Like all artistic and literary movements this one had, in the shape
of various periodicals, its manifestoes. In fact, it was a period
particularly rich in this kind of fruit. In _The Hobby Horse_ the
voices of the new spirit were mingled for the first time with those
of the past. There were, among other magazines, _The Rose Leaf_, _The
Chameleon_, _The Spirit Lamp_, _The Pageant_, _The Evergreen_, _The
Parade_, _The Quarto_, _The Dome_, _The Chord_, while among the popular
papers _The Idler_, _To-Day_, and _Pick-me-Up_ produced the work of men
like Edgar Wilson and S. H. Sime; and, further, _The Butterfly_, _The
Poster_, and _The Studio_ must be carefully studied for the tendencies
of the time. But the two principal organs of the movement were, beyond
all doubt, _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_. Round them, as around the
shrines of old beside the Ægean, gather the faithful and the chosen. In
the other publications there was too much jostling with the profane,
but here ‘_Procul profani_.’ It will be well, therefore, although it
has been done more or less before, to study these two magazines in some
detail, and also their literary editors who gathered the clan together.
In both cases Beardsley was the art editor, though he was ‘fired,’ to
put it plainly, from _The Yellow Book_ after its fourth number. His
influence, therefore, permeated both. In fact, he made them both works
of value for the coming generations, and particularly in the case of
_The Savoy_ he bore the burden of the day and saved the monthly from
fatuity. When he leaves _The Yellow Book_ it will be found to be never
the same. When he is too ill to be active in _The Savoy_ it becomes
very small beer. So interwoven with the lives and values of these
publications is the genius of Beardsley that one cannot speak of the
one without referring to the other. Of Beardsley himself I have already
spoken, so I propose to confine myself strictly to the art editor,
while dealing first with _The Yellow Book_ and its literary editor,
Henry Harland, and then with _The Savoy_ and Mr. Arthur Symons.
The publisher, Mr. John Lane, says[8] this much-discussed _Yellow Book_
was founded one morning during half-an-hour’s chat over cigarettes,
at the Hogarth Club, by himself, Beardsley, and Henry Harland. While
he states that ‘Mr. Harland had the faculty of getting the best from
his contributors,’ the publisher goes on to add: ‘Beardsley’s defect as
art editor was youth. He would not take himself seriously; as an editor
and draughtsman he was almost a practical joker, for one had, so to
speak, to place his drawings under a microscope and look at them upside
down. This tendency, on the eve of the production of Volume V., during
my first visit to the United States, rendered it necessary to omit his
work from that volume.’ Looking back on this, all that one can say now
is that although Beardsley may have been trying, after all, he and not
the publisher was _The Yellow Book_, and with his departure the spirit
of the age slowly volatilised from the work until it deteriorated into
a kind of dull keepsake of the Bodley Head. There were thirteen numbers
in all, and Beardsley actually art-edited the first four. In the
charming prospectus for the fifth volume he is still described as art
editor, and four Beardsleys were to have appeared in it: ‘Frontispiece
to the Chopin Nocturnes,’ ‘Atalanta,’ ‘Black Coffee,’ and the portrait
of Miss Letty Lind in ‘An Artist’s Model.’ However, the break came,
and Beardsley had no further connection, unfortunately, with the fifth
volume.
[8] In his pamphlet, _Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book_, p.
1. 1903.
The first number, as in the case of so many similar periodicals, was
brilliant. The standard set was too high, indeed, to last, and to the
staid English literary press of the time it was something of a seven
days’ wonder. _The Times_ described its note as a ‘combination of
English rowdyism and French lubricity.’ _The Westminster Gazette_ asked
for a ‘short Act of Parliament to make this kind of thing illegal.’
Above all, the whole rabble descends howling on the art editor. It is
Beardsley that annoys them, proving how he stands out at once beyond
his comrades. Against the literary editor, Henry Harland, nothing is
said; but the press are full of the offences of one Beardsley.
As Mr. J. M. Kennedy, in his _English Literature, 1880-1905_, has
devoted an admirable, if somewhat scornful, chapter to the contents of
_The Yellow Book_, it is to Henry Harland, who seems to have merited
all the charming things said about him, that I would now direct
attention.
