the victorian literary era was fecund in essayists, and the last decade lived up to this reputation. the forerunners of the essayists of the nineties were obviously walter pater, john addington symonds, oscar wilde with his intentions and whistler in his gentle art. behind these there was a great mass of french influence which, together with literary impressionism as exemplified in such books as crackanthorpe’s vignettes, was to give the essay and the so-called study a new lease of life. indeed, what came out of the period was not merely criticism as a useful broom sweeping away the chaff from the wheat, but criticism itself as a creative art, as wilde chose to call it; not merely dry-as-dust records of plays and cities, and other affairs as in guide manuals, but artistic impressions, in some ways as vital as the objects themselves. mr. arthur symons, in particular, has given us an abundance of this kind of work of which i have already spoken. so did lionel102 johnson and mr. max beerbohm, to whom i propose to allude here, and many others like mr. bernard shaw, who, though not of the movement, moved alongside it on his own way, and mr. g. s. street, in his episodes, richard le gallienne, arthur galton, francis adams in his essays in modernity, etc. etc. one has only to turn over the magazines of the period to find a band of writers, too numerous to mention, who aided on the movement with their pens. to cite one prominent example alone, there was grant allen with his essay on the new hedonism. here, however, i must be content with a brief appreciative glance at the works of the two writers i have mentioned, who were both actually of and in the movement itself. i have not here of set purpose referred to the henley essayists like charles whibley. but the two men of the nineties i have chosen to speak of here have been selected in the way an essayist should be selected nine times out of ten, that is to say, because of his pleasing personality. these two writers—particularly max—are such individual writers, yet they never offend. they are just pleasant garrulous companions.
for those who care at all passionately for the precious things of literature, the work of103 lionel johnson will always remain a cherished and secluded nook. the man was a scholar, a poet, and a critic, whose dominant note was gracile lucidity. a friend writing of his personal appearance at the time of his death said, ‘thin, pale, very delicate he looked, with a twitching of the facial muscles, which showed even at the age of twenty-four how unfit was his physique to support the strain of an abnormally nervous organization. quick and mouselike in his movements, reticent of speech and low-voiced, he looked like some old-fashioned child who had strayed by chance into an assembly of men. but a child could not have shown that inward smile of appreciative humour, a little aloof, a little contemptuous perhaps, that worked constantly around his mouth. he never changed except in the direction of a greater pallor and a greater fragility.’
cloistral mysticism was the key-chord of his two volumes of poetry (1895 and 1897). in some respects he seems to have strayed out of the seventeenth century of crashaw and herbert. his early training, no doubt, engendered this aspect. after six years in the grey gothic school of winchester he passed on to new college, oxford. here he came under104 the influence of pater, and was charmed by the latter’s then somewhat hieratic austerity. a devout irish catholic, he was moved by three themes: his old school, oxford, and ireland, and to these he unfortunately too often devoted his muse. after the quiet seclusion of his oxford years, on entering the vortex of london literary life he found that the world of wayfaring was a somewhat rough passage in the mire for one so delicate. out of the struggle between his scholarly aspirations and the cry of his time for life, more life, was woven perhaps the finest of all his poems, the dark angel:
dark angel, with thine aching lust to rid the world of penitence: malicious angel, who still dost my soul such subtile violence!—
because of thee, the land of dreams becomes a gathering place of fears: until tormented slumber seems one vehemence of useless tears....
thou art the whisper in the gloom, the hinting tone, the haunting laugh: thou art the adorner of my tomb, the minstrel of mine epitaph.
most of his poems are subjective, and the majority have a certain stiffness of movement of a priest laden with chasuble; but sometimes,105 however, as in mystic and cavalier, or in the lines on the statue of charles i at charing cross, he writes with a winsome charm and freedom of spirit:
armoured he rides, his head bare to the stars of doom: he triumphs now, the dead beholding london’s gloom....
surely this poem has the proud note of henley! there is another trait in his verse, which, in view of his essays, it is as well not to pass over. like william watson, his literary poems are pregnant with phrases of rich criticism. he calls back the immortals in a true bookman’s invocation hailing ‘opulent pindar,’ ‘the pure and perfect voice of gray,’ ‘pleasant and elegant and garrulous pliny’:
herodotus, all simple and all wise; demosthenes, a lightning flame of scorn: the surge of cicero, that never dies; and homer, grand against the ancient morn.
