A... has just been round to ask my advice. Would I
think it a wise thing if he bolted with Mrs. B...? "Have you quite
determined to do it?" I asked him. "Quite." "Well," I said, "in that case
I refuse to give you any advice."' Mrs. B... was a beautiful talented
woman, who, as the Welsh triad said of Guinevere, 'was much given to
being carried off.' I think we listened to him, and often obeyed him,
partly because he was quite plainly not upon the side of our parents.
We might have a different ground of quarrel, but the result seemed
more important than the ground, and his confident manner and speech
made us believe, perhaps for the first time, in victory. And besides, if
he did denounce, and in my case he certainly did, what we held in
secret reverence, he never failed to associate it with things, or persons,
that did not move us to reverence. Once I found him just returned from
some art congress in Liverpool or in Manchester. 'The Salvation
Armyism of art,' he called it, & gave a grotesque description of some
city councillor he had found admiring Turner. Henley, who hated all
that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided Turner, and finding the city
councillor the next day on the other side of the gallery, admiring some