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Title: The Men of The Nineties

Author: Bernard Muddiman

Release Date: September 25, 2016 [EBook #53142]

Language: English

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Transcriber’s Note


Table of Contents added by Transcriber and placed into the Public
Domain.


CONTENTS


    Prologue          1
      I              13
     II              36
    III              55
     IV              79
      V             101
     VI             118
    Epilogue        131
    Index           139




THE MEN OF THE NINETIES




    THE MEN OF THE NINETIES

    BY
    BERNARD MUDDIMAN

    [Illustration]

    G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
    NEW YORK
    1921




    _All rights reserved_




THE MEN OF THE

NINETIES




PROLOGUE


The day Beardsley left his stool and ledger in a London insurance
office and betook himself seriously to the illustration of that strange
comic world of Congreve, a new manifestation of English art blossomed.
It had, no doubt, been a long time germinating in the minds of many
men, and there had been numerous signs pointing the way on which the
artistic tendencies of the nineties would travel. For example, just
about the same time as Beardsley’s eighteenth year, a coterie of young
men, fresh from the Varsity in many cases, made their appearance in
London openly proclaiming the doctrine of art for art’s sake under
the ægis of Oscar Wilde. So in the last age of hansom cabs and dying
Victorian etiquette, these young men determined that the rather dull
art and literary world of London should flower like another Paris.

If, for the sake of making a beginning, one must fix on that memorable
day when Beardsley burnt his boats as the date of the opening of the
period of the nineties, it must be remembered that this arbitrary
limitation of the movement is rather a convenience than a necessity. To
divide up anything so continuous as literature and art into sections
like a bookcase is uncommonly like damming up a portion of a stream
to look at the fish in it. It breaks the contact between what was
before and what came after. However, as one must go a long way back to
investigate accurately how a new movement in art arises, and as it is
tedious to follow up all the clues that lead to the source, it will be
perhaps as well not to worry too much over the causes of the movement
or over the influences from which it arose. Let us accept the fact
so well pointed out by Mr. W. G. Blaikie Murdoch in _The Renaissance
of the Nineties_, that the output of the nineties was ‘a distinct
secession from the art of the previous age ..., in fact the eighties,
if they have a distinct character, were a time of transition, a period
of simmering for revolt rather than of actual outbreak; and it was in
the succeeding ten years that, thanks to certain young men, an upheaval
was really made.’

It is to France if anywhere we can trace the causes of this new
attitude. First of all, in painting, the great French impressionists,
with Manet and Monet leading them; the doctrine of plein air painting,
and all the wonder of this new school of painting gave a new thrill
to art. Then about 1885 the literary symbolists killed the Parnassian
school of poetry, while at the same time there was a new _esplozione
naturlistica_. Paris, always the city of light, was again fluting new
melodies for the world. In the Rue de Rome, Stéphane Mallarmé received
all the world of art and letters. To the Rue de Rome came Whistler,
John Payne, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and others. The French influence
that swept over to England was as powerful as that which stirred
artistic Germany, creating a German period of the nineties in the group
of symbolists who, under Stefan George, issued the now famous _Blätter
für die Kunst_. The Englishmen, indeed, who attended these soirées of
the Rue de Rome did not come away empty-handed. Not only did their
own work suffer an artistic change through this influence, but they
handed it on to their successors. So directly and indirectly the great
French painters and writers of the day influenced the art of England,
creating the opportunity for a distinct secession from the art of the
previous age. At the same time French art and literature were never
stationary but always developing. It was only in 1890 that we find
the real Régnier appearing. In the same year Paul Fort, just eighteen
summers like Beardsley, founded the Théâtre d’Art. All this French art
at high pressure had a stimulating effect on English art; and, in fact,
remained its main stimulus until the Boer War, when the imperialism of
writers like Kipling became the chief interest. So it was in no small
degree the literary symbolists, the plein air painters and all the
motives that lay behind them, that awoke the Englishmen of the nineties
to new possibilities in art and life. In Paris, in 1890, Rothenstein
met Conder, and at once the two became lifelong friends. There they
encountered artists like Toulouse Lautrec and Anquetin.

The first men, of course, to realise this feverish activity in France
were the elder men, who handed on the tidings to the younger majority.
Thus the men of the eighties turned the attention of the unknown of the
nineties towards France, so that Englishmen again began to remember
that something else counted in Paris besides lingerie. In dealing then
with the influences that helped to beget the period, it is as well to
remember that if Walter Pater and Whistler were its forerunners, so to
speak, Oscar Wilde and George Moore were responsible in no small degree
for many of the tendencies that afterwards became prevalent.

Wilde himself, in fact, was artistically an influence for evil on his
weaker juniors. His social success, his keen persiflage, his indolent
pose of greatness, blinded them as much as it did the οἱ πολλοί to his
real artistic industry and merit. His worst works were, in fact, with
one exception, his disciples. Richard Le Gallienne in his _Quest of the
Golden Girl_ and _Prose Fancies_ was watered-down Wilde, and very thin
at that. Even John Davidson, in _Baptist Lake_ and _Earl Lavender_,
strove in vain to overtake the masterly ease with which Wilde’s ordered
prose periods advance like cohorts of centurions to the sound of a
full orchestra. Wilde’s best work--his _Prose Poems_, his poem _The
Harlot’s House_, his one-acter _Salomé_, and one or two of the stories
in the _House of Pomegranates_--will, however, remain as some of the
finest flowers of the age’s art. Yet Wilde, in reality, was senior to
the nineties proper, and was much too good an artist to approve of much
of the work that was done in imitation of himself during the period
by the mere hangers-on of the nineties. He was with the men of the
nineties, but not of them. Beardsley, indeed, the age’s real king, took
the liberty of mocking at Wilde in the very illustrations, or rather
decorations, intended for Wilde’s most elaborate production. Wilde,
in his turn, never wrote for _The Yellow Book_, which he disliked
intensely. Again, we know what Symons’s opinion of Wilde was from his
essay on him as a poseur. In fact, Wilde was a writer apart from the
others, though undoubtedly his presence among them up to the time of
his débâcle was a profound direct influence.

On the other hand, George Moore, as a reactionary influence against
Victorianism,[1] as a senior who had lived and written in Paris, was
more of an indirect factor for the younger men. For a time he lived
in the Temple, where many of them had come to live. By his works he
helped to disseminate the influences of the great French writers and
painters that had come into his own life. His own writings came to
others surcharged with ‘The poisonous honey of France.’ In his _Modern
Painting_, in his novel, _Evelyn Innes_, in his era of servitude to
Flaubert’s majesty, he is of the nineties. But the nineties with George
Moore were merely a phase out of which he grew, as out of many others.
But when the nineties began Moore contrived to assist at their birth in
the same way as he did later at that of the Celtic renaissance. Indeed,
it is said, in Moore’s novel, _Mike Fletcher_ (1889), one can obtain a
glimpse of the manner in which the period was to burgeon.

    [1] See his _Literature at Nurse_, 1885.

There was, indeed, amongst the younger men in those early days a
wonderful spirit of camaraderie. It was an attractive period full
of the glamour of youth before it went down fighting for Art with a
capital A, before age had chilled its blood or dulled its vision. And
there came, no doubt, an immense vitality for them all, a stimulating
energy to each one, from this meeting together in London. Indeed,
coming together by chance, as it were, in London, they not only
discovered one another and the ineffable boon of comradeship, but they
also rediscovered, through Whistler, London for art. So once again the
streets of London began to be written about, not it is true in the
Dickens manner, but still with even as great a love as his. They went
so far as to attempt to institute real French café life, by having
meetings at the Cheshire Cheese and evenings in the Domino Room of the
Café Royal. Symons wrote of the ballets of Leicester Square; Dowson
of the purlieus round the docks; Davidson made poems of Fleet Street;
Binyon sang of white St. Martin’s and the golden gallery of St. Paul’s;
Crackanthorpe sketched his London vignettes; Street talks of the
indefinable romance of Mayfair. In fact the nineties brought the Muses
back to town. In a cabman’s shelter, in Soho restaurants of doubtful
cheapness, in each other’s rooms, they rejoiced in each other’s
company. At the same time Beardsley, by a stroke of luck through the
good services of friends, was commissioned by Mr. Dent to illustrate
_Le Morte d’Arthur_. The Bodley Press had begun in Vigo Street in 1887.
Symons, Yeats, and others had already published their first books. The
curtain had gone up on the drama of the nineties, of which this is
intended as a brief appreciation.

At the date of the appearance of these young men amid a mass of
lucubrators, there was actually a band of genuine young writers
(besides the big Victorians like Meredith and Hardy), who were turning
out good work, and who were under the sway of that old Pan of poetry,
Henley of _The National Observer_. These young men of Henley must not
be therefore confused with the _Yellow Book_ group. They were often
deliberately coarse, not because they liked it, but because it was
part of their artistic gospel. And when one considers the methods of
the feeblest of them, one sees more ruffianly sturdy British horseplay
than art, more braying and snarling than sounding on the lute. But
among the best of them, Stevenson, Kipling, and Steevens, was a fine
loyalty to the traditions of the leading spirit of the _Observer_
Henley--Pan playing on his reed with his crippled hoofs hiding amid
the water-lilies of the purling stream. All these last writers and
artists were men of the Anglo-Saxon tradition; while, on the other
hand, the young men who had, so to speak, just come to town, were full
of the Latin tradition. The main thing in the lives of these last was
French literature and art, and out of this influence came not only the
art, but the eccentricities, of the coterie, which is so often called
the nineties. Theirs was a new spirit. They were of the order of the
delectable ‘Les Jeunes.’ Epigram opened a new career with Oscar Wilde;
Beardsley dreamed of a strange world; Ernest Dowson used to drink
hashish and make love in Soho in the French manner of Henri Murger’s
Latin Quarter--for a time, indeed, hair was worn long, and the ties of
the petty homunculi of the Wilde crowd were of lace; but, fortunately,
artists like Beardsley and the other men worth while did not cultivate
foolishness except as a protection against the bourgeois.

But enough of these affectations; the point I wish to bring out here is
that the men who drew and wrote for _The Savoy_ wrote their art with
a difference to that of those others who were their contemporaries
but appeared in the first instance as a virile imperialistic movement
in _The Scots Observer_ and _The National Observer_. The artists of
the nineties were more, as we say rather badly in English, of the
‘kid-glove school.’ A note of refinement, a distinction of utterance,
an obsession in Art marked all their best as well as their worst work.
But this by no means prevented the two schools having a very salutary
influence on each other. Indeed, we find a man like Mr. W. B. Yeats,
who really belonged to a third movement, his own Celtic renaissance,
publishing first of all lyrics like ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ under
the banner of Henley, and attending a year or two later the Rhymers’
Club meetings before he found his own demesne. But to his former
comrades of the Cheshire Cheese, the men who concern us here, Yeats
has found occasion to render befitting praise in the well-known lines:

    You had to face your ends when young--
      ’Twas wine or women, or some curse--
    But never made a poorer song
      That you might have a heavier purse;

    Nor gave loud service to a cause
      That you might have a troop of friends:
    You kept the Muses’ sterner laws
      And unrepenting faced your ends.

In fact, since influences and counter-influences in all ages of
literature are such subtle vermin to ferret out, I propose to avoid
as far as possible any generalities in that connection, and to
interpret broadly and briefly a somewhat vague period that reviewers
have acquired the habit of calling ‘the nineties.’ What then was this
period? It was a portion of the last decade of the last century which
began about 1890, and passing through the Rhymers’ Club, blossomed out
into _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_ periodicals, and produced works
like Beardsley’s drawings, Conder’s fans, Dowson’s poetry, and Hubert
Crackanthorpe’s short stories. The men who composed the group are too
numerous to recall in their entirety, even if a satisfactory list of
such a nature could be produced. So all I intend to attempt here is a
summary of the activities of certain typical examples of the group as
will serve to furnish an appreciation of their general work. And the
way I propose to obtain this view is to begin by considering Beardsley
as the central figure of the period; to deal next with the two most
vital manifestoes of the movement and their respective literary
editors, _The Yellow Book_ and Henry Harland, _The Savoy_ and Mr.
Arthur Symons, passing on in turn to the writers of fiction, the poets,
the essayists and dramatists not of the whole decade, but only to those
with whom this particular movement is concerned; it will then be time
to make a few deductions on the spirit of the whole of this tendency.
By rigidly adhering to only those men who were actually of the nineties
group I am only too conscious these pages will be considered often
to be lacking in the great literary events and figures of the age,
such as Hardy’s _Jude the Obscure_, the rise of the Kipling star, the
tragedy of Wilde, the coming of Conrad, etc. etc. Yet the sole object
of this scant summary would be defeated if I began to prattle of these
and others like Bernard Shaw. In fact its _raison d’être_ constrains a
method of treatment which must not be broken.




I


To begin with Aubrey Beardsley has many advantages, for it brings
us at once not only to the type of mentality most representative of
the period, but also to the man whose creative power was probably
the greatest factor of the period, to the boy who changed, as has
been said, the black and white art of the world, and to the artist,
from whose work we can most easily deduce the leading contemporary
characteristics. The art of these men was in a way abnormal, while the
men themselves who produced it were exotics; and Beardsley’s is not
only the most abnormal art of them all, but also he himself is the
greatest exotic. As Robert Ross well said as a mere comment on the
decade, he is invaluable: ‘He sums up all the delightful manias, all
that is best in modern appreciation--Greek vases, Italian primitives,
the “Hypnerotomachia,” Chinese porcelain, Japanese kakemonos,
Renaissance friezes, old French and English furniture, rare enamels,
mediæval illumination, the débonnaire masters of the eighteenth
century, the English pre-Raphaelites.’ In Beardsley, so to speak, was
inset all the influences that went to make the period what it was. And
another reason why it is so convenient to begin with him is that he
and not Oscar Wilde was in reality the great creative genius of the
age. Besides his black-and-white work all the world knows, in which, as
Father Gray says, ‘His imaginative gifts never showed a sign of fatigue
or exhaustion,’[2] Beardsley practised in other arts. While a youngster
at Brighton he promised to become a musical prodigy, and in later days
Symons describes him at a Wagner concert gripping the seat with nervous
intensity. He wrote some charming poetry, and as picturesque a fairy
tale for grown-ups as has ever been written in _Under the Hill_. In an
interview he states, probably slyly, he was at work in 1895 on a modern
novel[3]; while in 1897 he said, ‘Cazotte has inspired me to make some
small contes. I have one in hand now called _The Celestial Lover_.’ He
began once to write a play with the actor, Brandon Thomas. In his late
illustrations for Gautier’s _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ he was clearly
working towards water-colour work, while at one time he began under
Walter Sickert his only oil painting (unfinished), ‘Women regarding a
dead mouse.’ By no means least, he became a leader in English poster
work. All of this was essentially creative work. And when death came
he was very far from his artistic or intellectual maturity. So is it
not just to say that this young man who practised nearly all the forms
of art, and who was also an avid reader and student, remains the chief
creative figure of the nineties?

    [2] _Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley_, with an Introduction by
        the Rev. John Gray, 1904.

    [3] _The Sketch_, April 10, 1895.

Indeed, there is no more pleasing personality in the whole period
than this ‘apostle of the grotesque,’ as his own decade loved to hail
him. Born at Brighton in 1872 he was educated at the local Grammar
School, whose magazine, _Past and Present_, contains his earliest
work. The Kate Greenaway picture books, it is said, started him
drawing. At school he was neither keen on his work or games, but used
to be continually doing ‘little rough, humorous sketches.’ Reading
was his great refuge, and when he fell in with some volumes of the
Restoration dramatists he had already begun to find his feet in that
world of the mad lusts of Wycherley and the perfumed artificiality
of Congreve. Of school life itself he speaks bitterly and with no
regret. At sixteen he must have been particularly glad to escape from
it and enter, first of all, an architect’s office in London, and then,
the next year, the Guardian Life and Fire Assurance Office, where
his fatal illness unfortunately first began to reveal its presence.
Then came his seed-time up till 1891, when he did little but amateur
theatricals. But at length Beardsley discovered himself. Many gentlemen
have subsequently stated that they discovered him. It may be that they
discovered him for themselves, but it was Beardsley and Beardsley alone
who found himself. He certainly received, however, a large amount of
appreciative sympathy when he started to draw a series of illustrations
in his spare time for Congreve’s _Way of the World_, and Marlowe’s
_Tamburlaine_. He was without art training in the usual sense, though
he went of nights in 1892 to Professor Brown’s night school at
Westminster, but still kept to the Insurance Office stool till August,
when, after being recognised by Burne-Jones and Watts with kindness,
he left his post to live by his art. What had probably actually
permitted him to take this step was the commission given by J. M. Dent
to illustrate _Le Morte d’Arthur_. Any way he was launched out by the
first number of _The Studio_ with Joseph Pennell’s article on ‘A New
Illustrator,’ and, what was more important, with eleven of Beardsley’s
own works. At that time all his art was intuitive without much
knowledge of modern black and white. Indeed he was artistically swamped
at the moment with the glory of the pre-Raphaelites and Burne-Jones.
The _Le Morte d’Arthur_, really, was intended as a kind of rival to the
Kelmscott Press publications, and Beardsley in his border designs had
small difficulty in excelling Morris’s work.

Next year, 1893, finds these influences modified to a certain extent,
although the _Salomé_ drawings still belong to that cadaverous,
lean and hungry world of Burne-Jones, from which Beardsley has not
completely as yet rescued himself by means of Frenchmen like Constantin
Guys; but his release has well arrived in 1894 with his design ‘The
Fat Woman,’ a caricature of Mrs. Whistler. Watteau, Rops, and the
Japanese, and the thousand books he is now reading throw open at last
all the splendour of the art world to him. He lacks nothing, and he
goes forward borrowing lavishly, like Shakespeare, from any source
that suits him. Beardsley’s illustrations are generally critical
decorations, although it must never be forgotten he did attempt on
more than one occasion a series of illustration pure and simple in,
for example, his early scenes for _Manon Lescaut_, _La Dame aux
Camélias_, and _Madame Bovary_, which are not altogether successful.
He is perhaps at his best as the illustrating critic, which he is
somewhat scornfully in _Salomé_, very happily in Pope’s _The Rape of
the Lock_, and triumphantly in Aristophanes’ _Lysistrata_. It can be
said of his work, rather sweepingly no doubt, but still truthfully,
he began by decorating books with his _Le Morte d’Arthur_; he then
tried illustrating them; but wound up in criticising them by his
decorations. ‘Have you noticed,’ he once wrote to Father Gray, ‘have
you noticed that no book ever gets well illustrated once it becomes a
classic? Contemporary illustrations are the only ones of any value or
interest.’ But Beardsley was always more than a mere illustrator, for
where a learned Editor writes notes and annotations on Aristophanes,
he decorates him; where Arthur Symons would write an essay on
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, Beardsley does a number of critical designs.
It was, in fact, an age of the critical function; but Beardsley’s
criticism is of that supreme kind Oscar Wilde called ‘creative
criticism.’

At one time it was customary for critics to plead that he was only a
supreme imitator of the Japanese or somebody; but, in reality, as has
been pointed out by Robert Ross in his admirable essays on his work, he
was as intensely original as an illustrator as Sandro Botticelli was in
his designs for Dante’s Divine Comedy, or William Blake for the drama
of Job. None of them interpreted authors for dull people who could not
understand what they read. Perhaps the very best way to appreciate
his work of this kind is often to take it away from the text, and say
this is the way Beardsley saw _The Rape of the Lock_. As for all the
supposed influences he is pretended to have laboured under, it can be
at once said, he was too restless a personality to accept merely one
influence at a time. If he took from anywhere, he took from everywhere,
and the result is a great and original draughtsman, the music of whose
line has been the theme of many artists. With little stippled lines in
the background, and masses of black in the foreground, the Wagnerites
burgeon forth. Black and white in some of his drawings even tell us
the colour of some of the silks his women wear, and his white is the
plain white of the paper, not the Chinese subterfuge. A few rhythmic
pen-strokes on the virgin sheet and strangely vital people live. The
hand of Salomé may be out of drawing, the anatomy of Lysistrata wrong;
but, all the same, they live with a rich malevolent life. One has to
go back to the Greek vase-painters to find such a vivid life realised
with such simple effects. This simplicity and austerity of lines, these
few dots for the telling eyelashes, these blank spaces of untouched
paper almost insult one with the perfect ease with which everything is
accomplished. But, as a matter of fact, how different, how difficult
was the actual creation of these designs! What infinite pains, what
knowledge went to their composition! ‘He sketched everything in pencil,
at first covering the paper with apparent scrawls, constantly rubbed
out and blocked in again, until the whole surface became raddled from
pencil, indiarubber, and knife; over this incoherent surface he worked
in Chinese ink with a gold pen, often ignoring the pencil lines,
afterwards carefully removed. So every drawing was invented, built
up, and completed on the same sheet of paper.’[4] ‘But Beardsley’s
subtlety does not lie only in his technique, but also in what he
expresses thereby. Looking at his drawings, one always feels in the
presence of something alive, something containing deep human interest;
and the reason is that, while Beardsley seldom aimed at realistic
rendering of the human form, he was a superb realist in another
respect, this being that his workmanship always proved itself adequate
for the expression of the most subtle emotions, and for the embodiment
of the artist’s unique personality.’[5]

    [4] _Aubrey Beardsley_, by Robert Ross, pp. 38-39. 1909.

