And all these criticisms now, all these quarrels, are like old spent battlefields the sands of gracious time have covered over and hidden from view. Alone the best work of the period remains; for good art has no period or special vogue.
Indeed, the elements that destroy the worthless, that winnow the chaff from the grain, have been at work. For us, indeed, this landscape has changed from what it once was, and looking at it now we acquire a new impression which was denied to the critics of the age itself. Some of us, without a doubt, have gone to the opposite extreme and prattle about it as an age of platitudes, and accuse a work of art of being as old as _The Yellow Book_. One might as well accuse a violet of being as old as the Greek Anthology. For always, to those wandering back in the right spirit to those days, there will come something of the infinite zest which stirred the being of the men of the nineties to create art. It was such an honest effort that one has to think of those times when Marlowe and his colleagues were athrob with æsthetic aspiration to find a similitude. The nineties, indeed, are a pleasant flower-garden in our literature over which many strange perfumes float. There are times when one wishes to retreat into such places, as there are moments when the backwaters enchant us from the main stream.
It has been said it was an age of nerves. If by this is implied a keener sensitiveness to certain feelings pulsating in the art of this movement, one will not have very far to go to find its cause in the French impressionistic school of Manet, which, after saturating all types of French artists, undoubtedly invaded writers over here even before the movement of the nineties began. On the age without a doubt it had a lasting influence, so that to a certain degree, without being over-busy with what went before, we may say its writers brought it to no small degree into common use in our literature. But just as impressionism in painting had existed centuries before in the ever-busy mind of men like Leonardo da Vinci, one cannot go so far as to say it had never existed before in our literature. Such a statement would be perhaps frivolous. But it was with these men it first came to exist as a kind of cry of a new clan. It was these men who were essentially hectics who essayed to etch the exotic impression. The majority of the work of the movement, in fact, can be described as impressionisms of the abnormal by a group of individualists. For in all their work the predominant keynote will be found to be a keen sense of that strangeness of proportion which Bacon noted as a characteristic of what he called beauty. It is observable as much in the poems of Dowson as in the drawings of Beardsley, two of the leading types of the movement. It vibrates intensely in the minor work of men like Wratislaw, and also in John Gray’s early volume, as I have endeavoured to show. All Mr. Arthur Symons’s criticism is a narration of his soul’s adventures in quest of it. It stirred the genius of Charles Conder, and vitalizes the rather cruel analysis of Hubert Crackanthorpe. We see it almost as the animating spirit of the age itself in Oscar Wilde’s poems, _The Sphinx_ and _The Harlot’s House_. It has become disseminated like a perfume from the writings of Pater in the men who came after him. It was, so to speak, a quickening stimulus to them as the rediscovery of a manuscript of Catullus, or a Greek figure was in the years of the Renaissance itself. With it came a sense of freedom. An attempt was made, because of it, for instance, to emancipate our literature to the same extent as the literatures of Latin countries move untrammelled by a hesitancy in the choice of certain themes. And people at the time, watching the fate of the prime movers, cried with a great deal of assurance, ‘That way lies madness!’