The poetry of the period is essentially an expression of moods and
sentiments. It is as much a form of impressionism as the art of Monet
and Renoir. Further, it seeks after, like all the art of the nineties,
that abnormality of proportion of which Bacon wrote in his ‘Essay on
Beauty.’ It is, too, a period wonderfully fertile in song. Besides
the nineties’ group, which is represented chiefly by the Rhymers’
Club, there were many other schools of song. Lord Alfred Douglas in
his _City of the Soul_, Oscar Wilde in his _Sphinx_ and _The Harlot’s
House_, Stephen Phillips and Henley, Francis Thompson in his _Hound
of Heaven_, are but some of the richness I am compelled to pass over
in order to adhere strictly to the programme of this rough summary.
Let us, therefore, turn at once to the Rhymers’ Club, whose origin and
desires have been so well explained by Arthur Symons, the cicerone
to the age, in his essay on Ernest Dowson. At the Cheshire Cheese in
Fleet Street it was arranged that a band of young poets should meet,
striving to recapture in London something of the Gallic spirit of
art and the charm of open discussion in the Latin Quartier. The Club
consisted of the following members: John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Edwin
J. Ellis, George Arthur Greene, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Cecil Hillier,
Richard Le Gallienne, Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, Ernest Rhys, Thomas
William Rolleston, Arthur Symons, John Todhunter, and William Butler
Yeats. Besides these members, the Club, which was without rules or
officers, had at one time affiliated to itself the following permanent
guests: John Gray, Edward Rose, J. T. Nettleship, Morley Roberts, A. B.
Chamberlain, Edward Garnett, and William Theodore Peters.
Oscar Wilde, though never a member, had a great influence on many of
those who were, and Victor Plarr describes a memorable meeting of the
Rhymers in Mr. Herbert Horne’s rooms in the Fitzroy settlement at which
Wilde appeared. The poet goes on: ‘It was an evening of notabilities.
Mr. Walter Crane stood with his back to the mantelpiece, deciding, very
kindly, on the merits of our effusions. And round Oscar Wilde, not then
under a cloud, hovered reverently Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson,
with others. This must have been in 1891, and I marvelled at the time
to notice the fascination which poor Wilde exercised over the otherwise
rational. He sat as it were enthroned and surrounded by a differential
circle.’
The influence of Verlaine and the symbolist poets of Paris in this
circle was profound. Every one had a passion for things French. Symons
translated the prose poems of Baudelaire and the verses of Mallarmé,
Dowson is inspired by the ‘Fêtes Gallantes,’ and so on. As Mr. Plarr
writes: ‘Stray Gauls used to be imported to grace literary circles
here. I remember one such--a rare instance of a rough Frenchman--to
whom Dowson was devoted. When a Gaul appeared in a coterie we were
either silent, like the schoolgirls in their French conversation hour,
or we talked a weird un-French French like the ladies in some of Du
Maurier’s drawings.’[15]
[15] Victor Plarr, _Ernest Dowson_, p. 23. 1914.
Of course it must not be supposed, however, that the nineties ever
remained at all stationary in this condition or entirely under these
influences. Mr. Plarr is speaking of the early nineties, the age when
John Gray’s _Silverpoints_ was perhaps a fair sample of the poetry
of the moment for this group; but, when at the same time it must
be remembered, poets like Francis Thompson and William Watson were
carrying on the staider traditions of English poetry altogether unmoved
by these exotic influences from Montmartre and the studios of the
south. The nineties group itself only remained for a restive moment
like this before each man was to go his own way. They were indeed all
souls seeking the way to perfection in art. Yeats went off to assist
to found the Irish School; Richard Le Gallienne went to America; Gray
became a priest. Many disappeared shortly afterwards from the lower
slopes of Parnassus, not being of those dowered with the true call;
and so, one after the other, all are to be accounted for. The genuine
men of the nineties after the fall of Wilde seem to have migrated to
Smithers’ wonderful bookshop in Bond Street, where their later works
were issued in ornate editions.
The names of others besides the actual members of the Rhymers’ Club
must not be altogether forgotten, such as Percy Hemingway with his
_Happy Wanderer_, Theodore Wratislaw, Olive Custance, Dollie Radford,
Rosamund Marriott-Watson, Norman Gale, and many others who were also of
the movement. However, of them I cannot speak here, but can only refer
the reader to the book-lists of Elkin Mathews and John Lane for the
first period, and of Leonard Smithers for the second. In the numerous
slim plaquettes of verse issued from these presses he will find golden
verse worthy of the labour of his research. Indeed, amid so many
writers one is compelled to resort to the odious necessity of a choice,
so I shall here all too briefly deal with _Silverpoints_ as a typical
volume of the early period, and then trace succinctly the career of two
poets, who had certainly the right to that appellation, Ernest Dowson
and John Davidson, and who were both not only of, but actually were the
movement itself. Lastly, in this section, as an indication of the wide
influence these writers had overseas, as in the case of the Birch Bark
School of Canada and certain poets in Australia, I wish to mention the
young American poet who was an intimate of so many of the men of the
nineties--William Theodore Peters.
