Chapter II: Personalities and Tendencies

Such manifestations of liveliness may seem to be of no very great importance to-day, but many minor freedoms now enjoyed by all without question were then the subjects of battle. It is difficult to realise even now how many changes in taste, ideas and habits were crammed into the _fin de siècle_ decade. For it has been too readily assumed that the achievement of the Eighteen Nineties is confined to that literary and artistic renaissance described by W. G. Blaikie Murdoch in _The Renaissance of the Nineties_. But such a conclusion is unjust to the period. The fine arts did flourish during the decade, and although many of the results were as ephemeral as they were extraordinary, others represent permanent additions to our store of artistic expression. Still, this habit of looking upon the renaissance as an affair of books and pictures has led too many into the belief that the main current of the artistic movement was solely an extension of the art-for-art’s-sake principle; when, as a matter of fact, the renaissance of the Nineties was far more concerned with art for the sake of life than with art for the sake of art. The men with the larger prodigality of genius were not engaged chiefly with art as art; for good or ill they were engaged equally with ideas and life. Popular taste also was attracted by the artist-philosopher, as may be seen by its readiness to appreciate the older and more didactic painters and writers--just as in other years it had enjoyed the didacticism of Charles Dickens. Thus George Frederick Watts, Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, for instance, though not of the period, received their nearest approach to popularity then; and the same may be said of William Morris, Walter Crane, and the craftsmen generally who had evolved out of the Ruskinian gospel of “joy and work” and the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

This obvious taste on the part of the thoughtful public of the _fin de siècle_ for art served with ideas found much to its liking in the writers who came into prominence during the time. Oscar Wilde I have already indicated as bridging the Eighties and Nineties, just as his art united the uncompromising artistic sufficiency upheld by Whistler and the art-culture of Pater. But there were in literature, besides, Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, using plays and novels for criticising morality and teaching newer modes of social life; Rudyard Kipling and William Ernest Henley using verse to stimulate patriotism; Francis Adams singing revolt; Edward Carpenter, democracy; William Watson, justice; and these were as characteristic of the Eighteen Nineties as the self-centred poets and critics and storytellers who clustered about _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_. Even painters, Charles Ricketts and James Pryde and William Nicholson, typical products of the period, turned their genius for a time into the realm of applied art; the first, like William Morris, in the making of beautiful books, and the two latter by becoming, under the pseudonym of the Beggarstaff Brothers, the founders of our modern school of poster designers. And apart from all of these instances of art applied to life, or used to stimulate life, the abundant practical genius of an age which strove always to express itself in the reordering of social conditions, in innumerable activities called “progressive,” embracing besides social, commercial, scientific and imperial affairs, supplies sufficient evidence of the breadth and variety of a renaissance which strove to triumph over what was merely artistic.

_By William Rothenstein_]

The movement of the Eighteen Nineties, however, which has most engaged the attention of writers, the movement called “Decadent,” or by the names of Oscar Wilde or Aubrey Beardsley, the movement Max Nordau denounced in Europe generally, and recently summed up by _The Times_ under the epithet “The Yellow Nineties,” does even now dominate the vision as we look backwards. And, indeed, though only a part of the renaissance, it was sufficiently “brilliant,” to use one of its own _cliches_, to dazzle those capable of being dazzled by the achievements of art and letters for many years to come. For a renaissance of art and ideas which in literature had for exemplars Oscar Wilde (his best books were all published in the Nineties), Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, John Davidson, Hubert Crackenthorpe, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Barrie, Alice Meynell, George Moore, Israel Zangwill, Henry Harland, George Gissing, “John Oliver Hobbes,” Grant Allen, Quiller Couch, Max Beerbohm, Cunninghame Graham, Fiona Macleod (William Sharp), Richard Le Gallienne, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson, and A. B. Walkley; and in pictorial art, James Pryde, William Nicholson, Phil May, William Orpen, Aubrey Beardsley, E. E. Hornel, Wilson Steer, Charles Ricketts, J. J. Shannon, Charles Shannon, John Lavery, John Duncan Fergusson, J. T. Peploe, Charles Conder and William Rothenstein could not have been other than arresting, could not, indeed, be other than important in the history of the arts. For, whatever may be the ultimate place of these workers in literature and painting in the national memory, and whatever value we set upon them then and now, few will deny that even the least of them did not contribute something of lasting or of temporary worth to the sensations and ideas of their age, or its vision of life, and to its conception of spiritual or mental power.

