No more than the æsthetes or the Impressionists were they conscious of any social or universal ideals that demanded expression.
The æsthetes had a doctrine; the Impressionists had a method and a technic.
Punch attacked the æsthetes alternately with the rapier and the bludgeon, using the former in the delicate raillery of Du Maurier's pictures, the latter in prose and verse comments on their eccentricities and extravagance.
It is enough to mention the names of Rossetti and Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Ruskin to realize how far the fashionable æsthetes disimproved on their masters.
We now come to the second argument with which the Æsthetes wish to defend the right of the artist to immorality.
At the card-table, in the public-house and the brothel, a base nature may procure sensations the intensity of which those offered by any work of the Æsthetes is far from being able to rival.
The Æsthetes affirm that artistic activity is the highest of which the human mind is capable, and must occupy the first place in the estimation of men.
Ego-maniacs, Decadents and Æsthetes have completely gathered under their banner this refuse of civilized peoples, and march at its head.
The truth is that the claim of the highest rank for art advanced by the Æsthetes involves the complete refutation of their other dogmas.
First of all, those artists over whom the Æsthetes grow so enthusiastic create in the healthy man no pleasure, but loathing or boredom.
Hence, as we have seen, not one of the sophisms of the Æsthetes withstands criticism.
He was the first of the Æsthetes to smell mediævalism as a smell of the morning; and not as a mere scent of decay.
Then the influence spread across the Channel, and the English Æsthetes arose to preach the gospel of imagination to the unimaginative.
The Decadents and Æsthetes were weak because they had no banner to fight beneath, no authority to appeal to in defence of their views, no definite gospel to preach.
In his very style the satirist of the æsthetes stood confessed almost as one of their number, whether he wished this to be seen or not--at least as one of the romantic school from whom they immediately descended.
Du Maurier exposed it all, and he exposed, too, the æsthetes to whom the salvation of the appearance of a suburban drawing-room could come to mean more than anything else in life.
We have shown the success of du Maurier with the æsthetes to go upon similar lines.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "sthetes" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
