The day Beardsley left his stool and ledger in a London insurance
office and betook himself seriously to the illustration of that strange
comic world of Congreve, a new manifestation of English art blossomed.
It had, no doubt, been a long time germinating in the minds of many
men, and there had been numerous signs pointing the way on which the
artistic tendencies of the nineties would travel. For example, just
about the same time as Beardsley’s eighteenth year, a coterie of young
men, fresh from the Varsity in many cases, made their appearance in
London openly proclaiming the doctrine of art for art’s sake under
the ægis of Oscar Wilde. So in the last age of hansom cabs and dying
Victorian etiquette, these young men determined that the rather dull
art and literary world of London should flower like another Paris.
If, for the sake of making a beginning, one must fix on that memorable
day when Beardsley burnt his boats as the date of the opening of the
period of the nineties, it must be remembered that this arbitrary
limitation of the movement is rather a convenience than a necessity. To
divide up anything so continuous as literature and art into sections
like a bookcase is uncommonly like damming up a portion of a stream
to look at the fish in it. It breaks the contact between what was
before and what came after. However, as one must go a long way back to
investigate accurately how a new movement in art arises, and as it is
tedious to follow up all the clues that lead to the source, it will be
perhaps as well not to worry too much over the causes of the movement
or over the influences from which it arose. Let us accept the fact
so well pointed out by Mr. W. G. Blaikie Murdoch in _The Renaissance
of the Nineties_, that the output of the nineties was ‘a distinct
secession from the art of the previous age ..., in fact the eighties,
if they have a distinct character, were a time of transition, a period
of simmering for revolt rather than of actual outbreak; and it was in
the succeeding ten years that, thanks to certain young men, an upheaval
was really made.’
It is to France if anywhere we can trace the causes of this new
attitude. First of all, in painting, the great French impressionists,
with Manet and Monet leading them; the doctrine of plein air painting,
and all the wonder of this new school of painting gave a new thrill
to art. Then about 1885 the literary symbolists killed the Parnassian
school of poetry, while at the same time there was a new _esplozione
naturlistica_. Paris, always the city of light, was again fluting new
melodies for the world. In the Rue de Rome, Stéphane Mallarmé received
all the world of art and letters. To the Rue de Rome came Whistler,
John Payne, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and others. The French influence
that swept over to England was as powerful as that which stirred
artistic Germany, creating a German period of the nineties in the group
of symbolists who, under Stefan George, issued the now famous _Blätter
für die Kunst_. The Englishmen, indeed, who attended these soirées of
the Rue de Rome did not come away empty-handed. Not only did their
own work suffer an artistic change through this influence, but they
handed it on to their successors. So directly and indirectly the great
French painters and writers of the day influenced the art of England,
creating the opportunity for a distinct secession from the art of the
previous age. At the same time French art and literature were never
stationary but always developing. It was only in 1890 that we find
the real Régnier appearing. In the same year Paul Fort, just eighteen
summers like Beardsley, founded the Théâtre d’Art. All this French art
at high pressure had a stimulating effect on English art; and, in fact,
remained its main stimulus until the Boer War, when the imperialism of
writers like Kipling became the chief interest. So it was in no small
degree the literary symbolists, the plein air painters and all the
motives that lay behind them, that awoke the Englishmen of the nineties
to new possibilities in art and life. In Paris, in 1890, Rothenstein
met Conder, and at once the two became lifelong friends. There they
encountered artists like Toulouse Lautrec and Anquetin.
The first men, of course, to realise this feverish activity in France
were the elder men, who handed on the tidings to the younger majority.
Thus the men of the eighties turned the attention of the unknown of the
nineties towards France, so that Englishmen again began to remember
that something else counted in Paris besides lingerie. In dealing then
with the influences that helped to beget the period, it is as well to
remember that if Walter Pater and Whistler were its forerunners, so to
speak, Oscar Wilde and George Moore were responsible in no small degree
for many of the tendencies that afterwards became prevalent.
