"The Idiots" in The Savoy: Decadence and the Celtic Fringe.

"The Idiots" was Conrad's first published story. Written in the spring of 1896, it appeared in October of the same year in a short-lived magazine called The Savoy. Students of Conrad probably know "The Idiots" as one of five stories in a collection called Tales of Unrest, published in 1898. This paper will concentrate on the story's original site of publication, arguing that when we read "The Idiots" as part of The Savoy, themes and continuities from that publication illuminate facets of the story that we might otherwise overlook. (1)

Conrad wrote "The Idiots" while on his honeymoon in Brittany; the title refers to a family of local children whom he had encountered in the area around Ile-Grande, where he and Jessie were staying. Conrad asked T. Fisher Unwin to place the story for him, but Unwin had difficulty finding a magazine to take it. Eventually, through Edward Garnett, the story found its way to The Savoy. But Conrad was not entirely pleased to be in such a magazine, one now best known as the epitome of nineties decadence. "Decadence" will link the various parts of my account and explain both why Conrad was uncomfortable with The Savoy and why its editor was drawn to Conrad's work. The Breton location of "The Idiots" is paralleled by similarly baleful Celtic settings in stories and essays in the eight numbers of The Savoy. (2) The Celtic world was decaying and yet at the same time undergoing a cultural revival. This paper will discuss "The Idiots" in the light of the complex and contradictory discourse of Celticism.

I.

In 1896, Conrad wrote two other short stories in addition to "The Idiots--"An Outpost of Progress" and "The Lagoon." He needed to sell them, and magazines were the market for short stories. But Conrad was suspicious of magazines. Anxious to develop a reputation as a serious novelist, he was well aware of the difference between wide popularity and recognition from a discerning few. Magazines catered to popular tastes, so they did little for a writer's prestige. But Conrad did make distinctions among them. When he wrote to Unwin telling him about a request from The Cornhill for stories, he commented, "I think this Cornhill is not a bad mag. to appear in" (CL 1: 286). A bad magazine was one like Pearson's, which asked him for something the following year. He turned it down: "I think it ["The Return"] is much too good to be thrown away where the right people won't see it" (CL 1: 405, original emphasis). Conrad's concern was to establish his literary standing, and the right people were those whose good opinion would help establish it. Such people did not read Pearson's. But they might well read The Cornhill and probably would look at Cosmopolis, another journal that interested Conrad. It began publication in January 1896, and although its editor turned down "The Idiots," he accepted "An Outpost of Progress." Conrad First tells us that "Cosmopolis: An International Review offered itself as a forum for European culture and international understanding in a time of escalating nationalism and militarism." The magazine included sections in English, French, and German, appearing with different covers in London, Paris, and Berlin; the London edition was published by Fisher Unwin. It ran only until November 1898, but during that short period "attracted an extraordinary array of contributors" (Cosmopolis). Apparently, the right people did see "An Outpost of Progress"; Conrad observes with satisfaction that "The Sat[urday] Review notices my story in the Cosmo [polis] with great discrimination" (CL 1: 363).

The Cornhill published "The Lagoon" in January 1897. Conrad had every reason to be happy to be in The Cornhill. Michael Ashley describes it as "the premier literary magazine of the High Victorian period, dominating the scene between 1860 and the 1890s" (250). Almost all the leading British writers of the period had shown their work there during the magazine's first twenty years. But by the early 1880s, circulation had dropped from 110,000 to 12,000. James Payn, who took over the editorship from Leslie Stephen in 1883, reduced the price from a shilling to sixpence and began to include a more middlebrow line of fiction--Grant Allen, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle. But circulation continued to fall, and in the late 1890s, the magazine returned to the shilling review format, becoming more literary (251). By the time "The Lagoon" appeared, The Cornhill was more its old self. This development must have satisfied Conrad, who would not have wanted his work appearing with the likes of Allen and Rider Haggard, whose reputations had been made by the undiscriminating multitude. Conrad's correspondence is peppered throughout his early career with derogatory remarks about the demos. There are plenty of acknowledgements of the need to put bread on the table, but they are mostly self-deprecatory, accusing himself of aesthetic backsliding. Conrad regarded himself as committed to his art first and foremost and therefore was unwilling to compromise with the market.

When Conrad wrote "The Idiots," The Savoy was only two issues old. The magazine was meant to be a serious publication like Cosmopolis or the shilling Cornhill. Nonetheless, he was unwilling to associate himself with the project. The problem began with Arthur Symons, the magazine's editor. Symons had achieved some prominence as early as 1893 with an article in Harper's titled "The Decadent Movement in Literature." Most of the writers he discussed wrote in French, so he was thus associated with figures such as Verlaine, Huysmans, Maeterlinck, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Mallarme. His own poetry was in a louche vein: a celebration of gas-lit nights, artifice of all sorts, and languorous idleness. (3) Before the first issue had even appeared, Symons had asked Edward Garnett if Conrad would be willing to provide a story for the new magazine that he was preparing. "The Idiots" was to hand, and neither The Cornhill nor Cosmopolis would take it; Conrad was newly married and in need of money, so he let Symons see his story, and Symons took it. But in the spring of 1896, Conrad wrote to Fisher Unwin, his publisher and agent: "I am very glad you do not think much of the 'Savoy.' The personality (as disclosed in some verses) of A.[rthur] S.[ymons] is not sympathetic to me" (CL 9: 31). The Pall Mall Gazette's notice of Symons's London Nights (2 September 1895) can be used as a gloss on the letter to Fisher Unwin: "Mr. Arthur Symons is a dirty-minded man, and his mind is reflected in the puddle of his bad verses" (Beckson 118). The Pall Mall Gazette's judgment was doubtless influenced by the fact that Symons was closely associated with the Decadent movement in the arts. In England, the arch decadent was Oscar Wilde, whose trial and public humiliation the year before was still fresh in the public mind. There was a danger that anyone associated with Wilde and French decadence would be defiled by the same pitch.

