The French Coterie of the Savoy 1896

The yellow nineties have always been regarded as fascinating yet also as something of a literary liability, a movement that took more from the world than it gave in return. And yet, although Art for Art may have rested in the “splendid isolation” of individual emotions, as it often did, for instance, in the poems of Arthur Symons, it was, in its debt to the French Symbolists, to Gautier, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, to the perfectionists like Flaubert, and in its over-all aspects to Baudelaire, truly international. There had been, of course, foreign influence on the Victorians, but never had there been such complete sympathy of interests as that which now bound the two intellectual groups facing each other across the water. Cultural barriers changed into cultural bridges, the fear of mal de mer was conquered, and the Channel was crossed and recrossed. London became a Quartier of Paris; Dowson and Wilde walked the streets dressed à la Bohème, the Beardsley group liked to think of themselves as habitués of the Café Royal, and Verlaine found an audience more rapt than that of the brasseries in the Boul. Mich. There was a new union of forces. The powerful influences of France can be traced nowhere better than in the life story of the Savoy, which, in its brief spurt of brilliant life in 1896, was more truly representative of the time than the Yellow Book. It would not be rash to call the Savoy an Anglo-French periodical, and in this, certainly, the first of its kind.