Wilde himself, in fact, was artistically an influence for evil on his
weaker juniors. His social success, his keen persiflage, his indolent
pose of greatness, blinded them as much as it did the οἱ πολλοί to his
real artistic industry and merit. His worst works were, in fact, with
one exception, his disciples. Richard Le Gallienne in his _Quest of the
Golden Girl_ and _Prose Fancies_ was watered-down Wilde, and very thin
at that. Even John Davidson, in _Baptist Lake_ and _Earl Lavender_,
strove in vain to overtake the masterly ease with which Wilde’s ordered
prose periods advance like cohorts of centurions to the sound of a
full orchestra. Wilde’s best work--his _Prose Poems_, his poem _The
Harlot’s House_, his one-acter _Salomé_, and one or two of the stories
in the _House of Pomegranates_--will, however, remain as some of the
finest flowers of the age’s art. Yet Wilde, in reality, was senior to
the nineties proper, and was much too good an artist to approve of much
of the work that was done in imitation of himself during the period
by the mere hangers-on of the nineties. He was with the men of the
nineties, but not of them. Beardsley, indeed, the age’s real king, took
the liberty of mocking at Wilde in the very illustrations, or rather
decorations, intended for Wilde’s most elaborate production. Wilde,
in his turn, never wrote for _The Yellow Book_, which he disliked
intensely. Again, we know what Symons’s opinion of Wilde was from his
essay on him as a poseur. In fact, Wilde was a writer apart from the
others, though undoubtedly his presence among them up to the time of
his débâcle was a profound direct influence.
On the other hand, George Moore, as a reactionary influence against
Victorianism,[1] as a senior who had lived and written in Paris, was
more of an indirect factor for the younger men. For a time he lived
in the Temple, where many of them had come to live. By his works he
helped to disseminate the influences of the great French writers and
painters that had come into his own life. His own writings came to
others surcharged with ‘The poisonous honey of France.’ In his _Modern
Painting_, in his novel, _Evelyn Innes_, in his era of servitude to
Flaubert’s majesty, he is of the nineties. But the nineties with George
Moore were merely a phase out of which he grew, as out of many others.
But when the nineties began Moore contrived to assist at their birth in
the same way as he did later at that of the Celtic renaissance. Indeed,
it is said, in Moore’s novel, _Mike Fletcher_ (1889), one can obtain a
glimpse of the manner in which the period was to burgeon.
[1] See his _Literature at Nurse_, 1885.
There was, indeed, amongst the younger men in those early days a
wonderful spirit of camaraderie. It was an attractive period full
of the glamour of youth before it went down fighting for Art with a
capital A, before age had chilled its blood or dulled its vision. And
there came, no doubt, an immense vitality for them all, a stimulating
energy to each one, from this meeting together in London. Indeed,
coming together by chance, as it were, in London, they not only
discovered one another and the ineffable boon of comradeship, but they
also rediscovered, through Whistler, London for art. So once again the
streets of London began to be written about, not it is true in the
Dickens manner, but still with even as great a love as his. They went
so far as to attempt to institute real French café life, by having
meetings at the Cheshire Cheese and evenings in the Domino Room of the
Café Royal. Symons wrote of the ballets of Leicester Square; Dowson
of the purlieus round the docks; Davidson made poems of Fleet Street;
Binyon sang of white St. Martin’s and the golden gallery of St. Paul’s;
Crackanthorpe sketched his London vignettes; Street talks of the
indefinable romance of Mayfair. In fact the nineties brought the Muses
back to town. In a cabman’s shelter, in Soho restaurants of doubtful
cheapness, in each other’s rooms, they rejoiced in each other’s
company. At the same time Beardsley, by a stroke of luck through the
good services of friends, was commissioned by Mr. Dent to illustrate
_Le Morte d’Arthur_. The Bodley Press had begun in Vigo Street in 1887.
Symons, Yeats, and others had already published their first books. The
curtain had gone up on the drama of the nineties, of which this is
intended as a brief appreciation.
At the date of the appearance of these young men amid a mass of
lucubrators, there was actually a band of genuine young writers
(besides the big Victorians like Meredith and Hardy), who were turning
out good work, and who were under the sway of that old Pan of poetry,
Henley of _The National Observer_. These young men of Henley must not
be therefore confused with the _Yellow Book_ group. They were often
deliberately coarse, not because they liked it, but because it was
part of their artistic gospel. And when one considers the methods of
the feeblest of them, one sees more ruffianly sturdy British horseplay
than art, more braying and snarling than sounding on the lute. But
among the best of them, Stevenson, Kipling, and Steevens, was a fine
loyalty to the traditions of the leading spirit of the _Observer_
Henley--Pan playing on his reed with his crippled hoofs hiding amid
the water-lilies of the purling stream. All these last writers and
artists were men of the Anglo-Saxon tradition; while, on the other
hand, the young men who had, so to speak, just come to town, were full
of the Latin tradition. The main thing in the lives of these last was
French literature and art, and out of this influence came not only the
art, but the eccentricities, of the coterie, which is so often called
the nineties. Theirs was a new spirit. They were of the order of the
delectable ‘Les Jeunes.’ Epigram opened a new career with Oscar Wilde;
Beardsley dreamed of a strange world; Ernest Dowson used to drink
hashish and make love in Soho in the French manner of Henri Murger’s
Latin Quarter--for a time, indeed, hair was worn long, and the ties of
the petty homunculi of the Wilde crowd were of lace; but, fortunately,
artists like Beardsley and the other men worth while did not cultivate
foolishness except as a protection against the bourgeois.
