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 was a fountain of malice, charged him outright with plagiarism, and, more venomously, asserted that he was as poor a judge of a coat as of a picture! But that—c'était la guerre. Much more damaging are these cold verdicts of Mr. Arthur Symons who cannot be accused of defective sympathies towards diabolists.

That reaffirms in other words what Pater said about him thirty-five years ago. Oscar Wilde is properly and accurately called a decadent because he degrades the æsthetic movement, lowers its level. The æsthetic movement in its highest phases was the successor of a moribund religious explanation of the world. Along toward the middle of the last century it undertook the task which was falling from the palsied hands of the church: it undertook a fresh, sincere, adequate expression of man's feeling toward the mystery and beauty and terror of life—the whole of it. So Ruskin