Number two (April, 1896, printed by the Chiswick Press) had another editorial note courageously thanking the critics of the Press for their reception of the first number, which ‘has been none the less flattering because it has been for the most part unfavourable.’ The contents included poems and stories by Symons, Dowson, and Yeats, while John Gray and Selwyn Image have poems and Wedmore a story. Beardsley continues his romance, and lifts the number out of the rut with his Wagneresque designs. Max Beerbohm caricatures him, and Shannon and Rothenstein are represented. Among articles there is a series on Verlaine; and Vincent O’Sullivan, in a paper ‘On the Kind of Fiction called Morbid,’ sounds a note of the group with his conclusion: ‘Let us cling by all means to our George Meredith, our Henry James ... but then let us try, if we cannot be towards others, unlike these, if not encouraging, at the least not actively hostile and harassing, when they go out in the black night to follow their own sullen will-o’-the-wisps.’ He is also to be thanked for registering the too little known name of the American, Francis Saltus.
Number three (July, 1896) appeared in paper covers, and The Savoy becomes a monthly instead of a quarterly from now on. There is a promise, unfulfilled, of the serial publication of George Moore’s new novel, Evelyn Innes. Yeats commences three articles on William Blake and his Illustrations to the ‘Divine Comedy,’ and Hubert Crackanthorpe contributes one of his best short stories. Owing to illness Beardsley’s novel stops publication, but his Ballad of a Barber relieves the monotony of some dull stuff by the smaller men. The reproductions of Blake’s illustrations are made to fill the art gap of Beardsley, who has only two black-and-whites in. The publication of his novel in book form is promised when the artist is well enough.
Number four (August, 1896) at once reveals the effect of Beardsley’s inactivity through illness, and shows that Beardsley is The Savoy, and all else but leather and prunella. The number, however, is saved by a story of Dowson, The Dying of Francis Donne, and on the art side a frontispiece for Balzac’s La Fille aux Yeux d’Or, by Charles Conder, is interesting.
Number five (September, 1896) is for some unaccountable reason the hardest number to procure. Besides the cover and title-page it contains only one Beardsley, The Woman in White, but the cover is an exceptionally beautiful Beardsley, the two figures in the park holding a colloque sentimental seem to have stepped out of the pages of Verlaine’s poem. Theodore Wratislaw and Ernest Rhys contribute the stories. Dowson, Yeats, and the Canadian, Bliss Carman, contribute the best of the poetry.
Number six (October, 1896), has a very poor art side, with the exception of Beardsley’s familiar The Death of Pierrot. The literary contents consists chiefly of the editor. One notices the periodical is dying. The only unique feature is a story, The Idiots, by Conrad, and Dowson is still faithful with a poem.
Number seven (November, 1896) announces in a leaflet (dated October) the death of The Savoy in the next number. The editorial note states that the periodical ‘has, in the main, conquered the prejudices of the press ... it has not conquered the general public, and, without the florins of the general public, no magazine ... can expect to pay its way.’ In this number Beardsley returns to attempt to salve it with his remarkable translation of Catullus: Carmen CI., and illustration thereto. Yeats and Dowson contribute poems and Beardsley his Tristan and Isolde drawing.
Number eight (December, 1896) completes the issue. The whole of the literary contents is by the Editor and the art contents by Beardsley himself: in all fourteen drawings. By way of epilogue, Symons says in their next venture, which is to appear twice a year, ‘that they are going to make no attempt to be popular.’ Unfortunately for English periodicals it was a venture never essayed.
That The Savoy is far truer to the period than The Yellow Book was perhaps in no small way due to the fact that Mr. Arthur Symons was its literary editor. For he at any rate in his strenuous search for an æsthetical solution for art and life, in his assiduous exploring in the Latin literatures for richer colours and stranger sensations—he, at any rate, has not only been the child of his time, but in some ways the father of it. His sincere love of art is beyond all question, and it has sent him into many strange byways. He has praised in purple prose the bird-like motions and flower-like colours of the ballet; he has taken us with him to Spanish music-halls and Sevillian Churches; he has garnered up carefully in English the myths of the symbolists and translated for us the enigmas of Mallarmé—Herodias, the blood and roses of D’Annunzio’s plays and the throbbing violins of Verlaine’s muse; he has taken us to continental cities, and with him we have heard Pachmann playing and seen the enchantments of the divine Duse. All the cults of the Seven Arts has this Admirable Crichton of Æstheticism discussed. He has worked towards a theory of æsthetics. He has written charmingly (if somewhat temperamentally) of his comrades like Beardsley, Crackanthorpe and Dowson. He was a leader in the campaign of the early nineties, and his work will always be the guiding hand for those who come after him and who wish to speak of this movement. As early as 1893 he was writing of it as ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ in Harper’s, when he speaks of the most representative work of the period: ‘After a fashion it is no doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence; an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilising refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity.’ Perhaps, in a way, it is an immense pity that Symons will become the universal guide to the period, for it must be conceded that he has always been prone to find perversity in anything, as Sir Thomas Browne was haunted with quincunxes. But of the subtilty of his judgments and of the charming prose in which he labours to express them there can be no question. Listen, for example, when he speaks of the aim of decadence: ‘To fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things; to fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul; that is the ideal of decadence.’ How beautifully it is said, so that one almost forgets how dangerous it is. Very aptly did Blaikie Murdoch say the Mantle of Pater fell on him. It is the same murmured litany of beautiful prose. Indeed Arthur Symons is the supreme type of belles lettrist. Just as in the early nineties he prided himself on the smell of patchouli about his verse, so he alone remains to-day with the old familiar scent about his writings of a period dead and gone which exacts rightfully our highest respect. As one owes him a debt of homage for his fine faithfulness to art, so one thinks of him, as he himself has written of Pater, as a ‘personality withdrawn from action, which it despises or dreads, solitary with its ideals, in the circle of its “exquisite moments” in the Palace of Art, where it is never quite at rest.’ How true that last phrase is, ‘never quite at rest,’ of the author. For to him Art is an escape—the supreme escape from life.
Arthur Symons began with a study on Browning and the volume Days and Nights when the eighties were still feeling their way towards the nineties. It was in Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895) that he appeared as perhaps the most outré member of the new movement. His perfection of technique in endeavouring to catch the fleeting impression by limiting it, never cataloguing it, marks the difference of his verse and that of the secession from much of the school of the eighties’ definite listing of facts. Symons, indeed, is not only a poet impressionist, but also a critic impressionist in his critical works like Studies in Two Literatures, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, and so on. This impressionism, whilst it makes his verse so intangible and delicate, also endows his appreciations with a certain all-pervading subtlety. It is as though a poet had begun to see with the Monet vision his own poems. It is as though a man comes away with an impression and is content with that impression on which to base his judgment. It is New Year’s Eve: the poet records his impression of the night:
We heard the bells of midnight burying the year.
Then the night poured its silent waters over us.
And then in the vague darkness faint and tremulous,
Time paused; then the night filled with sound; morning was here.