one endeavours to remember some one or two outstanding novels written by any one of the writers of this group. it must be at once admitted, one fails to recall a great novel. it is true that the great victorians, meredith and hardy, were hard at work at this time; but, then, neither of these writers belongs to this movement. then there was kipling, stevenson, barrie, and george moore. with the exception of the last, we have little to do with these here. they do not come within the scope of the present study.
none of the men of the nineties (as i have defined them) produced a great novel. it would be well, however, to give at once some connotation for so loose a term as ‘a great novel.’ let us then say that a good english novel is not necessarily a great novel; nor, for that matter, is a good russian novel necessarily a great novel. a great novel is a work of fiction that has entered into the realm of universal literature in the same way as the dramas56 of sophocles and shakespeare and molière have entered that glorious demesne. as a matter of fact, one can remember, i think in most cases, very few english novels that are great in this sense; while there are many more french and russian works that have an undeniable right to this title. therefore it is not, perhaps, so damaging a criticism of the period as it might at first sight appear to say it has produced no great novel.
but in so far as english fiction alone is concerned, it cannot be said that the men of the nineties produced work of a very high order in this form. they do not seem to have had the staying power demanded in such artistic production. the short poem, the short story, the small black and white drawing, the one act play—in fact, any form of art that just displays the climacteric moment and discards the rest pleased them. it was, as john davidson said, an age of bovril. while the novel, it must be admitted, needs either a profusion of ideas, as in the case of the russians, or of genitals, as in the case of the french. but the art of the nineties was essentially an expression of moods—and moods, after all, are such evanescent brief conditions. so it is not unnatural that the fruition of the novel was not rich57 among these writers. george gissing and george moore, in a way their forebears (i have in mind more particularly the latter), spread a taste for such works. indeed, in his confessions of a young man, george moore may be said to have predicted the masculine type of the nineties. gissing in 1891 was to daunt some with his new grub street, while henry james was to inspire enthusiasm in a few like hubert crackanthorpe. but naturally in the way of stimulus the main goad was france, which was at that date phenomenally rich in practitioners of the art of the novel. the vizetelly zolas, mr. george moore personally conducting the novels of certain of the french novelists over the channel, the desire to smash the fetters of victorian fiction which thomas hardy was to accomplish, were all inspiring sources which were, however, singularly unfruitful. walter pater long before in his academic romance marius, which they had all read eagerly, wrote charmingly of a field that would appeal to them when he said: ‘life in modern london ... is stuff sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth to build his “palace of art” of.’ but instead of taking the recommendation of this high priest they read dorian gray, which wilde would never have written if huysmans had not58 first written a rebours. the young men of henley, it must be confessed, did far finer work than richard le gallienne’s watery wildism in the quest of the golden girl. george moore wrote a masterpiece in evelyn innes, but ernest dowson and arthur moore in a comedy of masks and adrian rome did not retaliate. leonard merrick, who started publishing in the eighties, did not publish his best work till the nineties were dead and gone; while his best bohemian paris stories may owe as much to du maurier’s trilby (1894) as they do to henri murger. henry harland, as i have already said, only struck his vein of comedy fiction when the boer war had finished the movement. george gissing and arthur morrison belong, with frank harris, to the pugilistic school of henley’s young men, while richard whiteing, who turned from journalism to write no. 5 john street (1899), was too old a man and too late with his book to belong to the nineties’ group. arthur machen, in those days, belonged to the short story writers with hubert crackanthorpe, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group. the sailor, joseph conrad, the australian louis becke, the canadian, c. g. d. roberts, were working out their own salvation,59 and had nothing to do with the rhymers’ club. the strong creative brain of aubrey beardsley, indeed, in his unfinished picaresque romance, under the hill, which i have already mentioned, produced something new, but it was not a novel; while it is john davidson’s poetry that counts, not his novels, which remain unread nowadays on the shelf.
