t that they blamed everything, but upon the fact that
they praised something. They heaped curses upon man, but they used man
merely as a foil. The things they wished to praise by comparison were
the energies of Nature. Man was to them what talk and fashion were to
Carlyle, what philosophical and religious quarrels were to Omar, what
the whole race after practical happiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing
which must be censured in order that somebody else may be exalted. It
was merely a recognition of the fact that one cannot write in white
chalk except on a black-board.

Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the
desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and
depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in
winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in
storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older
earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very young
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