    [5] _The Renaissance of the Nineties_, by W. G. Blaikie
        Murdoch, p. 29. 1911.

This charming personality stood him in good stead when the Beardsley
craze burst upon London. He had literally set the Thames on fire. It
was in 1894, when he became art editor of _The Yellow Book_ (which I
discuss on another page), that the craze began in earnest. His poster
for Dr. John Todhunter’s _The Comedy of Sighs_, at the Avenue Theatre,
a three-quarter-length figure of a woman in deep blue, standing behind
a gauze curtain powdered with light green spots, electrified the dull
hoardings of London. Another poster, the female figure in a salmon-pink
dress standing opposite a second-hand bookshop, with its scheme of
black, green, orange, and salmon pink, advertising Fisher Unwin’s
_Pseudonym Library_, flashed its colours gaily amid a mass of stupid
commercial advertising. _Punch_ parodied ‘The Blessed Damozel’ with
a new version of lauds for ‘The Beardsley Girl.’ A famous tea-shop
exploited the type of female beauty.

Oscar Wilde’s play _Salomé_ was illustrated by the newly arrived young
artist. The columns of the papers and magazines spread his fame, or
more often belittled it. The new art magazine, _The Studio_, not only
raised him to the skies, but had its first cover done by him. And all
this happened to a boy who had only been gone from school six years,
and whose total age when he became the art craze of London was only
twenty-two. But he was not to stop there. After four more years of
crowded, feverish work he was to die, after having affected all the
black and white art of the world. He was to be at once accepted in
Paris. He was to raise a shoal of imitators, and to influence more or
less detrimentally dozens of good artists.

Yet all this phenomenal success was not to change his charming
personality in the least. He still remained Aubrey Beardsley, the boy
doomed to death, but still with the lovable heart of a boy who wanted
to enjoy life.

Max Beerbohm has given us a wonderful personal record of his friend,
in which he says: ‘For him, as for the schoolboy whose holidays are
near their close, every hour--every minute, even--had its value. His
drawings, his compositions in prose and in verse, his reading--these
things were not enough to satisfy his strenuous demands on life. He was
an accomplished musician, he was a great frequenter of concerts, and
seldom when he was in London did he miss a “Wagner night” at Covent
Garden. He loved dining-out, and, in fact, gaiety of any kind....
He was always most content where there was the greatest noise and
bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light.’
In the Domino Room of the Café Royal in London; outside the Brighton
Pavilion, whose architecture haunted him all his life, Beardsley was
at home and happy. ‘I am really happy,’ he writes, ‘in Paris.’ And it
was Beardsley’s chief preoccupation to communicate in his drawings the
surprise and delight which this visible world afforded him--a world
of strange demi-mondaines and eupeptic stockbrokers, of odd social
parasites and gullible idiots. He always had an engaging smile that was
delightful for friends and strangers; while he was big enough, Robert
Ross chronicles, to make friends and remain friends with many for whom
his art was totally unintelligible.

After he vacated _The Yellow Book_ art editorship, and _The Savoy_ had
been issued, Leonard Smithers became the real Beardsley publisher.
There were no dead-locks with him as to nude Amors, for Smithers had
a courage of his own--a courage great enough to issue _The Ballad of
Reading Gaol_ when Wilde was under his cloud, and no other publisher
would look at it. It was Smithers who issued _The Savoy_, the two
books of _Fifty Drawings_, _The Rape of the Lock_, _The Pierrot of the
Minute_, the designs for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, and among others
the eight ‘Lysistrata’ and the four ‘Juvenal’ drawings. For any one to
study all this variety and rapid growth to an astounding maturity of
conception and execution no better volumes can be recommended than _A
Book of Fifty Drawings_ (1897), and _A Second Book of Fifty Drawings_
(1899). The former book is much the better of the two, for the latter
is a book of scraps to a large extent. Indeed, in the first book all
the drawings were fortunately selected by both Beardsley himself and
Smithers. The artist allowed no drawing to appear in it with which he
was at all dissatisfied. It includes his favourite, ‘The Ascension of
St. Rose of Lima’; but one cannot help thinking that there have crept
into it far too many of his immature _Le Morte d’Arthur_ series. For
when this volume was issued he had completely discarded that painful
method of design. Indeed, the _Salomé_ decorations (1894) had bridged
this brief spell of his puerility to the rich fulfilment of _The Rape
of the Lock_ (1896). Whistler at once saw this difference, for, it is
on record, when Beardsley first showed these last designs to him he
‘looked at them first indifferently, then with interest, then with
delight. And then he said slowly, “Aubrey, I have made a very great
mistake, you are a very great artist.” And the boy burst out crying.
All Whistler could say, when he could say anything, was, “I mean it--I
mean it.”’

In reality one can of course now see signs of the real artist even in
the _Le Morte d’Arthur_ series. For example, the true Beardsley type
of woman appears in the design entitled ‘How Queen Guenever made her a
Nun.’ These Beardsley women, Wilde hinted, were first invented by the
artist and then copied by nature. They have, indeed, been the cause
of much fine writing, one androgynist describing them as the fruit of
a French bagnio and a Chinese visitor. As Pierre Caume demanded of
Félicien Rops we are moved to ask of Beardsley:

    Quels éclairs ont nimbé tes fillettes pâlies?
    Quel stupre assez pervers, quel amour devasté
    Met des reflets d’absinthe en leurs melancolies?

They belong to the same world as the women of Toulouse Lautrec, Rops,
Odélon Redon, Bayros, and Rassenfosse--the type known as _la loupeuse
insatiable et cupide_. They move and have their being in French erotica
and novels like _La Faustine_.

Beardsley had now (1896) reached his best period with _The Rape of the
Lock_ and _The Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes, and of the two the palm
should be awarded to the eight designs of the latter work. No one has
yet dared to say that these are probably his masterpieces; but some
day, when the kinship between Beardsley and those old Greek Masters
who designed their exquisite vases and wine cups is established, this
truism may also come to light. It is unlikely, however, to become
revealed until Aristophanes himself is fully translated in the vulgar
tongue, for not even the most generous Editor in his monumental edition
has essayed that impertinence to Mrs. Grundy. The illustrations or
rather critical decorations of Beardsley are also not likely to become
generally circulated to all because of their frankness. For phallism
is purely pornographic if it has nothing to do with your subject. But
unfortunately it is a considerable factor in the _Lysistrata_, as every
scholar knows. Beardsley himself in his letters lays considerable
emphasis on the fact that he was illustrating Aristophanes and not
Donnay’s French version of the same. And never was he more cynical
or more incisive; never did he use fewer lines with more effect;
never was love and its depravities more scathingly or so disdainfully
ridiculed. In all there were eight drawings issued with a variant of
the third, though I have reason to believe there was also a ninth, and
even this, his worst erotic drawing, has nothing to do with obscenity.
He had learned too much from the men who designed the old Hellenic
pottery to be obscene. He was frank as Chaucer is frank, not vicious
as Aretino delighted to be, or indecent like the English artists
Rowlandson and James Gillray were in some of their fantasies. Virgil
dying wanted to destroy his Æneids, and Beardsley _in articulo mortis_
wrote ‘to destroy all copies of _Lysistrata_ and bawdy drawings.’ Yet
he has nothing to fear from the genuine issue of those drawings that
remain, or from the numberless pirated copies that have since exuded
mysteriously into places like Charing Cross Road. Even Fuchs in his
_Erotische Kunst_ has to say: ‘Beardsley is specially to be noticed
for the refinement of his conceptions, his ultra-modern culture, his
taste, his sense of proportion, his maturity of execution. No harsh
or discordant notes, no violent tones. On the contrary, a wheedling
finesse. In some respects he is the “maladive” beauty of our time
incarnate.’ Beardsley, indeed, never descended to the horrors of an
Alfred Kubin or to the tone of certain of Bayros’s designs. He was
neither immoral nor moral, but unmoral like Rassenfosse or any one else
who has not a fixed ethical theory to teach. In his Juvenal drawings
(1897), his five Lucian sketches (1894), and the _Lysistrata_ (1896)
he went straight to the great gifts of classical literature, and in
touching classical things he took on the ancient outlook via, I
believe, those wonderful Greek vase designers[6] which he, so assiduous
a haunter of the British Museum, must have not only seen, but revelled
in. But of these the best and freest are the _Lysistrata_ conceptions;
and to enjoy these one needs an initiation that is not every man’s to
receive.

    [6] Ross says in his _Aubrey Beardsley_, p. 45, one of the
        events which contributed ‘to give Beardsley a fresh impetus
        and stimulate his method of expression’ about the _Salomé_
        time was ‘a series of visits to the collection of Greek
        vases in the British Museum (prompted by an essay of Mr.
        D. S. MacColl).’

We are, however, more interested here with the literary side of his
work, which divides itself into poetry and prose. As a poet Beardsley
has been accused of over-cleverness. Whatever that criticism means I do
not know. Probably it implies some similar reflection to the statement
that a dandy is over-dressed. I cannot, however, discover any such
affectation in, for example, that charming poem, _The Three Musicians_,
which recounts how the soprano ‘lightly frocked,’ the slim boy who dies
‘for réclame and recall at Paris,’ and the Polish pianist, pleased with
their thoughts, their breakfast, and the summer day, wend their way
‘along the path that skirts the wood’:

        The Polish genius lags behind,
          And, with some poppies in his hand,
        Picks out the strings and wood and wind
          Of an imaginary band.
    Enchanted that for once his men obey his beat and understand.

        The charming cantatrice reclines
          And rests a moment where she sees
        Her château’s roof that hotly shines
          Amid the dusky summer trees,
    And fans herself, half shuts her eyes, and smooths the frock about
                  her knees.

        The gracious boy is at her feet,
          And weighs his courage with his chance;
        His fears soon melt in noonday heat.
          The tourist gives a furious glance,
    Red as his guide-book, moves on, and offers up a prayer for France.

In _The Ballad of a Barber_, again, there is nothing but a trill of
song in limpid verse. How Carrousel, the barber of Meridian Street,
who could ‘curl wit into the dullest face,’ became _fou_ of the
thirteen-year-old King’s daughter, so that

    His fingers lost their cunning quite,
    His ivory combs obeyed no more;

is a typical ninety _jeu d’esprit_, only much better done than the
average one. With the fewest words Beardsley can sketch a scene or
character, as he used the fewest of lines in his drawings. This is
even better exemplified in his prose. Time and again a single sentence
of _Under the Hill_ gives us a complete picture:

  Sporion was a tall, depraved young man, with a slight stoop, a
  troubled walk, an oval, impassible face, with its olive skin drawn
  lightly over the bone, strong, scarlet lips, long Japanese eyes,
  and a great gilt toupet.

We seem to gaze with the Abbé Fanfreluche at the prints on his bedroom
wall:

  Within the delicate curved frames lived the corrupt and gracious
  creatures of Dorat and his school, slender children in masque
  and domino, smiling horribly, exquisite lechers leaning over
  the shoulders of smooth, doll-like girls, and doing nothing in
  particular, terrible little Pierrots posing as lady lovers and
  pointing at something outside the picture, and unearthly fops and
  huge, bird-like women mingling in some rococo room.

One rubs one’s eyes. Are these not the drawings Franz von Bayros of
Vienna realised later? But Beardsley’s output of both prose and verse
is actually so limited that one cannot compare his double art work to
that of an artist like Rossetti. When all is said and done, his great
literary work is the unfinished ‘fairy’ tale of _Under the Hill_. In
its complete form it belongs to the class of works like Casanova’s
_Mémoires_, the _Reigen_ of Schnitzler, the novels of Restif de
la Bretonne, and some of the _Thousand and One Nights_. It is an
enchanting book in the same way as _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ or _Le Roi
Pausole_ are enchanting books. In its rococo style it surpasses the
best rhythms of Wilde, who only succeeds in cataloguing long lists of
beautiful things, while Aubrey Beardsley suggests more than he says
in the true impressionist way of all the writers of the nineties.
Indeed, the purple patches of Beardsley are as rich in fine phrases
as any paragraphs of the period--as _faisandée_ as any French writer
has written. Elizabethan euphuists, Restoration conceit-makers, later
Latins with all the rich byzantium _floræ_ of brains like Apuleius,
can make as finely-sounding phrases, but I doubt whether they can pack
away in them as rich a pictorial glamour as many of the writers of the
nineties, and Beardsley amongst them, achieved. We have Helen in ‘a
flutter of frilled things’ at ‘taper-time’ before her mirror displaying
her neck and shoulders ‘so wonderfully drawn,’ and her ‘little
malicious breasts ... full of the irritation of loveliness that can
never be entirely comprehended, or ever enjoyed to the utmost.’ Whole
scenes of the book are unrolled before us like priceless tapestries.
The ‘_ombre_ gateway of the mysterious hill’ stands before us:

  The place where he stood waved drowsily with strange flowers, heavy
  with perfume, dripping with odours. Gloomy and nameless weeds not
  to be found in Mentzelius. Huge moths, so richly winged they must
  have banqueted upon tapestries and royal stuffs, slept on the
  pillars that flanked either side of the gateway, and the eyes of
  all the moths remained open and were burning and bursting with a
  mesh of veins. The pillars were fashioned in some pale stone, and
  rose up like hymns in the praise of pleasure, for from cap to base
  each one was carved with loving sculptures....

To read _The Toilet of Helen_, with its faint echoes perhaps of Max
Beerbohm’s ‘Toilet of Sabina’ in _The Perversion of Rouge_, is to be
lured on by the sound of the sentences:

  Before a toilet-table that shone like the altar of Nôtre Dame des
  Victoires, Helen was seated in a little dressing-gown of black
  and heliotrope. The Coiffeur Cosmé was caring for her scented
  chevelure, and with tiny silver tongs, warm from the caresses
  of the flame, made delicious intelligent curls that fell as
  lightly as a breath about her forehead and over her eyebrows, and
  clustered like tendrils round her neck. Her three favourite girls,
  Pappelarde, Blanchemains, and Loureyne, waited immediately upon her
  with perfume and powder in delicate flaçons and frail cassolettes,
  and held in porcelain jars the ravishing paints prepared by
  Châteline for those cheeks and lips which had grown a little pale
  with anguish of exile. Her three favourite boys, Claud, Clair, and
  Sarrasins, stood amorously about with salver, fan, and napkin.
  Millamant held a slight tray of slippers, Minette some tender
  gloves, La Popelinière--mistress of the robes--was ready with a
  frock of yellow and yellow. La Zambinella bore the jewels, Florizel
  some flowers, Amadour a box of various pins, and Vadius a box of
  sweets. Her doves, ever in attendance, walked about the room that
  was panelled with the gallant paintings of Jean Baptiste Dorat, and
  some dwarfs and doubtful creatures sat here and there lolling out
  their tongues, pinching each other, and behaving oddly enough.

There you have a Beardsley drawing transfused into words. The same is
true of his description of the woods of Auffray. The same is true of
the wonderful supper served on the terrace to Helen and her guests amid
the gardens. To find such another supper in literature one has to turn
to some French author, or, better still, to the ‘Cena Trimalchionis’
of Petronius himself. From this it will be seen that Beardsley’s
literary work,[7] like his black-and-white, though the embodiment of
the spirit of his age, is also of the noble order of the highest things
in art. It is for this reason, indeed, that I have selected Beardsley
as the centre-piece of this brief sketch of a movement that is dead
and gone. He was the incarnation of the spirit of the age; but, when
the fall of Wilde killed the age and the Boer War buried it, neither
of these things disturbed or changed the magic spell of his art. His
age may die, but he remains. Even now he has outlived the fad period,
while many of the books that were written at that date by others and
decorated by him are only valuable to-day because of his frontispiece
or wrapper. One has not forgotten those wrappers, for as one will not
forget the work of William Blake, one will not forget that of Aubrey
Beardsley. His enthusiasts treasure the smallest fragment.

    [7] _In The Influence of Baudelaire in France and England_,
        by G. Turquet-Milnes, pp. 277-280 (1913), there is an
        interesting study of his Baudelairism.




II


Like all artistic and literary movements this one had, in the shape
of various periodicals, its manifestoes. In fact, it was a period
particularly rich in this kind of fruit. In _The Hobby Horse_ the
voices of the new spirit were mingled for the first time with those
of the past. There were, among other magazines, _The Rose Leaf_, _The
Chameleon_, _The Spirit Lamp_, _The Pageant_, _The Evergreen_, _The
Parade_, _The Quarto_, _The Dome_, _The Chord_, while among the popular
papers _The Idler_, _To-Day_, and _Pick-me-Up_ produced the work of men
like Edgar Wilson and S. H. Sime; and, further, _The Butterfly_, _The
Poster_, and _The Studio_ must be carefully studied for the tendencies
of the time. But the two principal organs of the movement were, beyond
all doubt, _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_. Round them, as around the
shrines of old beside the Ægean, gather the faithful and the chosen. In
the other publications there was too much jostling with the profane,
but here ‘_Procul profani_.’ It will be well, therefore, although it
has been done more or less before, to study these two magazines in some
detail, and also their literary editors who gathered the clan together.
In both cases Beardsley was the art editor, though he was ‘fired,’ to
put it plainly, from _The Yellow Book_ after its fourth number. His
influence, therefore, permeated both. In fact, he made them both works
of value for the coming generations, and particularly in the case of
_The Savoy_ he bore the burden of the day and saved the monthly from
fatuity. When he leaves _The Yellow Book_ it will be found to be never
the same. When he is too ill to be active in _The Savoy_ it becomes
very small beer. So interwoven with the lives and values of these
publications is the genius of Beardsley that one cannot speak of the
one without referring to the other. Of Beardsley himself I have already
spoken, so I propose to confine myself strictly to the art editor,
while dealing first with _The Yellow Book_ and its literary editor,
Henry Harland, and then with _The Savoy_ and Mr. Arthur Symons.

The publisher, Mr. John Lane, says[8] this much-discussed _Yellow Book_
was founded one morning during half-an-hour’s chat over cigarettes,
at the Hogarth Club, by himself, Beardsley, and Henry Harland. While
he states that ‘Mr. Harland had the faculty of getting the best from
his contributors,’ the publisher goes on to add: ‘Beardsley’s defect as
art editor was youth. He would not take himself seriously; as an editor
and draughtsman he was almost a practical joker, for one had, so to
speak, to place his drawings under a microscope and look at them upside
down. This tendency, on the eve of the production of Volume V., during
my first visit to the United States, rendered it necessary to omit his
work from that volume.’ Looking back on this, all that one can say now
is that although Beardsley may have been trying, after all, he and not
the publisher was _The Yellow Book_, and with his departure the spirit
of the age slowly volatilised from the work until it deteriorated into
a kind of dull keepsake of the Bodley Head. There were thirteen numbers
in all, and Beardsley actually art-edited the first four. In the
charming prospectus for the fifth volume he is still described as art
editor, and four Beardsleys were to have appeared in it: ‘Frontispiece
to the Chopin Nocturnes,’ ‘Atalanta,’ ‘Black Coffee,’ and the portrait
of Miss Letty Lind in ‘An Artist’s Model.’ However, the break came,
and Beardsley had no further connection, unfortunately, with the fifth
volume.

    [8] In his pamphlet, _Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book_, p.
        1. 1903.

The first number, as in the case of so many similar periodicals, was
brilliant. The standard set was too high, indeed, to last, and to the
staid English literary press of the time it was something of a seven
days’ wonder. _The Times_ described its note as a ‘combination of
English rowdyism and French lubricity.’ _The Westminster Gazette_ asked
for a ‘short Act of Parliament to make this kind of thing illegal.’
Above all, the whole rabble descends howling on the art editor. It is
Beardsley that annoys them, proving how he stands out at once beyond
his comrades. Against the literary editor, Henry Harland, nothing is
said; but the press are full of the offences of one Beardsley.

As Mr. J. M. Kennedy, in his _English Literature, 1880-1905_, has
devoted an admirable, if somewhat scornful, chapter to the contents of
_The Yellow Book_, it is to Henry Harland, who seems to have merited
all the charming things said about him, that I would now direct
attention.

