Aubrey Beardsley Part 1

Aubrey Beardsley.

by Robert Ross.

Aubrey Beardsley was born on August 21st, 1872, at Brighton. He was a quiet, reserved child, caring little for lessons, though from an early age he shewed an apt.i.tude for drawing. He began his education at a Kindergarten. He was seven years old when the first symptoms of delicacy appeared, and he was sent to a preparatory school at Hurstpierpoint, where he was remarkable for his courage and extreme reserve. Threatened with tuberculosis, he was moved for his health to Epsom in 1881. In March 1883 his family settled in London, and Beardsley made his first public appearance as an infant musical phenomenon, playing at concerts in company with his sister. He had a great knowledge of music, and always spoke dogmatically on a subject, the only one he used to say, of which he knew anything. He became attracted at this time by Miss Kate Greenaway's picture books, and started illuminating menus and invitation cards with coloured chalks, making by this means quite considerable sums for a child.

In August 1884 he and his sister were sent back to Brighton, where they resided with an old aunt. Their lives were lonely, and Beardsley developed a taste for reading of a rather serious kind--the histories of Freeman and Greene being his favourite works. He could not remain a student without creating, so he started a history of the Armada! In November of the same year he was sent to the Brighton Grammar School as a day boy, becoming a boarder in January 1885. He was a great favourite with Mr King, the house-master, who encouraged his tastes for reading and drawing by giving him the use of a sitting-room and the run of a library. This was one of the first pieces of luck that attended Beardsley throughout life. The head-master, Mr Marshall, I am told, would hold him up as an example to the other boys, on account of his industry. His caricatures of the masters were fully appreciated by them, a rare occurrence in the lives of artists. He cultivated besides a talent for acting, and would often perform before large audiences at the Pavilion. He organized weekly performances at the school, designing and ill.u.s.trating the programmes. He even wrote a farce called "A Brown Study," which was played at Brighton, where it received serious attention from the dramatic critics of the town. He would purchase each volume of the Mermaid series of Elizabethan dramatists then being issued, and with his sister gave performances during the holidays. From the record of the "Brighton College Magazine," Beardsley appears to have taken a leading role in all histrionic fetes, and to "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" he contributed some delightful and racy little sketches, the first of his drawings, I believe, that were ever reproduced.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIEGFRIED _Reproduced from the original in the possession of Mrs. Bealby Wright_]

In July 1888 he left school, and almost immediately entered an architect's office in London. In 1889 he obtained a post in the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance. During the autumn of that year the fatal haemorrhages commenced; for two years he gave up his amateur theatricals and did little in the way of drawing. In 1891, however, he recuperated; a belief in his own powers revived. He now commenced a whole series of ill.u.s.trations to various plays, such as Marlowe's "Tamerlane,"

Congreve's "Way of the World," and various French works which he was able to enjoy in the original. He would often speak of the encouragement and kindness he received at this period from the Rev. Alfred Gurney, who had known his family at Brighton, and who was perhaps the earliest of his friends to realize that Beardsley possessed something more than mere cleverness or precocity.

Several people have claimed to discover Aubrey Beardsley, but I think it truer to say that he revealed himself, when proper acknowledgment has been made to Mr Aymer Vallance, Mr Joseph Pennell, Mr Frederick Evans, Mr J. M. Dent, and Mr John Lane, with whom Beardsley's art will always be a.s.sociated in connection with the Yellow Book, that too early daffodil that came before the swallow dared and could not take the winds of March for beauty. To Mr Pennell belongs the credit of introducing Beardsley's art to the public; and to Mr Dent is due the rare distinction of giving him practical encouragement, by commissioning the ill.u.s.trations to the "Morte d'Arthur," long before critics had written anything about him, or any but a few friends knew of his great powers. Beardsley was too remarkable a personality to remain in obscurity. Though I remember with some amus.e.m.e.nt how the editor of a well-known weekly mocked at a prophecy that the artist was a coming man who would very shortly excite discussion if not admiration. Fortunately Mr Pennell, a distinguished artist himself, and a fearless critic, not only espoused the cause of the new draughtsman, but became a personal friend for whom Beardsley always evinced great affection, and to whom he dedicated his "Alb.u.m of Fifty Drawings."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WOMAN IN THE MOON _From "Salome"_]

