The Eighteen Nineties by Holbrook Jackson — Read

"The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule. " -- OSCAR WILDE.

Love of town is a human passion which may not be suppressed by advocates of the Simple Life and the Return to Nature, even though they bedeck their propaganda with words of flame. Such enthusiasts can never be more than apostles of a marginal gospel, attracting the few and, perhaps, the ill-starred. To the average man they will be nothing but curious folk, a little unbalanced -- what are called cranks. For human life gravitates townwards; even when it emigrates, and settles in lands of prairie and forest, cities spring up about it; nothing, indeed, is more certain than the fact that, at the touch of humanity, the wilderness blossoms with the town. Normal man has, however, always loved to toy with the idea of the country, with its whispers of romance and health. But during the Eighteen Nineties, as in one or two other periods in history, art threw a glamour over the town, and all the artificial things conjured up by that word. Poets, it is true, did not abandon the pastoral mood, but they added to it an enthusiasm for what was urban. Where, in the past, they found romance only in wild and remote places, among what are called natural things, they now found romance in streets and theatres, in taverns and restaurants, in bricks and mortar and the creations of artificers. Poets no longer sought inspiration in solitude, they invoked the Muses in Fleet Street and the Strand. And whilst not entirely abandoning, as I say, the old themes which they have always and will always sing, they discovered a fresh delight in more sophisticated matters. These poets sang not only to "Corinna's going a-maying," but they found a subtle joy in acclaiming "Nora of the Pavement. " It were unkind to say that they ceased hearing the morning stars singing together, but they certainly heard also, and with equal delight, the "Stars" of the music halls. Richard Le Gallienne, for instance, ceased for a while his consideration of the lilies of the field to consider "the Iron Lilies of the Strand"; John Davidson, with his _Eclogues_, became the Virgil of Fleet Street; and Arthur Symons became the Herrick of the Theatre of Varieties.