Brief Notices: William Ernest Henley: A Study in the “Counter-Decadence” of the ‘Nineties

William Ernest Henley: A Study in the “Counter-Decadence” of the ‘Nineties by Jerome Hamilton Buckley. Princeton. $2.75

Henley was not an editor of the sort that Matthew Arnold would have been or T. S. Eliot was to be. He did not have a critical “position”; to reject Victorian decorum and end-of-the-century decadence did not come to that distinction. His own critical writing was fluent and hearty and not without general intelligence. Perhaps he was the better editor for not being exclusive; at any rate he found and sheltered and printed the best writers of his day. The weekly appearance of his National Observer was an exciting literary event though its circulation never reached four figures. In his own right Henley was a playwright, collaborating with R. L. S. on some plays of better literary than dramatic quality. He was also a poet, prosodically versatile and experimental and lacking the gift of lyric phrase. His conquest of pain and physical infirmity was heroic, but he over-compensated by becoming personally something of a bully. And Mr. Buckley’s book is as good as it can be under the circumstance that his critical eye refuses to look squarely at the titular object. For example, there were James, Yeats, and Shaw, all having editorial contact with Henley; all suffered discourtesy, and all took it gratefully except Shaw, who was better armed with the weapons of this world. These were men so much greater than Henley that there is a remarkable irony in Henley’s assurance, and if Mr. Buckley does not remark it he cannot seem to his readers very knowing.