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If you go to this woman's place, for instance" and he glanced at the note Alwyn had thrown on the table, "you will share the honors of the evening with the famous man-milliner of Bond Street, an 'artist' in gowns, the female upholsterer and house decorator, likewise an 'artist, the ladies who 'compose' sonnets in Regent Street, also 'artists, and chiefest among the motley crowd, perhaps, the so-called new 'Apostle' of aestheticism, a ponderous gentleman who says nothing and does nothing, and who, by reason of his stupendous inertia and taciturnity, is considered the greatest 'gun' of all! ... it's no use YOUR going among such people, in fact, no one who has any reverence left in him for the TRUTH of Art CAN mix with those whose profession of it is a mere trade and hypocritical sham.

It is probably of no more use to protest against it than it is to protest against the vulgar realism in pictorial art, which holds ugliness and beauty in equal esteem; or against aestheticism gone to seed in languid affectations; or against the enthusiasm of a social life which wreaks its religion on the color of a vestment, or sighs out its divine soul over an ancient pewter mug.

So he rooted his art, gave it the earth of Poland and its deliquescence is put off to the day when a new system of musical aestheticism will have routed the old, when the Ugly shall be king and Melody the handmaiden of science. But until that most grievous and undesired time he will catch the music of our souls and give it cry and flesh. Chopin is the open door in music.

The coarse, clumsy suspicion of some of the witnesses, the frivolous aestheticism of others, were equally obnoxious to his grim, bursting heart; but he was obliged to live, and, to pay his way, must put up with these impertinences. He sat down facing the wooden couch. His eyes remained open but seemed to look inward. His cheeks paled, and he became noticeably thinner.

"I'm glad you read me that, Bill, for that is just the sort of thing I mean to eradicate from your system. It's like a disease, this aestheticism of yours it's the Culture Ptomaine." "Now, hold on, Dumpling Dear, do you know a culture from a ptomaine?"

It is an attempt to present Florence of the fifteenth century, to contrast Savonarola's ardent Christianity with the Greek aestheticism of the Medicis, and to show the influence of the time upon two widely different characters, Romola and Tito Melema. This novel is the greatest intellectual achievement of its author; but it has neither the warmth of life, nor the vigor of her English stories.

So, in many a drink-shop in England, a piano or a band adds to the attractions, and gives a false air of aestheticism to pure animalism. Isaiah feels the incongruity that music should be so prostituted, and expresses it by adding to his list of musical instruments 'and wine' as if he would underscore the degradation of the great art to be the cupbearer of sots.

"I painted it before I knew how to paint," and standing before me, his palette in his hand, he expounded his new aestheticism: that up to the beginning of the nineteenth century all painting had been done first in monochrome and then glazed, and what we know as solid painting had been invented by Greuze.

The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow, steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of Neo-Georgian aestheticism. Such is the illogical quality of humanity that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard under the seat of current civilisation, saw these changes with regret.

She had certainly been led into no toleration of moral laxity, and indeed the effect of her husband's cynical Paganism had been to make her dread more acutely any infringement upon moral laws. She had been constantly learning, however, the enjoyment and appreciation of beauty, not merely in a conventional and Philistine sense, but as a pure Pagan aestheticism.