His posthumous volume, Last Studies, contains only three rather long short stories, an ‘in memoriam’ poem by Stopford A. Brooke, and an appreciation very gracefully done by Henry James. Referring in the field of fiction to the crudity of the old hands and the antiquity of new, his appreciator finds it difficult to render the aspect which constitutes Crackanthorpe’s ‘troubled individual note.’ He comes to the conclusion, ‘What appealed to him was the situation that asked for a certain fineness of art, and that could best be presented in a kind of foreshortened picture.’
The short story is mainly of two sorts: ‘The chain of items, figures in a kind of sum—one of the simple rules—of movement, added up as on a school-boy’s slate, and with the correct total and its little flourish, constituting the finish and accounting for the effect; or else it may be an effort preferably pictorial, a portrait of conditions, an attempt to summarise, and compress for purposes of presentation to “render” even, if possible, for purposes of expression.’ From the French Crackanthorpe learnt the latter method, and practised it. When we come to look at these last three stories (which with the tiny collection of Vignettes completes his work) we see how admirably exact is this criticism of his senior.
In Antony Garstin’s Courtship he is back in his own countryside of Cumberland among the shrewd, hard Dale folk. It is a little masterpiece conceived almost in the hopeless bitterness of Hardy at his darkest, most pessimistic moment. The crudeness in workmanship has gone, only the relentless inevitability of it all remains like the tragedies of life itself. Rosa Blencarn, the parson’s niece, a mere cheap flirt of unfinished comeliness, is but the bone of contention between the personalities of Antony and his mother. The widow Garstin is as fine a character as Crackanthorpe, in his twenty-two stories, has created. She lives, and in her veins flows the passion of disappointed age. ‘She was a heavy-built woman, upright, stalwart almost, despite her years. Her face was gaunt and sallow; deep wrinkles accentuated the hardness of her features. She wore a widow’s black cap above her iron-grey hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, and a soiled chequered apron.’ How easily we can see her saying to her great hulking son: ‘T’ hoose be mine, t’ Lord be praised,’ she continued in a loud, hard voice, ‘an’ as long as he spare me, Tony, I’ll na’ see Rosa Blencarn set foot inside it.’
It has all the unsavoury cruelty of humanity, and to find other such scenes in English literature we have to come down to Caradoc Evans’s My People, or James Joyce.
In Trevor Perkins, in a brief masterly way, we have the soul of the average young man of the nineties, who has ceased to believe in God or tolerate his parents, sketched for us. He walks out with the waitress of his bunshop, and we realise at once he is of those who are doomed to make fools of themselves on the reef of her sex. The last story, The Turn of the Wheel, is the history of the daughter who believes in her self-made father, and despises her sidetracked mother as an inferior being, only to find she has made a great mistake. It is one of the longest stories he wrote, and moves easily in the higher strata of London society. From this fashionable world to the rude and rugged scars and fells of Cumberland is a far cry; but here, as elsewhere, Crackanthorpe finds the friction of humanity is its own worst enemy. Yet behind all this impenetrably impersonal bitter play of human passions in these short stories, one feels somehow or other the distant beats of the author’s compassionate heart, which his sickness of life made him forcibly stop in the pride of his youth before he had time to realise himself or fulfil his rich promise.
IV
The poetry of the period is essentially an expression of moods and sentiments. It is as much a form of impressionism as the art of Monet and Renoir. Further, it seeks after, like all the art of the nineties, that abnormality of proportion of which Bacon wrote in his ‘Essay on Beauty.’ It is, too, a period wonderfully fertile in song. Besides the nineties’ group, which is represented chiefly by the Rhymers’ Club, there were many other schools of song. Lord Alfred Douglas in his City of the Soul, Oscar Wilde in his Sphinx and The Harlot’s House, Stephen Phillips and Henley, Francis Thompson in his Hound of Heaven, are but some of the richness I am compelled to pass over in order to adhere strictly to the programme of this rough summary. Let us, therefore, turn at once to the Rhymers’ Club, whose origin and desires have been so well explained by Arthur Symons, the cicerone to the age, in his essay on Ernest Dowson. At the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street it was arranged that a band of young poets should meet, striving to recapture in London something of the Gallic spirit of art and the charm of open discussion in the Latin Quartier. The Club consisted of the following members: John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Edwin J. Ellis, George Arthur Greene, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Cecil Hillier, Richard Le Gallienne, Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, Ernest Rhys, Thomas William Rolleston, Arthur Symons, John Todhunter, and William Butler Yeats. Besides these members, the Club, which was without rules or officers, had at one time affiliated to itself the following permanent guests: John Gray, Edward Rose, J. T. Nettleship, Morley Roberts, A. B. Chamberlain, Edward Garnett, and William Theodore Peters.
Oscar Wilde, though never a member, had a great influence on many of those who were, and Victor Plarr describes a memorable meeting of the Rhymers in Mr. Herbert Horne’s rooms in the Fitzroy settlement at which Wilde appeared. The poet goes on: ‘It was an evening of notabilities. Mr. Walter Crane stood with his back to the mantelpiece, deciding, very kindly, on the merits of our effusions. And round Oscar Wilde, not then under a cloud, hovered reverently Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, with others. This must have been in 1891, and I marvelled at the time to notice the fascination which poor Wilde exercised over the otherwise rational. He sat as it were enthroned and surrounded by a differential circle.’