Part 6

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 Tannhäuser_:

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.’

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 with 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 to 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_.

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 nightingales 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 Théâtre 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 Loïe 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 the 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.

V

The Victorian literary era was fecund in essayists, and the last decade lived up to this reputation. The forerunners of the essayists of the nineties were obviously Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde with his _Intentions_ and Whistler in his _Gentle Art_. Behind these there was a great mass of French influence which, together with literary impressionism as exemplified in such books as Crackanthorpe’s _Vignettes_, was to give the essay and the so-called study a new lease of life. Indeed, what came out of the period was not merely criticism as a useful broom sweeping away the chaff from the wheat, but criticism itself as a creative art, as Wilde chose to call it; not merely dry-as-dust records of plays and cities, and other affairs as in guide manuals, but artistic impressions, in some ways as vital as the objects themselves. Mr. Arthur Symons, in particular, has given us an abundance of this kind of work of which I have already spoken. So did Lionel Johnson and Mr. Max Beerbohm, to whom I propose to allude here, and many others like Mr. Bernard Shaw, who, though not of the movement, moved alongside it on his own way, and Mr. G. S. Street, in his _Episodes_, Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Galton, Francis Adams in his _Essays in Modernity_, etc. etc. One has only to turn over the magazines of the period to find a band of writers, too numerous to mention, who aided on the movement with their pens. To cite one prominent example alone, there was Grant Allen with his essay on _The New Hedonism_. Here, however, I must be content with a brief appreciative glance at the works of the two writers I have mentioned, who were both actually of and in the movement itself. I have not here of set purpose referred to the Henley essayists like Charles Whibley. But the two men of the nineties I have chosen to speak of here have been selected in the way an essayist should be selected nine times out of ten, that is to say, because of his pleasing personality. These two writers--particularly Max--are such individual writers, yet they never offend. They are just pleasant garrulous companions.

For those who care at all passionately for the precious things of literature, the work of Lionel Johnson will always remain a cherished and secluded nook. The man was a scholar, a poet, and a critic, whose dominant note was gracile lucidity. A friend writing of his personal appearance at the time of his death said, ‘Thin, pale, very delicate he looked, with a twitching of the facial muscles, which showed even at the age of twenty-four how unfit was his physique to support the strain of an abnormally nervous organization. Quick and mouselike in his movements, reticent of speech and low-voiced, he looked like some old-fashioned child who had strayed by chance into an assembly of men. But a child could not have shown that inward smile of appreciative humour, a little aloof, a little contemptuous perhaps, that worked constantly around his mouth. He never changed except in the direction of a greater pallor and a greater fragility.’

Cloistral mysticism was the key-chord of his two volumes of poetry (1895 and 1897). In some respects he seems to have strayed out of the seventeenth century of Crashaw and Herbert. His early training, no doubt, engendered this aspect. After six years in the grey Gothic school of Winchester he passed on to New College, Oxford. Here he came under the influence of Pater, and was charmed by the latter’s then somewhat hieratic austerity. A devout Irish Catholic, he was moved by three themes: his old school, Oxford, and Ireland, and to these he unfortunately too often devoted his muse. After the quiet seclusion of his Oxford years, on entering the vortex of London literary life he found that the world of wayfaring was a somewhat rough passage in the mire for one so delicate. Out of the struggle between his scholarly aspirations and the cry of his time for life, more life, was woven perhaps the finest of all his poems, _The Dark Angel_:

Dark angel, with thine aching lust To rid the world of penitence: Malicious angel, who still dost My soul such subtile violence!--

Because of thee, the land of dreams Becomes a gathering place of fears: Until tormented slumber seems One vehemence of useless tears....

Thou art the whisper in the gloom, The hinting tone, the haunting laugh: Thou art the adorner of my tomb, The minstrel of mine epitaph.

Most of his poems are subjective, and the majority have a certain stiffness of movement of a priest laden with chasuble; but sometimes, however, as in _Mystic and Cavalier_, or in the lines on the statue of Charles I at Charing Cross, he writes with a winsome charm and freedom of spirit:

Armoured he rides, his head Bare to the stars of doom: He triumphs now, the dead Beholding London’s gloom....

