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Rooms in the Darwin Hotel ROOMS IN THE DARWIN HOTEL STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM AND IDEAS 1880-1920 TOM GIBBONS UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA PRESS First published in 1973 by the University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, W.A. 6009 Agents: Eastern States of Australia, New Zealand, Papua and New Guinea: Melbourne University Press; United Kingdom, Europe, Middle East, and the Caribbean: Angus & Robertson (U.K.) Ltd, London; Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Philippines: Angus & Robertson (S.E. Asia) Pty Ltd, Singapore; United States, its territories and possessions, and Canada: International Scholarly Book Services Inc., Portland, Oregon Printed in Australia by Frank Daniels Pty Ltd, Perth, Western Australia, and bound by Stanley Owen and Sons Pty Ltd, Alexandria, New South Wales Registered in Australia for transmission by post as a book This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher © Tom Gibbons 1973 Library of Congress catalog card number 73-83715 ISBN 0 85564 072 3 Published with the assistance of a grant from the Australian Academy of the Humanities Contents Preface vii 1 The Age of Evolutionism 1 2 The New Hellenism: Havelock Ellis 39 3 The Art of Modernity: Arthur Symons 67 4 Art for Evolution’s Sake: Alfred Orage 98 5 A Kind of Religion 127 References 145 Index 159 Preface In this book I make amends for the neglect which has largely overtaken the literary criticism of three prominent figures of the period 1880-1920: Havelock Ellis, who is best known for his pioneering work in the field of sexual psychology, Arthur Symons, who is generally and quite unfairly thought of as the author of a handful of Decadent poems, and Alfred Orage, who is mainly remembered as editor from 1907 until 1922 of the influential political and literary magazine The New Age. While there are important ways in which Ellis, Symons and Orage differ as critics, there are equally important ways in which they have much in common with each other. In discussing their criticism I draw particular attention to cer- tain beliefs, attitudes and concerns which they have in com- mon with each other and with many of their contemporaries, as these seem central to our understanding of a complex, fascinating and seminal literary period which continues to elude definition. The most important of these beliefs are: religiously, a belief in some form of mysticism; politically, a belief in the desirability of an élite social class; aesthetically, a strong leaning towards transcendental and anti-naturalistic theories of art and literature. In my first chapter I show how ideas and beliefs of this kind were nourished by the evolutionary notions which dominated the thinking of the period 1880-1920. I also draw attention to the way in which these same notions, whilst encouraging the mood of millennia1 optimism in which Ellis, Symons and Orage wrote, at the same time exacerbated public alarm about the dangers of social and literary de- generation and decadence. In my final chapter, having viii PREFACE argued that orthodox twentieth-century modernism is deeply indebted to the occult symbolist aesthetic which flourished in the evolutionary climate of this earlier period, I offer my own views on the more important of the general issues which my survey appears to raise for students of literature and literary history. Although my study is mainly concerned with certain re- lationships between ideas and literary criticism during the period 1880-1920, I hope that it will throw a useful light upon important aspects of the period’s creative literature, which I assume to be major by any standard. It should help to ‘place’, for example, the evolutionism of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903), the pervasive imagery of cancerous social ‘disorder’ in H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909), the ironic use of Lombroso’s notions of individual degeneracy in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), and even the ‘psychic apparitions’ which so fascinated Henry James and which dominate The Turn of the Screw (1898). More generally, and perhaps more importantly, it should help to establish that the élitism and occultism of W. B. Yeats were the reverse of unusual during the period under discussion. As Ellis, Symons and Orage and their criticism are not well known, I have tried to bring them closer to the reader by including short outlines of their lives. For the biographi- cal information contained in these outlines I am indebted almost entirely to the following standard biographies: Havelock Ellis: Philosopher of Love by Houston Peterson, Arthur Symons: A Critical Biography by Roger Lhombreaud, and A. R. Orage: A Memoir by Philip Mairet. I have also tried to bring Ellis, Symons and Orage closer to the reader by quoting