the poetry of the period is essentially an expression of moods and sentiments. it is as much a form of impressionism as the art of monet and renoir. further, it seeks after, like all the art of the nineties, that abnormality of proportion of which bacon wrote in his ‘essay on beauty.’ it is, too, a period wonderfully fertile in song. besides the nineties’ group, which is represented chiefly by the rhymers’ club, there were many other schools of song. lord alfred douglas in his city of the soul, oscar wilde in his sphinx and the harlot’s house, stephen phillips and henley, francis thompson in his hound of heaven, are but some of the richness i am compelled to pass over in order to adhere strictly to the programme of this rough summary. let us, therefore, turn at once to the rhymers’ club, whose origin and desires have been so well explained by arthur symons, the cicerone to the age, in his essay on ernest dowson. at the cheshire cheese in fleet street it was80 arranged that a band of young poets should meet, striving to recapture in london something of the gallic spirit of art and the charm of open discussion in the latin quartier. the club consisted of the following members: john davidson, ernest dowson, edwin j. ellis, george arthur greene, lionel johnson, arthur cecil hillier, richard le gallienne, victor plarr, ernest radford, ernest rhys, thomas william rolleston, arthur symons, john todhunter, and william butler yeats. besides these members, the club, which was without rules or officers, had at one time affiliated to itself the following permanent guests: john gray, edward rose, j. t. nettleship, morley roberts, a. b. chamberlain, edward garnett, and william theodore peters.
oscar wilde, though never a member, had a great influence on many of those who were, and victor plarr describes a memorable meeting of the rhymers in mr. herbert horne’s rooms in the fitzroy settlement at which wilde appeared. the poet goes on: ‘it was an evening of notabilities. mr. walter crane stood with his back to the mantelpiece, deciding, very kindly, on the merits of our effusions. and round oscar wilde, not then under a cloud, hovered reverently lionel johnson and ernest81 dowson, with others. this must have been in 1891, and i marvelled at the time to notice the fascination which poor wilde exercised over the otherwise rational. he sat as it were enthroned and surrounded by a differential circle.’
the influence of verlaine and the symbolist poets of paris in this circle was profound. every one had a passion for things french. symons translated the prose poems of baudelaire and the verses of mallarmé, dowson is inspired by the ‘fêtes gallantes,’ and so on. as mr. plarr writes: ‘stray gauls used to be imported to grace literary circles here. i remember one such—a rare instance of a rough frenchman—to whom dowson was devoted. when a gaul appeared in a coterie we were either silent, like the schoolgirls in their french conversation hour, or we talked a weird un-french french like the ladies in some of du maurier’s drawings.’15
15 victor plarr, ernest dowson, p. 23. 1914.
of course it must not be supposed, however, that the nineties ever remained at all stationary in this condition or entirely under these influences. mr. plarr is speaking of the early nineties, the age when john gray’s silverpoints was perhaps a fair sample of the poetry of the82 moment for this group; but, when at the same time it must be remembered, poets like francis thompson and william watson were carrying on the staider traditions of english poetry altogether unmoved by these exotic influences from montmartre and the studios of the south. the nineties group itself only remained for a restive moment like this before each man was to go his own way. they were indeed all souls seeking the way to perfection in art. yeats went off to assist to found the irish school; richard le gallienne went to america; gray became a priest. many disappeared shortly afterwards from the lower slopes of parnassus, not being of those dowered with the true call; and so, one after the other, all are to be accounted for. the genuine men of the nineties after the fall of wilde seem to have migrated to smithers’ wonderful bookshop in bond street, where their later works were issued in ornate editions.
the names of others besides the actual members of the rhymers’ club must not be altogether forgotten, such as percy hemingway with his happy wanderer, theodore wratislaw, olive custance, dollie radford, rosamund marriott-watson, norman gale, and many others who were also of the movement. however,83 of them i cannot speak here, but can only refer the reader to the book-lists of elkin mathews and john lane for the first period, and of leonard smithers for the second. in the numerous slim plaquettes of verse issued from these presses he will find golden verse worthy of the labour of his research. indeed, amid so many writers one is compelled to resort to the odious necessity of a choice, so i shall here all too briefly deal with silverpoints as a typical volume of the early period, and then trace succinctly the career of two poets, who had certainly the right to that appellation, ernest dowson and john davidson, and who were both not only of, but actually were the movement itself. lastly, in this section, as an indication of the wide influence these writers had overseas, as in the case of the birch bark school of canada and certain poets in australia, i wish to mention the young american poet who was an intimate of so many of the men of the nineties—william theodore peters.
