Four Years | Page 5

Pre-Raphaelite there, derided that Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley
discovered the poor man on a chair in the middle of the room, staring
disconsolately upon the floor. He terrified us also, and certainly I did
not dare, and I think none of us dared, to speak our admiration for book
or picture he condemned, but he made us feel always our importance,
and no man among us could do good work, or show the promise of it,
and lack his praise.

I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth
Grahame, author of 'The Golden Age,' Barry Pain, now a well known
novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George
Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and
Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older than the rest. But
faces and names are vague to me and, while faces that I met but once
may rise clearly before me, a face met on many a Sunday has perhaps
vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I think, but I never met him; and
Stepniak, the nihilist, whom I knew well elsewhere but not there, said 'I
cannot go more than once a year, it is too exhausting.' Henley got the
best out of us all, because he had made us accept him as our judge and
we knew that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor
changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis that is
the foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I see his
crippled legs as though he were some Vulcan perpetually forging
swords for other men to use; and certainly I always thought of C..., a
fine classical scholar, a pale and seemingly gentle man, as our chief
swordsman and bravo. When Henley founded his weekly newspaper,
first the 'Scots,' afterwards 'The National Observer,' this young man
wrote articles and reviews notorious for savage wit; and years
afterwards when 'The National Observer' was dead, Henley dying &
our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him in Paris very sad and I think
very poor. 'Nobody will employ me now,' he said. 'Your master is
gone,' I answered, 'and you are like the spear in an old Irish story that
had to be kept dipped in poppy- juice that it might not go about killing
people on its own account.' I wrote my first good lyrics and tolerable
essays for 'The National Obsever' and as I always signed my work
could go my own road in some measure. Henley often revised my
lyrics, crossing out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and
I was comforted by my belief that he also re-wrote Kipling then in the
first flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of being
re-written and thought that others were not, and only began
investigation when the editorial characteristics--epigrams, archaisms
and all--appeared in the article upon Paris fashions and in that upon
opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I was not compelled to full conformity
for verse is plainly stubborn; and in prose, that I might avoid
unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost or fairy stories, picked

up from my mother, or some pilot at Rosses Point, and Henley saw that
I must needs mix a palette fitted to my subject matter. But if he had
changed every 'has' into 'hath' I would have let him, for had not we
sunned ourselves in his generosity? 'My young men out-dome and they
write better than I,' he wrote in some letter praising Charles Whibley's
work, and to another friend with a copy of my 'Man who dreamed of
Fairyland:' 'See what a fine thing has been written by one of my lads.'

VI
My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before
heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all
over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present that
night at Henley's, by right of propinquity or of accident, a man full of
the secret spite of dullness, who interrupted from time to time and
always to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery
he was foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of
artificiality that I think all Wilde's listeners have recorded, came from
the perfect rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that
made it possible. That very impression helped him as the effect of
metre, or of the antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is
itself a true metre, helps a writer, for he could pass without incongruity
from some unforeseen swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard
him say a few nights later: 'Give me "The Winter's