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 eat. I recall but one elderly man??Dunn his name was??rather silent and full of good sense, an old friend of Henleys. We were young men, none as yet established in his own, or in the worlds opinion, and Henley was our leader and our fidant. 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 determio 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 listeo 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 fident 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 i 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 gress in Liverpool or in Maer. The Salvation Armyism of art, he called it, & gave a grotesque description of some city cillor he had found admiring Turner. Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided Turner, and finding the city cillor the day oher side of the gallery, admiring some 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 dissolately upon the floor. He terrified us also, aainly I did not dare, and I think none of us dared, to speak our admiration for book or picture he ned, 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 remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Keh Grahame, author of The Golden Age,
Barry Pain, now a well known , R. A. M. Stevenson, art critid a famous talker, Gee Wyndham, later on a et 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 ot 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 khat his judgment could her sleep, nor be softened, nor ged, 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 Vul perpetually f swords for other men to use; aainly 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 neer, first the Scots, afterwards The National Observer, this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious for savage wit; and years afterwards wheional Observer
was dead, Henley dying & our cavern of