II
Like all artistic and literary movements this one had, in the shape of various periodicals, its manifestoes. In fact, it was a period particularly rich in this kind of fruit. In The Hobby Horse the voices of the new spirit were mingled for the first time with those of the past. There were, among other magazines, The Rose Leaf, The Chameleon, The Spirit Lamp, The Pageant, The Evergreen, The Parade, The Quarto, The Dome, The Chord, while among the popular papers The Idler, To-Day, and Pick-me-Up produced the work of men like Edgar Wilson and S. H. Sime; and, further, The Butterfly, The Poster, and The Studio must be carefully studied for the tendencies of the time. But the two principal organs of the movement were, beyond all doubt, The Yellow Book and The Savoy. Round them, as around the shrines of old beside the Ægean, gather the faithful and the chosen. In the other publications there was too much jostling with the profane, but here ‘Procul profani.’ It will be well, therefore, although it has been done more or less before, to study these two magazines in some detail, and also their literary editors who gathered the clan together. In both cases Beardsley was the art editor, though he was ‘fired,’ to put it plainly, from The Yellow Book after its fourth number. His influence, therefore, permeated both. In fact, he made them both works of value for the coming generations, and particularly in the case of The Savoy he bore the burden of the day and saved the monthly from fatuity. When he leaves The Yellow Book it will be found to be never the same. When he is too ill to be active in The Savoy it becomes very small beer. So interwoven with the lives and values of these publications is the genius of Beardsley that one cannot speak of the one without referring to the other. Of Beardsley himself I have already spoken, so I propose to confine myself strictly to the art editor, while dealing first with The Yellow Book and its literary editor, Henry Harland, and then with The Savoy and Mr. Arthur Symons.
The publisher, Mr. John Lane, says[8] this much-discussed Yellow Book was founded one morning during half-an-hour’s chat over cigarettes, at the Hogarth Club, by himself, Beardsley, and Henry Harland. While he states that ‘Mr. Harland had the faculty of getting the best from his contributors,’ the publisher goes on to add: ‘Beardsley’s defect as art editor was youth. He would not take himself seriously; as an editor and draughtsman he was almost a practical joker, for one had, so to speak, to place his drawings under a microscope and look at them upside down. This tendency, on the eve of the production of Volume V., during my first visit to the United States, rendered it necessary to omit his work from that volume.’ Looking back on this, all that one can say now is that although Beardsley may have been trying, after all, he and not the publisher was The Yellow Book, and with his departure the spirit of the age slowly volatilised from the work until it deteriorated into a kind of dull keepsake of the Bodley Head. There were thirteen numbers in all, and Beardsley actually art-edited the first four. In the charming prospectus for the fifth volume he is still described as art editor, and four Beardsleys were to have appeared in it: ‘Frontispiece to the Chopin Nocturnes,’ ‘Atalanta,’ ‘Black Coffee,’ and the portrait of Miss Letty Lind in ‘An Artist’s Model.’ However, the break came, and Beardsley had no further connection, unfortunately, with the fifth volume.
[8] In his pamphlet, Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book, p. 1. 1903.
The first number, as in the case of so many similar periodicals, was brilliant. The standard set was too high, indeed, to last, and to the staid English literary press of the time it was something of a seven days’ wonder. The Times described its note as a ‘combination of English rowdyism and French lubricity.’ The Westminster Gazette asked for a ‘short Act of Parliament to make this kind of thing illegal.’ Above all, the whole rabble descends howling on the art editor. It is Beardsley that annoys them, proving how he stands out at once beyond his comrades. Against the literary editor, Henry Harland, nothing is said; but the press are full of the offences of one Beardsley.
As Mr. J. M. Kennedy, in his English Literature, 1880–1905, has devoted an admirable, if somewhat scornful, chapter to the contents of The Yellow Book, it is to Henry Harland, who seems to have merited all the charming things said about him, that I would now direct attention.
A delicate valetudinarian always in search of health, he was born at Petrograd in March, 1861. He commenced life in the surrogate of New York State, whither his parents removed, writing in his spare time in the eighties, under the nom-de-plume of Sidney Luska, sketches of American Jewish life. Like Theodore Peters, Whistler, and Henry James, he could not, however, resist the call of the Old World, and he was at journalistic work in London when he was made editor of The Yellow Book. Besides his editorial duties he was a regular contributor, not only writing the series of notes signed ‘The Yellow Dwarf,’ but also turning out a number of short stories. But London was only to be a haven of brief sojourn for this writer, whose health sent him south to Italy. Perhaps his best work in the nineties was his short story Mademoiselle Miss, while later in Italy he opened up a new vein of dainty comedy fiction in almost rose-leaf prose with The Cardinal’s Snuff-Box (1900), whose happy delicacy of thought and style he never equalled again, but was always essaying to repeat until death carried him off in Italy. Although, therefore, sitting in the editorial chair at the Bodley Head, Harland can only be said to have been a bird of passage in the nineties, and not one of its pillars like Arthur Symons of The Savoy.
This later publication was started as a rival to The Yellow Book soon after Beardsley gave up the art-editing of the earlier periodical. In 1895, when ‘Symons and Dowson, Beardsley and Conder, were all together on a holiday at Dieppe ... it was there, in a cabaret Mr. Sickert has repeatedly painted, that The Savoy was originated.’[9] It was issued by Leonard Smithers, the most extraordinary publisher, in some respects, of the nineties, a kind of modern Cellini, who produced some wonderfully finely printed books, and was himself just as much a part of the movement as any of its numerous writers. Indeed, no survey of the period can be complete without a brief consideration of this man.
[9] W. G. Blaikie Murdoch’s Renaissance of the Nineties, p. 21. 1911.
But to return to The Savoy, it can be aptly described as the fine flower of the publications of the age. It is true The Yellow Book outlived it, but never did the gospel of the times flourish so exceedingly as in its pages. Here we see that violent love for a strangeness of proportion in art that was the keynote of the age. Here the abnormal, the bizarre, found their true home, and poetry is the pursuit of the unattainable by the exotic. It will, therefore, not perhaps be out of place before dealing with its literary editor, Mr. Arthur Symons, to discuss the eight numbers that appeared. Number one (printed by H. S. Nichols) appeared as a quarterly in boards in January, 1896. An editorial note by Arthur Symons, which originally appeared as a prospectus, hoped that The Savoy would prove ‘a periodical of an exclusively literary and artistic kind.... All we ask from our contributors is good work, and good work is all we offer our readers.... We have not invented a new point of view. We are not Realists, or Romanticists, or Decadents. For us, all art is good which is good art.’ The contents of the number included a typical Shaw article, full, like all of his work, of the obvious in the terms of the scandalous; some short stories by Wedmore, Dowson, Rudolf Dircks, Humphrey James, and Yeats. The other articles were hardly very original; but the contributions of Beardsley dwarf everything else. He towers out above all else with his illustrations, his poem The Three Musicians, and the beginning of his romantic story Under the Hill.