The Men of The Nineties

Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde with his Intentions and Whistler in his Gentle Art. Behind these there was a great mass of French influence which

de here, and many others like Mr. Bernard Shaw, who, though not of the movement, moved alongside it on his own way, and Mr. G. S. Street, in his Episodes, Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Galton, Francis Adams in his Essays in Modernity, etc. etc. One has only to turn over the magazines of the period to find a band of writers, too numerous to mention, who aided on the movement with their pens. To cite one prominent example alone, there was Grant Allen with his essay on The New Hedonism. Here, however, I must be content with a brief app

said, 'Thin, pale, very delicate he looked, with a twitching of the facial muscles, which showed even at the age of twenty-four how unfit was his physique to support the strain of an abnormally nervous organization. Quick and mouselike in his movements, reticent of speech and low-voiced, he looked like some old-f

lege, Oxford. Here he came under104 the influence of Pater, and was charmed by the latter's then somewhat hieratic austerity. A devout Irish Catholic, he was moved by three themes: his old school, Oxford, and Ireland, and to these he unfortunately too often devoted his muse. After the quiet seclusion of his Oxfor

he world of penitence: Malicious angel, who

gathering place of fears: Until tormented sl

g tone, the haunting laugh: Thou art the ador

est laden with chasuble; but sometimes,105 however, as in Mystic and Cavalier, or in the lines o

the stars of doom: He triumphs now,

to pass over. Like William Watson, his literary poems are pregnant with phrases of rich criticism. He calls back the immortals in a

ightning flame of scorn: The surge of Cicero, that n

ord standpoint of the nineties. There106 still remain many of his papers uncollected in various old newspaper files. But certainly the best of his work has been lovingly coll

t are not of yesterday. New poems, new essays, new stories, new lives, are not my company at Christmastide, but the never-ageing old. 'My days among the dead are passed.' Veracious Southey, how cruel a lie! My sole days among the dead are

f Mr. Pater, sets forth perhaps the best app

li says of Leonardo, 'waste life, insatiate in experiment.'... 'Nemo perfectus est,' says St. Bernard, 'qui perfectior esse appetit': it is as true in art as in religion. In art also 'the way to perfection is through a series of d

lness of his bookmaking) have all the bewildering charm of a born stylist. Certain of his phrases linger in the mind like music. 'Many a sad half-murmured thought of Pascal, many a deep and plangent utterance of Lucretius.' Or the line: 'The face whose changes dominate108 my heart.' Like the styles of Newman and Pater, on which his own is founded, he is singularly allusive. He cites critics by chapter and verse like an advocate defending a case. In fact, as in his critical magnum opus,

ions and less of these selected passages from his library. So it is to those passages where Johnson is most himself we turn in The Art of Thomas Hardy, which, in spite of its academicism

ssy barrow, with its great bones, its red-brown jars, its rude gold ornament, still safe in earth; a broad sky burning with stars; a solitary man. It is of no use to turn away, and to think of the village farms and cottages, with their antique ways and looks; of the deep woods, of the fall of the woodman's axe, the stir of the wind in the branches; of the rustic feasts and festivals, when the ho

in The Lilies of France, an episode of French anti-clericalism, which appeared in The Pageant, 1897, he slowly builds up a thing of verbal beauty that one feels was actually worthy of him, while in the previous number of the same quarterly he perpetrate

y of dullness and the friend of that Greek quality called 'charis.' He is the public school and Varsity man who is fond of, but afraid of, being tedious in literature; so with delightful affectation his vehicle is persiflage with a load of wit he pretends to disdain. Of all the prose writers of the Beardsley111 period he is the easiest and most charming to read. In fact, he is

arterlies, while in 1896 the little red volume with its white paper label appeared as The Works, containing all the best of this precocious enfant terrible of literature, who assures us that he read in bed, while at school, Marius the Epicurean, and found it not nearly so difficult as Midshipman Easy. At the age of twenty-five he cries: 'I shall write no more. Already

that though the Boer War and the Great War do not seem to have gagged him, there is something so impishly

ill take no liberty with their ritual; but Max saves the period with his whimsical irony. His is not the fearful, mordant irony of Octave Mirbeau, but a dainty butterfly fancy playing lightly over the113 pleasures of a pleasant life. To be essentially civilised is to be like a god. This is the pose of such a mentality. It is a winsome pose with no sharp edges to it, ju

time, and his personality is so likeable we stomach it all the time. It is the note that vibrates through all his amiable satiric irony, whether it be on the House of Commons Manner or in defence of the use of Cosmetics, or in describing the period of 1880. Everything, from first to last, is done with such good taste. Even in his wildest flights of raillery he is utterly purposed not to offend. In his charming paper, 1880, he has given us a vigorous vignette of the previous decade to The Yellow Book age. One can hardly help quoting a small passage here from this admirably worked up prose: 'In fact Beauty had existed long before 1880. It was Mr. Oscar Wilde who managed her début. To study the period is to admit that to him was due no small part of the social vogue that Beauty began to enjoy. Fired by his fervid words, men and women hurled their mahogany into the streets and ran

tent116 where there was the greatest noise and bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light. The "domino-room" at the Café Royal had always a great fascination for him: he liked the mirrors and the florid gilding, the little parties of foreigners, and the smoke and the clatter of the dominoes being shuffled on the marble tables.... I remember, also, very clearly, a supper at which Beardsley was present. After the supper we sat up rather late. He was the life and soul of the party

dler, Ma

art of their efflorescence. Sufficient unto that time is his work, and with a final quotation from this early paper so redolent of the movement that there is no mistaking it, we must leave him and his future on the knees of the gods: 'Was it not at Capua that they had a whole street where nothing was sold but dyes and unguents? We must have such a street, and, to fill our new Seplos

Sugar (The Parade, 1897), should also be mentioned as