THE ABBE
The black portfolio, carried under his arm, led to the waggery of a city wit that whilst Beardsley had turned his back upon the city he could not shake off the habits and atmosphere of the Insurance clerk for he always entered a room cautiously as if expecting to be kicked violently from behind and looked as if he had “called in on behalf of the Prudential.”
It is the fashion amongst the gushing to say of Beardsley that “if his master genius had been turned seriously towards the world of letters, his success would have been as undoubted there as it was in the world of arts.” It is true that Beardsley by his rare essays into literature proved a sensitive ear for literary colour in words of an artificial type; but his every literary effort proved his barrenness in literary gifts. His literary efforts were just precisely what the undergraduate, let loose upon London town, mistakes for literature, as university magazines painfully prove. He had just precisely those gifts that slay art in literature and set up a dreary painted sepulchre in its stead. He could turn out an extraordinary mimicry of a dandified stylist of bygone days; and the very skill in this intensely laboured exercise proved his utter uncreativeness in literature. He had a really sound sense of lilt in verse that was strangely denied to him in prose. It is precisely the cheap sort of precious stuff that imposes on superficial minds—the sort of barren brilliance that is the bewildering product not only of the academies but that is affected also in cultured city and scholastic circles.
Under the Hill was published in mutilated form in the coming Savoy, and afterwards in book form; and as such it baffles the wits to understand how it could have found a publisher, and how Arthur Symons could have printed this futile mutilated thing—if indeed he had any say in it, which is unthinkable. It is fantastic drivel, without cohesion, without sense, devoid of art as of meaning—a sheer laboured stupidity, revealing nothing—a posset, a poultice of affectations. The real book, of which all this is the bowdlerised inanity, is another matter; but it was so obscene, it revealed the young fellow revelling in an orgy of eroticism so unbridled, that it was impossible to publish it except in the privately printed ventures of Smithers’s underground press. But the real book is at least a significance. It gives us the real Beardsley in a self-confession such as explains much that would be otherwise baffling in his art. It is a frank emotional endeavour to utter the sexual ecstacies of a mind that dwells in a constant erotic excitement. To that extent at least it is art. Cut that only value out of it—a real revelation of life—and it yields us nothing but a nasty futility. But even the real book reveals a struggle with an instrument of expression for which Beardsley’s gifts were quite as inadequate as they were inadequate in the employment of colour to express emotion—even though in halting fashion it does discover the real unbridled Beardsley, naked and unashamed. It is literature at any rate compared with the fatuous ghost of it that was published to the world at large, the difference between a live man and a man of straw.
THE FRUIT BEARERS
A CHRISTMAS CARD
As a literary effort the “novel” is interesting rather in showing us Beardsley’s shortcomings than his promise. The occasionally happy images are artistic pictorially rather than in phrasing—better uttered pictorially than by words. Beardsley had the tuneless ear for literature that permits a man to write the hideous phrase “a historical essay.” In one so censorious as Beardsley in matters of letters and art it is strange to find him reeking with the ugly illiteracy of using words in prose that can only be employed in verse. There is a pedantic use of words which shows in Beardsley that innate vulgarity of mind and taste which seems to think that it is far more refined English to say that there is “an increased humidity in the atmosphere” than to say “it is raining.” We find in his prose “argent lakes,” “reticent waters,” “ombre gateways,” “taper-time,” “around its marge,” and suchlike elaborate affectations of phrasing, going cheek by jowl with the crude housemaidish vulgarisms of “the subtlest fish that ever were,” “anyhow it was a wonderful lake”—what Tree used wittily to call “re-faned” English and housemaid’s English jostling each other at a sort of literary remnant sale. Side by side with this pedantic phrasing, with the illiteracy of employing verse phrases in prose, and with the housemaid’s use of English, goes a crude vulgarity of cheap commonplaces such as: “The children cried out, I can tell you,” “Ah, the rorty little things!”, “The birds ... kept up ajargoning and refraining”; “commanded the most delicious view,” “it was a sweet little place”; “card tables with quite the daintiest and most elegant chairs”; “the sort of thing that fairly makes one melt”; “said the fat old thing,” “Tannhäuser’s scrumptious torso”; “a dear little coat,” “a sweet white muslin frock”; “quite the prettiest that ever was,” and the rest of it. It is only when Beardsley lets himself go on the wings of erotic fancies and the sexual emotions that seem to have been the constant if eternal torment of his being, that he approaches a literary achievement; and unfortunately it is precisely in these moods that publication is impossible.
This inability to create literature in a mind so skilful to translate or mimic the literature of the dead is very remarkable; but when we read a collection of Beardsley’s letters it is soon clear that he had been denied artistic literary gifts; for, the mind shows commonplace, unintellectual, innocent of spontaneous wit of phrase or the colour of words. It is almost incredible that the same hand that achieved Beardsley’s master-work in pen line could have been the same that shows so dullard in his letters to his friend John Gray. In them he reveals no slightest interest in the humanities, in the great questions that vex the age—he is concerned solely with his health or some business of his trade, or railway fares or what not. His very religious conversion shows him commonplace and childish. Of any great spiritual upheaval, of any vast vision into the immensities, of any pity for his struggling fellows, not a sign!