But enough of these affectations; the point I wish to bring out here is
that the men who drew and wrote for _The Savoy_ wrote their art with
a difference to that of those others who were their contemporaries
but appeared in the first instance as a virile imperialistic movement
in _The Scots Observer_ and _The National Observer_. The artists of
the nineties were more, as we say rather badly in English, of the
‘kid-glove school.’ A note of refinement, a distinction of utterance,
an obsession in Art marked all their best as well as their worst work.
But this by no means prevented the two schools having a very salutary
influence on each other. Indeed, we find a man like Mr. W. B. Yeats,
who really belonged to a third movement, his own Celtic renaissance,
publishing first of all lyrics like ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ under
the banner of Henley, and attending a year or two later the Rhymers’
Club meetings before he found his own demesne. But to his former
comrades of the Cheshire Cheese, the men who concern us here, Yeats
has found occasion to render befitting praise in the well-known lines:
You had to face your ends when young--
’Twas wine or women, or some curse--
But never made a poorer song
That you might have a heavier purse;
Nor gave loud service to a cause
That you might have a troop of friends:
You kept the Muses’ sterner laws
And unrepenting faced your ends.
In fact, since influences and counter-influences in all ages of
literature are such subtle vermin to ferret out, I propose to avoid
as far as possible any generalities in that connection, and to
interpret broadly and briefly a somewhat vague period that reviewers
have acquired the habit of calling ‘the nineties.’ What then was this
period? It was a portion of the last decade of the last century which
began about 1890, and passing through the Rhymers’ Club, blossomed out
into _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_ periodicals, and produced works
like Beardsley’s drawings, Conder’s fans, Dowson’s poetry, and Hubert
Crackanthorpe’s short stories. The men who composed the group are too
numerous to recall in their entirety, even if a satisfactory list of
such a nature could be produced. So all I intend to attempt here is a
summary of the activities of certain typical examples of the group as
will serve to furnish an appreciation of their general work. And the
way I propose to obtain this view is to begin by considering Beardsley
as the central figure of the period; to deal next with the two most
vital manifestoes of the movement and their respective literary
editors, _The Yellow Book_ and Henry Harland, _The Savoy_ and Mr.
Arthur Symons, passing on in turn to the writers of fiction, the poets,
the essayists and dramatists not of the whole decade, but only to those
with whom this particular movement is concerned; it will then be time
to make a few deductions on the spirit of the whole of this tendency.
By rigidly adhering to only those men who were actually of the nineties
group I am only too conscious these pages will be considered often
to be lacking in the great literary events and figures of the age,
such as Hardy’s _Jude the Obscure_, the rise of the Kipling star, the
tragedy of Wilde, the coming of Conrad, etc. etc. Yet the sole object
of this scant summary would be defeated if I began to prattle of these
and others like Bernard Shaw. In fact its _raison d’être_ constrains a
method of treatment which must not be broken.
I
To begin with Aubrey Beardsley has many advantages, for it brings
us at once not only to the type of mentality most representative of
the period, but also to the man whose creative power was probably
the greatest factor of the period, to the boy who changed, as has
been said, the black and white art of the world, and to the artist,
from whose work we can most easily deduce the leading contemporary
characteristics. The art of these men was in a way abnormal, while the
men themselves who produced it were exotics; and Beardsley’s is not
only the most abnormal art of them all, but also he himself is the
greatest exotic. As Robert Ross well said as a mere comment on the
decade, he is invaluable: ‘He sums up all the delightful manias, all
that is best in modern appreciation--Greek vases, Italian primitives,
the “Hypnerotomachia,” Chinese porcelain, Japanese kakemonos,
Renaissance friezes, old French and English furniture, rare enamels,
mediæval illumination, the débonnaire masters of the eighteenth
century, the English pre-Raphaelites.’ In Beardsley, so to speak, was
inset all the influences that went to make the period what it was. And
another reason why it is so convenient to begin with him is that he
and not Oscar Wilde was in reality the great creative genius of the
age. Besides his black-and-white work all the world knows, in which, as
Father Gray says, ‘His imaginative gifts never showed a sign of fatigue
or exhaustion,’[2] Beardsley practised in other arts. While a youngster
at Brighton he promised to become a musical prodigy, and in later days
Symons describes him at a Wagner concert gripping the seat with nervous
intensity. He wrote some charming poetry, and as picturesque a fairy
tale for grown-ups as has ever been written in _Under the Hill_. In an
interview he states, probably slyly, he was at work in 1895 on a modern
novel[3]; while in 1897 he said, ‘Cazotte has inspired me to make some
small contes. I have one in hand now called _The Celestial Lover_.’ He
began once to write a play with the actor, Brandon Thomas. In his late
illustrations for Gautier’s _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ he was clearly
working towards water-colour work, while at one time he began under
Walter Sickert his only oil painting (unfinished), ‘Women regarding a
dead mouse.’ By no means least, he became a leader in English poster
work. All of this was essentially creative work. And when death came
he was very far from his artistic or intellectual maturity. So is it
not just to say that this young man who practised nearly all the forms
of art, and who was also an avid reader and student, remains the chief
creative figure of the nineties?
