V
The Victorian literary era was fecund in essayists, and the last decade lived up to this reputation. The forerunners of the essayists of the nineties were obviously Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde with his Intentions and Whistler in his Gentle Art. Behind these there was a great mass of French influence which, together with literary impressionism as exemplified in such books as Crackanthorpe’s Vignettes, was to give the essay and the so-called study a new lease of life. Indeed, what came out of the period was not merely criticism as a useful broom sweeping away the chaff from the wheat, but criticism itself as a creative art, as Wilde chose to call it; not merely dry-as-dust records of plays and cities, and other affairs as in guide manuals, but artistic impressions, in some ways as vital as the objects themselves. Mr. Arthur Symons, in particular, has given us an abundance of this kind of work of which I have already spoken. So did Lionel Johnson and Mr. Max Beerbohm, to whom I propose to allude here, and many others like Mr. Bernard Shaw, who, though not of the movement, moved alongside it on his own way, and Mr. G. S. Street, in his Episodes, Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Galton, Francis Adams in his Essays in Modernity, etc. etc. One has only to turn over the magazines of the period to find a band of writers, too numerous to mention, who aided on the movement with their pens. To cite one prominent example alone, there was Grant Allen with his essay on The New Hedonism. Here, however, I must be content with a brief appreciative glance at the works of the two writers I have mentioned, who were both actually of and in the movement itself. I have not here of set purpose referred to the Henley essayists like Charles Whibley. But the two men of the nineties I have chosen to speak of here have been selected in the way an essayist should be selected nine times out of ten, that is to say, because of his pleasing personality. These two writers—particularly Max—are such individual writers, yet they never offend. They are just pleasant garrulous companions.
For those who care at all passionately for the precious things of literature, the work of Lionel Johnson will always remain a cherished and secluded nook. The man was a scholar, a poet, and a critic, whose dominant note was gracile lucidity. A friend writing of his personal appearance at the time of his death said, ‘Thin, pale, very delicate he looked, with a twitching of the facial muscles, which showed even at the age of twenty-four how unfit was his physique to support the strain of an abnormally nervous organization. Quick and mouselike in his movements, reticent of speech and low-voiced, he looked like some old-fashioned child who had strayed by chance into an assembly of men. But a child could not have shown that inward smile of appreciative humour, a little aloof, a little contemptuous perhaps, that worked constantly around his mouth. He never changed except in the direction of a greater pallor and a greater fragility.’
Cloistral mysticism was the key-chord of his two volumes of poetry (1895 and 1897). In some respects he seems to have strayed out of the seventeenth century of Crashaw and Herbert. His early training, no doubt, engendered this aspect. After six years in the grey Gothic school of Winchester he passed on to New College, Oxford. Here he came under the influence of Pater, and was charmed by the latter’s then somewhat hieratic austerity. A devout Irish Catholic, he was moved by three themes: his old school, Oxford, and Ireland, and to these he unfortunately too often devoted his muse. After the quiet seclusion of his Oxford years, on entering the vortex of London literary life he found that the world of wayfaring was a somewhat rough passage in the mire for one so delicate. Out of the struggle between his scholarly aspirations and the cry of his time for life, more life, was woven perhaps the finest of all his poems, The Dark Angel:
Dark angel, with thine aching lust
To rid the world of penitence:
Malicious angel, who still dost
My soul such subtile violence!—
Because of thee, the land of dreams
Becomes a gathering place of fears:
Until tormented slumber seems
One vehemence of useless tears....
Thou art the whisper in the gloom,
The hinting tone, the haunting laugh:
Thou art the adorner of my tomb,
The minstrel of mine epitaph.
Most of his poems are subjective, and the majority have a certain stiffness of movement of a priest laden with chasuble; but sometimes, however, as in Mystic and Cavalier, or in the lines on the statue of Charles I at Charing Cross, he writes with a winsome charm and freedom of spirit: