In the ancient hedge; and the tomb-nested owl At the foot's level beats with a vague wing. (Singing) My head is in a cloud; I'd let the whole world go. My rascal heart is proud Remembering and remembering. It is easier here to receive an impression from the whole than to explain the significance of any of the parts; but inexplicability has always been a prominent feature in Mr. Yeats's best performances. W. E. Henley WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY died in 1903. To-day his influence on living literature, though not the result of it, has almost ceased to exist. Henley's young men have grown up and become their own masters. Now and again one of them pays him a resounding compliment; men so diverse as Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. W. B. Yeats have testified to his greatness. His poems continue to be read. The copy I have before me shows that they were reprinted at regular intervals seventeen times between 1898 and 1917. A collected edition of his works is in course of publication; and the fourth and penultimate volume1 has just appeared. But Henley himself is passing into the legendary state. If you mentioned him to the young writers of to-day, his name would have no particular effect on them. If you were to analyse the influences that are helping to mould modern literature and to point out the precursors of its chief strains, his name would hardly appear in your essay. The sweet war-man is not dead and rotten; but his ghost has not so powerful an arm as the living swashbuckler. Henley in part created, in part was affected by, an attitude towards the world which nowadays we have replaced by another. Stevenson asked, "Shall we never shed blood?"; and Henley thought it would be a pity if we never did. For him any blood was better than none, even that which is shed when one bruiser hits another on the nose. When 1 Views and Reviews. By W. E. Henley. (Macmillan.) F:E.L. R 245 Henley and Stevenson collaborated as dramatists the heroes of three out of their four plays were respectively a deacon who was also a house-breaker, the ex-captain of a slaver, and the celebrated criminal, Robert Macaire. Henley's prologue to Admiral Guinea begins with the lines "Once was an Age, an Age of blood and gold, An Age of shipmen scoundrelly and bold....' But Stevenson's inquiry expressed a more than half-whimsical frame of mind; and in these plays he contrived that a purely whimsical love of horrors should prevail. Henley, however, was in dead earnest. He wrote in The Song of the Sword: "Black and lean, gray and cruel, And the blood on my elder, The twentieth-century commentary on that was to be seen in the umbrella-stands of many English homes during the war. There stood swords (at four guineas each) whose owners were at the front, fighting with bombs and loaded sticks. But Henley believed in his sword, and many of his associates believed with him. They agitated for the return of adventure to the world; and Mr. Kipling was of the party. It was a rebellion against the sedentary life and environment of the ordinary English citizen and the ordinary English writer; but, because it was not quite spontaneous, because it was for the most part a mere reaction against something else, it tended too often to confuse adventure and violence, eloquence and shouting, strength and brutality. It was born largely in the brain, not in the feelings, not in a natural necessity, and having sometimes but the feeblest of roots in genuine conviction it was liable to express itself in a vehemence which bordered on hysteria. There is no doubting where it came from; it was one of the many products of Darwinism, as Henley's sword makes clear when it sings of But cooler reflection suggests that man, if he is the highest result of evolution, may, perhaps, be able to refine, for his own purposes, on nature's crude process. And we have learnt that bloodshed on the largest scale is almost ludicrously easy to arrange, and that, considering it on the lowest plane, it may be the dullest of occupations. Henley's reaction against softness and the sedentary life is always possible and may always have salutary effects. But the mode of that reaction is, for this generation at least, and perhaps for many generations to follow it, quite impossible. If we engage in bloodshed again we are not likely to be reinforced by an abstract love of it for its own sake. Henley's doctrine, in its extreme form, was intellectual, not a genuine outcome of his whole spiritual being; and the fault which it bred in his writing was the fault bred by all not quite genuine convictions, namely, rhetoric. Rhetoric, in the bad sense, means, I suppose, a form of expression Ι which exceeds the feeling to be expressed. In one of the best essays in Views and Review, Henley defines with extraordinary delicacy and rightness the qualities of Mr. Austin Dobson's poetry: "The epithet is usually so just that it seems to have come into being with the noun it qualifies; the metaphor is mostly so appropriate that it leaves you in doubt as to whether it suggested the poem or the poem suggested it; the verb is never in excess of the idea it would convey; the effect of it all is that "something has here got itself uttered," and for good." He quotes a passage and continues: "The words I have italicised are the only words (it seems) in the language that are proper to the occasion: and yet how quietly they are produced, with what apparent unconsciousness they are set to do their work, how just and how sufficient is their effect!" This is praise which Henley himself never deserved and never can receive. The verb is never in excess of the idea that it would convey." He has written a description of a poet who is anything but rhetorical; and in doing so he has described his own antithesis. Let us take what is perhaps his own best known poem: "Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, . It matters not how strait the gate, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul." |