Surely this poem has the proud note of Henley! There is another trait in his verse, which, in view of his essays, it is as well not to pass over. Like William Watson, his literary poems are pregnant with phrases of rich criticism. He calls back the immortals in a true bookman’s invocation hailing ‘opulent Pindar,’ ‘the pure and perfect voice of Gray,’ ‘pleasant and elegant and garrulous Pliny’:

Herodotus, all simple and all wise; Demosthenes, a lightning flame of scorn: The surge of Cicero, that never dies; And Homer, grand against the ancient morn.

But we are here chiefly concerned with his prose writings. If it is the duty of the essayist to mirror the intellectuality of his age, Lionel Johnson was a mirror for the Oxford standpoint of the nineties. There still remain many of his papers uncollected in various old newspaper files. But certainly the best of his work has been lovingly collected by friendly hands, and worthily housed in _Post Liminium_. Take, for instance, this passage from an essay on books published originally in _The Academy_ (December 8th, 1900):

The glowing of my companionable fire upon the backs of my companionable books, and then the familiar difficulty of choice. Compassed about by old friends, whose virtues and vices I know better than my own, I will be loyal to loves that are not of yesterday. New poems, new essays, new stories, new lives, are not my company at Christmastide, but the never-ageing old. ‘My days among the dead are passed.’ Veracious Southey, how cruel a lie! My sole days among the dead are the days passed among the still-born or moribund moderns, not the white days and shining nights free for the strong voices of the ancients in fame. A classic has a permanence of pleasurability; that is the meaning of his estate and title.

Or again, Johnson in his paper on _The Work of Mr. Pater_, sets forth perhaps the best appreciation of his master that has yet appeared:

‘Magica sympathiæ!’ words borne upon the shield of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, are inscribed upon the writings of Mr. Pater, who found his way straight from the first to those matters proper to his genius, nor did he, as Fuseli says of Leonardo, ‘waste life, insatiate in experiment.’... ‘Nemo perfectus est,’ says St. Bernard, ‘qui perfectior esse appetit’: it is as true in art as in religion. In art also ‘the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts’ ... and truly, as Joubert said, we should hesitate before we differ in religion from the saints, in poetry from the poets.... There is no languorous toying with things of beauty, in a kind of opiate dream, to be found here.

While Symons has written on all the arts, the sphere of Johnson has been more limited to traditional English lines. Johnson attempts no broad æsthetical system like the former. All that he does is to illuminate the writer of whom he is speaking. And his little essays, eminent in their un-English lucidity, their scrupulous nicety, their conscious and deliberate beauty, adding to our _belles lettres_ a classical execution and finish (which perfection accounts perhaps for the classical smallness of his bookmaking) have all the bewildering charm of a born stylist. Certain of his phrases linger in the mind like music. ‘Many a sad half-murmured thought of Pascal, many a deep and plangent utterance of Lucretius.’ Or the line: ‘The face whose changes dominate my heart.’ Like the styles of Newman and Pater, on which his own is founded, he is singularly allusive. He cites critics by chapter and verse like an advocate defending a case. In fact, as in his critical _magnum opus_, _The Art of Thomas Hardy_, he is amazingly judicial. It is, too, since he is essentially academic, to the older critics he prefers to turn for guidance. As he writes: ‘Flaubert and Baudelaire and Gautier, Hennequin and M. Zola and M. Mallarmé, with all their colleagues or exponents, may sometimes be set aside, and suffer us to hear Quintilian or Ben Jonson, Cicero or Dryden.’ This habit sometimes makes him strenuous reading, particularly in longer criticisms like _The Art of Thomas Hardy_.

