3
To return to the Nineties. There were those, even then, who suspected that something was up in the state of English literature. Grave and scholarly men analyzed the state of affairs and speculated on causes and results. If the young men were pleased with themselves there were others who were not. There was a certain looseness of thinking and of phrasing that was not universally approved. The burden of such critical attitudes is a familiar one—it is the one that attends all new movements in literature, following change as the night follows the day.
The first and best expressed of these critical appraisals appeared in, of all places, the first volume of the Yellow Book itself. Advocating “Reticence in Literature,” Arthur Waugh wrote: “During the last quarter of a century ... the English man of letters has been indulging, with an entirely new freedom, his national birthright of outspokenness, and during the last twelve months there have been no uncertain indications that this freedom of speech is degenerating into license which some of us cannot but view with regret and apprehension.” A familiar note, an old refrain!
“The writers and the critics of contemporary literature have, it would seem, alike lost their heads; they have gone out into the byways and hedges in search of the new thing, and have brought into the study and subjected to the microscope mean objects of the roadside, whose analysis may be of value to science but is absolutely foreign to art.”
Mr. Waugh then proceeds to make the point that every great productive period of literature has been the result of some internal or external revulsion of feeling, some current of ideas. The great periods of productivity had been those when the national mind had been directed to some vast movement of emancipation, the discovery of new countries, the defeat of old enemies, the opening of fresh possibilities. But, Waugh remonstrates, the past quarter of a century had been sterile of important improvements, there had been no new territories and no new knowledge. Because of this sterility the minds of writers had been thrown back upon themselves and the most characteristic literature of the day had become introspective.
“Following one course,” says Waugh, “it has betaken itself to that analytical fiction which we associate primarily with America; following another course, it has sought for subject matter in the discussing of passions and sensations, common, doubtless, to every age of mankind, interesting and necessary, too, in their way, but passions and sensations hitherto disassociated with literature.”
It will be noted that Waugh attributes a certain regrettable trend to American sources, but then he later says that the tendency for literary frankness had its origins in Swinburne. Despite the accuracy of many points made by Waugh, it must be noted that the world in 1890 was not quite the uneventful place it seemed to him. There had been, it is true, no wars of any consequence for a fortnight or two, no Armada threatened, no European paranoiac gazed balefully across the Channel and regicide was, for that moment, happily unthought of. Such things were, so long as Victoria sat on the throne, unthinkable—especially the latter.
But Darwin’s Origin of the Species had been written some years before, and Karl Marx, who also had something of a London adventure, had written a book with the stodgy title Das Kapital, and the Webbs and the Socialists and the Fabians were quietly preparing their various ideologies. Things were brewing, even though under the surface, and no one paid them much heed, least of all the “irresponsibles” of the Nineties.
These things meant little to Waugh, apparently, and seemed of no particular consequence. They seemed of even less consequence to the delicate decadents who were staging a well publicized literary rebellion of their own. It is not our intention to go further into the matter nor to list the peculiarities of these practitioners of pastel prose, nor to relate the peccadillos of its precocious and precious poets. We content ourselves with observing that Arthur Machen had little to do with them, either as individuals or as a group.