Chapter 5

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 cold meat. I
can recall but one elderly man--Dunn his name was--rather silent
and full of good sense, an old friend of Henley's. We were young
men, none as yet established in his own, or in the world's
opinion, and Henley was our leader and our confidant. 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 determined to 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
listened to 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 confident 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 in
secret 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 congress in Liverpool or in Manchester.
'The Salvation Armyism of art,' he called it, & gave a grotesque
description of some city councillor he had found admiring Turner.
Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided
Turner, and finding the city councillor the next day on the other
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 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