ious
Nineties, the Naughty Nineties, the Rococo Nineties, are descriptions I
have seen, but the Fighting Nineties would be mine. As I recall those
stimulating days, the prevailing attitude of the artist in his studio,
the author at his desk, the critic at his task, was that of Henley's Man
in the Street:

Hands in your pockets, eyes on the pavement,
Where in the world is the fun of it all?
But a row--but a rush--but a face for your fist.
Then a crash through the dark--and a fall.

Scarcely an important picture was painted, an important illustration
published, an important book written, an important criticism made, that
it did not lead to battle. Few of the Young Men of the Nineties
accomplished all the triumphant things they thought they could, but the
one thing they never failed to do and to let the world know they were
doing was to fight, and they loved nothing better--coats off, sleeves
rolled up, arms squared. Whatever happened was to them a challenge.
Whistler began the Nineties with his Exhibition at the Groupil Gallery
and it was a rout for the enemy. The harmless portrait of Desboutin by
Degas was hung at the New English Art Club and straightaway artists and
critics were bludgeoning each other in the press. Men were elected to
the Royal Academy, pictures were bought by the Chantrey Bequest; new
papers and magazines were started by young enthusiasts with something to
say and no place to say it in; new poets, yearning for degeneracy, read
their poems to each other in a public house they preferred to
re-christen a tavern; new printing presses were founded to prove the
superiority of the esoteric few; new criticism--new because honest and
intelligent--was launched; everything suddenly became _fin-de-siecle_
in the passing catchword of the day borrowed from Paris; every fad of
the Continent was adopted; but no matter what it might be, the incident,
or work, or publication that roused any interest at all was the signal
for the clash of arms, for the row and the rush. Everybody had to be in
revolt, though it might not always have been easy to say against just
what. I remember once, at the show of a group of young painters who
fancied themselves fiery Independents, running across Felix Buhot, the
most inflammable man in the world, and his telling me, with his wild
eyes more aflame than usual, that he could smell the powder. He was not
far wrong, if his metaphor was a trifle out of proportion to those very