The First of the Moderns

POET, ESSAYIST, JOURNALIST, editor, reviewer, playwright, "and occasional hack writer of varied tomes," the prolific yet short-lived William Ernest Henley (1849–1903), close friend of Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, and Robert Louis Stevenson, is known today almost exclusively for the closing lines of a single, untitled poem of 1875, dubbed "Invictus" by critic Arthur Quiller-Couch: "I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul." This new selection of Henley's poetry and prose is an attempt at rehabilitating this neglected albeit important figure, The First of the Moderns (as editor John Howlett entitles his exemplary introduction) and the author of "a striking and highly original oeuvre."

Unfortunately, Henley has been overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries—Wilde, Shaw, Wells—and, in addition, much of his oeuvre has languished "in ageing, hard-to-access journals." Howlett has resurrected many of those lost pieces. And that Henley managed to write as much as he did in so short a time while also editing magazines for almost two decades—London (1878–79), Magazine of Art (1881–1886), Scots Observer (1889–1894), New Review (1895–1897)—is remarkable.

What is even more remarkable is that Henley was so productive despite being plagued by illness: a bout of tuberculosis in adolescence resulted in the amputation of his left leg below the knee in 1868, leaving him frail and in constant pain. Two operations by pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister saved his other leg but resulted in twenty months of recuperation in the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh. It was there that Henley began writing what would become his best-known work, In Hospital, the last of its three versions (1875, 1887, 1888) reproduced here in full. Readers must judge whether it is, as Howlett writes, "one of the greatest and most important sequences within the history of English poetry." It is no doubt "useful as a snapshot of social history" that evokes "the confining and claustrophobic nature of the institution." And it leaves little doubt that, like fellow-tubercular John Keats, Henley was half in love with easeful Death.

On the other hand, writing In Hospital may have been cathartic. As Howlett points out, Henley was now able "to generate a broader philosophy which included … the need for stoicism and a desire to be positively affirming of one's own existence." Indeed, many poems sound the carpe diem trumpet—while enjoining us to remember our "infinitesimal / Portion of Time."

My own preference, however, is for Henley the sketch artist. According to poet Alfred Noyes, Henley had the "gift of portraiture" and was "our first, our only, and unapproachable portrait-painter in English verse." Take, for instance, the sonnet sequence "London Types," where we find a bus-driver who "lives lustily," a life-guardsman "waxing statelier year by year," a Beefeater who is "an antic of old time," and a bar-maid who, "having mopped the zinc for certain years, / And faced the gas … fades and disappears." Pathos hovers over many of these miniatures.

Many of Henley's prose essays are also pen portraits—and not always kind ones. Byron, we read, "made himself offensively conspicuous, and from being infinitely popular became utterly contemptible." Or take the extended comparison between Byron and Wordsworth, which reads in part: "Byron's theory of life was one of liberty and self-sacrifice, Wordsworth's one of self-restraint and self-improvement; Byron's practice was dictated by a vigorous and voluptuous egotism, Wordsworth's by a benign and lofty selfishness." Neither poet fares very well. And neither does Victor Hugo ("a magnificent and entirely histrionic vulgarian"), or Benjamin Disraeli ("cynical and ambitious, flippant and sentimental, … imperiously egotistic"), or Matthew Arnold ("the intention and effect are cold even to austerity"). And yet minor poet Ernest Dobson's style "has distinction, elegance, urbanity, precision, an exquisite clarity," while Tennyson is lionized: "Everywhere are greatness and a high imagination moving at ease in the gold armour of an heroic...