[2] _Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley_, with an Introduction by
the Rev. John Gray, 1904.
[3] _The Sketch_, April 10, 1895.
Indeed, there is no more pleasing personality in the whole period
than this ‘apostle of the grotesque,’ as his own decade loved to hail
him. Born at Brighton in 1872 he was educated at the local Grammar
School, whose magazine, _Past and Present_, contains his earliest
work. The Kate Greenaway picture books, it is said, started him
drawing. At school he was neither keen on his work or games, but used
to be continually doing ‘little rough, humorous sketches.’ Reading
was his great refuge, and when he fell in with some volumes of the
Restoration dramatists he had already begun to find his feet in that
world of the mad lusts of Wycherley and the perfumed artificiality
of Congreve. Of school life itself he speaks bitterly and with no
regret. At sixteen he must have been particularly glad to escape from
it and enter, first of all, an architect’s office in London, and then,
the next year, the Guardian Life and Fire Assurance Office, where
his fatal illness unfortunately first began to reveal its presence.
Then came his seed-time up till 1891, when he did little but amateur
theatricals. But at length Beardsley discovered himself. Many gentlemen
have subsequently stated that they discovered him. It may be that they
discovered him for themselves, but it was Beardsley and Beardsley alone
who found himself. He certainly received, however, a large amount of
appreciative sympathy when he started to draw a series of illustrations
in his spare time for Congreve’s _Way of the World_, and Marlowe’s
_Tamburlaine_. He was without art training in the usual sense, though
he went of nights in 1892 to Professor Brown’s night school at
Westminster, but still kept to the Insurance Office stool till August,
when, after being recognised by Burne-Jones and Watts with kindness,
he left his post to live by his art. What had probably actually
permitted him to take this step was the commission given by J. M. Dent
to illustrate _Le Morte d’Arthur_. Any way he was launched out by the
first number of _The Studio_ with Joseph Pennell’s article on ‘A New
Illustrator,’ and, what was more important, with eleven of Beardsley’s
own works. At that time all his art was intuitive without much
knowledge of modern black and white. Indeed he was artistically swamped
at the moment with the glory of the pre-Raphaelites and Burne-Jones.
The _Le Morte d’Arthur_, really, was intended as a kind of rival to the
Kelmscott Press publications, and Beardsley in his border designs had
small difficulty in excelling Morris’s work.
Next year, 1893, finds these influences modified to a certain extent,
although the _Salomé_ drawings still belong to that cadaverous,
lean and hungry world of Burne-Jones, from which Beardsley has not
completely as yet rescued himself by means of Frenchmen like Constantin
Guys; but his release has well arrived in 1894 with his design ‘The
Fat Woman,’ a caricature of Mrs. Whistler. Watteau, Rops, and the
Japanese, and the thousand books he is now reading throw open at last
all the splendour of the art world to him. He lacks nothing, and he
goes forward borrowing lavishly, like Shakespeare, from any source
that suits him. Beardsley’s illustrations are generally critical
decorations, although it must never be forgotten he did attempt on
more than one occasion a series of illustration pure and simple in,
for example, his early scenes for _Manon Lescaut_, _La Dame aux
Camélias_, and _Madame Bovary_, which are not altogether successful.
He is perhaps at his best as the illustrating critic, which he is
somewhat scornfully in _Salomé_, very happily in Pope’s _The Rape of
the Lock_, and triumphantly in Aristophanes’ _Lysistrata_. It can be
said of his work, rather sweepingly no doubt, but still truthfully,
he began by decorating books with his _Le Morte d’Arthur_; he then
tried illustrating them; but wound up in criticising them by his
decorations. ‘Have you noticed,’ he once wrote to Father Gray, ‘have
you noticed that no book ever gets well illustrated once it becomes a
classic? Contemporary illustrations are the only ones of any value or
interest.’ But Beardsley was always more than a mere illustrator, for
where a learned Editor writes notes and annotations on Aristophanes,
he decorates him; where Arthur Symons would write an essay on
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, Beardsley does a number of critical designs.
It was, in fact, an age of the critical function; but Beardsley’s
criticism is of that supreme kind Oscar Wilde called ‘creative
criticism.’
