We feel surprised at Mr James' cognisance of anything so second-rate as this Decadent Movement of the late eighties and early nineties, because most of us basely judge it by its lack of worldly success instead of by its moral mission. The elect of the movement, if one delves in the memory of older Londoners, were certainly silly young men who were careful about the laundering of their evening shirts and who tried to introduce the tone of public-school life into ordinary society. And it is true that for all their talk of art they produced nothing but one good farce and a cartload of such weak, sweet verse as schoolgirls copy into exercise-books, and that from this small effort they sank exhausted down to prison, drink, madness, suicide; and struck whatever other notes there be in the descending scale of personal disgrace. And yet, for all its fruitlessness, that prattle about art gave them a valid claim on our respect. Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who wrote as though he were the offspring of two _Times_ leaders; among novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach; and in criticism Andrew Lang, who had admired Scott and Dickens in his schooldays and was not going to let himself down by admiring anybody nearer his own generation, greeted every exponent of the real with a high piercing northern sneer. It was of inestimable value that it should be cried, no matter in how pert a voice, that words are jewels which, wisely set, make by their shining mental light. That the cry could not save the young men who raised it, bore out their contention of the time's need for it; if they, seeking new beauty, could but celebrate the old dingy sins of towns, it showed in what a base age they had been bred. And if they could not save themselves they saved others. Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells set off in the nineties in a world encouragingly full of talk about good writing. Conrad, mouthing his difficult strange tales about the sea, found an audience that would sit hushed. And in the brain of one who, being then between forty and fifty years of age, might have been thought inaccessible to new conceptions of the art that had for so long preoccupied him, there passed important thoughts.