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.