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John Lane's Keynotes Series and the Fiction of the 1890's

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Wendell V. Harris
Wendell V. Harris*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Boulder
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Abstract

The Keynotes Series was the result of one of John Lane's schemes for calling attention to new writers and trends. These fourteen novels and nineteen volumes of short stories published between 1894 and 1897 represent a significant cross section of what Lane, whose Bodley Head Press was regarded as the center of fin de siècle literary attitudes, thought new and modish. An examination of the contents of the Series is useful in seeing the 1890's in perspective: conventional morality is there defended more often than attacked, decadent themes are few but technical experiments in structure and style many, and Hardy, not Wilde or Pater, exercises the greatest influence. (The first complete listing of the Series is included.)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 5 , October 1968 , pp. 1407 - 1413
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1. “The Nineties: Beginning, End, or Transition?” in Edwardians and Late Victorians, English Institute Essays, 1959 (New York, 1960), pp. 50–79.

2. The Eighteen-Nineties (New York, 1922), p. 45.

3. John Lane and the Nineties (London, 1936), pp. 128–129.

4. At the time, Lane and Elkin Mathews were still partners; the separation occurred later in 1894, at which time, according to May, p. 135, Keynotes was the firm's leading seller. Somewhat strangely, Beardsley's association with the Series drew hardly any hostile critical fire on the individual volumes. An exception was the anonymous review of The Great God Pan which appeared in the Athenaeum for 23 March 1895 (p. 375): “Appropriately enough, the title-page is designed by Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. One can well imagine that the idea of the author was to render into another medium the sentiment of those innumerable faces, all alike ugly with the ugliness of sin, with which this artist gratifies his admirers.”

5. E.g., Shiel's Prince Zaleski, Syrett's Nobody's Fault, and Sharp's At the Relton Arms were all first volumes. Machen published several books prior to The Great God Pan, but it was the first to bring him public notice.

6. The only volume in the Series not by an aspiring minor English author was the third, a translation by Lena Milman of Dostoievsky's Poor Folk. Its presence is probably to be accounted for by the rising interest in Russian fiction and the translator's association with Lane through the Yellow Book.

7. To discuss the careers of the individual authors of these volumes would extend this study to an unreasonable length. Almost all of them were just beginning their careers in the 1890's. Machen, Shiel, Harland, William Sharp, and Nesbit, at least, have secure if tiny niches in literary history. Evelyn Sharp, whose bibliography includes some thirty volumes of fiction, and Netta Syrett, with twice that number to her name, wrote considerable children's fiction. Most continued to write in one area or another. The extremes are represented by the actress Florence Farr, whose Keynotes volume was her only extended endeavor in fiction (the remainder of her writing being in the service of theosophy and mysticism), and J. S. Fletcher, the entries for whom in the British Museum catalogue occupy sixteen volumes.

8. Twentieth-century critics have also seen Machen's work in particular as redolent of evil. Dorothy Scarborough's The Supernatural in Fiction (New York and London, 1917) singles out his work with positive distaste: “Arthur Machen deals with strange, sinister aspects of supernaturalism unlike the wholesome folklore that other writers reveal to us… . One feels one should rinse his mind out after reading Machen's stories, particularly the collection called The Three Imposters” (p. 247).

9. An interesting contemporary view appears in Elizabeth R. Chapman's Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction (London, 1897). The sort of questioning was beginning which led H. G. Wells, for instance, from the positions he takes in A Modern Utopia (1905) and Ann Veronica (1909) to the statement in his 1933 Autobiography that “The family can remain only as a biological fact” (p. 404).

10. Another striking thing about the volume is the way it picks up and puts to original use many fashionable literary themes and preoccupations. Artistic geniuses possessed by a divine madness were rather in vogue among the minor storytellers (e.g., Claud Nicholson's Ugly Idol [Vol. xxx in the Keynotes Series], Eric Stenbock's “Viol D'Amour,” and Ella D'Arcy's “The Elegie”) as were various aspects of synaesthesia.

11. Adams was somewhat older than the majority of the contributors to the Series. A Child of the Age is the revised form of a novel originally published in 1884.

12. P. 152. This passage is one of the closest echoes of Pater's “Conclusion” to The Renaissance in the literature of the time. The attitude it reflects in the novel is one of melancholy realism, not of the decadent hedonism Pater is often accused of propagating.

13. This is a note struck constantly at the time, especially in the stories of Henry Harland, Ernest Dowson, and Frederick Wedmore.

14. For instance in Gissing's Eve's Ransom (1895); Gissing is forced to spend much effort and violate probability to get his hero and heroine across the channel together and at the same time preserve the technical innocence of their relationship.

15. The prose of the “Celtic Renaissance,” from Yeats's short stories like “Rosa Alchemica” to the fiction of The Evergreen, edited in Edinburgh by Patrick Geddes as an organ of the movement, almost uniformly exhibits a choice of style and subject matter similar to that of “Fiona Macleod.”

16. Retrospective Reviews, 1893–1895 (London, 1896), ii, 248.

17. The one successful story in the volume, “A Successful Intrusion,” follows the methods of Trollope rather than those of Hardy.

18. Retrospective Reviews, ii, 260. Harland's dominant moods were nostalgia (“We know how, in the Courts of Memory, mirth and melancholy wander hand in hand”) and disillusionment (“Life is a chance to make mistakes—a chance to make mistakes” [Grey Roses, pp. 128, 132]).

19. Beardsley's illustration, a faun whose knowing face was intended, according to Robert Ross, as a caricature of Whistler, was also a satiric jeu d'esprit- See Ross, Aubrey Beardsley (London, 1909), p. 83.

20. Unfinished Adventure (London, 1933), p. 56. See also Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree (London, 1939); Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic 90's (London, 1925); Ella Hepworth Dixon, A s I Knew Them (London, 1930); Gertrude Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist (London, 1932).

21. It may have appeared as Shadows of Life (London and New York : John Lane, 1898); I have not been able to examine a copy.