Aubrey Beardsley, The Savoys art editor, had an even more compromised reputation. He had been the art editor of The Yellow Book from its inception in 1894 until the spring of the following year, when the Wilde trials took place, and although Wilde had never contributed to The Yellow Book, dramatist and magazine were associated in the public mind. After a mob had broken every window of his office's premises, John Lane, the magazine's publisher, decided that a sacrifice should be offered up to respectable morality. Beardsley got the short straw. He had, after all, illustrated Wilde's Salome, and the highly-wrought, erotically suggestive drawings that he produced for the Yellow Book and later The Savoy were and still are regarded as exemplars of 1890s decadence. In the summer of 1895, Leonard Smithers, Symons's publisher (and also a publisher of pornography) suggested a new quarterly magazine to fill the more progressive space now abandoned by The Yellow Book. Beardsley was approached to be art editor. Still smarting from his dismissal in April from The Yellow Book, he was enthusiastic about the project and even came up with the name, The Savoy. Karl Beckson, Symons's biographer, points out that this was a risky choice because Wilde had associations with the Savoy Hotel, and these had been made public at his trial (120-21).

The Savoy is probably best remembered now for the work of Aubrey Beardsley. His draftsmanship appears in every issue of the magazine, and over the eight-number run, two or three poems and his unfinished novel, Under the Hill, were prominent. There is no doubt that informed readers would have regarded him as a decadent. And his work was known and admired in France-the home of decadence in the eyes of the English. Gabriel de Lautrec, in the Courier Francais on 2 February 1896, writes of Beardsley's work in The Savoy:

   The fragile and tormented grace, the faint, sometimes caricatured,
   sensuality, makes Aubrey Beardsley a new soul. His drawings are
   from a different art. [...] Their preciousness seems to hide an
   obsessive and perverse secret. I imagine a draftsman drunk on
   hashish dreaming of such landscapes. Happy are those who need
   neither hashish nor opium to open their eyes to the dream. If the
   word "evocative" is not an empty word or a barbarism, it is the
   word for the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. (4)

Beardsley was thus the epitome of nineties decadence in England, but while Symons was most certainly enthralled by decadent literature, he should not be thought of as cheerleading without reservations. In his Harper's article, Symons characterizes decadent literature as intensely self-conscious and given to "an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity [...] healthy we cannot call it" (858-59). It is thus "typical of a civilization grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or in conduct" (859). There is no question that decadent art beguiles Symons, but his choice of epithets and intensifiers makes it clear that Decadence marks a fall from classicism. He makes no bones about its generally signifying the end of "great periods," and decadent art is to be contrasted with the qualities of perfect simplicity, proportion, and sanity that characterize classicism. Decadence reflects the needs and manners of "a sophisticated society" and is true to that society's condition (859). But the condition is not one of robust good health. For Symons, decadent art is "a new and beautiful and interesting disease" (859); thus, the art does not create decadence but is its manifestation. The art is a symptom of a society entering its terminal phase; it is not the cause of the disease. Symons's was probably a minority view. Max Nordau, in his highly influential Entartung (1892)--translated as Degeneration in 1895-regarded the art of the fin de siecle as willfully decadent, and as such, encouraging society as a whole in its degeneration. The fate of Oscar Wilde was symptomatic of a cultural turn, a turn toward conservative social values. So with the Wilde typhoon not quite blown out and Symons and Beardsley at the helm, it is not hard to understand why Conrad would want to keep well to windward of The Savoy. But why would Symons want Conrad?

II.

According to Robert Hobson and William Pfeiffer, what principally drew Symons to Conrad was atmosphere (269). They argue from Symons's own 1925 Notes on Conrad, where he praises Conrad for his ability to generate atmosphere: "he creates thrilling effects by mere force of suggestion, elusive as some vague mist, full of illusion, of rare magic, which can become poisonous and sorcerous" (Symons 28). In this, Conrad is a soul mate of de Lautrec's "evocative" Beardsley. Symons declared in favor of atmosphere as early as 1893 when he praises the style of the Goncourts, "which has brought light and shadow into the color, which has softened outline in the magic of atmosphere" (860). Maeterlinck has even more of it: "an effect of atmosphere--an atmosphere in which outlines change and become mysterious" (864). Symons had been impressed by An Outcast of the Islands, where, presumably, he had found such "rare magic" and hoped for more of the same in "The Idiots."

Symons's article on the Decadent Movement dates from 1893. Two years later, on the other side of the Wilde trials, Symons was evidently anxious to distance the Savoy from the word decadence. Before the magazine even appeared, one of Arthur Waugh's weekly letters from London in the New York Critic reported that there would be "nothing decadent, nothing revolutionary" in The Savoy (Beckson 126). Symons's editorial note, which prefaced the first number, made a claim not for any particular school or coterie but for art itself:

It is hoped that the "THE SAVOY" will be a periodical of an exclusively literary and artistic kind. To present Literature in the shape of its letterpress, Art in the form of its illustrations. [....] We have no formulas, and we desire no false unity of form or matter. We have not invented a new point of view. We are not Realists, or Romanticists, or Decadents. For us, all art is good which is good art. (Weintraub xxiii)

There's more than an echo here of art for art's sake aestheticism, but clearly Symons hoped to calm the fears of those who anticipated the most hair-raising brand of fin-de-siecle experimentation. Yet Beardsley's illustrations and prose, the frequent presence of Continental decadents in translation, and poems by Ernest Dowson and Symons all tend against the "nothing decadent" claim; furthermore, a series of feminist-leaning stories could well be termed revolutionary (5)--by the end of the nineteenth century, the word decadent was used to condemn realist fiction and New Women writing. Nonetheless, Symons's opening statement of editorial policy was confirmed by the presence of sober contributors such as Edmund Gosse, George Bernard Shaw, (6) and Hubert Crackanthorpe. And Conrad's story with its strong debts to Maupassant and Flaubert was part of this restrained tone. (7) A case could well be made for The Savoy being advanced and progressive but not decadent.

