The first men, of course, to realise this feverish activity in France were the elder men, who handed on the tidings to the younger majority. Thus the men of the eighties turned the attention of the unknown of the nineties towards France, so that Englishmen again began to remember that something else counted in Paris besides lingerie. In dealing then with the influences that helped to beget the period, it is as well to remember that if Walter Pater and Whistler were its forerunners, so to speak, Oscar Wilde and George Moore were responsible in no small degree for many of the tendencies that afterwards became prevalent.
Wilde himself, in fact, was artistically an influence for evil on his weaker juniors. His social success, his keen persiflage, his indolent pose of greatness, blinded them as much as it did the οἱ πολλοί to his real artistic industry and merit. His worst works were, in fact, with one exception, his disciples. Richard Le Gallienne in his Quest of the Golden Girl and Prose Fancies was watered-down Wilde, and very thin at that. Even John Davidson, in Baptist Lake and Earl Lavender, strove in vain to overtake the masterly ease with which Wilde’s ordered prose periods advance like cohorts of centurions to the sound of a full orchestra. Wilde’s best work—his Prose Poems, his poem The Harlot’s House, his one-acter Salomé, and one or two of the stories in the House of Pomegranates—will, however, remain as some of the finest flowers of the age’s art. Yet Wilde, in reality, was senior to the nineties proper, and was much too good an artist to approve of much of the work that was done in imitation of himself during the period by the mere hangers-on of the nineties. He was with the men of the nineties, but not of them. Beardsley, indeed, the age’s real king, took the liberty of mocking at Wilde in the very illustrations, or rather decorations, intended for Wilde’s most elaborate production. Wilde, in his turn, never wrote for The Yellow Book, which he disliked intensely. Again, we know what Symons’s opinion of Wilde was from his essay on him as a poseur. In fact, Wilde was a writer apart from the others, though undoubtedly his presence among them up to the time of his débâcle was a profound direct influence.
On the other hand, George Moore, as a reactionary influence against Victorianism,[1] as a senior who had lived and written in Paris, was more of an indirect factor for the younger men. For a time he lived in the Temple, where many of them had come to live. By his works he helped to disseminate the influences of the great French writers and painters that had come into his own life. His own writings came to others surcharged with ‘The poisonous honey of France.’ In his Modern Painting, in his novel, Evelyn Innes, in his era of servitude to Flaubert’s majesty, he is of the nineties. But the nineties with George Moore were merely a phase out of which he grew, as out of many others. But when the nineties began Moore contrived to assist at their birth in the same way as he did later at that of the Celtic renaissance. Indeed, it is said, in Moore’s novel, Mike Fletcher (1889), one can obtain a glimpse of the manner in which the period was to burgeon.
[1] See his Literature at Nurse, 1885.
There was, indeed, amongst the younger men in those early days a wonderful spirit of camaraderie. It was an attractive period full of the glamour of youth before it went down fighting for Art with a capital A, before age had chilled its blood or dulled its vision. And there came, no doubt, an immense vitality for them all, a stimulating energy to each one, from this meeting together in London. Indeed, coming together by chance, as it were, in London, they not only discovered one another and the ineffable boon of comradeship, but they also rediscovered, through Whistler, London for art. So once again the streets of London began to be written about, not it is true in the Dickens manner, but still with even as great a love as his. They went so far as to attempt to institute real French café life, by having meetings at the Cheshire Cheese and evenings in the Domino Room of the Café Royal. Symons wrote of the ballets of Leicester Square; Dowson of the purlieus round the docks; Davidson made poems of Fleet Street; Binyon sang of white St. Martin’s and the golden gallery of St. Paul’s; Crackanthorpe sketched his London vignettes; Street talks of the indefinable romance of Mayfair. In fact the nineties brought the Muses back to town. In a cabman’s shelter, in Soho restaurants of doubtful cheapness, in each other’s rooms, they rejoiced in each other’s company. At the same time Beardsley, by a stroke of luck through the good services of friends, was commissioned by Mr. Dent to illustrate Le Morte d’Arthur. The Bodley Press had begun in Vigo Street in 1887. Symons, Yeats, and others had already published their first books. The curtain had gone up on the drama of the nineties, of which this is intended as a brief appreciation.
