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.
III
One endeavours to remember some one or two outstanding novels written by any one of the writers of this group. It must be at once admitted, one fails to recall a great novel. It is true that the great Victorians, Meredith and Hardy, were hard at work at this time; but, then, neither of these writers belongs to this movement. Then there was Kipling, Stevenson, Barrie, and George Moore. With the exception of the last, we have little to do with these here. They do not come within the scope of the present study.
None of the men of the nineties (as I have defined them) produced a great novel. It would be well, however, to give at once some connotation for so loose a term as ‘a great novel.’ Let us then say that a good English novel is not necessarily a great novel; nor, for that matter, is a good Russian novel necessarily a great novel. A great novel is a work of fiction that has entered into the realm of universal literature in the same way as the dramas of Sophocles and Shakespeare and Molière have entered that glorious demesne. As a matter of fact, one can remember, I think in most cases, very few English novels that are great in this sense; while there are many more French and Russian works that have an undeniable right to this title. Therefore it is not, perhaps, so damaging a criticism of the period as it might at first sight appear to say it has produced no great novel.
But in so far as English fiction alone is concerned, it cannot be said that the men of the nineties produced work of a very high order in this form. They do not seem to have had the staying power demanded in such artistic production. The short poem, the short story, the small black and white drawing, the one act play—in fact, any form of art that just displays the climacteric moment and discards the rest pleased them. It was, as John Davidson said, an age of Bovril. While the novel, it must be admitted, needs either a profusion of ideas, as in the case of the Russians, or of genitals, as in the case of the French. But the art of the nineties was essentially an expression of moods—and moods, after all, are such evanescent brief conditions. So it is not unnatural that the fruition of the novel was not rich among these writers. George Gissing and George Moore, in a way their forebears (I have in mind more particularly the latter), spread a taste for such works. Indeed, in his Confessions of a Young Man, George Moore may be said to have predicted the masculine type of the nineties. Gissing in 1891 was to daunt some with his New Grub Street, while Henry James was to inspire enthusiasm in a few like Hubert Crackanthorpe. But naturally in the way of stimulus the main goad was France, which was at that date phenomenally rich in practitioners of the art of the novel. The Vizetelly Zolas, Mr. George Moore personally conducting the novels of certain of the French novelists over the Channel, the desire to smash the fetters of Victorian fiction which Thomas Hardy was to accomplish, were all inspiring sources which were, however, singularly unfruitful. Walter Pater long before in his academic romance Marius, which they had all read eagerly, wrote charmingly of a field that would appeal to them when he said: ‘Life in modern London ... is stuff sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth to build his “palace of art” of.’ But instead of taking the recommendation of this high priest they read Dorian Gray, which Wilde would never have written if Huysmans had not first written A Rebours. The young men of Henley, it must be confessed, did far finer work than Richard Le Gallienne’s watery Wildism in The Quest of the Golden Girl. George Moore wrote a masterpiece in Evelyn Innes, but Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore in A Comedy of Masks and Adrian Rome did not retaliate. Leonard Merrick, who started publishing in the eighties, did not publish his best work till the nineties were dead and gone; while his best Bohemian Paris stories may owe as much to Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) as they do to Henri Murger. Henry Harland, as I have already said, only struck his vein of comedy fiction when the Boer War had finished the movement. George Gissing and Arthur Morrison belong, with Frank Harris, to the pugilistic school of Henley’s young men, while Richard Whiteing, who turned from journalism to write No. 5 John Street (1899), was too old a man and too late with his book to belong to the nineties’ group. Arthur Machen, in those days, belonged to the short story writers with Hubert Crackanthorpe, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group. The sailor, Joseph Conrad, the Australian Louis Becke, the Canadian, C. G. D. Roberts, were working out their own salvation, and had nothing to do with the Rhymers’ Club. The strong creative brain of Aubrey Beardsley, indeed, in his unfinished picaresque romance, Under the Hill, which I have already mentioned, produced something new, but it was not a novel; while it is John Davidson’s poetry that counts, not his novels, which remain unread nowadays on the shelf.