the narrow green octavo of silverpoints, with its lambent golden flames, strikes the eye at once as some bizarre and exotic work. it was one of the first of the limited éditions de luxe that mark the new printing of the decade, and is one of the most dainty little books ever issued by elkin mathews and john lane.84 most of the titles are in french, and there are imitations from charles baudelaire, arthur rimbaud, stéphane mallarmé, paul verlaine—the gods of the symbolist school at that moment. poems are dedicated (it was the habit of the decade) to friends, including pierre lou?s, paul verlaine, oscar wilde, r. h. sherard, henri teixeira de mattos, ernest dowson, etc. the predominant note is that of tigress’s blood and tiger-lilies. honey, roses, white breasts, and golden hair, with fierce passion and indolent languor, are the chords of the book’s frisson. all the panoply of the new english art begotten from the french here burgeons forth with the satanic note that was then in the fashion. we find this in the femmes damnées:
like moody beasts they lie along the sands; look where the sky against the sea-rim clings: foot stretches out to foot, and groping hands have languors soft and bitter shudderings.
some by the light of crumbling, resinous gums, in the still hollows of old pagan dens, call thee in aid to their deliriums o bacchus! cajoler of ancient pains.
and those whose breasts for scapulars are fain nurse under their long robes the cruel thong, these, in dim woods, where huddling shadows throng, mix with the foam of pleasure tears of pain.
85 there is more than an echo of rimbaud’s verses in this volume, and the poet is evidently straining always after the violent effect, the climacteric moment of a mood or passion. probably two of the most successfully carried through crises are the barber and mishka. the first of these as a typical example of the whole school i venture to spheterize in full:
i dreamed i was a barber; and there went beneath my hand, oh! manes extravagant. beneath my trembling fingers, many a mask of many a pleasant girl. it was my task to gild their hair, carefully, strand by strand; to paint their eyebrows with a timid hand; to draw a bodkin, from a vase of kohl, through the closed lashes; pencils from a bowl of sepia, to paint them underneath; to blow upon their eyes with a soft breath. they lay them back and watched the leaping bands.
the dream grew vague, i moulded with my hands the mobile breasts, the valley; and the waist i touched; and pigments reverently placed upon their thighs in sapient spots and stains, beryls and chrysolites and diaphanes, and gems whose hot harsh names are never said i was a masseur; and my fingers bled with wonder as i touched their awful limbs.
suddenly, in the marble trough there seems o, last of my pale mistresses, sweetness! a twylipped scarlet pansie. my caress86 tinges thy steel-grey eyes to violet, adown thy body skips the pit-a-pat of treatment once heard in a hospital for plagues that fascinate, but half appal.
so, at the sound, the blood of me stood cold; thy chaste hair ripened into sullen gold; thy throat, the shoulders, swelled and were uncouth; the breasts rose up and offered each a mouth; and on the belly, pallid blushes crept, that maddened me, until i laughed and wept.
here we have a long amorous catalogue. it is the catalogue age which comes via oscar wilde’s sphinx and salomé from certain french writers. but this does not make up for the singing power of the poet, and in long poems it becomes singularly laborious. however, this phase of poetry is so typical of the age that it is as well to have dealt with it before turning to the essentially ‘singing’ poets of the period, dowson and davidson.
indeed, there is no one in the nineties worthier of the honourable title of poet than ernest dowson. with his unsatisfied passion for adelaide in soho; his cry for ‘madder music and for stronger wine’; his ?sthetic theories, such as that the letter ‘v’ was the most87 beautiful of the letters; his reverence for things french, he has caused mr. symons, in one of his most notable essays, to draw a delightful portrait of a true enfant de bohême. robert harborough sherard has also kept the dowson tradition up in his description of the death of the vexed and torn spirit of the poet in his twenty years in paris, a work which contains much interesting material for a study of the nineties. but victor plarr, another poet of the nineties, enraged at the incompleteness of these pictures, has tried to give us in his reminiscences, unpublished letters, and marginalia, the other facet of dowson—the poète intime known to few.