As to what individuals among these writers and painters were the peculiar products of the Eighteen Nineties--that is, those who could not, or might not, have been produced by any other decade--it is not always easy to say. In dealing with the writers the book-lists of John Lane, Elkin Mathews and Leonard Smithers are useful guides in any process of narrowing-down; and further guidance may be found by a perusal of the files of _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_, for these two publications were the favourite lamps around which the most bizarre moths of the Nineties clustered. There were few essential writers of the Nineties who did not contribute to one or the other, and the very fact that Henry Harland, who edited the former, and Arthur Symons, who edited the latter, were able to gather together so many writers and artists who were at once novel and notable, emphasises the distinction of the artistic activities of the time. But that emphasis should not be taken as indicating merely an awakening of virtuosity during the Nineties; the many definite artistic movements, embracing both writers and painters and craftsmen, could not have occurred had there not been a considerable receptivity among the people of the time. A renaissance of art depends equally upon artist and public: the one is the complement of the other. The Eighteen Nineties would have been unworthy of special notice had there not been a public capable of responding to its awakening of taste and intelligence.

But doubt is set at rest when we remember how numerous were the excellent periodicals issued with fair evidence of success. No other decade in English history has produced so many distinctive and ambitious publications; for, apart from _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_, there were _The Parade_, _The Pageant_, _The Evergreen_, _The Chameleon_, _The Hobby Horse_, _The Rose Leaf_ and, later on, _The Quarto_, _The Dome_, and that able magazine’s musical brother, _The Chord_. These periodicals were, of course, the journals which represented the unique qualities in the literature and art of the decade; they were bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. But, important as they are, they do not by any means complete the typical and characteristic journalism of the period, for many less exclusive journals, journals making a wider public appeal, must be named--such notable examples of periodical literature and art, for example, as _The Studio_, _The Butterfly_, _The Poster_, _To-Morrow_, _Eureka_, and more popular still, but excellent also in their way, _The Idler_, _To-Day_ and _Pick-me-up_. The last, during its best days, and these covered several years, had among its contributors many of the best black-and-white artists of the decade; Phil May, Raven Hill, A. S. Hartrick, W. T. Manuel, S. H. Sime and Edgar Wilson regularly sent drawings to this sportive publication, which for genius and humour have not been excelled, even by _Punch_. But although these publications must be named to the credit of the period, many of them, like many of the distinguished writers I have named, might conceivably have been produced at any time during the past forty years. _Pick-me-up_, for example, presented no new point of view; it was sprightly and humorous in the popular sense--that is to say, it expressed the inconsequent outlook of the _bon viveur_ of fiction--and persistently assumed that cosmopolitan Piccadilly Circus-cum-Leicester Square, and the Anglo-American Boulevards des Italiens-cum-Montmartre (after midnight) were the last words in “life.” In short, _Pick-me-up_ represented the false and altogether absurd “Gay Paree” view of things--and to that extent it was not of a day but of all time. Such an attitude, however, is not inconsistent with a genius for art, and _Pick-me-up_ possessed a staff of black-and-white draughtsmen of unequalled ability, and sometimes of rare genius; and in addition to its native talent it also introduced to this country the work of good foreign draughtsmen, including that of the great French artist Steinlen. Still, an able group of black-and-white artists is by no means a peculiarity of the Nineties. The Sixties had _Once a Week_--and _Punch_ has reigned supreme from the Forties till to-day. Phil May and Raven Hill belonged to the artistic eminence of the Nineties, but, individual as they are, they might have happened in any other decade since Charles Keene and John Leech created the modern humorous pen drawing. One _Pick-me-up_ artist, and only one, had anything approaching _fin de siècle_ tendencies; that artist was (and is) S. H. Sime: he is an art product of the Nineties, along with Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Conder, Charles Ricketts and Laurence Housman.

The literary movement of the Eighteen Nineties has had full opportunity of insisting upon itself, but had no such opportunity existed the books of the period would have stood out with a certain distinction. In the year 1890 the literary field was so dominated by men whose reputations had long since been established, either with the inner circle of bookish people or the larger public, that any new-comers, especially in poetry, were apt to be labelled “minor.” Tennyson was still alive, and Robert Browning had died only in the previous year; Philip James Bailey was living, though forgotten, and Martin Tupper, like Browning, had passed away in 1889. William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne, although fully recognised as major poets, had still some good work to do, and there were a select few who admired the poetry of Coventry Patmore, and many who thought well of the works of Lewis Morris. And among women singers Jane Ingelow was still living, and Christina Rossetti was yet to publish two more volumes.

John Ruskin and Walter Pater were not only alive, but their æsthetic-social messages were finding ever wider fields of acceptance. “The acute but honourable minority,” which hitherto had been George Meredith’s way of referring to his own small following, was rapidly becoming a respectable body of supporters, aided not a little by the discerning but whole-hearted trumpeting of a young man from Liverpool, Richard Le Gallienne, who was to become a notability of the Nineties. Thomas Hardy, also, was established, and like Meredith winning to a wider, though not so tardy, popularity; and he also was heralded by a young poet of the period, Lionel Johnson, in a fine study called _The Art of Thomas Hardy_ (1894). John Henry Newman ended his ardent life in 1890, but Cardinal Manning was still living; so also were the popular Church of England divines, Archdeacon Farrar and Canon Liddon, the equally popular Nonconformist, Charles Spurgeon, and at the antipodes of their faith, James Martineau. In science the great names of Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton were honoured among living geniuses; and so was that of Alfred Russel Wallace, who survived until the eve of the Great War. The historian, James Anthony Froude, died in 1894, and W. E. H. Lecky lived through the decade.