but we are here chiefly concerned with his prose writings. if it is the duty of the essayist to mirror the intellectuality of his age, lionel johnson was a mirror for the oxford standpoint of the nineties. there106 still remain many of his papers uncollected in various old newspaper files. but certainly the best of his work has been lovingly collected by friendly hands, and worthily housed in post liminium. take, for instance, this passage from an essay on books published originally in the academy (december 8th, 1900):
the glowing of my companionable fire upon the backs of my companionable books, and then the familiar difficulty of choice. compassed about by old friends, whose virtues and vices i know better than my own, i will be loyal to loves that are not of yesterday. new poems, new essays, new stories, new lives, are not my company at christmastide, but the never-ageing old. ‘my days among the dead are passed.’ veracious southey, how cruel a lie! my sole days among the dead are the days passed among the still-born or moribund moderns, not the white days and shining nights free for the strong voices of the ancients in fame. a classic has a permanence of pleasurability; that is the meaning of his estate and title.
or again, johnson in his paper on the work of mr. pater, sets forth perhaps the best appreciation of his master that has yet appeared:
‘magica sympathi?!’ words borne upon the shield of lord herbert of cherbury, are inscribed107 upon the writings of mr. pater, who found his way straight from the first to those matters proper to his genius, nor did he, as fuseli says of leonardo, ‘waste life, insatiate in experiment.’... ‘nemo perfectus est,’ says st. bernard, ‘qui perfectior esse appetit’: it is as true in art as in religion. in art also ‘the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts’ ... and truly, as joubert said, we should hesitate before we differ in religion from the saints, in poetry from the poets.... there is no languorous toying with things of beauty, in a kind of opiate dream, to be found here.
while symons has written on all the arts, the sphere of johnson has been more limited to traditional english lines. johnson attempts no broad ?sthetical system like the former. all that he does is to illuminate the writer of whom he is speaking. and his little essays, eminent in their un-english lucidity, their scrupulous nicety, their conscious and deliberate beauty, adding to our belles lettres a classical execution and finish (which perfection accounts perhaps for the classical smallness of his bookmaking) have all the bewildering charm of a born stylist. certain of his phrases linger in the mind like music. ‘many a sad half-murmured thought of pascal, many a deep and plangent utterance of lucretius.’ or the line: ‘the face whose changes dominate108 my heart.’ like the styles of newman and pater, on which his own is founded, he is singularly allusive. he cites critics by chapter and verse like an advocate defending a case. in fact, as in his critical magnum opus, the art of thomas hardy, he is amazingly judicial. it is, too, since he is essentially academic, to the older critics he prefers to turn for guidance. as he writes: ‘flaubert and baudelaire and gautier, hennequin and m. zola and m. mallarmé, with all their colleagues or exponents, may sometimes be set aside, and suffer us to hear quintilian or ben jonson, cicero or dryden.’ this habit sometimes makes him strenuous reading, particularly in longer criticisms like the art of thomas hardy.
we grow weary of all this quotative authority. burton’s anatomy of melancholy cannot be brought into every-day literary criticism. we want to hear more of lionel johnson’s own direct opinions and less of these selected passages from his library. so it is to those passages where johnson is most himself we turn in the art of thomas hardy, which, in spite of its academicism and the youthfulness of its author, remains a genuine piece of sound critical work. the delightful imagery of the109 prose in such passages is often very illuminating, as in this paragraph:
from long and frequent converse with works of any favourite author, we often grow to thinking of them under some symbol or image; to see them summed up and expressed in some one composite scene of our own making; this is my ‘vision’ of mr. hardy’s works. a rolling down country, crossed by a roman road; here a gray standing stone, of what sacrificial ritual origin i can but guess; there a grassy barrow, with its great bones, its red-brown jars, its rude gold ornament, still safe in earth; a broad sky burning with stars; a solitary man. it is of no use to turn away, and to think of the village farms and cottages, with their antique ways and looks; of the deep woods, of the fall of the woodman’s axe, the stir of the wind in the branches; of the rustic feasts and festivals, when the home-brewed drink goes round, to the loosening of tongues and wits; of the hot meadows, fragrant hayfields, cool dairies, and blazing gardens; of shining cart-horses under the chestnut-trees and cows called in at milking time: they are characteristic scenes, but not the one characteristic scene. that is the great down by night, with its dead in their ancient graves, and its lonely living figure; ...
