Bernard Muddiman

“ From this it will be seen that Beardsley’s literary work,735 like his black-and-white, though the embodiment of the spirit of his age, is also of the noble order of the highest things in art. It is for this reason, indeed, that I have selected Beardsley as the centre-piece of this brief sketch of a movement that is dead and gone. He was the incarnation of the spirit of the age; but, when the fall of Wilde killed the age and the Boer War buried it, neither of these things disturbed or changed the magic spell of his art. His age may die, but he remains. ”

“ For us, indeed, this landscape has changed from what it once was, and looking at it now we acquire a new impression which was denied to the critics of the age itself. Some of us, without a doubt, have gone to the opposite extreme and prattle about it as an age of 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 is a little masterpiece conceived almost in the hopeless bitterness of Hardy at his darkest, most pessimistic moment. The crudeness in workmanship has gone, only the relentless inevitability of it all remains like the tragedies of life itself. Rosa Blencarn, the parson’s niece, 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. ”

“ 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 low upon their foreheads, to smile with open lips and eyes that met your glance, as they had been half women. ”

“ 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 grace almost Pierrot-like. Perhaps, indeed, they all had something of the Pierrot quality in them. Beardsley himself was enchanted by that little opera without words, ‘L’Enfant Prodigue.’ Dowson made a play about him. The Happy Hypocrite might be a story of the Pierrot himself grown old. ”

“ Paris, always the city of light, was again fluting new melodies for the world. In the Rue de Rome, Stéphane Mallarmé received all the world of art and letters. To the Rue de Rome came Whistler, John Payne, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and others. The French influence that swept over to England was as powerful as that which stirred artistic Germany, creating a German period of the nineties in the group of symbolists who, under Stefan George, issued the now famous Blätter für die Kunst. ”

“ In the same year Paul Fort, just eighteen summers like Beardsley, founded the Théâtre d’Art. All this French art at high pressure had a stimulating effect on English art; and, in fact, remained its main stimulus until the Boer War, when the imperialism of writers like Kipling became the chief interest. So it was in no small degree the literary symbolists, the plein air painters and all the motives that lay behind them, that awoke the Englishmen of the nineties to new possibilities in art and life. In Paris, in 1890, Rothenstein met Conder, and at once the two became lifelong friends. ”

“ In front of his window (if a temperament be a window looking out on life) there is a pleasant garden. Beyond is the noise and dust of the highway. He is the dandy in his choice of life as in his choice of literature, and in more than one sense he has written the happiest essays of the period.
It has been said his caricatures are essays. May we not equally say his essays are caricatures? The essay, indeed, is the work of the feline male, the man who sits beside the fire like Charles Lamb. The out-of-doors man writes the episode. ”

“ If, for the sake of making a beginning, one2 must fix on that memorable day when Beardsley burnt his boats as the date of the opening of the period of the nineties, it must be remembered that this arbitrary limitation of the movement is rather a convenience than a necessity. To divide up anything so continuous as literature and art into sections like a bookcase is uncommonly like damming up a portion of a stream to look at the fish in it. ”

“ True, at the same period as the nineties Oscar Wilde was producing plays burlesquing the world of Society, and Bernard Shaw was getting ready to launch his own works by bombasting every one else’s; but the little movement of the younger men 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. ”

“ Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé was illustrated by the newly arrived young artist. The columns of the papers and magazines spread his fame, or more often belittled it. The new art magazine, The Studio, not only raised him to the skies, but had its first cover done by him. And all this happened to a boy who had only been gone from school six years, and whose total age when he became the art craze of London was only twenty-two. But he was not to stop there. After four more years of crowded, feverish work he was to die, after having affected all the black and white art of the world. ”

“ Be this as it may, the men of the nineties bequeathed a certain subtleness of emotion to our art that is not without its value. They took Byron’s satanism and inflamed it with the lurid light of Baudelaire. Buveurs de lune after the manner of Paul Verlaine, they evoked something of the ethereal glamour of moonlight itself. ”

“ If the long staying powers required for the great novel in the world of comparative literature did not belong to the writers of the nineties group, at any rate they developed, more or less artistically, the climacteric effects of the conte. For the short story crossed the Channel by means of Guy de Maupassant, and out of it arose on this side for a brief decade or so a wonderful wealth of art. The short stories of Kipling are by no means the only pebbles on the beach. In fact, never even in France itself was there such variety of theme and treatment. ”

“ Beyond 1899 we cannot follow him, but he has been busy ever since with his parodies, his Yet Again, his lamentable novel, his one-act play, and so on.
It is to that Beardsley period to which he said he belonged we are here restricted. And it must be admitted that though the Boer War and the Great War do not seem to have gagged him, there is something so impishly impudent in his earlier work which renders it more remarkable than the complacent efforts of his later years.
Amid the searching seriousness of the nineties, Max is like balm in Gilead. He has the infinite blessing of irony. ”