The narrow green octavo of _Silverpoints_, with its lambent golden
flames, strikes the eye at once as some bizarre and exotic work. It
was one of the first of the limited éditions de luxe that mark the new
printing of the decade, and is one of the most dainty little books
ever issued by Elkin Mathews and John Lane. Most of the titles are
in French, and there are imitations from Charles Baudelaire, Arthur
Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine--the gods of the symbolist
school at that moment. Poems are dedicated (it was the habit of the
decade) to friends, including Pierre Louÿs, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde,
R. H. Sherard, Henri Teixeira de Mattos, Ernest Dowson, etc. The
predominant note is that of tigress’s blood and tiger-lilies. Honey,
roses, white breasts, and golden hair, with fierce passion and indolent
languor, are the chords of the book’s frisson. All the panoply of the
new English art begotten from the French here burgeons forth with the
Satanic note that was then in the fashion. We find this in the _Femmes
Damnées_:
Like moody beasts they lie along the sands;
Look where the sky against the sea-rim clings:
Foot stretches out to foot, and groping hands
Have languors soft and bitter shudderings.
Some by the light of crumbling, resinous gums,
In the still hollows of old pagan dens,
Call thee in aid to their deliriums
O Bacchus! cajoler of ancient pains.
And those whose breasts for scapulars are fain
Nurse under their long robes the cruel thong,
These, in dim woods, where huddling shadows throng,
Mix with the foam of pleasure tears of pain.
There is more than an echo of Rimbaud’s verses in this volume, and
the poet is evidently straining always after the violent effect, the
climacteric moment of a mood or passion. Probably two of the most
successfully carried through crises are _The Barber_ and _Mishka_. The
first of these as a typical example of the whole school I venture to
spheterize in full:
I dreamed I was a barber; and there went
Beneath my hand, oh! manes extravagant.
Beneath my trembling fingers, many a mask
Of many a pleasant girl. It was my task
To gild their hair, carefully, strand by strand;
To paint their eyebrows with a timid hand;
To draw a bodkin, from a vase of Kohl,
Through the closed lashes; pencils from a bowl
Of sepia, to paint them underneath;
To blow upon their eyes with a soft breath.
They lay them back and watched the leaping bands.
The dream grew vague, I moulded with my hands
The mobile breasts, the valley; and the waist
I touched; and pigments reverently placed
Upon their thighs in sapient spots and stains,
Beryls and chrysolites and diaphanes,
And gems whose hot harsh names are never said
I was a masseur; and my fingers bled
With wonder as I touched their awful limbs.
Suddenly, in the marble trough there seems
O, last of my pale mistresses, sweetness!
A twylipped scarlet pansie. My caress
Tinges thy steel-grey eyes to violet,
Adown thy body skips the pit-a-pat
Of treatment once heard in a hospital
For plagues that fascinate, but half appal.
So, at the sound, the blood of me stood cold;
Thy chaste hair ripened into sullen gold;
Thy throat, the shoulders, swelled and were uncouth;
The breasts rose up and offered each a mouth;
And on the belly, pallid blushes crept,
That maddened me, until I laughed and wept.
Here we have a long amorous catalogue. It is the catalogue age which
comes via Oscar Wilde’s _Sphinx_ and _Salomé_ from certain French
writers. But this does not make up for the singing power of the poet,
and in long poems it becomes singularly laborious. However, this phase
of poetry is so typical of the age that it is as well to have dealt
with it before turning to the essentially ‘singing’ poets of the
period, Dowson and Davidson.
Indeed, there is no one in the nineties worthier of the honourable
title of poet than Ernest Dowson. With his unsatisfied passion for
Adelaide in Soho; his cry for ‘madder music and for stronger wine’; his
æsthetic theories, such as that the letter ‘v’ was the most beautiful
of the letters; his reverence for things French, he has caused Mr.
Symons, in one of his most notable essays, to draw a delightful
portrait of a true _enfant de Bohême_. Robert Harborough Sherard has
also kept the Dowson tradition up in his description of the death of
the vexed and torn spirit of the poet in his _Twenty Years in Paris_,
a work which contains much interesting material for a study of the
nineties. But Victor Plarr, another poet of the nineties, enraged at
the incompleteness of these pictures, has tried to give us in his
reminiscences, unpublished letters, and marginalia, the other facet of
Dowson--the _poète intime_ known to few.
It is no question of ours, in a brief summary like this, which is the
truer portrait of Dowson; whether he was or was not like Keats in his
personal appearance; whether Arthur Moore and Dowson wrote alternate
chapters of _A Comedy of Masks_; whether in his last days or not
Leonard Smithers used to pay him thirty shillings a week for all he
could do; whether he used to pray or not in front of the bearded Virgin
at Arques; whether he used to drink hashish or not. All these problems
are outside the beauty of the lyric poetry of Dowson; and it is by his
poetry and not because of all these rumours around his brief life that
he will live.
He was the poet impressionist of momentary emotions, and poetry with
him was, as Stéphane Mallarmé said, ‘the language of a crisis.’ Each
Dowson poem is more or less the feverish impression of a hectical
crisis. For in a way he takes off where Keats ended, for Keats was
becoming a hectic, while Dowson started out as one.
Exceeding sorrow
Consumeth my sad heart!
Because to-morrow
We must part.
Now is exceeding sorrow
All my part!...
