it all seems a long time ago now since those days when verlaine was as a lantern for these young men’s feet, to guide them through the mazes of art. thirty years ago and more wilde was disclosing ‘décolleté spirits of astonishing conversation’; zola influenced that byron of pessimism, thomas hardy, to beget jude the obscure (1895), and when the critics assailed him the wessex giant guarded a ‘holy silence’ which has denied us up till now an emancipated novel such as the french and italians have, though james joyce may yet achieve it for us. it was also the age of youth in hansom cabs looking out on the lights of london’s west end which spread out before them as in a ‘huge black velvet flower.’ ibsen, tolstoy, maeterlinck, nietzsche, d’annunzio, and dostoievsky were beginning to percolate through by means of translations that opened out a new world into which everybody hastily swarmed. it was an age in which young men132 frankly lauded the value of egoism. indeed, it was essentially the age of young men. in those days a genital restiveness which came over from france started the sex equation. a hothouse fragrance swept across the pudibond wastes of our literature. hectics came glorying in their experiences. richard of the golden girl with his banjo lifts up his voice to chaunt ‘a bruisèd daffodil of last night’s sin.’ women like george egerton in her keynotes take questions further than mrs. lynn linton had ever done in the previous decade. exoticism, often vulgar when not in master hands, blabbed out its secrets in works like the woman who did. confounding the good with the bad, a wail went up against the so-called gospel of intensity. sometimes it was in the serious reviews and weeklies; at another time it was harry quilter. some young undergraduates at oxford, even in aristophanes at oxford (may, 1894), were filled with ‘an honest dislike for dorian gray, salomé, the yellow book, and the whole of the lackadaisical, opium-cigarette literature of the day.’ punch produced a beardsley britannia and sang of:
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the yellow poster girl looked out from her pinkly purple heaven, one eye was blue and one was green, her bang was cut uneven. she had three fingers on one hand, and the hairs on her head were seven.
and all these criticisms now, all these quarrels, are like old spent battlefields the sands of gracious time have covered over and hidden from view. alone the best work of the period remains; for good art has no period or special vogue.
indeed, the elements that destroy the worthless, that winnow the chaff from the grain, have been at work. for us, indeed, this landscape has changed from what it once was, and looking at it now we acquire a new impression which was denied to the critics of the age itself. some of us, without a doubt, have gone to the opposite extreme and prattle about it as an age of platitudes, and accuse a work of art of being as old as the yellow book. one might as well accuse a violet of being as old as the greek anthology. for always, to those wandering back in the right spirit to those days, there will come something of the infinite zest which stirred the being of the men of the nineties to create art. it was such an honest effort that one has to think of those times when marlowe and his colleagues were athrob with ?sthetic aspiration to find a similitude. the134 nineties, indeed, are a pleasant flower-garden in our literature over which many strange perfumes float. there are times when one wishes to retreat into such places, as there are moments when the backwaters enchant us from the main stream.
it has been said it was an age of nerves. if by this is implied a keener sensitiveness to certain feelings pulsating in the art of this movement, one will not have very far to go to find its cause in the french impressionistic school of manet, which, after saturating all types of french artists, undoubtedly invaded writers over here even before the movement of the nineties began. on the age without a doubt it had a lasting influence, so that to a certain degree, without being over-busy with what went before, we may say its writers brought it to no small degree into common use in our literature. but just as impressionism in painting had existed centuries before in the ever-busy mind of men like leonardo da vinci, one cannot go so far as to say it had never existed before in our literature. such a statement would be perhaps frivolous. but it was with these men it first came to exist as a kind of cry of a new clan. it was these men who were essentially hectics who essayed to etch the exotic135 impression. the majority of the work of the movement, in fact, can be described as impressionisms of the abnormal by a group of individualists. for in all their work the predominant keynote will be found to be a keen sense of that strangeness of proportion which bacon noted as a characteristic of what he called beauty. it is observable as much in the poems of dowson as in the drawings of beardsley, two of the leading types of the movement. it vibrates intensely in the minor work of men like wratislaw, and also in john gray’s early volume, as i have endeavoured to show. all mr. arthur symons’s criticism is a narration of his soul’s adventures in quest of it. it stirred the genius of charles conder, and vitalizes the rather cruel analysis of hubert crackanthorpe. we see it almost as the animating spirit of the age itself in oscar wilde’s poems, the sphinx and the harlot’s house. it has become disseminated like a perfume from the writings of pater in the men who came after him. it was, so to speak, a quickening stimulus to them as the rediscovery of a manuscript of catullus, or a greek figure was in the years of the renaissance itself. with it came a sense of freedom. an attempt was made, because of it, for instance, to136 emancipate our literature to the same extent as the literatures of latin countries move untrammelled by a hesitancy in the choice of certain themes. and people at the time, watching the fate of the prime movers, cried with a great deal of assurance, ‘that way lies madness!’
be this as it may, the men of the nineties bequeathed a certain subtleness of emotion to our art that is not without its value. they took byron’s satanism and inflamed it with the lurid light of baudelaire. buveurs de lune after the manner of paul verlaine, they evoked something of the ethereal glamour of moonlight itself. a realist like crackanthorpe tried to tread the whole via dolorosa without faltering by the wayside. poetry caught the mood of bizarre crises and edgar wilson wrought a strange delicate world of visions. in max beerbohm irony took on a weird twinge of grace almost pierrot-like. perhaps, indeed, they all had something of the pierrot quality in them. beardsley himself was enchanted by that little opera without words, ‘l’enfant prodigue.’ dowson made a play about him. the happy hypocrite might be a story of the pierrot himself grown old.
as i have hinted, much of the work conceived137 by these men was doomed to die, as in the case of every movement. what then remains, what is their balance to the good? who knows? about everything man has loved and fashioned there abides vestiges of the interest of humanity. only some things are easier to recall than others. they stand out more, so that one is bound to remark them. they have, so to speak, a cachet of their own. among these in this movement there comes the work of the men i have so hastily attempted to realise. each has about him something of that quality which is indefinable, but easily recognisable. each has his charm for those who care to come with a loving interest.
