THE EIGHTEEN NINETIES

A REVIEW OF ART AND IDEAS AT THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

BY

HOLBROOK JACKSON

AUTHOR OF “ROMANCE AND REALITY,” ETC.

LONDON

GRANT RICHARDS LTD.

MDCCCCXXII

First Edition 1913 Reprinted 1922

Printed in Great Britain by the Riverside Press Limited Edinburgh

TO

MAX BEERBOHM

[6]

Design by Aubrey Beardsley for the Contents Page of The Savoy, Vol. I.

[7]

LIST OF PLATES

[11]

PREFACE

This new edition of “The Eighteen Nineties” has been revised and corrected. Here and there notes and sentences have been added for purposes of clarity. In all other respects it resembles the 1913 edition. Through the courtesy of the Proprietors of “Punch” it has been possible to add to the illustrations Mr E. T. Reed’s admirable caricature, “Britannia à la Beardsley.”

H. J.

London, 1922

[13]

INTRODUCTION

There is little to say by way of introduction to this study, as the title, I imagine, explains the subject, with the possible exception that it does not, for reasons of space, indicate that I have reviewed only certain tendencies in art and ideas in this country. I have had, of course, to refer, incidentally, to the work of foreign writers and painters, but only as part of the process of tracing origins and lines of development. This is said not as excuse but in explanation of omissions which might otherwise be questioned. The movement which I have described in the British Islands was, to be sure, but one phase of a literary and artistic awakening which had its counterparts in many countries, particularly in France and Germany, and to some extent in Italy and Russia. Mr Arthur Symons, in the Symbolist Movement in Literature, has given us a valuable interpretation of one of its important phases in France, and Mr W. G. Blaikie Murdoch, in The Renaissance of the Nineties, has dealt eloquently, but all too briefly, with certain manifestations of the awakening in

our own country, whilst Mr J. M. Kennedy in English Literature, 1880–1905, has made the literary history of the quarter century he reviews the basis of an argument in defence of the classical as against the romantic idea. My intention has been to co-ordinate the various movements of the period, and avoiding sectional or specialised argument, to interpret them not only in relation to one another, but in relation to their foreign influences and the main trend of our national art and life. Thus my aim may be described as interpretative rather than critical, although criticism is not easily avoided by one who engages to select examples and instances from a great body of work.

No excuse need be made by me for confining my review to so limited a period as the last decade of the nineteenth[14] century, for once having decided to write about the art and ideas of the closing years of that century, the final ten years insisted upon definite recognition by the coincidence of position in time and appropriate happenings in literature, painting, and other arts and crafts. But, as a matter of fact, I have not confined myself strictly to a single decade, for it will be seen that my Nineties trespass upon the adjoining territory of the Eighties and the Nineteen Hundreds, and, to protect myself as far as possible against extraneous argument, I have adopted in the initial chapter the dates “1890–1900” as a kind of symbol for the period. The compromise is defensible, as I have not wilfully singled out a decade for review; that decade had singled itself out, the Eighteen Nineties having already become a distinctive epoch in the minds of those who concern themselves with art and ideas.

Anybody who studies the moods and thoughts of the Eighteen Nineties cannot fail to observe their central characteristic in a widespread concern for the correct—that is, the most effective, the most powerful, the most righteous—mode of living. For myself, however, the awakening of the Nineties does not appear to be the realisation of a purpose, but the realisation of a possibility. Life aroused curiosity. People became enthusiastic about the way it should be used. And in proof of sincerity there were opinionated battles—most of them inconclusive. But they were not wasteful on that account, for the very circumstance of idea pitting itself against idea, vision against vision, mood against mood, and, indeed, whim against whim, cleared the way for more definite action when the time ripened. It was an epoch of experiment, with some achievement and some remorse. The former is to be seen in certain lasting works of art and in the acceptance of new, and sometimes revolutionary, social ideas; the latter in the repentant attitude of so many poets and other artists of the time who, after

