Chapter 16

I had already met most of the poets of my generation. I had said,
soon after the publication of 'The Wanderings of Usheen,' to the
editor of a series of shilling reprints, who had set me to compile
tales of the Irish fairies, 'I am growing jealous of other poets,
and we will all grow jealous of each other unless we know each
other and so feel a share in each other's triumph.' He was a
Welshman, lately a mining engineer, Ernest Rhys, a writer of Welsh
translations and original poems that have often moved me greatly
though I can think of no one else who has read them. He was seven
or eight years older than myself and through his work as editor
knew everybody who would compile a book for seven or eight pounds.
Between us we founded 'The Rhymers' Club' which for some years was
to meet every night in an upper room with a sanded floor in an
ancient eating house in the Strand called 'The Cheshire Cheese.'
Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, John
Davidson, Richard le Gallienne, T. W. Rolleston, Selwyn Image and
two men of an older generation, Edwin Ellis and John Todhunter,
came constantly for a time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Home less
constantly, while William Watson joined but never came and Francis
Thompson came once but never joined; and sometimes, if we met in a
private house, which we did occasionally, Oscar Wilde came. It had
been useless to invite him to the 'Cheshire Cheese' for he hated
Bohemia. 'Olive Schreiner,' he said once to me, 'is staying in the
East End because that is the only place where people do not wear
masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live in the
West End because nothing in life interests me but the mask.'

We read our poems to one another and talked criticism and drank a
little wine. I sometimes say when I speak of the club, 'We had
such and such ideas, such and such a quarrel with the great
Victorians, we set before us such and such aims,' as though we had
many philosophical ideas. I say this because I am ashamed to admit
that I had these ideas and that whenever I began to talk of them a
gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish poet, who wrote
excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few years
later, 'You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of
letters;' and if all the rhymers had not been polite, if most of
them had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, they would have said the
same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought,
longing all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to
the art school instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to
a university, and learned all the classical foundations of English
literature and English culture, all that great erudition which,
once