Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties

ights. I rather think they began themselves and we k

er called our own-the old chambers in the old Buckingham Street house overlooking the river; I was doing more regular newspaper work than I had ever done before or ever hope to do again; we were in the Eighteen-Nineties, and I need neither the magnifying glasses through whic

its decadence. But because a small clique wrote an?mic verse and bragged of the vices for which they had not the strength, because a few youthful artists invented new methods of expression the outsider did not understand, that does not mean decadence. A period of revolt against decadence, of insurrection, of vigorous warfare it seemed to me who lived a

pockets, eyes

world is the

rush-but a fac

through the d

g 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-siècle 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

the big restaurants too beyond our purse, and the only real café was the Café Royal. At an earlier date Whistler had drawn his followers to it. In the Nineties Frederick Sandys was one of its most familiar figures. Even now, especially on Saturday nights, young men, in long hair and strange hats and laboriously unconventional clothes, are to be met there, looking a trifle solemnized by their sh

nhospitality, and we both liked the talk. But the day of reckoning came when, sitting down to lunch one morning, we realized that it was the first time we had eaten that simple meal alone for we could not remember how long. The lunch for which no preparation is m

to which, with age, I often find myself pleasantly yielding. Our friends, when we stopped them dropping in by day, began dropping in by night instead, and one group of friends to whom Thursday

by Josep

UR LONDO

nd the whiskey-and-soda without which an Englishman cannot exist through an evening-it was because I got too hungry not to need something to eat before the last of the company had said good-night. We did not offer even the comfort of space. Once the small dining-room that had been Etty's studio, and the not over-large room that was J.'s, and the nondescript room that was drawing-room and my workroom combined, were packed solid, there was no place to overflow into except the short, narrow entrance hall, and I still grow hot at

t at the wrong moment, or for the games and innumerable devices without which intelligent human beings are not supposed to be able to survive an evening in each other's company. The idle who play golf all day and bridge all night, who cannot eat in the short intervals between without music, believe that talk has gone out of fashion. My experience had been in Rome and Venice, was then in London, and is now, that men and women who have somet

by

. H