it is no question of ours, in a brief summary like this, which is the truer portrait of dowson; whether he was or was not like keats in his personal appearance; whether arthur moore and dowson wrote alternate chapters of a comedy of masks; whether in his last days or not leonard smithers used to pay him thirty shillings a week for all he could do; whether he used to pray or not in front of the bearded virgin at arques; whether he used to drink hashish or not. all these problems are outside the beauty of the lyric poetry of dowson; and it is by his poetry and not88 because of all these rumours around his brief life that he will live.
he was the poet impressionist of momentary emotions, and poetry with him was, as stéphane mallarmé said, ‘the language of a crisis.’ each dowson poem is more or less the feverish impression of a hectical crisis. for in a way he takes off where keats ended, for keats was becoming a hectic, while dowson started out as one.
exceeding sorrow consumeth my sad heart! because to-morrow we must part. now is exceeding sorrow all my part!...
be no word spoken; weep nothing: let a pale silence, unbroken silence prevail! prithee, be no word spoken, lest i fail!
his earliest poem to attract attention was amor umbratilis, which appeared in horne’s century guild hobby horse. it has the real dowson note, and marks him down at once as one of those poets who are by nature buveurs de lune. that was in 1891. in 1892 came out the first book of the rhymers’ club, and89 with six poems of dowson in it he definitely took his place in the movement. it is said that the oscar wilde set sent him a telegram shortly after this ‘peremptorily ordering him to appear at the café royal to lunch with the then great man.’ dowson was flattered, and might well be, for wilde was a splendid judge of good work.
two years later the club’s second book appeared, and dowson has again half a dozen poems in it, including the lovely extreme unction, and that rather doubtfully praised lyric ‘non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno cynarae.’ then in the same year as the savoy (1896) appeared his verses, printed on japanese vellum and bound in parchment, with a cover design in gold by aubrey beardsley—a typical smithers book. this volume contains the best of dowson, the handsel (if it is not too big a phrase to use of such a delicate and delightful artist), the handsel of his immortality. for there is something about dowson’s best work, though so fragile in its texture, that has the classic permanence of a latter-day propertius. he has a latin brevity and clarity, and he is at his best in this volume. something has vanished from the enchantment of the singer in decorations (1899). it is like the90 flowers of the night before. one feels that so many of these later verses had been done perforce, as victor plarr says, rather to keep on in the movement lest one was forgotten. but in 1899 the movement was moribund, and the winter of discontent for the pierrots of the nineties was fast closing down. remembering these things, one murmurs the sad beauty of those perfect lines of this true poet in his first volume:
when this, our rose, is faded, and these, our days, are done, in lands profoundly shaded from tempest and from sun: ah, once more come together, shall we forgive the past, and safe from worldly weather possess our souls at last.
not without reason one feels he has been called the ‘rosa rosarum of all the nineties,’ in so far as poetry is concerned; but, personally, i would prefer to call him, if one has to call such a true poet anything, the poets’ poet of the nineties. the best of his short stories rank high in the great mass of the literature of those days, and are dealt with (together with his partnership in two novels) in another section. as for his little one-act play,91 the pierrot of the minute, one is apt to feel perhaps that beardsley was not over unjust to it, when he described it as a tiresome playlet he had to illustrate. at any rate, it was the cause of beardsley’s doing one or two admirable decorations, even if the actual play, in which the young american poet of the nineties, theodore peters (of whom more anon), and beardsley’s own sister acted, was not effective as a stage production.
there is no doubt but that davidson, though he was outside the coteries of the nineties, was still of them. first of all he was a scotchman of evangelical extraction, and secondly he was not an oxford man. all this made him outside the group. on the other count, he was of the rhymers’ club, though he did not contribute to the books. he was strongly influenced by nietzsche, though the french influence in him was rather negative. his books came from the bodley head and were well recognised by its other members. beardsley even decorated some of them, and rothenstein did his portrait for the yellow book. in fact, davidson himself wrote for that periodical. all this made him of the group. it would be thus impossible to pass over such a poet in connection with this movement, for davidson has92 written some magnificent lyrics, if he has made his testaments too often and too turgidly. the davidson, indeed, of the nineties will be discovered to be, by any one examining his works, the davidson that will most probably survive.
