though many of the attitudes toward life and literature in his poetry are recognizably Victorian and his writings can be considered as having contributed, in part, to the overall accomplishments of Victorian literature. To be sure, the same generalizations might be made about Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom we include in the Victorian section because he wrote during the Victorian period?even though his work was not published until 1918, when it had a great effect on modernist poets and critics. That such placements can be problematic is a striking reminder that literary history, like all history, resists being divided into the time categories we set up for convenient reference.
The writers most closely identified with the fin de siecle (the French for, literally, 'end of the century'), a phrase often used in connection with this period, were proponents of 'art for art's sake': they believed that art should be restricted to celebrating beauty in a highly polished style, unconcerned with controversial issues such as politics. These tenets are perhaps most frequently associated with Oscar Wilde, but the 'aesthetes,' as these artists and writers were called, included painters such as James McNeill Whistler, critics such as Arthur Symons, and the young Yeats. In 1936, when Yeats in old age was compiling an anthology of 'modern verse,' he looked back, as he often did, to the group of poets of the 1890s to which he had once been attached. They styled themselves the Rhymers' Club, and they met at a restaurant in London to read their poems aloud to each other. Yeats recalled that an admiration for the writings of Walter Pater was a badge of membership. Indeed, the first 'poem' in his anthology is a passage of Pater's prose that Yeats prints as verse?the passage about the Mona Lisa in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) that begins 'She is older than the rocks among which she sits.'
The Rhymers' Club poets liked to think of themselves as anti-Victorians, and they had some cause to do so?they consciously revolted against the moral
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earnestness of early Victorian prophets such as Thomas Carlyle and against a large set of middle-class opinions that they enjoyed mocking. Even Matthew Arnold, although appreciated for his ridicule of middle-class Philistines, was suspect in the eyes of the aesthetes because he had attacked, in his essay on William Wordsworth, the French poet Theophile Gautier, whom they viewed as a chief progenitor of the aesthetic movement. What Alfred, Lord Tennyson called in 1873 'poisonous honey stolen from France' was, in the 1890s, favored fare. Yet the credo of art for art's sake also had roots in the writings of earlier nineteenth-century British writers. The poets of the aesthetic movement were in a sense the last heirs of the Romantics; the appeal to sensation in their imagery goes back through Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Tennyson to John Keats. They developed this sensationalism much more histrionically than did their predecessors, however, seeking compensation for the drabness of ordinary life in melancholy suggestiveness, antibourgeois outrageousness, heady ritualism, world weariness, or mere emotional debauchery?qualities that led some critics to denounce the fin de siecle as a time of decadence and degeneration. But the importance of this era of English literary history does not lie in its writers' sensationalism and desire to shock. Their strongly held belief in the independence of art, their view that a work of art has its own unique kind of value?that, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, poetry must be judged 'as poetry and not another thing'?is what most strongly influenced later generations. Not only did the aesthetic movement nurse the young Yeats and provide him with his lifelong belief in poetry as poetry rather than as a means to some moral or other end; it also provided some of the principal schools of twentieth- century criticism with their basic assumptions. 'Art for art's sake' was in the nineties a provocative slogan; in the modern period many leading critics (usually associated with the tenets of New Criticism in North America, and Practical Criticism in Great Britain) were largely concerned with demonstrating the uniqueness of the literary use of language. They sought to train readers to see works of literary art as possessing a special kind of form, a special kind of meaning, and hence a special kind of value. In this regard the later critics were the heirs of the nineties, however much they modified or enriched the legacy. It was the poets of the fin de siecle, too, who first absorbed the influence of the French symboliste poets, an influence that became pervasive in the twentieth century and is especially strong (in different ways) in the poetry of Yeats and Eliot.
Though this era is characterized as 'decadent,' the poetry of the period was more various than that label suggests. Much as Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley expanded the range of male literary identity through their dandyism and effeminacy, women writers of the aesthetic movement such as the pseudonymous Michael Field (Katharine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper) and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge made equally untraditional claims for women's experience, as Field translated and elaborated on Sappho's poems and Cole- ridge took on the witch's voice. There were also poets, such as William Ernest Henley and Rudyard Kipling, whose tone was strenuously masculine. They embraced the values not of languid contemplation but of a life of action, and they shared a commitment to realism that links them to naturalist novelists of the decade such as George Gissing and George Moore. Henley's realism appears in his grim sketches of hospital experiences, and Kipling's in his distinctive re- creation of the lives of common soldiers in the British Army in India and Africa.
Realism of another brand is evident in the tightly crafted dramas of the
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playwright Bernard Shaw. Works such as Mrs Warren's Profession (1898) reveal that some late-century artists wanted to engage with the pressing social, moral, and political issues of the day, and strove to challenge their audiences with thorny problems. Readers were unsettled, too, by one of the best-selling novellas of the period, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Although this horror story owes its allegiance to Gothicism rather than realism, many critics suggest that Robert Louis Stevenson's tale of a man split between his respectable public identity and an amoral secret self captures key anxieties of the fin de siecle. Within Wilde's oeuvre this theme is most closely embodied in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), but it also has an important place, in a very different mode, within The Importance of Being Earnest (performed 1895). In this light, bright, and sparkling drama, the concept of the double life is central to the two principal male characters, who have both invented fictitious characters (Algernon's Bunbury and Jack's brother Ernest) that enable them to indulge their desires.
In its variety of literary expressions, the fin de siecle manifests something akin to a split personality. Sometimes that division appears within the work of a single writer. Kipling has often been seen primarily as the spokesman of the British Empire, the poet who coined the phrase 'the white man's burden' to describe the northern races' necessary shouldering of the heavy weight of imperial rule. Yet Kipling also created the short story 'The Man Who Would Be King' (1888), a highly ambivalent allegory of empire, and wrote 'Recessional' for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Instead of offering a complacent celebration of her sixty-year reign, this hymn delivers a haunting elegy: by placing the achievements of his country and his century in the vaster perspectives of human history, Kipling makes us fully aware of their fragility.
MICHAEL FIELD Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) Edith Cooper (1862-1913)
Michael Field was the pseudonym adopted by Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper; together they published twenty-seven verse plays and eight volumes of poems. When Robert Browning wrote to Michael Field to praise a volume of plays, Cooper responded by comparing her collaborative relationship with Bradley to that of two famous Jacobean playwrights: 'My Aunt and I work together after the fashion of Beaumont and Fletcher. She is my senior, by but fifteen years. She has lived with me, taught me, encouraged me and joined me to her poetic life.' When Browning let slip the secret of their authorship, Bradley begged him to maintain the disguise. The revelation
