The Men of The Nineties

el. It is true that the great Victorians, Meredith and Hardy, were hard at work at this time; but, then, neither of these writers belongs to this movement. Then there was

an novel necessarily a great novel. A great novel is a work of fiction that has entered into the realm of universal literature in the same way as the dramas56 of Sophocles and Shakespeare and Molière have entered that glorious demesne. As a matter of fact, one can remember, I think in most cas

ubert Crackanthorpe. But naturally in the way of stimulus the main goad was France, which was at that date phenomenally rich in practitioners of the art of the novel. The Vizetelly Zolas, Mr. George Moore personally conducting the novels of certain of the French novelists over the Channel, the desire to smash the fetters of Victorian fiction which Thomas Hardy was to accomplish, were all inspiring sources which were, however, singularly unfruitful. Walter Pater long before in his academic romance Marius, which they had all read eagerly, wrote charmingly of a field that would appeal to them when he said: 'Life in modern London ... is stuff sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth to build his "palace of art" of.' But instead of taking the recommendation of this high priest they read Dorian Gray, which Wilde would never have written if Huysmans had not58 first written A Rebours. The young men of Henley, it must be confessed, did far finer work than Richard Le Gallienne's watery Wildism in The Quest of the Golden Girl. George Moore wrote a masterpiece in Evelyn Innes, but Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore in A Comedy of Masks and Adrian Rome did not retaliate. Leonard Merrick, who started publish

same period in, for example, his Ma?tresse d'Esthètes. What is cruder than Ranger-Gull's The Hypocrite, which has pretensions to be a picture of the young men of the period? And when one comes to think of it this is a great pity, as an excellent novel might have been penned around the feverish activities of60 these young exotics of the nineties. Robert Hichens' Green Carnation is, after all, perhaps the most brilliant attempt to picture the weaknesses of the period, and it is merely a skit taking off in the characters of Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reggie two well-known personalities. The Adventures of Jo

ng, and the epic is reduced to Stephen Phillips's Marpessa. The one-act play begins on the Continent to make a big appeal for more recognition than that of a curtain-raiser. Small theatres, particularly in Germany and Austria, give evening performances consisting of one-acters alone. It becomes the same in music. The age was short-winded and its art,62 to borrow a phrase from the pal?stra, could only stay over short distances. So, whereas there is a strange dearth of novels, the men of the nineties were very fruitful in short stories. In fact, it would not be perhaps too much to say that it was then, for the first time in English literature, the short story came into its own. At any rate, it would be more judicious to put the period as one in which the short story flourished vigorously (if not for the first time), in England, as a 'theme of art.' To understand exactly what I mean by this artistic treatment of the short story10 as a medium of literary expression, all that is necessary is, perhaps, to compare one of Dickens's short tales, for example, with one of Stevenson's short stories. The result is apparent at once in the difference of treatment-a difference as essential as the difference between the effect of a figure

discusses the short story as a distinct artisti

Dircks in his Verisimilitudes, Richard Le65 Gallienne, Kenneth Grahame, Percy Hemingway in his Out of Egypt, etc. Then we have men like R. B. Cunninghame Graham and H. W. Nevinson, clearly influenced by the movement and writing alongside of it of the ends of the earth they have visited. The former, for example, in a short story like Aurora La Cuji?i (Smithers, 1898) clearly reflects the influences of this period which gloried in the abnormal in Art. Known as a socialist of courage, Mr. Graham, whose name betrays his origin, has also visited many of the exotic places of the world. In his able book Mogreb-el-Acksa he has given us vignettes of Morocco that are unsurpassed; in his volume Success he has told us of those Spanish-sp

e contributed to Lord Alfred Douglas's The Spirit Lamp. As a specimen of his style the following extract from his s

rish nobody understands, and two black strange things like monkeys glide about with the book and the cruets-and there's music too, such music. There are things the top half like black cats, and the bottom part like men only their legs are all covered with c

ique style...; women selling water, calling out "aguá!" in so guttural a voice it seemed like Arabic; Cardobese hats, short jackets, and from the plaza a scent of blood and sweat acting like a rank aphrodisiac upon the crowd, and making the women squeeze each other's sweating hands, and look ambiguously at one another, as they were men; and causing the youths, with swaying hips and with their hair cut

