There was no question of either a literary revival or revolution in the nineties and there was no sham, colossal or minute.
The men engaged were not pretentious, not conceited, not humbugs. They were a group of men, mostly under 30, who just wrote and drew and painted as well as they could, in all sincerity and with no view of financial gain. Dowson, Johnson, Horner, Image, etc., etc., etc., were the humblest, most modest lot of literary men I ever met.
Their output was not immense: it was infinitesimal, just because they were so careful to produce only work that was “just so.” Think, Stephen. What did Henry Harland, one of the few to live to over 40, put out? The Cardinal’s Snuff Box, My Friend Prospers, Mademoiselle Miss and Other Stories: that is all! Ernest Dowson: two slim volumes of verse, half-a-dozen short stories, a collaborator’s share in two novels. John Gray: one slim volume of verse. Lionel Johnson: God knows how little. And so on. Arthur Symns has worked on steadily, but, though he is getting on for sixty, you cannot say that his output is immense or contains anything that was not worth doing.
Immensely advertised! Where? And by whom?
Beardsley’s output was immense, for his years. Ought not the world to be grateful for it? He told me once that he had an itch for work; and it looked afterwards as if he knew that he was doomed to die at 24 or 26 and wanted to throw off all he could before. When he worked no one knew: no one ever saw him at work and he was always about and always accessible.
He was not conceited.... Rickets and Shannon were a little conceited: they had a way of “coming the Pope” over the rest, as Will Rothenstein once put it to me. (Will always took “a proper pride” in his excellent work, but no more). But, Lord, hadn’t they the right to be? Was ever a book more beautifully designed than Silverpoints (cover, page, type, typesetting by Ricketts)? Place Ricketts’ cover of the Pageant beside any other book in your library and tell me how it strikes you. Look at anything that Charles Shannon condescends to exhibit in the Academy and see how the quality of it slays everything around it exactly as a picture by Whistler or Rossetti would do.
To revert to immensity of output (I have to keep levanting and tacking about), I call immense the output of Belloc (the modern Sterne), Chesterton (the modern Swift), E. V. Lucas (the modern Addison); they themselves would be flattered at the comparisons. These chaps, though they can and sometimes do write as well as the men of the nineties, spoil their average by writing immensely; and they write immensely because they want a good deal of money. Now the men of the nineties hadn’t clubs, homes, wives or children; lunched for a shilling; dined for eighteen pence; and didn’t want a lot of money. They cared neither for money nor fame; they cared for their own esteem and that of what you call their coterie and I their set.
And that (to answer a question which you once asked me) is art for art’s sake; and I maintain that it is not right to call this meaningless or pretentious or a sham.
This coterie, or set, was not noisy: I never met a quieter; it was self-sufficient only in the best sense; and it in no way imposed or impressed itself on the middle and upper classes of London society. How could they? I doubt if any number of the Savoy ever sold 1,000 copies; certainly no number ever sold 2,000. And they ... were never in society, were never in the outskirts of society and never wanted to be in either.
But there! I daresay you were thinking of Oscar all the time....