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.
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN OF _THE SATURDAY REVIEW_
CHRISTMAS SUPPLEMENT (1896)
_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.
[Illustration: COVER DESIGN OF _THE SAVOY_, VOLUME
I
_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.