Indeed, if the name of a good English novel by any one of them is demanded, it will be singularly difficult to suggest a satisfactory title. One can even go further, and state that they did not even have one amongst them who has handed on to us a vivid picture of their own lives in the form of fiction. Dowson, indeed, in the dock life of his books may have autobiographical touches, but they are purely personal. What I mean is, that there was no one standing by to give us a picture of them as Willy, the French writer, has given us of the sceptical yet juvenile enthusiasm of Les Jeunes of Paris of the same period in, for example, his Maîtresse d’Esthètes. What is cruder than Ranger-Gull’s The Hypocrite, which has pretensions to be a picture of the young men of the period? And when one comes to think of it this is a great pity, as an excellent novel might have been penned around the feverish activities of these young exotics of the nineties. Robert Hichens’ Green Carnation is, after all, perhaps the most brilliant attempt to picture the weaknesses of the period, and it is merely a skit taking off in the characters of Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reggie two well-known personalities. The Adventures of John Johns, it is true, is supposed to be the history of the rise of one of the smaller epigoni of the movement, but it is not a very brilliant achievement, though it has considerable merit and interest. One cannot indeed say that it is up to the standard of Ernest La Jeunesse’s Odin Howes, wherein the French Jew has given a veritable flashing insight on the last days of Wilde in Paris and those holes into which he crept to drink. What a pity, indeed, an English contemporary has not done the same for the Tite Street days, or given us in his book a serious study of the strange world of Whistler or Dowson.
In the face of this strange dearth of novels in this school one cannot help asking the reasons that engendered it. Without laying down any hard and fast rules, it will, I think, be seen that this vacuity came from the Zeitgeist of the group itself. As has been said, the large canvas, the five-act play, the long novel were démodé for the period. The age demanded, after the long realistic studies of the eighties in France, the climacteric moments only when the passions of the personæ of the drama were at white heat, so to speak, and life was lived intensely. Could not the great scene up to which the five long acts lead be squeezed into one? Was not the rediscovery of the Mimes of Herod as a sign of the times? Could not the great beauty of an immense landscape’s spirit be caught and seized on a small canvas? Could not the long-winded novel of three tomes be whittled down to the actual short-story motive? This reduction of everything to its climax can be seen in all the art of the period. Look at Beardsley’s decoration for Wilde’s Salomé, entitled itself ‘The Climax.’ Conder paints small objects like fans and diminutive water-colours and Crackanthorpe writes short stories. The poems of Dowson are short swallow flights of song, and the epic is reduced to Stephen Phillips’s Marpessa. The one-act play begins on the Continent to make a big appeal for more recognition than that of a curtain-raiser. Small theatres, particularly in Germany and Austria, give evening performances consisting of one-acters alone. It becomes the same in music. The age was short-winded and its art, to borrow a phrase from the palæstra, could only stay over short distances. So, whereas there is a strange dearth of novels, the men of the nineties were very fruitful in short stories. In fact, it would not be perhaps too much to say that it was then, for the first time in English literature, the short story came into its own. At any rate, it would be more judicious to put the period as one in which the short story flourished vigorously (if not for the first time), in England, as a ‘theme of art.’ To understand exactly what I mean by this artistic treatment of the short story[10] as a medium of literary expression, all that is necessary is, perhaps, to compare one of Dickens’s short tales, for example, with one of Stevenson’s short stories. The result is apparent at once in the difference of treatment—a difference as essential as the difference between the effect of a figure in stone and another in bronze. The earlier tale has none of the facets and subtleties that art has contrived to express by the latter narration. This artistic treatment of the short story by Englishmen, then, was a new thing and a good thing for English literature. If the long staying powers required for the great novel in the world of comparative literature did not belong to the writers of the nineties group, at any rate they developed, more or less artistically, the climacteric effects of the conte. For the short story crossed the Channel by means of Guy de Maupassant, and out of it arose on this side for a brief decade or so a wonderful wealth of art. The short stories of Kipling are by no means the only pebbles on the beach. In fact, never even in France itself was there such variety of theme and treatment. The successful short stories of the period are of all sorts and conditions. To exemplify as briefly as possible this variety is perhaps closer to my purpose than to waste time in proving such obvious facts as the anxious endeavours of all these writers to raise their work to the artistic elevation demanded of the short story, or their strenuous struggle to attain a suitable style and treatment for their themes.
[10] Frederick Wedmore in On Books and Arts (1899) discusses the short story as a distinct artistic medium. It can never be a ‘novel in a nutshell.’