“ He always had an engaging smile that was delightful for friends and strangers; while he was big enough, Robert Ross chronicles, to make friends and remain friends with many for whom his art was totally unintelligible.
After he vacated The Yellow Book art editorship, and The Savoy had been issued, Leonard Smithers became the real Beardsley publisher. There were no dead-locks with him as to nude Amors, for Smithers had a courage of his own—a courage great enough to issue The Ballad of Reading Gaol when Wilde was under his cloud, and no other publisher would look at it. ”

“ Beauty was sought in the most unlikely places. Young painters found her mobbled in the fogs, and bank-clerks versed in the writings of Mr. Hamerton, were heard to declare, as they sped home from the city, that the Underground Railway was beautiful from London Bridge to Westminster, but not from Sloane Square to Notting Hill Gate.’
It is thus that Max can play with a chord of almost tender irony on his subject, and such a style, so full of the writer’s personality, has the cachet of the veritable essayist. How charmingly, for example, he records his reminiscences of Beardsley. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What he wrote of Whistler in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, we may say of him:114 ‘His style never falters. The silhouette of no sentence is ever blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear, vocal cadence.’ And the refrain is Max himself all the 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. ”

“ When he leaves The Yellow Book it will be found to be never the same. When he is too ill to be active in The Savoy it becomes very small beer. So interwoven with the lives and values of these publications is the genius of Beardsley that one cannot speak of the one without referring to the other. Of Beardsley himself I have already spoken, so I propose to confine myself strictly to the art editor, while dealing first with The Yellow Book and its literary editor, Henry Harland, and then with The Savoy and Mr. Arthur Symons. ”

“ It has all the unsavoury cruelty of humanity, and to find other such scenes in English literature we have to come down to Caradoc Evans’s My People, or James Joyce.
In Trevor Perkins, in a brief masterly way, we have the soul of the average young man of the nineties, who has ceased to believe in God or tolerate his parents, sketched for us. He walks out with the waitress of his bunshop, and we realise at once he is of those who are doomed to make fools of themselves on the reef of her sex. ”

“ For where in all the theatres of the London of the nineties would the plays (if they had been written) of these young 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 only at the end of the decade do we see the dramatic outburst when the Irish movement founded a theatre of its own and produced J. M. Synge, and also when Miss Horniman gave Manchester a repertory theatre, and then Stanley Houghton came. ”

“ Sea nymphs swim through the windows of a sunken town, and reach towards the rose hands covered with rings; and a vague twilight hangs over all.’ This is explained to represent the search of man for the fleshly beauty which is so full of illusions for us all, while the spiritual beauty is ever far away. To this kind of interpretative design Oscar Wilde’s swan song, The Harlot’s House, lends itself admirably, and Miss Gyles’s black and white work here becomes inspired to the standard of Beardsley’s and Sime’s best work. ”

“ We must have such a street, and, to fill our new Seplosia, our Arcade of Unguents, all herbs and minerals and live creatures shall give of their substance. The white cliffs of Albion shall be ground to powder for Loveliness, and perfumed by the ghost of many a little violet. ”

“ From this fashionable world to the rude and rugged scars and fells of Cumberland is a far cry; but here, as elsewhere, Crackanthorpe finds the friction of humanity is its own worst enemy. Yet behind all this impenetrably impersonal bitter78 play of human passions in these short stories, one feels somehow or other the distant beats of the author’s compassionate heart, which his sickness of life made him forcibly stop in the pride of his youth before he had time to realise himself or fulfil his rich promise. ”

“ And all these criticisms now, all these quarrels, are like old spent battlefields the sands of gracious time have covered over and hidden from view. Alone the best work of the period remains; for good art has no period or special vogue. ”

“ If by this is implied a keener sensitiveness to certain feelings pulsating in the art of this movement, one will not have very far to go to find its cause in the French impressionistic school of Manet, which, after saturating all types of French artists, undoubtedly invaded writers over here even before the movement of the nineties began. On the age without a doubt it had a lasting influence, so that to a certain degree, without being over-busy with what went before, we may say its writers brought it to no small degree into common use in our literature. ”

“ To live through a single day with that overpowering consciousness of our real position, which, in the moments in which alone it mercifully comes, is like blinding light or the thrust of a flaming sword, would drive any man out of his senses.... ”

“ All we ask from our contributors is good work, and good work is all we offer our readers.... We have not invented a new point of view. We are not Realists, or Romanticists, or Decadents. For us, all art is good which is good art.’ The contents of the number included a typical Shaw article, full, like all of his work, of the obvious in the terms of the scandalous; some short stories by Wedmore, Dowson, Rudolf Dircks, Humphrey James, and Yeats. The other articles were hardly very original; but the contributions of Beardsley dwarf everything else. ”