indeed, if the name of a good english novel by any one of them is demanded, it will be singularly difficult to suggest a satisfactory title. one can even go further, and state that they did not even have one amongst them who has handed on to us a vivid picture of their own lives in the form of fiction. dowson, indeed, in the dock life of his books may have autobiographical touches, but they are purely personal. what i mean is, that there was no one standing by to give us a picture of them as willy, the french writer, has given us of the sceptical yet juvenile enthusiasm of les jeunes of paris of the same period in, for example, his ma?tresse d’esthètes. what is cruder than ranger-gull’s the hypocrite, which has pretensions to be a picture of the young men of the period? and when one comes to think of it this is a great pity, as an excellent novel might have been penned around the feverish activities of60 these young exotics of the nineties. robert hichens’ green carnation is, after all, perhaps the most brilliant attempt to picture the weaknesses of the period, and it is merely a skit taking off in the characters of esmé amarinth and lord reggie two well-known personalities. the adventures of john johns, it is true, is supposed to be the history of the rise of one of the smaller epigoni of the movement, but it is not a very brilliant achievement, though it has considerable merit and interest. one cannot indeed say that it is up to the standard of ernest la jeunesse’s odin howes, wherein the french jew has given a veritable flashing insight on the last days of wilde in paris and those holes into which he crept to drink. what a pity, indeed, an english contemporary has not done the same for the tite street days, or given us in his book a serious study of the strange world of whistler or dowson.
in the face of this strange dearth of novels in this school one cannot help asking the reasons that engendered it. without laying down any hard and fast rules, it will, i think, be seen that this vacuity came from the zeitgeist of the group itself. as has been said, the large canvas, the five-act play, the long novel were démodé for the period. the age61 demanded, after the long realistic studies of the eighties in france, the climacteric moments only when the passions of the person? of the drama were at white heat, so to speak, and life was lived intensely. could not the great scene up to which the five long acts lead be squeezed into one? was not the rediscovery of the mimes of herod as a sign of the times? could not the great beauty of an immense landscape’s spirit be caught and seized on a small canvas? could not the long-winded novel of three tomes be whittled down to the actual short-story motive? this reduction of everything to its climax can be seen in all the art of the period. look at beardsley’s decoration for wilde’s salomé, entitled itself ‘the climax.’ conder paints small objects like fans and diminutive water-colours and crackanthorpe writes short stories. the poems of dowson are short swallow flights of song, and the epic is reduced to stephen phillips’s marpessa. the one-act play begins on the continent to make a big appeal for more recognition than that of a curtain-raiser. small theatres, particularly in germany and austria, give evening performances consisting of one-acters alone. it becomes the same in music. the age was short-winded and its art,62 to borrow a phrase from the pal?stra, could only stay over short distances. so, whereas there is a strange dearth of novels, the men of the nineties were very fruitful in short stories. in fact, it would not be perhaps too much to say that it was then, for the first time in english literature, the short story came into its own. at any rate, it would be more judicious to put the period as one in which the short story flourished vigorously (if not for the first time), in england, as a ‘theme of art.’ to understand exactly what i mean by this artistic treatment of the short story10 as a medium of literary expression, all that is necessary is, perhaps, to compare one of dickens’s short tales, for example, with one of stevenson’s short stories. the result is apparent at once in the difference of treatment—a difference as essential as the difference between the effect of a figure in stone and another in bronze. the earlier tale has none of the facets and subtleties that art has contrived to express by the latter narration. this artistic treatment of the short story by englishmen, then, was a new thing and a good thing for english63 literature. 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. the successful short stories of the period are of all sorts and conditions. to exemplify as briefly as possible this variety is perhaps closer to my purpose than to waste time in proving such obvious facts as the anxious endeavours of all these writers to raise their work to the artistic elevation demanded of the short story, or their strenuous struggle to attain a suitable style and treatment for their themes.
10 frederick wedmore in on books and arts (1899) discusses the short story as a distinct artistic medium. it can never be a ‘novel in a nutshell.’