W. E. Henley, however, would probably not have agreed. As editor of the New Review, Henley was one of the most influential figures in the British literary world of the 1890s. He deplored the kind of quietism in the face of social decay that Symons seemed to accept. He and his school favored the active over the languid and had no time for the perverse or the bizarre. Their muscular aestheticism led Max Beerbohm to label the group "Henley's Regatta." But Henley was no philistine.

Peter D. McDonald divides the literary world of the 1890s into "purists" and "profiteers." Henley was of the former camp. For "purists," "the literary field exists in and for itself," in contrast to those for whom it is "an instrument for achieving other purposes," usually the making of money (14). Here was a man after Conrad's own heart, and McDonald notes that in 1897 Conrad was eager to have The Nigger of the "Narcissus" serialized in Henley's New Review. The list of prominent writers who were more or less in the editor's debt is substantial and impressive. Robert Louis Stevenson, George Saintsbury, and William Archer were early proteges, and in the 1890s, Henley's circle came to include Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, (8) W. B. Yeats, Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Morrison, J. M. Barrie, and Stephen Crane. He had always advocated for more established but often-controversial figures like Thomas Hardy and George Meredith (32). To be sure, such a group was united neither in politics nor in literary subject matter; where they came together was in a view of literature that demands an ideal of the man of letters who lives according to a firm code of writerly conduct. "The man of letters," declares Henley, "writes not for the many-headed monster; it is enough for him if he please himself and his friends. If he once listen to the voice of the great public, or yield to the tinkling of its shillings, he is traitor to his art, and henceforth a stranger to literature" (qtd. 33). The Savoy of Symons's editorial note was not so very far from this position, and we can at least place Conrad and Symons on the same purist page as regards the primacy of art over commercialism. For the latter, "The Idiots" fit The Savoy so well that he made it the lead prose in the October number.

Two years later came some confirmation of Symons's view. "The Idiots" was republished in Tales of Unrest. It appeared with four other stories--"Karain: A Memory," "An Outpost of Progress," "The Return," and "The Lagoon." Several of the descriptors Symons used of decadent art occur in various reviews. The Publisher's Circular criticizes Conrad's propensity for stylistic "languor" (Simmons 241). The London Review notes with approbation that the stories "invariably create an atmosphere" (242). The Scotsman mentioned the "degeneration" of the protagonists of "An Outpost" (229), and The Literary Gazette titles its notice "A Decadent": "Mr. Conrad shows himself here of the school of the Decadents, and reminds us of Huysmans" (247), and this judgment is not a condemnation. The writer particularly admires "Karain" and finds more to applaud in "The Return" than most reviewers. Of the other three stories, he writes, "All will repay a leisurely perusal, in which alone their rich aesthetic quality can be appreciated" (250). What Symons admired in Conrad, others did too.

III.

By the mid-twentieth century, The Savoy did not seem to have been an entirely appropriate venue for Conrad's story, which seemed a far cry from nineties excess. Lawrence Graver writes that "even now a reader feels a jolt when, after experiencing the somber mood of the 'The Idiots,' he turns to find Beardsley's deliciously decadent illustration, 'The Death of Pierrot'" (18). In fact, Graver is not quite correct in suggesting that the reader moves directly from Conrad to Beardsley. The story ends on page 30, facing which is a poem by Symons called "In Saint Jacques"--"The Death of Pierrot" follows the poem, on pages 32-33. (9) The poem, by anyone's account, is entirely consonant in tone with Conrad's story. We are still in France, in a church, watching an old woman praying before the altar of a saint. She might almost be Susan Bacadou's mother, Madame Levaille. "Ah, she is old, and the world's ways are rough, / She had grown old with sorrow year by year," writes Symons. We can discern a thematic continuity with Conrad's story: rural sorrow and decline combined with the apparently cold comforts of church. In the third stanza, the poet introduces himself into the poem:

Here, in the shadowy chapel, where I stand, An alien at the door, and see within Bent head and benediction of the hand, And may not, though I long to enter in. (Savoy 31)

The narrator of "The Idiots" is also plainly an outsider. His narrative voice is quickly lost in the story and never draws attention to itself after the first couple of pages. Symons, on the other hand, concludes that although he would like to kneel next to the old woman and share her vision, he knows that the Virgin would not appear to him: "I should see only wax and paint" (Savoy 31). A product of disenchanted modernity, he knows that the old woman's church and her faith are not available to him. The poem expresses nostalgia for a practice and faith that is already of another time and place. Although there is no nostalgia in Conrad's tale, there is the same awareness of a world that is passing away, that we are reading the kind of story that a modern person cannot participate in but may only observe as an outsider.

Had "The Death of Pierrot" indeed followed "The Idiots," there would still have been thematic continuity. Conrad knew well that artistic purism came at a price. So did The Savoy. The magazine's regular frontispiece was a Beardsley drawing of a young Pierrot on a winged horse. The illustration in the October number shows the clown dead. The Savoy did not survive the year, so Pierrot can be read as the magazine itself, nearing its end, and with it, devotion to artistic purity. It was overall a bad time for magazines dedicated to "true art." Henley's own National Review folded in December 1897 (Stape 97), and Cosmopolis went a year later, having lasted a scant three years. So Pierrot's death may also be taken more generally to refer to the death of artistic purism.

Art for art's sake had long been at risk. In his essay on John Millais in the same October issue (Savoy 57-58), Symons gives an account of that artist's betrayal of his great talent and of his artistic degeneration. This is not the degeneration that followers of Nordau perceived in Aestheticism but degeneration away from a devotion to the pursuit of artistic truth to the pursuit of "ready money and immediate fame." The true artist works "in contempt of the multitude and its prying unwisdom. The appeal of every great artist has been to the few" (57). The parallels to Henley are clear--and to Conrad's own 1897 Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus." (10) Fame and popularity are worth nothing against the approval of those who truly understand. And for Symons, as for Henley and Conrad, great contemporary art seeks the essence of truth, a truth that most will find unappealing or incomprehensible.

In similar vein and in the same October issue appeared an essay by Havelock Ellis on Jude the Obscure (Savoy 35-49), a book whose publication in 1895 had provoked national scandal. "Of course there is only one thing that the true artist can or will remember, and that is his art. He is only writing for one person--himself" (46). Ellis goes on to argue that the English novel fell into serious decline over the course of the nineteenth century. The rot set in with Scott's "prostituting his fame to make money" (35). Popular art is simple art, Ellis tells us. "I do not like drinking at the pools which are turbid from the hoofs of my fellow creatures," he declares (36); so he stopped reading Hardy when he became popular. For Ellis, Hardy became interesting again when he began to question the central tenets of popular nineteenth-century fiction, what he calls "the farmyard view" of love and marriage. A farmer sees two chickens or two sheep that he thinks will make good progeny, so he puts them together and thinks no more about it. In the same way, Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, and the rest present the reader with a young man and a young woman who are obviously fine material for marriage, and the novelist plays the part of the farmer in bringing them together. "Your wholesome-minded novelist," writes Ellis, "knows that the life of a pure-natured English-woman after marriage is, as Taine said, mainly that of a very broody hen, a series of merely physiological processes with which he, as a novelist, has no further concern" (39). The later Hardy does not see his role as novelist in this way, and Jude is primarily concerned with events that take place after marriage. Those who regard Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead as "monstrosities," Ellis writes, "are as shocked as a farmer would be to find that a hen had views of her own regarding the lord of the harem." Most of his readers were, accordingly, shocked, so Hardy now appeals to a select few. Millais embraced the multitude; Hardy will turn away from it and write no more fiction.

The parallel between "The Idiots" (Savoy 11-30) and Ellis's reading of Jude is quite striking. Conrad's story starts out in the farmyard manner; its ending is as bleak a critique of such an approach as could be imagined. Jean-Pierre Bacadou returns from his military service to the family farm and finds that it is falling into decline. His marriage is accomplished in two sentences (13). Like Hardy's narrative, "The Idiots" is concerned with what happens after marriage and hinges on the wife's refusal to be treated as a broody hen. Susan Bacadou kills her husband. Here, she resembles Tess Durbeyfield, another of Hardy's scandalous women. Susan's mother has no sympathy for her daughter, whom she thinks ought to have been a good hen and allowed her husband to go on treading her whenever he wished.

Ellis describes Sue Bridehead as characteristic of a type found in southern England in which "the heavier Teutonic and Scandinavian elements are [...] modified by the alert and volatile elements furnished by earlier races" (Savoy 41). In the late nineteenth century, earlier races would have been taken to be Celts. Ellis acknowledges that Jude and Sue belong "to a failing family stock" (45). There is no question but that the Breton Bacadous also exhibit such failure. This theme of Celtic decline threads its way through the entire run of The Savoy. And Symons had been unconsciously preparing the ground for the meeting of Celticism, Decadence, and Symbolism since the early part of the decade.

For the Symons of 1893, the decadent movement in art is Impressionism and Symbolism ("Decadent Movement" 858). By 1899, in his The Symbolist Movement in Literature, decadence was simply a matter of style, albeit a style particularly characteristic of such symbolists as Mallarme. The value of Impressionism and Symbolism, he claims in his 1893 essay, lies in their concern with truth. Both seek "the very essence of truth--the truth of appearances to the senses, of the visible world to the eyes that see it [Impressionism]; and the truth of spiritual things to the spiritual vision." The Symbolist aims to communicate "the 'soul' of that which can be apprehended only by the soul--the finer sense of things unseen, the deeper meaning of things evident" (859). These deeper, spiritual meanings will perforce tend toward the ineffable, the unspeakable, and the imprecise. Symons picks up on Verlaine's word nuance. "Poetry is to be something vague, intangible, evanescent, a winged soul in flight," straining "to express the inexpressible" (860).

If the inexpressible were expressed, it would no longer be inexpressible; once soul-knowledge is brought down to earth, its essential immaterial quality coagulates. Symons is adumbrating an aesthetic of the asymptotic curve. Success is to come close but never to touch. Such an aesthetic has distinct parallels with the discourse of Celticism put forward by Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold.

The modern discourse of the Celt can be traced back to the eighteenth century. Ossian is its preeminent, albeit spurious, representative. The Celts were said to be a people of highly evolved sensibility. There is a paradox at the heart of this figuring of Celtic identity: nature and the land are of vital importance to them, yet the Celts are unworldly. Their spiritual powers have evolved in response to the material power of their oppressors. Under constant threat from the Germanic world of brute fact and force, they have turned to the world of ideals. (11) For Matthew Arnold, their quest for the ideal manifests itself in a superb sense of style--not ironmasters but wordmasters (110). Arnold describes them as "Sentimental--always ready to react against the despotism of fact" (82; original emphasis). "Anything might flow and change, and become any other thing," writes W. B. Yeats in "The Celtic Element in Literature" (132). Ernest Renan sees the Celts as in constant pursuit of the ineffable, in "endless quest after an object ever flying from desire" (9). They live in a world that exists in parallel with supernatural realms. "Essentially a feminine race," (12) writes Renan, they uphold an ideal of woman "as a kind of vague vision, an intermediary between man and the supernatural world" (8).

