Chapter I: 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.