numerous examples of their art at once crowd the mind, such as ernest dowson’s dying of francis donne, max beerbohm’s happy hypocrite, frederick wedmore’s tender orgeas and miradou, arthur symons’s death of peter waydelin, the works of hubert64 crackanthorpe, or the fantastic tales of arthur machen, or eric count stenbock’s11 studies of death. h. d. lowry, though of henley’s young men, works at the same art of studies in sentiment in his women’s tragedies. so does mr. g. s. street in his episodes and george egerton in her discords and keynotes. among the others who deliberately tried to write the short story as an artistic theme at that period and who were at the same time in the movement can be mentioned henry harland, rudolf dircks in his verisimilitudes, richard le65 gallienne, kenneth grahame, percy hemingway in his out of egypt, etc. then we have men like r. b. cunninghame graham and h. w. nevinson, clearly influenced by the movement and writing alongside of it of the ends of the earth they have visited. the former, for example, in a short story like aurora la cuji?i (smithers, 1898) clearly reflects the influences of this period which gloried in the abnormal in art. known as a socialist of courage, mr. graham, whose name betrays his origin, has also visited many of the exotic places of the world. in his able book mogreb-el-acksa he has given us vignettes of morocco that are unsurpassed; in his volume success he has told us of those spanish-speaking races of south america, of the tango, and the horses of the pampas, and the estancias he knows so well. in aurora la cuji?i we have a vignette of seville so realistic that we almost believe that one is justified in considering that there is just enough motive in it to vivify it with the quickening touch of the short storyteller’s wand. it is slow in starting, but when this motive comes suddenly at the end we are almost left breathless, realising that everything that went before was but a slow, ruthless piling up of local colour. it is all66 done with such deliberate deftness. how we see the scenes unrolling slowly before us. like the thrilled people on the benches we watch the toreador about to make his kill as we read:
11 eric stenbock was at balliol, oxford. he collaborated in a volume of translations of balzac’s ‘short stories.’ he contributed to lord alfred douglas’s the spirit lamp. as a specimen of his style the following extract from his short story, the other side, may be offered. it is supposed to be an old breton woman’s description of the black mass:
‘then when they get to the top of the hill, there is an altar with six candles quite black and a sort of something in between, that nobody sees quite clearly, and the old black ram with the man’s face and long horns begins to say mass in a sort of gibberish nobody understands, and two black strange things like monkeys glide about with the book and the cruets—and there’s music too, such music. there are things the top half like black cats, and the bottom part like men only their legs are all covered with close black hair, and they play on the bag-pipes, and when they come to the elevation then—. amid the old crones there was lying on the hearth-rug, before the fire, a boy whose large lovely eyes dilated and whose limbs quivered in the very ecstacy of terror.’
the “espada” had come forward, mumbled his boniment in andaluz, swung his montera over his shoulder upon the ground, and after sticking his sword in every quarter of the bull had butchered him at last amid the applause of the assembled populace. blood on the sand; sun on the white plaza; upon the women’s faces “cascarilla”; scarlet and yellow fans, and white mantillas with “fleco y alamares” in the antique style...; women selling water, calling out “aguá!” in so guttural a voice it seemed like arabic; 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. blood, harlotry, sun, gay colours, flowers and waving palm-trees, women with roses stuck behind their ears,67 mules covered up in harness of red worsted, cigar girls, gipsies, tourists, soldiers, and the little villainous-looking urchins, who, though born old, do duty as children in the south.’
as we read this magical evocation of the spirit of place we rub our eyes and ask ourselves have we not been there. this prose of vivid impressionism is the goal of one and all. as the plein air school painted in the open air before nature, so these men must write as closely round their subject as actual experience can allow them. the vivid realisation of a mood, as we shall see in hubert crackanthorpe, is the desired prize. turn through the pages of ernest dowson’s dilemmas, and read, above all, a case of conscience; leaf frederick wedmore’s12 renunciations, and pause over the68 chemist in the suburbs, wherein, as h. d. traill said, the story of richard pelse’s life is a pure joy; in both cases vivid impressionism and mood realisation are the keynotes of the work. to understand these tendencies better and the excellence of the work achieved, it will be more advantageous, perhaps, to consider in more detail one writer only who carried the charm of the prose pen to a higher degree of emphasis and finish in the short story than any of the others, to wit, hubert crackanthorpe.
12 about the worst of frederick wedmore’s short stories, such as the north coast and eleanor, there is a hint of the melodrama of hugh conway’s called back, but it is a feeble replica of the original. the most successful of his short imaginative pieces, as the author rightly terms them, on the other hand, have a refined grace of slow movement that is at once captivating and refreshing. it seems impossible that the same man could have essayed both the worst and the best. as a specimen of the latter type of work, let me fasten on to the description of the entourage of pelse the chemist, the man with the tastes above his position:
‘there came a little snow. but in the parlour over the shop—with the three windows closely curtained—one could have forgetfulness of weather. there was the neat fireplace; the little low tea-table; a bookcase in which pelse—before that critical event at aix-les-bains—had been putting, gradually, first editions of the english poets; a cabinet of china, in which—but always before aix-les-bains—he had taken to accumulate some pretty english things of whitest paste or finest painting; a worcester cup, with its exotic birds, its lasting gold, its scale-blue ground, like lapis lazuli or sapphire; a chelsea figure; something from swansea; white plates of nantgarw, bestrewn with billingsley’s greyish pink roses, of which he knew the beauty, the free artistic touch. how the things had lost interest for him! “from the moment,” says some french critic, “that a woman occupies me, my collection does not exist.” and many a woman may lay claim to occupy a french art critic; only one had occupied richard pelse.’