tasting more life than was good for them, reluctantly sought peace in an escape from material concerns. The decade began with a dash for life and ended with a retreat—but not defeat. It was the[15] old battle between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, materialist and mystic, Christian and Pagan, but fought from a great variety of positions. Arthur Symons summed up the situation very effectively in the conclusion to Studies in Prose and Verse, where he discusses the conversion of Huysmans. “He has realised,” Mr Symons wrote, “the great choice between the world and something which is not the visible world, but out of which the visible world has been made, does not lie in the mere contrast of the subtler and grosser senses. He has come to realise what the choice really is, and he has chosen. Yet the choice is not quite so narrow as Barbey D’Aurevilly thought; perhaps it is a choice between actualising this dream or actualising that dream. In his escape from the world, one man chooses religion, and seems to find himself; another

choosing love may seem also to find himself; and may not another, coming to art as to a religion and as to a woman, seem to find himself not less effectively? The one certainty is that society is the enemy of man, and that formal art is the enemy of the artist. We shall not find ourselves in drawing-rooms or in museums. A man who goes through a day without some fine emotion has wasted his day, whatever he has gained by it. And it is so easy to go through day after day, busily and agreeably, without ever really living for a single instant. Art begins when a man wishes to immortalise the most vivid moment he has ever lived. Life has already, to one not an artist, become art in that moment. And the making of one’s life into art is after all the first duty and privilege of every man. It is to escape from material reality into whatever form of ecstasy is our own form of spiritual existence.” There we have the attitude of the Eighteen Nineties from which most pilgrimages into life began. In the following pages I have endeavoured

to expound the attitude and to indicate its victories and defeats.

Finally, I have to thank all those who have so willingly given me their aid by permitting me to quote from their works and to use the illustrations written and pictorial which add so much to the grace and value of this book. Particularly[16] I must thank Mr John Lane for permission to use the following designs by Aubrey Beardsley:—“The Rape of the Lock,” “Tail-piece from Salomé,” and the cover designs from The Yellow Book and The Savoy; Mr William Heinemann, for the study of Rudyard Kipling from Twelve Portraits by William Nicholson; Messrs J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., for Aubrey Beardsley’s page decoration from the Morte d’Arthur; Messrs George Routledge & Sons Ltd., for the frontispiece and title-page of The House of Joy, by Laurence Housman; the proprietors of Punch, for “A Lecture in Store,” by Phil May; the editor of Vanity Fair, for the caricature of Phil May by Spy; the editor of The Saturday Review, for William Rothenstein’s cover design of the Christmas Supplement, 1896; Mr Walter Crane and Messrs George

Allen & Co. Ltd., for the illustration from the decorated edition of the Faerie Queene; Mr Walter Crane, for the Socialist cartoon, “A Garland for May Day”; Mr Francis Meynell, for the photograph of the life mask of Francis Thompson; Mr Raven Hill, for “A Voluptuary,” from Pick-me-up; Mr Charles Ricketts, for the decorated pages from the Vale Press edition of John Gray’s Spiritual Poems; the executors of William Morris, for the page from the Kelmscott Coleridge; Mr Max Beerbohm, for his caricature of Aubrey Beardsley and “Mr W. B. Yeats introducing Mr George Moore to the Queen of the Fairies”; and my friends, Mr Frederick H. Evans, for his portrait study of Beardsley; Mr William Rothenstein, for his drawing of A. E. Housman; Mr S. H. Sime, for “The Banks of the Styx”; Mr Grant Richards, for the “Arrival of Prince Charming,” and “The Peacock Fan,” by Charles Conder; and Mr Frederick Richardson, for untiring help and many suggestions during the making of the book in all its stages.

Holbrook Jackson.

London, October, 1913.