At one time it was customary for critics to plead that he was only a
supreme imitator of the Japanese or somebody; but, in reality, as has
been pointed out by Robert Ross in his admirable essays on his work, he
was as intensely original as an illustrator as Sandro Botticelli was in
his designs for Dante’s Divine Comedy, or William Blake for the drama
of Job. None of them interpreted authors for dull people who could not
understand what they read. Perhaps the very best way to appreciate
his work of this kind is often to take it away from the text, and say
this is the way Beardsley saw _The Rape of the Lock_. As for all the
supposed influences he is pretended to have laboured under, it can be
at once said, he was too restless a personality to accept merely one
influence at a time. If he took from anywhere, he took from everywhere,
and the result is a great and original draughtsman, the music of whose
line has been the theme of many artists. With little stippled lines in
the background, and masses of black in the foreground, the Wagnerites
burgeon forth. Black and white in some of his drawings even tell us
the colour of some of the silks his women wear, and his white is the
plain white of the paper, not the Chinese subterfuge. A few rhythmic
pen-strokes on the virgin sheet and strangely vital people live. The
hand of Salomé may be out of drawing, the anatomy of Lysistrata wrong;
but, all the same, they live with a rich malevolent life. One has to
go back to the Greek vase-painters to find such a vivid life realised
with such simple effects. This simplicity and austerity of lines, these
few dots for the telling eyelashes, these blank spaces of untouched
paper almost insult one with the perfect ease with which everything is
accomplished. But, as a matter of fact, how different, how difficult
was the actual creation of these designs! What infinite pains, what
knowledge went to their composition! ‘He sketched everything in pencil,
at first covering the paper with apparent scrawls, constantly rubbed
out and blocked in again, until the whole surface became raddled from
pencil, indiarubber, and knife; over this incoherent surface he worked
in Chinese ink with a gold pen, often ignoring the pencil lines,
afterwards carefully removed. So every drawing was invented, built
up, and completed on the same sheet of paper.’[4] ‘But Beardsley’s
subtlety does not lie only in his technique, but also in what he
expresses thereby. Looking at his drawings, one always feels in the
presence of something alive, something containing deep human interest;
and the reason is that, while Beardsley seldom aimed at realistic
rendering of the human form, he was a superb realist in another
respect, this being that his workmanship always proved itself adequate
for the expression of the most subtle emotions, and for the embodiment
of the artist’s unique personality.’[5]
[4] _Aubrey Beardsley_, by Robert Ross, pp. 38-39. 1909.
[5] _The Renaissance of the Nineties_, by W. G. Blaikie
Murdoch, p. 29. 1911.
This charming personality stood him in good stead when the Beardsley
craze burst upon London. He had literally set the Thames on fire. It
was in 1894, when he became art editor of _The Yellow Book_ (which I
discuss on another page), that the craze began in earnest. His poster
for Dr. John Todhunter’s _The Comedy of Sighs_, at the Avenue Theatre,
a three-quarter-length figure of a woman in deep blue, standing behind
a gauze curtain powdered with light green spots, electrified the dull
hoardings of London. Another poster, the female figure in a salmon-pink
dress standing opposite a second-hand bookshop, with its scheme of
black, green, orange, and salmon pink, advertising Fisher Unwin’s
_Pseudonym Library_, flashed its colours gaily amid a mass of stupid
commercial advertising. _Punch_ parodied ‘The Blessed Damozel’ with
a new version of lauds for ‘The Beardsley Girl.’ A famous tea-shop
exploited the type of female beauty.
Oscar Wilde’s play _Salomé_ was illustrated by the newly arrived young
artist. The columns of the papers and magazines spread his fame, or
more often belittled it. The new art magazine, _The Studio_, not only
raised him to the skies, but had its first cover done by him. And all
this happened to a boy who had only been gone from school six years,
and whose total age when he became the art craze of London was only
twenty-two. But he was not to stop there. After four more years of
crowded, feverish work he was to die, after having affected all the
black and white art of the world. He was to be at once accepted in
Paris. He was to raise a shoal of imitators, and to influence more or
less detrimentally dozens of good artists.
Yet all this phenomenal success was not to change his charming
personality in the least. He still remained Aubrey Beardsley, the boy
doomed to death, but still with the lovable heart of a boy who wanted
to enjoy life.
Max Beerbohm has given us a wonderful personal record of his friend,
in which he says: ‘For him, as for the schoolboy whose holidays are
near their close, every hour--every minute, even--had its value. His
drawings, his compositions in prose and in verse, his reading--these
things were not enough to satisfy his strenuous demands on life. He was
an accomplished musician, he was a great frequenter of concerts, and
seldom when he was in London did he miss a “Wagner night” at Covent
Garden. He loved dining-out, and, in fact, gaiety of any kind....