he was born in 1857, but as mr. holbrook jackson admirably puts it, ‘john davidson did not show any distinctive fin de siècle characteristics until he produced his novel perfervid16 in 1890.’ his next work, a volume of poetry, which was the first to attract attention, in a music hall and other poems (1891), accentuates these distinctive characteristics, and fairly launches him on the tide of the movement. before that time he had been school-mastering and clerking in scotland, while his leisure had begotten three rather ill-conceived works. davidson discovered himself when he came to london to write. the movement of the nineties stimulated him towards artistic production, and when that movement was killed by the fall of wilde, and buried by the boer war, davidson again lost himself in the philosophic propaganda of his last years before he was driven to suicide. philosophy, indeed, with john davidson, was93 to eat one’s heart with resultant mental indigestion that completely unbalanced the artist in him. therefore, so far as this appreciation is concerned, we only have to deal with the happy davidson of the ballads and fleet street eclogues fame; the gay writer of a random itinerary (1894); the rather hopeless novelist of baptist lake (1894), and the wonderful mission of earl lavender (1895). the last tedious phase before he gave himself to the cornish sea is no affair of ours. in his testament he says ‘none should outlive his power,’ and realising probably that he had made this mistake, he wished to end it all.
16 the eighteen nineties, by holbrook jackson, p. 215 1913.
but in the nineties he was like his own birds, full of ‘oboe’ song and ‘broken music.’ seldom has the english river, the thames, been more sweetly chaunted than by him. while if we are looking for his kinship with his time there is no doubt about it in the ballad of a nun, who remarks:
i care not for my broken vow, though god should come in thunder soon, i am sister to the mountains now, and sister to the sun and moon.
a statement which we feel many of the beardsley ladies cadaverous with sin or fat with luxury would have been quite capable of repeating. again, his thirty bob a week in94 the yellow book is as much a ninety effort as his ballad of hell, while his novel, earl lavender, is a burlesque of certain of the eccentricities of the period. in a poetical note to this volume he sings:
oh! our age end style perplexes all our elders’ time has famed; on our sleeves we wear our sexes, our diseases, unashamed.
the prevalent realistic disease in poetry is well represented by a woman and her son:
he set his teeth, and saw his mother die, outside a city reveller’s tipsy tread severed the silence with a jagged rent.
above all, davidson handles with marked facility the modern ballad medium of narrative verse. the ballad of a nun, the ballad of an artist’s wife, and others, relate their story in easy, jogging quatrains. as a sample one can quote from a new ballad of tannh?user:
as he lay worshipping his bride, while rose leaves in her bosom fell, on dreams came sailing on a tide of sleep, he heard a matin bell.
‘hark! let us leave the magic hill,’ he said, ‘and live on earth with men.’ ‘no, here,’ she said, ‘we stay until the golden age shall come again.’
95 but if davidson could tell a tale in verse it cannot be said he understood the novel form. although here it is rather noticeable that he has a strange, unique feature among his contemporaries. for he at least has a sense of humour. max beerbohm, it is true, had the gift of irony; but davidson, almost alone, has a certain vein of grim scotch humour, as, for example, in the character of little red-headed mortimer in perfervid. in dowson, johnson, symons, and the others, one is sometimes appalled by the seriousness of it all. lastly, but by no means least, davidson occasionally attains the lyric rapture of unadulterated poetry in his shorter pieces, while his vignettes of nature linger in the memory on account of their truth and beauty. both these qualities—the lyric rapture and the keen eye for country sights and sounds—are to be found, for instance, in a runnable stag:
when the pods went pop on the broom, green broom, and apples began to be golden-skinned, we harboured a stag in the priory coomb, and we feathered his trail up wind, up wind!
among many other ambitions, davidson wanted to fire the scientific world with96 imaginative poetry. as he phrased it: ‘science is still a valley of dead bones till imagination breathes upon it.’ there are indeed evidences of an almost shelleyan pantheism in his credo. unhappy was his life, but, probably, he did not labour in vain, for a handsel of his song will endure. writing, indeed, was the consolation of his life:
i cannot write, i cannot think; ’tis half delight and half distress; my memory stumbles on the brink of some unfathomed happiness—
of some old happiness divine, what haunting scent, what haunting note, what word, or what melodious line, sends my heart throbbing to my throat?