At the date of the appearance of these young men amid a mass of lucubrators, there was actually a band of genuine young writers (besides the big Victorians like Meredith and Hardy), who were turning out good work, and who were under the sway of that old Pan of poetry, Henley of The National Observer. These young men of Henley must not be therefore confused with the Yellow Book group. They were often deliberately coarse, not because they liked it, but because it was part of their artistic gospel. And when one considers the methods of the feeblest of them, one sees more ruffianly sturdy British horseplay than art, more braying and snarling than sounding on the lute. But among the best of them, Stevenson, Kipling, and Steevens, was a fine loyalty to the traditions of the leading spirit of the Observer Henley—Pan playing on his reed with his crippled hoofs hiding amid the water-lilies of the purling stream. All these last writers and artists were men of the Anglo-Saxon tradition; while, on the other hand, the young men who had, so to speak, just come to town, were full of the Latin tradition. The main thing in the lives of these last was French literature and art, and out of this influence came not only the art, but the eccentricities, of the coterie, which is so often called the nineties. Theirs was a new spirit. They were of the order of the delectable ‘Les Jeunes.’ Epigram opened a new career with Oscar Wilde; Beardsley dreamed of a strange world; Ernest Dowson used to drink hashish and make love in Soho in the French manner of Henri Murger’s Latin Quarter—for a time, indeed, hair was worn long, and the ties of the petty homunculi of the Wilde crowd were of lace; but, fortunately, artists like Beardsley and the other men worth while did not cultivate foolishness except as a protection against the bourgeois.
But enough of these affectations; the point I wish to bring out here is that the men who drew and wrote for The Savoy wrote their art with a difference to that of those others who were their contemporaries but appeared in the first instance as a virile imperialistic movement in The Scots Observer and The National Observer. The artists of the nineties were more, as we say rather badly in English, of the ‘kid-glove school.’ A note of refinement, a distinction of utterance, an obsession in Art marked all their best as well as their worst work. But this by no means prevented the two schools having a very salutary influence on each other. Indeed, we find a man like Mr. W. B. Yeats, who really belonged to a third movement, his own Celtic renaissance, publishing first of all lyrics like ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ under the banner of Henley, and attending a year or two later the Rhymers’ Club meetings before he found his own demesne. But to his former comrades of the Cheshire Cheese, the men who concern us here, Yeats has found occasion to render befitting praise in the well-known lines:
You had to face your ends when young—
’Twas wine or women, or some curse—
But never made a poorer song
That you might have a heavier purse;
Nor gave loud service to a cause
That you might have a troop of friends:
You kept the Muses’ sterner laws
And unrepenting faced your ends.
In fact, since influences and counter-influences in all ages of literature are such subtle vermin to ferret out, I propose to avoid as far as possible any generalities in that connection, and to interpret broadly and briefly a somewhat vague period that reviewers have acquired the habit of calling ‘the nineties.’ What then was this period? It was a portion of the last decade of the last century which began about 1890, and passing through the Rhymers’ Club, blossomed out into The Yellow Book and The Savoy periodicals, and produced works like Beardsley’s drawings, Conder’s fans, Dowson’s poetry, and Hubert Crackanthorpe’s short stories. The men who composed the group are too numerous to recall in their entirety, even if a satisfactory list of such a nature could be produced. So all I intend to attempt here is a summary of the activities of certain typical examples of the group as will serve to furnish an appreciation of their general work. And the way I propose to obtain this view is to begin by considering Beardsley as the central figure of the period; to deal next with the two most vital manifestoes of the movement and their respective literary editors, The Yellow Book and Henry Harland, The Savoy and Mr. Arthur Symons, passing on in turn to the writers of fiction, the poets, the essayists and dramatists not of the whole decade, but only to those with whom this particular movement is concerned; it will then be time to make a few deductions on the spirit of the whole of this tendency. By rigidly adhering to only those men who were actually of the nineties group I am only too conscious these pages will be considered often to be lacking in the great literary events and figures of the age, such as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, the rise of the Kipling star, the tragedy of Wilde, the coming of Conrad, etc. etc. Yet the sole object of this scant summary would be defeated if I began to prattle of these and others like Bernard Shaw. In fact its raison d’être constrains a method of treatment which must not be broken.