Part 1 (2/2)

A little later Beardsley was popularly supposed to have given pictorial expression to the views and sentiments of a certain school, and his drawings were regarded as the outward artistic sign of inward literary corruption. This is not the place to discuss the invention of a mare's nest. He suffered considerably by this premature attempt to cla.s.sify his art. Further efforts to ridicule his work and suppress its publication were, however, among the most cheering failures of modern journalism.

In 1895 he ceased to contribute to the Yellow Book, and in January 1896 The Savoy was started by Leonard Smithers, with Mr Arthur Symons as the literary editor, who became the most subtle and discerning of all his critics after Beardsley's death. Failing health was the only difficulty with which he had to contend in the future. From March 1896, when he caught a severe chill at Brussels, he became a permanent invalid. He returned to England in May, and in August went to Bournemouth, where he spent the autumn and winter.

Those who visited him at Bournemouth never expected he would live for more than a few weeks. His courage, however, never failed him, and he continued work even while suffering from lung haemorrhage; but he expressed a hope and belief, in which he was justified, that he might be spared one more year. On March 31st, 1897, he was received into the Catholic Church. The sincerity of his religious convictions has been affirmed by those who were with him constantly; and, as I have suggested before, the flippancy and careless nature of his conversation were superficial: he was always strict in his religious observances. Among his intimate friends through life were clergymen and priests who have paid tribute to the reality and sincerity of his belief.

A week after being received, Beardsley rallied again, and moved to Paris, but still required the attention and untiring devotion of his mother, to whom he was deeply attached. He never returned to England again. From time to time he was cheered by visits from Miss Mabel Beardsley (Mrs Bealby Wright), who understood her brother as few sisters have done. For some time he stayed at St Germain, and in July 1897 he went to Dieppe, where he seemed almost to have recovered. It was only, however, for a short time, and in the end of 1897 he was hurried to Mentone. He never left his room after January 25th. The accounts of him which reached London prepared his friends for the end. Almost one of his last letters was to Mr Vincent O'Sullivan, the poet, congratulating him on his Introduction to ”Volpone,” for which Beardsley was making the ill.u.s.trations. Beardsley had a considerable knowledge and appreciation of Ben Jonson.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRONTISPIECE _From ”Plays” by John Davidson_]

On March 23rd, 1898, he received the last sacraments; and on the 25th, with perfect resignation, in the presence of his mother and sister, to whom he had confided messages of love and sympathy to his many friends, Aubrey Beardsley pa.s.sed away.

”Come back in sleep, for in the life Where thou art not We find none like thee. Time and strife And the world's lot

Move thee no more: but love at least And reverent heart May move thee, royal and released Soul, as thou art.”

No one could have wished him to live on in pain and suffering. I think the only trials of his life were the periods in which he was unfitted for work. His remarkable career was not darkened by any struggle for recognition. Few artists have been so fortunate as Aubrey Beardsley.

His short life was remarkably happy--at all events during the six years he was before the public. Everything he did met with success--a success thoroughly enjoyed by him. He seemed indifferent to the idle criticism and violent denunciation with which much of his art was hailed. I never heard of anyone of importance who disliked him personally; on the other hand, many who were hostile and prejudiced about his art ceased to attack him after meeting him. This must have been due to the magnetism and charm of his individuality, exercised quite unconsciously, for he never tried to conciliate people, or ”to work the oracle,” but rather gloried in shocking ”the enemy,” a boyish failing for which he may be forgiven.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WAGNERITES]