Be no word spoken;
Weep nothing: let a pale
Silence, unbroken
Silence prevail!
Prithee, be no word spoken,
Lest I fail!
His earliest poem to attract attention was _Amor Umbratilis_, which
appeared in Horne’s _Century Guild Hobby Horse_. It has the real
Dowson note, and marks him down at once as one of those poets who are
by nature _buveurs de lune_. That was in 1891. In 1892 came out the
first book of the Rhymers’ Club, and with six poems of Dowson in it he
definitely took his place in the movement. It is said that the Oscar
Wilde set sent him a telegram shortly after this ‘peremptorily ordering
him to appear at the Café Royal to lunch with the then great man.’
Dowson was flattered, and might well be, for Wilde was a splendid judge
of good work.
Two years later the Club’s second book appeared, and Dowson has again
half a dozen poems in it, including the lovely _Extreme Unction_, and
that rather doubtfully praised lyric ‘_non sum qualis eram bonae sub
regno Cynarae_.’ Then in the same year as _The Savoy_ (1896) appeared
his _Verses_, printed on Japanese vellum and bound in parchment, with a
cover design in gold by Aubrey Beardsley--a typical Smithers book. This
volume contains the best of Dowson, the handsel (if it is not too big
a phrase to use of such a delicate and delightful artist), the handsel
of his immortality. For there is something about Dowson’s best work,
though so fragile in its texture, that has the classic permanence of a
latter-day Propertius. He has a Latin brevity and clarity, and he is at
his best in this volume. Something has vanished from the enchantment
of the singer in _Decorations_ (1899). It is like the flowers of the
night before. One feels that so many of these later verses had been
done perforce, as Victor Plarr says, rather to keep on in the movement
lest one was forgotten. But in 1899 the movement was moribund, and the
winter of discontent for the Pierrots of the nineties was fast closing
down. Remembering these things, one murmurs the sad beauty of those
perfect lines of this true poet in his first volume:
When this, our rose, is faded,
And these, our days, are done,
In lands profoundly shaded
From tempest and from sun:
Ah, once more come together,
Shall we forgive the past,
And safe from worldly weather
Possess our souls at last.
Not without reason one feels he has been called the ‘rosa rosarum of
All the Nineties,’ in so far as poetry is concerned; but, personally, I
would prefer to call him, if one has to call such a true poet anything,
the poets’ poet of the nineties. The best of his short stories rank
high in the great mass of the literature of those days, and are dealt
with (together with his partnership in two novels) in another section.
As for his little one-act play, _The Pierrot of the Minute_, one is
apt to feel perhaps that Beardsley was not over unjust to it, when he
described it as a tiresome playlet he had to illustrate. At any rate,
it was the cause of Beardsley’s doing one or two admirable decorations,
even if the actual play, in which the young American poet of the
nineties, Theodore Peters (of whom more anon), and Beardsley’s own
sister acted, was not effective as a stage production.
There is no doubt but that Davidson, though he was outside the coteries
of the nineties, was still of them. First of all he was a Scotchman of
evangelical extraction, and secondly he was not an Oxford man. All this
made him outside the group. On the other count, he was of the Rhymers’
Club, though he did not contribute to the books. He was strongly
influenced by Nietzsche, though the French influence in him was rather
negative. His books came from the Bodley Head and were well recognised
by its other members. Beardsley even decorated some of them, and
Rothenstein did his portrait for _The Yellow Book_. In fact, Davidson
himself wrote for that periodical. All this made him of the group. It
would be thus impossible to pass over such a poet in connection with
this movement, for Davidson has written some magnificent lyrics, if
he has made his testaments too often and too turgidly. The Davidson,
indeed, of the nineties will be discovered to be, by any one examining
his works, the Davidson that will most probably survive.
He was born in 1857, but as Mr. Holbrook Jackson admirably puts
it, ‘John Davidson did not show any distinctive _fin de siècle_
characteristics until he produced his novel _Perfervid_[16] in 1890.’
His next work, a volume of poetry, which was the first to attract
attention, _In a Music Hall and other Poems_ (1891), accentuates these
distinctive characteristics, and fairly launches him on the tide of the
movement. Before that time he had been school-mastering and clerking
in Scotland, while his leisure had begotten three rather ill-conceived
works. Davidson discovered himself when he came to London to write. The
movement of the nineties stimulated him towards artistic production,
and when that movement was killed by the fall of Wilde, and buried by
the Boer War, Davidson again lost himself in the philosophic propaganda
of his last years before he was driven to suicide. Philosophy, indeed,
with John Davidson, was to eat one’s heart with resultant mental
indigestion that completely unbalanced the artist in him. Therefore,
so far as this appreciation is concerned, we only have to deal with
the happy Davidson of the _Ballads_ and _Fleet Street Eclogues_ fame;
the gay writer of _A Random Itinerary_ (1894); the rather hopeless
novelist of _Baptist Lake_ (1894), and _The Wonderful Mission of Earl
Lavender_ (1895). The last tedious phase before he gave himself to the
Cornish sea is no affair of ours. In his _Testament_ he says ‘none
should outlive his power,’ and realising probably that he had made this
mistake, he wished to end it all.
[16] _The Eighteen Nineties_, by Holbrook Jackson, p. 215 1913.
