Here I propose to go through a litany of some of my omissions. In
essaying to depict the aspects of an age there is always this pitfall,
omission, which ambuscades the adventurous spirit. For we who know so
little even about ourselves--how can we, without grave impertinence,
boldly say I wish to bring back to the mind of others an age dead and
gone? Everything is so interwoven in life that it is, for example, an
unwarranted arbitrariness to discuss the literature of this period
without brooding on the black and white art of the time, or the
canvases of its painters.
I have worried for some space over Aubrey Beardsley, but I have not
spoken of men like Mr. S. H. Sime, whose work Beardsley so delighted
in. Probably Sidney H. Sime’s work in _The Butterfly_, _The Idler_,
_Pick-me-Up_, _Eureka_, etc., besides his book illustrations, is in
some ways the most powerfully imaginative of the period. There has been
a Beardsley craze, and most assuredly there will be one day a Sime
craze, when collectors have focussed properly the marvellous suggestive
power of this artist’s work. Unfortunately, scattered up and down old
magazines, much of this work is, as it were, lost for the moment like
Toulouse Lautrec’s drawings in papers like _Le Rire_. But when it is
garnered up in a worthy book of drawings like the Beardsley books,
the power of Sime’s work will be undoubted. Fortunately Sime is still
amongst us, and occasionally a Dunsany book brings us fresh evidence of
his genius.
Again, I have not alluded to Edgar Wilson’s bizarre and fascinating
decorations of submarine life and Japonesque figures. Like Shannon,
Ricketts, Raven Hill, and others, he received his early art education
at the Lambeth School of Art. At the end of the eighties he began
collecting Japanese prints long before Beardsley had left school. In
fact, Edgar Wilson was one of the pioneers of the Japanese print in
this country--a love for the strange which came over to England from
France. A typical decorative design of Wilson’s[20] is ‘In the Depths
of the Sea,’ representing an octopus rampant over a human skull,
beneath which are two strange flat fish, and in the background a
sunken old three-decker with quaintly carved stern and glorious prow.
_Pick-me-Up_ first used his work as it did that of many another young
artist, and in its back files much of his best work can be found.
For _The Rambler_ he did different designs for each issue, which
is probably the only redeeming feature about that early Harmsworth
periodical. _The Sketch_, _Cassell’s_, _Scribner’s_, and above all _The
Idler_ and _The Butterfly_, are beautified among other papers by his
exotic decorations.
[20] _Edgar Wilson and his Work_, by Arthur Lawrence, _The
Idler_, July, 1899.
Once more I have not spoken at all of Miss Althea Gyles’s hectic
visions which, in her illustrations for Wilde’s _The Harlot’s House_,
probably reached the acme of the period’s realisation of the weird.
She is of course really of the Irish symbolists, and not one of the
nineties’ group at all; but, in her Wilde illustrations, she almost
enters the same field as the men of the nineties. Her connection, too,
with the firm of Smithers is another strong excuse for mentioning her
work here. In _The Dome_ both her drawings and poems appeared, while
in the December number for 1898 there is a note on her symbolism by
W. B. Yeats. In all her drawings the fancy that seems to have such free
flight is in reality severely ordered by the designer’s symbolism.
Sometimes it is merely intriguing, as in drawings like ‘The Rose of
God,’ where a naked woman is spread-eagled against the clouds above a
fleet of ships and walled city, while in other designs the symbolism is
full of suggestive loveliness, as in ‘Noah’s Raven.’ ‘The Ark floats
upon a grey sea under a grey sky, and the raven flutters above the sea.
A sea nymph, whose slender swaying body drifting among the grey waters
is a perfect symbol of the soul untouched by God or by passion, coils
the fingers of one hand about his feet and offers him a ring, while
her other hand holds a shining rose under the sea. Grotesque shapes
of little fishes flit about the rose, and grotesque shapes of larger
fishes swim hither and thither. Sea nymphs swim through the windows of
a sunken town, and reach towards the rose hands covered with rings; and
a vague twilight hangs over all.’ This is explained to represent the
search of man for the fleshly beauty which is so full of illusions for
us all, while the spiritual beauty is ever far away. To this kind of
interpretative design Oscar Wilde’s swan song, _The Harlot’s House_,
lends itself admirably, and Miss Gyles’s black and white work here
becomes inspired to the standard of Beardsley’s and Sime’s best work.
The shadow effects illustrating the stanzas,
Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
A phantom lover to her breast,
Sometimes they seemed to try and sing.
Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing
must be seen before one can place Althea Gyles’s drawings in their
proper place. It is not a replica of Beardsley, it is not a faint
far-off imitation of a Félicien Rops or Armand Rassenfosse, but
something genuinely original in its shadow-graphic use of masses of
black on a white ground.
Once more, _mea culpa_, I have paid scant attention to Max Beerbohm’s
caricatures, and I have failed to call attention here to his earlier
and later method of work. I have not even spoken of his little paper
entitled _The Spirit of Caricature_, wherein he discusses the spirit of
the art he practises. God forgive me! Or yet again what meed of homage
have I yet rendered to Mr. Will Rothenstein’s lithographic portraits,
which are absolutely a necessity to anyone who would live a while with
the shades of these men. Take, for example, his _Liber Juniorum_,
which alone contains lithographed drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, Max
Beerbohm, and Arthur Symons. Then there are so many others over whose
achievements I must keep a holy silence, such as Mr. Charles Ricketts
and his _Dial_, which was published by the Vale Press, and to which
John Gray contributed many poems.
Again, there are the colourists of this group, particularly Walter
Sickert and Charles Conder. The latter, above all, is the colour
comrade to Beardsley’s black and white. His figures are the lovers of
Dowson’s verse, his landscapes and world have all those memories of the
golden time that haunt the brain of John Gray and Theodore Wratislaw.
No note, however short, on the nineties would be complete without a
halt for praise of this painter of a strangely coloured _dolce far
niente_. For everything in his work, be it on canvas, silk panel, or
dainty fan, is drowsy with the glory of colour (as Mr. Holbrook Jackson
admirably says), ‘colour suggesting form, suggesting all corporeal
things, suggesting even itself, for Conder never more than hints at the
vivid possibilities of life, more than a hint might waken his puppets
from their Laodicean dream.’
Whether an idyllic landscape or a fantastic _bal masqué_ of Montmartre
or an Elysian _fête galante_ was his theme, the work itself is always
permeated with the spirit of Conder. His nude figure ‘Pearl,’ his
‘L’Oiseau Bleu,’ his ‘Femme dans une loge au théâtre,’ are typical of
his successful achievements. The ‘Fickle Love’ fan is but one of the
numerous exquisite works he produced in this branch of art; while ‘The
Masquerade’ is the work of a Beardsley-like fancy which could colour
like Conder.
Like his personality, his work suffered from certain unhappy moods, and
that is what makes so much of it uneven. Born in 1868, a descendant
of Louis Francis Roubiliac, the famous sculptor, whose work for the
figures of our eighteenth century porcelain factories is so well known,
of Conder it may be said, as of all artists with French blood in them,
when he is successful he is irresistible. He might not be able to
draw modern men, but how beautifully he drew the women of his day can
be seen in ‘La Toilette.’ He delighted, indeed, in designing women
wandering in dream gardens, in painting roses and Princes Charming.
It would be pleasant to travel through this world of delightful
dreams, were we not restricted of set purpose to the literary side of
the movement. And has it not already been done in Mr. Frank Gibson’s
_Charles Conder_?
Again, some of the publishers who produced the books of these men have
their right to something more than scant mention. To Mr. Elkin Mathews,
particularly as the first publisher of the Rhymers’ Club books and
as the issuer of John Gray’s first volume of poetry, bibliophiles
owe a debt of gratitude. In the early days of the nineties Mr. John
Lane became associated with him, until the autumn of 1894 witnessed
‘Parnassus divided into two peaks.’ Later, after the Wilde débâcle,
an extraordinary figure, worthy of a romance, in the person of the
late Leonard Smithers, who was at one time in the legal profession
at Sheffield, took the field as a publisher by way of H. S. Nichols.
He was no mere publisher but a man of considerable scholarship, who
not only issued but finished the Sir Richard Burton translation of
Catullus. Round him, to a considerable extent, the vanishing group
rallied for a little while before Death smote them one by one. Here is
no place to pay due justice to this amiable Benvenuto Cellini of book
printing himself, but it must be remembered his figure bulks largely in
the closing scenes. He kept Dowson from starvation. Beardsley wrote of
him as ‘our publisher.’[21] He, when others failed, had the courage to
launch on the English publishing market the released Wilde’s now famous
_Ballad of Reading Gaol_. If he did exceed certain rules for himself,
he at least took risks to help others. He was no supine battener on the
profits of books for young ladies’ seminaries. He was a printer, and
his bankruptcy may be said to have closed the period.
[21] It is interesting that in an unpublished letter of
Beardsley’s to Smithers when the latter was intending to
produce _The Peacock_, an unpublished quarterly, Beardsley
promises him his best work.
