Ancestral Voices

Excerpt from Ancestral Voices

Naturalism as a formula for life or for art. It was like the reading of a tragedy. Those young bloods set out into life, one and all, as though there were no laws, no nature of things; and one by one they ran their heads against one or other of those stone walls which are there the rude precaution of society, or the more delicate embarrassment of God, for the defence of some final decency. They all went to the Devil or returned to God; and these last, with an abjectness and confusion of the soul which, I believe, must have mixed with grief God's joy at their return. One went mad, one died in prison, and another made a clutch at God as he was slipping out of life, with a cry as much of indignation and despair as of faith. I implore you, wrote Aubrey Beardsley on his death-bed, to destroy all copies of and bawdy drawings. Show this to (naming a friend), and conjure him to do same. By all that is holy, all obscene drawings. And the words, in my death-agony, were added after his signature.

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