But in the nineties he was like his own birds, full of ‘oboe’ song and
‘broken music.’ Seldom has the English river, the Thames, been more
sweetly chaunted than by him. While if we are looking for his kinship
with his time there is no doubt about it in _The Ballad of a Nun_, who
remarks:
I care not for my broken vow,
Though God should come in thunder soon,
I am sister to the mountains now,
And sister to the sun and moon.
A statement which we feel many of the Beardsley ladies cadaverous with
sin or fat with luxury would have been quite capable of repeating.
Again, his _Thirty Bob a Week_ in _The Yellow Book_ is as much
a ninety effort as his _Ballad of Hell_, while his novel, _Earl
Lavender_, is a burlesque of certain of the eccentricities of the
period. In a poetical note to this volume he sings:
Oh! our age end style perplexes
All our Elders’ time has famed;
On our sleeves we wear our sexes,
Our diseases, unashamed.
The prevalent realistic disease in poetry is well represented by _A
Woman and her Son_:
He set his teeth, and saw his mother die,
Outside a city reveller’s tipsy tread
Severed the silence with a jagged rent.
Above all, Davidson handles with marked facility the modern ballad
medium of narrative verse. _The Ballad of a Nun_, _The Ballad of
an Artist’s Wife_, and others, relate their story in easy, jogging
quatrains. As a sample one can quote from _A New Ballad of Tannhäuser_:
As he lay worshipping his bride,
While rose leaves in her bosom fell,
On dreams came sailing on a tide
Of sleep, he heard a matin bell.
‘Hark! let us leave the magic hill,’
He said, ‘and live on earth with men.’
‘No, here,’ she said, ‘we stay until
The Golden Age shall come again.’
But if Davidson could tell a tale in verse it cannot be said he
understood the novel form. Although here it is rather noticeable that
he has a strange, unique feature among his contemporaries. For he at
least has a sense of humour. Max Beerbohm, it is true, had the gift
of irony; but Davidson, almost alone, has a certain vein of grim
Scotch humour, as, for example, in the character of little red-headed
Mortimer in _Perfervid_. In Dowson, Johnson, Symons, and the others,
one is sometimes appalled by the seriousness of it all. Lastly, but
by no means least, Davidson occasionally attains the lyric rapture of
unadulterated poetry in his shorter pieces, while his vignettes of
nature linger in the memory on account of their truth and beauty. Both
these qualities--the lyric rapture and the keen eye for country sights
and sounds--are to be found, for instance, in _A Runnable Stag_:
When the pods went pop on the broom, green broom,
And apples began to be golden-skinned,
We harboured a stag in the Priory coomb,
And we feathered his trail up wind, up wind!
Among many other ambitions, Davidson wanted to fire the scientific
world with imaginative poetry. As he phrased it: ‘Science is still
a valley of dead bones till imagination breathes upon it.’ There are
indeed evidences of an almost Shelleyan pantheism in his credo. Unhappy
was his life, but, probably, he did not labour in vain, for a handsel
of his song will endure. Writing, indeed, was the consolation of his
life:
I cannot write, I cannot think;
’Tis half delight and half distress;
My memory stumbles on the brink
Of some unfathomed happiness--
Of some old happiness divine,
What haunting scent, what haunting note,
What word, or what melodious line,
Sends my heart throbbing to my throat?
Indeed, why repeat it, both Dowson and he will live by their poetry.
But in the case of Davidson, in addition, there is his rather
elephantine humour. While again it must always be remembered that he
had the courage to state that the fear of speaking freely had ‘cramped
the literature of England for a century.’ It was the liberty of the
French literature indeed that in no small degree captivated the minds
of all these young men. Very few of them, however, had the courage to
speak freely. But it must always remain to Davidson’s credit that he
tried to write a freer, emancipated novel, which, however, he failed to
do, because he had a very remote idea of novel construction.
It was in 1896 that the quaint little salmon-pink volume of William
Theodore Peters, the young American poet, appeared, entitled _Posies
out of Rings_. This young American was an intimate of some of the men
of the nineties, and though it is doubtful whether he himself would
have ever achieved high fame as a poet, he had a sincere love for the
beautiful things of Art. Among all these tragedies of ill-health,
insanity and suicide that seemed to track down each of these young men,
his fate was perhaps the saddest of all, for he died of starvation
in Paris,[17] where many of his verses had appeared in a distinctly
American venture, _The Quartier Latin_. His volume of conceits are a
harking back, not always satisfactorily, to the ancient form of the
versified epigram. What was wrong with his Muse is that it was only
half alive. He puts indeed his own case in a nutshell in that charming
little poem _Pierrot and the Statue_, which I venture to quote in full:
[17] R. H. Sherard, _Twenty Years in Paris_.
One summer evening in a charméd wood,
Before a marble Venus, Pierrot stood;
A Venus beautiful beyond compare,
Gracious her lip, her snowy bosom bare,
Pierrot amorous, his cheeks aflame,
Called the white statue many a lover’s name.
An oriole flew down from off a tree,
‘Woo not a goddess made of stone!’ sang he.
‘All of my warmth to warm it,’ Pierrot said,
When by the pedestal he sank down dead;
The statue faintly flushed, it seemed to strive
To move--_but it was only half alive_.