A delicate valetudinarian always in search of health, he was born at
Petrograd in March, 1861. He commenced life in the surrogate of New
York State, whither his parents removed, writing in his spare time in
the eighties, under the _nom-de-plume_ of Sidney Luska, sketches of
American Jewish life. Like Theodore Peters, Whistler, and Henry James,
he could not, however, resist the call of the Old World, and he was
at journalistic work in London when he was made editor of _The Yellow
Book_. Besides his editorial duties he was a regular contributor, not
only writing the series of notes signed ‘The Yellow Dwarf,’ but also
turning out a number of short stories. But London was only to be a
haven of brief sojourn for this writer, whose health sent him south
to Italy. Perhaps his best work in the nineties was his short story
_Mademoiselle Miss_, while later in Italy he opened up a new vein of
dainty comedy fiction in almost rose-leaf prose with _The Cardinal’s
Snuff-Box_ (1900), whose happy delicacy of thought and style he never
equalled again, but was always essaying to repeat until death carried
him off in Italy. Although, therefore, sitting in the editorial chair
at the Bodley Head, Harland can only be said to have been a bird of
passage in the nineties, and not one of its pillars like Arthur Symons
of _The Savoy_.
This later publication was started as a rival to _The Yellow Book_
soon after Beardsley gave up the art-editing of the earlier periodical.
In 1895, when ‘Symons and Dowson, Beardsley and Conder, were all
together on a holiday at Dieppe ... it was there, in a cabaret Mr.
Sickert has repeatedly painted, that _The Savoy_ was originated.’[9] It
was issued by Leonard Smithers, the most extraordinary publisher, in
some respects, of the nineties, a kind of modern Cellini, who produced
some wonderfully finely printed books, and was himself just as much a
part of the movement as any of its numerous writers. Indeed, no survey
of the period can be complete without a brief consideration of this man.
[9] W. G. Blaikie Murdoch’s _Renaissance of the Nineties_, p.
21. 1911.
But to return to _The Savoy_, it can be aptly described as the
fine flower of the publications of the age. It is true _The Yellow
Book_ outlived it, but never did the gospel of the times flourish
so exceedingly as in its pages. Here we see that violent love for a
strangeness of proportion in art that was the keynote of the age.
Here the abnormal, the bizarre, found their true home, and poetry is
the pursuit of the unattainable by the exotic. It will, therefore,
not perhaps be out of place before dealing with its literary editor,
Mr. Arthur Symons, to discuss the eight numbers that appeared. Number
one (printed by H. S. Nichols) appeared as a quarterly in boards in
January, 1896. An editorial note by Arthur Symons, which originally
appeared as a prospectus, hoped that _The Savoy_ would prove ‘a
periodical of an exclusively literary and artistic kind.... All we
ask from our contributors is good work, and good work is all we offer
our readers.... We have not invented a new point of view. We are not
Realists, or Romanticists, or Decadents. For us, all art is good
which is good art.’ The contents of the number included a typical
Shaw article, full, like all of his work, of the obvious in the terms
of the scandalous; some short stories by Wedmore, Dowson, Rudolf
Dircks, Humphrey James, and Yeats. The other articles were hardly very
original; but the contributions of Beardsley dwarf everything else. He
towers out above all else with his illustrations, his poem _The Three
Musicians_, and the beginning of his romantic story _Under the Hill_.
Number two (April, 1896, printed by the Chiswick Press) had another
editorial note courageously thanking the critics of the Press for
their reception of the first number, which ‘has been none the less
flattering because it has been for the most part unfavourable.’ The
contents included poems and stories by Symons, Dowson, and Yeats, while
John Gray and Selwyn Image have poems and Wedmore a story. Beardsley
continues his romance, and lifts the number out of the rut with his
Wagneresque designs. Max Beerbohm caricatures him, and Shannon and
Rothenstein are represented. Among articles there is a series on
Verlaine; and Vincent O’Sullivan, in a paper ‘On the Kind of Fiction
called Morbid,’ sounds a note of the group with his conclusion: ‘Let
us cling by all means to our George Meredith, our Henry James ...
but then let us try, if we cannot be towards others, unlike these,
if not encouraging, at the least not actively hostile and harassing,
when they go out in the black night to follow their own sullen
will-o’-the-wisps.’ He is also to be thanked for registering the too
little known name of the American, Francis Saltus.