I shall never forget my first meeting with Aubrey Beardsley, on February 14th, 1892, at the rooms of Mr Vallance, the well-known disciple and biographer of William Morris. Though prepared for an extraordinary personality, I never expected the youthful apparition which glided into the room. He was shy, nervous, and self-conscious, without any of the intellectual a.s.surance and ease so characteristic of him eighteen months later when his success was unquestioned. He brought a portfolio of his marvellous drawings, in themselves an earnest of genius; but I hardly paid any attention to them at first, so overshadowed were they by the strange and fascinating originality of their author. In two hours it was not hard to discover that Beardsley's appearance did not belie him. He was an intellectual Marcellus suddenly matured. His rather long brown hair, instead of being "ebouriffe," as the ordinary genius is expected to wear it, was brushed smoothly and flatly on his head and over part of his immensely high and narrow brow. His face even then was terribly drawn and emaciated. Except in his manner, I do not think his general appearance altered very much in spite of the ill-health and suffering, borne with such unparalleled resignation and fort.i.tude: he always had a most delightful and engaging smile both for friends and strangers.

He grew less shy after half an hour, becoming gayer and more talkative.

He was full of Moliere and "Manon Lescaut" at the time; he seemed disappointed that none of us was musical; but he astonished by his knowledge of Balzac an authority on the subject who was also present.

He spoke much of the National Gallery and the British Museum, both of which he knew with extraordinary thoroughness. He told me he had only been once to the New Gallery, where he saw some pictures by Burne-Jones, but had never been to the Royal Academy. As far as I know, he never visited the spring shows of Burlington House. He always, however, defended that inst.i.tution with enthusiasm, saying he would rather be an Academician than an artist, "as it takes only one man to make an artist, but forty to make an Academician."

Our next meeting was a few weeks later, when he brought me a replica of his "_Joan of Arc_." I was anxious to buy the first and better version, now in the possession of Mr Frederick Evans, but he refused to part with it at the time. He seemed particularly proud of the drawing; it was the only work of this period he would allow to have any merit.

In the early summer of 1892 he visited Burne-Jones and Watts, receiving from the former artist cordial recognition and excellent advice which proved invaluable to him. He attributed to the same great painter the criticism that "he had learnt too much from the old masters and would benefit by the training of an art school." A few days afterwards he produced a most amusing caricature of himself being kicked down the stairs of the National Gallery by Raphael, t.i.tian, and Mantegna, whilst Michael Angelo dealt a blow on his head with a hammer. This entertaining little record, I am sorry to say, was destroyed. Beardsley was always sensible about friendly and intelligent criticism. When he reached a position enjoyed by no artist of his own age, he was swift to remedy any defect pointed out to him by artists or even by ordinary friends.

I never met anyone so receptive on all subjects; he would record what Mr Pennell or Puvis de Chavannes said in praise or blame of a particular drawing with equal candour and good humour. This was only one of his many amiable qualities. When he afterwards became a sort of household word and his fame, or notoriety as his enemies called it, was established, he never changed in this respect. He made friends and remained friends with many for whom his art was totally unintelligible.

Social charm triumphed over all differences. He would speak with enthusiasm about writers and artists quite out of sympathy with his own aims and aspirations. He never a.s.sumed that those to whom he was introduced either knew or admired his work. His character was brisk and virile to an extraordinary degree. He made enemies, I believe, by refusing to revolve in mutual admiration societies or to support literary and artistic cliques. With the shadow of death always over him and conscious of the brief time before him, he never gave himself up to morbid despair or useless complaints. He determined to enjoy life, and, equipped with all the curiosity and gaiety of boyhood, he caught at life's exquisite moments. There was always a very deep and sincere religious vein in his temperament, only noticeable to very intimate friends. With all his power of grasping the essential and absorbing knowledge, he remained charmingly unsophisticated. He took people as they came, never discriminating, perhaps, sufficiently the issues of life. He was unspoiled by success, unburdened with worldly wisdom.

He was generous to a fault, spending his money lavishly on his friends to an extent that became almost embarra.s.sing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TOILETTE OF SALOME _From "Salome"_]

His love and knowledge of books increased rather than diminished even after he devoted himself entirely to art. In early days he would exchange his drawings for ill.u.s.trated books and critical texts of the English cla.s.sics with Mr Frederick Evans, an early and enthusiastic buyer of his work. His tastes were not narrow. Poetry, memoirs, history, short stories, biography, and essays of all kinds appealed to him; but he cared little for novels, except in French. I don't think he ever read d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, though he enjoyed Scott during the last months of his life. He had an early predilection for lives of the Saints. The sc.r.a.p-book of sketches, containing drawings done prior to 1892, indicates the range and extent of his taste. There are ill.u.s.trations to "Manon Lescaut," "Tartarin," "Madame Bovary,"