A delicate valetudinarian always in search of health, he was born at
Petrograd in March, 1861. He commenced life in the surrogate of New
York State, whither his parents removed, writing in his spare time in
the eighties, under the _nom-de-plume_ of Sidney Luska, sketches of
American Jewish life. Like Theodore Peters, Whistler, and Henry James,
he could not, however, resist the call of the Old World, and he was
at journalistic work in London when he was made editor of _The Yellow
Book_. Besides his editorial duties he was a regular contributor, not
only writing the series of notes signed ‘The Yellow Dwarf,’ but also
turning out a number of short stories. But London was only to be a
haven of brief sojourn for this writer, whose health sent him south
to Italy. Perhaps his best work in the nineties was his short story
_Mademoiselle Miss_, while later in Italy he opened up a new vein of
dainty comedy fiction in almost rose-leaf prose with _The Cardinal’s
Snuff-Box_ (1900), whose happy delicacy of thought and style he never
equalled again, but was always essaying to repeat until death carried
him off in Italy. Although, therefore, sitting in the editorial chair
at the Bodley Head, Harland can only be said to have been a bird of
passage in the nineties, and not one of its pillars like Arthur Symons
of _The Savoy_.

This later publication was started as a rival to _The Yellow Book_
soon after Beardsley gave up the art-editing of the earlier periodical.
In 1895, when ‘Symons and Dowson, Beardsley and Conder, were all
together on a holiday at Dieppe ... it was there, in a cabaret Mr.
Sickert has repeatedly painted, that _The Savoy_ was originated.’[9] It
was issued by Leonard Smithers, the most extraordinary publisher, in
some respects, of the nineties, a kind of modern Cellini, who produced
some wonderfully finely printed books, and was himself just as much a
part of the movement as any of its numerous writers. Indeed, no survey
of the period can be complete without a brief consideration of this man.

    [9] W. G. Blaikie Murdoch’s _Renaissance of the Nineties_, p.
        21. 1911.

But to return to _The Savoy_, it can be aptly described as the
fine flower of the publications of the age. It is true _The Yellow
Book_ outlived it, but never did the gospel of the times flourish
so exceedingly as in its pages. Here we see that violent love for a
strangeness of proportion in art that was the keynote of the age.
Here the abnormal, the bizarre, found their true home, and poetry is
the pursuit of the unattainable by the exotic. It will, therefore,
not perhaps be out of place before dealing with its literary editor,
Mr. Arthur Symons, to discuss the eight numbers that appeared. Number
one (printed by H. S. Nichols) appeared as a quarterly in boards in
January, 1896. An editorial note by Arthur Symons, which originally
appeared as a prospectus, hoped that _The Savoy_ would prove ‘a
periodical of an exclusively literary and artistic kind.... All we
ask from our contributors is good work, and good work is all we offer
our readers.... We have not invented a new point of view. We are not
Realists, or Romanticists, or Decadents. For us, all art is good
which is good art.’ The contents of the number included a typical
Shaw article, full, like all of his work, of the obvious in the terms
of the scandalous; some short stories by Wedmore, Dowson, Rudolf
Dircks, Humphrey James, and Yeats. The other articles were hardly very
original; but the contributions of Beardsley dwarf everything else. He
towers out above all else with his illustrations, his poem _The Three
Musicians_, and the beginning of his romantic story _Under the Hill_.

Number two (April, 1896, printed by the Chiswick Press) had another
editorial note courageously thanking the critics of the Press for
their reception of the first number, which ‘has been none the less
flattering because it has been for the most part unfavourable.’ The
contents included poems and stories by Symons, Dowson, and Yeats, while
John Gray and Selwyn Image have poems and Wedmore a story. Beardsley
continues his romance, and lifts the number out of the rut with his
Wagneresque designs. Max Beerbohm caricatures him, and Shannon and
Rothenstein are represented. Among articles there is a series on
Verlaine; and Vincent O’Sullivan, in a paper ‘On the Kind of Fiction
called Morbid,’ sounds a note of the group with his conclusion: ‘Let
us cling by all means to our George Meredith, our Henry James ...
but then let us try, if we cannot be towards others, unlike these,
if not encouraging, at the least not actively hostile and harassing,
when they go out in the black night to follow their own sullen
will-o’-the-wisps.’ He is also to be thanked for registering the too
little known name of the American, Francis Saltus.

Number three (July, 1896) appeared in paper covers, and _The Savoy_
becomes a monthly instead of a quarterly from now on. There is a
promise, unfulfilled, of the serial publication of George Moore’s new
novel, _Evelyn Innes_. Yeats commences three articles on _William
Blake and his Illustrations to the ‘Divine Comedy_,’ and Hubert
Crackanthorpe contributes one of his best short stories. Owing to
illness Beardsley’s novel stops publication, but his _Ballad of a
Barber_ relieves the monotony of some dull stuff by the smaller men.
The reproductions of Blake’s illustrations are made to fill the art gap
of Beardsley, who has only two black-and-whites in. The publication of
his novel in book form is promised when the artist is well enough.

Number four (August, 1896) at once reveals the effect of Beardsley’s
inactivity through illness, and shows that Beardsley is _The Savoy_,
and all else but leather and prunella. The number, however, is saved by
a story of Dowson, _The Dying of Francis Donne_, and on the art side a
frontispiece for Balzac’s _La Fille aux Yeux d’Or_, by Charles Conder,
is interesting.

Number five (September, 1896) is for some unaccountable reason the
hardest number to procure. Besides the cover and title-page it
contains only one Beardsley, _The Woman in White_, but the cover is an
exceptionally beautiful Beardsley, the two figures in the park holding
a _colloque sentimental_ seem to have stepped out of the pages of
Verlaine’s poem. Theodore Wratislaw and Ernest Rhys contribute the
stories. Dowson, Yeats, and the Canadian, Bliss Carman, contribute the
best of the poetry.

Number six (October, 1896), has a very poor art side, with the
exception of Beardsley’s familiar _The Death of Pierrot_. The literary
contents consists chiefly of the editor. One notices the periodical is
dying. The only unique feature is a story, _The Idiots_, by Conrad, and
Dowson is still faithful with a poem.

Number seven (November, 1896) announces in a leaflet (dated October)
the death of _The Savoy_ in the next number. The editorial note states
that the periodical ‘has, in the main, conquered the prejudices of the
press ... it has not conquered the general public, and, without the
florins of the general public, no magazine ... can expect to pay its
way.’ In this number Beardsley returns to attempt to salve it with
his remarkable translation of Catullus: Carmen CI., and illustration
thereto. Yeats and Dowson contribute poems and Beardsley his Tristan
and Isolde drawing.

Number eight (December, 1896) completes the issue. The whole of the
literary contents is by the Editor and the art contents by Beardsley
himself: in all fourteen drawings. By way of epilogue, Symons says in
their next venture, which is to appear twice a year, ‘that they are
going to make no attempt to be popular.’ Unfortunately for English
periodicals it was a venture never essayed.

That _The Savoy_ is far truer to the period than _The Yellow Book_ was
perhaps in no small way due to the fact that Mr. Arthur Symons was its
literary editor. For he at any rate in his strenuous search for an
æsthetical solution for art and life, in his assiduous exploring in
the Latin literatures for richer colours and stranger sensations--he,
at any rate, has not only been the child of his time, but in some ways
the father of it. His sincere love of art is beyond all question,
and it has sent him into many strange byways. He has praised in
purple prose the bird-like motions and flower-like colours of the
ballet; he has taken us with him to Spanish music-halls and Sevillian
Churches; he has garnered up carefully in English the myths of the
symbolists and translated for us the enigmas of Mallarmé--_Herodias_,
the blood and roses of D’Annunzio’s plays and the throbbing violins
of Verlaine’s muse; he has taken us to continental cities, and with
him we have heard Pachmann playing and seen the enchantments of the
divine Duse. All the cults of the Seven Arts has this Admirable
Crichton of Æstheticism discussed. He has worked towards a theory of
æsthetics. He has written charmingly (if somewhat temperamentally)
of his comrades like Beardsley, Crackanthorpe and Dowson. He was
a leader in the campaign of the early nineties, and his work will
always be the guiding hand for those who come after him and who wish
to speak of this movement. As early as 1893 he was writing of it as
‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ in _Harper’s_, when he speaks of
the most representative work of the period: ‘After a fashion it is no
doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that mark the end of great
periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence;
an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an
over-subtilising refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral
perversity.’ Perhaps, in a way, it is an immense pity that Symons will
become the universal guide to the period, for it must be conceded
that he has always been prone to find perversity in anything, as Sir
Thomas Browne was haunted with quincunxes. But of the subtilty of his
judgments and of the charming prose in which he labours to express
them there can be no question. Listen, for example, when he speaks of
the aim of decadence: ‘To fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of
things; to fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the
voice of a human soul; that is the ideal of decadence.’ How beautifully
it is said, so that one almost forgets how dangerous it is. Very aptly
did Blaikie Murdoch say the Mantle of Pater fell on him. It is the same
murmured litany of beautiful prose. Indeed Arthur Symons is the supreme
type of _belles lettrist_. Just as in the early nineties he prided
himself on the smell of patchouli about his verse, so he alone remains
to-day with the old familiar scent about his writings of a period dead
and gone which exacts rightfully our highest respect. As one owes him
a debt of homage for his fine faithfulness to art, so one thinks of
him, as he himself has written of Pater, as a ‘personality withdrawn
from action, which it despises or dreads, solitary with its ideals, in
the circle of its “exquisite moments” in the Palace of Art, where it
is never quite at rest.’ How true that last phrase is, ‘never quite at
rest,’ of the author. For to him Art is an escape--the supreme escape
from life.

Arthur Symons began with a study on Browning and the volume _Days
and Nights_ when the eighties were still feeling their way towards
the nineties. It was in _Silhouettes_ (1892) and _London Nights_
(1895) that he appeared as perhaps the most _outré_ member of the new
movement. His perfection of technique in endeavouring to catch the
fleeting impression by limiting it, never cataloguing it, marks the
difference of his verse and that of the secession from much of the
school of the eighties’ definite listing of facts. Symons, indeed,
is not only a poet impressionist, but also a critic impressionist in
his critical works like _Studies in Two Literatures_, _The Symbolist
Movement in Literature_, and so on. This impressionism, whilst it makes
his verse so intangible and delicate, also endows his appreciations
with a certain all-pervading subtlety. It is as though a poet had begun
to see with the Monet vision his own poems. It is as though a man
comes away with an impression and is content with that impression on
which to base his judgment. It is New Year’s Eve: the poet records his
impression of the night:

    We heard the bells of midnight burying the year.
      Then the night poured its silent waters over us.
      And then in the vague darkness faint and tremulous,
    Time paused; then the night filled with sound; morning was here.

The poet is at the Alhambra or Empire Ballet: like an impressionist
picture a poem disengages the last fine shade of the scene. He wanders
at twilight in autumn through the mist-enfolded lanes:

    Night creeps across the darkening vale;
      On the horizon tree by tree
    Fades into shadowy skies as pale,
      As moonlight on a shadowy sea.

The vision remains like an etching. The poet is on the seashore at
sunset:

    The sea lies quietest beneath
      The after-sunset flush,
    That leaves upon the heaped gray clouds
      The grape’s faint purple blush.

It lingers like a water-colour in one’s memory. He sees a girl at
a restaurant and his poem is at once an impression as vivid as a
painter’s work. In a phrase he can cage a mood, in a quatrain a scene.
Where does this ability come from? The answer is, perhaps, given by the
one name Verlaine, whose genius Mr. Symons has done so much to hail.

In the gay days of the early nineties before black tragedy had clouded
the heavens there was no more daring secessionist from the tedious old
ways than the editor of _The Savoy_. To those days, like Dowson’s lover
of Cynara, he has ‘been faithful in his fashion.’ If the interest
is now not so vivid in his work it is because the centre of art has
shifted. If Mr. Symons has not shifted his centre too, but remained
faithful to the old dead Gods, it is no crime. It only means that we,
when we wish to see him as one of the figures of his group, must shut
up his volumes of criticism, forget his views on Toulouse Lautrec and
Gerard Nerval, and William Blake, put aside his later verses and his
widow’s cruse of writer’s recollections, and turn with assurance to the
débonnaire poet of _Silhouettes_ and _London Nights_.

It has been said that Mr. Symons stands for ‘a Pagan revolt against
Puritanism.’ It is argued, because he was nurtured in nonconformity,
art came to him with something of the hysteria a revelation comes to a
revivalist meeting. This may be true, but I cannot help thinking that
no writer amid all these French influences which he had so eagerly
sought out yet remains so typical of the English spirit. It may be
heresy, but I always see in mind the gaiety of a Nice carnival in a
certain drawing with one solid, solemn face surveying the scene over a
starched front. Beneath it is written: ‘Find the Englishman.’

Like the American critic, James Huneker, Mr. Arthur Symons has also
occasionally written short imaginative prose studies. One thinks, too,
in this respect of Walter Pater’s wonderful _Imaginary Portraits_ and
particularly his glorious study of Watteau, and I rather think that
this success must have moved the spirit of the two later critics to a
noble rivalry. The best, indeed, of Mr. Symons’s _Spiritual Adventures_
are probably those studies which are mostly attached to some theme
of art which has been after all the all-engrossing motive of this
delightful critic’s life. _An Autumn City_ and _The Death of Peter
Waydelin_: the first, a sensitive’s great love for Arles, whither he
brings his unresponsive bride; the other, a study quaintly suggestive
of a certain painter’s life: both of these sketches are unquestionably
more moving than Mr. Symons’s studies of nonconformists quivering at
the thought of hell-fire. To them one might add, perhaps, _Esther
Kahn_, the history of the psychological development of an actress after
the style of _La Faustine_.

Mr. Symons’s favourite word is ‘escape’; his favourite phrase ‘escape
from life.’ Now the one and now the other reappear continually in all
kinds of connections. Of John Addington Symonds, for example, he
writes: ‘All his work was in part an escape, an escape from himself.’
Of Ernest Dowson’s indulgence in the squalid debaucheries of the
Brussels kermesse he writes: ‘It was his own way of escape from life.’
Passages of like tenor abound in his writings; and, in one of his
papers on _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, he explains his
meaning more precisely:

  Our only chance, in this world, of a complete happiness, lies in
  the measure of our success in shutting the eyes of the mind, and
  deadening its sense of hearing, and dulling the keenness of its
  apprehension of the unknown.... As the present passes from us,
  hardly to be enjoyed except as memory or as hope, and only with
  an at best partial recognition of the uncertainty or inutility
  of both, it is with a kind of terror that we wake up, every now
  and then, to the whole knowledge of our ignorance, and to some
  perception of where it is leading us. To live through a single day
  with that overpowering consciousness of our real position, which,
  in the moments in which alone it mercifully comes, is like blinding
  light or the thrust of a flaming sword, would drive any man out of
  his senses.... And so there is a great silent conspiracy between
  us to forget death; all our lives are spent in busily forgetting
  death. That is why we are so active about so many things which
  we know to be unimportant, why we are so afraid of solitude, and
  so thankful for the company of our fellow creatures. Allowing
  ourselves for the most part to be vaguely conscious of that great
  suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile,
  annihilating reality, in many dreams, in religion, passion, art;
  each a forgetfulness, each a symbol of creation.... Each is a kind
  of sublime selfishness, the saint, the lover, and the artist having
  each an incommunicable ecstasy which he esteems as his ultimate
  attainment; however, in his lower moments, he may serve God in
  action, or do the will of his mistress, or minister to men by
  showing them a little beauty. But it is before all things an escape.

Mr. Symons finds in his system of æsthetics an escape from Methodism
and the Calvinistic threatenings of his childhood. He wishes to escape
‘hell.’ In the story of _Seaward Lackland_ there is a preacher whom
Methodism drove to madness. Mr. Symons has turned to Art so that he may
not feel the eternal flames taking hold of him.




III


One endeavours to remember some one or two outstanding novels
written by any one of the writers of this group. It must be at once
admitted, one fails to recall a great novel. It is true that the great
Victorians, Meredith and Hardy, were hard at work at this time; but,
then, neither of these writers belongs to this movement. Then there was
Kipling, Stevenson, Barrie, and George Moore. With the exception of the
last, we have little to do with these here. They do not come within the
scope of the present study.

None of the men of the nineties (as I have defined them) produced
a great novel. It would be well, however, to give at once some
connotation for so loose a term as ‘a great novel.’ Let us then say
that a good English novel is not necessarily a great novel; nor, for
that matter, is a good Russian novel necessarily a great novel. A great
novel is a work of fiction that has entered into the realm of universal
literature in the same way as the dramas of Sophocles and Shakespeare
and Molière have entered that glorious demesne. As a matter of fact,
one can remember, I think in most cases, very few English novels that
are great in this sense; while there are many more French and Russian
works that have an undeniable right to this title. Therefore it is not,
perhaps, so damaging a criticism of the period as it might at first
sight appear to say it has produced no great novel.

But in so far as English fiction alone is concerned, it cannot be said
that the men of the nineties produced work of a very high order in this
form. They do not seem to have had the staying power demanded in such
artistic production. The short poem, the short story, the small black
and white drawing, the one act play--in fact, any form of art that just
displays the climacteric moment and discards the rest pleased them.
It was, as John Davidson said, an age of Bovril. While the novel, it
must be admitted, needs either a profusion of ideas, as in the case
of the Russians, or of genitals, as in the case of the French. But
the art of the nineties was essentially an expression of moods--and
moods, after all, are such evanescent brief conditions. So it is not
unnatural that the fruition of the novel was not rich among these
writers. George Gissing and George Moore, in a way their forebears (I
have in mind more particularly the latter), spread a taste for such
works. Indeed, in his _Confessions of a Young Man_, George Moore may
be said to have predicted the masculine type of the nineties. Gissing
in 1891 was to daunt some with his _New Grub Street_, while Henry
James was to inspire enthusiasm in a few like Hubert Crackanthorpe.
But naturally in the way of stimulus the main goad was France, which
was at that date phenomenally rich in practitioners of the art of the
novel. The Vizetelly Zolas, Mr. George Moore personally conducting the
novels of certain of the French novelists over the Channel, the desire
to smash the fetters of Victorian fiction which Thomas Hardy was to
accomplish, were all inspiring sources which were, however, singularly
unfruitful. Walter Pater long before in his academic romance _Marius_,
which they had all read eagerly, wrote charmingly of a field that
would appeal to them when he said: ‘Life in modern London ... is stuff
sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth to build his “palace
of art” of.’ But instead of taking the recommendation of this high
priest they read _Dorian Gray_, which Wilde would never have written if
Huysmans had not first written _A Rebours_. The young men of Henley,
it must be confessed, did far finer work than Richard Le Gallienne’s
watery Wildism in _The Quest of the Golden Girl_. George Moore wrote a
masterpiece in _Evelyn Innes_, but Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore in _A
Comedy of Masks_ and _Adrian Rome_ did not retaliate. Leonard Merrick,
who started publishing in the eighties, did not publish his best work
till the nineties were dead and gone; while his best Bohemian Paris
stories may owe as much to Du Maurier’s _Trilby_ (1894) as they do to
Henri Murger. Henry Harland, as I have already said, only struck his
vein of comedy fiction when the Boer War had finished the movement.
George Gissing and Arthur Morrison belong, with Frank Harris, to the
pugilistic school of Henley’s young men, while Richard Whiteing, who
turned from journalism to write _No. 5 John Street_ (1899), was too
old a man and too late with his book to belong to the nineties’ group.
Arthur Machen, in those days, belonged to the short story writers with
Hubert Crackanthorpe, who was the great imaginative prose writer of
the group. The sailor, Joseph Conrad, the Australian Louis Becke, the
Canadian, C. G. D. Roberts, were working out their own salvation, and
had nothing to do with the Rhymers’ Club. The strong creative brain of
Aubrey Beardsley, indeed, in his unfinished picaresque romance, _Under
the Hill_, which I have already mentioned, produced something new, but
it was not a novel; while it is John Davidson’s poetry that counts, not
his novels, which remain unread nowadays on the shelf.

Indeed, if the name of a good English novel by any one of them is
demanded, it will be singularly difficult to suggest a satisfactory
title. One can even go further, and state that they did not even have
one amongst them who has handed on to us a vivid picture of their own
lives in the form of fiction. Dowson, indeed, in the dock life of his
books may have autobiographical touches, but they are purely personal.
What I mean is, that there was no one standing by to give us a picture
of them as Willy, the French writer, has given us of the sceptical yet
juvenile enthusiasm of Les Jeunes of Paris of the same period in, for
example, his _Maîtresse d’Esthètes_. What is cruder than Ranger-Gull’s
_The Hypocrite_, which has pretensions to be a picture of the young
men of the period? And when one comes to think of it this is a great
pity, as an excellent novel might have been penned around the feverish
activities of these young exotics of the nineties. Robert Hichens’
_Green Carnation_ is, after all, perhaps the most brilliant attempt to
picture the weaknesses of the period, and it is merely a skit taking
off in the characters of Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reggie two well-known
personalities. _The Adventures of John Johns_, it is true, is supposed
to be the history of the rise of one of the smaller epigoni of the
movement, but it is not a very brilliant achievement, though it has
considerable merit and interest. One cannot indeed say that it is up to
the standard of Ernest La Jeunesse’s _Odin Howes_, wherein the French
Jew has given a veritable flashing insight on the last days of Wilde
in Paris and those holes into which he crept to drink. What a pity,
indeed, an English contemporary has not done the same for the Tite
Street days, or given us in his book a serious study of the strange
world of Whistler or Dowson.