a curious anomaly can be remarked here, that in this period the great work of prose fiction was not to be resharpened by the young men to nearly the same extent as they resharpened the poetry and the essay. none69 approach meredith and hardy, who move like titans of the age, while kipling and crackanthorpe are the only two young men that give any quantity of imaginative prose work of a high new order (and in saying this one must not overlook arthur morrison’s mean streets, or zangwill’s ghetto tales, or the work of henry james) until conrad came from the sea and louis becke from australia to give new vistas to our fiction. but it is not with them we are concerned here, but with hubert crackanthorpe,13 of whose life the poet has sung:
13 it is interesting to note the verses also of the french poet francis jammes dedicated to crackanthorpe. jammes lived at orthez when crackanthorpe visited that remote countryside.
too rough his sea, too dark its angry tides! things of a day are we, shadows that move the lands of shadow.
crackanthorpe commenced his literary career as the editor, with w. h. wilkins, of the albemarle, a monthly review started in january, 1892, with a splendid supplement lithograph.
wreckage, the younger writer’s first volume, appeared in 1893, and contains seven studies of very unequal merit. its french inspiration as well as its french emulation is at once apparent,70 for in place of a foreword is the simple, all-sufficing french quotation as a keynote of the type of work displayed: ‘que le roman ait cette religion que le siècle passé appelait de ce large et vaste nom: “humanité”;—il lui suffit de cette conscience; son droit est là.’ the youth of the writer (he was only twenty-eight) must be remembered when discussing the inequality of these studies in passion, for all hinge on the old eternal theme. the last three are perhaps more finished work than the first four, and this is a pity from the point of view of the reader. profiles, indeed, the longest, is also in some respects the worst-conceived attempt. it is crude and immature in conception and projection. a young officer, in love with lily maguire, is deceived by her for a very emily bront?-like figure of a bold, bad, handsome man. the girl becomes a disreputable member of the prostitute class, and maurice, like the young fool he is, wishes to redeem her. but lily, whom the sensuous, romantic life has taught nothing, could never, she thinks, marry a man she did not care for, although she would sell herself to the first tom, dick, or harry. a conflict of egoisms concerns two people who have wasted their lives and then utterly destroy themselves by marrying one another, for they71 were too selfish to live even by themselves. the struggle for life is a maupassant14-conceived, but ineffectively told story of a wife betrayed by her husband, who sells herself for half-a-crown if she can go home in an hour. embers is much more effectively told, and here at last we begin to realise crackanthorpe is getting at the back of his characters. the same applies to that able gambling story, when greek meets greek, while in a dead woman we have crackanthorpe at last in his full stride. rushout the innkeeper, inconsolable for his dead wife, is as real as ‘bony and gaunt’ jonathan hays, who was the dead woman’s lover. how the husband discovers the dead woman’s infidelity; how he and hays were to have fought; and how at last ‘each remembered that she had belonged to the other, and, at that moment, they felt instinctively drawn together,’ is told by a master’s hand with a slow deliberation that is as relentless as life itself. here the narrative is direct and the delineation of character sharp. these two men with the card-sharper simon live, while as for the women of the book we wish to forget them, for they have nothing to redeem them except possibly the little french girl from nice.
14 maupassant’s inconsolables.
72
two years later appeared a far more ambitious and maturer volume containing half-a-dozen sentimental studies and half-a-dozen tales of the french villages crackanthorpe so loved and understood. his method of work becomes more pronounced here, that is to treat an english theme in the french manner, a task which demands more culture than the ruck of the conteurs for the english magazines attain with their facile tears and jackass laughters, their machine-like nonentities and pudibond ineptitudes. crackanthorpe, indeed, has left no following behind him, and only once later can i recall a volume of short stories that suggests his manner: j. y. f. cooke’s tales of the nineties in his stories of strange women.
