ART AND LITERATURE
269
which our attention is given." The fiction of transition, Kermode says,
"reflects our lack of confidence in ends, our mistrust of the apportioning
of history to epochs of this and that." "Our own epoch," he continues–
writing in 1965-"is the epoch of nothing positive, only of transition."
Kermode recognizes, too, that "the belief that one's own age is transition–
al between two major periods turns into a belief that the transition itself
becomes an age, a saeculum."
It
would appear that at least a few people in
the 1890s believed that something new was to come about and that they
would attend upon 'the trembling of the veil.'
Not that the decade exactly coincided with its calendar. The nineties
began in 1889 and ended in 1895, according to Richard EHmann, but he
meant Oscar Wilde's decade, not everyone else's.
It
would make equal
sense to say that the nineties began in 1884 when Huysmans published
A
Rebours
or in 1885 when Pater published
Marius the Epicurean.
It
would also
be reasonable to claim that the decade began, at least in England, on
February 8, 1886. On that day a mass meeting of the unemployed was held
in Trafalgar Square. The Fair Trade League had called the meeting, but it
was appropriated by John Burns and H.M. Hyndman of the Social
Democratic Federation. After the meeting, the crowd, led by Burns,
marched up Pall Mall toward Hyde Park. When some members of the
Reform Club jeered, the marchers responded by smashing windows, loot–
ing shops, and fighting wi th the police. On February 17 Burns, Hyndman,
H.H.Champion, and John E. William.s appeared in Bow Street Police
Court on a charge of sedition. On April 11 a jury found them not guilty.
By global standards this was not a major event; but the riot on "Black
Monday" was an instance-one of many-of social distress and anger.
It
also marked the degree to which the British political system failed to
assimilate the needs and passions that expressed themselves in dangerous
forms-anarchist movements, the endless question of Ireland, conflicts of
class, fears that the Empire would be brought down by unspeakable pra<;–
tices abroad and corruption at home.
In
The Princess Casamassima
(1886) Henry James tried to recognize the
passions that could not be contained and must disturb the 'vast smug sur–
face' of social and poli tical order.
In
the Preface to that novel, he says that
"the value I wished most to render and the effect I wished most to pro–
duce were precisely those of our not knowing, of society's not knowing,
but only guessing and suspecting and trying to ignore, what 'goes on' irrec–
oncilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface." Gissing's
Demos
(1886) is another account of the surface and the forces that threaten its
security. A few years later, in
The Secret Agent,
Conrad put his ear close to
the same ground.
James employed one method, assigning to Hyacinth Robinson the role
of witness and victim. Another method was that of the prophetic visions