In the face of this strange dearth of novels in this school one cannot
help asking the reasons that engendered it. Without laying down any
hard and fast rules, it will, I think, be seen that this vacuity came
from the Zeitgeist of the group itself. As has been said, the large
canvas, the five-act play, the long novel were _démodé_ for the period.
The age demanded, after the long realistic studies of the eighties in
France, the climacteric moments only when the passions of the _personæ_
of the drama were at white heat, so to speak, and life was lived
intensely. Could not the great scene up to which the five long acts
lead be squeezed into one? Was not the rediscovery of the _Mimes_ of
Herod as a sign of the times? Could not the great beauty of an immense
landscape’s spirit be caught and seized on a small canvas? Could not
the long-winded novel of three tomes be whittled down to the actual
short-story motive? This reduction of everything to its climax can be
seen in all the art of the period. Look at Beardsley’s decoration for
Wilde’s _Salomé_, entitled itself ‘The Climax.’ Conder paints small
objects like fans and diminutive water-colours and Crackanthorpe writes
short stories. The poems of Dowson are short swallow flights of song,
and the epic is reduced to Stephen Phillips’s _Marpessa_. The one-act
play begins on the Continent to make a big appeal for more recognition
than that of a curtain-raiser. Small theatres, particularly in Germany
and Austria, give evening performances consisting of one-acters alone.
It becomes the same in music. The age was short-winded and its art,
to borrow a phrase from the palæstra, could only stay over short
distances. So, whereas there is a strange dearth of novels, the men of
the nineties were very fruitful in short stories. In fact, it would
not be perhaps too much to say that it was then, for the first time in
English literature, the short story came into its own. At any rate, it
would be more judicious to put the period as one in which the short
story flourished vigorously (if not for the first time), in England, as
a ‘theme of art.’ To understand exactly what I mean by this artistic
treatment of the short story[10] as a medium of literary expression,
all that is necessary is, perhaps, to compare one of Dickens’s short
tales, for example, with one of Stevenson’s short stories. The result
is apparent at once in the difference of treatment--a difference as
essential as the difference between the effect of a figure in stone
and another in bronze. The earlier tale has none of the facets and
subtleties that art has contrived to express by the latter narration.
This artistic treatment of the short story by Englishmen, then, was
a new thing and a good thing for English literature. If the long
staying powers required for the great novel in the world of comparative
literature did not belong to the writers of the nineties group, at any
rate they developed, more or less artistically, the climacteric effects
of the _conte_. For the short story crossed the Channel by means of
Guy de Maupassant, and out of it arose on this side for a brief decade
or so a wonderful wealth of art. The short stories of Kipling are by
no means the only pebbles on the beach. In fact, never even in France
itself was there such variety of theme and treatment. The successful
short stories of the period are of all sorts and conditions. To
exemplify as briefly as possible this variety is perhaps closer to my
purpose than to waste time in proving such obvious facts as the anxious
endeavours of all these writers to raise their work to the artistic
elevation demanded of the short story, or their strenuous struggle to
attain a suitable style and treatment for their themes.

   [10] Frederick Wedmore in _On Books and Arts_ (1899) discusses
        the short story as a distinct artistic medium. It can never
        be a ‘novel in a nutshell.’

Numerous examples of their art at once crowd the mind, such as Ernest
Dowson’s _Dying of Francis Donne_, Max Beerbohm’s _Happy Hypocrite_,
Frederick Wedmore’s tender _Orgeas and Miradou_, Arthur Symons’s
_Death of Peter Waydelin_, the works of Hubert Crackanthorpe, or
the fantastic tales of Arthur Machen, or Eric Count Stenbock’s[11]
_Studies of Death_. H. D. Lowry, though of Henley’s young men, works
at the same art of studies in sentiment in his _Women’s Tragedies_.
So does Mr. G. S. Street in his _Episodes_ and George Egerton in her
_Discords and Keynotes_. Among the others who deliberately tried to
write the short story as an artistic theme at that period and who
were at the same time in the movement can be mentioned Henry Harland,
Rudolf Dircks in his _Verisimilitudes_, Richard Le Gallienne, Kenneth
Grahame, Percy Hemingway in his _Out of Egypt_, etc. Then we have men
like R. B. Cunninghame Graham and H. W. Nevinson, clearly influenced by
the movement and writing alongside of it of the ends of the earth they
have visited. The former, for example, in a short story like _Aurora La
Cujiñi_ (Smithers, 1898) clearly reflects the influences of this period
which gloried in the abnormal in Art. Known as a socialist of courage,
Mr. Graham, whose name betrays his origin, has also visited many of
the exotic places of the world. In his able book _Mogreb-el-Acksa_
he has given us vignettes of Morocco that are unsurpassed; in his
volume _Success_ he has told us of those Spanish-speaking races of
South America, of the tango, and the horses of the pampas, and the
estancias he knows so well. In _Aurora La Cujiñi_ we have a vignette of
Seville so realistic that we almost believe that one is justified in
considering that there is just enough motive in it to vivify it with
the quickening touch of the short storyteller’s wand. It is slow in
starting, but when this motive comes suddenly at the end we are almost
left breathless, realising that everything that went before was but a
slow, ruthless piling up of local colour. It is all done with such
deliberate deftness. How we see the scenes unrolling slowly before us.
Like the thrilled people on the benches we watch the Toreador about to
make his kill as we read:

   [11] Eric Stenbock was at Balliol, Oxford. He collaborated in
        a volume of translations of Balzac’s ‘Short Stories.’ He
        contributed to Lord Alfred Douglas’s _The Spirit Lamp_.
        As a specimen of his style the following extract from
        his short story, _The Other Side_, may be offered. It is
        supposed to be an old Breton woman’s description of the
        Black Mass:

          ‘Then when they get to the top of the hill, there is
          an altar with six candles quite black and a sort of
          something in between, that nobody sees quite clearly,
          and the old black ram with the man’s face and long
          horns begins to say Mass in a sort of gibberish nobody
          understands, and two black strange things like monkeys
          glide about with the book and the cruets--and there’s
          music too, such music. There are things the top half like
          black cats, and the bottom part like men only their legs
          are all covered with close black hair, and they play
          on the bag-pipes, and when they come to the elevation
          then--. Amid the old crones there was lying on the
          hearth-rug, before the fire, a boy whose large lovely
          eyes dilated and whose limbs quivered in the very ecstacy
          of terror.’

The “espada” had come forward, mumbled his boniment in Andaluz, swung
his montera over his shoulder upon the ground, and after sticking his
sword in every quarter of the bull had butchered him at last amid the
applause of the assembled populace. Blood on the sand; sun on the white
plaza; upon the women’s faces “cascarilla”; scarlet and yellow fans,
and white mantillas with “fleco y alamares” in the antique style...;
women selling water, calling out “aguá!” in so guttural a voice it
seemed like Arabic; Cardobese hats, short jackets, and from the plaza a
scent of blood and sweat acting like a rank aphrodisiac upon the crowd,
and making the women squeeze each other’s sweating hands, and look
ambiguously at one another, as they were men; and causing the youths,
with swaying hips and with their hair cut low upon their foreheads,
to smile with open lips and eyes that met your glance, as they had
been half women. Blood, harlotry, sun, gay colours, flowers and waving
palm-trees, women with roses stuck behind their ears, mules covered up
in harness of red worsted, cigar girls, gipsies, tourists, soldiers,
and the little villainous-looking urchins, who, though born old, do
duty as children in the South.’

As we read this magical evocation of the spirit of place we rub our
eyes and ask ourselves have we not been there. This prose of vivid
impressionism is the goal of one and all. As the plein air school
painted in the open air before Nature, so these men must write as
closely round their subject as actual experience can allow them. The
vivid realisation of a mood, as we shall see in Hubert Crackanthorpe,
is the desired prize. Turn through the pages of Ernest Dowson’s
_Dilemmas_, and read, above all, _A Case of Conscience_; leaf
Frederick Wedmore’s[12] _Renunciations_, and pause over _The Chemist
in the Suburbs_, wherein, as H. D. Traill said, the story of Richard
Pelse’s life is a pure joy; in both cases vivid impressionism and
mood realisation are the keynotes of the work. To understand these
tendencies better and the excellence of the work achieved, it will be
more advantageous, perhaps, to consider in more detail one writer only
who carried the charm of the prose pen to a higher degree of emphasis
and finish in the short story than any of the others, to wit, Hubert
Crackanthorpe.

   [12] About the worst of Frederick Wedmore’s short stories,
        such as _The North Coast and Eleanor_, there is a hint of
        the melodrama of Hugh Conway’s _Called Back_, but it is
        a feeble replica of the original. The most successful of
        his short imaginative pieces, as the author rightly terms
        them, on the other hand, have a refined grace of slow
        movement that is at once captivating and refreshing. It
        seems impossible that the same man could have essayed both
        the worst and the best. As a specimen of the latter type of
        work, let me fasten on to the description of the entourage
        of Pelse the chemist, the man with the tastes above his
        position:

          ‘There came a little snow. But in the parlour over the
          shop--with the three windows closely curtained--one
          could have forgetfulness of weather. There was the neat
          fireplace; the little low tea-table; a bookcase in which
          Pelse--before that critical event at Aix-les-Bains--had
          been putting, gradually, first editions of the English
          poets; a cabinet of china, in which--but always before
          Aix-les-Bains--he had taken to accumulate some pretty
          English things of whitest paste or finest painting; a
          Worcester cup, with its exotic birds, its lasting gold,
          its scale-blue ground, like lapis lazuli or sapphire; a
          Chelsea figure; something from Swansea; white plates of
          Nantgarw, bestrewn with Billingsley’s greyish pink roses,
          of which he knew the beauty, the free artistic touch.
          How the things had lost interest for him! “From the
          moment,” says some French critic, “that a woman occupies
          me, my collection does not exist.” And many a woman may
          lay claim to occupy a French art critic; only one had
          occupied Richard Pelse.’

A curious anomaly can be remarked here, that in this period the great
work of prose fiction was not to be resharpened by the young men to
nearly the same extent as they resharpened the poetry and the essay.
None approach Meredith and Hardy, who move like Titans of the age,
while Kipling and Crackanthorpe are the only two young men that give
any quantity of imaginative prose work of a high new order (and in
saying this one must not overlook Arthur Morrison’s _Mean Streets_, or
Zangwill’s Ghetto Tales, or the work of Henry James) until Conrad came
from the sea and Louis Becke from Australia to give new vistas to our
fiction. But it is not with them we are concerned here, but with Hubert
Crackanthorpe,[13] of whose life the poet has sung:

   [13] It is interesting to note the verses also of the French
        poet Francis Jammes dedicated to Crackanthorpe. Jammes
        lived at Orthez when Crackanthorpe visited that remote
        countryside.

    Too rough his sea, too dark its angry tides!
      Things of a day are we, shadows that move
    The lands of shadow.

Crackanthorpe commenced his literary career as the editor, with W. H.
Wilkins, of _The Albemarle_, a monthly review started in January, 1892,
with a splendid supplement lithograph.

_Wreckage_, the younger writer’s first volume, appeared in 1893, and
contains seven studies of very unequal merit. Its French inspiration
as well as its French emulation is at once apparent, for in place of
a foreword is the simple, all-sufficing French quotation as a keynote
of the type of work displayed: ‘Que le roman ait cette religion que
le siècle passé appelait de ce large et vaste nom: “Humanité”;--il
lui suffit de cette conscience; son droit est là.’ The youth of the
writer (he was only twenty-eight) must be remembered when discussing
the inequality of these studies in passion, for all hinge on the old
eternal theme. The last three are perhaps more finished work than
the first four, and this is a pity from the point of view of the
reader. _Profiles_, indeed, the longest, is also in some respects the
worst-conceived attempt. It is crude and immature in conception and
projection. A young officer, in love with Lily Maguire, is deceived
by her for a very Emily Brontë-like figure of a bold, bad, handsome
man. The girl becomes a disreputable member of the prostitute class,
and Maurice, like the young fool he is, wishes to redeem her. But
Lily, whom the sensuous, romantic life has taught nothing, could
never, she thinks, marry a man she did not care for, although she
would sell herself to the first Tom, Dick, or Harry. _A Conflict of
Egoisms_ concerns two people who have wasted their lives and then
utterly destroy themselves by marrying one another, for they were
too selfish to _live_ even by themselves. _The Struggle for Life_ is
a Maupassant[14]-conceived, but ineffectively told story of a wife
betrayed by her husband, who sells herself for half-a-crown if she can
go home in an hour. _Embers_ is much more effectively told, and here at
last we begin to realise Crackanthorpe is getting at the back of his
characters. The same applies to that able gambling story, _When Greek
meets Greek_, while in _A Dead Woman_ we have Crackanthorpe at last in
his full stride. Rushout the innkeeper, inconsolable for his dead wife,
is as real as ‘bony and gaunt’ Jonathan Hays, who was the dead woman’s
lover. How the husband discovers the dead woman’s infidelity; how he
and Hays were to have fought; and how at last ‘each remembered that she
had belonged to the other, and, at that moment, they felt instinctively
drawn together,’ is told by a master’s hand with a slow deliberation
that is as relentless as life itself. Here the narrative is direct and
the delineation of character sharp. These two men with the card-sharper
Simon live, while as for the women of the book we wish to forget them,
for they have nothing to redeem them except possibly the little French
girl from Nice.

   [14] Maupassant’s _Inconsolables_.

Two years later appeared a far more ambitious and maturer volume
containing half-a-dozen sentimental studies and half-a-dozen tales of
the French villages Crackanthorpe so loved and understood. His method
of work becomes more pronounced here, that is to treat an English
theme in the French manner, a task which demands more culture than
the ruck of the conteurs for the English magazines attain with their
facile tears and jackass laughters, their machine-like nonentities and
pudibond ineptitudes. Crackanthorpe, indeed, has left no following
behind him, and only once later can I recall a volume of short stories
that suggests his manner: J. Y. F. Cooke’s tales of the nineties in his
_Stories of Strange Women_.

In this new volume as before, Crackanthorpe devotes himself to
the expansion of the sentimental study, the problems of sexual
relationships, which are not altogether pleasing to every one, and this
may account for his limited appeal. In _Wreckage_ all the women were
vile, but here he evidently intends to picture the other side of women
in Ella, the wife of the poet Hillier, with its slow Flaubert unrolling
of her infinite delusion. In _Battledore and Shuttlecock_, in Nita,
of the old Empire promenade days, he again develops the good side.
While in the study of the _Love-sick Curate_ we feel that Ethel is not
hard-hearted, but only that the Rev. Burkett is an unutterable idiot.
_Modern Melodrama_ is the short, sharp climacteric stab of Maupassant
perhaps not over well done. The sentimental studies close with
_Yew-Trees and Peacocks_, which seems rather to have lost its point in
the telling. The tales of the Pyrennese villages where Crackanthorpe
used to stay are typical productions of the delight of the men of the
nineties in their sojourning on the sacred soil of France. _The White
Maize_, _Etienne Matton_, and _Gaston Lalanne’s Child_ are perhaps not
unworthy of the master himself in their simple directness, devoid of
all unnecessary padding. With a few phrases, indeed, Crackanthorpe can
lay his scene, strip his characters nude before us. How we realise,
for instance, Ella lying in bed the night before her mistaken marriage
with Hillier. She is there in all the virgin simplicity of the average
English country girl:

  The window was wide open, and the muslin curtains swaying in the
  breeze bulged towards her weirdly. She could see the orchard
  trees bathed in blackness, and above a square of sky, blue-grey,
  quivering with stifled light, flecked with a disorder of stars
  that seemed ready to rain upon the earth. After a while, little
  by little, she distinguished the forms of the trees. Slowly,
  monstrous, and sleek, the yellow moon was rising.

  She was no longer thinking of herself! She had forgotten that
  to-morrow was her wedding-day: for a moment, quite impersonally,
  she watched the moonlight stealing through the trees.

Again, Ronald, the youth from the Army Crammer’s, finds his way into
the music-hall, where he encounters Nita:

  Immediately he entered the theatre, the sudden sight of the scene
  stopped him, revealed, as it were, through a great gap. The stage
  blazed white; masses of recumbent girls, bathed in soft tints,
  swayed to dreamy cadence of muffled violins before the quivering
  gold-flecked minarets of an Eastern palace. He leaned against the
  side of the lounge to gaze down across the black belt of heads. The
  sight bewildered him. By-and-bye, he became conscious of a hum of
  voices, and a continual movement behind him. Men, for the most part
  in evening dress, were passing in procession to and fro, some women
  amongst them, smiling as they twittered mirthlessly; now and then
  he caught glimpses of others seated before little round tables,
  vacant, impassive, like waxwork figures, he thought.... He was
  throbbing with trepidating curiosity, buffeted by irresolution.

With the same exactitude the lonely fells around Scarsdale, where
Burkett is parson of the small Cumberland village, arise before us.

His posthumous volume, _Last Studies_, contains only three rather
long short stories, an ‘in memoriam’ poem by Stopford A. Brooke, and
an appreciation very gracefully done by Henry James. Referring in the
field of fiction to the crudity of the old hands and the antiquity of
new, his appreciator finds it difficult to render the aspect which
constitutes Crackanthorpe’s ‘troubled individual note.’ He comes to the
conclusion, ‘What appealed to him was the situation that asked for a
certain fineness of art, and that could best be presented in a kind of
foreshortened picture.’

The short story is mainly of two sorts: ‘The chain of items, figures in
a kind of sum--one of the simple rules--of movement, added up as on a
school-boy’s slate, and with the correct total and its little flourish,
constituting the finish and accounting for the effect; or else it may
be an effort preferably pictorial, a portrait of conditions, an attempt
to summarise, and compress for purposes of presentation to “render”
even, if possible, for purposes of expression.’ From the French
Crackanthorpe learnt the latter method, and practised it. When we come
to look at these last three stories (which with the tiny collection
of _Vignettes_ completes his work) we see how admirably exact is this
criticism of his senior.

In _Antony Garstin’s Courtship_ he is back in his own countryside of
Cumberland among the shrewd, hard Dale folk. It is a little masterpiece
conceived almost in the hopeless bitterness of Hardy at his darkest,
most pessimistic moment. The crudeness in workmanship has gone, only
the relentless inevitability of it all remains like the tragedies of
life itself. Rosa Blencarn, the parson’s niece, a mere cheap flirt
of unfinished comeliness, is but the bone of contention between the
personalities of Antony and his mother. The widow Garstin is as fine
a character as Crackanthorpe, in his twenty-two stories, has created.
She lives, and in her veins flows the passion of disappointed age. ‘She
was a heavy-built woman, upright, stalwart almost, despite her years.
Her face was gaunt and sallow; deep wrinkles accentuated the hardness
of her features. She wore a widow’s black cap above her iron-grey hair,
gold-rimmed spectacles, and a soiled chequered apron.’ How easily we
can see her saying to her great hulking son: ‘T’ hoose be mine, t’
Lord be praised,’ she continued in a loud, hard voice, ‘an’ as long as
he spare me, Tony, I’ll na’ see Rosa Blencarn set foot inside it.’

It has all the unsavoury cruelty of humanity, and to find other such
scenes in English literature we have to come down to Caradoc Evans’s
_My People_, or James Joyce.

In _Trevor Perkins_, in a brief masterly way, we have the soul of the
average young man of the nineties, who has ceased to believe in God or
tolerate his parents, sketched for us. He walks out with the waitress
of his bunshop, and we realise at once he is of those who are doomed
to make fools of themselves on the reef of her sex. The last story,
_The Turn of the Wheel_, is the history of the daughter who believes
in her self-made father, and despises her sidetracked mother as an
inferior being, only to find she has made a great mistake. It is one
of the longest stories he wrote, and moves easily in the higher strata
of London society. From this fashionable world to the rude and rugged
scars and fells of Cumberland is a far cry; but here, as elsewhere,
Crackanthorpe finds the friction of humanity is its own worst enemy.
Yet behind all this impenetrably impersonal bitter play of human
passions in these short stories, one feels somehow or other the distant
beats of the author’s compassionate heart, which his sickness of life
made him forcibly stop in the pride of his youth before he had time to
realise himself or fulfil his rich promise.




