London Visitor is Link With “Yellow Nineties”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26693, 12 February 1948, Page 8

London Visitor is Link With “Yellow Nineties”

Memories of “ The Yellow Nineties,” and of the many notable figures in literature and art that truly “ dazzled ” the last decade of the 19th century, have been awakened in Dunedin by the knowledge that amongst its centennial visitors is a son of one of the most gifted—and most tragic—writers in the language. The visitor is Mr Vyvyan Holland, the only surviving son of Oscar Wilde.

Mr Holland is accompanying his wife, who is on a business trip to the Dominion. Naturally, he has been a keen student of the period which produced such illustrious writers and artists, as his father, G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Dawson, John Davidson, Hubert Crackanthorpef W. B. Yeats, George Moore, Sir Max Beerbohm, J. M. Barrie, Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts, William Rothenstein, Charles Condor and a whole host of others. Sir Max Beerbohm and Bernard Shaw are still living. Time, however, has dealt a little harshly with many of those who died earlier, though the period retains its fascination for many writers, and there will probably be many additiohs to the small library on the subject. “My mother died in 1899 and my father in the following year,” Mr Holland told a Daily Times reporter yesterday, “and naturally, I have few personal memories. My brother, Cyril, died with a bullet wound in his head at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, in March, 1915.” As the administrator of his father’s estate, Mr Holland has come in contact with many leading personalities in the literary, art and theatrical worlds during the past 30 years, and it was about them, rather than his father, that he preferred to talk. Revolt Against Victorianism “I cannot tell you anything more about my father than you can read in a score of books,” he said. “But I have taken a keen interest in the period in which my father’s best work was done. What has come to be known as ‘fin de siecle,’ or as Max Beerbohm called it, the ‘Beardsley period,’ was more than anything, a breakaway from the old Victorian traditions of the three-volume novels Pf Wilkie Collins and Trollope. It was very much under the influence of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and the PreRaphaelite movement. French writers like Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, too, played a formative part. I think it might be described as a thorough revolt against the hypocrisy and the blatant insincerity of Victorian times. “ The 1890’s certainly produced 'an extraordinarily large number of good writers, but I think that one of the reasons why they did not have a greater and more permanent influence on the world was that many of them were avowed Socialists, or almost Communists. Of course, exceptions must be made in the case of Shaw and Wells. Shaw, in particular, took a malicious joy in debunking all the established institutions of his time, but he does not fit exactly into the period under discussion. Shaw, of course, was too overpowering a personality to, be fitted into any period, however big andrimportant it may be. In any case, he was more interested in promulgating the doctrine of Fabianism rather than spreading any literary or artistic gospel at that time.” Mr Holland said he had been a lifelong friend of Wells. “He was a truly delightful person—-an exceptionally human man.” Mr Holland was also a personal friend of the Irish novelist and ardent champion of French Impressionism, George Moore, and also of Sir Max Beerbohm. “ the incomparable Max,” and last true survivor of fin-de-siecleism. He is an ardent admirer of both Moore and Beerbolm, but was highly critical of another literary figure of the period, the late Frank Harris, who wrote a life of his

father. “He was very entertaining, and a most fluent conversationalist on any subject. He was intriguing enough to make you believe that he was telling you the truth, but in my opinion, he was just an old ruffian.” Ultra Modern Art “There was a wealth of artistic genius in the Eighteen Nineties,” Mr Holland continued, “ and the revolt against conventionalism, with the British Impressionists in the vanguard, had a salutary effect, but the protest against the servile copying of Nature has gone to extreme limits in the works of the Surrealists. In my opin ion a lot of this ultra-modern art would never have cbme into existence if it was not for an unmitigated ‘ramp’ worked by certain dealers and others. All sorts of quite worthless rubbish has, in consequence, been palmed off on the public, but I think it is safe to say that Surrealism, Cubism, and so on, a direct result of the merciless debunking of the Eighteen Nineties, has been discovered to be a hollow sham. Of course, you can always get thousands of people to see pictures of two-headed women and such monstrosities, but it looks as if the vogue for this sort of thing has gone.” Like his father, Mr Holland is an accomplished linguist, and during the war he was attached to the foreign news service of the 8.8. C. One of his tasks was to send secret broadcasts to resistance movements in various enemy-occupied countries. Apparently, his work was so efficient that the Nazis included his name amongst the list of Englishmen whom they were going to “ liquidate ” on their arrival in Britain. Mr Holland has written a number of short stories, and is the author of several translations, his last being the life of Sarah Bernhardt, the French tragedienne, who was a personal friend of his father’s, and for whom he wrote one of his most famous plays, “ Salome.” The book is by a granddaughter of the “Divine Sarah.”