They might as well have employed
Burne-Jones to illustrate _Martin Chuzzlewit_. It would not have been
more ludicrous than putting this portrayer of evil puppets, with their
thin lines like wire and their small faces like perverted children's, to
trace against the grand barbaric forests the sin and the sorrow of
Lancelot.
To return to the chief of the decadents, I will not speak of the end of
the individual story: there was horror and there was expiation. And, as
my conscience goes at least, no man should say one word that could
weaken the horror--or the pardon. But there is one literary consequence
of the thing which must be mentioned, because it bears us on to that
much breezier movement which first began to break in upon all this
ghastly idleness--I mean the Socialist Movement. I do not mean "_De
Profundis_"; I do not think he had got to the real depths when he wrote
that book. I mean the one real thing he ever wrote: _The Ballad of
Reading Gaol_; in which we hear a cry for common justice and brotherhood
very much deeper, more democratic and more true to the real trend of the
populace to-day, than anything the Socialists ever uttered even in the
boldest pages of Bernard Shaw.
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