2010: The Age of Decadence
From Vauxhall & Velvet By Julian Montrose
At last! — our age, so often timid in its praise of the past, has found the courage to canonise a man who embodied beauty in defiance of authority. This morning the British Government, in a ceremony dripping with silk rhetoric and mild embarrassment, named Lord Alban Fitzartur, Viscount d’Anatis, an official National Treasure. One almost imagines the old rogue winking from the afterlife, adjusting his cravat and remarking that the only national treasures worth keeping are the ones once considered contraband.
How deliciously appropriate that it should take a century for the establishment to drape its velvet arm around a man who spent his lifetime peeling back its hypocrisies with wit and charm. Fitzartur—actor, playwright, diplomat, philosopher, and patron saint of tasteful scandal—died (we think) in 1910, though the record is as artfully ambiguous as his own plays. Somewhere between the inkblots of history and the ashes of the war archives his final act was mislaid, leaving us only speculation and rumour. Some whisper he retired to Capri under an Italian name; others claim he is buried in Kent beneath an altar‑stone he designed himself. I prefer to imagine him simply slipping into myth, exquisite and unbowed.
That we still possess his works feels nothing short of miraculous. From The Peacock’s Complaint to The Vicar’s Fittings, from his bawdy fairy‑tale verses in The Trunk of Hidden Delights to the shadowed ecstasies of Tragedy with a Smile, they shimmer with irony and longing, centuries ahead of their time. His dialogue—all fan, flourish, and forbidden glance—cracked open the respectable carapace of Victorian theatre to reveal the pulsing sensuality beneath. In the coded repartee of “gentlemen of taste”, generations of gay readers found a secret inheritance, proof that contradiction could be style, and style could be survival.
What moves me most, here in the centenary haze, is not merely that the archives endure but that the meanings do. Fitzartur’s art refused apology. His was a world where masculinity pirouetted, morality quivered, and every mirror stage reflected desire as intellect. That a government which once outlawed love between men should now declare one of our own a national emblem is dazzling irony worthy of one of his own third‑act reversals.
The National Portrait Gallery will soon unveil a new exhibition—glittering manuscripts, restored playbills, scandalous caricatures—under the title Anatis Lives! Somewhere amid the gilt frames will hang a portrait elegant enough to deceive a censor, painted by one of his actors during an Italian summer. The smile, I’m told, is unmistakable: amused, conspiratorial, eternal.
Let us then raise a glass of something properly disreputable to this belated coronation. The long century of silence has ended in applause. For the first time, the nation recognises what queer artists and readers have always known: that art is not moral piety but survival in silk; that freedom can be whispered behind lace as powerfully as it can be shouted from a barricade; and that a gentleman, however peculiar his pleasures, may yet become England’s enduring emblem of grace.
So cheers, Lord Alban Fitzartur—playwright of pleasure, diplomat of desire, unrepentant aesthete. The country has finally caught up with your century.
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