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Updated: May 5, 2025
It was attacked immediately in "The Daily Chronicle", a liberal paper usually distinguished for a certain leaning in favour of artists and men of letters, as a "tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French "decadents" a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction."
But he differs from the psychological decadents and impressionists in this important point, that he thinks that although the blind men found out very little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was there all the time. The blind men formed mistaken theories because an elephant is a thing with a very curious shape.
And among them all Taurus Antinor, praefect of Rome, with his ruddy hair and bronzed skin, his massive frame clad in gorgeously embroidered tunic, his whole appearance heavy and almost rough, in strange contrast alike to the young decadents of the day as to the rigid primness of the patrician matrons, just as his harsh, even voice seemed to dominate the lazy and mellow trebles of the votaries of fashion.
To have met them, to be able to speak of them in intimate terms, to be authorities on the special vice of each, was the ambition of the yearning young decadents on the British side of the Channel, who imagined in the intimacy a proof of their own emancipation from it would have been hard to say what, their own genius for revolution if it was not clear what reason they had to revolt.
How did it feel, left alone among the alien oaks and with white people living their curious lives about it? Did it mourn, in its endless murmuring, for the Indians the Indians of other days and not the poor decadents who shambled up and down the road? For the Indians and the pines were now unalterably associated in Lydia's mind. The life of one depended on that of the other.
To net a Millsborough gallimaufry of decadents, criminals, and potential rebels had become in a few hours his absorbing desire. And in this short time he had almost frayed the smooth edges of the Permanent Under Secretary's official decorum. Randal Bellamy, with his affection for the girl, and his absorbing love of his younger brother, had as much interest in the affair as any other concerned.
"My supposed successes," he also tells us, "are founded on misunderstanding. My public reputation isn't worth a walnut-shell." And it is true he has been applauded, patronised, and monopolised for a quarter of a century by all the decadents of art and literature.
He held that justice was a mystery, but not, like the decadents, that justice was a delusion. He held, in other words, the true Browning doctrine, that in a dispute every one was to a certain extent right; not the decadent doctrine that in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by the nature of things wrong.
Comparison of this kind would be irrelevant but for the fact that behind all du Maurier's work in Punch there seems to hover an artist of a different kind from the one which it was possible for Mr. Punch to employ. SCENE The smoking-room at the Decadents. "After all, Smythe, what would Life be without Coffee?" "True, Jeohnes, True! And yet, after all, what is Life with Coffee?"
"He was a very artistic monster, you remember." "Like some of the decadents in London. Why is it that those who hate moral beauty so often worship all the other beauties?" "D'you think in their hearts they actually hate moral beauty?" "Well, despise it, laugh at it, try to tarnish it." "Paganism!" "Good heavens, no!"
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