We grow weary of all this quotative authority. Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_ cannot be brought into every-day literary criticism. We want to hear more of Lionel Johnson’s own direct opinions and less of these selected passages from his library. So it is to those passages where Johnson is most himself we turn in _The Art of Thomas Hardy_, which, in spite of its academicism and the youthfulness of its author, remains a genuine piece of sound critical work. The delightful imagery of the prose in such passages is often very illuminating, as in this paragraph:

From long and frequent converse with works of any favourite author, we often grow to thinking of them under some symbol or image; to see them summed up and expressed in some one composite scene of our own making; this is my ‘vision’ of Mr. Hardy’s works. A rolling down country, crossed by a Roman road; here a gray standing stone, of what sacrificial ritual origin I can but guess; there a grassy barrow, with its great bones, its red-brown jars, its rude gold ornament, still safe in earth; a broad sky burning with stars; a solitary man. It is of no use to turn away, and to think of the village farms and cottages, with their antique ways and looks; of the deep woods, of the fall of the woodman’s axe, the stir of the wind in the branches; of the rustic feasts and festivals, when the home-brewed drink goes round, to the loosening of tongues and wits; of the hot meadows, fragrant hayfields, cool dairies, and blazing gardens; of shining cart-horses under the chestnut-trees and cows called in at milking time: they are characteristic scenes, but not the one characteristic scene. That is the great down by night, with its dead in their ancient graves, and its lonely living figure; ...

There is, perhaps, a reek about it all of a too-conscious imitation of Pater’s murmured obituaries which makes one in the end rather tired of this hieratic treatment of art, so that one turns rather gladly to the one or two tales he wrote. For example in _The Lilies of France_, an episode of French anti-clericalism, which appeared in _The Pageant_, 1897, he slowly builds up a thing of verbal beauty that one feels was actually worthy of him, while in the previous number of the same quarterly he perpetrated a delightful ironism on the literary men of his period entitled _Incurable_, in which, perhaps, we may trace faint autobiographical clues. Such, briefly, was the work of this young man who was found dead in Fleet Street early one morning, aged thirty-five.

But the writer who was to bring irony in English literature to a consummate pitch, and add to the age a strange brief brilliance of his own wilful spirit, was Max Beerbohm. Max, the ‘Incomparable’ as Bernard Shaw once described him, is the charm of the gilded lily, the fairy prince of an urbane artificiality: he is in literature what the cocktail is among drinks; he is the enemy of dullness and the friend of that Greek quality called ‘charis.’ He is the public school and Varsity man who is fond of, but afraid of, being tedious in literature; so with delightful affectation his vehicle is persiflage with a load of wit he pretends to disdain. Of all the prose writers of the Beardsley period he is the easiest and most charming to read. In fact, he is the ideal essayist. He titillates the literary sense. Fortunately his glass is small, for if one had to drink it in quart pots the result would be as disastrous as in his one and only mistake--the long novel _Zuleika Dobson_, which is a late work written long after the nineties had been swallowed up by that maw which swallowed up Lesbia’s sparrow and all other beautiful dead things.

Max said in jest, ‘I belong to the Beardsley period,’ and it is one of those jests which is only too painfully true. When he was at Oxford he was caught up in the movement, and wrote, under Wilde’s influence, _A Defence of Cosmetics_ for the first number of _The Yellow Book_, and he also appeared in Lord Alfred Douglas’s magazine. Thenceforward he contributed to various quarterlies, while in 1896 the little red volume with its white paper label appeared as _The Works_, containing all the best of this precocious _enfant terrible_ of literature, who assures us that he read in bed, while at school, _Marius the Epicurean_, and found it not nearly so difficult as _Midshipman Easy_. At the age of twenty-five he cries: ‘I shall write no more. Already I feel myself to be a trifle outmoded,’ and he religiously does not keep his word. He keeps pouring out caricatures, writes _More_, the companion volume to _The Works_, and perpetrates his short story _The Happy Hypocrite_. 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. The others, except Beardsley (who too has this gift), are so appallingly serious. The French influences that went to their making seem to have killed the valiant English humour of Falstaff, Pickwick, and Verdant Green. They are all like young priests who will take no liberty with their ritual; but Max saves the period with his whimsical irony. His is not the fearful, mordant irony of Octave Mirbeau, but a dainty butterfly fancy playing lightly over the pleasures of a pleasant life. To be essentially civilised is to be like a god. This is the pose of such a mentality. It is a winsome pose with no sharp edges to it, just as the _poseur_ himself must be wilfully blind to all the seaminess of life. 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.