Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing
must be seen before one can place Althea Gyles’s drawings in their proper place. It is not a replica of Beardsley, it is not a faint far-off imitation of a Félicien Rops or Armand Rassenfosse, but something genuinely original in its shadow-graphic use of masses of black on a white ground.
Once more, mea culpa, I have paid scant attention to Max Beerbohm’s caricatures, and I have failed to call attention here to his earlier and later method of work. I have not even spoken of his little paper entitled The Spirit of Caricature, wherein he discusses the spirit of the art he practises. God forgive me! Or yet again what meed of homage have I yet rendered to Mr. Will Rothenstein’s lithographic portraits, which are absolutely a necessity to anyone who would live a while with the shades of these men. Take, for example, his Liber Juniorum, which alone contains lithographed drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, and Arthur Symons. Then there are so many others over whose achievements I must keep a holy silence, such as Mr. Charles Ricketts and his Dial, which was published by the Vale Press, and to which John Gray contributed many poems.
Again, there are the colourists of this group, particularly Walter Sickert and Charles Conder. The latter, above all, is the colour comrade to Beardsley’s black and white. His figures are the lovers of Dowson’s verse, his landscapes and world have all those memories of the golden time that haunt the brain of John Gray and Theodore Wratislaw. No note, however short, on the nineties would be complete without a halt for praise of this painter of a strangely coloured dolce far niente. For everything in his work, be it on canvas, silk panel, or dainty fan, is drowsy with the glory of colour (as Mr. Holbrook Jackson admirably says), ‘colour suggesting form, suggesting all corporeal things, suggesting even itself, for Conder never more than hints at the vivid possibilities of life, more than a hint might waken his puppets from their Laodicean dream.’
Whether an idyllic landscape or a fantastic bal masqué of Montmartre or an Elysian fête galante was his theme, the work itself is always permeated with the spirit of Conder. His nude figure ‘Pearl,’ his ‘L’Oiseau Bleu,’ his ‘Femme dans une loge au théâtre,’ are typical of his successful achievements. The ‘Fickle Love’ fan is but one of the numerous exquisite works he produced in this branch of art; while ‘The Masquerade’ is the work of a Beardsley-like fancy which could colour like Conder.
Like his personality, his work suffered from certain unhappy moods, and that is what makes so much of it uneven. Born in 1868, a descendant of Louis Francis Roubiliac, the famous sculptor, whose work for the figures of our eighteenth century porcelain factories is so well known, of Conder it may be said, as of all artists with French blood in them, when he is successful he is irresistible. He might not be able to draw modern men, but how beautifully he drew the women of his day can be seen in ‘La Toilette.’ He delighted, indeed, in designing women wandering in dream gardens, in painting roses and Princes Charming.
It would be pleasant to travel through this world of delightful dreams, were we not restricted of set purpose to the literary side of the movement. And has it not already been done in Mr. Frank Gibson’s Charles Conder?
Again, some of the publishers who produced the books of these men have their right to something more than scant mention. To Mr. Elkin Mathews, particularly as the first publisher of the Rhymers’ Club books and as the issuer of John Gray’s first volume of poetry, bibliophiles owe a debt of gratitude. In the early days of the nineties Mr. John Lane became associated with him, until the autumn of 1894 witnessed ‘Parnassus divided into two peaks.’ Later, after the Wilde débâcle, an extraordinary figure, worthy of a romance, in the person of the late Leonard Smithers, who was at one time in the legal profession at Sheffield, took the field as a publisher by way of H. S. Nichols. He was no mere publisher but a man of considerable scholarship, who not only issued but finished the Sir Richard Burton translation of Catullus. Round him, to a considerable extent, the vanishing group rallied for a little while before Death smote them one by one. Here is no place to pay due justice to this amiable Benvenuto Cellini of book printing himself, but it must be remembered his figure bulks largely in the closing scenes. He kept Dowson from starvation. Beardsley wrote of him as ‘our publisher.’[21] He, when others failed, had the courage to launch on the English publishing market the released Wilde’s now famous Ballad of Reading Gaol. If he did exceed certain rules for himself, he at least took risks to help others. He was no supine battener on the profits of books for young ladies’ seminaries. He was a printer, and his bankruptcy may be said to have closed the period.
[21] It is interesting that in an unpublished letter of Beardsley’s to Smithers when the latter was intending to produce The Peacock, an unpublished quarterly, Beardsley promises him his best work.
Lastly in this chaunt of omissions comes the drama of the nineties. Unfortunately the drama, in so far as it affects the group of the nineties with which we are concerned, is almost a nullity. Aubrey Beardsley once commenced a play, which was never heard of, in collaboration with Brandon Thomas. Ernest Dowson wrote what Beardsley called a ‘tiresome’ playlet. John Davidson perpetrated a number of plays such as Bruce (1886), Smith, a tragic farce (1888), Scaramouch in Naxos, and two other plays in 1889 when he was feeling his way, and translated much later as hackwork a play of François Coppée’s and Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas. Theodore Peters’ pastoral and other similar trifles only go to show how barren the group itself was in the dramatist’s talent. Nor can much be said for such poetic plays as Theodore Wratislaw’s The Pity of Love.