Art -- England; English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
There was, indeed, amongst the younger men in those early days a
wonderful spirit of camaraderie. It was an attractive period full
of the glamour of youth before it went down fighting for Art with a
capital A, before age had chilled its blood or dulled its vision. And
there came, no doubt, an immense vitality for them all, a stimulating
energy to each one, from this meeting together in London. Indeed,
coming together by chance, as it were, in London, they not only
discovered one another and the ineffable boon of comradeship, but they
also rediscovered, through Whistler, London for art. So once again the
streets of London began to be written about, not it is true in the
Dickens manner, but still with even as great a love as his. They went
so far as to attempt to institute real French café life, by having
meetings at the Cheshire Cheese and evenings in the Domino Room of the
Café Royal. Symons wrote of the ballets of Leicester Square; Dowson
of the purlieus round the docks; Davidson made poems of Fleet Street;
Binyon sang of white St. Martin’s and the golden gallery of St. Paul’s;
Crackanthorpe sketched his London vignettes; Street talks of the
indefinable romance of Mayfair. In fact the nineties brought the Muses
back to town. In a cabman’s shelter, in Soho restaurants of doubtful
cheapness, in each other’s rooms, they rejoiced in each other’s
company. At the same time Beardsley, by a stroke of luck through the
good services of friends, was commissioned by Mr. Dent to illustrate
_Le Morte d’Arthur_. The Bodley Press had begun in Vigo Street in 1887.
Symons, Yeats, and others had already published their first books. The
curtain had gone up on the drama of the nineties, of which this is
intended as a brief appreciation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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