Aubrey Beardsley was very typical of the Nineties in his unenjoying luxuriousness, his invalid indecorum, his trammelled originality, and his pert pessimism. He was in pictorial art much what Wilde was in literature, except that he possessed a certain conscience of the hand, so to speak, a pride and care for technical quality, which few considerable draughtsmen lack, while Wilde, though an artist also, lacked such fastidiousness, and was just as pleased with a cheap victory as with a dear one. Both he and Wilde were in revolt against convention, but each would have died rather than do anything naturally. Both were at war with the great Victorian commandment of decorum, but both respected slavishly the little law of a little clique. Both suggested the futility of all things, the one in the most precious prose, the other in the most austerely thought-out design. Both offended against all laws, human and divine, in order to be brilliant and exceptional, and both were under the thraldom of taboos with the force of the Decalogue and crotchets elevated to the dignity of a religion. Each was guilty of most extraordinarily bad taste, not a simple but a complex bad taste, reminiscent of the decaying Roman world; there was something barbaric in their over-sophistication, and something common in their over-refinement. They were much as a woman who turns up in a diamond tiara at a village penny reading, or a man who wears his orders at the dinner table of an intimate friend. Both had a curious delight in mere richness; that purring satisfaction of Wilde in a mere catalogue of precious stones—you will find it in _The Picture of Dorian Grey_—is paralleled again and again in the joy with which Beardsley elaborates gorgeous stuffs in his designs. And in the work of both is that rather indescribable thing I have spoken of as a revolt without a standard and without a hope. Neither knew quite where he expected to get; the main thing was to do something that shocked the orthodox. It was a feature common to many quite different people. The Socialists, for example, fought without making the smallest provision for a victory; they were content to make victory seem worthless to the party in possession. Mr. Shaw was most intent on showing that the system in being did not and could not work; he was far less interested in proving his own case. Conservatism was content with Liberal failure; it had no particular formula of its own. Novelists drank absinthe with perhaps a faint hope that they might write like Guy de Maupassant, but with a much stronger wish that they would be saved from writing like Sir Walter Besant.