THE habit, to which we are so much addicted, of writing books about
other people who have written books, will probably be a source of
intense discomfort to its practitioners in the twenty-first century.
Like the rest of their kind, they will pin their ambition to the
possibility of indulging in epigram at the expense of their
contemporaries. In order to lead up to the achievement of this desire
they will have to work in the nineteenth century and the twentieth.
Between the two they will find an obstacle of some terror. The eighteen
nineties will lie in their path, blocking the way like an unhealthy
moat, which some myopes might almost mistake for an aquarium. All manner
of queer fish may be discerned in these unclear waters.
To drop the metaphor, our historians will find themselves confronted by
a startling change. The great Victorians write no longer, but are
succeeded by eccentrics. There is Kipling, undoubtedly the most gifted
of them all, but not everybody's darling for all that. There is that
prolific trio of best-sellers, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Miss Marie Corelli,
and Mr. Hall Caine. There is Oscar Wilde, who has a vast reputation on
the Continent, but never succeeded in convincing the British that he was
much more than a compromise between a joke and a smell. There is the
whole Yellow Book team, who never succeeded in convincing anybody. The
economic basis of authorship had been shaken by the abolition of the
three-volume novel. The intellectual basis had been lulled to sleep by
that hotchpotch of convention and largeness that we call the Victorian
Era. Literature began to be an effort to express the inexpressible,
resulting in outraged grammar and many dots. . . .
English literature at the end of the last century stood in sore need of
some of the elementary virtues. If obviousness and simplicity are liable
to be overdone, they are not so deadly in their after-effects as the
bizarre and the extravagant. The literary movement of the eighteen
nineties was like a strong stimulant given to a patient dying of old
age. Its results were energetic, but the energy was convulsive. We
should laugh if we saw a man apparently dancing in mid-air--until we
noticed the rope about his neck. It is impossible to account for the
success of the Yellow Book school and its congeners save on the
assumption that the rope was, generally speaking, invisible.
In this Year of Grace, 1915, we are still too close to the eighteen
nineties, still too liable to be influenced by their ways, to be able to
speak for posterity and to pronounce the final judgment upon those evil
years. It is possible that the critics of the twenty-first century, as
they turn over the musty pages of the Yellow Book, will ejaculate with
feeling: "Good God, what a dull time these people must have had!" On the
whole it is probable that this will be their verdict. They will detect
the dullness behind the mechanical brilliancy of Oscar Wilde, and
recognize the strange hues of the whole AEsthetic Movement as the
garments of men who could not, or would not see. There is really no
rational alternative before our critics of the next century; if the men
of the eighteen nineties, and the queer things they gave us, were not
the products of an intense boredom, if, in strict point of fact, Wilde,
Beardsley, Davidson, Hankin, Dowson, and Lionel Johnson were men who
rollicked in the warm sunshine of the late Victorian period, then the
suicide, drunkenness and vice with which they were afflicted is surely
the strangest phenomenon in the history of human nature. To many people,
those years actually were dull.
The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of
afternoon in a rich house with large rooms; the
hours before teatime. They believed in nothing
except good manners; and the essence of good
manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be
defined as a silent yell.
So says Chesterton, yawning prodigiously.
One may even go farther, and declare that in those dark days a yawn was
the true sign of intelligence. It is no mere coincidence that the two
cleverest literary debutants of that last decade, Mr. Max Beerbohm and
the subject of this essay, both stepped on the stage making a pretty
exhibition of boredom. When the first of these published, in 1896, being
then twenty-four years old, his Works of Max Beerbohm he murmured in the
preface, "I shall write no more. Already I begin to feel myself a trifle
outmoded. . . . Younger men, with months of activity before them . . .
have pressed forward. . . . _Cedo junioribus._"
So too, when Chesterton produced his first book, four years later, he
called it _Greybeards at Play: Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen_,
and the dedication contained this verse:
Now we are old and wise and grey,
And shaky at the knees;
Now is the true time to delight
In picture books like these.
The joke would have been pointless in any other age. In 1900, directed
against the crapulous exoticism of contemporary literature, it was an
antidote, childhood was being used as a medicine against an assumed
attack of second childhood. The attack began with nonsense rhymes and
pictures. It was a complete success from the very first. There is this
important difference between the writer of nonsense verses and their
illustrator; the former must let himself go as much as he can, the
latter must hold himself in. In _Greybeards at Play_, Chesterton took
the bit between his teeth, and bolted faster than Edward Lear had ever
done. The antitheses of such verses as the following are irresistible:
For me, as Mr. Wordsworth says,
The duties shine like stars;
I formed my uncle's character,
Decreasing his cigars.