He had considerable intellectual vanity, but it never relapsed into common conceit. He was generous in recognizing the talent and genius of others, but was singularly perverse in some of his utterances. He said once that only four of his contemporaries interested him. He bore with extraordinary patience the a.s.sertions of foolish persons who calmly a.s.serted that both in America and England other artists had antic.i.p.ated the peculiarities of his style and methods. I have seen the works of these Lambert Simnels and Perkin Warbecks, and they proved, one and all, crows in peac.o.c.ks' feathers. Beardsley's style, nevertheless, influenced (unfortunately, I think) many excellent artists both younger and older than himself. In France his work was accepted without question: he was always gratified by the cordiality which greeted him in a country where he was more generally understood than in his own. He has ill.u.s.trious precedents in Constable and Bonnington. Italy, Austria, and Germany recognized in him a master some time before his death. At Berlin his picture of _Mrs Patrick Campbell_, the actress, is now in a place of honour in the Museum. A portrait study of himself is in the British Museum Print Room; a few examples are at South Kensington; but all his important work is in private collections; much of it is in America and Germany. In England, putting aside the notoriety and sensation caused by his posters and the Yellow Book, appreciation of his work has been confined rather to the few. He enjoyed, however, the friends.h.i.+p and intimacy of great numbers of people, shewing that his amiable qualities, no less than his art, received due recognition. His conversation was vehement and witty rather than humorous. He had a remarkable talent for mimicking, very rarely exercised. He loved argument, and supported theories for the sake of argument in the most convincing manner, leaving strangers with a totally wrong impression about himself, a deception to which he was much addicted. He possessed what is called an artificial manner, cultivated to an extent that might be mistaken for affectation.

He never could sit still for very long, and he made use of gesture for emphasis. His peculiar gait has been very happily rendered in a portrait of him by Mr Walter Sickert; he also sat to M. Blanche, the well-known French portrait painter; the portrait by himself is tinged with caricature.

To estimate the art of Aubrey Beardsley is not difficult. That his drawings must excite discussion at all times is only a proof of their lasting worth. They can never be dismissed with unkindly comment, nor shelved into the limbo of art criticism which waits for many blameless and depressing productions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Among artists and men of letters no less than with that great inartistic body, ”the art-loving public,” Aubrey Beardsley's name will always call forth wonder, admiration, speculation, and contempt. It should be conceded, however, that his work cannot appeal to everyone; and that many who have the highest perception of the beautiful see only the repulsive and unwholesome in the troubled, exotic expression of his genius. Fortunately, no reputation in art or letters rests on the verdict of majorities--it is the opinion of the few which finally triumphs. Artists and critics have already dwelt on the beauty of Aubrey Beardsley's line, which in his early work too often resolved itself into mere caligraphy; but the mature and perfect ill.u.s.trations to ”Salome”

and ”The Rape of the Lock” evince a mastery unsurpa.s.sed by any artist in any age or country. No one ever carried a simple line to its inevitable end with such sureness and firmness of purpose. And this is one of the lessons which even an accomplished draughtsman may learn from his drawings, in any age when scraggy execution masquerades under impressionism. Aubrey Beardsley did not s.h.i.+rk a difficulty by leaving lines to the imagination of critics, who might enlarge on the reticence of his medium. Art cant and studio jargon do not explain his work. It is really only the presence or absence of beauty in his drawing, and his wonderful powers of technique which need trouble his admirers or detractors. Nor are we confronted with any conjecture as to what Aubrey Beardsley might have done--he has left a series of achievements. While his early death caused deep sorrow among his personal friends, there need be no sorrow for an ”inheritor of unfulfilled renown.” Old age is no more a necessary complement to the realization of genius than premature death. Within six years, after pa.s.sing through all the imitative stages of probation, he produced masterpieces he might have repeated but never surpa.s.sed. His style would have changed. He was too receptive and too restless to acquiesce in a single convention.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ATALANTA]

This is hardly the place to dwell on the great strides which black and white art made in the nineteenth century. It has been called the most modern of the arts; for the most finished drawings of the old masters were done with a view to serve as studies or designs to be transferred to canvas, metal, and wood, not for frames at an expensive dealer's.

