The Men of The Nineties

r we who know so little even about ourselves-how can we, without grave impertinence, boldly say I wish to bring back to the mind of others an age dead and gone? Everything is so interwoven i

tive of the period. There has been a Beardsley craze, and most assuredly there will be one day a119 Sime craze, when collectors have focussed properly the marvellous suggestive power of this artist's work. Unfortunately, scattered up and down old magazines, much of this work is, as it were, lost for t

the Japanese print in this country-a love for the strange which came over to England from France. A typical decorative design of Wilson's20 is 'In the Depths of the Sea,' representing an octopus rampant over a human skull, beneath which are two strange flat fish, and in the background120 a sunken old three-decker with quaintly carved stern and glorious prow. Pick-me-Up first used his

Work, by Arthur Lawrence

flight is in reality severely ordered by the designer's symbolism. Sometimes it is merely121 intriguing, as in drawings like 'The Rose of God,' where a naked woman is spread-eagled against the clouds above a fleet of ships and walled city, while in other designs the symbolism is full of suggestive loveliness, as in 'Noah's Raven.' 'The Ark floats upon a grey sea under a grey sky, and the raven flutters above the sea. A sea nymph, whose slender swaying body drifting among the grey waters is a perfect symbol of the soul untouched by God or by passion, coils the fingers of one hand about his feet and offers him a ring, while her other hand holds a shining rose under the sea. Gr

2

d A phantom lover to her breast, So

Came out and smoked its cigarett

lica of Beardsley, it is not a faint far-off imitation of a Félicien Rops or Armand Rassenfosse,

practises. God forgive me! Or yet again what meed of homage have I yet rendered to Mr. Will Rothenstein's lithographic portraits, which are absolutely a necessity to anyone who would live a while with the shades of these men. Take, for example, his Liber Juniorum, which alone contains l

that haunt the brain of John Gray and Theodore Wratislaw. No note, however short, on the nineties would be complete without a halt for praise of this painter of a strangely coloured dolce far niente. For everything in his work, be it on canvas, silk panel, or dainty fan, is drowsy wi

Conder. His nude figure 'Pearl,' his 'L'Oiseau Bleu,' his 'Femme dans une loge au théatre,' are124 typical of his successful achievements. The 'Fickle Love' fan is

figures of our eighteenth century porcelain factories is so well known, of Conder it may be said, as of all artists with French blood in them, when he is successful he is irresistible. He might not be able

were we not restricted of set purpose to the literary side of the moveme

e, in the person of the late Leonard Smithers, who was at one time in the legal profession at Sheffield, took the field as a publisher by way of H. S. Nichols. He was no mere publisher but a man of considerable scholarship, who not only issued but finished the Sir Richard Burton translation of Catullus. Round him, to a considerable extent, the vanishing group rallied for a little while before Death smote them one by one. Here is no place to pay due justice to this amiable Benvenuto Cellini of book printing himself, but i

to Smithers when the latter was intending to produce The Peacock

Brandon Thomas. Ernest Dowson wrote what Beardsley called a 'tiresome' playlet. John Davidson perpetrated a number of plays such as Bruce (1886), Smith, a tragic farce (1888), Scaramouch in Naxos, and two other plays in 1889 when he was feeling his way, and translated much later

oung men have found a home? Probably the dramatic output of the nineties was nil because there were no small theatres in London at that date of the type to give these young men a hope that any works they might write could be produced. So

remained dramatically dumb. Nothing came even when George Moore produced The Strike at Arlingford and John Todhunter The Black Cat. It is a hard thing to believe that all these young men were devoid of the dramatic instinct. I128 prefer fo

theatre (if one may so symbolise it) is the charity house for emancipated dramatists. Ibsen's Doll's House had been produced in London just before the nineties' epoch began, and, like anything new in

l sorts of movements, as when Paul Fort, a boy of eighteen, founds in 1890 the Théatre d'Art. But what was going on in England? Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Wilde's Salomé, and his light comedies, together with stuff by Henry Arthur Jones, Sydney Grundy, etc., represented the serious drama. The critics were perturbed, as they generally are. The musical comedy and its singing, pirouetting soubrettes deluded the populace into the belief that

tol, 1

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er the critical work of Shaw on The Saturday Review was obviously unhappy. English theatres rapidly became as elaborate and as pompous as the Church Militant in its palmy days. They kept growing in size. In London, indeed, the small theatre n