The Men of the Nineties

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK
1921

PROLOGUE

The day Beardsley left his stool and ledger in a London insurance office and betook himself seriously to the illustration of that strange comic world of Congreve, a new manifestation of English art blossomed. It had, no doubt, been a long time germinating in the minds of many men, and there had been numerous signs pointing the way on which the artistic tendencies of the nineties would travel. For example, just about the same time as Beardsley’s eighteenth year, a coterie of young men, fresh from the Varsity in many cases, made their appearance in London openly proclaiming the doctrine of art for art’s sake under the ægis of Oscar Wilde. So in the last age of hansom cabs and dying Victorian etiquette, these young men determined that the rather dull art and literary world of London should flower like another Paris.

If, for the sake of making a beginning, one must fix on that memorable day when Beardsley burnt his boats as the date of the opening of the period of the nineties, it must be remembered that this arbitrary limitation of the movement is rather a convenience than a necessity. To divide up anything so continuous as literature and art into sections like a bookcase is uncommonly like damming up a portion of a stream to look at the fish in it. It breaks the contact between what was before and what came after. However, as one must go a long way back to investigate accurately how a new movement in art arises, and as it is tedious to follow up all the clues that lead to the source, it will be perhaps as well not to worry too much over the causes of the movement or over the influences from which it arose. Let us accept the fact so well pointed out by Mr. W. G. Blaikie Murdoch in The Renaissance of the Nineties, that the output of the nineties was ‘a distinct secession from the art of the previous age ..., in fact the eighties, if they have a distinct character, were a time of transition, a period of simmering for revolt rather than of actual outbreak; and it was in the succeeding ten years that, thanks to certain young men, an upheaval was really made.’

It is to France if anywhere we can trace the causes of this new attitude. First of all, in painting, the great French impressionists, with Manet and Monet leading them; the doctrine of plein air painting, and all the wonder of this new school of painting gave a new thrill to art. Then about 1885 the literary symbolists killed the Parnassian school of poetry, while at the same time there was a new esplozione naturlistica. Paris, always the city of light, was again fluting new melodies for the world. In the Rue de Rome, Stéphane Mallarmé received all the world of art and letters. To the Rue de Rome came Whistler, John Payne, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and others. The French influence that swept over to England was as powerful as that which stirred artistic Germany, creating a German period of the nineties in the group of symbolists who, under Stefan George, issued the now famous Blätter für die Kunst. The Englishmen, indeed, who attended these soirées of the Rue de Rome did not come away empty-handed. Not only did their own work suffer an artistic change through this influence, but they handed it on to their successors. So directly and indirectly the great French painters and writers of the day influenced the art of England, creating the opportunity for a distinct secession from the art of the previous age. At the same time French art and literature were never stationary but always developing. It was only in 1890 that we find the real Régnier appearing. In the same year Paul Fort, just eighteen summers like Beardsley, founded the Théâtre d’Art. All this French art at high pressure had a stimulating effect on English art; and, in fact, remained its main stimulus until the Boer War, when the imperialism of writers like Kipling became the chief interest. So it was in no small degree the literary symbolists, the plein air painters and all the motives that lay behind them, that awoke the Englishmen of the nineties to new possibilities in art and life. In Paris, in 1890, Rothenstein met Conder, and at once the two became lifelong friends. There they encountered artists like Toulouse Lautrec and Anquetin.