and very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when
seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a
gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time
powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at
the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was
the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was
only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of the
earth because amid all the cold and darkness their own hearts were
flaming like their own firesides.

Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and
lamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in Mr.
Aubrey Beardsley's allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with a
pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the
cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial
life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the
restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new
pessimism is a revolt in its favour.

The Byronic young man had an affectation of sincerity; the decadent,
going a step deeper into the avenues of the unreal, has positively an
affectation of affectation. And it is by their fopperies and their
frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is sincere; in
their lights and garlands and ribbons we read their indwelling despair.
It was so, indeed, with Byron himself; his really bitter moments were
his frivolous moments. He went on year after year calling down fire
upon mankind, summoning the deluge and the destructive sea and all the
ultimate energies of nature to sweep away the cities of the spawn of
man. But through all this his subconscious mind was not that of a
despairer; on the contrary, there is something of a kind of lawless