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CHAPTER I FIN DE SIÈCLE—1890–1900

In the year 1895 Max Beerbohm announced, how whimsically and how ironically it is not necessary to consider, that he felt himself a trifle outmoded. “I belong to the Beardsley period,” he said. The Eighteen Nineties were then at their meridian; but it was already the afternoon of the Beardsley period. That very year Aubrey Beardsley’s strange black and white masses and strong delicate lines disappeared from The Yellow Book, and he only contributed to the first few numbers of The Savoy, which began in 1896. Fatal disease was overtaking him, and remorse. Aubrey Beardsley actually abandoned his period in the evening of its brief day, and when he died, in 1898, the Beardsley period had almost become a memory. But, after all, Aubrey Beardsley was but an incident of the Eighteen Nineties, and only relatively a significant incident. He was but one expression of fin de siècle daring, of a bizarre and often exotic courage, prevalent at the time and connected but indirectly, and often negatively, with some of the most vital movements of a decade which was singularly rich

in ideas, personal genius and social will. Aubrey Beardsley crowded the vision of the period by the peculiarity of his art rather than by any need there was of that art to make the period complete. He was, therefore, not a necessity of the Eighteen Nineties, although his appearance in the decade was inevitable; indeed he was so essentially fin de siècle that one can say of him with more confidence than of any other artist of the decade that his appearance at any other time would have been inopportune.

The Eighteen Nineties were so tolerant of novelty in art and ideas that it would seem as though the declining century[18] wished to make amends for several decades of intellectual and artistic monotony. It may indeed be something more than coincidence that placed this decade at the close of a century, and fin de siècle may have been at one and the same time a swan song and a deathbed repentance. As a matter of fact, a quickening of life during the last years of a century is not without parallel. The preceding century closed with the French Revolution and the First Consulate of Napoleon, and the sixteenth century closed with the destruction of the Armada and the appearance of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Spenser, Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon; whilst the close of the fifteenth century saw the Revival of Learning, and the discovery of America by Columbus and of Newfoundland by Cabot. One cannot avoid the temptation to speculate on the meaning of such fin de siècle occurrences, for we are actually made more conscious of our standing towards time by the approaching demise of

a century, just as we are made conscious of our own ages on birthday anniversaries and New Year’s Eve. And it is at least thinkable that as we are certainly moved in the latter circumstances to pull ourselves together, as it were, even if the effort be only an instinctive attempt to find in action forgetfulness of the flight of time; so it is equally thinkable that a similar but racial instinct towards unique activity may come about at so impressive a period as the close of a century. But, whatever the cause, the last decade of the last century was, in spite of its many extravagances, a renascent period, characterised by much mental activity and a quickening of the imagination, combined with pride of material prosperity, conquest and imperial expansion, as well as the desire for social service and a fuller communal and personal life.

The Yellow Book

An Illustrated Quarterly

Volume 1 April 1894

London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane Boston: Copeland & Day

Price 5/- Net

Cover Design of The Yellow Book, Volume I

By Aubrey Beardsley

Max Nordau, the Jeremiah of the period, linked up his famous attack on what were called “fin de siècle tendencies” with certain traditional beliefs in the evil destiny of the closure of centuries. “The disposition of the times is curiously confused,” he said; “a compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement, of fearful presage and hang-dog renunciation. The prevalent feeling is that of [19]imminent perdition and extinction. Fin de siècle is at once a confession and a complaint. The old northern faith contained the fearsome doctrine of the Dusk of the Gods. In our days there have arisen in more highly developed minds vague qualms of the Dusk of the Nations, in which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world.” All of which sounds very hectic and hysterical now, nearly twenty years after it was first written, when many of the writers and artists he condemned have become harmless classics, and some almost forgotten. But it is interesting to remember Nordau’s

words, because they are an example of the very liveliness of a period which was equally lively in making or marring itself. The Eighteen Nineties, however, were not entirely decadent and hopeless; and even their decadence was often decadence only in name, for much of the genius denounced by Max Nordau as degeneration was a sane and healthy expression of a vitality which, as it is not difficult to show, would have been better named regeneration.