He was always most content where there was the greatest noise and
bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light.’
In the Domino Room of the Café Royal in London; outside the Brighton
Pavilion, whose architecture haunted him all his life, Beardsley was
at home and happy. ‘I am really happy,’ he writes, ‘in Paris.’ And it
was Beardsley’s chief preoccupation to communicate in his drawings the
surprise and delight which this visible world afforded him--a world
of strange demi-mondaines and eupeptic stockbrokers, of odd social
parasites and gullible idiots. He always had an engaging smile that was
delightful for friends and strangers; while he was big enough, Robert
Ross chronicles, to make friends and remain friends with many for whom
his art was totally unintelligible.
After he vacated _The Yellow Book_ art editorship, and _The Savoy_ had
been issued, Leonard Smithers became the real Beardsley publisher.
There were no dead-locks with him as to nude Amors, for Smithers had
a courage of his own--a courage great enough to issue _The Ballad of
Reading Gaol_ when Wilde was under his cloud, and no other publisher
would look at it. It was Smithers who issued _The Savoy_, the two
books of _Fifty Drawings_, _The Rape of the Lock_, _The Pierrot of the
Minute_, the designs for _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, and among others
the eight ‘Lysistrata’ and the four ‘Juvenal’ drawings. For any one to
study all this variety and rapid growth to an astounding maturity of
conception and execution no better volumes can be recommended than _A
Book of Fifty Drawings_ (1897), and _A Second Book of Fifty Drawings_
(1899). The former book is much the better of the two, for the latter
is a book of scraps to a large extent. Indeed, in the first book all
the drawings were fortunately selected by both Beardsley himself and
Smithers. The artist allowed no drawing to appear in it with which he
was at all dissatisfied. It includes his favourite, ‘The Ascension of
St. Rose of Lima’; but one cannot help thinking that there have crept
into it far too many of his immature _Le Morte d’Arthur_ series. For
when this volume was issued he had completely discarded that painful
method of design. Indeed, the _Salomé_ decorations (1894) had bridged
this brief spell of his puerility to the rich fulfilment of _The Rape
of the Lock_ (1896). Whistler at once saw this difference, for, it is
on record, when Beardsley first showed these last designs to him he
‘looked at them first indifferently, then with interest, then with
delight. And then he said slowly, “Aubrey, I have made a very great
mistake, you are a very great artist.” And the boy burst out crying.
All Whistler could say, when he could say anything, was, “I mean it--I
mean it.”’
In reality one can of course now see signs of the real artist even in
the _Le Morte d’Arthur_ series. For example, the true Beardsley type
of woman appears in the design entitled ‘How Queen Guenever made her a
Nun.’ These Beardsley women, Wilde hinted, were first invented by the
artist and then copied by nature. They have, indeed, been the cause
of much fine writing, one androgynist describing them as the fruit of
a French bagnio and a Chinese visitor. As Pierre Caume demanded of
Félicien Rops we are moved to ask of Beardsley:
Quels éclairs ont nimbé tes fillettes pâlies?
Quel stupre assez pervers, quel amour devasté
Met des reflets d’absinthe en leurs melancolies?
They belong to the same world as the women of Toulouse Lautrec, Rops,
Odélon Redon, Bayros, and Rassenfosse--the type known as _la loupeuse
insatiable et cupide_. They move and have their being in French erotica
and novels like _La Faustine_.
Beardsley had now (1896) reached his best period with _The Rape of the
Lock_ and _The Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes, and of the two the palm
should be awarded to the eight designs of the latter work. No one has
yet dared to say that these are probably his masterpieces; but some
day, when the kinship between Beardsley and those old Greek Masters
who designed their exquisite vases and wine cups is established, this
truism may also come to light. It is unlikely, however, to become
revealed until Aristophanes himself is fully translated in the vulgar
tongue, for not even the most generous Editor in his monumental edition
has essayed that impertinence to Mrs. Grundy. The illustrations or
rather critical decorations of Beardsley are also not likely to become
generally circulated to all because of their frankness. For phallism
is purely pornographic if it has nothing to do with your subject. But
unfortunately it is a considerable factor in the _Lysistrata_, as every
scholar knows. Beardsley himself in his letters lays considerable
emphasis on the fact that he was illustrating Aristophanes and not
Donnay’s French version of the same. And never was he more cynical
or more incisive; never did he use fewer lines with more effect;
never was love and its depravities more scathingly or so disdainfully
ridiculed. In all there were eight drawings issued with a variant of
the third, though I have reason to believe there was also a ninth, and
even this, his worst erotic drawing, has nothing to do with obscenity.