Such was the Muse’s response to Peters’ wooing; while he, in that
strange bohemian world of so many of the young writers of that day,
wrote in another short poem the epitaph of the majority of those who
gave so recklessly of their youth, only to fail. It is called _To the
Café aux Phares de l’Ouest, Quartier Montparnasse_:
The painted ship in the paste-board sea
Sails night and day.
To-morrow it will be as far as it was yesterday.
But underneath, in the Café,
The lusty crafts go down,
And one by one, poor mad souls drown--
While the painted ship in the paste-board sea
Sails night and day.
Such, indeed, was too often the fate of the epigoni of the movement.
Their nightingales were never heard; they were buried with all their
songs still unsung.
The only other volume which Theodore Peters essayed, to my knowledge,
was a little poetic one-acter like his friend Ernest Dowson’s _Pierrot
of the Minute_ (for which work he wrote an epilogue). Peters’ play,
entitled _The Tournament of Love_, is a very scarce item of the
nineties’ bibliography. He calls it a pastoral masque in one act, and
it was published by Brentano’s at Paris in 1894 and illustrated with
drawings by Alfred Jones. As Bantock wrote the music for _The Pierrot
of the Minute_, Noel Johnson composed the melodies for _The Tournament
of Love_. The masque was put on at the Théâtre d’Application (La
Bodinière), 18 rue St. Lazare, May 8, 1894. Peters himself took the
part of Bertrand de Roaix, a troubadour, while among the cast were
Wynford Dewhurst, the painter, and Loïe Fuller, the dancer. The scene
is an almond orchard on the outskirts of Toulouse, on the afternoon of
the 3rd May, 1498. ‘A group of troubadours discovered at the right of
the stage, seated upon a white semicircular Renaissance bench, some
tuning their instruments. Other poets towards the back. A laurel tree
at the right centre. On the left centre two heralds guard the entrance
to the lists.’ Pons d’Orange, the arrived poet, will win at this
tournament of love, the Eglantine nouvelle, ‘that golden prize of wit.’
But it is won by Bertrand de Roaix, who wants it not, but the love of
the institutress of this court of love, ‘Clémence Isaure, the Primrose
Queen of Beauty.’ At his love protestations she laughs; the troubadour
goes outside the lists and stabs himself. As he lies dying Clémence,
clothed in her white samite, powdered with silver fleur-de-lys and
edged with ermine, her dust-blonde hair bound with a fillet of
oak-leaves, comes forth from the lists and finds her boy lover’s body:
Love came and went; _we_
Knew him not. I have found my soul too late.
V
The Victorian literary era was fecund in essayists, and the last decade
lived up to this reputation. The forerunners of the essayists of the
nineties were obviously Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Oscar
Wilde with his _Intentions_ and Whistler in his _Gentle Art_. Behind
these there was a great mass of French influence which, together with
literary impressionism as exemplified in such books as Crackanthorpe’s
_Vignettes_, was to give the essay and the so-called study a new
lease of life. Indeed, what came out of the period was not merely
criticism as a useful broom sweeping away the chaff from the wheat,
but criticism itself as a creative art, as Wilde chose to call it; not
merely dry-as-dust records of plays and cities, and other affairs as
in guide manuals, but artistic impressions, in some ways as vital as
the objects themselves. Mr. Arthur Symons, in particular, has given us
an abundance of this kind of work of which I have already spoken. So
did Lionel Johnson and Mr. Max Beerbohm, to whom I propose to allude
here, and many others like Mr. Bernard Shaw, who, though not of the
movement, moved alongside it on his own way, and Mr. G. S. Street, in
his _Episodes_, Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Galton, Francis Adams
in his _Essays in Modernity_, etc. etc. One has only to turn over
the magazines of the period to find a band of writers, too numerous
to mention, who aided on the movement with their pens. To cite one
prominent example alone, there was Grant Allen with his essay on
_The New Hedonism_. Here, however, I must be content with a brief
appreciative glance at the works of the two writers I have mentioned,
who were both actually of and in the movement itself. I have not here
of set purpose referred to the Henley essayists like Charles Whibley.
But the two men of the nineties I have chosen to speak of here have
been selected in the way an essayist should be selected nine times out
of ten, that is to say, because of his pleasing personality. These two
writers--particularly Max--are such individual writers, yet they never
offend. They are just pleasant garrulous companions.
For those who care at all passionately for the precious things of
literature, the work of Lionel Johnson will always remain a cherished
and secluded nook. The man was a scholar, a poet, and a critic, whose
dominant note was gracile lucidity. A friend writing of his personal
appearance at the time of his death said, ‘Thin, pale, very delicate
he looked, with a twitching of the facial muscles, which showed even
at the age of twenty-four how unfit was his physique to support the
strain of an abnormally nervous organization. Quick and mouselike in
his movements, reticent of speech and low-voiced, he looked like some
old-fashioned child who had strayed by chance into an assembly of men.
But a child could not have shown that inward smile of appreciative
humour, a little aloof, a little contemptuous perhaps, that worked
constantly around his mouth. He never changed except in the direction
of a greater pallor and a greater fragility.’