Number three (July, 1896) appeared in paper covers, and _The Savoy_
becomes a monthly instead of a quarterly from now on. There is a
promise, unfulfilled, of the serial publication of George Moore’s new
novel, _Evelyn Innes_. Yeats commences three articles on _William
Blake and his Illustrations to the ‘Divine Comedy_,’ and Hubert
Crackanthorpe contributes one of his best short stories. Owing to
illness Beardsley’s novel stops publication, but his _Ballad of a
Barber_ relieves the monotony of some dull stuff by the smaller men.
The reproductions of Blake’s illustrations are made to fill the art gap
of Beardsley, who has only two black-and-whites in. The publication of
his novel in book form is promised when the artist is well enough.
Number four (August, 1896) at once reveals the effect of Beardsley’s
inactivity through illness, and shows that Beardsley is _The Savoy_,
and all else but leather and prunella. The number, however, is saved by
a story of Dowson, _The Dying of Francis Donne_, and on the art side a
frontispiece for Balzac’s _La Fille aux Yeux d’Or_, by Charles Conder,
is interesting.
Number five (September, 1896) is for some unaccountable reason the
hardest number to procure. Besides the cover and title-page it
contains only one Beardsley, _The Woman in White_, but the cover is an
exceptionally beautiful Beardsley, the two figures in the park holding
a _colloque sentimental_ seem to have stepped out of the pages of
Verlaine’s poem. Theodore Wratislaw and Ernest Rhys contribute the
stories. Dowson, Yeats, and the Canadian, Bliss Carman, contribute the
best of the poetry.
Number six (October, 1896), has a very poor art side, with the
exception of Beardsley’s familiar _The Death of Pierrot_. The literary
contents consists chiefly of the editor. One notices the periodical is
dying. The only unique feature is a story, _The Idiots_, by Conrad, and
Dowson is still faithful with a poem.
Number seven (November, 1896) announces in a leaflet (dated October)
the death of _The Savoy_ in the next number. The editorial note states
that the periodical ‘has, in the main, conquered the prejudices of the
press ... it has not conquered the general public, and, without the
florins of the general public, no magazine ... can expect to pay its
way.’ In this number Beardsley returns to attempt to salve it with
his remarkable translation of Catullus: Carmen CI., and illustration
thereto. Yeats and Dowson contribute poems and Beardsley his Tristan
and Isolde drawing.
Number eight (December, 1896) completes the issue. The whole of the
literary contents is by the Editor and the art contents by Beardsley
himself: in all fourteen drawings. By way of epilogue, Symons says in
their next venture, which is to appear twice a year, ‘that they are
going to make no attempt to be popular.’ Unfortunately for English
periodicals it was a venture never essayed.
