Chapter 5 - Page 2

sometimes, I
think, but I never met him; and Stepniak, the nihilist, whom I
knew well elsewhere but not there, said 'I cannot 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 knew
that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor
changed, 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 Vulcan perpetually
forging swords for other men to use; and certainly 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 newspaper, first the 'Scots,' afterwards 'The National
Observer,' this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious for
savage wit; and years afterwards when 'The National Observer' was
dead, Henley dying & our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him in
Paris very sad and I think very poor. 'Nobody will employ me now,'
he said. 'Your master is gone,' I answered, 'and you are like the
spear in an old Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy-
juice that it might not go about killing people on its own
account.' I wrote my first good lyrics and tolerable essays for
'The National Obsever' and as I always signed my work could go my
own road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics, crossing
out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I was
comforted by my belief that he also re-wrote Kipling then in the
first flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of
being re-written and thought that others were not, and only began
investigation when the editorial characteristics--epigrams,
archaisms and all--appeared in the article upon Paris fashions and
in that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I was not compelled to
full conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in prose, that
I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost or
fairy stories, picked up from my mother, or some pilot at Rosses
Point, and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my
subject matter. But if he had changed every 'has' into 'hath' I
would have let him, for had not we sunned ourselves in his
generosity? 'My young men out-dome and they write better than I,'
he wrote in some letter praising Charles Whibley's work, and to
another friend with a copy of my 'Man who dreamed of Fairyland:'
'See what a fine thing has been written by one of my lads.'