Beardsley
“He became a sort of household word”—so wrote Mr. Robert Ross in his readable little book on Beardsley.
A description of Beardsley’s reputation more wide of the mark I cannot imagine. Beardsley is really one of England’s “skeletons in the cupboard.” The average Englishman is somewhat ashamed of Beardsley as a fellow countryman, he feels there has been some mistake—the fellow ought to have been a Czecho-Slovac! To think that the year 1872 (a most respectable year!) should have brought to light this utterly un-English phenomenon is not pleasing to him. I have seen more than one young English student embarrassed and somewhat annoyed when an enthusiastic Frenchman has congratulated him on being a compatriot of that “great genius Aubrey Beardsley.” All the world over Beardsley is still “caviare to the general” and particularly to the English general. He is acceptable enough when his ideas are popularized by other artists: throughout France and America whole schools of present day illustrators are founded on his work; and he is rightly acknowledged as the “old master” of mechanical line engraving. He was the first artist to understand really and utilize to the full the possibilities of this process of reproduction; and—as so often happens with the first man to use a process intelligently—he carried it further and found it less restricting than any who have followed him.
Beardsley had an immense power of technical invention—like Hokusai, he was able to bring any subject of his choice within the scope of his convention, and to render it in a way that was perfect for the process by which his work was to be reproduced.
There is an ironical beauty in everything he ever did, and his compositions—regarded as an adjustment of spaces—are more consistently original and daring than those of any other Western artist, old or modern; only in the East can we find his equal in this particular expression of creative art.
The shock that Beardsley gave to British feelings was, I fancy, due far more to the intrinsic originality of his compositions than to the “nautiness,” imagined or real, in his drawings, about which we have heard so much. It is surely a case of honi soit qui mal y pense, for there is nothing in the books of drawings by Aubrey Beardsley that are published in this country that could offend a school miss.
Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown says in one of his adventures “Its the wrong shape in the abstract. Don’t you ever feel that about Eastern art? The colours are intoxicatingly lovely; but the shapes are mean and bad—deliberately mean and bad. I have seen wicked things in a Turkey carpet.” Well, Father Brown’s remark is illuminating, for not only are there wicked shapes in Turkey carpets but, however “beautifully seen” the rest of a Beardsley drawing is, the drawing of the faces in it is often deliberately mean and bad. But I think, also, that it would have been more just of Father Brown to have completed his remark with the “finish” that “is an added truth” by saying that he had never seen a wicked shape in a Persian carpet. This generalization about Eastern art and “the wrong shape in the abstract” makes one fear that perhaps the champion of Mr. Bateman might be no friend to Beardsley; and I regret to think that Mr. Chesterton might not champion Eastern shapes; or Beardsley—though I can understand his not doing so: I venerate him as the British lion and therefore it seems but natural that he should wage perpetual war against the unicorn—and doubtless he might regard Beardsley as a fabulous beast. The British feeling is strong about shapes—an Englishman likes to recognize a shape instantly; should he fail to do so he really is extremely uncomfortable and affronted and will, as often as not, turn on the creator of the “wrong shape” and accuse him of ungentlemanly conduct.
Phil May