in this new volume as before, crackanthorpe devotes himself to the expansion of the sentimental study, the problems of sexual relationships, which are not altogether pleasing to every one, and this may account for his limited appeal. in wreckage all the women were vile, but here he evidently intends to picture the other side of women in ella, the wife of the poet hillier, with its slow flaubert unrolling of her infinite delusion. in battledore and shuttlecock, in nita, of the old empire73 promenade days, he again develops the good side. while in the study of the love-sick curate we feel that ethel is not hard-hearted, but only that the rev. burkett is an unutterable idiot. modern melodrama is the short, sharp climacteric stab of maupassant perhaps not over well done. the sentimental studies close with yew-trees and peacocks, which seems rather to have lost its point in the telling. the tales of the pyrennese villages where crackanthorpe used to stay are typical productions of the delight of the men of the nineties in their sojourning on the sacred soil of france. the white maize, etienne matton, and gaston lalanne’s child are perhaps not unworthy of the master himself in their simple directness, devoid of all unnecessary padding. with a few phrases, indeed, crackanthorpe can lay his scene, strip his characters nude before us. how we realise, for instance, ella lying in bed the night before her mistaken marriage with hillier. she is there in all the virgin simplicity of the average english country girl:
the window was wide open, and the muslin curtains swaying in the breeze bulged towards her weirdly. she could see the orchard trees bathed in blackness, and above a square of sky,74 blue-grey, quivering with stifled light, flecked with a disorder of stars that seemed ready to rain upon the earth. after a while, little by little, she distinguished the forms of the trees. slowly, monstrous, and sleek, the yellow moon was rising.
she was no longer thinking of herself! she had forgotten that to-morrow was her wedding-day: for a moment, quite impersonally, she watched the moonlight stealing through the trees.
again, ronald, the youth from the army crammer’s, finds his way into the music-hall, where he encounters nita:
immediately he entered the theatre, the sudden sight of the scene stopped him, revealed, as it were, through a great gap. the stage blazed white; masses of recumbent girls, bathed in soft tints, swayed to dreamy cadence of muffled violins before the quivering gold-flecked minarets of an eastern palace. he leaned against the side of the lounge to gaze down across the black belt of heads. the sight bewildered him. by-and-bye, he became conscious of a hum of voices, and a continual movement behind him. men, for the most part in evening dress, were passing in procession to and fro, some women amongst them, smiling as they twittered mirthlessly; now and then he caught glimpses of others seated before little round tables, vacant, impassive, like waxwork figures, he thought.... he was throbbing with trepidating curiosity, buffeted by irresolution.
75 with the same exactitude the lonely fells around scarsdale, where burkett is parson of the small cumberland village, arise before us.
his posthumous volume, last studies, contains only three rather long short stories, an ‘in memoriam’ poem by stopford a. brooke, and an appreciation very gracefully done by henry james. referring in the field of fiction to the crudity of the old hands and the antiquity of new, his appreciator finds it difficult to render the aspect which constitutes crackanthorpe’s ‘troubled individual note.’ he comes to the conclusion, ‘what appealed to him was the situation that asked for a certain fineness of art, and that could best be presented in a kind of foreshortened picture.’
the short story is mainly of two sorts: ‘the chain of items, figures in a kind of sum—one of the simple rules—of movement, added up as on a school-boy’s slate, and with the correct total and its little flourish, constituting the finish and accounting for the effect; or else it may be an effort preferably pictorial, a portrait of conditions, an attempt to summarise, and compress for purposes of presentation to “render” even, if possible, for purposes of expression.’ from the french crackanthorpe learnt the latter method, and76 practised it. when we come to look at these last three stories (which with the tiny collection of vignettes completes his work) we see how admirably exact is this criticism of his senior.
in antony garstin’s courtship he is back in his own countryside of cumberland among the shrewd, hard dale folk. 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. ‘she was a heavy-built woman, upright, stalwart almost, despite her years. her face was gaunt and sallow; deep wrinkles accentuated the hardness of her features. she wore a widow’s black cap above her iron-grey hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, and a soiled chequered apron.’ how easily we can see her saying to her great hulking son:77 ‘t’ hoose be mine, t’ lord be praised,’ she continued in a loud, hard voice, ‘an’ as long as he spare me, tony, i’ll na’ see rosa blencarn set foot inside it.’
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. the last story, the turn of the wheel, is the history of the daughter who believes in her self-made father, and despises her sidetracked mother as an inferior being, only to find she has made a great mistake. it is one of the longest stories he wrote, and moves easily in the higher strata of london society. 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.