Vittore Pisano and Gentile Bellini would hardly have dared to mount their delightful studies and offer them as pictures to the critics and patrons of their day. At all events it were safer to say, that appreciation of a drawing for itself, without relation to the book or page it was intended to adorn or destroy, is comparatively modern. It is necessary to keep this in mind, because the suitability of Beardsley's work to the books he embellished was often accidental. His designs must be judged independently, as they were conceived, without any view of interpreting or even ill.u.s.trating a particular author. He was too subjective to be a mere ill.u.s.trator. Profoundly interested in literature for the purposes of his art, he only extracted from it whatever was suggestive as pattern; he never professed to interpret for dull people, unable to understand what they read, any more than the mediaeval illuminator and carver of grotesques attempted to explain the mysteries of the Christian faith on the borders of missals and breviaries or the miserere seats of the choir. His art was, of course, intensely _literary_, to use the word hated of modern critics, but his expression of it was the legitimate literature of the artist, not the art peculiar to literature. He did not attempt, or certainly never succeeded in giving, pictorial revision to a work of literature in the sense that Blake has done for the book of Job, and Botticelli for the ”Divine Comedy.” While hardly satisfying those for whom any work of art guilty of ”subject” becomes worthless, this immunity from the conventions of the ill.u.s.trator will secure for Beardsley a larger share of esteem among artists pure and simple than has ever fallen to William Blake, who appeals more to men of letters than to the artist or virtuoso. The uncritical profess to find many terrible meanings in Aubrey Beardsley's drawings; and he will probably never be freed from the charge of symbolism. However morbid the sentiment in some of his work, and often there was a _macabre_, an unholy insistence on the less beautiful side of human things, the cabala of the symbolists was a sealed book to him. Such things were entirely foreign to his lucid and vigorous intelligence. There is hardly a drawing of his that does not explain itself; the commentator will search in vain for any hieroglyphic or symbolic intention. The hieratic archaism of his early work misled many people, for whom pre-Raphaelitism means presupposition. Of mysticism, that stumbling-block, he had none at all. ”_The Initiation of a Neophyte into the Black Art_” would seem to contradict such a statement. The fantasy and grotesqueness of that lurid and haunting composition have nothing in common with the symbolism of black magic, the ritual of freemasonry, or all the fascinating magic to be found in the works of Eliphaz Levi. The sumptuous accessories in which he revelled had no other than a decorative intention, giving sometimes balance to a drawing, or conveying a literary suggestion necessary for its interpretation.

Artists are blamed for what they have not tried to do; or for the absence of qualities distinguis.h.i.+ng the work of an entirely different order of intellect; for their indifference to the observations of _others_. As who should ask from Reynolds a faithful reproduction of textile fabrics; and from Carlo Crivelli the natural phenomena of nature we expect from Turner and Constable? For nature as it should be, in the works of Corot and Turner; for nature made easy, in modern English landscape; for nature without tears, in the impressionist fas.h.i.+on, or as popularly viewed through the camera, Aubrey Beardsley had no feeling. He was frankly indifferent to picturesque peasants, the beauties of ”lovely spots,” either in England or France. A devout Catholic, the ringing of the Angelus did not lure him to present fields of mangel-wurzels in an evening haze. The treatment of nature in the larger and truer sense of the word had little attraction for him; he never tried, therefore, to represent air, atmosphere, and light, as many clever modern artists have done in black and white! Though Claude, that master of light and shadow, was a landscape painter who really interested him. Beardsley's landscape, therefore, is formal, primitive, conventional; a breath of air hardly shakes the delicate leaves of the straight poplars and willows that grow by his serpentine streams. The great cliffs, leaning down in promontories to the sea, have that unreal, architectural appearance so remarkable in the West of Cornwall, a place he had never visited. Yet his love and observation of flowers, trees, and gardens are very striking in the drawings for the ”Morte d'Arthur” and the Savoy Magazine, but it is the nature of the landscape gardener, not the landscape painter. There is some truth in the half-playful, half-unfriendly criticism, that his pictures were a form of romantic map-making. Future experts, however, may be trusted to deal with absence of chiaroscuro, values, tones, and the rest. In only one of his drawings, conceived, curiously enough, in the manner of Burne-Jones (an unlikely model), is there anything approaching what is usually termed atmosphere. Eliminating, therefore, all that must not be expected from his art--mere ill.u.s.tration, realism, symbolism and naturalism--in what, may be asked, does his supreme achievement consist? He has decorated white sheets of paper as they have never been decorated before; whether hung on the wall, reproduced in a book, or concealed in a museum, they remain among the most precious and exquisite works in the art of the nineteenth century, resembling the designs of William Blake only--in that they must be hated, misunderstood, and neglected, ere they are recognized as works of a master. With more simple materials than those employed by the fathers of black and white art, Beardsley has left memorials no less wonderful than those of the Greek vase-painters, so highly prized by artists and archaeologists alike, but no less difficult for the uninitiated to appreciate and understand.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MYSTERIOUS ROSE GARDEN]

