The Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces

by Joyce Kilmer

IN considering that brief and tumultuous period in English literature which is sometimes called The Æsthetic Renaissance, it is inevitable that three figures should stand out with particular vividness. They are Lionel Johnson, Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Dowson—a great poet, a brilliant, but unbalanced illustrator, and another poet, who wrote a great deal of rubbish and about four poems which are genuine and important contributions to English literature. What is the bond between these men? Why should they be grouped together?

They might be grouped together because they all three were creative artists whose careers, so far as the world knows, ended with the nineteenth century. They might be grouped together because they were animated by the same feeling, a violent reaction against the hideous scientific dogmatism, the deadly materialism of the much vaunted Victorian era. And they might be grouped together because all three were artists, seekers after that real but elusive thing called beauty, a thing which they found at last when they had made their submission to her who is the mother of all learning, all culture and all the arts, the Catholic Church.

And yet, although the fact that their conversion establishes a real and noble connection between these three men of genius, their characters and talents differ greatly. Only one of them—and that one Lionel Johnson—was directly inspired through a considerable period of years by his Catholic Faith. Ernest Dowson, the poet, and Aubrey Beardsley, the artist, became Catholics towards the end of their artistic careers, too late for the Faith to give to their work that purity and strength which are the guarantees of immortality. But Lionel Johnson found his Faith almost as soon as he found his genius, celebrated it in poems of enduring beauty, and left the world a precious heritage of song.

In his book "The Eighteen-Nineties," Mr. Holbrook Jackson has pointed out the significance of the revival of æstheticism which took place in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and has shown that it was symptomatic of a sort of idealistic revolt. The poets and artists were sick of the dogmatic materialism which dominated the mind of England. Huxley and Darwin seemed to have dragged the angels out of Heaven, even to have torn down Heaven itself, and to have put in its place nothing save a dull rational and inhuman scientific theory. Against this scientific dogmatism in matters intellectual and spiritual, and against a sort of bleak smugness in matters moral and social, the young idealists of the eighteen-nineties rebelled. Sometimes the thing which they advocated was cheap and tawdry enough, sometimes it was base and vicious. But they were at any rate in revolt—they had found at last that the religion of science and the morality of merely human convention could not satisfy their hearts and their souls.

And there was another phase to the renaissance of the nineties—it was a romantic adventure. These men were all of them young and ardent. If there had been some brave and noble adventure at hand, they would have undertaken it with song on their lips and laughter in their hearts. They longed to be in the daring minority, to battle for lost causes. Now, this tendency by itself, this ambition lacking a worthy aim is a dangerous thing. So some of these young men fell by the wayside, but others saw before them the great and immortal adventure, forsook their trivial toys and poses and attitudes, and enlisted in the shining army of a King more shamefully ill-used than Charles I, more powerful than Charlemagne.

For Aubrey Beardsley I have the greatest sympathy and admiration. That being the case, let me say that for the honor of his memory I wish that every drawing that he made, every one of those deftly-made arrangements in black and white, might be destroyed. It seems to me that he was of all the men of the eighteen-nineties the one genuine decadent. It is not only in such openly vicious things as the illustrations to Wilde's "Salome" that we find deliberate immorality in intention and expression, there is in all his work, however simple and even noble may be the theme, as for instance his illustrations to Malory's "Morte D'Arthur," a definite and unmistakable perversity, a sure sign of physical, mental and moral sickness.

Aubrey Beardsley's mental and moral sickness at first showed itself only in a contempt for the conventions of art and in especial for the conventions of proportion and prospective. It has sometimes been said that it is as absurd to rebel against the moral law as against the law of gravitation. The first revolt of a consumptive young architectural draughtsman with an extraordinary talent for line was against natural law—against the law of proportion. The first drawings which brought him any notoriety were extraordinary for two things—their admirable draughtsmanship and their deliberate eccentricities of proportion. He drew nothing but monsters—men eight feet tall with microscopic heads, women with arms as long as their entire bodies. The revolt against the moral law came later—the selection of hideously obscene subjects, the painful obsession with sex. Then came the sick boy's discoveries that after all beauty was no more in the weird ugliness he had celebrated than it was in the smug conventions of sentimental Victorian painting. A few weeks before his death Aubrey Beardsley found the immortal abiding place of beauty. Received into the Church, Aubrey Beardsley repented bitterly his misuse of his talents, and plead with his friends to destroy all his immoral drawings, of which he was now thoroughly ashamed. "Burn all my bawdy pictures," he wrote—a dying prayer which his pagan friends utterly disregarded. He had striven to find beauty in sin, and he knew that this seeking was in vain. For now he had found beauty, now he had learned to see in the lamp which is beauty the light which is God.

I have said that Aubrey Beardsley was the only true decadent of all the literary and artistic rebels of the eighteen-nineties. Certainly no intelligent person can call Ernest Dowson a decadent. It is true that there have been critics, such as Mr. Blakie Murdoch, who have tried to throw a halo of wickedness over this unfortunate young poet, to make him seem to be a sort of English Paul Verlaine. But Victor Plarr, who knew him intimately for many years, has told us that except for the tendency to drink too much, which was one of the causes of his death, Ernest Dowson was a simple, wholesome young man, who smoked large black cigars and was fond of playing practical jokes on his friends.

Ernest Dowson's religious poems have never seemed to me to be particularly convincing. I will read you one of the best of them and then tell you why it does not seem to me to ring true. It is called "Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration."

NUNS OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION