In that building, he seemed to remember, Granville Bantock had contended with popular audiences and the dead weight of past misery which drips like Mersey rain upon the mind of all artists. Carfax was not the man to live on the beach like Whitman (the very weather of Liverpool discouraged such a thought), or even like Gauguin (the manner of whose death could please no one), on a warm island, but he suspected that his own not unsuccessful career in the Civil Service had already so sobered and discoloured his imagination that his music and painting, products now of “spare time” only, would be unlikely to catch that great joy of emancipation which alone, he asserted, made life and art worthy of attention. Carfax always saw all good in terms of “emancipation”: all beauty, all duty. Others had seen the vision, but the slave selves of their past had intervened, making the gorgeous tawdry, the building in strange materials as rapidly failing in beauty, use and esteem as the human body itself.

The glass through which he glimpsed life as he sailed that morning imparted this rainbow – watery transient clarity of colour, while compressing and encircling with a boundless edge of uncertainty. Hence The Last of England: minor masterpiece, he felt, not so much of doomed adventure and hope to be blighted, as of escape unsanguine but compelled.

Robert Aickman, "The View".