Numerous examples of their art at once crowd the mind, such as Ernest Dowson’s Dying of Francis Donne, Max Beerbohm’s Happy Hypocrite, Frederick Wedmore’s tender Orgeas and Miradou, Arthur Symons’s Death of Peter Waydelin, the works of Hubert Crackanthorpe, or the fantastic tales of Arthur Machen, or Eric Count Stenbock’s[11] Studies of Death. H. D. Lowry, though of Henley’s young men, works at the same art of studies in sentiment in his Women’s Tragedies. So does Mr. G. S. Street in his Episodes and George Egerton in her Discords and Keynotes. Among the others who deliberately tried to write the short story as an artistic theme at that period and who were at the same time in the movement can be mentioned Henry Harland, Rudolf Dircks in his Verisimilitudes, Richard Le Gallienne, Kenneth Grahame, Percy Hemingway in his Out of Egypt, etc. Then we have men like R. B. Cunninghame Graham and H. W. Nevinson, clearly influenced by the movement and writing alongside of it of the ends of the earth they have visited. The former, for example, in a short story like Aurora La Cujiñi (Smithers, 1898) clearly reflects the influences of this period which gloried in the abnormal in Art. Known as a socialist of courage, Mr. Graham, whose name betrays his origin, has also visited many of the exotic places of the world. In his able book Mogreb-el-Acksa he has given us vignettes of Morocco that are unsurpassed; in his volume Success he has told us of those Spanish-speaking races of South America, of the tango, and the horses of the pampas, and the estancias he knows so well. In Aurora La Cujiñi we have a vignette of Seville so realistic that we almost believe that one is justified in considering that there is just enough motive in it to vivify it with the quickening touch of the short storyteller’s wand. It is slow in starting, but when this motive comes suddenly at the end we are almost left breathless, realising that everything that went before was but a slow, ruthless piling up of local colour. It is all done with such deliberate deftness. How we see the scenes unrolling slowly before us. Like the thrilled people on the benches we watch the Toreador about to make his kill as we read:
[11] Eric Stenbock was at Balliol, Oxford. He collaborated in a volume of translations of Balzac’s ‘Short Stories.’ He contributed to Lord Alfred Douglas’s The Spirit Lamp. As a specimen of his style the following extract from his short story, The Other Side, may be offered. It is supposed to be an old Breton woman’s description of the Black Mass:
‘Then when they get to the top of the hill, there is an altar with six candles quite black and a sort of something in between, that nobody sees quite clearly, and the old black ram with the man’s face and long horns begins to say Mass in a sort of gibberish nobody understands, and two black strange things like monkeys glide about with the book and the cruets—and there’s music too, such music. There are things the top half like black cats, and the bottom part like men only their legs are all covered with close black hair, and they play on the bag-pipes, and when they come to the elevation then—. Amid the old crones there was lying on the hearth-rug, before the fire, a boy whose large lovely eyes dilated and whose limbs quivered in the very ecstacy of terror.’
The “espada” had come forward, mumbled his boniment in Andaluz, swung his montera over his shoulder upon the ground, and after sticking his sword in every quarter of the bull had butchered him at last amid the applause of the assembled populace. Blood on the sand; sun on the white plaza; upon the women’s faces “cascarilla”; scarlet and yellow fans, and white mantillas with “fleco y alamares” in the antique style...; women selling water, calling out “aguá!” in so guttural a voice it seemed like Arabic; Cardobese hats, short jackets, and from the plaza a scent of blood and sweat acting like a rank aphrodisiac upon the crowd, and making the women squeeze each other’s sweating hands, and look ambiguously at one another, as they were men; and causing the youths, with swaying hips and with their hair cut low upon their foreheads, to smile with open lips and eyes that met your glance, as they had been half women. Blood, harlotry, sun, gay colours, flowers and waving palm-trees, women with roses stuck behind their ears, mules covered up in harness of red worsted, cigar girls, gipsies, tourists, soldiers, and the little villainous-looking urchins, who, though born old, do duty as children in the South.’
As we read this magical evocation of the spirit of place we rub our eyes and ask ourselves have we not been there. This prose of vivid impressionism is the goal of one and all. As the plein air school painted in the open air before Nature, so these men must write as closely round their subject as actual experience can allow them. The vivid realisation of a mood, as we shall see in Hubert Crackanthorpe, is the desired prize. Turn through the pages of Ernest Dowson’s Dilemmas, and read, above all, A Case of Conscience; leaf Frederick Wedmore’s[12] Renunciations, and pause over The Chemist in the Suburbs, wherein, as H. D. Traill said, the story of Richard Pelse’s life is a pure joy; in both cases vivid impressionism and mood realisation are the keynotes of the work. To understand these tendencies better and the excellence of the work achieved, it will be more advantageous, perhaps, to consider in more detail one writer only who carried the charm of the prose pen to a higher degree of emphasis and finish in the short story than any of the others, to wit, Hubert Crackanthorpe.
[12] About the worst of Frederick Wedmore’s short stories, such as The North Coast and Eleanor, there is a hint of the melodrama of Hugh Conway’s Called Back, but it is a feeble replica of the original. The most successful of his short imaginative pieces, as the author rightly terms them, on the other hand, have a refined grace of slow movement that is at once captivating and refreshing. It seems impossible that the same man could have essayed both the worst and the best. As a specimen of the latter type of work, let me fasten on to the description of the entourage of Pelse the chemist, the man with the tastes above his position:
‘There came a little snow. But in the parlour over the shop—with the three windows closely curtained—one could have forgetfulness of weather. There was the neat fireplace; the little low tea-table; a bookcase in which Pelse—before that critical event at Aix-les-Bains—had been putting, gradually, first editions of the English poets; a cabinet of china, in which—but always before Aix-les-Bains—he had taken to accumulate some pretty English things of whitest paste or finest painting; a Worcester cup, with its exotic birds, its lasting gold, its scale-blue ground, like lapis lazuli or sapphire; a Chelsea figure; something from Swansea; white plates of Nantgarw, bestrewn with Billingsley’s greyish pink roses, of which he knew the beauty, the free artistic touch. How the things had lost interest for him! “From the moment,” says some French critic, “that a woman occupies me, my collection does not exist.” And many a woman may lay claim to occupy a French art critic; only one had occupied Richard Pelse.’
A curious anomaly can be remarked here, that in this period the great work of prose fiction was not to be resharpened by the young men to nearly the same extent as they resharpened the poetry and the essay. None approach Meredith and Hardy, who move like Titans of the age, while Kipling and Crackanthorpe are the only two young men that give any quantity of imaginative prose work of a high new order (and in saying this one must not overlook Arthur Morrison’s Mean Streets, or Zangwill’s Ghetto Tales, or the work of Henry James) until Conrad came from the sea and Louis Becke from Australia to give new vistas to our fiction. But it is not with them we are concerned here, but with Hubert Crackanthorpe,[13] of whose life the poet has sung:
[13] It is interesting to note the verses also of the French poet Francis Jammes dedicated to Crackanthorpe. Jammes lived at Orthez when Crackanthorpe visited that remote countryside.
Too rough his sea, too dark its angry tides!
Things of a day are we, shadows that move
The lands of shadow.