IV


The poetry of the period is essentially an expression of moods and
sentiments. It is as much a form of impressionism as the art of Monet
and Renoir. Further, it seeks after, like all the art of the nineties,
that abnormality of proportion of which Bacon wrote in his ‘Essay on
Beauty.’ It is, too, a period wonderfully fertile in song. Besides
the nineties’ group, which is represented chiefly by the Rhymers’
Club, there were many other schools of song. Lord Alfred Douglas in
his _City of the Soul_, Oscar Wilde in his _Sphinx_ and _The Harlot’s
House_, Stephen Phillips and Henley, Francis Thompson in his _Hound
of Heaven_, are but some of the richness I am compelled to pass over
in order to adhere strictly to the programme of this rough summary.
Let us, therefore, turn at once to the Rhymers’ Club, whose origin and
desires have been so well explained by Arthur Symons, the cicerone
to the age, in his essay on Ernest Dowson. At the Cheshire Cheese in
Fleet Street it was arranged that a band of young poets should meet,
striving to recapture in London something of the Gallic spirit of
art and the charm of open discussion in the Latin Quartier. The Club
consisted of the following members: John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Edwin
J. Ellis, George Arthur Greene, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Cecil Hillier,
Richard Le Gallienne, Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, Ernest Rhys, Thomas
William Rolleston, Arthur Symons, John Todhunter, and William Butler
Yeats. Besides these members, the Club, which was without rules or
officers, had at one time affiliated to itself the following permanent
guests: John Gray, Edward Rose, J. T. Nettleship, Morley Roberts, A. B.
Chamberlain, Edward Garnett, and William Theodore Peters.

Oscar Wilde, though never a member, had a great influence on many of
those who were, and Victor Plarr describes a memorable meeting of the
Rhymers in Mr. Herbert Horne’s rooms in the Fitzroy settlement at which
Wilde appeared. The poet goes on: ‘It was an evening of notabilities.
Mr. Walter Crane stood with his back to the mantelpiece, deciding, very
kindly, on the merits of our effusions. And round Oscar Wilde, not then
under a cloud, hovered reverently Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson,
with others. This must have been in 1891, and I marvelled at the time
to notice the fascination which poor Wilde exercised over the otherwise
rational. He sat as it were enthroned and surrounded by a differential
circle.’

The influence of Verlaine and the symbolist poets of Paris in this
circle was profound. Every one had a passion for things French. Symons
translated the prose poems of Baudelaire and the verses of Mallarmé,
Dowson is inspired by the ‘Fêtes Gallantes,’ and so on. As Mr. Plarr
writes: ‘Stray Gauls used to be imported to grace literary circles
here. I remember one such--a rare instance of a rough Frenchman--to
whom Dowson was devoted. When a Gaul appeared in a coterie we were
either silent, like the schoolgirls in their French conversation hour,
or we talked a weird un-French French like the ladies in some of Du
Maurier’s drawings.’[15]

   [15] Victor Plarr, _Ernest Dowson_, p. 23. 1914.

Of course it must not be supposed, however, that the nineties ever
remained at all stationary in this condition or entirely under these
influences. Mr. Plarr is speaking of the early nineties, the age when
John Gray’s _Silverpoints_ was perhaps a fair sample of the poetry
of the moment for this group; but, when at the same time it must
be remembered, poets like Francis Thompson and William Watson were
carrying on the staider traditions of English poetry altogether unmoved
by these exotic influences from Montmartre and the studios of the
south. The nineties group itself only remained for a restive moment
like this before each man was to go his own way. They were indeed all
souls seeking the way to perfection in art. Yeats went off to assist
to found the Irish School; Richard Le Gallienne went to America; Gray
became a priest. Many disappeared shortly afterwards from the lower
slopes of Parnassus, not being of those dowered with the true call;
and so, one after the other, all are to be accounted for. The genuine
men of the nineties after the fall of Wilde seem to have migrated to
Smithers’ wonderful bookshop in Bond Street, where their later works
were issued in ornate editions.

The names of others besides the actual members of the Rhymers’ Club
must not be altogether forgotten, such as Percy Hemingway with his
_Happy Wanderer_, Theodore Wratislaw, Olive Custance, Dollie Radford,
Rosamund Marriott-Watson, Norman Gale, and many others who were also of
the movement. However, of them I cannot speak here, but can only refer
the reader to the book-lists of Elkin Mathews and John Lane for the
first period, and of Leonard Smithers for the second. In the numerous
slim plaquettes of verse issued from these presses he will find golden
verse worthy of the labour of his research. Indeed, amid so many
writers one is compelled to resort to the odious necessity of a choice,
so I shall here all too briefly deal with _Silverpoints_ as a typical
volume of the early period, and then trace succinctly the career of two
poets, who had certainly the right to that appellation, Ernest Dowson
and John Davidson, and who were both not only of, but actually were the
movement itself. Lastly, in this section, as an indication of the wide
influence these writers had overseas, as in the case of the Birch Bark
School of Canada and certain poets in Australia, I wish to mention the
young American poet who was an intimate of so many of the men of the
nineties--William Theodore Peters.

The narrow green octavo of _Silverpoints_, with its lambent golden
flames, strikes the eye at once as some bizarre and exotic work. It
was one of the first of the limited éditions de luxe that mark the new
printing of the decade, and is one of the most dainty little books
ever issued by Elkin Mathews and John Lane. Most of the titles are
in French, and there are imitations from Charles Baudelaire, Arthur
Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine--the gods of the symbolist
school at that moment. Poems are dedicated (it was the habit of the
decade) to friends, including Pierre Louÿs, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde,
R. H. Sherard, Henri Teixeira de Mattos, Ernest Dowson, etc. The
predominant note is that of tigress’s blood and tiger-lilies. Honey,
roses, white breasts, and golden hair, with fierce passion and indolent
languor, are the chords of the book’s frisson. All the panoply of the
new English art begotten from the French here burgeons forth with the
Satanic note that was then in the fashion. We find this in the _Femmes
Damnées_:

    Like moody beasts they lie along the sands;
    Look where the sky against the sea-rim clings:
    Foot stretches out to foot, and groping hands
    Have languors soft and bitter shudderings.

    Some by the light of crumbling, resinous gums,
    In the still hollows of old pagan dens,
    Call thee in aid to their deliriums
    O Bacchus! cajoler of ancient pains.

    And those whose breasts for scapulars are fain
    Nurse under their long robes the cruel thong,
    These, in dim woods, where huddling shadows throng,
    Mix with the foam of pleasure tears of pain.

There is more than an echo of Rimbaud’s verses in this volume, and
the poet is evidently straining always after the violent effect, the
climacteric moment of a mood or passion. Probably two of the most
successfully carried through crises are _The Barber_ and _Mishka_. The
first of these as a typical example of the whole school I venture to
spheterize in full:

    I dreamed I was a barber; and there went
    Beneath my hand, oh! manes extravagant.
    Beneath my trembling fingers, many a mask
    Of many a pleasant girl. It was my task
    To gild their hair, carefully, strand by strand;
    To paint their eyebrows with a timid hand;
    To draw a bodkin, from a vase of Kohl,
    Through the closed lashes; pencils from a bowl
    Of sepia, to paint them underneath;
    To blow upon their eyes with a soft breath.
    They lay them back and watched the leaping bands.

    The dream grew vague, I moulded with my hands
    The mobile breasts, the valley; and the waist
    I touched; and pigments reverently placed
    Upon their thighs in sapient spots and stains,
    Beryls and chrysolites and diaphanes,
    And gems whose hot harsh names are never said
    I was a masseur; and my fingers bled
    With wonder as I touched their awful limbs.

    Suddenly, in the marble trough there seems
    O, last of my pale mistresses, sweetness!
    A twylipped scarlet pansie. My caress
    Tinges thy steel-grey eyes to violet,
    Adown thy body skips the pit-a-pat
    Of treatment once heard in a hospital
    For plagues that fascinate, but half appal.

    So, at the sound, the blood of me stood cold;
    Thy chaste hair ripened into sullen gold;
    Thy throat, the shoulders, swelled and were uncouth;
    The breasts rose up and offered each a mouth;
    And on the belly, pallid blushes crept,
    That maddened me, until I laughed and wept.

Here we have a long amorous catalogue. It is the catalogue age which
comes via Oscar Wilde’s _Sphinx_ and _Salomé_ from certain French
writers. But this does not make up for the singing power of the poet,
and in long poems it becomes singularly laborious. However, this phase
of poetry is so typical of the age that it is as well to have dealt
with it before turning to the essentially ‘singing’ poets of the
period, Dowson and Davidson.

Indeed, there is no one in the nineties worthier of the honourable
title of poet than Ernest Dowson. With his unsatisfied passion for
Adelaide in Soho; his cry for ‘madder music and for stronger wine’; his
æsthetic theories, such as that the letter ‘v’ was the most beautiful
of the letters; his reverence for things French, he has caused Mr.
Symons, in one of his most notable essays, to draw a delightful
portrait of a true _enfant de Bohême_. Robert Harborough Sherard has
also kept the Dowson tradition up in his description of the death of
the vexed and torn spirit of the poet in his _Twenty Years in Paris_,
a work which contains much interesting material for a study of the
nineties. But Victor Plarr, another poet of the nineties, enraged at
the incompleteness of these pictures, has tried to give us in his
reminiscences, unpublished letters, and marginalia, the other facet of
Dowson--the _poète intime_ known to few.

It is no question of ours, in a brief summary like this, which is the
truer portrait of Dowson; whether he was or was not like Keats in his
personal appearance; whether Arthur Moore and Dowson wrote alternate
chapters of _A Comedy of Masks_; whether in his last days or not
Leonard Smithers used to pay him thirty shillings a week for all he
could do; whether he used to pray or not in front of the bearded Virgin
at Arques; whether he used to drink hashish or not. All these problems
are outside the beauty of the lyric poetry of Dowson; and it is by his
poetry and not because of all these rumours around his brief life that
he will live.

He was the poet impressionist of momentary emotions, and poetry with
him was, as Stéphane Mallarmé said, ‘the language of a crisis.’ Each
Dowson poem is more or less the feverish impression of a hectical
crisis. For in a way he takes off where Keats ended, for Keats was
becoming a hectic, while Dowson started out as one.

    Exceeding sorrow
      Consumeth my sad heart!
    Because to-morrow
      We must part.
    Now is exceeding sorrow
      All my part!...

    Be no word spoken;
      Weep nothing: let a pale
    Silence, unbroken
      Silence prevail!
    Prithee, be no word spoken,
      Lest I fail!

His earliest poem to attract attention was _Amor Umbratilis_, which
appeared in Horne’s _Century Guild Hobby Horse_. It has the real
Dowson note, and marks him down at once as one of those poets who are
by nature _buveurs de lune_. That was in 1891. In 1892 came out the
first book of the Rhymers’ Club, and with six poems of Dowson in it he
definitely took his place in the movement. It is said that the Oscar
Wilde set sent him a telegram shortly after this ‘peremptorily ordering
him to appear at the Café Royal to lunch with the then great man.’
Dowson was flattered, and might well be, for Wilde was a splendid judge
of good work.

Two years later the Club’s second book appeared, and Dowson has again
half a dozen poems in it, including the lovely _Extreme Unction_, and
that rather doubtfully praised lyric ‘_non sum qualis eram bonae sub
regno Cynarae_.’ Then in the same year as _The Savoy_ (1896) appeared
his _Verses_, printed on Japanese vellum and bound in parchment, with a
cover design in gold by Aubrey Beardsley--a typical Smithers book. This
volume contains the best of Dowson, the handsel (if it is not too big
a phrase to use of such a delicate and delightful artist), the handsel
of his immortality. For there is something about Dowson’s best work,
though so fragile in its texture, that has the classic permanence of a
latter-day Propertius. He has a Latin brevity and clarity, and he is at
his best in this volume. Something has vanished from the enchantment
of the singer in _Decorations_ (1899). It is like the flowers of the
night before. One feels that so many of these later verses had been
done perforce, as Victor Plarr says, rather to keep on in the movement
lest one was forgotten. But in 1899 the movement was moribund, and the
winter of discontent for the Pierrots of the nineties was fast closing
down. Remembering these things, one murmurs the sad beauty of those
perfect lines of this true poet in his first volume:

    When this, our rose, is faded,
      And these, our days, are done,
    In lands profoundly shaded
      From tempest and from sun:
    Ah, once more come together,
      Shall we forgive the past,
    And safe from worldly weather
      Possess our souls at last.

Not without reason one feels he has been called the ‘rosa rosarum of
All the Nineties,’ in so far as poetry is concerned; but, personally, I
would prefer to call him, if one has to call such a true poet anything,
the poets’ poet of the nineties. The best of his short stories rank
high in the great mass of the literature of those days, and are dealt
with (together with his partnership in two novels) in another section.
As for his little one-act play, _The Pierrot of the Minute_, one is
apt to feel perhaps that Beardsley was not over unjust to it, when he
described it as a tiresome playlet he had to illustrate. At any rate,
it was the cause of Beardsley’s doing one or two admirable decorations,
even if the actual play, in which the young American poet of the
nineties, Theodore Peters (of whom more anon), and Beardsley’s own
sister acted, was not effective as a stage production.

There is no doubt but that Davidson, though he was outside the coteries
of the nineties, was still of them. First of all he was a Scotchman of
evangelical extraction, and secondly he was not an Oxford man. All this
made him outside the group. On the other count, he was of the Rhymers’
Club, though he did not contribute to the books. He was strongly
influenced by Nietzsche, though the French influence in him was rather
negative. His books came from the Bodley Head and were well recognised
by its other members. Beardsley even decorated some of them, and
Rothenstein did his portrait for _The Yellow Book_. In fact, Davidson
himself wrote for that periodical. All this made him of the group. It
would be thus impossible to pass over such a poet in connection with
this movement, for Davidson has written some magnificent lyrics, if
he has made his testaments too often and too turgidly. The Davidson,
indeed, of the nineties will be discovered to be, by any one examining
his works, the Davidson that will most probably survive.

He was born in 1857, but as Mr. Holbrook Jackson admirably puts
it, ‘John Davidson did not show any distinctive _fin de siècle_
characteristics until he produced his novel _Perfervid_[16] in 1890.’
His next work, a volume of poetry, which was the first to attract
attention, _In a Music Hall and other Poems_ (1891), accentuates these
distinctive characteristics, and fairly launches him on the tide of the
movement. Before that time he had been school-mastering and clerking
in Scotland, while his leisure had begotten three rather ill-conceived
works. Davidson discovered himself when he came to London to write. The
movement of the nineties stimulated him towards artistic production,
and when that movement was killed by the fall of Wilde, and buried by
the Boer War, Davidson again lost himself in the philosophic propaganda
of his last years before he was driven to suicide. Philosophy, indeed,
with John Davidson, was to eat one’s heart with resultant mental
indigestion that completely unbalanced the artist in him. Therefore,
so far as this appreciation is concerned, we only have to deal with
the happy Davidson of the _Ballads_ and _Fleet Street Eclogues_ fame;
the gay writer of _A Random Itinerary_ (1894); the rather hopeless
novelist of _Baptist Lake_ (1894), and _The Wonderful Mission of Earl
Lavender_ (1895). The last tedious phase before he gave himself to the
Cornish sea is no affair of ours. In his _Testament_ he says ‘none
should outlive his power,’ and realising probably that he had made this
mistake, he wished to end it all.

   [16] _The Eighteen Nineties_, by Holbrook Jackson, p. 215 1913.

But in the nineties he was like his own birds, full of ‘oboe’ song and
‘broken music.’ Seldom has the English river, the Thames, been more
sweetly chaunted than by him. While if we are looking for his kinship
with his time there is no doubt about it in _The Ballad of a Nun_, who
remarks:

    I care not for my broken vow,
      Though God should come in thunder soon,
    I am sister to the mountains now,
      And sister to the sun and moon.

A statement which we feel many of the Beardsley ladies cadaverous with
sin or fat with luxury would have been quite capable of repeating.
Again, his _Thirty Bob a Week_ in _The Yellow Book_ is as much
a ninety effort as his _Ballad of Hell_, while his novel, _Earl
Lavender_, is a burlesque of certain of the eccentricities of the
period. In a poetical note to this volume he sings:

    Oh! our age end style perplexes
    All our Elders’ time has famed;
    On our sleeves we wear our sexes,
    Our diseases, unashamed.

The prevalent realistic disease in poetry is well represented by _A
Woman and her Son_:

    He set his teeth, and saw his mother die,
    Outside a city reveller’s tipsy tread
    Severed the silence with a jagged rent.

Above all, Davidson handles with marked facility the modern ballad
medium of narrative verse. _The Ballad of a Nun_, _The Ballad of
an Artist’s Wife_, and others, relate their story in easy, jogging
quatrains. As a sample one can quote from _A New Ballad of Tannhäuser_:

    As he lay worshipping his bride,
      While rose leaves in her bosom fell,
    On dreams came sailing on a tide
      Of sleep, he heard a matin bell.

    ‘Hark! let us leave the magic hill,’
      He said, ‘and live on earth with men.’
    ‘No, here,’ she said, ‘we stay until
      The Golden Age shall come again.’

But if Davidson could tell a tale in verse it cannot be said he
understood the novel form. Although here it is rather noticeable that
he has a strange, unique feature among his contemporaries. For he at
least has a sense of humour. Max Beerbohm, it is true, had the gift
of irony; but Davidson, almost alone, has a certain vein of grim
Scotch humour, as, for example, in the character of little red-headed
Mortimer in _Perfervid_. In Dowson, Johnson, Symons, and the others,
one is sometimes appalled by the seriousness of it all. Lastly, but
by no means least, Davidson occasionally attains the lyric rapture of
unadulterated poetry in his shorter pieces, while his vignettes of
nature linger in the memory on account of their truth and beauty. Both
these qualities--the lyric rapture and the keen eye for country sights
and sounds--are to be found, for instance, in _A Runnable Stag_:

    When the pods went pop on the broom, green broom,
      And apples began to be golden-skinned,
    We harboured a stag in the Priory coomb,
      And we feathered his trail up wind, up wind!

Among many other ambitions, Davidson wanted to fire the scientific
world with imaginative poetry. As he phrased it: ‘Science is still
a valley of dead bones till imagination breathes upon it.’ There are
indeed evidences of an almost Shelleyan pantheism in his credo. Unhappy
was his life, but, probably, he did not labour in vain, for a handsel
of his song will endure. Writing, indeed, was the consolation of his
life:

    I cannot write, I cannot think;
    ’Tis half delight and half distress;
    My memory stumbles on the brink
    Of some unfathomed happiness--

    Of some old happiness divine,
    What haunting scent, what haunting note,
    What word, or what melodious line,
    Sends my heart throbbing to my throat?

Indeed, why repeat it, both Dowson and he will live by their poetry.
But in the case of Davidson, in addition, there is his rather
elephantine humour. While again it must always be remembered that he
had the courage to state that the fear of speaking freely had ‘cramped
the literature of England for a century.’ It was the liberty of the
French literature indeed that in no small degree captivated the minds
of all these young men. Very few of them, however, had the courage to
speak freely. But it must always remain to Davidson’s credit that he
tried to write a freer, emancipated novel, which, however, he failed to
do, because he had a very remote idea of novel construction.

It was in 1896 that the quaint little salmon-pink volume of William
Theodore Peters, the young American poet, appeared, entitled _Posies
out of Rings_. This young American was an intimate of some of the men
of the nineties, and though it is doubtful whether he himself would
have ever achieved high fame as a poet, he had a sincere love for the
beautiful things of Art. Among all these tragedies of ill-health,
insanity and suicide that seemed to track down each of these young men,
his fate was perhaps the saddest of all, for he died of starvation
in Paris,[17] where many of his verses had appeared in a distinctly
American venture, _The Quartier Latin_. His volume of conceits are a
harking back, not always satisfactorily, to the ancient form of the
versified epigram. What was wrong with his Muse is that it was only
half alive. He puts indeed his own case in a nutshell in that charming
little poem _Pierrot and the Statue_, which I venture to quote in full:

   [17] R. H. Sherard, _Twenty Years in Paris_.

    One summer evening in a charméd wood,
    Before a marble Venus, Pierrot stood;
    A Venus beautiful beyond compare,
    Gracious her lip, her snowy bosom bare,
    Pierrot amorous, his cheeks aflame,
    Called the white statue many a lover’s name.
    An oriole flew down from off a tree,
    ‘Woo not a goddess made of stone!’ sang he.
    ‘All of my warmth to warm it,’ Pierrot said,
    When by the pedestal he sank down dead;
    The statue faintly flushed, it seemed to strive
    To move--_but it was only half alive_.

Such was the Muse’s response to Peters’ wooing; while he, in that
strange bohemian world of so many of the young writers of that day,
wrote in another short poem the epitaph of the majority of those who
gave so recklessly of their youth, only to fail. It is called _To the
Café aux Phares de l’Ouest, Quartier Montparnasse_:

    The painted ship in the paste-board sea
        Sails night and day.
    To-morrow it will be as far as it was yesterday.
        But underneath, in the Café,
        The lusty crafts go down,
    And one by one, poor mad souls drown--
    While the painted ship in the paste-board sea
        Sails night and day.

Such, indeed, was too often the fate of the epigoni of the movement.
Their nightingales were never heard; they were buried with all their
songs still unsung.

