PREFACE

THE END OF VICTORIANISM

The age commonly called Victorian came to an end in England about 1885. It was an age distinguished by many true idealists and many false ideals. It was, in spite of its notable artists, on an entirely different level from the epoch which had preceded it. Its poetry was, in the main, not universal but parochial; its romanticism was gilt and tinsel; its realism was as cheap as its showy glass pendants, red plush, parlor chromos and antimacassars. The period was full of a pessimistic resignation (the note popularized by Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyám) and a kind of negation which, refusing to see any glamour in the actual world, turned to the Middle Ages, to King Arthur, to the legend of Troy to the suave surroundings of a dream-world instead of the hard contours of actual experience.

The poets of a generation before this time were fired with such ideas as freedom, a deep and burning awe of nature, an insatiable hunger for truth in all its forms and manifestations. The characteristic but by no means the best poets of the Victorian Era, says Max Plowman, wrote under the dominance of churchliness, of sweetness and light,' and a thousand lesser theories that have not Truth but comfort for their end."

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The revolt against this and the tawdriness of the period had already begun; the best of Victorianism can be found not in men who were typically Victorian, but in pioneers like Browning and writers like Swinburne, Rossetti, William Morris, who were completely out of sympathy with their time.

It was Oscar Wilde who led the men of the now famous 'nineties toward an æsthetic freedom, to champion a beauty whose existence was its own excuse for being." Wilde's

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was, in the most outspoken manner, the first use of æstheticism as a slogan; the battle-cry of the group was actually the now outworn but then revolutionary "Art for Art's sake"! And, so sick were people of the shoddy ornaments and drab ugliness of the immediate past, that the slogan won. At least, temporarily.

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE ESTHETIC

PHILOSOPHY

The Yellow Book, the organ of a group of young writers and artists, appeared (1894-97), representing a reasoned and intellectual reaction, mainly suggested and influenced by the French. The group of contributors was a peculiarly mixed one with only one thing in common. And that was a conscious effort to repudiate the sugary airs and prim romantics of the Victorian Era.

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Almost the first act of the new men was to rouse and outrage their immediate predecessors. This end-of-the-century desire to shock, which was so strong and natural an impulse, still has a place of its own - especially as an antidote, a harsh corrective. Mid-Victorian propriety and selfsatisfaction crumbled under the swift and energetic audacities of the sensational young authors and artists. The old walls fell; the public, once so apathetic to belles lettres, was more than attentive to every phase of literary experimentation. The last decade of the nineteenth century was so tolerant of novelty in art and ideas, that it would seem, says Holbrook Jackson in his penetrative summary, The Eighteen-Nineties," as though the declining century wished to make amends for several decades of artistic monotony. It may indeed be something more than a coincidence that placed this decade at the close of a century, and fin de siècle may have been at once a swan song and a death-bed repentance."

Later on, the movement (if such it may be called), surfeited with its own excesses, fell into the mere poses of revolt; it degenerated into a defense not of Art but Artifici

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ality. Its failure, even as a movement," was its failure to

move.

It scarcely needed W. S. Gilbert (in Patience) or Robert Hichens (in The Green Carnation) to satirize its distorted and disillusioned attitudinizing. It strained itself to death; it became its own burlesque of the bizarre, an extravaganza of extravagance.

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

Henley repudiated this languid æstheticism; he scorned a negative art which was out of touch with the world. His was a large and sweeping affirmation. He felt that mere existence was glorious; life was coarse, difficult, often dangerous and dirty, but splendid at the heart. Art, he knew, could not be separated from the dreams and hungers of man; it could not flourish only on its own essences or technical accomplishments. To live, poetry would have to share the fears, angers, hopes and struggles of the prosaic world. And so Henley came like a swift salt breeze blowing through a perfumed and heavily-screened studio. He sang loudly (often too loudly) of the joy of living and the courage of the “unconquerable soul." He was a powerful influence not only as a poet but as a critic and editor. A pioneer and something of a prophet, he was one of the first to champion the paintings of Whistler and to proclaim the genius of the sculptor Rodin.

If at times Henley's verse is imperialistic, over-muscular and strident, his noisy moments are redeemed not only by his delicate lyrics but by his passionate enthusiasm for nobility in whatever cause it was joined.

THE CELTIC REVIVAL AND J. M. SYNGE

In 1889, William Butler Yeats published his Wanderings of Oisin; in the same year Douglas Hyde, the scholar and folk-lorist, brought out his Book of Gaelic Stories.

The revival of Gaelic and the renascence of Irish literature may be said to date from the publication of those two books.

The fundamental idea of both men and their followers was the same. It was to create a literature which would express the national consciousness of Ireland through a purely national art. This community of fellowship and aims is to be found in the varied but allied work of William Butler Yeats, "A. E." (George W. Russell), Moira O'Neill, Lionel Johnson, Katharine Tynan, Padraic Colum and others. They began to reflect the strange background of dreams, politics, suffering and heroism that is immortally Irish. The first fervor gone, a short period of dullness set in. After reanimating the old myths, surcharging legendary heroes with a new significance, it seemed for a while that the movement would lose itself in a literary mysticism. But an increasing concern with the peasant, the migratory laborer, the tramp, followed; an interest that was something of a reaction against the influence of Yeats and his mystic other-worldliness. And, in 1904, the Celtic Revival reached its height with John Millington Synge, who was not only the greatest dramatist of the Irish Theatre, but (to quote such contrary critics as George Moore and Harold Williams) " one of the greatest dramatists who have written in English." Synge's poetry, brusque and all too small in quantity, was a minor occupation with him and yet the quality and power of it is unmistakable. Its content is never great but the raw vigor in it was to serve as a bold banner a sort of brilliant Jolly Roger

for the younger men of the following period. It is not only this dramatist's brief verses and his intensely musical prose but his sharp prefaces that have exercised so strong an influence.

Synge's poetic power is unquestionably greatest in his superb plays. In The Well of the Saints, The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea there are more poignance, beauty of form and richness of language than in any piece of dramatic writing since Elizabethan times.

But although Synge's poetry was not his major concern, numbering only twenty-four original pieces and eighteen translations, it had a surprising effect upon his followers. It marked a point of departure, a reaction against both the too-polished and over-rhetorical verse of his immediate