_By Aubrey Beardsley_]

Literary reputations beginning in the Seventies and Eighties, and only in a few cases awaiting further buttressing in the Nineties, were numerous; these, besides those already named, included W. H. Mallock, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frederic Harrison, William Ernest Henley, John Addington Symonds, Arthur Pinero, Sidney Colvin, Austin Dobson, Edward Dowden, H. D. Traill, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Stopford Brooke, James Payn, Leslie Stephen, Henry James, Grant Allen, William Black, Robert Bridges, Frederick Wedmore, and among more popular writers, Marie Corelli, Rider Haggard, and Hall Caine. Mrs Humphry Ward had become famous on the publication of _Robert Elsmere_, in 1888, but the importance of her work during the succeeding decade places her, as it does also George Moore, Rudyard Kipling and George Gissing, each of whom did good work before 1890, in the newer movement. This latter was not, however, to have its effect on the younger generation alone, it was so irresistible as to inspire even those whose life-work was more or less done to new and modern activities. Thus Thomas Hardy began a new phase of his art in 1891 with _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, following it with the masterly, and ultra-modern, _Jude the Obscure_, in 1895. He also published his first volume of poems, _Wessex Poems_, in 1898. William Morris published most of his prose romances in the Nineties, including _News from Nowhere_, in 1891, and in quick succession _The Roots of the Mountains_, _The Story of the Glittering Plain_, _The Wood Beyond the World_, and _The Well at the World’s End_. _The Water of the Wondrous Isles_ and _The Story of the Sundering Flood_ were left in manuscript and published after his death. John Addington Symonds, whose chief work, _The History of the Italian Renaissance_, was completed between the years 1875–1886, published _In the Key of Blue_, a book so typical in some ways of the Nineties that it might well have been written by one of the younger generation. Frederick Wedmore, without being _fin de siècle_, published _Renunciations_ (a very Eighteen-Ninety title!) in 1893, and _English Episodes_, in 1894, both of these have a freshness of vision quite of the period. Theodore Watts-Danton published his gipsy novel, _Aylwin_ (1898). The great veteran of black-and-white art, George du Maurier, suddenly became a popular novelist with the famous _Trilby_ in 1894, which had been preceded by _Peter Ibbetson_ (1891) and succeeded by _The Martian_ (1896); and another veteran artist of great eminence also reasserted himself as a writer of first-rate power during the period, for it was not until 1890 that James McNeill Whistler collected and published in a delightful volume his “Ten O’Clock” lecture, and his various letters to the newspapers, with other Press cuttings, under the appropriate title of _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_. Grant Allen, besides becoming a journalistic champion of the new school, himself joined the younger generation by the publication of _The Woman Who Did_, in 1895, and Arthur W. Pinero, like Thomas Hardy with his novels, began a new phase as a playwright with the production of _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_, in 1893; for, doubtless, both _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ and _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_ would have been premature in the Eighties. And, finally, Richard Whiteing, veteran journalist, but unknown to the public by name, suddenly became something like famous by the publication of _No. 5 John Street_, in the last year of the decade.

Further evidence of the stimulating atmosphere of the period is to be found in the number of writers who sprang into existence out of the _Zeitgeist_ of the decade, as people in this country were beginning to call the spirit of the times. I do not mean those who were of the period in the narrower sense, but those who, taking that which every writer takes from his time, were sufficiently general in attitude not to have been peculiar to any movement. Among such writers may be named J. M. Barrie, Conan Doyle, Maurice Hewlett, Owen Seaman, Barry Pain, Pett Ridge, Israel Zangwill, Anthony Hope, W. H. Hudson, Joseph Conrad, Jerome K. Jerome, Stanley Weyman, H. A. Vachell, Stephen Phillips, Henry Newbolt, A. E. Housman, Arthur Christopher Benson, William Watson, Allen Upward, and the late G. W. Steevens, all of whom published their first notable work in the Nineties, and in many instances their best work. A qualification is necessary in the case of W. H. Hudson, whose earliest work, _The Purple Land that England Lost_, was born “out of its due time” in 1885, and consequently neglected by critics and public. Had this remarkable book been published ten years later, under its abridged title, _The Purple Land_, such a fate might not have befallen it; the Nineties almost certainly would have accorded it that recognition for which it had to await twice ten years. Robert Hichens should also appear in the above list, but the fact that he wrote in _The Green Carnation_ (1894) the most notable satire of the period brings him into the more exclusive movement.

