In other
words, we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously
significant phrase, _another man_. Now, it is this horrible fairy tale
of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the
Decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look forward
to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor on Tuesday,
Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday, may seem a
nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One
great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago, in
which he powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement by
declaring that he could stand in the prison yard and entirely comprehend
the feelings of a man about to be hanged:
'For he that lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.'
And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which
descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain
itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which
imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a
play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be
human.
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