Lastly in this chaunt of omissions comes the drama of the nineties.
Unfortunately the drama, in so far as it affects the group of the
nineties with which we are concerned, is almost a nullity. Aubrey
Beardsley once commenced a play, which was never heard of, in
collaboration with Brandon Thomas. Ernest Dowson wrote what Beardsley
called a ‘tiresome’ playlet. John Davidson perpetrated a number
of plays such as _Bruce_ (1886), _Smith, a tragic farce_ (1888),
_Scaramouch in Naxos_, and two other plays in 1889 when he was feeling
his way, and translated much later as hackwork a play of François
Coppée’s and Victor Hugo’s _Ruy Blas_. Theodore Peters’ pastoral and
other similar trifles only go to show how barren the group itself was
in the dramatist’s talent. Nor can much be said for such poetic plays
as Theodore Wratislaw’s _The Pity of Love_.
But it must be remembered, as a matter of fact, such a sweeping
conclusion may not only be unjust but even impertinent. For where in
all the theatres of the London of the nineties would the plays (if they
had been written) of these young men have found a home? Probably the
dramatic output of the nineties was nil because there were no small
theatres in London at that date of the type to give these young men
a hope that any works they might write could be produced. So only at
the end of the decade do we see the dramatic outburst when the Irish
movement founded a theatre of its own and produced J. M. Synge, and
also when Miss Horniman gave Manchester a repertory theatre, and then
Stanley Houghton came.
True, at the same period as the nineties Oscar Wilde was producing
plays burlesquing the world of Society, and Bernard Shaw was getting
ready to launch his own works by bombasting every one else’s; but the
little movement of the younger men remained dramatically dumb. Nothing
came even when George Moore produced _The Strike at Arlingford_ and
John Todhunter _The Black Cat_. It is a hard thing to believe that all
these young men were devoid of the dramatic instinct. I prefer for my
part to blame the London theatrical world for the lack of those minute
theatres which have become so much a part of the night life of big
continental cities and are so admirably adapted for the production of
the works of new dramatists.
Indeed, the theatrical atmosphere of London at that time was in its
usual perpetual state of stuffiness. There was not even a beneficent
society then such as we now have in the Pioneer Players, whose theatre
(if one may so symbolise it) is the charity house for emancipated
dramatists. Ibsen’s _Doll’s House_ had been produced in London just
before the nineties’ epoch began, and, like anything new in popular art
over here, raised the hue-and-cry. Then, too, the big ‘star’ curse,
which Wilde himself so justly spurned, was permanently settled on our
own insular drama like a stranglehold on the author.
Outside England, in the big art world of the continent, Schnitzler was
beginning in Vienna.[22] Maurice Maeterlinck, in Belgium, had begun[23]
too the drama of expressive silences which came to light in Paris.
There were Sudermann and Hauptmann in Germany; Echegaray in Spain;
D’Annunzio in Italy; Ibsen and Björnstjerne Björnson finishing their
work for the Scandinavian drama; while the playwrights of Paris were,
as always, feverishly fabricating all sorts of movements, as when Paul
Fort, a boy of eighteen, founds in 1890 the Théâtre d’Art. But what
was going on in England? Pinero’s _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, Wilde’s
_Salomé_, and his light comedies, together with stuff by Henry Arthur
Jones, Sydney Grundy, etc., represented the serious drama. The critics
were perturbed, as they generally are. The musical comedy and its
singing, pirouetting soubrettes deluded the populace into the belief
that it had a great drama, when all these spectacles should really
have been housed in London in spacious tearooms for the benefit of
that multitude which is fond of tinkling melody and teapots. There was
not even in London a single Überbrettlbuhnen, as the Germans mouth it,
where those who love beer could go to hear poets recite their verse _à
la_ Otto Bierbaum, let alone little theatres where what we so dolefully
term the serious drama could be played.
[22] _Anatol_, 1889-90.
[23] _La Princesse Maleine_, 1889.
Even, too, in those days, the newspaper critics, muzzled by the
business department, which has never any wish to lose its theatrical
advertisements, said little, with a few honest exceptions like Bernard
Shaw. Max Beerbohm, when he took over the critical work of Shaw on
_The Saturday Review_ was obviously unhappy. English theatres rapidly
became as elaborate and as pompous as the Church Militant in its palmy
days. They kept growing in size. In London, indeed, the small theatre
never had its boom. Indeed, the nineties was the age when the big
theatres were being built to fill their owners’ pockets and the men of
the nineties themselves (be it for whatever reason you like) did not
produce a single play.