The writers most imbued with the spirit of the time, direct outcome of circumstances peculiar to the _fin de siècle_, will be more fully considered in other chapters of this book. Suffice it to say here that they fall roughly into groups which express ideas and tendencies then prevalent and, if not always taking the form of designed movements, indicating the existence of very definite though subconscious movements in the psychology of the age. Delightful among _fin de siècle_ writers were those masters of a new urbanity, which, although in the direct tradition of Addison and Steele, of Dr Johnson and Charles Lamb, possessed a _flair_ of its own, a whimsical perversity, a “brilliance,” quite new to English letters. First and most eminent of these urbane essayists, for like their earlier prototypes they practised mainly the essayist’s art, comes Max Beerbohm, who considered himself outmoded at the age of twenty-four and celebrated the discovery by collecting his essays in a slim, red volume with paper label and uncut edges, and publishing them at the sign of The Bodley Head, in 1896, under the title of _The Works of Max Beerbohm_. From the same publishing house came fascinating volumes by G. S. Street, who satirised suburbans, talked charmingly of books, art and persons, and in _The Autobiography of a Boy_ revealed the irony of the youth who wanted to be himself, and to live his own scarlet life, without having any particular self to become or any definite life to live, save that of matching his silk dressing-gown with the furniture of his room. There were also Charles Whibley, who wrote able studies of scoundrels and dandies; Richard Le Gallienne, who made a fine art of praise and, besides reviving the picaresque novel of flirtation in _The Quest of the Golden Girl_, became a sort of _fin de siècle_ Leigh Hunt; John Davidson, who wrote the _Fleet Street Eclogues_ and some curiously urbane novels, but who was more poet than essayist, and, latterly, was so much interested in ideas that he became a philosopher using literature as his medium; and Arthur Symons, poet of the music hall, the café and the _demi-monde_, literary impressionist of towns, and penetrating critic of the writers and ideas of the decadence in France and England.

Another group of writers distinctly associated with the period received its inspiration from the Celtic revival. Its chief figure was William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet and dramatist, whose earliest volumes of distinction, _The Countess Kathleen_ and _The Celtic Twilight_, were published in 1892 and 1893. With him were Dr Douglas Hyde, George Russell (A.E.), John Eglinton, Lady Gregory, and others, who together made up the Irish Literary Movement which eventually established the Irish National Theatre in Abbey Street, Dublin, and produced the greatest of modern Irish dramatists, John Millington Synge. Wales also had its movement, with Ernest Rhys as its chief figure; and in Scotland there was a more effective revival, which clustered about Professor Patrick Geddes in Edinburgh and produced four numbers of a handsome quarterly magazine, called _The Evergreen_, in 1895, among its contributors being both “Fiona Macleod” and William Sharp (then supposed to be two separate persons). This Scottish movement was not entirely artistic in aim, but, like so many activities of the Nineties, it sought to link art and ideas with life, and so became actually a social movement with a Socialistic tendency. Next to W. B. Yeats the most prominent figure of the Celtic revival was Fiona Macleod, whose first book, _Pharais, A Romance of the Isles_, appeared in 1894. There was also another Scottish movement, very widely appreciated on this side of the border. It was called the “Kail Yard School,” and included the popular dialect fiction of J. M. Barrie, S. R. Crockett and “Ian Maclaren.”

The importation of realism from France began in the preceding decade, with translations of the novels of Emile Zola, for which the translator and publisher, Ernest Vizetelly, suffered imprisonment, and with the realistic novels of George Moore during the same period. That writer’s vivid piece of realism, _Esther Waters_ (1894), made history also by being the first notable novel to be banned by the libraries and placed on the _Index Expurgatorius_ of Messrs W. H. Smith & Son. In the same year a new realist arrived, in the person of Arthur Morrison, with _Tales of Mean Streets_, which was followed by _A Child of the Jago_, in 1896. These striking sketches of slum life were new in so far as they depicted slum life as a thing in itself at a time when people still looked upon the slums, much as they had done in the time of Dickens, as a subject for romantic philanthropy. W. Somerset Maugham published a slum novel, _Liza of Lambeth_, in 1897, which had some considerable vogue, and in 1899 Richard Whiteing’s _No. 5 John Street_ joined the same class. But there never could be more than a passing fancy for such sectional realism; slums were rapidly becoming the affair of the sociologist. Readers of books, and also those people who rarely read books, turned to the more stimulating realism, which by the way was not free of romance, of Rudyard Kipling, who had hitherto appeared in the blue-grey, paper-backed pamphlets issued, for Anglo-Indian consumption, by Wheeler of Allahabad. In 1890 their growing fame forced them upon the home booksellers, and when they were published in this country they aroused so great an interest that instead of remaining curiosities of Anglo-Indian publishing they became the chief modern literature of the English-speaking world. There were realists, too, like Cunninghame Graham, who savoured also of the new romance, whose first book appeared in 1895, and in the same year Frank Harris published his first volume of short stories, _Elder Conklin and Other Stories_. But neither of them achieved popularity. Cold also was the reception given to the personal experience of poverty which George Gissing put into his novels; although _The New Grub Street_ (1891) was at least the first of this unfortunate author’s works to receive anything like popular recognition.