At the same time the fact must not be overlooked that much of the vitality of the period, much even of its effective vitality, was destructive of ideas and conventions which we had come to look upon as more or less permanent; and one cannot help feeling, at this distance, that not a little of fin de siècle attractiveness was the result of abandonment due to internal chaos. But this is no cause for condemnation on our part, still less for self-complacency; for, as we have been told by Friedrich Nietzsche, himself a half-felt motive force, in this country at least, behind the tendencies of the times: “Unless you have chaos within you cannot give birth to a dancing star.” More than one dancing star swam into our ken in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and the proof of the regenerative powers of the period are to be found most obviously, but perhaps even more certainly, if not quite so plainly, in the fact that those who were most allied with its moods and whims were not only conscious of the fact, but in some cases capable of looking at themselves and

laughing. Fin de siècle was a pose as well as a fact, a point not realised[20] by Nordau. John Davidson, among others, was able to smile at its extravagances, and in Earl Lavender, his burlesque novel of the decadence, one of the characters, a garrulous Cockney dame with a smattering of French, reveals the existence of power to cast what Meredith would have called “the oblique ray” upon the doings of the time. “It’s fang-de-seeaycle that does it, my dear,” says this lady, “and education, and reading French.”

It is obvious, then, that people felt they were living amid changes and struggles, intellectual, social and spiritual, and the interpreters of the hour—the publicists, journalists and popular purveyors of ideas of all kinds—did not fail to make a sort of traffic in the spirit of the times. Anything strange or uncanny, anything which savoured of freak and perversity, was swiftly labelled fin de siècle, and given a certain topical prominence. The term became a fashion, and writers vied one with another as to which should apply it most aptly. At least one writer emphasised the phrase in an attempt to stigmatise it. “Observe,” wrote Max Beerbohm, “that I write no fool’s prattle about le fin de siècle.” And Max Nordau gives a useful list illustrating the manner in which the term was used in the country of its birth. A king who abdicates but retains by agreement certain political rights, which he afterwards sells to his country to provide means for the liquidation of debts contracted by play in Paris, is a fin de siècle king.

The police official who removes a piece of the skin of the murderer Pranzini after execution and has it tanned and made into a cigar-case, is a fin de siècle official. An American wedding ceremony held in a gasworks and the subsequent honeymoon in a balloon is a fin de siècle wedding. A schoolboy who, on passing the gaol where his father is imprisoned for embezzlement, remarks to a chum: “Look, that’s the governor’s school,” is a fin de siècle son. These are only a few from among innumerable examples illustrating the liveliness of the people of the Nineties to their hour and its characteristics. A further indication of the way in which the phrase permeated the mind of the period is found in its frequent occurrence in the books and essays of the day. It[21] appears fittingly enough in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, that typical book of the period, as a reflection upon an epigram afterwards used in A Woman of No Importance. Lady Narborough is saying:

“‘If we women did not love you for your defects, where would you all be? Not one of you would ever be married. You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors. Not, however, that that would alter you much. Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors and all the bachelors like married men!’

“‘Fin de siècle,’ murmured Sir Henry.

“‘Fin du globe,’ answered his hostess.

“‘I wish it were fin du globe,’ said Dorian, with a sigh. ‘Life is a great disappointment.’”

A reviewer of the novel, in The Speaker of 5th July 1890, describes Lord Henry Wotton as “an extremely fin-de-siècle gentleman.” And another book of the period, Baron Verdigris: A Romance of the Reversed Direction, by Jocelyn Quilp, issued in 1894, with a frontispiece by Beardsley, is prefaced by the following inscription:—

This Book is Dedicated equally to Fin-de-Siècleism, the Sensational Novel, and the Conventional Drawing-Room Ballad.

But side by side with the prevailing use of the phrase, and running its popularity very close, came the adjective “new”; it was applied in much the same way to indicate extreme modernity. Like fin de siècle, it hailed from France, and, after its original application in the phrase l’art nouveau had done considerable service in this country as a prefix to modern pictures, dresses and designs, our publicists discovered that other things were equally worthy of the useful adjective. Grant Allen wrote of “The New Hedonism”; H. D. Traill, of “The New Fiction,” opening his essay with the words: “Not to be new is, in these days, to be nothing.”[22] In August 1892 William Sharp designed and produced one number, and one only, of The Pagan Review, which was written entirely by himself under various pseudonyms, to promote the “New Paganism,” described as “a potent leaven in the yeast of the ‘younger generation,’ and which was concerned only with the new presentment of things.” And again, in the famous attack on The Picture of Dorian Gray, in