Much like Symons's decadents, the Celts are marked by an exquisite sensibility, but for Renan, they are an exhausted force: the race "has worn itself out in taking dreams for realities and in pursuing its splendid visions" (9). Yeats writes of "this 'mistaking dreams' which are perhaps essences, for 'realities,' which are perhaps accidents'" ("The Celtic Element" 134). For him, everyday reality is unreal. His Celts have become a race of symbolists, devoted to "the truth of spiritual things to the spiritual vision" ("Decadent Movement" 859), as Symons put it. But in The Savoy, they are represented as in decline. And so is Aestheticism itself, as Pierrot's death shows. True art, like Renan's Celts, is "at bay in its last place of retreat" (6).

When Conrad finally condescended to have "The Idiots" placed with The Savoy, he revealed himself as aesthetically "at bay." Writing to Fisher Unwin in July of 1896, he showed that he was still not happy about the magazine, but his first sentence could almost have been taken from either Ellis's essay on Hardy or Symons's on Millais: "Bad or good I cannot be ashamed of what is produced in perfect single mindedness--I cannot be ashamed of those things that are like fragments of my innermost being produced for the public gaze" (CL 1:293). He sees no reason to assume that The Savoy shares his own aesthetic values; no magazine does, he claims. Therefore, he will gain no cultural capital from publication in any magazine, and it makes no difference where the story appears. Furthermore, by denying any aesthetic integrity to the magazine world, he need not read rejections as valid judgments as to whether the story is good or bad.

But I must live. (13) I don't care much where I appear since the acceptance of such stories is not based on their artistic worth. It is probably right that it should be so. But in that case there is no particular gratification in being accepted here rather than there.--If the "Savoy" thing asks for my work-why not give it to them? I understand they pay tolerably well (2g[uineas] per page?). (CL 1: 293)

The relationship he imagines between himself and the magazine is intriguing: he is not offering the story, the magazine is asking for it, so Unwin should give it to them. In other words, he is declining to regard the story as an item of exchange. He represents it as a gift. He did not write it for the magazines but as an expression of himself. Because he does not enter intentionally into an exchange, he can consider himself as deaf to the blandishments of the many-headed monster and to the sound of tinkling shillings. For all the letter's lofty aristocratic tone, the last sentence acknowledges the protocols of trade while trying to distance The Savoy, with its almost tasteless willingness to pay, from the writer himself. (14)

IV.

Over the eight-number run of the Savoy, four Celtic-inflected stories appeared: Yeats's "Rosa Alchemica" in April, Hubert Crackanthorpe's "Anthony Garstin's Courtship" in July, Conrad's "The Idiots" in October, and Fiona Macleod's "Morag of the Glen" in the November issue. Crackanthorpe's and Macleod's narratives are most immediately parallel with Conrad's tale.

"Anthony Garstin's Courtship" is set in Cumberland. Although the name suggests its Celtic past, (15) Cumbria's Celtic roots had withered away to almost nothing by the late nineteenth century, but in its geography and its remoteness from the English social and economic core, it paralleled the British Celtic regions. The Garstins, sheep farmers, have lived at Houtsey for three centuries. The last male of the line is forty-six and still unmarried. The story tells how he courts and marries a young woman, even though he knows she is pregnant with another man's child.

Fiona Macleod's "Morag of the Glen" is set in the Scottish Highlands. The narrator has grown weary of the rain "and of the melancholy meh'ing of the sheep, that used to fill the hills with a lamentation, terrible, at times, to endure" (228). She lives with her aunt, who is the wife of Archibald Campbell, and their two daughters, Muireall and Morag. Campbell is a troubled man. The lands he and his family have lived on for generations are about to be usurped by an Englishman. Worse is that Muireall is pregnant by Jasper Morgan, the Englishman's son, and he has not married her. The pregnancy is deadly in both cultural and literal terms. "It is dying she is, you are for telling us! Well, well, now, and she the plaything o' Jasper Morgan, the son of the man there at Drumdoon, the man that wants to drive me away from here" (234), says Campbell. Morag also has reason to hate the younger Morgan. He had first made love to her, but she had refused to live with him in London, so he turned his attention to Muireall. Morag, who possesses some sort of fey power--she is evidently one of the women Renan writes of who is intermediary between this world and the other--simply tells Morgan to "Go!" "He gave a deep quivering sigh. Then without a word he turned, and walked straight into the darkness" (247; original emphasis) and to death in the churning river.

"Anthony Garstin's Courtship," "Morag of the Glen," and "The Idiots" are all concerned with questions of continuity. In Macleod's tale, the Campbell line is doubly terminated in that there are no male Campbells after Archibald and the land has been taken by an Englishman. The land, nature itself, takes revenge on the elder Morgan when his son, his continuator, is drowned in a river swollen by the rain that is so characteristic of the glen. And Morag is the instrument, Morag who is of the glen, whose "hair always retained the captive gold that the sunshine had spilled there" (229). Morag wins a victory, but we cannot feel that Gaelic will be heard in the glen for very much longer. Anthony Garstin has a wife, but her child is not of his blood, and the story finishes with his mother's dark prophecy: "But the time ull coom when ye'll regret this day, when ye eat oot yer repentance in doost an' ashes" (125).

