The Men of The Nineties

range comic world of Congreve, a new manifestation of English art blossomed. It had, no doubt, been a long time germinating in the m

appearance in London openly proclaiming the doctrine of art for art's sake under the ?gis of Oscar Wilde. So in the last age of hansom cabs a

ok at the fish in it. It breaks the contact between what was before and what came after. However, as one must go a long way back to investigate accurately how a new movement in art arises, and as it is tedious to follow up all the clues that lead to the source, it will be perhaps as well not to worry too much over the causes of the movement or over the influences from which it arose. Let us accept the fact so well poi

England was as powerful as that which stirred artistic Germany, creating a German period of the nineties in the group of symbolists who, under Stefan George, issued the now famous Bl?tter für die Kunst. The Englishmen, indeed, who attended these soirées of the Rue de Rome did not come away empty-handed. Not only did their own work suffer an artistic change through this influence, but they handed it on to their successors. So directly and indirectly the great French painters and writers of the day influenced the art of England, creating the opportunity for a distinct secession from the4 art of the previous age. At the same time French art and literature were never stationary but always developing. It wa

the nineties towards France, so that Englishmen again began to remember that something else counted in Paris besides lingerie. In dealing then with the influences that helped to beget5 the period, it is as w

ilde's ordered prose periods advance like cohorts of centurions to the sound of a full orchestra. Wilde's best work-his Prose Poems, his poem The Harlot's House, his one-acter Salomé, and one or two of the stories in the House of Pomegranates-will, however, remain as some of the finest flowers of the age's art. Yet Wilde, in reality, was senior to the nineties proper, and was much too good an artist to approve of much of the work that was6 done in imitation of himself during the period by the mere hangers-on of the nineties. He was wit

at French writers and painters that had come into his own life. His own writings came to others surcharged with 'The poisonous honey of France.' In his Modern Painting, in his novel, Evelyn Innes, in his era of servitude to7 Flaubert's majesty, he is of the nineties. But the nineties with George Moore were merely a p

terature at

on for art. So once again the streets of London began to be written about, not it is true in the Dickens manner, but still with even as great a love as his. They went so far as to attempt to institute real French café life, by having meetings8 at the Cheshire Cheese and evenings in the Domino Room of the Café Royal. Symons wrote of the ballets of Leicester Square; Dowson of the purlieus round the docks; Davidson made poems of Fleet Street; Binyon sang of white St. Martin's and the golden gallery of St. Paul's; Crackanthorpe sketched his London vignettes; Street talks of the

an art, more braying and snarling than sounding on the lute. But among the best of them, Stevenson, Kipling, and Steevens, was a fine loyalty to the traditions of the leading spirit of the Observer Henley-Pan playing on his reed with his crippled hoofs hiding amid the water-lilies of the purling stream. All these last writers and artists were men of the Anglo-Saxon tradition; while, on the other hand, the young men who had, so to speak, just come to town, were full of the Latin tradition. The main thing in the lives of these last was French literature and art, and out of this influence came not only the ar

we say rather badly in English, of the 'kid-glove school.' A note of refinement, a distinction of utterance, an obsession in Art marked all their best as well as their worst work. But this by no means prevented the two schools having a very salutary influence on each other. Indeed, we find a man like Mr. W. B. Yeats, who really belonged to a third movement, his o

ne or women, or some curse- But never made a p

t have a troop of friends: You kept the Muses'

erous to recall in their entirety, even if a satisfactory list of such a nature could be produced. So all12 I intend to attempt here is a summary of the activities of certain typical examples of the group as will serve to furnish an appreciation of their general work. And the way I propose to obtain this view is to begin by considering Beardsley as the central figure of the period; to deal next with the two most vital manifestoes of the movement and their respective literary editors, The Yellow Book and Henry Harland, The Savoy and Mr. Arthur Symons, passing on in turn to the writers of fiction, the poets, the essayists and dramatists not of the whole decade, but only to those