Balzac ("Le Cousin Pons," the "Contes Drolatiques"), Racine, Sh.e.l.ley's "Cenci." He retained his love of the drama, and began to write a play in collaboration with Mr Brandon Thomas. While dominated by pre-Raphaelite influences, he read with great avidity "Sidonia the Sorceress," and "The Shaving of s.h.a.gpat," a favourite book of Rossetti's; and it was with a view to ill.u.s.trate Mr Meredith's Arabian Night that he became introduced to Mr John Lane, who divides with Mr Herbert Pollit the honour of possessing the finest Beardsleys still in this country. He read Greek and Latin authors in translations, and often astonished scholars by his acute appreciation of their matter. He approached Dantesque mediaevalism through Rossetti and, later on, at the original source. Much of his early work ill.u.s.trated incidents in the "Divine Comedy." He was a fervent admirer of the "Romance of the Rose" in the original, and several mediaeval French books, but he once told me that he found the "Morte d'Arthur" very long-winded.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DANCER'S REWARD _From "Salome"_]

For one so romantic in the expression of his art, I should say his literary and artistic tastes were severely cla.s.sic, though you would have expected them to be bizarre. He was ambitious of literary success, but any aspirations were wisely discouraged by his admirers. His writings, however brilliant--and they often were brilliant--shewed a dangerous cleverness, which on cultivation might have proved disastrous to the realization of his true genius. "Under the Hill" is a delightful experiment in a rococo style of literature, and it would be difficult to praise sufficiently the rhythm and metrical adroitness of the two poems in the Savoy Magazine. Though I cannot speak of his musical attainments, it may be regarded as fortunate that so remarkable a genius was directed to a more permanent form of executive power.

His knowledge of life, art, and literature seemed the result of instinct rather than study; for no one has ever discovered where he found the time or opportunity for a.s.similating all he did. Gregarious and sociable by nature, he was amusingly secretive about his methods and times of work. Like other industrious men, he never pretended to be busy or pressed for time. He never denied his door to callers, nor refused to go anywhere on the plea of "work."

He disliked anyone being in the room when he was drawing, and hastily hid all his materials if a stranger entered the room. He would rarely exhibit an unfinished sketch, and carefully destroyed any he was not thoroughly satisfied with himself. He carried this sensitive spirit of selection and self-criticism rather far. Calling on friends who possessed primitives, he would destroy these early relics and leave a more mature and approved specimen of his art, or the _edition de luxe_ of some book he had ill.u.s.trated. Some of us were so annoyed that we were eventually obliged to lock up all early examples. For though friends thus victimized were endowed with a more valuable acquisition, they had a natural sentiment and affection for the unsophisticated designs of his earlier years.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TAILPIECE _From "Salome"_]

His life, though many-sided and successful, was outwardly uneventful.

In the early summer of 1892 he entered Professor Brown's night school at Westminster, but during the day continued his work at the Guardian Fire Insurance until August, when, by his sister's advice, he resigned his post. In December he acquainted with Mr Pennell, from whose encouragement and advice he reaped the fullest advantage. After commencing the decorations to the "Morte d'Arthur," he ceased to attend Professor Brown's cla.s.ses. In February 1893 some of his drawings were first published in London in the Pall Mall Budget under the editors.h.i.+p of Mr Lewis Hind, but one of the most striking of his early designs appeared in a little college magazine ent.i.tled The Bee. When The Studio was started by Mr Charles Holme under the able direction of the late Gleeson-White, Beardsley designed the first cover and Mr Pennell contributed the well-known appreciation of the new artist.

Towards the end of 1893 he commenced working for Mr John Lane, who issued his marvellous ill.u.s.trations to "Salome" in 1894. In April of the same year appeared the Yellow Book. To the first four volumes Beardsley contributed altogether about eighteen ill.u.s.trations. From a pictorial point of view this publication had no other _raison d'etre_ than as a vehicle for the production of Beardsley's work, though Henry Harland, in his capacity as literary editor, revealed the presence of many new writers among us. Throughout 1894 Beardsley's health seemed to improve, and his social success was considerable. In the previous year he had been ridiculed, but now the world accepted him at Mr Pennell's valuation. The Beardsley type became quite a fas.h.i.+on, and was burlesqued at many of the theatres; his name and work were on everyone's lips. He made friends with many of his contemporaries distinguished in art and literature. At the house of one of his friends he delivered a very amusing lecture on "Art" which created much discussion.

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.