That _The Savoy_ is far truer to the period than _The Yellow Book_ was
perhaps in no small way due to the fact that Mr. Arthur Symons was its
literary editor. For he at any rate in his strenuous search for an
æsthetical solution for art and life, in his assiduous exploring in
the Latin literatures for richer colours and stranger sensations--he,
at any rate, has not only been the child of his time, but in some ways
the father of it. His sincere love of art is beyond all question,
and it has sent him into many strange byways. He has praised in
purple prose the bird-like motions and flower-like colours of the
ballet; he has taken us with him to Spanish music-halls and Sevillian
Churches; he has garnered up carefully in English the myths of the
symbolists and translated for us the enigmas of Mallarmé--_Herodias_,
the blood and roses of D’Annunzio’s plays and the throbbing violins
of Verlaine’s muse; he has taken us to continental cities, and with
him we have heard Pachmann playing and seen the enchantments of the
divine Duse. All the cults of the Seven Arts has this Admirable
Crichton of Æstheticism discussed. He has worked towards a theory of
æsthetics. He has written charmingly (if somewhat temperamentally)
of his comrades like Beardsley, Crackanthorpe and Dowson. He was
a leader in the campaign of the early nineties, and his work will
always be the guiding hand for those who come after him and who wish
to speak of this movement. As early as 1893 he was writing of it as
‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ in _Harper’s_, when he speaks of
the most representative work of the period: ‘After a fashion it is no
doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that mark the end of great
periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence;
an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an
over-subtilising refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral
perversity.’ Perhaps, in a way, it is an immense pity that Symons will
become the universal guide to the period, for it must be conceded
that he has always been prone to find perversity in anything, as Sir
Thomas Browne was haunted with quincunxes. But of the subtilty of his
judgments and of the charming prose in which he labours to express
them there can be no question. Listen, for example, when he speaks of
the aim of decadence: ‘To fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of
things; to fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the
voice of a human soul; that is the ideal of decadence.’ How beautifully
it is said, so that one almost forgets how dangerous it is. Very aptly
did Blaikie Murdoch say the Mantle of Pater fell on him. It is the same
murmured litany of beautiful prose. Indeed Arthur Symons is the supreme
type of _belles lettrist_. Just as in the early nineties he prided
himself on the smell of patchouli about his verse, so he alone remains
to-day with the old familiar scent about his writings of a period dead
and gone which exacts rightfully our highest respect. As one owes him
a debt of homage for his fine faithfulness to art, so one thinks of
him, as he himself has written of Pater, as a ‘personality withdrawn
from action, which it despises or dreads, solitary with its ideals, in
the circle of its “exquisite moments” in the Palace of Art, where it
is never quite at rest.’ How true that last phrase is, ‘never quite at
rest,’ of the author. For to him Art is an escape--the supreme escape
from life.
Arthur Symons began with a study on Browning and the volume _Days
and Nights_ when the eighties were still feeling their way towards
the nineties. It was in _Silhouettes_ (1892) and _London Nights_
(1895) that he appeared as perhaps the most _outré_ member of the new
movement. His perfection of technique in endeavouring to catch the
fleeting impression by limiting it, never cataloguing it, marks the
difference of his verse and that of the secession from much of the
school of the eighties’ definite listing of facts. Symons, indeed,
is not only a poet impressionist, but also a critic impressionist in
his critical works like _Studies in Two Literatures_, _The Symbolist
Movement in Literature_, and so on. This impressionism, whilst it makes
his verse so intangible and delicate, also endows his appreciations
with a certain all-pervading subtlety. It is as though a poet had begun
to see with the Monet vision his own poems. It is as though a man
comes away with an impression and is content with that impression on
which to base his judgment. It is New Year’s Eve: the poet records his
impression of the night:
We heard the bells of midnight burying the year.
Then the night poured its silent waters over us.
And then in the vague darkness faint and tremulous,
Time paused; then the night filled with sound; morning was here.
The poet is at the Alhambra or Empire Ballet: like an impressionist
picture a poem disengages the last fine shade of the scene. He wanders
at twilight in autumn through the mist-enfolded lanes:
Night creeps across the darkening vale;
On the horizon tree by tree
Fades into shadowy skies as pale,
As moonlight on a shadowy sea.
The vision remains like an etching. The poet is on the seashore at
sunset:
The sea lies quietest beneath
The after-sunset flush,
That leaves upon the heaped gray clouds
The grape’s faint purple blush.
It lingers like a water-colour in one’s memory. He sees a girl at
a restaurant and his poem is at once an impression as vivid as a
painter’s work. In a phrase he can cage a mood, in a quatrain a scene.
Where does this ability come from? The answer is, perhaps, given by the
one name Verlaine, whose genius Mr. Symons has done so much to hail.
