Born in Gloucester, 23 Aug. 1849; married Anna, daughter of Edward Boyle, Edinburgh, 1878. Educ.: the Crypt Grammar School, Gloucester; LL.D. St. Andrews. Editor in London, 1877–78; the “Magazine of Art,” 1882–86; the “Scots”—afterwards the “National Observer,” 1888–93; “The New Review,” 1893–98; “The Tudor Translations” (North, Florio, Shelton, Holland, Urquhart, Berners, and others), etc. Publications: “Book of Verses,” 1888, 4th ed. 1893; “Memorial Catalogue of the French and Dutch Loan Collection,” 1888; “Views and Reviews, I. Literature,” 1890; “Song of the Sword,” 1892; 2nd ed. 1893; “The Centenary Burns” (with T. F. Henderson: Terminal Essay by W. E. H., published separately, 1898), I.–IV. 1896–97; the “Works of Lord Byron,” vol. I. 1897, etc.; “English Lyrics,” 1897; “Poems,” 1898; “The Poetry of Wilfrid Blunt” (with George Wyndham); “London Types” (with W. Nicholson), 1898; “For England’s Sake,” 1900; “Shakespeare, The Edinburgh Folio,” 1901; “Hawthorn and Lavender, and other verses,” 1901; “Views and Reviews, II. Painting and Scripture,” 1901. “Deacon Brodie,” “Beau Austin,” “Admiral Guinea,” “Macaire” (plays, with R. L. Stevenson).

Personal

  Henley was built on a scale designed for exercise and a vigorous life. Unkindly fate chained him to his desk and his crutch. His broad face shining like John Silver’s, bearded like the pard, he was a modern representative of the Viking—in design. Nature unhappily marred what she should have made to the design. His nature was simply composite. He breathed fire with all the fury of his baresark ancestors one moment, and he was capable of weeping like a child at the next. This feminine or emotional trait entered into that strange and virile nature. It is nine years since his child died, and it was evident to all his friends that from the date of the loss he began to die.

  In the days of my early acquaintance with Henley, some fourteen or fifteen years ago, I could never look at him without wondering why none of his artist friends had taken him for a model of Pan. They say he was like Johnson, and like Heine; and he had something of both. But to me he was the startling image of Pan come on earth and clothed—the great God Pan, down in the reeds by the river, with halting foot and flaming shaggy hair, and arms and shoulders huge and threatening, like those of some Faun or Satyr of the ancient woods, and the brow and eyes of the Olympians. Well-nigh captive to his chair, with the crutch never far from his elbow, dragging himself when he moved, with slow effort, he yet seemed instinct with the life of the germinating elemental earth, when gods and men were vital with the force that throbbed in breast and flower and wandering breeze. The large heart, and the large frame, the broad tolerant smile, the inexhaustible interest in nature and mankind, the brave, unquenchable cheerfulness under affliction and adversities, the frank appreciation and apology for the animal side of things, all helped to maintain the impression of a kind of Pagan strength and simplicity.

  How, as the hair greyed and whitened, the shining soul in the face crowned and glorified all! In the clear eyes were friendly looks and laughter, the lips gave kindly advice with smiling humour, and encouraging words that half deprecated his own criticism; or he talked of his contemporaries, friends and enemies, showering out generous words of praise, or emitting the bullet-like phrase of contempt, or the nickname that transfixed some weakness or vanity in the person mentioned. His faculty of criticism, indeed, was one of the finest gifts with which his multiplex nature was endowed; but, as with all expressions of his mind, it was of an intensely individual character, his definition was perfect, within the limits of his view, and every phrase helped to chisel out the clear-cut cameos of description, passion, or emotion. This intense faculty of seeing was part of the “hard, gem-like” flame with which life seemed to burn within his crippled body, and explains the limitless self-belief, the sacrifice of all to his view of the truth, and the indifference to conventions and received creeds that all his life procured him the atmosphere of a fighter.

General

  There is something revolutionary about all Mr. Henley’s work; but it is in his poetry that the stirrings of a new element have worked to most effectual issues. This new volume of poems, by its very existence, is a vigorous challenge, a notable manifesto, on behalf of a somewhat new art—the art of modernity in poetry. Based on the same principles as “A Book of Verses,” it develops those principles yet further, and, in the “London Voluntaries” particularly, and in such poems as the second, twenty-second and twenty-fourth of the “Rhymes and Rhythms,” succeeds to a remarkable degree in working out a really modern art of verse…. The style of the “Hospital Sonnets” is founded on the style of “Modern Love;” both from the rhymed and unrhymed poems in irregular metres, it is evident that Mr. Henley has learnt something from the odes of the “Unknown Eros;” there are touches of Walt Whitman, some of the notes of Heine; there is, too, something of the exquisitely disarticulated style of Verlaine. But with all this assimilation of influences that are in the air, Mr. Henley has developed for himself a style that becomes in the highest degree personal, and one realises behind it a most vigorous, distinct, and interesting personality…. The very subject, to begin with, was a discovery. Here is poetry made out of personal sensations, poetry which is half physiological, poetry which is pathology—and yet essentially poetry.

  We may deny to Mr. Henley certain faculties, as, for instance, a very liberal faculty for romance, such as was given to the gifted being whom he most resembles at his best—Heinrich Heine,—but we must credit him with a fascinating lyrical grace…. Mr. Henley’s poems, as his prose, bear the mark of concentration, precision, and the power of rejection,—which is perhaps the greatest quality an artist can have: in it is the root of the whole matter. Mr. Henley’s canvas is always small. In this regard he compares with some of his contemporaries and ancestors in poetry as Meissonier does with De Neuville. There is no plethora of expression or sentiment in the work of the New School; no cantos or multiplied stanzas; no languor nor linked sweetness; no attempt to “thrill the girls with dandy pathos.” Mr. Henley’s lyrics, full of delightful freshness and sprightliness and sentiment, have the quality of the perfect miniature. One feels that his words are etched out of the thought for their own sake as well as the thought’s sake, and that he will sacrifice neither for the girls nor the dandy pathos. Through Mr. Henley’s poetry there runs one note piped in many keys. He sings the gospel of conflict—of war; but he sings it without whining.