The astonis.h.i.+ng fertility of his invention, and the amount of work he managed to produce, were inconceivable; yet there is never any sign of hurry: there is no scamping in his deft and tidy drawing. The neatness of his most elaborate designs would suggest many sketches worked over and discarded before deciding on the final form and composition. Strange to say, this was not his method. 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. And the same process was repeated even when he produced replicas. At first he was indifferent to process reproduction, but, owing to Mr Pennell's influence, he later on always worked with that end in view; thereby losing, some will think, his independence. But he had nothing to complain of--Mr Pennell's contention about process was never so well proved as in Beardsley's case. His experiments in colour were not always successful, two of his most delightful designs he ruined by tinting. In the posters and Studio lithograph, however, the crude colour is highly effective, and ”_Mademoiselle de Maupin_” shewed he might have mastered water-colour had he chosen to do so. There are at present in the market many coloured forgeries of his work: these have been contrived by tracing or copying the reproductions; the colour is often used to conceal the paucity of the drawing and hesitancy of line; they are nearly always versions of well-known designs, and profess to be replicas. When there _is_ any doubt the history and provenance of the work should be carefully studied. It is not difficult to trace the pedigree of any _genuine_ example.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRONTISPIECE _From ”A Nocturne of Chopin”_]

A good deal has been made out of Beardsley's love of dark rooms and lamp light, but this has been grossly exaggerated. He had no great faith in north lights and studio paraphernalia, so necessary for those who use mediums other than his own. He would sometimes draw on a perfectly flat table, facing the light, which would fall directly on the paper, the blind slightly lowered.

The sources of Beardsley's inspiration have led critics into grievous errors. He was accused of imitating artists, some of whose work he had never seen, and of whose names he was ignorant at the time the alleged plagiarism was perpetrated--Felicien Rops may be mentioned as an instance. Beardsley contrived a style long before he came across any modern French ill.u.s.tration. He was innocent of either Salon, the Rosicrucians, and the Royal Academy alike; but his own influence on the Continent is said to be considerable. That he borrowed freely and from every imaginable master, old and new, is, of course, obvious. Eclectic is certainly applicable to him. But what he took he endowed with a fantastic and fascinating originality; to some image or accessory, familiar to anyone who has studied the old masters, he added the touch of modernity which brings them nearer to us, and reached refinements never thought of by the old masters. Imagination is the great pirate of art, and with Beardsley becomes a pretext for invention.

Prior to 1891 his drawings are interesting only for their precocity; they may be regarded, as one of his friends has said, more as a presage than a precedent. You marvel, on realizing the short interval which elapsed between their production and the masterpieces of his maturity.

His first enthusiasm was for the work of the Italian primitives, as Mr Charles Whibley says, distinguished ”for its free and flowing line.”

Even at a later time, when he devoted himself to eighteenth century models and ideals, his love of Andrea Mantegna never deserted him. He always kept reproductions from Mantegna at his side, and declared that he never ceased to learn secrets from them. In the ”_Litany of Mary Magdalen_” and the two versions of ”_Joan of Arc_” this influence is very marked. A Botticelli phase followed, and though afterwards discarded, was reverted to at a later period. The British Museum and the National Gallery were at first his only schools of art. As a matter of course, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, but chiefly through photographs and prints, succeeded in their turn; the influence of Burne-Jones lasting longer than any other.

<script>