As Mr. J. M. Kennedy, in his _English Literature, 1880-1905_, has devoted an admirable, if somewhat scornful, chapter to the contents of _The Yellow Book_, it is to Henry Harland, who seems to have merited all the charming things said about him, that I would now direct attention.
A delicate valetudinarian always in search of health, he was born at Petrograd in March, 1861. He commenced life in the surrogate of New York State, whither his parents removed, writing in his spare time in the eighties, under the _nom-de-plume_ of Sidney Luska, sketches of American Jewish life. Like Theodore Peters, Whistler, and Henry James, he could not, however, resist the call of the Old World, and he was at journalistic work in London when he was made editor of _The Yellow Book_. Besides his editorial duties he was a regular contributor, not only writing the series of notes signed ‘The Yellow Dwarf,’ but also turning out a number of short stories. But London was only to be a haven of brief sojourn for this writer, whose health sent him south to Italy. Perhaps his best work in the nineties was his short story _Mademoiselle Miss_, while later in Italy he opened up a new vein of dainty comedy fiction in almost rose-leaf prose with _The Cardinal’s Snuff-Box_ (1900), whose happy delicacy of thought and style he never equalled again, but was always essaying to repeat until death carried him off in Italy. Although, therefore, sitting in the editorial chair at the Bodley Head, Harland can only be said to have been a bird of passage in the nineties, and not one of its pillars like Arthur Symons of _The Savoy_.
This later publication was started as a rival to _The Yellow Book_ soon after Beardsley gave up the art-editing of the earlier periodical. In 1895, when ‘Symons and Dowson, Beardsley and Conder, were all together on a holiday at Dieppe ... it was there, in a cabaret Mr. Sickert has repeatedly painted, that _The Savoy_ was originated.’[9] It was issued by Leonard Smithers, the most extraordinary publisher, in some respects, of the nineties, a kind of modern Cellini, who produced some wonderfully finely printed books, and was himself just as much a part of the movement as any of its numerous writers. Indeed, no survey of the period can be complete without a brief consideration of this man.