I have pointed out more than once that the renaissance of the Nineties was largely social, and much of its literature reveals this spirit. There were many writers who made literature of their social zeal, more particularly among Socialists. Some of the realists, indeed, were avowed Socialists. Richard Whiteing, Cunninghame Graham, Frank Harris and Grant Allen were all of that faith. George Bernard Shaw and Robert Blatchford persistently used their literary skill in the propagation of social theories, and only less directly was the same thing done at that time by H. G. Wells, who has since passed through a phase of deliberate Socialist propaganda. George Bernard Shaw’s first really characteristic book, _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, appeared in 1891, his first play, _Widowers’ Houses_, in 1892, and his earliest collected plays, _Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant_, in 1898. Throughout the Nineties he was a busy journalist, criticising music, art, drama, life, anything in fact that anybody would print, for he had views to express, and determination to express them, on all phases of our social life.

Robert Blatchford published _Merrie England_, a remarkable essay in Socialist special pleading, written for the man-in-the-street in a strong, simple and picturesque manner. The book attracted wide notice, and did much towards consolidating the Socialist movement of the time. Over a million copies were sold, and it has been translated into Welsh, Danish, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Spanish, Hebrew and Norwegian. Edward Carpenter belongs to this class, for although _Towards Democracy_ was published, with several of his other books, in the Eighties, he wrote and lectured much during the Nineties. He was also one of the earliest of English writers to consider problems of sex. And finally, Sidney Webb, the social historian and sociologist, published his first works in the late Eighties and the Nineties: _Socialism in England_ (1889), _The London Programme_ (1892) and with his wife, Beatrice Webb, _The History of Trades Unionism_ and _Industrial Democracy_ in 1894 and 1898. The Nineties also saw the beginning of that careful sociological investigation of poverty and industrial conditions which has been the basis of so many recent reforms--the monumental inquiry of Charles Booth into the conditions of the labouring classes of London. This great work was begun in 1892 and finished in 1908, and is recorded in seventeen volumes, entitled _The Life and Labour of the London People_.

But there is no doubt that the most remarkable phase of the literary movement of the Eighteen Nineties was that which found expression in the work of those writers associated with the high journalism of _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_: poets, essayists and storytellers whose books were in most instances published either by Mr John Lane, at the Bodley Head, or by Mr Elkin Mathews, both of whom were established in Vigo Street. At the beginning of the decade they were partners, under the title of Elkin Mathews & John Lane; but the partnership was dissolved, and afterwards the partners carried on separate businesses almost opposite each other in the same street. Other publishers associated with the new literary movement were Henry & Co., Laurence & Bullen and, more intimately, Leonard Smithers, himself a decadent and the friend and associate of many of the leaders of the group. Nearer the new century the Unicorn Press continued some of the traditions of the early Nineties, when the other publishers of the movement had become normal. These last-named publishers, as in the case of so many of the British decadents, passed away with the Nineties or thereabouts. Mr William Heinemann was a notable publisher of the period and in sympathy with the younger generation; so was Mr Fisher Unwin, who showed his modernism by advertising his books by means of posters designed by Aubrey Beardsley; and Mr Grant Richards issued several important works of the time, notably Bernard Shaw’s _Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant_, and A. E. Housman’s _A Shropshire Lad_. The lists of any of these publishers issued during the decade prove interesting reading even to-day, and they reveal sometimes a type of publisher as _fin de siècle_ as their literary wares. No one will deny, however, that The Bodley Head was the chief home of the new movement, for not only did _The Yellow Book_ issue from that house, but books by Oscar Wilde, John Davidson, Francis Thompson, Max Beerbohm, Richard Le Gallienne, George Egerton, Laurence Binyon, Michael Field, Norman Gale, Kenneth Grahame, Lionel Johnson, Alice Meynell, William Watson, and G. S. Street. Leonard Smithers made a unique place for himself as a _fin de siècle_ publisher, and when _The Savoy_ (1896) was published by him he stood courageously for the ideas and art of the decadence at its darkest hour. With the passing of that excellent but short-lived quarterly the decadence in England may be said to have passed away.

