ART AND LITERATURE
273
Thomas Mann said of Aestheticism that it was "the first manifestation
of the European mind's rebellion against the whole morality of the bour–
geois age." Art is beautiful, as Adorno says, "by virtue of its opposition to
mere being."
Consider a few occasions in the 1890s. In April 1891, Wilde's
The
Picture
if
Dorian Gray
was published, and the bookseller WHo Smith
refused to carry it, on the grounds that it was a dirty book. In 1893, Arthur
Symons published
The Decadent Movement in Literature.
In 1894, the first
number of
The Yellow Book
appeared. Ian Fletcher has remarked that "to the
sober historian the imposition of Death Duties in 1894 appears more sig–
nificant than the trials of Oscar Wilde in the following year; the continuous
economic depression of 1890-96 than the sputtering history of the
Rhymers."
It
may be true; but the constituents of a cultural decade are not
always entirely political and economic. So it is worth mentioning that in
1896, the same WHo Smith refused to distribute the July number of
The
Savoy
because he attributed to Beardsley one of Blake's illustrations–
'Antaeus setting down Virgil and Dante upon the Verge of Cocytus'-in
an essay by Yeats. A few weeks later the row about Hardy's
Jude the Obscure
was stirred up further by Havelock Ellis's essay on it in
The Savoy
of
October 6. In 1898 Mallarme died at the age of fifty-six. Symons pub–
lished
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
in 1899. In 1900 Ruskin died at
the age of seventy-one. The past seemed a valley of regrets. It became a
sign of authenticity to believe that artists had only the future to look to.
"The future is what artists are," Wilde claimed.
In "The Tragic Generation" Yeats asked himself what had caused the
sinking of so many of his friends into dissipation and despair. It was not
poverty: several of his colleagues among the Rhymers of the Cheshire
Cheese were well enough off. Yeats wondered whether or not "our form
of lyric, our insistence upon emotion which has no relation to any public
interest, gathered together overwrought, unstable men." But he noted that
some of those writers who went out of their minds had no lyrical gift.
Then he speculated that Pater's philosophy as it is expressed in
Marius the
Epicurean
was to blame: "it taught us to walk upon a rope tightly stretched
through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope
in a storm." Thinking of Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, Yeats wrote,
in the poem "Ego Dominus Tuus" that
... those that love the world serve it in action,
Grow rich, popular and full of influence,
And should they paint or write, still it is action:
The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
