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The plays of Ibsen produced, the best of them, in the eighties of last century came to England in the nineties. In a way, perhaps, they were misunderstood by their worshippers hardly less than by their enemies, but all excrescences of enthusiasm apart they taught men a new and freer approach to moral questions, and a new and freer dramatic technique.
Canada's public men have never failed her in the critical times in her history when attempts were made through ignorance or design to turn her aside from the high road to national sovereignty; as witness Gait in 1859, Blake in his long duel with Lord Carnarvon, Sir John A. Macdonald in 1885, when he resisted the premature demand for a Canadian contingent for service in the Soudan, Tupper in the early nineties when his vigorous resistance to the proposal that Canada should pay tribute for protection had something to do with the demise of the Imperial Federation League.
In the 'nineties I looked around me and behold, Kipling, Phillips, Watson and Riley were in their work at the opposite extreme from Walt Whitman; he had not a single disciple of unquestioned poetic standing.
It was more like an amateur museum, with its big Fifteenth Century fireplace, and its brasses and tapestries on the walls, and if the huge Mirliton hanging from the ceiling was not remarkable as a work of art, it should now, as historic symbol of the Nineties, have a place at the Carnavalet by the side of the sign of the Chat Noir.
I have met men who worked for my brothers in the lumber woods of Wisconsin down among the yellow pines of the Arizona Desert. All that was back in the decrepit and languid and hopesick nineties. It was then you could see the skies of Southern Manitoba luridly aflame at night with wheat stacks it didn't pay to thresh. Came a turn of the wheel! Was it Destiny or Providence?
To this day the hero or heroine of the British novel who is led astray is apt to cross the Channel for the purpose. It was a delicate matter to accomplish this in the Nineties when the novelist happened to be a woman, for even the "New Woman" cry, if it armed her with her own front-door key, could not draw all the bolts and bars of convention for her.
True, in none of these years did the labor movement add over half a million members as in the memorable year of 1886; nevertheless, from the standpoint of permanence, the upheaval during the eighties can scarcely be classed with the one which began in the late nineties. In 1905 a backward tide set in; and the membership decreased by nearly 200,000 during that year.
Jack Bragdon was a much rarer type in Chicago of the early nineties or in any American city than he would be to-day. Milly's experience of the world had never brought her into close touch with Art. And Art has a fatal fascination for most women. They buzz around its white arc-light, or tallow dip, like heedless moths bent on their own destruction.
Our bookshelves that are still filled with them represent one of the most animated phases of the Nineties. And we looked upon the "men of the Sixties" as masters, among them giving to Sandys a leading place.
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