The new world of Rousseau was more complex even than Mr Strachey's description indicates and the Nineties, wilfully complicating many things, cannot be confined in a definition. Industry and the great personified Science both cut transversely across the path of pure Romanticism, and it was as Old Believers, the last of Rousseau's faithful in an age corrupted from the pure faith, that the Nineties first appear. With them his melancholy turned at times to pessimism, his doubts to a sceptical languor; one swooned with love of Nature only while walking along the Strand and knew the purity of love only in Leicester Square; and the hysteria which a kindly Providence bestowed on Rousseau the last disciples found could be safely and artificially induced. They fled him down the labyrinthine ways, but they embraced him at the gate. For in essence their faith was the same, and the same and most significant in this: that they had faith, and believed in the possibility of having faith, and believed in the triumph of whatever faith they held. They believed in the past and in the future, and they did not believe in the Fall of Man.
Mr Holbrook Jackson's history of this period is specifically, but not generally, critical; its valuations are of men and movements in relation to their time, and not to ours—intentionally and successfully so. The spiritual history of the time is contained in Mr Yeats' Memories and it is regrettable that Mr Jackson should have consulted neither these documents nor the one other, Enoch Soames, which is in its way as important, when he prepared this new edition of his book. The book is almost all surface, but the surface is agreeably rich, and I run through a summarizing page, jotting down phrases, to indicate how far the Nineties are from the twenties:
"Glorification of the fine arts . . . virtuosity. 'Fine shades' . . . the 'unique word' . . . peacock phrases. Expression in the average national life . . . saner and more balanced social consciousness . . . There were demands for culture and social redemption . . . transcendentalism . . . Social evils . . . vitality . . . New Hedonism . . . cheerfully endeavouring to solve the question 'How to Live' . . . feeling of expectancy . . . taste new sensation . . . life-tasting . . . New . . . new . . . new . . . Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
They are the slogans of a battle in which we never fought.