their own words as often as possible. In quoting from Havelock Ellis I have been able to rely nearly always upon his books of collected essays. Exactly the reverse is true of Symons and Orage. In quoting from their criticism I have returned wherever possible to their original articles as published in periodicals. In the case of Orage PREFACE ix this was necessary because most of his criticism is uncollected, such collections as exist being more misleading than other- wise. In the case of Symons it was necessary because his own collections of essays, though reasonably complete and repre- sentative, give almost no indication of the interesting and rapid chronological development of his critical ideas. The ‘Darwin Hotel’ of my title stands for the structure of evolutionary assumptions which dominated Western thought between 1880 and 1920. I have adapted it from the fictional hotel of that name described in the opening pages of Caesar’s Column, a prophetic novel about the late twen- tieth century which was first published under a pseudonym in 1890 by Ignatius Donnelly, better known as a contender for Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. According to Donnelly, the cut-throat capitalism of his day is heading towards a world controlled by a ruthless oligarchy of inter- national financiers, in which the great majority of people will have been reduced to serfdom. The characteristics of the upper-class diners in New York’s palatial Darwin Hotel of 1988, so named ‘in honour of the great English philoso- pher of the last century’, are intended by Donnelly as a warning of what will happen if the Darwinian law of the survival of the fittest is accepted as the sole criterion of human progress: . I could not help noticing that the women, young and old, were much alike in some particulars, as if some general causes had moulded them into the same form. Their looks were bold, penetrating, immodest, if I may so express it, almost to fierceness . The chief features in the expression of the men were incredulity, unbelief, cunning, observation, heartlessness. The titles of most other works consulted have been in- corporated into the necessarily extensive references to each chapter. This seemed preferable to overloading a short book still further by providing a separate bibliography. The in- terested reader may however also be referred to The Critic’s x PREFACE Alchemy (1953) by Ruth Z. Temple, who discusses Arthur Symons and other critics who introduced French symbolism into England, to ‘The New Age’ under Orage (1967) by Wallace Martin, who describes Orage’s editorship of that legendary periodical, and to Nietzsche in England 1880- 1914 (1970) by David S. Thatcher, who considers Orage as an important interpreter of Nietzsche’s work to English readers. A useful survey of the occult background to symbolism in literature is provided in The Way Down and Out (1959) by John Senior. The occult background to symbolism in painting is described in Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian (English translation 1971). T.H.G. Acknowledgements Some of the material in some of these studies derives from a doctoral dissertation approved by the University of Cam- bridge in 1966 and entitled ‘Literary Criticism and the Intel- lectual Milieu: some aspects of the period 1880-1914’. Whilst at Cambridge during 1964 and 1965 it was my privilege to work under Professors John Holloway and Graham Hough, whose advice and encouragement I here take pleasure in acknowledging. I am also very much indebted to colleagues in the University of Western Australia who have read and commented upon the various drafts of these studies, to the Haags Gemeentemuseum for permission to reproduce the Mondrian Evolution triptych on the dust-jacket, to the Australian Academy of the Humanities for a grant towards costs of publication, and to the editors of The British Journal of Aesthetics and Renaissance and Modern Studies for per- mission to reprint material on Symons and Ellis respectively. Special thanks are also due to staff of the Reid Library of the University of Western Australia for cheerfully locating and acquiring seemingly inexhaustible amounts of Symons material on my behalf. 1 The Age of Evolutionism Looked at in the very broadest possible way, the period 1880-1920 was one of full-scale ideological reaction from the scientific materialism, atheism, determinism and pes- simism of the mid-nineteenth century. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century these gave way on many sides to their opposites: philosophical idealism, religious transcendentalism, vitalism and optimism. In the words of a central figure of the period, the mystico-socialist poet Edward Carpenter, the early 1880s saw ‘the inception of a number of new movements or enterprises tending towards the establishment of mystical ideas and a new social order’.
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