The only other volume which Theodore Peters essayed, to my knowledge,
was a little poetic one-acter like his friend Ernest Dowson’s _Pierrot
of the Minute_ (for which work he wrote an epilogue). Peters’ play,
entitled _The Tournament of Love_, is a very scarce item of the
nineties’ bibliography. He calls it a pastoral masque in one act, and
it was published by Brentano’s at Paris in 1894 and illustrated with
drawings by Alfred Jones. As Bantock wrote the music for _The Pierrot
of the Minute_, Noel Johnson composed the melodies for _The Tournament
of Love_. The masque was put on at the Théâtre d’Application (La
Bodinière), 18 rue St. Lazare, May 8, 1894. Peters himself took the
part of Bertrand de Roaix, a troubadour, while among the cast were
Wynford Dewhurst, the painter, and Loïe Fuller, the dancer. The scene
is an almond orchard on the outskirts of Toulouse, on the afternoon of
the 3rd May, 1498. ‘A group of troubadours discovered at the right of
the stage, seated upon a white semicircular Renaissance bench, some
tuning their instruments. Other poets towards the back. A laurel tree
at the right centre. On the left centre two heralds guard the entrance
to the lists.’ Pons d’Orange, the arrived poet, will win at this
tournament of love, the Eglantine nouvelle, ‘that golden prize of wit.’
But it is won by Bertrand de Roaix, who wants it not, but the love of
the institutress of this court of love, ‘Clémence Isaure, the Primrose
Queen of Beauty.’ At his love protestations she laughs; the troubadour
goes outside the lists and stabs himself. As he lies dying Clémence,
clothed in her white samite, powdered with silver fleur-de-lys and
edged with ermine, her dust-blonde hair bound with a fillet of
oak-leaves, comes forth from the lists and finds her boy lover’s body:

          Love came and went; _we_
    Knew him not. I have found my soul too late.




V


The Victorian literary era was fecund in essayists, and the last decade
lived up to this reputation. The forerunners of the essayists of the
nineties were obviously Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Oscar
Wilde with his _Intentions_ and Whistler in his _Gentle Art_. Behind
these there was a great mass of French influence which, together with
literary impressionism as exemplified in such books as Crackanthorpe’s
_Vignettes_, was to give the essay and the so-called study a new
lease of life. Indeed, what came out of the period was not merely
criticism as a useful broom sweeping away the chaff from the wheat,
but criticism itself as a creative art, as Wilde chose to call it; not
merely dry-as-dust records of plays and cities, and other affairs as
in guide manuals, but artistic impressions, in some ways as vital as
the objects themselves. Mr. Arthur Symons, in particular, has given us
an abundance of this kind of work of which I have already spoken. So
did Lionel Johnson and Mr. Max Beerbohm, to whom I propose to allude
here, and many others like Mr. Bernard Shaw, who, though not of the
movement, moved alongside it on his own way, and Mr. G. S. Street, in
his _Episodes_, Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Galton, Francis Adams
in his _Essays in Modernity_, etc. etc. One has only to turn over
the magazines of the period to find a band of writers, too numerous
to mention, who aided on the movement with their pens. To cite one
prominent example alone, there was Grant Allen with his essay on
_The New Hedonism_. Here, however, I must be content with a brief
appreciative glance at the works of the two writers I have mentioned,
who were both actually of and in the movement itself. I have not here
of set purpose referred to the Henley essayists like Charles Whibley.
But the two men of the nineties I have chosen to speak of here have
been selected in the way an essayist should be selected nine times out
of ten, that is to say, because of his pleasing personality. These two
writers--particularly Max--are such individual writers, yet they never
offend. They are just pleasant garrulous companions.

For those who care at all passionately for the precious things of
literature, the work of Lionel Johnson will always remain a cherished
and secluded nook. The man was a scholar, a poet, and a critic, whose
dominant note was gracile lucidity. A friend writing of his personal
appearance at the time of his death said, ‘Thin, pale, very delicate
he looked, with a twitching of the facial muscles, which showed even
at the age of twenty-four how unfit was his physique to support the
strain of an abnormally nervous organization. Quick and mouselike in
his movements, reticent of speech and low-voiced, he looked like some
old-fashioned child who had strayed by chance into an assembly of men.
But a child could not have shown that inward smile of appreciative
humour, a little aloof, a little contemptuous perhaps, that worked
constantly around his mouth. He never changed except in the direction
of a greater pallor and a greater fragility.’

Cloistral mysticism was the key-chord of his two volumes of poetry
(1895 and 1897). In some respects he seems to have strayed out of
the seventeenth century of Crashaw and Herbert. His early training,
no doubt, engendered this aspect. After six years in the grey Gothic
school of Winchester he passed on to New College, Oxford. Here he came
under the influence of Pater, and was charmed by the latter’s then
somewhat hieratic austerity. A devout Irish Catholic, he was moved by
three themes: his old school, Oxford, and Ireland, and to these he
unfortunately too often devoted his muse. After the quiet seclusion of
his Oxford years, on entering the vortex of London literary life he
found that the world of wayfaring was a somewhat rough passage in the
mire for one so delicate. Out of the struggle between his scholarly
aspirations and the cry of his time for life, more life, was woven
perhaps the finest of all his poems, _The Dark Angel_:

    Dark angel, with thine aching lust
    To rid the world of penitence:
    Malicious angel, who still dost
    My soul such subtile violence!--

    Because of thee, the land of dreams
    Becomes a gathering place of fears:
    Until tormented slumber seems
    One vehemence of useless tears....

    Thou art the whisper in the gloom,
    The hinting tone, the haunting laugh:
    Thou art the adorner of my tomb,
    The minstrel of mine epitaph.

Most of his poems are subjective, and the majority have a certain
stiffness of movement of a priest laden with chasuble; but sometimes,
however, as in _Mystic and Cavalier_, or in the lines on the statue of
Charles I at Charing Cross, he writes with a winsome charm and freedom
of spirit:

    Armoured he rides, his head
    Bare to the stars of doom:
    He triumphs now, the dead
    Beholding London’s gloom....

Surely this poem has the proud note of Henley! There is another trait
in his verse, which, in view of his essays, it is as well not to pass
over. Like William Watson, his literary poems are pregnant with phrases
of rich criticism. He calls back the immortals in a true bookman’s
invocation hailing ‘opulent Pindar,’ ‘the pure and perfect voice of
Gray,’ ‘pleasant and elegant and garrulous Pliny’:

    Herodotus, all simple and all wise;
    Demosthenes, a lightning flame of scorn:
    The surge of Cicero, that never dies;
    And Homer, grand against the ancient morn.

But we are here chiefly concerned with his prose writings. If it is the
duty of the essayist to mirror the intellectuality of his age, Lionel
Johnson was a mirror for the Oxford standpoint of the nineties. There
still remain many of his papers uncollected in various old newspaper
files. But certainly the best of his work has been lovingly collected
by friendly hands, and worthily housed in _Post Liminium_. Take, for
instance, this passage from an essay on books published originally in
_The Academy_ (December 8th, 1900):

  The glowing of my companionable fire upon the backs of my
  companionable books, and then the familiar difficulty of choice.
  Compassed about by old friends, whose virtues and vices I know
  better than my own, I will be loyal to loves that are not of
  yesterday. New poems, new essays, new stories, new lives, are not
  my company at Christmastide, but the never-ageing old. ‘My days
  among the dead are passed.’ Veracious Southey, how cruel a lie! My
  sole days among the dead are the days passed among the still-born
  or moribund moderns, not the white days and shining nights free
  for the strong voices of the ancients in fame. A classic has a
  permanence of pleasurability; that is the meaning of his estate and
  title.

Or again, Johnson in his paper on _The Work of Mr. Pater_, sets forth
perhaps the best appreciation of his master that has yet appeared:

  ‘Magica sympathiæ!’ words borne upon the shield of Lord Herbert
  of Cherbury, are inscribed upon the writings of Mr. Pater, who
  found his way straight from the first to those matters proper
  to his genius, nor did he, as Fuseli says of Leonardo, ‘waste
  life, insatiate in experiment.’... ‘Nemo perfectus est,’ says St.
  Bernard, ‘qui perfectior esse appetit’: it is as true in art as in
  religion. In art also ‘the way to perfection is through a series of
  disgusts’ ... and truly, as Joubert said, we should hesitate before
  we differ in religion from the saints, in poetry from the poets....
  There is no languorous toying with things of beauty, in a kind of
  opiate dream, to be found here.

While Symons has written on all the arts, the sphere of Johnson has
been more limited to traditional English lines. Johnson attempts
no broad æsthetical system like the former. All that he does is to
illuminate the writer of whom he is speaking. And his little essays,
eminent in their un-English lucidity, their scrupulous nicety, their
conscious and deliberate beauty, adding to our _belles lettres_ a
classical execution and finish (which perfection accounts perhaps for
the classical smallness of his bookmaking) have all the bewildering
charm of a born stylist. Certain of his phrases linger in the mind
like music. ‘Many a sad half-murmured thought of Pascal, many a deep
and plangent utterance of Lucretius.’ Or the line: ‘The face whose
changes dominate my heart.’ Like the styles of Newman and Pater, on
which his own is founded, he is singularly allusive. He cites critics
by chapter and verse like an advocate defending a case. In fact, as in
his critical _magnum opus_, _The Art of Thomas Hardy_, he is amazingly
judicial. It is, too, since he is essentially academic, to the older
critics he prefers to turn for guidance. As he writes: ‘Flaubert and
Baudelaire and Gautier, Hennequin and M. Zola and M. Mallarmé, with
all their colleagues or exponents, may sometimes be set aside, and
suffer us to hear Quintilian or Ben Jonson, Cicero or Dryden.’ This
habit sometimes makes him strenuous reading, particularly in longer
criticisms like _The Art of Thomas Hardy_.

We grow weary of all this quotative authority. Burton’s _Anatomy of
Melancholy_ cannot be brought into every-day literary criticism. We
want to hear more of Lionel Johnson’s own direct opinions and less of
these selected passages from his library. So it is to those passages
where Johnson is most himself we turn in _The Art of Thomas Hardy_,
which, in spite of its academicism and the youthfulness of its author,
remains a genuine piece of sound critical work. The delightful imagery
of the prose in such passages is often very illuminating, as in this
paragraph:

  From long and frequent converse with works of any favourite author,
  we often grow to thinking of them under some symbol or image; to
  see them summed up and expressed in some one composite scene of our
  own making; this is my ‘vision’ of Mr. Hardy’s works. A rolling
  down country, crossed by a Roman road; here a gray standing stone,
  of what sacrificial ritual origin I can but guess; there a grassy
  barrow, with its great bones, its red-brown jars, its rude gold
  ornament, still safe in earth; a broad sky burning with stars; a
  solitary man. It is of no use to turn away, and to think of the
  village farms and cottages, with their antique ways and looks; of
  the deep woods, of the fall of the woodman’s axe, the stir of the
  wind in the branches; of the rustic feasts and festivals, when the
  home-brewed drink goes round, to the loosening of tongues and wits;
  of the hot meadows, fragrant hayfields, cool dairies, and blazing
  gardens; of shining cart-horses under the chestnut-trees and cows
  called in at milking time: they are characteristic scenes, but not
  the one characteristic scene. That is the great down by night, with
  its dead in their ancient graves, and its lonely living figure; ...

There is, perhaps, a reek about it all of a too-conscious imitation of
Pater’s murmured obituaries which makes one in the end rather tired of
this hieratic treatment of art, so that one turns rather gladly to the
one or two tales he wrote. For example in _The Lilies of France_, an
episode of French anti-clericalism, which appeared in _The Pageant_,
1897, he slowly builds up a thing of verbal beauty that one feels
was actually worthy of him, while in the previous number of the same
quarterly he perpetrated a delightful ironism on the literary men of
his period entitled _Incurable_, in which, perhaps, we may trace faint
autobiographical clues. Such, briefly, was the work of this young man
who was found dead in Fleet Street early one morning, aged thirty-five.

But the writer who was to bring irony in English literature to a
consummate pitch, and add to the age a strange brief brilliance of
his own wilful spirit, was Max Beerbohm. Max, the ‘Incomparable’ as
Bernard Shaw once described him, is the charm of the gilded lily, the
fairy prince of an urbane artificiality: he is in literature what the
cocktail is among drinks; he is the enemy of dullness and the friend of
that Greek quality called ‘charis.’ He is the public school and Varsity
man who is fond of, but afraid of, being tedious in literature; so with
delightful affectation his vehicle is persiflage with a load of wit he
pretends to disdain. Of all the prose writers of the Beardsley period
he is the easiest and most charming to read. In fact, he is the ideal
essayist. He titillates the literary sense. Fortunately his glass is
small, for if one had to drink it in quart pots the result would be
as disastrous as in his one and only mistake--the long novel _Zuleika
Dobson_, which is a late work written long after the nineties had been
swallowed up by that maw which swallowed up Lesbia’s sparrow and all
other beautiful dead things.

Max said in jest, ‘I belong to the Beardsley period,’ and it is one of
those jests which is only too painfully true. When he was at Oxford he
was caught up in the movement, and wrote, under Wilde’s influence, _A
Defence of Cosmetics_ for the first number of _The Yellow Book_, and
he also appeared in Lord Alfred Douglas’s magazine. Thenceforward he
contributed to various quarterlies, while in 1896 the little red volume
with its white paper label appeared as _The Works_, containing all the
best of this precocious _enfant terrible_ of literature, who assures
us that he read in bed, while at school, _Marius the Epicurean_, and
found it not nearly so difficult as _Midshipman Easy_. At the age of
twenty-five he cries: ‘I shall write no more. Already I feel myself to
be a trifle outmoded,’ and he religiously does not keep his word. He
keeps pouring out caricatures, writes _More_, the companion volume to
_The Works_, and perpetrates his short story _The Happy Hypocrite_.
Beyond 1899 we cannot follow him, but he has been busy ever since with
his parodies, his _Yet Again_, his lamentable novel, his one-act play,
and so on.

It is to that Beardsley period to which he said he belonged we are
here restricted. And it must be admitted that though the Boer War and
the Great War do not seem to have gagged him, there is something so
impishly impudent in his earlier work which renders it more remarkable
than the complacent efforts of his later years.

Amid the searching seriousness of the nineties, Max is like balm in
Gilead. He has the infinite blessing of irony. The others, except
Beardsley (who too has this gift), are so appallingly serious. The
French influences that went to their making seem to have killed the
valiant English humour of Falstaff, Pickwick, and Verdant Green.
They are all like young priests who will take no liberty with their
ritual; but Max saves the period with his whimsical irony. His is not
the fearful, mordant irony of Octave Mirbeau, but a dainty butterfly
fancy playing lightly over the pleasures of a pleasant life. To be
essentially civilised is to be like a god. This is the pose of such
a mentality. It is a winsome pose with no sharp edges to it, just as
the _poseur_ himself must be wilfully blind to all the seaminess of
life. In front of his window (if a temperament be a window looking out
on life) there is a pleasant garden. Beyond is the noise and dust of
the highway. He is the dandy in his choice of life as in his choice
of literature, and in more than one sense he has written the happiest
essays of the period.

It has been said his caricatures are essays. May we not equally say
his essays are caricatures? The essay, indeed, is the work of the
feline male, the man who sits beside the fire like Charles Lamb. The
out-of-doors man writes the episode. But Max is essentially an indoors
man, who has a perfect little dressing-room like a lady’s boudoir, but
much neater, where he concocts his essays we read so easily by infinite
labour, with a jewelled pen. It is as though he had said: ‘Literature
must either be amusing or dull; mine shall be the former.’ He is very
much the young man about town who has consented gracefully to come
and charm us. What he wrote of Whistler in _The Gentle Art of Making
Enemies_, we may say of him: ‘His style never falters. The silhouette
of no sentence is ever blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear,
vocal cadence.’ And the refrain is Max himself all the time, and his
personality is so likeable we stomach it all the time. It is the note
that vibrates through all his amiable satiric irony, whether it be on
the House of Commons Manner or in defence of the use of Cosmetics, or
in describing the period of 1880. Everything, from first to last, is
done with such good taste. Even in his wildest flights of raillery he
is utterly purposed not to offend. In his charming paper, _1880_, he
has given us a vigorous vignette of the previous decade to _The Yellow
Book_ age. One can hardly help quoting a small passage here from this
admirably worked up prose: ‘In fact Beauty had existed long before
1880. It was Mr. Oscar Wilde who managed her début. To study the period
is to admit that to him was due no small part of the social vogue that
Beauty began to enjoy. Fired by his fervid words, men and women hurled
their mahogany into the streets and ransacked the curio-shops for the
furniture of Annish days. Dadoes arose upon every wall, sunflowers and
the feathers of peacocks curved in every corner, tea grew quite cold
while the guests were praising the Willow Pattern of its cup. A few
fashionable women even dressed themselves in sinuous draperies and
unheard-of greens. Into whatsoever ball-room you went, you would surely
find, among the women in tiaras, and the fops and the distinguished
foreigners, half a score of comely ragamuffins in velveteen, murmuring
sonnets, posturing, waving their hands. Beauty was sought in the most
unlikely places. Young painters found her mobbled in the fogs, and
bank-clerks versed in the writings of Mr. Hamerton, were heard to
declare, as they sped home from the city, that the Underground Railway
was beautiful from London Bridge to Westminster, but not from Sloane
Square to Notting Hill Gate.’

It is thus that Max can play with a chord of almost tender irony on
his subject, and such a style, so full of the writer’s personality,
has the cachet of the veritable essayist. How charmingly, for example,
he records his reminiscences of Beardsley. It is a delightful little
picture of the artist, interesting enough to place beside Arthur
Symons’s portrait: ‘He loved dining out, and, in fact, gaiety of any
kind. His restlessness was, I suppose, one of the symptoms of his
malady. He was always most content where there was the greatest noise
and bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light.
The “domino-room” at the Café Royal had always a great fascination for
him: he liked the mirrors and the florid gilding, the little parties
of foreigners, and the smoke and the clatter of the dominoes being
shuffled on the marble tables.... I remember, also, very clearly,
a supper at which Beardsley was present. After the supper we sat
up rather late. He was the life and soul of the party, till, quite
suddenly almost in the middle of a sentence, he fell fast asleep in his
chair. He had overstrained his vitality, and it had all left him. I can
see him now as he sat there with his head sunk on his breast; the thin
face, white as the gardenia in his coat, and the prominent, harshly-cut
features; the hair, that always covered his whole forehead in a fringe
and was of so curious a colour--a kind of tortoise-shell; the narrow,
angular figure, and the long hands that were so full of power.’[18]

   [18] _The Idler_, May, 1898.

Outside this medium of the essay, with the exception of the
caricatures, Max is no longer the incomparable, for his short story,
_The Happy Hypocrite_, is not a short story at all, but a spoilt
essay;[19] while his novel is not merely a failure, but a veritable
disaster. With his first paper in _The Yellow Book_ he fell in with
the step of the men of the nineties, and he too became a part of their
efflorescence. Sufficient unto that time is his work, and with a final
quotation from this early paper so redolent of the movement that there
is no mistaking it, we must leave him and his future on the knees of
the gods: ‘Was it not at Capua that they had a whole street where
nothing was sold but dyes and unguents? We must have such a street,
and, to fill our new Seplosia, our Arcade of Unguents, all herbs
and minerals and live creatures shall give of their substance. The
white cliffs of Albion shall be ground to powder for Loveliness, and
perfumed by the ghost of many a little violet. The fluffy eider-ducks,
that are swimming round the pond, shall lose their feathers, that the
powder-puff may be moonlike as it passes over Loveliness’ lovely face.’

   [19] His Children’s Tale, _The Small Boy and the Barley Sugar_
        (_The Parade_, 1897), should also be mentioned as another
        case of shipwrecked ingenuity.




VI


Here I propose to go through a litany of some of my omissions. In
essaying to depict the aspects of an age there is always this pitfall,
omission, which ambuscades the adventurous spirit. For we who know so
little even about ourselves--how can we, without grave impertinence,
boldly say I wish to bring back to the mind of others an age dead and
gone? Everything is so interwoven in life that it is, for example, an
unwarranted arbitrariness to discuss the literature of this period
without brooding on the black and white art of the time, or the
canvases of its painters.

I have worried for some space over Aubrey Beardsley, but I have not
spoken of men like Mr. S. H. Sime, whose work Beardsley so delighted
in. Probably Sidney H. Sime’s work in _The Butterfly_, _The Idler_,
_Pick-me-Up_, _Eureka_, etc., besides his book illustrations, is in
some ways the most powerfully imaginative of the period. There has been
a Beardsley craze, and most assuredly there will be one day a Sime
craze, when collectors have focussed properly the marvellous suggestive
power of this artist’s work. Unfortunately, scattered up and down old
magazines, much of this work is, as it were, lost for the moment like
Toulouse Lautrec’s drawings in papers like _Le Rire_. But when it is
garnered up in a worthy book of drawings like the Beardsley books,
the power of Sime’s work will be undoubted. Fortunately Sime is still
amongst us, and occasionally a Dunsany book brings us fresh evidence of
his genius.

