The Men of The Nineties

rther, it seeks after, like all the art of the nineties, that abnormality of proportion of which Bacon wrote in his 'Essay on Beauty.' It is, too, a pe

e cicerone to the age, in his essay on Ernest Dowson. At the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street it was80 arranged that a band of young poets should meet, striving to recapture in London something of the Gallic spirit of art and the charm of open discussion in the Latin Quartier. The Club consisted of the following members: John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Edwin J. Ellis, George Arthur Greene, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Ceci

es on: 'It was an evening of notabilities. Mr. Walter Crane stood with his back to the mantelpiece, deciding, very kindly, on the merits of our effusions. And round Oscar Wilde, not then under a cloud, hovered reverently Lionel Johnson an

n is inspired by the 'Fêtes Gallantes,' and so on. As Mr. Plarr writes: 'Stray Gauls used to be imported to grace literary circles here. I remember one such-a rare instance of a rough Frenchman-to whom Dowson was

r, Ernest Dows

n were carrying on the staider traditions of English poetry altogether unmoved by these exotic influences from Montmartre and the studios of the south. The nineties group itself only remained for a restive moment like this before each man was to go his own way. They were indeed all souls seeking the way to perfection in art. Yeats went off to assist to found the Irish School; Richard Le Gallienn

and of Leonard Smithers for the second. In the numerous slim plaquettes of verse issued from these presses he will find golden verse worthy of the labour of his research. Indeed, amid so many writers one is compelled to resort to the odious necessity of a choice, so I shall here all too briefly deal with Silverpoints as a typical volume of the early period, and then trace succinctly the career of two poets, who had certainly t

nch, and there are imitations from Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine-the gods of the symbolist school at that moment. Poems are dedicated (it was the habit of the decade) to friends, including Pierre Lou?s, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, R. H. Sherard, Henri Teixeira de Mattos, Ernest Dowson, etc. The predominant

sky against the sea-rim clings: Foot stretches out to foot,

still hollows of old pagan dens, Call thee in aid to

r long robes the cruel thong, These, in dim woods, where huddli

iolent effect, the climacteric moment of a mood or passion. Probably two of the most successfully carried through crises

y task To gild their hair, carefully, strand by strand; To paint their eyebrows with a timid hand; To draw a bodkin, from a vase of Kohl, Through the closed

reverently placed Upon their thighs in sapient spots and stains, Beryls and chrysolites and diaphanes, And gems wh

ped scarlet pansie. My caress86 Tinges thy steel-grey eyes to violet, Adown thy body skips th

y throat, the shoulders, swelled and were uncouth; The breasts rose up and offered each a

this does not make up for the singing power of the poet, and in long poems it becomes singularly laborious. However, this phase of poetry is so

for things French, he has caused Mr. Symons, in one of his most notable essays, to draw a delightful portrait of a true enfant de Bohême. Robert Harborough Sherard has also kept the Dowson tradition up in his description of the death of the vexed and torn spirit of the poet in his Twenty Years in Paris, a

ters of A Comedy of Masks; whether in his last days or not Leonard Smithers used to pay him thirty shillings a week for all he could do; whether he used to pray or not in front of the bearded Virgin at Arques; whe

he language of a crisis.' Each Dowson poem is more or less the feverish impression of a hectical crisis. Fo

rt! Because to-morrow We must part. N

pale Silence, unbroken Silence prevail!

uveurs de lune. That was in 1891. In 1892 came out the first book of the Rhymers' Club, and89 with six poems of Dowson in it he definitely took his place in the movement. It is said that the Oscar Wilde set sen

est of Dowson, the handsel (if it is not too big a phrase to use of such a delicate and delightful artist), the handsel of his immortality. For there is something about Dowson's best work, though so fragile in its texture, that has the classic permanence of a latter-day Propertius. He has a Latin brevity and clarity, and he is at his best in this volume. Something has vanished from the enchantment of the singer in Decorations (1899

undly shaded From tempest and from sun: Ah, once more come together, Shall w

at mass of the literature of those days, and are dealt with (together with his partnership in two novels) in another section. As for his little one-act play,91 The Pierrot of the Minute, one is apt to feel perhaps that Beardsley was not over unjust to it, when he described it as a tiresome playl

trongly influenced by Nietzsche, though the French influence in him was rather negative. His books came from the Bodley Head and were well recognised by its other members. Beardsley even decorated some of them, and Rothenstein did his portrait for The Yellow Book. In fact, Davidson himself wrote for that periodical. All this made him of the

three rather ill-conceived works. Davidson discovered himself when he came to London to write. The movement of the nineties stimulated him towards artistic production, and when that movement was killed by the fall of Wilde, and buried by the Boer War, Davidson again lost himself in the philosophic propaganda of his last years before he was driven to suicide. Philosophy, indeed, with John Davidson, was93 to eat one's heart with resultant mental indigestion that completely unbalanced the artist in him. Ther

eties, by Holbrook

as the English river, the Thames, been more sweetly chaunted than by him. While if we are looki

ld come in thunder soon, I am sister to the m

f repeating. Again, his Thirty Bob a Week in94 The Yellow Book is as much a ninety effort as his Ballad of Hell, while his no

Elders' time has famed; On our sleeves w

ase in poetry is well repres

e, Outside a city reveller's tipsy trea

erse. The Ballad of a Nun, The Ballad of an Artist's Wife, and others, relate their stor

eaves in her bosom fell, On dreams came saili

nd live on earth with men.' 'No, here,' she said

on, almost alone, has a certain vein of grim Scotch humour, as, for example, in the character of little red-headed Mortimer in Perfervid. In Dowson, Johnson, Symons, and the others, one is sometimes appalled by the seriousness of it all. Lastly, but by no means least, Davidson occasionally att

es began to be golden-skinned, We harboured a stag in the

lley of dead bones till imagination breathes upon it.' There are indeed evidences of an almost Shelleyan pantheism in his credo. Unhappy was

elight and half distress; My memory stumble

t, what haunting note, What word, or what melodi

at the fear of speaking freely had 'cramped the literature of England for a century.' It was the liberty of the French literature indeed that in no small degree captivated the minds of all these young men. Very few of them, how

a sincere love for the beautiful things of Art. Among all these tragedies of ill-health, insanity and suicide that seemed to track down each of these young men, his fate was perhaps the saddest of all, for he died of starvation in Paris,17 where many of his verses had appeared in a distinctly American venture, The Qu

ard, Twenty Y

orous, his cheeks aflame, Called the white statue many a lover's name. An oriole flew down from off a tree, 'Woo not a goddess made of stone!' sang he. 'All of

young writers of that day, wrote in another short poem the epitaph of the majority of those who gave so rec

as it was yesterday. But underneath, in the Café, The lusty crafts go down, And one by on

f the movement. Their nightingales99 were never heard

pplication (La Bodinière), 18 rue St. Lazare, May 8, 1894. Peters himself took the part of Bertrand de Roaix, a troubadour, while among the cast were Wynford Dewhurst, the painter, and Lo?e Fuller, the dancer. The scene is an almond orchard on the outskirts of Toulouse, on the afternoon of the 3rd May, 1498. 'A group of troubadours discovered at the right of the stage, seated upon a white semicircular Renaissance bench, some tuning their instruments. Other poets towards the back. A laurel tree at the right centre. On the left centre two heralds guard the entrance to the100 lists.' Pons d'

him not. I have found my s