Cloistral mysticism was the key-chord of his two volumes of poetry
(1895 and 1897). In some respects he seems to have strayed out of
the seventeenth century of Crashaw and Herbert. His early training,
no doubt, engendered this aspect. After six years in the grey Gothic
school of Winchester he passed on to New College, Oxford. Here he came
under the influence of Pater, and was charmed by the latter’s then
somewhat hieratic austerity. A devout Irish Catholic, he was moved by
three themes: his old school, Oxford, and Ireland, and to these he
unfortunately too often devoted his muse. After the quiet seclusion of
his Oxford years, on entering the vortex of London literary life he
found that the world of wayfaring was a somewhat rough passage in the
mire for one so delicate. Out of the struggle between his scholarly
aspirations and the cry of his time for life, more life, was woven
perhaps the finest of all his poems, _The Dark Angel_:
Dark angel, with thine aching lust
To rid the world of penitence:
Malicious angel, who still dost
My soul such subtile violence!--
Because of thee, the land of dreams
Becomes a gathering place of fears:
Until tormented slumber seems
One vehemence of useless tears....
Thou art the whisper in the gloom,
The hinting tone, the haunting laugh:
Thou art the adorner of my tomb,
The minstrel of mine epitaph.
Most of his poems are subjective, and the majority have a certain
stiffness of movement of a priest laden with chasuble; but sometimes,
however, as in _Mystic and Cavalier_, or in the lines on the statue of
Charles I at Charing Cross, he writes with a winsome charm and freedom
of spirit:
Armoured he rides, his head
Bare to the stars of doom:
He triumphs now, the dead
Beholding London’s gloom....
Surely this poem has the proud note of Henley! There is another trait
in his verse, which, in view of his essays, it is as well not to pass
over. Like William Watson, his literary poems are pregnant with phrases
of rich criticism. He calls back the immortals in a true bookman’s
invocation hailing ‘opulent Pindar,’ ‘the pure and perfect voice of
Gray,’ ‘pleasant and elegant and garrulous Pliny’:
Herodotus, all simple and all wise;
Demosthenes, a lightning flame of scorn:
The surge of Cicero, that never dies;
And Homer, grand against the ancient morn.
But we are here chiefly concerned with his prose writings. If it is the
duty of the essayist to mirror the intellectuality of his age, Lionel
Johnson was a mirror for the Oxford standpoint of the nineties. There
still remain many of his papers uncollected in various old newspaper
files. But certainly the best of his work has been lovingly collected
by friendly hands, and worthily housed in _Post Liminium_. Take, for
instance, this passage from an essay on books published originally in
_The Academy_ (December 8th, 1900):
The glowing of my companionable fire upon the backs of my
companionable books, and then the familiar difficulty of choice.
Compassed about by old friends, whose virtues and vices I know
better than my own, I will be loyal to loves that are not of
yesterday. New poems, new essays, new stories, new lives, are not
my company at Christmastide, but the never-ageing old. ‘My days
among the dead are passed.’ Veracious Southey, how cruel a lie! My
sole days among the dead are the days passed among the still-born
or moribund moderns, not the white days and shining nights free
for the strong voices of the ancients in fame. A classic has a
permanence of pleasurability; that is the meaning of his estate and
title.
Or again, Johnson in his paper on _The Work of Mr. Pater_, sets forth
perhaps the best appreciation of his master that has yet appeared:
‘Magica sympathiæ!’ words borne upon the shield of Lord Herbert
of Cherbury, are inscribed upon the writings of Mr. Pater, who
found his way straight from the first to those matters proper
to his genius, nor did he, as Fuseli says of Leonardo, ‘waste
life, insatiate in experiment.’... ‘Nemo perfectus est,’ says St.
Bernard, ‘qui perfectior esse appetit’: it is as true in art as in
religion. In art also ‘the way to perfection is through a series of
disgusts’ ... and truly, as Joubert said, we should hesitate before
we differ in religion from the saints, in poetry from the poets....
There is no languorous toying with things of beauty, in a kind of
opiate dream, to be found here.
While Symons has written on all the arts, the sphere of Johnson has
been more limited to traditional English lines. Johnson attempts
no broad æsthetical system like the former. All that he does is to
illuminate the writer of whom he is speaking. And his little essays,
eminent in their un-English lucidity, their scrupulous nicety, their
conscious and deliberate beauty, adding to our _belles lettres_ a
classical execution and finish (which perfection accounts perhaps for
the classical smallness of his bookmaking) have all the bewildering
charm of a born stylist. Certain of his phrases linger in the mind
like music. ‘Many a sad half-murmured thought of Pascal, many a deep
and plangent utterance of Lucretius.’ Or the line: ‘The face whose
changes dominate my heart.’ Like the styles of Newman and Pater, on
which his own is founded, he is singularly allusive. He cites critics
by chapter and verse like an advocate defending a case. In fact, as in
his critical _magnum opus_, _The Art of Thomas Hardy_, he is amazingly
judicial. It is, too, since he is essentially academic, to the older
critics he prefers to turn for guidance. As he writes: ‘Flaubert and
Baudelaire and Gautier, Hennequin and M. Zola and M. Mallarmé, with
all their colleagues or exponents, may sometimes be set aside, and
suffer us to hear Quintilian or Ben Jonson, Cicero or Dryden.’ This
habit sometimes makes him strenuous reading, particularly in longer
criticisms like _The Art of Thomas Hardy_.