The list of contributors to those two periodicals constitute practically the _dramatis personæ_ of the movement--with the notable exception of Oscar Wilde, not any of whose work appeared in either. _The Yellow Book_ had Henry Harland for literary editor, and for art editor, Aubrey Beardsley. Its first four numbers (1894–1895) afford us a clear and comprehensive view of the literary movement of the Nineties; but after the withdrawal of Aubrey Beardsley, who transferred his work to _The Savoy_ in January 1896, the policy of _The Yellow Book_ seemed to change, and this change proceeded always more away from the characteristics of the early days, and, save for its yellow covers, _The Yellow Book_ eventually was hardly to be distinguished from any high-class magazine in book form. The first number was in the nature of a bombshell thrown into the world of letters. It had not hitherto occurred to a publisher to give a periodical the dignity of book form; and, although literature had before then been treated as journalism, it was quite a new thing in this country for a group of lesser-known writers and artists to be glorified in the regal format of a five-shilling quarterly. But the experiment was a success even in the commercial sense, a circumstance aided no doubt by its flaming cover of yellow, out of which the Aubrey Beardsley woman smirked at the public for the first time. Nothing like _The Yellow Book_ had been seen before. It was newness _in excelsis_: novelty naked and unashamed. People were puzzled and shocked and delighted, and yellow became the colour of the hour, the symbol of the time-spirit. It was associated with all that was _bizarre_ and queer in art and life, with all that was outrageously modern. Richard Le Gallienne wrote a _prose fancy_ on “The Boom in Yellow,” in which he pointed out many applications of the colour with that _fin de siècle_ flippancy which was one of his characteristics, without, however, tracing the decorative use of yellow to Whistler, as he should have done. Nevertheless his essay recalls very amusingly the fashion of the moment. “Bill-posters,” he says, “are beginning to discover the attractive qualities of the colour. Who can ever forget meeting for the first time upon a hoarding Mr Dudley Hardy’s wonderful Yellow Girl, the pretty advance-guard of _To-Day_? But I suppose the honour of the discovery of the colour for advertising purposes rests with Mr Colman; though its recent boom comes from publishers, and particularly from The Bodley Head. _The Yellow Book_ with any other colour would hardly have sold as well--the first private edition of Mr Arthur Benson’s poems, by the way, came caparisoned in yellow, and with the identical name, _Le Cahier Jaune_; and no doubt it was largely its title that made the success of _The Yellow Aster_.”

The first number of _The Yellow Book_, published in April 1894, contained contributions by Richard Le Gallienne, Max Beerbohm, Ella D’Arcy, Arthur Symons, Henry Harland, George Egerton, Hubert Crackenthorpe, John Davidson, John Oliver Hobbes and George Moore, all of whom were in the vanguard of the new movement, and among the newer artists, besides Aubrey Beardsley, who contributed four full drawings, the cover decorations and title-page, there were Walter Sickert, Joseph Pennell, Laurence Housman, Will Rothenstein, and R. Anning Bell. But although _The Yellow Book_ was mainly _fin de siècle_ it was not exclusively so, for it included contributions by Henry James, Arthur Christopher Benson, William Watson, Arthur Waugh, Richard Garnett and Edmund Gosse, and illustrations by J. T. Nettleship and Charles W. Furse, and, above all, as though to reassure its readers and the British public after the Beardsley cover, and certain contents to match, and to assert its fundamental respectability, it contained a frontispiece by Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A. Volume II. had Norman Gale, Alfred Hayes, Dolly Radford and Kenneth Grahame among its new contributors, and P. Wilson Steer, E. J. Sullivan, A. S. Hartrick and Walter Crane among its illustrators. Volume III. was more modern than Volume II., for in addition to many of the younger generation who contributed to the earlier volumes it introduced into its company Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Olive Custance, Theodore Wratislaw and Charles Dalmon, whilst Max Beerbohm was represented among the illustrators by his caricature of George IV. The most notable addition to the contributors of Volume IV. was Charles Conder, who sent a design for a fan; and Volume V. is interesting as it contains an article by G. S. Street, the first English essay on Anatole France, by the Hon. Maurice Baring, and the first article by that distinguished French writer and _savant_ ever published in England.

In spite, however, of its novelty, and the excellence of the contents of its early numbers, _The Yellow Book_ was always inclined not only to compromise in matters of editorial policy, but its contents were not always chosen according to the high standard such a work demanded, and this became more pronounced after the retirement of Beardsley. _The Savoy_ pursued a different policy. Edited by Arthur Symons, it stood boldly for the modern note without fear and without any wavering of purpose. Hence it represents the most ambitious and, if not the most comprehensive, the most satisfying achievement of _fin de siècle_ journalism in this country. Such a result was inevitable with an editor of rare critical genius and one who had been profoundly influenced by the French decadents. If his choice was not always decadent it was always modern, even when it selected a drawing of a distant time. This can be seen also among the literary contributors to _The Savoy_, among whom were Arthur Symons, W. B. Yeats, Theodore Wratislaw, Ernest Rhys, Fiona Macleod, George Moore, Edward Carpenter, Ford Madox Hueffer and Lionel Johnson. All are _fin de siècle_ writers, though differing in type and aim, and such writers could hardly do otherwise than give the periodical a decidedly modern expression, in spite of a challenging Editorial Note prefaced to No. 1 (dictated, it would seem, by dissatisfaction with the uneven editing, _fin de siècle_ pose with apparent readiness to compromise of _The Yellow Book_), which disavowed a definite modernist intent:

