The influence of Verlaine and the symbolist poets of Paris in this circle was profound. Every one had a passion for things French. Symons translated the prose poems of Baudelaire and the verses of Mallarmé, Dowson is inspired by the ‘Fêtes Gallantes,’ and so on. As Mr. Plarr writes: ‘Stray Gauls used to be imported to grace literary circles here. I remember one such—a rare instance of a rough Frenchman—to whom Dowson was devoted. When a Gaul appeared in a coterie we were either silent, like the schoolgirls in their French conversation hour, or we talked a weird un-French French like the ladies in some of Du Maurier’s drawings.’[15]
[15] Victor Plarr, Ernest Dowson, p. 23. 1914.
Of course it must not be supposed, however, that the nineties ever remained at all stationary in this condition or entirely under these influences. Mr. Plarr is speaking of the early nineties, the age when John Gray’s Silverpoints was perhaps a fair sample of the poetry of the moment for this group; but, when at the same time it must be remembered, poets like Francis Thompson and William Watson were carrying on the staider traditions of English poetry altogether unmoved by these exotic influences from Montmartre and the studios of the south. The nineties group itself only remained for a restive moment like this before each man was to go his own way. They were indeed all souls seeking the way to perfection in art. Yeats went off to assist to found the Irish School; Richard Le Gallienne went to America; Gray became a priest. Many disappeared shortly afterwards from the lower slopes of Parnassus, not being of those dowered with the true call; and so, one after the other, all are to be accounted for. The genuine men of the nineties after the fall of Wilde seem to have migrated to Smithers’ wonderful bookshop in Bond Street, where their later works were issued in ornate editions.
The names of others besides the actual members of the Rhymers’ Club must not be altogether forgotten, such as Percy Hemingway with his Happy Wanderer, Theodore Wratislaw, Olive Custance, Dollie Radford, Rosamund Marriott-Watson, Norman Gale, and many others who were also of the movement. However, of them I cannot speak here, but can only refer the reader to the book-lists of Elkin Mathews and John Lane for the first period, and of Leonard Smithers for the second. In the numerous slim plaquettes of verse issued from these presses he will find golden verse worthy of the labour of his research. Indeed, amid so many writers one is compelled to resort to the odious necessity of a choice, so I shall here all too briefly deal with Silverpoints as a typical volume of the early period, and then trace succinctly the career of two poets, who had certainly the right to that appellation, Ernest Dowson and John Davidson, and who were both not only of, but actually were the movement itself. Lastly, in this section, as an indication of the wide influence these writers had overseas, as in the case of the Birch Bark School of Canada and certain poets in Australia, I wish to mention the young American poet who was an intimate of so many of the men of the nineties—William Theodore Peters.
The narrow green octavo of Silverpoints, with its lambent golden flames, strikes the eye at once as some bizarre and exotic work. It was one of the first of the limited éditions de luxe that mark the new printing of the decade, and is one of the most dainty little books ever issued by Elkin Mathews and John Lane. Most of the titles are in French, and there are imitations from Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine—the gods of the symbolist school at that moment. Poems are dedicated (it was the habit of the decade) to friends, including Pierre Louÿs, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, R. H. Sherard, Henri Teixeira de Mattos, Ernest Dowson, etc. The predominant note is that of tigress’s blood and tiger-lilies. Honey, roses, white breasts, and golden hair, with fierce passion and indolent languor, are the chords of the book’s frisson. All the panoply of the new English art begotten from the French here burgeons forth with the Satanic note that was then in the fashion. We find this in the Femmes Damnées:
Like moody beasts they lie along the sands;
Look where the sky against the sea-rim clings:
Foot stretches out to foot, and groping hands
Have languors soft and bitter shudderings.
Some by the light of crumbling, resinous gums,
In the still hollows of old pagan dens,
Call thee in aid to their deliriums
O Bacchus! cajoler of ancient pains.
And those whose breasts for scapulars are fain
Nurse under their long robes the cruel thong,
These, in dim woods, where huddling shadows throng,
Mix with the foam of pleasure tears of pain.
There is more than an echo of Rimbaud’s verses in this volume, and the poet is evidently straining always after the violent effect, the climacteric moment of a mood or passion. Probably two of the most successfully carried through crises are The Barber and Mishka. The first of these as a typical example of the whole school I venture to spheterize in full:
I dreamed I was a barber; and there went
Beneath my hand, oh! manes extravagant.
Beneath my trembling fingers, many a mask
Of many a pleasant girl. It was my task
To gild their hair, carefully, strand by strand;
To paint their eyebrows with a timid hand;
To draw a bodkin, from a vase of Kohl,
Through the closed lashes; pencils from a bowl
Of sepia, to paint them underneath;
To blow upon their eyes with a soft breath.
They lay them back and watched the leaping bands.