Quarrels and Coteries in the 1890s

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This essay considers the rivalries and quarrels of coterie culture and some of its leading figures in the 1890s, including Yeats and the Rhymers' Club, the 'Valistes' (Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon), Francis Thompson and the Catholic circle surrounding Alice and Wilfred Meynell, and the Wilde and Whistler camps. Recognition of the complex motives behind the quarrels and hatreds of the time--battles for leadership, professional jealousy, financial interests, and the creative spirit of argument and contrariness--offers an alternative to previous accounts of the raillery of the period and its clash between decadents and anti-decadents. ********** Seldom, in recent history, have the social 'upper crust' and the cultural elite been the same. This is especially so in England, which has never really taken to the salon tradition of French culture. The 'Holland House Circle' and the Seamore Place elite of Lady Blessington (the Irish-born Margaret Gardiner nee Power) in the early part of the nineteenth century were exceptional. Casting around for a culturally militant circle in the late nineteenth century, one would not look to Wilfred Scawen Blunt's Crabbet Club, which foundered on rumbustiousness, nor to Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire and the high-born 'Souls' of Lady Dedborough (Ettie Grenfell), who appear to have been more interested in tennis than in who should succeed Tennyson. Lady Wilde's attempt to relocate her salon from Dublin to a small house in London in the late 1880s and early 1890s fell flat. George Bernard Shaw described her gatherings as 'desperate affairs'. (1) Speranza's grande dame manner, along with her flounced dressed and risque repartee, had become an embarrassing anachronism. By then, Gladstone's 'Home Rule' for Ireland had hardened political divisions within English society and made social gatherings a risky business. From mid-century, literary and artistic avant-gardism had in any case shifted towards what Ian Fletcher has called 'the privilegedly unprivileged circle' and the 'mythology of the group personality'. (2) Its 'voice' was usually the little magazine. The Germ (1850), the voice of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (the 'P.R.B.'), was to inspire Herbert Horne and Arthur Mackmurdo's The Century Guild Hobby Horse later in the century (1884-92), and Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon's The Dial (1889-97). The emergence of guilds, brotherhoods, and coteries was of course evident all over Europe from mid-century. The failure of the revolutions of 1848 coincided with the rise of creative revolution, and the quest for an authentic style and direction that resisted middle-class identity and conformity. Famously, the dominance of the Paris Salon, the official annual exhibition of the works of living artists, was challenged by an exhibition of rejected pictures (the Salon des Refuses) in 1863, and after the first Impressionist exhibition of 1873, by independent artists who declined to send their pictures to the official Salon. In England, in 1848, it was a dislike of the Academy, England's equivalent of the Paris Salon, that gave birth to the romantically independent 'P.R.B.'. Collective action in the larger political arena was matched by collective creative revolution, in which the coterie was central. There is, arguably, an important difference between the Pre-Raphaelites and later artistic groupings. Whereas the Pre-Raphaelites took on the literary and artistic Establishment, later coteries in England had to assert their identity in a rapidly expanding literary and artistic marketplace, while fending off the usual threats to group identity caused by factionalism and individualism from within. As Kelsey Thornton has indicated, the traditional reading of the 1890s in terms of a clash between the decadents and the anti-decadents provides a somewhat simplistic outline of the motivations behind the complexity of quarrels, feuds, and heartfelt hatreds that characterize the period. …