The Men of The Nineties

bby Horse the voices of the new spirit were mingled for the first time with those of the past. There were, among other magazines, The Rose Leaf, The Chameleon, The Spirit Lamp, The Pag

study these two magazines in some detail, and also their literary editors who gathered the clan together. In both cases Beardsley was the art editor, though he was 'fired,' to put it plainly, from The Yellow Book after its fourth number. His influence, therefore, permeated both. In fact, he made them both works of value for the coming generations, and particularly in the case of The Savoy he bore the burden of the day and saved the monthly from fatuity. When he leaves The Yellow Book it

, to place his drawings under a microscope and look at them upside down. This tendency, on the eve of the production of Volume V., during my first visit to the United States, rendered it necessary to omit his work from that volume.' Looking back on this, all that one can say now is that although Beardsley may have been trying, after all, he and not the publisher was The Yellow Book, and with his departure the spirit of the age slowly volatilised from the work until it deteriorated into a

rey Beardsley and The

Times described its note as a 'combination of English rowdyism and French lubricity.' The Westminster Gazette asked for a 'short Act of Parliament to make this kind of thing illegal.' Above all, the whole rabble descends howli

ewhat scornful, chapter to the contents of The Yellow Book, it is to Henry Harland, who seem

ndon when he was made editor of The Yellow Book. Besides his editorial duties he was a regular contributor, not only writing the series of notes signed 'The Yellow Dwarf,' but also turning out a number of short stories. But London was only to be a haven of brief sojourn for this writer, whose health sent him south to Italy. Perhaps his best work in the nineties was his short story Mademoiselle Miss, while later in Italy he opened up a n

ieppe ... it was there, in a cabaret Mr. Sickert has repeatedly painted, that The Savoy was originated.'9 It was issued by Leonard Smithers, the most extraordinary publisher, in some respects, of the nineties, a kind of modern Cel

h's Renaissance of the

literary editor, Mr. Arthur Symons, to discuss the eight numbers that appeared. Number one (printed by H. S. Nichols) appeared as a quarterly in boards in January, 1896. An editorial note by Arthur Symons, which originally appeared as a prospectus, hoped that The Savoy would prove 'a periodical of an exclusively literary and artistic kind.... All we ask from our contributors is good work, and good work is all we offer our readers.... We have not invented a new point of view. We are not Realists, or Romanticists

ms and Wedmore a story. Beardsley continues his romance, and lifts the number out of the rut with his Wagneresque designs. Max Beerbohm caricatures him, and Shannon and Rothenstein are represented. Among articles there is a series on Verlaine; and Vincent O'Sullivan, in a paper 'On the Kind of Fiction called Morbid,' sounds a note of the group with his conclusion: 'Let us cli

rticles on44 William Blake and his Illustrations to the 'Divine Comedy,' and Hubert Crackanthorpe contributes one of his best short stories. Owing to illness Beardsley's novel stops publication, but his Ballad of a Barber relieves the monotony o

y is The Savoy, and all else but leather and prunella. The number, however, is saved by a story of Dowson, The Dying of

oman in White, but the cover is an exceptionally beautiful Beardsley, the two figures in the park holding a colloque sentimental seem to have stepped out of the pag

ath of Pierrot. The literary contents consists chiefly of the editor. One notices the periodical is dyi

prejudices of the press ... it has not conquered the general public, and, without the florins of the general public, no magazine ... can expect to pay its way.' In this number Beardsley ret

ardsley himself: in all fourteen drawings.46 By way of epilogue, Symons says in their next venture, which is to appear twice a ye

f ?sthetics. He has written charmingly (if somewhat temperamentally) of his comrades like Beardsley, Crackanthorpe and Dowson. He was a leader in the campaign of the early nineties, and his work will always be the guiding hand for those who come after him and who wish to speak of this movement. As early as 1893 he was writing of it as 'The Decadent Movement in Literature' in Harper's, when he speaks of the most representative work of the period: 'After a fashion it is no doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence; an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilising refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity.' Perhaps, in a way, it is an immense pity that Symons will become the universal guide to the period, for it must be conceded that he has always been prone to find perversity in anything, as Sir Thomas Browne was haunted with quincunxes. But of the subtilty of his judgments and of the charming prose in which he labours to express them there can be no question. Listen, for example, w

r cataloguing it, marks the difference of his verse and that of the secession from much of the school of the eighties' definite listing of facts. Symons, indeed, is not only a poet impressionist, but also a critic impressionist in his critical works like Studies in Two Literatures, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, and so on. This impressionism, whilst it makes h

its silent waters over us. And then in the vague darkness faint and tre

onist picture a poem disengages the last fine shade of the scene.

he horizon tree by tree Fades into shadowy s

an etching. The poet is

unset flush, That leaves upon the heaped

on as vivid as a painter's work. In a phrase he can cage a mood, in a quatrain a scene. Where does this ability co

nterest is now not so vivid in his work it is because the centre of art has shifted. If Mr. Symons has not shifted his centre too, but remained faithful to the old dead Gods, it is no crime. It only means that we, when we wish to see him as one of the figures of his group

o a revivalist meeting. This may be true, but I cannot help thinking that no writer amid all these French influences which he had so eagerly sought out yet remains so typical of the English spirit. It may

le rivalry. The best, indeed, of Mr. Symons's Spiritual Adventures are probably those studies which are mostly attached to some theme of art which has been after all the all-engrossing motive of this delightful critic's life. An Autumn City and The Death of Peter Waydelin: the first, a sensitive's great love for Arles, whither he brings his unrespon

s, for example, he writes: 'All his work was in part an escape, an escape from himself.' Of Ernest Dowson's indulgence in the squalid debaucheries of the Brussels kermesse he writes: 'It w

ough a single day with that overpowering consciousness of our real position, which, in the moments in which alone it mercifully comes, is like blinding light or the thrust of a flaming sword, would drive any man out of his senses.... And so there is a great silent conspiracy between us to forget death; all our lives are spent in busily forgetting death. That is why we are so active about so many things which we know to be unimportant, why we are so afraid of solitude, and so thankful for the54 company of our fellow creatures. Allowing ourselves for the most

dhood. He wishes to escape 'hell.' In the story of Seaward Lackland there is a preacher whom Methodism drove to m