He had learned too much from the men who designed the old Hellenic
pottery to be obscene. He was frank as Chaucer is frank, not vicious
as Aretino delighted to be, or indecent like the English artists
Rowlandson and James Gillray were in some of their fantasies. Virgil
dying wanted to destroy his Æneids, and Beardsley _in articulo mortis_
wrote ‘to destroy all copies of _Lysistrata_ and bawdy drawings.’ Yet
he has nothing to fear from the genuine issue of those drawings that
remain, or from the numberless pirated copies that have since exuded
mysteriously into places like Charing Cross Road. Even Fuchs in his
_Erotische Kunst_ has to say: ‘Beardsley is specially to be noticed
for the refinement of his conceptions, his ultra-modern culture, his
taste, his sense of proportion, his maturity of execution. No harsh
or discordant notes, no violent tones. On the contrary, a wheedling
finesse. In some respects he is the “maladive” beauty of our time
incarnate.’ Beardsley, indeed, never descended to the horrors of an
Alfred Kubin or to the tone of certain of Bayros’s designs. He was
neither immoral nor moral, but unmoral like Rassenfosse or any one else
who has not a fixed ethical theory to teach. In his Juvenal drawings
(1897), his five Lucian sketches (1894), and the _Lysistrata_ (1896)
he went straight to the great gifts of classical literature, and in
touching classical things he took on the ancient outlook via, I
believe, those wonderful Greek vase designers[6] which he, so assiduous
a haunter of the British Museum, must have not only seen, but revelled
in. But of these the best and freest are the _Lysistrata_ conceptions;
and to enjoy these one needs an initiation that is not every man’s to
receive.
[6] Ross says in his _Aubrey Beardsley_, p. 45, one of the
events which contributed ‘to give Beardsley a fresh impetus
and stimulate his method of expression’ about the _Salomé_
time was ‘a series of visits to the collection of Greek
vases in the British Museum (prompted by an essay of Mr.
D. S. MacColl).’
We are, however, more interested here with the literary side of his
work, which divides itself into poetry and prose. As a poet Beardsley
has been accused of over-cleverness. Whatever that criticism means I do
not know. Probably it implies some similar reflection to the statement
that a dandy is over-dressed. I cannot, however, discover any such
affectation in, for example, that charming poem, _The Three Musicians_,
which recounts how the soprano ‘lightly frocked,’ the slim boy who dies
‘for réclame and recall at Paris,’ and the Polish pianist, pleased with
their thoughts, their breakfast, and the summer day, wend their way
‘along the path that skirts the wood’:
The Polish genius lags behind,
And, with some poppies in his hand,
Picks out the strings and wood and wind
Of an imaginary band.
Enchanted that for once his men obey his beat and understand.
The charming cantatrice reclines
And rests a moment where she sees
Her château’s roof that hotly shines
Amid the dusky summer trees,
And fans herself, half shuts her eyes, and smooths the frock about
her knees.
The gracious boy is at her feet,
And weighs his courage with his chance;
His fears soon melt in noonday heat.
The tourist gives a furious glance,
Red as his guide-book, moves on, and offers up a prayer for France.
In _The Ballad of a Barber_, again, there is nothing but a trill of
song in limpid verse. How Carrousel, the barber of Meridian Street,
who could ‘curl wit into the dullest face,’ became _fou_ of the
thirteen-year-old King’s daughter, so that
His fingers lost their cunning quite,
His ivory combs obeyed no more;
is a typical ninety _jeu d’esprit_, only much better done than the
average one. With the fewest words Beardsley can sketch a scene or
character, as he used the fewest of lines in his drawings. This is
even better exemplified in his prose. Time and again a single sentence
of _Under the Hill_ gives us a complete picture:
Sporion was a tall, depraved young man, with a slight stoop, a
troubled walk, an oval, impassible face, with its olive skin drawn
lightly over the bone, strong, scarlet lips, long Japanese eyes,
and a great gilt toupet.
We seem to gaze with the Abbé Fanfreluche at the prints on his bedroom
wall:
Within the delicate curved frames lived the corrupt and gracious
creatures of Dorat and his school, slender children in masque
and domino, smiling horribly, exquisite lechers leaning over
the shoulders of smooth, doll-like girls, and doing nothing in
particular, terrible little Pierrots posing as lady lovers and
pointing at something outside the picture, and unearthly fops and
huge, bird-like women mingling in some rococo room.
