His lapses were those proper to the one
good thing he really was, an Irish swashbuckler--a fighter. Some of the
Roman Emperors might have had the same luxuriousness and yet the same
courage. But the later decadents were far worse, especially the decadent
critics, the decadent illustrators--there were even decadent publishers.
And they utterly lost the light and reason of their existence: they were
masters of the clumsy and the incongruous. I will take only one example.
Aubrey Beardsley may be admired as an artist or no; he does not enter
into the scope of this book. But it is true that there is a certain
brief mood, a certain narrow aspect of life, which he renders to the
imagination rightly. It is mostly felt under white, deathly lights in
Piccadilly, with the black hollow of heaven behind shiny hats or painted
faces: a horrible impression that all mankind are masks. This being the
thing Beardsley could express (and the only thing he could express), it
is the solemn and awful fact that he was set down to illustrate Malory's
_Morte d'Arthur_. There is no need to say more; taste, in the artist's
sense, must have been utterly dead.
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