In Conrad's story, when Jean-Pierre Bacadou returns from his military service, he sees that his parents have grown too old to manage the family farm. The younger man talks with his father. "It is not for me that I am speaking," he says, "It is for the land" (Savoy 13). And the land requires children of those who husband it. So he marries. At the birth of his twin sons, Jean-Pierre imagines them both grown up and "striding over the land from patch to patch, wringing tribute from the earth beloved and fruitful" (14), but that can never happen; he sees that they are "for ever useless, to be fed while he lived and ... What would become of the land when he died?" (18). It will pass to someone else and continuity will be broken.

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan describes "The Idiots" as "one of Conrad's most pointless stories" (186). Although Jean-Pierre and Susan Bacadou are both dead by the conclusion of the narrative, the story does not seem finished. "The absolute and final end does not yield the 'sense of an ending' that would endow the plot with significance, that retrospective illumination on which narratives--both traditional and modernist--depend for their ultimate justification" (187). In this, "The Idiots" exemplifies, for Erdinast-Vulcan, the modernist anxiety that there is no sense in the ending and that any sense there may be is merely a fiction.

Jean-Pierre's marriage was an entirely instrumental affair. Its end was children. And children were its end in that they brought about the death of both father and mother. Jean-Pierre, like Anthony Garstin, is quite clear about the meaning of children. They are the means of continuity. Without them, things will not continue. What would become of the land? The purpose of children is to continue the narrative of habitation, the six centuries of Campbells in Teenabrae, the three hundred years of Garstins at Houtsey, the countless generations of Bacadous in the parish of Ploumar. Children who can never be more than children effectively deny the movement of narrative. The idiots of the title are represented as speechless, empty, signs of non-continuance. None of them can look back at their parents and say, "Yes, I understand what to do. I will do the same as you, and we will share the same narrative." Jean-Pierre had imagined it thus: "A man that would think as he thought, that would feel as he felt; a man who would be part of himself, and yet remain to trample masterfully on that earth when he was gone" (Savoy 21). None of his children can fulfill his narrative, and after giving birth to four of them, Susan wants to bring an end to what she must regard as a meaninglessness string of barren signifiers. But Jean-Pierre seems to be willing to risk bringing more and more of them into the world, to generate a narrative that cannot be fulfilled. So Susan kills him and thereby calls a stop to this story that by normative standards is going nowhere. It should be noted that although Conrad's description of the children is uncompromisingly ableist and deeply offensive to a modern reader, he does at least leave the children alive, albeit now outside narrative, "forgotten by time" (II). (16)

Erdinast-Vulcan reads the story as exemplary of modernist anxiety. Who is anxious, though? The protagonists of these three stories are not quite modern enough to feel modernist angst. Theirs is the anxiety of a pre-modern or not-quite-modern society in the face of modernity. All the characters realize that the greatest threat to their societies is from there being no children at all. But the children who come are never quite right: not their father's child; stillborn out of wedlock, killing the mother in the process; or the Bacadous' children. The problem is in the fathering. The father of Rosa's child is a "great beast," "a bad, sinful man," whom she wishes dead (Crackanthorpe 105). Morag sees to the death of Jasper Morgan, "the hound!" for the "cruel wrong" he did her sister (247). Jean-Pierre Bacadou, in his compulsion to avoid leaving his land to strangers, makes himself of the devil's party. When Millot tries to save her from the cliff, Susan thinks he is her husband, undead. "How many times must I kill you--you blasphemer! Satan sends you here. I am damned too" (Savoy 29). The next moment, she vanishes from before Millot's eyes, "as if the islet itself had swerved aside from under her feet" (29). The land itself, for which Jean-Pierre spoke and toiled, will have no truck with the family.

V.

The final item in the October Savoy is Arthur Symons's regular "Causerie." This one is "from a Castle in Ireland" (Savoy 93-95). Thus, the whole issue is bookended by Celtic Europe, and the story and the essay come into conversation. Symons was staying with Yeats at Tillyra Castle in Galway. (17) The castle is "mysterious" and "this mountainous land inclos[es] one within the circle of its own magic" (95). The topography is suggestive of Conrad's description of "hilly and green country, set in a barren circle of rocks and sands" (15). In "The Idiots," the circle becomes the site of Susan's final descent into delusion. It marks a boundary between life and death, a place of very sinister magic. Within the circle are the Bacadou children, "an offence to the sunshine" (12). The rocks and sand thus enclose a blighted land. Symons's description of the Irish countryside begins to parallel Conrad's Brittany. "In the afternoon we drive through a strange land, which has the desolation of ancient and dwindling things" (93). The people themselves share something of the desolation: "a few peasants pass on the road, moving somberly, without speaking." He sees some tinkers, "huddled like crouching beasts on their little, rough, open carts" (94). Conrad's Breton peasants are not much more evolved. A full day after the Bacadous' wedding, leading members of the community were still to be found asleep in ditches along the road to Treguier. This parallelism encourages us to read Conrad's Brittany as more fully Celtic than we would if reading the story in isolation; the landscape takes on some of the sinister magic that Symons's and Macleod's Celtic lands carry.

The premodern landscape harbors a culture at risk. Here, as in all three stories, cultural desolation is figured in the natural environment. As "The Idiots" moves toward its climax, nature itself becomes ever more ominous: "And from morning to till night one could see all over the land black denuded boughs, the boughs gnarled and twisted, as if contorted with pain" (Savoy 20). Symons describes the trees in the West of Ireland as straining "wildly in the air, writhing away from the side of the sea." He admits to finding "all this barrenness, grayness, monotony, solitude, at once primitive and fantastical, curiously attractive" (94). The primitiveness makes it fantastical, and the fantastical is what appeals to a student of Symbolism and a decadent. He is fascinated by the evanescent quality in the landscape. "I have never seen such coloured darkness as this water; green passing into slate, slate into purple, purple into dead black" (95). Here is "the magic of atmosphere" that Symons found so fascinating in the Goncourts, in Maeterlinck, and in Conrad.