One rubs one’s eyes. Are these not the drawings Franz von Bayros of
Vienna realised later? But Beardsley’s output of both prose and verse
is actually so limited that one cannot compare his double art work to
that of an artist like Rossetti. When all is said and done, his great
literary work is the unfinished ‘fairy’ tale of _Under the Hill_. In
its complete form it belongs to the class of works like Casanova’s
_Mémoires_, the _Reigen_ of Schnitzler, the novels of Restif de
la Bretonne, and some of the _Thousand and One Nights_. It is an
enchanting book in the same way as _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ or _Le Roi
Pausole_ are enchanting books. In its rococo style it surpasses the
best rhythms of Wilde, who only succeeds in cataloguing long lists of
beautiful things, while Aubrey Beardsley suggests more than he says
in the true impressionist way of all the writers of the nineties.
Indeed, the purple patches of Beardsley are as rich in fine phrases
as any paragraphs of the period--as _faisandée_ as any French writer
has written. Elizabethan euphuists, Restoration conceit-makers, later
Latins with all the rich byzantium _floræ_ of brains like Apuleius,
can make as finely-sounding phrases, but I doubt whether they can pack
away in them as rich a pictorial glamour as many of the writers of the
nineties, and Beardsley amongst them, achieved. We have Helen in ‘a
flutter of frilled things’ at ‘taper-time’ before her mirror displaying
her neck and shoulders ‘so wonderfully drawn,’ and her ‘little
malicious breasts ... full of the irritation of loveliness that can
never be entirely comprehended, or ever enjoyed to the utmost.’ Whole
scenes of the book are unrolled before us like priceless tapestries.
The ‘_ombre_ gateway of the mysterious hill’ stands before us:
The place where he stood waved drowsily with strange flowers, heavy
with perfume, dripping with odours. Gloomy and nameless weeds not
to be found in Mentzelius. Huge moths, so richly winged they must
have banqueted upon tapestries and royal stuffs, slept on the
pillars that flanked either side of the gateway, and the eyes of
all the moths remained open and were burning and bursting with a
mesh of veins. The pillars were fashioned in some pale stone, and
rose up like hymns in the praise of pleasure, for from cap to base
each one was carved with loving sculptures....
To read _The Toilet of Helen_, with its faint echoes perhaps of Max
Beerbohm’s ‘Toilet of Sabina’ in _The Perversion of Rouge_, is to be
lured on by the sound of the sentences:
Before a toilet-table that shone like the altar of Nôtre Dame des
Victoires, Helen was seated in a little dressing-gown of black
and heliotrope. The Coiffeur Cosmé was caring for her scented
chevelure, and with tiny silver tongs, warm from the caresses
of the flame, made delicious intelligent curls that fell as
lightly as a breath about her forehead and over her eyebrows, and
clustered like tendrils round her neck. Her three favourite girls,
Pappelarde, Blanchemains, and Loureyne, waited immediately upon her
with perfume and powder in delicate flaçons and frail cassolettes,
and held in porcelain jars the ravishing paints prepared by
Châteline for those cheeks and lips which had grown a little pale
with anguish of exile. Her three favourite boys, Claud, Clair, and
Sarrasins, stood amorously about with salver, fan, and napkin.
Millamant held a slight tray of slippers, Minette some tender
gloves, La Popelinière--mistress of the robes--was ready with a
frock of yellow and yellow. La Zambinella bore the jewels, Florizel
some flowers, Amadour a box of various pins, and Vadius a box of
sweets. Her doves, ever in attendance, walked about the room that
was panelled with the gallant paintings of Jean Baptiste Dorat, and
some dwarfs and doubtful creatures sat here and there lolling out
their tongues, pinching each other, and behaving oddly enough.
There you have a Beardsley drawing transfused into words. The same is
true of his description of the woods of Auffray. The same is true of
the wonderful supper served on the terrace to Helen and her guests amid
the gardens. To find such another supper in literature one has to turn
to some French author, or, better still, to the ‘Cena Trimalchionis’
of Petronius himself. From this it will be seen that Beardsley’s
literary work,[7] like his black-and-white, though the embodiment of
the spirit of his age, is also of the noble order of the highest things
in art. It is for this reason, indeed, that I have selected Beardsley
as the centre-piece of this brief sketch of a movement that is dead
and gone. He was the incarnation of the spirit of the age; but, when
the fall of Wilde killed the age and the Boer War buried it, neither
of these things disturbed or changed the magic spell of his art. His
age may die, but he remains. Even now he has outlived the fad period,
while many of the books that were written at that date by others and
decorated by him are only valuable to-day because of his frontispiece
or wrapper. One has not forgotten those wrappers, for as one will not
forget the work of William Blake, one will not forget that of Aubrey
Beardsley. His enthusiasts treasure the smallest fragment.
[7] _In The Influence of Baudelaire in France and England_,
by G. Turquet-Milnes, pp. 277-280 (1913), there is an
interesting study of his Baudelairism.