The jockeys on the wall would have been at
home on the lid of a cigar box belonging to any average member of the
_jeunesse dor?e_ of any Continental city, while an etching of Felicien
Rops that lounged upon a sidetable would have been eminently suitable to
the house of a certain celebrity nicknamed the "Queen of Diamonds." The
golden figures that sprawled over the huge cabinet must have delighted
certain modern artists, whose rickety fingers can only portray in line
a fanciful corruption totally devoid of relation to humanity, but such
frail spectres would have shrunk with horror from certain robust works of
art, over which the most healthy of the beefy brigade might have smacked
large lips for hours. The room was in fact one quarrel between the
masculine and feminine, the corrupt "modern" and the flagrant Philistine,
the vaguely suggestive Nineteenth Century Athenian and the larky and
unbridled schoolboy. A neurotic woman seemed to have been at work here, a
sordid youth there. On a sidetable the hysterical man of our civilization
fought a duel in taste with some Amazon whose kept vow had evidently
wrought a cancer in her mind. In every corner there was the clash of
civil war. Yet there was always the cloudy red, visible through the
lattice-work of decoration, as the blue sky is visible through the
lattice-work of a Tadema interior.
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