The Men of The Nineties

as disclosing 'décolleté spirits of astonishing conversation'; Zola influenced that Byron of pessimism, Thomas Hardy, to beget Jude the Obscure (1895), and when the critics assailed

estiveness which came over from France started the sex equation. A hothouse fragrance swept across the pudibond wastes of our literature. Hectics came glorying in their experiences. Richard of the Golden Girl with his banjo lifts up his voice to chaunt 'a bruisèd daffodil of last night's sin.' Women like George Egerton in her Keynotes take questions further than Mrs. Lynn Linton had ever done in the previous decade. Exoticism, often vulgar when not in master hands, blabbed out its secrets in

3

ne eye was blue and one was green, Her bang was cut uneven. She ha

lds the sands of gracious time have covered over and hidden from view. Alone t

f platitudes, and accuse a work of art of being as old as The Yellow Book. One might as well accuse a violet of being as old as the Greek Anthology. For always, to those wandering back in the right spirit to those days, there will come something of the infinite zest which stirred the being of the men of the nineties to create art. It was such an honest effort that o

ous. But it was with these men it first came to exist as a kind of cry of a new clan. It was these men who were essentially hectics who essayed to etch the exotic135 impression. The majority of the work of the movement, in fact, can be described as impressionisms of the abnormal by a group of individualists. For in all their work the predominant keynote will be found to be a keen sense of that strangeness of proportion which Bacon noted as a characteristic of what he called beauty. It is observable as much in the poems of Dowson as in the drawings of Beardsley, two of the leading types of the movement. It vibrates intensely in the minor work of men like Wratislaw, and also in John Gray's early volume, as I have endeavoured to show. All Mr. Arthur Symons's criticism is a narration of his soul's adventures in quest of it. It stirr

thereal glamour of moonlight itself. A realist like Crackanthorpe tried to tread the whole via dolorosa without faltering by the wayside. Poetry caught the mood of bizarre crises and Edgar Wilson wrought a strange delicate world of visions. In Max Beerbohm irony took on a weird twinge of

bides vestiges of the interest of humanity. Only some things are easier to recall than others. They stand out more, so that one is bound to remark them. They have, so to speak, a cachet of their own. Among these in this movement th

nd