So much granted, it must be said that the
aesthetic movement was unoriginal, and that
it did not produce one really great man. It
borrowed its ideas and its ideals wholesale,
from the Pre-Raphaelites, from Pater, from
the French Symbolistes. Wilde took Salome
from the far finer Herodiade of Flaubert, The
Picture of Dorian Gray from the infinitely more
powerful A Rebours of Huysmans. Dowson
imitated Baudelaire, while some of the most
beautiful poems of Mr. Symons are gem-like
translations, no whit behind the originals, of
the work of Paul Verlaine. Wilde, Beardsley
and Dowson would have been, as Mr. Jackson
remarks, more at home in Paris than London.
The eyes of the intellectuals were turned to-
ward Ireland, upon the successors of Mangan,
Sir Samuel Ferguson and the young Mr. W. B.
Yeats. The whole trend of the period was
un-English.
It was also artificial. Again to quote
Mr. Jackson : "It was a characteristic of the
decadence not to sing of the bloom of Nature
but the bloom of cosmetics." The hymning of

14



INTRODUCTION

London, of London's cafes and street lights and
women of pleasure ; Wilde's ingenious and
amusing theory of the dependence of Nature
upon Art were as much instances of perversion
as were the acts that brought him to Reading
Gaol. The ' red mouths ' its young^ men
yearned for were ' bought,' its flowers were
ever ' parched,' its heroines ' wan,' its boys



In the later eighties there spread bruit of a
man who was delighting India with very dif-
ferent fare. " Mr. Kipling," said The Saturday
Review, " is a new writer, or a writer new to the
English as distinct from the Anglo-Indian.
