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diff --git a/old/53142-0.txt b/old/53142-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 470542d..0000000 --- a/old/53142-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,4407 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Men of The Nineties, by Bernard Muddiman - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: The Men of The Nineties - -Author: Bernard Muddiman - -Release Date: September 25, 2016 [EBook #53142] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MEN OF THE NINETIES *** - - - - -Produced by Clarity, Charlie Howard, and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -file was produced from images generously made available -by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) - - - - - - - - - -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. - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Men of The Nineties, by Bernard Muddiman - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MEN OF THE NINETIES *** - -***** This file should be named 53142-0.txt or 53142-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/3/1/4/53142/ - -Produced by Clarity, Charlie Howard, and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -file was produced from images generously made available -by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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