Osburt Burdett, Holbrook Jackson, Richard LeGallienne and other more talented and serious students have gone over the period with admirable thoroughness. The magnifying glass has been placed over every one of Beardsley’s drawings and even the most moribund of the minor poets has been the subject of at least one monograph. Still, it will be interesting to review briefly what has been said of the men of the Nineties, if only because it may be applied, with certain changes and reservations, to the Twenties and, for that matter, to the period which we are about to enter. For the birth of the Atomic Age, for all its violent and destructive debut, cannot have been more shocking, in some respects, than the impact of the coterie of the green carnation upon the Victorianism of the Nineties.
The group known as the Yellow Book boys, or the men of the Nineties, or the delicate decadents were, as Donald Davidson has remarked, “time-conscious” to an intense degree. They were nearing the end of a century, just as the men of the Twenties lived through the end of an epoch and the men of the Forties enter a new one. There is still, you see, this strange analogy between the “Tragic Generation” as the men of the Nineties called themselves, and the “Lost Generation” as the men of the Twenties called themselves. Whether or not there will be a continuing analogy between the three decades is an interesting speculation, but quite beyond the scope of this study. Or is it?
The men of the Nineties were time-conscious to an intense degree and they were self-conscious to an even greater degree. Being young men, for one thing, and acutely aware of the Victorianism of their Victorian age for another, and rather preoccupied with the importance of being earnest and alive in the closing years of a century for still another, they were rather more self-conscious than most young men.
Now it is an odd thing, when one considers it, that the young and self-conscious members of the Anglo-Saxon races, in whatever age, discover in themselves a remarkable affinity and a positive predilection for the culture and customs of France. This happens time and again, and whenever it does happen it is accompanied by a profound contempt for the Anglo-Saxonishness of their Anglo-Saxon contemporaries and compatriots. No doubt there are excellent reasons for this. It is a strange thing, but it is by no means unusual, since it has happened with something very much like regularity ever since William the Norman crossed the Channel—and perhaps even before that.
The Saxon nobles who set themselves apart from the peasantry were probably the first to adopt the manners and language of the Norman court. Almost any intrigue current at the time, or for the next few centuries, seemed the more likely to succeed if it acquired a dash of the Gallic. Even in that most English of all English periods, the age of Elizabeth, the young blades and the intellectuals felt the more dashing and, presumably, the more intellectual for a smattering of French oaths and a short time spent in the courts or chateaux of France, or the alleys and marketplaces of Paris.
Well, then, the men of the Nineties acquired their smattering of French and their translations of Baudelaire and Verlaine and felt the better for them ... much as our men of the Twenties rode the cattle-boats to the Left Bank and wrote the “only American literature” of their day. Little magazines sprang up in the Nineties, verse grew steadily more libre, and there was little difference, spiritually at any rate, between the Bodley Head in 1890 and the Shakespeare Head in 1920 or thereabouts. Another lost, tragic generation of self-conscious Anglo-Saxons had “found themselves”—and France.
3
To return to the Nineties. There were those, even then, who suspected that something was up in the state of English literature. Grave and scholarly men analyzed the state of affairs and speculated on causes and results. If the young men were pleased with themselves there were others who were not. There was a certain looseness of thinking and of phrasing that was not universally approved. The burden of such critical attitudes is a familiar one—it is the one that attends all new movements in literature, following change as the night follows the day.
The first and best expressed of these critical appraisals appeared in, of all places, the first volume of the Yellow Book itself. Advocating “Reticence in Literature,” Arthur Waugh wrote: “During the last quarter of a century ... the English man of letters has been indulging, with an entirely new freedom, his national birthright of outspokenness, and during the last twelve months there have been no uncertain indications that this freedom of speech is degenerating into license which some of us cannot but view with regret and apprehension.” A familiar note, an old refrain!
“The writers and the critics of contemporary literature have, it would seem, alike lost their heads; they have gone out into the byways and hedges in search of the new thing, and have brought into the study and subjected to the microscope mean objects of the roadside, whose analysis may be of value to science but is absolutely foreign to art.”