It all seems a long time ago now since those days when Verlaine was as
a lantern for these young men’s feet, to guide them through the mazes
of Art. Thirty years ago and more Wilde was disclosing ‘décolleté
spirits of astonishing conversation’; Zola influenced that Byron of
pessimism, Thomas Hardy, to beget _Jude the Obscure_ (1895), and when
the critics assailed him the Wessex giant guarded a ‘holy silence’
which has denied us up till now an emancipated novel such as the
French and Italians have, though James Joyce may yet achieve it for
us. It was also the age of youth in hansom cabs looking out on the
lights of London’s West End which spread out before them as in a
‘huge black velvet flower.’ Ibsen, Tolstoy, Maeterlinck, Nietzsche,
D’Annunzio, and Dostoievsky were beginning to percolate through by
means of translations that opened out a new world into which everybody
hastily swarmed. It was an age in which young men frankly lauded the
value of egoism. Indeed, it was essentially the age of young men. In
those days a genital restiveness which came over from France started
the sex equation. A hothouse fragrance swept across the pudibond
wastes of our literature. Hectics came glorying in their experiences.
Richard of the Golden Girl with his banjo lifts up his voice to chaunt
‘a bruisèd daffodil of last night’s sin.’ Women like George Egerton
in her _Keynotes_ take questions further than Mrs. Lynn Linton had
ever done in the previous decade. Exoticism, often vulgar when not
in master hands, blabbed out its secrets in works like _The Woman
who Did_. Confounding the good with the bad, a wail went up against
the so-called gospel of intensity. Sometimes it was in the serious
reviews and weeklies; at another time it was Harry Quilter. Some young
undergraduates at Oxford, even in _Aristophanes at Oxford_ (May, 1894),
were filled with ‘an honest dislike for _Dorian Gray_, _Salomé_, _The
Yellow Book_, and the whole of the lackadaisical, opium-cigarette
literature of the day.’ _Punch_ produced a Beardsley Britannia and sang
of:
The Yellow Poster girl looked out
From her pinkly purple heaven,
One eye was blue and one was green,
Her bang was cut uneven.
She had three fingers on one hand,
And the hairs on her head were seven.
And all these criticisms now, all these quarrels, are like old spent
battlefields the sands of gracious time have covered over and hidden
from view. Alone the best work of the period remains; for good art has
no period or special vogue.
Indeed, the elements that destroy the worthless, that winnow the chaff
from the grain, have been at work. For us, indeed, this landscape has
changed from what it once was, and looking at it now we acquire a new
impression which was denied to the critics of the age itself. Some of
us, without a doubt, have gone to the opposite extreme and prattle
about it as an age of platitudes, and accuse a work of art of being as
old as _The Yellow Book_. One might as well accuse a violet of being as
old as the Greek Anthology. For always, to those wandering back in the
right spirit to those days, there will come something of the infinite
zest which stirred the being of the men of the nineties to create art.
It was such an honest effort that one has to think of those times when
Marlowe and his colleagues were athrob with æsthetic aspiration to find
a similitude. The nineties, indeed, are a pleasant flower-garden in
our literature over which many strange perfumes float. There are times
when one wishes to retreat into such places, as there are moments when
the backwaters enchant us from the main stream.
It has been said it was an age of nerves. If by this is implied a
keener sensitiveness to certain feelings pulsating in the art of this
movement, one will not have very far to go to find its cause in the
French impressionistic school of Manet, which, after saturating all
types of French artists, undoubtedly invaded writers over here even
before the movement of the nineties began. On the age without a doubt
it had a lasting influence, so that to a certain degree, without being
over-busy with what went before, we may say its writers brought it
to no small degree into common use in our literature. But just as
impressionism in painting had existed centuries before in the ever-busy
mind of men like Leonardo da Vinci, one cannot go so far as to say it
had never existed before in our literature. Such a statement would be
perhaps frivolous. But it was with these men it first came to exist
as a kind of cry of a new clan. It was these men who were essentially
hectics who essayed to etch the exotic impression. The majority of
the work of the movement, in fact, can be described as impressionisms
of the abnormal by a group of individualists. For in all their work
the predominant keynote will be found to be a keen sense of that
strangeness of proportion which Bacon noted as a characteristic of what
he called beauty. It is observable as much in the poems of Dowson as in
the drawings of Beardsley, two of the leading types of the movement. It
vibrates intensely in the minor work of men like Wratislaw, and also
in John Gray’s early volume, as I have endeavoured to show. All Mr.
Arthur Symons’s criticism is a narration of his soul’s adventures in
quest of it. It stirred the genius of Charles Conder, and vitalizes the
rather cruel analysis of Hubert Crackanthorpe. We see it almost as the
animating spirit of the age itself in Oscar Wilde’s poems, _The Sphinx_
and _The Harlot’s House_. It has become disseminated like a perfume
from the writings of Pater in the men who came after him. It was, so to
speak, a quickening stimulus to them as the rediscovery of a manuscript
of Catullus, or a Greek figure was in the years of the Renaissance
itself. With it came a sense of freedom. An attempt was made, because
of it, for instance, to emancipate our literature to the same extent
as the literatures of Latin countries move untrammelled by a hesitancy
in the choice of certain themes. And people at the time, watching the
fate of the prime movers, cried with a great deal of assurance, ‘That
way lies madness!’
Be this as it may, the men of the nineties bequeathed a certain
subtleness of emotion to our art that is not without its value.
They took Byron’s satanism and inflamed it with the lurid light of
Baudelaire. _Buveurs de lune_ after the manner of Paul Verlaine, they
evoked something of the ethereal glamour of moonlight itself. A realist
like Crackanthorpe tried to tread the whole _via dolorosa_ without
faltering by the wayside. Poetry caught the mood of bizarre crises
and Edgar Wilson wrought a strange delicate world of visions. In Max
Beerbohm irony took on a weird twinge of grace almost Pierrot-like.
Perhaps, indeed, they all had something of the Pierrot quality in
them. Beardsley himself was enchanted by that little opera without
words, ‘L’Enfant Prodigue.’ Dowson made a play about him. _The Happy
Hypocrite_ might be a story of the Pierrot himself grown old.
As I have hinted, much of the work conceived by these men was doomed
to die, as in the case of every movement. What then remains, what is
their balance to the good? Who knows? About everything man has loved
and fashioned there abides vestiges of the interest of humanity. Only
some things are easier to recall than others. They stand out more, so
that one is bound to remark them. They have, so to speak, a _cachet_ of
their own. Among these in this movement there comes the work of the men
I have so hastily attempted to realise. Each has about him something of
that quality which is indefinable, but easily recognisable. Each has
his charm for those who care to come with a loving interest.