It all seems a long time ago now since those days when Verlaine was as a lantern for these young men’s feet, to guide them through the mazes of Art. Thirty years ago and more Wilde was disclosing ‘décolleté spirits of astonishing conversation’; Zola influenced that Byron of pessimism, Thomas Hardy, to beget _Jude the Obscure_ (1895), and when the critics assailed him the Wessex giant guarded a ‘holy silence’ which has denied us up till now an emancipated novel such as the French and Italians have, though James Joyce may yet achieve it for us. It was also the age of youth in hansom cabs looking out on the lights of London’s West End which spread out before them as in a ‘huge black velvet flower.’ Ibsen, Tolstoy, Maeterlinck, Nietzsche, D’Annunzio, and Dostoievsky were beginning to percolate through by means of translations that opened out a new world into which everybody hastily swarmed. It was an age in which young men frankly lauded the value of egoism. Indeed, it was essentially the age of young men. In those days a genital restiveness which came over from France started the sex equation. A hothouse fragrance swept across the pudibond wastes of our literature. Hectics came glorying in their experiences. Richard of the Golden Girl with his banjo lifts up his voice to chaunt ‘a bruisèd daffodil of last night’s sin.’ Women like George Egerton in her _Keynotes_ take questions further than Mrs. Lynn Linton had ever done in the previous decade. Exoticism, often vulgar when not in master hands, blabbed out its secrets in works like _The Woman who Did_. Confounding the good with the bad, a wail went up against the so-called gospel of intensity. Sometimes it was in the serious reviews and weeklies; at another time it was Harry Quilter. Some young undergraduates at Oxford, even in _Aristophanes at Oxford_ (May, 1894), were filled with ‘an honest dislike for _Dorian Gray_, _Salomé_, _The Yellow Book_, and the whole of the lackadaisical, opium-cigarette literature of the day.’ _Punch_ produced a Beardsley Britannia and sang of:
The Yellow Poster girl looked out From her pinkly purple heaven, One eye was blue and one was green, Her bang was cut uneven. She had three fingers on one hand, And the hairs on her head were seven.