Aubrey Beardsley represented most authentically a special aspect of the Nineties. There were two main attitudes in the thought of the period. Most that was virile was Imperialistic; Mr. Kipling was but the greatest of a whole school, and Mr. Chamberlain did not so much form an Imperialistic party as place himself at the head of a party already formed. There was much that was admirable in this enthusiasm, but it tended, like most enthusiasms, to a certain falsity of view. Mr. Balfour has remarked on the difficulty of finding any enthusiast who will tell the simple truth, and the constant contemplation of maps coloured red undoubtedly led to failure to appreciate the other colours of the palette. Too much stress was laid on Medicine Hat and Bulawayo; the silent men with strong chins, who passed their lives predominating over people black, brown, and yellow, were somewhat too readily assumed to be the only people who mattered; and, just as the earlier nineteenth-century industrialist had looked only to more machinery to cure the ills much machinery (working fatalistically) had already created, so the late nineteenth-century Imperialist, while conscious that everything was not lovely in East Ham, could only think of making things right with another slice of East Africa.
Aubrey Beardsley
(From a photograph by F. H. Evans.)
But this school was in the main healthy; perhaps its chief weakness was a too conscious health; it thought too much of muscle and chest expansion, and forgot that a man has a soul to be saved as well as a biceps to be flexed. But it is more reasonable to take pride in a strong arm than to glory in a weak lung, and the simplest of the Imperialists had the advantage over the most complex of the Decadents, in that a real sanity underlay their incidental extravagances. They might be too fond of one monotonous colour scheme of red, white, and blue, but it did stand for something recognisable. But the Decadents, finding satisfaction only in art tints, went on mixing and re-mixing the primary tints until they got to something very like mud-colour, and even to mud itself. These people stood for something which can perhaps be best described as a revolt without a standard, a rebellion without object or hope. They were in arms against everything that had happened, but had no idea whatever of what they wanted to happen. Indeed, they appeared to be pretty certain that nothing genuine could happen. They seemed to be really impressed by the accident that they were near the end of a century. Two French expressions occur with disheartening frequency in the periodicals of the time. One is chic and the other fin-de-siÈcle. Closely consorting with these invaders was the native (or rather American-English) adjective “smart,” usually used in conjunction with the substantive “set.” It was the whole duty of a “smart set” (literary or otherwise) to be chic, and true chic could only be attained by being fin-de-siÈcle. So all to whom fashion was of importance, since they could not help being Victorian and nineteenth-century, deliberately set about wearing the livery of the period inside out or upside down, deriding what they could not change. There was a curiously impotent restlessness among the intellectuals of the period, like that of people imprisoned in a waiting-room during a block on the railway, or in a country house on a wet Sunday. When people are tired of sitting still, and cannot summon resolution to go out for a walk, they are apt to depreciate the furniture and take it out of the cushions; and the Decadent movement was really an assault on Victorian console tables and antimacassars by men and women who had grown too soft in Victorian easy chairs.
Aubrey Beardsley was very typical of the Nineties in his unenjoying luxuriousness, his invalid indecorum, his trammelled originality, and his pert pessimism. He was in pictorial art much what Wilde was in literature, except that he possessed a certain conscience of the hand, so to speak, a pride and care for technical quality, which few considerable draughtsmen lack, while Wilde, though an artist also, lacked such fastidiousness, and was just as pleased with a cheap victory as with a dear one. Both he and Wilde were in revolt against convention, but each would have died rather than do anything naturally. Both were at war with the great Victorian commandment of decorum, but both respected slavishly the little law of a little clique. Both suggested the futility of all things, the one in the most precious prose, the other in the most austerely thought-out design. Both offended against all laws, human and divine, in order to be brilliant and exceptional, and both were under the thraldom of taboos with the force of the Decalogue and crotchets elevated to the dignity of a religion. Each was guilty of most extraordinarily bad taste, not a simple but a complex bad taste, reminiscent of the decaying Roman world; there was something barbaric in their over-sophistication, and something common in their over-refinement. They were much as a woman who turns up in a diamond tiara at a village penny reading, or a man who wears his orders at the dinner table of an intimate friend. Both had a curious delight in mere richness; that purring satisfaction of Wilde in a mere catalogue of precious stones—you will find it in The Picture of Dorian Grey—is paralleled again and again in the joy with which Beardsley elaborates gorgeous stuffs in his designs. And in the work of both is that rather indescribable thing I have spoken of as a revolt without a standard and without a hope. Neither knew quite where he expected to get; the main thing was to do something that shocked the orthodox. It was a feature common to many quite different people. The Socialists, for example, fought without making the smallest provision for a victory; they were content to make victory seem worthless to the party in possession. Mr. Shaw was most intent on showing that the system in being did not and could not work; he was far less interested in proving his own case. Conservatism was content with Liberal failure; it had no particular formula of its own. Novelists drank absinthe with perhaps a faint hope that they might write like Guy de Maupassant, but with a much stronger wish that they would be saved from writing like Sir Walter Besant.
