Chapter XV: A Younger Generation

During the ’seventies I got to know many of the younger men of letters whose fame had not yet completely asserted itself. My association with the _Saturday Review_ brought me into closer contact with my old friend, Walter Pollock, whom I had known from a boy, and it was as his guest that I constantly found myself at lunch-time at the Savile Club, a favourite haunt of Robert Louis Stevenson when he happened to be in London.

Those lunches at the Savile, with discussions carried late into the afternoon and sometimes prolonged to the dinner-hour, remain as a vivid and delightful recollection. It was there that I met Henley, a notable individuality, at that time almost without recognition in the world of literature; and Charles Brookfield, who would look in now and then to lighten our graver discussions with his keen and incisive wit; and among others, Richard Duffield, a strange yet not unattractive individuality who won instant recognition by reason of a fortuitous resemblance to Michael Angelo, due to a broken nose; but whose literary claims, as far as I can remember, rested chiefly upon a presumably exclusive knowledge of the work of Cervantes.

But of the figures of that little coterie to which I was so often and so hospitably bidden, the engaging personality of Robert Louis Stevenson stands out distinctly. He carried with him throughout all the period in which I had any knowledge of him the indestructible character of a boy. The conscious artistic quality which marks his literary work, yielding to it a perfection which made it even then a mark of envy for us all, had no place in his personal converse. As a talker he made no demand for consideration, and it was that perhaps which lent to his companionship such a singular charm. What he had to say, though it was often brilliantly said, left little sense of premeditation. The topic of the moment, however carelessly it might have been suggested, seemed in him for the moment to be all-absorbing. However trivial it might be, it was not too trivial for his acceptance; and however unpromising it might seem to others, his quick agile spirit contrived to draw from its discussion something that was notable and memorable.

I think of him now with his long straight hair carelessly flung backward, and the swift alert eyes, quick in expressive response to any point of humour that arose, as one of the most fascinating characters it has ever been my fortune to encounter in conversation. He said nothing that appeared to be considered, and little that was not illuminating, and yet through it all, though his talk could rise on occasion to heights of deep earnestness and enthusiasm, there remained the ever-present sense of the boy. Something of the spirit of boyish adventure inspired his presence, something, too, of boyish recklessness, so that it was not always easy to remember, in the perfect freedom of intercourse which his nature allowed, that he was before all things a man of letters, a man to whom no refinement of our tongue was unknown: above all things a student and a master of style, in his work constantly perfecting an instrument which we, who were his contemporaries, were very well aware that we used by comparison only as bunglers and beginners.

In this sense I used to feel that there was a striking contrast between the man and his writing. Personally, and as a talker, it was the carelessness of his attack of any subject that first impressed me. His interest seemed wholly centred and absorbed by the incident, the character, or the episode under discussion, and the means by which his thought and feeling concerning it might be expressed, were by contrast almost negligently employed. As a writer, great as is the rank he deservedly holds in the region of romance, his work yields to me exactly the opposite impression. His own faith in the story he has to tell is never, to my thinking, entirely convincing. Something too much of the conscious artist intrudes itself between the narrator and the reader, something that robs the result of the sense that the recorded fact is a fact indeed. It is impossible to forget, I think, even in Stevenson’s happiest work that he is an accomplished man of letters; and although there is no great writer who is not, the greatest and ablest allow us to forget it.

Certainly in contact with Stevenson the man, one had no temptation to remember it. One was never haunted in those delightful hours of social intercourse by the suspicion that he was searching for a phrase, and yet often enough our conversation turned upon points of style; and I remember once in a selected line of a poet, where the fitness of a single word was under discussion, Stevenson swiftly checked our condemnation by a remark that seemed all the more apt because it came from his lips:

“My dear Carr, every word looks guilty when it is put into the dock.”

I suppose no one ever had a juster or more generous appreciation of the great leisurely genius of Sir Walter Scott than was possessed by Stevenson. No one by intention or design was more desirous to exclude from his own work the sense of modishness in style, and yet it remains with me as a final impression of Stevenson as a writer, that he occasionally laid himself open to the reproach that he would, as a critic, have been the first to detect in the work of another.

But I can think of him now only as I knew him then, an unconquerable boy with his heart set for adventure, lending to our talk as often as he came into it something of that daring outlook into worlds as yet undiscovered which characterised the adventurers of the seventeenth century.

It may have been something of this fighting quality in himself that attracted Stevenson to the combative spirit of Henley. Their first association, of course, bore an early date, and it may have been again something in poor Henley’s physical disability which provoked and sustained Stevenson’s affectionate regard. It is not altogether pleasant to reflect that such affection loyally rendered on Stevenson’s part was not at the close so loyally recognised by his comrade. Henley’s vehement personality rendered his presence on those particular afternoons at the Savile Club a constant factor of vitality. It was impossible for thought to slumber while Henley was awake. There was no opinion he would not question, no proposition, however confidently or however modestly put forward, he would not immediately set upon its trial. Those were his days of battle, and it was not easy then to guess that a few years later he would win to his standard quite a troop of young men eager to enforce the gospel he had to preach.

At the time of which I am thinking he was fighting for his own hand, and he fought strenuously; the mere love of the conflict was a dominating passion, and if there was, as I think sometimes there was, an underlying note of personal bitterness, may it not be set down in the hearts of those who knew him, and who survive him, as the inevitable price humanity has to pay for the long martyrdom of pain to which nature had doomed him?