The stones of the fields and of the castle are utterly solid and mundane, yet the very symbolic quality that they take up from their Celtic past makes them insubstantial. Symons is being drawn in by this bothness, as if something can be at the same time real and unreal. The appeal is perilous: "Among these solid and shifting things, in this castle which is at once so ancient a reality and so essential a dream, I feel myself to be in some danger of loosening the tightness of my hold upon external things, ... If I lived here too long I should forget that I am a Londoner and remember that I am a Cornishman" (Savoy 95). (18) Symons's Celtic blood puts him in danger of devoting himself to what Yeats calls "a world made wholly of essences" ("Rosa Alchemica" 71). "No," concludes Symons, "decidedly I have no part among those remote idealists: I must come back to London; for I have perceived the insidious danger of idealism ever since I came to these ascetic regions" (Savoy 95). Symons is convinced that he must resist his inner Celt, his inner symbolist. The danger was made plain in Yeats's "Rosa Alchemica" (which appeared in The Savoy in April). This story tells of a group of alchemists, men devoted to accessing the real world behind this one of illusion. They have a house of study and worship on a pier on the west coast of Ireland. They are discovered there and stoned to death by local peasants, urged on by an unfrocked whiskey priest (70). As we might have gathered from Conrad's tale, not all Celts have achieved a high level of spiritual evolution.

Yeats and Macleod both acknowledge the stone-hard quality of their Celtic people, but they are drawn to an idea of the historical culture, all the more real and insubstantial for its historicity--real in its insubstantiality. The narratives show that when there is a conflict between the pre-modern and the modern, the pre-modern dies, although it tends to see to its own end, as when Susan Bacadou falls to her death in the belief that she is being pursued by a supernatural entity. The modern and the premodern are not compatible. Both Susan and Jean-Pierre have seen something of the modern world. She has been to Paris, and he has done his military service, during which he has learned Republican and freethinking ways. The parish priest and the local grandee are inclined to regard the couples unfortunate children as a judgment on Jean-Pierre's republicanism. After the third child reveals himself to be like his twin brothers, Susan and her mother persuade Jean-Pierre to turn to the priests for aid. It does no good. "A swindle of the crows [priests]. That's what it is," he shouts (19). Once abandoned, the old ways cannot be recuperated. Indeed, they become deadly. Susan collapses into her cultural past and dies in the belief that she is being pursued by a ghost. Symons fears that if he stayed too long in the West of Ireland, some sort of essential Celtic identity would take possession of him. Such Symbolism is indeed, quite deadly.

WILLIAM ATKINSON

APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

(1.) For similar readings of Conrad stories in their immediate contexts, see my "Bound in Blackwood's: The Imperialism of 'The Heart of Darkness' in its Immediate Context," Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 50, 2005, pp. 368-393; and "Conrad in The Strand: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and 'The Tale"' The Conradian, vol. 38, no. 2, 2013, pp. 72-89.

(2.) It was published in January, April, July, August, September, October, November, and December.

(3.) Silhouettes, London Nights, Amoris Victima, and Images of Good and Evil were the titles of his 1890s books of verse. The following lines are representative:

   The charm of rouge on fragile cheeks,
   Pearl-powder, and about the eyes,
   The dark and lustrous eastern dyes. ("Maquillage" from Silhouettes,
      CW1: 107)
   He who has entered by this sorrow's door
   Is neither dead nor living any more. ("Amoris Victima" from Amoris
      Victima, CW 1: 273)
   Here my ambition dies; I ask
   No more than some half-idle task,
   To be done idly, and to fill
   Some gaps of leisure when I will. ("Intermezzo: Venetian Nights"
      from London Nights,
   CW1: 224)

(4.) "La grace frele et tourmentee, la sensualite legere et parfois caricaturale, font d'Aubrey Beardsley une ame neuve. Ses dessins sont d'un autre art.[....] Leur mievrerie semble cacher un secret obsedant et pervers. J'imagine qu'un dessinateur ivre de haschich reverait de tels paysages. Heureux ceux qui n'ont nul besoin de haschich ou d'opium pour ouvrir leurs yeux au reve. Si le mot 'evocatoire' n'est pas un vain mot ou un barbarisme, c'est le mot des dessins d'Aubrey Beardsley" (qtd. in Garbaty 612).

(5.) In the October number, see "Elsa: A Story by the Author of 'A Mere Man.'"

(6.) Some might balk at the notion that Shaw was sober. His politics were certainly leftwing, but that is why he was no aestheticist. He wrote in the hope of changing people's minds.

(7.) The most widely held view of "The Idiots"--and Conrad's own view--is that the story is "obviously derivative" (Tales vii), of Maupassant. Frederick Karl judges the story to be "imitative of Maupassant's naturalistic methods at their most simplistic" (374). Gene M. Moore has identified the Maupassant in question as "La Mere aux monstres" (51), a story that tells of a woman who makes a living out of selling her appallingly deformed children to freak shows. She had discovered the trick of how to ensure that the children were deformed when, as a maidservant, she had disguised her pregnancy by strapping a board against her belly. The real point of the story, however, is a woman of fashion and beauty who is pointed out at the end of the narrative. She has produced three such children by refusing to abandon her corsets during pregnancy.

(8.) By the early years of the twentieth century, Wells was no longer a "purist," and literature for him had become a means to a political end. This change in attitude is largely responsible for the fading away of the friendship between Wells and Conrad, a friendship that grew out of Wells's positive response to An Outcast of the Islands. See Linda Dryden for a full account of the Wells-Conrad connection and its relationship to literature as art.

