of a scented
cigarette that martyrdom is martyrdom in some respects, has seized on
and mastered all more delicate considerations in the mind. It is unwise
in a poet to goad the sleeping lion of laughter.

In less dexterous hands the decadent idea, what there was of it, went
entirely to pieces, which nobody has troubled to pick up. Oddly enough
(unless this be always the Nemesis of excess) it began to be
insupportable in the very ways in which it claimed specially to be
subtle and tactful; in the feeling for different art-forms, in the
welding of subject and style, in the appropriateness of the epithet and
the unity of the mood. Wilde himself wrote some things that were not
immorality, but merely bad taste; not the bad taste of the conservative
suburbs, which merely means anything violent or shocking, but real bad
taste; as in a stern subject treated in a florid style; an over-dressed
woman at a supper of old friends; or a bad joke that nobody had time to
laugh at. This mixture of sensibility and coarseness in the man was very
curious; and I for one cannot endure (for example) his sensual way of
speaking of dead substances, satin or marble or velvet, as if he were
stroking a lot of dogs and cats. But there was a sort of power--or at
least weight--in his coarseness. 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. They might as well have employ