, as we shall see in Hubert Crackanthorpe, is the desired prize. Turn through the pages of Ernest Dowson's Dilemmas, and read, above all, A Case of Conscience; leaf Frederick Wedmore's12 Renunciations, and pause over The68 Chemist in the Suburbs, wherein, as H. D. Traill said, the story of Richard Pelse's life is a pure joy; in both cases vivid impressionism an

uccessful of his short imaginative pieces, as the author rightly terms them, on the other hand, have a refined grace of slow movement that is at once captivating and refreshing. It seems impossible that the same

a cabinet of china, in which-but always before Aix-les-Bains-he had taken to accumulate some pretty English things of whitest paste or finest painting; a Worcester cup, with its exotic birds, its lasting gold, its scale-blue ground, like lapis lazuli or sapphire; a Chelsea figure; something from Swansea; white plates of Nantgarw, bestre

move like Titans of the age, while Kipling and Crackanthorpe are the only two young men that give any quantity of imaginative prose work of a high new order (and in saying this one must not overlook Arthur Morrison's Mean Streets, or Zangwill's Gh

oet Francis Jammes dedicated to Crackanthorpe. Jammes lived

ry tides! Things of a day are we, s

with W. H. Wilkins, of The Albemarle, a monthly review star

A young officer, in love with Lily Maguire, is deceived by her for a very Emily Bront?-like figure of a bold, bad, handsome man. The girl becomes a disreputable member of the prostitute class, and Maurice, like the young fool he is, wishes to redeem her. But Lily, whom the sensuous, romantic life has taught nothing, could never, she thinks, marry a man she did not care for, although she would sell herself to the first Tom, Dick, or Harry. A Conflict of Egoisms concerns two people who have wasted their lives and then utterly destroy themselves by marrying one another, for they71 were too selfish to live even by themselves. The Struggle for Life is a Maupassant14-conceived, but ineffectively told story of a wife betrayed by her husband, who sells herself for half-a-crown if she can go home in an hour. Embers is much more effectively told, and here at last we begin to realise Crackantho

ant's Inco

here, that is to treat an English theme in the French manner, a task which demands more culture than the ruck of the conteurs for the English magazines attain with their facile tears and jackass laughters, their machine-like nonentities

he again develops the good side. While in the study of the Love-sick Curate we feel that Ethel is not hard-hearted, but only that the Rev. Burkett is an unutterable idiot. Modern Melodrama is the short, sharp climacteric stab of Maupassant perhaps not over well done. The sentimental studies close with Yew-Trees and Peacocks, which seems rather to have lost its point in the telling. The tales of the Pyrennese villages where Crackanthorpe used to stay are typical productions of the delight of the men of t

n blackness, and above a square of sky,74 blue-grey, quivering with stifled light, flecked with a disorder of stars that seemed ready to rain up

that to-morrow was her wedding-day: for a moment, quite imper

my Crammer's, finds his way into the

of an Eastern palace. He leaned against the side of the lounge to gaze down across the black belt of heads. The sight bewildered him. By-and-bye, he became conscious of a hum of voices, and a continual movement behind him. Men, for the most part in evening dress, were passing in proc

around Scarsdale, where Burkett is parson of

ring in the field of fiction to the crudity of the old hands and the antiquity of new, his appreciator finds it difficult to render the aspect which constitutes Crackanthorpe's 'troubled indi

accounting for the effect; or else it may be an effort preferably pictorial, a portrait of conditions, an attempt to summarise, and compress for purposes of presentation to "render" even, if possible, for purposes of expression.' From the

a mere cheap flirt of unfinished comeliness, is but the bone of contention between the personalities of Antony and his mother. The widow Garstin is as fine a character as Crackanthorpe, in his twenty-two stories, has created. She lives, and in her veins flows the passion of disappointed age. 'She was a heavy-built woman, upright, stalwart almost, despite her years. Her face was gaunt and s

ind other such scenes in English literature we have to

he daughter who believes in her self-made father, and despises her sidetracked mother as an inferior being, only to find she has made a great mistake. It is one of the longest stories he wrote, and moves easily in the higher strata of London society. From this fashionable world to the rude and rugged scars and fells of Cumberland is a far cry; but here, as elsewhere, Crackanthorpe find