  It is as a poet he has the highest claim upon us now, and as a poet he will take rank hereafter; yet he has certainly made a deeper mark upon his generation as a critic than any of his contemporaries. Mr. Lang, who once reigned paramount, has long since discarded his influence, and there is none left to dispute Mr. Henley’s royalty…. I am not here dealing with him as a poet, but merely as a critic of literature. As such, it is not too much to say that his authority has slowly undermined the prestige of the middle Victorian ideals. In a sense he is the foundation of a new period. That these words are none too extravagant is proved by his present position as the arbiter of a distinct school of fiction. For one who is no novelist himself this is a considerable performance…. By a number of young writers he is regarded with the affection and reverence that a high priest might claim…. Mr. Henley’s critical insight recalls the flare of an electric light. There are queer patches of blackness outside of the path of the illumination, passages of darkness along the angles; but within these confines the white light cuts its way rudely, sharply, and with pitiless severity. Along the sphere of the irradiation the white flare is merciless in its scrutiny; every fault and flaw is picked out as by magic, every virtue is assigned its value. For sheer illumination of insight within these broad boundaries Mr. Henley, so far as I know, has no peer alive.

  Mr. Henley, in his verse, is two things: a painter-etcher and a pure lyrist. In the former capacity his touch is too stern, too precise, and of too condensed significance to allure the popular eye, which prefers a smoother surface, a more luscious tone. As a lyrist, again, Mr. Henley, though a master-rhymer when he pleases, is apt to renounce the aid of rhyme and strict melodic form. Now the triangle, though we may not realise it, is one of the most popular instruments in the band, and not to be lightly dispensed with. Moreover, though Mr. Henley does not, if I may put it so, deliberately intellectualise, a somewhat aggressive personal philosophy runs through his lyrics—a grim stoicism, with an inclination to envisage life in its grotesquer aspects.

  If his leading trait is a rugged strength and faithfulness to the thing seen or known, such as looks from his bust by Rodin, he has also the capacity for sudden intimacies of beauty or feeling which is the birthright of strength. Not much more gravely and poignantly tender has been written than the rhymeless lyric, “When you wake in your crib,” while the minor lyrics cover a very various range of quality. From the direct truth of “In Hospital” to the gates of romance in the later book, you have measured a compass very unique, and this romance is drawn from the stony ground of London. Perhaps, indeed, it is as the poet of London that he will best be remembered.

  He was a strong, honest, full-blooded man, a good lover and a good hater, and singer of the best English lyrics during half a generation.

  He seemed incapable of what an eighteenth century critic would have called a sustained flight; and he was apparently destitute of any real constructive or creative power. He never wrote a story, or a narrative poem, or anything in prose which was beyond the limits of a short essay; and if in his three plays he was able to “stay” over a somewhat longer course, it was only with the assistance of Stevenson, who no doubt was responsible for the constructional and dramatic part of the work, such as it is. Henley was the painter of miniatures, the maker of cameos. There are some rough, and even brutal, passages in his poems; but his art, taken as a whole, was delicate, precise, and finished. When he set to work, the violence that one noticed in his talk, the over-emphasis of his intellectual temper, died away; in his best passages he has the subtle restraint, the economy of material, and the careful manipulation, of the artist-workman. He will live through his lyric passages, and his vignettes, in prose and verse. No man of our time has expressed a mood of the emotions with more absolute appropriateness and verbal harmony, and that is lyric poetry in its essence.

  He saw shrewdly, felt keenly, and blessed or banned with a zest that stimulated whether it convinced or not. His views, whether one accepted or rejected them, were at least wholly his own. In that sense they were original, and in another sense they were original also, for they were not shared by the average reader or critic. His criticisms, and the criticisms he inspired were apt to be of the “slashing” sort. He wielded, not the finely tempered, needle-pointed rapier of the duellist, but a well-ground axe, that sometimes turned in his hand, and came down headforemost with the blunt force of a navvy’s hammer. In considering the ferocity of much of the criticism that he wrote himself, or impelled the young men gathered about him to write, due allowance must be made—and some of his victims made it—for the galling physical disabilities under which he laboured…. How long he will be remembered by the outer world, no one can guess. It is only as a poet that his reputation can last; and his present reputation is wholly disproportionate to his popularity. But the man who wrote “A Book of Verses,” “London Voluntaries,” and, only this year, that buoyant and imaginative glorification of the Mercédes motor-car, “A Song of Speed” needs no brand to proclaim him a true bard. His style, always vivid and picturesque, was pre-eminently “of the man himself.”

  Life touched his mind at every point, yet though it was in general transmuted into merely literary and poetic values, the keenness and the poignancy of his expression have given a richness to English literature that, surely, will never be tarnished by time. He had his weakness and lackings; he was something of a Pagan; he had nothing to teach except how to be a good Englishman, to be honest, and speak the truth; he had no deep religious convictions to express, for at the best Deity was to him merely an asset of literary capital to be used for the most telling effect. In the intense zestfulness of his life things appealed to him as much from their emotional as from their brutal or even obscene aspect; but ever he loved tender beauty, and saw wistfulness in the dearest things, and with his poet’s vision found loveliness in the darkest corners of his beloved London as on the flashing downs beneath an April sky. At the last his manner of pride and aggressiveness was but the expression of the sanity and truth that were the texture of his life as they are of all his work.