THE SAVOY in Cross Section

176 a wholly satisfactory definition. Miss Charlesworth is to be congratulated in having illuminated some of the "dark passages" of the late nineteenth-century artistic sensibility, but a full acount of the phenomenon has yet to be written. And before that can be done we must clarify our ideas as to the meaning of Decadence. American University —John M. Munro of Bei rut, Lebanon 3 · THE SAVOY in C ross _S eç_t [on_ THE SAVOY: NINETIES EXPERIMENT, Edited with an Introduction By Stanley Weintraub. University Park, Pa, and Lond: The Pennsylvania State U P. $7.50. Few books have the "good looks" to make so favorable a first impression as this one; it is surely one of the handsomest volumes to be produced by any American university press. In the careful selection of materials, artistic layout and design, and nearly flawless printing and binding the book is a credit both to the book designer (Mari 1 yn Shobaken) and printer (Kingsport Press), It includes a selection of 29 poems, stories and essays and 25 illustrations from the one-year life span of THE SAVOY (January-December I896), which came into being largely because Aubrey Beardsley was f i red—from THE YELLOW BOOK—in the wake of the Wilde scandal. Choosing the selections was undoubtedly Weintraub's chief agony, since he was certain to omit much that was good, in its brief life the journal maintained a higher literary and artistic level than THE YELLOW BOOK (whose existence, 189497 , brackets that of "The Beardsley," as Hesketh Pearson called it). The July, I896 number is perhaps not atypical. In it are contributions by Ernest Dowson, Hubert Crackanthorpe. W, B, Yeats, Arthur Symons, Havelock Ellis, Aubrey Beardsley and George Moore, Other contributors from time to time included G.B,S., Joseph Conrad and Max Beerbohm, Reading THE SAVOY whole, then, would provide a sound introduction to the literary WHO'S WHO of the 1890's, But as THE SAVOY is difficult to obtain, and most scholars would gladly settle for reading less than the entire journal, Weintraub's selection will satisfy our need to know more about this "Nineties Experiment," Reading it gives a quite accurate impression of the original journal. It is true that the proportion of poetry here is considerably smaller, and that of stories somewhat larger, than in a typical number· of THb SAVOY but that probably reflects a judgment concerning the relative merit of the fiction and verse in the journal with which many scholars would agree. Otherwise the selections are nicely balanced; there are pieces by major and minor figures and literary and artistic work of wide variety. Lastly, but significantly, Weintraub's witty, well-informed introduction provides the selections just the right amount of context to make the works of poet, novelist and artist live again, For anyone interested in the I890's this book is emphatically recommended, Purdue University —W. Eugene Davis ...