indeed, why repeat it, both dowson and he will live by their poetry. but in the case of davidson, in addition, there is his rather elephantine humour. while again it must always be remembered that he had the courage to state that the fear of speaking freely had ‘cramped the literature of england for a century.’ it was the liberty of the french literature indeed that in no small degree captivated the minds of all these young men. very few of them, however, had the courage to97 speak freely. but it must always remain to davidson’s credit that he tried to write a freer, emancipated novel, which, however, he failed to do, because he had a very remote idea of novel construction.
it was in 1896 that the quaint little salmon-pink volume of william theodore peters, the young american poet, appeared, entitled posies out of rings. this young american was an intimate of some of the men of the nineties, and though it is doubtful whether he himself would have ever achieved high fame as a poet, he had a sincere love for the beautiful things of art. among all these tragedies of ill-health, insanity and suicide that seemed to track down each of these young men, his fate was perhaps the saddest of all, for he died of starvation in paris,17 where many of his verses had appeared in a distinctly american venture, the quartier latin. his volume of conceits are a harking back, not always satisfactorily, to the ancient form of the versified epigram. what was wrong with his muse is that it was only half alive. he puts indeed his own case in a nutshell in that charming little poem pierrot and the statue, which i venture to quote in full:
17 r. h. sherard, twenty years in paris.
98
one summer evening in a charméd wood, before a marble venus, pierrot stood; a venus beautiful beyond compare, gracious her lip, her snowy bosom bare, pierrot amorous, his cheeks aflame, called the white statue many a lover’s name. an oriole flew down from off a tree, ‘woo not a goddess made of stone!’ sang he. ‘all of my warmth to warm it,’ pierrot said, when by the pedestal he sank down dead; the statue faintly flushed, it seemed to strive to move—but it was only half alive.
such was the muse’s response to peters’ wooing; while he, in that strange bohemian world of so many of the young writers of that day, wrote in another short poem the epitaph of the majority of those who gave so recklessly of their youth, only to fail. it is called to the café aux phares de l’ouest, quartier montparnasse:
the painted ship in the paste-board sea sails night and day. to-morrow it will be as far as it was yesterday. but underneath, in the café, the lusty crafts go down, and one by one, poor mad souls drown— while the painted ship in the paste-board sea sails night and day.
such, indeed, was too often the fate of the epigoni of the movement. their nightingales99 were never heard; they were buried with all their songs still unsung.
the only other volume which theodore peters essayed, to my knowledge, was a little poetic one-acter like his friend ernest dowson’s pierrot of the minute (for which work he wrote an epilogue). peters’ play, entitled the tournament of love, is a very scarce item of the nineties’ bibliography. he calls it a pastoral masque in one act, and it was published by brentano’s at paris in 1894 and illustrated with drawings by alfred jones. as bantock wrote the music for the pierrot of the minute, noel johnson composed the melodies for the tournament of love. the masque was put on at the théatre d’application (la bodinière), 18 rue st. lazare, may 8, 1894. peters himself took the part of bertrand de roaix, a troubadour, while among the cast were wynford dewhurst, the painter, and lo?e fuller, the dancer. the scene is an almond orchard on the outskirts of toulouse, on the afternoon of the 3rd may, 1498. ‘a group of troubadours discovered at the right of the stage, seated upon a white semicircular renaissance bench, some tuning their instruments. other poets towards the back. a laurel tree at the right centre. on the left centre two heralds guard the entrance to the100 lists.’ pons d’orange, the arrived poet, will win at this tournament of love, the eglantine nouvelle, ‘that golden prize of wit.’ but it is won by bertrand de roaix, who wants it not, but the love of the institutress of this court of love, ‘clémence isaure, the primrose queen of beauty.’ at his love protestations she laughs; the troubadour goes outside the lists and stabs himself. as he lies dying clémence, clothed in her white samite, powdered with silver fleur-de-lys and edged with ermine, her dust-blonde hair bound with a fillet of oak-leaves, comes forth from the lists and finds her boy lover’s body:
love came and went; we knew him not. i have found my soul too late.