And yet Henley, for all the valorous spirit that was in him, was not always proof against sudden attack. One night when we were gathered at the Savile after some public dinner where we had all been present, Irving was of the party. Irving had a trick of waiting for his foe, and on this particular occasion, as I recall it, he was chafing under a criticism which had been delivered by Henley upon his impersonation of Macbeth. Henley appeared to be well aware that the matter in difference between them would come under discussion before the evening was ended, and was obviously ready with all the destructive weapons that were arrayed in his critical armoury. But quick and vigilant as he was as a fighting force, he nevertheless proved himself unready for the kind of attack which Irving had designed. Very quietly and almost deferentially the actor came to his point. After much genial interchange of cordial sentiment on one side and the other, Irving suddenly pounced upon his man.

“I notice,” he said, speaking to Henley in that tone of reverie which with him always concealed an imminent blow, “that you do not approve of my conception of Macbeth. Tell me now, for I should be interested to hear it, how would you play Macbeth if you were called upon to present the character on the stage? What is your conception?”

Henley was hardly prepared for such an invitation, and as we sat in expectation of what he would have to say, it was easy to perceive that the critic’s destructive method, which at that time was uppermost in him, could not suddenly readjust itself to the task of offering any coherent appreciation of the character which Irving, according to his allegation, had misinterpreted.

Irving was notoriously skilful in this kind of combat. He was patient in the endurance of any slight which he conceived to be passed upon his work as an actor, but his patience was never forgetful, and when the hour came, however long it might have been delayed, when he thought that he could claim his own, he was wont to strike mercilessly.

I remember an incident concerning myself, belonging to the earlier stages of our friendship. It was after the conclusion to a dinner of the Rabelais Club, when he invited several of us to adjourn to his rooms in Grafton Street for a final cigar. I was very cordially bidden to be of the company, little guessing that he had selected this particular occasion to single me out as the mark of his disapproval. When we were all comfortably seated round him, and he was reclining deep in his chair in an easy attitude that I afterwards learned to know was nearly always ominous, he threw out for our discussion a proposition in regard to which we could not fail to find ourselves unanimous.

“Now, talking among friends,” he said, “I suppose that you would all agree that criticism ought to be fair?”

With no possible exception we were all loudly enthusiastic in assent.

“Quite so,” replied Irving, in the same dispassionate and measured tones. “Well, then,” he continued, in a voice somewhat threateningly raised but still carefully controlled, “there is a criticism I have read in a magazine called _The Theatre_ about a play of mine. Very clever!” And then with sudden vehemence, pointing to me, he added, “You wrote it!”

“Do you mean,” I inquired, “the article on _Iolanthe_?”--an adaptation by W. G. Wills of _King Rene’s Daughter_ which had recently been presented at the Lyceum. “Yes, I wrote it!”

“Quite so,” returned Irving, his voice now rising in a tenser strain. “Well, nothing more unfair and more unjust has ever been written.”

I was young enough then not to be unmoved by this sudden and unexpected onslaught, but I summoned the courage to ask him, in reply, if the magazine was in the room. I saw as I spoke that it was lying on the table, and I asked him, as the article was short, if he would allow me to read it to those of my fellow-critics who were present, some of whom might fairly be supposed to be unaware of its import.

Irving could not, of course, but assent to my demand, but when I had concluded he appealed with even greater vehemence to those who were present in justification of what he had already said.

“You see! You see!” he cried. “Not one word about me!”

“It is quite true, Irving,” I answered. “And I will tell you why. I do not think any one has a higher appreciation of your genius as an actor than I have, and if I could have found the occasion to praise this particular performance I would gladly have seized it, but I thought it, rightly or wrongly, a bad performance, and, out of a spirit of loyalty to my larger admiration of your talent, I refrained from saying so. But I see now that I was wrong. In view of what you have said to-night I feel it would have been better to have said what I thought. You may however be assured, after what has occurred, that I shall not commit that blunder again.”

My defence was absolutely sincere, and I think Irving realised it. At any rate, I know that this little incident, which occurred upon the threshold of our friendship, did not hinder the formation of a close fellowship which endured and strengthened during the greater part of his career.

Bret Harte was an occasional visitor to the Savile, but I saw him more often and more intimately at the delightful meetings of the Kinsmen Club, a society that was designedly founded to bring together men of kindred interest in Art and Letters from both sides of the Atlantic. It has often been something of a puzzle to me that Bret Harte should not have ranked higher as an author among his own compatriots. In his own realm as a story-teller it seems to me hardly possible to rank him too high. That he owed much to Dickens he himself, I believe, would have been the first to acknowledge; but that his own individuality, both in humour and pathos, outstripped any reproach of imitation cannot, I think, be questioned by those to whom his work makes any strong appeal.

Socially he never made any endeavour to press for consideration of his literary claims. He was willing to speak of his work on the invitation of others, and always with modesty. In converse you would hardly have guessed he was a writer, nor did he often lead conversation on to the subject of literature, but I found in him, what I have always found in his writings, a certain reticent delicacy of perception, touched and fired now and again with a quick chivalry of feeling in all that concerned the relation of the sexes.

To his own countrymen I suppose he belonged to a past era in literary art, an era which preceded that elaborate analysis of the feminine temperament as distinguished from feminine character which to the mind of so many modern novelists appears to rank as the final victory of fiction.