ort to express the inexpressible,
resulting in outraged grammar and many dots. . . .

English literature at the end of the last century stood in sore need of
some of the elementary virtues. If obviousness and simplicity are liable
to be overdone, they are not so deadly in their after-effects as the
bizarre and the extravagant. The literary movement of the eighteen
nineties was like a strong stimulant given to a patient dying of old
age. Its results were energetic, but the energy was convulsive. We
should laugh if we saw a man apparently dancing in mid-air--until we
noticed the rope about his neck. It is impossible to account for the
success of the Yellow Book school and its congeners save on the
assumption that the rope was, generally speaking, invisible.

In this Year of Grace, 1915, we are still too close to the eighteen
nineties, still too liable to be influenced by their ways, to be able to
speak for posterity and to pronounce the final judgment upon those evil
years. It is possible that the critics of the twenty-first century, as
they turn over the musty pages of the Yellow Book, will ejaculate with
feeling: "Good God, what a dull time these people must have had!" On the
whole it is probable that this will be their verdict. They will detect
the dullness behind the mechanical brilliancy of Oscar Wilde, and
recognize the strange hues of the whole AEsthetic Movement as the
garments of men who could not, or would not see. There is really no
rational alternative before our critics of the next century; if the men
of the eighteen nineties, and the queer things they gave us, were not
the products of an intense boredom, if, in strict point of fact, Wilde,
Beardsley, Davidson, Hankin, Dowson, and Lionel Johnson were men who
rollicked in the warm sunshine of the late Victorian period, then the
suicide, drunkenness and vice with which they were afflicted is surely
the strangest phenomenon in the history of human nature. To many people,
those years actually were dull.

The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of
afternoon in a rich house with large rooms; the
hours before teatime. They believed in nothing
except good manners; and the essence of good
manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be
defined as a silent yell.

So says Chesterton, yawning prodigiously.

One may even go farther, and declare that in those dark days a yawn was
the true sign of intelli