exasperated at their
indifference to the fashion of their own river-bed--that Swinburne in one
way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had filled their work
with what I called "impurities," curiosities about politics, about
science, about history, about religion; and that we must create once more
the pure work.

Our clothes were, for the most part unadventurous like our conversation,
though I indeed wore a brown velveteen coat, a loose tie, and a very old
inverness cape, discarded by my father twenty years before and preserved
by my Sligo-born mother whose actions were unreasoning and habitual like
the seasons. But no other member of the club, except Le Gallienne, who
wore a loose tie, and Symons, who had an inverness cape that was quite new
and almost fashionable, would have shown himself for the world in any
costume but "that of an English gentleman." "One should be quite
unnoticeable," Johnson explained to me. Those who conformed most carefully
to the fashion in their clothes, generally departed furthest from it in
their handwriting, which was small, neat, and studied, one poet--which, I
forget--having founded his upon the handwriting of George Herbert. Dowson
and Symons I was to know better in later years when Symons became a very
dear friend, and I never got behind John Davidson's Scottish roughness and
exasperation, though I saw much of him, but from the first I devoted
myself to Lionel Johnson. He and Horne and Image and one or two others,
shared a man-servant and an old house in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square,
typical figures of transition, doing as an achievement of learning and of
exquisite taste what their predecessors did in careless abundance. All
were Pre-Raphaelite, and sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or
other a ragged figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon the
Pre-Raphaelite painter, once the friend of Rossetti and of Swinburne, but
fresh now from some low public house. Condemned to a long term of
imprisonment for a criminal offence, he had sunk into drunkenness and
misery. Introduced one night, however, to some man who mistook him, in the
dim candle light, for another Solomon, a successful academic painter and
R.A., he started to his feet in a rage with, "Sir, do you dare to mistake
me for that mountebank?" Though not one had hearkened to the feeblest
caw, or been spattered by the smallest dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall,
Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage bundle of old