Pessimism is always barren; a pessimism which needs continual conscious cultivation is merely ridiculous. Aubrey Beardsley was saved from being merely ridiculous by that conscience of the hand to which I have alluded. He might have been Mr. Shaw’s model for the character of Dubedat, the invalid artist of The Doctor’s Dilemma, who had every fault but treason to the truth of line and the “might of design.” Indeed, only a real passion for his art could have enabled him to compress so much achievement into so short a space of time. At the beginning of the Nineties he was unknown; the decade was little more than half completed when he died; yet in the interval he had become the most discussed artist in England, and had made for himself a place in English art which is still notable. He was gifted with a fatal precocity. Born and educated at Brighton, he lived during his earlier years the unwholesomely pampered existence of an infant phenomenon. It was, however, music and not draughtsmanship which brought him this early notice; such things as survive from his ’teens and earlier are in no way remarkable. It was not until he had been working for some time in an insurance office in London that certain drawings, done in his spare time, were put prominently before the world by the discrimination of a critic. In a moment the unknown youth became famous, and the short remainder of his life was a struggle to get through the commissions showered on him. He had so far had no sort of training; he now made some attempt to learn the grammar of his art, but his attendance at the chosen studio was extremely desultory, and he might almost be said to be entirely self-taught. He was a strange mixture of industry and slackness. Under the inspiration of an idea, he would shut himself up for days in his rooms, with the blinds drawn and the electric light on, working at designs in a sort of concentrated fury. Then for weeks he would idle or worse than idle, while the publishers raged over broken engagements. For he retained his passion for music; he liked society in which he could exercise a kind of hard wit which was his; he had a fancy for becoming a man of letters; and places where modish men and women were to be seen were frequented partly because he liked the surroundings for themselves, and partly because they gave him types and ideas.
Beardsley had one great talent apart from the mere mastery of line. Over-civilised himself, he was unequalled in suggesting the tragedy of over-civilisation, though quite possibly he did not feel it. He could portray with remorseless truth, though in a convention as strict as that of an old Chinese artist, certain types of modern men and women. He is the limner of the pinched soul, the pampered body, the craving without appetite, the animalism without animal health. At Brighton, even as a boy, he must have studied with close attention those types which are easily lost in a great city, but are isolated at the seaside as on a lighted stage, and, dominating nature as actors do their scenic properties, give the impression that large fortunes and small passions are the stuff life is made of. To Beardsley the greater light and the less only existed as astronomical facts of minor interest; his real element was the arc-light of the street or the shaded glow of the interior. There is a sense of joyless depravity about his men and women, as if vice were a routine, and even a solemn social ritual; and his illustrations of the “Morte d’Arthur” are made ridiculous by the perpetual recurrence of the haggard eyes and small, evil features of people Beardsley had studied in a Piccadilly restaurant or the Casino at Dieppe. Anachronism, so often the joy and life of literature, is no necessary fault in the decorative artist, and nobody need quarrel with Beardsley for taking liberties with the gowning of Isolde. But it was an anachronism without excuse to swap souls as well as dresses. The chief fault was with those who commissioned him to do work for which he was unfitted. An artist who really loved the domes and minarets of the Brighton Pavilion should have been manifestly out of the running for the illustration of the heroic.
Those who think of genius as a form of disease of course connect the radical unhealth which is the stamp of everything Beardsley did with the physical malady which claimed him as an early victim, forgetting that many men with much the same peculiarities have lived to a good old age with no trouble more serious than an occasional indigestion. If he were an invalid, Beardsley, like Stevenson and Henley, was a virile one, and it may be doubted whether the lines of his career were predestined for him by his phthisical disposition. His disease was very far advanced before it left any considerable mark on his work, and it might almost be said that up to the end he was making progress. A more reasonable explanation of the peculiar flavour of his work is to be found in the reaction of a highly individual mind to an intellectual fashion. The fashion came from France, and was the result of the defeat of 1870; it was born on the other side of the Channel of a quite explicable despair, but adopted on this side of the Channel only for wantonness. After the terrible year, the French could no longer pretend to one sort of primacy in Europe, but a primacy of some kind seems to be necessary to the life of France, and so the French intellectuals pretended to a primacy in decay. The arguments, unconsciously worked out, seemed to run something like this: “We, the French, are the most civilised race of mankind. We have been beaten by healthy barbarians. We are doomed to be beaten again, some time or other, by the same healthy barbarians. Health is the quality of barbarism. Let us, therefore, make a boast of our unhealth, and if it does not exist let us make a false pretence of it. The tricolour is lowered. Let us raise the yellow flag of the lazar-house.” The yellow flag was accordingly unfurled, and the Yellow Book was the answering signal in England. Most that was unwholesome in England in the Nineties was French in origin, and most that was unwholesome in France sprang from a poisoned wound then only twenty years old. Beardsley was Beardsley chiefly because Bismarck was Bismarck.
Fate denied Beardsley any chance of outgrowing what may possibly have been after all only the mood of youthful cynicism. His health broke down definitely in the spring of 1896, and the next two years were a mournful, hopeless, and rather lonely struggle against increasing weakness. He took refuge for the winter at Bournemouth, where he lived in a house called “Muriel,” of which he wrote to a friend: “I feel as shy of my address as a boy at school is of his Christian name when it is Ebenezer or Aubrey.” A few months later his troubled spirit sought repose in the Roman Catholic Church; he made his first confession in March, 1897. Commenting somewhat earlier on a priest who was also a painter, he had remarked: “What a stumbling-block such pious men must find in the practice of their art”; now he observed of Pascal that “he understood that to become a Christian the man of letters must sacrifice his gifts, just as Mary Magdalene must sacrifice her beauty.” “The most important step of my life,” he said of his conversion. “I feel now like someone who has been standing waiting on the doorstep of a house upon a cold day and who cannot make up his mind to knock for a long while. At last the door is thrown open, and all the warmth of kind hospitality makes glad the frozen traveller.”
An improvement in his health enabled him to go abroad during the summer. But the approach of autumn gave him warning that hopes were illusory; at Mentone he was too ill to touch paper, and he died in the early spring of 1898. Six years had comprised the span of his artistic life, and two of them had been spent in continuous illness.