We grow weary of all this quotative authority. Burton’s _Anatomy of
Melancholy_ cannot be brought into every-day literary criticism. We
want to hear more of Lionel Johnson’s own direct opinions and less of
these selected passages from his library. So it is to those passages
where Johnson is most himself we turn in _The Art of Thomas Hardy_,
which, in spite of its academicism and the youthfulness of its author,
remains a genuine piece of sound critical work. The delightful imagery
of the prose in such passages is often very illuminating, as in this
paragraph:
From long and frequent converse with works of any favourite author,
we often grow to thinking of them under some symbol or image; to
see them summed up and expressed in some one composite scene of our
own making; this is my ‘vision’ of Mr. Hardy’s works. A rolling
down country, crossed by a Roman road; here a gray standing stone,
of what sacrificial ritual origin I can but guess; there a grassy
barrow, with its great bones, its red-brown jars, its rude gold
ornament, still safe in earth; a broad sky burning with stars; a
solitary man. It is of no use to turn away, and to think of the
village farms and cottages, with their antique ways and looks; of
the deep woods, of the fall of the woodman’s axe, the stir of the
wind in the branches; of the rustic feasts and festivals, when the
home-brewed drink goes round, to the loosening of tongues and wits;
of the hot meadows, fragrant hayfields, cool dairies, and blazing
gardens; of shining cart-horses under the chestnut-trees and cows
called in at milking time: they are characteristic scenes, but not
the one characteristic scene. That is the great down by night, with
its dead in their ancient graves, and its lonely living figure; ...
There is, perhaps, a reek about it all of a too-conscious imitation of
Pater’s murmured obituaries which makes one in the end rather tired of
this hieratic treatment of art, so that one turns rather gladly to the
one or two tales he wrote. For example in _The Lilies of France_, an
episode of French anti-clericalism, which appeared in _The Pageant_,
1897, he slowly builds up a thing of verbal beauty that one feels
was actually worthy of him, while in the previous number of the same
quarterly he perpetrated a delightful ironism on the literary men of
his period entitled _Incurable_, in which, perhaps, we may trace faint
autobiographical clues. Such, briefly, was the work of this young man
who was found dead in Fleet Street early one morning, aged thirty-five.
But the writer who was to bring irony in English literature to a
consummate pitch, and add to the age a strange brief brilliance of
his own wilful spirit, was Max Beerbohm. Max, the ‘Incomparable’ as
Bernard Shaw once described him, is the charm of the gilded lily, the
fairy prince of an urbane artificiality: he is in literature what the
cocktail is among drinks; he is the enemy of dullness and the friend of
that Greek quality called ‘charis.’ He is the public school and Varsity
man who is fond of, but afraid of, being tedious in literature; so with
delightful affectation his vehicle is persiflage with a load of wit he
pretends to disdain. Of all the prose writers of the Beardsley period
he is the easiest and most charming to read. In fact, he is the ideal
essayist. He titillates the literary sense. Fortunately his glass is
small, for if one had to drink it in quart pots the result would be
as disastrous as in his one and only mistake--the long novel _Zuleika
Dobson_, which is a late work written long after the nineties had been
swallowed up by that maw which swallowed up Lesbia’s sparrow and all
other beautiful dead things.
Max said in jest, ‘I belong to the Beardsley period,’ and it is one of
those jests which is only too painfully true. When he was at Oxford he
was caught up in the movement, and wrote, under Wilde’s influence, _A
Defence of Cosmetics_ for the first number of _The Yellow Book_, and
he also appeared in Lord Alfred Douglas’s magazine. Thenceforward he
contributed to various quarterlies, while in 1896 the little red volume
with its white paper label appeared as _The Works_, containing all the
best of this precocious _enfant terrible_ of literature, who assures
us that he read in bed, while at school, _Marius the Epicurean_, and
found it not nearly so difficult as _Midshipman Easy_. At the age of
twenty-five he cries: ‘I shall write no more. Already I feel myself to
be a trifle outmoded,’ and he religiously does not keep his word. He
keeps pouring out caricatures, writes _More_, the companion volume to
_The Works_, and perpetrates his short story _The Happy Hypocrite_.
Beyond 1899 we cannot follow him, but he has been busy ever since with
his parodies, his _Yet Again_, his lamentable novel, his one-act play,
and so on.
It is to that Beardsley period to which he said he belonged we are
here restricted. And it must be admitted that though the Boer War and
the Great War do not seem to have gagged him, there is something so
impishly impudent in his earlier work which renders it more remarkable
than the complacent efforts of his later years.
Amid the searching seriousness of the nineties, Max is like balm in
Gilead. He has the infinite blessing of irony. The others, except
Beardsley (who too has this gift), are so appallingly serious. The
French influences that went to their making seem to have killed the
valiant English humour of Falstaff, Pickwick, and Verdant Green.