Again, I have not alluded to Edgar Wilson’s bizarre and fascinating
decorations of submarine life and Japonesque figures. Like Shannon,
Ricketts, Raven Hill, and others, he received his early art education
at the Lambeth School of Art. At the end of the eighties he began
collecting Japanese prints long before Beardsley had left school. In
fact, Edgar Wilson was one of the pioneers of the Japanese print in
this country--a love for the strange which came over to England from
France. A typical decorative design of Wilson’s[20] is ‘In the Depths
of the Sea,’ representing an octopus rampant over a human skull,
beneath which are two strange flat fish, and in the background a
sunken old three-decker with quaintly carved stern and glorious prow.
_Pick-me-Up_ first used his work as it did that of many another young
artist, and in its back files much of his best work can be found.
For _The Rambler_ he did different designs for each issue, which
is probably the only redeeming feature about that early Harmsworth
periodical. _The Sketch_, _Cassell’s_, _Scribner’s_, and above all _The
Idler_ and _The Butterfly_, are beautified among other papers by his
exotic decorations.

   [20] _Edgar Wilson and his Work_, by Arthur Lawrence, _The
        Idler_, July, 1899.

Once more I have not spoken at all of Miss Althea Gyles’s hectic
visions which, in her illustrations for Wilde’s _The Harlot’s House_,
probably reached the acme of the period’s realisation of the weird.
She is of course really of the Irish symbolists, and not one of the
nineties’ group at all; but, in her Wilde illustrations, she almost
enters the same field as the men of the nineties. Her connection, too,
with the firm of Smithers is another strong excuse for mentioning her
work here. In _The Dome_ both her drawings and poems appeared, while
in the December number for 1898 there is a note on her symbolism by
W. B. Yeats. In all her drawings the fancy that seems to have such free
flight is in reality severely ordered by the designer’s symbolism.
Sometimes it is merely intriguing, as in drawings like ‘The Rose of
God,’ where a naked woman is spread-eagled against the clouds above a
fleet of ships and walled city, while in other designs the symbolism is
full of suggestive loveliness, as in ‘Noah’s Raven.’ ‘The Ark floats
upon a grey sea under a grey sky, and the raven flutters above the sea.
A sea nymph, whose slender swaying body drifting among the grey waters
is a perfect symbol of the soul untouched by God or by passion, coils
the fingers of one hand about his feet and offers him a ring, while
her other hand holds a shining rose under the sea. Grotesque shapes
of little fishes flit about the rose, and grotesque shapes of larger
fishes swim hither and thither. Sea nymphs swim through the windows of
a sunken town, and reach towards the rose hands covered with rings; and
a vague twilight hangs over all.’ This is explained to represent the
search of man for the fleshly beauty which is so full of illusions for
us all, while the spiritual beauty is ever far away. To this kind of
interpretative design Oscar Wilde’s swan song, _The Harlot’s House_,
lends itself admirably, and Miss Gyles’s black and white work here
becomes inspired to the standard of Beardsley’s and Sime’s best work.
The shadow effects illustrating the stanzas,

    Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
    A phantom lover to her breast,
        Sometimes they seemed to try and sing.

    Sometimes a horrible marionette
    Came out and smoked its cigarette
        Upon the steps like a live thing

must be seen before one can place Althea Gyles’s drawings in their
proper place. It is not a replica of Beardsley, it is not a faint
far-off imitation of a Félicien Rops or Armand Rassenfosse, but
something genuinely original in its shadow-graphic use of masses of
black on a white ground.

Once more, _mea culpa_, I have paid scant attention to Max Beerbohm’s
caricatures, and I have failed to call attention here to his earlier
and later method of work. I have not even spoken of his little paper
entitled _The Spirit of Caricature_, wherein he discusses the spirit of
the art he practises. God forgive me! Or yet again what meed of homage
have I yet rendered to Mr. Will Rothenstein’s lithographic portraits,
which are absolutely a necessity to anyone who would live a while with
the shades of these men. Take, for example, his _Liber Juniorum_,
which alone contains lithographed drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, Max
Beerbohm, and Arthur Symons. Then there are so many others over whose
achievements I must keep a holy silence, such as Mr. Charles Ricketts
and his _Dial_, which was published by the Vale Press, and to which
John Gray contributed many poems.

Again, there are the colourists of this group, particularly Walter
Sickert and Charles Conder. The latter, above all, is the colour
comrade to Beardsley’s black and white. His figures are the lovers of
Dowson’s verse, his landscapes and world have all those memories of the
golden time that haunt the brain of John Gray and Theodore Wratislaw.
No note, however short, on the nineties would be complete without a
halt for praise of this painter of a strangely coloured _dolce far
niente_. For everything in his work, be it on canvas, silk panel, or
dainty fan, is drowsy with the glory of colour (as Mr. Holbrook Jackson
admirably says), ‘colour suggesting form, suggesting all corporeal
things, suggesting even itself, for Conder never more than hints at the
vivid possibilities of life, more than a hint might waken his puppets
from their Laodicean dream.’

Whether an idyllic landscape or a fantastic _bal masqué_ of Montmartre
or an Elysian _fête galante_ was his theme, the work itself is always
permeated with the spirit of Conder. His nude figure ‘Pearl,’ his
‘L’Oiseau Bleu,’ his ‘Femme dans une loge au théâtre,’ are typical of
his successful achievements. The ‘Fickle Love’ fan is but one of the
numerous exquisite works he produced in this branch of art; while ‘The
Masquerade’ is the work of a Beardsley-like fancy which could colour
like Conder.

Like his personality, his work suffered from certain unhappy moods, and
that is what makes so much of it uneven. Born in 1868, a descendant
of Louis Francis Roubiliac, the famous sculptor, whose work for the
figures of our eighteenth century porcelain factories is so well known,
of Conder it may be said, as of all artists with French blood in them,
when he is successful he is irresistible. He might not be able to
draw modern men, but how beautifully he drew the women of his day can
be seen in ‘La Toilette.’ He delighted, indeed, in designing women
wandering in dream gardens, in painting roses and Princes Charming.

It would be pleasant to travel through this world of delightful
dreams, were we not restricted of set purpose to the literary side of
the movement. And has it not already been done in Mr. Frank Gibson’s
_Charles Conder_?

Again, some of the publishers who produced the books of these men have
their right to something more than scant mention. To Mr. Elkin Mathews,
particularly as the first publisher of the Rhymers’ Club books and
as the issuer of John Gray’s first volume of poetry, bibliophiles
owe a debt of gratitude. In the early days of the nineties Mr. John
Lane became associated with him, until the autumn of 1894 witnessed
‘Parnassus divided into two peaks.’ Later, after the Wilde débâcle,
an extraordinary figure, worthy of a romance, in the person of the
late Leonard Smithers, who was at one time in the legal profession
at Sheffield, took the field as a publisher by way of H. S. Nichols.
He was no mere publisher but a man of considerable scholarship, who
not only issued but finished the Sir Richard Burton translation of
Catullus. Round him, to a considerable extent, the vanishing group
rallied for a little while before Death smote them one by one. Here is
no place to pay due justice to this amiable Benvenuto Cellini of book
printing himself, but it must be remembered his figure bulks largely in
the closing scenes. He kept Dowson from starvation. Beardsley wrote of
him as ‘our publisher.’[21] He, when others failed, had the courage to
launch on the English publishing market the released Wilde’s now famous
_Ballad of Reading Gaol_. If he did exceed certain rules for himself,
he at least took risks to help others. He was no supine battener on the
profits of books for young ladies’ seminaries. He was a printer, and
his bankruptcy may be said to have closed the period.

   [21] It is interesting that in an unpublished letter of
        Beardsley’s to Smithers when the latter was intending to
        produce _The Peacock_, an unpublished quarterly, Beardsley
        promises him his best work.

Lastly in this chaunt of omissions comes the drama of the nineties.
Unfortunately the drama, in so far as it affects the group of the
nineties with which we are concerned, is almost a nullity. Aubrey
Beardsley once commenced a play, which was never heard of, in
collaboration with Brandon Thomas. Ernest Dowson wrote what Beardsley
called a ‘tiresome’ playlet. John Davidson perpetrated a number
of plays such as _Bruce_ (1886), _Smith, a tragic farce_ (1888),
_Scaramouch in Naxos_, and two other plays in 1889 when he was feeling
his way, and translated much later as hackwork a play of François
Coppée’s and Victor Hugo’s _Ruy Blas_. Theodore Peters’ pastoral and
other similar trifles only go to show how barren the group itself was
in the dramatist’s talent. Nor can much be said for such poetic plays
as Theodore Wratislaw’s _The Pity of Love_.

But it must be remembered, as a matter of fact, such a sweeping
conclusion may not only be unjust but even impertinent. For where in
all the theatres of the London of the nineties would the plays (if they
had been written) of these young men have found a home? Probably the
dramatic output of the nineties was nil because there were no small
theatres in London at that date of the type to give these young men
a hope that any works they might write could be produced. So only at
the end of the decade do we see the dramatic outburst when the Irish
movement founded a theatre of its own and produced J. M. Synge, and
also when Miss Horniman gave Manchester a repertory theatre, and then
Stanley Houghton came.

True, at the same period as the nineties Oscar Wilde was producing
plays burlesquing the world of Society, and Bernard Shaw was getting
ready to launch his own works by bombasting every one else’s; but the
little movement of the younger men remained dramatically dumb. Nothing
came even when George Moore produced _The Strike at Arlingford_ and
John Todhunter _The Black Cat_. It is a hard thing to believe that all
these young men were devoid of the dramatic instinct. I prefer for my
part to blame the London theatrical world for the lack of those minute
theatres which have become so much a part of the night life of big
continental cities and are so admirably adapted for the production of
the works of new dramatists.

Indeed, the theatrical atmosphere of London at that time was in its
usual perpetual state of stuffiness. There was not even a beneficent
society then such as we now have in the Pioneer Players, whose theatre
(if one may so symbolise it) is the charity house for emancipated
dramatists. Ibsen’s _Doll’s House_ had been produced in London just
before the nineties’ epoch began, and, like anything new in popular art
over here, raised the hue-and-cry. Then, too, the big ‘star’ curse,
which Wilde himself so justly spurned, was permanently settled on our
own insular drama like a stranglehold on the author.

Outside England, in the big art world of the continent, Schnitzler was
beginning in Vienna.[22] Maurice Maeterlinck, in Belgium, had begun[23]
too the drama of expressive silences which came to light in Paris.
There were Sudermann and Hauptmann in Germany; Echegaray in Spain;
D’Annunzio in Italy; Ibsen and Björnstjerne Björnson finishing their
work for the Scandinavian drama; while the playwrights of Paris were,
as always, feverishly fabricating all sorts of movements, as when Paul
Fort, a boy of eighteen, founds in 1890 the Théâtre d’Art. But what
was going on in England? Pinero’s _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, Wilde’s
_Salomé_, and his light comedies, together with stuff by Henry Arthur
Jones, Sydney Grundy, etc., represented the serious drama. The critics
were perturbed, as they generally are. The musical comedy and its
singing, pirouetting soubrettes deluded the populace into the belief
that it had a great drama, when all these spectacles should really
have been housed in London in spacious tearooms for the benefit of
that multitude which is fond of tinkling melody and teapots. There was
not even in London a single Überbrettlbuhnen, as the Germans mouth it,
where those who love beer could go to hear poets recite their verse _à
la_ Otto Bierbaum, let alone little theatres where what we so dolefully
term the serious drama could be played.

   [22] _Anatol_, 1889-90.

   [23] _La Princesse Maleine_, 1889.

Even, too, in those days, the newspaper critics, muzzled by the
business department, which has never any wish to lose its theatrical
advertisements, said little, with a few honest exceptions like Bernard
Shaw. Max Beerbohm, when he took over the critical work of Shaw on
_The Saturday Review_ was obviously unhappy. English theatres rapidly
became as elaborate and as pompous as the Church Militant in its palmy
days. They kept growing in size. In London, indeed, the small theatre
never had its boom. Indeed, the nineties was the age when the big
theatres were being built to fill their owners’ pockets and the men of
the nineties themselves (be it for whatever reason you like) did not
produce a single play.




EPILOGUE


It all seems a long time ago now since those days when Verlaine was as
a lantern for these young men’s feet, to guide them through the mazes
of Art. Thirty years ago and more Wilde was disclosing ‘décolleté
spirits of astonishing conversation’; Zola influenced that Byron of
pessimism, Thomas Hardy, to beget _Jude the Obscure_ (1895), and when
the critics assailed him the Wessex giant guarded a ‘holy silence’
which has denied us up till now an emancipated novel such as the
French and Italians have, though James Joyce may yet achieve it for
us. It was also the age of youth in hansom cabs looking out on the
lights of London’s West End which spread out before them as in a
‘huge black velvet flower.’ Ibsen, Tolstoy, Maeterlinck, Nietzsche,
D’Annunzio, and Dostoievsky were beginning to percolate through by
means of translations that opened out a new world into which everybody
hastily swarmed. It was an age in which young men frankly lauded the
value of egoism. Indeed, it was essentially the age of young men. In
those days a genital restiveness which came over from France started
the sex equation. A hothouse fragrance swept across the pudibond
wastes of our literature. Hectics came glorying in their experiences.
Richard of the Golden Girl with his banjo lifts up his voice to chaunt
‘a bruisèd daffodil of last night’s sin.’ Women like George Egerton
in her _Keynotes_ take questions further than Mrs. Lynn Linton had
ever done in the previous decade. Exoticism, often vulgar when not
in master hands, blabbed out its secrets in works like _The Woman
who Did_. Confounding the good with the bad, a wail went up against
the so-called gospel of intensity. Sometimes it was in the serious
reviews and weeklies; at another time it was Harry Quilter. Some young
undergraduates at Oxford, even in _Aristophanes at Oxford_ (May, 1894),
were filled with ‘an honest dislike for _Dorian Gray_, _Salomé_, _The
Yellow Book_, and the whole of the lackadaisical, opium-cigarette
literature of the day.’ _Punch_ produced a Beardsley Britannia and sang
of:

    The Yellow Poster girl looked out
    From her pinkly purple heaven,
    One eye was blue and one was green,
    Her bang was cut uneven.
    She had three fingers on one hand,
    And the hairs on her head were seven.

And all these criticisms now, all these quarrels, are like old spent
battlefields the sands of gracious time have covered over and hidden
from view. Alone the best work of the period remains; for good art has
no period or special vogue.

Indeed, the elements that destroy the worthless, that winnow the chaff
from the grain, have been at work. For us, indeed, this landscape has
changed from what it once was, and looking at it now we acquire a new
impression which was denied to the critics of the age itself. Some of
us, without a doubt, have gone to the opposite extreme and prattle
about it as an age of platitudes, and accuse a work of art of being as
old as _The Yellow Book_. One might as well accuse a violet of being as
old as the Greek Anthology. For always, to those wandering back in the
right spirit to those days, there will come something of the infinite
zest which stirred the being of the men of the nineties to create art.
It was such an honest effort that one has to think of those times when
Marlowe and his colleagues were athrob with æsthetic aspiration to find
a similitude. The nineties, indeed, are a pleasant flower-garden in
our literature over which many strange perfumes float. There are times
when one wishes to retreat into such places, as there are moments when
the backwaters enchant us from the main stream.

It has been said it was an age of nerves. If by this is implied a
keener sensitiveness to certain feelings pulsating in the art of this
movement, one will not have very far to go to find its cause in the
French impressionistic school of Manet, which, after saturating all
types of French artists, undoubtedly invaded writers over here even
before the movement of the nineties began. On the age without a doubt
it had a lasting influence, so that to a certain degree, without being
over-busy with what went before, we may say its writers brought it
to no small degree into common use in our literature. But just as
impressionism in painting had existed centuries before in the ever-busy
mind of men like Leonardo da Vinci, one cannot go so far as to say it
had never existed before in our literature. Such a statement would be
perhaps frivolous. But it was with these men it first came to exist
as a kind of cry of a new clan. It was these men who were essentially
hectics who essayed to etch the exotic impression. The majority of
the work of the movement, in fact, can be described as impressionisms
of the abnormal by a group of individualists. For in all their work
the predominant keynote will be found to be a keen sense of that
strangeness of proportion which Bacon noted as a characteristic of what
he called beauty. It is observable as much in the poems of Dowson as in
the drawings of Beardsley, two of the leading types of the movement. It
vibrates intensely in the minor work of men like Wratislaw, and also
in John Gray’s early volume, as I have endeavoured to show. All Mr.
Arthur Symons’s criticism is a narration of his soul’s adventures in
quest of it. It stirred the genius of Charles Conder, and vitalizes the
rather cruel analysis of Hubert Crackanthorpe. We see it almost as the
animating spirit of the age itself in Oscar Wilde’s poems, _The Sphinx_
and _The Harlot’s House_. It has become disseminated like a perfume
from the writings of Pater in the men who came after him. It was, so to
speak, a quickening stimulus to them as the rediscovery of a manuscript
of Catullus, or a Greek figure was in the years of the Renaissance
itself. With it came a sense of freedom. An attempt was made, because
of it, for instance, to emancipate our literature to the same extent
as the literatures of Latin countries move untrammelled by a hesitancy
in the choice of certain themes. And people at the time, watching the
fate of the prime movers, cried with a great deal of assurance, ‘That
way lies madness!’

Be this as it may, the men of the nineties bequeathed a certain
subtleness of emotion to our art that is not without its value.
They took Byron’s satanism and inflamed it with the lurid light of
Baudelaire. _Buveurs de lune_ after the manner of Paul Verlaine, they
evoked something of the ethereal glamour of moonlight itself. A realist
like Crackanthorpe tried to tread the whole _via dolorosa_ without
faltering by the wayside. Poetry caught the mood of bizarre crises
and Edgar Wilson wrought a strange delicate world of visions. In Max
Beerbohm irony took on a weird twinge of grace almost Pierrot-like.
Perhaps, indeed, they all had something of the Pierrot quality in
them. Beardsley himself was enchanted by that little opera without
words, ‘L’Enfant Prodigue.’ Dowson made a play about him. _The Happy
Hypocrite_ might be a story of the Pierrot himself grown old.

As I have hinted, much of the work conceived by these men was doomed
to die, as in the case of every movement. What then remains, what is
their balance to the good? Who knows? About everything man has loved
and fashioned there abides vestiges of the interest of humanity. Only
some things are easier to recall than others. They stand out more, so
that one is bound to remark them. They have, so to speak, a _cachet_ of
their own. Among these in this movement there comes the work of the men
I have so hastily attempted to realise. Each has about him something of
that quality which is indefinable, but easily recognisable. Each has
his charm for those who care to come with a loving interest.




INDEX


  _Academy, The_, 106.

  Adams, Francis, 102.

  _Adrian Rome_, 58.

  _Adventures of John Johns, The_, 60.

  _Æneids, The_, 28.

  _Albemarle, The_, 69.

  Allen, Grant, 102.

  _Amor Umbratilis_, 88.

  _Anatol_, 128.

  _Anatomy of Melancholy, The_, 108.

  Anquetin, 4.

  _Antony Garstin’s Courtship_, 76.

  Apuleius, 32.

  _A Rebours_, 58.

  Aretino, Pietro, 27.

  Aristophanes, 18, 26, 27.

  _Aristophanes at Oxford_, 132.

  _Art of Thomas Hardy, The_, 108.

  _Artist’s Model, An_, 39.

  _Ascension of St. Rose of Lima, The_, 25.

  _Atalanta_, 38.

  _Aubrey Beardsley_, 20, 29.

  _Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book_, 37.

  _Aurora La Cujiñi_, 65.

  _Autumn City, An_, 52.

  Avenue Theatre, 21.


  Bacon, Francis, 79, 135.

  _Ballad of a Barber, The_, 30, 44, 85.

  _Ballad of a Nun, The_, 93, 94.

  _Ballad of an Artist’s Wife, The_, 94.

  _Ballad of Hell_, 94.

  _Ballad of Reading Gaol, The_, 24, 126.

  _Ballads_, 93.

  Balzac, 44, 64.

  Bantock, Granville, 99.

  _Baptist Lake_, 5, 93.

  _Barber, The_, 85.

  Barrie, J. M., 55.

  _Battledore and Shuttlecock_, 72.

  Baudelaire, Charles, 81, 84, 136.

  Bayros, Franz von, 26, 28, 31.

  Beardsley, Aubrey, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8-14, 16-19, 23-32, 34, 35, 37-39,
      41-45, 47, 59, 61, 89, 91, 93, 112, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121-123,
      125, 126, 135, 136.

  _Beardsley, Aubrey_, 20, 29.

  _Beardsley, Aubrey, and the Yellow Book_, 37.

  _Beardsley, Aubrey, The Last Letters of_, 14.

  _Beardsley Girl, The_, 22.

  Becke, Louis, 58, 69.

  Beerbohm, Max, 23, 33, 43, 63, 95, 102, 110, 111-117, 122, 130, 136.

  Bierbaum, Otto, 129.

  Binyon, Laurence, 8.

  Birch Bark School, 83.

  Björnson, Björnstjerne, 129.

  _Black Cat, The_, 127.