In the gay days of the early nineties before black tragedy had clouded
the heavens there was no more daring secessionist from the tedious old
ways than the editor of _The Savoy_. To those days, like Dowson’s lover
of Cynara, he has ‘been faithful in his fashion.’ If the interest
is now not so vivid in his work it is because the centre of art has
shifted. If Mr. Symons has not shifted his centre too, but remained
faithful to the old dead Gods, it is no crime. It only means that we,
when we wish to see him as one of the figures of his group, must shut
up his volumes of criticism, forget his views on Toulouse Lautrec and
Gerard Nerval, and William Blake, put aside his later verses and his
widow’s cruse of writer’s recollections, and turn with assurance to the
débonnaire poet of _Silhouettes_ and _London Nights_.
It has been said that Mr. Symons stands for ‘a Pagan revolt against
Puritanism.’ It is argued, because he was nurtured in nonconformity,
art came to him with something of the hysteria a revelation comes to a
revivalist meeting. This may be true, but I cannot help thinking that
no writer amid all these French influences which he had so eagerly
sought out yet remains so typical of the English spirit. It may be
heresy, but I always see in mind the gaiety of a Nice carnival in a
certain drawing with one solid, solemn face surveying the scene over a
starched front. Beneath it is written: ‘Find the Englishman.’
Like the American critic, James Huneker, Mr. Arthur Symons has also
occasionally written short imaginative prose studies. One thinks, too,
in this respect of Walter Pater’s wonderful _Imaginary Portraits_ and
particularly his glorious study of Watteau, and I rather think that
this success must have moved the spirit of the two later critics to a
noble rivalry. The best, indeed, of Mr. Symons’s _Spiritual Adventures_
are probably those studies which are mostly attached to some theme
of art which has been after all the all-engrossing motive of this
delightful critic’s life. _An Autumn City_ and _The Death of Peter
Waydelin_: the first, a sensitive’s great love for Arles, whither he
brings his unresponsive bride; the other, a study quaintly suggestive
of a certain painter’s life: both of these sketches are unquestionably
more moving than Mr. Symons’s studies of nonconformists quivering at
the thought of hell-fire. To them one might add, perhaps, _Esther
Kahn_, the history of the psychological development of an actress after
the style of _La Faustine_.
Mr. Symons’s favourite word is ‘escape’; his favourite phrase ‘escape
from life.’ Now the one and now the other reappear continually in all
kinds of connections. Of John Addington Symonds, for example, he
writes: ‘All his work was in part an escape, an escape from himself.’
Of Ernest Dowson’s indulgence in the squalid debaucheries of the
Brussels kermesse he writes: ‘It was his own way of escape from life.’
Passages of like tenor abound in his writings; and, in one of his
papers on _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, he explains his
meaning more precisely:
Our only chance, in this world, of a complete happiness, lies in
the measure of our success in shutting the eyes of the mind, and
deadening its sense of hearing, and dulling the keenness of its
apprehension of the unknown.... As the present passes from us,
hardly to be enjoyed except as memory or as hope, and only with
an at best partial recognition of the uncertainty or inutility
of both, it is with a kind of terror that we wake up, every now
and then, to the whole knowledge of our ignorance, and to some
perception of where it is leading us. To live through a single day
with that overpowering consciousness of our real position, which,
in the moments in which alone it mercifully comes, is like blinding
light or the thrust of a flaming sword, would drive any man out of
his senses.... And so there is a great silent conspiracy between
us to forget death; all our lives are spent in busily forgetting
death. That is why we are so active about so many things which
we know to be unimportant, why we are so afraid of solitude, and
so thankful for the company of our fellow creatures. Allowing
ourselves for the most part to be vaguely conscious of that great
suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile,
annihilating reality, in many dreams, in religion, passion, art;
each a forgetfulness, each a symbol of creation.... Each is a kind
of sublime selfishness, the saint, the lover, and the artist having
each an incommunicable ecstasy which he esteems as his ultimate
attainment; however, in his lower moments, he may serve God in
action, or do the will of his mistress, or minister to men by
showing them a little beauty. But it is before all things an escape.
Mr. Symons finds in his system of æsthetics an escape from Methodism
and the Calvinistic threatenings of his childhood. He wishes to escape
‘hell.’ In the story of _Seaward Lackland_ there is a preacher whom
Methodism drove to madness. Mr. Symons has turned to Art so that he may
not feel the eternal flames taking hold of him.