there is, perhaps, a reek about it all of a too-conscious imitation of pater’s murmured obituaries which makes one in the end rather tired of this hieratic treatment of art, so that110 one turns rather gladly to the one or two tales he wrote. for example in the lilies of france, an episode of french anti-clericalism, which appeared in the pageant, 1897, he slowly builds up a thing of verbal beauty that one feels was actually worthy of him, while in the previous number of the same quarterly he perpetrated a delightful ironism on the literary men of his period entitled incurable, in which, perhaps, we may trace faint autobiographical clues. such, briefly, was the work of this young man who was found dead in fleet street early one morning, aged thirty-five.
but the writer who was to bring irony in english literature to a consummate pitch, and add to the age a strange brief brilliance of his own wilful spirit, was max beerbohm. max, the ‘incomparable’ as bernard shaw once described him, is the charm of the gilded lily, the fairy prince of an urbane artificiality: he is in literature what the cocktail is among drinks; he is the enemy of dullness and the friend of that greek quality called ‘charis.’ he is the public school and varsity man who is fond of, but afraid of, being tedious in literature; so with delightful affectation his vehicle is persiflage with a load of wit he pretends to disdain. of all the prose writers of the beardsley111 period he is the easiest and most charming to read. in fact, he is the ideal essayist. he titillates the literary sense. fortunately his glass is small, for if one had to drink it in quart pots the result would be as disastrous as in his one and only mistake—the long novel zuleika dobson, which is a late work written long after the nineties had been swallowed up by that maw which swallowed up lesbia’s sparrow and all other beautiful dead things.
max said in jest, ‘i belong to the beardsley period,’ and it is one of those jests which is only too painfully true. when he was at oxford he was caught up in the movement, and wrote, under wilde’s influence, a defence of cosmetics for the first number of the yellow book, and he also appeared in lord alfred douglas’s magazine. thenceforward he contributed to various quarterlies, while in 1896 the little red volume with its white paper label appeared as the works, containing all the best of this precocious enfant terrible of literature, who assures us that he read in bed, while at school, marius the epicurean, and found it not nearly so difficult as midshipman easy. at the age of twenty-five he cries: ‘i shall write no more. already i feel myself to be a trifle outmoded,’ and he religiously does not keep his word. he112 keeps pouring out caricatures, writes more, the companion volume to the works, and perpetrates his short story the happy hypocrite. beyond 1899 we cannot follow him, but he has been busy ever since with his parodies, his yet again, his lamentable novel, his one-act play, and so on.
it is to that beardsley period to which he said he belonged we are here restricted. and it must be admitted that though the boer war and the great war do not seem to have gagged him, there is something so impishly impudent in his earlier work which renders it more remarkable than the complacent efforts of his later years.
amid the searching seriousness of the nineties, max is like balm in gilead. he has the infinite blessing of irony. the others, except beardsley (who too has this gift), are so appallingly serious. the french influences that went to their making seem to have killed the valiant english humour of falstaff, pickwick, and verdant green. they are all like young priests who will take no liberty with their ritual; but max saves the period with his whimsical irony. his is not the fearful, mordant irony of octave mirbeau, but a dainty butterfly fancy playing lightly over the113 pleasures of a pleasant life. to be essentially civilised is to be like a god. this is the pose of such a mentality. it is a winsome pose with no sharp edges to it, just as the poseur himself must be wilfully blind to all the seaminess of life. in front of his window (if a temperament be a window looking out on life) there is a pleasant garden. beyond is the noise and dust of the highway. he is the dandy in his choice of life as in his choice of literature, and in more than one sense he has written the happiest essays of the period.
