Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.     

“THE EIGHTEEN NINETIES – A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century” by Holbrook Jackson (First published 1913)

 

    The book had been sitting unread on my shelves for years – a battered old Pelican paperback (a subsidiary of Penguin Books) printed in the late 1930s. I assumed that it had also been written in the 1930s. Only when I looked more closely did I realise that it was a reprint of a book first published in 1913.

Why did I now pluck it from the shelf and read it? Because it was called The Eighteen Nineties, subtitled A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, and I had just read and reviewed on this blog Matthew Sturgis’ biography of AubreyBeardsley, one of the key artists in England’s 1890s. I wanted to get another perspective on that era.

The Eighteen Nineties was written by a now-forgotten figure, Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948), who was reasonably influential in his own time, or at least so the standard sources (Wikipedia et al.) tell me. Holbrook Jackson, as I learned, was essentially a journalist. He was originally part of the Fabian Society but left it as he became more interested in the arts than in politics and economics. Over the years he edited various art- and -literature focused publications. For a while he seems to have been attracted to the cranky Social Credit ideas of C.H. Douglas. He was very prolific in his output and wrote more than 45 books and pamphlets, especially in his later years when he became interested in book collecting. He wrote about book collectors, typefaces, valuable old books and so forth. I remember the late craft printer Ronald Holloway once directing me to Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania (published in 1930), in which Ron revelled. Jackson was apparently adept at devising epigrams, my favourite being “The poor are the only consistent altruists; they sell all they have and give it to the rich.” Yet, forsooth, he was still a journalist at heart and journalism tends to decay and become irrelevant more quickly than most other forms of writing. So, I thought as I began to work my way through The Eighteen Nineties, how much would I find Holbrook Jackson’s commentary outmoded, old-fashioned, the product of a dated perspective on the arts? And how much would I find his commentary still accurate, shrewd, valid, even witty in places? 

Jackson would have been in his late thirties when wrote The Eighteen Nineties. And of course the 1890s were little more than a decade before he was writing. Doubtless he would have had to apply some tact, given that many of the artists and authors he wrote about were still living. Despite the English 1890s being a heyday of imperialism, colonialism, wars and social unrest, Jackson mentions these things only peripherally. Literature, art and drama in England are his focus, although there are necessarily many frequent allusions to contemporary French writers and poets who, after all, largely influenced English Impressionism, literary Realism and “Decadence” in both literature and art.

            In twenty-one trim chapters, Holbrook Jackson guides us through some major figures of the day. One of the great merits of his survey is that he quotes at length what others had to say in the 1890s themselves. In some chapters, Jackson is more brief than in others, especially when he can summarise an artist or author with a few pithy phrases. Thus it is in “The Incomparable Max” (Chapter 7) where Jackson describes Max Beerbohm as “the spirit of urbanity incarnate” and sees Beerbohm as more conservative than the dandy-s and “decadents” of his era whom Max satirised and almost mocked, but with a delicacy that did not belittle them. Thus too in his all too brief chapter called “The Discovery of the Celt” (Chapter 10) where he skips quickly through the work of W.B. Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Moore, Douglas Hyde and the Irish Literary Theatre, before giving a hasty wink at Scots and Welsh authors. “The Minor Poet” (Chapter 11) defends a number of minor poets, but sees only Ernest Dowson as genuinely memorable. A curious chapter on Francis Thompson (Chapter 12) characterises the poet as a genuine mystic, uncaring about the life of poverty he lived because of all the opium he took, which raddled his brain. Jackson, largely on the strength of Francis Thompson’s most enduring poem “The Hound of Heaven”, sees Thompson as allied to 17^th century religious poets like Herbert, Crashaw and Traherne more than to his contemporaries.

Oddest chapter of all is the chapter on John Davidson (Chapter 13), Scots son of an Evangelical minister, unco dour, lifelong plagued with depression, prolific author of (forgotten) novels, endless pamphlets and nine collections of poetry, influenced by the thinking of Nietzsche and eventually (probably) a suicide. Jackson sees Davidson as a man of great ability, but a prophet who was not quite sure of what he was aiming at and always ill at ease with the world. The strangest thing is that Holbrook Jackson begins this chapter by declaring that ”The Eighteen Nineties had no more remarkable mind and no more distinctive poet than John Davidson”. [Personal note – I’m not saying Davidson was of no account. I recall that, many years later, T. S. Eliot crowned one of Davidson’s best-known poems, “Thirty Bob a Week”, as a classic. It is.]

There are three other chapters that seem to be in a rush. The chapter on Rudyard Kipling (Chapter 17) is very ambiguous in tone. Jackson praises Kipling for his vital, lively, colloquial verses and his vivid evocations of a distant land (India), far removed from the wan verses of the “decadents’; but he chastises Kipling for his less appealing and more propagandistic verses. While Jackson takes it for granted that British Imperialism is a great and righteous enterprise, he condemns “jingoism”… but over a century later its hard to see “jingoism” as separable from imperialism. When he turns to painting and “British Impressionists”(Chapter 20) he notes that George Moore said that “Everyone must go to France. France is the source of all the arts” and English impressionists followed this advice as they rebelled from the staid styles of the Royal Academy; but Jackson then falls into naming a plethora of artists who can more-or-less be linked to impressionism – Whistler of course, but also Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent, Nicholson, Orpen, Augustus John, William Rothenstein… one’s head spins. One is also amazed that in his closing chapter “In Black and White” (Chapter 21), considering the art of pen and pencil sketches in magazines,  Jackson crowns the cartoonist Phil May as the genius of the era. [Not that Jackson ever uses the word “cartoon” or its derivative as it was not yet used to mean a drawing in a magazine. Jackson uses the term “caricature”. ]

So far, the chapters I have noted are good journalism of their day, even if often “boosting”, as important and influential, creative people who are now forgotten or regarded as insipid, dull, unimportant footnotes. Not that it’s fair to task too much somebody who was reporting on his time and place. What is highly-praised now will doubtless be ridiculed or forgotten in a century or so.

