LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

augment as people lose an ethical basis of life, as they lose passion for
justice, love of real distinction between one idea and another. Diagnosis
will replace love, analysis will give way to squalor. There are steps and
slopes downward toward Avernus, falsification will enter. Honest men,
when a dogma or style has been falsified, will turn analytic. They will be
partial, the first ones emphatic and vigorous. They will aim, that is, the
best ones will aim at health.
For example, Manet, fed up with falsification of color in painting, Manet
reduced to analysis of light and color. Both making distinct contributions
to world art. Manet one of the world’s greatest.
But what is temperament in a sound man becomes by excess, disease in
a weak man. Unbalance, hard to divide at certain point, and if one drifts
with the current, one grows tolerant first of weakness, and then
accustomed to weakness, and then plops into squalor.
Mediterranean sanity and beauty, order. TO KALON, the world was
saner when the cult of ugliness did NOT engage the attentions of
anyone.
I know all about chocolate box, pseudo beauty, etc. BUT a deflection of
the AIM is a decadence. It is a false ripening, it is green fruit going
rotten. Beardsley was a sick man, knew he had to make a name quick if
he wanted to make it. Personal wish, NOT belief in what art is or ought
to be. Knew he hadn’t time to learn to PAINT. HIS sane youthful
impulse was to pre-Raphealite beauty. Early drawings, Burne-Jones,
that’s what he WANTED.
Yeats asked him why he hadn’t stuck to it. Beardsley was no slouch, he
was a courageous invalid. He was a heroic invalid, up to the point of his
force. He didn’t lie to himself nor to his friends in private. He answered:
Beauty is so DIFFICULT.