short irregular beard and moustache, his lined and wrinkled face, his eyes
steadily fixed upon some object, in complete confidence and
self-possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are there exactly
as I remember him. I have seen other portraits and they too show him
exactly as I remember him, as though he had but one appearance and that
seen fully at the first glance and by all alike. He was most human--human
I used to say like one of Shakespeare's characters--and yet pressed and
pummelled, as it were, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture and a
speech as by some overwhelming situation. I disagreed with him about
everything, but I admired him beyond words. With the exception of some
early poems founded upon old French models I disliked his poetry, mainly
because he wrote in _vers libre_, which I associated with Tyndall and
Huxley, and Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant staring with vacant eyes at
her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an
hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the strongest
passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, sung in
metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or
riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelism affected him as some
people are affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself
at our first meeting without political interests or convictions, he soon
grew into a violent unionist and imperialist. I used to say when I spoke
of his poems: "He is like a great actor with a bad part; yet who would
look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini played the grave-digger?" and
I might so have explained much that he said and did. I meant that he was
like a great actor of passion--character-acting meant nothing to me for
many years--and an actor of passion will display some one quality of soul,
personified again and again, just as a great poetical painter, Titian,
Botticelli, Rossetti, may depend for his greatness upon a type of beauty
which presently we call by his name. Irving, the last of the sort on the
English stage, and in modern England and France it is the rarest sort,
never moved me but in the expression of intellectual pride and though I
saw Salvini but once I am convinced that his genius was a kind of animal
nobility. Henley, half inarticulate--"I am very costive," he would
say--beset with personal quarrels, built up an image of power and
magnanimity till it became, at momen