The chapters with which Jackson seems more engaged are those that discuss five things – the “decadence”; the revival of drama; a new realism in literature; and the arts and crafts movement that included the revival of artistic book publication.

His opening chapters “Fin de siècle 1890-1900”, “Personalities and Tendencies” and “The Decadence” take us through the general scene – the emergence of “the New Woman” (whatever that might have meant then); the rise of polite socialism (the Fabian Society);  The Yellow Book; the impact of Oscar Wilde; the huge influence of French writers and poets (Baudelaire, Huysmans, Gautier etc.) and of Walter Pater; and the attraction of either Catholicism or Mysticism for many English poets. Then come two chapters which are explicitly about Oscar Wilde (Chapter 4) and Aubrey Beardsley (Chapter 5), as if they are the stars of the show. Of Oscar Wilde he remarks “Throughout the whole of his life he tried to live up, not to his blue-and-white china, but to an idea of personality; and the whole of his philosophy is concerned with an attempt to prove that personality, even though it destroy itself, should be the final work of art.” In other words, Wilde’s view was an elevated form of egotism. Jackson then turns to “The New Dandyism” (Chapter 6) which he interprets as not so much a revolt against convention as a revolt against boredom and often produced by young men who wallowed in sordor but hardly ever dirtied their hands. As Max Beerbohm remarked, he had encountered “the lurid verses written by young men who, in real life, know no haunt more lurid than a literary public-house.” Later Jackson criticises the precious prose and redundant recherche words employed by the decadents. And (Chapter 8) “Shocking as a Fine Art” reasonably separates the foolish habit of attempting to “epater la bourgeoisie” (shocking the middle-classes for no particular reason) from the real and justified shocks delivered in the realism of Zola or Ibsen.

The revival of drama he connects with a chapter (Chapter 14) on George Bernard Shaw called “Enter G. B. S.”, wherein he is able to discuss all the plays Shaw had written in the 1890s and 1900s. This means the best plays Shaw ever wrote, save for a few later plays like Pygmalion and Saint Joan which had not yet been penned when Jackson was writing.  Jackson heaps praise upon Shaw as supplanting Victorian melodrama or inane domestic farce. At the same time, while obviously seeing Shaw as a reformer of society and something of a radical, Jackson also sees Shaw as, in the end, a sort of religious man malgre lui, with a philosophy leading towards a transcendent view of humanity. The praise is, I suppose, justified in the context that this book was written; but a century later, readers might be more aware of, and likely to criticise, Shaw’s habit of turning his plays into formal lectures with neat, somewhat propagandistic, conclusions. The following chapter “The Higher Drama” (Chapter 15) looks at the influence in England of the plays of Ibsen, translated and staged by the likes of William Archer, and how they were at first loathed by the general play-going audiences and the popular critics. Oscar Wilde’s plays were popular, if a little subversive, but Shaw’s first plays were very earnest and more likely to attract only Fabians and other intellectuals. Gradually, however, and influenced by foreigners like Ibsen, Strindberg and Hauptmann, British playwrights such as George Moore [better known as a novelist] began to put hard realism on the stage. It is, however, a little disconcerting to find Holbrook Jackson praising Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones as among these new realists, when Pinero and Jones are now universally regarded as fusty Victorian relics.

    In “The New Fiction” (Chapter 16) Jackson sees Emile Zola as encouraging English novelists to write more frankly, even if Zola’s novels were censored and expurgated in their first English translations. Now there were novels about the slums (like Arthur Morrison’s A Child ofthe Jago), about severe poverty (like George Gissing’s The Nether World), about unmarried mothers and prostitution (like George Moore’s Esther Waters, which was regarded as scandalous) and about all the horrors of society. As so often happens when a critic tries to cover a whole decade of literary achievement, this chapter collapses into a profusion of authors’ names (most of them now forgotten). Apart from the new realism in 1890s novels, Jackson also notes new genres that were popping up, “scientific romances’ [now called science fiction] (H. G. Wells); exotic travel (Kipling) and Scottish regionalism (J. M. Barrie].

    As for Jackson’s beloved arts and crafts, they are caught in “Art and Life” (Chapter 18) and “The Revival of Printing” (Chapter 19). William Morris, in Jackson’s view, is the hero of craft, both designer and poet, broadminded and (unlike Ruskin) not repelled by Impressionism even if it was not his own style. Jackson sees Morris as a crusader for a utopian society with great art and design available to the general public. As for his chapter on printing, Jackson reveals a specialist’s enthusiasm for new fonts, attractive binding, imaginative end-papers and illustration as created by Morris’s Kelmscott Press, by the Vale Press, the Essex House Press and the Doves press.

It is in his survey of the “decadence”, the revival of drama, a new realism in literature and the arts and crafts movement that Holbrook Jackson is at his best, because he is most involved as both advocate and critic. For a reader in the early 21^st century, there are some delicacies of expression that now seem rather twee or inhibited. For example Jackson never directly mentions Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality but instead speaks of “serious rumours about his private life and habits”. And he speaks of a publisher  as standing “courageously for the ideas and art of the decadence at its darkest hour” (meaning when Wilde was under arrest). Obviously, too, he sometimes champions writers and artists who are now regarded as being back-numbers and of no particular merit. But then trying to pick winners is a very imprecise enterprise. Besides, the great majority of people whom Jackson mentions do still have some recognition. While the pages packed only with names (and no real commentary) are pure journalism, Jackson at his best is a real critic. Even now Jackson’s The Eighteen Nineties is still at least a good primer to a busy decade.