“It is hoped that THE SAVOY will be a periodical of an
exclusively literary and artistic kind. To present Literature
in the shape of its letterpress, Art in the form of its
illustrations, will be its aim. For the attainment of that aim
we can but rely on our best endeavours and on the logic of our
belief that good writers and artists will care to see their work
in company with the work of good writers and artists. Readers
who look to a new periodical for only very well-known or only
very obscure names must permit themselves to be disappointed. We
have no objection to a celebrity who deserves to be celebrated,
or to an unknown person who has not been seen often enough to be
recognised in passing. All we ask from our contributors is good
work, and good work is all we offer our readers. This we offer
with some confidence. We have no formulas, and we desire no
false unity of form or matter. 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. We hope to appeal
to the tastes of the intelligent by not being original for
originality’s sake, or audacious for the sake of advertisement,
or timid for the convenience of the elderly-minded. We intend
to print no verse which has not some close relationship with
poetry, no fiction which has not a certain sense of what
is finest in living fact, no criticism which has not some
knowledge, discernment and sincerity in its judgment. We could
scarcely say more, and we are content to think we can scarcely
say less.”

_The Savoy_ lived for twelve months, and during that time it went far towards realising its editor’s ideal. It did realise that ideal to the extent of not admitting anything to its pages which could not be recommended alone on artistic grounds, and it never for a moment stepped beneath its high intent for the sake of financial gain or any of the other snares and pitfalls of even well-meaning editors. Among contributors who were modern without being decadent were Bernard Shaw, who is represented in the first number by his most essay-like essay, “On Going to Church”; Havelock Ellis, who contributed one of the earliest articles in English on Friedrich Nietzsche; Frederick Wedmore, Edmund Gosse, Selwyn Image, Mathilde Blind and Joseph Conrad. Besides these _The Savoy_ contained translations from Paul Verlaine, Emil Verhaeren and Cesare Lombroso. The illustrations were always modern, and always distinguished, and included, in addition to the last and, in many instances, best of Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings, examples of the work of Charles Conder, Will Rothenstein, C. H. Shannon, Max Beerbohm, Joseph Pennell, William T. Horton, Walter Sickert and Phil May. It also reveals Aubrey Beardsley as a writer in both prose and poetry, the former taking the shape of his aggressively modern romance, _Under the Hill_. _The Savoy_ was admittedly an art-for-art’s-sake publication, and its failure in twelve months through lack of support proves that there was at the time no public for such a publication, even though the half-a-crown charged for each issue was not only half the price of _The Yellow Book_, but well within the reach of a fairly numerous cultured class. That class proved unequal to the demand of a decadent periodical of a fine type. Neither did the fact of a number being banned by Messrs W. H. Smith & Son, because it contained a reproduction of one of William Blake’s pictures, have any appreciable effect on its circulation; and, finally, funds reached so low an ebb that Arthur Symons was forced to write the whole of the last number himself, and in his epilogue to his readers on the last page of that number he confessed to the pessimistic belief that “Comparatively few people care for art at all, and most of these care for it because they mistake it for something else,” which in a way is true, but not necessarily unwise on the part of the majority, for art, as the Nineties were beginning to learn, was less important than life. But that does not invalidate the excellence of _The Savoy_.

A final attempt was made to produce a good periodical by the publication of _The Dome_, described as “A Quarterly containing examples of all the Arts,” at the price of one shilling, in 1898, two years after the death of _The Savoy_. But this quarterly never attempted to do more than represent the various arts; it had no guiding theory save excellence, with the result that it was less definite than either of its forerunners. It admitted good work of the past as well as the present, and reprinted many fine examples of ancient and modern wood-engraving. Notable among its modern illustrators were Gordon Craig and Althea Giles; and among its writers, Laurence Binyon, W. B. Yeats, C. J. Holmes, Laurence Housman, T. W. H. Crosland, Stephen Phillips, Fiona Macleod, John F. Runciman, T. Sturge Moore, Francis Thompson, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Gordon Bottomley, Arthur Symons, Roger Fry, “Israfel,” and there was also a translation of one of Maurice Maeterlinck’s earliest stories, _The Massacre of the Innocents_.

