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Updated: June 9, 2025
The Western Art Circuit had been started up by a handful of painters and literary men in "the city"; among them, Abner Joyce, notable veritist; Adrian Bond, aesthete, yet not without praiseworthy leanings toward the naturalistic; Stephen Giles, decorator of the mansions of the great, but still not wholly forgetful of his own rustic origins; and one or two of the professors at the Art Academy.
I have known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters. He too knew how to keep our elders in their place, and his method was plainly the more successful for Henley had been dismissed. 'No he is not an aesthete, Henley commented later, being somewhat embarrassed by Wilde's Pre-Raphaelite entanglement.
Everyone sometimes uses "beauty" in an unaesthetic sense; most people habitually do so. To everyone, except perhaps here and there an occasional aesthete, the commonest sense of the word is unaesthetic. Of its grosser abuse, patent in our chatter about "beautiful huntin'" and "beautiful shootin'," I need not take account; it would be open to the precious to reply that they never do so abuse it.
As a matter of fact, there was much more of the aesthete in him than of the Nonconformist. He lived for his tastes. It is because he is a novelist of tastes rather than of passions that he is unlikely ever to be popular even to the degree to, which Meredith is popular. One imagines him, from his childhood, as a perfect connoisseur, a dilettante.
But what I want such people to do, and what they never do, is to turn this truth round. I want them to imagine, not a Kensington aesthete walking down David Street to the Holy Sepulchre, but a Greek monk or a Russian pilgrim walking down Kensington High Street to Kensington Gardens. I am not speaking now of moral but of artistic things; of the concrete arts and crafts used in popular worship.
For above all things Godfrey was a man, not a hermit or a saint or an aesthete, but just a man with more gifts of a sort than have some others. He lived the life of the rest, he hunted, he shot tigers, doing those things that the Anglo-Indian officer does, but all the same he studied.
His observation, too, was often that of a spirited common-sense realist rather than an aesthete, as in his first description of Fanny Brawne: I am, however, tired of such style, and shall decline any more of it. Yet before many months he was writing to the "minx," "I will imagine you Venus to-night, and pray, pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen."
His hands tightened; they held her shoulders. The gentle aesthete was a furious Celt. He wished that it was a man with whom he was dealing. Still Millicent was brave, her voice scornful. "Baksheesh the moving finger in the East." "You contemptible creature!" he said. "Who did you pay?" "That would be telling." "I know it would," he said. "And you are going to tell me."
As his literary work assured him a modest income, he eventually deemed it more in accordance with his dignity to make a home of his own. A friend of his, of the same age as himself, the sister of the aesthete Wendt of Leipzig, who afterwards became famous, was chosen by him to keep house for him.
That is to say, a couple of philosophers belonging to a regiment of hussars had, together with an aesthete who had not yet completed his student's course and a gambler who had squandered his all, formed a secret society of philanthropic aims under the presidency of a certain old rascal of a freemason and the ruined gambler aforesaid.
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