These years that followed on that double disillusionment were like one
long afternoon in a rich house on a rainy day. It was not merely that
everybody believed that nothing would happen; it was also that everybody
believed that anything happening was even duller than nothing happening.
It was in this stale atmosphere that a few flickers of the old
Swinburnian flame survived; and were called Art. The great men of the
older artistic movement did not live in this time; rather they lived
through it. But this time did produce an interregnum of art that had a
truth of its own; though that truth was near to being only a consistent
lie.
The movement of those called AEsthetes (as satirised in _Patience_) and
the movement of those afterwards called Decadents (satirised in Mr.
Street's delightful _Autobiography of a Boy_) had the same captain; or
at any rate the same bandmaster. Oscar Wilde walked in front of the
first procession wearing a sunflower, and in front of the second
procession wearing a green carnation. With the aesthetic movement and its
more serious elements, I deal elsewhere; but the second appearance of
Wilde is also connected with real intellectual influences, largely
negative, indeed, but subtle and influential.
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