That _The Savoy_ is far truer to the period than _The Yellow Book_ was perhaps in no small way due to the fact that Mr. Arthur Symons was its literary editor. For he at any rate in his strenuous search for an æsthetical solution for art and life, in his assiduous exploring in the Latin literatures for richer colours and stranger sensations--he, at any rate, has not only been the child of his time, but in some ways the father of it. His sincere love of art is beyond all question, and it has sent him into many strange byways. He has praised in purple prose the bird-like motions and flower-like colours of the ballet; he has taken us with him to Spanish music-halls and Sevillian Churches; he has garnered up carefully in English the myths of the symbolists and translated for us the enigmas of Mallarmé--_Herodias_, the blood and roses of D’Annunzio’s plays and the throbbing violins of Verlaine’s muse; he has taken us to continental cities, and with him we have heard Pachmann playing and seen the enchantments of the divine Duse. All the cults of the Seven Arts has this Admirable Crichton of Æstheticism discussed. He has worked towards a theory of æsthetics. He has written charmingly (if somewhat temperamentally) of his comrades like Beardsley, Crackanthorpe and Dowson. He was a leader in the campaign of the early nineties, and his work will always be the guiding hand for those who come after him and who wish to speak of this movement. As early as 1893 he was writing of it as ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ in _Harper’s_, when he speaks of the most representative work of the period: ‘After a fashion it is no doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence; an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilising refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity.’ Perhaps, in a way, it is an immense pity that Symons will become the universal guide to the period, for it must be conceded that he has always been prone to find perversity in anything, as Sir Thomas Browne was haunted with quincunxes. But of the subtilty of his judgments and of the charming prose in which he labours to express them there can be no question. Listen, for example, when he speaks of the aim of decadence: ‘To fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things; to fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul; that is the ideal of decadence.’ How beautifully it is said, so that one almost forgets how dangerous it is. Very aptly did Blaikie Murdoch say the Mantle of Pater fell on him. It is the same murmured litany of beautiful prose. Indeed Arthur Symons is the supreme type of _belles lettrist_. Just as in the early nineties he prided himself on the smell of patchouli about his verse, so he alone remains to-day with the old familiar scent about his writings of a period dead