It will be seen from the foregoing that the art movement of the Eighteen Nineties found one of its most characteristic expressions in _belles lettres_. It was largely a literary renaissance, exemplifying itself in poetry, drama, fiction and the essay. Books became once again respected for their own sakes; publishers, led by John Lane, Elkin Mathews and, later, by J. M. Dent, competed as much in beauty and daintiness of production as in names and contents, and this bookish reverence reached its highest expression in a veritable apotheosis of the book at the hands of William Morris of the Kelmscott Press and Hacon & Ricketts of the Vale Press. But this branch of the fine arts, although still remote from the average national life, was no longer remote in the old sense; it did not desire academic honours, and those who promoted the renaissance had no idea of establishing a corner in culture. An air of freedom surrounded the movement; old ideals were not the only things that suffered at the hands of the iconoclasts, but, as we have seen, old barriers and boundaries were broken down and pitched aside; a new right-of-way was proclaimed, and invitations to take to it were scattered broadcast. It was not entirely a democratic movement, however, and in some of its more intense moments it was not at all democratic. What really happened in the Nineties was that doors were thrown open and people might enter and pass through into whatever lay beyond if they would or could, and whether they were invited or not. To that extent the period was democratic. Such an attitude was a more or less intuitive recognition of a very obvious awakening of intelligence which represented the first mental crop of the movement towards popular education. The Board Schools were bearing fruit; Secondary Education and University Extension culture were producing a new inquisitiveness. Ibsen’s younger generation was knocking at the door. The growing demand for culture was partially satisfied, in the case of those who could expect no further aid from the educational system, by popular reprints of the classics, as could be seen by the ever-growing demand for the volumes of _The Scott Library_, _The Canterbury Poets_ and _The Temple Classics_. The mental and imaginative stimulus thus obtained created a hunger in many for still newer sensations, and many of these passed through the doors of the decadents or the realists into stranger realms. The remainder, unable to appreciate the bizarre atmosphere of _The Yellow Book_, turned with avidity to the new romantic literature of the Yellow Press.

The Eighteen Nineties were to no small extent the battleground of these two types of culture--the one represented by _The Yellow Book_, the other by the Yellow Press. The one was unique, individual, a little weird, often exotic, demanding the right to _be_--in its own way even to waywardness; but this was really an abnormal minority, and in no sense national. The other was broad, general popular; it was the majority, the man-in-the-street awaiting a new medium of expression. In the great fight the latter won. _The Yellow Book_, with all its “new” hopes and hectic aspirations, has passed away, and _The Daily Mail_, established two years later, flourishes. In a deeper sense, also, these two publications represent the two phases of the times. The characteristic excitability and hunger for sensation are exemplified in the one as much as the other, for what after all was the “brilliance” of Vigo Street but the “sensationalism” of Fleet Street seen from the cultured side? Both were the outcome of a society which had absorbed a bigger idea of life than it knew how to put into practice, and it is not surprising to those who look back upon the period to find that both tendencies, in so far as they were divorced from the social revolution of the Nineties, were nihilistic, the one finding its Moscow at the Old Bailey, in 1895, the other in South Africa, in 1899.

I use both terms and dates symbolically, for I am neither blind to the element of injustice in the condemnation of Oscar Wilde nor to the soul of goodness in the South African War. But at the moment I am dealing with main tendencies, and trying to give an idea-picture of a period, which was self-contained even in its disasters. The first half was remarkable for a literary and artistic renaissance, degenerating into decadence; the second for a new sense of patriotism degenerating into jingoism. The former was in the ascendant during the first five years. In 1895 the literary outlook in England had never been brighter; an engaging and promising novelty full of high vitality pervaded the Press and the publishers’ lists, and it was even commencing to invade the stage, when with the arrest of Oscar Wilde the whole renaissance suffered a sudden collapse as if it had been no more than a gaily coloured balloon. “The crash of the fall certainly affected the whole spirit of this year,” says R. H. Gretton, in his _Modern History of the English People_. “There were few great houses in London where he was not known; fewer still where there was not among the younger generation an aggressive, irresponsible intolerance which had some relation, however vague, to his brilliant figure. Even athleticism rejoiced at this date to dissociate itself from anything that might have been in danger of easy approval from an older generation, by being too æsthetic; captains of university football teams had been seen with long hair. There was too much of real revolt in the movement to allow the fate of one man to hold it lastingly in check; but a certain silence, almost, if not quite, shamefaced, settled for the moment on much of the social life of the country.” Two of Oscar Wilde’s plays were being performed at the time, and they were immediately suppressed. Outside of the smoking-room that writer’s name was scarcely whispered; it was suppressed entirely in the newspapers. His books were allowed to go out of print, and unauthorised publishers pirated them, and were allowed for a time to thrive upon the _succès de scandale_ attained by the books because of the misfortune of their author.

With the arresting of the art movement of the Nineties came the chance of the man-in-the-street, whose new intellectual needs found a new caterer in Alfred Harmsworth. The political prejudices of the average man and his need for romance by proxy were exploited with phenomenal success by the audacious genius of the great newspaper administrator who has since won a world-wide reputation as Lord Northcliffe. _The Daily Mail_ openly fanned the Jingo flame, already beginning to leap aloft under the inspiration of Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes, and the melodramatic Jameson Raid of December 1895. Then came the Jubilee of 1897, when pride of race reached so unseemly a pitch that Rudyard Kipling even, the acknowledged poet of Imperialism, as the new patriotism was called, was moved to rebuke his compatriots:

“_If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Of lesser breeds without the Law.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!_”

But there was no turning back. Bitten by an unseeing pride, expressing itself in a strangely inorganic patriotism, the nation forgot art and letters and social regeneration, in the indulgence of blatant aspirations which reached their apotheosis in the orgy of Mafeking Night.