They are all like young priests who will take no liberty with their
ritual; but Max saves the period with his whimsical irony. His is not
the fearful, mordant irony of Octave Mirbeau, but a dainty butterfly
fancy playing lightly over the pleasures of a pleasant life. To be
essentially civilised is to be like a god. This is the pose of such
a mentality. It is a winsome pose with no sharp edges to it, just as
the _poseur_ himself must be wilfully blind to all the seaminess of
life. In front of his window (if a temperament be a window looking out
on life) there is a pleasant garden. Beyond is the noise and dust of
the highway. He is the dandy in his choice of life as in his choice
of literature, and in more than one sense he has written the happiest
essays of the period.
It has been said his caricatures are essays. May we not equally say
his essays are caricatures? The essay, indeed, is the work of the
feline male, the man who sits beside the fire like Charles Lamb. The
out-of-doors man writes the episode. But Max is essentially an indoors
man, who has a perfect little dressing-room like a lady’s boudoir, but
much neater, where he concocts his essays we read so easily by infinite
labour, with a jewelled pen. It is as though he had said: ‘Literature
must either be amusing or dull; mine shall be the former.’ He is very
much the young man about town who has consented gracefully to come
and charm us. What he wrote of Whistler in _The Gentle Art of Making
Enemies_, we may say of him: ‘His style never falters. The silhouette
of no sentence is ever blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear,
vocal cadence.’ And the refrain is Max himself all the time, and his
personality is so likeable we stomach it all the time. It is the note
that vibrates through all his amiable satiric irony, whether it be on
the House of Commons Manner or in defence of the use of Cosmetics, or
in describing the period of 1880. Everything, from first to last, is
done with such good taste. Even in his wildest flights of raillery he
is utterly purposed not to offend. In his charming paper, _1880_, he
has given us a vigorous vignette of the previous decade to _The Yellow
Book_ age. One can hardly help quoting a small passage here from this
admirably worked up prose: ‘In fact Beauty had existed long before
1880. It was Mr. Oscar Wilde who managed her début. To study the period
is to admit that to him was due no small part of the social vogue that
Beauty began to enjoy. Fired by his fervid words, men and women hurled
their mahogany into the streets and ransacked the curio-shops for the
furniture of Annish days. Dadoes arose upon every wall, sunflowers and
the feathers of peacocks curved in every corner, tea grew quite cold
while the guests were praising the Willow Pattern of its cup. A few
fashionable women even dressed themselves in sinuous draperies and
unheard-of greens. Into whatsoever ball-room you went, you would surely
find, among the women in tiaras, and the fops and the distinguished
foreigners, half a score of comely ragamuffins in velveteen, murmuring
sonnets, posturing, waving their hands. Beauty was sought in the most
unlikely places. Young painters found her mobbled in the fogs, and
bank-clerks versed in the writings of Mr. Hamerton, were heard to
declare, as they sped home from the city, that the Underground Railway
was beautiful from London Bridge to Westminster, but not from Sloane
Square to Notting Hill Gate.’
It is thus that Max can play with a chord of almost tender irony on
his subject, and such a style, so full of the writer’s personality,
has the cachet of the veritable essayist. How charmingly, for example,
he records his reminiscences of Beardsley. It is a delightful little
picture of the artist, interesting enough to place beside Arthur
Symons’s portrait: ‘He loved dining out, and, in fact, gaiety of any
kind. His restlessness was, I suppose, one of the symptoms of his
malady. He was always most content where there was the greatest noise
and bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light.
The “domino-room” at the Café Royal had always a great fascination for
him: he liked the mirrors and the florid gilding, the little parties
of foreigners, and the smoke and the clatter of the dominoes being
shuffled on the marble tables.... I remember, also, very clearly,
a supper at which Beardsley was present. After the supper we sat
up rather late. He was the life and soul of the party, till, quite
suddenly almost in the middle of a sentence, he fell fast asleep in his
chair. He had overstrained his vitality, and it had all left him. I can
see him now as he sat there with his head sunk on his breast; the thin
face, white as the gardenia in his coat, and the prominent, harshly-cut
features; the hair, that always covered his whole forehead in a fringe
and was of so curious a colour--a kind of tortoise-shell; the narrow,
angular figure, and the long hands that were so full of power.’[18]
[18] _The Idler_, May, 1898.
Outside this medium of the essay, with the exception of the
caricatures, Max is no longer the incomparable, for his short story,
_The Happy Hypocrite_, is not a short story at all, but a spoilt
essay;[19] while his novel is not merely a failure, but a veritable
disaster. With his first paper in _The Yellow Book_ he fell in with
the step of the men of the nineties, and he too became a part of their
efflorescence. Sufficient unto that time is his work, and with a final
quotation from this early paper so redolent of the movement that there
is no mistaking it, we must leave him and his future on the knees of
the gods: ‘Was it not at Capua that they had a whole street where
nothing was sold but dyes and unguents? We must have such a street,
and, to fill our new Seplosia, our Arcade of Unguents, all herbs
and minerals and live creatures shall give of their substance. The
white cliffs of Albion shall be ground to powder for Loveliness, and
perfumed by the ghost of many a little violet. The fluffy eider-ducks,
that are swimming round the pond, shall lose their feathers, that the
powder-puff may be moonlike as it passes over Loveliness’ lovely face.’
[19] His Children’s Tale, _The Small Boy and the Barley Sugar_
(_The Parade_, 1897), should also be mentioned as another
case of shipwrecked ingenuity.