  _Black Coffee_, 38.

  Blake, William, 19, 35, 44, 51.

  _Blake, William, and his Illustrations to the ‘Divine Comedy,’_ 43, 44.

  _Blätter für die Kunst_, 3.

  _Blessed Damozel_, The, 22.

  Bodley Head, The, 38, 40, 91.

  Bodley Press, The, 8.

  _Book of Fifty Drawings, A_, 24.

  Botticelli, Sandro, 19.

  Bovril, 56.

  Brentano’s, 99.

  Brighton, Beardsley at, 14, 15, 23.

  British Museum, 29.

  Brooke, Stopford A., 75.

  Brown, Professor, 16.

  Browne, Sir Thomas, 47.

  Browning, Robert, 48.

  _Bruce_, 126.

  Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 16, 17.

  Burton, Robert, 108.

  Burton, Sir Richard F., 125.

  _Butterfly, The_, 36, 118, 120.

  Byron, Lord, 136.


  Café Royal, 8, 23, 89, 116.

  _Called Back_, 67.

  _Cardinal’s Snuff-Box, The_, 40.

  Carman, Bliss, 45.

  _Carmen Cl._, 45.

  Casanova, 31.

  _Case of Conscience, A_, 67.

  _Cassell’s Magazine_, 120.

  Catullus, 45, 125, 135.

  Caume, Pierre, 26.

  Cazotte, 14.

  _Celestial Lovers, The_, 14.

  _Cena Trimalchionis_, 34.

  _Century Guild Hobby Horse, The_, 88.

  Chamberlain, A. B., 80.

  _Chameleon, The_, 36.

  Charing Cross Road, 28.

  _Charles Conder_, 124.

  Chaucer, Geoffrey, 27.

  _Chemist in the Suburbs, The_, 68.

  Cheshire Cheese, 8, 10, 79.

  Chiswick Press, 42.

  _Chord, The_, 36.

  _City of the Soul, The_, 79.

  _Climax, The_, 61.

  _Comedy of Masks, A_, 58, 87.

  _Comedy of Sighs, The_, 21.

  Conder, Charles, 4, 11, 41, 44, 61, 123, 124, 135.

  _Confessions of a Young Man, The_, 57.

  _Conflict of Egoisms, A_, 70.

  Congreve, William, 1, 16.

  Conrad, Joseph, 12, 45, 58, 69.

  Conway, Hugh, 67.

  Cooke, J. Y. F., 72.

  Coppée, François, 126.

  Covent Garden, 23.

  Crackanthorpe, Hubert, 8, 11, 44, 47, 57, 58, 61, 64, 67-77, 101,
            135, 136.

  Crane, Walter, 80.

  Crashaw, Richard, 103.

  Custance, Olive, 82.


  _Dame aux Camélias, La_, 18.

  D’Annunzio, Gabrielle, 46, 128, 131.

  Dante, 19.

  _Dark Angel, The_, 104.

  Davidson, John, 5, 8, 56, 59, 80, 83, 86, 91-97, 126.

  _Days and Nights_, 48.

  _Dead Woman, A_, 71.

  _Death of Peter Waydelin, The_, 52, 63.

  _Death of Pierrot, The_, 45.

  _Decadent Movement in Literature, The_, 47.

  _Decorations_, 89.

  _Defence of Cosmetics, A_, 111.

  Dent, J. M., 8, 17.

  Dewhurst, Wynford, 99.

  _Dial, The_, 123.

  Dickens, Charles, 7, 62.

  _Dilemmas_, 67.

  Dircks, Rudolf, 42, 64.

  _Discords_, 64.

  _Divine Comedy, The_, 19.

  _Doll’s House, A_, 128.

  _Dome, The_, 36, 120.

  Donnay, Maurice, 27.

  Dostoievsky, Feodor, 131.

  Douglas, Lord Alfred, 64, 79, 111.

  Dowson, Ernest, 8, 9, 11, 41-45, 47, 50, 53, 58-61, 63, 67, 79-81,
            83, 84, 86-89, 95, 96, 99, 123, 125, 126, 135, 136.

  Du Maurier, George, 58, 81.

  Dunsany, Lord, 119.

  Duse, Eleonora, 46.

  _Dying of Francis Donne, The_, 44, 63.


  _Earl Lavender_, 5.

  Echegaray, José, 128.

  Egerton, George, 64, 132.

  _1880_, 114.

  _Eighteen Nineties, The_, 92.

  Ellis, Edwin J., 80.

  _Embers_, 71.

  _English Literature_, 1880-1905, 39.

  _Episodes_, 64, 102.

  _Ernest Dowson_, 81.

  _Erotische Kunst_, 28.

  _Essay on Beauty_, 79.

  _Essays in Modernity_, 102.

  _Esther Khan_, 52.

  _Etienne Matton_, 73.

  _Eureka_, 118.

  Evans, Caradoc, 77.

  _Evelyn Innes_, 6, 43, 58.

  _Evergreen, The_, 36.

  _Extreme Unction_, 89.


  _Fat Woman, The_, 17.

  _Femmes Damnées_, 84.

  _Fêtes Gallantes_, 81.

  _Fille aux Yeux d’Or, La_, 44.

  Fitzroy Settlement, 80.

  Flaubert, Gustave, 6.

  _Fleet Street Eclogues_, 93.

  Fort, Paul, 4, 129.

  _Frontispiece to the Chopin Nocturnes_, 38.

  Fuchs, Eduard, 28.

  Fuller, Loïe, 99.


  Gale, Norman, 82.

  Galton, Arthur, 102.

  Garnett, Edward, 80.

  _Gaston Lalanne’s Child_, 73.

  Gautier, Théophile, 15.

  _Gentle Art of Making Enemies, The_, 101, 113.

  George, Stephan, 3.

  Gibson, Frank, 124.

  Gillray, James, 28.

  Gissing, George, 57, 58.

  Graham, R. B. Cunninghame, 65.

  Grahame, Kenneth, 65.

  Gray, John, 14, 18, 43, 80-82, 123, 125, 135.

  _Green Carnation, The_, 60.

  Greenaway, Kate, 15.

  Greene, George Arthur, 80.

  Grundy, Mrs., 27.

  Grundy, Sydney, 129.

  Guardian Life and Fire Assurance Co., 16.

  Guys, Constantine, 17.

  Gyles, Althea, 120-122.


  Hamerton, P. G., 115.

  _Happy Hypocrite, The_, 63, 116, 137.

  _Happy Wanderer, The_, 82, 112.

  Hardy, Thomas, 8, 12, 55, 57, 69, 76, 131.

  Harland, Henry, 12, 37-40, 58, 64.

  _Harlot’s House, The_, 5, 79, 120, 121, 135.

  _Harper’s Magazine_, 47.

  Harris, Frank, 58.

  Hauptmann, Gerhardt, 128.

  Hemingway, Percy, 68, 82.

  Henley, W. E., 8-10, 58, 64, 79, 102, 105.

  Herbert, George, 103.

  Herodas, 61.

  _Herodias_, 46.

  Hichens, Robert, 60.

  Hill, Raven, 119.

  Hillier, Arthur Cecil, 80.

  _Hobby Horse, The_, 36.

  Hogarth Club, 38.

  Horne, Herbert P., 80.

  Horniman, Miss, 127.

  Houghton, Stanley, 127.

  _Hound of Heaven, The_, 79.

  _House of Pomegranates, The_, 5.

  _How Queen Guenever made her a Nun_, 25.

  Hugo, Victor, 126.

  Huneker, James, 52.

  Huysmans, J. K., 57.

  _Hypnerotomachia, The_, 13.

  _Hypocrite, The_, 59.


  Ibsen, Henrik, 128, 131.

  _Idiots, The_, 45.

  _Idler, The_, 36, 116, 118-120.

  Image, Selwyn, 43.

  _Imaginary Portraits_, 52.

  _In a Music Hall_, 92.

  _Inconsolables_, 71.

  _Incurable_, 110.

  _Influence of Baudelaire in France and England, The_, 34.

  _Intentions_, 101.

  _In the Depths of the Sea_, 119.


  Jackson, Holbrook, 92, 123.

  James, Henry, 40, 43, 57, 69,75.

  James, Humphrey, 42.

  Jammes, Francis, 69.

  Job, 19.

  Johnson, Lionel, 80, 95, 102-110.

  Johnson, Noel, 99.

  Jones, Alfred, 99.

  Jones, Henry Arthur, 129.

  Joyce, James, 77, 131.

  _Jude the Obscure_, 12, 131.

  Juvenal, 24, 28.


  Keats, John, 87, 88.

  Kelmscott Press, 17.

  Kennedy, J. M., 39.

  _Keynotes_, 64, 132.

  ‘Kid-glove School,’ 10.

  Kipling, Rudyard, 4, 12, 55, 63, 69.

  Kubin, Alfred, 28.


  _La Faustine_, 26, 52.

  La Jeunesse, Ernest, 60.

  _Lake Isle of Innisfree, The_, 10.

  Lamb, Charles, 113.

  Lambeth School of Art, 119.

  Lane, John, 37, 83, 125.

  _Last Studies_, 75.

  Lautrec, Toulouse, 4, 26, 51, 119.

  Lawrence, Arthur, 119.

  Le Gallienne, Richard, 5, 58, 65, 80, 82, 102, 132.

  _L’Enfant Prodigue_, 136.

  _Le Rire_, 119.

  _Liber Juniorum_, 122.

  _Lilies of France, The_, 110.

  Lind, Letty, 38.

  Linton, Mrs. Lynn, 132.

  _Literature at Nurse_, 6.

  _London Nights_, 49, 51.

  Louÿs, Pierre, 84.

  _Love-sick Curate, The_, 73.

  Lowry, H. D., 64.

  Lucian, 28.

  Luska, Sidney (i.e. Henry Harland), 40.

  _Lysistrata, The_, 18, 24, 26-29.


  MacColl, D. S., 29.

  Machen, Arthur, 58, 64.

  _Madame Bovary_, 18.

  _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, 15, 18, 24, 32.

  _Mademoiselle Miss_, 40.

  Maeterlinck, Maurice, 128, 131.

  _Maîtresse d’Esthètes_, 59.

  Mallarmé, Stéphane, 3, 46, 81, 84, 88.

  Manet, Eduard, 3, 134.

  _Manon Lescaut_, 18.

  _Marius the Epicurean_, 57, 111.

  Marlowe, Christopher, 16, 134.

  _Marpessa_, 61.

  Marriott-Watson, Rosamund, 82.

  Mathews, Elkin, 83, 124.

  Mattos, Henri Teixeira de, 84.

  Maupassant, Guy de, 63, 71.

  _Mémoires_ (Casanova), 32.

  Meredith, George, 8, 43, 55, 69.

  Merrick, Leonard, 58.

  _Mike Fletcher_, 7.

  Mimes, 61.

  Mirbeau, Octave, 112.

  _Mishka_, 85.

  _Mr. Midshipman Easy_, 111.

  _Modern Melodrama_, 73.

  _Modern Painting_, 6.

  _Mogreb-el-Acksa_, 65.

  Molière, 56.

  Monet, Claude, 3, 49, 79.

  Moore, Arthur, 58, 87.

  Moore, George, 3, 5-7, 43, 55, 57, 58, 127.

  _More_, 112.

  Morris, William, 17.

  Morrison, Arthur, 58, 69.

  _Morte d’Arthur, Le_, 8, 17, 18, 25.

  Murdoch, W. G. Blaikie, 2, 21, 41, 48.

  Murger, Henri, 9, 58.

  _My People_, 77.

  _Mystic and Cavalier_, 105.


  _National Observer, The_, 8, 10.

  Nerval, Gerard de, 51.

  Nettleship, J. T., 80.

  Nevinson, H. W., 65.

  _New Ballad of Tännhauser, A_, 94.

  _New Grub Street_, 57.

  _New Hedonism, The_, 102.

  _New Illustrator, A_, 17.

  Newman, John Henry, 108.

  Nichols, H. S., 42, 125.

  Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 91, 131.

  _No. 5 John Street_, 58.

  _Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae_, 89.

  _North Coast and Eleanor, The_, 67.


  _Odin Howes_, 60.

  _On Books and Art_, 62.

  _On the Kind of Fiction called Morbid_, 43.

  _Orgeas and Mirandou_, 63.

  O’Sullivan, Vincent, 43.

  _Other Side, The_, 64.

  _Out of Egypt_, 65.


  Pachmann, Vladimir de, 46.

  _Pageant, The_, 36, 110.

  _Parade, The_, 36, 117.

  _Past and Present_, 15.

  _Pater, The Work of Mr._, 106.

  Pater, Walter, 5, 48, 52, 57, 101, 104, 108, 135.

  Payne, John, 3.

  _Peacock, The_, 125.

  Pennell, Joseph, 17.

  _Perfervid_, 92, 95.

  _Perversion of Rouge, The_, 33.

  Peters, William Theodore, 40, 80, 83, 91, 97-99, 126.

  Petronius, 34.

  Phillips, Stephen, 61, 79.

  _Pick-me-Up_, 36, 112, 118.

  _Picture of Dorian Gray, The_, 57, 132.

  _Pierrot and the Statue_, 97.

  _Pierrot of the Minute, The_, 24 91, 99.

  Pinero, A. W., 129.

  Pioneer Players, 128.

  _Pity of Love, The_, 126.

  Plarr, Victor, 80, 81, 87, 90.

  Pope, Alexander, 18.

  _Posies out of Rings_, 97.

  _Post Liminium_, 106.

  _Poster, The_, 36.

  Pre-Raphaelites, 4, 14, 17.

  _Princesse Maleine, La_, 128.

  _Profiles_, 70.

  Propertius, 89.

  _Prose Fancies_, 5.

  _Prose Poems_, 5.

  _Pseudonym Library, The_, 22.

  _Punch_, 22, 132.


  _Quartier Latin, The_, 97.

  _Quarto, The_, 36.

  _Quest of the Golden Girl, The_, 5, 58.

  Quilter, Harry, 132.


  Radford, Dollie, 82.

  Radford, Ernest, 80.

  _Rambler, The_, 120.

  _Random Itinerary, A_, 93.

  Ranger-Gull, Cyril, 59.

  _Rape of the Lock, The_, 18, 19, 24-26.

  Rassenfosse Armand, 26, 28, 122.

  Redon, Odélon, 26.

  Régnier, H. F. J., 4.

  _Reigen_, 32.

  _Renaissance of the Nineties, The_, 2, 21, 41.

  Renoir, P. A., 79.

  _Renunciations_, 67.

  Restif de la Breton, 32.

  Restoration dramatists, 15.

  Rhymers’ Club, 10, 11, 59, 79, 80, 82, 88, 91, 125.

  Rhys, Ernest, 44, 80.

  Ricketts, Charles, 119, 123.

  Rimbaud, Arthur, 84, 85.

  Roberts, C. G. D., 58.

  Roberts, Morley, 80.

  _Roi Pausole, Le_, 32.

  Rolleston, Thomas William, 83.

  Rops, Félicien, 17, 26, 122.

  Rose, Edward, 80.

  _Rose Leaf, The_, 36.

  Ross, Robert, 13, 19, 20, 24, 29.

  Rossetti, D. G., 31.

  Rothenstein, William, 4, 43, 91, 122.

  Rowlandson, Thomas, 27.

  _Runnable Stag, A_, 95.

  _Ruy Blas_, 126.


  _Salomé_, 5, 17, 18, 22, 25, 29, 61, 86, 129, 132.

  Saltus, Francis, 43.

  _Saturday Review, The_, 130.

  _Savoy, The_, 10-12, 24, 36, 37, 40-46, 50, 89.

  _Scaramouch in Naxos_, 126.

  Schnitzler, Arthur, 32, 128.

  _Scots Observer, The_, 10.

  _Scribner’s Magazine_, 120.

  _Seaward Lackland_, 54.

  _Second Book of Fifty Drawings, A_, 24.

  _Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The_, 129.

  Shakespeare, William, 18, 56.

  Shannon, Charles H., 43, 119.

  Shaw, George Bernard, 12, 42, 102, 110, 127, 130.

  Sherard, Robert H., 84, 87, 97.

  Sickert, Walter, 15, 41, 123.

  _Silhouettes_, 49, 51.

  _Silverpoints_, 81, 83.

  Sime, S. H., 36, 118, 119, 121.

  _Sketch, The_, 14, 120.

  _Small Boy and the Barley Sugar, The_, 117.

  _Smith: A Tragic Farce_, 126.

  Smithers, Leonard, 24, 25, 41, 82, 83, 87, 89, 120, 125.

  Sophocles, 56.

  _Sphinx, The_, 79, 86, 135.

  _Spirit of Caricature, The_, 122.

  _Spirit Lamp, The_, 36, 64.

  _Spiritual Adventures_, 52.

  Stenbock, Eric Count, 64.

  Stevenson, Robert Louis, 55, 62.

  _Stories of Strange Women_, 72.

  Street, G. S., 8, 64, 102.

  _Strike at Arlingford, The_, 127.

  _Struggle for Life, The_, 71.

  _Studies in Two Literatures_, 49.

  _Studies of Death_, 64.

  _Studio, The_, 17, 22, 36.

  _Success_, 65.

  Sudermann, Hermann, 128.

  _Symbolist Movement in Literature, The_, 49, 53.

  Symonds, John Addington, 52, 53, 101.

  Symons, Arthur, 6, 8, 12, 14, 18, 37, 40-43, 46-54, 63, 79-81, 87,
            95, 101, 107, 115, 122, 135.

  Synge, J. M., 127.


  _Tales of Mean Streets_, 69.

  _Tamburlaine_, 16.

  _Testament_, 93.

  Théâtre d’Art, 4.

  _Thirty Bob a Week_, 93.

  Thomas, Brandon, 14, 126.

  Thompson, Francis, 79, 82.

  _Thousand and One Nights, The_, 32.

  _Three Musicians, The_, 29, 42.

  _Times, The_, 39.

  _To-Day_, 36.

  Todhunter, Dr. John, 21, 80, 127.

  _Toilet of Helen, The_, 33.

  _Toilet of Sabina, The_, 33.

  Tolstoy, Leo, 131.

  _To the Café aux Phares de l’Ouest, Quartier Montparnasse_, 98.

  _Tournament of Love, The_, 99.

  Traill, H. D., 68.

  _Trevor Perkins_, 77.

  _Trilby_, 58.

  _Tristan and Isolde_, 45.

  _Turn of the Wheel, The_, 77.

  Turquet-Milnes, G., 34.

  _Twenty Years in Paris_, 87, 97·


  _Under the Hill_, 14, 31, 42, 59.

  Unwin, T. Fisher, 22.


  Vale Press, 123.

  _Verisimilitudes_, 64.

  Verlaine, Paul, 43, 44, 46, 50, 81, 84, 131, 136.

  _Vignettes_, 76, 101.

  Vinci, Leonardo da, 134.

  Virgil, 28.

  Vizetelly & Co., 57.


  Wagner, Richard, 14.

  Wagnerites, The, 19.

  Watson, William, 82, 105.

  Watteau, Jean Antoine, 17, 52.

  Watts, George Frederick, 16.

  _Way of the World, The_, 16.

  Wedmore, Frederick, 42, 43, 62, 63, 67.

  _Westminster Gazette, The_, 39.

  _When Greek meets Greek_, 71.

  Whibley, Charles, 102.

  Whistler, James McNeill, 3, 5, 7, 25, 40, 60, 101, 113.

  Whistler, Mrs. James McNeill, 17.

  _White Maize, The_, 73.

  Whiteing, Richard, 58.

  Wilde, Oscar, 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 19, 22, 24, 25, 32, 34, 57,
            60, 61, 79-82, 84, 86, 89, 101, 111, 114, 120, 121,
            125-129, 131, 135.

  Wilkins. W. H., 69.

  Willy, 59.

  Wilson, Edgar, 36, 119, 136.

  _Wilson, Edgar, and his Work_, 119.

  _Woman and her Son, A_, 94.

  _Woman in White, The_, 44.

  _Woman Who Did, The_, 132.

  _Women’s Tragedies_, 64.

  _Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, The_, 93, 94.

  _Work of Mr. Pater, The_, 106.

  _Works, The_, 111, 112.

  Wratislaw, Theodore, 44, 82, 123, 126, 135.

  _Wreckage_, 69, 72.

  Wycherley, William, 16.


  Yeats, W. B., 8, 10, 11, 42, 43, 45, 80, 82, 120.

  _Yellow Book, The_, 6, 11, 12, 21, 24, 36-41, 46, 91, 94, 111, 114,
            117, 132, 133.

  _Yellow Book_ Group, The, 9.

  ‘Yellow Dwarf, The,’ 40.

  _Yet Again_, 112.

  _Yew-Trees and Peacocks_, 73.


  Zangwill, Israel, 69.

  Zola, Émile, 57, 131.

  _Zuleika Dobson_, 111.


_London, Strangeways, Printers._




Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Whatever foreign language errors may exist in the text are the author’s
own, and have been left undisturbed.

Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.





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