it has been said his caricatures are essays. may we not equally say his essays are caricatures? the essay, indeed, is the work of the feline male, the man who sits beside the fire like charles lamb. the out-of-doors man writes the episode. but max is essentially an indoors man, who has a perfect little dressing-room like a lady’s boudoir, but much neater, where he concocts his essays we read so easily by infinite labour, with a jewelled pen. it is as though he had said: ‘literature must either be amusing or dull; mine shall be the former.’ he is very much the young man about town who has consented gracefully to come and charm us. what he wrote of whistler in the gentle art of making enemies, we may say of him:114 ‘his style never falters. the silhouette of no sentence is ever blurred. every sentence is ringing with a clear, vocal cadence.’ and the refrain is max himself all the time, and his personality is so likeable we stomach it all the time. it is the note that vibrates through all his amiable satiric irony, whether it be on the house of commons manner or in defence of the use of cosmetics, or in describing the period of 1880. everything, from first to last, is done with such good taste. even in his wildest flights of raillery he is utterly purposed not to offend. in his charming paper, 1880, he has given us a vigorous vignette of the previous decade to the yellow book age. one can hardly help quoting a small passage here from this admirably worked up prose: ‘in fact beauty had existed long before 1880. it was mr. oscar wilde who managed her début. to study the period is to admit that to him was due no small part of the social vogue that beauty began to enjoy. fired by his fervid words, men and women hurled their mahogany into the streets and ransacked the curio-shops for the furniture of annish days. dadoes arose upon every wall, sunflowers and the feathers of peacocks curved in every corner, tea grew quite cold while the guests were115 praising the willow pattern of its cup. a few fashionable women even dressed themselves in sinuous draperies and unheard-of greens. into whatsoever ball-room you went, you would surely find, among the women in tiaras, and the fops and the distinguished foreigners, half a score of comely ragamuffins in velveteen, murmuring sonnets, posturing, waving their hands. beauty was sought in the most unlikely places. young painters found her mobbled in the fogs, and bank-clerks versed in the writings of mr. hamerton, were heard to declare, as they sped home from the city, that the underground railway was beautiful from london bridge to westminster, but not from sloane square to notting hill gate.’
it is thus that max can play with a chord of almost tender irony on his subject, and such a style, so full of the writer’s personality, has the cachet of the veritable essayist. how charmingly, for example, he records his reminiscences of beardsley. it is a delightful little picture of the artist, interesting enough to place beside arthur symons’s portrait: ‘he loved dining out, and, in fact, gaiety of any kind. his restlessness was, i suppose, one of the symptoms of his malady. he was always most content116 where there was the greatest noise and bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light. the “domino-room” at the café royal had always a great fascination for him: he liked the mirrors and the florid gilding, the little parties of foreigners, and the smoke and the clatter of the dominoes being shuffled on the marble tables.... i remember, also, very clearly, a supper at which beardsley was present. after the supper we sat up rather late. he was the life and soul of the party, till, quite suddenly almost in the middle of a sentence, he fell fast asleep in his chair. he had overstrained his vitality, and it had all left him. i can see him now as he sat there with his head sunk on his breast; the thin face, white as the gardenia in his coat, and the prominent, harshly-cut features; the hair, that always covered his whole forehead in a fringe and was of so curious a colour—a kind of tortoise-shell; the narrow, angular figure, and the long hands that were so full of power.’18
18 the idler, may, 1898.
outside this medium of the essay, with the exception of the caricatures, max is no longer the incomparable, for his short story, the happy hypocrite, is not a short story at all,117 but a spoilt essay;19 while his novel is not merely a failure, but a veritable disaster. with his first paper in the yellow book he fell in with the step of the men of the nineties, and he too became a part of their efflorescence. sufficient unto that time is his work, and with a final quotation from this early paper so redolent of the movement that there is no mistaking it, we must leave him and his future on the knees of the gods: ‘was it not at capua that they had a whole street where nothing was sold but dyes and unguents? we must have such a street, and, to fill our new seplosia, our arcade of unguents, all herbs and minerals and live creatures shall give of their substance. the white cliffs of albion shall be ground to powder for loveliness, and perfumed by the ghost of many a little violet. the fluffy eider-ducks, that are swimming round the pond, shall lose their feathers, that the powder-puff may be moonlike as it passes over loveliness’ lovely face.’
19 his children’s tale, the small boy and the barley sugar (the parade, 1897), should also be mentioned as another case of shipwrecked ingenuity.
