Re: Yellow nineties
Posted by:
Platypus (IP Logged)
Date: 5 August, 2020 07:39PM
... that tract of English life and letters sometimes designated as the Yellow 'Nineties, in which a confluence of forces had made fashionable the languor of Pater, the dandyism of Whistler and Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley's sinister attenuations of evil, the drab realism of Gissing and George Moore, Russian pessimism, Parisian Orientalism, the dreary sad-eyed singing of Ernest Dowson, the spiritual impotence of Arthur Symons, and every shade of the venemous melancholia which infests the airs of Swinburne's <Garden or Proserpine.>
Stuard P. Sherman, "Gilbert Keith Chesterton", The World's Best Literature vol. 6 (Knickerbocker Press, New York, 1917), p. 3628b.
Here's a more-appreciative assessment:
The movement of the Eighteen Nineties, however, which has most engaged the attention of writers, the movement called "Decadent," or by the names of Oscar Wilde or Aubrey Beardsley, and recently summed up by The Times under the epithet "The Yellow Nineties," does even now dominate the vision as we look back. And, indeed, though only part of the renaissance, is as sufficiently "brilliant," to use one its its own cliches, to dazzle those capable of being dazzled by the achievements of art and letters for many years to come. For a renaissance of art and ideas which in literature had for examplars Oscar Wilde (his best books were all published in the Nineties), Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, John Davidson, Hubert Crackenthorpe, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Barrie, Alice Meynell, George Moore, Israel Zangwill, Henry Harland, George Gissing, "John Oliver Hobbes," Grant Allen, Quiller Couch, Max Beerbohm, Cunninhame Grahame, Fiona Macleod (William Sharp), Richard L Gallienne, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson, and A.B. Walkley; and in pictorial art, James Pryde, William Nicholson, Phil May, William Orpen, Aubrey Beardsley, E.E. Hornel, Wilson Steer, Charles Ricketts, J.J. Shannon, Charles Shannon, John Lavery, John Duncan Fergusson, J.T. Peploe, Charles Condor and William Rothstein could not have been other than arresting, could not, indeed, be other than important in the history of the arts.
Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (Riverside Press, Edinburgh, 1922), p. 34 (first published 1913)