Your only excuse would be that you took Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw to be and practically alone to be the men of the nineties. That is not so. And, if you agree with me that Oscar was a man of the eighties and that Shaw is a man of the twentieth century, you have no excuse whatever and 98% of the first paragraph in your letter is dead wrong.
I presume that you keep copies of your letters to me: you should; they will be useful for your Memoirs of a Celibate (John Murray: 1950; 105/-net). Anyhow, here goes:
There was no question of either a literary revival or revolution in the nineties and there was no sham, colossal or minute.
The men engaged were not pretentious, not conceited, not humbugs. They were a group of men, mostly under 30, who just wrote and drew and painted as well as they could, in all sincerity and with no view of financial gain. Dowson, Johnson, Horner, Image, etc., etc., etc., were the humblest, most modest lot of literary men I ever met.
Their output was not immense: it was infinitesimal, just because they were so careful to produce only work that was "just so." Think, Stephen. What did Henry Harland, one of the few to live to over 40, put out? The Cardinal's Snuff Box, My Friend Prospers, Mademoiselle'
