THE ASTHETE AND THE MASHER

Observer, Volume 6, Issue 152, 11 August 1883, Page 10

THE ASTHETE AND THE MASHER

Sir Frederick: Leighton, Mr Matthew Arnold, Dr Bradley, and the high art critics at Home complain that art has degenerated into astheticipm, and that precisely what the masher is to the normal young Briton, the aesthete is to the . sincere student of art. The masher is the product of Mammon ; cestheticism is a revulsion from the parvenues of the Stock Exchange. The masher is a young man of the period, without the moral or physical backbone which 'we expect in honest representatives of English youth. He lives a life of effeminate self-indulgence, and his mental horizon is limited by the City on one Bide and by a West-end theatre on the other. He is without ideas, knowledge, or chivalry. He mistakes foppery for fashion, and has none of the redeeming virtues of the great bucks of the D'Orsay period, or of the tremendous swells - whom John Leech drew to perfection, and who flourished about the period of the Crimean War. Nearly the same description applies to the professional aesthete. As the masher seeks to attain the reputation of fashion and fastness without possessing the qualities which distinguish the man of the world in the best sense, so does the aesthete pose aa the disciple of culture without the intellectual fibre which real culture implies. The existence of the one is, in fact, the price we pay for the existence of the other. The aesthete has, like the masher, his peculiar costume, his pet phrases, his chosen stock of absiirdities. Arcades atnbo. Of the two the masher is perhaps, his effeminacy and vulgarity, notwithstanding the less objectionable ; for the testhete exercises a large amount of corrupting and enervating influence which the masher does not. It is consolatory, however, to learn that in spite of the6e two forms of affectation, the standard of English manhood has not sensibly declined. The aesthetes and the mashers are recruited from the classes who never would have been foremost representatives of British, manhood. If masherism and aestheticism had not come to their aid they would have found pleasure in some other form of social absurdity. Masherism is a growth of the age of socral transition, as sestheticism is of the age of intellectual transition. -Both will pass away when they have had their day, and the British race will not have suffered either in mental or physical health. Fortunately neither of the two extravagances have found a congenial soil in this Colony, except perhaps in a mild form among the Tite Barnacles of the Civil Service in Wellington. Our young men have not the wealth or leisure to fit them for the parts. Our masher is a lower type of animal, whose sphere of operations is confined to hotel-bars and Satur-day-night saunterings in Queen-street ; our aesthetes are practical "every -day young men" and women, who have not yet learned the pretty jargon, attitudes, and principles of the Oscar Wilde school. An aesthete of that type would speedily become the laughing-stock of soberminded business men, and the prey of larrikins.

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