(9.) All references to the October number of The Savoy can be found in Conrad First, where "The Idiots" and the entire number are available. The page numbers are therefore from the magazine itself. Citations from other numbers of The Savoy come from Stanley Weintraub's collection of stories, articles, poems, and illustrations from the entire eight-number run.

(10.) Conrad defines art as "a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect" (Narcissus xi). Symonds would not have found anything to disagree with there. The writers single-mindedness will entail hard work and solitude such that "the supreme cry of Art for Art, even, loses the exciting ring of its apparent immorality. It sounds far off. It has ceased to be a cry, and is heard only as a whisper, often incomprehensible, but at times and faintly encouraging" (xv). Art for art's sake is only apparently immoral.

(11.) Many nineteenth-century Germans would be appalled at the suggestion that they were not spiritual or sentimental. The paradox of the Celts, they would say, could just as reasonably be claimed for themselves. I take no position in the argument; the hypothetical Germans would need to take the matter up with Arnold.

(12.) See Arnold 86.

(13.) Symons might have deprecated such flimsiness of commitment. Against Millais's spineless "deference to the opinion of the middle classes," he contrasts "another," whose "immaculate devotion to art" has resulted in his "living in a destitute and unhonoured obscurity" (Savoy 58).

(14.) In his "Causerie" from the December Savoy, Symons shows himself to be really quite close to Conrad's position. He laments that The Savoy cannot continue publication because he had hoped that it could be both popular and true to its aesthetic principles. "If you care for art you don't get rich." However, Symons is not downcast. He is planning a new venture: the proposed periodical will less frequent, better produced, and more expensive. "In this way we shall be able to appeal to that limited public which cares for the things we care for, which cares for art, really for art's sake" (Weintraub 276). And there will be no danger of popularity, of art as commodity.

(15.) Cf. Cymru (Wales).

(16.) The narrator veers between a level of condescending compassion and disgusted horror. Compare "Such creatures are forgotten by time, and live untouched by the years till death gathers them up into its compassionate bosom: the faithful death that never forgets in the press of its work the most insignificant of its children" (Savoy 11), and "They were an offence to the sunshine, a reproach to empty heaven, a blight on the concentrated and purposeful vigour of the wild landscape" (12). Many a eugenicist of the period would have found nothing to quarrel with in these descriptions. Such a eugenicist appears eleven years later as Comrade Ossipon in The Secret Agent. He judges Stevie to be "a degenerate." But Ossipon is an exemplar of vile wrongheadedness, so the novel is implicitly rejecting such a simplistic judgment and might even be read as a critique of the ableist elements of the earlier story.

(17.) Yeats was the most frequent outside contributor to the Savoy. He has a presence in all but two of the issues, providing over the course of the year three stories and five poems, all them about Ireland, and a set of three articles on Blake's illustrations to Dante.

(18.) Symons himself was born in Wales, but his parents were from Cornwall. The Cornish language had not been widely spoken since at least the eighteenth century. A revival of interest in all aspects of Cornish culture began in the late nineteenth century, and in 1904, Henry Jenner published his Handbook of the Cornish Language.

WORKS CITED

Ashley, Michael. The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880-1950. British Library, 2006.

Beckson, Karl. Arthur Symons: A Life. Clarendon, 1987.

Conrad, Joseph. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. 9 vols., edited by Frederick Karl, Laurence Davies, Owen Knowles, J. H. Stape, and Gene M. Moore, Cambridge University Press, 1986-2007.

--. "The Idiots." The Savoy, Nov. 1896, Conrad First, Accessed 29 Oct. 2016.

--. The Nigger of the "Narcissus." Doubleday, 1925.

Cosmopolis. Conrad First, Accessed 29 Oct. 2016.

Crackanthorpe, Hubert. "Anthony Garstin's Courtship." The Savoy: Nineties Experiment, Edited by Stanley Weintraub, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966.

Dryden, Linda. Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells: The Fin-de-Siecle Literary Scene. Palgrave, 2015.

Garbaty, Thomas Jay. "The French Coterie of The Savoy 1896." PMLA, vol. 75, no. 5, 1960, pp. 609-15.

Gordon, John Dozier. Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist. Russell, 1963.

Graver, Lawrence. Conrad's Short Fiction. University of California Press, 1969.

Henley, W. E. "Literature and Democracy," The National Observer, 11 April, 1891, p. 528.

Hobson, Robert J., and William S. Pfeiffer. "Conrad's First Story and the Savoy: Typescript Revisions to "'The Idiots.'" Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 18, 1981, pp. 267-72.

Karl, Frederick R. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives, A Biography. Faber, 1979.

Macleod, Flora. "Morag of the Glen." The Savoy: Nineties Experiment, edited by Stanley Weintraub, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966.

McDonald, Peter D. British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Moore, Gene M. "Conrad's 'The Idiots' and Maupassant's 'La Mere aux monsters.'" Conrad: Intertexts and Appropriations, edited by Gene M. Moore, Owen Knowles, and J. H. Stape, Rodopi, 1997.

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Simmons, Allan. Joseph Conrad: Contemporary Reviews, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Stape, John. The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad. Pantheon, 2007.

Symons, Arthur. The Collected Works of Arthur Symons. AMS Press, 1973. 3 vols.

--. "The Decadent Movement in Literature." Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Nov. 1893, pp. 858-67.

Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. University of California Press, 1979.

Weintraub, Stanley. The Savoy: Nineties Experiment. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966.

Yeats, W. B. "The Celtic Element in Literature." Ideas of Good and Evil. Russell and Russell, 1967.

--. "Rosa Alchemica." The Savoy: Nineties Experiment. Edited by Stanley Weintraub, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966.

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Author:	Atkinson, William
Publication:	Conradiana
Date:	Jun 22, 2015
Words:	8968
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