Some quarter of an hours walk from Bedford Park, out on the high road to Rid, 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 plete fidend self?possession, a 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 appearand that seen fully at the first gland by all alike. He was most human??human, I used to say, like one of Shakespeares characters??a pressed and pummelled, as it were, into a siitude, 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?Lepages ish peasant staring with vat eyes at her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wahe stro passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, arical 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 is or vis, 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 se 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?ag 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 paiitian, 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 Fra is the rarest sort, never moved me but in the expression of intellectual pride; and though I saw Salvini but once, I am vihat his genius was a kind of animal nobility. Henley, half inarticulate??I am very costive, he would say??besetwith 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 opiniohe trivance of a sub?scioushat sought always t life to the dramatic crisis, and expression to that point of artifice where the true self could find its tongue. Without oppos there had been no drama, and in his youth Ruskinism and Pre?Raphaelitism, for he was of my fathers geiohe only possible oppos. How could o his prejudice when, that he himself might play a worthy part, he must find beyond the on rout, whom he derided and flouted daily, oppos he could imagine moulded like himself? Once he said to me in the height of his imperial propaganda, Tell those young men in Ireland