His
little Book of Verses reveals to us an artist who is seeking to find new
methods of expression and has not merely a delicate sense of beauty and a
brilliant, fantastic wit, but a real passion also for what is horrible,
ugly, or grotesque. No doubt, everything that is worthy of existence is
worthy also of art--at least, one would like to think so--but while echo
or mirror can repeat for us a beautiful thing, to render artistically a
thing that is ugly requires the most exquisite alchemy of form, the most
subtle magic of transformation. To me there is more of the cry of
Marsyas than of the singing of Apollo in the earlier poems of Mr.
Henley's volume, In Hospital: Rhymes and Rhythms, as he calls them. But
it is impossible to deny their power. Some of them are like bright,
vivid pastels; others like charcoal drawings, with dull blacks and murky
whites; others like etchings with deeply-bitten lines, and abrupt
contrasts, and clever colour-suggestions. In fact, they are like
anything and everything, except perfected poems--that they certainly are
not. They are still in the twilight. They are preludes, experiments,
inspired jottings in a note-book, and should be heralded by a design of
'Genius Making Sketches.' Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to
verse; it gives that delightful sense of limitation which in all the arts
is so pleasurable, and is, indeed, one of the secrets of perfection; it
will whisper, as a French critic has said, 'things unexpected and
charming, things with strange and remote relations to each other,' and
bind them together in indissoluble bonds of beauty; and in his constant
rejection of rhyme, Mr. Henley seems to me to have abdicated half his
power. He is a roi en exil who has thrown away some of the strings of
his lute; a poet who has forgotten the fairest part of his kingdom.

However, all work criticises itself. Here is one of Mr. Henley's
inspired jottings. According to the temperament of the reader, it will
serve either as a model or as the reverse:

As with varnish red and glistening
Dripped his hair; his feet were rigid;
Raised, he settled stiffly sideways:
You could see the hurts were spinal.

He had fallen from an engine,
And been dragged along the metals.
It was hopeless, and they knew it;
So they covered him, and left him.

As he lay, by fits half sentient,
Inarticulately moaning,
With his stockinged feet protruded
Sharp and awkward from the blankets,

To his bed there came a woman,
Stood and looked and sighed a little,
And departed without speaking,
As himself a few hours after.

I was told she was his sweetheart.
They were on the eve of marriage.
She was quiet as a statue,
But her lip was gray and writhen.

In this poem, the rhythm and the music, such as it is, are
obvious--perhaps a little too obvious. In the following I see nothing
but ingeniously printed prose. It is a description--and a very accurate
one--of a scene in a hospital ward. The medical students are supposed to
be crowding round the doctor.